The ambulance outside alerted two of the neighbours.
‘Is Janice OK? Mrs Hughes asked. ‘She’s been looking very drawn.’
‘I saw her come to the door. I think it’s…’
‘Alex?’
‘Janice told me he’s been worse lately,’ Mrs Phillips said.
‘That overdose. Last summer, wasn’t it? Do you think he…?
Mrs Phillips clamped her lips together. This isn’t suitable conversation her stiffly proper expression seemed to say.
/
Eirlys was everything to him. He watched her grow as a baby, kept an eye on her schooling. On her reaching puberty he became over-interested, you might say. When she had boyfriends, well he had jealousy like a bridge has rivets. Eirlys’ marriage left him grey somehow, his spirit seemed to have drained from him. But he had the blues in him right from when we first dated, just kids. He was prone to them. Having a daughter gave him some relief, I suppose; her leaving home extinguished that. I tried to help him but his empty heart wouldn’t let me in. I’ve been expecting this ever since last summer. Longer, really, if I’m honest.
/
Sheila Phillips began making the tea for her and Fred. The final blast furnace at the steelworks was shutting down today. Two thousand jobs going over the next few months. They’d all seen it coming and the workers were now resigned to a town without the smoke or stink. The redundancy money would help. But after? Would Fred work again? He was in his fifties. She hoped so. Some of them, maybe, could end up like Alex Smith. Once Alex had gone on the sick, he’d really spiralled down, hadn’t he? All that time on his hands and his mind like a torch on a mirror, just reflecting on himself. She didn’t want that happening to Fred.
/
In the ambulance Janice Smith held Alex’s still hand. She’d popped out from the house to the Spar for a few things and by the time she’d returned Alex had hung himself. The paramedics had tried to revive him, then pronounced him dead, and taken him and her in the ambulance. Now she was in a hospital corridor and he was in the mortuary. Could she have discovered the rope he’d hidden away? Should she have sought help for him early in their marriage when he sometimes sobbed unaccountably and said he felt hopeless? A list of might-have-beens rattled in her head.
They said something about ‘do you have an undertaker, a burial plan?’ Well of course not, Alex wasn’t even sixty. Then something about they’d keep his body there, and an undertaker would be in touch. They’d let her say goodbye to that gaunt, unfulfilled body on the slab. Then she’d stumbled out into the car park to find Eirlys, who’d she rung. Above her she saw a huge grey cloud that stretched right across to Swansea. Darkness in the air. Inside Alex too, strangling life from him. There’d be dark days for a while. Just accept.
