My First Colouring Book E-Book

Lloyd Jones

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

Seitenzahl: 396

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2013

Beschreibung

Love, angels, addiction and death; they're all here in My First Colouring Book, a collection of short stories from award-winning novelist Lloyd Jones. Themed on all the colours of the rainbow - and a few extra - these stories and essays paint a picture of criss-crossing lives. They are spoken by an unexpected variety of voices: a young girl has adventures in the night, a surgeion becomes a shepherd; a middle-aged man seeks love for the last time. And his travel essays, sent from the compass points of his home country, Wales, are not to be missed.

Leseprobe

Contents

Title Page

Dedication

brown

post office red

blood

yellow

wine

red

violet

chocolate

purple

white

orange

black

transparent

sepia

blue

indigo

opaque

green

gold

pink

silver

Essays

north

south

east

west

About the author

Copyright

MY FIRST COLOURING BOOK

Lloyd Jones

To Skvar the boy, Edwin the man

brown

LATELY I’ve had time to sit and watch the world slow down. There’s still life out there, but it’s moving away from me gradually. Clouds drift across the sky; lawn mowers burble and drone like party bores on unseen lawns; a leisurely tabby cat stalks in Mrs Morley’s garden, her tail doing the Indian rope trick.

Ours is a family business, gone very quiet in the last few years. New Tesco’s down the road, same old story. Corner shop and sub post office – a thing of the past. Makes me feel ancient and antiquated just sitting here inside the place. What’s that old saying about money? The first generation makes it, the second keeps it, the third spends it. I’m the third generation behind this counter, and the only thing I can spend freely is time. Waiting and watching, ticking like an old clock in the corner, marking time. My family has petrified slowly over millions of hours waiting for customers… makes me think of the old oak beams, crooked and iron-hard, in the church porch. I don’t even bother dusting under the counter now.We’ll close sooner or later, it’s only a matter of time. The accountant gets quieter every time I visit. His place is gathering dust too, I’ve noticed. Both of us well past our sell-by dates. So I spend far too much of my day looking through the window, ticking off the day’s anticipated events, come rain or shine: the bread van first, a fat green beetle scuttling down the hill frantically with the hedgerows whirling behind it, doing a dervish dance; then Postman Pat, shovelling the mail into a box outside our shop, kicking it in – this one’s so young and spotty he doesn’t even bother looking at me through the window.

Then there’s a trickle of professionals going to good jobs an hour or more away; they only come here when they’ve forgotten something at Tesco’s. Birthday balloons and firelighters, that sort of thing. They’re all so well groomed. Nice teeth, nice hair, clean fingernails, lovely bedside manner. Look into their eyes and you see a Microsoft logo where the pupils used to be. We call them the Llandroids.

I open at eight, ready for the school kids. Little shits. You need eyes in the back of your head. Good homes, too, most of them. Afterwards it’s down to a trickle – the old regulars come here for bread and hope, to know they’re still alive; to mumble a litany of surgery bulletins and rolling village news, cheerless gossip nurtured hydroponically behind net curtains. They count their small change out of cracked plastic purses, penny by penny – as if they were grey-haired children playing a final, silent game of shop with the old money.

Death is the centrepoint: Latitude nought degrees, Longitude nought degrees, Year Zero, the Capital City; it hovers quietly above the town, a titanic mother ship waiting for the shuttles, each coffin a pod returning to the cargo hold, ready for the final journey to deep space. Home. When they stand outside my window pointing to the sky I know they’re not picking out a buzzard or an owl – they’re celebrating another departure, silently streaking the sky. Time they measure in rainfall and funerals. But there’s another construct out there on the streets and it weaves a captivating pattern – it’s the criss-crossing of individuals as they go about their daily grind. It’s as delicate as a sampler – a cross-stitch of pathways and pavements, tracks and alleyways weaving through the town, all with junctions and interstices where people meet each other almost every day on the way to somewhere, or as they move away from someone, literally and metaphorically. Some of these meetings are haphazard but fairly regular, while others are as habitual as clockwork. Here’s an example of the irregular: young Carrie Little is having a red hot scene with Iwan Roberts the trainee gamekeeper, newly separated, and she leaves his rumpled bed between five-thirty and six every morning, still all a-tingle and flushed, presumably, otherwise it’s a waste of time Carrie dear; more often than not she meets the milkman on the corner by the postbox. They nod and smile but never say a word. Sometimes she looks back, after she’s passed him, and smirks. Me too. We’re all conspirators at heart, and I treasure this beautifully-crafted piece of knowledge – yes, I hold it up to the light and polish it gently whenever Iwan’s mother, she of the tartan skirt and a history of depression, harks on about her precious heartbroken son while she’s getting her weekly ration of shortbread biscuits.

There are plenty of other meetings every day, as regular as clockwork, excepting holidays and illness. I could cite any number, but for convenience I’ll use my own daily encounter with Mr Barker. He’s an old codger, knocking on ninety, and I meet him every afternoon between four-thirty and five in a particularly dreary part of town, a T-junction near the hospital. I wish I could flatter the place, but it’s a stunningly boring part of Planet Earth: bland, empty-looking houses (with dirty windows) rising straight out of the dog-spattered pavements, on an abused stretch of highway scarred by countless handpicks and drills, as if it were a practice ground for apprentice road workers. There’s one redeeming feature – a tiny public garden on the corner, with a few bullied trees and a dilapidated bench. It’s the remains of an old park which has disappeared under an urban jungle – the corner of a stamp torn off accidentally and left attached to the serrations in a stamp book. I pass this place every day on my way to the botanical gardens, where I stroll for an hour or so before returning to the shop to relieve my husband. And it’s at the T-junction, every day, that I meet Mr Barker. Or perhaps I should be more precise and say it’s where I used to meet Mr Barker until recently.

For months we nodded to each other as we passed. Then an element of humour crept in, and for a while we smiled and greeted each other in an exaggerated way. There followed a period when we observed normal social custom, saying a breezyGood afternoon!orDreadful weather!orIsn’t it lovely!

Finally, we stopped. One day, I can’t remember when, we came to a halt as we passed, and eyed each other. Why that particular moment, I don’t know. Sometimes I think we all have meters inside us, counting everything consumed or experienced, just as we have electric and gas meters in our homes. A mileometer/smileometer which clocks and logs everything we do and everybody we meet. Sooner or later the dial stops spinning and we come to rest, looking at somewhere or someone in a different way. It’s when a landscape becomes a landmark, or when yet another face becomes a familiar person. So I introduced myself, and Mr Barker did the same. During the following year one or other of us would sit on the bench in the park and wait. But there was no development of the relationship – no cosy chats or cups of tea in the nearest café, and certainly no secret yearnings because Mr Barker is old enough to be my father, and if you must know, I have a taste for toy boys. People often mistake my husband for my son. When pleasure is thin on the ground one must grab what’s available with both hands, so to speak.

I must describe this man, Mr Barker. His head is too big for his body, and he has huge jugs, so he reminds me of Wallace inWallace and Gromitwith a pork pie hat (too small) jammed on top. He has short arms and legs, so if you imagine a walking Potato Man you’re close to the mark. The only hair evident is a bushy moustache, droopy and nicotine yellow (though I’ve never seen him smoke); and the incongruity of his continued existence on this earth is heightened by his upright, almost regal bearing – as if he were a cartoon character come to life for the day, with one eye staring backwards into the past and the other staring forwards into the future. He’s a knot between two colours in a knitted pullover – a singular day between two epochs. Dolefully, his chestnut eyes – once beautiful no doubt – regard everyone with the spaniel’s dread of the size twelve boot. But Mr Barker is still alive, yes he’s still very much alive: he’s a living example of the lottery of existence. Somehow his blood struggles round every hour, somehow his brain tallies each day in its ancient ledger.

He fought in the war and carries his medals with him always, hidden away in an inside pocket. I got to know about his mates in the army, and the big events: injuries and near-misses, a month in the glasshouse for decking a sergeant.

So I grew fond of him. These things happen. We’d sit for a few minutes on the bench, dusting a few selected topics, one of which was the allotment he went to every day of the year, and therefore the cause of our daily meeting. We’d discuss onions and beans, carrot fly and blight; the warm friability of soil in spring. He talked tenderly of humus and haulm: his gnarled, earthy fingers became a puppeteer’s as he re-enacted the drama of the soil. Seedlings were his chorus and slugs were the forces of evil in his version of Lear on the blasted heath, myself starring as Cordelia. And then other things became apparent, slowly. Subtly and poignantly.

One afternoon, in a light warm shower, he transferred a dirt-streaked carrier bag to my right hand suddenly, with no opportunity for me to refuse: inside it a clutch of new potatoes and a baby lettuce, still necklaced with a cobweb of rootlets and soil particles. Into my hand he thrust a posy of sweet peas, freshly picked and still sparkling with water droplets. They were a gift from this ancient man to a woman he hardly knew. Eventually I learnt to parley with gifts of my own – out-of-date mints, a packet of seeds come apart at the seam. I felt something gracious and true in the air, a minor exposition of the latent nobility of civilised society. Every day he came in the same clothes: the pork pie hat, shiny and denuded at the front, where his fingers grasped it; a thornproof tweed jacket which looked indestructible, over a clean white shirt and brown tie, carefully knotted; grey slacks tucked into his socks, and once-white trainers, which looked as absurd as a tutu on a navvy. I felt he might have discovered them in his grandson’s bin and couldn’t bear the waste.

Every hospital has a patient who should have died but didn’t, sparking a TV documentary; Mr Barker was a man who defied death not because he wanted to, but because death had paid him a visit and felt so much at home it stayed, putting off the inevitable until the last possible moment, just as a young man who’s just enjoyed his first heady holiday romance refuses to go home and stalks around moodily.

But there’s another point to this story, and it involves the theatre, or an element of drama at least. Because Mr Barker was a solo dramatist of exceptional skill, I realised gradually. I learnt to sit back, relax, and enjoy the production.

He got up at five o’clock every morning, without any need for an alarm clock – his body was finely tuned, to the exact minute. Then he put on the kettle and followed a set routine, choreographed to the smallest detail: the wash, the shave, the dressing, the tea-drinking, the breakfast and the washing-up had all the symbolic and stylised ritualism of a Japanese Noh play. Of course the seasons changed his timetable little by little: in winter he’d light a fire ready for his wife’s later rising, and in early spring he’d spend longer in his greenhouse, planting and watering his seedlings, refilling the heater with paraffin ready for the evening to come. In autumn he’d hum to himself in the outhouse as he brushed and tidied the place, then he’d store his apples a finger’s width apart in the loft, or prepare the apparatus – sieve and muslin, earthenware pot and jars, ready for his wife to make apple jelly, and he described its delicious clarity, with a sprig of rosemary as subtle as a coral reef in the bottom of each jar. But the mainframe of his existence remained constant, reassuring and habitual.

Each of our meetings was basically the same, but also slightly different every time, and by the end I felt as though I’d been to a particular play over and over again, many times – rather like that woman who’s so addicted toThe Sound of Musicshe’s seen it thousands of times. Finally, I realised that Mr Barker played this performance every single day of his life, from his rising in the morning till the final curtain at bedtime. He staged 365 performances of his one-man show every year, with a bonus every leap year. I watched them, alone in the auditorium, and clapped silently after all of them. I could picture him in his dressing room soon after dawn, putting on his costume, applying the greasepaint; preparing his props – the pork pie hat and the ever-brown tie, his fork and his spade and his hoe, his ridiculous trainers for comic effect. This was not the National Theatre of Brent staging a Shakespearean play in five minutes, nor an Alan BennettTalking Headsmonologue, but a full staging ofKing Lear, daughters and all, since he had two of his own and I’d become the third. It was unnerving.

Each play, I realised, was a 24-hour re-enactment of his whole life: ninety-odd years condensed into a span between sunrise and moonrise, and it had to be completed or he would die. That was the nub of the matter. If he faltered, if he cancelled one single performance, the show would collapse and the curtain would come down for ever.

I saw it in his eyes. And sometimes it was a struggle, I could see that too, since old men get ill and they get tired… the trick is to keep moving – however slowly, however wheezily. Sometimes he sat on the seat by my side and chatted amiably; sometimes he indicated with his hand that he was out of puff and needed to recover.

As the heat of the sun dwindled this year, and the autumn arrived slowly, I noticed a slight shift in him, to match the sun’s diminution. I had to wait for him more and more often; his arrival on the seat, on his way home from the allotment, was getting a little later – and more laborious – every day, or so it seemed to me. And he’d still be sitting there, occasionally, when I returned from the botanical gardens. He made light of it, saying he enjoyed seeing the kids go past, watching the world go by, and what was the hurry anyway, supper wasn’t for an hour and ‘the missus’ didn’t mind at all.

He talked about his wife in a cavalier ‘her indoors’ sort of way, but he boasted her accomplishments proudly: her landscape paintings, her poems, her housecraft.

I thought he was stuttering to an end in October. The play was faltering; he was beginning to forget his lines. He was taking too long to get across the stage, into position. EvenThe Mousetraphad to end eventually, I thought. But although his recovery periods on the bench became longer and quieter, he continued without losing a single episode. The day he faltered would be his last. Mr Barker’s motto was:The show must go on.

I really miss seeing him every day, meeting him on that bench. It was so inconsequential, yet so consoling – talking about the little things in life, while maintaining life’s steady beat, seeing the pendulum swing to its final point and then falling back again. My part in the play ended in early November, with a strange dry cough and a sudden loss of weight. Things hadn’t been right for quite some time, but it’s so hard to tell, isn’t it? After the blood tests there were a number of hospital visits, then the diagnosis. An unexpected twist to the plot; a tragic ending. There’s no real point in having any further treatment, so I’m going to soldier on behind the counter, waiting for my body to harden inside, and then I’ll join the ancient oakwood and the yews in the churchyard.

I got a card from him only the other day, slipped under the door of the shop, complete with a neat brown fingerprint smelling of radishes. He said he missed our meetings, there’s no-one to talk to nowadays about the allotment. His handwriting’s well educated, stylish. A flamboyant and sensualf, with a looping descender. Why should I be so surprised? But I won’t reply. What could I say? Come up and see me sometime? Come to my shop and see a few old women being served in silence? Because none of them has said anything much after the first slow wave of hesitant sorries. They don’t know what to say, not to my face, anyway. They look at my wig and they wonder, I can see it written all over their faces – they’ll wash their hands carefully when they get home and wonder about the little white bus to Tesco’s. At the moment they’re still trying to be loyal. But then they all point at the mother ship and turn towards me afterwards… I can see from here that their teeth are stained with the story of my illness: their careful gossip has left a brown tea mark at the bottom of their cups.

The tealeaves have spoken. As for Mr Barker, I’ll not see him again. He’s a busy man – and the show must go on.

post office red

EVERY car accident has its own unique sounds, presumably. In the rock ‘n’ roll of a road crash, every performance is a ‘classic’ with amazing paradiddles from the drummer and great riffs from the bass player. Heavy metal. Crash bang wallop.

I was thinking this rather strange thought as I sat in the driving seat of my green VW Golf at about 3.30pm on Christmas Eve, 2007 – the time and date I noted later when I made an insurance claim. Fortunately, no-one was hurt since it was a minor accident and no other vehicle was involved. Even small reversals have their plus sides; there was that great feeling of being alive and unhurt after a potentially fatal misjudgement. The throb of my heart, the zing of the blood in my ears confirmed I was still on Planet Earth, still living the good life. I’m not religious so I didn’t offer thanks to a god – but I nodded towards Blind Fate and gave an ironic smile of gratitude. I was forced, however, to stay right there in my seat until help came along because the car was wedged in a ditch with a muddy bank looming through the passenger side window and a small forest of blackthorns pressing against the window to my right. I was up against a hedge, and I could actually see an old blackbird’s nest close by in the twisted branchlets. The car ticked and clanged for a while, then settled into a glum silence. So did I. Time travels so very slowly when you’re going nowhere fast. Eventually someone came along and the curtain rose on an elaborate play, well-rehearsed in pretty well every human brain: here was an opportunity (at last) for a passer-by to be good and rather heroic as the mobile phone came out. As I sat there someone got a once-in-a-lifetime chance to dial 999 for real – and as he did so a whole heap of sensory experiences skidded into my brain: my eyes took in the cold muddy road, a wheel trim resting in a tree (and looking like one of those horrible torture wheels in medieval illustrations), globs of broken glass gleaming on the verge.

Police, lights, action. Firemen, lights, action. Out I came. Breathalysed. Negative.

You OK Mister?

Yes I’m fine.

But a passing doctor (yes, these things actually happen) expresses concern and insists I hop into his vehicle for a quick check-up. My eyes are a bit glazed, apparently. But that’s my usual look, I joke…

His name is Jonathan and I make a faltering attempt at conversation while he looks into my eyes with his thingy. We sit there in his medical-smelling estate car: he says he’ll take me to the nearest town once he’s sure I’m not in shock. So we sit there in a lay-by, looking at the scene of the accident – a severe ninety degree bend in a country road, on a bit of a hill, overlooked by trees on our left and a house on our right. The house is tall and thin, rather gaunt and grey but in good condition, with clean windows offset by dark turquoise curtains. It’s a farmhouse, I think, because it has a few tidy outbuildings with bright red doors and a small barn painted in the same bright Post Office red. There’s a grassy yard in front of the house and an old Scots Pine, giant-bodied and gnarled, reminding me of an illustration in Grimm’s fairy tales. There’s a kennel but no dog. A cowshed but no cows. Pigpens but no pigs. I’ve seen this living postcard many hundreds of times, in fact it’s embedded in my memory. I’ve even dreamt about it. Yes, this scene has a particular importance for me.

Nothing at all moves as we survey the scene. There is no evidence of life. Not even a dog-bark or a passing cat. Nothing. Not a dicky bird.

Maybe my gaze is a little too intense because Jonathan asks me if I’m OK.

Fine thanks. Really.

He wants to know what happened. I think he’s playing for time, waiting for me to show any possible symptoms. Blood dribbling from my ear, whatever.

So I tell him.

I was looking at that house.

I sense his head turning to look at me.

Why? That’s a nasty bend…

Yes, I should have been concentrating. But I was concentrating on the wrong thing.

Why the house… do you know the people there? he asks.

So I tell him the whole story.

Jonathan, I say, that house has been in my life forever and always. I passed it twice a day, as I went to and from school, for a decade. I’ve passed it hundreds of times since then too, and there has never been any change.

You mean it’s always looked like that? he asks.

Yes, exactly the same. For the forty-odd years I’ve passed it, not a single thing has changed.

That’s a bit peculiar, he says.The cars outside the place, haven’t they changed?

I’ve never seen a single car parked outside the place.

But there’s a garage…

Never seen the doors open, nor a car.

There’s a washing line…

That’s the first thing I look at, I say. That’s what I was looking at when I lost control of the bloody car…

Children playing?

I’ve never seen one single sign of human life in that place, I say.

I don’t know when I first started to look. It must have been during my teens.

There must have been a point in my life when my brain first registered this strangeness. A fulcrum in time when my young mind rang an alarm bell whenever I passed and told me to look at the place, to search it for any small signs of movement. Of course there must be hundreds or thousands of places I’ve passed during my life and I’ve not felt this imperative to stare: to look for a tweak of the curtains, or a dribble of smoke rising from the chimney. Even with holiday homes you eventually seesomethingduring a lifetime.

Jonathan breaks in on my thoughts abruptly.

I think I’ll go and knock on the door…

He’s also intrigued now.

I wouldn’t bother, I say, if there was anybody inside the place they’d have come out when I crashed, surely.

Jonathan thinks about this.

Unless they were deaf, or old, or both perhaps.

I don’t answer him, because my mind has gone off on a tangent. Do I actually want to see anyone move? Do I want to meet the perfectly ordinary human beings who may have lived in that house for x number of years, blissfully unaware of the storyline I’ve written for their home – or should that beunwritten? Because this thing I’ve got about the house is the exact opposite of a soap opera, isn’t it? I’m making sure that nothing happens. I’m creating a non-story, an antithesis ofhappening.

Jonathan picks up on my thoughts.

Perhaps you don’t actually want anyone to live there, or anything to happen, he says. And he adds a storyline of his own.

I went for a walk on the mountain behind my house last week, he tells me as a preamble to his anecdote. There’s a seat halfway up so I had a bit of a sit-down to enjoy the view. While I was getting to my feet I noticed a scrap of cloth, about four inches by two, in the heather – light blue satin, I think, cut unevenly with scissors and frayed at the edges… I was about to throw it back on the ground when I noticed that someone had written somethingon it in biro. Chinese characters, a message in Chinese on a hillside in Wales. I was really fascinated!

Why didn’t you take it to the local Chinese restaurant, they’d have translated it for you, I say.

Yes, I thought about that. I put it in a frame and it’s on the wall above my computer because it looks nice there. After a while I decided not to take it round to the Chinese because…

It’s my turn to read his thought.

Because you didn’t want to know what the message says?

He laughs loudly and healthily.

Yes. It could be a shopping list or something banal like that.

I agree with him. Best to leave it undeciphered. A little bit of mystery.

Maybe it was a message to a girlfriend, or something. A last farewell note. Perhaps she’d taken it up there to have a good cry.

Yeah, it could be anything. Don’t want to know, he says. I’ve already made up lots of meanings for it as I work on my laptop – mostly romantic, to tell you the truth. That’s the way our minds seem to work, isn’t it?

I agreed, and we chatted away for some time before he decided I was OK and drove to the nearest town, Llanrwst, which is where I live. When he dropped me off at my home in George Street he took my phone number.

I’ll check up on you tomorrow, he said.

He seemed genuine and kind. I could imagine him being a wonderful father to four perfect children while keeping a whole community alive, or going out to Africa and ministering to a small shanty town until his hair went white.

When I said goodbye to him I never expected to see him again. But he was standing on my doorstep within forty-eight hours, his face all lit up with excitement.

Hope you don’t mind me coming to see you like this, but you made me realise something the other day, he said as he sat with a cup of coffee rattling in his hands, crouching slightly forward in one of our front-room chairs, my wife’s shadow hovering in the kitchen doorway. I’ve got a place just like yours – not so far away from here, actually. Never seen anyone move there either!

My wife gave me one of her looks, then disappeared into the kitchen. Is he all there? she asked when I went to tell her. You’re goingwhere? You’re both as daft as each other.

But the fact of the matter was that we’d decided there and then to visit this place of his, which was somewhere in the valley, near Trefriw. I put on my warmest coat, since Boxing Day had turned out nasty, and off we went into a young gale. The trees were threshing about and the river was already running quite high as we meandered down the valley along the old road. Eventually we swung off the highway and parked up on a grass verge near a group of houses. There were three of them, 1930s style, with hipped roofs and iron windows. Two had been painted a bright white while the one in the middle looked run down and generally in need of some TLC. Jonathan handed me a pair of binoculars, as if we were a couple of coppers casing the joint, and said just three words: the middle one.

I took a good look at it. The curtains were ragged, the windows were dirty and the garden gate was half on, half off. I could see nothing unusual about it – the house was typical of many dozens like it in the area. Just a bit run down.

But Jonathan was absorbed by it. Been to that house on the left many times, bloke had a stroke three years ago, he said in a conspiratorialdon’t-tell-anyone-elsesort of voice. I’ve also been to the house on the right a couple of times, but I’ve never seen a single movement in the middle house. And yet I get the feeling there’s someone in there… after all, the holiday homes tend to be well looked after.

Perhaps someone died and there’s no heir, I said. You get that sometimes – houses left to rot because nobody owns them and no-one knows where the deeds are.

And so we left it. He took me home and we said farewell. That was that, I thought. A bit of seasonal madness, really. My car was a write-off and I’m on the buses for a while, since I’ve got my OAP pass and there’s no real need for a car of my own any more – in fact I’m thinking of doing without one now. Do my bit for the planet, now I’ve done my bit to wreck it.

So I pass that house of Jonathan’s twice a week on the bus, on my way to Llandudno – I meet an old friend there for a chat and a pint, and if the weather’s fine we go for a walk along the prom. Usual thing – we’re old work friends so we chew the cud and keep each other up to date on ex-colleagues heading for the departure lounge. Many have already left for the world’s only remaining place without a Rough Guide. As I pass that house of Jonathan’s on the bus I take a good look at it. I even started carrying a camera so I could record any movement; as the bus approached the trio of houses I’d prime my digital Fujifilm and take a snap, in case there had been any changes.

Until a few weeks ago I’d collected 134 pictures of the house, all stored in a separate folder on my computer. A couple are blurred and a few are mottled with raindrops on the bus window but they all tell the same story – I never saw anything or anybody in the proximity of that house. Zilch. Until recently. Then, as I passed one day, I swung the camera to the window and took a picture which instantly told a story. I’ve studied it countless times. Picture 135 is different from the rest. It has a human figure in it, walking up the path, carrying two plastic carrier bags. Spar bags with six-pack and bottle shapes – a very old image in my mind. Some of my friends have been alkies; this was a morning trip for some recovery juice.

As the days passed by I began to wonder: should I tell Jonathan? Big, big question. After all it washishouse –hismystery. On the other hand I was left asking myself: would I want to know aboutmyhouse if he saw someone movingthere? Would I wantmyillusions shattered by a standard digital photo sent by email, showing Mr and Mrs Normal and their two normal children in front of my lovely abnormal house? Or a lonely man walking up a garden path, feeling like death warmed up, convulsed with shame and morning sickness?

I chewed on this question until it was a mushy pulp. I worried it like a puppy with a slipper, I didn’t let it out of my sight for an hour, day or night. I was so restless at night the wife made me sleep in the spare room. So I hung Picture 135 on the wall in there. She thought I was overheating in the upstairs department. It was like a scene fromBlow-Upwith David Hemmings looking at that ‘murder in the park’ photo over and over again. I didn’t tell Jonathan or anyone else about the picture. Perhaps that was a mistake, because soon afterwards my eye fell on a headline in theDaily Post:Doctor ‘critical’ after house incident.

When I went to see him in hospital he was on the mend, though still virtually unrecognisable. His face had been stitched up, the bruised flesh criss-crossed with butterfly stitches. I asked him what had happened, and the plotline was pretty straightforward, as I’d anticipated: overcome with curiosity he’d visited ‘his’ house late one night, and since there were no lights on he’d tried the back door, which was open. While exploring the house in darkness he’d tripped over a prone figure and tumbled to the floor. Startled, the ‘tenant’ of the house had woken suddenly from a drunken coma, wielded and smashed an empty bottle frantically in the dark and (more by accident than design) had ‘bottled’ poor old Jonathan, severing the carotid artery in his neck.

Nearly copped it – thank God I’m a doctor or I’d be dead, he mumbled through his swollen lips.

The ‘tenant’ turned out to be an itinerant who’d been living there for many years: he’d got away with it because the neighbours thought he was the owner.

Ironically, when the itinerant made a statement to the police he said he’d watched the house over several weeks, while living in nearby woods, and after seeing no signs of occupation he’d forced the back door and made himself at home. Me and Jonathan laughed over that, we just had to.

I meet him now and again, and he’s getting better. He was never charged by the police; his profession saved him, I suspect, though I don’t know what sort of story he told them. As for my own ‘empty’ house, the one on the ninety-degree bend in the country, I still haven’t seen anybody moving there. And there’s a reason for that. Since Jonathan’s near-death incident I’ve given the place a miss – I still haven’t got a car, and there’s another road – with a bus route – to the place I visit; although it’s a bit of a detour it ensures I never seemyhouse again. People think I’ve changed my route because of the accident. But no, it’s not that.

It’s become strangely important that the scene remains undisturbed outside that gaunt little house with its red barn and tidy outbuildings. It’s a painting on an easel without an artist to finish it off. And there’s another thing. For some strange reason the thought has grown inside me that once I see any movement there I’ll die.

blood

THERE is a place secreted in the hills of mid Wales which few people know about, and even fewer have visited. I suppose it’s best described as a miniature version of the wide tableland which stretches for countless miles in the Chang-thang region of Northern Tibet – a place so flat and featureless it’s been known to send men mad, overcome by their own smallness. But this place in Wales is no Shangri-La. Its long seclusion from the outside world has left it relatively unchanged for a thousand years, a bleak landscape flocked by countless sheep which drift in eternal silence below an old, forgetful sky. The shepherds who look after them have changed as little as the landscape; they while away their time in ancient ways, tending their sturdy speckled sheep, making a strong hard cheese in their mountain huts, and carving ornate bijou objects from soapstone with astonishing expertise: the finished article resembles a tiny catacomb, with perfect rooms and passageways, stairs and cellars within the stone. There are hardly any women, since all but the simple and deformed run off in their teens to become rugby wives in places such as Bradford and St Helens. It’s an unforgiving terrain peopled by strong and unusual people – as the explorer and wit Valentine Zappa noted, it’s a place where the women are monosyllabic, the sheep bipolar and the men trisexual.

Out of this place, one day, came a man called Gwynoro. He became a close friend of mine, despite medical protocol – I was his surgeon. He arrived in my operating theatre in great pain, due to a colonic tangle caused by eating too much of the local delicacy, not unlike haggis, consumed traditionally by rushlight to the wail of the Welsh shepherds’brochbib, a crude bagpipe, and thecrwth, a primitive fiddle. When he arrived he was still dressed in the traditional garb – a sheepskin jerkin over wide black pantaloons, and I must admit it was I who ordered his wide-brimmed leather hat and puttees to be destroyed immediately, such was their appalling hogo. Thankfully he forgave me, eventually, but I mustn’t rush into the story.

These people are hardy, and Gwynoro was young and fit, but he almost perished. During the operation he needed ten pints of blood, imported from Mexico as it happens, and this has a bearing on my tale because, about a month after he was discharged, Gwynoro started to behave in an unusual and intriguing fashion. I have to admit that I indulged him rather because he was such a charming and engaging character, unspoilt by the tricks and wiles of modern society. He kept us all in stitches with his simple, earthy humour and held us spellbound with the lore of his people, plus a thousand and one things we didn’t know about the crafty and intelligent sheep he so adored (but only his own flock). Anyway, about a month after being sent home to the hills he returned, and the change was striking. Gone were the sheepskin jacket and hairy pantaloons; he arrived sporting a full Zapata moustache under a flamboyant sombrero, and he was clad in the wide breeches of the gaucho, complemented superblyby a pair of new Cuban-heeled cowboy boots (the leatherwork was breathtaking). I found him slumped in the corridor, with his hat over his eyes, and presumed he was having a siesta – but when I shook him it became clear he was in enormous pain, as if he’d taken a bullet from a gringo. He was back to see me because of a fresh digestive problem – he’d developed an addiction to chili con carne, and his guts were rotten again: even worse, he’d lost all interest in sheep, and hadbought a herd of small and scrawny mules. Frankly, he’d been diddled and I was angry on his behalf. He was a sick man again, and I was mystified. What had caused this change in his behaviour? I consulted my colleagues, more experienced than I, and we formulated a theory. Of course, we all knew about cellular memory, whereby people who receive organ transplants often take on the memories, behaviour and habits of the donors.But not one of us had heard of cellular memory brought on by blood transfusions. Gwynoro was unique – and in making medical history he became acause celebrein medical circles.

After his recovery we persuaded him to part with his mules, which we’d kept in a fenced-off part of the hospital grounds, near the psychiatric unit (an unfortunate choice, for reasons I cannot make public); they were sold to a former Welsh professor who did rides on Aberystwyth beach. While visiting them, Gwynoro promptly fell in love with the town and gate-crashed some of the history lectures at the university, where he learned all he wanted to know about Mexico’s revolutionary history, and there’s plenty of that.

This is a very interesting period in my life, amigo, he said to me one day, picking his teeth moodily with a cocktail stick. I’d been called into town to bail him out after an incident in the High Street late the previous night, when he’d fired shots into the air while shoutingViva la Revoluciónin the manner of a crazedpistolero. Fortunately for him he’d been firing blanks, otherwise he’d be behind bars to this day.

Something had to be done, and quickly. I set up a trust fund and, medics being a kindly lot on the whole, we soon had enough money to buy him a set of ornamental spurs and a plane ticket to Mexico, where we hoped he’d burn himself out and then resume his old life in the Welsh hills. Or maybe he’d make a go of it, establish a new colony perhaps, like a distant relative of mine, John Hughes, who left Merthyr in 1869 and set up an industrial centre called Hughesofca in the Ukraine – now called Donetsk. Within a few years a colony of about a hundred Welsh families had been established there: perhaps Gwynoro could do the same, I conjectured. Little did I know my man. There followed a lull, which encouraged me to think that all was well. Unbeknown to me he was stoking up on tortillas stuffed with fresh green chilis – so hot and dangerous that the locals took him to their hearts, overcome with admiration, and dubbed him El Popo, the nickname of Popocatepetl, a huge active volcano near Mexico City. News came filtering through via the national newspapers that he’d become the leader of Mexico’s largest trade union, and was agitating for land reforms to liberate the peasants. On October 1, 2006, a revolt broke out in Yucatan province and he was arrested. As the ringleader he was charged with insurrection and political agitation. With hindsight, I should have foreseen what was going to happen, it was all rather predictable, given Gwynoro’s childish sense of justice, his hot-headed naivety, and his strange new blood. There were unexpected repercussions. A new cocktail calledThe Red Hot Welshmanbecame all the rage in Mexico City and led to a number of fatalities.

Exotic blood transfusions took over from size zero, breast implants and Botox as the ‘in’ thing among celebrities, leading to some pretty amazing consequences: Paris Hilton learnt Welsh, became a pig farmer in Powys and wrote a seminal paper on moral philosophy, while Pete Doherty became a Sunday School teacher and part-time fireman in Abersoch, though he went off the rails when they refused him permission to try a new penillion style at the cerdd dant festival. Jordan formed a new pagan cult among the bosky groves of Anglesey, called the Mon Again Druids, and I needn’t tell you what happened to Charlotte and Gavin – really, someone ought to have warned them about doing that sort of thing in Red Square on the coldest night of the year.

I’d bailed him out once, so I did it again. It was getting to be a habit, but I felt partly responsible. I flew out to Mexico (precipitating a substantial backlog of people awaiting operations, and forcing two Assembly AMs to resign), then attested at his trial that the blood transfusion had changed his personality etc, so he was deported with a warning never to bother Central America again, or he’d be starring in a real life version ofBring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia. I took him home with me and installed him in a caravan, sited in a small paddock by my orchard. I’d used it as a study, and he turned it into a nice little home for himself. Touchingly, he called it his haciendavan. Poor Gwynoro was a broken man by now, and I felt a lump in my throat whenever I saw the shadow of his sombrero floating around inside the caravan – I think he even wore it in bed. I whipped him into hospital for a transfusion and managed to stabilise him on a fairly normal diet, though the red-hot chili sauce was never far from his hand; the smell of it hung in a sickly-sweet haze over the orchard, and my dear wife refused to collect the apples when autumn came. ThenI made a fundamental mistake – I sent him on holiday to Porthcawl, hoping the change of air would help. I really should have known better. All went well during the holiday itself, but on the train home he met a Leninist-Trotskyite from Taffs Well (apparently they’re all like that down there) and came home with his head stuffed full of new and exciting notions. He also brought his new friend, called Siencyn, and they set up a radical-syndicalist group called Meibion Marx, using the caravan as their base.

One night, while the neighbourhood was asleep, they rounded up every sheep in the district (using Gwynoro’s ovine expertise) and branded them all on the (left) side with a blood red hammer and sickle. Next day we were hit by a furore unprecedented in Wales, with TV crews and helicopters ravaging the area, and gutter journalists offering substantial sums for any snippet of information. Some over-excited fool burnt down a couple of holiday cottages, and we had pandemonium on our hands for a whole month. Just when I thought the hoo-ha was dying down I was visited by a couple of heavies who looked like Pinkerton men searching for Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, but turned out to be hoods from the US National Security Agency at Menwith Hill, the huge monitoring station on the Yorkshire Moors. Apparently they’d picked up the sheep markings via satellite – there’s wonderful for you. The smallest of the hoods was one of those smarmy super-intelligent types who regaled us for some time (in a false accent straight out ofFargo) with arcane facts about Welsh sheep: apparently our four-legged friends are unique in their tonal range, and had fooled the Menwith satellite system into mistaking their lonesome bleats for the wheel-screech of an antique Russian missile-launcher being manoeuvred into position near Gdansk. For a day or so, apparently, every warhead in Europe had been trained on a small field in Llanfihangel-yng-Ngwynfa.