Mr Vogel

by Lloyd Jones

  ‘St James the Greater,’ Waldo says. ‘Son of Zebedee and Salome, known for his quick temper and his vehemence. He was one of the sons of thunder. Killed by Herod but his body was miraculously transported to Spain. Big Daddy of the pilgrim saints. Made his name by bringing a boy who was unjustly hanged back to life. Good for street cred, bringing a kid back to life. He’d be pretty sure of a job with the social services.’

  I am dismissive. ‘No Christian icons for me, OK? Mine’s a pagan walk. I will hunt the comb and the mirror and the shears between the wild boar’s ears for Culhwch, or I’ll search for Mabon or Rhiannon.’

  Williams’s card shows a picture of Lourdes, and bears the message:

  Miracle of miracles! Getting married to Anwen – wedding in Wales (which brought us together) after she’s done the St David’s pilgrimage. Look forward to seeing you. John.

  ‘Just a bit sickening, don’t you think?’ I say. ‘All that bloody joy and well-being and I’m to blame.’

  Waldo admonishes me. ‘Don’t be such a sourpuss. Let them be happy.’

  They were flowing down the A55, Paddy stirring grumpily in the back. They heard a bottle-top being unscrewed, and a couple of splutters as Paddy coped with the sudden intake of raw alcohol.

  Gwydion explained everything to Mr Vogel. Whilst Dr Jackson slept for 24 hours Mr Vogel and his loyal band would dash around Wales, visiting as many pigtowns as possible. They were taking part in their own version of the story of Gwydion and Pryderi’s magic pigs in the Mabinogi. They would take pictures at each place and present them to Dr Jackson as proof that Mr Vogel had indeed walked right round Wales.

  They turned off at the Black Cat roundabout and headed for their first pigtown – Mochdre near Colwyn Bay. Waldo drove into the car park of a big double glazing factory and stopped the jalopy. The engine ticked as they sat in silence.

  Waldo lugged an old rucksack from the back, and an Ordnance Survey map.

  ‘What size feet are you?’ he asked Mr Vogel.

  ‘Five.’

  ‘Christ, I knew they were small, but I didn’t think they were that small. These are mine – size 11, but you won’t be wearing them for long, so don’t fret.’

  He took off Mr Vogel’s special Velcro-strapped shoes and quickly replaced them with his own jumbo walking boots. He jammed a walker’s hat on his head, a floppy broad-brimmed canvas hat which fluttered forlornly in the breeze, like an early, experimental aeroplane plunging off a church belfry. Waldo got out and opened the back doors; the piglet ran around in crazy zig-zags before he could catch it. There was a general melee as everyone got out of the van. Waldo tied the piglet to a length of rope, and Paddy rolled out into the road in a shower of straw. The scene was deteriorating into farce, and Mr Vogel saw a line of faces appearing in the windows of the factory, staring at them.

  Waldo helped him into the rucksack straps, then rammed the map into a prominent place between his puny chest and a strap. In his huge shoes and voluminous black trousers, Mr Vogel looked like Charlie Chaplin in Gold Rush. After lugging the piglet to the Mochdre road sign and tying it to a stanchion, Waldo arranged the scene so that Mr Vogel and the piglet both faced the camera, with the road sign behind them and a tolerable smile on both their faces. Mr Vogel joined in the spirit of things – he jutted his chest out, and placed his right leg forward in a manly and stirring pose, trying to look like Hillary about to unfurl his flag on the summit of Everest. By now a line of cars and lorries, fronted by a busload of people, had halted to look at their antics. Realising they had to be quick before the police were called, Gwydion took a picture of the scene and waited for it to emerge from the Polaroid. When it did, he gave a manic thumbs-up and ran to the pig, untied it, and swept it back into the van with a swift scooping movement. It was then that they realised that Paddy had lurched off in search of a pub. They passed a police car as they fled the scene, and a worrying period ensued as they searched for Paddy, who had unerringly found the only pub in the village, the Mountain View, and disappeared inside.

  They finally got away and settled down to a long drive to the English border; by lunchtime they were nosing along country lanes towards Llanrhaeadr-ym-mochnant, home of the country’s highest waterfall. As any self-respecting Welshman will know, this is one of the seven wonders of Wales: the ‘moch’ in its name is one of the pigs in this story, and our heroes’ antics deserve to go down in history as the eighth wonder. You will be troubled for only a short while longer with this last madcap journey around Wales, our mother country, sweetest of all the Earth’s dominions. We will pass over this higgledy-piggledy day, though we must reveal to you, in passing, that Paddy pretended to be a film director, preparing for a shoot, at the waterfall, and a tourist became so engrossed in events that she fell in the water and nearly drowned.

  Also, in yet another moment of confusion, they ended up on the Mochdre Industrial Estate in Newtown instead of the nearby village of Mochdre; Waldo turned this to his advantage however by buying a large tin of cut-price industrial paint stripper from Confederate Chemicals – he said it would be ideal for a project he had in mind. Also, when they reached Nant-y-Moch near Ponterwyd they somehow got caught up in the annual skyline fell race as the runners came home: when Paddy got out to jeer at the runners he forgot to close the door and the piglet escaped. It finished a very creditable third in the race and it made the front pages of most of the local newspapers. The Cambrian News showed a picture of the pig in Mr Vogel’s arms, with a yellow rosette pinned to Mr Vogel’s lapel, under the headline: ‘Well Done Del! Boy, what a shock as Trotter runs away with Olym-pig title’ and the Western Mail had a similar photograph under the headline ‘Mystery runner hogs the limelight’, whereas the Daily Post managed only a paragraph, headlined, ‘Rind-up of today’s sport’. An item on the television news showed Mr Vogel and the piglet surrounded by a horde of children on the finishing line chanting ‘Hoggy Hoggy Hoggy, Oink Oink Oink.’

  Finally, I must disclose that when they left their twelfth and final porcine destination the pig was briefly forgotten when they drove away and was nearly lost for ever.

  They arrived back at their home town as midnight approached, in an intoxicating medley of smells: pigshit, alcohol, sweat, hot engine oil and diesel fumes. They deposited the live pig in its normal abode, a farm on the outskirts (Waldo had useful friends everywhere), leaving it with a host of memories – its visit to the otherworld would be passed on from pig to pig unto the last vestiges of recorded time.

  The plastic pig was likewise returned to its normal home, the Blue Angel bookshop, and Mr Vogel, Gwydion and Paddy all managed to snatch some sleep in spare beds or on sofas in Waldo’s house.

  Mr Vogel went to bed with twelve fresh Polaroid snaps in his piggy bank.

  ‘THERE!’

  Mr Vogel was jabbing Dr Jackson in the chest.

  The doctor had woken up in one of the general wards, and the nurses had giggled when his wife arrived with a pair of silk pyjamas for him, monogrammed with the initials SJ.

  He felt very ill, as if he’d fallen into the pig-pen with Dorothy at the beginning of The Wizard of Oz, before her journey along the yellow brick road; in fact, he felt as if he’d been trampled by a whole herd of enraged pigs.

  ‘Believe me now?’ said Mr Vogel in a near-hysterical screech.

  Dr Jackson tried to focus on Mr Vogel’s face in the murk; he looked like a Munchkin, thought Dr Jackson, whose vision still hadn’t cleared properly. Dr Jackson looked ill. Somehow he’d lost a day: one minute he’d been talking to Mr Vogel, and the next he’d woken up in a hospital bed. It was baffling. They were doing tests.

  ‘That’ll teach you to doubt a Welshman,’ said Mr Vogel, who was still jabbing uncomfortably at Dr Jackson’s monogram. Twelve piggy Polaroid pictures were scattered on the bed, each showing Mr Vogel standing by a proud and happy piglet, beside twelve different versions of the Mochdre roadsign; Mr Vogel had tossed them onto the coverlet, dramatically, when he burst into the room. He was sitting, n
ow, on the side of Dr Jackson’s bed, his nose only a few inches from the doctor’s.

  ‘Proof,’ said Mr Vogel triumphantly, ‘if proof were ever needed, that the great walk around Wales was a FACT [he almost spat the word], an ACTUALITY, as REAL as... as...’

  Mr Vogel spluttered. He couldn’t think of a suitable comparison, and he was so worked up he could hardly control himself. Gwydion stood behind him, nodding. And behind Gwydion stood Waldo, also nodding, and behind him stood Paddy, also nodding, and behind them all, in the window, other faces could also be seen nodding.

  ‘Believe me now, you stupid Anglo-Saxon, you dreamer of steals?’ said Mr Vogel, getting his sentence horribly mangled. He was shaking.

  ‘What’s the ‘S’ for anyway,’ asked Gwydion behind him.

  Dr Jackson stared uncomprehendingly.

  ‘The ‘S’?’ he asked.

  ‘Yes, the ‘S’ in ‘SJ’ on your pyjamas.

  Dr Jackson was cornered; this was a very delicate topic – his father had also been a psychiatrist, and had wanted his son to follow in his footsteps.

  Gwydion saw the fear in his eyes, and twigged.

  ‘Sigmund, isn’t it?’ he cried triumphantly. ‘It’s bloody Sigmund, isn’t it?’

  Dr Jackson closed his eyes and wished them all away.

  He stuttered. ‘Yes, it is Sigmund, and yes, I do believe everything you’ve said, now please, please go.’ He shrank so far back in the pillows he almost disappeared.

  Mr Vogel got to his feet and prepared to leave, but he couldn’t go without one last parting shot. ‘So now you know, Dr Bigshot, what it’s like to be on the other end of a periscope,’ he gibbered, before turning away. ‘I mean stethoscope,’ he added weakly. There was an episode of pushing and shoving before they could all get out.

  Dr Jackson was very glad, and went back to sleep.

  Mr Vogel sat in Waldo’s van, which still smelt strongly of pig deposits. He was still cross, and he was having an imaginary conversation with Dr Jackson, in which he got his sentences right and defeated the doctor completely with incontestable arguments.

  ‘You can’t invent a past for yourself,’ the doctor was saying, dismissively.

  ‘I wouldn’t put a bet on that,’ answered Mr Vogel suavely. ‘That’s what everyone else does, all you so-called normal people. Even if you honestly believe you’re telling the truth you’re making most of it up to cover up your inadequacies or bad behaviour. You try getting a sensible version of a divorce – you’ll find two perfect people who married crazy psychopaths. Anyway, that’s what history is – a big jumble of facts and fables. Whole books written about Wales but you can hardly find any two authors who agree. So I’m going to do the same.’

  Gwydion had told him about Welsh poets of long ago who had apparently shown a great knack for prophecy – but they were merely fiddling the books. If the Welsh lost a battle, let’s call it Battle X, the poets would write a great poem, hide it in the back of a cupboard for a while, then ‘find’ it, pretending it had been written long ago in the past. They’d say: cripes, look what we have here, a poem predicting we would lose Battle X and get wiped out big style, but the poem says we’ll paste the pesky English in our next battle and live happily ever after.

  It was an early form of propaganda.

  Mr Vogel had discussed this with Gwydion.

  ‘Sometimes you’ve got to talk yourself up,’ he’d said to Mr Vogel, sitting by his side. ‘Give yourself some good publicity. Look at the Tudors – they were the biggest spin doctors of all time. What’s wrong with a bit of exaggeration? It’s one of the Celtic talents,’ said Gwydion. ‘And you’ve got them all.’

  ‘Anyway,’ said Mr Vogel, ‘our version of events is all true, with real people and real happenings, so it’s not a fiction. All we’ve done is fiddle about a bit with time and space. And the universe itself does that, so sod the lot of them. If the bloody universe can have wormholes then so can we. We’re just two charmed blue quarks acting strangely.’

  ‘Now I’ve one last favour to ask you,’ Mr Vogel said to Waldo later that morning, when they’d had some breakfast (for Paddy, that meant raiding Waldo’s drinks cabinet).

  ‘You’re always asking for one last favour, and I always give in,’ replied Waldo. ‘Must be because I like you. You’re completely off the wall, but the world wouldn’t be the same without Mr Vogel. Come on, what is it?’

  ‘Just take me back to the hospital, one last time. I need to see Anna.’

  ‘That’s going to be difficult – remember, you did a runner from the place.’

  ‘I know,’ said Mr Vogel. ‘But I really must see her – I’ve got something I want to give her.’

  The time had come. At last, Mr Vogel was ready to start a new chapter in his life.

  He felt hope rising slowly inside him like bubbles in a bottle of lemonade waiting to be opened at a summer picnic. The time had come for the dream to end and his adventure to begin. The world around him hummed with choices. Now he had an abundance of possible fates, not just one miserable option.

  After the initial shock of his admission he had felt quite at home in the psychiatric unit, when he knew they weren’t going to strap him to a frame or carve him up again. The ward was as busy as a factory, with people coming and going with amazing rapidity: sometimes, when he got up in the morning there were two or three new people, who had come like owls in the night.

  After a few weeks Mr Vogel felt like an elder statesman, and often he could be heard giving gentle advice to a new migrant. And then people began reappearing, and after a few days they would disappear again. Mostly they shadow-walked in silence, hunched and defensive. Some weeks there was hardly anyone he could talk to, because they were all in a parallel universe, which was quite frightening by the looks of it.

  The ward also had a silent host of characters visible only to the other patients. By comparing himself with those patients, Mr Vogel realised that he was quite well. He took to a lightweight walking stick, on which he proved to be quite nifty.

  He had stopped composing a grandiose alter ego for himself. When he first arrived on the ward people who commented on his limp might have been told, with studied insouciance: I picked it up during the last hundred miles of my walk around Wales.

  Mr Vogel had a fine eye for bathos and hyperbole, and he loved the attention. He basked in the wan limelight of his brief fame, knowing that the thudding dullness of normal life was an ever-present danger, and that a whole line of men in suits was waiting to stuff him behind an office desk and bury his soul under a pile of fatuous mission-statements.

  Nowadays, he told the truth.

  He had harrowed his past as a puzzled historian might try to unravel early Welsh poems of epic and heroic bravado. He was proud of his own mini-epic, his pocket Iliad. It was a part of him now. The future, he surmised, would need no major remodelling, only minor embellishment. He had spent a suitable period feasting and drinking and telling stories of epic adventures, as the Welsh warriors of Y Gododdin had done in the old Northern Britain before their famous but doomed mission to steal Catraeth from the enemy; now it was time for him to take his place in the quest.

  Mr Vogel washed and shaved. He flattened his hair as well as he could and buffed his shoes. His breakfast weighed rather heavily on his stomach, and he realised suddenly how nervous he was. He became irritable. His work had to be done before he could calm down.

  He really was very nervous. He wondered to himself: why, exactly, am I so shaky?

  It wasn’t the teddy – he knew that it was going from him, that it was finally and utterly part of his past; now was the time to put childish things aside, to stop replaying his childhood video, to make a new one – to create another life. Perhaps he was nervous about his impending rendezvous with Anna.

  Though doomed and childish, it had been the only love he had ever felt for a woman. He’d had feelings, certainly, but not feelings like everyone else, the sort that seemed to grow back instantly like shark’s teeth whe
n they’d been ripped out. He had seen how quickly love turned to hatred, and he feared deep emotions. He’d just wanted to be friends with everyone. Now he knew what love was like, and it pained him. He didn’t regret the experience, it was part of living, but now he wanted to put it back in a giant storeroom with all the other powder-kegs which had been rolled towards him down the dark alleyways of life.

  Waldo and Paddy took him there in the truck, to help him and to give him moral support. It was raining, and the wipers had broken down. The three of them sat outside the psychiatric unit, listening to the light patter of the rain, broken only by the noise of Paddy unscrewing his bottle and taking swigs.

  ‘You all right? You’re very quiet,’ said Waldo.

  ‘Yeh... fine. Just want this over with,’ said Mr Vogel.

  Rupert was still propped up on the windscreen in front of them. His ears had risen high in the air and the effect was slightly comical. Paddy got lyrical.

  ‘D’ya realise me boys, this is the last drop in the bottle, the final party in the pox clinic, we’re over and out, it’s time to sing goodbye to mission control, it’s a giant step for Mr Vogel, a small yawn for mankind. It’s the end of the affair, me little farticle.’ He roughed up Mr Vogel’s hair. ‘You’ve gone and done it now smelly-pants, you’ve got yourself in the papers, you’ve met a bint, and you’re finally getting rid of that manky bit of fur. Bout time too. You say your father gave it away? Silly bastard should have given you away the same time, would have saved us all a lot of trouble.’

  ‘Don’t push it,’ said Waldo. ‘Remember, he’s paid for your extravagant habits for quite a while.’

  ‘Yeah, paid for my finishing school – my bloody liver finishing school,’ cried Paddy. He lurched forward, grabbed the bear in front of him and flung it through the window in one movement.

  Waldo retrieved it. Rupert’s ears were damp and dusty, and his single eye looked sorrowfully at them.

  ‘You all done with this quest now Vogel?’ asked Paddy. ‘No more cripples, horses, travellers, damn silly notions, messages from Tasmania, letters from Amerikee. I’m up to here with it all. OK?’