The Same Room, Six Nights a Week

The Bridge Street Club in Port Talbot is one room with a wooden floor, a bar down the left side, and a ceiling that has been painted over so many times the plaster looks soft. What the room is depends entirely on the day.

On Tuesday it is a salsa class, which has been running for eleven years and has never once had enough men. On Wednesday it is bingo, and the same eleven women sit at the same three tables, and the caller has a voice like a station announcement. Thursday is the darts league. On Friday, one Friday a month, it is a metal night, and four bands play to sixty people who have driven in from three valleys. Saturday is whatever has been booked: a fortieth, a retirement, a fundraiser for the rugby club. And on Sunday, more often than you would expect, it is a christening lunch, with a long table down the middle and sandwiches under cling film.

Gwilym comes to all of it.

He doesn’t dance. He has been standing at the end of the salsa class for eleven years without once stepping onto the floor. He doesn’t play bingo, although he’ll hold somebody’s card while she goes outside for a cigarette. He doesn’t like metal, and says so, cheerfully, to the bands, who like him anyway. He isn’t related to a single one of the babies.

What he does is know things. He knows which of the two doors sticks in wet weather. He knows that the woman who runs the raffle has a daughter studying medicine in Cardiff, and he asks about her, and he remembers the answer from the last time he asked. He knows the barman’s shifts better than the barman’s mother does. He has been coming since the year the carpet was blue, which nobody under fifty remembers.

Ask him why and he’ll tell you he likes the room. That is true, and it isn’t the answer.

Last Sunday, at a christening for a baby whose parents he had never met, a woman in her thirties stopped beside his chair and said she remembered him from her nan’s eightieth, in this room, nine years ago. He remembered it too. He remembered that the cake had the wrong name on it, and that nobody ever told her nan.

That is what he comes for. Gwilym doesn’t have to telephone anybody, or arrange anything, or ask whether it would be all right to call round on a Thursday. He sits in the same room often enough, and sooner or later every person he has ever known walks in through that door with a plate in their hand.

The room changes six nights a week. He is the one thing in it that doesn’t.