Sixteen Shades of Crazy. Rachel Trezise

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       5

      On Fridays the village smelled like chip fat, smog clouds from the deep-fat fryers oozing from kitchen windows. Ellie was at home, in Gwendolyn Street, a Victorian terrace overlooking the rest of Aberalaw. From her bay window she could see past the terraces in front, down to the square and the statue in the centre. A couple of pear-shaped women were unpegging their faded bedclothes from the washing lines, the men driving from the electronic factories on Pengoes Industrial Estate to the Pump House or the Labour Club. Her living room was bare, save for Andy’s huge television. The fitted carpet had been a fixture since 1973; floral swirls bursting into explosions of satsuma and chocolate-brown every few square metres. The satinette sofa was covered with a cream linen throw-over, but it continually slipped away, revealing patches of mauve and royal blue. The block colour thinned the oxygen, made the atmosphere seem perpetually constipated. Buying expensive things for a rented property was negative equity, Andy said.

      She was flicking through a copy of the NME when he came in; she was skim-reading stories about bands less talented than The Boobs written by journalists less talented than her. He stripped down to his denim cut-offs and T-shirt, left his paint-stained overall on the floor. He went straight to the tiny kitchen to wash his hands with antibacterial soap. Ellie put the magazine down and followed him. She sat on the chipboard worktop. ‘Good day was it?’ she said.

      ‘Not bad, babe.’ He whipped the tea towel from its handle and scraped his fingers in it, his skin pink with toil and hot water. He and Marc had laboured at his father’s decorating company since they were 15 and 16 years old. They probably always would.

      ‘It’s Friday,’ she said cheerfully, trying to alert him to the onset of the weekend. Six days and counting since Johnny-Come-Lately had turned up. Ellie would have liked to go to the Pump House in the hope of meeting him again. But Andy’d always exercised a dreadful Puritan work ethic. He didn’t like drinking all that much. It was difficult to imagine how he filled his time on the road; cooped in a Transit van saturated with lager farts, a couple of dipsomaniacs for company. ‘Do you think Marc and Rhiannon are going out?’

      Andy pretended he hadn’t heard her. He opened the fridge, unleashing the sweet stench of decaying food. He picked a lettuce up by its unopened packaging and tossed it in the swing-top. He took the potatoes out of a plastic grocery bag and began to peel and cut, his blue eyes squinting at the stabs of the vegetable knife, his tongue poked out in application, the starchy water sloshing out of the basin and landing on the floor tiles around his bare feet. An abnormally big bumblebee hurtled against the window, hit the pane with a thud, then dropped out of view.

      The couple ate their dinner in the living room, at either end of the sofa. Andy was watching a rugby match, knife-handle seized in his curled fingers, head tilted towards the television; a physical mannerism he’d inherited from his father. Moving images hypnotized him. Commentators spoke to him in a seductive language that left him deaf to live words. Occasionally he looked away, hurriedly piled a handful of chips into a slice of bread and quickly gnawed at the sandwich, the grease collecting in the crooks of his mouth. At the sound of the half-time whistle, he turned to look at Ellie.

      ‘Now that I’m home,’ he said, pausing to ensure he’d got her attention, ‘we should fix a date for the wedding.’ He folded a piece of bread in half and mopped the egg yolk up from his plate.

      Ellie put her own plate on the floor, setting her cutlery at the rim. It was eighteen months since he’d first asked. She was on her way home from work, stepping off the train in Aberalaw station when she noticed something strange about the mountain behind their house. Initially she thought it was a flock of sheep that had accidentally arranged itself into some uncanny correlation. When she got to the square she started to decipher the words. ‘MARRY ME ELIZABET,’ it said, vast characters spelt out against the moss green bracken with hundreds of smooth grey pebbles. Andy was standing on the doorstep, a nervous twist in his grin. ‘What do you think?’ he said, voice quivering. ‘I nicked them from Merthyr Mawr in the old man’s tipper. Weren’t enough to do the last H.’ She agreed, immediately, emphatically, because, even if she hadn’t wanted to marry him, she thought she would grow into wanting it, the way she’d grown into her sister’s hand-me-down clothes. Two days later, embarrassed by the attention it was attracting, she asked him to go back to the mountain and take the stones down. He’d bought her a nine-carat gold diamond solitaire, the only diamond she’d ever owned, and she’d spent days scraping her knuckle against the bay window, trying to slice the pane. The ring was dull now, with time and glue from the factory. They didn’t get married because they didn’t have the money to pay for the wedding. They still didn’t have the money.

      ‘My СКАЧАТЬ