by Lloyd Jones
Through the glass, in deep space, I can see a transporter ship carrying another little batch of genes to their destination. My own. Genes are never happy. After their raid on your body they always make a quick getaway. They always want to go somewhere else – inside someone else as quickly as possible.
A little question for you: from the amount of darkness surrounding us can we always assume that there will be a certain amount of light also; or is it the other way round? If we look at those little pinpricks of light within and without us, should we always infer a terrible and sucking darkness?
My dark past is behind me now… I made sure I let go of my past, accepting the fact that that part of my life was only a small fraction of my life. I knew the black hole was out there, waiting to suck me in and forever control my destiny – but only if I let it
– Dave Pelzer, A Child Called ‘It’.
OK, I’ve gone on a bit. I’ll stop now. A bit worked up, that’s all. So here’s something to soothe you – something about a hole: but it’s definitely not black. It’s very beautiful. I want to take you back to the annual fiesta – called Sa Cova (the cave) – which took place every year until recently at a small fishing village called Farol, on what is now the Costa Brava. Every year one of the village girls was chosen to be the central figure in a very old mystery; indeed, its meaning has long been forgotten. On the day of the fiesta the child and her mother were taken in a boat to a secret cave. Followed by several other boats, all of them full of women in fine clothes, the chosen one would be rowed several miles to Sa Cova, a sea cave containing beautiful water suffused with a strange blue light. There, the mother would strike her daughter lightly, the child would pretend to cry, and they would all return home. Make what you will of that tale. But it’s marvellous, isn’t it?
In early February I had gone for a picnic with Olly to the Glynllifon Country Park near Caernarfon. It’s set in the grounds of a mansion built by one of the old magnates who stole large chunks of land from the Welsh peasantry; I wanted to roam around it to see what we’d all missed out on. Before we went I cooked a special cake for our picnic. I don’t know if you like a dollop of dope in your chocolate cake, but my own belief is that the secret lies in the quality of the bud butter. I melt about a pound of butter in a pan and mix in the hash, then I leave the mix to mature. Don’t let it boil or you’ll ruin the taste. Then I make a chocolate cake the normal way. I’ve had very few complaints. My own cakes are guaranteed to get twelve people floating, eight people flying, or four people into outer space. I had a magic chocolate cake right there in my rucksack when I went with Olly to Glynllifon. We took a bus; it’s better that way sometimes. You get to feel the mood of the country.
We set off in a bitterly cold easterly wind and, judging by the number of seared plants and bushes on the wayside, it must have been a pretty smug little wind. The sky was split neatly into two, as if we were inside one of those plastic sweety eggs you get in 20p machines: grey to the west, blue to the east. The sea was on the way out, and it looked sharp and cold; if you stepped in that water you’d feel like a slipper in a basket full of puppies. As we waited for a bus we changed colour slowly, chameleon-wise, becoming purple and blotched to match the others in the queue. In their multi-coloured coats they were songbirds garbed too soon in mating plumage, dying now in starved flocks on the frozen ground.
A few blossoms had popped out in the hedgerows but the blackthorn bushes were making a real effort to keep their buds inside them, as if they were children desperate to go to the toilet but forced to stand around awkwardly, trying to keep it all in. February enfolded us; the defeated land was besieged in a garrison of greys. When the bus came we found a seat near the back, behind a group of youngsters who were chatting about stuff ’n’ fings. One of them had glitter on her face, the remains of last night’s fun scattered on her crusty make-up and around her spots. I felt a pang of envy. The old people vanguarded the front, front line fodder ready for slaughter. Rolling past the crematorium I wondered who’d be buried first: Mr Cassini or me?
A girl was trying to read a book but her mind was elsewhere. Another girl scrutinised a hospital letter; by the way she pored over the doctor’s scrawl I wondered if she was going in for tests. It could be the most significant day of her life. A horde got off at the hospital, hurriedly, as if they hoped to leave their diseases on the empty seats. No, it’s not mine, honestly.
Outside the window the estuary was a mud-wound; the leafless trees were stark and brachiated, upturned lungs in a medical textbook. Happy in a shit-spattered field I saw an orange pony, fat as a toffee apple and snug in a canvas coat pithed with dry white mud. I thought there was a mood of expectancy in the bus, as if we were all sitting in a cuckoo clock about to chime. I enjoyed the countryside flashing by. None of the kids looked out. Flicking from TV screen to computer screen to mobile screen, they live in a virtual world now. I felt sad… about my constant search for stories, symbols and similes hidden among the clouds, the seared plants, the emaciated branches. The Green Man on a dirty bus. A cherry tree snowed gently onto a hedge. Big deal. Perhaps the kids are right. What is blossom to them – bush-bling? Why bother with the real world. Perhaps their mobiles change tone subtly with the seasons, when it’s time to mate: Behold, O Fortuna, our Nokias sing of nookie and nippers.
We approached Caernarfon, and in that light the concrete came into its own; it bloomed in grey outbursts of melancholy. People thorned the streets, and in a pause between buses we had breakfast in Caffi Gronant. I listened to a conversation in Chinese on a nearby table. Cosmopolitan Caernarfon. Sometime between the sausages and the beans I talked to Olly about wells, for the last time. They had served no purpose in my quest to recover the past. Why should they?
You tease your personal history until you tire of it; and then it becomes an old toy in a cupboard, waiting for the final throw-out
– ap Llwyd.
I thought about the little girl in the news, trapped in a well far away. A shaft had been sunk; a local potholer had descended and was boring through the clay to connect the two holes; he was a yard or so away from her. No signs of life were being detected. Time was running out. The media swarmed all over the area; the nation paused and millions turned to face the well.
There are many ghostly stories about maidens falling down wells, or throwing themselves into the water below. These legends may echo human sacrifices long ago.
Some wells were oracular – people prayed by them and waited for guidance. A person who’d been robbed might throw bits of bread on the water and name a suspect; the bread sank if the thief was named. Prehistoric wells were sacred and may have been guarded by divine maidens or priestesses. In some legends, the well-maiden was a dark nemesis: if a warrior encountered her washing bloody linen he knew he was doomed. Some wells were guarded by sacred fish, dragons, serpents or eels. Killing or removing them brought dire consequences. Well-dressing is probably a residue of well-worship. According to one tradition a Waste Land was created when brutal men violated the well-maidens and stole their golden cups. The land became barren; trees withered and the waters dried up. The Waste Land was also a landscape of spiritual death. The chief Celtic well divinity was the three-in-one goddess Coventina, closely identified with the Greek goddess Mnemosyne, mother of the nine Muses, who personified memory. Mortals were given a choice after they’d consulted the Oracle: they could either keep their memories and drink from the Spring of Mnemosyne, or they could forget the past and drink from the Spring of Lethe. The Delphic Oracle could supposedly tell the future because of a sacred spring which emitted vapours. Science has an explanation: the fumes contain ethylene, a sweet-smelling gas with an intoxicating effect.
Olly and I enjoyed our breakfast at Caffi Gronant. Afterwards I popped into a store over the road to stock up on some grub for our picnic at Glynllifon. There was a special offer on the chicken salad sandwiches: chicken breast with mayonnaise and salad on malted wheatgrain bread. Sounded great. And there was a two packs for
the price of one offer on the marshmallows, so that was that. To make sure that Olly was happy I grabbed a bottle of Ty Nant in its cobalt blue bottle – water drawn from a vast underground aquifer near Llanon, south of Aberystwyth. The aquifer was discovered below farmland by a noted water diviner in 1976; after a borehole was sunk through 100 feet of rock he declared it to be the purest water he had ever tasted.
Soon we were on another bus, heading out of town. An old headmaster of mine got on and slumped into the seat in front of me; he looked like a ghost among all the other pensioners, and my journey began to feel like a spectral ride into the past – to a museum, where we’d all be stuffed and propped up in cobwebbed corners, ready to whisper our polite conversations, like the dummies I’d seen on Dumbarton Rock. Mannequins again. During a lonely childhood Carl Jung – who felt compelled to live near water throughout his life – carved a comforting friend, a little wooden mannequin which he hid in the attic.
These passengers were different: as we changed longitude – travelled westwards, into old Wales – they became more direct, less formal with those around them; they bantered and pointed. The cadence changed; voices were higher.
Most of them looked ravaged – straggly survivors of a generation which had subsisted on black humour, booze and fags, but the good times still struggled inside them. At one bus stop an old man struggled for breath, his goldfish mouth filtering the thin air around his haunted face; he had two bundles of kindling wood in orange nets, and he looked as though he’d carried them all the way from Neverland.
It was a nice ride. I felt comfortable and happy. There was snow on the mountains – exposed bone in a tureen of hills – and I could see a little figure on each of the peaks, waving at me. I’d been to the top of each and every one of them. I loved it all that day. A few flakes of snow gyrated in the air. Some people say it’s harder to love your country when it’s cold. Do the Italians love Rome more than Inuits love the tundra? I’ll have to ask Dafydd Apolloni.
We arrived at Glynllifon in wan sunshine. If you like trees, this is a good place to go. There are trees from all over the world. Towering redwoods, tactile cypresses. There’s even a tree from China called the Seven Son Flower of Zhejiang. I probably climbed trees a lot during those lost ten years. Like that little boy with a bad haircut in The Singing Detective, whose parents quarrelled all the time. He escaped up trees, seeing things he shouldn’t see. Even now I like to sit in the branches of a tree, swaying gently in a breeze, looking at the world go by.
There are lots of sculptures in the park at Glynllifon, and an art installation in the shape of a ruined house with two trees growing inside it, and Welsh poetry on the wall, plus a picture of seven quarrymen from long ago. This is what the poetry says:
Voices come in waves daw lleisiau yn donnau
Along the white road, ar hyd y lon wen,
I have remembered yr wyf wedi cofio
And I have forgotten, ac rwyf wedi anghofio,
The fire is fading in the grate: mae’r tan yn mynd i lawr yn y grat:
I will go to bed, af i’m gwely,
Tomorrow will come fe ddaw yfory
And I will still be able to ask questions a chaf ddal i ofyn cwestiynau.
I am standing by the seven quarrymen: I say men, but two of them are just boys (one of them looks beaten, he’s so tired he can hardly hold himself up – his arms loll in front of him, exhausted). The men have big moustaches and Klondike hats or bowlers. There’s still a lot of humour in those faces, and some anger, also some bitterness, wariness, tiredness. They’ll never go home to study the fire and mull over hard times because they’re painted on a wall by the side of a large field. Close by them there’s a lake (a real lake). OK – it’s a pond, and its surface is green, clogged with watercress and weeds. Jutting out of this pond is a female arm, straight in the air, with outstretched fingers, as if a mermaid has stretched out, from under the slime, to catch a ball. There are two little holes in the wrist; I point to them and I say to Olly: ‘Look, those holes look like the needle marks on your arm after they took blood samples.’
She doesn’t say anything back.
In the palm of this metal, chocolate-coloured hand there’s a bolt. It’s obvious that the hand held a sword once, but the sword is no longer there. Stolen, probably. That would make sense.
Olly and me, we had our dinner among the trees. There’s a little picnic site at Glynllifon, and as the sun crept up the slats on our table I bathed in the shade of a magnificent evergreen oak. A farmer whistled to his sheep and they responded emotionally, bleating with pleasure as they ran towards him. The power of food. Murder me, steal my lambs, but first give me a handful of Ewe Nuts.
I don’t suppose you want to know this, but sheep can remember the faces of ten people and fifty other sheep for at least two years. That sort of information comes in handy when you’re standing next to a stranger at a bus stop and need to break the ice.
The snow on the mountains reminded me of marbled bathrooms, the sort you want to get in and out of quickly because they’re so inhospitable. The colours had been sucked from the fields, as if they were polar bear hides which had been gnawed by used-up Inuit women before they stumbled out into the snow to be eaten by bears. Or is that a pathetic fallacy, too? Recycled ancestors, their spirits passing through the bear and re-entering their children via succulent bear steaks. Alimentary, my dear Watson.
So many words for ice. But no words at all for modern, urban yearnings – for snow, for purity, for white bears and simple myths.
Olly and me, we ate two large slices of chocolate cake. After that we were extra happy. Olly became a bit strange. Sort of dreamy, and a bit giggly of course.
Duxie makes exceedingly nice cakes.
I remember the time I stood looking at the Lady of the Lake’s damaged hand. Olly was standing very close to me; I could smell her intricate femininity. I reached out and took her hand in mine, and she let me, but I sensed immediately, as you do, that it was an appeasement. She didn’t respond in the way I wanted, with one of those incredibly sophisticated messages which flit through you; the sort of message Schumacher gets when the lights turn green. We were standing by the water, and I thought of Jack and Jill, and the smell of vinegar and brown paper. According to a Scandinavian myth the moon god Mani captured two children while they were drawing water from a well and their shadows can still be seen, carrying a bucket on a pole between them, when the moon is full. My own children… they might as well be on the moon. Are they missing me? Do they ever cry in the night, as I do?
I relinquished Olly’s hand. That was probably the last time I tried it on with her.
She smiled her tired little smile, and the shadows under her eyes dragged me towards her, filling me with moonlight and desire. Perhaps it was the cake. I wondered if she was going to cry; I imagined the elemental, underground taste of her tears, the metallic tang of the water, its geyser warmth. A miniature Excalibur in every drop.
To bridge the silence between us, I made smalltalk about my picnic in the snow project. I’d already found two film characters to join me on the tartan rug – Captain Oates and Karol Karol, the Polish hairdresser; now I was searching for a third.
Olly suggested the little boy in The Road to Perdition, riding his bicycle through the snow. Within a few days his whole family would be wiped out by mobsters. I wasn’t sure about that one so we compromised with a good old-fashioned bit of schmaltz. Dr Zhivago. Yes, that snowed-up cottage on the steppes and two mournful eyes in the frosted window; the crazy dash by Yuri – Omar Sharif – as he escapes from the claustrophobic confines of his home, flees from his pregnant wife, and heads for the arms (and bed) of his lover Lara. Julie Christie. Yes, Dr Zhivago would do fine; I could have a clip from the film, and then a Sharif look-alike arriving at my picnic. And so we dreamed on…
Standing by our lake-pond, I made a sudden connection. A tremor ran through me.
‘Bloody hell,’ I said slowly, ‘I’ve just seen something.’
She peered into the pond, trying to see what I saw.
‘No, not in there,’ I said. ‘In here,’ and I tapped my temple.
She made a face. Olly could be quite hurtful, actually.
‘Go on then,’ she said.
I checked my pockets, found a tenpenny piece, and flicked it into the pond. She rolled her eyes. My offering disappeared in a silver flash and sank near the well-rounded shoulder below the swordless hand. I almost expected a swish, for the arm to salvage my coin and hold it aloft.
I’d made an intriguing connection. Slow, yes, I’ve always been a yard behind the rest, mentally. But I’ve been granted a few special favours on life’s great soccer pitch; that’s the way it seems to work.