But Seimon’s hard words began to echo around him and Eurig wondered how long it would be before they’d be able to talk it all through, without tantrums and abuse. Damn the golden haired boy for reminding him so vividly of Seimon! Had it been Hefin who’d responded with such hostility, Eurig would have been less surprised and perhaps not even cared too much; after all, Hefin had always been a bit of a Mammy’s boy and taken Fflur’s side in everything. But no… Hefin had shown an understanding of the human condition’s curiously fickle nature that seemed beyond his fifteen years. Fflur had suggested that perhaps Seimon’s disappointment was the greater because he and Eurig had been so close – and that his feeling of betrayal, therefore, was that much deeper. In that sense, Eurig could see how Seimon had, perhaps, lost considerably more than Hefin had, and that was why he needed to try to talk with him again.

After vehemently beating the dust of many months from the rug, releasing within its cloud some of the upset and frustration that had built up in the days since the row with his head-strong seventeen year-old, Eurig rolled it back over the living room floor and moved the table and dining chairs back to their place. He took in the new layout and was pleased. Now that ‘The Warren’ was no longer just for the odd weekend and summer holidays he needed to put his own stamp on the cottage. After much hassle he’d had the phone connected, and in time he’d replace the eccentric remnants that had accumulated over the year: curtains no longer matching changes of wallpaper in the family home and chairs too dated or loose-springed for everyday comfort. Eurig knew that when he came to chop them into sticks for the stove, each piece of furniture would surrender its bittersweet memories.

Eurig

With the grandfather clock’s choked mid-day chime, you consider the promise of the dunes and relish the afternoon’s possibilities. You strip. Rubbing the factor twenty sun block into your thighs and up into your groin, you become aroused at the prospect of meeting Dylan again. Catching sight of yourself in the cracked mirror of the wardrobe door you wonder whether to smear your pidyn with sunscreen; you certainly don’t want to get burnt there. You lick your forearm, already covered with sun lotion; it tastes unpleasantly chemical. You’ll just have to risk sunburn if you take off your trunks!

They’d met the previous afternoon. After an unsuccessful hour cruising a twenty-something, muscle-bound god with a conch-shell tattoo where others might have an appendix scar, Eurig had given up the chase. Lying on his towel in a shallow hollow, his head cupped in his hands, he mused on what might have been. Dylan, attracted by the genial look of an older man, sat on a low dune, partly concealed by a tussock of marram grass, and watched Eurig for a good ten minutes; he took in the leanness of his body, the greying at his temples and the black thickets in his armpits and groin. He feasted on the fantasy of their bodies coming together… but the pips from his watch broke through the reverie and signalled that his time in the dunes was up for another day. Eurig smiled at the man whose watch alarm had drawn his attention, and though he was unable to make out his features in the bright sunlight, he beckoned him over. They shook hands rather formally, Eurig thought, given that so many in the dunes were considerably more intimate on an altogether anonymous basis. They introduced one another, and as Dylan explained that he had to get back to the hospital for an evening clinic, Eurig lost his head in the boy’s searching gaze.