‘How’d he get in this state?’ Potter protested.
‘You take that arm, I’ll take this,’ Evans directed him, murmured ‘Now’ and the two of them hauled the collapsed old man onto unsteady feet. They continued to hold him mistrustfully.
‘I’ll be alri`,’ the man said. His large jowls, as if transplanted from a boxer dog, wobbled with the rest of his plump body. ‘What was the sc…?’ Did we wn?’
‘We won. Need to get you home.’
‘One mo’ for the v’tory, boys?’
‘Home, Dave,’ Evans insisted. ‘I’ve called a cab.’
‘Can’t than` you eno`. V’tory at Twickus.’
The two chemists walked him out of the pub, then guided him carefully into the cab like delivery men easing a large refrigerator into a small domestic space. Back at the bar Potter, still stirred up, said: ‘Who was he?’
‘My uncle.’
‘Likes his ale. A popular regular?’
‘Comes for the England game. Popular? Hmm.’
‘Gimme the goods, Gwyn. What’s he done bad?’
A sigh of reluctance, then: ‘He upset the community round here. Long time ago now.’
‘I got it. He’s your uncle so you have to stand by him whatever others think? What did he do?’ Seeing Gwyn shifting uncomfortably, he added, ‘If you don’t mind me asking?’
‘I can’t… I don’t want to… He ran over a child. Killed the kiddie. He’d been drinking, you see.’
‘That’s tough. And he’s still got his drink problem for Christ’s sakes.’
‘Imbibing for Wales-England to cheer himself up. The rest of the year he doesn’t touch a drop.’
Potter, puzzled, asked: ‘Do people in here accept him?’
‘They ignore him. He can’t harm anybody now, except himself: as you’ve just seen.’
The young researcher scrutinised his head of project as though he were a difficult chemical formula. ‘You’re saying today only he lets go like this?’
‘Let’s go – forgets – I don’t know what you’d call it. But tomorrow he’ll be sober and there’ll be three hundred and sixty three more days thereafter of living with himself and not being able to forget.’
‘Well there’s a story. And what happened to the child’s family?’
Gwyn gripped the bar, shook his head, whispered, ‘Look, I don’t want to…The mother moved away. The loss, it… devasted her.’
‘That’s awful. And the dad?’
Another sigh of reluctance. ‘You’re talking to him.’
‘You’re…? You mean she’s your wife?
‘Ex-wife.’
‘And you’ve forgiven your uncle?’
‘It was twenty years ago. I’ve moved on. You have to or you end up like Dave. Today he’s in the present; every other day he’s looking back.’
‘What can I…? I didn’t know.’
‘You’d no need to. Look, I’d best be off.’
‘Sure. See you in the lab tomorrow then.’
‘Yfory, Barry.’
Potter watched him go. Gwyn was bloody heroic! Who cared whether England or Wales won? That child, Dave: he couldn’t grasp it. His pint glass on the bar: was it studying him like some large eye? No, none of it made sense. He pushed the glowering glass away.
