Mr Cassini

by Lloyd Jones

Yes, that’s what I think.

  I got that impression too. What do they call it, when you project yourself onto other people?

  Transference.

  Yes, that’s the one. I realised that he was using me to re-enact his own past, somehow.

  I take it that your own father has caused you problems?

  Yes. He made things absolutely impossible for my boyfriend – that’s why I came here, to get away from it all for a while. Sanctuary, I suppose. I told them to sort it all out by the time I got back. You know what men are like. One minute they’re snarling and threatening to kill each other, the next minute they’re in a bar with their arms round each other, friends for ever.

  So you wanted to marry this man?

  Mad about him.

  What went wrong?

  My bloody father, that’s what went wrong. He was being a sod again. I’m just a normal girl, I just want a normal life. But he always makes it difficult. He made life hell for my mother. When I was small I couldn’t believe he was my real father, I thought it was impossible, a big mistake. Every day I wanted him to die. Never happened, did it.

  Did he abuse you?

  No, not really. Now I know more about that sort of thing I realise he wasn’t that bad. Duxie talked about cold cruelty and hot cruelty. If kids were mistreated but there was a lot of love around they usually got over it. But if they got cold cruelty, without any love, that was the thing that really messed them up for ever. It was cold abuse that did the real damage, he said. Those were the people who felt empty inside.

  I don’t think he’s necessarily right about that, but did he say any more on the subject?

  He asked me if I ever felt as if I had holes all the way through me, like Swiss cheese.

  Have you?

  No, I’ve never felt like that. But he said he had something wrong inside him. Bored out by little miners when he was a child, he said. There were lots of people like that. They tried filling the holes with alcohol, or drugs, or food, but they never filled them up. He said there were silos or hoppers inside him but all the switches were bust, the machinery didn’t work properly, so some hoppers were perpetually empty while others were overflowing hopelessly. And there was water coming up inside him again, filling him up from below, travelling up his legs. He couldn’t find the plug. That’s the way he described it.

  Had he tried getting help?

  He mentioned a psychiatrist. He’d read some stuff too, but as he said himself, a little knowledge is a dangerous thing. He was searching for something – an explanation, I think. He wasn’t that keen on psychiatry. A form of alchemy, he said. Doomed to failure, a search for fool’s gold. He mentioned a doctor… Dee? He said this doctor and others like him had made millions of useless experiments, spent billions of hours chasing a dream. He thought the whole psychoanalysis thing was a bit sad, another tale of alembics and elixirs. He thought the pressure to make sense of it all was another tyranny – a useless experiment. There was no such thing as a lasting solution, and if there was, humans would destroy it immediately to create a new set of problems. But maybe he could reach a personal solution, he said… a small solution. He called it the eighth story.

  Eighth story?

  Yes, he said something about there being seven classical plots in the human story. The eighth, he said, involved a white room.

  Was this a real room, or a room in his mind?

  No idea. He said he’d sat in a perfectly white room once and it was a room of complete simplicity. He had spent all his life making thousands of small decisions every day, but when he sat in that room there was only one decision left for him to make, only one in the whole wide world.

  Did he tell you what it was?

  Yes.

  [Little Michael moved seats to be closer to her in the cafe: he actually jostled the copper into sitting by the window, and then he moved into the warm indent left by his bum. There was something of the White Rabbit about Little Michael; he seemed to arrive out of nowhere, and he had a surreal edge.

  ‘I’m starting a protest movement,’ he said to Olly. As usual he was immaculate, in his neatly pressed black suit. He couldn’t contain himself; like everyone else he had to be in on the action.

  ‘And what exactly are you protesting about?’ she asked.

  Little Michael leaned across the policeman and wrote with his finger in the condensation on the window, in big capital letters:

  SAVE THE FLY!

  ‘There,’ he said, ‘poor little sod, he’s got as much right to live as you lot. Why persecute him? He’s the best entertainment we’ve had in here for years.’

  Olly laughed. She wrote under it:

  LONG LIVE MR CASSINI!

  The policeman added:

  EAT SHIT! 12 MILLION FLIES CAN’T BE WRONG

  but Olly rubbed it out.

  There was a slightly embarrassed pause, then Little Michael reignited the conversation.

  ‘You having trouble with your pop?’ he asked Olly.

  ‘Yes,’ she said wearily, ‘but I think we’ve discussed it enough now.’

  ‘Never mind,’ he said, covering her hand with his, ‘he’ll get his come-uppance one day. You always pay in the end. He’ll die a lonely old man. He won’t sleep proper. People with a bad conscience always fear the judgement of children,’ he added. ‘But I can’t remember who said that.’

  Olly regarded him with a bemused look. ‘Who rattled your cage tonight?’

  Little Michael looked sheepish. ‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘Do you mind if I join you for a while? Only I couldn’t help overhearing.’

  Olly waved her hand to show it was OK.

  ‘I was involved with a complete bastard once, so I know what you’re on about,’ said Little Michael.

  Duxie daydreamed for a while. They were by the lake again, having their picnic, with cloud-shoals silvering the reefs of Snowdonia. The frosty hills would loom like enormous maggots in a mist. He would offer a sandwich and tell her about the fantasy world he’d woven around himself as he drove his van around Britain. He could see no reason for not telling her. What could he lose? He would describe his journeys along the road-veins creasing Britain’s ancient skin. He would tell her all. Well, all that he remembered. Maybe he’d tell her about the photograph of the man in a fez, looking drunkenly into the camera, imitating Tommy Cooper. He would tell her about his dreams and fantasies. He’d dreamed about her repeatedly, ever since he first saw her in Stefano’s. In his fantasy world they were at college together. She was a girl in trouble. He wouldn’t mention the sexual tension he’d concocted. What were dreams anyway? A vision of the future perhaps – a forewarning or a presentiment. That was the ancient view, wasn’t it? Or perhaps there was a cinema in the mind, entertaining the brain as we slept. Or an old part of the brain was sifting through the day’s events and stripping out any information which reinforced survival techniques, then threw the rest away in a dreamy jumble. No one knew, really…]

  Had he been a driver all his life?

  I think so. He seemed envious of me, going to college. He’d never had an education, never had a chance to go to college or a university. Perhaps his dreams reflected a hidden wish – that he wanted to be cleverer, more qualified than he was. He said he’d studied at the Mesolimbic Reward Centre, wherever that is.

  It’s in the brain.

  So he was having me on?

  Looks like it. Did he mention dopamine?

  Something like that, yes.

  He was talking about drugs, probably – the way you get pleasure when you take them.

  The little sod. I thought he was being serious.

  Did he tell you about his dreams?

  Some of them. There were lots of dummies. What do you call them – those dummies in shop windows…

  Mannequins?

  Yes, that’s the word. He talked a lot about mannequins and murders. He mentioned holes a lot. Wells and floods. Stuff from long ago. I couldn’t make much sense of it all.

  The mannequins were symbol
s, perhaps?

  What do you mean?

  Perhaps they symbolised something?

  Such as?

  Well, they could have symbolised people who’d been dehumanised in some way. You’ve mentioned domestic abuse – they could be the sort of people who live with a typical domestic tyrant. All their wiring ripped out. Shells. Get my drift?

  Yes, I suppose so. Sounds a bit simplistic to me.

  Anything else? Did he mention anything else?

  Plenty. He had so much hocus-pocus inside his head – it was like a teen flick in there. There was a room in his dreams, a dark room with a big table in the middle all set out for a meal, something like Sunday lunch. No one ever spoke a word, they all sat there like dummies.

  The mannequins?

  ‘Yes, lifeless, as if they were in a museum. No one ever said a word in his dreams.

  And…?

  They could hear someone coming… they could hear a key in the lock.

  Go on.

  But there was nothing else. Just one scene from the past, that’s all he was allowed. He would feel a bit choked inside. A hot tight feeling in his chest. He felt as if his blood was bubbling slightly and his ears zinged – that’s how he described it. And then a sudden plunge into depression. It felt like a freefall into a black void, he said.

  [Duxie went into a daydream again, looking down at the town, his chin resting in the cup of his gloved hand. He was back at the lake again, with Olly. He would offer her some chocolate cake and watch the lake darken under a cloud grazing the air for dampness. He would press her to eat another slice. And she’d nibble gracefully without getting chocolate sauce all over her nose, like he did. Oaf that he was.

  How would he explain the demonic figure in his dreams, and in his daydreams too?

  He was worried. Would she get the wrong idea? Maybe her eyes would sharpen and she’d size him up anew, see him in a different light.

  ‘Are you Mr Cassini?’ she might ask.

  ‘Bloody hell no,’ he’d reply tersely. ‘Absolutely not. I promise you. I swear it!’

  She might consider his answer, weigh up his response. Give him an unwavering look. He would be forced into a corner; he would have to convince her of his innocence.

  ‘It’s true, I do have a family,’ he would say. ‘But they live in Birmingham. I haven’t seen them, any of them, for years.’

  And she would respond, quite naturally, with: ‘And why did they move to Birmingham? Why did they go away from you, why didn’t you follow them?’

  He’d reply: ‘I felt rejected. I thought they would be better off without me.’

  ‘What a cop-out. If you’d loved them properly you’d have followed them anywhere, to the ends of the earth.’

  ‘Yes, well, I didn’t.’ He’d have to be truthful.

  He’d notice, suddenly, that the air was thickening, that the cloud cover was not much higher than a dome tent around them. Tunnels of light and dark. He would start packing up the picnic. A grey cloud-pillow would descend slowly from above, as if intending to smother them. A few snowflakes would be puffed into the air around them, frozen eider down blown through a rent in the stitching.

  ‘So if Mr Cassini isn’t you, who is he?’

  She would want to know the truth. There would be no getting out of it now. He would be cornered, with his back to the wall. He would have to be evasive.

  ‘He’s got to be someone – someone real for you to construct such a story in your head. He has nothing at all to do with my father and you know it. He’s either you, or he’s…’

  Hopefully, she would peter off there.

  But no, she was much too sharp.

  ‘... your father. Tell me about your own father. Where is he now?’

  The truth was stranger than fiction, so he’d tell her the truth.]

  He told you about his father?

  Yes, in a way. I asked him where his parents lived. He said his mother was dead; his father was at the football ground, he said. ‘Watching a game?’ I asked. ‘No,’ he replied. ‘He’s a groundsman then,’ I said. ‘No,’ he replied. ‘He’s with the worms, where he belongs.’

  I said ‘Duxie, you need to explain this to me.’ And he told me. I was the first person he ever told – how he’d buried his father under the football pitch.

  He’d killed him?

  No, nothing like that. They’d brought his ashes back from the crematorium in a jar, but he didn’t know what to do with them.

  Why didn’t he scatter them somewhere, like any normal person would?

  He was very confused. For some reason he wanted to keep an eye on his father’s remains. I asked him why. He wasn’t quite sure. But there was some unfinished business. That’s the way he put it, unfinished business.

  ‘You see, he’d disappeared for years, gone out of our lives in a second,’ he said to me. ‘Then he came back, as a corpse. They’d found him dead. He’d been living in the next town. There’s only one photo of him, he’s wearing a fez. I think he was some sort of amateur magician. No one would tell me anything about him. He was a forbidden subject. But I knew, somehow, that he had something to do with my hands.’

  His hands?

  Duxie always wore gloves. There was something wrong with his hands.

  What?

  I’ll get to that in a minute.

  [Duxie had buried his father right below the centre spot. He sneaked down to the pitch one night and dug a good hole, about three feet down. Duxie put him in there, in his grey plastic jar. Then he put the turf back, carefully. Nobody noticed because they were always repairing the centre spot anyway. He was still there. Duxie watched him from his window. He was safe down there.]

  Sounds as if that jar was a bit of a holy grail to him.

  Yes, it was of immense significance.

  But why there?

  He didn’t want his father sneaking up on him, that’s what he said.

  He wanted to know where he was.

  Doesn’t make sense – the man was dead. And why was he so important to Duxie? He’d been missing for most of his life.

  Duxie said to me once: I think it’s possible, don’t you, that fathers who aren’t there for your childhood can often play a bigger part in your life than fathers who are.’

  I think that was one reason. But the gloves… they were the main reason.

  [Sitting in the café, Duxie was gripped by another panic attack. What if they ran out of petrol on their way to the lake? He’d ran out of petrol last week. He’d had a verbal warning. He imagined the scene, with Olly. The pick-up would start spluttering. It would grind to a halt, as if a huge finger was pushing against the front bumper.

  ‘Bugger,’ Duxie would say. He would grasp the driving wheel and bang his head on it. ‘Bugger, bugger, bugger.’

  They would sit quietly, neither saying a word as the pick-up tick-ticked and faded, a colossal grasshopper without energy, unable to make the final leap to safety. Olly would look straight ahead, with the curl waving softly in the cab’s unseen wafts.

  ‘Got a can in the back?’

  ‘No,’ he would reply softly.

  ‘You bloody pillock. What are we going to do now?’

  Duxie would consider the possibilities and then they would sit there, listening to the silence of the approaching snow.]

  Where were we… ah yes, his father. Correct me if I’m wrong, but his father seemed to hold an exaggerated importance in his life, considering he hadn’t been there for most of it.

  That’s true. He had his own theory, as usual. He said that fathers seemed to play three important roles for their children. Part of them had to be heroic, another part was anti-heroic, and the third part had to be absent.

  You’ve lost me completely.

  This is what he told me. For a small child, say up to twelve, the father is usually a superhero. He can do no wrong. Then, for adolescence, he becomes an anti-hero. It’s necessary, apparently, for normal development. Kids are testing the water, seeing how far they can go b
efore they enter society. And then there’s the absent bit. It’s like a painting on your wall. No matter how much you like it, if you have to look at it all the time you get sick of it. So it has to be absent from your life, strategically, to be fully appreciated.

  Like a father going to work, say, or for a night out with his mates?

  Yes, that’s about right. But if a father’s absent all the time his absence takes on a whole new meaning, disproportionate to his importance.

  [She would sit in the cab of the pick-up, and he would enjoy their steamed-up isolation in this little igloo of time. He would tell her more about his dreams, about Mr Cassini’s vampirism. Drinking the tears of women and children to stay alive. That would be easy to explain, she would know all about that. Her own father had fastened alligator clips onto the nipples of all the women around him and drained their batteries.

  ‘Oh yes, that’s pretty straightforward symbolism,’ she would tell Duxie. ‘Your father must have been a pretty nasty piece of work. This is the biggest clue we’ve got. An abusive father feeds on his family’s emotions, sucks up their life forces. You have to pity him just a little bit because he’s cursed, like Dracula, to live in a twilight world. Abusive parents colonise the mind, in the same way as bats colonise a cave; their droppings cover the surface of the memory.’

  He would look at her and marvel at her insight.

  ‘Is that why my memory is so faulty?’

  ‘I think so, don’t you? The human memory is a wonderful thing. It can shield us from the past.’

  ‘And why would it do that?’

  ‘To help us survive. That’s all, really. We’re just survival machines, aren’t we? It’s like putting a blanket over a dead person – merely covering up the past.’

  ‘OK, I understand,’ he would say, getting ready to go out in the cold, to flag down the first car, to get some petrol, but in no hurry because he’d be feeling snug as a bug with Olly. Maybe he’d roll a quick joint. He’d go over everything again. His father had been an amateur magician who’d either disappeared into the darkness or who’d been flushed out of the family nest. He’d fed off other people until they were lifeless – mannequins, sitting around a table, waiting for their lord and master to come home from the pub, waiting for him to start his shouting, his throwing, his slapping, his smashing, his homeland terror… they were all dummies, pushed and pulled into odd and unnatural shapes by a one-man Khmer Rouge. The effect of his reign of terror would be felt for generations to come, his teeth marks would go from neck to neck along the generations, from father to son, until a Van Helsing – a philosopher and metaphysician, one of the most advanced scientists of his day – drove a stake through the heart of the beast. Was that why he had included Adam Phillips in his story – a man who could explain things to him?