Safia copied the gesture contemptuously, unsatisfied with the answer.
‘Fine,’ Ellie said, again. ‘Went out, got pissed. Same shit, different day.’ She didn’t have the energy for a discussion about it. Her head was still fuzzy with the phet comedown. She hadn’t done powder for years, wasn’t used to the dizzying after-effects.
She picked a new mug from the pile and gently ran her fingertips along the circumference, feeling for imperfections. She peeled a decal from its backing and wound it around the mug, squinting at it as she ironed the air bubbles out with her tongue-shaped smoother. Gavin dropped a mug on the floor and Ellie looked up to see if it had smashed. It had, but he continued to work regardless, struggling with the direct print machine. He was a solid man with a girlfriend he didn’t like and twins on the way. He made mistakes and stuck by them, held his head high, took the bacon home. He was wearing a Cardiff City football T-shirt, the season fixtures printed on its back. It was a reject from the T-shirt department. Nobody wore their own stuff to work unless the only seconds out were England sweatshirts. She knew the fixtures now by heart. They’d both worked overtime fourteen days in a row. Gavin was saving for a double buggy and Ellie had to make-up Andy’s half of last month’s rent.
In the beginning, Ellie had been impressed by The Boobs. Andy was adamant that they were going to make it and Ellie had no reason to doubt him. Ambition was written through her own bones like a stick of Porthcawl rock. She knew what it was to want rabbling cities and hectic skylines, to have dreams about seeing the back of the valleys. So when she moved in with Andy, only to discover their joint income didn’t stretch to the lease, not even on a crumbling two-bedroom in Aberalaw, Ellie was happy to quit freelancing in favour of a steady income. She figured that when the hard work was done, she’d be one half of an über-couple, renowned for throwing vegetarian dinner parties at their chic Greenwich Village brownstone. That was over a year ago, and she felt as though she’d stuck enough stickers on mugs to last four lifetimes.
‘Bastard!’ Gavin said as another mug spun out of his grip. It shattered on the concrete floor. He bent down to retrieve the fragments, throwing each one into the mini-skip with an expletive.
‘Are you going to tell me about your weekend?’ Safia said, eyes narrowing to slits. ‘I thought Andy was coming home on Saturday.’ Safia didn’t have a social life. She spent most of her leisure time cooking pasanday for her family. She watched Coronation Street. She meticulously clung to the details of Ellie’s existence like a tabloid journalist unearthing the secrets of an A-list celebrity.
Every day, Ellie ran through an inventory of the things she’d done since she’d last seen Safia: what time she’d got home; what she’d eaten for dinner. Safia’s favourite subject was Andy. If he and Ellie had had sex, Safia needed to know the position, the point of orgasm, the colour of the sheets. Over time Ellie had begun to embellish these little narratives, so that she’d eaten scallops instead of battered cod, worn negligees instead of fleece pyjamas, got twenty minutes of cunnilingus instead of nothing. It was inevitable: Safia’s appetite for romance was insatiable, but Ellie had lived with Andy for a long time – they sometimes couldn’t be bothered to have sex. And today she wasn’t thinking about Andy at all; her mind’s eye was busy with the stranger’s image: his chaotic hair, his treacle-black eyes, his lily-white teeth.
It made something in her tummy swell, like a fist of dough in an oven. She was wondering why his girlfriend wasn’t allowed to drink vodka, wondering what his name was, wondering what the hell he was doing in Aberalaw. These little mysteries were far more compelling than anything to do with Andy, more compelling even than the idyllic fantasy life she had created for herself and conveyed on a daily basis to Safia. The stranger arrived seamlessly in her consciousness. One minute she’d been missing Andy; the next, there was some long-haired extraterrestrial who had materialized from thin air.
‘El?’ Safia said, as if from some distance.
Ellie sighed, annoyed by the interruption. She considered telling Safia about the stranger, but then quickly dismissed the idea. Safia was as chaste and delicate as the foil on a new coffee jar. She was religious. She’d been conditioned to ignore temptation, neglect her own feelings, banish any rebellious thoughts that accidentally found their way into her head. She wouldn’t understand Ellie’s predicament.
‘Yeah, Andy’s home,’ Ellie said. ‘And the band had some good news. A Radio 1 DJ liked one of their demos. He wants them to go on his show.’
‘Wow,’ Safia said. ‘They’re going to be famous!’
Behind her the fire exit opened. Jane appeared, heels clicking on the concrete. She stood next to their adjoining desks; hand on hip, counted the trays of mugs piled up from the floor. She noted the total down on her clipboard, her glasses slipping down her nose. ‘You know we need a whole new batch of these packed and shipped by the end of August, don’t you? Save your chitchat for your coffee break.’
At six on Wednesday night, Ellie was on her way home from the factory. The sun was reflecting on the bronze statue in the middle of Aberalaw Square. It was a Dai-capped miner, one arm clutching his Davy lamp, the other curved protectively around his wife and babe-in-arms. It was hard to distinguish one limb from another, especially if Ellie had been drinking in the Pump House. As Ellie got close to the pub she saw Rhiannon standing on the doorstep, talking into her mobile phone, a pair of pinstripe bell-bottom under her white hairdressing tunic. Ellie began to walk faster, trying to dodge her, scurrying past the statue towards the safety of Woodland Terrace. But a metre away from the pine end, Rhiannon’s voice rang through the village like a marauding police siren. ‘Oi, mush, come back by yere a minute.’
Ellie reluctantly turned around and walked back to the pub, her duffel bag jerking on her shoulder. She stood in front of Rhiannon while Rhiannon finished her conversation and flipped her phone shut. ‘Kelly’s gone to the dentist to get her rotten teeth out,’ she said. ‘Too many fuckin’ sweets or somethin’. Fancy comin’ in yere with me for a drink or what?’
Rhiannon was bordering on alcoholism, carried half-litre bottles of spirits around in her handbag. But she always needed someone to drink with. Misery loves company. Kelly was her teenage assistant at the salon; usually they went out together every night after work. Ellie picked at a glue stain on the thigh of her khaki cammos. Andy didn’t like her drinking on week nights; he didn’t like her drinking without him.
‘Well?’ Rhiannon yapped.
Ellie jumped.
‘Ewe ’avin a bloody drink or not?’
Ellie followed Rhiannon through the pub and into the games area. Rhiannon sat at her table, the surface of it obscured with wineglasses full of Liebfraumilch, the house white. She picked one of the glasses up and gave it to Ellie, then took a sip of her own. ‘I’ve got a game of pool on the go,’ she said, pulling a worn cue out of the umbrella stand. ‘I’ll break if ewe don’ mind.’
Dai Davies looked up from his newspaper. ‘Go on, bach,’ he said, shouting across the pub, holding his beer stein up in the air. He was a fixture at the Pump House bar, a retired cat burglar who delighted in malicious hearsay. He was also Rhiannon’s uncle.
Rhiannon held the cue against herself, the tip burrowed between her double-D breasts. She squinted at it and puffed on the chalk then ducked at the edge of the table, one leg kicking out at the rear, her cropped bell-bottom revealing a thick band of brown skin. ‘Italian coloured,’ she called herself. But she wasn’t Italian. Her parents were as Welsh as they came; career criminals from the Dinham Estate. The man who Rhiannon swore was her father, despite his being white and her clearly being mixed race, had been murdered in his prison cell when she was a kid. But not before giving her some cock-and-bull history lesson about south Walians originally being naturally dark-skinned, a story she still used to defend herself whenever someone from the estate called her a nigger.
The