Too Cold For Snow

and he found that soon he was making real progress, especially when he started to use his teeth as well, biting off gobbets of coal and spitting them out even as his nails made a high screeching sound.
    He made it into the next colliery in the valley and decided to lie in wait, a lizard waiting for the fly. The father of three he snapped up was trailing his butties on the way back to the spake when Davy nabbed him, dispatching him with a spade. He dragged him into an air vent and started with the eyes, as if he were eating caramels.
    And so he continued – always on the move – snacking as he went, or if he got a fat one staying awhile so that he grew plumper – reserves of energy he drew on as he moved across the coalfield. From feast to famine he went, investigating closed workings and thriving mines, able to gnaw through the earth like a rat through a ship’s hawser. On and on, forever hungry and seldom sated. Blaenyrhaca. Pergwm. Abercwmnedd. Tyle One and Tyle Two. Along Ogmore and Rhymney, shadowing the rivers in their courses and unlocking floods and terrors.
    In 1963 there was a sighting. A hydrologist, checking out some pipe casings in the pit in Wyattstown heard a strange scuffling sound and then saw a deformed man run down a tunnel. By the time his description had been repeated around a frightened village the man had grown: his globular cross eyes were the size of sinner plates, like a gargantuan barn owl with a squint. The man’s nails were those of a pantomime Mandarin and his deformed hump of a back thrashed around in the collective imagination like an eel stretching on dry land. The teeth, man, they were as big as stalactites! I heard he chased this man and ran so fast the man only got away by wriggling out of his coat! After that, teams armed with police truncheons were sent to check every part of the mine, but to no avail. The monster was made of Scotch mist. He seeped away like a breath of methane.
    It was Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher who did for Davy. As she took on the unions and closed down the mines throughout the United Kingdom, so too did she eliminate Davy’s source of food. But there were side benefits to the Thatcher era, too. The police had less money to spend on trying to catch the monster that the popular imagination had cast like a Grendel inhabiting the land of fear. The National Coal Board was forced to up the danger money for anyone who worked underground. Police investigators over the decades remained dumbfounded that they hadn’t so much as a single decent clue to go on.
    And then the last pit in Wales closed and Davy could no longer smell so much as a molecule of new prey, for all his desperate, snuffling peregrinations along drift and through hard surfaces. So he had to leave the subterranean world. He had to go to the Overground, where meat was plentiful. He managed to make his home there, found a way to live. Snaring and surviving, stalking unwitting prey, along the empty aisles of late night supermarkets.
    Recently there was another sighting, behind the loading bay of Tesco in Llansamlet. But not enough of a sighting for the scared man to tell his mates, as he’d been drinking on shift.
    He’s seen a man seemingly bent over on himself, dragging something heavy in the direction of the overspill car park.
    Davy’d nabbed a man behind household goods, stunned him with a brick, the swiftly pulled him through some plastic flaps into the stockroom and through the back doors where some men were unloading pallets. Pulling the carcass swiftly now, as if it were on a sled, he got it out onto the ramp and pulled it with a dull thump to the ground, his actions urged on by hunger.
    Safe in a clump of rhododendron, Davy scrutinised his victim: plenty there for a long feast. The miner got out a knife, a fork and a threadwire saw, ideal for cutting bone. He started carving, pulling back the delicate thin meat over the forehead with all the care in the world.

Disco Christening
     
     
    When Keith Pearson phoned the Cawdor Bay Hotel (***AA) to book a reception after Owen Peredur’s christening, he was asked if he wanted to arrange a disco afterwards. A disco? He was assured by the manager, whose voice had the consistency of molasses, that it was all the rage, people loved it. Abso-lute-ly loved it! He explained. After the formality, the lace-lined palaver and the vows before God and the godparents, you needed to be able to let your hair down. Shake it on down, Mr Pearson. Shake