One Blue Moon by Catrin Collier Read Free Book Online Page A

another seven hours, he was too numb to rise to Jenny’s bait. At that moment he decided if that was the way she wanted to play their relationship, she could play alone. Pulling down his cap, and turning up the collar of his good, partly worn overcoat that had come courtesy of Horton’s stall in lieu of wages, he stepped out into the rain-soaked throng milling around the stalls. Too proud to follow, Jenny continued to wander up the arcade towards Gelliwastad Road.
    Inwardly she burned with righteous indignation, but the display windows either side of her grew misty as her eyes clouded with unshed tears. She loved Haydn with all her heart, but she felt threatened by the facets of his life that took him away from her. His job as callboy swallowed every night of the week except Sunday, and that meant they could never spend an ordinary night when the cinemas or theatres were open ‘courting’, like every other young couple on the Graig. Even the busiest and best market mornings were out, because he helped out on Horton’s second-hand clothes stall. She had to count herself lucky if he stole enough time, as he had today, to grab a quick cup of tea in Ronnie’s before going to the Town Hall to begin his shift there. She knew his family needed the money, but she only wished he could earn it somewhere alone, in isolation, not in the Town Hall which was full of half-naked, predatory chorus girls, or Horton’s stall which acted like a magnet to all the would-be man eaters and vamps in the town.
    Whenever she saw him standing beneath the canvas that covered Horton’s trestles, he was surrounded by admiring and giggling groups of females, and whether they were twelve years old or pushing thirty, they all looked at him with blatantly plaintive and adoring eyes. ‘Cow’s eyes’, she’d called them the last time she and Haydn had rowed. Every word he exchanged with them, every smile he sent their way, sliced agonisingly through her heart.
    She’d frequently crept away from Horton’s stall before he’d noticed her presence. Running home where she could assuage her wounded pride by indulging in mild flirtations with the boys who picked up their mother’s groceries or bought odd cigarettes from her father’s shop. But no matter how late the shop closed, Haydn was inevitably still at work, and she was left with the dreary routine of supper eaten in a grim, oppressive silence with her mentally, if not physically, estranged parents. Followed by the door closing on her father as he left for the Morning Star to drown his sorrows over the loss of his one true love, Megan.
    Her mother was no comfort. She lived out her life in a sweetly smiling torpor which enabled her, outwardly at least, to ignore most of the unpleasant aspects of her life, including and especially her husband. Desperate for conversation and companionship, some nights Jenny walked up the Graig hill and called in on the Ronconi girls. The large, warm family overflowed into every corner of their double-bayed terraced house on Danycoedcae Road, but their company, pleasant and amusing as it was, only seemed to accentuate her evening loneliness; and when she’d tried to discuss her problems with Tina Ronconi, Tina had laughed, telling her frankly that if she was tired of Haydn there were plenty of others, herself included, willing to take him off her hands.
    What made her present row with Haydn all the more unpalatable was that she’d seen it coming. For weeks now her jealousy had simmered dangerously close to the surface. Lying in bed at night she’d rehearsed the scene a hundred times over. Even down to the final bitter words she’d flung at Haydn. Only in her imaginings he had always apologised, reaching to her with outstretched arms and tears of contrition in his eyes. If only she’d known that he would walk away ... Would he come back? Or was this the end?
    Last night she’d dared to interrupt the Mother Riley show in an attempt to discuss her confused feelings