Ellie balanced the cans in the crooks of her arms, the glasses hooked in her fingers. As she turned to walk away, she stepped into somebody, her stiletto heel stabbing the rubber toecap of a basketball boot. Instinctively, she knew it was the stranger. She jolted backwards, the weight of a glass falling from her grip. Then, in her bewildered attempt to catch it before guessing which direction it was going to take, she jumped back at him, stepping again on his foot.
‘Whoa!’ he said, catching her, his arms stretched out like Jesus, as though trying to counter all eventualities. He smelled of musk and petrol and faintly of smoke. The glass landed on a beer towel, the liquid trickling out, forming a small dark patch on the Terylene. The barman caught the glass before it rolled off the edge.
‘Sorry,’ Ellie said, cheeks beginning to burn.
‘It’s okay,’ he said. ‘Want another one?’ He let go of her body and stepped backwards, the sudden absence of his touch sending an amphetamine rush through Ellie’s spine. It smashed against her cranium like a pinball he had triggered. Something about him activated a weird animalism in Ellie, an acute hunger in her abdominal walls. Immediately, she wanted to touch him again, to feel the sensation one more time. She stepped away. ‘Where are you from?’ she said. She wasn’t from Aberalaw either. She knew what a difficult time he’d have settling in.
He picked the empty glass up, gripping it with his bony, icicle-like fingers. ‘Cornwall,’ he said, sniffing it. He put it back on the towel. ‘Did you want another?’
Ellie thought about the West Country accents that had surrounded her throughout her three-year stint at Plymouth University. She was homesick suddenly for nights out at the Pavilions, for morning strolls along the Barbican, for lunchtime editorial meetings at the student magazine. When she had lived in Plymouth, she had never been homesick for Wales. ‘If you don’t mind,’ she said, remembering herself. ‘That one was for your girlfriend anyway.’
The man smiled affectionately at her. ‘She is not allowed to drink vodka,’ he said.
Andy daren’t tell Ellie what she wasn’t allowed to drink. Around here, the women wore the trousers, not because Welsh women were in any manner advanced in feminist thinking, but because Welsh men were so indolent; too dozy for domestic altercations. She couldn’t decide if the man’s dominance over his girlfriend’s choice of beverage was sexist, or exotic. She smiled weakly, shrugged her shoulders. She walked back to the lounge, her arms scrunched around herself like wings, the cold glasses clutched against her prickly skin. She is not allowed to drink vodka. ‘What a wanker,’ she thought as she kicked the lounge door open, knowing even as she thought it that what she was experiencing was not abhorrence. It was allure. This was girl meets boy, big style; the token of acceptance she’d been about to present to his girlfriend was bankrupt, common sense pirouetting into the middle distance, vanishing like the spilt liquor.
The rest of the night slipped away between a long, drawn-out stomach-ache and ephemeral spasms of jealousy. The amphetamine high dulled to a dreary pain, winding leisurely around her stomach, like a washing machine on a wool cycle. All night Rhiannon wouldn’t stop talking to the man. She jabbered perpetually, head bobbing like a buoy on choppy water. Every time she touched his emaciated wrist, accidentally, but more often intentionally, Ellie felt envy solidifying like a lethal tumour, deep inside her. Occasionally, the man caught Ellie’s stare, his onyx eyes glassy now from the smoke. They rested on her for a few seconds, alert and apologetic, but then quickly moved on to his drink, or, unbearably, on to Rhiannon. But Ellie didn’t stop looking at him, not even when Andy tried to kiss or speak to her. And what she noticed, just before the couple unexpectedly stood up, waved and left, was that everyone else in the pub was staring at them too, craning their necks and gawking, because this was a south Wales valley village, and nobody ever left, and nobody new ever arrived. They were like aliens, that couple, swanning in with their accents and their pockmarks. They might as well have arrived in a silvery saucer-shaped spaceship. Nobody outside of their own table attempted to speak to them, to ask where they were from or what their business here was, again because this was Aberalaw, a south Wales valley town. Instead, the other customers peered, and peered, like a mob of meerkats standing on hind legs. Then, when the couple had gone, they all turned to one another and made up their own stories.
On Monday, Ellie boarded her 7 a.m. train with the usual commuters: a middle-aged administrator at Ponty College and a bricky working down the Bay. They were the only three people awake in Aberalaw at that time in the morning. At 7.55 she alighted at Cardiff Central Station, the nearby Brains Brewery coming to life for another sun-soaked shift, the pungent stench of the hops saturating her twenty-minute speed-walk to Atlas Road. There she sat in a stifling workshop, sticking stickers on mugs while the rush hours whizzed past the yellow bricks of the city.
There was a crisis going on with the Alton Towers batch. They needed another five hundred by the end of summer but the Ceramics department couldn’t get the colour right. Ellie was bored of the stupid picture: a navy turreted castle with red fireworks in the background. The mugs were orange and the castle kept coming out purple. It was because the kiln was set at the wrong temperature. Everybody on the floor knew it. But the management were adamant it was Safia and Ellie’s fault. Jane was trying to stop them using hand cream, stop them eating crisps in case they got gunk on their fingers; all sorts of screwed-up rules it was illegal to instate. The desks were stacked with tray upon tray of orange mugs, all waiting for quality control. They even had a mini-skip in which to throw the rejects, smashing each one first in an attempt to prevent light fingers. Ellie had jokingly offered Jane a majority percentage in a spot of bent trade but Jane had threatened to report her. Jane, who was Ellie’s sister, had been the Ceramics manager for seven years. She was obnoxious to start with, but the job had pushed her to the edge. The factory floor was a breeding ground for paranoia. You had to keep watching your back because everyone around you would do almost anything to defend their own menial position, bereft of the courage to go and try something new. It was like a prison cell; the guy next to you initially appearing to be another hapless fool, then twelve months later turning into a loathsome psychopath whose face you dreamt about mutilating with a craft knife you stole from the art studio.
Safia threw a chewing gum at Ellie. It hit her on the cheekbone then landed at the bottom of her glue trough with last week’s tacky scraps of paper. Ellie fished it out and threw it back at Safia, a new layer of gloop staining the sleeve of her crisp white blouse.
Safia laughed. ‘Yous have a good weekend?’ she said. She was a tall Pakistani girl with clumpy mascara. She’d ambled into the factory and sat at Belinda’s desk, a week after Belinda had walked out. For the first five days she’d complained that the transfers sent in from the cover-coaters were too thin, or too thick, that the mugs were chipped and discoloured. Ellie’d liked Belinda because Belinda danced incessantly to the music in her headphones, ignoring everything Jane said. She’d had the words Fuck Work inscribed across the bust of her tabard. But Safia was pedantic.
One stormy Tuesday morning following a bank holiday, Safia and Ellie were the only daft cows who’d turned up for work. Forced to sit in the workshop together at lunch, chewing oily tuna sandwiches from the newsagent on the corner, Ellie reluctantly warmed to Safia’s worrisome and naive nature; the way she thought she’d never get over her first love, a U2 fan from Caerphilly. She was born and raised in Cardiff, the essence of the city audible in her nasal words. Her family had sent her to Manchester for two months during a perplexing adolescence and her mother had taken her to Pakistan once to meet her grandmother. Safia had cried to come home long before the four weeks were spent; screamed on the first day, scared shitless by lizards climbing up the living-room walls. She was struggling to balance her life between her Muslim family and extended Western social circle. A difficult situation arose every time someone mentioned going to McDonald’s for lunch or offered her a glass