Mr Cassini

by Lloyd Jones

  PC 66 turned to the rainbow messengers and said, simply:

  ‘Go with him, guide him to the top of the mountain. I shall see you there.’

  And that was the last time that Mr Cassini saw Big Bay or Little Bay, or the island, or the marshes beyond, or his colossus – the Red Man – looking out to sea.

  PC 66 took Mr Cassini’s matt red van (with his bicycle inside it) to the top of the eastern pass above the town and he drove it as fast as he could without injuring himself into a gap in the wall, simulating an accident. Then he cycled back and prepared himself for the day ahead.

  9

  THE TIDE GOES OUT

  Sherlock Holmes

  and the seven rings of Saturn

  TOO many things are happening at the moment. Hoping to hear news of Olly, I’ve started listening to the radio again and looking at the telly, and that’s always a bad sign. It’s February and it’s cold. I feel as if I’m sitting in a dark kitchen with the fridge door ajar – there’s a nicotine glow, the hum of snow to come. Outside, the earth is flat and colourless – clingfilmed ready for reheating; the barcode trees are stark and black, waiting for spring’s leafy new price tags. I wait for each dawn as a sick man waits for medical results.

  I’m standing by the sea-facing window, next to my telescope, looking down at the harbour. If I concentrate all the lenses of my mind I can focus on a tiny upstairs window in Bangor in the nineteenth century. A man called John Jones is training a large telescope on the snowy cap of Mars. He calls his telescope Jumbo. He made it himself. By day he counts slates in the local docks; he has already been a farmer’s boy and a servant. But after reading The Solar System by Dr Dick he has become enamoured of stars.

  There’s a blue boat in the harbour and its chains are rattling, its capstan spinning. Soon it will glide seawards and I need to be on it – I want to be a dot on someone’s horizon. And strangely, portentously, there’s a ghost moth in the hallway, clinging to the glass pane above my front door. It hasn’t moved for days. I stand there, sometimes, willing it to life. There’s sadness in moths. In times of drought, without dew, they may travel in clouds for many miles, looking for water. When they find it they drown in large numbers as they try to settle on its surface.

  I have some final business to attend to. I am in need of friends. I have called upon them all to help me – and here’s one of them now, scurrying up the path.

  He was with us a short while ago: magnifying glass in hand, one eye larger than the other in the best cartoon fashion. The man who used his brilliant deductive skills to free two innocent men from prison – in real life. He introduced skis to Switzerland. He voyaged to the Arctic as surgeon on a whaling ship. He enthralled the public with his creation, Sherlock Holmes. Yes, Arthur Conan Doyle is with us again, though in a different guise – as a spiritualist. For him it was a great crusade, and if you don’t believe me, read his two-volume The History of Spiritualism. To tell you the truth, Sherlock Holmes meant very little to him. Ready cash. He thought his historical novel The White Company was his best work. Like most of us, Conan Doyle had a skeleton in the cupboard – his father drank enough of the hard stuff to sink Baker Street under a sea of bottles. One of seven children, given to fits of violence, Doyle senior spent much of his life in mental asylums or nursing homes for alcoholics.

  Already fascinated by psychic research – séances, telepathy and thought transference, Conan Doyle was devastated by the death from pneumonia of his son Kingsley, and the tragedy refracted his mind; at a sitting held by a Welsh medium his son ‘spoke’ to him. Conan Doyle was hooked.

  Sherlock’s sleuthing tips were of no help in the search for Olly. And there’s even worse news. The police have given up. Even Dafydd Apolloni in Rome has thrown in the towel, and we all know what he and his hot-blooded compatriots will do to find a pretty girl. So I’m going on a different tack. I’m going to get in touch with her through spiritualism.

  ‘Oh well,’ I hear you say as you lay down my book. ‘Pity – he’d kept it together pretty well until now, for a lunatic that is. But communing with the lost and the dead? Forget it.’

  The truth is, I have a confession to make. During the last few months a creeping sensation has spread over me. Not a realisation, exactly – more a suspicion. A hunch? A little orange Post-it note from Sherlock, or my Sixth Sense, saying: Everything is happening now. The past and the future, too. All that has happened and all that will happen is happening now. Without beginning, middle or end, the performance is continuous and ever-happening. Whatever has been in the past and whatever will be in the future is happening now, all at the same time.

  I know, sounds barmy to me too. I don’t believe in all that tosh either. But hang on for a sec. Don’t go yet. I wouldn’t bother you with this if I didn’t have something to go on. A solitary clue.

  Lately I’ve been having a recurring déjà-vu, but it’s a déjà-vu with a difference. It’s not a sharp, tangy repeat from the past. It’s from the future. It happened yesterday, when I was travelling up-country, from the sea towards the foothills of Snowdonia. Meandering up the valley, following the curves of the river – I was somewhere near the old Roman ford.

  There I was, travelling along in my pick-up, when I had a typical déjà-vu experience but it was from the future: I was transported by my senses to exactly the same place after my death. It was the same old world, pretty much, and it felt familiar in a déjà-vu sort of way. But time had moved on a bit, and I wasn’t there. I was acutely – and not unpleasantly – aware that I’d left the stage; I was simply not there any longer. Don’t get me wrong. I don’t believe in an afterlife. No – my senses (or my mind) were merely playing tricks with me. Happens to loads of people, apparently. Nothing new under the moon. But how about the millions who do believe in all that, all those who have believed in spiritualism? A surprising number of Welsh people, actually. Superstitious lot. I should know. Few people have spent more time than me avoiding ladders and tossing salt around by the sackful. Research has shown that the average Welshman spends a total of thirteen weeks of his life touching wood and saying Touch Wood.

  I’m joking! Never take me seriously.

  Let’s examine the Welsh and their penchant for the supernatural.

  Take Jack Webber, born in one of the South Wales valleys in 1907: he spoke through trumpets and his presence affected electrical equipment.

  Or how about Treherbert-born Alexander Frederick Harris. At one Christmas séance featuring a luminous ball he caused the decorations and balloons to be pulled down by spirit children who played on tambourines, mouth organs and drums. During the war he ‘reunited’ a woman with her dead son. At a séance the young man appeared dramatically, held out his arms to the woman, and said: Mum, it's Derry. With a cry of anguish she jumped from her seat and wept tears of joy in the arms of her ‘dead’ son.

  I, too, decided to try a spot of spiritualism in my search for Olly. I got in touch, via the internet, with a spiritualist medium who makes your angels accessible to you.

  ‘I am bestowed with the gifts of clairvoyance, clairaudience, clairaroma and clairsentience and I have been psychic all of my life,’ she says on her website. ‘As a child I experienced the joy of playing with Spirit children and enjoyed their unconditional love. These same Spirit children are still with me, they are my guides who have grown up along side of me; and with their love and light they help me to link with the Spirit world.’

  She continues: ‘By connecting with the Angels I will help you to be more able to understand the synchronicities – the planned coincidences which happen to all of us at some time in our lives.’

  I emailed her, and while I waited for guidance I did a bit of detective work, since I am a Welsh Sherlock manqué (manky Welshman, more like it).

  I sensed that the medium would never reply. She didn’t…

  I had a bit of luck though. I met that man again, the Cardiff psychoanalyst and writer, or maybe it was Merlin, messing around again. He was sitting in a little
café on the hill, and when I saw him I went straight up to him. No messing around this time.

  ‘You must be Mr Adam Phillips,’ I said as I sat down opposite him (if it was him). He looked a bit startled but he held his own counsel and nodded amenably as he ate his breakfast and listened to me.

  ‘I loved Houdini’s Box,’ I said enthusiastically.

  Houdini’s Box, one of his books, examines four different escape artists. One of them is a little girl who has been abused. She plays her own version of hide-and-seek. You may not have realised it, but hide and seek is a subtle game. If you put yourself out of reach, or refuse to hide, you’re not playing the game.

  I grabbed some paper napkins and scribbled down a few of the sentences which passed between us, over the tomato ketchup bottle, that morning:

  ❅ We can’t describe ourselves without also describing what we need to escape from and what we want to escape to.

  ❅ People often feel most alive when they’re escaping, most paralysed before and after.

  ❅ What we want is born of what we want to get away from.

  ❅ Sandor Ferenczi: do people colonise the world with fear to distract themselves?

  ❅ Hungarian proverb: It is better to fear than to be frightened.

  ❅ When it doesn’t starkly and literally save our lives (when we shoot our approaching lion) fear sustains our ignorance… what is being escaped from is often shrouded in mystery.

  ❅ The opposite of fear is choice. Indeed, the whole notion of choice may have been invented as a counter, an alternative, to fear.

  ❅ We transgress to find out if we can escape, create havoc to see what will survive.

  ❅ All symptoms are a kind of geography; they take a person in certain directions, to certain places and not to others. They are a schedule of avoidances, a set of warning signals.

  ❅ It is fortunate that pain has made us so inventive.

  Adam Phillips (if it was he, I’ll never know now) finished his breakfast and thanked me for my company. It had been an exhilarating conversation. I had learnt much, and I thanked him effusively. ‘Absolute pleasure,’ he said as he enveloped himself in a large and warm-looking coat. Perhaps it was my imagination, but his step seemed to quicken into a near-run as he disappeared into the crowd. He liked to keep fit, obviously. But my thoughts were already elsewhere, since a faint but perceptible rainbow was forming over the town, as if to salute this transference of ideas from one mind to another.

  The Yanomami people who have survived marauding gold diggers, loggers and Christians in the rainforests of South America like to hunt, fish, and cultivate gardens – when left alone. To communicate with the spirit world, their shamans snort a hallucinogenic snuff made from the bark of the virola tree. Their spirits appear to them as miniature humans, magnificently decorated with ceremonial ornaments. They are the spirits of the forest – mammals, birds, fish, amphibians, reptiles, insects. There are spirits which represent trees, leaves, vines, water, also stones and waterfalls; spirits representing the sun and the moon, storms, thunder and lightning, and mythological beings. There are also humble household spirits such as the dog spirit, the fire spirit and the clay pot spirit. Finally, there are spirits representing the white man and his domesticated animals. These white spirits are conjured as an antidote – to ward off epidemics.

  Shamans control the fury of the storms, the tic-toc of day and night, the seasons, and the abundance and fertility of game. They prevent the arch of the sky from falling down (the present earth is an ancient fallen sky); they also control the forest’s aggressive spirits and cure Yanomamis made sick by sorcery.

  Shamans ‘die’ when they take their snuff and they enter a visionary trance. White men who have joined them in this rite have seen brilliant sights: rainbows trapped inside the shamans’ feathered headdresses, flowers weeping in their hair, trees trying to soar into the sky, leaves falling to the ground with great howling noises. They report that the stars throb; the sky opens and a great wind destroys everything in its path; the ground opens and snakes slip away into the earth. Then they are engulfed by terror and death hovers all around. They lie under a canopy of immense sorrows.

  I am not the brightest of men, but I’m making a connection here. Forests, men behaving as if they were possessed, generally off their heads, but treated by everyone else as if they were wise beyond measure, awesome, visionary…

  Yes, we’re back with our old friend Merlin again. The madman in the woods. Perhaps he wasn’t that mad after all. Just off his head. Shitfaced. And where did all the Druids and the vates hang out? In the groves. Sounds like a good excuse to me. Merlin the local dealer.

  The time has come for me to describe my own descent into the underworld. You know already that my experiment with wells failed: that I was unable to journey into the past as I had hoped. The first ten years of my life were still a mystery to me.

  So I turned to the ground itself, because over the years a few tiny shards had risen, slowly, as if they’d been transported – like miniature surfboards – to the surface of my memory on incredibly slow-moving waves created by the activities of a trillion mind-worms. Those shards reminded me of the poems which once formed part of an epic Welsh saga known as Canu Heledd. The poems are all that remain of a great myth; the basic story, told in prose (long ago) has been lost.

  Looking back now, I can see that my descent below ground had started (unconsciously) a few weeks previously. Olly had been with me then too.

  We’d been sitting in Merlin’s café bar in Ystradgynlais, I remember it as if it were yesterday. You know the place – red and green façade, big leather Chesterfield in the window to let you sit and watch the world go by. Me and Olly, just the two of us, loafing about and enjoying it. Good energy in Ystradgynlais, too. Steady community or, as they say down the valleys, tidy.

  ‘Let’s go down a pit,’ I said to Olly, but no, she wanted to go to the Dan-yr-Ogof caves up the road. I stood my ground and prevailed (for a change).

  The Lewis Merthyr Colliery in the Rhondda seemed the obvious place to go. I asked a friendly man standing in the doorway of a shop on the crossroads: Brian Davies menswear, footwear & protective clothing etc: ‘How do we get to the Rhondda?’

  There was a sharp intake of breath and he shook his head, as if to say that a blood-soaked man had crawled into town less than an hour ago… last stagecoach through the pass ambushed by Arapahos, all dead and scalped, mainly women and children. I felt excited by this, as if we were at the far end of the Silk Road, in Mongolia perhaps, not just round the corner from Lower Cwmtwrch.

  We got there eventually, via Neath and Blaengwynfi. First a Sherpa bus full to the brim with people who bubbled with language: Welsh, and English, and even sign language too. Raindrops chandeliered the dirty windows in liquid constellations (I saw Hydra, Draco); my star-streaks glimmered against a dark backdrop of forests and ravines climbing up on either side – for most of the journey we were in a deep cleft matlocked in the moorland. Giant wheels appeared, as if newly invented, rearing above their dereliction; skeletal pithead wheels, abandoned like so many upturned supermarket trolleys, rusting above the coal shafts: spinsterish, spindled, bespoke. There be dragons.

  A lonesome whistler on the back seat harrowed my brain. The wipers, I thought, were trying to reach out beyond their ambit, trying to suck in the unobtainable raindrops just beyond their sweep; and I saw parallels with my own search for meaning, beyond the constraints of my own blades, sweeping the glassy plains of my past.

  The villages we passed had an Austrian feel to them, perched on ledges, but there were windows patched up with cardboard and flowerless gardens. King Coal took the money with him. Onwards we lurched in our bus, crammed into our seats as if we were spiders pushed into a matchbox by a bored child, and spinning from our backs – from all of us – came the silken thread of our lives, swirling though the rear window, entwining to form a history, a gossamer cord dragging the parachute of what has happened between us today, and may never h
appen again.

  We hitched a lift over the mountain and descended into Treorchy. If Honolulu is the rainbow capital of the world, overarched by a vibrant bow almost every day of the year, then Treorchy was the capital of the clouds that day. Capital of the clouds… the appellation would look nice on a nameplate somewhere in Wales:

  CERRIGYDRUDION

  Capital of the Clouds

  You could have a competition based on rainfall, cloudfall, and the number of angels seen walking the streets.

  Through the rain-mottled window of the rain-mottled car I looked down on the Rhondda, half in awe. The place is legendary. This is where the Great Jehovah lives, the Great Redeemer – this is the barren land. This is where they bake the Bread of Heaven. Terraces of miners’ houses stretched away in long miles, some of them dead straight and some of them following the bendy contours of the valley.

  A brief history of Hwntws: South Wales is riven by deep valleys, each with its own coal-mining history. South Walians are knows as Hwntws (North Walians are Gogs).

  Hwntws are divided into Straight Hwntws (born in straight terraces) and Bendy Hwntws (born in bendy terraces). Telling one from the other is quite easy. Straight Hwntws prefer rugby, which has lots of straight lines in it: they sit in straight rows in the stands watching straight lineouts and straight three-quarters. The rugby ball, which is fighting the circle and gradually straightening out, is kicked between two very straight posts. Also, Straight Hwntws will frequently converge in long straight lines, standing in comfortable silence (often in pubs, as it happens). There is no point in walking to either end of this line, looking for the object of the queue, since there isn’t one – they’re merely drawing strength and comfort from each other in emulation of their houses. If you want to identify the Bendy Hwntws, simply throw a party and wait until everyone’s drunk, then start a conga. The Bendy Hwntws will adapt happily to the conga’s snake-like path, but the Straight Hwntws will eventually revert to the norm, stiffen into a straight line, and punch a hole in the side of your house before disappearing into the distance; thus the phrase to bring the house down.