4

Pigeon scuffs around the town, thinking of Gwyn, until the thoughts turn so smudged they’re black like something burnt and ruined. When that happens, Pigeon starts peering in through people’s windows, looking for light. He’s a scavenger, a scavenger for comfort. Day to day to day, Pigeon drags his feet around his pebble-dashed kingdom. Non-descript, gloomy, at the wrong end of nowhere. Perhaps.

But below the grey domain of this hill, the patchwork fields stretch their expanse of emerald down, sloping to a silver sea of torn paper waves. And above, above the hill, there are the crouching mountains, with their lakes, like broken mirrors wedged between valleys, and along the tops of the plaited ridges there’s that trembling, pencil-line horizon. It’s worth a second look. Just briefly.

So here, here’s Pigeon again. Here, grey. Just a sketch the boy. His face is sallow. There’s a snarl at his lips, and his shoulders are delicate as eggshells. Pigeon, here on the hill, wanders the pebble-dash, pebbled ash, scuffing his feet up the hill, and then up between the houses.

Pigeon goes right up to the top of the hill. To where you can sit and look down at the town all spread out like a handkerchief. Pigeon spits at it. He can spit a long way now, but still, the gob of spit lands on the grass just below him, and the town is still there. Pigeon sits on the hill, legs crossed, watching the day turning slowly. When his legs are cold through the school trousers, Pigeon stands, shakes out his legs and starts back down, for the town, the houses in their higgledey rows. He walks back into it. Into the pattern of the town, and scuffs along the streets between the shapes of the houses.

He stops at one that’s off balance. It’s skiw wiff. Crooked. Bits and pieces of it shoot out in all directions, like a peculiar, mangled space ship. It’s Pigeon’s house. Outside is Pigeon’s shed. That’s Pigeon’s hole.

Pigeon avoids the house, and goes straight round to his shed.

Back in the good days the house was chaotic, a tangle of words and arguments, and conversations even, and even fun.

Like this very particular day, back then, in the house, in spring. It was her birthday, and Pigeon’s mam had put on such a beautiful dress, and, in the dress, she was spinning and spinning in the kitchen, so that the pretty flowers on the dress streaked through the air, and a dish was knocked off the draining board by the spinning flowers on the dress. And that day she just laughed, that day, and her laugh, it was easy, like a soft breeze. So pretty, Pigeon’s mam, like a ghost, but pretty.

Pigeon can remember that day. Pigeon can still remember, and he tells his mam about it, sitting on his bed in the shed in the falling night this Sunday. And she’s quiet, but she strokes his hair as he lies his head on her lap, as he talks. And her hands are soft as feathers, so that Pigeon doesn’t know if they’re there at all. Her han