In a small Welsh village in the late 1980s, B is swept up in village bonhomie when M buys a Christmas round for everyone in the pub. M has taken over his late father’s hardware shop where the hard times of the miners’ strike and the ensuing unemployment were acknowledged with credit. He and B exchange a look and a chat, arranging to meet on New Year’s Eve. They carefully find their way to a relationship that becomes love, B working in M's shop and living in the makeshift bedsitter above next to M’s room. Downstairs they continue their performance of staff and shopkeeper, stifling their horror at the screaming ‘gay plague’ tabloid headlines announcing HIV/AIDS, quoted in tones of disgust by customers. Upstairs they’ve discovered a passion and love which feels like home.
Shapland’s novella is delivered in a series of short chapters arranged in brief paragraphs, full of evocative images vividly summoning up the Welsh landscape. The relationship between B and M is beautifully drawn, each of them terrified of exposure, careful to conceal a love that has taken them both by surprise, a happiness that can’t be shared with family. Their public days together are hedged around with self-restraint and a performance of straightness lest anyone guess their true relationship. Shapland captures how exhausting that must be, and how infuriating. It’s a striking piece of writing, beautiful and moving, brief but extraordinarily powerful.