Ellie shattered the virgin balls, exposing a purple stain on the green felt where Siân had tipped a pint of cider & black a few months earlier.
‘I tell ewe,’ Rhiannon said, ‘when ’ey make it I’m gonna have a big bloody mansion built on Pengoes Mountain, a big bloody electrocuted gate to keep the scum from the estate out.’ She clapped her hands, like a seal doing tricks for a piece of fish. Pool games with Rhiannon were not meant to be won. They played by loitering around the table for three-quarters of an hour, talking about whatever Rhiannon wanted to talk about, taking it in turns with slow, aimless strikes. Ellie daren’t put any effort into it. She was afraid of beating Rhiannon, afraid of what Rhiannon’s reaction might entail. If Rhiannon was anything she was a sore loser, so Ellie saved her concentration for pool games with Griff. Nothing annoyed Griff like losing a pub game to a girl.
‘Bloody tired I am,’ Rhiannon said. ‘Marc’s fault it is. Came home wanting six weeks’ worth of nooky in two days.’ Ellie cringed at the mention of nooky. Rhiannon was always fraught to portray herself as a hip, 20-year-old fashion aficionado. She read articles in Kelly’s magazines about John Galliano and Stella McCartney, was always dripping in fake haute couture. But her vocabulary perpetually belied her disguise. Words like nooky and mush and Billy Whizz. Her voice came straight from the estate.
‘Three times in one fuckin’ night,’ she said. ‘That run in the family or wha’?’
Andy and Marc were brothers, Andy the elder by a year, which meant that Ellie and Rhiannon were very nearly sisters: sisters by common law. There was a time when Ellie could stand Rhiannon, when she didn’t cross the street to avoid her, when she thought she was a suave and quick-witted femme fatale. Marc had met her eight months ago at a gig in Penmaes Welfare Hall, one of those ones where The Boobs stood in for the resident cabaret act, a glam-rock cover band called The Poseurs. As soon as the locals worked out that Andy didn’t know any T-Rex riffs, The Boobs got bottled off. One dour Sunday afternoon, a black woman had appeared on the dance-floor, strutting around on her own, a miniature bottle of Moët in her fist, a luminous pink straw, shaped like a treble clef, sticking out of the top. She was wearing a tiny yellow A-line dress and a pair of fishnet stockings, the black lace bands at the top of them exposed. Her accent was so Welsh, so cordial and melodic, it would have seemed foolish to interpret it as anything other than endearing.
Ellie clearly remembered thinking that she could do with a friend like Rhiannon. It gave her hope to think that such a sophisticated specimen of being existed in a place so overcrowded with rednecks. Of course that was all positive prejudice. Rhiannon turned out to be the most bigoted person Ellie’d ever met: a brainless, reckless tart. There was no champagne in that bottle. It was just something she used to carry around in her counterfeit Prada handbag, one of her good-time-girl props. But she’d given Marc a lift home in her red sports car and he’d never been the same since. Ellie always joked that she must do something really special in bed.
‘I mean,’ Rhiannon said, swallowing a big gulp of wine, ‘does Andy have to shag ewe every night?’
‘He would if he could,’ Ellie said. For the most part, Andy and Ellie’s libidos worked on different time zones. His was on Greenwich Mean Time; hers was on Central Daylight. They hardly ever converged. ‘Every night I hear him brushing his teeth in the bathroom with his electric toothbrush. That means he wants it. He told me once that it is a family trait; that it comes from his mother. Gwynnie. Can you imagine? Apparently she’s a real goer.’
Ellie expected Rhiannon to laugh but she had already lost interest in the subject. She was standing in front of the mirrored beer advert, arranging her hair so it stuck up like the head feathers of an exotic bird, her wineglass held in the air as though she expected an attendant to come and fill it. She hadn’t expected an answer. She thought she was the only person in the village who had sex, and was therefore the only one qualified to speak of it.
They left the game half finished when Rhiannon decided she was too tired to play. She propped the cue against the wall and it immediately fell and crashed on the parquet floor. She rolled her eyes as she plonked herself down on the stool. ‘It’s that powder as well, see,’ she said. She curled her hand around her jaw, hiding her mouth from Dai Davies’s eye-line. ‘A couple of dabs on a Saturday and I’m not right till Wednesday.’
‘You took quite a lot of it,’ Ellie said, safe in the knowledge that sarcasm went right over Rhiannon’s head.
‘Bloody good stuff it was,’ Rhiannon said. ‘I’d like to know where ’e got it from, El. Eighteen bloody months I’ve been trying to get hold of some whizz like that. Nothing!’
‘Scotland,’ Ellie said. She knew Rhiannon wasn’t the sharpest knife in the drawer, but it was obvious. ‘Marc brought it back from Glasgow.’
‘No,’ Rhiannon said. She shook her head, sprigs of her carefully placed hair falling flat. ‘Marc din’t have enough money to get home. Griff’s asked ’is mammy to put a loan in his account for petrol. They’d still be on a fuckin’ motorway somewhere otherwise. I bought the speed, from that English bloke, with the long ’air. ’E was in yere on Saturday with ’is missus. Just moved yere, ’e ’as, sold ’is farm in Devon or somethin’. Bloody good stuff it was, El. I don’t wanna be lining some English twat’s pocket, do I? Whass ’appenin’ in Cardiff? Anything about?’
Rhiannon was talking about the stranger. ‘He’s not from Devon,’ Ellie said. ‘He’s from Cornwall. There’s a difference.’ She looked Rhiannon straight in the eyes, something she didn’t do very often. ‘Are you sure you got it from him?’
‘Yes!’ Rhiannon said. ‘I saw ’im on the square on Saturday morning. ’E was doing a deal with a kid from the estate. I went right bloody up to ’im, asked ’im what ’e ’ad. He’s got disco pills too, he told me.’
That’s how Rhiannon knew him. That’s why she kept touching him on Saturday, as if he was her pet dog. He didn’t look like someone who sold drugs. Street pushers wore baggy, food-stained jogging-bottoms. They lived in unfurnished flats on the Dinham Estate. Ellie quickly imagined what kind of job her ideal man would have. He would be a painter or an architect, someone with a pencil in his hand. But this was Aberalaw and drug dealing was as good a job as anyone could hope to get. ‘What’s his name?’ she said.
Rhiannon snuck a glimpse at Dai. He was reading the local newspaper, studying the ‘Look Who’s Been in Court’ column, looking for stories he could exaggerate. Jenny Two-Books, the assistant from the betting shop on the High Street, had just arrived to collect her extra takings. She ran her own service for the alkies who were too drunk to walk to the shop. ‘Johnny,’ Rhiannon said. ‘Johnny somethin’.’
‘Where does he live?’
‘I don’t bloody know, El. What’s it to ewe anyway?’
Ellie felt her cheeks redden. She looked down at the assortment of wineglasses on the table, trying to hide her face from Rhiannon, but Rhiannon had already detected something in her enquiry. ‘Ewe don’t fancy ’im or somethin’, do ewe, El?’
‘Don’t be stupid,’ Ellie said, not looking up from her drink. ‘I love Andy.’
Rhiannon lifted the egg-cup-shaped glass to her mouth, peering intently at Ellie over the rim. ‘Aye,’ she said. ‘I love Marc an’ all. I love Marc as much as ewe love Andy, don’t think that I don’t. An’ if I ’ear anyone saying I don’t love Marc, I’ll fuckin’ batter ’em.’ Whatever that was supposed to mean. Ellie shrugged and reached for her glass.
Rhiannon beat her to it. ‘I’ll get ewe a fresh one,’ she said, giggling, the angry smirk on her face fading from the bottom up. ‘But ewe’ll ’ave to remember ’ow many ewe owe me. I can’t afford to keep us both in wine. Things ain’t that good at the salon.’
Dai