Chapter 2
Non
It took two shampoos to get the beer smell out of my hair.
It usually took at least three, but thankfully, Kev had sent me home early.
After leaving Elis to speed home in his van, I had started to re-stock the fridges when Kev told me to go enjoy the rest of the warm evening.
Without arguing, I grabbed my stuff and rushed home for a much-needed cold shower.
As I made my way out of the bathroom and across the hall back to my bedroom, I couldn’t help but steal a glance at myself in the full-length mirror.
There was so much about my appearance that had changed in the last two years, albeit gradually.
Looking at myself in a towel, I couldn’t ignore the toll grief had on my body.
I didn’t hate it, though, this new person.
The girl whose best friend died was still there in the faint bags under my eyes, but she’d been covered up by someone new.
I’d regained all the weight I’d lost when Cat was ill and then some.
Despite the general consensus on chubby people, I actually quite liked the way I looked now.
My hair was still the same bland shade of mousey brown and pin-straight, sitting just below my jaw.
The new addition of the fringe I bravely cut one evening last year framed my round face.
Arguably the biggest change was the large tattoo that started above my elbow and snaked around my bicep and up my shoulder, finishing at the nape of my neck.
I had found out about the money a few days after Cat died.
It could have even been a week after she passed, really; grief had made me so numb that I lost any concept of time.
An unknown number had called our landline and claimed Cat had made a will for a small sum of money she had saved up and named one benefactor.
Me.
The next day, I made my way down to the solicitor’s office and was handed an envelope with a cheque and a handwritten note from her:
It’s not much but I wanted you to have it. Spend it on something stupid.
And I did. I spent that money on a tattoo of a flower she’d spun some old wives’ tale about when we were children.
According to Cat, foxglove was a flower used to ward off all kinds of evil magic, particularly that of Witches.
They grew abundantly in the front garden of our—well, officially Aunty Glad’s—bungalow.
After a miserable Sunday visit from my grandmother that had left me sobbing, Catrin had hurried me to the front doorstep.
Wiping away my tears, she told me that the land grew the flowers here because it knew to keep the old hag—the endearing term she used for my grandmother—out of our garden.
Catrin picked a few while Aunty Glad wasn’t looking and pinned them in my hair to make a crown.
I always wondered why I was dropped off from a Sunday visit with Granny at the garden gate. Mum was never well enough to stand outside waiting for me; she would always be in bed by the time I got home. Maybe Cat was right and those flowers in the garden grew to keep my grandmother out.
Tracing the magenta whirls with my freezing fingertip, I couldn’t help but smile as I remembered Catrin’s ferocity.
I always wished I could be more like her.
She was so unapologetically herself. Since the tattoo gave me a crumb of satisfaction in the way I looked, I’d realised how much I had been holding back.
Always downplaying myself to avoid unwanted attention—a lesson ingrained into my very being courtesy of Sunday visits with Granny dearest.
I hoped Catrin was proud of me, wherever she was, for finally doing something for myself.
The sound of light footsteps approaching pulled me from my thoughts. The gentle rattle of a teacup and saucer told me it was Aunty Glad on her way back from the kitchen. Likely sneaking out something sweet while Mum was asleep.
“What on Earth are you doing standing in the hall? You’re soaking wet, bach.”
Bowed fingers gently brushed my shoulder as I turned to meet her milky blue eyes. Glad was tiny in stature, not even five foot tall. Her usual neatly plaited hair was loose, flowing down to her elbows.
I had to crane my neck down to meet her weather-worn face as I smiled gently to put her at ease. I knew better than to linger in the hall late in the evening; Glad got easily spooked by anything unusual or out of routine.
“Sorry, Aunty Glad, I got a bit distracted.”
She lifted her hand from my shoulder and cupped my face. The calluses from years of sewing were so at odds with her gentle touch. “So much sadness in those eyes of yours, love. Tell me, were you thinking of her again?”
I couldn’t help but let the smile drop from my face. Glad’s lucid moments were few and far between, but when she did have them, it was only ever to talk about Catrin’s passing.
“I’m always thinking of her, Glad,” I whispered, trying to fight the stinging tears that pooled in my eyes.
She lifted her crooked hand from my face and batted my shoulder lightly, startling me.
“Aunty to you, my girl. We might not be blood, but we are family. You have my eyes.” She pointed directly at my left pupil, and I couldn’t help but wince.
Almost everything else about my appearance was average, bland even.
But the unusual silver sheen—or Arian in Welsh—to my left iris was anything but.
The right being a yellow gold, or Aur, made them stand out even more.
What I wouldn’t give to have eyes just like Glad.
Maybe then I could look in the mirror without the constant reminder of who I really got at least the left one from.
“I get these monstrosities from my father,” I snapped, then instantly regretted it. I knew better than to mention anything that could upset her, particularly anything to do with my paternal family.
Frustration passed over her face; she must have been really lucid if she could recall my father.
“Anyway,” I added quickly to try and steer the conversation away from the uncomfortable subject, “you better hide those jam tarts before Mum catches you,” I winked and nodded at the packet stuffed under her arm. “But it can be our little secret.”
Before I could finish, her focus moved to the wall behind me. I knew from the slight shift in eye contact that her attention had lapsed.
She turned slowly, without a word, and shuffled back down the hall towards the ajar door, her teacup and saucer rattling the whole time. I stayed in the corridor long enough to make sure she got to her bedroom safely.
Just as the door was about to shut, she poked her head back out, her expression more pensive than before.
“We have many secrets, you and I. Nos da, Elin,” she said softly, then shut the door with a click.
I’d learnt long ago to stop correcting Glad when she called me by the wrong name; her stubborn side would always insist she was right anyway. Elin was a new one, but I assumed she meant my mother, Eluned. The two names were similar enough, I supposed.
Glad had no biological family alive anymore. She never had children, and her husband passed long before we ever moved in, so Mum and I really were the closest thing she had to a family left.
I made my way back into my bedroom, conscious of the small puddle of water that had formed on the hall floor from my lingering.
Apart from the plans I’d made to see Elis, I had nothing else to do, and the thought of sitting in my room alone for the rest of the evening was a new kind of torture.
I hated that I couldn’t spend more than thirty minutes alone without needing something to numb whatever it was I was feeling.
So, after throwing on some jeans and an old tank top, I made my way into town to quench that vice.
Alcohol was, in my opinion, the lesser of all the recent evils.
In the couple of years since Catrin had passed, I had tried every drug I could get my hands on in Caerglan to make the pain of losing her easier.
In the beginning, it had helped, but eventually, the dark thoughts would plague my mind even when I was high.
I started mixing in drink, which blocked everything out for a while.
But eventually I was stuck on the same old cycle of either not feeling anything at all or feeling too much.
Thankfully, my relationship that wasn’t really a relationship with Elis had given me enough of a distraction that I didn’t need the narcotics anymore. But I was still inclined to drown myself in the occasional drink.
I had every intention of rushing home after my quick trip to the off-licence; I didn’t like the thought of Aunty Glad and Mum being home alone for too long.
Especially if I was going to be gone most of the night at Elis’s.
But as I passed the iron gates to the local park, something urged me to stop and take a detour.
Not much about Caerglan was beautiful, and ironically, one of the very few picturesque locations here was a man-made lake.
For some reason, it was never officially named, or if it had been, no one still living here remembered it.
But Catrin and I used to call it Llyn Hedd.
According to Cat, whose Welsh was considerably more proficient than my own, it meant something like “peaceful lake”.
We would visit frequently throughout our childhood and teens. We sat at the water’s edge, chatting about our most recent heartbreak or whatever insignificant thing seemed so important to us at the time.
If Catrin couldn’t join me, I would just talk to the water itself, pretending the ripples were its way of telling me it was listening. It was here I ran to after the last time I saw Granny, nine years ago—the same day as my disastrous Cychwyniad.
Not much had changed about the place in the years since I’d last visited. It was a little more overgrown than usual but still quaint.
The rock we would sit on overhung the edge of the lake and had miraculously avoided being vandalised. The stone was still scorched from the last time I was here, but I didn’t allow myself to think about the final memories I had of that night.
Ungracefully, I sat myself down on the rock and tucked my knees into my chest. Taking in a deep breath, I opened the bottle of gin I’d hidden inside my jacket. The liquid burned as it went down my throat, but it felt good to feel something for once.
The peace was divine as I soaked up this little slice of calmness. Very few people in Caerglan knew where this was and even fewer came here.
When the creaking gate snapped me out of my trance, I assumed it was someone coming to walk their dogs late at night. But when the giggling started, I was positive some teenagers had snuck in to drink or smoke.
I stood from my rock and skirted the water’s edge until I came to a break in the trees that gave me a clear view of the park behind.
Two people who were too tall to be teenagers stumbled down the path towards me. They both had long hair, but one’s voice was most certainly feminine.
“I feel like I’m sixteen again, doing this!” she giggled.
The other person pushed her against the wall and kissed her passionately. My cheeks flushed, and I suddenly felt like some creepy perv in the bushes.
“Why can’t we do this back at your place?” the woman said coyly.
“I told you, I’m working tonight. But I’ll be free early tomorrow morning if you want to come around.”
The woman nodded, then gripped the front of the man’s t-shirt and kissed him deeply.
Hand in hand, he guided her down the path.
I slipped behind a tree as they passed the clearing that opened onto the lake.
My foot kicked an empty beer can I hadn’t noticed and sent it rolling.
The noise caused the man to look in my direction.
As he passed under the streetlamp, his face came into view.
Elis.
My Elis.
I must have said his name out loud without realising because Elis froze and scanned the line of trees I was hiding behind.
“Non? Non, is that you?”
As panic constricted my chest, my fight or flight reaction kicked in. It came as no surprise to me when it chose flight, and I ran as quickly as my legs would allow me into the night.