by Lloyd Jones
He just kept on driving along country roads, keeping the afternoon sun behind him as it sank towards the western sea. Long ribbons of daisy-flecked grass flowed between the wheels. August was tired and sleepy, summer’s sap-flow had slowed, and snails had already begun their long journey towards winter, climbing laboriously up the hogweed stalks; the season had come to a stop, a convoy waiting for its own spillage of pollen to be cleared off the road. Now it sat there in the spent grasses, its creaking bodywork already starting to rust.
They drove for hours, skirting deep woods squatting like huge green chiller cabinets, until the taller oaks and sycamores cast long shadows across the bleached wheatfields. They felt completely alone in this vast open terrain, and indeed they saw no one for a long time, not until late afternoon, when they met an England sign by the roadside. Shortly afterwards they entered a typical Hereford village, black and white cottages with sinister cats disappearing through rough holes under doors. Through the small-paned windows they could see warty hags with gnarled hands, up to no good behind broken cobwebs and piss-yellow net curtains.
For chrissakes carry on, said Ziggy, or I’ll start screaming.
So on they went, following the signs for Hereford. They got there late at night when the light was failing, so hardly anyone saw them putting in at one of the better hotels, a place with a garage to hide away the car. Like so many bankrupts, Pryderi had a surprising ability to find tons of money when he needed to. He showed off, hinted at a secret stash, got them an expensive suite. Swiss bank account, or maybe not, wink wink. Rhiannon was taken aback and stayed close to Big M; she liked it all above board.
They stayed in this place for a month, keeping a low profile, making sure they spoke good English always. Posh place with plenty of toffs floating around. In the meantime, Pryderi used his hunter’s instincts to comb the town for a bargain, and soon he’d spotted one – a boarded-up pub by the river called The Saddle Inn, going for a song. The previous landlord had been a dipso who’d played the optics all day, pissed as a rat by noon, people helping themselves while he picked fights with strangers. Nightmare, the place had been closed down by the constabulary.
So Pryderi bought it with his back pocket dosh and the four of them threw themselves into the business. Nice coat of blue paint, clean windows, yellow chintz curtains, classy prints on the walls, tables and chairs outside and a nice bistro feel to the place; shiny beer taps, good coffee, relaxing view of the old Wye Bridge. Felt almost French. Big M used to go down to the river each morning for a dip.
I just love that river, he’d say. Rises in Wales, ends in Wales, takes a stroll through England along the way. The water sounds Welsh, it so reminds me of home.
You’d know where he was by his dragon-red towelling robe on the bank, weighed down by the finest blue suede shoes ever seen in the city. Elvis would have been proud of them; a pair of catalogue Ben Shermans with a price tag to match their mod origins in the sixties: a mere sixty-five quid. He’d thrown them in as extras during a big splurge, but once on his feet they’d stayed there. Those shoes became his trademark.
Big M, with his usual aplomb, opened a nice little restaurant at the back.
The customers poked fun at him, they said shuffle them shoes Big M, but he liked that sort of thing.
The Ben Shermans looked a little out of place beneath his checkerboard trousers, but his chef’s toque seemed to balance things out once he’d added a blue flash to the headband. Nice touch, a hint of cavalier humour. They liked him, they liked his little eatery hidden away at the end of a flowerpot alley, with its little courtyard, fountain, and abundant greenery. He grew a splendid moustache and twiddled it as he engaged in badinage, teasing the men, making ridiculous passes at the women – all of them, indiscriminately, even the grandmothers: he was a natural magical realist. He went to their tables at dusk with rosebuds in slender vases, he lit their cigarettes, he indulged in crazy episodes of tap dancing as he carried the plates, he sang Tyrolean love songs from the windows above, he even brought out his fiddle on special occasions, swept around the place playing gypsy music and ogling the ladies close up with incredibly mournful eyes.
And the food, ah, the food was out of this world. Seafood a house speciality, but the a la carte menu was huge and catholic, a high church liturgy for a swelling congregation. It was just a hobby to Big M; just another string to his bow. But he was booked up every night, and soon enough he’d garnered a Michelin star and a great review in the Sunday Times. The chief ape himself, A.A. Gill, had declared that the food was much too good to be served so proximate to the dark ugly trolls who lurked just over the border.
And so it went on, a new paradise on earth was created by the four of them, but it didn’t go on for long enough. That old human worm, envy, crawled around the gutters of Hereford and spoke in many ears, whispering who is this man who wears his blue suede shoes in bed, seduces your wives and daughters, wriggles his hips and says he’s a love god? Why do our burghers crowd his tables, laugh in his sunny courtyard, go home with their wives to love again after years of cold indifference?
Soon, a brick sailed through one of the front windows. A few scenes occurred in the courtyard, staged by paid thugs. It was happening all over again, but no threatening gunshot was needed this time round. Customers were melting away and worse was to come, said the rumours. Bad stuff: a knife in the dark, or fire through the letterbox. Pryderi stowed his Beretta in his sock again. Ziggy started to chain smoke. Rhiannon doodled pictures of horses on napkins and dropped plates in the kitchen. It couldn’t go on.
Pryderi was mad with rage. He wanted to fight fire with fire; he wanted to take them on at their own game. He prodded Big M, urged him on with fighting talk. But to no avail. Big M wasn’t having any of it, his fighting days were over. Last thing I need is a spell in the cooler. Maybe he was ready for a change anyway. Cooking all day could get boring, and there wasn’t much time to chill. Big M spread his hands wide, shrugged his shoulders, and said: ‘Let’s move on. What’s the point? Trouble breeds trouble, anyway I’ve had enough of small-town people with small-town minds. The river’s getting colder, autumn’s on the way. Let’s crack on, let’s have a nice easy time for a while, see some places and watch the leaves fall.’
Infuriated, Pryderi gave in, sold the place for a song, and had the Bentley serviced.
Soon they were gone.
Lou read the story till his eyes ached, then went for lunch in the students’ caff downstairs. Tray in hand, he looked around for someone to sit with, but all eyes seemed to be elsewhere, anywhere except where he was standing. Again he felt isolated, and soon he was morose too. His sandwich tasted artificial and his too-hot coffee came in a false styro-mug. Nothing felt real any more. Even the students around him had an ersatz quality about them, a submissive Stepford Wives blandness. Perhaps they were the Stepford children. Modern education had reduced the world to twelve incontrovertible bullet points, and the rest of the universe fitted neatly onto a Facebook page. Any restlessness was quickly numbed by a limitless flow of celebrity trivia. Christ, it was depressing. But he himself was a product of the same system. How much more exacting were his methods? Not nearly as good as Dr Dermot Feeney’s, who’d actually gone out and found some of Big M’s relatives. Yes, he’d got the story straight from the horse’s mouth. Or maybe the cat’s. Feeney had traced one of Big M’s cousins, through a nostalgia forum called Manx for the Memories, to an old people’s home in Douglas, Isle of Man. A geriatric who wore spanking new tartan slippers with gold bobbles, and who still had an interest in lurve.
Lou left half a sandwich and took his coffee to his room, then read on.
After Hereford, anonymity. Four chameleons in search of a shadow. Even Feeney wasn’t allowed to know where they’d landed. *A city in England, never revealed, said his notes. This time they rented a closed-down pub called The Shield and Dagger. Its cider specialties – Three Hammers, Green Goblin, Frosty Jack, Total Wipeout – hinted at a West Country
location. Glastonbury Tor in the distance, maybe. A house for hard-drinking men with silvery eyes, blinded young by the apple maggot.
Who knows where they went, because they kept themselves to themselves. No food this time. No showmanship from Big M, not for a while anyway. But eventually the Big M within got the better of him. What started as bar-room banter became a regular routine, which became a comedy slot every Friday night – Big M with a black hat and a mic, a spotlight, and a flow of rough cider. He’d developed a bit of a drink problem during that period, according to Feeney. Big M seemed to get better with every pint. Like the brew, he became even more potent and deadly as the night wore on. Friday night got to be very popular at the Mutton, as it was called, mutton dagger being a well-known synonym in those parts for a man’s best friend...
The Shield and Dagger became a magnet as the Friday night comedy store spilled over into Saturday, then Sunday; taxis arrived suddenly from far and wide as Big M and his guests turned every weekend into a mini fringe event fuelled by gallons of scrumpy. His favourite routine, Fill yer Boots, based on his own penchance for snazzy footwear, was legendary. Hell for Leather also did very well. He was ideally suited to stand-up; cool and laconic, sad and ironic. But his popularity had the usual downside, and soon enough his success was pissing off all the local publicans. Their empty bars gave them plenty of time to work up a fury, and to plan revenge. One night the fab four at the Shield and Dagger were woken by a tremendous wall-rattling bang, and when the men opened the front door, Pryderi with his Beretta at the ready, they found a stinky old boot nailed to the wood, its tongue lolling out at them; inside it they found a message with an unlit match sellotaped to it. Not very polite. Pryderi put his Beretta back in his sock and read it.
The shits, he said to Big M without looking up. They want us out of town by noon on Sunday. Or the place’ll go up in smoke, us lot with it.
He put the note back inside the boot and returned upstairs slowly, mumbling savagely to himself. Again he wanted to take them on, fight them, use the gun if necessary.
But Big M packed away his clothes and his fancy boots, cancelled all deliveries, and invited everyone in the town to a drink-till-we’re-dry comedy session at the Mutton.
When they drove away at noon on Sunday – the timing was meant to be ironic – they left a pile of sleeping bodies and a hundred hangovers lying around in the Shield and Dagger. They left a message on the bar: Lock up when you go and throw away the key. The fun times were over. Yet again they said farewell to their temporary beds and hit the road.
Never mind, said Big M, it was fun while it lasted.
But Pryderi was getting pissed off with Big M’s attitude, fed up with their gypsy lifestyle and fed up with being constantly hassled. Just because they were good at what they did. Or was it something else? Their accents? Maybe Big M’s bed-seeking missiles, his wandering shoes?
Forget it, said Big M nonchalantly, driving the Bentley with his fingertips. He’d kept the comedy hat; it went well with his black Torino boots from Samuel Windsor, both soles studded with a single drawing pin to give a satisfying clink whenever Big M strode forwards. Vain, yes of course he was vain. But aren’t we all, in different ways?
Jesus Christ, we can’t go on like this, Pryderi had said in a roadside diner somewhere between the nowhere of their past and the nowhere of their future. We can’t go on like this. He was looking at the clouds far off on the eastern horizon, and trying to eat a leathery breakfast which was vile enough to kill a dog. Those clouds – perhaps they should head towards them like storm hunters: perhaps they should ride into a tornado and end it all. Pryderi was feeling lower than he’d ever felt before, and the sky seemed higher. The world outside seemed vast and dark and threatening. Where next?
Lou stopped reading, went over to his window, and looked out onto the world again. The clouds were still there, a long line of them, but they were losing their shape and morphing into pale discolourations.
He thought of the computer clouds, viewed by four wandering friends sitting inside a grubby roadside diner. It was amazing how his mind could flick between the real world in front of him and the tiny world inside his computer. And there was yet another bank of clouds: those inside his head, on which rested the gods of the ancient world. Apollo, Lord of Mice, still alive in the small soft memories of mankind. God of the sun, truth and prophecy. A contradictory god, created in man’s image; a beautiful smooth-skinned god, androgynous and bisexual, who could bring plague and then its antidote, healing. Lou tried to compare the four travellers in the roadside diner to the mythical mice which lived below Apollo’s altar. He saw Pryderi as a mouse whose fate awaited him like a sprung trap; Big M was a small sleek mouse with a nose for cats. Yes, Big M was the master-mouse who found the next big grain store, then led his tribe to safety when the pied piper arrived.
His mind drifted to some of the mice events in his life; camping in the Lake District with his brother one Easter, with frost on the ground and a posse of Hell’s Angels in the field below them, Lou had leant a bottle of milk against a fencing post before turning in, and when he tried to pour some milk into their tea mugs in the morning he’d wondered why the flow was so sluggish, until he saw a small mousy face, eyes closed for evermore, floating to the top of the cream: it had climbed in and drowned in the night. The mouse had looked like a tiny hairy child coming to the surface after a dive.
Lou turned back to his desk and read the last part of the chapter hurriedly, so that he could go home to Catrin. She wanted the nursery finished, ready for their baby.
Chapter M2 had been finished while Dr Feeney recovered at a Sligo clinic, his illness unspecified. Perhaps other things had started to go wrong in advance of his heart attack. Lou sympathised with him briefly, a big sick man alone in a strange bed, his heavy bushtracker’s hat in his locker, sweat-stained and smelling like a newly flensed animal hide. One of Lou’s colleagues, who’d met Feeney at a convention, had described him as a quiet, brooding, sit-at-the-back man with acne scars and permanently mis-shaven features. But Feeney was cunning; he’d been able to follow the fab four on their fugitive journey thanks to a letter sent by Rhiannon to Pryderi a few years later when she was in a psychiatric unit. Her letter had been an attempt at catharsis – apparently her son had been taken into care for a while when he was a small child. But though never really meant to be seen by Pryderi, or by anyone else for that matter, the letter had been kept in the family archive.
Following their mournful meal at the roadside diner they’d headed off at a tangent, deep into Middle England, and when the people and houses passing by had changed almost beyond recognition they stopped the car at a country town and sat in it for a while, windows open, listening. By now they were far away from the sea, and far away too from the chiff-chaff cadence of their native country. The voices around them had slowed and stiffened, more clay now than sand. They could go no further; they had reached the end of the road.
This time it was Ziggy who took control.
No more bloody pubs, she said with feeling. The boys had messed up every time so far, so the girls would have a go. Something different. She left them sitting in the car and took a shufty down the high street. When she returned she had two bags of condensed cholesterol from the pie & cake shop, delicious sausage rolls still warm from the oven and fresh cream cakes. Mmm. Crumbs everywhere. Worth travelling for. So a pie & cake shop was out of the question, she said wryly. How about a shoe shop? She hadn’t spotted one, they could sell some leather goods like bags and belts as well as footwear. Anything except cider. The smell of it made her sick now. And she’d heard stories of dead rats and all sorts of shit floating in the vats. Ziggy was all woman. She wanted a shoe shop.
You making fun of me? asked Big M, looking down at a pair of brand new boots on his size twelves.
No, said Ziggy, I’ve just seen some of the most down-at-heel plebs in the whole wide world. Bloody peasants. We’ll educate them, give them a better class of footwea
r.
Quite a snob, Ziggy. Who was she to look down on people? said Big M.
After all, she was an itinerant without a home or a job. That shut her up. But shoe shop it was.
As the other patients recovered and went home, Dermot Feeney had documented it all from his clinic. Superstitious, he’d started to fear the three empty beds swimming in shark circles around him, their cold white sheets hunting for fresh meat.
Ziggy rented a shop in the high street and dipped into Pryderi’s back pocket to fund her new venture. Cider and comedy had served them well, he had wads of cash again. While the shop was being fitted out they sent Big M on a mission to buy the classiest boots in Britain. Brown, black, red, blue or gold, they would have to be the best available. Big M relished his task and set off in the Bentley, happy to be alone again. When he returned, a fortnight later, he was sporting an amazing pair of Lazarus Python winklepickers from Paolo Vandini, which Rhiannon ordered him to remove at once. Unusually for her she was short of patience with his sang froid, his come-day go-day attitude. Big M was always sunny side up, forever paddling in the warm river of his own life. A shrug of the shoulders and then the boyish smile, disarming everyone. But it was time to be a bit more serious; they were attracting the wrong sort of attention again.
So Big M went into a bit of a sulk and spent his days hanging around bars, while Pryderi went all macho on them and refused to mince around in a poofter parlour as he put it. Still, the shop was a big success and Big M was kept busy supplying it with top-class footwear. Ziggy insisted on calling it Gracious in Defeat.
The shop sign, white lettering on purple, was revolting but the plebs loved it. As autumn blew its first crinkle-cut leaves down the high street the populace lined up to part with their Jobseeker’s Allowance. Big M spent many days and nights away buying eye-boggling boots and staying at expensive hotels. He’d hand his card to the bar girls and introduce himself humorously as chief buyer to a shoe empire called Gracious in Defeat. Wit and shoes: with just one more ingredient, chocolate, he introduced a whole new meaning to infidelity.