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 breezy Good afternoon! or Dreadful weather! or Isn’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 in Wallace and Gromit with 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. Th
e 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 to The Sound of Music she’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 Bennett Talking Heads monologue, but a full staging of King 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. Even The Mousetrap had 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 sensual f, with a looping descender. Why should I be so s
urprised? 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.