by Lloyd Jones
After his recovery we persuaded him to part with his mules, which we’d kept in a fenced-off part of the hospital grounds, near the psychiatric unit (an unfortunate choice, for reasons I cannot make public); they were sold to a former Welsh professor who did rides on Aberystwyth beach. While visiting them, Gwynoro promptly fell in love with the town and gate-crashed some of the history lectures at the university, where he learned all he wanted to know about Mexico’s revolutionary history, and there’s plenty of that.
This is a very interesting period in my life, amigo, he said to me one day, picking his teeth moodily with a cocktail stick. I’d been called into town to bail him out after an incident in the High Street late the previous night, when he’d fired shots into the air while shouting Viva la Revolución in the manner of a crazed pistolero. Fortunately for him he’d been firing blanks, otherwise he’d be behind bars to this day.
Something had to be done, and quickly. I set up a trust fund and, medics being a kindly lot on the whole, we soon had enough money to buy him a set of ornamental spurs and a plane ticket to Mexico, where we hoped he’d burn himself out and then resume his old life in the Welsh hills. Or maybe he’d make a go of it, establish a new colony perhaps, like a distant relative of mine, John Hughes, who left Merthyr in 1869 and set up an industrial centre called Hughesofca in the Ukraine – now called Donetsk. Within a few years a colony of about a hundred Welsh families had been established there: perhaps Gwynoro could do the same, I conjectured. Little did I know my man. There followed a lull, which encouraged me to think that all was well. Unbeknown to me he was stoking up on tortillas stuffed with fresh green chilis – so hot and dangerous that the locals took him to their hearts, overcome with admiration, and dubbed him El Popo, the nickname of Popocatepetl, a huge active volcano near Mexico City. News came filtering through via the national newspapers that he’d become the leader of Mexico’s largest trade union, and was agitating for land reforms to liberate the peasants. On October 1, 2006, a revolt broke out in Yucatan province and he was arrested. As the ringleader he was charged with insurrection and political agitation. With hindsight, I should have foreseen what was going to happen, it was all rather predictable, given Gwynoro’s childish sense of justice, his hot-headed naivety, and his strange new blood. There were unexpected repercussions. A new cocktail called The Red Hot Welshman became all the rage in Mexico City and led to a number of fatalities.
Exotic blood transfusions took over from size zero, breast implants and Botox as the ‘in’ thing among celebrities, leading to some pretty amazing consequences: Paris Hilton learnt Welsh, became a pig farmer in Powys and wrote a seminal paper on moral philosophy, while Pete Doherty became a Sunday School teacher and part-time fireman in Abersoch, though he went off the rails when they refused him permission to try a new penillion style at the cerdd dant festival. Jordan formed a new pagan cult among the bosky groves of Anglesey, called the Mon Again Druids, and I needn’t tell you what happened to Charlotte and Gavin – really, someone ought to have warned them about doing that sort of thing in Red Square on the coldest night of the year.
I’d bailed him out once, so I did it again. It was getting to be a habit, but I felt partly responsible. I flew out to Mexico (precipitating a substantial backlog of people awaiting operations, and forcing two Assembly AMs to resign), then attested at his trial that the blood transfusion had changed his personality etc, so he was deported with a warning never to bother Central America again, or he’d be starring in a real life version of Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia. I took him home with me and installed him in a caravan, sited in a small paddock by my orchard. I’d used it as a study, and he turned it into a nice little home for himself. Touchingly, he called it his haciendavan. Poor Gwynoro was a broken man by now, and I felt a lump in my throat whenever I saw the shadow of his sombrero floating around inside the caravan – I think he even wore it in bed. I whipped him into hospital for a transfusion and managed to stabilise him on a fairly normal diet, though the red-hot chili sauce was never far from his hand; the smell of it hung in a sickly-sweet haze over the orchard, and my dear wife refused to collect the apples when autumn came. Then I made a fundamental mistake – I sent him on holiday to Porthcawl, hoping the change of air would help. I really should have known better. All went well during the holiday itself, but on the train home he met a Leninist-Trotskyite from Taffs Well (apparently they’re all like that down there) and came home with his head stuffed full of new and exciting notions. He also brought his new friend, called Siencyn, and they set up a radical-syndicalist group called Meibion Marx, using the caravan as their base.
One night, while the neighbourhood was asleep, they rounded up every sheep in the district (using Gwynoro’s ovine expertise) and branded them all on the (left) side with a blood red hammer and sickle. Next day we were hit by a furore unprecedented in Wales, with TV crews and helicopters ravaging the area, and gutter journalists offering substantial sums for any snippet of information. Some over-excited fool burnt down a couple of holiday cottages, and we had pandemonium on our hands for a whole month. Just when I thought the hoo-ha was dying down I was visited by a couple of heavies who looked like Pinkerton men searching for Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, but turned out to be hoods from the US National Security Agency at Menwith Hill, the huge monitoring station on the Yorkshire Moors. Apparently they’d picked up the sheep markings via satellite – there’s wonderful for you. The smallest of the hoods was one of those smarmy super-intelligent types who regaled us for some time (in a false accent straight out of Fargo) with arcane facts about Welsh sheep: apparently our four-legged friends are unique in their tonal range, and had fooled the Menwith satellite system into mistaking their lonesome bleats for the wheel-screech of an antique Russian missile-launcher being manoeuvred into position near Gdansk. For a day or so, apparently, every warhead in Europe had been trained on a small field in Llanfihangel-yng-Ngwynfa.
The smarmy agent went down to the caravan to question Gwynoro and Siencyn, and ended up staying for a whole week. I got quite jealous and wanted to be there too – I could see Gwynoro’s sombrero nodding sombrely as he listened, or wobbling manically as he made a valid point. Jealous? Yes I was. This journey with Gwynoro… was I starting to have feelings for him? Crazy, impetuous fool that he was, rabid village revolutionary, pocket Che Guevara, I spent more time worrying about him, caring about him, than I did for my own wife. I even wondered if some of his blood had seeped into my own system during one of the ops.
It was a four-berth caravan, and I moved in the next day. There was a downside, of course, there always is – I had to share a bed with Siencyn, who snored supersonically or abused himself throughout the night; there was no rest with him – the mark of a bona fide revolutionary.
What a great plot we hatched in our haciendavan, as the September monsoon enfolded us and the season of mists and mellow fruitfulness stained the orchard and the hillsides in a thousand tints of red and brown. Like most budding revolutionaries, I was now able to wax quite lyrical. This was our plan, and it was magnifico: we would steal back to the mid Wales plateau by dead of night and garb ourselves as traditional shepherds. One night, we did just that.
Gwynoro’s hut was still there, but it was in a sorry state, slumped to one side, and the door was off its hinges; we ejected a family of rather irritable sheep, who’d made it their home. Gwynoro stood looking at it for a long time, with one eye crying and one eye laughing, as the Germans put it. But we tidied up and swung into cheese production; I used my medical knowledge to pose as a shaman and soon the other shepherds were flocking to our door in droves, to be cured of ringworm, orf, foot rot, all those common ailments which afflict civilised man.
One thing we all knew as we huddled over our evening repast of cheese stew: sheep were the answer. They invariably are. Our plan was codenamed The Menwith Manoeuvre, and now we swung into action. Waiting for the first moonless night, and working to our detailed instructions, the shepherds of the plateau penned al
l their sheep and branded them anew. Dressed in my shamanic skins and wolf mask, I’d told them to paint a runic sign on the sheep’s flanks, to excite good magic (they were all in my thrall by now). But the sign was in fact the signature of our old friend, Mr Al-Qaida. Our plan worked perfectly: the Menwith satellites zoomed in on the sheep at first light, and by breakfast time the agents were arriving in carloads. We were able to deal with these small-scale incursions on a man-to-man basis, and the first day went well – I think we lost only two men to their sixty or so. The next day saw the arrival of the armoured corps, as we anticipated, and we were ready for them. It was Gwynoro who would claim the credit for the brilliance of our plan. Remembering that the shepherds were expert carvers, he ordered them to shape huge flocks of snowy white sheep out of cheese, and the results were breathtaking. Only when you touched them did you suspect the sheep weren’t real. That wasn’t all. Each of them carried a sizeable explosives charge, designed by Siencyn, who’d had a mania for that sort of thing since he was a small boy, running errands for Meibion Glyndwr on the streets of Taffs Well. Our false sheep were arranged in eye-catching clusters along the only pass into the region, and it was Siencyn who detonated them at opportune moments, resulting in another major success, and by the gods we were proud of ourselves by nightfall – the Americans retreated ignominiously: the battlefield was ours. To the victor his spoils, and we celebrated deep into the night, quaffing bowlfuls of sheep’s milk followed by cheese stew and, for dessert, cheese fondue a la Grec. When dawn broke on the bloodstained fields, we knew that every single Cruise missile, every warhead the Americans possessed, would be ready to obliterate us from the landscape. And so we embarked on Plan B. It was audacious, and if we held our nerve manfully our names would live forever alongside such revolutionary luminaries as Garibaldi and Guevara.
During the early period, as we went about establishing ourselves as shepherds on the plain, I’d approached the Arts Council with a startling and original project. I planned to drive a flock of sheep, in the tradition of the old drovers (and following all the old drovers’ routes) to Yorkshire. In a bogus and specious application bid I ‘proved’ that the speckled sheep of mid Wales were of ancient Celtic stock originating from the old Brythonic hills in the north of England, and my thesis was that the sheep would walk faster and faster as they got closer to home, and indeed would need no human guidance at all. The dimwits at the arts council swallowed it hook, line and sinker – soon I was a quarter of a million quid better off and the whole of Wales was primed, courtesy of a gullible and sentimental media, for the sight of a huge flock of sheep being herded along the A55 Expressway, followed by a posse of oddly-dressed shepherds. I’m glad to say, the police were most helpful. Our journey to the Pennines went remarkably well, though the short dash along the verge of the M6 (northbound) was dangerous and depressing. Once up on Saddleworth Moor, however, the sheep were in their element and they threatened to prove my ‘theory’ correct, such was their friskiness and general unruliness. Eventually we reached our destination, well aware that the Americans were still following us, missiles primed and loaded. On the last night of our expedition we staged an extravaganza for the media. After sacrificing some of our flock (not without a tear or two) we held a full eisteddfod, complete with a crowning and a chairing, followed with a feast held by rushlight to the wail of the brochbib and the crwth. Dressed in sheepskin jerkins and black pantaloons, with wide-brimmed leather hats and puttees, we were a formidable and emotional sight, moving even hard-bitten reporters to tears. But they were silent by the morning – we’d spiked their milkshakes with Rohyprol and, of the three hundred who revelled with us that night, only one was left standing by the morning. Meanwhile we’d been busy with the final – and most impudent – part of our plan. Before starting off we’d partly-sheared the left flank of each sheep, leaving a loose flap of wool which was held in place with a clothes peg. Underneath it we’d inscribed the tender flesh with the well known insignia, in a flowing Arabic script, of the Al-Qaida family. Now, as dawn’s rosy fingers touched the east, we quickly removed the loose wool-flap on each sheep and pointing the whole flock towards Menwith Hill. Tears flowed as we waved them goodbye, but there was no holding them back now – they ran as if they’d seen the Promised Land. Alas, they would be in heaven sooner than they imagined. Within a few minutes they were in the shadow of the American tracking station, and soon enough the satellite system picked them up. The Al-Qaida insignia did its job remarkably well; almost immediately a welter of Scud and Cruise missiles filled the air with their hissing death-songs, and in no time at all the sheep and the tracking station were pulp and rubble.
We had little time to grieve, or to celebrate. Divesting ourselves of our garb, we swapped clothes with some of the sleeping journalists and milled around for a while, asking crass questions and prodding the dead sheep. Late that day we made our escape in a four by four with smoked windscreens, purloined from a hapless journo, and returned to Wales. We went back to the haciendavan and lay low for a while, but our revolutionary fervour was on the wane and sadly we took to quarrelling and blaming each other for the deaths of so many healthy and lovable sheep. Siencyn and the smarmy agent went their own ways, while Gwynoro and I went back to the hut on the plain where we spent the rest of our lives living as gentle rustics: tending our sturdy speckled sheep, making a strong hard cheese in our mountain hut, and carving ornate bijou objects below an old, forgetful sky.
yellow
I AM a nondescript European, podgy and white, with the sort of snowman’s body all eyes flit away from on the beach. But once, briefly, I was yellow.
For a while I felt alien to myself and the world – as if I’d just landed on another planet. Or perhaps I felt like a Chinese coolie, shipped to the New World and cast among strangers, slaving on a new railroad in hostile surroundings: waiting for an arrow in the back, or a fatal bout of cholera.
It was a strange experience: wherever I went people looked at me surreptitiously but few said anything. Years later my friends joked about it – everyone seemed to have a when you were yellow anecdote, but they mostly kept shtum at the time.
It started in my eyes, this yellow pigment, and I began to wilt, as if I were an autumn leaf on the turn or a neglected houseplant.
Looking in the bathroom mirror, in a strange house in an unfamiliar place – I was living temporarily on an island – I saw my eyeballs change colour slowly, taking on a urine hue at their borders. Yellow on white: that eye-catching duotone you see when your piss hits the ceramic trough in a public urinal. It was a slow process: for days I thought it was an illusion. My visits to the mirror became ever more frequent and ever more pathetic; I stared and shifted in the pallid light, not quite believing my own eyes, but when I lifted my eyelids I saw confirmation of my fears. I was turning yellow. There was a feeling deep inside my head that the dye was leaking from addled metal drums strewn around in a central depot deep inside my body, delivered there in dirty yellow lorries, and then dumped as poison in the still ponds of my surface life by tattooed mercenaries.
But to admit the truth, it was I alone who was the polluter.
Soon my companions in the house noticed too. The cuticles on my nails were next, little crescent moons turning cheesy yellow, and each morning when I checked myself, dreamily self-absorbed, the stain had spread further in a slow blush across my body. Death was doodling on my skin while chatting on the phone, making arrangements for my funeral.
When I walked around in public I thought of the Jews, forced to wear the Star of David in Nazi Germany. Suddenly I felt a strong sense of empathy with them; I felt as though I were wearing my own personal yellow star – my skin. I’m not trying to make a connection, god forbid, my condition was trivial in comparison. But that is what I thought of then. My sanity changed colour about that time too. I’m told that madness has been linked with the colour yellow. And I remember an advertising man telling me during one of those mystifying workplace conventions that yellow is the best
colour to use if a black and white advert needs bringing out – the human eye is drawn to it quicker than any other tint.
So I went to see a doctor – who saw at a glance that I was a living advertisement for my ailment. No prizes for guessing what created this new yellow me. Two bottles of vodka a day chased down with gut-rot cider – the fabled White Lightning – on top of hardly any food at all had battered my liver into submission. Within hours I was in hospital, watching real living people as they really really died.
There’s a phrase, frightened to death. But during that episode I was frightened to life. Frankly, the shock of that yellow malfunction made me realise how awfully mortal I was, and I ran for my dear little life. Sheer cowardice. As I’d suspected all along I was a yellowbelly, literally and metaphorically. I’ve not had a drink since December 28, 2001 – and I’m an average white man again nowadays. Incidentally, vodka birthdays are much more meaningful than real birthdays. December 28 shimmers in my cranial calendar as no other date ever has: it’s the birthday of my twin brother who came out of my side, into the world, about fifty years after my own birth. We talk together often about December 28: he has a morbid interest in the lifetime I led before that date.
The years passed and my yellow period faded almost out of memory. One doesn’t meet many yellow people in public, not the lurid yellow of the jaundiced, anyway. Then, one day, I came across a yellow person in a very public place. I was standing on a platform at Crewe railway station, waiting for my connection, when she walked in front of me. My emotional response was immediate and strong: I wanted to go to her. The instinct was very powerful – magnetic. I wanted to tell her that I too had been yellow once upon a time. But of course I didn’t. I say of course, but we don’t trot up to absolute strangers, normally, do we? For a start, there might be reasons other than alcohol for her hue. Hepatitis caught on holiday perhaps, or kidney stones. So I stood and watched her, fascinated, as if I were a rare bird watching another of my kind coming in to land on an otherwise lifeless island strewn with the hot dry guano of thirst. I reasoned that she wouldn’t want to be bracketed with an ageing alcoholic. She might be ashamed of her colour, wouldn’t want anyone to draw attention to it. And decorum, bloody decorum. Christ, the decorum of humans in public places, passing each other without a word or a nod. Urbanites in particular treat every passing male as if he were Hannibal Lecter in the last frothing throes of avian flu and rabies combined.
