Neon Roses
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Synopsis
A coming-of-age novel about two women falling in love during the culturally and politically turbulent 1980s.
It's 1984 in The Valleys, South Wales, and Eluned Hughes is stuck. The miners' strikes are ravaging her family and community, and her boyfriend of six years, Lloyd, is starting to bring up marriage more than she would like. She spends her days selling shoes, listening to Madonna, and trying to hold it all together. Meanwhile, Eluned's clever and precocious little sister, Mabli, thinks she knows it all. Mabli takes her older, moneyed, Thatcherite, policeman boyfriend, Graham, as the ticket out of her working class reality.
So, Eluned is left contemplating her own destiny - staying at home with a husband and a couple of kids - until one day she hears about a fundraising group called Lesbians and Gays Support the Miners. Apparently they're from London, they've been raising money for the miners in her town, and they're coming to visit. She's curious, for sure. And even more so when she lays eyes on June for the first time. She has short hair, she wears leather jackets, she's moody - and Eluned's life is turned upside down.
NEON ROSES takes us on a ride of all the glorious sights and sounds of the 1980s, as Eluned attempts to carve her identity out of the protests, Pride parades, nightclubs and parties of Cardiff, London and Manchester. But this is also a story about two sisters, and the different paths they take outside of where they come from. What is the reality of reconciling family with queerness? What does a family even look like? What choice should Eluned make when her little sister rings her up out of the blue one night, confessing the truth about her relationship with Graham?
(P) 2023 Hodder & Stoughton Limited
Release date: May 25, 2023
Publisher: John Murray Press
Print pages: 304
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Neon Roses
Rachel Dawson
Thank you to my agent, Imogen Morrell, at Greene & Heaton. I am so grateful for your sharp insight, and your tenacious and positive approach. It has also been brilliant to work with editors at John Murray Press, Abigail Scruby and Becky Walsh. It is overwhelmingly flattering and exciting to have your expert eyes on my work, and to be able to talk about writing with you.
Thank you to all at Literature Wales: special thanks must go to Petra Bennett for her support in early 2020, Katherine Stansfield for her excellent teaching, and Rebecca F. John for her mentorship and friendship. I’m also very grateful for the friends I’ve made through Literature Wales, particularly Efa Lois. Diolch i Efa am y crempogau a’r sgyrsiau.
Thank you so much to Lisa Power MBE, Kevin Franklin, Joyce Timperley, Grace Timperley, Sue Bundy, Mam, and everyone else who has answered a range of questions about life in the 1980s. Mam, you deserve a medal for answering my questions about your favourite 1980s ‘pulling moves’.
Many thanks to Stefan Dickers at the Bishopsgate Archives. It was so helpful to see your material about Wales, and even better to have a look through some 1980s copies of On Our Backs! It was also thrilling to visit the People’s History Museum and to be given the privilege of handling the original LGSM documents. Thank you so much for letting me see those.
Thank you to Siobhan Fahey for setting up the online Rebel Dykes Film Club, and for being so warm and encouraging. Similarly, thank you to the Out On The Page team and the Writers With Faces group for keeping me going during lockdown. Thank you to the researchers at the Coalfield Women Project for your informative events.
It is brilliant that so much information is freely available online. Thank you to the Manchester Dance Music Archive, Colin Clews from ‘Gay in the 80s’, the team behind the Log Books podcast, Museum Wales/Amgueddfa Cymru, People’s Collection Wales, and everyone else who runs a blog or online archive. There is a wealth of information on YouTube, from the Dancing in Dulais film made by LGSM to recordings of BBC radio jingles, and full coverage of the 1986 election.
I started my reading with Tim Tate’s Pride: The Unlikely Story of the Unsung Heroes of the Miner’s Strike, Red in the Rainbow by Hannah Dee, The South Wales Miners 1964–1985 by Ben Curtis, and The Fed by Hywel Francis. I am sure you could start your research with any number of excellent books, but I got a lot out of these.
Bethan, thank you for everything. From driving me round the Dulais Valley to all of your dramaturgical guidance, and the things I won’t say here. I’m so grateful to have such inspiring and wonderful friends. I would like to offer heartfelt thanks to our community here in Cardiff: Kate, Amo, Kat, Rob, Nia, Catriona, Sam, Crash, Jaz, Nazmia, Sara, Claire, Zara, Fionnuala, Chrixtobel, Frances, Aimee and Tove.
Thank you to my parents for your support and love. Mam, you’re a legend and I love you. Uncle Len, thank you for passing on your obsessive love for music, but I’m sorry that I can’t agree that the 1950s were the best decade for records. Sue and Jude, thank you for gifting me a line for this novel in our wedding guestbook. Dawsons, please don’t make me change my name back.
Thank you to Lisa and Georgia next door for keeping me sane in 2020. Georgia, pop it back on the shelf for a bit!
Thank you to Christina Thatcher for establishing Roath Writers, and for your encouragement and friendship over the years.
A massive thank you to Angela Eshun, Candy Ikwuwunna, Edward Whelan, Emily Butler, Helen Dring and Izzy Rabey for reading early chapters of this and giving me your feedback.
A Literature Wales New Writer’s Bursary supported by the National Lottery through the Arts Council of Wales was received to develop this novel.
Chapter 1
15 October 1984
Drive is off before Eluned can stuff her skinny paper ticket in her coat pocket. Luckily, she knows what’s coming. She grips the side of his cab, bending her knees while the floor bucks underneath her. The terraces lining the street face off like a pair of cowboys with pistols drawn, so it takes some forceful steering from Drive to turn the bus in the space between them. The white pebbledash of the end terrace fills the bus window, like they’re driving through a blizzard. Bit close today. The bus pitches forward as he guides them back down to the main road, brakes squealing as he controls their descent. Eluned grapples her way up the aisle using the rails on the back of each seat, Mabli following behind.
Mabs always prefers to sit at the back of the bus. These days there is never much competition for the seats. There are still a few girls off to work at the Tick Tock. But you used to see the Mamgus on their way into town, with their smart framed handbags and Portcullis patterned coats. Eluned hasn’t seen the jeweller’s shopgirl, Michelle the Gems, in ages. If Eluned is early for the bus home, she lingers outside the jeweller’s window to admire the tricolour twisted hoops, the way Michelle must have angled the spotlight to perfectly set the diamonds aflame. Eluned knows she’s kidding herself when she thinks that perhaps the other bus, the one east along the bottom of the Beacons and down the Neath valley, is busier. Everyone is skint, from Cynheidre to Blaenavon.
Eluned hangs on the grab rail to let Mabli scootch up next to the window. Mabli shifts along the seat, one leg neatly folded over the other, to give Eluned room to spread out. Eluned can’t help the way her fat knees go. Mabli teases that they’re like cousin Tirion’s eyes, always trying to escape each other. The bus heads north at first, kissing the feet of the Beacons before racing the River Tawe down the valley. The Tawe gets rowdier as it gathers the Llech, the Geidd, the Haffes and the Twrch like a group of lads on the piss, roping in other stop-outs as they stumble from pub to pub. The bus leaves the Tawe, where the river puts its arm round the shoulder of the Clydach, before making its final stagger down to Swansea Bay.
This time of year, Eluned’s favourite part of the journey is catching the sun creeping over the top of Varteg Hill and washing the exposed sandstone of Mynydd Allt-y-Grug in rose gold. Grug was Mamgu’s middle name – heather. The sun must be a Welsh speaker because it’s like she’s purposefully lit the heather so that its delicate flowers glow in every shade from apricot to cerise. Even the grasses in the gaps between the heather look as if they’ve been individually tipped in gold, like tiny metal spears.
Dad used to call Mynydd Allt-y-Grug the moving mountain. When Eluned and Mabli were little he took them walking to see where the old road was buried, and to peep through the trees at rubble that was once a home. After that, Mabli used to hold her breath as they drove past, as if that would be enough to hold back a landslide.
Eluned takes the Binatone Mini and its headphones out of her handbag and flicks open the back with her thumbnail before rubbing the batteries from side to side. They’re a precious commodity these days, and these cold mornings drain them faster.
The Binatone headphones have a metal headband and two round plastic speakers that lie flush against your ears. They haven’t had enough money to buy the type you can separate and poke in your ears directly, so Mabli holds the headphones up between them, putting her ear against the outside of one speaker, while Eluned does the same on the other. Not ideal, but it does the job. Eluned would be lying if she said that the thought of other people overhearing their music didn’t give her a bit of a thrill.
Mabli’s recorded last night’s Peter Powell’s ‘Five 45’s at 5.45’ onto a cassette, so that they can review the new releases together. Powell’s picks are rarely avant-garde; Mabli says she heard that the record labels pay for the artists to be featured. But it’s a much better feature than ‘Select-A-Disc’, where they are subjected to airheads crying about their boyfriends, requesting songs that have already had the arse kicked out of them. Eluned’s had a grudge against that feature since she sent in a postcard for Mabli’s sixteenth birthday and it never got played. Eluned had requested ‘The Model’ by Kraftwerk, the very week before it soared to number two.
Before March, they used to listen to ‘Five 45’s’ as a family. Mam would be finishing tea, while Mabli and Eluned buttered bread and defrosted peas, and Dad laid the table. Now, the strike has disrupted all their routines. Dad won’t budge from Wales at Six, there’s rarely extra bread with their evening meal, and they’re lucky if Mabli turns up at all.
Mabli is adept at cutting off the end of the 5.30 Newsbeat bulletin when she records off the radio. It’s a good job too, as the news starts arguments these days. They’ve only got one blank tape left, so Mabli keeps rewinding back and recording over it. Eluned startles when the tape starts with a clash of different jingles. Her ears are sharp; in just a few seconds she picks out the different snippets. There’s the knock-off Prince bassline, the electric guitar from Janice Long’s rock show, and the toe-curling singing from the beginning of ‘Best Sound in Britain’. Finally, Mabli’s latest recording starts midway through Powell’s exuberant, synth-heavy intro.
Powell’s first pick is ‘Freedom’ by Wham! Mabli identifies it from the first blast of trumpet, digging her nails into Eluned’s knee with a hissed, ‘George!’
It’s tremendous, obviously. It will be their third number one this year. But it’s hardly new; Wham! did the song on Wogan last weekend. The family had gathered around to watch, Mam inducing hilarity with her insistence that before Eluned came along, Dad had hair like Andrew Ridgeley.
The second song is Chaka Khan, ‘I Feel For You’. Eluned always enjoyed this track on Prince’s album, despite Dad trying to sing along in his ropey falsetto. This is faster, more frenetic. Lloyd told her that it’s Stevie Wonder on the harmonica, but surely Stevie has got better things to do. The rapper is supposed to be big in the States, but the only word she can make out on this record is ‘Chaka’. She’ll have to give it another listen on the hi-fi at home. These tinny headphones, and the way they have to hold them, can’t be doing it justice. Mabli likes it, shimmying her shoulders enough that they jostle Eluned, but subtly enough that no one else would notice. Most of the time, Mabli gives the impression that she would rather die than be seen enjoying herself in public.
Powell segues into another R&B track, ‘In My House’. Eluned hasn’t heard this one yet, and she mashes the speaker further into the shell of her ear to make sure that she’s hearing as much as she can. The steady drumbeat is undeniable. Mabli taps her pointed work shoe, bought with Eluned’s staff discount, against Eluned’s shin. Eluned stares out of the window. Drive has done all the village pick-ups and now they’re sailing down the A4067, eating up the scenery as the song struts to its final chorus.
‘Calamity Crush’, the penultimate track, is a bit of a change. This is new to her as well. It wasn’t long ago that Eluned would have heard songs before Peter Powell, London-or-no-London. But since she’s been helping Mam with the food parcels she hasn’t had the time to listen to as much radio, and she hasn’t had enough money for her magazines either.
Mabli pulls her ear away from the headphones. ‘I’ve had enough of this. I can’t afford a headache. It sounds like someone has leant on all the buttons at once.’
Can’t afford a headache. Does that mean she might show her face at the picket line? Finally. Eluned has pestered her about it since March.
‘Are you coming later then?’ Eluned asks. ‘Mair says I can go after lunch and have half pay for it. She reckons she’d come herself if she didn’t have the shop.’
Mabli snorts. ‘It sounds like the shop’s been dead lately. It’s a nice way for Mair to save a bit of money and look like a martyr.’
‘Easy to be a cynic. So are you coming then?’
Mabli pushes the loose end of her watch strap until it forms the shape of a hot air balloon. She stares down at it, then pulls it taut again. ‘No. I’m sorry,’ she says. ‘They can’t spare me. I’m taking minutes for the senior partner.’
‘Come on,’ Eluned cajoles. ‘Dad would love it if you came. I know you might not remember; but you got so into it in ’72.’
Mabli turns her head to stare out the window.
Eluned persists. ‘We made Dad potassium permanganate soaks in the washing-up bowl. You used to love swooshing the water around his feet while the crystals dissolved. They stained his skin a horrific plum colour, like he’d been beaten up. You loved the power cuts, you used to make us pretend that we were at the beginning of The Railway Children, eating bread and marmalade by candlelight and listening out for mice.’
Mabli finally smiles. ‘I do remember missing Dad when he went up to Birmingham, and then he brought us back those white teddies. I loved mine. But that guy, Freddie Matthews, died not long after. The Union men love pretending that they’re at the Battle of the Alamo, and now every time they walk out it has to be even more of a spectacle.’
‘How do you remember the name of a man who died when you were six?’
Eluned knows the answer before she asks the question.
‘Graham and I were talking about it the other night,’ Mabli says. ‘It was after he died that people started taking it out on the police.’
Ah, yes. Just one more conversational topic that she repeats verbatim from her pig boyfriend. Eluned asks, ‘How old was he then? Knocking thirty?’
Mabli rolls her eyes. ‘Graham has only just turned thirty. He was the same age that I am, just about to start police college.’
There’s no point trying to persuade Mabli that Graham is too old for her. They first met on one of Eluned’s minibus trips down to Talk of the Abbey, a nightclub in Neath. Mabli had been nagging for months to go with her older sister, and Eluned had finally interceded on Mabli’s behalf. God, she shouldn’t have bothered. Graham had been lurking in the shadows, apparently investigating local complaints about their monthly gay night. Eluned wasn’t interested in his anecdotes about alleyway handjobs. Everyone needs somewhere to cop off. She’d left Mabli to it and joined her own boyfriend, Lloyd, on the dance floor with a pint of watered-down cider. Eluned danced with one eye over Lloyd’s shoulder, watching Mabli apparently rapt as Graham gesticulated at her.
It wasn’t long after Talk of the Abbey that Graham started picking up Mabli from the house in his Vauxhall Astra. Dad had asked Mabli and Eluned to excuse themselves upstairs for a moment and, according to Mam, gently reminded Graham of Mabli’s age. For the few weeks after that, everywhere Dad went he was trailed by police cars. Eluned had called him paranoid, then he drove her to work on a morning when she’d missed her bus. As soon as they reached the Gurnos, one of those jam-butty police cars popped up in the rear-view. It never put its lights on but was up their arse all the way to Ponty. Dad tried changing lanes, speeding up, but it remained doggedly behind them. After that, they agreed to leave Mabli to it.
‘Look. Earlier, Mam suggested, and I think it’s a good idea, too, that it would be tremendous if you could do a question-and-answer session at the Welfare. We’ve been there a lot recently, and people have been asking about what they’re entitled to, what they can claim, that sort of thing.’
‘I’m not going to help people fiddle the system.’
Already, that stuck-up tone. Eluned clicks in the rewind button and holds it down while the tape whirs back to the beginning, the plastic casing vibrating slightly in her hand. No wonder Mam won’t have this conversation with her.
‘There’s no fiddling. It’s making sure that people are applying for everything they have the right to receive. Some people don’t have any money coming in.’
‘It’s sad that people are skint. But I don’t want you telling people that I’m a legal expert when I’m just a secretary. All I do is . . .’ Mabli mimes typing, eyes frozen in the middle distance as she flicks her imaginary carriage and keeps going.
‘Come off it, Mabli. You could impress them! You’d be showing that you’ve got initiative, you’re a real go-getter.’
‘Or, more likely, get told off for being a troublemaker.’
‘Mam will get you the paperwork from the dole office and you can break it down. People would listen to you. You’ve always been so good at explaining things.’
French declensions, factorising algebraic equations, that speech from Macbeth. Mabli always lapped Eluned at school.
‘I haven’t even got my feet under the table yet, and you should hear what the partners say about Scargill. It starts with, “What sort of leader calls a strike at the end of winter?” but it doesn’t end as polite. With Graham in the police as well . . . it looks bad. I won’t do myself any favours by making a holy show of myself.’
Eluned says, ‘This is urgent. Thatcher is cutting benefits because she says that the NUM is handing out fifteen quid a week to members, but you know they’ve not been able to hand out that kind of money for months.’
‘I don’t know if you’ve noticed while you’ve been out playing with cans of soup, but children are dying in Ethiopia. Those IRA nutters are on the up. The Fed are punching themselves and asking the government, “Why are you hurting me?” There’s more going on than this pissing contest between Comrade Scargill and whoever his enemies are this week.’
‘It’s nothing like that,’ Eluned snaps. ‘You know Dad hates taking money off us, but imagine how bad it would be if we weren’t bringing something in.’
Mabli mutters, ‘For a man who hates doing it, he certainly does it a lot.’
Silence festers. Eluned looks out at the double-fronted stone houses that she always admires on this stretch of road. There’s a Coal Not Dole poster in almost every window. There are more people supporting the strike than not in this part of the world. Eluned winds the headphone lead round their Binatone.
Mabli usually gets off at the stop by the Dillwyn Arms, but today she starts gathering her stuff as soon as Brecon Road turns into High Street.
Eluned holds out their Binatone. It’s Mabli’s turn to have it.
Mabli’s eyes flicker dismissively between the cassette player and Eluned’s face. ‘No thanks, I’ll get a lift off Graham.’
‘Well, I’ll be on the minibus with Mam.’
‘Take it anyway,’ says Mabli. ‘If the shop is quiet, you can listen in the stockroom. There’s Janice Long’s show on the end of the tape.’
Eluned gives a tight nod. ‘Diolch. Have a good one.’
Eluned crushes herself back into the bus seat as Mabli slithers across and into the aisle. Mabli smooths the front of her skirt, and pushes her bag strap up her shoulder.
‘I hope today goes well,’ she says.
Eluned’s christening shoes were from Blossoms; butter-soft white Mary Janes. When she was fifteen, she opened her first payslip there too. In all that time, Mair Bevan hasn’t changed a bit. Mair’s dark brown hair is lacquered until it’s as smooth and stiff as a snail’s shell. Emerald earrings swing from her earlobes; the holes have been pulled so long you could push a 2p through them. When Eluned gets close enough to kiss her cheek, stale alcohol lingers underneath L’Air du Temps.
Mair keeps a tub of Atrixo underneath the counter and slathers her hands in the unctuous lotion at least three times a day, buffing it into the raised veins and papery creases. Mair is convinced that the key to shifting stock is in her elegant hands; she must have spent hours teaching Eluned to hold a shoe with her hands positioned like an oyster shell.
Eluned barely opens the till, only ringing up a tin of boot polish and a pair of socks with loose-fit cuffs. Some women loiter for a chat, littering the shop with their worries like those balls of tissue paper that sneak out of their shoeboxes and get everywhere. They each poke a couple of coppers in the slot on the old Smash tin on the counter, liberally covered with yellow National Union of Mineworkers stickers. Mair and Eluned have been collecting for the last few months, although donations have dwindled since the summer. Eluned untwists a paperclip and digs for dirt under her nails until the skin turns a lurid pink. When that stings too much, she bashes the handle of the card-imprinting machine back and forth. Finally, she signs a couple of credit card receipts with her own large, looping signature, pretending it’s an autograph.
Mair pulls back the lace curtain that separates the shop from the window display. She drags her finger along the shelf in the window and flicks a grey slug of dust onto the floor. ‘Bach, can you dust these shelves for me before you go?’
Before the strike, Eluned had been so excited to build their window display. Mair had ordered in some new shoes from an Italian supplier. When they arrived, a pair of high heels immediately caught Eluned’s eye. Vibrant teal suede, with metallic violet lightning bolts stretching down the sides. Shoes for dancing, for pleasure. They even smelt tremendous; Eluned often found herself in the stockroom, taking a huff of their velvety, earthy scent. When Mair wrote ‘£20’ on the cardboard tags with her Sheaffer fountain pen, Eluned immediately calculated how many hours she would need to work to buy them.
Mair had wagered with Eluned that if she shifted four pairs of them by the end of the spring then she could have the last pair for herself. It was a bad bet. No one around here can afford them now. Mam never spent £20 on her own wedding shoes.
Eluned finds her dusting rag and wipes over the window display. One side of her dream shoes are faded to a drab blue. The only woman who’s asked to try them on was a scab’s wife. Eluned had taken the initiative to tell her that nothing at Blossoms would be available to purchase until her husband was back on the pickets. The shameless cow had stuffed her dirty money back in her handbag and walked rigidly out of the shop. As soon as this sabre-rattling is over, women will start coming back to shop. She’ll soon get those shoes flying off the shelves, then she can get her own. When it’s blown over, the boys will organise minibuses to Swansea again, and she’ll wear her shoes on the dance floor of Barons nightclub. She’s been repeating the same thing for the last seven months.
Chapter 10
11 February 1985
‘You need to do something about Eluned,’ says Mam from the hall.
Great. This again. Eluned turns Pebble Mill up and pulls the crocheted blanket round her shoulders. They’re happy to stand in the kitchen and whisper about her, but it hasn’t occurred to them to talk to her.
Dad says, ‘What can I do? She’s fine, she’s quiet.’
‘Fine? Iesu Grist! She’s not fine. Eluned has never, never been quiet—’
‘Calm down.’
Thank you, Dad. He’s washing up, a new development, while Mam does Committee paperwork and harangues him.
‘I can’t calm down, Emyr. We’ve got one daughter shacked up with a copper twice her age, and one that’s on the verge of the madhouse.’
‘Eluned needs time. She went to the Welfare yesterday, didn’t she?’
Mam had been brilliant, tallying the food donations and divvying them up into parcels. She’d done the calculations in her head before Eluned had even finished listening to the list of items. Eluned’s brain runs so slowly these days, it’s easier to stay in bed.
Dad talks her into letting him give her driving lessons. He couldn’t teach her how to measure circumference without causing a row, so God knows why he’s putting them through this. At least it’s something to do. They’ve had the same car for years. The gearstick is stiff, the ceiling stained yellow with cigarette smoke and the driver’s seat black from years of coal dust. It’s weird to be in the driving seat. Dad helps her guide the car on to the road and down their steep hill. She squeezes the steering wheel, pulling as if she can control the machine by force.
When the car is on the flat Dad directs her round the corner, to park up outside the shop. He says, ‘Your mam is driving herself mental trying to work out why you dumped Lloyd.’
‘Don’t start with the Jolly Twp Giant stuff,’ she says.
‘Ah, there’s no malice in it. He’s good as gold. But what do you think I wanted to do at your age?’
Eluned scrunches her nose. She’s never thought about it. ‘Something with music?’
Dad mimes throwing a dart. ‘Bull’s-eye. I would have loved my own record shop.’
She can see it now. The ageing mod, still stuck in his braces, boring pretty women about grain count and sle. . .
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