by Rhys Hughes
This is an easier task than might be expected.
First obtain a length of tubular steel. I removed the leg of an old deckchair with a hacksaw. Flatten one end of the cylinder as airtight as possible, folding the metal over, and create a pan with a gentler tap an inch or so further along. In this hollow will nestle the priming. Bore a hole in the centre of the pan, so that the priming will connect with the propellant. Now bind the rest of the tube tightly with leather, to guard against shrapnel from misfirings. I like to lay the barrel in the groove of a prepared piece of pine, one end of the shallow trench closed, fixed to the back of the tube with powerful adhesive. This will absorb some of the recoil. A stock is optional.
Gunpowder is the tricky part. It is possible to mix your own, using the regular formula—75% saltpetre, obtainable from the chemist’s as a weedkiller; 13% charcoal, filched from a friend’s barbecue; 12% sulphur, available as a stomach remedy— but the result is usually poor, even if ground in a blender, due to the fire suppressants routinely added to the ingredients. Better to gather it ready-made from fireworks, removing the fuses from bangers and jumping jacks, and emptying the tubes into a jar. It’s expensive: a dozen bangers will only suffice for a single shot, but one able to puncture a solid oak door with a steel ball-bearing, wrapped in greased felt for a tight fit.
For triggers, all sorts of ingenious mechanisms can be employed. My penchant for electrical engineering encouraged me to eschew cogs, levers and flakes of flint. I taped a six volt battery to the lower side of the pistol, ran two wires to a toggle switch, and from there to a pen-spring resting over the pan. The resistance of coil to current would heat it up beyond the ignition point of the priming. With this system, a long delay between pressing the trigger and shooting a target is inevitable: enough time for the target to flee. But I didn’t want to use the thing. Only if Swansea council refused to implement our terms would we let the bus have it. Straight between the wipers.
I was less nervous than I’d expected as I boarded the vehicle and bought a return ticket to Cardiff. Sitting close behind the driver, I waited to see if anybody else would climb on. But Rhiannon had targeted the midday service, whose main purpose is to exchange stale air between the cities, so I remained a solitary passenger as the driver turned the ignition and lumbered out of the station. When we stopped at the first set of traffic lights, I untied my bag and carefully extracted my weapon. Then I jabbed the barrel into his neck and ordered him to remove his presence from the bus. He complied without protest, obviously pleased to have gained a new anecdote for dunking in sweet tea.
Taking his place behind the wheel, I wrestled with the controls. In the wing mirror I observed him lope toward the station. I wanted to call out for some instructions, but knew Rhiannon would disapprove. Torturing the clutch, I managed to wheel the bus onto Oystermouth Road and back up Dillwyn Street, to the roundabout where St Helen’s Road and the Kingsway dance a giddy waltz. First exit and up George Street to connect with the alarming Constitution Hill. The cobbles rattled my dignity; something at the back of the bus broke. Nobody who witnessed my progress betrayed any surprise, ignoring the tumult and corroded colour. I was tempted to stop and pick them up, to make a point.
So I reached Rhondda Street without major incident, and my wife was waiting with the garage open. Dylan fitted perfectly, which demonstrates a certain lunacy on the part of the architect of our property. We remain the only couple I know who have a lockup tall enough to conceal a double decker. The man who used it before us collected tractors; the man before him, igloos. We threw the bolts, rubbed our hands in glee. Rhiannon took a sequence of polaroid photographs of our victim, with copies of today’s Evening Post pasted on the windscreen, to prove the date. Then I removed a hubcap with a spanner, wrapped it in the paper and addressed it. Other parts were folded in other papers.
“What now?” I asked, for your benefit, because I knew.
“We’ll get them to the post office before last collection,” my wife replied, taking the parcels from me. “Then sit back and wait. With luck, we might make the breakfast news.”
Leaving Dylan alone, we ascended the spiral staircase to our living quarters, directly above the garage. I was in a state of nervous delight more powerful than any I had experienced since the opening of the second Severn Bridge. While my wife went to post the packages, with our list of demands attached, I listened to obscure tunes on the gramophone. A Welsh panoply of screeches, hoots and jangles—crwth, pibgorn and pibacwd in loving disharmony. Then I sampled a rendering of Robert ap Huw’s airs on an inappropriate pedal harp. No good trying to run a modern democracy on this stuff. Might as well sign a job contract with a leg of lamb! Or was it simpler to overthrow democracy?
The gramophone wound down, as did my heart. I poured a deep whisky. My wife returned and we sat in each other’s arms, to save the upholstery from unnecessary wear. Not infrequently, I stood and crept to the window to twitch a net curtain and gaze across the silent street. There were no police snipers or Arts Council detectives. The sodium lamps, spouting a weak light, exhausted after its climb, cast cones on damp slabs. Nothing in the artificial dusk between. Rhiannon proclaimed me weak: I still had a loaded pistol, she reminded me. A bloody shootout would also serve our purpose, draw attention to our transcendent crime. The authorities would come, but not yet. We were secure.
At last it was time for bed, and we still hadn’t been arrested. Yet I could not relax. Was the news of this audacious abduction spreading in the depot tea rooms? Were the crews of the airport coaches, those lonely heralds of the beyond, shaking their numb heads over our bold stroke? It was a momentous feeling, all of it, and I doubted I would ever manage to sleep, but I must have fallen into a dream, for an eldritch voice lapped my earlobes an hour or two before dawn, and though the actual words were much too faint to be intelligible, the way in which they were punctuated was somehow horribly familiar. I twisted in an extremity of panic, until I was fully trapped in the sheets.
The following morning, after Rhiannon cut me free, I asked her: “Do you ever write verse to yourself?”
“That’s wasteful. I save all my metaphors for you.”
“My conscience recited a poem at me.”
She arched an eyebrow, but her grin was wide. “Well, it never had a university education, and is too immature to mind its own business. Mine tends to respect the cultural differences between us, and let me do what I choose. Pay no attention, Glyn.”
Taking her advice, I rose and fried breakfast. Seaweed and oatmeal. I switched on the radio, hoping to catch the news. There were reports of redundancies and leakage in industry; the hushing up by the Council of a financial scandal; the arrival of a festering crooner on the latest lame leg of his untalented tour. Nothing out of the ordinary. Rhiannon joined me as I trawled the frequencies, ranging the dial, but not a single word about the kidnapping of Dylan Thomas, or the inconvenience for commuters to Cardiff. Nobody cared, perhaps because they hadn’t even noticed. This was bizarre. I climbed into the attic with a pair of powerful binoculars and stood by the western skylight.
“The Gower Peninsular is still there!”
Rhiannon fumed: “The Evening Post staff are so inefficient! They’re just playing for time, of course.”
Later, she went shopping and returned with a large basket of fruit. We ran our hands through the peaches in dismay. I was reluctant to go to bed that night, more scared than if our exploits had generated hysteria, a perversity which, according to my wife, was another symptom of my lack of academic achievement. I tolerated her insults, eager to grip her warm limbs for safety. But again the voice came, and now I was able to decode two score words among the hissing:
And timetables shall have no dominion.
Passengers in a hurry shall be one
With the snail in the shell and the glacier;
When their tickets are punched and the punches are late,
They shall have no refund in pocket or purse . . .
I shook Rhiannon u
ntil she snapped open an eye. This gross doggerel was not in my head. It was projected from below, from the garage, from a room unknown to our neighbours, hidden from all. My first impression was that a thief had broken in, and that he sought to lighten his wickedness with a lyric, as Welsh burglars are fond of doing. But my wife is highly allergic to woollen hats, even from afar, and she sneezed not. There was another explanation for the phenomenon, one I had scant desire to learn. Were we the butt of a cruel trick?
It occurred to me that if the authorities had traced the crime back to us, they might adopt psychological techniques to force us out, rather than risk an open assault. They would, for instance, try to drive us mad with audible anomalies. But Rhiannon chuckled at my paranoia: it was too elaborate a scheme for the Welsh. No, we were undetected. Perhaps it was the wind, the same wind which blew atoms of long dead naked men over the face of the west moon, above the shifting sands of Broughton Bay. She is too rational for terrors, my wife.
Easy for her: a girl who can thump clouds with her steady pulse. My own heart, which I always ration sparingly, is less mature. It failed me now; I did not, could not, descend into the garage to solve the mystery. Begged my wife to stay in bed with me, pulling the sheets over our ears. Then we made love, to further drown the sounds, for a minute or two. The thief, if such he was, might have his diabolical way with my tool kit. I didn’t mind. But when day came, I was manly again, determined to conquer our lyrical foe, to edit him away.
I have a computer in the corner of the bedroom which responds to my voice. The software is standard now, but my incredulity doesn’t diminish with prices. An idea came to me which necessitated waiting indoors while Rhiannon shopped and spied on public reaction, which was still minimal. The city, she said, was careless, more ugly than lovely, more blind than ugly. She regarded its apathy with sympathetic contempt. Meanwhile I ran a microphone cable from computer to garage, having muffled the pickup in cotton, to adjust the source noise more closely to my own slurred tones. Then I set the printer by the bed.
There was no need to actually enter the garage: I dropped the wires through the centre of the spiral staircase, the absent hub of the helix, until they touched the ground. Because of the feeling of competence this gave me, I slept quite well, only holding one of my wife’s legs. At last a drone revived me. The printer was composing. I fumbled for the bedside lamp, frowning at the first sheet:
I, in my engineered image, drive on two levels,
Forged in man’s alloys, the aluminium conveyor
Riding my ghost over asphalt,
The decks of this rusty bus rise on the double,
My half fare in reluctance for the bags in the aisle,
Blocking the emergency exit.
A terrible fit of trembling overwhelmed me. My wife could do little to calm my nerves, for she was also appalled, and with good reason. Rare indeed the burglar who could utter anything quite this pretentious! Some paranormal force had to be involved. A malevolent power, cowardly, curly and chubby. There is much evil in this world, but I couldn’t picture how any of it might scan so badly. Yet if no human or ghoul was responsible, what manner of ineffable verse, dark with elegiac contagion, had invaded our home? I shrieked the question.
My wife pressed her chill lips to my ear. “It’s a Dylan Thomas. The histrionic delivery is identical.”
“How can you be sure? I don’t recognise the poem.”
“No, Glyn, it is a new work.”
“What a malign imagination you have! I’m shocked.”
“Consider it carefully. Does it seem to make sense on first reading but on closer scrutiny reveal itself as totally meaningless? And are you ashamed to admit this in case others call you ignorant, even though they are in exactly the same position?”
“By a white giant’s thigh, you’re right!”
“I rest my case, husband. Now then, we must mull the optimum method of silencing the phenomenon. If it continues, our neighbours will surely be alerted and our scheme ruined.”
That was very true. Our hostage had to remain hidden. And to you in that chair—reader or whatever you call yourself— here is a personal message, a warning, if you prefer:
Don’t go searching for our garage on Rhondda Street. You won’t find it, or any sort of storage space on that road. Terrace houses dominate a region which is little more than a student ghetto. And though our lockup is an immense facility, voluminous enough to shelter a dirigible, I have disguised it with a wooden façade, painted to resemble the windows, door and stonework of a standard dwelling. There is even a hanging basket and the silhouette of a cat on the sill. And the height is masked by a board daubed to look like sky over roof.
Quiet is essential to preserve the illusion. As Rhiannon and myself argued over what steps to take, other than those which led downward, the printer resumed its virulent spew:
All the drizzle long it was running, it was horrid, the engine
Croaked like frog in throat, the fumes from the exhaust, it was benzine
And sulphur, grey and bubbling
And pure carbon monoxide.
And nightly over the unwashed drunks
As I drove to Bridgend the hooligans were stoning windscreens,
All the drug long I heard, bleating with the sheep, breaking jars
Flying into shards, and the leeks
Littering into the dark.
Utter despair guided our limbs for us. Each tendon was plucked with the thumbnails of outrage. Determined not only to protect myself, but to avenge this violation of literature, I ripped the paper from the printer and crumpled it, aware that a verse of such foulness would forever twist itself into the obscurest corners of my mind, like the pig-iron vanes of a Llareggub mill—darker than a Satanic version. The former ventilates clichés rather than workers, and will never waft the smell of parsley. I seized the pistol, my wife took down a spear from the wall—a souvenir from Aberystwyth. Then we charged.
The bus seemed to be grinning as we burst into the lockup and confronted our nightmare. But the source of the poetry was inside the vehicle, ogre or imp I couldn’t tell. Then it looked up and I saw it was a man, almost as frightened as myself, naked and decorated with paint. Spiral patterns turned stomach and limbs into smoke; his hair was whitened with lime, or flour. He pushed his face against the grimy glass. Something terrible in his eyes, not quite agony. Bubbles of blood burst on his lips as his jaw worked the poem, the imagery vibrating inside the bus, then booming from the chassis like a major disaster.
Nothing for it but to attempt a rescue. Rhiannon inserted the point of her weapon into the gap between the doors and heaved. They opened and the prisoner spilled out. At first, like many victims of torture, he was unable, or unwilling, to accept his freedom. Still his molars chewed his torment, adding to cosmic discord:
The force that through the bleak streets drives the bus
Drives Welsh politics; that oils pistons and palms
Is my councillor.
And I am dumb to give any crooked fool
My vote in the forthcoming local elections.
He continued to chant vile words, until Rhiannon reversed her spear and knocked him on the head. We studied him from all angles. A primitive specimen who had only recently learned the use of metal: his single item of adornment was a bronze shield slung over his back on a strap. He must have been on the bus when I hijacked it, maybe sleeping upstairs through the adventure, only waking when Dylan was trapped in the garage. But why parody the Cwmdonkin Bard, instead of shouting for help? There were many questions, most of them ludicrous.
I prodded him with my slipper. “Why are you undressed in that woad? Who are you? Where are you going?”
“Hywel the Baker. Travelling from Lladloh to Cardiff, to open a pub in the Docks. Not a shield, a baking tray, this is! Spot of bother in my home village, all sorts of pagan rumpus, so I ran away. Thought it would be nicer out of the valleys. The god of golden beer went there, you see, tamping mad, to brew potch and heck.”
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br /> “But where the druidic blazes are your clothes?”
“Lladloh is near Lampeter,” he sighed.
That explained everything and I didn’t interrogate him on the point further. But Rhiannon had much to say, rattling her spear in time to her words, two sets of barbs matching.
“Agitating us every night with poems!”
“Don’t have a go at me! Terrible time, I’ve had, since leaving home last month. Walked to Carmarthen, then stole a bicycle and rode it here. Sold it at the station for my fare on the shuttle. Meant to be an hour’s drive to Cardiff! But stale air made me insensible. Found myself in this garage! Been here for days, and he’s been forcing me to declaim. Entered my mind, he did, the curly rogue.”
My wife frowned. “Who are you talking about?”
“The spirit of Dylan Thomas! He’s been reincarnated as this bus. He sapped my will and made me shout out his new verse. Can’t do it himself, because he hasn’t got a tongue. Wouldn’t leave me be until I went along. No manners! Brought up under a tub, anyone would think. The poetic soul, I suppose. All flippant and mean.”
It was time to be clever. I pointed out the logical difficulties in the concept of a man translating into the form of a bus. I won’t go into details here—if you’re interested, I suggest you visit the Philosophy Department of Swansea University. Ask for Liz Evans or Ieuan Lloyd. They will explain why reincarnation as an idea is fundamentally untenable. It hinges on a definition of identity. If a bus has all the memories of the real Dylan, his emotions and traits, that is still no indication that it is Dylan. The most that can be stated is that the bus has become exactly like him. What’s lacking is that one to one relation which permits us to validate an identity through time.
Hywel was unimpressed. “Don’t be daft! Bound to be Dylan. His curls and loquacity have transmigrated!”