Mr Cassini

by Lloyd Jones

  You make it sound as if he was feeding off your unhappiness.

  No, it was something else. He was bothered by something, and it was to do with the nuisance calls. He was trying to come to terms with something, I guess. He described it as decommissioning, as if he was a used-up power station. He said to me: If you had seven days to live, Olly, what would you do?

  I asked him straight if he only had seven days to live. He said no, he was good for another thirty years. But he still wanted to know what I’d do if I only had a week to live. Go back home, get married quick to my bloke, spend a week in bed with a crate of champagne I said. That sounds good enough for me, he said. But how about you, I asked. What would you do? And he said the strangest thing. He said he’d go for a picnic in the snow.

  Picnic in the snow?

  Yes, he was excited by the idea. It was an ambition he had. He was going to invite some people. He wanted to film it all. He was waiting for some snow.

  Sounds crackers.

  Well, at least it was different. It meant something to him, so I went along with it. He mentioned the weather forecast, said there was snow on the way. He was like a big kid. He was all excited, as if he had a birthday coming up.

  Anything else odd about him?

  He mentioned islands a lot. He laughed at the island cartoons in the newspapers, they all seem to have a palm tree in the middle and a man with a long beard trying to send a message in a bottle… and he mention a Glubbdubb-something or other, an island of magicians in Gulliver’s Travels, a place where Gulliver could talk with people from the past.

  What happened next?

  I left the café, but I promised to meet him again. Why not? He wanted to tell me about his snow plan. He said to me as I put my scarf on: ‘Olly, did you know that icebergs are blue inside? And there’s an iceberg – the B15 – which is almost the size of Wales?’

  ‘No, that one passed me by,’ I said. ‘Must have blinked.’

  ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Almost everything in the world is measured in Wales-units now. Part of the icecap melted away last year and they said it was three times the size of Wales. If some of the rainforest is chopped down it’s five times the size of Wales. It’s an international unit of measurement. A measure of disaster, usually.’

  I thought that was funny. I laughed at that. Then I left him to it, and I walked down to my aunty’s house by the harbour.

  [She left, suddenly. They all watched her go. She wore a creamy-yellow corduroy jacket with the collar up, bunching her hair in attractive loops around her face. One particular curl swept loose over her right eye, swirling in sidewinder motions along her cheek. Light green trousers. Duxie couldn’t identify the material – something like moleskin, soft and supple. Light brown boots, leather. Stylish in an understated way.

  When she stretched to put her jacket on he noticed a tiny butterfly tattoo on her right shoulder. The door closed behind her and she was gone, suddenly. They didn’t see her pass the window, it was as if she’d disappeared into thin air. There was a brief, animated hubbub as Stefano, the Gimp and a couple of the older males made comments about her. Weary by now, Duxie decided to get a taxi home. He couldn’t be bothered walking up the hill. He saw her as they passed, and the taxi wobbled slightly as the driver – also staring – corrected a drift towards the pavement. Never seen her before, said the driver. Nor me either, said Duxie.

  Later, sitting by his window overlooking the football field, Duxie rolled a joint. He liked a blow before bed, it helped him to relax. Once he’d had a run-in with the heavy drugs: acid, speed, charlie. After the break-up he’d done a lot. He’d needed something to take the pain away. It had been like falling into a hole full of cotton wool. Thankfully, he’d weaned himself away from the heavies, calmed himself down with cannabis. It was pretty harmless stuff, he reckoned. So he skinned up on his little side-table and waited for the stuff to take effect. It did, pretty soon. Duxie sat and smoked, wondered about the girl in Stefano’s. Something stirred in him. He sensed that the girl was vulnerable; that she had been hurt badly, and her eyes spoke of a troubled past.

  Duxie would return to the café every day to talk with her; perhaps he would be able to gain her confidence (if the Gimp allowed him to) and maybe he could help her. He felt protective towards her, and he reasoned – probably correctly – that he was using up some of the fatherly feeling he’d stored up inside him, unable to use it on his own kids.

  Duxie rolled another joint, just to be sure of getting some shut-eye. Sleep was virtually impossible these days without a good blow first. His body gradually unfurled. He listened intently, trying to hear any noises coming from the flat below. All quiet. They were out, thank God. The rows had got worse recently, and Duxie had found himself very tense, extremely wound up as he waited every night for the raised voices, the breaking crockery.

  He thought about tomorrow. It would be a better day than the day he’d just had, hopefully. There had been a long delay on a mountain pass, caused by a pile-up involving three vehicles. One of them was vintage – a Minerva Landaulette; also a blue Polo, and behind that a rust bucket, an old van painted clumsily in matt red. He’d been one of the first on the scene, but there had been no sign of any passengers: the vehicles looked as though they’d been put there for a film or an advert. Strange. He needed to start early in the morning – he had a drop in Scotland, it was going to be a long day. He was taking some bottled water on the up journey and bringing some jeans back down. He could have a good think in the van. Finally, Duxie fetched out an old tin box from a drawer in the table by his side. It was an ancient Christmas selection box, with a snow scene and people ice-skating; a scene of merriment and laughter, with lots of children running around looking happy and excited. He prised open the lid – it was very stiff, slightly rusty – and started flipping randomly through a higgledy-piggledy stack of old photographs, most of them faded. They smelt musty. They were mostly creased, many were partly perished. Family heirlooms. Some of them were so old he had no idea who was looking back at him. There were soldiers and farmers. God knows who they were: it was strange to think that most of them had shared the same genes as him, the same acid clusters, the same lettering in a very old line of seaside rock.

  Duxie found what he was looking for – a picture of a man in a fez. He had a sloppy grin on his face and his hands were held out in front of him, in a Tommy Cooper pose. Duxie knew he was drunk. He was afraid of this man in the picture…

  The dreams were returning – the dreams of magic and fear. Dreams from his childhood, presumably. Duxie returned the picture to the box and closed it. Methodically, as usual, he cleared away his smoking debris and washed the ashtray and his cup under the cold tap. He returned with a cloth to wipe the table.

  Tomorrow he was going north on an errand. He would weave a good fantasy to cheat the satellite watching him in the sky. Then, in the evening, he would hurry from the snooker hall to watch the beautiful girl as she smoked and drank coffee under the pink neon sign. He would ask her to go on a picnic with him.

  Duxie read for a while, as usual. He’d finished Rings of Saturn and now he was on Knud Holmboe’s Desert Encounter, a book about a dangerous adventure in North Africa. The Italians had blocked up some of the Bedouin wells with concrete in retribution for a rebellion. Duxie felt a deep sympathy for the Bedouins.

  That night he dreamt of wells, and in his dream he went on a long journey with Olly. The seven rainbow bands on the side of his van had turned into seven human messengers from the past. In his dream, Olly was in terrible trouble and only he could help her. Outside his window the night air smelt of snow, as sharp and medical as the smell of a swab on his arm before the anaesthetic sent him to another land – a land from which he was exiled, a land in a perpetual state of emergency…]

  12

  THE TIDE COMES IN

  The interview tapes (2)

  Would you like to describe the second meeting? Do you remember what you talked about?

  Yes, I remember
that evening very well because Mr Cassini was finally nailed. Or so we thought. There was a shout from the ex-copper’s table, and Stefano came rushing out of the kitchen all excited, as if the Red Baron had been shot down. He fetched a drinking straw and played with the fly’s body, leaning over the table – his nose almost touched it. Mrs Griffiths shuffled over too and studied the upturned insect. The table was covered in sugar grains – they were scattered all over the place after the copper brought his hand down on the pyramid he’d made as a lure.

  ‘Non corretto,’ said Stefano. ‘This one isn’t Mr Cassini. This one he is grey all over, Mr Cassini is blue and sort of greeny too, no?’

  We all agreed. The policeman admitted his mistake, and we all sat down again. The policeman tidied his table with a serviette and started another vigil. Soon, an angry outburst from the kitchen confirmed that Mr Cassini was back. There was an explosion of noise caused by saucepans falling onto the floor: Stefano had missed again, and he was getting cross. We could hear him banging his knives on the preparation boards and barking at the Gimp.

  [Duxie listened to the commotion and planned his picnic. He knew the ideal place. He would borrow a tartan rug from Harriet next door, and he had a picnic basket in one of the storage cupboards – he knew exactly where. It might need a good clean. February was an odd time for a picnic, but if they were lucky with the weather it could be very enjoyable. Snow – he wanted snow. He’d watch cloud-shadows on the sea and look for dolphins cleaving the waves. All that water. Fountains of the great deep. The river down below would be doing a silvery conga through the trees. He would nudge her arm and point to a gleaming speck on the far horizon: the ghost ship, which had been sighted many times before. Or maybe it was an iceberg, she might say. Twice the size of Wales. He’d pull a face and make a weak joke about manic, sexually ambivalent bears in the Arctic being bi-polar and she’d bring her mug down hard on his gloved hand.

  He would consult his Bumper Book of British Picnics and he’d choose a pleasing medley of sandwiches and titbits. No alcohol – he would select the finest water, collected and bottled at one of Wales’ ancient springs. Perhaps he should take a couple of folding chairs. The mirror-calm lakes would dazzle her. Once settled, she could nibble at a sandwich and contemplate the consumptive hills, as grey and placid as sleeping hippos.

  ‘Did you know that hippos like bananas?’ he would ask across the table, and she would shake her head, her big luminous eyes brimming with wonder and doubt. He would take a couple of bananas, and apples of course. Plus one of his special cakes. He would tell her about his secret life. He would tell her about his amnesia… so many years lost, a hole in every day which needed to be darned. He would tell her about the man who forgot the word for anchor and never came to land. He would tell her about the seven swans and their flight through the rainbow. Yes, he would conjecture on man’s need for the far horizon as a perpetual mystery – a paradigm for the line between the temporal and the spiritual. A grand illusion, but also a clear demarcation between feeble man and the infinite, unknowable universe beyond.

  She would respond warmly, he thought. Perhaps she would smoke and study the teeming waters of the lake for a while, the lake they’d chosen as their final destination. Perhaps she would compare the mountain ravines to duelling scars. Perhaps she would comment on the sheet of water in front of them. Water was magical, she would say. It gave life to all – yet it killed and destroyed just as easily. Humans, who started off in the sea long ago, had not fully left it: they still needed water, carrying it around with them in the same way as spacemen carried oxygen in their tanks on the moon. The amniotic fluid, which surrounded each unborn child, was a perfect re-creation of the ocean, with exactly the same salinity. Tears were miniature droplets of history – liquid stigmatas: symbols of regret, signifying the last few drops to fall from our bodies when we first left the seas all those millions of years ago.

  He would marvel at her beauty, even more pronounced in the limpid air. Everything in the story was true:

  Yellower was her head than the flower of the broom, whiter was her flesh than the foam of the wave; whiter were her palms and her fingers than the shoots of the marsh trefoil from amidst the fine gravel of a welling spring. Neither the eye of the mewed hawk, nor the eye of the thrice-mewed falcon, not an eye was there fairer than hers. Whiter were her breasts than the breast of the white swan, redder were her cheeks than the reddest foxgloves. Whoso beheld her would be filled with love for her. Four white trefoils sprang up behind her wherever she went; and for that reason was she called Olwen.

  He would add to the conversation. Water had been an important escape route for many peoples fleeing persecution and poverty, he would say. The human race was divided into the people of the sea and the people of the land. But there came a time, eventually, when it was necessary for all of us to leave the shore. One couldn’t put one’s back to the land for ever and ignore it. At a critical point in one’s evolution it was necessary to turn away from the sea, to head towards the hinterland. There were certain understandings which could only be arrived at on a peak in the centre of one’s country. It was a different dimension. Land without sea. In the act of travelling from the sea to the centre a traveller might construe a different frame of mind which was based on the whole rather than the peripheral.

  Their picnic would get off to a sound start, and if it was a little old fashioned in tone, then so what? She might enjoy a bit of decorum and restraint. So would he. The world had gone mad, everyone agreed on that. Souls bought with trinkets, indescribable nonsense in the papers and on television. Britain had a rancid end-of-empire gloom about it with all the decent, thoughtful people watching askance from the margins as a children’s party degenerated into a disgusting and violent bun fight. Duxie was sick of it all; a society in which Prozac was being consumed in such huge quantities that it was being found in the drinking water, building up in river systems and groundwater. A society grounded on fear, permeated by nervousness, unable to sleep properly: twelve million people slept badly for three nights out of seven. We were people who raged, he’d say. We were people who couldn’t cope with silence; our children lost in a virtual limbo, drifting from one screen to another, unable to comprehend the natural world – the real world – and therefore glad to expunge it, to enclose it in a hard, cold, concrete casing of forgetfulness.

  He would give her a choice of sandwiches. Cheese with a subtle salad, in case she was a vegetarian. As an option he would make a ham and pickle combination with tomatoes drizzled in a boisterous vinaigrette. He would go mad and buy a selection of biscuits from the best shop in town. And he would make a chocolate cake too, just in case. He would tell her about its contents, of course. He wasn’t into sneaky little tricks like that…

  He would tell her about Shackleton’s men, starving on Elephant Island as they waited for deliverance, dreaming of food, craving for sweets: Clark wanted Devonshire dumpling with cream, James wanted syrup pudding, McIlroy wanted marmalade pudding and cream, Rickinson wanted blackberry and apple tart with cream; but Perce Blackboro, the Welsh stowaway who had part of his frostbitten foot, gangrenous and black, amputated under an upturned boat amid the icy rocks, had merely wanted bread and butter. Duxie felt guilty. He’d got so fat he was telling people he was going to be a Munchkin in the Christmas panto… he felt like a grub which had munched its way though leaf after leaf, waiting for respite from gluttony, waiting to be an imago at last.]

  So the fly was still alive. Could you tell me, again, why it was called Mr Cassini?

  He seemed to call anything or anybody who bothered him Mr Cassini. I don’t know why. It was like a code. Something to do with those nuisance phone calls he received, too. He had a call on his mobile that evening and when it ended he made a funny face, shrugged, and said: Mr Cassini again. The colour went from his face and he was quiet for a while.

  Did you ask him about this Mr Cassini who phoned him?

  Yes. I said to him, ‘Tell me what’s going on, you mi
ght as well Duxie... in a few days I’ll have gone and we’ll never see each other again. Talking to strangers is good for you, sometimes.’ But he turned the conversation round to me again. He wanted to know more about my father. He wanted to know if he’d hurt me, or done other things…

  I’m beginning to think…

  You’re beginning to think that his preoccupation with my father had more to do with his father than mine?