by Lloyd Jones
A note on funerals: The Betsileo men of Madagascar fight with bulls and drink themselves unconscious while waiting for the burial ceremony; they cover their faces with shroud-cloths and engage in orgiastic and incestuous sex. ‘I am drunk! I am animal!’ they cry. Even sisters are not respected.
All the usual rituals of the high church were observed at Mr Cassini’s funeral because he loved drama and respected history: a cowled cleric walked slowly before his coffin as it was carried through the town, with the church bell tolling its sad homage. All the pallbearers were right-handed, as Mr Cassini had instructed in his magnum opus, The Dexter Propensity. The priest was chanting, In my Father’s house are many mansions: if it were not so, I would have told you. I go to prepare a place for you.
The priest’s voice was dramatic and sonorous; it was a fine piece of theatre as the bell clanged mournfully above on its rusty spindle. PC 66 thought of Mr Cassini in God’s mansions. He would have found a room for his own use by now. Would it have dummies sitting in it already, all of them sitting quietly like the dummies in Mr Cassini’s front room?
His exact wishes were followed respectfully. All the children were given lachrymatories to collect their tears, and there was a large crowd of hired mourners. The ashes were put in an urn or ossuary, which Mr Cassini had thrown and fired himself, and this was placed in his riverside grave. After the capstone was hoicked into place by the strongmen of the village, sweating and crushing their fingers in a torrent of swear words, a mound of earth was raised over it so that it resembled a massive molehill. Burnt with him as requested, in the coffin, was a description of Branwen’s death from a broken heart in the Mabinogi, plus Mr Cassini’s own annotated copy of The Dexter Propensity, and the maps he had made of his children’s bodies (front and back) on graph paper, noting all their scars, birthmarks and blemishes.
Because Mr Cassini had himself been a funeral photographer, PC 66 took a formal picture of all those present, since they wanted to follow his instructions to the letter. PC 66 used Mr Cassini’s own box camera and tripod, and he asked everyone – just as Mr Cassini did – to strike a pose and look away from the camera, as if following a bird in the sky. Afterwards the crowd dispersed, some surrounding the embers of the funeral pyre, others stalking off to the Blue Angel where they became tremendously drunk. The wind howled that afternoon and the entire town closed down. The tallest oak in the long avenue of trees between the Blue Angel and the docks was ripped out of the ground, creating a strange visual effect, as though a tooth had been yanked out by a kid, leaving an unaccustomed gap in a normally fulsome smile. This breach in the line became known as Cassini’s Revenge. When the woodsmen cleared the tree and sawed off its stump, to tidy it, they found an odd kink in one of the age-rings. Dendrologists later matched the kink to a year of very odd events in the locality; and strangely enough, Mr Cassini had arrived during that very same year.
PC 66’s version of events, recorded in his black notebooks: The shops had shut and drawn down their blinds; the vegetable store had covered its produce with paper and locked up, and even the newsagents had closed early. The bookshop closed altogether, for good, since Mr Cassini had sustained it for years by buying books with previous owners’ addresses in them and sending them back to the same address, with a letter, even though a hundred years might have elapsed since the address had been written down; in some cases the houses had been demolished. His actions brought results occasionally: some highly unusual people walked into town looking for him. He made them stand in his darkened front room among the mannequins and he questioned them about their lives. Some of them stayed for a day or two, intrigued by his mesmerising presence; three of them stayed for good and accompanied him to the shoreline daily, waiting for him to dispense his legendary wisdom.
Rainwater poured down the hill past the Blue Angel and formed a swirling, bubbling trap by the back door. The tempest blanked us out and tried to wash us away; it rattled our doors and shook our windows; it flicked our ears and noses. It bullied us – it ripped our clothes and stung our faces with a wet-nettle wind which yowled through the eaves and screamed in the trees. Every hallway was cold and damp, miserable with muddy footprints in soggy newspapers strewn on the floor; everywhere I saw stinking, steaming dogs and runny noses, crying children and irritable old people. Mr Cassini would have been delighted. He loved regions of sorrow and doleful shades, whether human or geographical. To make matters worse, a car accident on the eastern headland blocked the road, preventing anyone from leaving the town. There was a wake at Mr Cassini’s house, which is called Mortlake, and I wore my uniform still, with my helmet held under my left arm, though I was wet through like everyone else. I will describe his house to you. It is the custom in this town to paint the sea-facing houses in a host of pastel colours, alternating sky blues and daffodil yellows, or blushing pinks and mineral greens, and Mr Cassini had also given his house a hue – a strong matt red to ward off evil spirits (which is why his everyday overalls were splashed with red paint, giving him the appearance of a murderer who had gone on the rampage). I will tell you now, to put you in the know, since I hate silly little secrets, that his nickname was Blue Murder, partly because of the splashes of red on his navy blue overalls, and partly because of his notorious temper. But he was completely colour-blind himself. His children were obliged to sit in his darkened front room almost every day, describing colours to him, even if it was sunny outside and they wanted to play. I can hear their little voices, reciting:
Jack the Ripper’s letters – written in red…
His pig was called Golly. She was a fat saddleback sow who was fed first every mealtime, even before the children, and therefore loved her master very much and her little piggy eyes followed him everywhere. She had enormous strength and I treated her with great respect.
So the outside of his house is red, with small windows (many of them broken, with bits of cardboard covering the holes) and a slate roof with moss growing on it. The front door is of heavy oak with two solid black hinges and a big black doorknob in the shape of a pig’s head with a ring through its nose. Mr Cassini hoped it would answer every question put to it, like Roger Bacon’s brazen head, but it never did. However it makes a very loud clang, which is answered by a rare polysyllabic echo in the gable of the Blue Angel – a mere seven doors away. The front doorstep is very old and has a foot-worn groove in it; this was kept sparkling clean by Mrs Cassini when she was with us, but now it is dirty and scruffy, with bits of rubbish lodged in the cracks.
When you enter, there is a small, gloomy hallway with a floor of red quarry tiles, cracked and uneven; it always smells of boiled cabbage. The stairs are carpeted with a worn and frayed green runner which Mr Cassini stole from an empty house on the edge of town. On the bottom step there is a big orange stain where he left a piece of red cheese, half-chewed, while he was putting up a picture: he trod this cheese into the carpet as he walked backwards up the stairs with the picture in his hands, trying to find the right spot for it on the wall. It is a large black and white engraving – called The Frown – and it shows some little children sitting on a low bench facing you. It has the words
Full well the busy whisper circling round
Conveyed the dismal tidings when he frowned.
One of the boys has a dunce’s cap and another has a handkerchief knotted around his head. A little girl, smaller than the rest, is obviously very tired, rubbing her eyes. Each child is trying to study a book, and the frown they’re so afraid of is clearly coming from their schoolmaster. It’s quite a big picture, and I like it. Mr Cassini left it to me, so it is mine now, and it will look dandy on the wall of the police station.
The rain stopped, the sky cleared at six o’clock or thereabouts. I have been looking at the waves and feeling sad, because Mr Cassini loved the shore. He said that Britain had a Count of the Shore once. Mr Cassini spent a lot of time down there. He said it was the place to wait for wisdom and knowledge. There is a ghost down there, a little girl who runs from e
ast to west in the sea mists: people can hear her laughing at first, and then she cries in the marshes. I used to play football with Mr Cassini on the sands with me in goal, between two pullovers. He used to cheat because I never got to take any shots but I didn’t mind. Then we’d go off together to beachcomb and to study all the living things, and we collected many shells which I have on my windowsill in the big room where the public come to see me at the police station. I can name them all – scallop, limpet, periwinkle, wentletrap, dog whelk, nautilus, baby ear, Venus comb, giant false triton, and so on…
Being with Mr Cassini was fun. When the birds swirled around us and the sand was soft under my feet, they were the happiest times. Out there in Little Bay, him sitting on his big rock and me sitting on my little rock next to him, singing The Teddy Bears’ Picnic, making him laugh. I never met anyone, man dog or child, who doesn’t enjoy messing around on the beach. I used to fly my kite and Mr Cassini would let me bury him in sand if he was in a good mood. Some people said, spitefully, that when I was with Mr Cassini I was like a dog’s leg, shaking involuntarily when the beast’s belly was being scratched. I think that was cruel, don’t you?
The fountain: Late in the evening, after the funeral, a new fountain broke out near the eastern headland; its pure waters poured along the hollow of the valley, towards the sea. PC 66 went to see it; he sat down on the grass and marvelled at it. As he sat there a rainbow formed above him and a lone figure approached him, dressed in shimmering blue. PC 66 recognised him immediately as the second rainbow messenger, who sat down and also expressed admiration for the new flow of water.
‘How unfortunate that Mr Cassini is dead,’ said the messenger. ‘Anyone who drinks freely and bathes his temples in this fountain will be made whole again, sane and intact with his reason restored.’
After a while he turned to PC 66 and offered him a gift – a smooth, round object, the pale pink obsidian stone used by Dr John Dee to summon angels, before the conman Edward Kelley ruined everything with his naked spirit Madimi.
‘Everything will change soon, when the snow comes,’ said the messenger.
PC 66 nodded and thanked him before he departed swiftly through the trees.
Extracts from PC 66’s black notebooks: Why did Mr Cassini have mannequins sitting around the big table in his front room, with the curtains drawn and the dust gathering? Though God knows where the dust came from, because Mr Cassini kept that room locked at all times, and even I, his very best friend, got to see it only twice. There were long-dead flies caught in shoals in the cobweb-nets which hung in every window. It smelt musty and damp, a bit spooky too. Mr Cassini liked it that way. He was crazy, I guess.
No cockle-gathering today. This is the oldest trade around here, and Mr Cassini made a big study of it; he wrote a paper for the university and they made a big fuss of him, until they discovered that his essay was a straight crib from a big cockle-toff at Swansea University, who knew more about cockles than he knew about his wife’s knickers. That’s what Mr Cassini said.
You want to know what it’s like, this town of ours – where everyone is either possessed or dispossessed? Let’s go to the top of the church tower, where the jackdaws congregate under the squeaky bell. If we look straight out to sea we can see all around us – but only sometimes, because we live on the edge of light here, in a region of near-constant mists. Perhaps we will see the soldiers – a state of emergency has been in force for some time now, but we’ve got used to it. When night darkens the streets we all stay indoors. Offshore from the marshes lies the island, low in the water, and it makes me think of an alligator lurking there, about to snaffle a passing boat. We can have a fine time up here watching the island move in and out of the winter mists, or sinking suddenly in a squall. Sometimes it lies as still as a sleeping slug on a glass table in summer. We can listen out for the great bell on the eastern tip, which frightens children in the night because it’s being rung by the Bwci-bo, sent to punish all naughty kiddie-winks; and we can watch the immense beam of the lighthouse (spurned by ships, which have fallen madly in love with satellites and follow them lamb-like, everywhere) as it searches out thieves and adulterers tip-toeing around the bedrooms of the town.
‘That lighthouse,’ said Mr Cassini one evening in the twilight, sitting on his throne-rock in Little Bay, cleaning his nails with a razor shell, ‘reminds me of a kid lying on his back, playing with a torch like I did when I was a kid. Ever do that boy?’
‘Yes sir.’
‘One of them torches with green and red filters, I shone it up at the stars because the teacher told us that the light would reach the end of the universe, and I did it for hours hoping little green men would come to take my ma and pa away.’
‘Never did that.’
‘Did you have a torch?’
‘Yes sir.’
‘What the hell did you do with it then?’
‘Pretended I was a spy. Sent Morse Code signals to the ships.’
‘No kidding…’
‘No sir.’
In the bell-tower above the slate roof-pattern, a pattern which all the little green men have in their space atlases so they can identify Wales in the how to recognise countries from above section, I can also see a massive headland, glowering above the water, falling down steeply into the sea. The top has been sliced off by the quarrymen and I wait for a big spoon to come out of the sky and dip into its yolk.
Between the headland and the town there is a magnificent crescent beach called Big Bay. It ends at the mouth of the river, down below us at the foot of the town, where there’s a small but busy port decked with brightly-painted boats, and nets hung out to dry on the quayside. A small blue fishing boat is leaving the harbour, I can see smoke coming from its exhaust. On the other side of the river, to our left, there’s another bay, much smaller but also perfectly formed, covered in shells of all shapes and sizes. This is Little Bay. Then there is a hundred-yard length of rock-pools, ideal for children to play around in, and then there’s a long walk along the edge of a marsh, before you come to a matching headland which is almost a replica of the one on the other side of us. Visitors – when they came, before the troubles – generally used Big Bay, whilst local children and the cockle and mussel gatherers, and waifs and strays, use Little Bay. Last summer a young porpoise was found washed up in Little Bay and the children (and me!) ran from the sea in relays with buckets of water to keep it moist, but it died before we could get it back in the water. Mr Cassini took it away with the harbourmaster’s tractor and trailer and dumped it in the marshlands. Mr Cassini had great big muscles, as big as rats, moving up and down his arms. He also had a very big conk.
Seven descriptions of Mr Cassini’s nose:
Bogey warehouse
Double-barrelled snotgun
Mank tank
Slime against humanity
Chute to kill
Finger buffet
Pick ’n’ mix.
‘Shanti Shanti, Dahat Dahat...’
Mr Cassini was walking around a lump of clay, and he was chanting.
I remember it all like it was yesterday, the two of us in a quiet nook upriver, where the Afon Ddu calms down in a black pool, a witch’s cauldron topped with ghastly froth. There is a bank of bluish-white clay in that spot, cold as a corpse, and Mr Cassini had taken me there one winter’s afternoon, with a bottle of whisky, some old clothes and an axe. He lopped branches from an alder and set to work.
‘What are we doing sir?’ I asked, looking at the water lapping around my regulation police issue boots, size 14, polished to perfection (I like to see the sky reflected in them) but smudged now with clay.
‘A golem.’
‘A golem?’
‘Yes boy, a golem.’
I searched my mind for the meaning of that word, and it came back to me from somewhere, eventually. I had come across it in that terrifying book he’d made me read, all about Templars and Masons and Rosicrucians… the cabbala, gnostics, alchemy, underground rooms, elixirs. I
t nearly sent me crazy, I felt funny in the head for weeks afterwards. There was another book he’d made me read, about a Rabbi Loew who’d moulded a man of clay – a golem – and walked around it seven times chanting Shanti Shanti Dahat Dahat...
It came to life, and delivered the Jews of Prague from evil. But Mr Cassini wasn’t Jewish. I asked him why he was making a golem. It was then that he mentioned the name of John Dee, who was a master of the dark arts. Mr Cassini was fascinated by magic but he wasn’t very good at it – he spent years trying to get colourful handkerchiefs to stream out of his pockets but he never got it right and afterwards he was in a bad temper every time.
A note on Dr John Dee: His amazing career started while he was a student at Cambridge, with a fantastical stage effect: an actor was carried upwards on the back of a great beetle, up to ‘heaven’ during a performance of Peace by Aristophanes; the startled audience was convinced that Dee had magical powers. In Elizabethan times, having a reputation as a magician and a necromancer was a short cut to the gallows. Dr Dee survived, but only just. Star Chamber chewed on him and spat him out. He set Elizabeth I’s coronation date, and he was called to the court to reassure her when a comet appeared, inexplicably, in the sky. He coined the word Britannia and he talked to angels. He was an alchemist, a cabalist, a crystallomancer; he was a world authority on the occult and mathematics and he put a hex on the Spanish Armada, claiming responsibility for the bad weather which blew the Spaniards off course.
When he lectured at the Sorbonne, students climbed the outside walls to hear him through the windows. He believed that numbers could lead to complete understanding; he emphasised the straight line and the circle, the sun, the planets and the zodiac. When asked to reform the calendar he suggested taking away 11 days from the year, and this was indeed adopted – nearly 200 years later. He had the largest personal library in Britain, which included Arabian books on astrology. But while he was on one of his trips abroad his library was attacked by a mob and set on fire, because they thought he was malevolent. Five hundred books were destroyed, including rare old manuscripts. But Dr Dee worked on.