CHAPTER 13
I drove us back, as Siân was having difficulty seeing through the tears.

“Did you know, Lainey? Did you know what they planned?”

“I had an idea, fy nghariad, but I didn’t think he’d be quite so blunt. Mam said it, aye? If you have no family, we will give you one”

“Where do these people come from? I look at mine, and, well, shit. There’s just no comparison!”

I sighed. “You haven’t got a Sarah, have you? She’s the difference. Accept a trans daughter, and putting up with a dyke is a stroll. And I really hate to say it, but Joe Evans almost did us all a favour. If anything really cleared Dad’s mind, it was seeing his younger child broken. I am so, so glad I managed to stop him going round to that bastard’s: he’d have killed him. No, Siân, they’re not special, aye? Well, they ARE special, you know what I mean. Most people are just as special, in that way. They just need a chance”

“That middle ground you spoke of?”

“Yes, exactly. There’s a lot in our training about what they call conflict resolution, aye? A lot of that boils down to empathy, stepping into their shoes for a bit”

That brought a laugh amid the sniffs. “You empathise with a purse snatcher or a flasher, then?”

“After I’ve locked them up, perhaps. Seriously, though, you have to. You work the same streets, you see the same people. They aren’t all arseholes, aye? We have a couple that steal stupid things, things to get them caught, and they do it when it’s crap weather, aye? Nowhere else to sleep, and it gets them fed. You can’t hate someone like that, can you? There are some, though…”

I thought of the other types, too many of them. Two of them were coppers. Push that thought back; their time would come, just like Joe’s but probably less violent.

“Siân…”

“Um?”

“I want us to try, together. See if we can’t bring them round. Give them their bite of the cherry, aye?”

“And if they don’t come round?”

“We deal with what we have to, cariad. No assumptions; just prepare for both options”

She spent the rest of the journey in silence. I decided to look up hotels in the area, without telling her. I owed her the effort, even if it came to nothing. What are we without family? I ended up running it past Kev, to see if he could get any ideas via Vicky as to how it might be best to play it. The first thing he did was laugh, and then lend me a book from his locker.

“Men’s bible, Lainey!”

“Eh? The Good Beer Guide? What’ll that do, then?”

He sighed. “Lists of pubs, girl. Some of them with rooms to sleep in and breakfasts to eat, innit?”

Of course. He squeezed my shoulder.

“I’ll see what Vicky says, aye? Your own girl possibly a bit too close to see a way past, but no promises. What’ll you do if they throw a wobbly?”

“Usual stuff, aye? Public place, in a crowd. Might get a bit embarrassing if they shout but, well, had worse with Sarah. We will cope”

I hit the bookshop that afternoon, and picked up an OS map of the area. I’d been there once or twice on school trips, but it was truly a foreign country to me. Find a decent spot to share our bed, find out how and where we could make it official, and when, and then face the dragons. I was ending up spending more and more of my, our, off-duty time at Siân’s, which meant seeing Vicky a lot, and, well, that meant Kevin as well. I heard that he was getting a lot of teasing about effectively sharing a house with three women, but being a man he simply grinned and claimed to be taking it as a compliment.

Three weeks later, I all but forced my girl into the car. Her courage was failing her badly, and it was me that had to do all the arranging. Kev’s book had come up with a pub, the Bryn Tyrch, only a mile or so from Pont Cyfing, and I had booked us in for the Friday and Saturday nights. No way would her family be doing anything other than bother their god on a Sunday, so it would be the day after we arrived. That gave us the chance to cut and run if it went really badly as well as an opportunity to spend time with her relatives if it went well, and pigs flew. We ran up the well-remembered road to Aberystwyth, then through Machynlleth and Dolgellau before taking Siân’s route through Ffestiniog and the Crimea pass to Betws. What a grim place Ffestiniog was, especially Blaenau, and I thanked my good fortune to have been given somewhere to grow up that was so much nicer. The rain didn’t help my mood, but as we came over the Waterloo Bridge it was starting to brighten up. The sun was out as we passed the Ugly House, and then Siân caught my arm.

“Over there, Lainey. Just over the bridge”

There was a left turn marked, just after the speed limit signs, showing a dead end road, which seemed apt.

“How far to the pub?”

“About a mile, mile and a half. There are three pubs, and it’s the third one. Parking opposite it”

One pub with a stagecoach outside was followed by another built almost into the hillside, and then a third after the Youth Hostel sign and the garage. The Bryn Tyrch. Someone clearly had a sense of humour, because even the pub sign had a mole on it—the name means, loosely, ‘mole hill’, though only loosely. We checked in, we dumped the bags, and I lay on the bed for an hour or two before we made our way down for a surprisingly good meal. The place was clearly popular with both locals and tourists, and as the dark closed in I listened to the odd Gog accent mixing with all sorts of English tones. Just before we headed back to our room there was a sudden exodus, and I remembered the YHA just down the road. Late night drinking clearly remained off their list of activities, which I found oddly reassuring. I took Siân back up to our room, telling myself that I would take my good feelings wherever I could find them. The next day was going to be hard.

Breakfast was excellent, and as soon as we had cleared our plates, Siân rang what was supposed to be her home. I got only half the conversation, naturally, and every now and again it wandered off into that peculiar version of the language they speak up there, verbs all wrong and vowels through the nose. Eventually, she hung up, resting her forehead on the wall for a full minute.

“Lainey, they will be here in an hour. Just Mam and Dad. I didn’t say I had company. Coward, I am, absolutely spineless”

I moved to hold her, to a tut of disapproval from another guest. Sod you.

“You are here though, fy nghariad. That’s more courage than most would have”

“Well, when I asked Vicky to tell them I was coming, I told her not to say anything about you. You must think I am ashamed”

“Why are you trying to talk yourself out of this, Siân?”

“Because I’m frightened, my darling. I don’t want to see you hurt, ever, in any way”

“With my job, it sort of comes along with the uniform. Do this for me, try, aye? Otherwise we’ll never know”

I took a seat away from her as the time approached, and watched as a tall man in a tweedy jacket and a flat cap entered, accompanied by a dumpy woman in the worst dress I have ever seen worn, with enough hair escaping her headscarf to show me her relationship to my lover. As arranged, one of the bar staff brought over a serving of tea, and it all looked very, very polite, if completely and utterly unnatural. I could only get a few snatches of their conversation, but there was no warmth there. Her mother’s face worked a couple of times, a swift grimace or pursing of the mouth as if a lemon had fallen into it.

Finally, she shrugged and visibly slumped, before looking over to me and raising her eyebrows. I took the hint and walked over. Siân was trembling.

“Mam, Dad, Elaine Powell, my intended. Lainey, Carwyn and Angharad”

I nodded and held out my hand. “Mr and Mrs Roberts…”

Angharad Roberts looked at my hand as if I had offered her a dog turd.

“Whore. Pervert”

There was no passion at all in her voice. It was flat and as calm as if she had been a shopkeeper telling me the price of a newspaper, but in the eyes I could see the hatred festering, waiting for the right moment to emerge. Mrs Roberts stood, pulling her shapeless coat closed around her, and turned to her husband. She was in full Gog flow, the accent making her very hard to understand, but her meaning remained clear. The meeting was a mistake, they had no daughter, and neither of us would ever contact them again.

Siân was sobbing as her father rose, and I almost expected to see her tears evaporating in the boiling waves of hatred coming from her mother. How in hell could someone feel that way, speak that way, to their own child? Carwyn turned to me as he fastened his jacket, and spoke to me in English.

“I will speak this way to make sure my meaning is clear. We will have no truck with perversion and unnatural fornication. We will have a daughter if she sees a way to repent her whoring and sin and make peace with her congregation and with her Saviour”

Angharad interrupted him, also in English. This time there was some passion in her words.

“I would rather the Creator had made me barren than to have given birth to such an unnatural thing. I will do my duty as a Christian. I will pray for you to be delivered from your sin, but I will also pray that if you not turn from your whoring that you are consigned to the deepest pits of Hell as soon as the Good Lord sees fit. And may His time run swiftly. Der ymlaen, Carwyn”

They walked out, and Siân turned to bury her face in the wing of the armchair. I moved to hold her, and she clung to my arm. Between sobs, the words came out.

“I knew this was a mistake, Lainey. I knew it!”

“Siân, we had to know, aye? We had to be sure. Come on; upstairs, away from the audience, aye?”

We drove back that afternoon, and I started looking at places for our wedding. It rained.