Island of Lightning

by Robert Minhinnick

  No matter the hour, time’s nearly up. Katia knows it. Yet what else is there to do? Another drink? Another man? But all the men are lesser men now. Somehow disappointing men. Looking at such men she can measure herself. Gauge how far she has fallen. How far she has travelled in the wrong direction. Or she might compare herself to the others who are catching a different bus.

  And as pubs will, The Buck encourages introspection. Iwan Llwyd wrote a poem about a man he met here. A man he considered a ‘character’. Now Iwan is dead and that man still a drunken boor. I look at Katia, never so haggard, never more thoughtful. She glances at her watch and waits at the counter. The wind might have slackened and I leave.

  3.

  Two weeks later the town is full of men with tremendous quiffs and sideburns. Some of this hair is real. The first two I spotted were searching for a café. Yes, unmistakeable Elvis tributeers. Probably they had booked rooms a year in advance, Elvis weekend specials without breakfast.

  And soon there are hundreds. And then thousands. Many are men and women dressed as Elvis, or characters in the Elvis pantheon. As this is particularly sparse for a man who recorded an (estimated) 800 songs, their fancy dress is given over not only to approximations of The King, but people wearing anything notionally historical from the period.

  These include men turned out as GI’s, with women as appropriate dancing partners, men and women dressed as ‘hula’ Elvis from the ‘Hawaiian’ films, adorned in plastic garlands. A few are characters salvaged from early hits like Jailhouse Rock.

  This is one of the few songs that offer such opportunity. A Leiber-Stoller number from ’57, Jerry Leiber died in August 2011 and was one of the era’s better lyricists. Clearly he influenced Bob Dylan. ‘Jailhouse Rock’ offers drama, characterisation, wit. How rare.

  Of those paying homage to Elvis, two or three members of one party are dressed as ‘the Purple gang’ – in fact “the whole rhythm section”. There are also the convicts with their numbers, possibly Spider Murphy, Shifty, and ‘the sad Sack’.

  ‘Jailhouse Rock’ and ‘In the Ghetto’ were probably the most interesting songs, lyrically, that Elvis recorded, the former ideal for interpretation by imaginative fancy-dressers.

  Otherwise there are ironic, no, brutal commentaries on Elvis’s weight gain in later years. Some men wear inflatable suits, others are padded with pillows. But generally, it’s a bizarre parade. Anything goes, the weirder the better. Because tributes these days invariably involve some form of impersonation. Fancy dress has become a new art form.

  Porthcawl seems an unlikely place for an Elvis celebration which has rapidly become extravagant. I work for the charity, Sustainable Wales, and am in the town every day. We have run a small shop for the last five years, Sussed, where all goods, the staff and volunteers are told, have their own unique story. We have to be able to tell those stories. So, be interested in what you sell, we encourage. This isn’t an ordinary job. We’re promoting life not a lifestyle.

  That life might include local honey, environmentally-friendly detergent, fair trade chocolate. Crucial purchases? Hardly. We also sell new books. Not many, but enough to make us the only shop for miles aware of new literature.

  But times are hard. The ‘footfall’ in Porthcawl, we’re told, has declined dramatically. It seems that people are waiting for our first Tesco to open.

  For the first Elvis festival we had taken our rare pink vinyl double album from 1978 – eighteen number ones and gatefold cover – to display in Sussed. Truthfully, it had rarely been played. Unlistenables included ‘Love Me Tender’, ‘Don’t Cry Daddy’, ‘Crying in the Chapel’. Mawkish, self-pitying, self-loathing.

  That’s why the best Elvis YouTubes show him drunk or overcome by absurdity. The highlight occurs when he heckles one of his backing singers. She misunderstands the purpose of his music, delivering an operetta-style performance. Sometimes, Elvis is saying, this is all… ridiculous.

  And eight hundred and thirty seven Las Vegas concerts? Elvis’s schedule seems preposterous but these days audiences for a single festival can be larger than his combined Vegas crowd. I was there when the Rolling Stones played Knebworth, August 21, 1976. They descended from a helicopter at 2 a.m., each an Orpheus with electric lyre, hair in spikes, tottering on Cuban heels.

  The band faced down an audience estimated at half a million. Surely, they must have believed, they had been delivered into hell. When dawn broke, the scenes were apocalyptic. Knebworth, Woodstock, Isle of Wight? They were our generation’s Waterloo. Or our Passchendaele. What a terrifying thought.

  I admit I used to hate Elvis Presley. Didn’t go to art school, did he? Wasn’t in a group, was he? Importantly, he didn’t write his own material, although he helped with early arrangements. Instead, he joined the army and was manipulated as a cash-cow by cynical management. John Lennon, who owed him so much (“before Elvis there was nothing”) said joining up had castrated Elvis.

  Yet I’ve changed. I still dislike most Elvis music, but the early raw rock and the late dramatic flourish are fine, the former because of reworkings of tunes such as ‘Blue Moon over Kentucky’. These were propelled by a guitar and slapped bass played by Scotty Moore and Bill Black. The unreplicable Sun studio echo also contributed much. But most of those eight hundred songs are overwhelmed by kitsch. Formulaic, they’re downright bad.

  These days Sussed is the last shop in town where you might purchase new literature. Not that anyone does. How do book sellers manage? I’ve no idea. Books are fair trade chocolate in a world of Pound Shop bargain bins. In this town the last real book shop has given up and died. It will reopen as a hairdresser’s, as everywhere else. I’m surprised the owners waited so long.

  With the pink record I’d also taken the biography of Elvis by Albert Goldman. The album must have been noteworthy, as it was immediately stolen. The book was ignored, but then it is a hatchet job, almost literally so. Goldman’s 600 pages have an unpleasant ‘know-better-than-you’ tone. It ends with a graphic account of Elvis’s autopsy, and a list of the drugs present in the body. The complete report has been sealed until 2027, fifty years after Elvis’s death.

  Environmental purists look away now. In an attempt to make money out of the deceased, our idea for the festival was to turn our town centre office, known as ‘The Green Room’, into ‘The Elvis Diner’, offering coffee and sandwiches. We had thought particularly of ‘The Elvis’, assembled from a soft Italian loaf, a pound of peanut butter, several bananas cut lengthways, honey and a bacon garnish.

  We also created a street stall for Sussed products, and played Elvis’s music: scratchy vinyl, as authentic as we could manage. Raul Arieta, who runs the Porthcawl ‘Rock Club’ accompanied the songs, then played alone, R&B becoming freeform jazz. The rest of us danced. I’d like to say jived but jiving’s beyond me, although my wife, who frequented the original Cavern, is adept. One music lover who heckled with cries of wankers was removed by the constabulary.

  Yes, times are hard and the environmental movement financially embarrassed. The world now requires greens who are innovative entrepreneurs, maybe prepared to live with nuclear power. As the new austerity bites, so idealists seem fewer. Or am I simply bewildered by middle age?

  Nevertheless, at Sussed we decided to do Elvis proud. The shop window displayed copies of the Daily Mirror front page from August 17, 1976 – “Elvis Presley is dead” – and old album sleeves, such as ‘Aloha from Hawaii via Satellite’ and ‘Elvis Sings the Wonderful World Of Christmas’.

  Dead, one man said to me. Don’t you know he’s only sleeping?

  Like every other hero from history…

  4.

  Now town teems with men with impossibly black wigs and muttonchops. They are entrants in the festival’s karaokes and competitions. And I ask, who are these people? Why have they come? The clearest answer is they hail from south Wales, especially the valleys, and the English Midlands. What they’re creating is a magnificent working class eisteddfod. And whoever they are,
they certainly understand the protocols of alcohol.

  Thus the Elvis Festival is an excuse for drinking. Exactly the same as international rugby. But it’s more subtly done. Thursday and Friday drinking constitute exquisite preliminaries. The booze is to be savoured, indeed relished, each glass deliciously anticipated.

  Saturday drinking on the other hand is relentless and singleminded. The drinker is not merely owed his drink. He deserves it like no other drink he will take. This Saturday drinker propels himself determinedly into the amnesiac twilight of Sunday morning. The wreckage of Saturday night is spectacular.

  Sunday’s drinking has a wistful quality. Despite the regularity of Sabbath sport, a tracing of guilt adheres to it. The toasts are wry yet congratulatory. We survived last night, they seem to say. Don’t know how. Don’t know why…

  For the Elvis Festival, drinking continued into Monday. This was a shifty, apologetic drinking, for which the drinker asked himself, why am I doing this? I didn’t know I was allowed.

  And Tuesday drinking? This is the terra incognita of booze. Yet I saw two men with cans of Special Brew together on a bench at Trinity. It was 9.30 a.m. and they were ready for the world. They too felt Porthcawl and Elvis owed them a drink. Perhaps we did.

  5.

  Saturday night it rains torrentially. But I’m out with plenty of others, not all of whom are inebriates, looking for buses amongst unfamiliar fleets. We’re soaked but there’s a definite camaraderie.

  What would Elvis have done? someone asks, joining a bus queue.

  Get a taxi, comes a reply.

  Before I go I pass the breakwater. Surely nobody would be rash enough to venture there? But yes, a hesitant figure has blundered on, looking for the right road.

  He won’t find it there. It’s a dangerous place to walk, along a narrow stone pier where the lighthouse glows a spectral orange through its panes.

  Better take care, Elvis, I say to the legions surrounding me. Better take care.

  As to Katia, I’ve forgotten what she looks like. Yet I know I will see her again.

  Infinity Speaker

  Homage to Guillevic (1907-1997)

  Avebury

  The stars are running down the avenues of Avebury. I look through the stones at the comets and sphinx-faced Mars, at the cartoons of the constellations and all the familiar cosmic crowd. And together we gaze down the avenues of Avebury, seeking the energy stored in its cells, that battery that burns under the wheat and the wheat-coloured flints and the sunken coliseums of chalk.

  Down these white roads I go, and think: do stones wait? Are these stones waiting? Perhaps for some summons from the ones they will recognise, and though weak as the brain’s electricity, a fire will race between them.

  But is Avebury waiting? Screwed into their sockets like grey light bulbs these stones are a religion abandoned by priests grown tired of waiting. So I listen to rooks, those cinders in the sunset, and the power lines above the Red Lion, crackling with our prayers.

  Now here is January asleep under its webbing, an army dreaming of what it means to win a war.

  At the stones it is soon midnight. This one I touch as if it was a child. How easily the frost’s pixels vanish under my hand. For this next stone there’s a formal embrace, but surely this next is already a lover, my tongue in the bell of its armpit, and I know the salt of it, the pulse, the stone’s body ivoried in the lights of the A4.

  And when I look, there is my skin upon Avebury’s skin, my heart against Avebury’s heart, and here is my thinking against Avebury’s thinking and my snow upon the snow of Avebury, trodden to transparency. Six thousand Januaries of snow under my heels.

  The four thousand at Carnac

  Once again

  what shall we do with you,

  those of us who are able?

  Upright in the sun,

  proud of our labours,

  always approaching a greater secret,

  And you, our remorse

  for not having gained it.*

  A minute ago they were mine. Those footprints. A minute ago the cressbeds, a commotion of cormorants – augers of the tide. A minute ago those footprints were mine. On the quayside, on the river-riven stones those footprints leading up to me. Were mine. Leading to the quayside and the cress-beds. Those. Mine. A minute ago. Leading up to me. On the river-riven stones.

  Modern poetry resembles a party in some overheated apartment. Everyone talks, nobody listens. Guillevic is invited but has not arrived. Or has he? Who is that then, looking out of the window? What’s to see?

  In a line of iron pines there’s an oak. And a red squirrel. And there are Les Geants de Kerzerho, menhirs splintered by lightning, a little removed from the crowd.

  We have forgotten the reasons for these four thousand stones. Perhaps they are a dance. An architecture. A language. But I wonder how we could have mislaid what seems now the most important knowledge in the world.

  Appetite intervenes. I carry a tray of oysters through the town and serve them with lemon, a redflecked loaf and cidre fermier from Vergers de Kermabo, at a table where two rivers join.

  Bloody stones, we splutter. Maybe they’re an alphabet. Or telephone boxes.

  Yet one thing’s clear. They were important once and are more so now. Those stones. Grey as the barley under a megalithic sky. Yet my mind tracks back to the blackthorn born this morning.

  Mwr

  On the train they look like us. Sober in charcoal, plugged into Playstations. Or in their Izuzu Warriors on the Tonysguboriau sliproad, Bridge FM in the Infinity speakers.

  But when they come home it’s different. They hang their Samsungs on the sea-rocket and in the oystershells still used as mirrors they regard themselves. At last, the weekend. At last they can relax. And speak their own language.

  These people are the neolithics. There are not many left but there were few to start. Rather short. A little stocky. So they blend in as they always have.

  And that language? Highly endangered. In fact it’s down to one word. That word is mwr. But don’t ask what mwr means. Mwr might mean a million things. Breadcrumb sponge? That’s mwr. Moon jelly? Mwr will do. Downsize? Throughput? Must be mwr. Because mwr is all these people need to build a life. To continue a civilisation. As to losing words, they’re used to it. Mws and mwth? Morkin and mormo? They came and went. Words are mortal too.

  But to me mwr was always a puzzle. I’ve heard the word for thirty years. And forgotten I hear it. So I thought I’d solve its mystery.

  On a day without colour, fog like deadwhite pearls of arsenic, I asked the watchmen in the bonded warehouse, their backs to the brandies and the baldaquins, to the chalices turned from Brazilian bloodwood.

  Their eyes were on their cards, then on the dealer, then scanning a screen where nothing moved. No-one murmured of mwr in that place. There were rottweilers that stood over thimbles of myrrh but of miracles there was no mind.

  When I came out I looked at the water. Something was moving, maybe a wreck the current nudged. Yes maybe mwr was there. But I wandered back inland around the bends in Briton’s Way.

  I asked a man digging into a dunghill but he shook his head.

  There’s no such word, he muttered, and returned to the wall of mauve and cream he had exposed in the midden, cutting at that seam, his own misery sufficient, his blade faith enough.

  In her driveway a woman was polishing a powerboat’s nameplate and she laughed and said that she was a newcomer to the country and did not care for its murky corners.

  In the schoolyard my old headmaster looked morose. Did we teach you nothing? he asked. Or is it so easy to forget? We murdered mwr, we made it meagre, a field, a ditch, a name too strange for the map, a morsel the surveyors spared, a moor behind locked doors.

  He’s wrong, I thought as I came away. The histories say nothing but I know there will be more to mwr tomorrow, that mwr is the mirror of a marvellous vale, an outpost, an outcrop, a forest, a fortress and on the atlas’s last page mwr is a moraine with
the moonlight’s electroplate upon it, a city under the sand, a monument, a battlefield, an isthmus slim as an avocet’s ankle, a reef, a rift, a rendezvous in the corner of the graveyard where the babies are buried with no-one to mourn and the graves are thrown open like music boxes where our names are played once and are gone.

  Yes I guess that is mwr. Or Mwr. A muster of ghosts. But in the meantime I will go back to the sea, to what was moving there, and sit in The Marine on a corner stool amongst a gang of myrmidons sipping malt and we will muse on the merits of a single syllable and wager the wheres and whens of it and the homecoming we shall have.

  * Translation of this poem from Guillevic’s ‘Carnac’ by Teo Savory, from ‘Selected Poems’ Penguin (1974). See also Bloodaxe’s ‘Selected Poems’ of Guillevic (1999).

  Old Man of the Willow

  There’s a knock on the door. Wes comes in with a box under his arm.

  Thought you’d like to see this, he says.

  Thanks, Wes.

  This one’s a beauty. Oh yes.

  Seen one before, Wes. West of here.

  Thought you’d like to see.

  He’s a beauty all right, I say.

  Fourth time. No. Make it five.

  But only roadkill.

  Fifth time I caught this one.

  On the highway, I say. Going down to Druid.

  Yip. Five times.

  Side of the road. I stopped and looked at it.

  Had this box handy.

  Coming out of some town up there.

  Cardboard box.

  Black and white. Like this one. Smaller though. Coming out of Dodsland it might have been.

  Lost his wife, this one has.

  And the ants were busy.

  And his kits long gone. Caught him sweet as shelling peas. Fifth time.

  You’re the best, Wes.

  Won’t learn, see. Won’t learn their lessons.

  No road sense either.

  Follow their bellies is what they do. Greedy SOBs.