I looked back at her when I reached the telephone. By now she was sitting on the rising bank by the edge of the expressway: a little girl lost in the yellow grass, in that familiar pose of hers with her legs tucked up, her chin on her knees and her arms hugging her shins.
Footballers don’t like that word – shins. My own shins are old torch-barrels holding furred-over batteries of pain; at worst I get high-voltage jabs, at best a steady, humming ache. Shins… the only tenderness you’ll ever experience on the pitch. And shins never let you forget their countless couplings with the stud. Shins of the father.
Anyway, as I messed with the phone, with a finger in my right ear trying to block out the traffic-roar, I noticed the fuzz arriving. They parked behind her car, lights flashing, so I ambled back.
They both recognise me straight away, as usual. You get tired of it. Fame’s a friggin’ nuisance after a while.
‘It’s Duxie,’ says one, all smarmy-faced and jolly-me-lad.
‘Duxie!’ simpers the other. ‘Not going to score here, are you mate?’
He looks at the dummy in the back seat and then at Olly, still sitting on the grass. ‘But then again…’
The other copper grins.
‘You can’t beat a nice little threesome, can you Duxie.’
The motorway traffic sucks me and blows me.
In the old days people used to stop, but chivalry is dead. Here I am, with a couple of upstarts and they’re taking the piss. I mustn’t complain however. Fortunately for me I was kind to Copper No 1 on a touchline once, when he was a kid, so he helps me out with a can of petrol. Not the normal procedure, but seeing as it’s me…
‘What’ya doing these days, Duxie?’ asks Copper No 2.
Petrol fumes spread around us in the air. The smell of car-blood.
I offer some money for the petrol, but they wave me away.
‘Student,’ I reply, and they laugh soft and low, the way people do when they’ve spent too much time making jigsaws out of human parts.
I thank them and they go, quietly; back to the ant-run.
There’s a rat-a-tat on my brain-window. It’s Duxie the student, books tucked under his arm, leaving the library.
‘Ahem,’ he says, looking at me through the glass, with a faint gleam of contempt in his eye. ‘For fuck’s sake don’t tell people – especially policemen – that you’re a student. They’ll take the piss, for ever. OK?’
I look away.
We’re on the move again, thank God. I look at her surreptitiously. Her mouth is set in a hard, determined line. I won’t ever do that again, she seems to be thinking.
I settle back in my seat and drift into dreamtime. The A55… it’s tidal, I’ve noticed. Tyres hum a dawn chorus on the tarmac and then the morning tide sucks out thousands of human sand-grains, most of them dragged eastwards by a monetary moon. Some of them are swept far away by the currents, as far as Manchester and Cheshire. They return on the evening flood, all used up, thousands of popped corks swept in on a tired tide, wave after wave flooding the Welsh shoreline. Civilisation is bad for your mental health. Freud said that, not me.
We swirl through tunnels, leaving the twin headlands behind us, and dive into the Conwy Tunnel, below the river; we’re snug in our steel corpuscle, speeding through a tangle of artificial veins inserted under Wales’ ageing, liver-spotted skin. The fans in the tunnel emit a tortured sci-fi hum and suddenly I’m in the belly of a space freighter, on the lookout for aliens. I look for the Elastoplasts on her arm: they’re still there.
‘What are you thinking about?’
I delay my response until we emerge from our underwater burrow, popping to the surface on the English side of the river. The Conwy is still one of the north’s ancient delimiters. As we thud along the coast I scan the horizon for a phantom boat, the Ghost Ship of Abergele, which has its own web site (if nowhere else) to sail in.
I tell Olly about my wells and my sunken holes as we cruise through the red-roofed urban belt around Colwyn Bay. The glades around the Dingle have gone, demystified under English vernacular.
Am I starting to whinge?
No, merely comparing. I admire the contrasts, actually. Incidentally, a house destroyed in a dream signifies grief. One of the James Bonds was born in a house demolished to make way for this motorway. Timothy Dalton, I think. Green eyes, a cleft chin and a Martini (shaken not stirred) were enough to get him outta here. Also Terry Jones of Monty Python fame and Paula Yates. They all got out the superhuman way. And what do you need to get into Colwyn Bay nowadays?
A grand’s worth of hash and a bootful of Es should do it.
A few explanations.
I am Duxie, former professional footballer, wing-clipped angel of the Astroturf, now a student at one of the local FE colleges. It’s one of those sumps created by Maggie Thatcher to drain away the dole kids so they wouldn’t appear in the figures; nowadays a reservoir for all sorts of people: kids avoiding the sixth form in a haze of spliffery and angsty wail-sounds, beleaguered single mothers hanging from the breadline, and small town self-improvers like me.
Official subjects: Psychology, Eng Lit, Welsh Lit, History and Media Studies.
Real subjects: The ghosts running around on that moonlit field in my head now the floodlights have been switched off and the gates are locked.
She is Olwen – Olly to her friends, fairest of all maidens on my psychology course (the one with the fewest spots) and generally fucked-up damosel. I am the father figure she needs for now; she talks to me as a daughter would, I imagine, but our coffee break chats are humid with sexuality. One day I sidled up to her in the caff after a lecture on Freud and changed a big round chocolaty O left by a mug-ring on the cover of her notebook into: Will you be my Oedi-pal?
She thought that was OK.
Large dimensions, regular good looks and childish humour have got me into plenty of beds. This one’s different though. We both want to keep it clean, don’t ask me why.
Olly comes to college every day, even when she has no lectures. She hates it at home.
She’s a restless, unpredictable talker.
‘Why do you always wear a suit?’ she asked me soon after we met.
‘Habit. I used to be a professional footballer, they sort of expect you to be an ambassador off the pitch.’
One day she turned to me and said: ‘You’re ideal for my big psychology essay this term. I’ll call it Courtship and the Offside Rule. Do you mind?’
‘Explain,’ I said.
‘In courtship you always need to be ahead of the game while appearing to be behind it.’
I smiled and said: ‘True’.
Playing cat and mouse with defences… I’ve done plenty of that, on and off the pitch.
‘Don’t call it The Goalkeeper’s Fear of the Penalty,’ I added.
‘That’s been done, hasn’t it?’
‘Yes. Usual story, men fiddling around with their balls.’
She brought her mug down on my fingers, playfully but a bit too hard. She really was quite physical, this girl.
‘Don’t ever crack jokes like that again,’ she said.
‘OK,’ I mumbled as I sucked an injured knuckle. ‘Well, will you help me?’
I said I’d think about it, but I helped her; that way I could look at the nape of her neck when she was bent over the table, writing about me with a chewed-up biro. When you’ve glutted on flesh it’s nice to sit and watch it sometimes. You can’t really admire flesh when you’re trying to nail a climax onto it.
By the way – my big essay will be on Holes (please, don’t go all Freudian on me).
I started thinking about holes when I got tangled up in a goal-net one day. I realised I’d spent a lot of time aiming a ball – itself full of nothing – at a nylon web full of little nothings.
He found holes in the defence as a sheep finds holes in a fence: one minute he was with the flock, the next he was clear, running for the wide open spaces, and he left the keeper bleating for help – Caerna
rfon & Denbigh Herald.
I found cunning little quotes:
A net is a collection of holes tied together with string
– Julian Barnes.
So I got interested in holes – black holes and white holes, empty holes and filled-in holes. Idle holes and busy holes: pits, quarries, mines, shafts, adits, caves, burrows, tunnels… and holes with a dark past.
Emptiness is defined by the shape that will fill it – Adam Phillips.
Wales has about 7,000 holes and shafts left over from mining. I especially like holes with water in them: ponds, lakes, inland seas, wells…
What is it that makes a pond so fascinating in a field, and land so amazing from the sea? – Lisa St Aubin de Teran.
I became interested in this Welsh guy, Llwyd ap Llwyd, who was born in the same county as me. He tinkered with words a bit.
Holes, by their presence, imply an absence – ap Llwyd.
Two of his polemics have survived – one entitled A Defence of Sheep and the other bearing the enigmatic title (sic). His first and only book, Water-Divining in the Foothills of Paradise, disappeared without trace – I believe I have the sole remaining copy.
We turned off the A55 and drove into Holywell, to pick up Olly’s mother. This was the reason for our journey to Scotland. I didn’t know the details, but her parents were splitting up, apparently. Olly was wordless about it. The usual dark secrets I surmised. There was an overall atmosphere of tension, fear perhaps, which triggered my early warning system. The kids had grown up… it was a late separation, maybe. A surprise to everyone except the cloven pair. I imagined a long, tired deception – a yellow, brittle parchment of dead love-skin stretched thin over the mummified corpse of their marriage; many years of passing each other silently on loveless landings. Those imagined scenes of tendresse which had intrigued or revolted the children had simply never taken place. But before loading her mother we stopped at St Winefride’s Well.
History of a hole: Probably the most famous healing well in Britain. Nowadays a perpendicular gothic affair sleeps by a rather tired cistern of frothy water decked with flotillas of used cartons and sweet wrappers. Viewing this spot, it’s difficult to imagine the busyness of the scene in medieval times, when hordes flocked to their British Lourdes. St Winefride’s story was among the first to be printed. According to William Caxton’s 1485 Life of St Winefride:
... after the hede of the Vyrgyne was cut of and touchyd the ground, as we afore have said, sprang up a welle of spryngyng water largely endurying unto this day, which heleth al langours and sekenesses as well in men as in bestes...
She was the daughter of a local prince. One day a chieftain, Caradog, tried to seduce her. She resisted, but the bastard sliced her head off. A spring erupted where it landed. Well-side virgins often lost their heads, reflecting a sacrificial rite from prehistory. Reunited with her head, Winefride became a nun and had a white scar around her neck for the rest of her life. Her well was signposted from as far away as Northumberland and Norfolk. Henry V made a 45-mile pilgrimage on foot from Shrewsbury to St Winefride’s to give thanks for his victory at Agincourt. Scandalised, Dr Johnson complained in 1774 that the bath is completely and indecently open: a woman bathed while we all looked on.
Some interesting facts about wells: People with maladies bathed their wounds or diseased areas with rags which they tied to a tree near the well (hoping the disease would stay on the rag). Warty people pierced their warts with pins which were thrown in the well to carry away the warts. Throughout history, up to present-day Lourdes, pilgrims have gone to water to be cured. The strongest of all Christian rituals, baptism, is very old – wells were popular with pagans too. Prehistoric people clearly believed that water was magical, and they worshipped it. What made it move? A sacred power? Flowing water is a magician’s hinge, the passage between two worlds, says Iain Sinclair. Water rituals may have been associated with the sun and the weather; magic may have been used to prevent rain and flooding. Water can be light and scintillating one day, dark and dangerous the next. It sustains life and destroys it.
Invalids went to a certain Welsh well after sunset, made an offering of fourpence and walked around it three times, reciting the Lord’s Prayer each time. Men offered a cockerel, women a hen. They slept under the altar until dawn, using the Bible as a pillow and a communion cloth as a coverlet. Finally, they made an offering of sixpence and left their fowl as a gift. If the bird died it was assumed the disease has been transferred to it.
A couple of times in my life I’ve opened a door and the room behind it has been full of water, right up to the ceiling.
I sat by the well and tried to focus on the past, on the lost years of my childhood. I seem to be the opposite of the Memory Man. All I saw in that hole was melancholia. The water stared back at me, unresponsive, a border guard waiting for a bribe.
Had I got myself into a tangle? My heart was sinking fast. I’d been accidentally locked in the dressing rooms once after a particularly miserable home defeat; the memory of that dismal Saturday evening crept greyly into my psyche now; the musky smell of failure – male sweat, liniment and mud. Looking up, I saw Olly’s mannequin sitting in the back seat, staring ahead, impassively. I had read recently about a German artist called Oscar Schlemmer – one of the Bauhaus School – who’d fallen desperately in love with Mahler’s widow, Alma. She’d rejected him; his response had been to craft a life-sized doll which looked exactly like Alma: this doll had sat beside Schlemmer every day as he drove his car around Vienna. I’d been intrigued by his actions: they bordered on madness, certainly, but I thought I saw a certain viability there too. I seemed to be surrounded by bloody lunatics. I had other things to think about right now. My psychology course had confronted me with a difficult question: if my body was a small country ruled by chemicals, was I living in a chemical tyranny or a chemical democracy? Did I have any say in the way I operated, or was I merely following orders, slavishly, from cradle to grave? I thought the issue was important: if I was living in a democracy I could reason with it maybe – but if it was a tyranny I might have to deceive it, or wheedle with it, or even go underground… I would have to join an emotional resistance movement scuttling through the night-tunnels of my heart; a Maquis cell with an illicit radio in my cavernous sub-conscious, concerting an assault on the fascist overlord who ruled me with an iron fist. Me.
We nosed into a street of terraced houses and stopped. Olly got out and rapped on a door. My eyes may have deceived me, but I thought the door-knocker was in the shape of a pig’s head. The house looked ragged, and a pane in one of the upstairs windows had been broken: a piece of cardboard had been stuffed into the aperture to keep out draughts.
A woman emerged suddenly from the house, with a battered suitcase in her left hand. She slammed the door behind her, preempting any attempt by Olly to go into the house; in fact she pushed Olly away, towards the car. She was dumpy, stolid, forbidding in her gestures. She wore tatty blue shoes and a long beige coat, done up to the top button – typical charity shop stuff. Her face, puffy and pasty, was almost obscured by a cheap pair of dark glasses. Oddly, she also seemed to be wearing a wig, making her look very much like the mannequin in the seat behind me. I got out of the car quickly and dropped my seat so that she could get into the back, which she did with alacrity. Olly was left on the pavement, looking at the downstairs window, hesitating, as if she should do something, or as if she expected something to happen. Then she got in and we drove off. No one said anything, until I broke the ice.
It was strange, I thought, how Olly had turned away from the house without wanting to say hello to her father. Her face was set, emotionless. Her mother said nothing, for mile after mile. I thought maybe she was ill, so I left her alone after the initial greetings. A long journey lay ahead of us: it would take up to five hours to get to Glasgow, where a sister lived.
We joined the M6 and my spirits fell. Entering England is always depressing, and that’s not the way it should be: it’s still a beautif
ul country, but its main portals – the heavy-duty motorways – are so grim. There’s a foretaste as we leave Wales, at Deeside, with its straggly urban jumble and its deflowered verges, sickly trees. On the way we talk, Olly and me, but her mother stays quiet. After a while I forget her and the mannequin, sitting in the back. We talk about college, because we’re still skating around each other, and my eyes are still having to spend too much time doing their biological chores, sweeping along the white corridors of her body.
I shift the conversation to our writing projects. Having started an essay on Dr John Dee, the Welsh-born mathematical genius and alchemist, a strange thing has happened – I’ve allowed Mr Cassini and PC 66 to invade my story. She doesn’t believe me, she thinks I’m taking the piss, or writing a weak parable about Bush and Blair. But I’m not bullshitting her. This is really going on.
I look at her beside me and I feel guilty. Why the hell am I bothering her with all this, when she’s so low? I have a pretty good idea what’s upsetting her. In a way, I suppose, something has been wrong since I first got to know her. Looking back, I think there was a change in her mood right at the beginning, when I first met her, as if something bad was happening in her life; she became pensive, broody, preoccupied; she may have started to lose weight even then, as far back as a term ago. I began feeling protective towards her; after all, mental tyrants can be almost as troubling as real ones. Which do I fear most: the manager on the touchline or the manager in my head, shaking me awake every morning?
In the car I begin talking to her, and I notice her eyes flicking towards the rear-view mirror, checking what’s happening behind her. But she’s not looking at the traffic – she’s looking at her mother.