The Cloud

I

“I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked,


dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix


angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of the night.”

- Allen Ginsberg, Howl

Black and white photographs of that first scene that first morning are often sold and hung on unseen walls so that people can gander in that nineteen-twenties West-Egg kind of way and say, “Hrum Hrum.” There’s a kind of mystical fog that comes over this city at this time and you don’t get it so many other places. Shining and bright. Forget all preconceptions of the city smog – grey and sullen cloud looking like someone has painted the sky with a wispy but ugly leaden paint. Mystical means that there’s something different about it and that’s exactly what I mean by it. It’s a hazefog of emotion – as if you’re going to go into the unknown or as if some other life is waiting for you wherever it is your going.

I was riding on that train listening to music and thinking that I had a few months to get through. The town had probably not changed at all and the thought of this scared me into a stupefied state as I watched the countryside flying by from the train window. There was a woman opposite me and she had white hair and curls that she may or may not have had set in a salon where pink haired ladies talk about their days and the times which are a-changing. It’s all-good though. She thought I was going to steal her bag because she was clutching it real tight and every time I moved my hand to change the track on my headphones she grabbed it tighter and her knuckles became whiter and I watched her face wince and her eyes roll and her back click as she tensed her soul. I found this funny. The thing is, out of the two of us, I would be more inclined to trust myself than her. You see, she’s the kind of old woman that was a hell raiser in her time. I bet she broke a few hearts back in the 50s. Yes – She is that old. In the 80’s she wore a bum bag with electric pink shell suit and said things like “mega cool” and in the 70s she started using the word “wizard” in every day conversation (and I am not against this adjective) and freaking out on a nightly basis. She was profoundly interesting.

Across the aisle, there were two more old women and they were reading papers or at least one of them was because the other one was drinking a glass of wine and it had only been 11am. She was, I assumed without caution, either an alcoholic or else just enjoying her retirement while she rides the railroad with her best friend who she’s probably known her whole life in this town. Bridgend. I never. She must have gone to school over in Cornelly and when she was a little girl her father was probably killed in a bar fight but she turned out alright and anyway, during the wartime it was better to be able to live off the fat of the land (of course I’m just assuming again.) There’s no lack of land in Cornelly – hills and farms surround it.

So anyway, I was sitting there with the woman next to me thinking I’m a thief, on my left arm; a woman who thinks nothing because she’s destroyed her mind with years of red wine in the morning – her friend watching idly. There’s other people – a girl who thinks I’m looking at her and I hate this because I feel incriminated – am I paranoid? Am I?

There’s no telling what is really going through any one person’s mind at any one given time on any one given train while it rides bashing and crashing through the cold welsh air in the morning light. Was anyone thinking what I was thinking? Was anyone thinking about what I wanted to know? Did anyone already know the answer to what I thought I might want to know something about? Too many variables could affect such a question and you cannot calculate these things because people are too different. So only one question and one thought came into my mind when I read on the silent old lady’s copy of the Western Mail or South Wales Echo, that one more teenager in the Bridgend area had killed themselves. This was a certainty, but the nature of the question was not. Even if I could decide on the question, how was I to find the answer? Did I already know the answer? Did anybody in my hometown even know the real question or were they asking themselves all the wrong things?

“Another one,” one of the old ladies said with red-wine teeth, “I just can’t believe it Martha.”

“Duw, Duw, I know. What’s got into them – we would never have thought of doing such a stupid thing would we?”

“Mind… times were different then weren’t they? Now they’ve got that infranet or whatever you call it and it’s so much easier to get a hold of drugs. It must be the drugs see.”

“Ei. Duw duw.”

And so the two continued perpetually as I rode the train back into this nowhere town on July 1st and the mystic city was in flames behind me. The cloud, with which I would become so familiar that summer, had fallen over Bridgend and it was foreboding and angry. The sort of cloud that is waiting to eat you up. It’s petrifying. No one wants this kind of thing to happen to them. I must admit that I did consider just trucking right through to Swansea. Unlike previous trips, there was no one parked in the disabled spaces out front to collect me, Matt Cleaver, as I disembarked and paid very little mind at all to the gap ‘twixt platform and train. There is no chance that I would even get off the train or look out the window of this town if I didn’t have to. Too many strange memories – a year ago it would have been completely different. In fact, I know for certain that it would have been a whole different bag of apples because I remember finishing my last exam on June 30th – does June really even have thirty days or did I just make that up? Anyway, it does not matter. I was going to be picked up by Nick Lomax my best friend from home and presently taken to meet my ex-girlfriend Roxanne. Last June and July and August and early parts of September were a variation on the summers before but something totally wonderful. I had in my mind that I was going to head out to Western France a few weeks after my arrival home, which probably made the weeks, which had sandwiched June 30th and whenever I eventually left better. I wish that things had happened one year later than they did because this summer, only Nick was around. Things had ended with Roxanne and all my other friends from home. Nothing bad – but you know that sometimes things just drown out, fall apart, cease to live, get the blues, roll on and you get left behind or leave them behind – at any rate, this is what happened to poor Roxanne and all her friends.

The weather changes for the worse every time that you reach Bridgend. There was a cloud over this town in those days, and not the same type that you get in Cardiff. There is no ‘mystic’ in Bridgend, except the fortuneteller who is making her jolly way around the pubs at the bottom of Station Hill, delivering messages from Uncle Shoni who is “happy and in a better place but has a message for a man with a hair loss problem.” Every man in those pubs raises his hand at one time or another.

    This summer was destined to be laced with writing, or trying to pass the third base of écriture, interspersed by music –mainly of the folk variety, re-runs of ER and One Tree Hill and occasionally heading out into the oasis of a city café probably Buffalo/Ten Feet Tall where the atmosphere is just what you need on an afternoon writing spree or Milgi’s where they’ve got a wicked yurt and excellent virgin cocktails. That said, these words are being written in Glo Bar on Churchill Way where the espresso is. Sublime.

    Truthfully though, no-one cares about which café to go to… what everyone really wants to know about is what had happened to make Bridgend Town so hell-unbearable for 22 children by the time the media stopped talking about copy-cat suicide. I always found the copy-cat idea stupid. Honestly, I would like to know what kind of craziness had inspired someone to say that the most logical reason for ’20-odd’ deaths was imitation. That’s like saying; the reason a junkie gets AIDS from a dirty needle is because her friends are all infected too. It’s idiotic. Everyone is terminally infected with death, some people are doing all they can to speed up the process.

    The bus station in Bridgend is at the bottom of Station Hill and down an alley-road where there’s a kebab shop whose slogan reads, “You’ve tried the rest, now try the best.” I wondered to myself if his goods were really the best. Probably not, I decided. Just opposite this shop, there’s a place, which kind of appears to be an old empty car showroom. My friend Joe Jones once wanted to open a big music shop therein. Joe Jones was a nice guy – he recorded a vocal track of a short story that I once wrote for me and I later set it to experimental music. He had a lot of bedroom recording stuff and slept on a couch, having done away with his bed so that he could fit more musical instruments and gear in there. In fact, his massive wardrobe was only half filled with clothes. The other side he used as a vocal booth and he had stacks upon stacks of egg boxes for sound-proofing his room that he pilfered from his night job in Tesco in Bridgend centre. This guy did it for the love of music, he made no money from it and he didn’t care a mite. God bless him, he moved away to London to chase after the girl he wanted to marry. He succeeded and has since become quite successful as a punk musician.

    The X2 from Cardiff leaves Bridgend bus station once every half hour. It had actually cleared up and was sunny and warm by now. The weather always played this kind of funny game with me at the bus depot. The building is a new development and reminds me of some botanical gardens or a back garden conservatory of Corinthian size. There are only three kinds of people who use busses around here. In order of group size: old age pensioners who visit Seconds Ahead to buy off-cut clothes for their grandchildren; number two: caravaners who the locals call ‘Trogs’ as in troglodytes, or people who dwell in caves – they come from the Rhondda Valleys mostly and spend their holiday pay in Porthcawl and stay in Happy Valley and Trecco Bay; you can also see teenagers who catch one of the ‘60’ series of buses in from the villages surrounding Bridgend and then ride a connecting bus out to the Pines – the shopping mall over the other side of town and the ugly heart of the youth community. You will rarely see any other kind of person riding a First Western bus and I do not know why this is really.

    Eventually my bus, the X2 to Swansea came and the driver charged me £2.50 to get to Porthcawl where I would be living in my parents’ house for the summer months. My mother had come to collect my things a few days before and we had put everything into boxes. These and one crate awaited me at home and unpacking was top priority according to Mum. This I did in two days but I chose two that weren’t adjacent. This cooled the blow of realising that I was no longer a resident of Richards Street, Cathays, Cardiff where I had had the best single year of my young life. Besides, there really is nothing to do in this town. Matt Cleaver was here for four months now.

    Getting out in the daytime is tough. There’s all sort of stickiness that you have to work through if you’re going to get out of the house. First and foremost, there’s waking up in the morning. After that it’s really a matter of working out what you’re going to have to do next: do you make a cup of coffee? Yes. With black coffee, there’s another issue how much do you drink? Drink too much and you get coffee hunger; terrible pangs of hunger that are inexplicably hard to eradicate from your stomach. Alternatively, you drink too little and you’re left with an incurable heart hunger and for someone who’s as delicately balanced on a well-fed heart as I, this presents a big issue. On the wake of my arrival in Porthcawl, this was about the biggest question that I had to ask myself. This indicated to me that my life really is not hard. There are some starving kids in Africa who would kill to live in Bridgend. Praise be to our little towns by the sea and to the one who loves them more than I.

    Now, I don’t know how much of this story you’re going to identify with, but I promise you that one thing you’re going to get with is coping with seeing hometown friends. I adore the kind of people I grew up with – best days of your life they say, but I wouldn’t have much to compare to on that front. I’m a child. Seeing friends from school is always interesting. The first time I came home, I went to a party in the evening over in Nottage village. It was Peter James’ 20th Birthday. Pete is a guy who really shocked me when we grew up. Used to be that he was an introverted kind of guy with his milky face and shy soul, which he kept back behind his teeth somewhere but when we hit about 16 he became a real uh… cat. Changed almost overnight from this stinking introverted kid to a seaside Hercules surfing the evening sunset out at Rest Bay, addicted to speed and perpetual motion and always riding off and running up and down the stairs jumping back and forth through seconds and minutes. Straight-up-no-lies beserkerlerkers. He was dating the first girl I had ever dated and she was there that night – this had been the first time that I’d seen Mary since we had broken up except once when I had bumped into them both in a snooker hall in Cardiff city. Pete had started taking her out a few months after we had stopped but it didn’t tick me off at all, I was already well over it and together with Roxanne. Bridgend is like that. In small towns; normal rules of relationships don’t convert, compute or reconcile to those held by the rest of the world. That was the last Porthcawl party that I’d been to and I was hoping that Pete’s 21st Birthday Party held more promise than the previous year because man that party was lame – it wasn’t going anywhere. I had turned up with my 2l carton of orange juice, which I frequently take to parties because I don’t even drink a drop of that stenchy liquor (but I don’t mind when other people drink it or smoke and they blow the clouds in my face because it’s relaxing and it makes me think about Woody Allen somehow… or Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus dangling tiny homerolled cigarettes between their index and middle fingers and scratching their own faces with a thumb, how elegant.) It had been weird to see the people who had gone off and done their own thing. This was not what had disturbed me though. The disturbing thing was that after one whole year out in the big wide whole world when I had had adventures and had met several mad ones and felt the wildfire rabid eveningtide, no-one had anything interesting to say to each other – they just stood around in the back garden of good ol’ Pete’s house and had just made stupid jokes and drank cans of Strongbow:

“I saw a documentary about Cat’s Eyes the other night. You know?” Said a young chirpy boy who nobody really kept in touch with and he had turned up without an invite but no one really paid this any mind,

“What? The things on the motorway? Or actual cats?” The other said,

“Like on the M4.” The first boy answered waiting for a response but only an eyebrow raise of welsh politeness was offered, “Ye butt. But it was a bit middle of the road for me.” Fits of laughter trailed the punch line. And ye shall know a tree by its fruit - nothing good can come of a night like this. I had left very early and I don’t remember what I had done afterwards. Memorable.

    The second of July spoke a somewhat better word because, I had hoped, the kids who I used to know had undergone some kind of metamorphosis and were no longer the same. Not the kind of metamorphoses that you read about in Kafka novels, for Gregor Samsa had remained completely the same in personality and had only been turned into and ‘unseemly insect’ in physicality. No, I was hoping for some kind of angelic and miraculous change to have overtaken these people – some would be poets in their hearts but speak like workingmen, some would have travelled and seen Gods reflection in the Nevada desert at 5am (as I once saw, but you have to see this for yourself for no-one could tell you what it looks like), some would have married up and married young like fair maidens. Yes, this evening had the smack of something more wholesome and good and pleasing and hopeful than previous soirees of the seaside town of my youth. I was really hoping that someone wanted to be mad or that there already was someone like this because often I just feel a little seul in this town. I wondered if I was alone in this sentiment and feeling.

My mother, Charlotte Cleaver, had asked me to take some cardboard boxes and other things up to the rubbish dump in the afternoon and we had traded in our car (which I loved) for an old green estate which shuddered when you hit 30mph and the windows didn’t work and it felt much like you had been buried alive whenever you drove it. This did not sit well with me at all. I figured it was because the conditions that I now found myself in were not preferable to me and so anything else just seemed like the straw that broke the camels humpy back. So after my coffee (not too much but not too little… maybe a bit too much because I felt insatiably hungry actually), shower and time that I spent praying in the morning, I headed out to the refuse place which is just opposite Happy Valley Caravan Park (where the busriders come from) - Stormy down way if you know Bridgend at all. I had it in my head to just dump all this stuff and then go back home and do something interesting like play guitar or meet up with a friend, but I just looked around on the internet for a little while and then before I knew it, the evening was approaching and Pete James’ party was beckoning like a siren. Maybe not a siren actually, because there would be no actual death at this shindig. Probably.

Donning my best plaid shirt and dark rimmed glasses, there was left only to hop in the coffin and trek right over there and just swing on into the flare-up. With my expectations rather high for a place like this, I did just that. In university, I had been to parties where people had looked quite familiar but often I couldn’t tell more than what class myself and someone at the party were in. An event like this was a whole other kettle of kippers, I knew everyone there and they knew me and we knew each other and we knew intimate histories of each other’s lives. We all knew who had dated who and why they had split up and who had got with who in the abandoned pub near Trecco which had burned down years ago. We all knew that so-and-so was related to so-and-so by the third cousin of the second mother on the fathers’ side and a family tree with all possible outlets. You’ve got to love small town chatter-natter. When I arrived, I saw a group of my close friends from my final year at school. Circles of faces all over the place. Some bright looking, some forlorn. Seriously.

I went and carted my orange juice (no pulp) over to John Michaelson who I consider to be my closest friend from home other than Nick Lomax. John was also enrolled at Cardiff University. He is a culture junkie and just loves to suck in films and music and happenings of the city midnight, as do I, and on that level we relate well. I had once sat in his room at university and asked him what he’d been doing. The room was plastered in posters of punk bands, famous films. He didn’t answer with more than, ‘Not much,’ but he then went on to open up one of his desk drawers and pull out, of all the things that he could keep in a desk drawer, a massive shiny black desert eagle rifle saying, ‘Check this out. I’ve been a bit busy with my student loan ya know?’ Immediately I was a little frightened having not spoken to him for a while and wondering if he had become some sort of gun crime lover, after all, the first weeks of university are the hardest. I recoiled wondering whether or not he was going to shoot me down in a bout of insane depression and homesickness or just explain that he had killed a man and that you really couldn’t tell what it was like to see the whites of a dying person’s eyes as he bled out on the pavement and about how someone facing the grave will say the most ecclesiastical things. He gestured over to a tray that was resting on his desk,

‘Pick it up and hold it out,’ he had said, ‘I want to show you something cool.’

Now listen up because this is important what with all the gun crime in Britain’s cities at the moment. When faced with someone who may or not be a lunatic who is holding a desert eagle in one hand and telling you to pick something up with the other hand, many people would not know what to do. The initial thought that could pass through one’s mind is that the appropriate course of action is to question whether or not the gun is real… this is the erroneous way of dealing with such a situation. If the gun turns out to be real, there is a high chance that a crazy person may misconstrue this as an attempt to commandeer his firearm – carnage may be a direct result. The second option that someone may choose is to run… again, this may result in a crazy person thinking that you don’t trust him or her once again resulting in blood and guts. I recommend that the best possible course of action in a situation is just to hold the tray up for the guy – if he shoots the tray and it’s a real gun, he shoots the tray and it’s all good you’ve proved you’ve got the stones to deal with such a decision (but you should find some excuse to leave hastily after that and try not to look nervous while you’re doing it). Alternatively, if he shoots you, heck, you probably won’t even know any better because you’ve just been shot with a high powered fire-arm at close range. Next thing you know, you’ll be standing at the judgement seat of Christ. So I’m holding the tray and am rather scared with all four of the previously discussed options running through my head at the same time and mixing into a cocktail of nonsense suggestions, turning me into a rabbit in headlights. Johnny Boy looks me in the eye, giggles a bit, and then pulls the trigger causing a heart-wrenching click followed by the tray flying right out of my hand and falling on the floor several inches behind me. I scream a little (and have to clench every muscle in my body with angst – a little bit of wee came out and I won’t lie about this), John giggles like a coot and then explains that it’s a replica and it only shoots BBs, which are kind of small plastic balls. I was so angry but did not let it show in case he decided to shoot me with it – not a deadly occurrence but nonetheless unpleasant. Thus the lesson on the proper handling of lunatic firearm owners ends. Heed these words child.

Figuring that there’s no one better to talk to than a close friend, I head over to John Michaelson. Besides, there’ll be time to talk to everyone – but I must be careful not to wait so long because after a little while people will have had their fill of juice and chaos will be all but inevitable. So runs a normal party.

“What’s up?” John Inquires

“Oh you know man, not a lot… loving my Porthcawl summer – digging everything and trying to get out to the city as much as possible,” I replied – and although I already know what he was doing with his summer, it was only courteous to ask him anyway, “What are you doing with yourself man?”

“The usual; working, goofing off.” Then he paused a while as if he knew that I may want to write, ‘told you so’ in that space between his answer and what he said next, “I managed to get myself 500 words in a monthly paper.” This was good – John is an excellent writer and funny as heck to boot. A further pause ensued. He sipped his beer – Kronenbourg. Then he put up his bottle close to his chest and I offered up a prayer that his destiny would be grand because he’s an honest type and there’s no malice or violence behind his beautiful eyes. He waited respectfully, “Did you hear about Alan?”

“Yeh dude, I heard. I couldn’t believe it. Do they know what happened?” I said, speaking from the deepest place there is. “I hadn’t seen him for… I don’t know…”

“Since we were kids… My back pages eh?” I always appreciate a Dylan reference. “Here’s to Alan.” He raised his bottle to his forehead and at arm’s length – so did everyone else having obviously overheard our conversation about Alan.

Alan was the one of the last kids to have killed himself in this town in the last three years. When I knew him, he was a bit of a crook. He used to take a lot of drugs and get into a lot of fights and... well, he wasn’t so nice. Everyone knew him – used to hang around with a guy (who had killed himself upon hearing of Alan’s demise,) who was a real nasty piece of work. He beat a friend of mine up with a pair of crutches – his own crutches. I smirked at the irony of a man getting a beat down with his own walking aids.

The fact that people were now toasting someone who wasn’t popular because of his sheer unfriendliness just goes to show what death does to someone. It can canonise the nastiest of people and it turns the urban saint into some sort of legend. Everyone remembers them exactly as they wanted them to be – lovers of life, bright young people, youthful always. Death equalises everyone no matter what circumstances befell beforehand. In the sleep of the grave, the solution always equals zero even if the equation added up to one. And the answer always goes unquestioned. Alan is now a zero – but a beautiful one and gleaming in the collective memory of Bridgend.

There was an impromptu respectful silence for all of the young ones who, for whatever reason, never managed to make it to this party. After this, nattering resumed and everyone continued to what he had done before Johnny opened up all of our thoughts for a moment or two.

It was coming up for ten o’clock in the evening, the party was getting lively – you could feel it in the air, and people’s thoughts were getting more abstract. I had already spent time catching up with lots of old-time friends and it just so happened that some had begun the transformation that I had hoped for them.

There were crazy stories thrown about. The kind of stuff that you just wouldn’t believe. One guy told me that he’d drunk a pint of his own urine just for kicks one evening. Another told me about all the crazy stuff that had happened to his band when they were playing pubs and clubs – biker gangs and driving through the cold night air with the music turned up to eleven and their minds far from the road. This is life in Bridgend county. It’s not so bad if you’re looking for some easy giggles for a week or maybe two. Just don’t stick in one place for too long.

Pete James hadn’t yet made and appearance and I guessed that he was just with Mary somewhere. I asked around for a while – nobody had seen Pete but some people said they’d seen Mary. Someone lit up a barbecue and there were a lot of friends sitting around it. Some were listening to one person playing guitar, with the flames doing an offbeat dance to the music, some lay looking at the moon from the comfort of the neatly mown lawnbed, a group were passing around a drugcigarette and had the chuckles.

As the moon came our from behind the clouds and shined down on these fresh young countenances, I stood sipping on my orange juice and drinking in acoustic guitars and the laughter of kindred spirits and in this moment, I realise that what I was really looking for – ones who are mad to live, mad to be saved, mad to talk, who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, these ones were sitting right here around the fire and loving life. I begged the Lord that the cloud of suicide and depression would be lifted and that Bridgend would no longer feel its sad sullen acid barking rain – for the fervent effectual prayer of a righteous man availeth much.

Had I know that this was to be the last moment that time would cease to exist for a few seconds while I stood idly by to watch bright souls going about their duty, I would perhaps have taken part in the quantum freeze – but alas, it was not to be. I heard a crash of doors inside Pete’s house and then another. What had just been a lovely evening was interrupted when Mary ran out of the house screaming and crying. She bumped into me and I caught her. Everyone turned their collective gaze towards her and her petite head covered completely in wheat brown hair was pressed hard into my chest. Some people around the barbecue whispered amongst themselves; waiting to see what the explanation for the ruckus would be.

“It’s Pete.” She moaned. No one needed to hear another word, we all hung our heads so low. Too the moon hid behind the cloud.