by Lloyd Jones
I moved out of that flat eventually, before the dry rot sucked out all my juices. Got myself a nice gaff now, up at the top end of town, looking down on the football pitch as it happens. Sometimes, on Saturdays, I watch them playing from my bedroom window. I’m trying to get some qualifications, though I don’t know what for. Don’t know what I want to do, never did really. I just did what people wanted me to do, all my life, and you know what happens if you try to please – they soon have you running round like Maradonna on speed. Willing horse and all that.
I keep the place clean, I have a telly and all that sort of stuff. I listen to music a lot. I like to have books around. And of course I’ve got a lot of pictures. The most important – taking the Cup at Wembley – I keep tucked away in my computer room. People get the wrong idea if you stick something like that by the front door. I keep the medals locked away. I’ve got some nice memories on the walls: team pics, presentations, meeting some of my heroes – Pele, Cruyff, Rushie, Giggsy, even Maradonna – the man himself – at a nightclub in Rome.
Those pictures mean a lot to me, so I’m going to tell you about ap Llwyd again. Remember him? The loner who wrote Water-Divining in the Foothills of Paradise. His book seems to be regular bedtime reading for me these days.
Here’s a passage I read last night – in the middle of the night to be honest, because my sleep patterns are all over the place. As usual, ap Llwyd is in the café with his Italian buddy Stefano, and they’re having one of their animated conversations (I wonder, sometimes, just how much time ap Llwyd spent in those foothills of his).
Stefano was keyed up that night – more excited than I’d ever seen him before, swiping at the condensation on the window so that we could see the landmarks below. He pointed out the individual colours: red for the glow above the pithead wheel; orange for the long line of dwindling haloes around the lamp standards edging away from us along the main road, towards civilisation; green for the boat-lights, dim and diffused, in the harbour. He was going through one of his anarchist phases and he wore a black tee-shirt bearing a stark white message:
DON’T VOTE
SHOW THEM
YOU CARE
‘You seem excited tonight, Stefano,’ I remarked.
‘Do you think so?’ he replied. ‘È vero, I suppose I am a little on edge.’ As the condensation returned to the windowpane he traced a pattern among all the lights, which somehow resembled the outline of a bird in flight.
‘What a strange coincidence,’ he said, loudly enough to gain everyone’s attention in the café. They turned round and stared at him in unison, reminding me of startled cows in their stalls, white-eyed and steaming, waiting for the farmer to give them some winter feed.
‘Today this is not the only bird to be there – yet not there – caro amico.’
Stefano’s English was weak at times, so I asked him for a clarification.
‘The bird on the window – it is there, yet it is not there, si?’
‘Yes, what of it?’
‘Today I was looking at a famous painting which should have had a bird in it – but the bird wasn’t there.’
‘Yes? Go on,’ I said encouragingly.
‘This painting is by Gainsborough, and it is called Mr and Mrs Andrews.’
I knew the one; it shows a gentleman and his wife in the Suffolk countryside in about 1750 – he with a gun slung nonchalantly under his arm, she sitting on a rococo bench, in an azure blue dress, her hands held meekly in her lap.
‘Did you ever look at that picture?’ asked Stefano.
‘I’ve seen copies, yes.’
‘Did you ever look closely at her hands?’
‘No, I never did.’
‘You look next time. There’s nothing there, because this Gainsborough never finished the picture.’
‘And what’s that got to do with a bird?’
He chuckled and took a draught of coffee. He seemed calmer.
‘Well, there are two theories. Some say that Gainsborough meant to paint Mrs Andrews holding a child. Others say that Gainsborough meant to paint her holding a pheasant – but she wouldn’t hold it because it was dead. The bird was meant to be a symbol of her husband’s prowess with the gun. But she didn’t want any blood or guts anywhere near her, no thank you very much.’
‘And so there’s nothing there,’ I remarked. Warming to the subject, I told him a story about Cézanne: after 115 sittings for his portrait in 1899, the art dealer Ambroise Vollard noticed that two tiny patches on his right hand remained unpainted in the picture. Cézanne warned him that putting the wrong colour on either patch would ruin the painting, forcing him to start again from scratch. The two spots of bare canvas – hardly visible – were never covered.
‘Aha,’ my friend interjected, ‘so it was more important for Cézanne to be satisfied artistically than for him to finish his pictures completely.’
‘Seems so,’ I replied.
After a full minute’s silence he raised his eyes from his coffee mug and stared at me intently.
‘You may remember that some time last year, when you came to my home, you noticed something unusual.’
‘Yes, I have a clear memory of that day,’ I replied. ‘I had just returned from the foothills, and we were due to celebrate my discovery.’
What I had found was unique in the history of water-divining: seven interconnected wells, all yielding water of the very highest quality. I’d discovered they were connected by dropping a red dye into the first – only for it to colour the second, and the third to a lesser degree, and so on. In a similar fashion, the Greeks had used pine cones to track sinkholes from the mountains, through limestone channels, to coastland springs down below in the Gulf of Argos.
‘What did you remark on that day, when you visited my house?’
‘I commented on the fact that a very large picture in your vestibule had been turned to face the wall.’
‘Indeed. What you couldn’t know, since you did not visit every room, was that every single picture and photograph in my house had been turned to face the wall.’
‘And why did you do that?’
‘I thought you’d be interested,’ he said, clicking his fingers and ordering two more coffees with a simple rotation of his right forefinger over our empty mugs.
‘For one month of the year, every February, I turn all my pictures to the wall. You find that a strange thing to do?’
‘You can’t deny that it’s unusual…’
‘Yes, I admit it. But for that month, as I pass each picture, I try to remember the scene it portrays, the people it depicts. I try to remember all the details, and why I like each picture – why I have it on my wall. And do you know why?’
‘No idea, my friend.’
‘Because I realised something one day. I realised that if I was forced to look at any of my pictures every single day, for hour after hour, I would soon be sick to death of them. In fact, a major part of my enjoyment was not being in the room for long periods, and not being able to see the picture for days on end.’
My dear friend Stefano gave a soft, musical laugh. His eyes gleamed. How I admired him that day. What wonderful thoughts he had!
But he hadn’t quite finished. As the fresh coffees arrived at our table in a small cloud of steam he bathed me in one of his most intense gazes and added:
‘And so it is with our own lives, my friend. If we spend too much time in the company of our own histories they soon tire us. We must turn them to the wall at regular intervals, hide them in case we become sickened by our own pasts.’
I clapped him on the back and congratulated him. And then I astounded him with a quotation I had learnt off by heart one night as I sat by my campfire in a cave-mouth just a few yards from the seventh well; a marvellous quotation from a man called Julian Barnes:
The past is a distant, receding coastline, and we are all in the same boat. Along the stern rail there is a line of telescopes; each brings the shore into focus at a given distance. If the boat is becalm
ed, one of the telescopes will be in continual use; it will seem to tell the whole, the unchanging truth. But this is an illusion; and as the boat sets off again, we return to our normal activity: scurrying from one telescope to another, seeing the sharpness fade in one, waiting for the blear to clear in another. And when the blear does clear, we imagine that we have made it do so all by ourselves.
Now it was Stefano’s turn to clap me on the back. Our friendship was set in stone from that day onwards.
Olly took me home and I put my feet up. I didn’t even try the coffee routine. After a quick bath I sat on the couch in a damp towel and turned on the telly to get the footie scores. Onto the screen came a rugby match and I groaned because I’d forgotten, God knows how, that an international was being played that day. In fact it was the international, against the old enemy, and a spiky-haired kid with silver boots was about to take a penalty. You could tell it was a mighty important kick. Four minutes to go and Wales were 9-8 down. As he placed the ball and prepared himself, my thoughts raced back to Dinas Emrys: to a long-ago battle between a red dragon and a white dragon, watched by anxious eyes. Things didn’t change much, I thought, except that millions of eyes were watching this particular tussle. He got the kick – it was Gavin Henson I think – and he was a hero that night. No nerves at all – he just did the job. That’s what makes heroes: they can kill the nerves and deliver the goods.
My next task was to run an errand for Olly on Sunday. I didn’t feel like doing it, but promises are promises. I’d agreed to run Fit Boy to Holyhead. He was taking a ferry over to Ireland. Something to do with pigshit – apparently the Irish have dreamt up a new way of dealing with farmyard sewage; instead of saving it up in sewage pits they channel it into wetland lagoons and let reeds filter out the poo. Fit Boy was going out there to find out more – something to do with his course at the college. Smelly business, but Fit Boy always came up smelling of roses. Not much love lost between us – I think he’s a poser – but Olly loves him (there’s no accounting for taste) so I try to be nice to him.
I picked him up in my own jalopy, a decaying yellow Toyota pick-up, and we headed over the Suspension Bridge and across Anglesey. I wasn’t in the mood for chit-chat so I let him do the talking. When he ran out of topics I switched on the radio and we picked up the news. That little girl in the well was still down inside it, and they were having big problems. One of the big engineering companies was drilling a shaft alongside the well in an attempt to get to her. She was still alive, but they couldn’t get any water to her (deeply ironic, I thought). By now it was a race against time.
‘You two going to have any kids?’ I asked him in an attempt to make conversation.
‘Loads,’ he said. ‘Though the way things are going I’m not sure there’s going to be a wedding, never mind kids.’
‘How come?’
‘Oh, problems. Loads of stuff. And Olly seems to be going through a bad time, no one knows why. She won’t talk to anyone about it,’ he said.
‘Not even you?’
‘No.’
‘I’m really surprised.’
I could see him looking at me through the corner of his eye.
‘To tell you the truth, I thought she was talking to you about it. She seems to be cavorting with you most of the time.’
I told him the truth about her and me – though I would have told him exactly the same story if we’d been at it like rabbits, which unfortunately we hadn’t. We were helping each other with course work at the college, I said. Besides, I was old enough to be her father, etc. etc. I didn’t tell him about the crying though. He had to learn about the tears himself. Perhaps he was too vain or too arrogant to register other people’s emotions. Of course, there was a possibility he knew everything. We didn’t talk about it.
I drove steadily through the centre of the island, on the old road. We were overhung by a large black saucepan-lid cloud, in the centre of the sky above us, leaving an encircling ring of blue all around us, along the horizon; helicopters swayed drunkenly through this slit of blueness as if they were bees arriving at a hive. The hedgerow-tops on either side of the road had been given a crew-cut recently and tail-up blackbirds strutted their stuff along the flat parade-ground surfaces, hurling shrill commands at the surrounding countryside. And then, on the grey verges, we saw flowers for the dead everywhere. We came across bouquets at many lonely spots: against walls, tied to fences. They had been left in memory of people killed in road accidents, and clearly there had been a spate of fatal accidents. Colourful blooms wilted in their cellophane wrappers. There were skid marks, churned-up verges and broken walls. I survived a bad crash once and as I looked at the flowers I relived those last few seconds before impact. After a while my mind returned to the world around me, and I felt glad I was still there to appreciate it. Death is so absolute, isn’t it?
I took him to Terminal One and accompanied him to the departure lounge. There’s a circular glass reception area beyond the ticket desks, so I sat on a bright blue chair, looking over my shoulder at a forest of masts in the harbour, whilst he sorted his ticket. A skein of wild geese struggled across one of the panes, in the far distance.
‘Bloody hell,’ he said when he returned. ‘Bit steep.’
I wasn’t particularly bothered, since I wasn’t paying, so I had a gander at the people around me, trying to spot the Irishmen going home to guzzle some Guinness.
I hadn’t been scanning the crowd for long when my eye landed on a head of curls and a rugged profile which I recognised straight away, or thought I recognised anyway. Was it him? Surely to God it was – the man himself again. Adam Phillips, the Cardiff brainbox who said such memorable lines as ‘you can change childhood by deciding what not to say about it’. Yes, I felt sure it was him. Yet again I found myself listening in on his conversation, and I nearly moved to the seat next to him, but I thought he might think I was a crank and stop talking.
I listened intently. By the Christ! He was telling that marvellous story about Procrustes. Never heard of Procrustes? You’ve never lived. Procrustes lived in Greece a long time ago. Adam Phillips was telling his mate all about this man, and I felt like shouting over: ‘Hey Mr Phillips, I know all about this geezer,’ but I didn’t say a word of course. Procrustes liked to entertain. He made a point of inviting lots of guests to his house. Procrustes believed that size matters.
Adam Phillips (if it was indeed him) was telling the story real good.
Procrustes lived in a house by the side of the road and he offered hospitality to passing strangers. They were invited in for a pleasant meal and a night’s rest in a very special bed. Procrustes told his guests that the bed was unique because it was always the same length as the person lying in it, no matter how big or small the guest was. Naturally, the guests were intrigued by this one-size-fits-all sort of bed and they all gave it a try. And that was a very big – or possibly very small – mistake. Because Procrustes had his own way of making them fit the bill. As soon as the guests lay down, Procrustes went to work on them, stretching them on the rack if they were too short for the bed or chopping off their legs if they was too long. Theseus turned the tables on Procrustes by making him fit his own bed.
I like that story. I can’t remember why Adam Phillips was telling it – I think it was something to do with the need to tailor the way we listen to the people around us.
I spent about five minutes plucking up courage, but as I stood up to go to him Adam Phillips got up too, put on his coat, shook hands with his mate and bounded towards the departure gates. I’d missed my chance again. I was pretty pissed off with myself, I can tell you, but I comforted myself with the thought that, such was the frequency of my accidental meetings with Phillips, I was bound to have a chat with him sooner or later. Hoping that some of that brilliance might rub off on me I sat down in the very chair he’d used, settling my arse into the blue fabric, which was still warm. If I expected any exchange of genius-atoms I was sadly disappointed. Things like that may happen in Cardif
f but they don’t happen in Holyhead.
Anyway, as I was sitting there, wondering what to do next (Fit Boy had gone to the gents, and I felt obliged to wait until he re-emerged), I picked up a magazine which had been left on the seat beside me. I opened the mag at random, and my eyes nearly popped out of my head. Ever since I’d started all this phooey, coincidences had come along in droves. But the coincidence which greeted me now was beyond the pale. I had said farewell to my last mannequin in Glasgow, or so I’d thought. I would never have to deal with another mannequin ever again, or so I’d thought. But as I leafed through that glossy magazine, full as it was with the twaddle of Britain’s salon society, I noticed that all the girlie models looked like mannequins: lifeless, representational, consumed. When I looked at that magazine I felt that the whole of the twentieth century had been a missed period in the history of western civilisation. And then, to top it all, I came across an article on Lester Gaba and his beloved Cynthia. Lester Gaba was a soap sculptor who became a mannequin artist. During the thirties he created Cynthia from plaster of Paris. Cynthia became a famous ‘socialite’ who sat languorously, cigarette in hand, at the Stork Club. She became Lester’s constant companion – at the opera, riding through the city. She needed at least three strong men to carry her, but she looked exquisite. She became a celebrity: couturiers sent her clothes, Cartier and Tiffany lent her jewellery. Sadly, Cynthia slipped from a chair in a beauty salon and shattered into a thousand pieces.