The Tip of My Tongue Read online

  Contents

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Introduction

  The Tip of My Tongue

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Thirteen

  Fourteen

  Fifteen

  Sixteen

  Seventeen

  Eighteen

  Nineteen

  Twenty

  Twenty-one

  Geraint, son of Erbin: a synopsis

  Afterword

  Acknowledgements

  Copyright

  For Steve

  New Stories from the Mabinogion

  Introduction

  Some stories, it seems, just keep on going. Whatever you do to them, the words are still whispered abroad, a whistle in the reeds, a bird’s song in your ear.

  Every culture has its myths; many share ingredients with each other. Stir the pot, retell the tale and you draw out something new, a new flavour, a new meaning maybe. There’s no one right version. Perhaps it’s because myths were a way of describing our place in the world, of putting people and their search for meaning in a bigger picture, that they linger in our imagination.

  The eleven stories of the Mabinogion (‘story of youth’) are diverse native Welsh tales taken from two medieval manuscripts. But their roots go back hundreds of years, through written fragments and the unwritten, storytelling tradition. They were first collected under this title, and translated into English, in the nineteenth century.

  The Mabinogion brings us Celtic mythology, Arthurian romance, and a history of the Island of Britain seen through the eyes of medieval Wales – but tells tales that stretch way beyond the boundaries of contemporary Wales, just as the ‘Welsh’ part of this island once did: Welsh was once spoken as far north as Edinburgh. In one tale, the gigantic Bendigeidfran wears the crown of London, and his severed head is buried there, facing France, to protect the land from invaders.

  There is enchantment and shape-shifting, conflict, peacemaking, love, betrayal. A wife conjured out of flowers is punished for unfaithfulness by being turned into an owl, Arthur and his knights chase a magical wild boar and its piglets from Ireland across south Wales to Cornwall, a prince changes places with the king of the underworld for a year...

  Many of these myths are familiar in Wales, and some have filtered through into the wider British tradition, but others are little known beyond the Welsh border. In this series of New Stories from the Mabinogion the old tales are at the heart of the new, to be enjoyed wherever they are read.

  Each author has chosen a story to reinvent and retell for their own reasons and in their own way: creating fresh, contemporary tales that speak to us as much of the world we know now as of times long gone.

  Penny Thomas, series editor

  The Tip of My Tongue

  (and some other weapons as well)

  One

  Sapphire Street

  Summer 1976

  ...middle of something. It’s a rare skill you have, Enid. Quite... unique.

  My mother has stopped me asking my question by holding her hand up in the air like she’s the lolli­pop lady on Splott Road. Now I have to wait while she feeds the curtain to the Beast, which is my mother’s name for the washing machine which is not a real washing machine but is only a mangle. We have to do the curtains because the Erbins are coming, who are very rich and are relatives and have got a black dog. I know this because I am learning to be an International Spy and am gathering information by being sneaky and using my special powers to my Utmost Advantage as A Champion of Law and Order and Justice.

  My mother always swears a lot when she does the mangling and always gives it the Look of Death and sometimes she even hits it.

  A washing machine, he said, she goes, doing my father’s voice, Maria, I’ll buy you a hundred bloody washing machines if it’ll make you happy. Give me strength.

  I’d like to ask her my question but she has taught me that there are moments I can speak and moments I must Keep Schtum. My mother is training me to be a spy so that I can tell her what is going on with my dad when she is not there. I am her Eyes and Ears. She looks at me and her face is all pink and sweaty.

  What? She says it like a dare, What now?

  I can’t ask her my question straight out ­as that is not how spies do it, so I make something up. This is known as a Cover Story and will put my mother off the scent.

  Jackie says her little sister put her arm in the mangle, and she...

  Don’t you ever try that! she says, Don’t you go near this thing! It’s a tool of damnation. Stay. Away. From the Beast.

  Up goes the hand again. She pulls the strap on her sundress and bends round the back of the Beast where the curtain is being spat out. The sun has burned her shoulder bright red. She’s washing the curtains for the first time in Living History because my mother says the Erbins will look down their noses at us and say things like, Oh, your curtains are so disgusting, Maria, however do you stand it? Or they’ll go, Oh, haven’t you got shagpile? We’ve got shagpile in all our rooms and double shagpile in the bathroom too. And the dog has got shagpile wall­paper in his kennel as well.

  We’ve never ever had a visit from a relative before, so this is the sort of thing we will have to put up with when they come.

  By the time she’s got the curtain out of the rollers, I have found a way of saying my question so it’s not suspicious.

  Will Uncle Horace come on his own? I go, all casual.

  He’s not your uncle, not technically. He’s my nineteenth cousin fourth removed or something, and a toffee-nosed prat.

  She stops and looks up like she’s lost something and just spotted it again behind my head.

  Christ Almighty, they’ll want to eat, won’t they? Go and get my tin, Enid, I’ll need to have a think.

  What she means is she’ll need to have a fag because she always feels better when she has a rollie, and sometimes she lets me make the rollie myself with her machine.

  Indoors the house is black as night so I can’t see where she’s put the tin at first, but then the lights go back on inside my eyes and I find it on the sideboard in the living room hidden under all my mother’s stuff. There are lots of new poems on bits of any old thing all heaped up waiting for her Muse to come back.

  My mother is Maria Bracchi, and she is also an Illustrious Poet, which my dad has told me means she is famous. Her real name is Maria Kilbride but when she married my father she became a born-again Italian, so she says, even though my dad’s from Merthyr Tydfil. She is Illustrious though, that is really true because she’s had her picture in the South Wales Echo twice and sometimes gets her poems done in little books. The Muse disappeared from my mother when she got the letter from Uncle Horace. My mother says her Muse is like a narky friend who can really help you but only when they want to.

  She didn’t show me what Uncle Horace had put in his letter, which I think is very strange as she wants my opinion on nearly everything, but I heard her telling it to my dad when I should have been asleep. Some of it I couldn’t hear very well on account of the pipes under the floorboards, but most of it was about the weather anyway and what they do down in Devon where they live.

  We so enjoy our trips to the coast, I don’t know why you haven’t considered holidaying here, she went, and then she said in her own voice, Because you’ve never bloody invited us!

  Then she said something about their new Rover, which made me push my ear hard to the floor, because I know dogs are sometimes called Rover, and then she said more stu
ff about their visit, and then at the end she said:

  ...still have the black dog, is there any hope he will be free of it?

  From my investigations I can conclude that:

  The Erbins have got a black dog.

  The Erbins have got a black dog they don’t want and can’t get rid of, even if they have got him a shagpile kennel.

  We do not have a dog. Not yet.

  Me and my mother sit on the step in the sunshine and she has a fag and I have an ice lolly from the freezer box and we both have a think about food. It’s not that we are too poor or anything, it’s only that my mother says she and the stove don’t always see eye to eye. Everything she puts in the oven comes out looking like a tramp’s shoe. So we’re planning a meal that won’t need too much cooking.

  It’s summer, Enid, she says, No one wants a hot meal in this weather. We can have salad and cold meats. And pickles.

  Beetroot, I say, and we both look at the dirt where my dad will grow his vegetables.

  Precisely, she says.

  She puts her face on my shoulder and blows a big raspberry, and she smells of rollies and Aqua Manda and I can see how the freckles on her nose have all joined up.

  Don’t burn in this sun, lovely, get a bit of oil on, won’t you? she says.

  Do dogs eat salad? I ask, really sneaky. I will find a way to get my question out if it kills me. She looks at me a bit funny so I change the subject and say, Will Uncle Horace bring anyone else? like I couldn’t care less if he does or he doesn’t.

  I expect Celia will be coming, so they’re bound to bring Geraint as well. Can’t leave him on his lonesome, can they?

  Who’s Geraint?

  Their precious little bundle of joy, she says.

  Is Geraint a name like Gelert? I ask, Or Rover?

  My mother jumps up and goes through the kitchen door and when she comes back out, she’s got the Famous Family Album under her arm. It’s covered in cream leather with flowers on each corner which I know are called fleur de lys. I’ve seen every photograph in it, which are mostly of weddings or old people in grey hats and suits. There’s one that’s supposed to be of me but it’s just a blob in a pram.

  I like the ones of my mother and father best. In the first one it’s their wedding day and they’re standing together but with a rose bush between them and my mother is screwing her eyes up and my father is smiling really huge so his teeth are like tombstones. That was before he got his Dental Problems which have so Plagued him and Made his Life a Living Hell.

  The other one isn’t a very good photo on account of their heads being chopped off but you can still see my mother’s swimming costume which is black and white stripes and there’s a bucket and a spade and a sandcastle which she says my father spent all day helping me to make. Even though you can’t see their faces, you can tell they’re really enjoying themselves. My mother has put Monte Carlo underneath in joined-up writing, but one day she told me it was actually Porthcawl Beach and just a little joke because Carlo is my dad’s name.

  I don’t remember being there because I was only little but I took this photo all by myself. Sometimes I try to see me in the picture with my bucket and spade, but I’m the one taking the photograph and you can’t be in two places at one time. If you look really closely you can see the dents in the sand that I made with my feet.

  My mother opens the album and gets a wodge of pictures out from the inside back cover.

  Here they are, she goes, The perfect little family. Horace Erbin, his lovely wife Celia, and little Geraint in the shorts there.

  Uncle Horace is wearing a suit with a gold chain on it to show how rich he is, and Aunty Celia’s got on a hat so massive you can’t see her face.

  That’s because of her squinty eye, says my mother, tapping the picture all disgusted.

  I’m sad to see that Geraint is just an ordinary boy, apart from his hair which is black as coal and looks like the helmets they used to wear in the old days. He’s not like a Gelert at all. My mother can tell something has worried me because she puts her arm round my shoulder and gives me a cuddle.

  I’ve told you, love, they didn’t approve, she says. They made that perfectly clear. So they weren’t gonna make it into the Famous Family Album, were they? But you can’t hold a grudge for eternity, although God knows there’s some that’ll try.

  What she means is there’s a story behind the picture of my mother and father and the rose bush. I didn’t notice it for ages and no one would ever guess, but once when we were going through the album when it was raining outside, she pointed to the rose bush and sang, Come out, come out, wherever you are! And I laughed because it’s like she does when we play hide and seek, and she said,

  See that little speck of white there, behind the roses? That’s you. We wanted you in the pictures, but the photographer wouldn’t allow it. So we found a way to sneak you in.

  She thinks I’m worrying about me being born Out of Wedlock and all that, but I really couldn’t care less about it, and then before I even know I’m going to say it, I say,

  Will they be bringing their dog, too, Mam?

  Two

  My father’s got a big black gap when he grins, right where his front tooth should be. He pulled it out with the pliers one Saturday after the racing when he couldn’t stand the pain for one more second. With his gold earring in his left ear and his droopy moustache, he looks like Macoco the pirate. None of the other fathers round here look anything like a pirate, even though some of them have teeth gone, and according to my mother a few of them can walk the plank. He’s waiting for a gold one to be made, but that was since before Christmas and now it’s summer and he still has a hole big enough to put my finger in.

  He works at GKN all week and on Saturdays he takes me into town to do the food shopping because my mother can’t be trusted with money. Really I think he likes the fuss he gets from all the shop girls. We can spend a hundred hours buying half a pound of olives. Then he meets his buddies at the Hayes and he gives me his sugar cubes off the side of his saucer while they have their discussions. The thing to do with sugar cubes is to melt them a bit in your mouth before you bite them and then you can spread the crunchy bits all over the place with your tongue and later on in say maybe an hour when you’ve forgotten all about it you can find a bit of sugar snuck away behind your back tooth or up the side of your gum. Brilliant.

  Once his friend Terence tried to give me his sugar as well but my father put a stop to it.

  Don’t do that, Tel mate, he said. She’s addicted. And she’s inherited my teeth n’all.

  Terence looked a bit sorry for me with all my problems but it didn’t stop him sneaking me a couple of cubes anyway when my dad wasn’t noticing.

  Sometimes I remember I’m supposed to be spy­ing and reporting back to my mother, so I try to concentrate on what they’re all talking about, but she isn’t really interested in what I tell her, only how they looked. Was Errol’s shirt ironed this time? Had Danny still got the plaster cast on his arm from when he got thrown out of The Rev? Was Michael wearing his wedding ring? That sort of thing. She calls it Doing a Recce.

  There are masses of pigeons waddling round the snack bar. When I’m bored of spying for my mother I count the ones with bad feet. They walk like Mrs Millar from across the road. My mother says it’s because she always goes out in her flip-flops.

  Have you ever seen that woman in a pair of shoes? she goes, No!

  Nearly all the pigeons have got toes curled up double or missing, but they don’t seem to mind it.

  After the Hayes we go to the indoor market and look at the animals in Gordon’s pet stall. I’m crouching down talking to the rats while my dad is whistling at the parrot. He would love to have it, but my mother says she gets asthmatic around birds, and that’s why I’m not allowed a dog. I know a rat is out of the question too.

  The only allowable pet is a goldfish, but I’ve already had a few and they’re very boring for a pet, going round and round and round all the time
. The last one was black and yellow and we won it at Barry Island. My dad called it Moby after a famous shark when I wanted to call it Robert Crumb from two doors down on account of his mouth always being open like that, but my dad said how would I like it if someone called their pet monkey Enid? I said I wouldn’t mind if I was allowed to play with it.

  One day when I was at school my mother felt so bad for Moby she said she took him to the river and set him free. I didn’t even notice for about a week, and when I finally saw he was gone, she said, See, that’s why you can’t have a dog. Left to you, the poor thing would starve to death.

  I keep the World of Dogs book under my bed, which has every breed on the planet. I’d like a deerhound, which is like a cross between a horse and the sheepskin rug my friend Jackie’s mum bought off the market, and plus their long faces remind me of Jackie as well. I think it would be nice to have a boy dog, and then I can call him David, after David Cassidy, who is an expert on puppies.

  I’m considering Woody versus David as a name for my deerhound when my dad nudges me and points to the inside of the stall. Two puppies in a cage! They are batting each other with their paws and biting each other’s heads. Close up they look like a couple of dishrags, both black and white with straggly fur and bits of straw stuck all over the place.

  Gordon comes and points a warning at me. He’s bald and fat and his head and neck are exactly the same size, and covered in tattoos, so from the back he looks like a giant marrow stuffed in a t-shirt. There’s one of a scorpion crawling into his ear and more on his arms and hands as well, and knuckleduster rings on all his fingers. My dad calls him Gay Gordon, but not to his face, because he used to be a wrestler before he did his back in. Gordon won’t let anyone put their fingers in the cages and there are signs up everywhere telling you not to as well, as if you’d disobey Gordon for one second.

  What do you think your mam would say if we came home with one of these? says my dad, crouching down and making kissing noises at the puppies. I think he’s asking if I want one, but then I think about the one that’ll be left behind with Gordon and I feel very sad for it.