The Cure of Souls

‘It’s not your crisis. Maybe I should have noticed how it was with Amy and Layla Riddock. We’ve all been there, haven’t we?’

‘Bullying? Intimidation?’

‘You ever have days you were so scared to go to school you were faking stupid symptoms? Hasn’t happened to me since I was like really young… eleven, twelve. I was quite small then, for my age. Thought I was going to wind up looking like Mum.’

‘Little and cute?’

‘Little is not cute at school.’

‘Always the ones who are just a bit bigger who go for you, isn’t it?’ Eirion said. ‘The ones who’ve maybe been bullied a bit themselves. They do much worse stuff and they get away with it because nobody suspects them.’

‘And you’re just so scared at the time. Adults are like, “Oh, you should stick up for yourself.” But you know they can do anything to you at school, right under the noses of the staff. Like, even if you die, it’s only going to look like an accident! They’re completely outside the law. Nobody out there realizes how totally evil kids can be. It’s like some false-memory thing sets in with adults, and all kids become cute and need protecting. And that’s how you wind up with teenage psychos like Riddock.’

‘When you’re nine’ – Eirion lay on his back, gazing into the darkness of the room – ‘there are eleven-year- olds who’re like… like Charles Manson.’

‘Who?’

‘This weird American guy who got people to kill for him. Murdered this movie star and all these rich people, just went into their homes and ripped them to pieces. Manson was claiming to be receiving these psychic messages. And the people who killed for him – who included women – they wrote “pigs” and stuff on the wall in the victims’ blood.’

‘You’re right,’ Jane said. ‘You’re really not being very helpful.’

She wondered if he’d grown up thinking of this guy, Manson, as the ultimate bogeyman because his own family was so damn rich.

There was a knock on the bedroom door.

‘Shiiiiiiiiiiiiiit!’ Jane reached up and snapped off the lamp. Did they never, never, never go to sleep?

‘Eirion?’ That hated tripping, lilting, little-girly voice.

‘What?’ Eirion called out hoarsely.

‘Ydy Jane yno?’

‘Er… no,’ Eirion replied.

‘Wel, ble mae Jane?’

‘Probably gone to the shop.’

‘Aw, Eirion… ma’r siop ar gau!’

‘That does it!’ Jane swung her legs off the bed. She was wearing her jeans and her lemon-yellow top. She moved across the bare boards to the door.

Eirion was looking anxious. ‘Look, don’t,’ he whispered. ‘Can’t you just let it go?’

Jane stopped at the door and thought for a moment, then smiled. She crept back and lay on the bed. Eirion was sitting on the side of the bed by now, shoving his bare feet into his trainers.

‘Sioned?’ Jane called out in this foggy, slurry voice.

‘Jane!’

‘Look, would you mind giving us a few more minutes. We’re having sex, OK? Ni’n, er, yn shaggio.’

A wonderfully awed silence.

Eirion kind of crumpled.

‘Again!’ Jane breathed loudly. ‘Harder! Deeper! Oh God…! ’

From hell? Oh yeah.

See, most of the ordinary Welsh people she’d met, Jane liked. This might seem like generalized and simplistic, but they seemed kind of classless, no side to them. Contrary to what everybody said, you could have a laugh with them. Look at Gomer Parry.

Look at Eirion, for that matter: chunky, honest, self-deprecating… and this incredible smile that was (as she’d written in a poem she was never going to show him in a million years) like all the birds starting to sing at once on a soft spring morning.

The poor sod. Raised among the crachach.

This was what they were called – the Welsh aristocracy, the top families. A few of them had titles, but most of them were contemptuous of English honours, although – being sharp business people – they were usually incredibly polite to the English people they encountered.

Eirion said his dad, Dafydd Sion Lewis, was some kind of Welsh quango king. He ‘served’ on the Welsh Development Agency, the Welsh Arts Council, the Wales Tourist Board, the Broadcasting Council for Wales. And he was a major executive shareholder in whatever Welsh Water and Welsh Electricity were calling themselves this week. There was a bunch of them like his dad, Eirion said. The names of the organizations and businesses might change but it was always the same people in control.

Dafydd Sion Lewis was plump and beaming and hearty and, according to Eirion in his darker moments, majorly corrupt.

Gwennan was his second wife, about fifteen years younger. She was a former secondary-school teacher of the Welsh language and now – as a result of being married to the quango king – a key member of the Welsh Language Board, which existed to keep the native tongue alive and thriving.

Not that Jane had a problem with this. She was all for having more languages around: Gaelic, Cornish… anything to keep people different from each other, to create a sense of otherness.

At first, she’d thought that Gwennan, with her two cars and her movie-star wardrobe, was a fairly cool person.

It had taken only one day of the holiday for her to realize what Eirion had already kind of implied: that everything had gone to Gwennan’s head – the wealth, the status, the establishment of the Welsh Assembly. She was now a warrior queen of the New Wales, wielding the language like a spear.

‘Except it isn’t a new Wales at all,’ Eirion had said morosely. ‘It’s the same old place, run by the same old iffy councillors, except they’re now known as Assembly Members, supported by the same old bent financiers, but with this new sense of superiority. Suddenly, they’re looking down on everybody…’

‘Especially the English?’ Jane had suggested.

‘Especially the English because the English don’t have Wales’s unique identity.’

Actually, Eirion said, most of the time he found Gwennan quite amusing. She was essentially superficial and quite naive. And she could be very kind sometimes. When she noticed you.

Unfortunately, Gwennan had come with baggage: Sioned and Lowri, eleven and eight, the little princesses. Bilingual through and through. Pocket evangelists for the language and the culture.

‘No, Jane,’ Sioned would say, wagging her little forefinger until Jane wanted to snap it off. ‘I’ve told you and told you, I’m not doing it unless you ask me yn Cymreig.’

‘You know what I’m really doing here, don’t you?’ Jane said to Eirion when Sioned had gone, presumably to wait for her mother and Dafydd to return to receive the shocking facts. (Was there such a verb as shaggio? They seemed to have converted every other English term coined since about 1750.) ‘You know what I am?’

‘If she says anything, we’ll just simply tell her you were joking,’ Eirion said uncomfortably. ‘Kind of a risque joke to make to an eleven-year-old, mind, but…’

‘I’m the first English au pair in Wales, that’s what I am. Do you realize that?’

Behind the door in the farmhouse kitchen Gwennan had hung an appointments calendar. Every day this week displayed a lunch date for her and Dafydd. Every evening they went out for dinner in St David’s or Haverfordwest, because several of their friends also had cottages in the area. Because the Pembrokeshire coast was becoming like