Mr Cassini E-Book

Lloyd Jones

• Herausgeber: Seren
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 597

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2016

Beschreibung

WINNER OF WALES BOOK OF THE YEAR AWARD 2007 "Lloyd Jones's psychogeographic epic about, among other things, Wales, football, water-divining, madness, vampires, Merlin, legends, policemen, birds, mannequins and picnics, is full of ideas but (purposefully) spirals far away from any kind of narrative. Absurdist and resonant, this is a meditation on a nation that is anything but straightforward." THE GUARDIAN "Few people write with this much verve any more. An extraordinary work of the imagination." THE INDEPENDENT "Lyrical and inventive." THE TIMES Mr Cassini, the remarkable follow-up to the award-winning Mr Vogel, is an amazing journey through the geography of one man's troubled mind as he tries to recover the lost years of his childhood. Duxie is a dreamer with holes in his memory. With the help of a mysterious and beautiful girl he sets out on a quest to fill the gaps in his history. And as they search the landscapes and myths of the past they uncover domestic and national tyranny. The tale twists together strands of dream, daydream and reality as Duxie journeys towards freedom – and a final understanding of what caused his amnesia. Because lurking deep within his dreams is a sinister, vampire figure called Mr Cassini, who drinks women's tears, keeps stolen mannequins in a darkened room, and gets up to terrible deeds with his policeman side-kick. Journeying through time, Duxie investigates caves and wells, mystics and madness, and seeks out four extraordinary champions to help him stage a showcase trial on a mountain in the centre of Wales. Mr Cassini is a novel with many themes, including monsters, snow, picnics, islands, drugs, rainbows, eating disorders, insects, justice and magic. Lloyd Jones walked around Wales – a journey of more than a thousand miles – while writing his first novel, the prize-winning Mr Vogel. For Mr Cassini he changed tack, walking across Wales seven times in seven different directions. The result is an ambitious and brilliant exploration of lost childhood and the distortions of the past. Learned, funny and tragic, Mr Cassini is told in dazzling colour.

Leseprobe

To my mother, Mary,

My sister, Eurwen,

And my brother, Dafydd.

Seren is the book imprint of

Poetry Wales Press Ltd

57 Nolton Street, Bridgend, CF31 3AE, Wales

www.seren-books.com

© Lloyd Jones, 2006

ISBN 1-85411-425-5

The right of Lloyd Jones to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.

A CIP record for this title is available from the British Library.

This book is a work of fiction. The characters and incidents portrayed are the work of the author’s imagination. Any other resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted at any time or by any means electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise without the prior permission of the copyright holder.

The publisher works with the financial assistance of the Welsh Books Council.

Printed in Plantin by CPD (Wales), Ebbw Vale

The spirit of any age is captured by the way it dances, and by the way it describes magic.

Cassini –The Dexter Propensity.

Is motion the only reality?

Theroux –The Primary Colors.

I wish to thank Academi, whose grant made it possible for me to write this book.

All the characters in this novel are completely fictitious.

The policeman, PC 66, or PC 99 as he is also known, bears no resemblance or relation to anyone living or dead – the numbers have been chosen merely because they are reversible and interchangeable.

INTRODUCTION

IT was a time of ice and emptiness. A time of hunger, too. He had gone to the island in winter, and he had freed lapwings and redwings frozen to the white ground, glued into place as if they were living postage stamps.

He had stood on the ice to hear it crack. He had found echoes in the cliffs around him, and his voice had resounded from towers and steeples of uncontaminated white.

He had thrown stones on the frozen lakes, and they had zinged in the way that railway lines zing when a train is travelling down the line.

He had been to other islands, this man who wore gloves on his island of glass. He had been to one of the loneliest islands in the world, further away from the teeming continents than almost anywhere else on Earth – a speck in the South Atlantic. He had gone there to learn about a failed adventurer, hideously disfigured, who had hidden himself away for a very long time.

The adventurer was called Fernando Lopez, a Portuguese nobleman, who had been among a cadre of soldiers which had gone native while their commander left Goa to fetch more conquistadors. Shackled and maimed as a punishment for adopting the free-and-easy lifestyle of the Moslems, Lopez lost his right hand, his left thumb, his ears and his nose; also his hair, beard and eyebrows were plucked out in a practice known as scaling the fish. On his way back to Portugal in 1515, returning to his wife and children, Lopez was overcome by qualms when his ship anchored at St Helena to take on water. He fled ashore and hid in the forest. The crew left him a tinderbox and a saucepan, a barrel of biscuits and some dried meat. He was the island’s first inhabitant, and his strange exile lasted for 30 years, until his death. In all those years, living so far from the mass of men, he slept on a straw bed in a grotto which he’d hewn himself. It became the still point of his life, far away from society’s slow obsessions. As the years went by, Lopez showed himself to visiting sailors, who regarded him as a saint. Taking pity on him, they gave him whatever they had to offer, including seeds and tree cuttings such as palm, banana, lemon, orange, lime and pomegranate. They gave him ducks, hens, peacocks and turkeys; also cats and dogs, and farmyard animals. Labouring incessantly, he planted orchards and vineyards, extravagant gardens and prosperous vegetable plots: his mini-paradise became legendary, and the story of his Lear-like kingship over a perfect, uncivilised dominion was eventually heard by the monarchy in his homeland. They summoned him to their palace and, once he had made his reticent appearance at court, he was allowed to go to Rome where he gained absolution for his sins. Then, overcome again by humanity, he returned to his island home and went into hiding until he secured a promise that he would never have to leave it again.

Our traveller – this man who wore gloves on his island of glass – had been to other islands too, many of them. He had been to Galapagos and to the Islands of the Colour-Blind. He had been to the Hebrides, to the island of Jura, where he’d heard the rockfall of Orwell’s typewriter as his great futuristic novel Nineteen Eighty-Four took shape. He had listened to Orwell’s consumptive cough as the dreadful winter of 1947 tightened his chest and took him ever-closer to death; he had seen new words etched in crystal ice on Orwell’s windowpanes: Newspeak, Doublespeak, and Big Brother.

To learn something about this man who wears gloves, always, even in his sleep, we must go back in time. He was very ill once, in a hospital, and he felt very weak. As they tested his body he had time to reflect on his life. We must go back to one particular night, an important night in his life. It was New Year’s Eve, and he was sitting alone in a hospital side room, fighting the forces of darkness as they gathered around him, and listening to fireworks going off in the nearby town, watching them streak the sky with silver and many brilliant colours. As Big Ben began its preamble to midnight a doctor summoned him, with a finger, to his bed. So, as midnight struck, he was being examined again and he was trying hard not to scream.

It was then, in the first minute of the new year, that he decided on a course of action. Tired of feeling neither dead nor alive, a zombie in fact, he had made a pact with himself: if he was to live he would live. If he was to die he would die, and quickly.

That night, as he sat in the hall of mirrors which is death’s antechamber, a strange incident took place. He may have been semi-conscious, but he certainly wasn’t asleep when he experienced a brief but intense vision. Quite suddenly he was in a small, roofless room which was perfectly white. He was sitting on a low bench, made of something like white plastic. In front of him were two unmarked doors, which could have been virtual doors because they had no handles. He knew without being told that one door led to life, the other to death. Our traveller took the one which led to life, and he is still with us today. What is remarkable is that during the six months following that miraculous escape through the white door, the world seemed more brilliant and beautiful than he had ever seen it: nature was more resplendent and exciting, Wales more lovely, colours more scintillating, experiences more resonant than at any other time in his life. That is what he told people whom he met walking in the snow.

Many people have had similar experiences – by using drugs, or by starving themselves, or by suffering some form of mental collapse. That’s all by the by.

There came a time, many years later, when our traveller wanted to revisit that little white room so that he could step out of it again and see all those brilliant sights anew – but he wanted to do so without mescaline, or cocaine, or deprivation. He read about the subject. He rounded up all the usual suspects: Huxley peering through the doors of perception, Castaneda fooling with peyote in the Mexican desert; the sorcerer-saint Milarepa gaining the holy grail of all mystics in his Tibetan cave – mastery over his own self, and the power to change his body into any shape he wished, to fly across the sky like a bird.

But our traveller – let us call him by his nickname, Duxie – could see no way of returning to that white room. Then one day he came across the story of an eighteenth-century prince from Nigeria who’d been kidnapped by slavers. The prince, Olaudah Equiano, eventually settled in England after an adventurous life and wrote his memoirs. One particular passage made a great impression on Duxie:

However, all my alarms began to subside when we got sight of land; and at last the ship reached Falmouth, after a passage of thirteen weeks. Every heart on board seemed gladdened on our reaching the shore, and none more than mine. The captain immediately went on shore, and sent on board some fresh provisions, which we wanted very much: we made good use of them, and our famine soon turned into feasting, almost without ending. It was about the beginning of spring 1757, when I arrived in England, and I was nearly twelve years of age at that time. I was very much struck with the buildings and the pavement of the streets in Falmouth; and, indeed, every object I saw filled me with fresh surprise.

One morning, when I got up on deck, I perceived it covered all over with the snow that fell overnight. As I had never seen any thing of the kind before, I thought it was salt; so I immediately ran down to the mate and desired him, as well as I could, to come and see how somebody in the night had thrown salt all over the deck. He, knowing what it was, desired me to bring some of it down to him: accordingly I took up a handful of it, which I found very cold indeed; and when I bought it to him he desired me to taste it. I did so, and was surprised above measure. I then asked him what it was; he told me it was snow; but I could not by any means understand him. He asked me if we had no such thing in our country; I told him “No.” I then asked him the use of it, and who made it: he told me a great man in the heavens, called God; but here again I was to all intents and purposes at a loss to understand him; and the more so, when a little after I saw the air filled with it, in a heavy shower, which fell down on the same day.

Our traveller, Duxie, felt sure that this passage had provided him with the means to describe those few seconds in his white room. Soon, he decided on a course of action. Shortly after Christmas he hired a boat to take him out to the least well known of the Welsh islands, Ynysvitrain as the English call it, together with sufficient food supplies to last him for a while. He obtained permission from the naturalists’ trust, which owns a cabin on the island, to use it as a den, in return for a suitable donation towards the upkeep of his temporary home. He took with him pen and paper as well as a good supply of warm clothing. His gloves were a curio: he found them among his father’s belongings, cleared from his house when he died. They fitted him perfectly, after he’d removed the cobwebbed dust-lace from their insides. They were of tight-fitting brown leather, fur-lined, with black press-studs at the wrist.

Duxie waited for the first snows of winter to fall, and then he started to write an account of the time leading up to his experience in the white room. He wrote the entire story wearing gloves, and, when he was too tired to write, he wandered around the island, which is also known as the island of glass because its many surfaces become a real-life Narnia when the cold sets in. He took with him, also, a telescope with which to study the skies and the natural world around him; finally, since all island castaways are allowed one book, he took a volume called The Book of Snow, written by an Inuit called Ootek. He was amazed to discover that every snowflake, though sharing the same six-sided shape, has its own individual pattern (though no one knows how this fact was established).

Which brings us to the main reason for his sojourn in the snow, on the Island of Ynysvitrain, in a wooden hut which harboured a dead ghost moth, silky white, in the barrel of its door-lock – Wonderment.

This everyday life of ours is rather short of it, don’t you think? True wonderment – at the cosmos around us and within us – rather than at man’s folly and madness. So he waited for the snow with a growing sense of anticipation: he was awed by the beauty of Ynysvitrain, by the beauty of the stars, and by the beauty of words, even Ootek’s weird and wonderful Inuit words for snow:

anniu – falling snow

api – ground snow

siqoq – smoky, drifting snow

upsik – wind-beaten snow

and so on; Ootek also described ice – frazil ice, porridge ice, pancake ice – and the snows of Nunavut, tinted by fungi in marvellous shades of red, green, blue and black.

Sometimes our traveller imagines himself at the third pole – the Pole of Relative Inaccessibility, the furthest point from any land in the Arctic Circle. He sees birds moving in whitebait flocks, shimmering silently below the sun. He watches wax form in soft yellow tears on the candle in his hut, his lair of shadows. And so he trains his telescope on Saturn. As the north wind blows, as the snows gather, he examines the dark and divisive circle which cleaves the Rings of Saturn. That black hoop is known as Cassini’s Ring: he must pass through its darkness before he can re-enter his white room. This is his story, as he tells it to strangers in the snow.

DUXIE’S PROLOGUE

OF all days, this must be the day. I have looked to all points of the mind’s compass, and I know that this is the day.

Do you believe in signs, signals?

I have never done so... omens and auguries are the stuff of dreams.

And yet I cannot ignore these portents.

I awoke to a rainbow of mesmerising intensity, arched low over the swell of the land. Troubled by its message, I tried to remove its sedulous curve with my finger by smearing its seven colours in the condensation of my night-breath on the window pane. But it blazed, flooded into a brilliant bow.

And then, flying along the far-off rim of the sea, came the swans – seven in line, glittering under the sun. What could it all mean? Why did they pass through the rainbow in such silence, those paper birds – their mechanical wings pulled up and down, slowly, by the taut thread of the horizon?

There was a message there, surely. Seven colours, seven white birds...

You must understand that I am not superstitious; those birds were not a warning sent to me from heaven knows where, I know that. But when the swans entered that rainbow a key turned in the vaults of my memory.

The time has come, then, to tell you what happened. Perhaps I should have told you sooner. But too many people had been hurt; feelings were still raw. So I kept all those memories to myself, re-igniting them sometimes by looking at the black and white photographs, faded and creased, which I keep in an old toffee tin in my bedroom. The tin is rusty and musty, a stale reminder of the years which have passed. When I open the lid I smell a deep, acrid tang: and I yearn for the past, sniffing my own nostalgia as an addict smells Methadone. Each photograph, with its white border – its edging of surf – becomes an atoll of memory.

I must act now, before my next winter is an old man’s winter: before I start to hoard time, before I become sleepy and watchful, frugal with heat and oxygen – an adventist waiting for the coming of his last spring-child. Even now the willows line the waysides in their winter orange, stooping to remind me.

The people in my story: you will get to know them well. My name is...

My name is loaded with associations. All names are. My name is so heavily marked with the stains of the past that I would rather keep it to myself for now; so let us start afresh – please use my nickname, Duxie. Let’s forget about the physical details. They always get in the way, don’t they. You wonder about my eyes? No, they’re fine. It’s the snow – it was like a flashbulb going off in my face, too close... the insides of my eyes are still white, all the detail has gone.

The people in my story, I will tell you about them. There’s a young and beautiful woman – Olly. And there in the background, always, is Mr Cassini.

Seven days in a man’s life: how can I possibly convey the importance of that week – among the countless weeks in my existence? No doubt you too can remember a decisive time in your life: an episode which shaped the person you’ve become, made you the human being you are today.

Duxie and Olly. Both of us have a past. When I say a past I think we all know what I mean by that. People who don’t talk about their past tend to accumulate a certain air of mystery, do they not? Olly didn’t do it deliberately, I assure you. But having closed the door on her previous life she kept it locked; the past was an archive or a fiction, and she was tired of its warped messages.

I think you already know that she disappeared once, quite some time ago now, when she was a young woman. Perhaps went missing would be a better way of putting it.

People were concerned; yes, there was a lot of worry, but foul play was never suspected. After all, she left a note. At the end of her brief message she’d scrawled something by a long-ago poet called Li Yu – a couple of lines I’d taught her while we watched boats on the river:

A paddle in spring’s breeze, a leaf-like boat,

In the myriad ripples I attain freedom.

I’d felt close to her that day: we’d shared a giggle because one of the boats was called Cirrhosis of the River. And she’d compared the yachts lying on their sides in the estuary mud to fat white nudists, sleeping on their bellies in the sun.

That note – she left a solitary sentence at the end, a footnote from which I alone could draw any meaning:

Come to eat sweets and cry.

Nowadays there would be a huge drama no doubt: police cars with flashing lights, television appeals, counselling. But things were different then. I’m not saying better – just different. Also, everyone had a pretty strong feeling that Olly was somewhere safe, that everything would turn out OK. And, since she’s very much alive and well today, I don’t have to tell you that she was found again, all in one piece (if not particularly well). What you don’t know, I suspect, is that something very important happened to both of us that week. Is that a shock to you?

I’ll tell you all about it.

I want to go back – to the year she went missing. I will return to one particular day, a Sunday in February. She and I had arranged to go on an outing: a picnic, if the weather allowed. We were lucky – sandwiched among a pile of damp and mouldy days we found a bright, mostly sunny morning with spring-like bursts of promise. It was her turn to choose our destination. I was surprised, therefore, when the car turned eastwards. I remarked on this, since I couldn’t remember a time when she’d turned to the east. She always went west, to Snowdonia or Anglesey. She smiled, but gave no clues. Although our friendship was relatively new we had slipped into an easy companionship and neither of us felt much need to talk as we motored on. She turned off at St Asaph, skirted the city, and drove a few miles into the countryside. After leaving the car on a deep bed of leaf-mould in a shallow lay-by, we walked along a rough track, between a huddle of houses, and headed for a field. At the topmost edge of this field, below a sombre, leafless wood, I could see a ruin. It looked ecclesiastical, and soon I was standing in the roofless chapel which is attached to an ancient well known as Ffynnon Fair. I sat on the star-shaped rim of the well, watching dreamy bubbles drifting to the surface, as if they were escaping from an antediluvian mudfish buried in the fine brown sediment below the water.

Apparently this well – used as a bathing pool, and famous for its healing powers – had a canopy resting on ornamental pillars long ago. It fell into disrepair after Henry VIII took his revenge on the Church. The ruin is in a pleasant, almost enchanted dingle, with butterbur and bamboo growing around a stumble of fallen stones, damp and mossy. As the sun played among the bubbles I trailed my fingers in the soft, lime-rich water and, such was the old-world feel of the place, I imagined I was in a realm of water-nymphs and dryads. You may condemn my description as fey, but I am merely trying to describe the nature of that particular day.

Olly had been silent for long periods. Had I been more observant I might have noticed the sag in her shoulders, the droop of her head. But I hadn’t. As we ate the first of our sandwiches (ham, coleslaw and Branston Pickle on rye bread) and pored over children’s prayers which had been written on scraps of paper – now mouldering – and placed in a hole in the chapel wall, I had no idea that Olly was being oppressed by an inner turmoil. I was serene and contented under my feeble winter sun, and totally impervious to her personal unhappiness. You needn’t chide me. I have reproached myself often enough. So when I turned to talk to her, only to see tears running down her cheeks, I was shocked. For a moment I sat with my hand frozen in mid-air, clutching half a sandwich. My mouth was already open, ready to take a bite from the bread; I put it down immediately and moved closer to her. I put my arm around her, and we sat like that for a few minutes. She felt very slender, very vulnerable, and her body’s little judders and spasms travelled down my arm, into my heart. She cried soundlessly, and then stopped, sniffed, wiped her nose with her sleeve, and stood up. She smiled, and said sorry. Neither of us had a tissue so I handed her some of the kitchen towel lining the bottom of the sandwich box. Reddish patches spread around her eyes and nose.

‘Sorry,’ she said again. ‘I don’t know what’s wrong – I keep breaking into tears unexpectedly, without any reason. It happened in Bangor High Street yesterday. Quite embarrassing. I was just walking along... ’

She smiled again, and started packing the picnic into her rucksack.

‘Come on,’ she said. ‘Let’s find the caves.’

As I trudged behind her I wondered what I should do. Let it pass? Press her for more information? Something told me to bide my time. She’d said only a few words – but they were enough to trouble me considerably. We moved upwards slowly through a hanger of ash trees and holly, with the River Elwy glinting below us. Eventually we came to a clearing, a dome-like knoll overlooking the valley. We sat on two soft green tussock-stools and admired the view. Directly opposite was a hanging valley which cupped an emerald-green field and a smoking farmhouse. Curtains of rain drifted down the cwm in white pillars which toppled slowly onto the floor of the valley in slow-motion, silently, as if drifts of talcum powder were falling onto the floor of a bathroom, or flour was being sifted through a sieve. Inexplicably, we were left dry.

‘Come on,’ she said with a hint of mock gaiety. ‘Let’s explore.’

She led me down a steep, overgrown path. Soon we were among a plethora of limestone caves. A few years ago one of them had yielded a haul of ancient bones: bear, rhinoceros, wolf, leopard, deer and bison – and the earliest human bones ever found in Wales, from an early form of Neanderthal Man (with a large, powerful jaw and heavy eyebrows) who lived here a quarter of a million years ago.

She led me into a cave, using a key-ring torch, but when the cave narrowed sharply, forcing me to wriggle through a constriction, I lost my nerve and headed straight back to the entrance. Yes me, Superman, captain of the Welsh football team not so very long ago. Mr Nerves of Steel himself.

‘Not very good in tight holes – claustrophobia,’ I shouted back into the cave.

She followed me out, and led me to the mouth of another cave. This time I was better prepared, so I followed her along a longish stretch of tunnel which snaked through the rock. When we emerged into the sunlight, I realised quickly that we were back where I’d stood panting and palpitating after my earlier, aborted attempt – the two caves were linked. I looked sheepish, but she didn’t tease me. So we wandered in and out of caves and caverns, pointing to striations and red-ochre tinges in the limestone. I made silly noises in the caverns so that I could enjoy the echoes. Childish, I know. But although it was February, a black winter month, nature’s sudden burst of optimism had warmed my bones.

Then we headed back towards the car, along the valley floor, through a calm, reposeful meadow. On our way home, thrumming along the expressway, she revealed more to me about her state of mind. She’d been feeling very low. Sleeping badly. Lately, each day had been a challenge. She had felt estranged from society, and there had been physical symptoms: tiredness, and a flu-like sensitivity of the skin. She often felt like crying, suddenly and without warning. She was clearly stressed, or seriously depressed. I knew that she was due to be married in the spring. Was she worried about the wedding?

No.

Health?

She was checking that out.

Something to do with college?

Yes, in part. She’d fallen behind with her essays.

I asked her why, since she was always in the library when I went there.

A long pause. A squall hit the car and a few hailstones slithered down the windscreen – a tetchy reminder that winter was still with us.

‘Can I ask you a favour?’ she asked.

‘Yes, of course.’

She flicked the wipers onto double speed.

‘I need to take my mother to Glasgow next weekend, and I could do with some company on the way back. It’s a long way to drive alone. And since you know about the crying... (pause)... I’m also having panic attacks.’

‘Sure I’ll come. No problem.’

I wondered what her boyfriend was doing. Had they fallen out? All the girls at college were mad about him. He was the best-looking man around.

I didn’t pursue the topic.

On the white of her arm I noticed two circular Elastoplasts, wheat-coloured, which reminded me faintly of crop circles. I imagined a tiny alien craft landing on her arm in the night, leaving an exotic pattern in the soft, almost invisible down. I felt an urge to lean over and tease the sticky edge of the Elastoplast where it clung to the flat warm plain of her forearm, in the way we all want to pick at fresh Elastoplasts.

‘Did you hurt yourself?’ I asked her.

‘Pardon?’

‘Your arm – the plasters.’

‘Blood tests,’ she said, with a hint of annoyance. ‘I’m not completely bloody helpless – I can just about get myself to a doctor, you know.’

And that was Olly all over – calm and composed one second, but a coil of barbed wire the next if you stepped on her.

Again, I let sleeping dogs lie. We drove to my home, where she dropped me off.

‘See you in college tomorrow,’ she said after refusing my offer of coffee.

Indoors, I sat in silence for a while, pondering the day’s events. I had a smoke, too – it always helps me to relax.

I had never seen Olly in that state before. Normally she was reserved, quick-witted and funny in a droll sort of way. She experienced every single botheration suffered by the very beautiful: midge-clouds of men, and a continuous need to walk everywhere with the shield of her intelligence held up in front of her, to protect her from the regiments of fools who besieged her body.

Why she turned to me I have no idea. One of her friends – another woman – might have made better sense of it all. But it was me she chose, and the unravelling took me on a vertigo ride to the North and the South, to the East and the West. There was something the matter with Olly. I would have to wait some time before I found out what it was.

That night, the winter returned with a vengeance.

I would like to tell you the whole story. I want to tell you about my dreams and my daydreams too. I want to tell you about the snow. I want to tell you about love and the opposite of love, which isn’t always hate.

Perhaps I should talk about everyday matters, but I don’t want to now. I want a change. I want to talk about the big things... about whales, because they mourn, and about polar bears, because they’re left-handed – southpaws – all of them. I want to talk about little things too – about iceworms and wormholes. I want to describe spiders, hanging in their nets like fallen acrobats. I want to describe silence, that sheet of glass on which the universe is painted.

I will have to tell you about Mr Cassini too. It was not my wish to include him in this story but he’s a stubborn man who won’t take no for an answer. He is obdurate. He won’t go away. Sometimes he bangs about at night and keeps me awake. He calls at inconvenient times and takes up hours of my time. He refuses to leave until I give in to his demands. Mr Cassini has forced his way into my account. When I told him he was in my story he rubbed his hands and smiled.

In this world so large I have a little room. I will sit here and tell you what happened. You may want to know, for instance, why I have a telescope in my sea-facing window, pointing at the sky. If you ask me about my telescope, I will focus all the lenses in my mind and I will look into the past: I will go back four hundred years, to a town in Holland, where an obscure spectacle-maker called Hans Lippershey is sitting in his room, watching two small children at play. They are amusing themselves... they put two of his lenses together and they peer at a church tower in the distance. They see it wonderfully magnified. They laugh and they giggle... the telescope is born.

I will look again into the past. Not far away from Hans Lippershey, some of the most important discoveries in the history of biology have already been made by a tradesman called Antonie van Leeuwenhoek. Working alone in his room, driven by boundless curiosity, he has fashioned a microscope with skill and diligence; he has discovered bacteria, sperm cells, blood cells, and much else. He has discovered a world of microscopic life. How marvellous it would be if we could view ourselves, see ourselves squirming and darting on the glass plate of the past.

My own telescope helps me to look at what has happened already in the universe; after all, every single telescope trained on the stars is looking into the past. Take Saturn. When I focus on the planet’s stupendous rings I am looking at something which happened up to 84 minutes ago.

The cosmos swirling around us in its incalculable vastness, the miniature cosmos under our fingernails: is there anything left to be discovered by the common man, sitting in his room? Or are we reduced to discovering a few small things about ourselves, of no import to anyone else: and if so, is the spirit of discovery dead?

Is that why we worry about weeds and wallpaper?

There is a point to all this pondering. I am about to go on a small personal voyage of discovery, and I must use every tool and artifice available to me. For instance, if I cannot actually be inside the Cassini spacecraft as it circles Saturn (a planet with seven main rings) following a voyage of seven years through space, then there are ways of simulating the experience. I am not referring to drugs alone, but they have their place of course. Paul Theroux went to South America to retrace William Burroughs’ notorious trip to the rainforests in search of the holy grail of psychotropics, the final fix – yage:

... vine of the soul, secret nectar of the Amazon, the shaman’s holy drink, the ultimate poison, a miracle cure. More generally known as ayahuasca, a word I found bewitching, it was said to make its users prescient if not telepathic. Rocket fuel is another active ingredient: in an ayahuasca trance, many users have testified, you travel to distant planets, you meet extraterrestials and moon goddesses.

“Yage is space time travel,” Burroughs said.

With or without drugs I will go on a journey through time and space. I assure you that I was free of any hallucinogenic when the swans passed through the rainbow. But since the number seven is my number, as they say; since I seem to choose it before all other numbers in draws and lotteries, I will use it too in my quest for personal discovery. There are no more than seven basic plots to the human story, according to some, and every tale ever told fits one of seven categories. Maybe this fable of mine is the eighth – my own. Now is the time, surely, for me to mix my own colours. What do painters say? Start with black and then move, shade by shade, towards the light. If you want to make white whiter, add a little blue.

In the harbour a fishing boat waits for me, placid in the pancake ice – its wooden hull, a bright new shade of powder blue, is dreamy and distorted in the water. A plume of diesel blue drifts from its exhaust. A million mirrors dangle from the sky.

I have seen such scenes in lonely fjords. But this is Wales, and I am leaving for the island. Something is happening inside me. I want to go back, to where the sum went wrong. My memories have been eaten away, moths plucked from the air by a night owl. My life is an ending without a story. They say the human body undergoes a complete change of cells every seven years. And this is it – a change is happening. I can feel it.

Lime-green catkins ooze from the trees like toothpaste escaping in fine whorls from cracks in the tube. The past is about to ooze out of me too.

This is my year of magic.

Part 1

Dreams

1 THE TIDE GOES OUT

The journey begins

I SLAMMED the boot lid, hard, and the car rocked.

Then I noticed something – a head, nodding rhythmically in the back seat.

A wig... my mind imagined... was that a wig? The hair was ash blonde and coarse.

There was something slightly unnatural about it. And I wasn’t expecting anyone else to be with us.

My eyes moved from the wig to Olly’s face.

Standing by the driver’s door, with the keys in her right hand, she watched me with bemused eyes; smile lines were forming, delicately, at the corners of her eyes.

Her mouth parted and she laughed softly, looked down, and I heard a soft blip as she disabled the central locking system. There was a scrunch of chippings as she got in. Walking towards the passenger side, I glanced sideways at the person sitting in the back of the car.

Then I eased myself into my seat and belted myself in.

The interior of the car was cold and impassive: left to stand alone in an unpeopled landscape, I imagined it would guard itself, defend its own squat metal kennel for a thousand years. I sensed a foreboding – this box, trimmed in factory grey, had something about it that day which hinted at a cold, robotic future.

Her body was suddenly next to me, close. My stomach muscles tensed slightly as she swished her belt across her midriff. This accentuated her breasts, and I averted my eyes courteously. I was aware of small currents of air, sent by her movements, brushing coolly against my skin. As she leant towards me, head down, looking for the belt-snap, a swathe of hair fell from behind her right ear and curtained her face; it swayed in a graceful curve and my biology admired its rich cascade. There was a slight hint of shampoo; I thought of the shoulder underneath her hair, white, unclothed.

‘Ready?’

I nodded, and our eyes locked momentarily. I had to look up slightly – she was higher in her seat than I expected. Then she started the car and we began our long journey north, the roads salty and white. Indicating, she steered us towards the expressway’s churning, dyspeptic canal. My mind flitted from subject to subject.

Why was I needed now, yet again? Just when I was getting some peace and quiet – at last. I was so fed up with being needed all the time. People are so needy. Can’t they ever sort out their own problems? Their voices gnaw at me: on my mobile, through the letterbox. Pleading. And I’m not getting any younger. Sometimes I feel as if I’m walking in a glass corridor, a circular tube of memories, walking round and round, getting tired...

‘You’re very quiet today,’ she said.

‘Just thinking.’

She was a fast driver, I noticed. But good. An easy, experienced competence. For a while, as we overtook in the fast lane, we were level with a car full of youngish men, uber-chavs in baseball caps. They studied her, dispassionately: an ordnance party, measuring her topography in trigs and chains. One of them said something and they all laughed. She was unaware of their interest; I shifted my eyes away from them.

‘Something bothering you?’ she asked.

‘Oh, not really.’

Small clouds, greyed by the windscreen, travelled in a ghost-train of reflections across her face. The sky was a Brillo factory, puffing out small neat cloud-parcels on the horizon’s conveyor belt. Above us, on the pockmarked cheek of the hill, gorse erupted in zit clusters.

‘Are you absolutely sure you want to do this?’ she asked in a carefully controlled voice.

‘For God’s sake yes, absolutely. I really want to – I promise.’

‘I just thought then, for a moment, you were having second thoughts.’

‘No, absolutely not. I’m looking forward to it, really. Life was getting far too boring. I need a new challenge.’

Liar. New challenge? Christ, hadn’t I dealt with enough challenges – solved enough problems?

I snuggled into my seat and closed my eyes. The soporific hum of the engine eased me towards sleep. I needed to recharge, to recover. My toast had landed butter-side up whenever I’d tripped up in life, mostly. But I was getting older, I needed more rest. Stupefied, my body lay on a coned-off stretch of the human highway – like so many fortysomething people – recovering after my first big collision with mortality. I was time-fodder like everyone else; I was aware of death, in the corner of my eye, sitting in his dodgem, tattooed and fresh from the pub, singling me out and laughing a little too loudly as he prepared to ram me again, from behind. Someone famous said that middle age is when you stop running away from your past. Correction. Middle age is when you stop running away from your past and start running away from your future. But before I run I want to rest awhile, on the hard shoulder... waiting for my future.

I decided, after a while, to tell her. I wanted to begin with a clean slate – with nothing to hide. And I thought we could trade secrets, perhaps. If I told her a little about my inner life then she might tell me more about the demons running around inside her. It was worth a try.

‘I’m trying to write about it... to tell the whole story – everything that’s happened,’ I said after a while.

‘Really!’ She was excited. ‘That’s incredible! I’m really glad.’

I knew she meant it.

She flicked us back into the slow lane.

‘It’s a great story... your fans’ll be well happy!’

She was young enough to say well happy.

That word – well. There it was again. Perhaps our jaunt to Ffynnon Fair had triggered a recurring association. Everywhere I turned there seemed to be wells. I had even encountered a well in my front room while I stood waiting for Olly to pick me up. Standing in the bay window, listening for her car, I’d grabbed the nearest book on the top shelf of an old oak bookcase close to hand. My fingers had alighted on a dog-eared, cloth-covered ex libris edition of Knud Holmboe’s Desert Encounter – and I’d thumbed through it, looking for a passage which had made a big impression on me many years previously. Holmboe, a Dane born in the early 1900s, had converted to Islam and had gone on a dangerous adventure in North Africa. It cost him his life – at the age of just 29 he was murdered by Arab brigands a few miles south of Akaba, but not before recording his fascinating story: a journey through the desert... and there I found it, the passage I’d wanted to read again. Travelling by car through the sands, with a leaky radiator, he had come across an old marabout – a sorcerer prophet as Holmboe describes him – who had refused a lift, despite being literally in the middle of nowhere. Having no urgent business elsewhere, or perhaps no business at all, anywhere in the world, he was content to walk all day, alone, in the searing heat. And then, after breaking down, Holmboe and his party had been saved by desert cave-dwellers, who gave them water and gypsum with which to repair their radiator. It had been a close run thing. My heart had been wrenched by a passage describing how the Italians had blocked up the Bedouin wells with concrete, condemning them to a slow death, in retribution for a Bedouin rebellion against the European occupation of their homeland.

‘I’ve made a tentative start,’ I said. ‘Of course, I’ll have to change it all later on. But you have to start somewhere... ’

She glanced at me.

‘Let me guess,’ she said. ‘I’m trying to guess where you’ll start the story.’

I was almost asleep by the time she came up with anything. When I heard her voice I dipped out of the fog seeping around my brain.

‘It’s a place. I’m fairly sure it’s a place, not a person, at the start of your story,’ she said. ‘The Millennium Stadium perhaps, after the final whistle... ’

‘Wrong,’ I replied, laughing lightly. ‘It’s a place, sure, but there are people too. It’s certainly not the Millennium Stadium. It’s a place where nothing ever moves, nothing ever happens.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘I’m having to work from photos. That’s all I have to go on.’

‘You’re writing about old photos?’

‘Yes, in a way. It’s a part of my life which I can’t remember anything about, so I’m trying to work out what happened.’

‘So there’s no one in the photos?’

‘There are people, yes.’

She waited for me to continue.

‘But the people never move,’ I added lamely. ‘They’re frozen – I can’t remember them ever moving, or laughing, or saying anything. They’re like cardboard cut-outs.’

‘Nothing strange about that,’ she said. ‘Same with all pictures from the past – those people have gone... they might as well have been dead for a thousand years, in a way.’

I murmured something, purposefully indistinct, to fill in some time. I closed my eyes again. I was weary: after all, the whole country was a vast winter dormitory; millions of animals were snoozing contentedly while humanity ranged the land, a crazed squirrel looking for its nuts.

‘You can’t leave it at that,’ she said, prodding me on again. She couldn’t leave me alone, like the rest of them.

I told her: ‘Nothing at all happens – there’s a big gap in my memory. For ten years of my life, nothing at all happened. I can’t remember a single thing. There’s no footage – no film clips, no video to run. Blank. Just one big empty black hole.’

She looked towards me, through that smoky curl sweeping across her face.

‘When was this?’

‘Up to the age of ten. Absolutely nothing. And whenever I try to remember, a feeling comes over me... ’

I hesitated, again.

‘Go on... ’

‘It’s like a numb feeling, but there’s another feeling as well... a sort of prickly pre-excitement; the sort you get before doing a bungee jump.’

‘Never done one.’

‘Neither have I, actually. You know what I mean, though... ’

‘Butterflies, you mean?’

‘Yeah, something like butterflies, but not quite – the dream equivalent of butterflies. The sort you get in your sleep and you wake up feeling edgy, wound up. As if someone had been chasing you, and you were glad to be awake... ’

‘How often do you go to this nothing place of yours?’

‘Oh, every now and again. I don’t go there often because I’ve a feeling it’s too dangerous... that there’s something in that hole which I don’t want to know about, yet I’m drawn towards it, like a kid near a pond. I get a sort of vertigo, if you know what I mean... ’

I relaxed against the head-rest and closed my eyes. Could shards of memory rise slowly to the surface – was it possible? When I was young I’d been too busy running around; now, perhaps, I had time to kneel and comb the soil with my fingers, gather all the pieces and reconstruct a vessel to hold my past.

I left her alone, to think for a while. I hoped there would be a trade-off – that she would reveal something about her problems. I wanted her to tell me why she was hurting inside – why she cried suddenly in unexpected places. It became a wink-joke between us: she would start to cry, silently, and I would hand her a sweet. Almost Pavlovian – but it was the only response I could come up with, except for hugging her, which wasn’t always appropriate. Not when she was driving, anyway. Today she stayed silent, flicking the sweet I’d given her from cheek to cheek. I could hear it rolling against her teeth occasionally and I thought of river boulders clunking downstream in a storm. I tried something new every day almost, but she liked the fruit gums best. Hated Liquorice Allsorts, spat them out. Slowly, I got to know her likes and dislikes. Her mannerisms too: the way she twanged her bra straps when she was bored, and blew out her fringe, her lips sounding like a muffled road drill, when she was exasperated. Strange quirks, too: she had a thing about the moon, knew all its phases; she liked French cinema but listened to country and western. Christ.

Then we needed petrol, she noticed, and we started looking for stations. We were running on empty, and a niggling worry entered the car space.

‘You’re going to tell everything then,’ she said. ‘Is it going to be kiss and tell or cry and tell, if you know what I mean?’

‘Haven’t decided yet.’

I was getting concerned.

‘Have you got any petrol in a can?’ I asked.

‘No.’

I mulled, fatalistically, as we motored on.

‘Anyway,’ I said, ‘how are you getting on at the moment? Are you still behind with your course work?’

‘Yes, still trying to catch up.’

‘What’s the problem?’

She gathered a strand of hair curling across her eyes and tucked it behind her left ear. I admired its flow, the dynamic of its sidewinder snake-life. Also her nose, her mouth – everything about her was in the right quantity and proportion.

‘I’m having trouble with history.’

‘History?’

‘Yep. I can’t finish one of my essays.’

‘What’s it about?’

‘John Dee.’

‘I had trouble with him too. Very peculiar man.’

‘Powerful, strange.’

‘Yes, very. What’s the problem – all that Harry Potter stuff, his dark arts?’

‘No, nothing like that.’

‘All that cabala and alchemy getting to you?’

‘No, I’m fine with all that.’

‘Well, what is it then?’

The strand of hair loosened and she tucked it back into place again; she rubbed her nose with her sleeve, sniffed, looked at me and smiled.

That was a lovely smile.

‘You won’t believe me, anyway.’

‘Try me.’

‘Do you believe in angels?’

‘And fairies too, and Father Christmas... ’

‘Don’t be nasty to me.’

I made sooth-a-baby noises.

‘All right then – do you believe in the opposite of angels? Whatever the opposite of an angel is called. Incubus, is that right?’

‘Something like that.’

‘I think so. Incubus is male isn’t it? A nasty man who comes to you in the night. Something like that, anyway.’

‘Succubus.’

‘Pardon?’

‘Succubus is the female equivalent.’

‘Oh.’

And I thought of Meridiana the Succubus – a beautiful tenth century demon who helped the first French Pope, Sylvester II, to gain power and riches – or so the story goes. A fabled scholar with an incredible knowledge of many subjects including Arab astronomy, Sylvester also studied magic and astrology. A myth arose that he was a sorcerer, in league with the Devil. He was forced to flee after ‘stealing’ a book of spells from an Arab philosopher who pursued him, tracing him by the stars. Sylvester hid by hanging from a wooden bridge, where, suspended between heaven and earth, he was invisible to the magician. Some say that Sylvester fashioned a bronze head which answered yes or no to his questions.

My mind returned to the present, and the reason for our journey. There was something the matter with Olly. She was out of sorts. She was caught in a fast spin cycle.

‘I’ve been howling at the moon again,’ she said as we drove through one of the tunnels.

‘Pardon?’

‘Howling at the moon.’

‘You mean howling, literally?’

‘No. Phoning my friends late at night when I’m drunk.’

She still had a sense of humour. That was a good sign. I liked the way she lobbed her mind at me like a grenade then watched, bemused, as I scanned it desperately to see if she’d removed the pin.

Out of the tunnel, a few miles further on, I said: ‘Sleeping OK?’

She rubbed her nose with her sleeve again.

‘No, not really... I’ve been having lots of bad dreams. Every night – feels like that, anyway.’

I wondered what she was dreaming about.

A half-sucked sweet peeped out between her lips, sickly-green, and she wiggled it about for a while with her tongue.

‘For ages now... mostly about a war. It starts with a statue coming down, and I’m underneath it, trying to get out of the way.’

I gave her time to follow this up, but she was silent for a mile or so. I thought perhaps she wanted to shrug it off.

She told me eventually. The statue toppled down on her every night. Then she was on the run, in derelict buildings or in lonely places. She was always in a war, and it was really frightening. She told me about the jets screaming down on her.

‘How could I imagine it? I’ve never seen anything like that – but it’s so realistic,’ she said. ‘As if I’m there when it’s happening.’

I was really fascinated now. Involved. I wanted to know what was going on.

An Orwellian nightmare was taking place in Iraq, but the British public had gone back to sleep, engorged on fantasy. I started to rant about it, one of those middle-aged loop tapes you slot in and then off you go, knowing that everyone else has a vast collection of their own too, gathering dust, re-played on long walks or during sleepless nights. The very last station on the line for an old British freight train called free speech; where lost commuters rant to antique gods on darkened platforms in the middle of nowhere, somewhere like Cilmeri or Adlestrop. Perhaps I ranted too long, too hard, because at some stage I stopped suddenly, as if a fox had heard a twig snap.

She turned and tried to give me an encouraging smile, but it wasn’t the right sort of smile: it turned down at the edges, into a snarl almost. Again, I sensed that vulnerability in her, the whiteness of her neck under the sidewinder curl.

Then her shoulders sagged a bit, and I knew I’d hurt her. Reminded her of something, or someone. Ranting. The last thing she wanted was a fool like me talking shit. She’d made a simple child-like sign, a gesture of futility... I shut up straight away. I sensed she was on the edge. Maybe her mind was bending with fatigue, or worse – about to wander off the edge of reason.

I adjusted my position in the seat, lifting the seat belt off my chest with my left thumb so that I could stretch and squirm, faff about until I was comfortable again.

She detected my thoughts, and in a second she flared up.

‘Don’t bother your little brain with it,’ she said hotly. ‘I don’t need any Ladybird Book of Psychology stuff from you, OK? And for the record I’m completely sane – a whole lot saner than you’ll ever be.’

I didn’t even try to rescue the situation. I just sat still and waited. This made matters worse.

‘You think I’m cracking up or something?’

‘No,’ I whimpered.

Worse again. She hit me, quite hard, across my chest, with her left arm. And again. The car wobbled twice as she did so.

‘No?’ she said, and again: ‘Don’t believe me? No?’

She shoved the side of my head, roughly – on the wrong side of playful. I was really surprised; I just sat there, feeling shocked.

‘Think I’m making this up?’ she said, but less aggressively this time. There was a wobble in her voice. Bloody hell. What had I let myself in for? A loony female, a loony mission. I was tangled up in a web already, ready for the white coats to come for us both.

‘Well you are acting a bit strange,’ I said as reasonably as possible. ‘And you are battering me. You’re not exactly behaving normally, are you?’

She let that rest for a while.

‘These dreams,’ she said. ‘Please try to understand. They won’t go away. And now they’ve moved into my life.’

I know how creatures of the mind take on a life of their own. It’s the dream-work. Your subconscious and all that.

A few miles later she said: ‘Sorry about hitting you... really. I’m sorry.’

She sounded a bit emotional.

‘I’ve got some anger in there.’

‘A helluva lot of anger if you ask me.’

‘Yeah, well.’

I tell her more about my story. This story I’m about to write: I’ve decided to start it at the edge of the world, on the seashore. I don’t feel as if I’m on dry land – but I’m not on water either. An in-between place. That’s how I feel at the moment. Between one life and another: I feel as though I have to decide, soon, whether to head inland or whether to get in a boat and head off to another existence, completely different. Meanwhile, I’m walking along the shore, beachcombing my life for clues. Which way will I go? I simply don’t know yet. Living on the edge of a country you get waves from both directions.

Olly was quiet for a long time; I left her alone with her thoughts... big grey thoughts which evaded me, made me think of a family of elephants retiring grumpily into their enclosure at the zoo and brooding heavily just out of sight, in the corner of their concrete bunker – everyone knew they were there but no one could see anything. Maddening.

After a while, she said:

‘Where’s it going, this story of ours – where will you take it?’

Suddenly the story was ours.

‘Is this story ours?’ I asked her.

She turned to look at me, for a little too long: I began to drive for her, staring at the road ahead in a meaningful way.

Then it happened. The car began to stutter and lose power. I realised what was happening and a wave of irritation – mixed with some anger – washed over me.

‘You better get over onto the hard shoulder,’ I said.

She looked taut, guilty, suddenly tired.

‘Bugger. Why am I so stupid... ’

I merely said: ‘Don’t worry, we’ve all done it.’ As it happens, I never have.

So we rested there, on the hard shoulder, and passing cars took on a strange aggression. Not until you stop do you realise how really aggressive motorway traffic is – unforgiving, hostile even.

‘I wonder what the police’ll make of her if they come along,’ I said.

She raised her eyebrows, quizzically.

I gestured behind me.

‘Oh, the mannequin.’

She laughed, but her body was braced and her hands still grasped the steering wheel firmly.

‘My mother,’ she began, then she wafted air onto her face, using her hand as a fan: the gesture was girlish and appealing. Now I noticed, she was quite flushed.

‘My mother’s making me a wedding dress.’ Pointing backwards over her shoulder, she added: ‘That thing is supposed to be exactly the same size as me – that’s what they said at college, anyway. It means mum can make the dress in her own time, when I’m not there.’

‘You got it at college?’

‘Yes – fashion department. Going spare. I’ve got to return it sometime.’

I turned and stared at the inanimate in the back seat. It looked straight ahead, lifeless. Mannequins I find spooky. They freak me a bit. Also those life-sized cartoon characters you get, like Mickey Mouse or Donald Duck, at Disneyland. I can’t stand too close to them.

This mannequin was dressed in a simple floral dress made of a light, almost diaphanous material, and she was wearing an ash blonde wig and shades. She had regulation cone-shaped breasts swelling sexlessly under large print marigolds. Her legs were pressed neatly together and her hands were clasped in front of her virginally; she could have been an unmarried aunt being driven to church.

I looked at my watch: it was nine o’clock.

‘What time is it?’

‘Nine.’

She fiddled with the radio, and the news filtered in. I took little notice. News is seldom fresh: it’s a soup made from very old bones. As I began a sentence she said shush! and turned up the volume.

The first item was freaky. Identical twin sisters in their seventies had walked into the sea near Porthcawl... suicide pact.

The next item was also strange: a small girl had fallen down a well... emergency services massing... four fire engines... old, disused... narrow, crumbling... child still alive... faint sounds from below...

Olly stooped down suddenly, turned it off. Perhaps I imagined it, but a shiver seemed to run through her body.

In the distance I could see an emergency telephone point.

‘Are you in the AA? RAC?’

‘No.’

‘This is going to be fun, isn’t it,’ I said as I opened the door.

I sat for a while, one foot out of the car, working up some energy.