Work, Sex and Rugby

by Lewis Davies

Overview

Young and strong, this novel's protagonist, Lewis, is equally keen on beer and girls and bored in equal measures by his job and by club rugby. He only has one problem: he's a closet romantic, and life isn't matching up to all he thinks it should be.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780952155805
Publisher:	Parthian Books
Publication date:	12/01/2003
Pages:	175
Product dimensions:	6.40(w) x 7.90(h) x 0.60(d)

About the Author

Lewis Davies is a writer and publisher whose work includes many plays, poetry collections, essays, and novels, such as Tree of Crows.

Read an Excerpt

Work, Sex and Rugby

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By Lewis Davies, Ravi Pawar

Parthian

Copyright © 2004 Lewis Davies
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-908946-39-3

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CHAPTER 1

Thursday

'John Long's carpets, unbea ...'

'Two fifty seven swa ...'

'Lewis, love.'

'The next record ...'

'Lewis, it's seven.'

'Nothing ever happens, nothing ...'

'We all go along as before.'

'And that was from ...'

'Next the. ... after this.'

'Breakfast is. ... Baker hire this week.'

'At the Enterprise Zone, a free microwave oven.'

'Are you up yet?'

'Uh?'

'It's seven-thirty.'

'I'll be up now.'

Lewis focused hazily across the room, his gaze directed by the dull light feebly dripping through the curtains. The green unreal glow of the radio alarm clock flickered malevolently in the darkest corner. It joyfully informed him that it was seven o six. As usual it was wrong; who can you trust when your clock lies to you? The radio offered him another microwave he didn't need. He realised he would have to get up. Another reality filled morning was there waiting. It was not about to go away through lack of attention. Winter nights are the shortest when you are counting the hours. Sunday was still three days away. At least he didn't have a hangover.

He forced the overbearing weight of the quilt off the bed and stood up with as much reluctance as he could muster without actually staying in bed. His eyes refocused inaccurately as he reached for a pair of jeans hung over the back of the room's solitary chair. It was a basic room: four walls and a ceiling; one floor; one cupboard brown and boring; an arched mirror; a relict desk from a time when he was supposed to have been a studious schoolboy and a piano which he never played. Lewis stumbled out of it and into the bathroom where a handful of cold water brought him completely out of the night for the first time.

After gingerly washing himself, Lewis made the descent to the breakfast table where he knew from experience his mother and father would already be. His mother was a phenomenon; her efficiency was frightening. She would have been up at six, never needing the extra sleep and by the time Lewis surfaced already washed the clothes, hung them out to dry, ironed the clothes she had aired yesterday, set the breakfast table and finally cut the sandwiches for both Lewis and his father's lunch. Lewis could only just manage sitting at the breakfast table, eating and perhaps making the odd brief attempt at conversation.

Nobody spoke as Lewis grappled heroically with an uncooperative piece of toast in a vain attempt to cover it with jam. Giving up, he concentrated on eating it.

'Still up at Longford?' His father asked him. He already knew the answer but was bored with the silence.

'Yeh,' replied Lewis through a mouthful of toast.

'How many weeks have you got left up there?' He knew the rough answer to this one as well but conversation with Lewis in the morning required patience.

'Three, perhaps four.'

'Been there a while now.'

'Yes, I'm bored stiff with the place.'

'Well, I did warn you didn't I?'

'What do you mean?'

'I told you not to join the building trade.'

'Leave it out, Dad.'

'It's alright saying leave it out, but I've told you before, you should have stayed on at school.' He had told him before. It was his favourite lecturing topic.

'Oh yeah, with one 'O' level in art. What the hell was I going to do?'

'That was your own decision, you know you could have ...'

'Leave it out Dad, it's too bloody early in the morning.'

'Language, please,' his mother interrupted. 'You're not on the building site yet.'

'He'd never have need gone on the building site if he'd listened to what I told him.'

'David, please, that's enough.'

'I don't know why I put up with this. One mention of a complaint against the building game and he's off on his favourite ramble. I mean everybody complains about work but I have to get a lecture on bloody higher education.'

'Lewis,' her tone warned him not to continue. 'Pass your mother the jam.'

Lewis obliged.

* * *

Ten minutes later Lewis was walking down Pant Glas towards the junction with the main road. His boss would pick him up at ten past eight.

He shared the bus stop with two middle-aged women and a tall schoolgirl from the Catholic college. One of the women looked him up and down. He smiled hopefully at the girl, she ignored him. He consoled himself with the solace that she was too young anyway.

The schoolgirl boarded her bus and the women theirs but there was still no sign of Watkins. J.R.Watkins:Jeremiah Royston Watkins. Lewis had been working for him for almost five years. It was a small operation: the boss, Lewis, and a plasterer brought in when the work was available. Roy was getting on a bit now: nearly sixty but he was still fit and as least as sharp as his plaster board nails. He struggled with the heavier work, forcing Lewis to work harder as a result. But he was fair and although Lewis described him as a hard bastard he rather liked him. The extra work was nothing.

A wide overweight van appeared in the distance beyond the traffic lights. As it meandered closer the legend blazoned brazenly across the front demanded attention. J.R.Watkins Master Builder. It still made Lewis smile, despite its accuracy.

The van slouched into the bus stop. J.R. would occasionally boast that he had been in business thirty years. The van looked as if it had seen twenty of them but it was only an illusion; nothing lasted long with Roy. Lewis was doing well on four.

'Morning, Roy,' offered Lewis as he jumped into the warm cab.

'Morning, Lew.'

Nobody ever addressed him as J.R. to his face. It was doubtful if he would have understood the Dallas connection. But you didn't take the chance. Most people called him Mr. Watkins with a reverence reserved for a religious man. Few knew what the J stood for. Lewis knew because it was on his income tax forms. He was doing well with Roy.

The van ambled back out into the flow of traffic. A cacophony of horns objected to its arbitrary progress. Roy was not one for the formalities of the highway code.

'They can run into me if they want to, Lew, but who's going to come off worse?'

* * *

The morning ambled forward. Lewis had mixed a banker for Roy to get on with before turning his attention to the ton of breeze blocks which had to be moved for the garage.

'Ready for breakfast, Lew?'

'Aye right, Roy,' replied Lewis eagerly.

'Get the tea on then.'

'Right.'

Lewis turned the cement mixer off and an unsuitable silence surrounded the site.

Breakfast was the first stoppage of the day. It wasn't really breakfast as both Lewis and Roy would have eaten earlier but it was a necessary break. Lewis carried the tea to the first floor where Roy had been working. Roy was sitting on an up-turned milkcrate earnestly reading the back page of the Daily Mirror. He didn't look up as Lewis placed a mug of tea in front of him.

'I see the Swans won last night,' announced Roy.

'Aye, I heard it on the radio this morning.'

'I thought you'd have gone down.'

'No, I haven't bothered much this season, with the rugby and all I haven't had much time,' explained Lewis.

'It's the women that's stopping you watching the football. I'll bet that's where you were last night,'

'Well as a matter of fact ...'

Roy laughed.

'Who was it this time?'

'Just some girl I've been bumping into on the weekends.'

'Anyone I know?'

'You wouldn't know her, would you?'

'I might, mun, what's her name?'

'Louise.'

'C'mon, Lew, play the game, Louise what?'

'Richardson.'

'Where does she live?'

'Daniel Street, you don't know her,' Lewis insisted emphatically.

'Up above the old cinema?'

'Aye,'

'Is her father's name Dennis?'

There was a pause.

'I don't know.'

'Used to work in the steelworks before they laid him off.'

Lewis surrendered to his interrogator.

'Could be.'

'Her mother works on the fruit stall in the market?'

'How the hell am I supposed to know? Took her out I did, not research her life history.'

'I know her, mun, well I used to know her mother anyway. Gwen Williams, a right raver in her day, not that I'd know anything of that mind.'

Lewis marvelled at Roy's encyclopedic knowledge of the town's inhabitants.

'You'd better watch her, Lew.'

'I was, last night.'

Roy laughed.

'No joy then, Lew?'

Lewis said nothing.

'Thought you were looking a bit down this morning.'

Lewis remained silent. Roy laughed again.

'C'mon then, Lew, these walls won't build themselves. Another banker.'

Lewis was almost eager to get started again. The cement mixer grudgingly spluttered into its uneven laborious rotation, churning sand and cement which Lewis shovelled effortlessly into its wide gaping mouth. The work to him now was easy, laborious but easy. The tired ache of his muscles, taut on the warmest of mornings, was now only a distant memory of his first months with Roy. He had always been strong in comparison with his peers at school; his winning of the discus throwing at the school sports day was an annual event. He even had a certificate buried somewhere with his mother's patiently ambitious mementos of his youth. Lewis Davies West Glamorgan County Champion-Intermediate Level. The lettering was in gold and there was an underlain picture of a runner in silhouette. There had been speculation of winning a red vest, but there was training involved and he wouldn't discipline himself. What was the point? He had won the school championships out of fun: it was easy. The county championships because they involved a day off school. He had been surprised when he had won, narrowly but with no extra effort. Dai Sparks, the sports teacher, had been excited by his win, cajoling and then threatening him to train for a national vest. Lewis had known the distances required were beyond him and even if he could have achieved them after three months training, so what? He could throw a discus an extra 1.8 metres. Useful. He had enjoyed throwing it because it was an easy skill; training would have stifled the pleasure.

When he had abandoned school early in April, his body had recoiled from the intense strain enforced upon him. The building game was hard. He was strong but it was a raw shallow strength of early youth. His muscles flared with the extra exertion. Every shovel of sand, barrowful of cement and armful of breeze blocks burned his body further. But his strength was not a brittle strength; it diminished and then regrouped, his body hardening as the callouses on his hands hardened to enclose his first watery blisters. Now, after four years with Roy, the aches of the morning and the warm stinging blisters of the afternoons were only a distant laughing memory.

He worked as a machine. It was rumoured among his friends that he ran on diesel. 'You only had to fill him up every half hour.' Lewis enjoyed the humour, people could look at his actions all they liked but no one could picture his thoughts.

He tipped the banker out of the mixer into the wheelbarrow, its regular consistency just supporting its own weight. It had a dull green colour: the beach yellow of the quartz sand overwhelmed by a grey glutinous cement. When Lewis was killing time he would occasionally pick a shell fragment from the sand and idly recall its provenance, memorised from his geology lessons. The subject had always fascinated him. The time scales were somehow reassuring: a sandstone 250 million years old; a mollusc 350 million years old. It demanded a perspective. He was only twenty years old; how was it possible to reconcile the scales except in terms of a hopelessly brief life. Everlasting life in death was not an alternative. He quoted faultlessly from an 'O' level text book concerning a 300 million year dead shell when in a mere sixty years there would be no mind. The mountains upon which he spent most of his youth were continually in the motion of rejoining the sea from which they had only recently come. It was all a cycle and for him it would be a brief one.

'Oi! Lew, What's the bloody hold-up? Are you catching a bus to mix that cement?'

Roy's voice disturbed Lewis from a discussion with himself. He realised with disgust that he was killing time. The work was strangling him. He quickly filled two buckets with cement before making the short journey to the upstairs extension where Roy was completing an inside screen wall.

'Come on, Lew, where the hell have you been?'

'Sorry, Roy, couldn't get the mix right.'

Roy knew this wasn't the real reason. He looked at the boy with guilt but just took the buckets of cement. Not wishing to interfere, Roy sensed the disillusionment that Lewis was experiencing. He had lived it. It had taken him twenty years to work through. He just hoped it would not take Lewis that long. A few more years on the piss with the lads, a couple of seasons of rugby, a rushed romance of living room floors and car front seats hiding from parents and the blaze of headlights. And then a woman to look after him before the easy nights absorbed him. Roy watched Lewis out of the window space as he walked back to the mixer. He hoped Lewis could hack it: he liked him. He stayed when most drifted on. He worked hard and he could talk, not just about the building game and rugby, he had ideas.

Roy had watched Lewis grow up. He remembered the boyish enthusiasm of the first weeks at work, willing to learn despite the tired muscles. He had been impressed by his subtle adaptions to the toil of work. Then he watched, fascinated as Lewis let his thoughts appear; always much closer to the surface than he realised and a mirror image of his own thirty years ago. The disillusionment with the cycle of work, the endless repetition and the awful realisation that there was nothing else. Life was this. Roy stood back as Lewis would attempt to bury his thoughts, subjugate with distractions his frustrated ideas. Futile pursuits would distort his time: sport, women, beer. Usually it would be drink. Equilibrium would be grudgingly regained as his goals tasted of distaste. Commitment altered little and hid nothing.

To Roy it was absorbing. A chance to reassess his own youth, gauge his own mistakes from a cheap ringside seat. He did not interfere, allowing Lewis to make his own decisions, mark his own time. Roy knew himself too well; he wouldn't have listened.

His own first days at work were not that far away. The unfamiliar faces with the more than familiar practical jokes; he had learned to laugh early but embarrassment is difficult to conceal, anger even harder. He had finished school on a Friday and started work the following Monday. His mother had arranged the apprenticeship for him. There had been no question of staying on, with younger brothers to support. His father was a hazy memory, a smiling face in black and white, holding his mother in a bare studio. The coal had taken him away before Roy had a chance to learn to know him. There was only a lingering happiness, of huge warm hands as they threw him into the air before engulfing him in a sea of strength. The board had settled with free coal for a lifetime in an attempt to ameliorate for the loss. The compensation was less because his soul had clung to a burnt body and a determined wife for a few days outside the mine.

The apprenticeship was with Will Davies. His mother had insisted on a Saturday start: there was no point in hiding from work. Will had sent him away. 'Don't start anyone on a Saturday, son. Come back Monday, eight sharp. Have the weekend off on me.' Roy never started anything on a Saturday.

Roy didn't blame his mother for forcing him to work. She had no alternative. But it still hurt when he was tricked into thinking about it. He wouldn't have been good enough for a scholarship, but he was brighter than the majority of boys whose fathers had been able to pay for grammar school. Education was only free if you could afford it. Free for the boys who now worked in town, cocooned in corpulent offices, or had moved away to another provincial retreat as lethargic as the last. There was resentment in that there had been no opportunity for him. He had to make his own way or be entrapped in the benefit maze or submerged in the cheap rotten beer that would hold so many of his once friends. Shadow figures in a grey half awake town.

Roy knew that Lewis hadn't seen the chances in school, a way forward. Lewis had hated the regimented dullness, the concerted attempt to homogenize everyone in the mire of reduced expectation. There was an opportunity there; an escape route if you wanted it enough. Roy would have exploited it but there were no first chances. While the dullards with the money had prospered and now offered platitudes to him across stained desks, as he paid for the handshakes and signatures. Smiles through transparent bars.

Roy was aware that Lewis's father had made a vain attempt to force Lewis to stay on at school, vaguely aware of the advantages. Roy would have done better but rarely questioned Lewis on his decision. Mark his own time, make his own mistakes.

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from Work, Sex and Rugby by Lewis Davies, Ravi Pawar. Copyright © 2004 Lewis Davies. Excerpted by permission of Parthian.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

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Table of Contents

Contents

Title page,
Dedication,
Introduction,
Thursday,
Friday,
Saturday,
Sunday,
About the author,
By the same author,
Copyright,