See How They Run

by Lloyd Jones

  Speech

  Mr Jones hasn’t spoken since arrival.

  Mood

  Distressed while in the company of people, insists on being alone. Self-absorbed and in­active when on his own in the garden or in the quiet room, hasn’t been in the dayroom and will only eat alone. Avoids all social interaction.

  Thinking

  Unknown, but he seems very depressed.

  Perception

  Unknown, since he won’t communicate.

  Cognition

  Ditto.

  Insight

  Ditto.

  Judgement

  Ditto.

  General remarks

  Very little can be ascertained about Mr Jones, since he won’t communicate. He seems to be in a state of shock, and insists on being completely alone wherever he is in the building. He likes quiet places. When he first arrived he was accompanied by a man who refused to give his name. They had two small dogs with them. According to a doctor in casualty, both men had been walking in the countryside when their dogs became involved in a fight with a badger. When the dogs became trapped in the sett, Mr Jones started to dig down with his hands in an attempt to rescue them but he was bitten by the badger, so his friend flagged down a passing ambulance so that he could come in for a tetanus jab. This friend brought Mr Jones to the psychiatric unit because he went into a rigid state and appeared to be suffering a breakdown. This other man mentioned something about a gunshot, though there were no injuries. The porter on front entrance said the dogs were a bit manic and actually entered the unit for a while. Both men appeared to be distressed and wild in appearance – the porter thought they were gypsies or homeless people. But according to the ambulance driver the men flagged him down near a cliff-top hotel and asked to be brought to the hospital. The picture is unclear, but hopefully we’ll get to the bottom of it when someone visits Mr Jones, though it’s been over a week since he arrived and no one has come yet.

  Health

  Blood tests show no physical problems except mild anaemia (iron tablets prescribed, dietary advice has been sent to the caterers). Bruising and contusions have healed. Please note – he has a rare blood group, RH negative.

  Possessions

  Huge roll of money (which he won’t part with!)

  Memory stick (green, transparent, which he also insists on keeping)

  Clothing etc

  He has been issued with an emergency outfit and a pair of trainers, plus toothbrush and plastic razors, soap etc. He has refused to wear the trainers and remains unshaven, though he has been cleaned up.

  Lou sat back in his seat and put his head in his hands. A green memory stick! Could it be the same one? Had Dr Dermot Feeney somehow got his hands on it and claimed its valuable cargo as his own? Had Dr Feeney been a latter-day wrecker who’d lanterned Pryderi’s ship of memories onto the rocks and then claimed it as salvage? Or had he merely stolen it from an academic vault? This possibility gave a strange, surreal twist to the plot, since it was becoming almost impossible for Lou to source the material arriving at his door. Some of the info was probably true, but some of it might have been introduced as a series of palimpsests by someone with an agenda. But who, and why? Was the story important enough to be used by someone as a propaganda tool? There was a possibilty, of course, that Pryderi and Big M had been part of something much bigger, and their rugby fame had been used as a cover. Yes, that was a distinct possibility, thought Lou. If the state or the church were involved, as per usual, then Pryderi and Big M – who had been heroes of their time – could have been very useful. But who had swiped the memory stick from Pryderi – had it been the very person who’d written the hospital report all those years ago, a person who was just another pawn in the game, someone who was little more than an office clerk? Lou cursed himself for wiping the green memory stick; he fetched it from the fruit bowl and wiped a smudge of dead banana off it, then pushed it into its docking bay and moused it open. Nothing. Sweet FA, as he’d feared. He checked his recycling bin and that too was empty. Idiot. He’d destroyed everything, but why? He saw a picture of himself on the deck of the Irish ferry, tossing sheaves of paper into the sea and chuckling drunkenly. Evil little goblin. What had driven him to do that? Some senseless wish to get his own back, but on whom? He could dredge up a shoal of excuses. Was it Pryderi’s swaggering manliness, which contrasted so strongly with his own nerdy insustantiability? Or was it the possibility that Big M was his father and had abandoned him – after all, there was a definite likeness around the eyes, he’d seen it in the photos on the walls of the Hotel Corvo. Yes, there was a big vengeful worm eating Lou’s insides, as big as one of those hideous Indian tapeworms.

  Had he really come from the tall, handsome, easy-going man who had stared back at him from the uniform wooden frames? A man with a passion for classy women and fancy shoes? Those pictures, like the landscapes on the walls of the psychiatric unit, were snapshots from the country’s fabled past. They were instant forms of propaganda, perpetuating ancient myths and portraying a green country, beautiful and honourable, filled to bursting with heroes and lovely women living according to ancient codes of honour, courteous and moral and honest. Civilised people, with fine sensibilities and unusual abilities, aesthetic and brilliant. Propaganda, all of it. And look at Wales now. An old country overwhelmed by a digital tide of cultural effluence, living in a virtual world imported and manipulated by rich and powerful men. A nation numbed by capitalism, trussed up and ready to be eaten at leisure by the all-consuming mega-corps which had spun their huge nets between the hedge funds of the world. Lou felt sick with hatred, hatred for everything that man had done to the world. He closed down his computer and prepared to go home, then went over to his window and stood there in his coat, still seething, looking at the lights coming on in the streets below him. Above him, the stars were coming out; he could see Deneb emerging as the Summer Triangle slid towards deep autumn. The world outside felt huge and dark and damply wonderful, an enormous copse with a bristling, aggressive super-badger passing through its undergrowth, snuffling and tearing at the ground; it was during brief moments such as this that the human animal saw how small and transient he was. Perhaps such moments were becoming rarer; blanked out by white light; the universe was gradually fading from sight. Man’s urban chaos was a huge props department which had become hopelessly cluttered, reducing the human drama to a wait in the wings for seven billion extras as a group of political fools worked on their broken deus ex machina.

  Standing there, Lou’s idling mind came up with something. Hadn’t he noticed that the red stick had forty kilobytes of memory stored on it, whilst the Pryderi document couldn’t possibly account for all of that? There had to be something else on it. He decided to look at it in the morning, then changed his mind and sat down at his desk again, still in his coat. Whilst he fired up his computer he phoned home to tell Catrin he’d be late, but there was no response, which was strange because there was no reason on earth why she shouldn’t be there. Unless, of course, she’d gone into labour. As he sat there watching his screensaver appear he realised that he should be doing something more, so he tried her mobile, again without result. That was really strange.

  He knew he should be going out in search of her, but he continued with the operation. He was thinking now about the baby inside her, a tiny charioteer about to enter a mad coliseum. Lou had been excited about the birth, but as it came nearer he’d detected am ambivalence within himself: a classical Freudian complex perhaps, a realisation that a usurper was about to claim his kingdom.

  Go on, speed away and find her said a voice in his head but the dark matter which perpetually threatened him took hold of his inner gravity once again and he continued with his relentless quest for destruction; he slotted the red memory stick into his computer and set about solving the issue of the extra memory use.

  The original mental state report had been corrupted by his software, because he was on an oldish Windows system which reduced part of every new do
cument to a meaningless jumble of hieroglyphics streaming down the page in a monstrous DNA sequence. That’s what had happened with this document too, so he’d failed to notice an island of sense at the very bottom of the sequence. He’d missed it until now – a second mental assessment at the psychiatric unit, which involved Pryderi to a certain degree but which now introduced another person. His mother, Rhiannon.

  Following the same formula as the first assessment, Rhiannon’s document also logged her appearance, noting that she was reasonably tidy in a worn but clean horse-riding outfit which included jodhpurs and tall riding boots. She had arrived at the door of the unit leading a seventeen-hand stallion, and she had stood looking at the building as if it were a newly landed spaceship. The horse had stomped and neighed; these sounds had alerted Pryderi, who immediately went to the entrance to find her. They had embraced each other for a long time, rocking from side to side, and both had wept. Then, Pryderi had led her by the hand into the unit, leaving the horse tied to railings outside (it was taken away to local stables later that day).

  Rhiannon and Pryderi had sat in the same wordless state, moving away from people whenever they approached, seeking only each other’s company, either in the quiet room or in the garden; often they could be seen sitting on the marble lip of the ornamental fountain holding hands, listening to the gurgle of the water but saying nothing – as if both had signed a vow of silence. One staff member claimed that Rhiannon had said a single sentence as she held Pryderi that first time outside the entrance: something like Oh God Pryderi, what are you doing in here?

  The theory among staff was that Rhiannon, whoever she was, had decided not to talk as an instinctive act of solidarity; the link between the two was unknown, but it was clear that they were either related or very close friends. In this state they had stayed together as the days drifted by, in retreat from the world.

  They weren’t unco-operative, but neither did they communicate with the staff. The need to find a solution became urgent, according to the assessment notes, or both of them would be there for ever.

  No one came to see them, and so the months drifted by. Early winter arrived and with it came the equinox storms. Pryderi and Rhiannon could be seen at the window of the quiet room, watching lightning fork over Wales, listening to the storm winds. One night a terrible clap of thunder seemed to affect them more than the others; they took fright and tried to escape from the unit. One of the patients claimed that a gun had been fired, though there was no evidence for that. But the next day, for their own safety, the pair were sectioned and the outside world became a place beyond walls for them both. From that day on they were sealed away in a glass cabinet.

  Lou closed the document and tried to breathe slowly and deeply, the way they’d taught him on the anger management course. But the dark matter within him massed again and sent his hand towards the mouse. In a series of slow, deliberate movements he highlighted the document and deleted it, leaving the memory stick completely blank. Then he emptied the recycle bin to make absolutely sure it was gone and detached the stick from its hole in the tower unit. It tinkled against the porcelain when he tossed it into the fruit bowl.

  That was it. He’d expressed himself in the only way he knew how, and the story was dead. He’d go to see the prof tomorrow and tell him some sob story, kill the whole damn thing stone dead. He might even resign. The Big M story had been consigned to a few footnotes in history. Whatever his motives, which were complex and irritating, he’d extracted revenge on Feeney and academia in general. Perhaps he would have to explain his actions. As for now, he’d go home to look after his wife and baby child. That’s what society expected of him.

  But when he arrived home she was gone. There was a note on the table, but it didn’t bring him any joy. Because Llwyd McNamara’s world was really breaking up now, and he was in deep trouble. He knew it, too.

  VI

  An eerie, pregnant silence met Lou when he arrived home. As soon as he opened the door he suspected that something had changed. Old intuitions kicked in – those subliminal instincts which come into play when we suspect that someone is looking at us from behind, or following us.

  Now, standing in the hallway with its pattern of blood and sand-coloured tiles, he sensed that there was no one there – the building had a cold, empty feel. He called her name, quietly then loudly and insistently, but there was no response. He bounded up the stairs and poked his head round all the doors, but every room held the same sarcophagal silence. Upstairs was like a morgue without a body; the newly painted nursery jangled his nerves and he experienced a few moments of panic and sickness.

  Wondering what to do next, he wound up the Birdytweet mobile hanging over the empty cot and watched seven little plastic birds circle the empty nest below, moving their wings jerkily and twittering a mechanical dirge as their little beaks opened and closed. Lou was overwhelmed by sadness, and he was forced to sit down for a while. It was a tristesse which started with his own birth and then passed like a shadow over the tragi-comic minutiae of his life, before passing over the life of his unborn child also, through every rainy day and every small reversal, until the time came, many years in the future, when the child would wind up his own plastic birds in his own newly decorated nursery and feel the same timeswept sadness.

  What if Catrin was ill? More importantly, was he culpable if she’d lost the baby? Had he been attentive enough? Had he actually cared enough, had he really meant it when he’d promised to be a good father? Or had the last few months indicated to Catrin that his own agenda was far more important to him than fatherhood? What had he been doing while her belly swelled and her mind fronded delicately in the luxuriant gardens of impending motherhood? Had he been there for her, his parental promise shining in his eyes? No, probably not. His distraction may have been evident as he pursued the Big M story; maybe they’d disengaged and drifted apart from each other, she retreating to her friends and her books, he to his corrosive microworld inside the memory sticks.

  Lou had a resigned air when he walked downstairs, because by then he felt sure that Catrin had gone, possibly for ever, in the way that women sometimes make monumental decisions at crucial times, and then stick to them unerringly. Downstairs looked the same as it always had since Catrin became pregnant. She’d become obsessively clean and tidy; the worktops gleamed and the flowers beamed as usual in their vases, but there was one stark difference: Catrin’s absence was almost a physical presence. The lower rooms sat there in dumb resignation, as if they were three hostages who had been gagged, blindfolded and trussed up by burglars. But as he turned away from the sitting room he noticed an envelope leaning against the fruit bowl on their newly bought Ikea coffee table, with a scrawl on it. Closer up he saw his name – the Welsh version, Llwyd – underlined decisively. It had all the appearance of a Dear John letter, and when he opened it he saw that it contained two items. The first was a simple home-made card showing the view from his college window (when had she taken that?) with a short message inside:

  Gone away to the coast for a few days to think things over. It’s been like living with a stranger recently, a stranger I don’t like very much. What happened, Llwyd? Did I do something? Why have you changed so much since I fell pregnant? I need to sort my head out. Catrin.

  PS The Vice-Chancellor delivered this on his way to the airport, said he’d been very busy and he’d forgotten about it. He also said he hadn’t seen you for a while and he seemed worried about you.

  The object she referred to had fallen onto the glass surface of the table when he removed the card. It whirred and tinkled, giving off a sparkling rotating light before wobbling to a standstill. Lou was fascinated by it and he toyed with it for a while, spinning it around in the palm of his left hand. It was just like the others, holding its silvery innards in a pretty plastic jacket; the only difference was that this one was light blue in colour. Once again he had the feeling that he was being toyed with. So the vice-chancellor had just happened to drop it by on hi
s way to the airport. A likely story. And there was another thing which struck him: the first memory stick had come to him via a minor academic; the second had come from a professor, and this last one had come from the top dog himself. Lou was puzzled. Why would academia want to play silly buggers with a lowly pawn like him? Perhaps it was all a huge coincidence. Perhaps he was imagining things.

  Catrin was already forgotten by the time he’d jabbed the blue memory stick into his laptop in the study. He watched the tail-light flashing its firefly signal; and since he had no mouse now he used his fingerpad to open its contents. It seemed to hold a number of documents, but again they were being corrupted by his software and he encountered a wasteland of meaningless symbols and signs before he found anything comprehensible. Two of the documents were virtually indecipherable, but a few subtle clues led him to the conclusion that they contained all the information which had come to him on the green and red sticks, but which he’d killed off on his computer at the college. He blanched. All that vitriol he’d shown had been a complete waste of emotion. Pissing in the wind. He’d spent an enormous amount of malign energy and sadistic forethought to no purpose. All the information had survived on this stick – and on many others, probably. He’d been outwitted, and once again the feeling came over him that he was being used. Powerful forces were at play, and he was being manipulated. Worse still, he had no idea who was playing cat and mouse with him, or why he was being kicked like an under-inflated ball from one end of the academic field to the other.

  According to the blue memory stick, Big M and Ziggy had made occasional visits to the leper huts by the hospital to visit Rhiannon and Pryderi, but both inmates had become locked in some sort of mother-son complex, or a wordless relationship like Olaf the Peacock and this mute thrall-woman. By now they were living in their own submersible bubble, a diving chamber floating way below everyone else in a lagoon of silence. And because of official protocol the two on the outside weren’t allowed to know any details of their condition. Big M and Ziggy could only assume that an old trauma had been reactivated. Although facts were in short supply, they knew that Pryderi had been separated from his mother when he was very young, and that neither of them had been able to talk about the issue at any time in their lives. Perhaps the gunshot at Hotel Corvo had lit a slow fuse, or maybe the incident with the badger had acted as a catalyst. There was something about the smell of a badger, pungent and porcine, which came straight from prehistory; it had a musk-like ability to arouse primal fears and desires.