‘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.
As I waited for impetus a rainbow formed, indistinctly, arching high over the emergency telephone but framing it perfectly, as though giving me a sign. We looked at it, emboldening now, its colours clarifying against the grey of the cloud-mass behind it. Something occurred to me. When we’re children we’re all told about the crock of gold but no one ever tells us how to find it. Isn’t that life though?
‘A rainbow,’ she said, smiling. ‘That means we’re going to be all right – safe.’
I turned to look at her, quizzically.
‘Arc of the covenant,’ she said. ‘No more floods. God says so. A promise.’
‘Everything’s going to be all right then,’ I said, cynically.
‘I promise,’ she said. ‘Cross my heart and hope to die.’
And she smiled that sweet smile of hers.
As I’m about to get out she lays her left hand on my sleeve and says:
‘Listen.’
I sit quietly, but the only sounds I hear are traffic noises.
Then there’s a lull, a brief respite in the cacophony, and I listen astutely.
She points to her left ear and waggles a finger in the direction of the sea, which gleams and sparkles through the trees alongside us.
She smiles.
‘Can you hear the waves?’
And yes, I can hear the sound of the waves, coming to us somehow through the febrile air, sent to this strip of madness from the old world.
I nod, and then I start walking towards the telephone.
Other people’s dreams are usually boring, aren’t they? People say I had this dream last night and you switch off almost straight away. But dreams are central to our story, so I’ve got to include them. The truth is that I started remembering my dreams too, as if Olly’s revelations had set off a recording device in my brain. They were bad dreams, nasty dreams. Dreams from long ago, from somewhere deep inside me. Our night lives had similar threads; my own dreams seemed to shadow Olly’s dreams sympathetically – as if we were dreaming in syncopation. Maybe we were dreaming about the same things: the same old monsters in different clothing. Those dreams of mine came from a seemingly bottomless well within me, a ceaseless subconscious spring not unlike the bubbling outflow we’d visited at Ffynnon Fair. Dreams as stories... I wonder if there are seven basic dreams, as there are seven basic human stories. In Italo Calvino’s masterpiece If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller there is a fable about
an old Indian known as the Father of Stories, a man of immemorial age, blind and illiterate, who uninterruptedly tells stories that take place in countries and in times completely unknown to him. The phenomenon has brought expeditions of anthropologists and para-psychologists; it has been determined that many novels published by famous authors had been recited word for word by the wheezing voice of the Father of Stories several years before their appearance. The old Indian, according to some, is the universal source of narrative material, the primordial magma from which the individual manifestations of each writer develop; according to others, a seer who, thanks to his consumption of hallucinatory mushrooms, manages to establish communication with the inner world of the strongest visionary temperaments and pick up their psychic waves; according to still others he is the reincarnation of Homer, of the storyteller of the Arabian Nights, of the author of the Popol Vuh, as well as of Alexandre Dumas and James Joyce...
I will tell you about the man in my dreams, the man who rubs his hands and smiles.
He has become real to me, as real as Olly’s parallel creation is to her. You might accuse me of using all the tired tricks of the symbolist, but I refute the charge: this is how it was, and I am telling you what happened as truthfully as I can. As she said – sad, lovely Olly – there’s something deep inside all of us, firing away all the time, something like an old boiler-house in a museum cellar, heating up all the rooms inside our heads, the rooms of the past, so that we can walk through them now and again on rainy days. Olly’s dream-rooms were a bit scary. Haunted, you might say.
When I think of antique gods I imagine large men, but not massive, well-muscled but beyond the first bloom, gold-skinned, with violet eyes I can barely look into. My antique god is sinuous, spare, silent, wise, and simply robed in blue, the rarest colour in nature: the blue worn by villains, supernatural creatures, ghosts and friends in Japanese theatre. I fear this antique god of mine. We create, we imagine our own gods and monsters. The Ancients believed in two-headed monsters, and during the Middle Ages monsters were seen as forebodings or agents of wrath – half-human creatures spawned by bestiality. They ate and drank with both their mouths simultaneously – malefic signs of God’s anger, symbols of nature’s raw power.
Renaissance man also described prodigies, such as the monstrous head ‘discovered’ in an egg in 1569, with the face of a man and a beard and hair made of small living serpents... monstrosities such as this were portrayed on public display boards, or broadsides, around which crowds gathered to view fantastical illustrations and to hear the monster’s story told aloud. And what of Frankenstein’s creator Mary Shelley – wasn’t she responding to all those nineteenth-century attempts to engineer monstrous deformities in living organisms, in the name of science?
Olly’s monster was a dream monster. Mine, too, rose sympathetically from an ancient bed to trouble my sleeping hours. I will tell you about my first dream. I will tell you about Mr Cassini and his friend the policeman.
Sometimes truth doesn’t tell the truth as well as fiction does. Sometimes the truth needs telling in diverse ways. Butterflies taste with their feet. Did you know that? Sometimes we must use our senses in unexpected ways.
Flip the switch, douse the light. We’re in our own cinema of the night. Some of the film is in colour, some in black and white.
2
THE TIDE COMES IN
Scenes from a dream:
the policeman’s confession
Scene 1 ?
?? at a police station
It was a foul and dismal morning in February, and PC 66 was tired and irritable. He hadn’t slept well, though his bed was comfortable enough. A dog had howled all night under his window. He’d put too much paprika in his stew the previous evening, and all through the night he’d had to drink water, constantly, from the carafe by his bedside at the police station. Then, in the dead shade of night, the heavy black clouds streaming past his grimy window had made him think of tarantulas scuttling across a body. Towards morning he was woken by a loud knocking. Rising quickly, guiltily, he unbolted the door and opened it to a huge man swathed in a black cape made of thick rubber; it left pools of rainwater on the tiles in the hallway. The huge man slumped into a chair while PC 66 made coffee in two dirty mugs, both cracked and stained a deep earthy brown. Afterwards, as the coffee sent coils of steam into the gloomy air, PC 66 stood at the main window, with his mug held low in his right hand, looking out towards the sea – though he saw nothing except a stunted rose bush by the window, since a ghostly mist had descended onto the garden. The shadows seemed to gather round him, and as he peered into the mist a sinister segment of his dreams returned to him from the depths of his sleep; in fact he was grateful that the night had passed, fitfully, into history. Out there on the sands he had heard a child running eastwards into the white of a sea mist: with each footbeat the child seemed to come closer. He’d heard cries of laughter and exultation; and then the child had moved away from him, westwards. He’d heard someone weep in the dolorous marshes beyond Little Bay.
Although he’d been awake for an hour now, PC 66 remained agitated: his mind was still troubled by the dreadful puppets of his dreams. And now, with daylight breaking, starving owls – unable to find food at night – were being mobbed by other birds. Silently, he addressed an imaginary jury on the other side of the window. Once or twice his lips moved to the flow of his confession. For he had a confession to make…
Scene 2 – PC 66 begins his confession to the invisible jury in the white mist outside his window. This is what he said:
I think you have a right to know what happened, right from the start. I’m almost excited about it – as if I were about to go through customs. I’ve got too much baggage. All those memories you leave in boxes all over the place, with your friends. In all the houses you’ve left behind. Bits and bobs in dusty attics everywhere. I have a declaration to make about my past. No, that’s not strictly true. I have many things to declare about my past. It’s time to get it all off my chest. I’d like that. Maybe I could relax a bit afterwards. That calm, drugged feeling you get when an ordeal is over. Actually, I was thinking about it yesterday, on the beach, walking along aimlessly. Daydreaming, really. It’s an old daydream of mine. I imagine the seawater all gone, just for a day, so that I can walk along the bottom of the sea looking at what’s there. Little hills and valleys I never knew about – wrecks, skeletons, whatever. I’d wander about all day, I’d walk all the way round the island and back; maybe I’d look over my shoulder now and again, fearful in case the sea came roaring back to swallow me up, but I’d really enjoy that day. I’d go on my own perhaps, and maybe I would meet other people wandering along the bottom of the sea bed and we’d laugh and say did you see this and did you see that. Maybe I’d take a camera, maybe not. Cameras make your memory lazy. I would remember it all for ever, after the sea’s allowed back in. I want to start with a clean slate. I’ll tell you all about it. Don’t rush me though – I want to figure it all out first. I want to know exactly how and why I did it.
[The end of the admission]
PC 66 turned to the huge man in the chair and studied him, although his ravaged features were barely visible in the half-light. Mr Cassini – yes, the story started with Mr Cassini, really. A gigantic man he was, nearly seven feet tall, he seemed that tall anyway, and immensely strong. A saturnine man, sitting in the gloom hatching vain empires, the sort of man who stole wild birds’ eggs. Such a big laugh on him too, a big male noise coming out of his mouth, a bull-roar in a cavern; his teeth were bats hanging in a cave full of sound. Mr Cassini – with his ancient, fish-like smell – was the key to it all. Mad, yes, he was certainly mad. But PC 66 loved that man. And he hated him too. Was that possible? There were just a few people you could love and hate at the same time. Mr Cassini was just such a man, there was no doubt about that. So where did he start? He turned to face the courtroom…
Scene 3 – a courtroom: PC 66 is in the witness box
In your own time PC 66, could you please tell us when you first met Mr Cassini?
I think it was during the trial of Lady Violet Charlesworth.
You mean Miss Violet Charlesworth. She was certainly no lady [laughter].
You’re right, she was no lady.
Can you tell us your first impressions?
It was a strange case. Miss Charlesworth…
No, your first impressions of Mr Cassini.
I’m sorry. Mr Cassini – a very big man, physically. Charismatic. Very powerful. I think everyone was rather afraid of him. We were in awe of him, all of us. He was very clever, he knew a lot about the world. And he was very funny at times. I remember the time when…
Thank you PC 66, there’s no need for you to continue with your little story [titters from the gallery]. Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, I would like you to examine Specimen A – an essay on local history [the jury reads]:
The story of a bogus ‘heiress’, who cheated the young doctor who loved her and left a trail of debts before faking her own death, gripped Britain as the year 1909 dawned on a troubled country.
When she was finally brought to justice it became clear that Violet Charlesworth, who took on the trappings of great wealth – including mansions in Wiltshire and Scotland, a fleet of cars and chauffeurs, expensive dogs and fine clothes, had drawn her whole family into a web of deceit.
The sensational case of Lady Violet, as she became known, starts on the coast road between Conwy and Bangor. Nowadays it teems with traffic; in 1909 it was virtually deserted. On a spur of rock high above the sea Lady Violet started a trail of mystery which was to lead detectives all over Britain.
The North Wales Weekly News was absorbed in domestic matters: negligent parents were being taken to court by the NSPCC; abandoned wives were suing their husbands; young women, disappointed in love, were gaining compensation for breach of promise. Suffragettes were causing chaotic scenes everywhere, including the beach at Colwyn Bay. But the biggest story by far in the edition of January 8 was headlined:
MOTOR CAR MYSTERY
Young Lady’s Supposed Terrible Death
Full Story of an Extraordinary Accident
It seems a terrible fate had befallen a young lady named Miss Violet Charlesworth of St Asaph. According to her travelling companions, one of them her sister, the other the chauffeur, Miss Charlesworth had been pitched out of the car after colliding with a wall, and had fallen fifty feet down a cliff into the sea. Her body had not been recovered. Reports of the tragedy had caused a thrill of horror to be experienced throughout the country.
The previous Saturday had been a fine day. Violet and her sister Lilian had decided to go for a short run in their car, a Minerva Landaulette, driven by their chauffeur Albert Watts. But the weather was so pleasant they extended their trip to Bangor, where they had tea at a prominent hotel. It was Violet, apparently, who took the wheel on the return journey. As she negotiated a dangerous bend the car apparently hit a stone, swerved to the left, and sped – out of control – into an opening in the boundary wall, coming to rest a few inches from the cliff edge. Violet was ‘thrown’ through the windscreen into the sea. Her sister Lilian ran, in a state of frenzy, to a nearby inn to get help. In the search that followed a lady’s motoring cap and a notebook were found on the cliffs. But there were doubts from the outset. Witnesses said there was little or no water near the base of the rocks below when they searched for Violet’s body – so how could she have been swept away? Violet had supposedly been
the driver, yet the windscreen through which she’d been propelled was smashed on the passenger side.
The Weekly News delved briefly into Violet’s colourful history.
It seemed she was very fond of motoring and employed two chauffeurs. Recently she had rented a house at Calne in Wiltshire and another at Fortrose in Ross-shire for seven years at an annual rent of £250. She had refurbished the Fortrose mansion in Highland fashion. There were three or four cars in the garage. She loved night driving and dogs.
Heavily in debt, she was traced to Oban in Scotland and then her name hit the headlines everywhere. In the following weeks she appeared at various music halls – though her reception ‘did not encourage her to make many appearances’ – and a film was made of her escapade, on location, starring Violet Charlesworth as herself. In the meantime, she was declared bankrupt.
Then came a huge surprise. Whilst probing her acquisition of various expensive rugs made of tiger, polar bear and leopard skins, police discovered that she had defrauded a Rhyl doctor – who had fallen in love with her – by pretending she was due to inherit a fortune from an old friend in Melbourne, Australia. By July, coach owners in Rhyl were making a feature of drives to her former home at St Asaph.
On February 11, 1910, eight days before Manchester United played their first league game at their new ground, Old Trafford, the newspaper reported ‘the sensational arrest’ of Miss Violet Charlesworth and her mother, to face charges of fraudulently obtaining large sums of money from the doctor and a widow from Derby. Dressed in a bright green coat lined with white satin, a large black hat trimmed with ostrich feathers, and a white stole, Violet looked extremely pale and her mother sobbed bitterly during the trial. Both mother and daughter, it appears, were initially sentenced to five years’ penal servitude but their sentences were reduced to three years apiece because of ameliorating circumstances. And so ended the sensational case of ‘Lady’ Violet Charlesworth.
PC 66, have you read the evidence?