A New Novel by the acclaimed Welsh author Robat ap Rhisiart
A Circle Has No End or
Seven Minutes Fifty Nine Seconds
“Again.” The body on the bed jerked upwards. The continuous beep changed into a series and a voice said,
“I’ve got a pulse.”
“Good,” replied a man in a mask. “For how long, I wonder? Severe trauma to the head, skull broken--------.” He glanced at the clock, which read four thirty pm. The curtain rails and hooks clicked noisily like rosary beads in a nun’s winter frozen fingers.
“Can’t do much about the head injury until we’ve got his heart stable. What hit him, or did he hit, any idea?”
“An ice cream van, I heard.”
The patient lay still and silent, unmoved and unmoving, by the urgent bustle around his dying body. Doctors, nurses, nurses, doctors, a black robed priest, more nurses crowded the bleak area of his last bed. Only his mind still urged life to him, pressured him to stay; not to go on down the long road into the valley, but would he listen to its pleadings? Everything caused him pain, even the roots of his hair ached. If he could have spoken he would have said it was all disappointing. No bright lights. No rainbow coloured scimitars shining in a thunder-headed sky. Had the sun decided not to come out, was that why there was no rainbow? No, the sun always came out, if it didn’t it would be like getting killed but not dying, which seemed not just impossible but stupid.
On a dim grey day in a dubious month, under a pall-black, fall-black rain-filled sky, an infant awoke from the long day dream of his water borne pregnancy. The trauma tore into the essence of his being as he came into consciousness; was ripped bloodily into consciousness. He could not know whether the sun shone that day, nor did he care, locked as he was in the warp of his being, mouth searching for the instinctive nipple. The dull temper of the solitary hours escaped him for they were now cluttered with an awakening, the noise of his mother’s cries mixed with his own, creating a symphonic fear.
Growth of itself grew and, side stepping the experience of his elders, he learned of his own volition. Learned by tasting, seeing, smelling and by thinking. What he would think as a youth would appear good in his boy’s eyes where the long summer grasses were a thousand years of a Second’s Eternity.
Tightly controlled shivering in a bitter east wind; but the boys being tough guys - like Mickey Spillane or Stanley Matthews - would never admit to noticing it. Even though their faces, fingers and knees were blue – taking turns they kicked a tin can at the makeshift goal made of skinny jumpers – whilst the other defended.
“Rotten game on Saturday, Matt. They played like pricks.” Twelve, and full of mistaken manliness.
“Yeah! Smith played all right, that goal he scored in the second half was a right blinder.” Matt blinked owlishly behind his glasses. He walked over and kicked the tin can. They had no ball for it was just after the War when even joy, like sweets, was rationed, the winter weather was in concert with all else. Clouds, belly-pregnant with snow, and the ground, concrete hard, with a frost that was not concerned with the lives it affected. People died, whilst the boys played with a tin can, so did small creatures, dug into the ground or under unburnt bonfires, whilst waiting in vain for a Spring which, as yet, had not even begun to unpack its bags.
“S’pose so, but let’s face it he should score, they paid Leyton Orient enough for him.” John’s voice, a pubescent squeak, echoing an adult scorn as words from a political speech. His eyes seeing the pubescent pimples on the other boy’s face but not noticing the blue eyes, that longed for real friendship, behind their panes of clear glass. And, in an idle moment he wondered what went on in the mind behind them; the pimples that is, not the glasses.
“Ten thousand weren’t it?”
John nodded vaguely, he did not really know but was not going to admit his ignorance to Matt.
“And he ain’t worth it.”
“Reckon you’d do better?” Matt ventured a joke.
“No, but I’d cost a bloody sight less!” John’s voice filled with the unknowing certainty and knowledgeable contempt of his age.
“Yeah! A bloody sight less!” echoed Matt. He was not going to be outdone in the game of up-growing in the uses of profanity. He had his likewise ideas and within the scope could see, if myopically, where he was going. But his path and ‘their’ reality were yet to diverge and when they did both would taste the dregs of disillusion.
White, against a blindness that, dim, he saw as little patterns, plates of a weird armadillo mind, shiny with the glossy hopes of dead years. He stirred, straining against the resented umbilical cord.
“He’s fighting – where’s his wife?”
“In the visitors’ room, very upset but holding it in, We could have trouble there if we lose him.”
“Someone with her?”
“Of course. Coincidentally, she slightly injured herself rushing to get to the accident? But she’s okay, very calm really, perhaps too calm.”
A bitter rattle of hard rain against windows on a wild winter morning; it seemed to be saying something but his ears, outer and inner, could not make sense of it.
A pebble clattered against a tin in the noisy world of the refuse tip where they were playing. The place was full of grass-eaten old bottles, bedsteads, tins, bike wheels and the doors off cupboards, once proud possessions. A grumbling machine gathered up huge mouthfuls of muck, and dribbled bits of it as it threw parts of one pile onto another for no apparent reason.
“Goal!” shouted John, flinging his arms wide to encompass an imaginary crowd and laughing hysterically. The tip echoed his yell in the oily pit of its place behind the gasworks where the smell was thicker than the weeds. Unimpeded by the children who crawled all over it, the tip went on with its job of digesting the waste products of humanity. It was oblivious to the feet that scrambled across its tangled mouth or splashed through the oily, rainbow patterned pools that never dried up, not even the hottest summer weather. It was oblivious to the years of children that played with its food; bedstead, bike, car, boot and stinking rags along with soulless singularities, nails in the coffins of the living.
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