My First Colouring Book

by Lloyd Jones

  I noticed that Eugene was wearing white gloves, and I surmised from his newly brushed hair that he had been spruced up by the servants. But he was ill at ease throughout, fidgeting with his hat, which he held in his hands between his legs, and casting nervous glances at the people around him.

  Mercifully, the lady of the house made but a short speech in which she alluded to her wedding day, the arrival of Eugene on their lawn during the celebrations (laughter), the construction of the garden, its formal opening, and the awards which had followed (applause), its development and maturation, and its role now in the hearts and minds of those who knew it, walked in it, and loved in it. They had sought out the garden’s creator and he was the guest of honour that day (more applause), for he had returned again after many years to witness a day of celebration and joy, marked by the unveiling of a suitable statue. Without further ado, our hostess untied the golden cord and a servant whisked away the wrapper, revealing a bronze statue of a young man under an apple tree, about to pluck a fruit from a lower bough. In all respects it was most realistic, partly because the tree was a real apple tree, contained in a large terracotta pot. The likeness to Eugene was apparent only in the characteristics of the face, since we had here a young Adonis in his pomp, well muscled and strongly built. His hair was wreathed in laurels and his left hand held a cornucopia, full of fruit, into which he was about to place an apple from the tree; he had the aspect of a god of fertility greeting the spring. The head, and in particular the nose, was perfectly recognisable, however, and drew admiring glances and exclamations from the throng. Eugene was pressed to say a few words, but declined clumsily. Instead, he asked our hostess if he could be taken on a tour of the garden, to the Cedar of Lebanon and around all the delightful attractions he had constructed all those years ago. He tottered off, and I followed, admiring the lady’s bearing from behind, though knowing little about the flowers and bushes which grew in profusion – yet with great subtlety and delicacy – in their allotted places. As we approached the huge tree which dominated the far end of the garden he stopped by a small artificial waterfall, near a weeping willow. He looked at his guide, who seemed to understand his wishes. She looked at me, then at him; he looked around at me, shrugged his shoulders and mumbled something, then she parted the descending willow fronds and led him into the tree’s ambit. I followed them, at a slight distance, until I too was underneath the willow’s umbrella of foliage.

  After a while, when my eyes had grown accustomed to the gloom, I saw them approach an irregular doorway, which turned out to be the boulder-strewn entrance to a picaresque grotto, glinting with reflective stones, and revealing gargoyles, daemons and hamadryads moving in and out of the rough-hewn walls. At the far end, in a pool of light created by a cunning aperture in the grotto roof, I could see a comfortable divan covered over with a deep crimson wrap and bathed in the soft green leaf-colour of the weeping willow outside. On it was a young woman, very pale and distracted, with her shoulders hunched and her hands clenched between her knees. She was introduced to me as the lady’s daughter, about to be married. I congratulated her and tried to make small talk, as one does with a stranger. And yet she had familiar looks. Surely I knew her from somewhere else? I searched my memory. There was something about her face – the nose, the bone structure; her expression when she looked at her mother, at Eugene, and then at me. As we all sat in silence, with the pale young woman and her mother on the divan, and Eugene and I on cast iron garden chairs painted white, on either side of her, it became clear to me suddenly that I was about to learn a very shocking secret.

  green

  DURING that chimeless hour before midnight, between the last glass of wine and bedtime, I go to sleep for a while. The girls have gone, taking all the oxygen with them, and in the dry heat my eyes droop; my brain shimmers into a faraway camel moving slowly in a desert heatwave, and I drift pleasantly into a little nap among the crumbs. As I crumple slowly into a punctured balloon I nod off to the sound of a bluebottle flying lone sorties around the room. It speeds up and down the valleys between the mugs and the jugs, strafing the leaning towers of crockery and, in the eerie silence between its full-throttle dives, I know a Dream is about to come my way.

  It’s so strange, the world inside my Dream. I’m alone in the house and I’m pensive. I call out to you, as I always do in my Dream. But you’re not there. You’ve gone again. I try to say some words but my mouth won’t work. I’m trying to say: Please come home to me – let that door open now, let it be you. I won’t care if you leave oil stains on the handle or cement dust on the carpet...

  But nothing at all comes out, not a word.

  When a Dream comes I go to another country, but you never seem to be there. I’m always looking for you. I go out in the shimmering silence of first light, as the songbirds start to sing, looking for you under a shiny new rainbow. I’m in my flowery plastic mac and favourite red Wellingtons. I skip out of the house and storm down the road, full of wonderment and puzzlement, walking in any direction, looking for you. The Dream’s in colour, it’s nice and bright in here. Pausing for breath by the school I encounter a small table, draped with a red damask cloth, on which someone has built a makeshift shrine with a crucifix and a picture of Jesus, bearded, smiling in his flowing blue robes. A candle burns in a glass lantern and there are prayer beads, a holy book, and messages of hope scribbled in childish writing. Among them an upturned fly, dead, and a note, in your hand: Please pray for my wife Rachel, about to be troubled by a Dream.

  A small boy dressed in the crimson and white of a choirboy kneels by the shrine and I ask him: What is the meaning of this?

  A small girl, he says warily, noticing my wild air, is in a state of exultancy: waves of great emotion pass over her in the classroom – one minute she swoons in a paroxysm of sorrow, the next she cries out in ecstasies of happiness.

  I also scribble a message and leave it on the table: Come back to me Benito, I love you more than all the flowers of spring.

  Homewards I wend, already exhausted. I crawl fitfully under a marigold sun and the garden wilts without you, Benito: a robin in a scarlet cope celebrates mass in the shrubbery, singing a canticle for your safe deliverance. Sitting on the stairs I weep in a white cloud belching from the great swinging incense-burner you’ve constructed on a whim in the hallway. Now my brain crumbles: through the window I see you walking intently towards the woods… yes, it’s you, stepping into your willow cathedral. A troupe of mistle thrushes, finials on every treetop, sing you in with madrigals and tropes.

  What a Dream I’m having, Benito.

  Filled with trepidation now, I don my red Wellingtons again and follow you into the trees… but what’s this? The Dream’s going bad! You’re nowhere to be seen, Benito. I’m in a sylvan snare, trapped by the Green Man. I can sense him, my body’s going hot and I’m making whimpering sounds like a sleeping dog.

  The Green Man has found me out. Lurking near a massive oak he scents me and yowls pitifully. His massive lugs swivel towards me – two fleshy, algae-mottled satellite dishes, furred with age; his eyebrows unfurl and move towards me on the wind in dense filaments, sensing my humid core. Sequinned with seeds, he dazzles. He sibilates in his ancient language, a primeval earth-moan, words dribbling from his mouth in a thick, green chlorophyll slime. His feet have disappeared: he sways plant-like, up to his shins in loam; his loins are wrapped in pantaloons of rotting humus. His eyes scan me for blight and mould; he beckons with his branchlet arms, urging me upwards through tangled leaves which darken the sky. Into him and through him I climb, panting, raking my shins on his spiny bark. Up among the cumuli, in a cloud-halo, I find a flower-strewn platform, a pixie place bathed in lantern lights – a fairy citadel glowing in soft, diffused colours. On the wind comes a haunting melody, a shepherd’s lament wafting from ancient reed-pipes. In the distance I see you Benito, my paramour, I see you writhing and weeping in the long grass. Benito, I cry. Benito my own true love.

  Opening my lichen-tinted ha
nd, I drop a dead fly into the awaiting moss bowl. A shudder goes through the Green Man: my token has been accepted. Enfolding me tenderly in swathes of fine tendrils, he scans me for the knowledge he needs; then he downloads noisily, sucking my brain through a straw. My head whirrs; he rewards me with sensations far beyond human emotions: sensual tremors sweep through my body in waves lasting hours, maybe days. Now I must fly from him. He gurgles with pleasure as I rend my clothes in a frantic helter-skelter descent. Lunging at me, his fronds try to pod me, to rip away my fragile anthers. Running now, I laugh and sing on the dusty road as I flee. The people I meet on the way are Tylwyth Teg, elfin and animated, returning from their revels, a night of moonlit dancing on the green. Greeting me boisterously, they drive their miniature cattle before them, lowing and heavy with milk; in their arms they hide stolen babies, mewling and wan. I will away to the savannahs, to find Benito. I climb upwards through a ravine, among colossal boulders, to the tableland where three rivers meet, then I hit the Roman road: a white weal in the moorland, a dribble of history along the mountain’s bilberry tablecloth. Far below me on the yellow strand, where I first laid eyes on you Benito, a mermaid sings among the wandering sailors, blind and bumbling men with broken nets and broken dreams. Her tender young body indents the summer sand, warm and golden. At last I reach the Druids’ Circle, ashen with exhaustion.

  Ah, my lovely Dream. My sad, mad Dream.

  Benito, he’s so brazen. Just as I expected, he’s drunk again, or drugged with happiness – stretched out languorously at full length on the short-cropped grass, propped up on his left elbow. His flowing locks and moustaches glow in a ray of preternatural light; his blue overalls, spattered with paint, have been cast aside. He’s as naked as the day he was born. Tears well up and spurt onto my cheeks. Benito, you break my heart, I whisper.

  In his left hand, I think, he holds the Pipes of Pan; in his right hand a crystal glass, which swirls loops of effervescent wine into the refulgent air as he sways to the rhythm of his dark music. Flushed, his face glows with pleasure. His luminous, intoxicated eyes stay on her throughout, lovingly, as she poses and pirouettes, executes perfect arabesques in the soft green grass. His crazy, adoring inamorata. A woman in her eighties. The shame of it!

  She is dressed – undressed? – in a harebell costume, barefoot, dancing around the standing stones, tinkling a song of enchantment and sleep. Yes, dammit, in a lawn green pixie dress, torn (by him?) in provocative places. And the giggle on the girl.

  On top of a monolith her cat purrs a mighty purr, her back arched with pleasure.

  Behind them twelve white rabbits, in top hats and tails, throw themselves into a Moulin Rouge can-can. He ignores me. The bastard.

  I flee homewards, plastic Wellingtons chaffing my legs. The cock crows thrice at Cammarnaint Farm and I am forsaken. At eight bells I weep in the heather. Now my lover is Caliban, dancing with fell Sycorax the witch; I am Ariel, imprisoned in the cloven pine. My teeth ache with longing – for his hot breath in my hair, for his arms around me. Oh! – to hear the hiss of his spit sizzle in the fireplace on a stormy winter’s night.

  As I descend, pathetically, into the town a fine rain arrives in ribs of white which drift slowly across the valley, dreamlike towers of foam disintegrating in slow motion onto the land... handfuls of chalk thrown to the wind. On the shimmering roads I walk on water, and my steps hiss in the trees. I am an insect drifting on a melting ice-mirror. I am nothing without him.

  The bells on the fuchsias toll for me.

  Drunk as a lord and pawed wantonly by matelots singing rude hornpipes in the Victoria Hotel, I shed all my inhibitions and dance naked on a sticky table. My toes are crimson with bilberry juice or blood. Retribution, Benito. I have a jamjar of gin in my hand and jack tars aplenty to keep me amused. Cuckolded by an eighty-year-old pixie? Not me, not gracefully. Landlord! – pour some more gin in my jar! Slop my future into a bucket and throw it to the pigs!

  Twilight and evening bell,

  And after that the dark!

  And may there be no sadness of farewell,

  When I embark …

  My dream, Benito, it’s my Dream again.

  Furiously, I tell them everything, those fuddled fools dribbling into their black porter. One of them raises his shipwrecked eyes from the flotsam beer mats and eyes me as steadily as he can. His voice I don’t recognise, but there’s something about the twitch in his right hand which reminds me of… yes, it’s Cadfan, the town scrivener, missing presumed drowned for fifty years or more. On his eye-patch the Old Testament writ complete in a lovely monastic script. Medieval Welsh – a speciality in these parts. I greet him warmly, fondle his stump. He has been on a voyage to fetch green tiger beetles to make his ink, iridescent and everlasting: he is ready for his first commission. A scroll of calfskin vellum on the table already bears a massive decorated capital in the shape of my naked body caught deliciously in flagrante. The likeness is remarkable, down to the goosebumps.

  Take a note, Cadfan, I boom magisterially through my plentiful tears.

  Dear Pixie,

  I will have my husband back without further ado. Whatever your magic, ancient and horrid hag, unfetter him now and send him home to his beloved (me). Shipwrecked he came ashore and shipwrecked he will soon be again, on the rocks of your lust. It was I who saved him with love and broth, who made his thighs the girth of a small bull and his manly item as big as a fencing post. It was I who bought him his first plastering trowel down the market; it was I who carried his first sack of lime from the kilns on my bent back; it was I who cooked him supper every night, the hod still stuck – with sweat – to my exhausted body, you witch. It was I who tended his manly wounds with waterproof plasters and it was I who bore him twelve children (all of them done well, three of them doctors and one a prophet).

  May the fleas of a thousand camels infest your ****.

  Yours, Rachel (daughter of Jones the Postman).

  Homewards I wend my weary way, in my red Wellingtons, naked in the streets and humbled. Toothless grandmothers, sitting on their doorsteps in black, laugh at me, saying they will be next to woo him. Outside the school Christ is weeping tomato ketchup from his stigmata, and the school kids smirk at me.

  Pixie, Pixie, Benito loves a Pixie they chant in unison. My own little Megan among them, there’s no pity to be had. Crouching again under the great incense-burner in the hallway I blub and flay my skin with a torn picture of him, my poor Benito. What I’d give now to hear the clatter of his hobnailed boots in the yard, the roar of his voice in the pigshed. Instead I see a note being pushed through the letterbox, and I recognise the inky green fingers of Cadfan, no less. He beats a hasty retreat whilst I read the scrawl, which glows beetle-green.

  Dear Rachel (daughter of Jones the Postman),

  I have been to see for myself what they’re up to, your husband and the pixie, still on the mountain they are and dare I say it, fallen into sin with night fast approaching and danger at every turn on the lonely moor. The music I don’t mind but I draw the line at wine, men should stick to beer. I agree that lawn green suits her exceedingly, and the distressed hemline, slanting from her left thigh to her right knee, was a subtle and provocative masterstroke. Her dancing, like Isadora’s at its best, was simply divine. The rabbits were superb and fulfilled their obligations to the letter. Rachel my love, you are radiant, you are sunsparkle on the shimmering ponds of heaven. I include herewith a solution to your problems and a relevant recipe.

  All my love, Cadfan ap Iago the Younger.

  PS. I am only sixty-seven and carry with me always a diploma in calligraphy from the Benevolent School for Retired and Maimed Sailors.

  Naked under my see-through plastic mac, iconic in my red Wellingtons, I skip out of the house joyfully and storm the shops, grabbing goods off the shelves willy-nilly. I career up and down the Co-op, scouring every aisle for delicacies and scattering shoppers with my overloaded trolley. I pay for it all with promises and daisy chains. Soon I am ready to
execute the coup de grace. Oh, my beautiful Dream.

  Benito, I am writing in my beautiful Dream!

  Dear Cadfan ap Iago,

  As you suggested, I put the dish before him in his love bower at the height of the revelry; if I might say so, your recommendation – wild mushroom, chestnut and sage penne was a brilliant choice. After selecting the finest ingredients: penne pasta, Umbrian olive oil, Sicilian butter, fresh porcini mushrooms, garlic, sage, parmesan and freshly roasted chestnuts, accompanied by a poignant Chianti, I cooked the feast alfresco on the summit of Dinas, on a fire fragranced with wild mountain herbs. Needless to say, the first mouthful dispelled his fantasy and within seconds he was back to normal. He returned penitent to the lowlands, holding my hand like a naughty schoolboy. After a satisfying and complete repast, three bottles of wine and a nap in front of the telly, he’s back to his old self again. I would be grateful if you would send me a bill to cover your costs. Please advise the octogenarian pixie that her cat has fleas. More important, please inform her that my lover has reclaimed his sanity, and that her wiles will work no more. Tell the old witch she’s no match for my love – and fresh porcini mushrooms.

  Tell her also that the fly she put in my ointment has been disposed of.

  Yours appreciatively, Rachel.

  Sometime before the chimes of midnight I wake suddenly after a little nap, my head resting on the table, nestling in the crook of my right arm. I’m still holding a knife and my hair’s sprinkled with breadcrumbs. It’s almost dark in the soft glow of the telly: there are shadows among the crocks and the cruets. The furry taste in my mouth, tinged with garlic and wine, reminds me that we’ve just enjoyed a large and pleasant meal. My eyes focus, slowly, on a fly. It’s dead, I think, lying upside-down on the tablecloth, a small black blob. I flick it away and it disappears among the cups and the plates – a miniature china city, deserted.