as she ran away.
I had often wondered whether, if my parents had given me an Italian name, I might have made my home in my father’s old country, like my sister Paola. Something rolling like Giancarlo. Waving to all and sundry in my silk suit in the sun in the piazza sucking up spaghetti con vongole, instead of my single-syllable Brythonic moniker predestining me to grey skies and scrub-topped hills.
Paola lived in a village above San Remo with her husband Roberto, a plumber who hated me. I had never found a reason for that hatred, which both my sister and my mother, trying to keep extended family cracks smoothed over, told me I was imagining. The only thing I could pin it on was that I had once informed him in a spirit of bonhomie that Paola and I used to share a bath as children.
‘Naked!’ His reaction had surprised me.
And it should have warned me not to respond with a quip, that underwear only got in the way of soaping down the fundamentals.
Whatever it had been, Roberto had inculcated a terror of me in his children, so that Graziella’s reaction hadn’t come as a surprise.
‘Glyn!’ I don’t know whether it was the richness of her adopted language, but Paola managed to put a lot of expression into merely saying my name. Like anxiety and What the fuck are you calling for?
‘Hi, Paola, you all right?’
‘How’s Mum?’ she asked anxiously. As usual, she couldn’t imagine a call from me without an image of our mother face-first at the bottom of the stairs, or straining to hear the last hopeless echo of the defibrillator.
‘She’s fine.’
Even over the phone I felt her de-stress. ‘I was sorry to hear about the accident.’
‘Thanks, but I’m fine now.’
‘Mum says you’re on convalescent leave?’ She was probing. The worry being that I might be trying to swing some Mediterranean recuperation, and she was already preparing herself for Roberto’s reaction.
I put her out of her misery. ‘Do you remember a guy called Edgar Fiske?’
‘Edgar Fiske? What on earth brings him up?’
‘He was stalking you at teacher training college?’
She gave a small laugh. ‘Well, stalking is putting it a bit strong.’
‘That’s the word you used. When you came home once and told me about it. You were really upset, said you couldn’t say anything to Mum or Dad.’
‘Glyn, I don’t really remember that, and what’s it got to do with anything now?’
I had hoped for a more sinister recall from her, but I ploughed on anyway. ‘Colin Forbes, my friend from Splottlands?’
‘I remember Colin. What about him?’
‘We went over to Bath and sorted it out for you.’
‘Sorted what out?’ she asked, puzzled.
I felt that it was time to add a rider. ‘I was eighteen. I wasn’t very subtle in those days. My social skills weren’t too highly developed.’
‘Tell me about it,’ she chuckled. ‘But what did you sort out?’
‘Didn’t you ever wonder why he didn’t bother you again?’
‘I got a new boyfriend.’ She paused. ‘Are you trying to tell me something different?’
I winced at the crassness of the memory. Feeling the shame now in the retelling. ‘We boot-polished his private parts and took a Polaroid photograph and told him we’d post it on the student noticeboard if he didn’t leave you alone.’
‘Glyn!’ she screeched. ‘How could you? That was horrible.’
‘It worked,’ I protested righteously.
‘No it didn’t. Going out with a rugby player worked.’
I didn’t try to correct her. ‘Have you any idea where Edgar Fiske is now?’
‘Why? Are you going to apologize?’
I thought of the set-up in the Scots pine stand. ‘I think it may have gone past the time for an apology.’
‘I think you should. God, Glyn, that was such a horrible thing to do. Poor Edgar.’ She was silent for a moment. ‘Edgar and his partner Michael are running a little gallery and tea room in Yeovil. You’ll find him in the telephone book.’
‘Edgar Fiske is gay?’ I asked, surprised.
‘Of course. That’s why he was pretending to be interested in me at college. He didn’t want the trainee PE teachers finding out and making his life a misery.’
A tea room in Yeovil? Suddenly it looked as though Edgar Fiske had lost his sting.
Okay, gay men could be vindictive too. But not usually if their life had settled into a comfortable and contented pattern, which would appear to be the case with Edgar Fiske.
Back to square one. With Edgar Fiske disposed of, there was really no one I could think of out there with a big enough grudge against me.
Was I going to have to consider Jessie Bullock again?
No. It couldn’t be. I shook my head to reinforce it. She was an eighteen-year-old girl from the foothills. The Mid Wales equivalent of fucking Heidi. And the Heidis of this world didn’t draw down the wrath of professional snipers.
Now that I was home, had no pied wagtail, and had run up against another brick wall, I found that I wasn’t yet ready for the isolation. I didn’t want to be here alone when the night came down.
Dinas, the town that Jack Galbraith had exiled me to, hadn’t quite achieved the tourist bonanza it had hoped for when it had promoted itself as having more abandoned Primitive Methodist chapels per head of population than anywhere else. Consequently the Chamber of Commerce was currently debating whether to give up on failed religion and to try and ride the coat-tails of the town’s dead lead-mining legacy instead. It was that kind of vibrancy that kept the tumbleweed moving.
I bought some basic foodstuffs in the convenience store and made my way to The Fleece across the empty market square, past the Victorian gothic clock tower, and the statue of a shepherd with a tilted traffic cone on his head.
The Fleece had been a coaching inn until a smarter and more enterprising town had stepped in and pinched the mail trade. The place now doubled up as my unofficial city desk and recreational centre. Its owners, David and Sandra Williams, who had both spent some time out in the wider world, were also the nearest things I had to best buddies in Dinas without feathers.
I went in through the door to the rear bar. It was early, and the place was quiet enough for David to be making a show of polishing glasses behind the front bar. He held one up to the light with the scrutiny of an ever-hopeful opal miner.
I saw myself in the mirror behind the bar. My gait was still stiff, and the jolting motion it produced, combined with my discoloured, unshaven face and the plastic carrier bag of groceries, gave me the look of an old lush on automatic pilot treading the well-worn nightly path to the beer tap.
I sent out a silent prayer for this to please not be the future I was seeing.
David turned round. He did a jerky double-take when he saw me. ‘Jesus, Glyn …’ He ducked his head into the service entry between the two bars and yelled, ‘Sandra!’ He emerged smiling. ‘We weren’t expecting you. You should have called and I’d have come over and got you.’
‘Thanks, but I need the practice.’
He took a step backwards and appraised me, following it up with a wince. ‘You’re not a great advert for the health service.’
‘Don’t knock it, you should have seen the before pictures.’ I climbed stiffly onto a bar stool.