roadswim-collective

[roadswim-collective]

Three Times He Lied To Me - Lie #1  (version 2)

I was twenty four when I met Will. I fell for him. We were together for a couple of years, the first one pretty good, the second pretty bad, and then we split up. I'm forty three now and this morning something funny happened that made me think about Will for the first time in years.  

It was 1997 and I was back in Aberdare, living with my mother, after three years in halls of residence. Here's a list of the places you'd be most likely to see me during the year I was twenty four:

on a train

in a library

at a railway station

in a corridor

on a bus

at a bus stop

in my bedroom.

I had literally no social life, unless you count going to the shop for tobacco. My best friend was my I, Claudius box set. On Friday nights when my mother was out with the girls from darts, I'd lie in the bath for a couple of hours, drinking Prosecco and reading Mary Beard. Sometimes I'd do that on Saturday nights too. Occasionally, very occasionally, someone I'd been at uni with might phone to see if I wanted to come for a night out in Cardiff. I tended to say yes and then not go. I'd get so stupidly stressed in making the arrangements that I'd be tired before I set out. I never knew which  train to catch, or what to wear or say. Then a voice in my head would ask why I was even bothering, and I never had an answer. So I just put everything away, closed the wardrobe doors, and stayed at home. But then I'd have to make some idiotic and obviously untrue excuse, and over time the invitations dried up. The whole thing filled me with equal parts shame and relief. So then I'd tell myself that this was just the way I was, no point feeling guilty about it, run a nice hot bath and get the Prosecco from the fridge. And of course later on, in bed, I'd have to stop myself thinking about it all, imagining the sort of night they were having. I was a funny sort of girl, really, all awkward and unsure.  

I did go other places sometimes. If the weather was nice you might see me in a castle. Or I might be at Caerleon, looking at the Roman stuff. And now and again you'd see me out of breath at the top of a hill somewhere looking at the remains of an Iron Age fort. I was always alone on these excursions and they were always slightly unsatisfying. Not because I was alone, that was fine, but because they were the same old tourist traps, the places I could get to on public transport. I hadn't learned to drive and couldn't afford a car anyway. I knew of dozens of places within a 25-mile radius of home that had interesting old things to poke round but I couldn't get to them by bus so they were out of bounds to me. Even Caerleon, which I did to death over about three summers, was four different buses from Aberdare. You'd spend half the day getting there and back. I remember how desperate I was to be a driver but I couldn't even afford lessons.

I'd just begun a Master's in history, a two-year course, and I was completely broke. Amazingly I'd got a First in my degree and my tutor recommended me for post-grad. It was all a bit overwhelming. I was the first in my family to go to uni, you see. Well, my father was accepted at some art college back in the day but he didn't go. Both sides of my family had always been miners and farmers, originally from Carmarthenshire. There were no mortar boards in our history until I came along, which seemed quite a big deal at the time. Also, I was never one of those kids who are expected to go on to higher education. I left school at sixteen with a handful of mediocre O Levels. Yes, O Levels, I'm ancient. I don't blame the school really, it was no worse than any other valleys comp. Plenty of bright kids went on to good things from there, my friend Chloe stayed at school to do her A Levels then went to Cambridge to study physics.  

Most teachers had me down as one of the bright kids but I just wasn't in the right head space at the time. My father left home a week before my fifteenth birthday and everything went mad. It was about the messiest break up imaginable. If I gave you the details it would sound like something from Jeremy Kyle. There was fighting, there were threats, there was an arrest. There, that'll give you some idea. I couldn't handle school at that point, I couldn't handle anything. My mother wasn't in the best shape either, off work with anxiety and depression. The bank nearly repossessed the house and my brother got an eighteen month suspended sentence for threatening behaviour. So I sleepwalked through my exams, got the kind of results you'd predict, and that was it for me and school. I decided I should explore the world of work, make some money, maybe move out and get a place of my own.

I knew exactly where I wanted to live, right at the top of Heol-y-Mynydd. This was over the other side of Aberdare from us, a street of council houses climbing the lower slope of the western valley wall. As far as you can go in that direction without leaving the Cynon Valley. Cars traverse an alpine zig zag to the plateau, heading to and from the Rhondda. When it's night and you look out of your bedroom window, down in Robertstown by the river, the highest little orange lights you see before the black of the mountain, that's Heol-y-Mynydd. It's one of those steep streets where each layer of houses overlooks the rooftops of the layer below. I fancied living up there. I wanted one of the houses in the last layer, the ones that backed on to the hillside, where the road ended. I saw myself sitting at the window in a quiet kitchen, watching the mountain rise up in stages, first trees, then ferns, then stubbly grass and exposed rock to the top. When my parents were shouting and screaming horrible things at each other, I'd feel like they were injecting broken glass under my skin and I had to get out. So I'd go for long walks, usually with a bottle of something and a packet of Marlboro Lights, trying to go where there were no people. That was easy enough in Robertstown as most of the place had been knocked down years ago. Our house was in one of the few streets left. You could see where the others had been if you walked through the wild weeds and bushes that grew over their remains, and this I did. Sometimes I'd cross the bypass and go as far as the two hundred year old bridge. I looked down at the matted lines of moss under my boots and saw traces of the tramway and of the buried canal.

Skirting town through sidestreets I'd come out on Victoria Square where the statue of frock-coated Caradog outside the Black Lion would wave his left hand at me, the conductor's baton held high in his right. From there it was a long slog up the hill, sometimes to Dare Valley Country Park to sit in the café and watch the happy families being happy, or all the way up to Heol-y-Mynydd for the view. I stopped going there after a while. There were some girls living up there who didn't like me. Their parents didn't like my mother. It was all very tangled and twisted, some of them were belonging to my father, there was some grudge there I didn't entirely know about and I didn't want to either. I got spotted mooning around the cul de sac on a Sunday afternoon and it went round that I was roaming the streets pissed up. My mother got the blame then passed it back to me. So I cut Heol-y-Mynydd out. I could get the same view from the Country Park, so I started going there. You just had to get past all the happy people, the horse riders and the hikers and the families in the play area. I didn't dream of a house in Heol-y-Mynydd now. I dreamt of a house built into the mountain itself, halfway up the ridge, half-sunk into the rock, half-hidden in the ferns, built of wood and stone, plastic bottles and tyres. I'd run solar cells from a water wheel in the stream, grow my own food, reuse every scrap of waste. They'd never find me there, and no-one could ever lay a claim to my house, no mortgage lender, no bank, no landlord, no family, no council, because I would have built it with my own hands.  

Meanwhile, back in the real world, I ritually burnt all my school stuff in the back garden, and set off to explore the world of work. First I got a job in a factory in Talbot Green, hated it and left after six months, then got a job at the tax office in Llanishen, hated it, quit after nine months, then worked in a nursing home for almost year, which I hated even more, then on the dole for six months, which nearly killed me, then Asda for a year and a half, which was okay but deadly dull. I never made any money, the pay was always crap, no matter how many hours overtime I did. And most of it went on getting to work and back, on keeping yourself fed and clean, just basic living. I couldn't afford a place of my own, I just skulked in my bedroom, listening to Nirvana and blowing smoke out the window. I was drinking a fair bit by then, getting stoned before work, throwing myself at stupid boys who didn't give a shit about me, wearing long sleeves to hide my cuts, all the usual teenage stuff.

I remember being in Aberdare Park one Saturday night, drinking and smoking weed with a couple of girls and a whole load of boys from Cwmbach. They were loud, those boys, and people were looking. Rhian Abbott spotted a squirrel in the tree above us and one of the Cwmbach boys took aim and threw a beer bottle at it. I felt sick. So I turned away from them and locked eyes with Chloe, my friend from school, the one who went up to Cambridge. I hadn't seen her for a long time, we weren't really friends anymore. She was walking her family's dog along the wide path from the lake. My face was frozen in its grimace. I felt cold in my stupid little vest top, my stupid short skirt, squatting there under a tree with my bulging thighs. Chloe was neat but casual in blue jeans, white top, nice blue fitted cardigan. She smiled at me as she passed, a very brief but very kind smile, understandably not wanting it to be seen by anyone else, certainly not the Cwmbach boys. I appreciated Chloe's warmth but I couldn't unfreeze my own face to smile back. My stomach was burning.

By the time I got to Asda, I was about as bitter and full of regret as it's possible for a person just turned twenty to be. So this is it, I thought, the world of work. Sheer bloody purgatory. I had this voice in my head all the time, it went something like this: if only you'd stayed in school, done some A Levels, if you could just have kept it together and managed that, you wouldn't be here now, on the bus to work at 7am, you'd either be in a much better job, doing something you actually like and be any good at, or maybe even at university studying history maybe or English, but you couldn't, could you, so this is your life now. And so on. If I didn't shut it down, and I couldn't always shut it down, it would keep going, pointing out every mistake I'd ever made, every underlying flaw in me, cutting deeper and deeper, if only you were braver, if only you were more interesting, if only you were thin and pretty. It filled every hour I spent at work and invaded all the hours I wasn't, ruining whole weekends, dragging all my longed-for patches of annual leave into the pit of despair. I hated the sight of myself, avoided mirrors and windows. Pure regret is the most horrible feeling, it burns. It's like drowning in your own stomach acid.

So I eased up on the self-medication – vodka mainly - and started going to night school. Weirdly, it was my father who put the idea in my head, on one of the very rare times he bothered to get in touch. My relationship with my mother was at rock bottom, we weren't even arguing by that stage, just silent, then my dad turns up out of the blue and tells me I'm a clever girl, and says why not give education another go. So off I went to Aberdare College and enrolled. Three A Levels, English, History, and Sociology. In my memories of night school it's always winter, I'm always shivering at the Cwmdare bus stop in the dark. My brain seems to have muted the other seasons, the light nights and the warm weather, and fixated on the image of me waiting for the bus home in various combinations of cold, wet, and windblown. I suppose it did get fairly exhausting, working all day and heading out to college at night, and it didn't help when the weather was terrible.

But I kept it together and it turned out I was really good at studying. I spent weekends in my room, reading and writing and making notes, instead of getting off my face in pubs and up back lanes and in boys' cars. I kept my brain so busy that the if only voice could hardly get a word in. Now I'd gained a bit of confidence my essays were getting better, more expansive, with bits of original thought in them, actual ideas I was coming up with. They were coming back with A pluses and comments in red, responses to the points I'd made and the examples I'd used, suggestions for further research, engagement with my arguments. Encouragement, basically. Of course, I could barely string a sentence together when talking to lecturers, but I'd be smiling all over my face as I tucked my essays away in my bag, ready to take them home, read the comments again, then file them neatly in their folders.  

Lyndsey Walters, my English lecturer, was tall and slim with long silver hair and Virgina Woolf cheekbones. I liked her a lot, she seemed to get me straight away. One day in April she asked me what I was going to do when I passed my exams. I laughed and said, "If I pass them." She told me that all I had to do was carry on as I was and there was no question I'd pass them, and probably with very good grades. I told her she had more confidence in me than I did. Of course Lyndsey was right on that score, I got As in English and History and a B in Sociology. I told her I was hoping to get a better job than the ones I'd been doing until now, or maybe even try uni. She smiled and said, "If you chose university, Anna, I'm sure you'd never regret it." That was the exact moment I made my mind up. Well, between that moment and the half hour wait for the bus. Those two words next to each other, never and regret. That was what did it, I think. It was pretty obvious that this was my second chance, and probably my last. If only I could keep it together, pass these exams, get my A Levels, I could go to university. I could be a student. For the next three years I'd be studying for a degree. Lyndsey was sure I'd never regret it. And of course she was right on that score too.

So I went to uni and, as I say, it was quite a big deal at the time. Nerve-wracking. I more or less expected to crash and burn. Everyone else seemed so confident, so talky, and loud. So English, I was about to say. But that's not fair. I just hadn't met many people like that back then. A lot of them hardly bothered going to lectures and they were always incredibly insulting about the lecturers.  Now me, for the first two years I just kept my head down and my mouth shut. I worked as hard as I possibly could, hoping to keep up. I read literally everything. When a lecturer praised my work, I'd carry that around with me for days like a little glow of fire to ward off the doubts.

The other freshers, of course, were always on the piss. Now me, I was trying my best to stay off the booze. I started drinking properly when I was fifteen, as my parents marriage was imploding. I was either horribly drunk or horribly hungover for most of the next five years. That was how I dealt with the crap jobs and the crap everything else. I still associated being drunk with being almost suicidally miserable. This went on until I started the A Levels, when I weaned myself off daily vodka and began saving it for the weekends. After a lot of effort, I got my drinking under control and I wasn't going to lose it now. But this lot, my fellow students, drank like kids when Mum's gone out and left the drinks cabinet open. That's how they seemed to me, like little kids. I'd imagined uni would be a place where you'd make amazing friendships with people of like minds. It was a bit disappointing to find I didn't seem to have a lot in common with anyone. I did make some friends eventually, a little gang of us, all a bit socially awkward, clinging to each other.

Not that I was some kind of nun. My main indulgences were:

thin little roll ups in liquorice papers smoked on the library steps, about one every half hour

a bottle of Stolly (this, as I say, was the 90s) in my bottom drawer for winding down at the end of a long essay

the occasional lump of cheap hash to see me through the holidays

a boy from Norfolk with nice dark eyes, though that was more trouble than it was worth.

By the final year I knew I was heading for at least a 2:1, possibly even a First. There didn't seem so many of the loud talky ones around by then. There were a lot of drop outs. On the one hand that made it hard, because the spotlight began to shine on me a bit more. I couldn't just hide at the back of the seminars anymore, I was invited to contribute. I was still awful at talking to people, my voice sounded terrible. On the other hand, those little glows of praise from my lecturers had grown into a proper fire, burning day and night. And I started to see them as human, my tutors, not as untouchable gods or whatever but as people who were obsessed by the past, by trying to dig it up and read it and see it as it was, just like me. It was hard to believe I'd made it to the end of the three years. And now they were encouraging me to take it further, to do an MA. I mean, it was way beyond what I'd expected. That last year was just wonderful, I loved it.

The day I graduated, my mother cried and my brother puked. We were all in the union bar, toasting each other. I can drink my brother under the table, and I did. Uncle Lloyd was there too, wearing a blue suit that I won't forget too soon, putting away the cheap beer and chatting a bit too much to my girlfriends. My father hadn't turned up. He'd promised he would, but that's my father. I used to be such a daddy's girl but even so, I can't believe I really expected him to be there. Maybe I didn't, I can't quite remember now.

So anyway, yes. That was nice, to be doing so well. And now I got to spend the next couple of years digging around in post-Roman Britain, a time I'd been mildly obsessed with since I heard the stories of Saint David and Saint Dyfrig in RE at school. I always saw it as this mysterious realm full of saints and kings and warlords and clashing cosmologies, all of it hidden in layers and layers of myth and dirt. It was like digging up a real life epic, it was kind of a dream come true for me.

On the other hand, after three years as a student I was completely broke. And here I was back at home, with my mother, just the two of us now, my brother having left home. I was commuting to Cardiff from Aberdare, an hour each way on the train, to do my studying. I was making a tiny bit of money working part-time in college libraries at different campuses all over the place, not just Cardiff, Merthyr, Treforest, all over. I had an encyclopaedic knowledge of the Valley Lines timetable. Half my waking life was spent travelling on trains. I ate my breakfast on trains, did my reading, made notes, ate my lunch, caught up on sleep. I'd sometimes wake up and forget which train I was on, which direction I was travelling, where I was going. My mind was usually far off in the mist, tracing the fortunes of long dead kingdoms, reading the inscriptions on tombs.

There was mild piss-taking from people I was at school with when I bumped into them in Aberdare, me looking as poverty-stricken as I actually was, them dressed head to foot in labels, taking shopping back to the Audi. This was the 90s, there was lots of credit around, everybody was up to their necks in it. I'd never been into that style, the labels and the bling and the fake tan, even before uni. I was always the alterno-girl, with the black jeans and the hippy skirts and the Docs, even before that kind of thing went mainstream. But around now, just after getting the degree, it was all pretty shabby and worn out. I needed new jeans, new skirts, new shoes, new hair, new everything. Not that I wanted to change my style, get myself an orange face and fake lashes or anything like that. It's just that if you're going to stand out, it works better if your clothes aren't exactly the same ones you've been wearing for the last five years. It's too easy for them to call you a scarecrow then, which Adele Porter actually did, smiling warmly as she did so, when she saw me shopping for vitamins in Holland and Barret. And when I'd been doing the weekly shop with my mother in Morrison's and we went for food in The Bute, who comes across to say hello but Lee Coburn, who used to torment me at school with putrid and unwanted suggestions for improving my sex appeal. He was a manager at Sports Direct in Merthyr now. He told us all about it but I can't remember a single thing he said beyond the word bonus. Then he asked how I was getting on so I told him. Got a First, studying for a Masters, living with my mother. No, no car. No money. He laughed and said, "Christ love, I'm glad I wasn't clever enough to go to uni." My mother wet herself laughing.

I didn't hate these people, I should say. I didn't envy them either. When I thought about Aberdare, about the whole Cynon Valley, I saw all our lives, every feeling, every thought, every word and deed, contained between the walls of a rambling groove; the groove carved by half a million years of glaciers the size of mountains moving south; the last of them melting away, grass and moss and trees growing thick in the u-shaped troughs they made; rivers and streams, heron and kingfisher, hawk and falcon, squirrel and hare and otter, barely any people, for ten thousand years; one of the wild places of the world, the treacherous woods you enter if you step off the fairytale path, sunk deep in green, too boggy to farm, too twisted to settle; then a two hundred year blip, a scramble for minerals buried in the mountains, fills the random groove with more humans than have crossed these two rivers, Dare and Cynon, in ten millennia; now that era too was over, the people it brought were melting away to the south; the green was encroaching on the tracks and traces; the streams were reverting from dead black glitter to clear silver, waders were catching fish; the gouges and the tips and the tunnels were sinking back into the green; Aberdare would end up a dead name, like Robertstown, referring to something built and destroyed long before, and all this would go back to being one of the wild places. So what the hell were we all still doing here?

I was starting to feel a bit sort of nothing about everything, or everything modern, everyday life, the here and now. I'd even stopped watching reality TV. The new series of Big Brother came and went without me noticing. The only things I watched now were history documentaries. Well, and Derren Brown, I loved his stuff.

My uni friends had all sort of evaporated by now. The same thing had happened when I left school, or whenever I changed jobs. It was happening again now. Helen and Julie, Rupinder, Jay, Alex and Steve, Danny, my sort of ex, they'd almost faded out, just a year after we all graduated and I promised to stay in touch. None of my friendships were ever strong enough to survive a transition, everyone just floated away. I couldn't say why.

I was happy enough though, don't get me wrong. To be honest, I couldn't really imagine looking round a castle with someone else. Having to talk to them, listen to them, instead of just looking at the stuff. Or standing on an iron age site, a hill fort, looking down into the valley, no sound, only the wind whispering and the birds calling – and just because someone else is there you've got to ruin it with talk. I tried to see it in more positive terms but I failed to convince myself. I just couldn't imagine it. Very often, I paid for the audio guide tour, with the headphones.

Anyway, there was this librarian I was sort of mildy obsessed with. His name was Will and he was twenty nine. He worked at the humanities library at Cardiff Uni. I did some shifts there, he was sort of my line manager, one of them anyway. He was slim and tall with thick dark brown hair and he talked a lot. The women all loved him. He was funny though not quite as funny as he thought. Well, they never are, are they? He had a good look though, kind of a classic look. He wore skinny dark blue jeans and you never saw him in trainers, he always wore leather boots. His shirts were always good, maroon or deep purple or blue, and they always fitted him perfectly, nicely tight across the chest and stopping, untucked, just at the hip. His eyes were green and twinkly, his grin was cheeky. If you ever  happened to be up close to him, like the time I helped him resolve a paper jam in the tiny photocopier room, you could just make out that his aftershave was the good stuff, not Lynx. I didn't think he fancied me but I knew for sure that he knew I fancied him. I sometimes got flustered when we were chatting in a corridor. I was full of pent-up lust. There were moments when literally all I wanted out of life was for Will to turn up at my door late one night and fuck me senseless. Preferably a Friday night, when my mother was out with the darts girls and I was all wet and alluring from my bath.

Anyway it was no good, he had a girlfriend. Cerys. They lived together. No kids though. So there was always the chance they'd split up. I tried to gauge the likelihood. It seemed a pretty stormy relationship. He did lots of routines about him and Cerys rowing all the time, her insane jealousy. And we all laughed, the girls in the staff room, when he was doing his Cerys material.

He turned up to work one day with his wrist in a splint. When we asked him about it, he said this: "A woman in a bar came up to ask where the toilets were, the missus didn't like it so she broke my wrist." No-one was sure if he was joking or not, but he just smiled his rueful smile and said, "Well, I guess you can take the girl out of Blaendulais..." Later he walked the story back and told us he'd actually fallen over drunk. Everyone laughed again. But the next day when we were getting cans from the machine Will confided to me that the reason he'd fallen was because Cerys pushed him over some bins on the way back from the pub. "We shouldn't drink together, me and her," he told me. "Only one of us should be drunk at a time. Or it goes bad."

So it all seemed quite volatile. Sometimes he looked miserable. There were phone calls from Cerys that sent him scuttling outside, scowling. He made lots of jokes about how unreasonable she was, how she flew into a rage, shouted and screamed. In dark moments I imagined that what he was leaving out from these stories for the sake of decency was all the amazing sex they were having when they weren't rowing. She probably shouted and screamed her way through that too. Lucky bitch. I didn't know enough to make that assumption, really, but it crept up on me sometimes as a slightly depressing certainty.  

So then they did split up, Will and Cerys. It wasn't the first time but she'd gone back home to her parents and apparently she'd never done that before. Will seemed pretty upset and he got a lot of sympathy at work, which he obviously enjoyed. I'd say the percentage male/female split at the humanities library was about 30/70 to the girls. Some of the men seemed a bit uncomfortable with being out-numbered, but certainly not Will. He blatantly loved being surrounded by women. Looking back, that was a big part of what made him attractive. To enjoy being around women like that, to have fun with us, let us take the piss a bit, give it back to us a bit, but all so light and funny, never aiming to hurt and never taking offence, all this made him seem like a real man to me. I realised I had a definite crush on Will. It was the first time for a long time I'd felt like this about a bloke.

So the weeks went by and he was still single. It looked like it might really be over this time. I wondered what, if anything, I should do. But then he started going out for drinks after work and that changed everything. We'd all go, a big pack of us. Yes, me too. This sort of party gang developed. Friday nights mostly and usually around Cathays, in the Woodville or the Pen and Wig, the student pubs. There was boozing and there was bad behaviour. Looking back, what we had in common was that we were all either single and a bit desperate, or in relationships that were on the slide. Apart from Zoe, who was neither, and just wanted to let her hair down after years of being sensible. I got caught up in it a bit. Well, a lot. I'm not really into that kind of thing, in general. I'm useless at small talk, it's just embarrassing. So I drink too much to compensate, and I talk a load of crap, wear myself out, and have to spend the next fortnight in bed. But it's funny how a change in just one colleague's relationship status can act as a catalyst on a whole office full of people.

Of course I always had to catch the last train back home. That was at ten to eleven so I was leaving early, baling out while the night was still young. They were all staying out, Will and everyone, they were going on somewhere else. And I'd be on the train, half-cut but not quite pissed, with all the sweaty bellowing valley boys, nodding-waking-dribbling all the way back to Aberdare. There was nothing left for me at home really. The girls I'd been friends with at school, before I went off the rails, had all left the valley a long time ago. The girls who'd stayed there were on their second or third kids. We didn't have anything in common now.

I wondered if I was turning into that cliché, the bright working class oik who gets into university and turns into a middle class snob. It's a pretty well worn storyline by now. The little oik has to go back home for a visit and it ends badly. Oik displays contempt, disgust, is pretentious, and at very best can only manage a condescending smile, a patronising phrase. There's usually some tragi-comic confrontation-with-the-parents scene. It's been done a million times, to the point of parody. Maybe because it was so obvious, so expected, I was really keen for it not to happen to me. Who wants to feel their entire life is just following a boring old script? Plus, it wasn't as if I'd got my degree somewhere posh. I'd gone to the local university, because I genuinely thought that's what you did when you filled in your UCAS form, you picked the ones closest to you. And this local university, where I spent three of the happiest years of my life, where I learnt so much about the world and about myself, had only just changed from being a polytechnic, prior to which it was a technical college, having started life as the South Wales and Monmouthshire School of Mines. To a certain kind of person, that history would be hilarious. I knew that to some people, I hadn't really been to university at all. To them, my First wasn't a real First. My whole experience would be seen as entirely contained within the tiny circle of Welsh irrelevance. They wouldn't see that I had made any real movement at all.

I kept seeing things on the walk back from the station, like a homemade poster in the window of a hair salon in support of Cwmbach boy Rhodri Watkins who was through to the semi-finals of X Factor; two blokes outside Wetherspoons squaring up for a fight, another bloke between them trying to break it up, all three in their fifties; graffiti on the back wall of PLACEHOLDER: Bong On 9T4, Fuk Da Law Smok Da Draw; the sound of a pub full of people singing along to John Denver's Country Roads; a plump and scruffy student in a hippy skirt and Docs tottering back to her mother's house. What we were even doing here, any of us? The thing that had dragged us all here, the money, was long gone, shut down, dried up. Here was Wellington Street, so empty and long, and so quiet, with dark wild bushes on either side growing thicker every year. A century and a half ago this was the main drag, and there were streets and streets of houses running left and right, all the way to the Gadlys, with heavy barges moving slowly down the canal, men and women in lit up trams coming from the bridge on the Dare side. That was Robertstown, a bustling industrial slum full of mostly young people, life expectancy 50 at best, notorious for being nonconformist in their religion, revolutionary in their politics, energetic in their sexuality, and obstinately Welsh in their language. Back then the name Robertstown was splashed in London newspapers as a byword for the latest moral panic. It's not much more than the name now, still there on maps and signs, designating a long empty road, a rump of undemolished terraces, and a cheap furniture warehouse.

So I moved in with my new friend Zoe who was doing a PhD and lived in a rented house in Cardiff. I first met Zoe when we were both shelving books in the same section. I was leafing through a book on Frida Kahlo when I heard the squeaking wheels of a trolley. A girl around my age. New girl. We said hi, I helped her get the hang of the shelves, then she said she liked my boots. They were brand new, these boots, leather, cherry red, with buckles and zips, from Eccentrix in the High Street Arcade. Cost a fortune. They were part of me updating my wardrobe and although I kind of loved them, I wasn't a hundred per cent confident in my own taste. So of course I broke into a real smile and said thanks, getting back in return my very first Zoe beam. She had the best smile, still does. A very open face, with huge eyes, and you can see every twist and turn of emotion running across it. I always told her she'd be useless at poker. I once watched her completely blow a birthday surprise without saying a word. She was mortified, clapped both hands over her face and walked backwards out of the room. Bless her, she's the worst liar I've ever met.

I'd started staying over with Zoe if it was going to be a big night, someone's birthday or whatever excuse came up. I'd slipped back on the drinking since getting my degree. It wasn't out of hand, like when I was eighteen and drinking vodka every day, but I could still put it away. You know how in any group of boozers one idiot will always be rallying supporters for another round of shots, even when it's 3am and everyone's already so ruinously wankered they can barely speak? Well that idiot was me. Zoe was a bit more of a lightweight but determined to stay the course. She'd been a very studious, sober girl up until now, A Levels, degree, masters, now doctorate, with no gaps in between. It was pretty clear she wanted to let her hair down a bit. I made sure I always kept an eye on her, she could get quite random and messy when she was pissed. She wasn't the most worldly of people. She was very funny and cute when she'd had a drink, you know, not a pain in the arse type drunk. But she'd misread signals from other people, or just not see them at all. She definitely needed someone to watch her back.

So we'd end up tottering along Wyeverne Road, me with my arm around Zoe, holding her steady, guiding her round bins and dog turds, keeping an eye out for pervs, while she burbled away about this and that. She was a very talkative drinker, Zoe, wide-eyed and constantly surprised by things. I felt like her cynical big sister, even though she was older than me. One night we saw a man looking totally out of it, sitting on a bench in PLACEHOLDER. I had to stop Zoe from going over to him, she was worried he was ill, needed help. She looked like Florence Nightingale with a Brecon Carreg bottle instead of a lamp. So I clutched her tight to my side and told her to leave him, he was just stoned out of his mind. Zoe said, "Well, maybe, but how do you know for sure? He could be having a brain haemorrhage." I told her to look at the bench, next to the man, and she saw his little glass pipe and his lighter, bits of tinfoil. "If he is having a brain haemorrahage," I told Zoe as we walked away with our arms linked, "it's one he's paid good money for, so let's just leave him to it, right?" And Zoe looked at me and gave me her full beam. I remember she said, "God, Anna, where the hell would I be without you?" "Probably chained up in a brothel," I told her. And along we went to Fitzroy Street, cackling away like a couple of old witches.

A few months after that Zoe told me her landlord would be looking for a new tenant for the attic room soon. A month later I moved in. Zoe had never seen I, Claudius. I remedied that. It was part of our hangover routine. We'd drink coffee and eat pains au chocolat from Sainsbury's and watch I, Claudius. In fact, just the other day I got a text from Zoe which read: QUINCTILIUS VARUS, WHERE ARE MY EAGLES?! Zxxx

So one Friday night we all ended up in this over-priced cocktail bar on City Road, six or seven of us, about 1am. Zoe and I happened to be sitting opposite Will, the three of us leaning in close over a tiny circular table to be heard above the music. He was on great form that night, Will. He listened to the latest installment of Zoe's catastrophic love life with great interest and had a lot to say about it all. He told Zoe that none of it was her fault and she deserved much better. He said, "Look at me, after all this Cerys stuff – I'm bruised, sure, I'm bruised to holy fuck, but I'm not bleeding." I'd almost say he was cosying up her to her but I didn't get that feeling, it read more like a supportive friend thing. Also, I noticed that he was addressing quite a few of his comments on love and heartbreak and so on directly at me. As in, right into my eyes. So of course I began to feel ridiculously excited and kept insisting on more drinks all round.

When men try and chat you up, it's almost always boring, and forced, and makes you cringe. I mean, I suppose I'm partly to blame because I'm just no good at small talk. And chatting up is just a subset of small talk, isn't it. You're not really talking about anything in particular, there's nothing to cling on to, and it's all crappy. You're just wafting these threadbare festoons at each other in desperation. So I tend to just sort of clam up. Will, though, he was quite good at it.

Zoe was talking to Hannah so now Will and I were just looking at each other over our tiny table. He grinned and beckoned me to lean in closer, so I did.

He said, "I'd like to try something out on you, if you don't mind."

So I raised my eyebrows at him and said, "Um, okay..?"

To which Will did a mischievous little chuckle and told me it was a kind of personality test.

"Don't be worried though," he said, "it's not serious, it's just a bit of buggering about, of no diagnostic value.

"Well that's a relief," I said, and he chuckled again.

I could smell his good aftershave – I'd asked him earlier and he told me Issey Miyake - and he had about half a centimetre of stubble on his chin and around his lips. I could see the dark hairs on his chest poking over the top of his shirt. Plus I was half-cut. Plus it had been a bloody long while since I'd even been near a bloke. So you can imagine, can't you?

Will's idea turned out to be quite good. Basically, you've heard that thing – if you could have as your superpower either being able to fly or being able to make yourself invisible, which would you choose? It's like those crappy questions you get on Facebook that are meant to reveal some essential truth about your personality based on a seemingly throwaway choice you make. Well, Will said he hated the superpowers thing, it was a fix, a swizz, because all the traits associated with flying were really good ones – success, confidence, flying high, reaching for the sky, freedom, the great beyond. And then you had invisibility, said Will, which was the choice of creeps.

"Think of the kind of stuff being invisible would allow you to do, would invite you to do. It's nothing very noble, is it," he said. "It's sneaking around, it's hiding, not being upfront and honest. It's peeping toms and crooks, it's sneaks and spies and saboteurs, it's eavesdroppers and shoplifters and pickpockets. Invisibility appeals to the voyeur, to the nosey parker and the perv."

So it wasn't really much of a choice, he said, in fact it was a complete fix and he'd thought of his own, much better alternative. I was laughing at all this, by the way, and reaching across to maul his arm from time to time. This was a good deal better than your average chat up, I was thinking, and even if it wasn't a chat up I was having fun with a silly man on a Friday night and and he was making me laugh so just go with it, just enjoy yourself for god's sake.

"So what's your own, much better alternative?" I asked.

"Okay," Will said, "here's the thing. Some old fella down the road from you, a mad professor type, he's built a time machine. It's in his garden shed and he's invited you to have a go."

"So this old man is trying to get me to go into his garden shed with him?" I said. "I don't think I believe he's got a time machine in there, Will, to be honest. I think he might have other reasons."

"Fair point," said Will laughed. "Make it your grandfather then. Someone you trust."

"How about my grandmother?"

"What's the matter, you don't trust your grandfather?"

"Well, yes I did trust my grandfather and he did make things in his shed, but he's not alive now so..."

"Oh christ, sorry," he said, wincing. "I haven't got any grandparents left, as of last month. Life's a shit, innit. Okay, so you go into the shed, there's the time machine, and your lovely old Nana is inviting you to be the first to have a go on it."

"First?"

"Yup. First ever trip, the maiden voyage. And she wants it to be you, her favourite grand-daughter."

"Her only grand-daughter. So, I'm like a sort of guinea pig? My Nan wants me as a guinea pig?"

"Yeah, I suppose so," Will said. "But in a very loving way."

I did one of my stupid big honking snorting laughs all over him at this point. He seemed to enjoy it, this muffled explosion of me. By now, fed up with shouting over the music, Will had come round the table and we were pretty much squeezed together. We were laughing at my laugh. I told him my dad always called it my walrus mating cry. Will said it was unashamed and life-affirming, that it was "one of the great laughs". What a bloody charmer, eh? I was starting to feel pretty damn good about myself, doing all the sexy banter, all the flirty-flirty stuff. I'm a bit slow on the uptake sometimes, I don't always read the signals. This, though, with Will, this Friday night, I felt bloody fantastic about everything.

"Alright, forget about your Nan and the shed and everything," Will said. "You've just got hold of this time machine somehow, doesn't matter how, okay? But you can only use it once, I mean for one return trip. There and back, then that's it. So the question is – where would you choose to go, the future or the past?" Then he frowned. "Actually this might not work so well on you because you're a history student, not a normal person."

Anyway, to speed things up a bit, that question of Will's led to a conversation between us that went on until we all got chucked out of the place at about two, and then continued in the taxi. I told Will I'd choose to visit the past, of course, either to 5 or 6AD, just after the Romans left, just to see what it was really like. Either that or all the way back to the start, before agriculture, before cities and empires, to when we were still nomads. Just to see if we were any happier then. We talked about that for a while, the distant past, then Will said if he had the one-trip time machine he'd definitely choose the future, no question at all. At least two thousand years, he said, either that or a few million, because he wanted to see how it all panned out. So then we talked about that for a while, the far future.

It was all quite slurry and rambly and drunken, of course, but it just kept going, and we got on to what all this might for our respective personalities, and about the state of the world in general, whether things were getting better or worse, whether there was any hope for the human race, and if not, when exactly had it all gone wrong. Suddenly we were in Fitzroy Street and Zoe was getting out of the taxi, waving goodnight, stumbling on her doorstep, trying to find her key, fiddling it into the lock, waving goodnight again, and falling into her hallway. I was staying in the taxi with Will, who was in the middle of saying that there never was a golden age, it was just a fantasy, there was never a time when everything was in harmony and everyone was happy, but that there could possibly be one at some point to come if we didn't blow ourselves up or make ourselves extinct through climate change. And also there was Paul the spotty Australian IT boy who was fast asleep and snoring and had to be shoved really hard to wake him and get him out at his place in Riverside while we went on to Will's flat, quite a nice one, with a balcony overlooking Pontcanna Fields.

Six months later to the day we were in Rome together. It was my first ever visit and it was fascinating, overwhelming, beautiful. It was early October but so warm, the sun so strong and bright. Everything seemed golden, everything seemed glowing. Will and I were celebrating the half year anniversary of the night we got together. We'd been wandering around all day, talking and looking. We'd had lunch at a ridiculously over-priced tourist trap by the Tiber, and decided it was worth it for the view from the terrace. The plane trees along the river had all turned bright orange and were dropping their leaves into the water. We walked from the Circus to the Colosseum, across to the Forum and up the Capitoline Hill. Talking and looking all the time, me with my guide book, tracing out the shape of the ancient city, Will trying to imagine what would be left of modern Rome in a few thousand years time, picturing future tourists nosing round the remains of the airport, the shopping mall, the office blocks. We were looking down from the Capitoline at the Forum, his arm round my waist, mine round his, and I remember us both saying the same thing at the same time, the same sentence – Nothing lasts forever. We were both delighted, of course, as though we'd come from different angles to arrive miraculously at the same spot, and we kissed, because that's what it's like when you're in the honeymoon period. It struck me that what we were having was a continuation of the same conversation that we'd started in that over-priced cocktail bar in Roath. The idea filled me with strange new feelings. The silly word 'soulmate' kept jumping out at me. I wondered how long a conversation between two people could last. Maybe a whole lifetime?

It was an odd match really. We were different in lots and lots and lots of ways. We hardly agreed on anything. And at first, I think we were both kind of fascinated by how different we were, despite having quite a lot in common. Here are some of the things we had in common:

smallish working class valleys hometowns, Aberdare and Glynneath

stopped feeling that we fit in to our respective hometowns at around the same age, 14

each had an older brother who got married and moved away, his to England, mine to Monmouthshire, which amounts to the same thing

divorced parents, dads who'd left home when we were teenagers and slightly difficult relationships with our mothers

both went to Welsh school, though Will didn't really keep up the language now

first in our family to get a degree, Will having achieved a 2:2 in psychology

we'd both been members of the Green Party at some point, although neither of us was now

similarly miserable teenage years, greasy depressions spent in cocoons of totemic books, music, films, art, clothes, comedy, metaphysics, magic, comics, etc, evolving into a dense and intricate personal para-reality to which the everyday world of bus stops and dog shit was just a mundane and laughable annexe.

It felt as though we'd started off in roughly the same place but had headed in different directions. We kept coming back to the past/future thing, it was like some structuring principle we used in thinking about our differences. Here are some differences we noticed:

Favourite films - me: Agora, with Rachel Weisz as Hypatia, Elizabeth, with Cate Blanchett, Mel Gibson's Mayan epic Apocalypto, and yes Gladiator. Will liked Bladerunner, Alien, Akira, the first Matrix.

Books/authors – On holidays from my study reading I liked Sarah Waters and Hilary Mantel. One of my old favourites was Alan Garner, ever since I read The Owl Service when I was thirteen. As a kid I read and loved all of Tolkien to the point where it affected my dreams and I saw epic battles on my walk to school, raging in the morning clouds that cling to Maerdy mountain. Will had never read any Tolkien but had an impressive number of multi-part space operas under his belt, his favourite being Iain M. Banks' Culture novels. He could quote huge chunks of Douglas Adams and he also loved William Gibson...or was it William Burroughs? One or the other anyway. He mostly read non-fiction now, a lot of pop science, Freakonomics, Malcolm Gladwell, Dawkins.

Music – I listened to Fairport Convention and Nina Simone. Will listened to German minimal techno.

The state of the world today – we both agreed that everything was in a right mess, massive poverty, total exploitation, greed, capitalism, eco collapse, extinction event imminent, and all caused by us, by humans. Where Will and I differed was in the directions we looked for solutions. It was the time machine again – he went forward, I went back. Will agreed that humans had caused damage to the world by being too clever – fossil fuels, nuclear weapons, international tourism, etc –  but he said turning the clock back was impossible, undesirable, and wouldn't work anyway. It was too late in the day to return to our nomadic roots, he said, we were seven billion people mostly living in cities now. The only way to solve the problems our cleverness had caused was to get even more clever. Will was keen on technological fixes. Sometimes he sketched out a sort of post-market utopia in which we've abolished scarcity, outgrown the lizard brain, conquered evil and greed with intelligence, and built a new world based on a new understanding. We'd first heal our planet with incredible new machines, and then we'd move out beyond Earth in peaceful waves of creative colonisation, slowly evolving into children of the stars. And I'd needle him by asking who was going to own these machines, who was going to control them, who was going to build them and who was going to profit from them. Same as ever, I'd say – billionaires. Same shit, different day.

And me, I still do the same now, I dig back to older societies and pre-modern ways of life, tribal ways and folk narratives, non-profit motives, sustainability, to structures of feeling abandoned on the road to modernity, old medicines for our modern sickness. It's all very vague and woolly, and not at all historically supported of course. It's just a feeling, really, and it's probably not true. Will was never very open to any of this stuff. His closing flourish was always something about whatever the old days might have had going for them, it was basically a kind of blissful ignorance, hardly to be envied, and besides, no-one – not even you Anna! - would genuinely want to live in any era of human history before reliable anaesthetics were invented.

As I say, we hardly agreed on anything. But in the early days that was part of what made it fun. We used to debate things, it was what we did. And whatever we were talking about, at some level you could sense that same old past/present thing, his time machine thing. I thought it was really quite clever. It seemed to me he'd hit on something essential about his approach to life and mine, and the differences between them. I thought other people might recognise something of themselves in it too. At the time, I thought Will didn't realise how clever he was. I thought I detected a lack of confidence hiding under his verbal swagger. I decided I'd see if I could help with that, to encourage him. After all, he was giving me a boost. He was so attentive, he really listened to me. I felt myself expand when we were together. I thought maybe we could be good for each other. This is all faintly hilarious to me now, of course.

So we were at a cafe opposite the Colosseum having coffee. We sat at a little round table on the pavement with everyone going by. I tried to order two double espressos but I messed up my pronunciation and the waiter brought us singles. Will beckoned the guy back over, and the waiter smiled and said, in English, "You want milk?" Will gave him half a grin, shook his head, and said, "Nessun latte – doppio – prego," and they both laughed, the waiter nodding and whisking off our tray. Then Will turned back to me and grinned his bloody adorable grin. I was thinking we'd have this coffee then maybe I'd suggest we pop back to the hotel for an hour or so.

"Milk indeed," he said. "He must have taken us for a couple of weak ass English milk weeds."

I laughed.

"You know what you should do, Will? You should be a writer. You should write something."

"Ha, what?" he said. "I don't think so. I ain't got nothin' to say."

"You've always got something to say, you idiot."

"Well, yeah, but it's all bullshit really, innit, when you come down to it."

"Well, yeah, but that needn't matter. Look at some of the crap that that sells."

"Mmm, fair point," he said. "But, no, I really don't think there's anything in my particular brand of bullshit that would sell."

"I don't know," I said. "What about your time machine? I'd say you could definitely make something out of that. It's good. It gets you thinking."

"You reckon?"

"I do, yeah. I think you could make that into something, a story, something funny and clever," I said, "like you."

And he leaned across the table and kissed me. A big kiss, slow and warm, right there with everyone going by on the pavement. When I opened my eyes again he was smiling at me, his eyes were so twinkling, he was so handsome, and golden autumnal Rome was glowing away behind him. I felt so good, so happy, more than happy. It was all so much more than I'd expected. I whispered a suggestion to him and, after our espressos, we popped back to the hotel for an hour.

Can we just skip for a minute back to that first night I spent with Will, at his flat in Llandaf North? So it's stupid o'clock in the morning, we've been getting through his Scotch, we're almost at the point where you drink yourselves sober, and we're out on his brown bolted balcony. I'm squinting at glimpses of the Millennium Stadium and the BT building through the trees. A mile and half away, the city centre. The rain is falling but the air is warm and smells sweet. We haven't had sex yet and we're still not quite sure if we're going to. Will had a text from his ex earlier – at two in the morning! - and it sort of made the atmosphere between us a bit weird. So now we're on the balcony, talking.

I remember telling him that all his Bladerunners and his Aliens and his cyberpunk whatever, all these futures he was into were all horrible. No-one would want to actually live in any of them. These are dystopias. It's satire. The future in most of these things he loved was some crazy exaggerated version of today's world, with all our problems pushed to the limit. I remember him grinning as I pressed the point.  

"Well," he said, "not pessimistically but just being ojective, it's probably more likely we'll fuck it all up and ruin the world. Than not. Realistically speaking."

"That's funny," I told him, "you love the future but you don't even believe in it really. Your best guess is it's going to be even worse than today."

And then he told me this story. There's this couple, he said, and she's like you, she loves the past. And he loves the future. And one day this time machine really does turn up, but you can only take one ride each in it. Just one return trip because human minds can only deal with the experience once in a lifetime. She goes first, heads into the past, and comes back one second later in a state of deep depression and disillusionment. So he has a go, heads into the future, comes back one second later, just as depressed and disillusioned. They conclude from their experiences that the present is as good as it gets, so they enter into a suicide pact. As for living, they say, our spambots can do that for us. But then he remembers that he's already visited both their graves in the far future and the dates on their headstones made it clear they're going to live for several more decades. So they don't bother, they just sell the time machine on eBay and split up. She later marries a quantity surveyor and lives in a big beautiful house that becomes a millstone round her neck, while he moves to Kefalonia and drinks himself to death.  

So it was a funny little story with a bleak punchline. It made me laugh. I asked him if he'd just made it up and he said yes, he'd made it up right there on the spot. That's good, I said, that's funny. You should write that up. That would make an amusing little story, I said. Will just shrugged, which was something he did a lot, a sort of French shrug, very minimal, with a slight downturn of the mouth and uplift of the eyebrows, comme ci comme ça. I told him he should write a whole stack of little stories like that, make them into a book. He grinned and said he'd just wanted to make me laugh. I pulled him to me and that was it. We were both a bit too drunk and tired really but it was nice falling asleep and waking up tangled with him.

.  

I kept telling him to write his time machine story but he never did. I couldn't understand, because he kept saying he wanted to write. I mean, I thought it would be a good little exercise to get him started. After all, he had the whole thing there, he just had to write it up. But he didn't write it. He didn't write anything. If he did, I never saw it. He probably got sick of me going on about the bloody story.

As I say, this was twenty years ago, when I was a student. Let's fast forward now. At nine o'clock this morning I was in Rome, at Ciampino Airport, waiting with a couple of colleagues for an EasyJet flight back home. We've been at a conference in the Sapienza for the last three days, during which time we've all eaten a huge amount of food, drunk a decent amount of wine, and I've given a paper on some of the connections between Macsen Wledig of the Mabinogion and the real life emperor Magnus Maximus. But the most memorable part of the trip, the thing that will give this particular trip to Rome its unique stamp in my mind, happened last night, after dinner, when we watched a wild boar running along the Via Cavour. We were at a pavement cafe, six of us. There was a commotion on the street, some shouting, an engine revving. I turned in time to see this animal, a boar, running at top speed up the middle of the road, heading towards the railway station. The shape of its body as it ran, it was perfect, exactly as you'd expect a running boar to look. Like an ancient painting come to life. There were two boys on a red Vespa chasing it. The boy on the back was filming it all on his phone. We turned to watch them go, not just the six of us but everyone in the cafe, the waiters too. One of them ran out on the road and called to the boys. From further up the street came a volley of car horns. In all my trips to the city over the years, that's something I've never seen before. I said as much over the table as we settled again to our dinner. Gabi, our host from the history department, smiled and said, "Perhaps next time you come there will be also be wolves in the streets."

Now we were all heading home, me in the company of Ian Bamford and Maria Shields, both of whom I've worked with for almost a decade now. Maria, who has good Italian, was reading a story in the paper, translating bits for us.

"'Resident Salvatore Golino said 'Rome has become an open sewer, a scandal, full of rats, foxes, wild boar and rubbish. We are drowning in trash, we can’t take it anymore, and our government does nothing.'"

I thought, yes, the city does look a bit messier than usual these days. I'd sort of noticed it the last few times I visited, though it was hard to be definite because Rome has always had its messy aspect, and especially around the station. But now the news was full of boar sightings, uncollected rubbish, hordes of rats, broken roads, under-maintained buses bursting into flame, escalators collapsing in the metro. Maria said something like, See, you stop investing in public services and before you know it the streets are full of boar. The thought of this decaying Rome, sinking back into the wild, felt familiar. A dystopian vision, the future of the great cities, mismanaged by kleptocrats, going feral. It was like one of his, Will's. That was his kind of thing. A memory then of my first visit to the city, when I didn't even notice the messy modern aspect because my eyes were so greedy for the beautiful past. And, yes, of course, for him. I remembered how golden it all looked, at that round table opposite the Coliseum. Years ago now, decades. Not worth remembering really.

So I asked Ian what he was reading. He held up the cover of his slim paperback. It was called Minimum City, a collection of short stories by the American author Todd Keever.

"Oh, him," I said, grimacing.

"Not a fan then?" Ian said.

"I've never read anything by him," I said. "But I did read an interview with him in the Guardian once and, well, let's just say I wasn't tempted to venture any further into his mindscape."

"No?"

"No," I said. "Quite the opposite."

"I mean, he has become this sort of awful reactionary figure now," said Ian, "and each new novel is worse than the last. I mean he's really scraping the bottom of the barrel now, all this stuff about Muslims and trans issues and masculinity, it's meant to be satire but it's just awful."

"You're really selling him to me," I said.

"Well, to be honest I wouldn't recommend anything by him except for his first novel, The Drift, which is still pretty funny and sharp, and this, which is about half good and half not so good."

He held up the cover, which had a very mid-90s design, blurred digital abstract, with words Deeply, darkly funny – Chuck Palahniuk on the bottom left.

"I mean, it's not profound at all," he said, "they're more like comic sketches. It's from very early in his career. Twenty eight short stories, some of them just a paragraph long. Sting in the tail stuff, although it's more of a dagger in the back really. There's one called The Return Trip."

And he told me the story. Bet you can guess how it went. It was one of the shorter ones. When Ian had finished telling me the story, I asked if I could take a look at the book. I turned to The Return Trip and I read it. As I did, I felt my mouth, my whole face, turning into a big grin, as though someone in the back of my head was turning a huge rotary handle. It was all there, and I mean all of it. The narrator starts with a riff about which superpower would you choose, flight or invisibility, and declares it a fix. Then he suggests his alternative, time travel, would you choose past or future. And then we're straight into the story, the couple with the time machine, her going to the past, him going to the future, both coming back depressed, the failed suicide pact, the break up. It was, as I say, all there. Right down to the spambots line. Grinning very widely by now, almost giggling, I flipped to the front to read the publication details. The Return Trip by Todd Keever was first published in an online magazine called Young Boasthard's four years and eight months before that night I went home with Will. It was collected in Minimum City and published by Harper Collins in the UK seven months before he told me the story on the balcony of his flat and passed it off as his own. My shoulders started shaking, I put my hand to my mouth, snorted, and that boar went running through my mind, and somehow the boar was Will. Haven't seen him or even thought about him for years, decades. But that was him alright, running along the Via Cavour. I started giggling and my inner voice said, Oh look there goes Will in such an arch and campy tone, and so totally Aberdare, that I couldn't hold back any more and I burst out with one of my big walrus laughs.

Coming next: Lie #2

[roadswim-collective]

Based on the latest scientific research.

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A compilation of funny Scandinavian TV commercials

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Selection of stills from the film Minimum City (2012, written and directed by Claire McKay)

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Birds Hell (Reprise): The Book of Job

Extracted from Transcript C

Right, let's have a go of this one.

(Inhales from e-cigarette, coughs)  

God help, that is harsh.

(Coughs, spits, laughs)

What the hell was that again? Lychee and Raspberry, for god's sake.

(Blows nose, clears throat)

Think I'll go back to the bloody Zestappeal. Anyway, where was I? Christ knows. Oh yeah, so car parks, right? Twice in my life I've been sat on the ground at the edge of a hospital car park, totally brainshot and unable to move. Once was when my brother died, back in 1987, in the old East Glam Hospital, and I was fifteen. Twice was a little while ago at the new Royal Glam Hospital when those birds scared me and all the cars were dead. And what these two car parks taught me was this, right?

When everything's gone wrong and fuck all makes sense, if your brain is smart and knows what's good for it, what it'll do is try to ignore everything. It'll try to get you back to your distractions ASAP, whatever they are. It'll say, hey so life's got no inherent meaning but you invest it with your own meaning and basically just seize the day, have fun and be kind. (Laughs)  Oh, and it'll also do that if it's a particularly thick brain. (Coughs) Yeah...and...then it'll get all obsessive over some hobby or other. According to the tastes it was brought up to enjoy, you know.  Like golf, or fucking, or politics. Maybe faith, religious faith, that's an old favourite, right? (Sniggers)

But my brain, for some reason, this is what I learned in those car parks, doesn't do that. Distractions don't work, they don't distract. Stupid thin things they all seem, stale, flat, and useless. And everything is just a distraction really, every possible thing, love and pleasure, all just a distraction from this truth I'm drowning in right now. My brain, in those car parks, just goes numb and I start to see things in the landscape beyond the perimeter fence and I just don't know where or what I am. 

Actually, I remember this Jehovah's Witness who came round the house one day, a few years ago now, and she was on the doorstep, you know, and I can rarely resist shooting the shit with them when they knock.  I think they see me as a challenge.  I usually talk about the Book of Job. Because that doesn't exactly show the non-existent bastard in the best light, does it?  

I mean...(Laughs) it's all about God gambling with the Devil over the soul of the best man on earth, right?  They have a bet and the stakes are this poor fella's eternal soul.  Which is fucked up for a start, right?  Because if He's God, and God is Love, then why did the bugger take the bet?  Not very loving, that, is it?  Kind of suggests the whole thing is just a game to Him, right?

Anyway, the Devil says, look here now, Jehovah, show me the best and most righteous man on that beloved planet of yours, and I bet I can get to him so bad that he ends up cursing you, his Lord God.  

And what does our loving shepherd tell the Devil?  Does He tell him, mate, fuck off, you're being a dick...(Coughs) and anyway, I've got a duty of care here, so no way, no bet, no deal. Back to the infernal realm with you, old son.

No, he says game on.  

Knowing full well the kind of shit He's letting Job in for, right, all the delicious death and disease and disaster the Devil has in store.  

Game on.

And this is just to win a bet, mind.

(Yawns)

The funniest bit is the ending though.  When God's righteous man, reduced by now to a toothless, hairless, multi-bereaved tramp with these pulsating buboes all over his body, sitting in the ditch where his home used to be, when poor old Job finally dares to raise the slightest, most timid, respectful little question to some sympathetic friends as to what the point is of all this devastation, down comes God Himself.  There He is, right next to them, in the form of  a whirlwind.  He's come to talk to the bloke who's wondering why his life has so spectacularly fallen apart. And what does He do?  

(Laughs)

What He does is He gives Job the most almighty bollocking for even thinking such a thing. And I mean like a really enormous bollocking. A god-sized bollocking. Makes it clear to Job in no uncertain terms that he doesn't even get to ask that question. That what's it all about, eh? that everyone asks at some point in their lives, usually when the shit's hit the fan.  Don't even dare to wonder what it's all about, says God, only I know that, you're so tiny and bloody mortal, I can crush mountains, so I guess you'd better just STFU.

It's true, check it out yourself, Book of Job, in between Esther and Psalms.

And to back it up, He goes on and on, for two whole pages right, about what a massive big God He is, how incredibly powerful and mighty, how He made everything, and how He holds up the sky and moves the stars and fills every fathom of every ocean (Bellows) so how could you possibly expect to know what my plan is, puny mortal!

And He's a real sort of alpha male arsehole about it too, at one point boasting about His big dangerous monster pets, Leviathan and Behemoth, and talking about how He hooks them through the lips and drags them around on chains. Now that sounds all too bloody familiar, dunnit? Like, 24-year-old Lee from Clydach swaggering around with his pitbulls, Tyson and Facefucker. The god version of that syndrome, right?

And all the time this Jehovah thug is all up in poor old Job's pustulent, ruined, human face, giving it all the sarcastic questions routine, I wonder if you could drag sea monsters around on chains? I wonder if you could hold up a mountain, eh? EH?

So that's essentially God's answer to Job, his answer to the question of why a loving God allows suffering in the world.  And the answer is because shut the fuck up, that's why.  

Hallelujah!

(Coughs, inhales more nicotine vapour)

And I mean, yeah, God does magic back Job's stuff in the end, his house and all his sheep and that, and he does clear up his boils for him and gives him new kids to replace the dead ones, after the Devil gives up the bet, but still...think of the psychic trauma, the PTSD for poor bloody Job. Because there's no mention of God giving him a merciful mind wipe, like Men in Black, so he can forget the whole twisted fucking nightmare.  No, the poor sod has to spend the rest of his life all freaked out, walking on eggshells, never able to relax into it all, even at his kitchen table with his new daughters around him, because he's always totally and horrifically aware that any time it can all be shat on and pissed over, for no reason at all.

Anyway, so I'd spin this out for them on the doorstep, the Jehovah's Nusiances, and they'd smile pityingly at how a lost soul can read the True Word of God and still go astray.  

(Laughs)

Or maybe they thought I was the devil, trying to send them astray.  

I've got one about the Tower of Babel too...but...maybe another time...(Indistinguishable) All working together...(Inaudible)...must be the only time in the whole of human history, international co-operation (Indecipherable)...too many ruined buildings in this story without that one on top (Laughs, slurps).

Sorry, just eating...daring to eat...a peach.

(Slurps) Or a reasonable facsimile thereof.

No, but the point I was trying to make was this, right? This Jehovah's Witness, she said to me that what will happen is this.  When the Day comes, there'll be a final battle between Jehovah and Satan.  After a load of terrible armageddon and apocalypse stuff, God will win and  everyone who is still alive on the planet will be sorted by the Angels into two groups, the Saved and the Damned.  The Damned go straight to Hell, of course, to be punished and tortured for all eternity.  And the Saved? They get to stay on the Earth and live forever, at their physical peak, on a planet transformed so it's like the Garden of Eden again.

The way this woman described it...She said that if you were one of the Saved, you could live forever and, you know, inherit the earth.  Do all the things you always wanted to do.  Like me, she said, I love to knit and what I'd really love to do is start off with fleece straight from the sheep, and then go all the way through preparing it and washing it and dyeing it and carding it and finally knitting clothes with it. To me, that would be heaven.  To you, something different, but whatever it is there would be time for.  Words to that effect. Nice little lady in her 70s, very slight, delicate features, pale skin, quite ordinary looking, and yet that little bone china head of hers was the container of such a tiny, cosy eternity, she and her saved friends and a neverending supply of sheep.  

(Coughs)  

It seems so obviously bloody silly but, you know, it kept this little old lady trudging up the steep steps of every house on our side of the street in the pissing grey drizzle.  An insane act, surely?  But it's working for her you know?  It goes to show how far you can go if you really invest in some crock of shit or other.  Don't forget, it's all about distraction.  Your brain knows the truth, deep down.  It knows there's no reason for any of this, no reason and no purpose. It knows there's no God, there's no Devil and there's fuck all when you die. Even that little Jehovah lady, even her brain knew it deep down. But, unlike me, she'd invested in some crock of shit or other, and that kept her happily distracted. As far as she was concerned, she wasn't just spouting nonsense at indifferent strangers in a cold wet cul de sac in a slowly dying post-industrial zone among the impoverished uplands of northern Europe.  No, she was on a very special mission (Giggles)...from God...it's quite sweet really.

(Giggles, coughs).

And despite my best efforts as devil's advocate, she stuck with it.  Although she never did call back, which isn't like them, is it?  Once they've got their hooks in, they keep coming back, don't they?  Not this one, though.  

I wonder why she didn't call back.    

(Laughs, coughs)

[roadswim-collective]

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Three Times He Lied To Me  Lie 1.

I was twenty three when I met him. I was back at home, living with my mother, after three years in halls of residence. Here's a list of the places you'd be most likely to see me during the year I was twenty three:

on a train

in a library

at a railway station

in a corridor

at my tutor's office

in my bedroom.

I had literally no social life, unless you count going to the shop for tobacco. My best friend was my I, Claudius box set. On Friday nights when my mother was out with the girls from darts, I'd drink Prosecco in the bath. Sometimes I'd do that on Saturday nights too.

I did go other places sometimes. If the weather was nice you might see me in a castle. Caerphilly was my favourite. Or I might be at a Roman site like Caerleon. And now and again you might see me out of breath at the top of a hill somewhere looking at the remains of an Iron Age fort. I was always alone on these excursions. I'd end the day pretty much as I'd started it, lying in my bed, in my old bedroom, probably watching Gladiator.

I was halfway through a master's in history with archaeology, a two-year course, and I was completely broke. Amazingly I'd got a First in my degree, and my tutor recommended me for post-grad. It was all a bit overwhelming. I was the first in my family to go to uni, you see. Well, my father was accepted at some art college back in the day but he didn't finish the course, he dropped out. Other than that, though, I was the first to go on to higher education. It was quite a big deal at the time. Nerve-wracking. I more or less expected to crash and burn.

Everyone else seemed so confident, so talky, and loud. So English, I was about to say. But that's not fair. I just hadn't met many people like that back then, middle class people. A lot of them hardly bothered going to lectures and they were always incredibly insulting about the tutors. They were always on the piss too. Now me, for the first two years I just kept my head down and my mouth shut. I worked as hard as I possibly could, hoping to keep up. I read literally everything. When a lecturer praised my work, I'd carry that around with me for days like a little glow of fire to ward off the doubts.

Not that I was some kind of nun. My main indulgences were:

thin little roll ups in liquorice papers smoked on the library steps, about one every half hour

a bottle of vodka in my bottom drawer for winding down at the end of a long essay

the occasional lump of cheap hash to see me through the holidays

a boy from Norfolk with nice dark eyes, though that was more trouble than it was worth.

By the final year, though, I knew I was heading for at least a 2:1, possibly even a First. There didn't seem so many of the loud talky ones around by then. There were a lot of drop outs. On the one hand that made it hard, because the spotlight began to shine on me a bit more. I couldn't just hide in the back of the seminars anymore, I was invited to contribute. On the other hand, those little glows of praise from my lecturers had grown into a proper fire, burning day and night. And I started to see them as human, my tutors, not as untouchable gods or whatever but as people who were obsessed by the past, by trying to dig it up and see it as it was, just like me. It was hard to believe I'd made it to the end of the three years. And now they were encouraging me to take it further, to do an MA.

I mean, it was way beyond what I'd expected. That last year was just wonderful, I loved it.

The day I graduated, my mother cried and my brother puked. We were all in the union bar, toasting each other. I can drink my brother under the table, and I did that day. Uncle Lloyd was there too, wearing a blue suit that I won't forget too soon, putting away the cheap beer and chatting a bit too much to girls. My father hadn't turned up. He'd promised he would, but that's my father. I can't believe I really expected him to be there. Maybe I didn't, I can't quite remember now.

So anyway, yes. That was, nice, to be doing so well. And now I got to spend the next couple of years digging around in sub-Roman Britain, a time I'd been mildly obsessed with since I heard the stories of Saint David and Saint Dyfrig in RE at school. I always saw it as this mysterious realm full of saints and kings and warlords and clashing cosmologies, and all of it hidden in layers and layers of myth and dirt. It was like digging up a real life epic, it was kind of  a dream come true for me.

On the other hand, after three years as a student I was completely broke, massively in debt, and I hadn't made any friends. And now I was back at home, with my mother, in my old bedroom, commuting to Cardiff from Aberdare, an hour each way on the train, to do my studying. I was making a tiny bit of money working part-time in college libraries at different campuses all over the place, Merthyr, Treforest, all over. I read my Mary Beard books over lunch, and on station platforms in all weathers I listened to podcasts.

My mind was usually far off in the mist, tracing trade routes of lost empires, digging through dead cities, reading old epitaphs. I was starting to feel a bit sort of nothing about everything, or everything modern, everyday life, here and now. I'd even stopped watching reality TV. The only things I watched now were documentaries. Well, and Derren Brown, I loved his stuff.

Everyone I'd known, my uni friends, had all sort of evaporated. The same thing had happened when I left school, or whenever I changed jobs. It was happening again now. Helen and Julie, Rupinder, Jay, Alex and Steve, Danny, my sort of ex, they'd almost faded out, just a year after we all graduated and I promised to stay in touch. None of my friendships were ever strong enough to survive the transition, everyone just floated away. I couldn't say why.

I was happy enough though, don't get me wrong, I enjoyed my own company. To be honest, I couldn't really imagine looking round a historical site with someone else. Having to talk to them, listen to them, instead of just looking at the stuff. Or standing on an iron age site, a hill fort, looking down into the valley, no sound, only the wind whispering and the birds calling – and just because someone else is there you've got to ruin it all with small talk. I tried to see it in more positive terms but I failed to convince myself. I just couldn't imagine it. Very often, I paid for the audio guide tour, with the headphones.

Anyway, there was this librarian I was sort of obsessed with. His name was Will and he was twenty nine. He worked at the humanities library at Cardiff Uni. I did some shifts there, he was sort of my line manager, one of them anyway. He was slim and tall with thick hair and he talked a lot. The women all loved him. He was funny though not quite as funny as he thought. Well, they never are, are they? But he wore tight jeans and brown boots and they suited him, oh my god they suited him. His eyes were green and twinkly, his grin was cheeky. I didn't think he fancied me but I knew for sure that he knew I fancied him.

I sometimes got flustered when we were chatting in a corridor. I was full of pent-up lust. There were moments when literally all I wanted out of life was for Will to turn up at my door late one night and fuck me senseless. Preferably a Friday night, when my mother was out with the darts girls and I was all wet and alluring from my Prosecco bath.

Anyway it was no good, he had a girlfriend. Cerys. They lived together. No kids though. So there was always the chance they'd split up. I tried to gauge the likelihood. It seemed a pretty stormy relationship. He made lots of bad jokes about him and Cerys rowing all the time, her insane jealousy.

He turned up to work one day with his wrist in a splint. When we asked him about it, he said this: "A woman in a bar came up to ask where the toilets were, and the missus didn't like it so she broke my wrist, just as a friendly warning." It turned out later he was joking and he'd actually fallen over drunk. Everyone laughed. But the next day when we were getting cans from the machine Will confided to me that the reason he'd fallen was because Cerys pushed him over some bins on the way back from the pub. "We shouldn't drink together, me and her," he told me. "Only one of us should be drunk at a time. Or it goes bad."

So it all seemed quite volatile. Sometimes he looked miserable. There were phone calls from Cerys that sent him scuttling outside, scowling. He made lots of jokes about how unreasonable she was, how she flew into a rage, shouted and screamed. In dark moments I imagined that what he was leaving out from all these stories for the sake of decency was all the amazing, passionate, hot sex they were having when they weren't rowing. She probably shouted and screamed all the way through that too. Lucky bitch. I didn't have enough experience to make that assumption, really, but it crept up on me sometimes as a slightly depressing certainty.

All this drama seemed very distant from my own life. It was like watching I, Claudius, all that passion, the lust and the violence, Brian Blessed. And there was me, alone in my teenage bed at night, my hand wandering down, trying to visualise the exact lift and curvature of beautiful Will's tight bum. I was wondering if it was finally time I invested in a vibrator.

So then they did split up, Will and Cerys. It wasn't the first time but she'd gone back to Llanelli or Ammanford or wherever she was from, and apparently she'd never done that before. Will seemed pretty upset and he got a lot of sympathy at work, which he obviously enjoyed. I'd say the percentage male/female split at the humanities library was about 30/70 to the girls. Some of the men seemed a bit uncomfortable with this, with being out-numbered, but others blatantly loved being surrounded by women. Will was one of those.

He started going out for drinks after work. We'd all go, a big pack of us. Yes, me too. This sort of party gang developed. Friday nights mostly and usually around Cathays, in the Woodville or the Pen and Wig. There was boozing and there was bad behaviour. I got caught up in it a bit. I'm not really into that kind of thing, in general. I'm useless at small talk, it's just embarrassing, so I drink too much to compensate, and I talk a load of crap, wear myself out, and have to spend the next fortnight in bed. But it's funny how a change in just one colleague's relationship status can act as a catalyst on the pent up frustrations of the whole office.

And of course I always had to catch the last train back home. That was at ten to eleven so I was leaving early, baling out while the night was still young. They were all staying out, Will and everyone, they were going on somewhere else. And I'd be on the train, half-cut but not quite pissed, with all the sweaty bellowing valley boys, nodding-waking-dribbling all the way back to cold dark Aberdare.

There was nothing left for me at home really. The girls who'd stayed there were on their second or third kids. We had nothing in common now. All the boys were messing about with the same old things as before, cars and sports and booze, just with jowls now and already balding. Thinking about it, I don't suppose I had much in common with anyone in the first place.

So I started staying the night now and again with my new friend Abby who was doing a PhD and lived in Roath. Not every weekend, just if it was going to be a big night, someone's birthday or whatever excuse came up. I was quite good at drinking, still am, and I'd always be among the last standing. It was me who had to get Abby into a taxi and find her door key and let us in and, more than once, hold her hair back while she was sick. And when it came down to the last handful at the very end, Will was always there too. Will and me, Abby, Hannah, Chris, a few others. There until the bitter end. None of us had anything much to go home to really.

So one Friday night we ended up in this over-priced cocktail bar on City Road, six or seven of us I think, probably about 1am. Abby and I happened to be sitting opposite Will, the three of us leaning in close over a tiny glossy circle of table to be heard above the music. He was on great form that night, Will. He listened to the latest installment of Abby's catastrophic love life with great interest and had a lot to say about it all. He told Abby that none of it was her fault and she deserved much better. He said, "Look at me, after all this Cerys stuff – I'm bruised, sure, I'm bruised to holy fuck, but I'm not bleeding." I'd almost say he was cosying up her to her but I didn't get that feeling, it read more like a supportive friend thing. Also, I noticed that he was addressing quite a few of his comments on love and heartbreak and so on directly at me. As in, right into my eyes. So of course I began to feel ridiculously excited and kept insisting on more drinks all round.

When men try and chat you up, it's almost always boring, and forced, and makes you cringe. I mean, I suppose I'm partly to blame because I'm just no good at small talk. And chatting up is usually just a subset of small talk, really. You're not usually talking about anything in particular, there's nothing to cling on to, and it's all crappy, you're just wafting these threadbare festoons at each other in desperation. So I tend to just sort of clam up and that's the effect most blokes' efforts have on me, their intended target. Not Will. He was good.

Abby was talking to Hannah so now Will and I were just looking at each other over our tiny table. He grinned and beckoned me to lean in closer, so I did, and he said, "I'd like to try something out on you, if you don't mind." So I raised my eyebrows at him and said Um, okay..? To which Will did a mischievous little chuckle and told me it was a kind of personality test, and I said A test? O-kaaaay... "Don't be worried though", he said, "it's not serious, it's just a bit of buggering about, of no diagnostic value," so I said, Well that's a relief and he chuckled again.

And he was wearing this really nice aftershave and I could see the hairs on his chest poking over the top of his shirt. Plus I was half-cut. Plus it had been a bloody long while since I'd even been near a bloke. So you can imagine, can't you?

Will's idea turned out to be quite good. Basically, you've heard that thing – if you could have as your superpower either being able to fly or being able to make yourself invisible, which would you choose? Those crappy questions you get on Facebook that are meant to reveal some essential truth about your personality based on a seemingly throwaway choice you make. Well, Will said he hated it because it was an obvious fix, a swizz, the superpowers thing, because all the traits associated with flying were really good ones – success, confidence, flying high, reaching for the sky, freedom, the great beyond. And then you had invisibility, said Will, which was the choice of creeps. Think of the kinds of things being invisible would allow you, would invite you to do. It's nothing very noble, is it, Will said. It's sneaking around, it's hiding, not being upfront and honest. It's peeping toms, he said, it's sneaks and spies and saboteurs, it's eavesdroppers and shoplifters and pickpockets. Invisibility appeals to the voyeur, to the nosey parker and the perv. So it wasn't really much of a choice, he said, in fact it was a complete fix and he'd thought of his own, much better alternative.

I was laughing at all this, by the way, and reaching across to maul his arm from time to time. This was a good deal better than your average chat up, I was thinking, and even if it wasn't a chat up I was having fun with a silly man on a Friday night and and he was making me laugh so just go with it, just enjoy yourself for god's sake.

"Okay," says Will, "here's the thing. Some old fella down the road from you, mad professor type, he's built a time machine. It's in his garden shed and he's invited you to have a go."

"So this old man is trying to get me to go into his garden shed with him?" I say. "I don't think I believe he's got a time machine in there, to be honest. I think he might have other reasons."

"Fair point," says Will. "Make it your grandfather then. Someone you trust."

"How about my grandmother?"

Will says, "What's the matter, you don't trust your grandfather?"

"Very funny," I say. "Well, yes I did trust my grandfather and he did make things in his shed, but he's not alive now so..."

"Oh shit. Sorry," he says. "I haven't got any grandparents left, as of last month. Ah well, life's a shit, your grandmother it is then. Okay, so you go into the shed, there's the time machine, and your lovely old Nana is inviting you to be the first to have a go on it."

"First?"

"Yup. First ever trip, the maiden voyage. And she wants it to be you, her favourite grand-daughter."

"Her only grand-daughter, " I tell him. "So, I'm like a sort of guinea pig? My Nan wants me as a guinea pig?"

"Yeah, I suppose so," Will says. "But in a very loving way."

I did one of my stupid big honking snorting laughs all over him at this point. By now, fed up with shouting over the music, Will had come round the table and we were pretty much squeezed together. He seemed to enjoy it, this muffled explosion of me. We were laughing at my laugh. I called it my walrus call, he said it was a great, unashamed, life-affirming laugh, he said it was one of the great laughs. What a bloody charmer, eh? I was seriously starting to wonder if I'd be spending the night at Will's instead of holding Abby's hair as she puked. I was starting to feel pretty damn good about myself, doing all the sexy banter, all the flirty-flirty stuff. I'm a bit slow on the uptake sometimes, I don't always read the signals. This, though, with Will, this Friday night, I felt bloody fantastic about everything.

"Alright, forget about your Nan and the shed and everything," Will said. "You've just got hold of this time machine somehow, okay? But you can only use it once, I mean for one return trip. There and back, then that's it. So the question is – where would you choose to go, the future or the past?" Then he frowned. "Actually this might not work so well on you because you're an archaeology student, not a normal person."

Anyway, to speed things up a bit, that question of Will's led to a conversation between us that went on until we all got chucked out of the place at about two and then continued in the taxi heading for Abby's house. I told Will I'd choose to visit the past, of course, either to sub-Roman Britain to see what it was really like, or all the way back to the start, before agriculture, to when we were still nomads. We talked about that for a while, the distant past, then Will said if he had the one-trip time machine he'd definitely choose the future, no question at all. At least two thousand years, he said, either that or a few million, because he wanted to see how it all panned out. 

So then we talked about that for a while, the far future. It was all quite slurry and rambly and drunken, of course, but it just kept going, and we got on to what all this might for our respective personalities, and about the state of the world in general, whether things were getting better or worse, whether there was any hope for the human race and all that. 

And then, suddenly it seemed, we were outside Abby's house and she was getting out of the taxi, stumbling on her doorstep, trying to find her key, fiddling it into the lock, waving goodnight, and falling into her hallway, while I was staying in the taxi with Will, who was in the middle of saying that there never was a golden age, it was just a fantasy, there was never a time when everything was in harmony and everyone was happy, but that there could possibly be one at some point to come if we didn't blow ourselves up or make ourselves extinct through climate change, and also there was Paul the spotty Australian IT boy who was fast asleep and snoring and had to be shoved really hard to wake him and get him out at his place in Riverside while we went on to Will's flat, quite a nice one in Llandaf North.

And then, suddenly it seemed, it was a year a later and we were on holiday in Rome. It was my first ever visit and it was amazing, overwhelming, beautiful, and Will and I were celebrating the anniversary of that night when we got together, and we were walking around having what was basically a continuation of the same conversation that we'd started then, in that over-priced cocktail bar in Roath.

It was an odd match really, Will and I. We were different in lots and lots and lots of ways. We hardly agreed on anything. And at first, I think we were both kind of fascinated by how different we were, despite having quite a lot in common. Here are some of the things we had in common:

smallish working class valleys hometowns, Aberdare and Glynneath

stopped feeling that we fit in to our respective hometowns at around the same age, 14

each had an older brother who got married and moved away, his to England, mine to Monmouthshire, which amounts to the same thing

divorced parents, both our dads had left home, both of us were under 10 at the time, and neither of us really saw much of our fathers

both went to Welsh school but hadn't really kept up the language since

first in our family to get a degree, Will having achieved a 2:2 in psychology

we'd both been members of the Green Party at some point, although neither of us was now

similarly miserable teenage years, greasy depressions spent in cocoons of totemic books, music, films, art, clothes, comedy, metaphysics, magic, comics, etc, evolving into a dense and intricate personal para-reality to which the everyday world of bus stops and dog shit was merely a laughable and mundane annexe.

It felt as though we'd started off in roughly the same place but had headed in different directions. We kept coming back to the past/future thing, it was like some structuring principle we used in thinking about our differences. Here are some of differences we noticed:

Favourite films - me: Agora, with Rachel Weisz as Hypatia, Elizabeth, with Cate Blanchett, Mel Gibson's Mayan epic Apocalypto, and yes Gladiator. Will liked Bladerunner, Alien, Star Wars, the first Matrix, The Fifth Element, and Guardians of the Galaxy

Books/authors – On holidays from my study reading I liked Sarah Waters and Hilary Mantel. One of my favourites was Alan Garner, ever since I read The Owl Service when I was thirteen. As a kid I read and loved all of Tolkien to the point where it affected my dreams and I saw epic battles on my walk to school, raging in the morning clouds that cling to the scarp of Maerdy mountain. Will had never read any Tolkien but had an impressive number of multi-part space operas under his belt, his favourite being Iain M. Banks' Culture novels. He could quote huge chunks of Douglas Adams and he also loved William Gibson...or was it William Burroughs? One or the other anyway. He mostly read non-fiction now, a lot of pop science, Freakonomics, Malcolm Gladwell, Dawkins.

Music – I listened to Fairport Convention and Nina Simone. Will listened to German minimal techno

The state of the world today – we both agreed that everything was in a right mess, massive poverty, total exploitation, greed, capitalism, eco collapse, extinction event imminent, all caused by us. Not just Will and me. Humans. Where we differed was where we looked for possible solutions. It was the time machine again – he went forward, I went back. Will felt there was no way to fix all the things wrong with the world by going back, it was too late. Humans had caused damage to the world by being too clever – fossil fuels, international tourism etc – but it was only humans therefore who could fix it all, by being even more clever. He looked to a post-market utopia in which we've abolished scarcity, outgrown the lizard brain, conquered evil and greed with intelligence, and built a new world based on a new understanding. We'd first heal our planet with our incredible new machines, and then we'd move out beyond Earth in creative, peaceful waves, slowly evolving into children of the stars. I exaggerate, but only a bit. And me, I still do the same now, I dig back to older societies and pre-modern ways of life, tribal ways and folk narratives, non-profit motives, sustainability, to structures of feeling abandoned on the road to modernity, old medicines for our modern sickness. Will was never very open to any of this stuff. His closing flourish was always something about whatever the old days might have had going for them, it was basically a kind of blissful ignorance, hardly to be envied, and besides, no-one – not even you! - would genuinely want to live in any era of human history before reliable anaesthetics were invented.

As I say, we hardly agreed on anything. But in the early days that was part of what made it fun. We used to debate things a lot in the early days, it was what we did. And whatever we were talking about, at some level you could sense that same old past/present thing, his time machine thing. It really seemed to me he'd hit on something essential about his approach to life and mine, and the differences between them.

So we were in a cafe opposite the Colosseum having coffee, sat right in the bay window, watching the street life. I tried to order two double espressos but I messed up my pronunciation and the waiter brought us singles. Will beckoned the guy back over, and the waiter smiled and said, in English, "You want milk?" Will gave him half a grin, shook his head, and said, "Nessun latte – doppio – prego," and they both laughed, the waiter nodding and whisking off our tray. Then Will turned back to me and grinned his bloody adorable grin. I was thinking we might have this coffee then maybe pop back to the hotel room for an hour or so.

"Milk indeed," he said. "He must have taken us for a couple of weak ass English milk weeds."

I laughed.

"You know what you should do, Will? You should be a writer. You should write something."

"Ha, what?" he said. "I don't think so. I haven't got anything to say."

"You've always got something to say, you idiot."

"Well, yeah, but it's all bullshit really, when you come down to it."

"Well, yeah, but that needn't matter. Look at some of the crap that that sells."

"Mmm, Da Vinci Code, Fifty Shades, Jeremy Clarkson, fair point," he said. "But, no, no, I really don't think there's anything in my particular brand of bullshit that would sell."

"I don't know," I said. "What about your time machine? I'd say you could definitely make something out of that. It's good. It gets you thinking."

"Do you reckon?"

"I do, yes, I think you could make that into something, a story, something funny and clever," I said, "like you."

And he leaned across the table and kissed me. A big kiss, right there in the bay window, with everyone going by. When I opened my eyes again he was smiling at me, his eyes were so warm, he was so handsome, and golden autumnal Rome was glowing away behind him. I felt so good, so happy, more than happy. It was all so much more than I'd expected. I whispered a suggestion to him and, after our espressos, we popped back to the hotel for an hour.

Will often said he'd like to write but he never did. And the thing is, he already had a story about that time machine, an actual story with a beginning, a middle, and a funny but very bleak punchline. I couldn't see why he didn't write it up. Can we just skip just for a minute back to that first night I spent with Will, at his flat in Llandaf North? So it's stupid o'clock in the morning, we're both at the point where you drink yourselves sober, and we're out on his brown bolted balcony. I'm squinting at

glimpses of the Millennium Stadium and the BT building through the trees. A mile and half away, the city centre. The rain is falling but the air is warm and smells sweet. We're still not quite sure if we're going to do it. Will had a text from his ex earlier – at three in the morning! - and it sort of made the atmosphere between us a bit weird. So now we're on the balcony, talking. I remember telling him that all his Bladerunners and his Aliens and his cyberpunk whatever, all these futures he was into were all horrible. Mostly these were all dystopias. It was satire. The future in most of these things he loved was some crazy exaggerated version of today's world, with all our problems pushed to the limit. I remember him grinning as I pressed the point.  Well, he said, realistically, and whatever I'd prefer, it's probably more likely we'll fuck it all up and ruin the world. Realistically speaking, he said. That's funny, I told him, you love the future but you don't even believe in it really. Your best guess is it's going to be even worse than today.

And then he told me this story. There's this couple, he said, and she's like you, she loves the past. And he loves the future. And one day this time machine really does turn up, but you can only take one ride each in it. Just one return trip because human minds can only deal with the experience once in a lifetime, any more and you burn out your brain. So she goes first, heads into the past, and comes back a few seconds later in a state of deep depression and disillusionment. Then he has a go, into the future, and comes back a few seconds, depressed and disillusioned. They conclude from their experiences that the present is as good as it gets and enter into a suicide pact. As for living, they say, our spambots can do that for us. But then he remembers that he's already visited both their graves in the far future and the dates on their headstones made it clear they were going to live for several more decades so they don't bother and just split up. She later married a quantity surveyor and bought a big house near Chepstow, and he drank himself to death.  

So it was a funny little story with a bleak punchline. I kept telling him to write it up but he never did. I couldn't understand because he kept saying he wanted to write. I mean, I thought it would be a good little exercise to get him started. After all, he had the whole thing there, he just had to write it up. But he didn't write it. He didn't write anything. If he did, I never saw it.

This morning I looked through my bedroom window and the sky was turning a lighter and lighter blue as the sun came up over the motorway. Everything around was beginning to glow. By the time I got to work the clouds had come, colours went grey, and at lunchtime it started raining. It was pouring down as I drove home at five. I sat in a traffic jam on Cathedral Road, blowing the heaters to clear the windscreen, getting hot and prickly, opening the window and getting splashed, and thinking, well, how quickly it came and went, that early sun, and what a long time ago it seemed now.

There's a Welsh saying, Nid yn y bore mae canmol diwrnod teg. A rough translation would be something like, Morning is not the time to praise a fine day. In other words, it's very unwise to call it a nice day when it's still early and it might well piss down later. I love that. It's one of the cliches about the Welsh, that we're very pessimistic. All down to the rain, or the diet, or being conquered, or the Miners Strike. I can't speak for anyone else though, Welsh or otherwise. You might call it pessimism, fair enough - I just call it realism.

I've just got back from a conference in Rome. The paper I gave looked at some of the connections between Macsen Wledig of the Mabinogion and the real life Roman emperor Magnus Maximus. It was beautiful, of course, as it always is in the autumn, golden, and glowing. I walked down by the Tiber where all the plane trees had turned orange and were dropping their leaves into the river. Being the maudlin bitch I am, I made a point of walking pretty much the exact route I walked with Will, eleven years ago now, from the Circus to the Colosseum and up to the Capitoline Hill. It was dark by the time I got to the top and my legs were aching. I leaned on a railing, looking down at the spotlit Forum, and I thought about Will, and I thought about my father, who died six months ago next Tuesday, and I felt like crying to be honest. But I didn't, partly because it would have been pathetic and made me feel worse, but mainly because these anti-depressants I'm on seem to dry up my tear ducts. I get the trigger to cry but nothing comes. Probably for the best.

When I get home from these things I'm always exhausted. Even a short trip with no paper to give leaves me completely worn out. I know what it is. It's not the work, that's nothing. It's not even giving the paper, I've long since built my public speaking armour, I can climb into it whenever I need to. No, it's all the other stuff. The chatting and socialising. Relaxing, kicking back. Networking. All that side of it. I'm useless at it. Wears me out. Never been any good at that stuff.

So I tend to get home, lock myself in my house, set the phone to messages, and basically not talk to anyone for, well, for as long as I can get away with. Which is usually about 48 hours, then I go back to work. I always make sure to book time off for exactly this purpose. I call it my decompression period. If I don't get it, if I have to go straight back to work, I go a bit mad. Noticably so. Incredibly irritable, interspersed with moments of mild hysteria. To be fair to my colleagues, they're used to it by now, they've adapted, it's become 'a thing', an amusing thing everyone knows about me, Anna. Academia is a perfect trap for eccentrics. Everyone has their quirks, but actual, diagnosable personality disorders are no more or less common than in any other vocation.

I haven't really changed. Not really.

During decompression I can't even read anything. All my books stay on their shelves. I turn instead to the internet. Last night I watched a whole series of a forgotten ITV sitcom from the 80s called Me and My Girl, starring Richard O'Sullivan as a widower bringing up his now teenage daughter Sam, played by Emma Ridley. Don't ask me why, it's not very good. And this morning I looked up Will's Facebook. Don't ask me why. He's got his profile set to public so I can have a good look at all his family holidays, his wife's birthday, their anniversaries, their kids growing up. Not that I envy her, I can just imagine all the crap she has to put up with. She probably doesn't even know the half of it. She looks more and more hopeless in the pictures, to be quite honest, and a bit thinner every time. This – looking at Will's Facebook – this is no good. I realise that and I hardly ever do it. Why would I, really? I found out all about Will a long time ago, and that's why we're not together now. The main feeling I get when I think of how close I came to ending up with him is relief. I look around my cosy house and I think, wow, close escape. But when I'm in this state, post-conference, I end up doing it, peeking into Will's life, I don't know why.

I wondered if Will ever did rouse himself to write anything. If he ever made something of his time machine thing. By the look of his Facebook, he hadn't, he was still at the humanities library, head of department. When I was full of his family pictures I just sorted of drifted through various Google searches, all pretty desultory. I suppose I was vaguely wondering if anyone else had come up with a similar idea anywhere in the world. Turned out, someone had. My drifting led to a review of a book of short stories, called Minimum City, including one which sounded remarkably similar to Will's time machine story. It was just a synopsis really but it was enough to make me look up the short story collection and its author. It was an American author, a man, quite a big name but I'd never heard of him. Contemporary set fiction still isn't really my thing. From reading the Amazon reviews and all the rest of it, this is what I learned about Minimum City:

It was made up of 28 stories

They were all very short, some only a paragraph long

It was a very slim book, with big type and wide margins

All the stories were set in the modern world

They all tended to have some kind of twist / sting in the tail

The tone was cynical, darkly funny, etc etc

It didn't sound like my kind of thing but I could imagine Will enjoying it, at least Will as he was when I knew him, I can't speak for now obviously. I found the story. It had first been published in an online literature journal before being collected in the Minimum City collection. Its title was The Return Trip. It was very short. A couple come into possession of a time machine. All the rest follows exactly as in the story Will told me on the balcony of his flat in The Crescent at about four in the morning, twelve years ago. Right down to the spambots line. 

I'd already checked publication dates. The Return Trip by this American author whose name eludes me now was first published in an online magazine called Young Boasthard's four years and eight months before Will told me the story. It was collected in Minimum City and published by Harper Collins six months before Will told me that story and passed it off as his own, on the balcony of his flat.

And I started laughing and laughing, until I had to put my bowl down in case I got milky cornflakes over my t-shirt.

[roadswim-collective]

Selection of stills from the film Minimum City (2012, written and directed by Claire McKay)

[roadswim-collective]

Lunar Perigree

An email arrives from an anonymous Roadswim member from the Biscuit Factory, Dowlais:

“A few years ago my lens broker, the much missed Salvatore D'Acosta, suggested I rove over a loop pool against the wolf flow. This, he said, would cure me of my ribs. This, then, became the method I found to dole out the lode, as it were, and I remain extremely great. Full to Sal, who could lead a deal in a dale :)

“This thing...what it is I don't know... (Coughs, sniggers) But this...thing....whatever it is... Well, you know, it is...what it is....  (Giggles) .... But... what is it? (Shrieking laughter echoes along caverns measureless to man, shrievling becauses unctuate. The last moulded ratiocinated plume greets a longer downy phlegmaticism.) Flowery tools invalidate the entire received morain. A jester, a gesture, adjacent to the absolutised agents of abjection. These leaves ravill the quilted pence of mormon, the slow, sly begrudged turning of floss. Bid good on the torn rope, foul soul! Your bittern is slide with yacht market ever sliding with the bitterns' jot – mark it!

“And how, if you whom those so ever these haddock might be got to have them into this union, relegated as they thrive, otherwise my topiary whelk they degree. For hundred shell penitent shall mauve ash purling, divided wooden sheaves, shoals, blackened plastic heaves. From the lower platform, she'll consecrate puffin-steam. These are your only flip-flops, you're aghast at the puce of the sun hat but you'll come round when you see the textured brilliance of the poncho. A greaseproof paper cone of salted cashews, stashed in your waistcoat's inner pocket.”

Needless to say, I’m an extremely clever man.

[roadswim-collective]

Birds Hell

Transcript D

I’m not going to write any of this down. No point, is there? No-one’s going to read it anyway.  

(Coughs)

Obviously.

(Coughs, laughs)

There’s nobody left to read it, is there? In the whole world. Just those doctor things. And it’s not reading, what they do. It’s scanning. It’s all just a…bar code to them. Horrible plastic bastards.  (Laughs) Just doing their job, of course. Picking through the rubble, you know, the rubble and the wreckage.  Sifting through the ruins. Probing the remains.  

(Laughs)

Of which I am one. Actually, get this - I’m the only one of my particular type of ruin still standing.  I’m the very last of the human ruins.  

Rare specimen I am. No not rare, beyond rare. No wonder they won’t let me go back.  The bastards.  Back to the little…nest.  My Junction 33.  Peace and quiet there at least.  I can empty out my…pockets.  There, I can. And only there.(Laughs) I want to go back to my bloody nest.

So that’s it, bollocks, I’m not writing any more. It's pointless, innit? I’ll just ramble on into this thing until I fall asleep. Then they can take it away and transcribe it or whatever they want to do with it. To be honest (Laughs) they can make it into a major bloody motion picture for all the shits I now give. (Cough)  

I really don’t care anymore.  I just … I don’t care.  I just want to ... um … sleep, you know what I mean?

______________

Okay, so... (Yawns)…I’ve slept. It’s gone from fake night-time to fake daytime. If they’ve kept to the usual pattern, that’s got to be eight hours’ kip I've just had. They do it with lights. I wish they wouldn’t bother. Days and nights don’t work like that anymore, they haven’t for ages. So what’s the point pretending? Stupid sods.

(Shouts) Stupid sods!

(Laughs)

Right, from the start, here we go. This is the first I knew of it. I woke up in hospital. Not this one, this isn't a real one.  

(Coughs)

My head was bandaged and I couldn’t help noticing that I was being transfused. Or had been.  

There was a line in my arm going to an empty blood bag. Confusion. I couldn’t remember much. What happened to me? I was fully clothed but they weren't my clothes. For definite. I mean, I don't own any grey flannel tracksuits. Or Fred Perry t-shirts.

No underpants, I noticed. None at all.

And also, why was it so incredibly quiet on this ward? Seriously, it was silent in there.

Thirsty I was, really really thirsty.  My lips were crusty, my throat all choked.  

That’s when I remembered falling down the stairs in Wetherspoons.  Yup.  It was coming back to me now.  I got dizzy on the way back from the toilets in Wetherspoons, the one in Ponty, and I fell down the stairs.  

Must have bashed my head.  Lost some blood.  That’s what I was doing in hospital.  And I remember thinking, well ... you know, Jesus Christ like, what a bloody state to get in.  

I was in a very bad mood, see. There’s actually no use trying to cheer yourself up beyond a certain point, it just makes it worse. At that stage, you might as well go and get pissed on your own in fucking Wetherspoons. Anything else would be dishonest.  

Reason I was in a bad mood was (Laughs) woman trouble. (Coughs) See, I was expecting to drive to Heathrow the next day and get on a plane to Ghana. I was going to surprise someone. I hoped she’d be pleased to see me, right? Yeah? Get the picture?

I’d packed in my terrible job.  I was going to do volunteering. Conservation work. I hadn’t really looked into it properly, to be honest. I was hoping my ... friend would help me sort it all out. She’d already gone out there, six months ago. I was going to surprise her. I thought I'd (Coughs) fallen in love.

  I barely even … knew her. I just got wrapped up in it all. My job was shit, my life was shit, I was becoming shit myself. It was getting so I couldn’t look in a mirror because I couldn’t stand the sight of the shit staring back at me.  

I mean, yes, the whole thing felt slightly insane. But it was good, it felt good, being adventurous.  Been too timid, half my problem. Time to ... sort of ... shake things up, have an adventure, maybe reset my whole life. Maybe I could make this the summer when everything changed for the better.

(Sighs deeply)

I think I was probably depressed.  

(Laughs, coughs)

Anyway, whatever. Sense of momentum, you know, getting it all sorted, flight, passport, visa, and the shots, yellow fever, cholera, rabies, hepatitis et cetera, plus I'd been taking anti-malaria tablets for a fortnight. Bought a whole load of clothes, shorts and polo shirts ... (Laughs) I looked like a fucking (Coughs) ... I looked a right charlie, let's just say. Some blokes are cut out for that kind of thing. I'm not. I knew it, deep down. But I was trying not to be such a miserable bastard.  

To be honest, thank god I never made it to Ghana because it's bound to be choked up with rich white men from various nations, all machoed up, ex-pats and tourists indulging their dick-swinging fantasies, especially along the coast.

Not now, obviously. If it's anything like round here, all it's choked up with now is weeds and birds.

(Drinks, coughs)

(Shouts) Noisy bastard birds! All the bloody time! Driving me round the bastard bend!

(Drinks)  

Ah well, just doing their thing. It's all theirs now. To cover in white shit and feathers.

______________

(Burps twice)

Basically, she'd met someone out there, another volunteer. Swedish guy. Noah. Fair play really. Thank fuck she told me her news before I told her mine. So we had a nice chat on Skype. She told me all about the village where they were staying, and the work they were doing, and about all the people she'd met. I told her it sounded amazing. I told her to keep up the good work, take care, and keep posting stuff to her blog because the pictures were amazing. I told her I was glad she was happy.

Little white lie there. Her pictures weren't really amazing. Kind of ordinary.  

And then I went to Wetherspoons to get completely annihilated.  

(Laughs) Instead, I just fell down the stairs, bumped my head, and everyone else got annihilated.  

So even that little plan went arse-about-tit.

(Shrieks) You got to laugh, haven't you!

(Quieter) Slit your throat otherwise.

(Still quieter) To quote my late grandmother.

______________

So, yeah, I wake up in hospital. And I recognise it straight away. I know exactly where I am. The Royal Glamorgan. Near Talbot Green, not far from the Mint. But the whole place is completely silent. No telly, no phones ringing, no trolleys rattling, no things going beep, no people talking, laughing, groaning, being sick – none of it.  

I'm sitting on the bed. Looking round the ward. All on my own. Dressing gowns and slippers, puzzle books and phones are all here, but not their owners.  On their tables, half-drunk drinks, tea still steaming. No nurses, no porters, no doctors.

(Spits) And I'm busting for a pee. So, a bit groggy, dizzy still, but off I go. Pair of ugly white trainers under the bed, I put 'em on, just so I look like the complete dick, and I'm pushing the blood bag along on a tripod. Out past the nurses' station. Empty. Past the next ward. Empty. Along the corridor.  Empty. It was starting to get to me.

Arrived at the toilet. Empty. Though, of course, I was glad of it in this case.

(Coughs)

So I was standing there, pissing, and the bastard light in the ceiling went out. Pitch black suddenly and I shot pee everywhere. I'm quite a jumpy person. But then I thought, okay, maybe it's one of those energy saving lights, gone wrong. But no, because when I opened the door everything was in deep gloom, corridor and ward, all lights out, silent.

Now, me, when I'm in panic mode it's like my autonomic nervous system hacks direct into my internal monologue.  It's like (Quietly) Hmm, that's odd, I wonder if there's been some kind of (Shouts) FUCK GOING BACK TO THE WARD! SOMETHING'S FUCKED! GET OUTSIDE!

(Opens bottle, pours, drinks)

So off I go, dragging my little tin tripod on shitty casters, the empty bag waving like some sick flag, the tube looping in the air and coming back up into my arm, off I go, stumbling down this gloomy-as-fuck corridor. There were no windows that showed outside, just other insides, wards and waiting rooms and canteens, and the faintest glow of light came from occasional and titchy slits and slats of glass tucked away in geometrical alcoves in the ceiling.

And no fucking people, none.

I put my hand on the wall and it was clammy, you know?  Like your forehead when you've got 'flu.  And in some bits it was like you could feel lumps under the surface, mushy lumps somewhere.

They've evacuated the hospital. That was my first thought. There's a problem and they've had to get everyone out. Gas leak maybe? And I suppose they just forgot me. I was unconscious at the time, of course, and it must be easily done when you're dealing with unconscious people, to just forget about them. I didn't feel any anger or indignation or anything. Shit happens, right?  

Obviously if anything bad did happen to me, I'd be taking the local health board to the fucking cleaners.

So I come to the lobby or the foyer or whatever, the big main entrance, and there's still no-one, it's still silent.  Past the WRVS shop and the vending machines I go, out the wide open doors. The tripod's trundling along concrete now. And I'm like – where the hell's all the people who got evacuated?  Is this not a muster point? Shouldn't there be fucking chaos all round here?  Where's all the desperately ill patients shivering in their beds?  Where's all the medicals trying to save them?

I just stood there looking at the handful of cars parked in the drop off zone. Windows were open, like they'd just been left. There was an ambulance there too. The back doors were open and I could just see inside.

Something moved.

I didn't see what, just a movement, something black.

My heart was thumping.  I went a bit closer, to look.

My tripod's wheels squeaked and two big black birds flew out of the ambulance.

I heard myself shout, and I fell to my knees. The birds shot over my head, screeching, straight into the hopsital.  I heard their echoes behind my back, cawing down the corridors.

I was like, Jesus Christ! And I got up and went. I just picked up the IV stand and ran like fuck. In a straight line, you know, away from the hospital. Over the flowerbeds. Zebra crossing. Footbridge. Over the river. Into the massive visitors' car park. Precisely zero thinking going on at this point. Panic system at peak flow. My eyes about to burst out of my head. Running like fuck in this grey tracksuit and ugly trainers, all a bit too big for me, you know.   And my balls are going to ache like a bastard when the adrenaline wears off, bouncing all over the place because I've got no pants on.

I keep going and now I'm at the far end of the car park. Perimeter fence marks the border of the hospital empire and beyond that it's just knotweed nettle wilderness, with encroachment of invasive weeds continous from May to September. Eventually I calm down, you know, stop running. Sit on the kerb to get my breath back.  

(Exhales noisily and lengthily)

And then I noticed the cars. They were, like...old. Rusty. You couldn't even tell what colours they'd been, they were all just a mixture of orange and green, rust and moss. And they were dead. Their seals were gone, rubber perished, there was water inside them. I saw seats sprouting ferns, vines coiled round gear sticks, toadstools on parcel shelves. Even their oil puddles had dried up into dead little rainbows.

(Quietly, barely audible) All just sitting there, man, side by side, all rotted, with the tyres gone.  Rolls of (Indecipherable) ... like my father did ... (Indecipherable) ... and lungs, for non smokers like, down to that little brook, past the pay station and the footbridge.  

A couple of years, I'd say, left alone. For them to get like that. At least a couple of years. I wondered if the steam was still rising from the abandoned teas and coffees. I turned to look back at the hospital. I could just make it out through the trees. Something about the shapes visible between the leaves and branches seemed ... wrong. So I stood up for a proper look, and I saw that the hospital was dead too. Long dead. But different from the cars, not rusty or mossy, more melted. Like when you look at a rotting peach. (Laughs) I threw up then.

(Hums same four note interval repeatedly)

Bollocks, that'll do for tonight.

______________

(Inhales vaporised nicotine solution from electronic dispenser.  Prolonged coughing.)

Christ help, this rum and coke flavour's a bit harsh. (Coughs) That Zestappeal was bloody horrible too.  I think I'll go back to the caramint mocha. Even though it gives me the shits.

Where was I? In the hospital car park. I sort of slumped on the ground. It could have been two hours I was there, and I swear not one thought went through my mind. In the end it was the needle in my arm that got me moving. It was irritating my skin so I just pulled it out, left the tripod behind, and started walking.

Things were just as bad when I got to the dual carriageway. The big roundabout on the A4119, it used to be all landscaped with grass and bushes and trees. Now you could hardly make out where it ended and the road began. Looking over to Heol-y-Sarn I could see the Royal Mint, grey and brown, misshapen, soft like the hospital. There was Finnings, the plant hire place, and the GeesinkNorba factory, and they were ruined too.  But differently ruined. Not melted looking. Exploded looking.  

And Christ my head's really spinning now. I've walked round the roundabout twice already. Once clockwise then backards. Why won't everything go back to normal?

(Laughs, coughs, hums same four note interval repeatedly)

______________

(Inaudible) ... even have a relaxing shit in peace ... (Muffled) ... doctors, so-called doctors, drones they...(Voice obscured by rustling) ... and christ alone knows what they want with it ...(Indecipherable) ... piece of genuine human dung ... fucking ... soi-disant doctors (Inaudible) ... in a bloody museum.

(Yawns)

Anyway, so, next thing I know I'm riding a bike along the motorway to Cardiff. Can't quite remember where I got it, might have been Halford's. One of those big shops anyway, on the retail park in Talbot Green. Whole place was a ruin, it wasn't like theft. A shrinking circle of concrete with ragged green closing in. Moss covered signs, Argos, New Look, Next.

They were in pretty good nick, the bikes, sheltered in the store, no rust. So I wheeled one out, on to the pavement. The noise disturbed some birds in the remains of Pizza Hut. I saw them rise up through the broken roof and soar away in a cloud. It hit me again - just birds. And me. Nothing else. I remember shaking my head for a while, while those words kept repeating in my mind – just birds...and me...nothing else. It got on my nerves so bad I screamed Shut up! More birds burst out of some burnt out shell, squawking, clouding up, and soaring away. And me, I jumped on the bike and headed for the junction with the M4, pedalling as hard as I could.

The motorway was all green and bumpy. Dead cars scattered along it. Trees growing out of it. Five years, at least, more like ten. To get like this. But it still led east, to the city. And I wanted to see the city. Perhaps things would be better in Cardiff.

Like that's ever worked before.

(Laughs for almost a minute, then coughs for just over minute)

See, I know ... I knew ... There were people I knew in Cardiff. People I'd worked with, mainly. Not friends, colleagues. I only had one friend and I didn't really like him

(Pours drink)

And Julia, of course. My ex-wife.  

(Sound of tablets dissolving in liquid)

And Connor. Of course.

(Long pause followed by sound of drinking)

It was hard work, I tell you, pedalling along that fucked up motorway. (Burps) Lumpy and bumpy. Vines and creepers. Hard bloody work. Hot too, proper June heat, but humid, sunless. It was only about six miles into Cardiff but it took me ages. After a while, I was just doubled over the bike, pushing all my energy into the legs, which were numb, and staring down at the ground beneath the wheels. I hardly knew where I was, what I was doing. I saw no-one, no sign of anyone. Not just people, no animals either, not even a rat in the rubble, not even a dog barking somewhere, not even a fly in my eye.

The trees, though, and the sky, and the ruins, they were full of birds. Even when I had my head down I could hear them, noisy bloody birds, driving me (Shouts) round the bloody bend!

(Coughs)

One time, just after the Junction 33 exit, I lifted myself and look round. I was in a desert. Not like a golden desert of shimmering sands. A dirty brown desert. Dried up and cracked. All those rolling fields on the way to Cardiff, you know, skirting the Vale, all those farms and golf courses? All the different shades of green, the big shady acres between the pylons? All gone. No buildings, no pylons, no grass. Just black clouds blowing round a dustbowl. No signs of life except some big legged buzzards clawing the dirt. I put my head down again and kept going.

See, hope isn't your friend, it's not. It's your enemy.  (Laughs, coughs, inhales vapourised nicotine)

(Huskily) I feel so much better since I gave up hope.

(Exhales vapourised nicotine while laughing)

I used to have key-ring with that written on it. Present from Julia.

(Laughs quietly but steadily for several minutes)

______________

Yeah, so then I was in Cardiff, cycling through Whitchurch. Expensive part of town. Wide avenues, big trees, Georgian houses, semi-detached with drives. Lots of Audis and BMWs, Mercs and four-by-fours, and the odd Jag. Real quality avenues, quality trees. It was all perfect too. No ruins, no rust. It was late autumn now though. The leaves were falling like snow.

(Sound of teeth grinding)

So I turned left into another avenue. And I knew it. There was a small school halfway along on the left. For special needs kids. Just a small school, two houses joined together with a yard between. I knew this street. That, over there, was Connor's school. My son, our son. Julia and me.

I'd been to this place about ... maybe two or three times before. The first when we came to have a look at it, Julia and me and the social worker, we met the headteacher. Second time on his first morning when we dropped him off. And maybe one more time, I think I went there once more, just after we separated. I'm sure I remember ... It'll come back to me. It was before the divorce but after I moved out, I think, and I was in a bit of a mess. I mean...to be honest with you I just wanted to die.  Every day I'd wake up and ... the guilt, you know ... I just didn't want to ...

(Sighs)

Yeah. So.  (Vapes noisily) I'm walking up the drive. So quiet. No noise from the yard, no music from the classrooms, no laughing, no crying. I'm looking through the railings, and of course there's no kids. Fallen leaves rustling, that's all, dry and red and orange and yellow. A breeze whips up and it sends them whirling. Through the railings they look like patches of fire, like flames dancing.

The door was locked. I pressed the intercom and heard it buzz through the building. Then I climbed on to the windowsill and looked in. All was in flux. Paint pots open, paintings still drying, you could see the liquid sheen on the blobs and blots. Toys scattered everywhere, coats all hanging on pegs. Empty wheelchairs. My throat went tight.

I jumped down and walked round the back.

I heard a noise, a hissing. Coming from the classroom. I looked through the door and saw it. Someone had left a tap on. Water was gushing into a big blue bowl, which was overflowing. The desk it stood on was wet, and the floor was a puddle.

I wondered again if the steam was still rising from the cups in the hospital.

Soon the whole floor of the classroom will be flooded.

Connor.

(Inhales sharply)

And if ... even if he'd been there ... he wouldn't recognise me. His mum, maybe. Yes, probably ... no, definitely. Definitley his mum. His new dad? Maybe, maybe not. Who could tell? Definitely not me though. It was too late, it was all too late. Even before this, it was already too late.

So I walked away from the place, passing the yard on the way, looking up so as not to see the wheelchairs all covered with dead leaves, and noticing that the trees that rose above the yard were full of small birds, five or six to a branch, not singing, just looking at me.

  (Exhales lengthily)

______________

(Indistinct, muffled) ... it's that, innit? Without my ... (inaudible) ... that the last generation has to carry the whole weight of all the generations that came before. And they buckle under it, obviously.

(Vapes profoundly)

Shit, it hasn't been recording. (Sniggers) Oh well, doesn't matter. Nobody needs half an hour of me philosophizing. Let's just say Cardiff was ... no good.

I tried my flat but the whole place looked like it had been bombed. Bombed several times then left to nature. Western Avenue was like a deep green trench. The Cathedral School was in ruins, sprouting trees, noisy with birds. The Crescent was still there, 80s redbrick ziggurat on a traffic island, but it looked like a grinning mouthful of broken teeth. Horton House, down the end, was flattened to the ground floor.  Reynoldston House was full of holes, right through. Cheriton House, my place, was still mostly standing, but like a doll's house with the front missing. The whole lot was sunk in deep green.

It started to rain and my tooth started to ache. The wind picked up too. And I was just wearing this crappy grey tracksuit, like. So now I'm just thinking about shelter, you know, all I want is to get inside somewhere.

It was funny, you know. Looking up at the fourth floor corridor that led to my flat ... with all the windows smashed ... and thinking....y'know ... that's where I tried to top myself.

(In his grandmother's voice) Got to laugh.

(In his own voice) After the divorce, see, this is where I came. This flat. Rented it off a nice lady in Porthmadog. Work all day then back here for constant self-medication, alone, in the dark. Rum and pills. Phone turned off. The guilt, et cetera. Overdid it one night with Co-codamol. You know. Despair, and all that. Changed my mind, halfway through. Typical me. Puked most of it back up. Still felt rough though. For hours. Had to give in, eventually, my guts were killing me. Called the ambulance. Couldn't really do it, go through with it. It was the ... well, I suppose it was the thought of my mother. (Coughs) Ha, my poor old Mammy. Well, she's already buried one kid, like, and I've seen what it's done. To her, I mean, to her brain. Driven her half mad at least. So...off to the Heath Hospital, A and E. Stomach pumped. No harm done. I couldn't do it to her. Pretended it was an accident I did. Maybe it was. What is an accident anyway?

(Long pause – 1 min. 42sec.)

Well, some harm done but not enough.

(Quietly) Slit your throat otherwise.

______________

Oh yeah, and a funny thing happened when I got into my flat. See, I live on the fourth floor and the stairs were blown to bits so I had to climb up. I went into the nearest flat with a hole right through it and no ceiling, I stacked up a load of broken furniture, and climbed into the flat above. Then to the next one. It was like climbing up inside a Swiss cheese. Glimpsing burnt and broken bits of people's lives. African masks and Indian tapestries in the first, pewter tankards and horse brasses in the second, melted chrome and broken glass in the third.

By the time I got to mine, the toothache was really bad. It had been building up for a while, my tooth was rotting and the filling fell out a few months earlier. But a dentist was on the endless list of shit I hadn't sorted out for myself since the divorce. So the only thing I could think of, standing there in my blasted out flat, was pain relief. There should have been a stash of Tramadol in a drawer somewhere. But the furniture was upside down, burnt black, missing legs and feet and arms. The whole left side of my face was throbbing. I couldn't think of anything else, you know what it's like. It was like I had tentacles in there, reaching up to my brain. Everything had shrunk to this, to toothache.

So I'm rummaging through the mess, trying to find pain relief, and instead I find this blister pack buried in the ashes of the coffee table, and I don't think I recognise it. It's anonymous and there's just one pill left. I pop it out to have a look. A small capsule, green and yellow. Doesn't ring a bell. I furrow my brow but even that makes the left side of my face ache just a bit harder.

Squinting because I didn't have my glasses, I saw the pill had this printed on it – skd487. Now that seemed familiar. I couldn't place it but that number ... I can see it now, skd487... but I still can't work it out. I mean, at the time I only wanted to know one thing about it – would it help with the toothache? I wouldn't mind how it helped. Painkiller preferably, opioid for choice, but if it just knocked me out that would be fine too. My poor throbbing gob, you know? So I thought, fuck it, and I necked the pill.

As I stood up, a parrot landed on the brown bolted balcony and said the word Malaria. I nearly jumped through the hole in the floor. I recognised the parrot, we'd met before. He was Kenny and he lived next door, with old Grace and her ten thousand pot plants. I locked myself out once and knocked on number 33. Grace let me go out her balcony and climb over to mine. I went back for a cup of tea, to say thanks. That's when I met Kenny. He whistled a bit of Hitler has only got one ball and said things like More tea, vicar?

Now here he was, looking a little bit older, just round the eyes, standing on my balcony.

I said Malaria?

Kenny said Malaria.

I said it again, and so did he.

Then he cocked his head first left then right, looking at me. I told him I didn't understand. He said it one more time – Malaria - then he whistled his tune, turned, and leapt off the balcony. I went out too. Kenny was soaring over Llandaf Fields. Heading into town. I had glimpses of the Millennium Stadium and the BT building through the canopy of green leaves. A tower of black smoke reaching for the sky. A mile and half away, the city centre. The rain was still falling but the air was warm and smelled sweet. I was sweating. My hands were shaking. I felt very thirsty. But the toothache seemed to be easing off a bit, so that was a relief.

(Hums same four note interval repeatedly)

______________

So listen now, tell me if you’ve had this experience, right?  

Oh.

You can’t can you? You’re not real.  

Sorry, tactless.  

(Prolonged laughter and subsequent coughing)

Oh Christ alive … hang on.

(Sips drink)

No, but for the sake of argument, right?  

You’re looking up at the sky, it’s late night, there’s no clouds, it’s all clear from horizon to horizon, right? It’s a warm August night, say, and you’re looking at all the billions and trillions of stars.   And you begin to notice this one star in particular. It looks bigger than the rest, or maybe it’s brighter, or twinklier than the rest. It catches your attention. You’re wondering if it might be a planet, you know, maybe it's Venus or whatever.

And then you notice something – it's moving. Not like a shooting star, plummeting, fast. It's moving steadily, across the sky, in a straight line. For a second, you're a bit confused. Is it a comet? A UFO? But then you finally realise  - it's just an aeroplane. Nothing weird after all. Probably a 747 crammed with punters farting silently and trying to get to sleep, about 30,000 feet above you. You watch it fly into the distance, getting smaller and dimmer, dwindling, until you can't see it anymore. The stars, the real stars, they just keep twinkling on. You've had that, right? For the sake of argument?

Okay, yeah, but only I’ve had the experience of looking up at the sky one night and seeing every single star do that. And not come back, they've never come back.

Like I say, Cardiff was a dead loss.

(Produces a yawn which collapses into a cough)

I had a wander round the city centre, Queen Street, St Mary's Street, Castle Street, The Hayes. Nothing doing. All ruined and overgrown. The arcades all broken glass. Trees growing through St David's Hall. I leaned the bike against the fallen statue of Nye Bevan and wandered for hours, poking around the shops, picking up bits and pieces from the mess. Some Tramadol first for my aching gob, from behind the counter in Boots. I necked four of them straight away, washed down with an energy drink I found intact in a crushed fridge unit. I sat there, in the pharmacist's swivel chair, for about half an hour, waiting for them to kick in. It was quiet, the roof was missing, I watched the sun moving and the nice warm glow spread through me. The toothache faded away. I felt heavy and light at the same time, heavy on the inside and light on the outside. (Laughs) Ah, good old opioids.

(Breaks wind)

So I sort of drifted around town, picking stuff up if it looked okay. I got a Rolex, an iPad, two pairs of Raybans. A cashmere coat from John Lewis. Some Timberland boots, a decent pair of jeans from Jack Wills, a Superdry t-shirt ... erm, what else ... Three bottles of Glenlivet ... um ... a Zippo lighter, a Moleskine notebook with a posh pen ... some cigars. My mind was a total blank, but at least it was peaceful. With the four Tramadols inside me, I was quite enjoying myself, just going round the shops in a daze, trying things on.

I got hungry and I saw a Greggs, open at the front, dark inside. Creepers and vines round the entrance. Water trickling out, green moss. I took a few steps inside, I don't know what I was hoping for. Stale pasties.

I didn't get far though. Everything was covered in white shit and feathers. I heard them before I saw them. Gulls, big meaty ones, screaming out at me from the back of the shop. I don't know how many, it felt like fucking hundreds. So I turned and ran out, with all of them following me, dive bombing me, swooping at my head, getting the beak in. I was running and falling, over broken bits of building, roots, pipes, and in and out of holes in the pavement, cracks and craters. I dropped my whiskey. I kept going and the bloody birds kept following me, but thinning out slowly, dropping back.

By the time I got to St John's there were only a handful of the fuckers after me. The tall stone tower had collapsed and it lay along Church Street, broken open, like tree after fifty years rotting on the forest floor. I ducked into the indoor market and lost the last gulls. It was like a sunken labyrinth in there, stinking of rotten meat and mildew.

Anyway, to cut a long story short, it was getting dark and I was getting drowsy. I wanted to go somewhere warm and comfortable. I wanted to sit down, no, lie down, drink some booze, and hopefully sleep. I was right by Howells the department store so I thought, okay, I want to go to bed and they've got a bed department. So in I went. Wasn't too bad once you got further in. It's a proper big old department store, it's got endless nooks and crannies. You can get lost in there. I took a torch from the homeware department and found my way to the beds, in the basement. I found a good one, all intact, a kingsize double I think it was, and I made a little nest.

Before turning in, I swiped some more whiskey from the food hall and went up to the roof. I wanted to see if there were any lights anywhere in the city.  There were none, well, other than the glow of a fire burning somewhere out towards Grangetown.

Standing out there, drinking Glenmorangie, smoking a cigar, I had a three-sixty view of ... nothing. So unbelievably dark. Everything gone, the city, the hills. Just the glow in Grangetown visible in the blackness. Other than that, the only light came from the stars. And as looked up at them, so they began to move. Like airliners, you know, straight line and steady. Like 747s in the night. No sound though, in ones and twos, clusters then and swarms.  And all in different directions, every possible direction, as long as it was away.  

I can still see them now.They dwindle, into tiny twinkles you can hardly see. Then even the dwindles fade.

It was…I…all I could do was watch, it was…

(Long pause: 1m 53s)

The sky was completely black, completely empty then. And by then I'd drunk most of the bottle and smoked most of the cigars. I felt the whole weight of the day crushing down on me. Definitely time for bed. I just had to lie down or else fall down. Bedtime. Goodnight, nos da, no star. I staggered back into the store, stumbled down to the basement, found my bed, crawled in, passed out.

So yeah, that was it for Cardiff. Dead loss.

(Very long pause: 7m 22s)

(Coughs)

Next day, hungover to absolute fuck, I decided to go and find the bike and head up the valleys. See if there was anything left of the Rhondda.

(Laughs, coughs)

Guess what the answer to that was.

(Sniggers)

______________

(Long pause – 2m 11s)

Not far to go now. Nearly finished. Then I'll shut up.

(Sighs)

I saw a bus on North Road, all intact. I got on. There were shopping bags in the aisles. There were coats draped on rails. There was a walking a stick, a buggy, and a pram. It was like everyone on the bus had vanished, just disappeared, no more than a second ago. The keys were in the ignition.

But were the cups of tea still steaming in the hospital?

So yeah, I started the bus and drove out of Cardiff. There was nothing in my way. I followed the A470. Going north, into the Valleys. Back home.

At Tongwynlais I looked up to see if Castell Coch was still there but there was no sign of it, just the woods and the red cliffs. And passing Taffs Well I turned to see if our house was standing, Julia's house I mean, Julia and her ... new ... husband. And the kids ... of course.

(Sigh, vapes, coughs)  

All gone. Every house in the street. Nothing left but rubble, craters, scorch marks. The cul de sac road blasted with debris.

(Yawns)

I was heading up to the Rhondda, to Ferndale. It's where I grew up. My mother still lives there. Graig Terrace. It was pointless but .... Well, that's where I was going anyway.

It was quite nice driving along. I'd necked some more Tramadol, plus a little hair of the dog, and I was singing. Sometimes I'd shout stuff over my shoulder, like, Next stop Hopkinstown, Hopkinstown next stop. Mind your trolley there, love. You boys at the back – sit down!

Then back to the singing.

(Sings)

Feel I'm goin' back

To Massachussetts

Something's tellin' me

I must go home.

By the time I reached Porth the sun was strong, the sky pale blue. Flocks of homing pigeons swooping and gliding. I drove with the doors open, for the breeze. Familiar old contours of the snaking Rhondda. Childhood memories everywhere, up the woods, on the tips, down by the river. Dens by the railway line, boozing in the lanes.

I was deep in my fuzzy brain, numb with nostalgia, all the way up to Tylorstown. About a mile to my mother's house. And then I shook my head and had a proper look. The cars on the roads, they were old. Not old as in rusted et cetera, all intact. Old as in cars from the past, from the 70s. A Ford Capri, a Triumph Dolomite, a Vauxhall Chevette. The shops, they were the same. The houses, the adverts, everything. Lidl wasn't there, nor the new leisure centre. Pit buildings, depots and chapels stood there instead. I think I laughed. Laughed in a fuck me, what now? kind of way.

(Laughs)

(In grandmother's voice) Slit your throat otherwise!

(Laughs, coughs, laughs, coughs, laughs, coughs)

Just past the Duke of York I looked down at the banana tip and of course the bloody washery was standing there. Six storey grey concrete building with a giant funnel on the side open to the sky. For washing coal. I remembered watching them demolish it back when I was kid. We all came to watch, just about everyone from Ferndale and Tylorstown. I was there with my mam and my brother. I watched them demolish it, this was about ... 77, 78. We were always going to watch things being blown up or knocked down. It was the last days of coal in the Rhondda. You could see it all coming apart. Either that or they'd just leave things to rot, like the stone powerhouse in Pandy. We used to crawl in and explore. Heavy rotting hulks, sprouting vegetation, sinking in the undergrowth, dripping and crumbling. Me and Jason and Gremlin and Andrew Rowe and his brother. Sometimes you'd tread on a rusty nail and have to have a tetanus.

I was nearly at Graig Terrace now, just passing Oakland Villas. You could tell just from the curtains in the front windows that this was the 70s. In as much as I tried to work it out at all, I reckoned that whatever had happened to the world had happened to time as well. After all, space and time aren't separate, are they? Just two aspects of the same thing, right? So damage to one could, I suppose, damage the other. And that's about as far as I went with that.

Next stop, Graig Terrace, I shouted over my shoulder. Bus terminates here.

______________

So I park the bus in the street and walk up to the house. It's all there, the iron railings painted brown, the old windows, the old front door, wide open. Monet prints on the wall, the coal fire, shelf full of Reader's Digest, the Neil Diamond LPs, the old white telephone, the floral wallpaper, the Rediffusion telly.

And there's my brother's wheelchair, folded up in the alcove under the stairs. I should point out that Ryan died in 1985. He was seventeen, me fifteen. My parents split up the following year. Having a disabled kid can really fuck up a marriage. Especially if your husband is a fucking ... weak ... useless ... idiot.

(Long pause, 2m, 11s)

Just ask my ex-wife.

(Laughs hysterically, then coughs for almost a minute)

Anyway, so ... I... I just looked at Ryan's wheelchair for a few minutes.

Then I stood at the foot of the stairs and called out for my mother.

(Long pause, 3m 47s)

A memory came to me then, and it was like I was watching it happen in front of me.

(Sighs explosively)

There's me, aged eight, maybe nine, and I'm in the lounge there, watching telly. There's a documentary on about what would happen in a nuclear war. There's a pumpkin representing a human head pierced by glass shards. There's a detailed description of blast wounds and radiation sickness. You've got to put dead people in bin bags and chuck them out, in case they kill you too.

My eyes are wide, I can't stop watching. There's stock footage of Hiroshima, miles of shattered houses, people's shadows burnt on walls. If you can still have kids you mustn't because they'll come out wrong. The whole world will be sick. Life will be pointless. The best you can hope is they drop one right on you. Better for us all just to be vapourised, all of us turned to steam.

I shouldn't be watching this, it's past my bedtime. Is this really the way the world is? All the time, in school, playing in the yard, and down the park, and at the beach, and on Christmas Day, and ... tucked up in bed .... there's this thing hanging over us. And the most horrible part was that ... people made it like this. We made it.

(Coughs)

Always just ... four minutes away (Coughs, spits) .... from hell .

(Emits an unnameable sound, somewhere between a laugh, a cough, and a sob)

So I go looking for my mother, because I'm scared, no, more than scared. I'm shivering. Mam's busy trying to get my brother upstairs to bed. It's a bad one tonight, he's having a proper tantrum. Ryan must be about 11 but his mind's no more than three. He's swollen with steroids for his rheumatoid arthritis, and he's so wired you know that the next thing will be another seizure, one of the big ones. I can see them struggling on the stairs, halfway up, and hear the ragged voice coming out of my Mam as she tries to reason with him. I'm afraid to speak, but I've got to.

Don't know where my father was. Up the rugby club probably.

I tell her I've seen a thing on telly about nucelar bombs and I'm scared. Mam looks at me over Ryan's shoulder. Her eyes are red, raw.

"The sooner the better," she says, "and put us all out of our misery."

(Long pause, 2m 33s)

I went stumbling out through of the house, down the three steps into the street. I got back on the bus and drove away.

______________

(Sings)

And the lights all went out in Massachusetts

The day that I

Left her standing

On her own

(Sighs)

I spent that night up on Park Road, lying across the back seat of the bus. No houses this high. No pavements, no street lights, no cat's eyes. We used to play up here. Climb the hill behind the street. Walk through the ferns to Muddy Pool. Catch tadpoles. Look down at the colliery by the river. Later, we'd look down and see it falling apart, blowing up, rotting. And later still, when I was a teenager, after Ryan died, smoking weed all alone in the same ferns, I'd just see what we called the banana tip, a long and curved space, black, where nothing could grow.

So ... yeah. Sun went down. No lights in the valley. No stars in the sky. Just as I was falling asleep I heard an owl.

The next day, in the pissing rain, I turned the bus round and drove down from of the Rhondda towards the M4. There was nothing else to do, to see. I just didn't...care anymore.

I passed the Royal Glamorgan Hospital again on my way to Talbot Green. It was hardly there at all now. Like a month old peach. Even though it looked even worse than before, I didn't feel sick at all. The cups of tea, they wouldn't be steaming now. That was one less thing to wonder about.

(Snorts)

And as I got closer to Junction 34 it was clear that all the stuff like the hospital, the schools, the council estate, they'd all gone the same way, slowly rotting, dissolving into slime and fungus. But the shops, you know, the retail park and the pubs, the fast food places, the new builds, they were different, they'd just exploded. But you know what? I didn't give a fuck by then.

So I got to the motorway services at Junction 33, stopped the bus, and went in. It was nice and dark in there, and I was sick of seeing things. I went past the Burger King and the WHSmith, and I made a nest for myself in the Costa. I made it comfy, you know, and warm. I emptied out my pockets. I fed off stale biscuits and muffins, M&Ms, Coke. Mostly I just lay down in my nest. It was dark and quiet, and that's all I wanted. Peace and quiet.

Once I thought I heard a voice. Coming from somewhere near the disabled toilet. A kid's voice, saying something. I sat up and looked into the gloom. Heart thumping fast again, after going so slow for so long. But there was nothing, no movement, no sound. What was the voice saying, what did it call? Was it my name, Danny? Or was it Daddy? Or nothing at all?

It's too late now.

______________

(Laughs)

And .... basically ... that went on for ....

(Long pause, 2m, 13s)

... I don't know, ages. Then one day I woke up and it was all bright. (Chuckles) And noisy. All the ... bloody ... lights were on ... and, y'know ... all the fruit machines were dinging away ... and you could smell the coffee ... and the Burger King ... (Laughs) And I rubbed my eyes and I saw the whole place was full of people. Just coming and going, eating and drinking, buying shit from Smith's ... taking their drinks out to their cars ... And, basically, it was just a normal fucking day at Cardiff West services ...

(Laughs, yawns, long pause – 3m 31s)

(Speaks increasingly slowly and with more frequent pauses) And, y'know ... seemed the world hadn't ended after all ... (Chuckles) It was just me after all ... The whole thing was ... in my head ... (Gasps) And I thought I'd ... basically ... lost my mind ... had a breakdown or ... whatever. And then I thought about all the shit I had to deal with now .... all my debts ... quitting my job ... Julia and Connor ... and now I was ... mentally ill ... and I'd have to face up to all this ... shit ... and carry on living. Because the world, y'know ... it hadn't ended, it was still going. And then this nice lady asked me if I was okay and I started screaming and I couldn't stop and they brought me here.

(Yawns, long pause – 3m 56s)

You don't fucking fool me though. This is all bollocks, I know. You're trying to make me think everyone's still alive. This is a simulation, don't think I'm ... unaware of that. I don't know who the fuck you are or where you come from, but I know you're keeping me in this fake hospital because I'm a rare specimen. (Yawns) No, more than rare. The world really has ended.

(Yawns, long pause – 4m 23s)

Very last ... of the ... human ruins ... (Chuckles)

(Long pause, 2m.48s. followed by snoring for 6h 22m)

End of transcription.

______________

Date: REDACTED

From: REDACTED

To: REDACTED

Subject: Transcript D – might come in handy?

Morning Pete,

Here’s the document you were after, transcript D, hope it’s useful. I’ve read it twice now and it certainly helps puts some flesh on the bones. I’d say there’s some good stuff in there, from the point of view of suggesting that the poor fella may have been at least halfway to a mental breakdown long before he took your client's anti-malaria medication. So granted the side effects brought on his psychosis, there’s no denying that was a factor, they’ve got the doctor’s report.  

But by his own account he was a pretty unstable personality anyway. There may be implications for your client’s liability that could be explored.  There might be a case for reduced damages, or at least some kind of ceiling on the amount, given the obvious instability of their client well in advance of taking the product.  

It may help to minimize the drug’s role at least a little, but if you don’t need it please feel free to shred it.  

Have a good weekend

Kev

[roadswim-collective]

“In order to understand the arcades from the ground up, we sink into the deepest stratum of the dream...How strangely this light suffuses the covered arcades...A glaucous gleam, seemingly filtered through deep water, with the specific quality of a flash of leg revealed by a lifted skirt, that pale brilliance...The arcades and interiors are residues of a dream world. The utilization of dream elements in waking is a textbook example of dialectical thought...

“Corresponding to the form of the new means of production, which in the beginning is still ruled by the form of the old (Marx), are images in the collective consciousness in which the new is permeated with the old. These images are wish images; in them the collective seeks both to overcome and to transfigure the immaturity of the social product and the inadequacies in the social organization of production. 

“At the same time, what emerges in these wish images is the resolute effort to distance oneself from all that is antiquated — which includes, however, the recent past These tendencies deflect the imagination (which is given impetus by the new) back upon the primal past. In the dream in which each epoch entertains images of its successor, the latter appears wedded to elements of primal history <Urgeschichte> — that is, to elements of a classless society. 

“And the experiences of such a society — as stored in the unconscious of the collective — engender, through interpenetration with what is new, the Utopia that has left its trace in a thousand configurations of life, from enduring edifices to passing fashions. 

“This standstill is Utopia and the dialectical image, therefore, dream image. Such an image is afforded by the commodity per se: as fetish. Such an Linage is presented by the arcades, which are house no less than street. Such an image is the prostitute — seller and sold in one.”

from The Arcades Project

by

Walter Benjamin, 1892-1940

[roadswim-collective]

THE MANY WORLDS OF JOANNA MILKWEED- FOREWORD

by Daniel Brogan

Joanna Milkweed, sculptor, producer, co-creator of Dan the Can Man, died last year at the age of 104 at her home near Wenvoe, surrounded to the end by a faint air of mystery.

A photograph from her last public appearance, at the BAFTA children’s awards ceremony, in London, in the year 1998, shows Joanna sitting at an angle to her colleagues.

At the Grosvenor, over a landscape of napkins and wine bottles in silhouette, Milkweed’s husband, the producer Bill Kenzie, along with animator Clayton Morgan, looks toward the lit stage. Around the shadowy table, lesser colleagues incline the same way. Their smiles are fixed, they look anxious, expectant.

Joanna is looking elsewhere. Her chair is turned so that she is at a right angle to the stage, to the spotlight, to the hallowed space where the announcements and the speeches are made. One hand hangs limp between her knees, the other holds a champagne flute. Her gaze is unreadable. There is a darkness either in or around her eyes that reminds one of cigarette burns.

Born in the Rhondda Valley in 1961 and educated at Saint Martins College, Joanna Milkweed was always looking elsewhere. In all but the most posed of shots, her eyes consistently fail to meet the camera. In this picture, taken in August 1998, the tendency reaches its geometrical conclusion. She is at 90 degrees to the ceremony.

Minutes after the shot was snapped Joanna and her colleagues won their second award of the night. Dan the Can Manhad already won best animation, Bill accepting the trophy from the writer Michael Rosen, and now Zum4 Entertainment – formed by Joanna, Bill, and Clayton – was about to be named Best New Independent Production Company.

Less than a year later Milkweed divorced Kenzie and went on to sell him all the rights to their creation, the perennially popular delivery man Dan, his yellow truck, and his whole motorway corridor world.

Milkweed never made another programme. Her withdrawal from public life was abrupt and total. She went away and never came back.

Joanna had been active in film and television design for 20 years at this point. From the start, she was determined to work in animation and soon made her name. Her gift as an artist appeared to combine two different elements, the intricacy and detailed beauty of her model work on the one hand, on the other a certain looseness or wildness of the imagination. Milkweed’s best work contained equal parts of each tendency, working together, eccentric visions sculpted into perfect scale models.

Joanna Milkweed designed and built a glorious variety of miniature worlds for dozens of different projects through the 80s and into the 90s. A lot of her work was done in fantasy and sci fi settings – a library in a university on an icy moon of Saturn, the interior of a smashed up block of flats in a post-apocalyptic city, a war torn village in the Dark Ages. Her eye for detail brought all these strange scenes and more to vivid life.

Milkweed also worked in children’s television, creating memorable sets for popular series like Mr Tweedyman,Samson and Gwynn, and The Shimmers.

“Joanna always brought something extra,” recalls Miles Brierley, who hired Milkweed to work on his long-runningAquarius 3000 series (1986 – 1993) and again on the one-off special Tarvin’s Future (1994).

“No matter what the project was, you knew that if you got Joanna Milkweed in you were going to get something really very special.

“Joanna’s stuff was just so imaginative, and so beautiful, she actually took what we were doing to another level. Certainly in the early days of Aquarius, before we’d found our voice, Joanna’s models were the best reason to watch the damn show!”

In 1995, while pregnant with her first child, Joanna conceived the initial spark that led to the creation of Dan, the vending machine resupply driver whose adventures still entertain children to this day.

Ex-husband Bill Kenzie, though often derided, has written movingly about this moment in his posthumously published memoir Just the Delivery Man:

“Joanna was suddenly hungry, after feeling sick all day, so now I tried to tempt her with different food possibilities. It’s quite difficult to predict what will tempt the appetite of a pregnant woman. I offered soups and salads, biscuits and chocolate, various sundries from the back of the cupboard. All in vain.

“Finally, in desperation rather than in hope, I blurted the word: McDonald’s? And Joanna rewarded me with an ironic grin, as was her way. I went to hunt for the car keys.

“We were still living in Newport at this point, much to our distress. The new house in Roath was ready for us to move into, had been since May. We’d hoped to be in and settled well before now, with Joanna’s bump so big and round. Moving house is stressful, as is having a baby. Trying to do the two at the same time though? An absolute hellscape. Which may seem an overstatement but to those who have never had to try it, I’d simply say – try it!

“Being pregnant brought out the anxious, worrying side of Joanna. It didn’t help that it was such a difficult pregnancy. I remember thinking, well, thanks a lot Mother Nature. Thanks for making this a lot more difficult than it strictly had to be. And of course it was Joanna who bore the brunt. I felt so sorry for her, we had so many ups and downs. My own temperament is much calmer, more simply optimistic.

“If you ask most of my friends and colleagues to describe me in a few brief words, you’d probably find a lot of variations on Laid back, including So laid back it’s a wonder he doesn’t fall flat on his back. It’s true, I’m naturally relaxed almost to a fault. People start to find it annoying, my lack of urgency. I know Joanna found it annoying. I guess we were at different poles emotionally, as in so much else.

“I suppose I felt at some level that my influence would help her chill out a little. Looking back, it seemed to have the opposite effect, giving Joanna a target for her fears, her irritation, and her many frustrations. I don’t think either of us was very easy to live with, we were still young and were both quite extreme personalities at that point. But different extremes, Joanna and I – opposite poles. We had our moments though, which I’ll never forget, and would never want to forget. They made us who we are.

“While eating her Quarterpounder Meal in the car, her first solid food since the bout of uncontrollable vomiting on Wednesday afternoon, we looked across the car park at the panorama beyond, the M4 motorway snaking its way through Newport, heading west through a pink sky to the sunset. And I remember, will never forget, Joanna putting my hand on her bump to feel our child moving in there, nearly ready to meet us, and listening at the same time as she told me about this idea she’d had, it had just come to her now, the first stirrings.

“It was an idea for a show, a show of her very own. About all this – and she pointed with her Coke cup at the world outside our car. Joanna’s words, as I felt the baby kick, I’ll never forget, all those lights just coming on, all starting to shine, all those tiny lives. Her own eyes were shining, and I told her so. That was the moment Dan the Can Man was conceived. Three weeks later our beautiful baby Dylan was born.

“As I say, we had our moments.”

Joanna had never originated a show, had always worked for hire on other people’s projects. Now she worked with Bill and their university friend Clayton to create a pilot episode, on the strength of which the BBC commissioned a series of six 10-minute episodes, aimed at a 4-8 age group. The first series aired in March 1996 and was an immediate hit.

Parents began calling the BBC to ask if there were plans to release Dan the Can Man on video or DVD. Something about Joanna’s creation – and it was Joanna’s really, before it was anyone else’s – made it hugely popular right from the off, and well beyond its intended age group.

A hastily commissioned second series, of 12-episodes, was an even bigger hit. The series, like Teletubbies and Rastamouse before it, seemed designed to tempt cultural commentators. There were countless columns and thinkpieces in the broadsheets, while the tabloids kept up the hunt for innuendo well beyond the point of reason.

It was assumed that Dan the Can Man, despite the good-natured simplicity of the stories themselves, said something…or represented something…perhaps reflected something. No-one seemed quite sure but trying to define it – that was the thing that kept the columnists and the panellists going.

A piece in The Guardian called it the first post-Fordist kids’ show. The Times called it Trumpton on a zero hours contract. A writer for the Daily Mail bemoaned the show’s strenuous attempts to tick every last diversity box. Art critic Brian Sewell called it a drearily faithful depiction of our current atomisation and malaise, while on the same Radio 4 panel show, comedian and activist Mark Thomas asserted that it’s like Brecht or something – and we’re all Dan the Can Man now.

Joanna Milkweed, quoted in 1997: “Ultimately it’s about a little man called Dan who goes round filling up vending machines with soft drinks, and all his little adventures on the way.”

Licensing deals were signed. There was merchandise, the figures first, then the bedsheets and backpacks. Zum4 Entertainment was formed. Money began to flow. At the centre of the whirlwind stood the central trio, Jo and Bill and Clay. They each had an area of expertise: Joanna made the sets, the models and the puppets, Clay animated them, and Bill sold the finished product.

They were a team, a family. They had trust and they respected each other. Then Joanna walked away. She left behind her company, her lucrative creation, her career in TV, her life in London, and her husband. She was 41.

The two children, Dylan and Hazel, Joanna kept with her.

Milkweed bought a house near Cardiff and they lived there together, just the three of them, until the children grew up and left home. Joanna never remarried, never – as far as we can tell – embarked on another romantic relationship.

Bill Kenzie remarried twice, was divorced twice, and died at the age of 66, having turned Zum4 into an internationally successful company, while paragliding in Crete.

After Milkweed’s return to Wales in 1999 all invitations to collaborate on projects were refused, offers of work were ignored. Old acquaintances and friendships were left behind, until no-one seemed to have any idea what had become of her.

Miles Brierley regards the loss of Joanna’s gifts to the world of film and TV as “a bloody tragedy.

“I would have loved to work with Joanna again, she was quite, quite unique. I did pester her for some years with projects, inviting her to come to the studios to look at what we were doing.

“At first she just replied with polite refusals but after about three years of me periodically pestering her with offers of work, she began replying in the form of these funny postcards she’d made herself, some cryptic picture on the front. Usually stuff like derelict phone boxes with weeds growing through the little windows. Old pubs rotting away.

“Once there was a broken television set, old tube style, smashed screen, in the middle of a messy bit of muddy wood somewhere.

“I thought, yes, well, okay. I get the picture. It’s a no, isn’t it?”

For the next 63 years, until her death last year and the opening of her house to the public earlier this year, Joanna succeeded in staying beneath the margin of the world’s notice.

The one exception to Milkweed’s absence from the public stage occurred in the year 2000, when papers carried the report of a 42 year old woman arrested for breaking and entering a storage unit in Stroud. Joanna Milkweed admitted robbing the unit repeatedly over two months, emptying it of almost all its contents before a dog-walker spotted her and called the police.

Milkweed told officers that everything she had taken – which comprised all the sets, vehicles, clothes, and puppets she’d ever made for Dan the Can Man – belonged to her. The owners of the unit, Zum4 Entertainment Worldwide, declined to press charges and Joanna kept the models. They were obsolete anyway, production of the show having moved from stop motion animation to 3D computer design, in order to keep up with international demand. Bill Kenzie told a reporter, “All she had to do was ask.”

All this is a matter of public record. These are the bare facts in the case of Joanna Milkweed, as they would appear to any casual researcher. The questions they raise are many. The most obvious are: Why did Milkweed abandon her success, her creation, and her marriage in 1999?Was it for the same or at least a related set of reasons? Why did she turn her back so completely on her profession and the friends she’d made? How or why did a previously prolific artist with an astonishing work rate subdue her creative energy for the rest of her life?What did she do with her imagination, with her her hands, for the latter 63 years of her life?

In brief, whatever happened to Joanna Milkweed?

These questions are not easily answered. A woman addicted to privacy makes a difficult subject for a biographer, and I can’t pretend to be suited for such a tricky task. My role is that of an editor, or perhaps an assembler would be more accurate. What I have assembled are simply fragments of Joanna. The writer who eventually takes on the challenge of the supremely elusive Milkweed has my respect and my sympathy. I look forward to reading the finished product.

This book aims to answer just one question: what did Joanna do with all the models she stole from the lock up?

[roadswim-collective]

Bundock, Kiely – Domiciliary care worker, 24, from Trebanog, Rhondda, employed for the last four years by Initial Care Options; paid £6.57 an hour, excluding time driving between calls, with no petrol allowance. She works six days a week, covers over 90 miles a day and spends fleeting gaps between calls loading up on caffeine ‘n’ carbs in supermarket cafes.  She’s working up to 60 hours a week and still flat broke.  Last week she nearly handed in her notice after an incident in which one of her calls, a 92 year old widower, had collapsed and Kiely was told by her line manager to leave him and get on to the next call.  An occasional Effluent Lagoon contributor, Kiely sends in pictures taken on her phone as she travels between calls, telling us: “If you want any more, let me know, I got loads of them, they’ll only be deleted otherwise.”

[roadswim-collective]

(via https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=50g918Iyucg)

[roadswim-collective]

A Christmas card from Rebekah Analoglou (first aired 1985)

[roadswim-collective]

(Roadswim Collective)

An Effluent Lagoon Uneasy Summer Barbecue Mix, for you, to ward off the chills and the afraid.

"To brighten up this 'uck awful summer the Roadswim Collective brings you a mix of sunshine 'n' good times classics! Kick off your flip flops and dance away the 2016 blues!!¬!!!!!!¬""!¬|fe JIFPAi\fbv,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,./,"

Gerard Manley Hopkins, Which HiFi

Tracklist:

The Merkins – Les Hyper Sound (Sadier/Gane)

The Croutons – Croutons

The Drones – Drones

The TTR-45 – The Silent Chorus (J Maus)

The National Botanic Gardens – Bacteria Memories

The Mortgage – Embossed in Benbush

The Leightons – Superluminal Scissors

The Soft White Clouds of Earth – Beautiful (Perry)

The Lies Your Mother Told Me When We First Met – Thanks, Bye

The Bad – Birds Hell

The Mortgage – Still Embossed in Benbush