‘Did I say I wanted coffee?’ Siân said, surprised by her own insolence. Typically she would have drunk it, thankful he’d done something. But she was angry, in a way she’d never been before. She could feel it swimming around in the pit of her stomach, a fuming cloud of black. She picked a mug up and threw the granules in the sink.
‘What’s the matter with you?’ Griff said, gawping at her. ‘You don’t even like wine. Are you pregnant again?’
‘Iesu mawr!’ Siân said, which was Welsh for Jesus Christ. ‘All you had to say was that I looked nice. I’m not pregnant.’ There was a magnificent sense of relief in the words, and in her raised voice. She’d never heard herself shout so loudly. Nobody in the house had. It was magnificently still, the only sound Siân’s own harried breathing. She felt more of the boisterous disdain wedged in her throat, fighting its way out. Before she could stop herself, she cried, ‘I can’t be pregnant, can I? Because I was sterilized! Because you wouldn’t get a vasectomy!’
Now there really were no lies in her house. She’d kept it quiet for two years, because she knew it’d break Griff’s heart. He wanted as many children as possible; refused point-blank to get seen to, like a stubborn bull who thought his manhood was in his testicles. It was hard work looking after kids, looking after them properly. Two was enough for anyone and she hadn’t planned Niall. She fell pregnant again before she had chance to organize contraception after Angharad. She couldn’t cope with four, not with two jobs. She was already scuttling about like the beheaded hen she’d seen at her mamgu’s farm. Another baby would’ve killed her. So when they told her she was entitled to tubal ligation she signed their form of consent, out of worry, not spite. Still, the news hit him like an uppercut. He was silent, his hand trembling as he dropped sugar into his mug.
‘The doctors advised me to have it,’ she said, staring at the floor. ‘They said I couldn’t provide more than three children with all the financial and emotional support they’d need. I’m not Wonder Woman, am I?’ She took a deep breath, disappointed by the last statement because she wanted to be Wonder Woman. ‘Anyway, I don’t sit in those shops every night, getting ogled by alkies so that you can pay for MOTs and drive around Scotland sleeping with Scottish groupies. I do it for the kids we’ve got.’
‘Siân!’ Griff said. ‘That money is for us to go to London. It’s our big break. Besides,’ he glanced sideways at her, ‘if you don’t want to get looked at, why would you put all that muck on your face?’ He gave the kettle a smug grin, pleased with his snappy comeback.
‘Piss off,’ Siân said, bereft of a clever retort. She passed the drumsticks to James and he took them tentatively, his mouth a big O. She took her bag from the hook behind the door. ‘There’s curry in the pot,’ she said not looking at anyone. On her way out she swigged the last of the repellent wine. She dropped her new lipstick into her handbag.
At lunchtime on Saturday, Andy and Ellie were five miles west of Aberalaw, in Pontypridd, the local market town; one high street with a Boots and a Woollies where people from the valley went to buy luxury goods, birthday presents for fussy teenagers, leather shoes for court hearings. Every other week they came, to stare at things they couldn’t afford, to spend time. In Marks & Sparks Andy fingered the cuff of a suit jacket, stroking it like money. ‘I like this,’ he said. Before Ellie had chance to get near it, a middle-aged woman squeezed between them and joined him in his approval, squinting at the buttons over her half-moon spectacles, heaps of plastic bags hunched under her podgy arms. After a minute she seemed to remember that she had no need for a man’s suit. Perhaps her husband was dead.
Ellie looked at the jacket. As she did she realized why Andy’d been so eager to get to the men’s department, marching in military step towards the formal wear. He was looking for a wedding suit. ‘It’s OK,’ she said, dread gripping her by the buttocks. She moved away from him, along the aisle to look at the silver cuff links. They were all packaged in little blue velvet boxes, one pair fashioned on a spirit level with a bead of purple liquid that swam around inside the transparent vials. Ellie was drawn to sparkle. She liked new, shiny things. At university she’d collected stainless-steel colanders and woks and hung them on the kitchen racks in the St Jude’s student house. She liked the way they looked when they caught the morning sun from the patio. She never used them. She never cooked. Her housemates did, and when the utensils burned or grew dull, she threw them away and used her pitiful student loan to buy more, too lazy to set to work with a scouring pad.
‘What about this?’ he said. He was holding a black shirt with a beige tie knotted around its collar, the whole cellophane package pulled close to his proud chest, his pupils broad like a kid on its first ecstasy pill.
‘Beige?’ she said, wrinkling her nose. ‘I don’t think it’d complement my bridesmaids,’ though she had no idea what colour her bridesmaids were going to wear. At some point in her life she must have wanted a white satin gown, a pearl-encrusted headdress, a horse-drawn carriage, ice sculptures, cake-toppers, champagne fountains. Most little girls did. But not Ellie, not now; now when she saw a wedding car her instinct was to shout ‘Don’t do it’ at the bride. She’d recently seen an advert for perfume on Andy’s big television, a film of a woman sitting at her dressing table on the morning of her wedding day, then cut to the same woman strutting along a catwalk, one silk winkle-picker in front of the other, ear-splitting applause from the crowded auditorium. The voiceover said, ‘For the happiest day of her life’, or something equally fey. That’s all Ellie wanted: a big dress rehearsal. Her appetite for married life had fallen by the wayside; what she wanted was a life.
Outside it was hot, the street thick with the smell of sweat and anti-perspirant. Tarpaulin market stalls lined the road, the Asian traders standing behind clothes racks, arms folded, as adolescent girls jumbled through the stock, their mothers wincing at their choices. All around, shoppers reluctantly handed over dog-eared five-pound notes and walked away with gauzy blue plastic bags. Behind the traditional market, the booths of the French travelling bazaar wound around the corner into Taff Street, the vendors packing wine and olives in brown paper, the tricolour draped behind them, the lower half of the town immersed in the stench of Roquefort like bags of rotting rubbish.
Gangs of teenagers were skateboarding around the tax office, their wheels scraping on the concrete as Andy and Ellie walked back to the car park, cutting through the dilapidated precinct. ‘When my mother and father got married they had the reception in their own garden,’ Andy said. ‘They had to call my mother away from the oven to cut the cake!’
‘It’s two thousand and three, And!’ Ellie said. ‘And I’m not your mother. I can’t buy a metre of tulle from a fabric stall and conjure it into a veil. It doesn’t work like that. Weddings cost a fortune. We could do Route Sixty-six before we put a deposit down on a cold finger buffet. And who wants a cold finger buffet?’
Ynysangharad Park opened up in front of them, the music from the bandstand drifting over to Bridge Street. On summer Saturdays the council provided free entertainment. ‘Can’t we do that instead?’ she said. ‘Go travelling? That’s a commitment. It’s a bonding exercise.’
Andy wasn’t listening to her. He was pointing through the railings of the park, at a ginger-haired boy kicking a football against a tree trunk. ‘Look!’ he said, ‘it’s James.’ He started walking towards the boy, through the ornate park gate. ‘Griff must be here somewhere.’
They were all there, Griff and Siân, Marc and Rhiannon, Johnny and his girlfriend, on the bank in front of the stage, their bodies propped around a tartan blanket. Johnny was sitting cross-legged, at the edge of the gathering, his messy black ringlets hanging limp between his shoulder blades. His girlfriend was lying next to him, blonde hair fanned out on the ground. Ellie’s nerves began to ring, vibrating against her spinal cord; she wondered how he’d got there, without her knowing about it. She tried to swerve towards them, but Andy gripped her wrist, pulling her towards Marc and Rhiannon.