The Meifod Claw

Two

Two

March arrived in North Wales with its timely reticence. Threads of spring, brooding earlier mornings, sprouts of dandelions and dotted anemones wove their way into the fibres of the landscape. The tenacious wind bags of winter persisted, lifting away pieces of the passing season while threatening weeks of spring rain soon saw the eaves of the farmhouse and its barn shed their deepest tears. It was to the irrational patter of these droplets that Derek had found himself an engrossed audience, sitting in his wheelchair and looking out across the courtyard to the barn.

From some distance away, he heard them then: the growing sounds of a diesel engine that rose and fell with the landscape. He leaned forward from his chair and looked down the driveway. Droplets of rain smacked on his head and he saw Benjamin pull the van onto the track while Herbert reached over from the passenger seat and gave repeated thrashings to the horn.

‘Ahoy, shanty man!’ Herbert called out as they pulled up close to the centre of the courtyard. He leapt down from the cab and in a half spin, sent the van door slamming back into place.

For a few moments, Herbert stood there amongst the rain in front of his abandoned uncle. Derek sat back in his chair and hid behind the door frame.

There followed a pause.

Herbert headed for the door as a crest of smoke flowed out, and he stopped again.

‘You’re late,’ came Derek’s voice from inside the frame.

‘And wet,’ replied Herbert as he stood to the side, out of sight of Derek. Over in the cab, Benjamin sat himself back in the driver’s seat, thinking he would let this scene play out till its inevitable lapse to distraction. He looked over to the barn and began considering many things to himself.

‘It’s been a miserable winter, Herb,’ Derek went on, still out of sight. ‘Too long . . . too long on my own.’

‘Yeah, I did see your beard, Derek. Is it tame? I don’t think I can come in until I know it’s safe.’

‘Your sister hasn’t been to visit for I don’t know how long.’

‘Well, we’ve come to sort all that as well.’

‘Then I better put the kettle on. Does your friend come out before night-time?’

Herbert looked to Benjamin and slapped his hand onto his thigh. ‘Come on now, lad! Come by!’ he yelled, and with an arthritic heave, the driver’s door opened and Benjamin gathered himself together and made fast across the courtyard to the kitchen. He stopped just inside the door and looked up to the broken light fittings while Derek filled the kettle from his chair, his back to them both.

‘Did you bring any more light bulbs, boys?’ he asked.

‘I’ll adjust the coil,’ Benjamin replied, still looking up. ‘Shan’t happen again.’

With a squeak, the tap was turned off, and Derek sat the kettle on his lap, turning his wheelchair with critical purpose until he faced the two boys. Herbert was sitting on a chair beside the table, aimlessly looking about the kitchen. He was cross-legged, fitted out in old denim and woollen weaves with mouse-coloured hair hanging loose about his head. Derek saw his nephew finally look back to him and open his mouth to speak, but he raised a finger in protest.

‘Let me get a look at the pair of you first,’ he told them and placed his hand back down. ‘I’ve almost forgotten what you look like.’

Benjamin shuffled a little on his feet. He did not take to games and considered that if this was how it would be, he might as well take his brown cords and navy sweater and walk the hell out of there, right there and then. He turned his receding black hairline towards Herbert with a look of frayed patience and scratched at his short beard. Herbert returned the gesture with a face that tried its best to temper him, that said he knew his uncle’s games.

A warm smile grew from every wrinkle of Derek’s face then, and like flowers, his eyes unfolded in colour, the grey wash receding and refreshed. Then he laughed, great and warm.

‘It’s very good to see you both,’ he told them and Herbert leapt from the chair, engulfing him in a tangled embrace of woolly jumpers and wheels.

‘This one doesn’t hug then?’ Derek asked as they separated and looked to Benjamin.

‘Nah, he doesn’t,’ Herbert told him and put his right arm around Derek’s shoulder while they both stared at Herbert’s awkward friend. ‘But he does mastermind the impossible.’

Having busied himself making the boys tea, Derek outlined some terms he insisted upon, the sum of which was that the three of them agreed to do nothing more with their day than cooking and smoking and catching up on stories with tea and rum. Derek had offered by way of reason that the house had been quiet for so long that any sudden bustle, exclamation or redecoration could greatly disturb the equilibrium he had been maintaining. Herbert wondered if perhaps his uncle just wasn’t yet ready to give up his life in the galley-house and be forced into a cold bedroom at night.

‘It’s a fair enough plan for the day,’ Herbert broadly agreed. ‘But I’ll be buggered if I’m driving the van into town for provisions while it’s still packed with our belongings. We’ll clear her out at least and then we can go and get some chicken to keep us going.’

This agreed upon as well, Herbert and Benjamin had their tea with something to smoke and then made fast to unload the van while a gathering north-east wind began to drive away the drizzle from the landscape. Derek brewed more tea and noted the rise in bag use. With regular beats of time, he watched Herbert and Benjamin leave and return through the kitchen door and on through to the sitting room. Boxes, bags, weights and measures, beds and other things somehow made their way out of the finite space of a Bedford van and ballooned across the entire sitting room. Above them, the vibrations of a room long forgotten observed these goings-on much like an infant, considering from every corner and beam the tenure of this new habitation as a young child sees fresh toys in a pen.

Moments later, following a hurried goodbye-for-now, Derek found himself alone once more. Only now the stillness around him had been rattled and would not come to settle again.

‘Didn’t they have any luncheon meat?’ Derek asked.

Herbert had been rifling through shopping bags heavy with the weight of all the riches available to the Sunday afternoon Welsh shopping experience of 1992. Derek had spied a tin of corned beef.

‘They did, but luncheon meat always looks sweaty,’ Herbert told him.

‘And corned beef looks like veins,’ added Benjamin half to himself as he sat at the kitchen table.

‘Got some tea bags, didn’t want to chance that,’ Herbert said, much to his uncle’s satisfaction.

‘And rum?’ Derek thought to ask a moment later.

‘There’s rum, Uncle.’

‘Then we’re good to go, boys. Sit yourselves down for a few minutes. Not you though, Ben, you can make my electricity behave and then you can sit down and tell me how your device works. And Herbert . . .’ Derek made sharp eyes across to his young nephew of twenty-six years. ‘Roll something up there, good chap, while you’re not busy. And then after that, either one of you are welcome to explain to me, properly . . . why have we come to live here? Reasons were beginning to escape me.’

Benjamin picked himself up and went into the sitting room to collect a small screwdriver. Herbert sat himself down and looked over the table for some card while outside the sun began to drop away in steep dives across the kitchen window. By the time it had dropped away altogether and shadowed the three souls of that kitchen, they had found themselves at the wheels and mechanisms of conspiracy.

‘But what about friction?’ Derek asked Benjamin, with open palms resting off the end of his wheelchair. He had recently seen Benjamin tame the electricity in their house with no more than a fractional turn of a screw to the coil that he had been sent. Benjamin had given Derek an answer that referred to electromagnetism and frequency harmonics. From this, one thing led to another and some hours later, Derek thought to ask again that simple question of friction and energy.

‘f**k friction,’ Benjamin summarised, taking a long swig on the bottle of rum and a pull on a joint before he fell into various spasms. It humoured Derek to watch him.

‘Well, that’s certainly the spirit!’ he told Benjamin before looking to his nephew. ‘What say you, Herbie? You’re obviously putting a lot of stock in all this electromagnetics. And the condition of the barn.’

Herbert was leaning onto the chrome bar of the Aga, facing the pair at the table. He was about to speak when the kettle peeped to life and he spun to attention. Taking the kettle from the hot plate, he poured a handsome amount of water into a glass coffee pot. Meaning to answer Derek at this point, he instead peered over the rim of the coffee pot and saw an archipelago of caffeine shorelines descend into their depths, a wave of decadent scents rising up into his nostrils. With a snap, he turned around and saw those with him waiting for some form of response, one that wasn’t the one he had just displayed. Herbert put a joint to his lips, took a pull and went for a seat, passing the smoke on to his uncle.

‘Well, Derek,’ he began slowly. ‘Friction is . . . an attention seeker.’

Displeased with this explanation, Benjamin rolled his eyes and dropped his forearms onto the table in a bid to take control. Not to be undone, Herbert kept his eyes on Derek, raising his left hand up to Benjamin in protest.

‘Okay, okay!’ Herbert said. ‘I’ll answer properly.’

The two boys sat back in their chairs and Herbert began again. ‘Benjamin reckons on there being a relationship betwixt gravity, electricity and magnetism.’

With this, he stood up and went to pour three cups of coffee, leaving Benjamin just enough time to utter that there was a relationship, as Herbert well knew.

Picking up the coffee pot, Herbert continued. ‘I guess us three being here means that all three of us think that there is something to this. Two-thirds of us at least. Maybe we . . . I . . . didn’t include precisely all the details before you agreed to pay your share for the house, Derek.’

He looked down and poured the first cup. ‘Regardless, you can see what Benjamin can do with a couple of strips of alloy.’

Two cups.

‘But when you see what Benjamin can do with magnets, electricity and mathematics . . . well, you’ll know why we chose to do this out of the way, out here.’

Three cups full.

Herbert returned to the table in a quiet embrace of his own pride, believing the conviction of what he had said. He passed a cup to Benjamin and one to Derek, sat back and relaxed in his chair.

‘Once again, what about friction?’ Derek asked, taking a sip of his coffee.

Benjamin pulled his chair up to the table with a sudden scrape on the wooden floor and got straight in with his answer.

‘Humans are pretty much at one end of a spectrum,’ he began. ‘Gravity, or whatever gravity turns out to be, owns us. Technology, however, need not be like that. We can lean it towards something other . . . I have two high-quality magnets with their positive sides joined; just dropping it from the roof of this house will show you the delay in gravity. To be honest, that’s a pretty simple system and it’s not really enough for us, for what we have planned. We’re going to have to encourage or coerce a considerable density of electromagnetism to negate gravity or anything else. And without her realising, obviously.’

Benjamin paused for a moment to finish his joint and take the remains of the next one passed along by Herbert. Noting how little remained, he took a pull and stubbed the remains of that one out too. Derek opened his hands out in a gesture that he may continue explaining.

‘That’s not the difficult part – just where we start,’ Benjamin said. ‘The difficult part is getting all that together to power a flying saucer. I’ve never built a flying saucer before, although I’ve built a few odd things the past few years.’

A moment of hesitation filled the space between them all.

Derek would have none of it. ‘When I first set to building my concrete boat, most of the people around me assumed it a funny turn,’ he told them and groped down his beard in long thought. ‘Some still do, even though I built the bastard. Of course’—Derek’s eyes met Benjamin’s across the table—‘I had seen someone build a boat before, if you know what I mean.’

‘Well, this is basically just an air boat,’ Herbert thought out loud, his eyes becoming distant. ‘. . . less concrete . . .’

Thus considered, he took a swig of coffee and looked for a way back into the conversation. Benjamin continued to explain himself, and his summation was simply time, space and money.

‘Speaking of which,’—he glanced to the back door—‘it would be good to actually see the barn. The operations suite, I should say.’

‘It’s a great deal messy in there,’ Derek told them, placing his coffee cup down and reaching for a box of trucker-sized rolling papers. ‘Not good, not good at all. Unpleasant in there, boys.’

He then spread a large pinch of stout-coloured tobacco up and down the paper, Herbert observing his method.

‘Went in there a few weeks ago,’ he went on, ‘on an off day when the weather was sunny.’ Fumbling for the plastic container, he placed a similar amount of cannabis to sit on top.

A clumpy arrangement, Herbert thought.

‘Bird s**t. Rat s**t,’ added Derek for effect while his eyes watched his hands at work. He collected the bundle of Rizla together and began to roll it up. Herbert offered him one of the many roaches that he had been making over the course of the day, and Derek took one with a courtesy nod, pushed it carefully into the near end of the roll and tapped it down onto the table with a gestured poise of strike. He then placed it through the small frays of his beard and to his lips.

‘I think it’s structurally pretty much alright though, from where I can see.’

Herbert frowned a little and looked between his uncle and the joint. ‘Are you still talking about the joint, Derek?’