Mr Cassini

by Lloyd Jones

  Yes I have.

  Is it a fair representation of the case?

  It is.

  Does it shed any light on Mr Cassini’s arrival in this part of the world?

  What exactly do you mean?

  Is it not true that Miss Charlesworth had two chauffeurs in her employ when she lived in this region?

  I believe so.

  One of them was called Albert Watts, I believe, and the other was called Mr Cassini. Is that true?

  That is what I’ve been told. Mr Cassini revealed to me one day that his father had been one of the chauffeurs who had accompanied Lady Violet, I mean Miss Charlesworth, to Wales. Mr Cassini senior fell in love with the region. When he lost his employment with Lady Violet he decided to stay, and got a job as a bread van driver.

  I have no further questions for the present.

  Scene 4 – at the police station again

  PC 66 gave up his daydream and turned to his guest. He offered him another drink, but the man refused. He had some urgent business in hand. He was there merely to remind PC 66 of their conversation the previous evening. But PC 66 would never forget that conversation, as long as he lived, since he’d made a promise which weighed on him as heavily as an anvil tied to his neck. Mr Cassini departed and PC 66 turned to the window again. The mist was clearing and, in the distance, he could see faint masses looming to the east and west, great haggard promontories which glowered over the two crescent bays down below him. It was on one of these jutting headlands that Violet Charlesworth had feigned her own death. Those headlands were dangerous to women. In 1631 a gentleman called Sir John Bramston had journeyed over one of the passes in the company of a lady. She became so frightened she had to be taken off her horse and led backwards along the steepest part of the track. There had been many accidents. In 1762 a rector, with a midwife behind him, had fallen with his horse down the steepest part of the cliff. The midwife and the horse were killed. The rector survived, rescued his saddle, and marched off exulting at his preservation.

  Scene 5 – PC 66’s first deposition

  I am a policeman and this is my beat. I live in fantastical, dangerous times. Only a handful of the older townspeople know my real name. Everyone, however, knows my number, which is 66. Almost everyone calls me PC 66, but a few of the scumboys call me PC 99, referring to a notorious incident when I was held upside-down by one of them and subjected to various demeaning acts. They will be punished in the great courtroom in the sky.

  Scene 6 – the rainbow messengers

  At this point a rainbow appeared and PC 66 was visited by seven mental apparitions, each of them bearing a message…

  As PC 66 was about to turn away from the window a rainbow began to form down below him, bridging the river which divided Big Bay from Little Bay. He watched it take shape against the intangible sea. The colours clarified, then burst into their full glory. He was amazed and touched by the rainbow’s beauty as it flickered into life, emblazoning a world of insipid, washed-out nothingness. As he stood there, watching, the colours seemed to beam into his brain, activating a strange sequence of thoughts – as if the seven colours had triggered seven synaptic messengers who came dashing towards him along the runnels of his mind, all bearing messages. As each of them approached him he felt as though they were sticking Post-it notes to his forehead, one by one. This is what they said to him:

  First messenger: Listen to me PC 66: when the past is ready to be revisited you must be ready to come in the beat of a single pulse. And today is the day. My friend, listen to me well. So that this story can be told in a satisfactory way we have been allocated:

  Seven days, or the duration of fourteen tides.

  Second messenger: We are required to employ the following symbols:

  A hill

  A stone

  A palace

  A seat

  A tree

  A well

  A fire.

  Third messenger: We are granted the following accoutrements:

  The uniform of a serving police officer

  A police station

  A book entitled The Dexter Propensity

  A book entitled Water-Divining in the Foothills of Paradise

  Twelve mannequins

  A car

  An onion.

  Fourth messenger: We are granted the presence, real or imagined, of the following:

  The astrologer, alchemist and magician John Dee

  The Wizards of Cwrt-y-Cadno

  The Caerleon writer Arthur Machen and his

  story The White People

  Four Welsh eccentrics meeting on the summit of

  Pumlumon Arwystli as they cross Wales in four

  different directions

  Merlin – stricken by madness

  The psychoanalyst and writer Adam Phillips from

  Cardiff

  Freud’s biographer, Ernest Jones from the Gower,

  whose sister died laughing.

  Fifth messenger: Fortune will smile on us if we include:

  Four apple trees and four pigs

  Four inundations

  Four tears which change the course of someone’s

  life

  Seven descriptions of Mr Cassini’s nose

  Seven descriptions of Mr Cassini’s eyes

  Seven descriptions of Mr Cassini’s ears

  Seven descriptions of Mr Cassini’s mouth.

  Sixth messenger: We will be required to mention:

  Four battlegrounds or forests in Scotland, Ireland,

  Wales and England

  Four motorway service stations or cafes

  A reputable psychiatrist

  Big Bay

  Little Bay

  A football field

  The island in the centre of the lake known as

  Llyn-y-Dywarchen near Beddgelert.

  Seventh messenger: The tale must be told by two people. You, PC 66, will recount the story as the tide comes in and Duxie, the celebrated former captain of the Welsh football team, will recite the story as the tide goes out. Do you understand?

  Did he understand? Of course he didn’t understand. PC 66 stuttered a few words, wanting clarification, but the messengers moved away from him swiftly as soon as the seventh had finished speaking. He shouted WAIT… but they’d gone. As far as he knew they were already running other errands in the hot blancmange of his brain, even as he spoke. He hoped they hadn’t been put to death, as messengers so often were. In an ideal world they might have been allowed to spend a few hours with him, chatting around a table, poring over maps, looking at relevant photographs. But they were clearly agitated; they wanted to impart their messages and be off. PC 66 felt rather vulnerable. Seven messengers had assailed his mind with a barrage of strange commands.

  Scene 7 – a strange incident involving PC 66 and one of the rainbow messengers. Shortly after the seventh messenger departed, PC 66 followed him and dropped him with a standard tackle somewhere deep inside his own cerebellum. This is PC 66’s description of the arrest, recorded in his regulation police notebook:

  Both of us still panting, I pushed him up against the side of a filthy, graffiti-strewn underpass (it was as commonplace as any piss-stained underpass in any brain). I held him against the concrete, hard, but he seemed strangely unperturbed as he waited for my next move. I gained the impression that he’d suffered this sort of indignity many times before. I looked into a finely creased, weather-beaten face, which was as shiny as an apple skin. His cheeks were healthy and ruddy, with tiny deltas of capillaries near the surface. I was reminded of a farmer in the Hiraethog Moors, warming himself by the fire after rescuing a sheep from the snowdrifts. His eyes were sharp and grey under tightly-curled, close-cropped hair greying at the temples. I put him at roughly my age, about forty. About my size too. With a deep pang in my heart, I realised that his clothes were quite exceptional, and from another age. His left shoulder, nearest my nose, smelt of moss and cowslips. He saw my wonderment, and looked down proudly at his brocaded silk tunic, and
at the buskins on his feet, made of new cordwain with buckles of gold on the instep to fasten them.

  He regarded me, solemnly, as if awaiting a response.

  I was speechless.

  ‘You don’t recognise me, do you?’

  I had absolutely no idea who he was. A figment? Someone I’d put behind bars, many years ago?

  ‘I’m from The Lady of the Fountain,’ he said proudly. ‘Medieval romance. Remember reading it?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘You were still young – only nineteen. Sunday morning, very early. Very depressed. Sian Roberts had just run off with a rugby player.’

  I barely remembered her, never mind The Lady of the Fountain.

  He put his hand on my shoulder, gently.

  ‘Let us go from here,’ he said. ‘No man should loiter in a place like this.’

  And side by side, amiably, we walked from that filthy hole and sought out a springy green bank in a glade where we lay on our backs in total silence for quite some time, looking into the treetops and tracing a troupe of mistle thrushes as they tadpoled a clear blue sky. I relaxed and almost forgot we were living in a state of emergency. After a while the realisation crept up on me that I recognised the glade we lay in – it was a place from my childhood.

  ‘The underpass in your cerebellum,’ said the seventh messenger in a lazy, sleepy voice. ‘You do realise that I’ll have to report it?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘It’s a particularly disgusting underpass – I feel dirty all over.’

  ‘Don’t blame me – I didn’t put it there. I just happened to walk through it one day, in Llandudno Junction as it happens.’

  Rolling over, he cupped a flower to his nose and sniffed it expressively.

  ‘I would really like to get rid of it,’ I said. ‘Llandudno Junction isn’t the sort of place you’re anxious to remember.’

  He released the flower and made tutting noises.

  ‘I certainly can’t get it wiped from your memory, but I will ask for it to be dimmed. Perhaps you’ll remember it occasionally, every ten years or so. That would be an improvement, wouldn’t it?’

  I made appreciative noises, and closed my eyes so that I could better enjoy the wavering drone of a bee rifling the drawers of a nearby foxglove.

  ‘A strange phenomenon,’ he said enigmatically by my side. ‘A dirty stinky underpass in your brain. Stuck inside there for ever.’

  I felt an urge to smell him again, so I rolled over onto my left side and put my face close to his tunic. Woven into that brocade were old sounds too: an orchestra of reedy sadness under the immense shadow of a greenwood tree – a shawm, a viol, a psaltery and a rebeck intoning a forgotten hymn to Cernunnos, lord of nature; in the strains of that music I saw a green sea of baby bracken springing in graceful swans’ necks from the acrid belly of the soil, warming on a spring morning long ago.

  The seventh messenger snapped his fingers, startling me.

  ‘Of course,’ he said, propping himself on his right elbow and gazing at me. His face was dappled with leaf shadows, reminding me of the flecks which speckled his own irises.

  ‘The first messenger withheld some information which might interest you.’

  ‘Yes?’

  He chewed on a stem of grass, ruminatively.

  ‘I’ll make a deal with you,’ he said, finally.

  ‘Pardon?’

  ‘Are you interested in doing a trade-off?’

  Quite unused to being visited by seven messengers in one day, and slightly wary by now, I said:

  ‘Depends.’

  He guffawed. ‘Once a policeman…’

  ‘It’s nothing to do with that.’

  ‘Hah! So why be so suspicious?’

  I claimed my right to silence, and he fell onto his back again.

  ‘It’s only a little favour I’m asking,’ he said. ‘And you’ll get a rather valuable snippet of information in return. How about it?’

  Since I was already caught up in a mad hatter’s tea party, I went along with it all.

  He continued: ‘Only I was up in one of the more remote regions of your brain yesterday, just bowling along, minding my own business, when I thought of a neat little metaphor – which I’d like you to use. You’re always going on about water, anyway, so it’s quite relevant.’

  ‘Is that all you’re asking for?’

  ‘It means quite a lot to me, as a matter of fact.’

  I told him to spit it out.

  ‘I was thinking about waves,’ he said, ‘and I realised that they remind me of the roar inside your body when all those microscopic beads of pleasure swarm to the surface of your skin during a love-storm.’

  ‘Old hat,’ I said wearily. ‘Jaded old metaphors, worn away with use. Next you’ll be comparing raindrops to the beads of sweat on my father’s skin in the tiny moment he made me…’

  He looked hurt.

  ‘All right then. I’ll try again. How about waves as… the spray-burst tang of an after-dinner mint, a white torrent spilling from the sea’s dark, chocolate promise.’

  ‘Christ,’ I said, ‘you sound like a wine bar hack who’s spent all his life working for an advertising agency.’

  ‘You’re bloody hard to please today, aren’t you?’

  ‘Go on,’ I said. ‘How about waves as pianola keys played by a ghostly pair of hands or an old man’s false teeth flapping inside the sea’s foam-crazed mouth.’

  He fell silent, and I fell to musing over his ridiculous symbols, and all those images presented to me by the seven messengers – outmoded, old-fashioned…

  I felt depressed, suddenly, by the seven messengers and their archaic symbols. I’m a product of the twentieth century; surely the messengers could have come up with something newer, more scientific, more challenging.

  ‘What’s with all this antiquated stuff you’ve given me?’ I asked querulously. ‘Can’t we be more modern? Why isn’t there a motherboard or an interface in there?’

  He shrugged his shoulders.

  ‘Search me. I’m only the messenger. You’ll have to have a word with your brain about that.’

  So we left it at that. As he said, there was no point talking to him about it. But I was puzzled, and a bit angry. I felt more up-to-date than wells and rainbows and seven times bloody seven. I skulked, broodily, in a plantation of dark thoughts.

  ‘You’ve forgotten already, haven’t you,’ he said.

  Forgotten what?’

  ‘The deal we made – I have to tell you something about the first messenger, remember?’

  ‘God yes,’ I cried, clapping my hand to my head melodramatically.

  ‘There’s no need to be sarcastic.’

  ‘Sorry.’

  I urged him, politely, to continue.

  ‘Every seventh wave is larger than the others. And the fourteenth tide is the highest tide of all. Be careful that day. You must leave the seashore and head inland. Do you understand me?’

  Understand him? Of course I didn’t understand him.

  ‘I understand you perfectly,’ I said.

  When I awoke the seventh messenger had gone and I was back in my own little bed. My first thoughts were of Lady Violet’s car, see-sawing perilously on a cliff-edge, high above the sea-rocks, and I sat up quickly. Then I remembered that all this had happened in my mind. Next, I remembered my idyll in the glade with the seventh messenger.

  A coldness came over me, and I buried myself in the bedclothes again. I felt rather sad.

  The end of the dream.

  3

  THE TIDE GOES OUT

  The journey to Dumbarton Rock

  It’s a February morning in Wales. The ground is white with hoar frost and the air is vestry-cold. Tinged with early morning red, the broken clouds which fill the sky are the sort of crimson-grey cobbles seen by a king moments before a Parisian guillotine sliced off his head. They’re menacing – they’re clouds with altitude.

  February 2, marking the old pagan sabbat of Imbolc, has just pass
ed and an embryonic spring is stirring in the Earth’s womb. February 2 is also Groundhog Day; more importantly, it’s the day after Charlie Bucket’s life-changing trip to the chocolate factory. The milky air of winter smokes around us and we are drugged bees in a hive.

  I’m on the road with Olly and we’re sharing dreams. Both of us have a monster running around in our night brains – a fenodyree, a fetch, a fachan or a sluagh… one of the unforgiving dead – a man-beast who occupies our minds when we’ve finally fallen asleep in chairs and the TV gleam is moonlight, ghostly and white… when the night switchboards of the brain hum and glow.

  That was one helluva weird dream she says after I’ve introduced her to Mr Cassini and PC 66. You don’t get much weirder than that. A guilty copper, a huge man in a cape, a vanishing lady, seven rainbow messengers… full marks to you, she says, ten out of ten. But she’s been taken over too, by Mr Cassini’s doppelganger.

  I have other dreams too – nagging dreams, insistent dreams. I’m needed somewhere. There are children in the background, I hear their voices. They’re my own children and I’m torn in two; I want to go to them, but part of me wants to stay in the dream.

  Anyway, back to the present, back to reality. The two of us are on the road and we’ve run out of petrol. As I walk towards the orange emergency telephone, I have time to tell you a little about myself.

  I am Duxie, once the doyen of Welsh footballers and captain of the national team. Fallen into disrepute now. Tarnished image. News of the World, as usual. The sex, yes, I’ll admit to that – but the drugs, no way. Looking back, I could have been many things, but, like most people, I took the easy route. In my case, the physical route. In the Cup Final between body and soul we all know which side usually wins.

  I became a professional footballer.

  High point: Captain of Wales. Low point: the final year, as player-manager of Carmarthen Town in the League of Wales. I wrote a book about it – you may have come across it: Tales for Wales.

  He strings sentences together quite professionally – what a pity his team never managed to string any passes together – Western Mail.

  Wales’ answer to Thierry Henri: the only footballer in Wales who can think without dribbling – The Sun.

  I’ve retired now, but I’m still good on my feet. I play in goal for a local pub in the Sunday League – a very enjoyable black joke, and it keeps me in shape. Which is why I break into a jog on my way to the emergency telephone. I try to keep fit – it’s something that stays with you: it’s a way of life for ever. You see ex-Army blokes and you know straight away, they’re still immaculate. Skies and windows, another world shining in their shiny shoes.