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 adv
enturous 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.