This was the ancestral home of the ‘great sturdy men’ of Strathclyde. Welshmen.
Down below me there’s a lot of history. The town is untidy, dominated by its concertina-roofed distillery buildings. The neat, newish Dumbarton football ground shelters below me in the shadow of the rock; over the road lies the Blackburn aircraft factory where 250 Sunderland flying boats were made during the last war. Although it’s Sunday an orange claw-machine chunters and gnaws at the remains of one of the old distilleries. Red-brick walls topple to the ground, soundlessly, in the distance. Another fortification is being demolished…
I descend a flight of stairs to an old jailhouse known as the French Prison. Peeking through its grimy windows I see two costumed mannequins, dressed in what looks like eighteenth-century garb, conducting a desultory conversation. And then I spot the well. According to history it dried up ‘miraculously’ when Olaf the White, the Norse king of Dublin, laid siege to the rock in the ninth century. The Britons held out for four months, but when their well expired the Vikings overran them, plundered their treasure and took a ‘great host’ of slaves to Ireland, on a fleet of 200 ships. This feat earned Olaf a slot in the Icelandic sagas as the greatest warrior in the Western Sea. It didn’t improve his life prospects – he was dead within a year. Incidentally, his wife was called Aud the deep-minded.
I kneel by the concrete-covered well and look at it through a side-grating. Coins glisten softly in the shaded water. I select a tenpenny piece, toss it in plopfully, and make a tenpenny wish.
As I prepare to depart I consider the importance of this rock in the Merlin tale. It was the home of Rhydderch Hael (Rhydderch the Generous), who ruled the men of Strathclyde between 580-612. And, according to legend, Rhydderch led an expedition 120 miles south, to a place near the present Scottish border, to sort out an upstart warlord named Gwenddolau. One of the victims of that encounter was a court jester or poet going by the name of Lailoken – the protean Merlin.
I felt sure now, as I left the rock and walked through a small public park to the edge of the Clyde, that I wanted to follow Rhydderch south, to the battle site, to the place where Lailoken had gone mad and walked out on everyone. But first I had to pick up Olly. I said goodbye to Dumbarton Rock and its deep history: from here William ‘Braveheart’ Wallace had gone to his execution in London. For some reason I feel impelled to tell you that Wallace suffered a terrible fate; after being hung, drawn and quartered he was kept alive long enough to see his own intestines thrown onto a fire: his head was impaled on a spike on London Bridge, his right arm was displayed on the bridge at Newcastle-upon-Tyne, his left arm went to Berwick, his right leg to Perth and his left leg to Aberdeen. Yes, I’m fascinated by the macabre. You too?
Soon I’d fetched Olly and told her my plan: to head for the battleground, the ancient parish of Arthuret on the Cumbrian-Scottish border. She acceded.
I was in gentler mood on the way down. Motherwell’s lumbering warrior-flats were frozen in motion, as if caught in a game of grandmother’s footsteps. Down we went, back through the upland hills, which had lost their menace and were now an assortment of multi-coloured Play-doh blobs on a playschool table, bathed in weak sunshine. Flocks of lapwings, balancing commas on their heads, wandered around at random to punctuate the green prose. The grasslands reminded me of Gwyn Thomas: The colour of the snooker table fascinates me. Having an allergy to lawn mowers, I find a deep calm in the sight of anything green that doesn’t grow.
We turned off the motorway just south of Gretna, drove into Longtown, and parked in English Street. We surveyed the broad main street of an old market town.
According to the Arthurian expert Professor Norma Goodrich, we are at the epicentre of the Arthurian kingdom. The battle of Camlan, she says, was fought just a few miles to the east. Arthur was interred in this very parish, Arthuret. That is what she says.
So we drive a short way out of town to the red sandstone church, which is close to the ground and pretty. Without entirely realising what I’m doing, I get the Chinese meal from the boot and tuck it under my arm.
‘What the hell are you doing?’ she asks, waving the air away from her nose. ‘And what the hell is that smell?’
I explain.
‘So what are you going to do with it?’
‘Eat it.’
She pulls a face.
‘That’s disgusting. You can really go off people you know. Revolting.’
But I take no notice, and while I’m looking for a level gravestone to sit on I spot a sign directing me to St Michael’s Well, on the hem of the churchyard. We sit by the water and I polish off some cold spare ribs while she looks into the distance – we’re on a bit of a stage here, raised slightly above the plain.
‘I’ve seen everything now,’ she says. ‘Former Captain of Wales Eats Chinese Spare Ribs at Arthur’s Burial Site.’
‘What of it?’ I respond. ‘A man’s got to eat.’
‘Yuk!’
She looks kinda pretty when she’s disgusted. Gorgeous. I lick my fingers and parcel the food. I’ve got to stop thinking about it. She’s about to be married. Strictly off limits. But with a body like that… well, you know what I mean. Feral desires.
‘Tell me why we’re here, will you?’
I flick some stray rice grains from my lap and roll my tongue around my mouth, trying to get rid of the spare ribs.
‘I’ll try,’ I say to her. ‘But as soon as you say Merlin a smoke machine starts up and soon you’re up to your eyes in fog. There’s a different version of his story for every day of the year.’
I tell her about Lailoken.
Story of a madman: Once a certain fool, or homo fatuus, called Lailoken served a chieftain called Gwenddolau. In 573AD Rhydderch Hael and his men travelled to Arthuret and gave Gwenddolau a good hiding at the battle of Arfderydd, just north of Longtown, between the river Liddel and Carwinley burn. The battle became famous in Welsh legend as one of the three most futile battles ever, because it was on account of a lark’s nest. Lailoken lost the plot during the battle. The heavens opened and he saw a vision of intolerable splendour, with a huge army of warriors brandishing their weapons at him, dazzling him hopelessly. He was seized by an evil spirit which drove him into the forest.
‘So that’s it – we’ve finished here now, have we?’
‘No, not quite.’
‘There’s more?’
‘Yes.’
‘Well, come on then, let’s have it.’
I fiddled about in my pocket and found some loose change. Finding two tenpenny pieces, I handed one of them to her, and then tossed mine into the well. It landed in the middle of the rising water, which bubbled delicately on the surface, as a bird’s throat bubbles when it sings.
I made my wish. When I opened my eyes I saw that she was staring at me as though I were the local madman now, not Lailoken.
‘You expect me to join you in your childish games?’
‘Up to you.’
Pointedly refusing to shut her eyes, she chucked her coin and turned immediately towards the gate into the churchyard.
‘Aren’t you going to make a wish then?’ I asked.
‘Made it, but you’re still alive.’
‘Ha bloody ha.’
I followed her through the gravestones. I’d wanted to poke around, but the church was locked so we headed back into town.
‘Where am I going now then?’ she asked, rubbing the driving wheel, trying to warm it. She was slightly more cordial. ‘Home?’
‘No. Let’s call at the community centre, see what we can find out.’
She didn’t complain. In a few minutes we were inside the centre and getting plenty of help. On the telephone, local historian Ken Campbell directed us a few miles north, to a motte and bailey on a prominent site overlooking the plain. Soon we were standing in a damp and drizzled tangle of undergrowth, on the tumescent Liddel Strength, and there was no doubt in my mind, as we looked down on the plain, that we were close to the site of the batt
le. I felt sure that if we had a Geiger counter which could sniff out old blood it would be beeping away like mad. The Caledonian Forest into which Lailoken fled has been eroded but there are patches everywhere in Mohican spikes. Looking into the gloom of a copse I could imagine the sound of a moaning lament coming from a madman talking to his pig. This was where the original Merlin went loopy. Or was it? Perhaps he was already a myth by the time of the battle – a naked, hairy madman condemned to live among wild beasts as a punishment for abandoning his fellow warriors during battle. He prophesied his own triple death: he would be ambushed by shepherds who’d beat him with cudgels and throw him into the Tweed. His body would be pierced by a stake.
‘Charming,’ said Olly.
I was bloody glad that my own battles had rarely lasted more than ninety minutes and had always ended with a bath and a bellyful of beer. There were other rewards, too…
A farmyard dog bared its teeth as we approached the car, so I drew her towards me.
She shrugged my arm away and said:
‘Hands off. I’m spoken for, remember?’
‘Sorry, I wasn’t thinking.’
She looked at me with a neutral look and said:
‘You should know the offside rules by now.’
Later, in the car, as we entered Wales, she said: ‘Are you going to kill off this character of yours?’
‘Cassini? Yes. I’ve got to, haven’t I… or he’s going to get me.’
‘Any ideas how? A threefold death, like Lailoken?’
I looked at her profile, framed by the bland, milky opacity of the window behind her. The curl in her hair as it folded made me think of the sensuous, undulating pleats made by newly-turned furrows on upland fields as the ploughmen dipped in and out of the contours. Her shining hair clips were gulls on the wing, above the naked earth.
‘Ideally, the death should be foretold,’ she said.
‘U-hu,’ I replied, nodding to give her encouragement.
‘I think Mr Cassini needs a special sort of death, something exceptional.’
It took me a minute or so to remember his name. I had to go through the alphabet twice before I came up with it: ‘Aeschylus.’
‘Pardon?’
‘Greek dramatist, died in a very strange way. Killed by a tortoise.’
She gave me a dry look.
‘Let me guess. In the library, with a dagger?’
‘No, really. An eagle grabbed hold of a tortoise, flew high in the air, then dropped it to shatter its carapace. Unfortunately for Aeschylus, the tortoise landed on his head and killed him.’
‘Must have been the first person killed by fast food,’ she replied.
We laughed.
She was funny, Olly. She could really make me laugh.
The clouds are boat keels throbbing overhead, preparing to drop their depth charges. And then the rain arrives, at last… by the time we get home the ground is covered in a gleaming meniscus, the sleeve of silver around a newborn puppy.
We are coursing in and out of the folded skin of old Britain, and I’m also moving through the brain’s enfoldments, through the geography of the mind: through fossilised forests and moonlit mines, in the vanished realms of childhood.
‘Anyway,’ she says, ‘it’s quite obvious – you’ve got to kill him off. Straight away, before he gets a hold.’
‘How do I do that?’ I ask.
‘With a funeral,’ she says. ‘It’s time we had a funeral. If this was Taggart we’d have had ten funerals already. The coffins would be lined up in rows. Get rid of him!’
‘I’ll try,’ I say. ‘But it may not be quite that simple.’
4
THE TIDE COMES IN
Mr Cassini’s death.
His lavish funeral
WHEN the end came it came quickly. Quite unexpectedly, with no sign of ill-health, Mr Cassini was found dead in his bed. There was an air of disbelief in the town. Cats in this country have nine lives, in Iran they have seven. Mr Cassini simply ran out of lives. A remarkable feature of the case was that the walls of his bedroom were furred over with a film of white ice when he was discovered, though the weather wasn’t particularly cold. Another peculiarity was that he’d died clutching the receiver of his telephone (which he kept by the side of the bed), and stranger still, the receiver’s black earpiece was cracked and brittle, as if it had been subjected to extreme cold. PC 66 noted in his report to the coroner that Mr Cassini made frequent telephone calls to an unknown person, often becoming loud and aggressive.
What killed him? No one knows to this day. But his icy bedroom was full to the brim with flowers, and only a handful of people knew that Mr Cassini suffered from an acute form of anthrophobia – a profound fear of flowers. There was another peculiarity. Among the irises and the chrysanthemums and the carnations, a pair of miniature wind-up dancers, entwined around each other in an eternal waltz, were still going round and round, mechanically, on his bedside table when he was found. The female dancer’s gauze skirt had made a precise circle in the dust. No one got to the bottom of that mystery either: it was PC 66 alone, probably, who knew that Mr Cassini detested all forms of dance.
The funeral was held, according to Mr Cassini’s meticulous instructions, on a day of sublime Welsh rain. The raindrops were microscopic, almost illusional, fine and warm, and the mourners might as well have been wrapped in blotting paper. The sky’s weepy breakdown started at first light, and a seeping dampness invaded everyone, insidiously, hissing with pleasure as it spread in a stain all over their helpless white bodies. Children made big saucer eyes when the rain leached into their underclothes; women put their backs to the town walls and protected their street-facing parts with their hands, as if they feared a damp spider might scuttle into their gussets, or maybe a farmer might plant a great big swampy hand on their bottoms.
All the townspeople gathered like a convocation of frogs croaking on the muddy steps of an antediluvian bog-church, tilted and half-sucked into the sodden sphagnum; they felt that day as if the water had a new consistency – as if a demonic scientist had meddled with it, since they all felt as though they had too much oxygen inside them, and gulped as amphibians do when they move between one world and the next. Their faltering hymns were straggly weeds, wilting in the crazy paving of new Wales, for they had no heart for modern deities, those people: the retinue mourning him that day worshipped far older gods.
Everyone wore black.
Mr Cassini had already constructed his own grave at the end of his back garden, which runs to the edge of a small, dark, recessive stretch of water known locally as Afon Ddu, or the black river. This river spends most of its time skulking behind slippery rocks or slipping through the gloomy trees which loiter around its banks in sullen gangs, waiting to mug passers-by.
His oblong grave was made from four granite slabs laid edgeways in the earth; the capstone was circular, since Mr Cassini always added his own unique touch. Mr Cassini had ordered his body to be kept on ice until a wet and windy day came along – he thought that fair-weather funerals lacked atmosphere and gravitas – and he ordered the whole town to gather for a cremation in the manner of Dr William Price.
A note on the famous Dr William Price: He was born in 1800, the son of a clergyman, and became a doctor, caring for the old farming families and the new colliers as Glamorgan grew a great crop of iron and coal for the world. Dr Price was tall and strong with a hooked nose, glaring eyes, long hair and a long beard; he was normally dressed all in green, white or scarlet, and on his head he wore a fox-skin with its front paws on his forehead and its tail hanging down his back. He was incredibly eccentric, and violently radical. He was a vegetarian who believed that everything in nature, from a mole to a mountain, had a soul, and he was also a revolutionary republican. He condemned marriage as a form of slavery and took a common-law wife when he was 81; their two children were called Iesu Grist and Iarlles Morgannwg, or the Countess of Glamorgan. He was equally eccentric as a doctor: he concentrated on causes, not symp
toms, and he charged his patients only when he failed to cure them. He wouldn’t treat them at all if they smoked. He never wore socks, on hygienic grounds, and he washed every coin that came his way.
After the collapse of the Chartist rebellion in 1839 he ran away to France, where he spent seven years. Constantly in trouble with the law, he always defended himself, though in one court case he employed his infant daughter as assistant counsel.
Dr Price started to build a great Druidical temple with a tower and a camera obscura on top. He was to be its resident Archdruid: but it came to nothing. When Dr Price’s baby Iesu died the doctor was heart-broken, because he believed the child was destined to restore the lost secrets of the Druids.
He took the little body to a field above Llantrisant and cremated it, but his neighbours thought he’d burnt the child alive and an angry crowd assembled. The doctor drove them away with a pistol in each hand; his partner held a shotgun.
Dr Price was arrested and charged with the illegal disposal of a body. He defended himself, wearing tartan and a white linen smock with scalloped cuffs, and at Glamorgan Assizes he won a momentous decision. The burning was declared lawful, and cremation became legal throughout the British Empire. When he died in 1893, a huge crowd of mourners witnessed his cremation. Each had bought a ticket with the words Cremation of Dr Price, Admit Bearer. His last act had been to drink a glass of champagne.
And so, in the manner of Dr William Price, Mr Cassini ordered his body – still thawing as it travelled – to be borne from the mortuary in a plain oak coffin, and burnt on a huge bonfire on the beach (the rocks nearby are still black from the flames). In emulation of the great man he had printed his own tickets with the words Cremation of Mr Cassini, Admit Bearer, which he had sold for many years before his death. As the coffin arrived on the outskirts of town all the townspeople assembled in groups, as he had taught them, and formed a huge human MR CASSINI on the sands.