In the Evil Day

70

…WALES…

They lay in their sweat in the cold room, her head on his chest.

She had come to him in the early morning, light behind the curtains. He heard the door and he was moving, one leg off the bed.

‘I dreamt you’d gone,’ she said. ‘I dreamt I came here and found you’d gone.’

He held out his arms. She came to him and he put his arms around her, put his head against the long white nightdress, against her stomach, smelled the clean cotton and her body, rubbed his face against her. She pushed him away gently, crossed her arms and lifted her garment over her head, revealed herself, lean, small breasts.

They made love slowly. He felt the hesitancy in her and he had it in himself, he did not deserve her, he was too crude a creature for her. But when he entered her, she became urgent, squeezed his flesh, made him roll, roll again, she bit him, scratched him, she groaned, and he could not maintain his silence.

Done, she was sleepy, languid, her body was aligned with him, her arm lay across him, a hand on his thigh.

Niemand spoke into her damp hair, softly, ‘I want to say thank you. Better than I said it. I don’t know why you did that for me.’

‘I saw you coming,’ she said. ‘You had this look.’

He felt her words on his skin, the warm brush of her breath.

‘I thought, shit, off his face, he shouldn’t be in the traffic. And then I saw your eyes and I thought, no, not stoned, I didn’t know what but I knew not stoned.’

He remembered the yellow helmet looking at him and the man coming from behind and the weak feeling.

‘My brother died in Cardiff because no one would help him,’ she said. ‘They thought he was drunk but he was diabetic, he was having a hypo and people walked around him, walked away. So. No. Anyway, you looked so straight, your hair, the tan, and you looked hurt, there’s a look you know, you see it in kids. And then I saw this guy coming, he was running. In a suit but not your suit person, like a bouncer, thug face, and I thought, fuck you, boyo, let’s go, catch us if you can.’

She raised a hand, touched his lips, ran a finger along the thin ridge of cartilage on his broken nose.

‘Do you have a job?’ she said. ‘Do something?’

How did you tell someone like this what you did, what you had done, without her rejecting you?

‘A soldier,’ he said. ‘I used to be a soldier.’