My First Colouring Book

  Enough’s enough I said to myself one day. Something’s got to give, so I goes down the road and has a word with Doris Doom. Seems to know what to do in an emergency, she fought for Franco’s Fascists in the Spanish Civil War just to prove she was more of a rebel than her six brothers on the other side. She was standing by the gate smoking her pipe as usual when I got to her house, and I loitered for a while until she said:

  – What yew want then Iestyn

  and spat a big yellow gob on the path, big as a hubcap.

  – I’m needing some sound advice but my mammy died so I come to you I answered truthfully.

  – You did right there see, Iestyn

  she replied, and we enjoyed pleasant small talk for another hour or two, until eventually I told her the exact nature of my plight, except the bit about going on porn sites.

  – Iestyn, yew got to wrest the plot from society and make the story your own

  she said to me, leaning on the gate and puffing vigorously on her briar, as she always does when she’s making a dialectical point.

  – Iestyn, it seems to me you’ve three basic choices

  she continued, her dark eyes either fixed meditatively on the slopes of the Black Mountain or scanning my face for a response.

  – Yew can take the typical Welsh route, give up without a fight, sign your house away, go and live in the shed with the budgie and drink yourself to death,

  she mulled fatalistically,

  – Or perhaps yew want to take the American route, put everyone under the patio, including the blow-up doll and the budgie, but that’s not really you either, is it?

  she continued, her white-hot pipe sending a shower of sparks into the encroaching gloom.

  – My preferred option is this Iestyn. Go down to the Miners’ Arms tonight with a pocketful of money, get Psycho and his mates hanging drunk and then take them home to sort it out for you, send Sigrid packing and her sponging brother too. By the way, he’s not her brother really – look at his eyes, they’re just like the milkman’s.

  Soon as she spoke I knew she’d uttered words of pure wisdom. By closing time I had Psycho and his mates, plus a carry-out and a good quarter of skunk, staggering up the garden path behind me and in no time at all Sigrid, her brother and all their possessions were out in the garden. There was a nasty and unforeseen twist which had me and Doris worried for a while. Psycho and his mates proved hard to dislodge – they stayed for ten days in all and left the place wrecked. The only reason they went was because one of them wanted to buy a horse at Llanybydder Fair.

  When I popped up to tell Doris, I took her a kilo of Kosovan Shag for her pipe – she was overjoyed, hadn’t smoked anything that strong since the Civil War, looted it from a body she had. We was buddies by now.

  – Get rid of the budgie too, take it back to the shop

  she advised, bathing me in a warm smile.

  – Show your compassionate side, spare the bird or they’ll think you killed your wife

  she said and I did as she asked. He’s been bought by Mrs Prytherch at Number 37 now, I can hear him calling my name from her living room when I go to work in the morning. Iestyn! he says through the window, and I feel a wave of hiraeth sweeping through me as I think about Sigrid, and being in bed with her by my side in Wendy’s winceyette nightie, reading Chinese poetry. What was I to do with my beloved Sigrid the plastic doll, I asked Doris. I couldn’t put her in the bin, the binmen always rifled it for valuables. She said

  – Iestyn my lover, there are some things a man has to decide for himself, and Sigrid you’ll have to sort out on your own, then peel some potatoes for tea will yew…

  Was it the little green-eyed monster I saw in her eyes that day? After a lot of thought I decided to bury Sigrid under the patio – if anyone asked me where the missus was I’d say

  – Under the patio!

  And I wouldn’t be telling a lie. But I made sure her eyes were directly under a crack so she could see me if I ever had a barbecue – never had one despite all the cost, I used it to park my sidecar after the suspension went. I sold the house to the Chief Inspector – he said he’d fallen in love with it when he came to interview me. And that was that. I took lodgings with Doris and it worked out fine, we went on holiday to Spain. She got to visit her old battle haunts and I had a lovely tan coming home. I never saw Wendy again. Nobody did. But I wake in the night and my mind is troubled. Worry has furrowed my brow – the doctor says I’ve an ulcer and Doris says I scream in the night, it reminds her of the wounded in their death throes at Guernica.

  I think about her lying there under the patio, so cold and lifeless. The only woman who gave me real pleasure, even if she couldn’t cook, or read a map, or satisfy me in bed.

  So pure and innocent, Sigrid with the lovely blue eyes…

  indigo

  YOU were the cause of it all, Daddy, with your tall stories and your strange ideas.

  All the other girls managed to find normal fathers – men who worked for the council or delivered mail; blokes who drank too much, ran the football team, grew dope in hot silver tents or sold pirate DVDs. Men with debts and ulcers, sometimes worried and watchful, other times funny and tired.

  The kids in my class were all caught smoking or found drunk as a skunk outside the Spar, but no not me. I was the one who ended up with nice manners and twelve stars shining brightly on my GCSE results, thanks to the alien who lived in the same house as mum and me. A six-foot-seven weirdo with a million-volt shock of wiry grey hair – a stooping, preoccupied shadow who wore sandals, even in winter. Not that I didn’t love you, I loved you sure enough. But why did you have to be so different? Why did you make me blush every time I saw you at the school gates?

  When I was six I used to practise saying it in my bedroom mirror, having no idea what it meant: Pro-fess-or. I said it over and over again to myself, twisting it out of shape, my hot little breath misting the glass. It took a long time to say it right.

  It doesn’t matter sweetie pie, you’d say as you passed my bedroom door, smiling at me. But it did, it mattered then and it’s mattered all my life.

  Sometimes – whenever you could – you went to a distant land, a place of mystery, spices, silks and otherworldly music. You were my own living Ali Baba, flying into the distance on a magic carpet, and the paradise you went to was a romantic vision for a child, but too strange and vast to be understood, so I made do with dolls and dreams until I was old enough to comprehend that other half of you which lived for months on end on another continent, where you existed without me – a place where you disappeared to, coming back animated and thin, gusting new and puzzling smells. You brought back things I was seldom allowed to touch: an exotic sari for my mother, who wore it on Christmas Day, or a painting – a new miniature showing a Moghul garden perhaps, with richly brocaded men and half-naked women doing strange crooked things.

  If you’re in Heaven, Daddy, as you surely must be, or with Shiva, listen to me now. It started with you, yes, it started with you and the indigo bedroom, because I wanted purple, the same as the other little girls in my class. Why do little girls like purple, why do they want purple bedrooms with purple desks and purple doors? There must be a reason, and I had the same reason as everyone else for wanting a purple room. I wanted to be clever like you and mum but first I wanted a purple room like Emily Davies who pulled my hair in the playground and whispered Professor Pissface in my burning ear. Purple is the colour of little girls’ dreams. I asked for a purple bedroom and I got an indigo bedroom, it said so on the paint pot.

  I said: Daddy this is indigo, look at the label.

  But it made no difference, you didn’t listen.

  It’s purple really, sweetie pie, you replied, and I was lost, perplexed, didn’t know what to do. The seed of uncertainty was planted then, that very day – soon I was living in a hayfever cloud of doubt: suspicion scabbed my skin and clogged my lungs. When you unwrapped my first inhaler, took it out of its box and read the instructions while I rotated
it carefully, looking for its mysteries, I think we both noticed that its plastic sleeve was more indigo than purple. Did I comprehend the subtle irony, even then?

  I itched and I scratched; the fray became a rip – within a month the tin which said indigo had torn me into two little sweetie pies.

  Purple you promised, but it said indigo on the can. It didn’t matter that the colour was right, because the name had to be too – that’s the way it is in little girls’ minds.

  We’re talking about important things here, Daddy. The same thing happened with mum: you didn’t listen to her either when she tried to tell you about something which was important to her, something close to her heart. It wasn’t a big thing, but women can’t live in big houses for days on end waiting for something to happen, because it never does. Perhaps she never understood the quiet affection you showed her: if your love had been strange, unruly, outsized and pungent, like your body, then the marriage might have lasted. Your trips grew longer, and when you came back it was her turn to vanish, it was she who went away to a far-off land, a place inside her head which even I was never allowed to visit – and the only presents she brought back were the dirty plates piled up in the kitchen, the silences, the unwashed clothes of depression. Her pain, like yours, was never unpacked or laundered, never aired.

  No-one’s fault, nobody to blame: that’s the mantra, isn’t it? Your generation was taught to think it and to say it to each other, then to all the world: when two grown people can’t keep it together it’s fifty-fifty, six of one and half a dozen of the other. But while you went south to Asia and mum went north to ice-land, our family went west. Kaput. One flew east, one flew west, one flew over the cuckoo’s nest.

  I was living in two homes soon enough, you and mum sharing me down the middle. Did you haggle? I can’t imagine it, somehow.

  You can have the TV and the three piece suite, I can have the…

  So the rip continued, and I was torn in half. Not exactly, Daddy. You can’t cut love just so, faithfully in half; you and mum, with all your brains, should have known better – someone will surely get too much pastry and someone will get too much jam if you cut a little sweetie pie in half.

  If mum was purple and you were indigo, all those many years ago, and that’s the way it seemed to me at the time, I lived in the shade between you, trying to love you both the same, measuring my raw and childish love in two little heaps on my plastic kitchen scales. And so I learnt to divide and apportion, count up days and allocate the hours with precision and exactitude – so that you both got your full share of me, your sub-divided sweetie pie.

  Mum was for talking and shopping, painting our nails together, minor rows over nothing much, and decorating my new bedroom, purple of course… and providentially, miraculously, I can’t forget our slow journey together, a return to her homeland from the Arctic Circle, hand-in-hand. She became happy again, and it suited her, painting my nails pink in the purple aura of my attic bedroom, and laughing. I found male things once or twice – a tie unravelling from below her bed, a note on the kitchen noticeboard which she hadn’t noticed, with a phone number. But I never mentioned them to either party. Mum’s the word, and frankly, I didn’t want to know. Like all little girls, I wanted – expected – you both to do the decent thing and get back together again. Still do, inside my skull, in the place where nothing bad has ever happened, never will.

  Daddy, you stayed in the old house and my room stayed indigo. You never touched it again, never looked inside the door, so it became a mess in there, a jumble of clothes on the floor and cobwebs above the wardrobe. I liked it that way; anarchy seemed to suit our new relationship. Staying at your place was good for other things too – for cadging money, smoking in the greenhouse, dreaming, planning which university I’d go to, and camping trips in the mountains with fresh bread and sausages and tins of beans. We went up there often, crawling and panting up their flanks, sharing water bottles; as you got older you slowed down, your eyes weakened, but I was still your sun, your little sweetie pie. We’d go your favourite route, me walking behind the gorse ring of your hair, burnt out in the middle by baldness; up we went, onto bald Drum, along the fence to Foel Fras, onwards to Carnedd Llewelyn, dipping down to Yr Elen because you always wanted to look down the valley to Bethesda. Then onwards to Carnedd Dafydd; we’d sit on the summit, me leaning against you, and we’d look towards the heart of Wales, to the south east. I’d put an arm around you (only one, the other was for mum) and you’d go through the roll call of mountains as they faded away from us in blue and purple silhouettes. Moel Siabod was nearest: a loner, idiosyncratic – unchained from the rest. I think you felt an affinity with Moel Siabod, ostracised by all the other ranges.

  Your melancholia dwelt there on Carnedd Dafydd: each time you’d recall the hero-prince who gave the peak its name; hanged, drawn and quartered in Shrewsbury, his body dragged through the streets and dismembered. York and Winchester fought like dogs over who got his right shoulder. And I wondered, as you spoke, about my own body, about being cut up and divided among you two, my parents. Which parts would go to whom? Some bits were obviously my mother’s, but my hands and feet were yours. They were out of proportion, out of step with the world. And my hair – who would want my hair, with its crazy mix of copper red from mum and frantic frizzle from you, Daddy?

  Up there in the hills was the only place where you and I were completely happy together.

  One by one, in layers, the mountains receded from our view, from the Christmas pudding blob of Arenig Fach, flicker-flamed in burning vapours, to ghostly Arenig Fawr, dowsed in methylated spirits and haunted by eight American servicemen.

  Living with mum during the week and with you over the weekends, in the old house, was never schizophrenic but it changed my body-and-soul clock; a mirrored duality was spawned in me, a taste for two separate identities. I became two different people: I dressed differently at mum’s, talked differently when I was at your place, Daddy.

  I smoked in one house but not the other, slept longer at mum’s but better in the old place with you…

  Later in life, not content with one home or one husband, I wanted two: eventually my deeply cloven nature, my duality got the better of me and soon I was living a double life, married to two men in quick succession: one of them a dark, squat Welshman and the other a lanky, fair-haired Englishman. I forgot to tell either I was married to another and spent years, willingly, being shared – I felt as if I were a coin, being tossed into the air repeatedly, seeing the sequence of my life unfold. The first house was tidy, the next unruly. In one I smoked, left the washing up, and cadged money; in the other I painted my nails, scoured e-bay for bargains, and cleaned the cupboards wearing purple Marigolds.

  I moved between them as the mood took me and opportunity allowed. The only way I could express love at all was in two equal parts, as you, my parents, had configured: I became a fruit tree with its branches trained along espaliers to the left and right of me, strung up on wires, unable to grow normally, towards the sun. In one home my bedroom was purple and in the other it was indigo – in both I pleased my husbands in equal measure, in exactly the same ratio, without an extra kiss for one or the other, nor one single disproportionate moan or stroke of affection. I was strictly fair, counting each and every sexual encounter so that both my husbands achieved exactly the same amount of pleasure in exactly the same positions in many of the same locations, though making love in a toilet near the top of the Eiffel Tower was slightly more enjoyable with the Welshman because the novelty had worn off somewhat by the time I went there with the Englishman; however, I balanced this by taking the Englishman to the Ritz and making love to him there first. I’m glad that I never wanted to make love to both men at the same time, though it could have been arranged. You know what men are like.

  To each husband I gave a boy and a girl, and all four I loved equally. At last the curse of my manifold divisions was lifted: no half-loves or semi-hemispheres of affection partitioned my maternal instin
cts, since the wholeness of my devotion covered all my children without isolation or segregation. We carried on like that for many years before I was discovered. Now it’s the children who feel the need to measure their love for me, but they dispense it in uneven and unpredictable portions. A little from one, too much from the other. My formula for eternal fairness has gone astray, for ever I presume, unless it’s found in a dusty cupboard many years from now, or resurfaces mysteriously, as if it were a great-grandmother’s prized recipe for chutney or raspberry jam.