by Lloyd Jones
Fit Boy went his way and I went mine. I headed towards the eastern tip of the island – to Llaneilian, where I had some business in hand. I drove past some of the milestones on my countrymen’s long road to the Promised Land – Abarim, Soar, Bazrah, Carmel: the wayside chapels where my ancestors fell in love with the original – and best – pyramid salesman. There are over 6,000 chapels in Wales, most of them named after places in the Holy Land. I don’t suppose that many people in Palestine walk around looking at shrines called Llanfrothen, Nefyn, Narberth, Dwygyfylchi…
Their hymns had a sexual rhythm; their prayers ended in climactic exultation. The old people would be troubled by that comparison, yes, shocked. But love dies, sooner or later. And it died in the chapels. Something to do with unrequited love, I fear. They lie there sleeping, those chapels, post-coital, still in the missionary position.
At Amlwch the sea was a topaz aquarium, so I parked up to admire the view. I looked towards the horizon and imagined out-of-sight Ireland stuck to a glassy sea-panel on the world’s rotating mirrorball, in the eternal disco of the cosmos – her people waiting for the music to start, waiting for the music to stop. Waiting for the darkness, waiting for the light. Waiting for a kiss, conception, compassion, death. In that silent, magical realm over the horizon birds wove their paths through the air and animals cropped the rich pastures – but I heard them neither bleat nor caw. I could hear the people, however. Some of them were laughing as they played on the flutes of love, some were lamenting as they beat on the drums of hatred. Some were sane, some were mad. For just like the Scottish and the Welsh, the Irish also have a wild man in the woods. His story is told in Buile Shuibne – the frenzy of Shuibne (pronounced Sweeney). The wild man was known as a gelt, and this is how a thirteenth-century Norse text described him:
There is also one thing which will seem very wonderful about men who are called gelt. It happens that when two hosts meet and are arrayed in battle-array, and when the battle-cry is raised loudly on both sides, that cowardly men run wild and lose their wits from the dread and fear which seize them. And then they run into a wood away from the other men, and live there like wild beasts, and shun the meeting of men like wild beasts. And it is said of these men that when they have lived in the woods in that condition for twenty years then feathers grow on their bodies as on birds, whereby their bodies are protected against frost and cold, but the feathers are not so large that they may fly like birds. Yet their swiftness is said to be so great that other men cannot approach them… for these people run along the trees almost as swiftly as monkeys or squirrels.
Sweeney, the son of a king, is supposed to have lost his reason at the Battle of Moira. But his madness also gave him strange powers: he could levitate, and he could utter beautiful, magical poetry.
As I meditated on his story I tried to compare Sweeney to Mr Cassini. But it was a different type of madness, I could see that clearly now. Sweeney and Lailoken had both gone mad in almost identical circumstances, during battle. Their minds had snapped, suddenly, while under severe strain. But Mr Cassini’s madness was quite different: he was able to live in society, and affect (infect?) other people around him. He showed no outward manifestation of unreason; in fact, his madness could be passed off as harmless eccentricity. My dreams were trying to say something. I had to get to the bottom of this.
I enjoyed my journey along the coast. Olly had been in my pickup and I thought I could smell traces of her perfume. I felt as if I was travelling with her in spirit – as if the scent, or shampoo smell, was her soul hovering around me. I opened a packet of Everton Mints and chewed contentedly. Although she wasn’t there I felt closer to her than in real life. I daydreamed about her – in an honourable way. Yes, certainly, I liked her physically. But there again, just about every man on the planet might desire her carnally. She was extremely beautiful.
There was not among the Welsh a woman more beautiful than she. She surpassed the fairness of the goddesses, and the petals of the privet, and the blooming roses and the fragrant lilies of the fields. The glory of spring shone in her alone, and she had the splendour of the stars in her two eyes, and splendid hair shining with the gleam of gold.
She turned heads wherever she went. Men stood in lines, frozen into statues, just gawping at her when she got off a bus or a train. Whole streets ground to a halt when she walked through town. Even women stopped what they were doing and watched her pass. But that was only part of her. I have already mentioned her intelligence and humour. She was also an ecstatic dancer – it’s true, she partied like there was no tomorrow. Men fawned, pleaded, begged, threatened, but they got nowhere. Until Fit Boy won her heart. Even he didn’t make it all the way to her bed. She was a classical, traditional girl. No ring, no fling.
And yet there was something wrong with it all. Something not quite right. At times I gained the impression that she was going through with the Grand Plan merely as a matter of form. As if the whole thing was the re-enactment of a story written long ago. She had the bearing of an Electra or an Antigone. Has it ever struck you that some people are different – elevated, removed, segregated by a glass wall of other-ness? You know, those occasional kids at school who are treated in a different way to the rest; everyone feels, secretly, that they’ll achieve something big or die tragically young. Is the mark upon them from the start? I don’t know. Some people, just a few, are cast in ancient moulds; they move and act as if they’re reincarnations of the mythological heroes and heroines of the antique world. They rise to dizzying heights or they fall into the bottomless pit. They disappear from view, then suddenly they’re in magazines, newspapers; they’re on telly, in films.
I’m standing by Ffynnon Eilian, the well in Llaneilian, and I’ve got something in my hand. It’s not a handkerchief. In one Welsh parish long ago, girls who wanted to discover their lovers’ intentions would go the well and spread a hanky on the water: if it drifted to the south their lovers would be honest and honourable; but if it went northwards they were in for a hard time.
What I have in my hand is a small piece of slate, and there’s a name on it. I drop it into the water and I make a wish. Why? Am I finally losing it? All that pressure over the years – to win at all costs, to bring glory to my country, has it all been too much for me, finally?
No. I’m playing games again. Not with a football, this time. I’m playing the game of life. That’s what it is, after all. Just a game. Don’t you agree? Take it seriously for just one second and it’ll have you by the neck.
Let’s go back to 1925, when a strange discovery was made at Ffynnon Eilian. Out of the depths of the well came a small piece of slate, about three inches by two inches, with a pattern etched around its border. Someone had carved the letters RF in the centre of the slate and pinned a wax figure to it. This effigy had a head, body, legs, and one arm – the left arm had been broken off. It seems likely that this voodoo token was put in the well by someone who bore ill-will towards RF. Ffynnon Eilian was a cursing well. It fell into disrepair over the years and nearly disappeared altogether, but the council has made some repairs recently. Local farmer To m Owen put his hand in there one day and pulled out a couple of corks with pins sticking in them. Someone, in the past, had been cursed…
Healing wells, wishing wells, cursing wells – they’re all variants on a theme: people went to them hoping to cure a disease, ignite a romance, or skewer an enemy. The Romans had well spirits or gods such as Sulis or Mercury. They threw inscribed lead tablets into the water – many have been found in the area around the Severn estuary. Roman curse tablets had four major themes:
Pleas for the return of stolen goods
Pleas for success in a lawsuit
Pleas for success in love
Curses on charioteers and their horses.
When the wells became Christianised they were given saints’ names. At Ffynnon Gybi near Holyhead the names of the people to be cursed were written on paper which was put in a hidey-hole near the well. People often dropped pins into
cursing wells: bent pins for curses, straight pins for good wishes. At one well a live frog was skewered and a cork placed at each end of the skewer. The frog was then floated on the well, and the person being cursed would suffer ill-fortune for as long as the frog remained alive. Some well-owners made good money: one man earned nearly £300 a year from curses. In 1820 the standard charge was five shillings for a curse, fifteen shillings for lifting it.
So I drop my bit of slate in the water. And the name I curse?
You know very well.
I entertain myself on the homeward journey with an imaginary film clip. It’s the second part of my picnic in the snow idea. Remember Captain Oates, stumbling out into the snow? My next clip is from Three Colours:White. The Polish hairdresser Karol Karol, divorced by his Parisian wife because he can’t consummate their marriage, and left penniless, is smuggled back into Poland inside a trunk. But misfortune strikes yet again and the trunk is stolen by baggage thieves. The action moves to a rubbish dump outside Warsaw where the thieves leave him lying in the snow, after beating him up. Karol wakes up in the snowswept dump and cries out: Home at last! He forges a new life for himself: he makes a fortune and he fakes his own death… in fact, he’s ideal. Karol Karol can join Captain Oates on the tartan rug in my film. Perhaps I should have a polar bear too. I share something with polar bears – a blockage. Mine’s in my memory. But bears have a more unusual variety – a plug of faeces, dead cells and hair which forms in their bumholes when they’re hibernating. It’s called a tappen. No kidding.
As soon as I drove into town I knew something had happened. There were a couple of cop cars outside Fit Boy’s house. So I stopped.
The coppers were sitting in their cars, waiting. Since I knew that Fit Boy was on Irish soil by now, I thought I’d better help out. I walked up to one of the cars and knocked on the driver’s window. It slid down slowly and the copper looked at me unemotionally, wafting copperish smells towards me: shower gel and chewing gum. I looked at their numbers, but there wasn’t a PC 66 among them.
‘Yes?’
‘He’s not there,’ I said. ‘He’s in Ireland.’
The cop looked at me all over, up and down.
‘You’re Duxie, aren’t you?’
He’d recognised me.
‘Yes.’
He grinned. ‘I was there when you scored that second goal against England. Bloody great. What a day that was.’
I dropped my eyes to the ground, briefly.
‘What’s going on?’ I asked.
He let a few seconds go by, then he turned to his mate, who eventually nodded.
‘You know a girl called Olwen?’
‘Yes, I’m at college with her.’
‘Friend of hers?’
‘Yes, we do a lot together.’
He smiled, cunningly.
‘Oh yes? Haven’t changed much then, Duxie?’
‘Nothing like that.’
‘Sure.’
Again, some time went by, so I straightened up. In the distance, over the sea, I could see a dense cloud coming in, and it had the yellowness of snow about it.
‘Something happened to her?’ I asked.
‘Perhaps.’
I was getting a bit edgy.
‘Are you going to tell me?’
Again, he played a waiting game.
‘We’re trying to get hold of her next of kin.’
I told him that her mother was in Scotland and her boyfriend was in Ireland.
‘Don’t know much about the father,’ I said, ‘but I think he lives in Holywell.’
‘OK,’ he said, and the window started rolling upwards.
I put my hand on the rim, to indicate I hadn’t finished. He stopped.
‘Well, are you going to give me a clue then?’
He pondered for a moment or two.
‘I suppose you’ll find out something sooner or later,’ he said, ‘but don’t go spreading this around yet.’
He told me what had happened.
Olly’s car had been found. At least they thought it was hers. It had crashed into a wall on one of the passes high above the sea, east of the town.
‘No one in it,’ he said. ‘Smashed windscreen but no sign of the driver. Would you recognise her car if you saw it?’
‘Yes, it’s a little blue Polo.’
He conferred with his mate.
‘Do you mind coming with us to see it?’
‘Nope.’
‘Jump in then.’
When I saw the car, which had been towed to a lay-by, I recognised it immediately. I told the copper it was hers, and we circled it slowly, looking at the damage.
They were searching for her body on the rocks below.
‘No blood?’ I asked.
‘No.’
I looked inside, and on the back seat I could see a big buff envelope, recycled by the looks of it, and it had my name on it. I pointed it out to the copper, and he fetched it for me. After pulling out the contents – a wad of paper – and giving it all a brief once-over he handed it over to me. The long and the short of it was that Olly had disappeared – and Mr Cassini was back, making a nuisance of himself again. She’d written me a letter, and it went like this:
It’s no good, Duxie. Playing games won’t make it better. Perhaps you think you’ve got rid of him, but he’s back. Remember, this is our story. He’s got hold of me now too. I dream about him every night. I wrote it all down.
I think you’re using me. You’re not interested in me as a person. You’ve projected your own neuroses onto me, like a novelist – you’ve never allowed me to be myself. I might as well be a character in a fairy story, or a mannequin in Cassini’s front room. And all that stuff you have in your head about magical islands – what about Diego Garcia? What about those people robbed of their homes by the British and Americans? What about Guantanamo Bay? What about those poor men in orange suits? Islands can be bad places too, you know, places of tyranny. Face up to reality, Duxie. When you’re ready, come to me.
I’m going to eat sweets and cry!
Love, Olly.
And she left me seven kisses, but I think that was her idea of a joke.
6
THE TIDE COMES IN
Mr Cassini’s dramatic return:
Olly takes up the story
BEFORE his sudden death, Mr Cassini had painted a marvellous door on the western wall of the public bar at the Blue Angel. It was a fake door – a trompe l’oeil – and although it was in black and white, it was very realistic; many customers had tried to open it. In their hurry to get to the toilets some men had gone crashing into it, because Mr Cassini had painted gentlemen on the mock timber. It was his little joke. Newcomers were made to look stupid as they fumbled for the non-existent door-handle.
‘You shouldn’t be trying it anyway,’ Mr Cassini told a juvenile shark as the boy turned away from the door one evening, his face red with beer and embarrassment. ‘It’s clearly marked gentlemen, and you’re certainly no gentleman.’
One morning, when the one-eyed landlord went downstairs to open up, he found the fake door open – or it appeared to be open, since a totally new door had been painted on the wall. The paint was still wet. He’d smelt it as he walked downstairs.
And there was a shock in store. There, sitting at the bar, as large as life – and with fresh paint on his overalls – was Mr Cassini. He was back in the land of the living. There was one striking difference, however: his hair had turned completely white.
He demanded a pint, and was given one, free.
After downing three pints in quick succession, Mr Cassini waved an arm in the general direction of the new door and said: ‘Well, what do you think? Is it as good as the first door?’
Never one for saying much, the landlord nodded. From where he stood it seemed real enough. It appeared to open onto a dark hallway paved with cracked quarry tiles. A flight of stairs disappeared upwards.
Nothing about Mr Cassini surprised him. This was the man who observed
his own nine-day week, with a normal weekend and seven shorter days sandwiched in between so that days went faster in winter or merged into each other in summer, if he so wished. Mr Cassini had offered to cremate the landlord when he died and put his ashes in an egg-timer which could be used on the bar of the Blue Angel when subsequent landlords called time. He was probably mad. What did they say about men like him? The looser the connection the brighter the spark…
Mr Cassini explained sooner rather than later.
Finding a mangled fiver in the top pocket of his blue-and-red overalls, the man they called Blue Murder ordered yet another pint and said: ‘I take it you know your quantum physics?’
The landlord nodded, since he did try to keep up with all the latest developments. He was a five-dimensional, bouncing universe man himself.
‘We live in a cosmos which has many dimensions, isn’t that so?’
Again, the landlord nodded.
‘Eleven dimensions at the last count, all swirling around us now, as I speak,’ said Mr Cassini, wiping a snowfall of froth off his top lip with his sleeve. ‘Let me explain where I’ve just come from,’ he continued. ‘Scientists don’t know this yet, but the eleven dimensions are all participles of the verb to be. They are:
I might be, I might not be, I might have been, I might not have been, I can be, I cannot be, I will be, I will not be, I am, I am not, I have been and I am again.
So, at this precise moment, eleven versions of me are swirling around you in the public bar of the Blue Angel. I have chosen, however, to appear to you as the eleventh and final dimension, I have been and I am again. Thus I make myself immortal. Got that?’