Mr Cassini

by Lloyd Jones

  Again, the landlord nodded. He had no idea what Mr Cassini was talking about; he was completely lost. Why were the dead so demanding?

  ‘Another pint?’ he asked Mr Cassini. ‘This one’s on me.’

  Meanwhile, PC 66 was feeling pretty despondent, sitting on his rock in Little Bay, looking at the turnstones as they weaved and sifted along the water’s edge. He was trying to digest all the official orders which had landed on his desk that morning: identity cards were being introduced, followed by restrictions on movement. He was depressed. In front of him was a slopping chamber pot full to the brim with frothy yellow sea-piss; behind him somewhere he could hear a cockle woman singing an aria to a group of men huddled around one of the steaming cockle cauldrons. And sure enough, as she sang her violet notes, a rainbow shimmered into life; seven unbraided plaits bridged the river; seven dream-bands rippled in the water’s subdued reflection. Then zap – the third rainbow messenger arrived, moving faster than light itself as she materialised on Mr Cassini’s throne-rock, next to PC 66. Yes, it was a she. Initially PC 66 thought he’d been joined by a boy, but the unmistakeable swell of her bodice and the curve of her hips betrayed her sex. They enjoyed the rainbow, mutually, in silence.

  ‘You know the Muslim view on rainbows, don’t you?’ said the rainbow messenger eventually.

  ‘No, I’m afraid I don’t.’

  ‘The colours represent the seven different types of clay used to create mankind.’

  ‘That’s rather nice, isn’t it,’ he answered.

  A car, glinting in the brilliant light, appeared to balance on the apex of the rainbow as it crawled along the mountain pass to the east. It came to a sudden stop, and PC 66 wondered if he should investigate.

  ‘Personally, I’m with Keats on the subject of rainbows,’ said his visitor. PC 66 raised an eyebrow.

  ‘He believed that all the poetry of the rainbow was destroyed by science – that something was lost for ever when Newton unwove its magic, reduced it to prismatic colours.’

  PC 66 mused on this.

  ‘By the way,’ she added with studied insouciance, ‘indigo was probably added merely to create a seventh colour because the God Squad weren’t happy with the number six. Something to do with 666.’

  She looked closely at his police number and grinned. ‘Seems you’re pretty close to evil yourself.’

  ‘I’m a good copper,’ he replied firmly, ‘and I’m certainly not into cheap symbolism. Now can you tell me why you’re here?’

  ‘I have a present for you,’ said his visitor as she prepared to leave. She withdrew a book from the folds of her vests and handed it to him. It was a copy of Mr Cassini’s great work, The Dexter Propensity, which PC 66 had heard so much about but had never seen. The only copy, apparently. After wiping his hands on his regulation police trousers he took it reverentially, and flipped it open at random pages.

  ‘It’s all yours now,’ she said. ‘Do with it what you will, but be careful whom you show it to; only sturdy minds can withstand its malignance.’

  As she prepared to leave, the messenger added: ‘Before I forget, the seventh rainbow messenger sends his best wishes. He’s rather fond of you, it seems. He sends a warning – beware the nation’s collective and elective amnesia. Remember Erich Fromm’s words about the retreat from liberty – towards authoritarianism, destructiveness and robotic conformity. Get out before you succumb too, he says.’

  And as soon as she came, she went. PC 66 touched the boulder on which she’d sat – Mr Cassini’s throne-rock – but it was stone cold.

  In the gloom of Mr Cassini’s front room there are many effigies. The first has been described in detail: a crumbling eminence grise – the golem. The left arm was never completed, since Mr Cassini was an unashamed despiser of all things sinistral, anti-clockwise or laevogyrous. Strips of plaster have been taped to the golem’s neck to prevent its head from falling off, and it looks as though it’s been in an accident.

  The second effigy, sitting next to the golem, is that of Mrs Cassini. Its principium is a red mannequin, stolen deftly by Mr Cassini from the window of the ladies’ haberdashery shop one lunchtime when the proprietress, Mrs Evans, was in the back room eating her light lunch (always two ryebread biscuits, a slice of cheese and an apple, since she was forever on a diet). He had waited for the right moment, pounced, and stuffed the inanimate into the back of his battered ex-delivery van which had been painted roughly, by hand, in the same colour as Mr Cassini’s house: a matt red with big droopy paint-runs. A very sloppy job indeed, but Mr Cassini simply didn’t care.

  ‘I am a moralist, not a mechanic,’ he would say whenever anything went wrong with his chariot. It was PC 66 who sorted out the problem, always.

  This red mannequin has a nice feel to it, a soft bristly texture, close-cropped and comforting, like an old bus-seat, or the worn but comfortable sofa in your grandmother’s front room. Mr Cassini undressed the mannequin (mannequins were never left undressed in Mrs Evans’ window) and then he dressed it again, in Mrs Cassini’s Sunday best (all charity shop stuff) – a flimsy dress with a marigold pattern and a revolting purple tapestry coat made from Welsh wool, heavy as a wet tarpaulin; it made PC 66 feel nauseous. Mr Cassini added a pair of opaque fifty-denier stockings used by women to hide varicose veins, and a pair of blue lattice-effect shoes. All these items she had worn on her WI trip to Cardiff, to collect her award for embroidery. Mr Cassini added her ash-blonde wig, and this lay on the mannequin’s crown like a tuft of coarse dead marram grass, sun-bleached; finally, he added her spectacles on their silvery chain. Mrs Cassini’s effigy appeared to be writing a letter: a pen had been stuffed into her left hand. Below this was a sheaf of papers, with her actual writing on them (Mr Cassini had rummaged in the box he kept below his bed and had found some of the love letters she’d sent him during their courtship). Why did she have a wig? Mr Cassini said she’d had treatment for cancer. Some of the townspeople whispered that he’d pulled out her real hair during regular beatings. Mr Cassini laughed at this and said: ‘Let them say what they like, the woman loves me. I know that for sure because she proves it to me every night.’ And here he always gave his great roar-laugh.

  Scattered among the slippery seaweed strands, among the rock-pools, Mr Cassini and his steadfast companion PC 66 found many shoes and gloves. They found large quantities of black and green Wellingtons, also boots, espadrilles, pumps, plimsolls, sandals, brogues, moccasins, sneakers, loafers, slippers, in fact just about every sort of footwear you could imagine, in every conceivable size and colour. They also found gloves, rubber or otherwise, mittens and gauntlets, again in all shapes and sizes. Mr Cassini collected all these and created a piece of installation art not unlike the Terracotta Army, with all the shoes assembled in lines, all pointing in the same direction. This he exhibited in a shed at the docks, in a show called The Mermaid Murders. The highlight of the show was a large outline of a mermaid figure, rather like one of those white lines drawn around murder victims in cartoons, except that Mr Cassini’s victim was huge and delineated in tiny white sea shells sprinkled together. It looked rather striking, though the local paper gave it a slating under the heading One foot in the wave. Mr Cassini never forgave the editor and slandered him whenever he could. Mr Cassini conducted a lengthy survey of the castaway shoes and found, to his joy, a preponderance of right-footed shoes. This data he converted into the principal chapter of his great thesis, The Dexter Propensity. Mr Cassini loathed left-handed people. PC 66 thought there was definitely something behind this hatred; he simply refused to believe that it was a completely irrational, unreasonable prejudice. But he never got to the bottom of Mr Cassini’s sinistrophobic tendencies.

  ‘Porky,’ said Mr Cassini indulgently as they strolled along Little Bay, looking for new shells. ‘I don’t suppose you know where the word sinister comes from, d’ya?’

  He had a close-to-your-heart way of speaking, as if you were the best friend he’d ever had. He talked to you like a brother or a father, all
warm and easy, and funny with it, quite different to his appearance, because he was a fearsome physical being, cratered and pocked, with hair springing out of him like thick undergrowth.

  ‘Nope,’ said PC 66 amiably, ‘no idea where sinister comes from.’

  ‘Well,’ said Mr Cassini, spitting a gob as big as a jellyfish onto a rock, where it quivered with oystery slitheriness, ‘sinister is the Latin word for left. Are you with me so far, boy?’

  Mr Cassini talked like this all the time, like he was a big kid really.

  ‘Truth is boy, the old people believed that the left half of your body was bad. Honest injun. Them medievals thought yer left half belonged to the Devil. So that’s why sinister means harmful or menacin’ and all that boy.’

  Here he popped another shell into his jacket pocket, so that he looked increasingly like a donkey with bulging panniers on each flank.

  ‘And the right part of yer body is yer dexter half, and that comes from the Latin word for right. Them oldies thought the right hand side of the body was better and stronger. Right is might and might is right.’

  ‘Jeez,’ said PC 66, ‘I didn’t know that Mr Cassini.’

  He had a great store of one-liners, Mr Cassini, as limitless as the shells on the shore.

  ‘I’d give my right arm to be ambidextrous,’ he’d say, and then he’d laugh his stupendous, roaring laugh.

  Mr Cassini told PC 66 all about being right-handed. He said the right hand path was straight and true. The left hand path was bent and skewed; it led to the dark woods, evil and misfortune. Left-handed people were a freaky minority. The Muslims’ left-handed toilet ritual was deplorable, and he commended a North American Indian tribe who restrained their children’s left arm to ensure right-handedness… didn’t Christ sit on the right hand of God?

  Mr Cassini, he was a helluva fellah, everybody said that. What a brain, they’d say.

  What a brain, and funny with it too.

  Mr Cassini was a hell of a man.

  When The Dexter Propensity fell open in PC 66’s hands, it was at the letter H.

  His attention was caught, in the first instance, by an entry entitled Household Winds.

  Mr Cassini wrote in large block capitals, and this is what his entry said:

  After exhaustive studies, I have discovered that each house has its own household wind. No two sound alike. The household wind at my own home is tethered to the guttering outside the front bedroom and has a range of five descending half-tones followed by five ascending half-tones in the key of E Minor. They are close to a sequence in the lento of Elgar’s E Minor cello concerto (composed immediately after the First World War as a lament for an irrecoverably lost world). My own household wind has three identifiable mood ranges, namely

  a) Mistral, Rhone Valley, strong and freezing

  b) Tramontana, Italy, brisk and cool

  c) Baguio, Philippines, cold with driving snow.

  I have named the household wind at my own abode – Caliban (A).

  I would describe it as a windling with a flugelhorn parent, a fluted and mournful night-stalker, a tune whistled by the Fifth Horseman through his teeth on the Day of Judgement. It is exceedingly sad and I enjoy it most of a night immediately after a funeral, when I lie on my bed listening to it before and after * with Mrs Cassini.

  As PC 66 read this entry a wind-riffle caught the page and turned it over (rather spookily, he thought), revealing another heading: HARRIES (see Wizards of Cwrt-y-Cadno).

  PC 66 turned to the back of the book and found WEREWOLVES. Under this there were many entries, ending with:

  In Galician folklore, the seventh son will be a werewolf. In other folklores, after six daughters, the seventh child is to be a son and a werewolf. In other European folklores, the seventh son of a seventh son will be a vampire.

  Next to this entry he found WIZARDS:

  Just a short walk from the Dolaucothi gold mines at Pumsaint, up the richly-wooded Cothi Valley, in a quiet corner of Carmarthenshire, there once lived two wise and cunning men, and they practised magic: a mixture of folk remedies, conventional medicine, and the dark arts. They were not unique in Britain; it was an age when superstition crackled and surged along the country’s goblin-crowded lanes (very few people ventured out at night).

  John Harries and his son Henry – the Wizards of Cwrt-y-Cadno – were among a cadre of charmers, fortune-tellers and diviners who were given the titles white witch, wise man (or woman), wizard or conjuror. In Wales the charmer was known as a dyn hysbys. Charmers didn’t set bones or treat the major organs. They dealt with skin diseases, bleeding, and mental well-being. And what magic they held at their fingertips.

  Abracadabra: A local girl had disappeared – she’d been murdered by her boyfriend. John Harries was asked to locate her body. He told the authorities where they could find the corpse – but when it was found he was charged as an accessory to the crime. Summoned to Llandovery Court, Harries challenged the magistrates to test his powers, saying: You tell me which hour you came into the world and I will tell you the hour you will depart from it.

  They dropped the case.

  The Wizards of Cwrt-y-Cadno were chosen to sit in Mr Cassini’s dingy front room, facing the venerable John Dee: since the Harries boys were wiz-kids with astrology they would have much to talk about. Mr Cassini faced a problem obtaining two new mannequins: they had to be taller than usual, since John Harries was reputed to be six feet two inches tall, with short dark hair and mutton-chop sideboards. He was always cheerful, bright of eye and pleasant of speech.

  So Mr Cassini went to work with his usual industry and ingeniousness.

  The do-it-yourself shop had two large windows on either side of the main entrance. In the left hand window there was a model kitchen, and in the right hand window a model bathroom. In the kitchen stood a tall, silvery mannequin – alien-looking, faceless and sexless – with a saucepan in its hand, standing by the stove. In the model bathroom there stood another silvery mannequin, taking a dusty shower. Mr Cassini waited until the New Year revels had died down, heaved a brick through the main entrance, and snatched the dummies. He then spread a rumour around town that Mrs Evans’ son had been seen in an upstairs window at the haberdashery shop wearing women’s clothing, and it was he who had broken into the do-it-yourself shop to steal the dummies in a drunken fit of perverted lust. Everyone believed the rumour, naturally. Secreted in Mr Cassini’s front room, the dummies were dressed in a countrified manner, in knee breeches.

  The people of Carmarthen believed the Harries family derived their powers from a large book of spells which was kept padlocked, because even the Harries family were terrified of it. Some believed it was the Book of the Seven Seals. Once a year the wizards took it to a secret place in the woods, unchained it, and if Abaddon, the angel of the bottomless pit, allowed them entry they would delve into the book’s vertiginous secrets. Thunder would reverberate in the Cothi Valley and people would mutter to each other: O! Mae’r meddygon wedi agor y llyfr du… the doctors have opened the black book.

  The sick and the sorrowful came from all parts of Wales. John Harries was so good at charming away pain that people believed he was in league with the Devil. Lunatics were taken to him from as far afield as Pembrokeshire and Radnorshire, and he had a wonderful power over them with his water treatments, herb treatments and bleeding treatments. Sometimes he took patients to the banks of a river and fired an old revolver; this frightened them so much that they fell in the water and often recovered their sanity.

  Mr Cassini, too, kept an old Luger in the box under his bed…

  Charms, herbal treatments and shock therapy were the Harries’ main tools. Their ancient knowledge was fused with modern learning, making them marvellous and magical in the eyes of their uneducated and illiterate patients. Both had the power to stop bleeding instantly through laying on of hands and prayer (a gift they shared with the notorious holy man Rasputin, and a craft still practised in parts of Russia). At Cwrt-y-Cadno they believed that p
ure spring water was a cure in its own right.

  Hey presto: A deranged man believed he was bewitched. Various doctors had failed to cure him. The Harries diagnosis: the patient had swallowed an evil spirit (a tadpole which had grown into a frog). After consulting texts and invoking spirits the patient was forced to be sick. His vomit contained a frog, and the man was cured.

  Mr Cassini goes to the Blue Angel every day without fail. He sups at least ten pints, quarrels with the one-eyed landlord and sells contraband to the juvenile sharks. They’re scared to death of him. But like PC 66, they’re in awe of him too. After a game of snooker and a display of his famous trick shots (none of which he ever gets right) Mr Cassini and PC 66 are in the toilets, which stink. Shit on the pan. Graffiti. Phone numbers, lewd suggestions, the usual stuff. Mr Cassini’s coming to the end of a good night. He’s about twelve pints good. He’s almost ready to go home for his midnight fry-up and * with Mrs Cassini. Right now, he’s talking about death. Mr Cassini always wears his vampire teeth in the toilets, to frighten strangers – he stares at them in the next cubicle, with his huge bloodshot eyes, and then he opens his mouth slowly to reveal his luminous plastic fangs.

  ‘You think people will miss you when you’re gone Porky?’ asked Mr Cassini.

  ‘Not much,’ replied PC 66. But he knew that in thirty years’ time the sharks would come over all nostalgic and say do you remember 66, and then someone would say surely you mean 99, and there’d be a rare old flare-up, and they’d have to call the police.

  Mr Cassini nearly deafened PC 66 with his boom-laugh, then he went twelve-pints misty-eyed and said:

  ‘Reckon there’ll be a right old to-do when I finally go.’

  ‘Reckon you’re right there Mr Cassini.’

  ‘I can’t decide, y’know.’

  ‘Can’t decide what, Mr Cassini?’ asked PC 66 as he washed his hands.