Rachel Trezise - Sixteen Shades of Crazy

‘El?’ Safia said, as if from some distance.

Ellie sighed, annoyed by the interruption. She considered telling Safia about the stranger, but then quickly dismissed the idea. Safia was as chaste and delicate as the foil on a new coffee jar. She was religious. She’d been conditioned to ignore temptation, neglect her own feelings, banish any rebellious thoughts that accidentally found their way into her head. She wouldn’t understand Ellie’s predicament.

‘Yeah, Andy’s home,’ Ellie said. ‘And the band had some good news. A Radio 1 DJ liked one of their demos. He wants them to go on his show.’

‘Wow,’ Safia said. ‘They’re going to be famous!’

Behind her the fire exit opened. Jane appeared, heels clicking on the concrete. She stood next to their adjoining desks; hand on hip, counted the trays of mugs piled up from the floor. She noted the total down on her clipboard, her glasses slipping down her nose. ‘You know we need a whole new batch of these packed and shipped by the end of August, don’t you? Save your chitchat for your coffee break.’

At six on Wednesday night, Ellie was on her way home from the factory. The sun was reflecting on the bronze statue in the middle of Aberalaw Square. It was a Dai-capped miner, one arm clutching his Davy lamp, the other curved protectively around his wife and babe-in-arms. It was hard to distinguish one limb from another, especially if Ellie had been drinking in the Pump House. As Ellie got close to the pub she saw Rhiannon standing on the doorstep, talking into her mobile phone, a pair of pinstripe bell-bottom under her white hairdressing tunic. Ellie began to walk faster, trying to dodge her, scurrying past the statue towards the safety of Woodland Terrace. But a metre away from the pine end, Rhiannon’s voice rang through the village like a marauding police siren. ‘Oi, mush, come back by yere a minute.’

Ellie reluctantly turned around and walked back to the pub, her duffel bag jerking on her shoulder. She stood in front of Rhiannon while Rhiannon finished her conversation and flipped her phone shut. ‘Kelly’s gone to the dentist to get her rotten teeth out,’ she said. ‘Too many fuckin’ sweets or somethin’. Fancy comin’ in yere with me for a drink or what?’

Rhiannon was bordering on alcoholism, carried half-litre bottles of spirits around in her handbag. But she always needed someone to drink with. Misery loves company. Kelly was her teenage assistant at the salon; usually they went out together every night after work. Ellie picked at a glue stain on the thigh of her khaki cammos. Andy didn’t like her drinking on week nights; he didn’t like her drinking without him.

‘Well?’ Rhiannon yapped.

Ellie jumped.

‘Ewe ’avin a bloody drink or not?’

Ellie followed Rhiannon through the pub and into the games area. Rhiannon sat at her table, the surface of it obscured with wineglasses full of Liebfraumilch, the house white. She picked one of the glasses up and gave it to Ellie, then took a sip of her own. ‘I’ve got a game of pool on the go,’ she said, pulling a worn cue out of the umbrella stand. ‘I’ll break if ewe don’ mind.’

Dai Davies looked up from his newspaper. ‘Go on, bach,’ he said, shouting across the pub, holding his beer stein up in the air. He was a fixture at the Pump House bar, a retired cat burglar who delighted in malicious hearsay. He was also Rhiannon’s uncle.

Rhiannon held the cue against herself, the tip burrowed between her double-D breasts. She squinted at it and puffed on the chalk then ducked at the edge of the table, one leg kicking out at the rear, her cropped bell-bottom revealing a thick band of brown skin. ‘Italian coloured,’ she called herself. But she wasn’t Italian. Her parents were as Welsh as they came; career criminals from the Dinham Estate. The man who Rhiannon swore was her father, despite his being white and her clearly being mixed race, had been murdered in his prison cell when she was a kid. But not before giving her some cock-and-bull history lesson about south Walians originally being naturally dark-skinned, a story she still used to defend herself whenever someone from the estate called her a nigger.

The white ball rolled into the pocket without hitting any of the colours. Rhiannon passed the cue to Ellie. ‘What d’yew reckon about this radio show?’ she said. ‘Ewe know about stuff like that, El. Am I gonna be rich next week or what? Cause I’ve had it with that bloody salon, I ’ave. Ewe can catch all sorts of shit messing with people’s ’air. Nits, skin diseases, ’alf of those inbreds from the estate got AIDS. I should get danger money for what I do.’

Ellie shattered the virgin balls, exposing a purple stain on the green felt where Siân had tipped a pint of cider & black a few months earlier.

‘I tell ewe,’ Rhiannon said, ‘when ’ey make it I’m gonna have a big bloody mansion built on Pengoes Mountain, a big bloody electrocuted gate to keep the scum from the estate out.’ She clapped her hands, like a seal doing tricks for a piece of fish. Pool games with Rhiannon were not meant to be won. They played by loitering around the table for three-quarters of an hour, talking about whatever Rhiannon wanted to talk about, taking it in turns with slow, aimless strikes. Ellie daren’t put any effort into it. She was afraid of beating Rhiannon, afraid of what Rhiannon’s reaction might entail. If Rhiannon was anything she was a sore loser, so Ellie saved her concentration for pool games with Griff. Nothing annoyed Griff like losing a pub game to a girl.

‘Bloody tired I am,’ Rhiannon said. ‘Marc’s fault it is. Came home wanting six weeks’ worth of nooky in two days.’ Ellie cringed at the mention of nooky . Rhiannon was always fraught to portray herself as a hip, 20-year-old fashion aficionado. She read articles in Kelly’s magazines about John Galliano and Stella McCartney, was always dripping in fake haute couture. But her vocabulary perpetually belied her disguise. Words like nooky and mush and Billy Whizz . Her voice came straight from the estate.

‘Three times in one fuckin’ night,’ she said. ‘That run in the family or wha’?’

Andy and Marc were brothers, Andy the elder by a year, which meant that Ellie and Rhiannon were very nearly sisters: sisters by common law. There was a time when Ellie could stand Rhiannon, when she didn’t cross the street to avoid her, when she thought she was a suave and quick-witted femme fatale . Marc had met her eight months ago at a gig in Penmaes Welfare Hall, one of those ones where The Boobs stood in for the resident cabaret act, a glam-rock cover band called The Poseurs. As soon as the locals worked out that Andy didn’t know any T-Rex riffs, The Boobs got bottled off. One dour Sunday afternoon, a black woman had appeared on the dance-floor, strutting around on her own, a miniature bottle of Moët in her fist, a luminous pink straw, shaped like a treble clef, sticking out of the top. She was wearing a tiny yellow A-line dress and a pair of fishnet stockings, the black lace bands at the top of them exposed. Her accent was so Welsh, so cordial and melodic, it would have seemed foolish to interpret it as anything other than endearing.

Ellie clearly remembered thinking that she could do with a friend like Rhiannon. It gave her hope to think that such a sophisticated specimen of being existed in a place so overcrowded with rednecks. Of course that was all positive prejudice. Rhiannon turned out to be the most bigoted person Ellie’d ever met: a brainless, reckless tart. There was no champagne in that bottle. It was just something she used to carry around in her counterfeit Prada handbag, one of her good-time-girl props. But she’d given Marc a lift home in her red sports car and he’d never been the same since. Ellie always joked that she must do something really special in bed.