Mr Vogel

by Lloyd Jones

  ‘What’s that then?’ asked Mr Vogel, his interest aroused.

  ‘By the end of the day the ants have recovered the flax seeds, all except one. And that last seed is brought in by a lame ant just before nightfall.’

  ‘That’s me!’ cried Mr Vogel. ‘The lame ant! – that’s me, isn’t it!’

  ‘Yes of course it is.’

  A thought struck me.

  ‘And you, Mr Vogel, will bring in the last seed of our story.’

  He had another terrible nightmare that night. Again, the date February 28th had a special significance. All hell was let loose, he said. His ruse had gone terribly wrong: the two booksellers he dispatched along a ley-line to Hay-on-Wye went awry and ended up in Milford Haven where they activated the Quaker Whaling Fleet; this was now in pursuit of Moby Dick northwards through Ramsey Sound. But the whale had wreaked a terrible revenge – many men had been lost overboard, among them Captain Ahab (his peg leg devoured by the Gower Worm); all the crew had stood like penguins on the starboard rail, looking at Wales and singing (to the tune of the national anthem):

  Whales! Whales! Bloody Great Fishes Are Whales –

  They Swim Through The Sea,

  We Eat Them For Tea,

  Oh Bloody Great Fishes Are Whales.

  Their voices were reedy in the wind; the whale’s gigantic spume-geyser spurted between the shark-finned rocks of the Bishops and Clerks. Billy Silverfish tried to harpoon Great Auks. Mr Vogel would be arraigned for this, hanged from the yardarm.

  He told me eventually, of course. Mr Vogel couldn’t keep that sort of secret.

  I had already guessed, after a fashion.

  He was afraid of the yellow fan of light outside the off-licence, or ‘liquor store’ as he called it. It was a warm, inviting wedge in the darkness.

  He feared that if he stepped inside that light ever again he would be lured onto the rocks by the wrecker’s treacherous lantern, swaying drunkenly in the wind. Walking through that fan of light would require just three steps. And then he could keep on walking. For ever.

  THE SECOND STEP

  THEY yearned for April, the sweetest month, when the days would be young, lithesome and warm, and pilgrims would gather once again to take their paths to enlightenment. People would have a spring in their step. The hedgerows would welcome a new wave of flowers; the fresh and verdant banks would greet them like flower-girls, cradling primroses and violets, and wood anemones and snowdrops.

  Enthroned on a large boxful of books brought to him by the helpful Debbie, Gwydion wrote of alexanders landing under their light green parachutes; birds hurrying through the fragile air with bits and bobs in their beaks; blackbirds singing plangent cadenzas, thrushes warming the earth’s blood with their absurd promises. April was a good time to be alive.

  Mr Vogel was beginning to grasp reality again; he had given up all hope of his party, and after taking stock of the world around him he was beginning to make plans for the future. His dream world hadn’t vanished completely. A new set of night pictures swamped his mind, including this sleep-fable:

  By February 29th the southern fisher-folk of Milford Haven were becalmed in Cardigan Bay; the dark and volatile inhabitants of the western seaboard swooned in great numbers, overcome by the sweet fragrance of Moby Dick’s ambergris which floated offshore, a perfumed island. Now the Anglesey whalers left Holyhead to join the hunt, their dervish compass sent whirring by the mirror, comb and shears held between the ears of a monstrous boar cleaving the waves between Ireland and Wales. Calamitous divinations were uttered by the Aberaeron Soothsayer: his fishbones augured a great battle and much blood – only one would survive, a mermaid would reveal all…

  Gwydion watched, amused, as the normal people – the hospital staff and the authorities – compiled a history for Mr Vogel. They had traced his medical records on the same day as a small piece appeared on the front page of The Daily Informer under the heading: Mystery ‘walker’ puzzles hospital.

  While his medical files flitted to and fro along the highways of Wales in search of him, Mr Vogel rested and contemplated. He looked at his fellow humans, scurrying around him in pursuit of meaning and purpose. He looked through the windows, at a world which mocked them all by having no meaning and no purpose, in vast amounts.

  In this ampleness of time he fell in love.

  His choice was supremely bizarre and couldn’t have been predicted by anyone, least of all himself, as is nearly always the case in matters of the heart. To complicate matters she was married – and she was extremely suicidal, even before she met him. Her husband was small, inoffensive, and devoted to her. Mr Vogel cared not a whit. He courted her avidly.

  Anna was most definitely not the prettiest girl in town. Anna was sad.

  Anna sat in her chair in the corner all day, trembling and smoking, and harming herself. She had livid weals on her arms where she scratched herself, and old white scars where she had cut herself with knives. They reminded Mr Vogel of the zig-zag patterns cut in the stones of a Neolithic tomb on Anglesey. He had sat outside it, watching a gaggle of dirty, aggressive, near-naked children twittering in an ancient language whilst they collected frogs, toads, snails, fishes and snakes for a miraculous potion – such a concoction, desiccated and withered, had been discovered by archaeologists, poured onto a hearth there; this was hard fact, not a figment of his imagination as the children had been, garrulous and quick-moving above him on the mushroom mound.

  Poor Anna. Her story was too terrible to imagine. Mr Vogel found her engrossing, and her story so sad that he cried vicariously and alone on the toilet, his tears a salty palimpsest dripping between the operating scars on his scrawny legs. Never before had a woman touched his heart so. He had seemed unable to love. He put this down to childhood experiences which he had never discussed with anyone. He, also, had been tormented by his father, whose special cruelty was to put little Vogel on the kitchen table and take his trousers off so that visitors – anyone – could see his puny, curved legs. He also removed the boy’s underpants so that they could see his operation scars. Vogel’s cheeks still burned with indignity and shame.

  Now he spilt out his pain to Anna, and their bond was formed. It was first love in middle age, and Mr Vogel had never felt such feelings; they burst inside him like hot sherbet lemons.

  He felt as though he were in a dream. None of it seemed real. He had taken on the smell of the ward, of displacement and dislodgement, pain and fear; now a new smell joined all the others, the smell of newly-ploughed love.

  Anna told him her story. She had been one of three children; the other children, her two brothers, had been treated lovingly, normally. Unaccountably, the parents had developed a steely and icy hatred for their only daughter, and had treated her terribly. From the age of about eight onwards she had been prostituted by them, forced to sleep with men from the town. One of them was a magistrate. This was the truth. Mr Vogel knew she was telling the truth. He realised that many of the people around him held stories which were very frightening, almost beyond the comprehension of normal people.

  Anna developed a terror of those men who used her. She would hide under her bed, screaming, when they came. One day a new ‘customer’ had been taken to her, but she had refused him. He had threatened her, and told her that if she continued to refuse him he would kill her pet tortoise – her parents’ sole concession to her childhood (it had belonged to her brothers). She had believed him incapable of a crime so despicable, and had continued to resist him. He had returned later that day and had jumped on the tortoise before her eyes.

  Her sexual servitude had continued throughout her childhood. Eventually she had escaped. She had married, but her first husband had been a monster who had beaten her mercilessly and terrorized their children. It is common for abused children to pick abusers as their partners; Anna wasn’t to know this. In time he was jailed. Her life reached a more even keel with the arrival of her second husband, who was close to being a saint. Periodically, however, the past revis
ited her. She would retreat into caves of fear and howling coldness, tearing herself on the stalagmites and stalactites of her memories; nightmares descended on her in vicious wolverine packs, ripping at her sanity. Her husband knew where to find her: hiding under the bed. Twice she had tried to hang herself. The guilt ensuing from these attempts at suicide added yet more to her next bouts of depression and self-loathing. It was then that she came to the hospital. It was why she was here now.

  At one stage Anna had become religious, and had gone to church up to three or four times every day. She had prayed and prayed to be left alone, to be cleansed. Once she had taken a small figurine of Christ from the church and had kept it under her pillow until her guilt grew too strong, and she had taken it back to the priest. He had castigated her, telling her not to go there again.

  It was then that she knew there was no God. She had pleaded with Him in the small hours of her childhood as the shadows of tyrants climbed the stairs to her bedroom; she had implored, begged for a miracle, wet herself with fear, but there had been no voice of pity, no help. She knew, now, finally, that there was no God.

  Anna had a special bedroom. Every wall was covered in mirrors. Every square inch.

  Every so often she would go there with a knife and cut her wrists, then smear her blood all over the mirrors. This alleviated her pain for short periods.

  Mr Vogel was indignant on her behalf. He felt angry. Things like that shouldn’t happen in real life: he wasn’t at all sure if they should happen in stories, either.

  He felt like going to her parents to accost them. Were they still alive? Had she seen them since leaving home?

  Anna told him that they were both still alive. Yes, she had been to see them once. They had behaved as if nothing had ever happened, as if they had destroyed all mental records of their crime. When she had asked them to account for their vile behaviour they had told her not to be a silly little girl. Nothing had changed. She had left. She had fitful contact with her brothers, who were unsure whether to believe her story. After all, these were the parents who had shown great love to two of their children, given them plenty of toys and affection; how could they have treated the other so very differently? Surely it was impossible.

  Mr Vogel was in love. He desperately wanted to win the raffle so that he could give her the giant teddy bear. It would make up for all the teddy bears she had never played with when she was a little girl. Perhaps she would stop hurting herself. It would make everything better.

  Mr Vogel didn’t win the raffle. The bear was won by the doctor with the trailing stethoscope, who gave it to the children’s ward. Mr Vogel was so upset he cried on the toilet for hours, and the staff removed his belt.

  The article in the Daily Informer resulted in a trickle of calls: Mr Vogel was quickly identified as David Jones, an eccentric and often drunken disabled man who lived in a scruffy house on a hill near the centre of town. There were a few visitors, most of them from the fringes of society. One was caught trying to smuggle a bottle of whisky onto the ward. The chief guests were a Sumo-bellied builder and his trusty sidekick, a lean and angular man who stayed on the ward only briefly, and who spent most of his time sleeping on one of the benches in the garden outside the entrance to the psychiatric unit.

  An interregnum set in; the passing days became weeks as Gwydion and Mr Vogel worked on the saga, their fabulous version of Mr Vogel’s life and times. Gwydion sat on his ever-rising throne of books while Mr Vogel sat in a chair beside him.

  Mr Vogel’s tall stories now became formal set-pieces, glorious renaissance buildings which housed myths of perpendicular beauty – sheer and poetic. Gwydion enjoyed listening to him as he held forth:

  ‘I remember HM Stanley rather well – we were brought up in the same workhouse, the one in St Asaph,’ he was telling Sylvia the Hoover, who was cat-napping (her dark little head, in an African-looking bandana, had slipped onto his shoulder).

  ‘Met him years later and he told me all about that famous encounter with Livingstone in Africa. When he arrived, apparently, he was met by a huge mob, and he was forced to walk down a living avenue of people, until he came to a white man with a grey beard. Livingstone looked pale and very tired, apparently. Stanley said he felt like running up to him and embracing him, but he was scared of having his pride dented so he tried to be dignified – he walked to him deliberately, took off his hat, and said: Dr Livingstone, I presume?

  Yes, replied Livingstone with a kind smile, lifting his cap slightly (Mr Vogel lifted an imaginary cap). They both grasped hands, and then Stanley said aloud, for all to hear: I thank God, doctor, I have been permitted to see you.

  Sylvia gave a loud snort in her sleep and a jolt went through her body, then she went back to sleep.

  ‘Nice story,’ said Gwydion as he glided up to Mr Vogel and sat down.

  Mr Vogel hardly turned a hair, and embroidered his outrageous fib, looking Gwydion full in the eye:

  ‘Your face reminds me of a man I knew in Africa,’ he continued, his hands waving about expressively as he described his experience. ‘He was bitten by a snake when he was asleep. I tied a string tightly around his leg and since I didn’t have any caustic I put some gunpowder in the wound and exploded it. I cut out the bitten part with a knife and burnt the area with a piece of white-hot iron, then I instructed the porters to keep him awake at all cost whilst I went to sleep – I was too tired to stand by now. If the patient goes to sleep he’ll die: he must be kept awake at all cost.’

  ‘Come on,’ said Gwydion, ‘we’ll go and put that down on paper.’

  ‘Incidentally,’ said Mr Vogel airily, ‘Dickens loved getting out and about before writing – nothing he liked better than a long walk at high speed.’

  Mr Vogel got up and limped to his room, Gwydion following.

  Dr Jackson, or Wacko as he was known on the ward, the consultant psychiatrist, eventually got to see Mr Vogel. Everyone seemed to know when it was the consultant’s visiting day. There was expectancy in the air; Sylvia the Hoover washed and tidied herself, and tried to behave normally – in fact everyone seemed to behave far more normally than they usually did. This mystified Mr Vogel. He sat next to Anna and asked her:

  ‘If I get you a teddy bear will you stop harming yourself?’

  ‘I’ll try,’ she said. ‘I’ll try my best.’ And she meant it.

  Dr Jackson discussed Mr Vogel with his coterie in the interview room.

  ‘Seems we have an interesting case here,’ he said in an overly interested sort of way. He was very well dressed and immaculately groomed, with bright blue eyes and long blond hair waving stylishly around his impressive head. His peers at medical school had called him The Professor. He looked excessively powerful. Donovan thought: That man looks so absolutely right for the part, with his nice hair and his white teeth and his sparkling eyes and his £300 suit and his shiny brogues. Donovan thought illicit thoughts; would the consultant get the same reverential treatment, would he have passed the same exams, he wondered, if he’d been small, lame, ugly, bald and had a couple of teeth missing? No, though Donovan, not bloody likely; people still liked their leaders to look the part. He had noticed that the hospital administrators mostly seemed taller, bigger, smarter, more confident than the ward staff.

  Dr Jackson’s voice took on a carefully modulated tone.

  ‘There’s nothing much we can do about his physical state, since he’s permanently lame – his adventure stories are a complete fabrication. His exploits and escapades are castles in the air, he’s tilting at windmills. For one reason or another he’s living in a fantasy world and our job is to rescue him and bring him back to our world, to reality.’

  A slow series of nods from the gathering indicated that they agreed, though Donovan thought it might be better to leave Mr Vogel in cloud cuckoo land, wherever that might be – beyond Blaenau Ffestiniog, on Pumlumon maybe, in the fifth dimension.

  ‘Now,’ continued Dr Jackson. ‘Debbie, I believe you have been his personal helper. What’s y
our opinion on this?’

  Debbie was still a bit new to the heady atmosphere of the case conference, but she took a deep breath, as her mother had taught her to, pretended she was alone, and read (slightly nervously) from her notes.

  ‘The patient has settled well on the ward. He was upset and agitated at first, but now accepts that he must stay here until he is allowed to go. He seems confused and often says that he cannot be entirely sure what has really happened to him, since the real events of his life have merged with his fictions and his dreams. He’s rather dotty and says strange things. He says that truth has changed continuously since he was born, and he is no longer certain which version he should believe, or whether he should believe anything at all (whatever all that means!).’

  Mr Vogel had told her his theory: that all experiences, bad ones especially, were constantly replayed by the mind, like a video, and edited slightly every time to produce a version of our personal history which was acceptable to the mind.

  ‘That’s all we do throughout our lives, really,’ he told her. ‘We join up with a good story and write ourselves into the script, otherwise it will all have been for nothing.’

  He said that every country on earth has constantly doctored or re-edited its own history, so why shouldn’t he?

  She continued: ‘Mr Vogel says that everything becomes mixed up as you get older, and it doesn’t really matter eventually if it happened or if you dreamt it. He is sociable and polite, and now that he uses his room he likes to sit in it with Gwydion for long periods. They seem to be writing a story and Mr Vogel laughs and cries quite a lot when they’re talking about it. At first he seemed very scared in case we restrained him in some way, or locked him in, but he has now relaxed.’

  ‘He has a strange little habit, hasn’t he Debs,’ Donovan added. ‘Go on, tell them.’

  Debbie reddened and hesitated; now that her delivery had been broken she became quite shaky.

  Dr Jackson soothed her. ‘That’s fine Debbie. You’re doing fine. Please tell us about his little habit. I hope it’s not too offensive...’