See How They Run

by Lloyd Jones

  He was out for a long time, and they were beginning to worry. But eventually he stirred, and after the preliminaries to consciousness he came to. He looked around him but failed to make any connection with his new surroundings. He was in a small room with uneven walls, painted in a bright yellow ochre. A few candles shimmered here and there, their flames wafted occasionally by a draught, or perhaps by someone moving. The air smelt of mud and straw; primitive, elemental. He struggled to focus, and on turning his head he saw two human faces looking at him, waiting for him to recover.

  ‘Sorry about that Llwyd,’ said a faraway voice. ‘We got a bit carried away, but you were destroying our food for the winter.’

  He spent some more time defuzzing, and then he recognised the big man in denim sitting next to Catrin on a haybale. He was resting with his back to the wall, with his big hands behind his head and his legs jutting out in front of him. Lou could smell the leather of his footwear, big brown builders’ boots with steel toecaps. Lou realised who he was.

  ‘Big M,’ he whispered through cracked lips. He was thirsty, very thirsty, and suddenly he was sick. He managed to wriggle sideways before he brought up the burger meal on the floor by the side of his bed, which rustled as he moved – it was made of straw.

  They helped him outside, so that he could get some air, while Big M cleared the mess inside with a spade.

  Lou sat on a bale by the door to the building, which was small and round and squat. There were two others, completing a circle, and they looked more like hobbit homes than anything else. Lou and his companions could be sitting by a settlement somewhere in Africa, or in the Indian desert. Big M sat on a nearby bale and observed him.

  ‘They’re made of woven straw plastered with mud, six more behind us,’ he indicated with a thumb over his shoulder. ‘Nice and warm, but you have to be careful with the candles, and there’s a chance you’ll wake up sharing your bed with a mouse,’ he added nonchalantly.

  Catrin was sitting on another bale, hunched in a posture which Lou knew well. She was upset.

  ‘I’m sorry about this Manawydan, I never thought he’d do something like this.’

  She appeared on the verge of tears.

  ‘Hey, never mind, it wasn’t your fault,’ he replied softly. ‘Little shits like this all over the place. I’m used to it.’

  Lou resented being called a little shit, but there again he was one, so he kept quiet.

  He was chattering with cold, but his insides felt better now. It was strange being so close to Big M, in the flesh; Lou had dealt with an abstract and faraway heroic figure for so long that the man had reached some sort of mythological status in his mind. Coupled with his size and his rugby exploits, he seemed totemic and special. And pleasant, too, really nice. Anyone else might have been abusive, or aggressive, but the man in front of Lou was calm and dignified and urbane, if a touch withdrawn or resigned.

  Lou wondered if he should apologise. Was he ready for that sort of thing? Would it mean anything to anyone – or would it sound like so many of the century’s empty mouthings, another fatuous apology?

  Sorry all you little sardines, for putting you into tins...

  ‘I’m sorry,’ said Lou. He was talking to the ground.

  ‘Sorry for what, exactly?’ asked Big M.

  Lou looked up into his eyes, blue and candid and clear. They held his gaze openly, inquiringly. He seemed genuinely interested in Lou.

  ‘Sorry about the fields,’ answered Lou. ‘Don’t know what got into me.’

  Catrin got up, went over to him, and stooped down.

  ‘And the rest too, tell him about the rest. He deserves to know the truth, Llwyd.’

  But he was unable to answer and she regained her seat. As they rested in silence, Lou gathered his thoughts. His eyes detected a faint light on the eastern horizon, and he realised that the dawn was approaching. The mice would be coming to the end of their shift now. Hundreds, maybe thousands of them, out there among the skyscraper stalks. Wizzing up and down in their invisible lifts, tiny furry citizens in their city of stems. They’d been around mankind for a long time, sharing his story; sharing his food and his home too. Perhaps they were the gods of old, made small. Perhaps that might happen to man too; he would be rescaled, cut down to size again in the ancient landscape. No bad thing, thought Lou. That would give the other animals a chance.

  Maybe it would be easier to tell the whole story now, get it off his chest, clear the account. What was the point in dissembling any further anyway, playing a stupid game, messing with people. Wasn’t it easier to be frank and straightforward?

  He began to tell them about the background: his research, the threat posed by Dermot Feeney’s book, academic competition, the race to shine in a field of excellence.

  ‘I wouldn’t mention fields of excellence right now,’ said Big M.

  Again, Lou said sorry.

  ‘No point in saying sorry over and over again,’ said Big M, ‘just explain to me why you did it so that I can understand, that’s all I’m asking. You’ve just wiped out most of our winter store of food and I think we deserve to know why. Someone or other has had it in for us since we came here and we’ve just taken it every time, turned the other cheek, but now I really want to know what’s behind all this.’

  Big M was perturbed, but not angry. He stood up and came to stand by Lou. He seemed very big, standing up to his full height, his close-cropped hair looking like stubble. His head was almost out of sight, he really was a huge man. How old was he? Lou tried to fix an approximate year but it was impossible, the man could be anything between thirty and a hundred. Some words came echoing out of the memory stick in his breast pocket. I’m a sex god you know. And yes, he was still very good looking, in a mature sort of way. He really did seem ageless.

  Lou went through some of the reasons for his actions. But they didn’t ring true. Sitting in the stalled car, earlier, a simple realisation had appeared in the full beam of his headlights. He’d tried to destroy Big M’s story, not because he had anything against Big M, but because he was expressing his own sense of failure. He had known all along, inside himself, that he’d never been up to the task of writing a stand-out book about Big M. He simply wasn’t up to it. He maybe had the acumen, he maybe had the intellect, but he didn’t have the mental stamina or the dogged perseverance needed to write such a book. One needed intellectual slack to do such a thing. He had no depth, no intuition, no experience of probing and delving. His generation had never suffered, and unfortunately for mankind, most people became prescient and compassionate and accommodating only when they’d suffered a bit themselves.

  ‘What I did, really, was a bit childish,’ said Lou finally. ‘The anger inside me was the anger of a child. I wasn’t trying to hurt you Big M, you seem to be a nice kind of guy. But I was angry because I saw other people being successful around me and I was getting nowhere. When you see another academic being praised and admired and honoured, and all the time you’re sitting in your little room going nowhere, a little red monster enters you, pumps you full of envy and bile, you get hot and angry inside, you want to...’

  Lou trailed off, knowing that he didn’t need to say any more.

  ‘And anyway, you provoked me,’ he added. ‘Why did you feed me the memory sticks, what was that stuff with the scarecrows, dressing them up like me?’

  He looked round towards the other two; Big M had retreated to his bale and was sitting in his characteristic pose, lying back against the hut with his head resting in his hands. He’d found himself in this position many times over the last few years as various adversities had arrived.

  ‘I have absolutely no idea what you’re talking about,’ answered Big M, and Lou knew immediately that he was telling the truth.

  ‘And you, Catrin – was it you who did it?’

  She looked aghast.

  ‘Me? Why the hell would I do that, Lou? I’m about to give birth to your child, for God’s sake. Do you think I’ve
got nothing better to do than...’

  She trailed off, and again Lou knew instinctively that she was telling the truth. So it had all been a co-incidence; paranoia and guilt had fed his imagination. As with most conspiracy theories, bigotry and ineptitude had been at the root of it all.

  ‘So this is what an avenging angel looks like,’ said Big M quietly. ‘Are you my avenging angel, Llwyd? Are you the angel of the bottomless pit? Were you behind the gunshot at the hotel that night?’

  Lou lifted his head, and allowed himself a smile. ‘I had nothing to do with it, and you know it. You’ll have to blame that on Pryderi. He got in with the wrong crowd, I’m not that type,’ he answered.

  ‘No, you’re just an ordinary bloke, aren’t you Llwyd,’ said Big M, returning to his reflective head-in-hands pose. He was tired now, and feeling resigned again.

  Resigned to man’s idiocies and petty squabbles.

  ‘You know something, Llwyd,’ said Big M quietly, ‘man’s reputation as an intelligent animal rests on a very few shoulders.’

  Lou took a while to digest this.

  ‘Not everyone can be famous you know,’ continued Big M. ‘I quite liked it in the Middle Ages when artisans were anonymous, just part of the team. I also liked it when we had small gods for everything; we may have been misguided, but having a god for the trees gave trees some safety and having a god for the rivers gave rivers some protection.’

  Big M went off on a riff about the western cult of the self. There was no attempt now at graft or per­severance or a personal journey, he said. The only way to reach immortality was via a pair of plastic tits or three minutes of prancing about on X Factor. And what about the past? Why had Wales turned its back on its own history and adopted the fables of a small Mediterranean country, a land of sand and burning sun? Why had they welcomed a foreign god, singular and seductive, but all the same very human?

  Lou kept quiet. The man wanted to have his say. Let him rant. Let him put the world to rights. That’s what old men did when they couldn’t chase women or carouse any more...

  Lou regarded the man uncomprehendingly. His size and obvious power created a mesmeric forcefield around him. Lou had met only one man like him: a Russian cosmonaut, Colonel Alexander Volkov, hero of the Soviet Union, who’d spent a year circling the Earth in Mir when the USSR disintegrated, leaving him to watch from above, unable to return until someone at Star City paid the bills. He’d gone up a Soviet citizen and come down a Russian. Lou had met him at a university party when Volkov had been on a British tour, and like everyone else he’d been drugged by the man’s presence. As everyone had agreed later, Volkov’s mass had seemed different; he had his own forcefield, you could almost feel the magnetic rings pulsing around him.

  The scene changed again as they sat there mutely. The dawn had established itself, but at the same time the atmosphere had become opaque and whispy. Soon they were sitting in a thick cool sea mist which muffled the world and erased the landscape below them.

  ‘Oh bloody hell,’ said Big M wearily. ‘Not the sodding mists again. I thought they’d gone. I can’t stand the thought of walking around in skimmed milk for another year.’

  The birds and the animals, which had just started their morning chatter, fell silent again. Only the smash and swash of the distant sea serrated the silence, threading in and out of their white linen world.

  ‘Look, a mouse,’ said Catrin. She didn’t fall into a panic, as she surely would have at home, thought Lou. Why was she different here?

  The mouse was poised on the edge of a bale, sniffing the air, moving its uplifted head from side to side. Slowly, deftly, Big M moved his hand behind it and closed on it, then took it round for all to see. The mouse seemed unfazed; it sat in Big M’s massive paw, looking at them unseeingly with dark, clear little eyes, its whiskers tremulous and hyperactive.

  ‘Beautiful, isn’t it,’ said Big M. ‘The harvest mouse, Mycromys Minutus. Makes a marvellous little ball of woven grass high among the corn stalks for its summer home.’

  He turned it over gently and moved a finger aside, to show them its white belly. The rest of it was covered in a soft brown fur, tinted with russet.

  ‘It’ll take some of our seeds and store them in a winter larder underground. Isn’t it wonderful?’

  They admired it, snug in his hand, apparently unaware of its vulnerability.

  Big M moved over to Lou’s bale and sat beside him. Lou felt a warm, solid form press against him but detected no menace. Looking sideways towards Big M, he noticed the mouse tattoo on his chest, under his shirt on the left pectoralis major; the trademark badge of the old Welsh rugby teams. It looked faded and mystical; a warrior’s scar, a man’s story etched on his skin. Lou felt a pang of nostalgia for this other man’s history; he heard the voices of a massed sepia crowd on the wind, and saw the blurred faces of his countrymen as they hurried in their thousands towards the field of battle. They were old or dead now, those people; their memories of Wales had seeped away into the past.

  ‘Open up,’ said Big M, unfurling Lou’s hand and transferring the mouse onto his palm before closing his fingers over the tiny body.

  ‘There,’ said Big M, ‘what does that feel like? You’re a god now Llwyd, you can do what you like with the mouse. Anything. You can kill it quickly, you can kill it slowly, or you can let it go. Up to you now Llwyd. Look how massive you are, how tiny it is. One movement from you and it’s dead. You can decide its fate Llwyd, you have the power of life or death over it. Decide!’

  Lou sat on his bale in the mist, with the beautiful little mouse in his closed hand. Such a nice warm feeling. He raised and flipped his hand round so that he could look directly into its face; again, the mouse seemed unperturbed, or at least resigned to its fate.

  Two little mouse eyes looked into his, and they stayed like that for a minute or so as Lou examined the face and the quivering whiskers, the implausible little mouth.

  ‘It’s the acrobat of the wheatfields, swinging through the corn stalks,’ said Big M. ‘It drinks from droplets of water on blades of grass. Such freedom. Such licence to roam and destroy our crops, but it takes only what it needs, Llwyd. It doesn’t destroy for fun. Only man does that on a regular basis. So do it, kill it if you feel like it. Break its neck and throw it into the hedge. You’re in control now Llwyd...’

  Lou continued to look at the little face for a while, then he straightened his hand, lowered it to the ground, and opened it. The mouse stayed stock still for a few seconds, as if awaiting the rasp of the guillotine, then it vanished into the mist.

  A round of gentle applause rippled behind Lou’s back, and he turned to see a group of about twelve people ringed around him. They were smiling, and a couple had glistening eyes.

  ‘There you are, Llwyd, now you know what it feels like to be a god. And you’ve learnt a lesson that all country children learnt in the old days – that the best feeling of all is to spare the mouse, to let it go,’ said Big M. ‘Don’t you think so, Llwyd?’

  As he spoke, two figures came looming out of the mist, startling them. It took a few seconds for anyone to recognise them, because they weren’t expected, then Big M leapt to his feet, saying: ‘Pryderi! Rhiannon!’

  Lou stayed silent, head bowed, his eyes still on the mouse’s path to liberation, as the people around him embraced each other, clasped hands, cried, all those things you do when you’re reunited with someone important to you after a long time. It was pretty emotional, figures moving in and out of the mist, throwing their arms around each other, filling the air with human feeling. They took a while to settle, then Big M introduced him to the assembly and told something of the story, beginning with the memory sticks and Lou’s quest for academic fame. He didn’t mention Lou’s attempt to eradicate Big M.

  With an obliterating mist chalking out their features, Lou was reminded of a school production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, in which he’d played the malign Puck; and here they were again at the pla
y’s ending, with Big M as Oberon the king of the fairies reunited with his queen Titania in her bower deep in the forest. It was uncanny.

  Then, Big M asked one of the group to take Lou into one of the huts so that he could get himself together and prepare for whatever he was going to do next. And what was that? Go home, presumably, thought Lou, though his mind was blank. He hadn’t a clue what might happen next. And he needed to know what Catrin was likely to do. Was she going to stay here? Should he insist that his wife accompany him home, with their unborn baby still inside her? He’d never done alpha male before, and it was probably too late now. They’d all laugh at him probably, so he’d have to beg her. But on the other hand he wasn’t all that bothered if she stayed. She seemed happy with these people, and he sensed that their marriage was effectively over. He’d find someone else in no time anyway. The Polish cleaner perhaps, she could live in the attic.

  ‘Show him my collection,’ said Big M as Lou was ushered away. This time he was taken behind the hut where he’d lain earlier, to the centre of the settlement. He noticed that there were nine huts in all, grouped in threes: a sort of democratic round table of huts, since none was bigger or more prominent that the others. In the centre, however, there was a different structure: it was a tall square building, set on four stanchions so that the first floor was a good metre above the ground, leaving an open space underneath.

  ‘That’s to prevent the mice from getting in, and to allow a flow of air to dry the grain,’ said his guide, a young man of about twenty-five, dark and lean. ‘We were experimenting this year with native cereals – the first field you tried to destroy had einkorn in it, the second had spelt, so it looks like we’ll have to rely on emmer this winter.’