by Rhys Hughes
In the morning I’d begin the journey back to Cardiff. In the meantime I’d linger in a world where every twisted leer was a grin. A planet of grins discovered and colonised and exploited by me, but liberated by standing up for nothing in particular.
Nowhere Near Milk Wood
I needed a manager, that’s what, because without one I was going nowhere. And nowhere is probably an unpleasant place. Already I’d been to Swansea, so I had an inkling, though I’m disinclined to judge the two places exactly alike, for the simple reason you can return from Swansea. Plus there’s a difference between going nowhere and going to it. Yes, a manager was called for, and I called for one, wrote actually. I placed an advertisement in a local magazine.
I should have chosen a publication devoted to the music business, I appreciate that now, but they were too expensive. I picked one I could more easily afford. I wrote out my advertisement, keeping it short and enigmatic. Then I waited in my rented room for a reply. I was living in Beresford Road at the time and the flow of traffic outside my window resembled the excited murmuring of the audience I’d never known. In the evenings, the glare of the headlamps pierced the curtains, illuminating the peeling wallpaper that was all I had to look at.
To say I saw patterns there would be interesting, but I didn’t. I tried. The swirls of faded colour, possibly never bright, flickered with the intensity of a dull headache, but they never congealed into the forms of living things. I slept in the chair which was the only item of furniture in the room. There was movement above me, other lodgers, feasibly happier than I, going about their own penurious affairs. I never saw them, though we dwelled in close proximity, nor had I any vast desires in that direction. Anonymity seemed right for this place and time.
One morning there was a knock on my window. I stood and parted the curtains and peered out. A moonface was pressed to the glass on the other side. By this, I don’t mean a round face, jolly and pockmarked, but a thin curved one in profile, fused to a crescent head. He was listening, whoever he was, for sounds of activity within. I obliged by rapping a selection of my knuckles back, and he sprang away from the pane in pain, but then he turned to regard me directly, winked his cold blue eyes and mouthed the words, “May I come in?” and grinned when I nodded.
I went into the grimy hallway and opened the heavy ugly door and invited him into my humble, very bare, abode. He stood uneasily in the dust, wringing his hands and forgetting to blink, and I shivered, but the temperature in my room was always a few degrees lower than it ought to be, whatever the season, so I dismissed this. I would have offered him tea, coffee, fruit juice, weak and salty beer, but I had none, so I reached into a pocket and drew out a small piece of bread, which I was saving for my dinner, but he declined this gift. I replaced it gratefully and we stared at each other helplessly.
After a while, he said, “I’m here.”
“I agree,” I replied, “but who are you exactly?”
“The answer to your advert.”
“Of course!” I exclaimed.
The tension, which had been unbearably abstruse, was broken. We shook hands, a ritual which lasts an hour with me and is best avoided. But I was overjoyed, for I believed the answer to my problems had materialised, a manager, my ticket to delayed success, the balm for my soul, worn out by years of hope deferred. He was my guide on the path to fame, a man with an astronomical head, and a mind for such figures too, for those would be my profits when I hit the big time, if there was any justice in the world, whether the world of elements or the insubstantial one of business. I didn’t care! A mentor, seemingly congealed from the early traffic fumes, here with me at last!
“When can we begin?” I asked.
“Right away,” he said.
“Let’s go!” I enthused.
“Fine,” he replied. “I’ll give you a lift to my factory.”
I was so excited I neglected to question this suggestion until it was too late. I merely followed him out of my room, not even bothering to lock the door behind me because I knew I’d never return, and climbed into the sidecar of his motorcycle, whose chrome side was emblazoned with the image of a speeding glacier, ice crystals vaporising from its surface and flaring off behind like a rocket’s exhaust trail. The engine didn’t start. He turned the key in the ignition again and again and finally it clattered and groaned into some sort of life, undoubtedly alien and doomed. We roared off at walking pace and joined the more competent traffic. This should have told me something.
But it didn’t.
We passed under a railway bridge, where the road was in a dip and flooded with dirty rainwater, and almost failed to make it out safely, but our destination wasn’t far. We went down Tweedsmuir Road until we left the domestic streets behind. Now we were in the district of Tremorfa, where an industrial zone lurked like a temple complex dedicated to boiled eggs. It was depressing and therefore familiar, though I’d never been here before. We spluttered to a halt outside a grey building, a perfect cube, set on its own among black earth and patches of dead grass.
There were no windows in its walls and the main door was metal and chill to the touch. We entered. A freezing mist enveloped us. It was at this point that the first doubt assailed me. Frost cracked on my eyebrows as I knitted them, knitted them not warmly enough, not like cardigans, to display a mild confusion. No, it was severe, my frown, by necessity of temperature. Then I asked him plainly:
“What sort of manager are you?”
“I run a cold storage company. This is it.”
“I wanted a music manager.”
“Yes, but you advertised in the REFRIGERATION GAZETTE, so you have nobody to blame but yourself, unless you deem multiple heads too many to hold just one responsibility.”
“I don’t,” I confessed sadly.
“Well, I’m your manager now. I answered your advert.”
“I need gigs,” I said.
He pondered this and blew on his hands. “I’ll do my best to provide. Have you considered looking for them in the future?”
“The one place I haven’t.”
He gripped my shoulder. “Let’s try there!”
He led me to a chamber at the core of the factory and shut me within. A dim light filtered through an observation slit in the hatch. The interior was bare, almost the same as my room in Beresford Road, but without wallpaper. The sides were ceramic and hard. I squatted and waited, glancing uneasily at the intake pipes in the ceiling. I heard my manager turning valves outside. Then I was sprayed with a very cold fluid, perhaps liquid nitrogen. It lapped around my ankles, my calves, my thighs. My mind began to shut down, suspend its duties, cancel its appointments with ideas. I was being sealed in ice! It didn’t worry me too much, no more than anything else in my life, which was already infinitely bothered. It’s better to be a cube than a square.
A cube which eventually melted. I was free again, but my manager had gone. So had the factory and its machinery, including the chamber which was my prison. So had the industrial zone of Tremorfa and its bordering streets. So had the rest of Cardiff. I crouched in a region of lagoons and a grim wind made sluggish ripples on the metallic waters, which reflected the light of an overcast sky. There was no vegetation, just a crude and sloppy mud tower at the limits of my vision. I reached for my pocket and my piece of bread but it had gone, crumbled to atoms. For that matter so had my pocket and clothes.
Nude, I started limping down the paths between the gelid pools. I had terrible cramp. I wondered how my garments could decay while I was trapped in ice. I guessed I must have been thawing for a long time and the bitter coldness of my present environment had delayed the return of my consciousness. That was it. By the time I reached the tower, circulation had returned to forty of my legs. A figure sat on a stool in the doorway and squinted at me. He was doing nothing, but I’d obviously interrupted him. I didn’t feel sorry.
“Whet du yua went?” he sneered.
“Information, breakfast, celebrity,” I replied.
“Qa
eont eccint,” he snorted. “Uat uf wurk ectur, eri yua? Git ewey, lievi mi eluni. O’m basy, cen’t yua till? Baggir uff!”
“Just as soon as I get what I need. But you don’t look busy to me. You’re just sitting, twiddling, scowling.”
“Nu, O’m pritindong nuni uf thos ixosts et ell.”
He gestured at the entire landscape.
I sympathised. “Keep trying. Don’t give up. But I need a gig.”
“Will, yua wun’t fond uni hiri!”
“I suppose not,” I conceded.
He seemed to soften. “Yua mast gu tu thi Osli uf Chrumi. Ot’s thi unly pleci whiri masocoens mey fond wurk.”
I frowned. “The Isle of Chrome? What’s that?”
“Thi cepotel uf thi lewfal plenit. Fulluw thos peth antol ot bicumis e prupir rued, thin kiip guong elung ot woth nu dovirsouns end yua woll onivotebly git thiri. Guud lack!”
He gave me a fruit for my hunger, but no celebrity for my reputation. The fruit was bruised and ugly. Before I left, I asked him: “Who are you?”
And he snapped, “Thi furmir Prisodint uf thi Wurld...”
I believed him, His bitterness was proof.
“Goodbye,” I said, and he replied:
“Nuw O cen’t ivin jaggli! Ivirythong guis et lung lest!”
And I peeled the fuit and bit into it, because I felt it was expected of me. It was sweeter than its appearance promised, and I hoped this was a metaphor for myself. It hadn’t been so far. But I’m an optimist, always looking to the future. I was living there now, so it had to deliver or I’d be left with nothing. I walked. I left the lagoons behind and reached a very smooth plain, bland and unremarkable, the path dividing it in two, and I wondered if I had wandered into limbo, a future where erosion had flattened every protuberance, each crinkle and crease on the planet’s surface. Not sexy, that. An infinite Belgium of the mind. And cryogenic freezing is a one-way ticket. I was stuck.
The clouds began to break and I glimpsed a pale pink sky beyond. The sun, wherever it was, had started to set. It was going to get even colder. I needed clothes or shelter, but neither were available. There was nothing left to do but run to generate heat. I hate running on empty stomachs, but my options were limited. So I accelerated over the plain and soon the friction warmed my cheeks. I kept under the one hundred miles per hour mark, because of the speed wobble. A sprained ankle at that rate and the ground becomes a big bruise just waiting to pass it onto you when you land. But the terrain was perfectly level, without holes.
As the ambient light dimmed into a muddy dusk, the silhouettes of low hills appeared on the horizon. I gasped in relief and slowed my velocity. The clouds had thinned out even more and stars were visible. I knew I was heading the correct way, though the path hadn’t become the promised road. Behind the lower hills were higher ones, and beyond those true mountains. I was too weary to be inspired, but I saved the memory for later, when I’d have my feet up on a constellation of couches, if that astrological-comfy conjunction ever occurred. I couldn’t feel confident at present it would. I was ravenous and my eye alighted on the first plants I’d encountered, but they weren’t edible. Not yet. A few bluish mosses. Later I encountered ferns and tumbleweed too lazy to roll. No, not lazy. Square. The dice of desolation...
I ran up a slope into a forest of thin trees. They wore their branches bare and I wondered where the man in the tower had got his fruit from. Not from here. The trees were so thin I could almost pinch the thickest between finger and thumb, like the neck of a distant banjo which forgets to grow bigger when you approach it. There were mushrooms in the next forest, wide enough to curl up on, but not quite warm enough for a nude sleeper. Then I was racing between boulders, bandit friendly terrain, if old novels and romantic lithographs are to be believed. They probably aren’t. So don’t! Go on then, have it your way. Reckless. My elevation had increased considerably. I was passing between the hills and catching up with the mountains. They glistened with no colours in the unanimous night, no purples and silver. I slowed my pace again, for I was weak now. I cantered rather than galloped.
Dawn found me weaving through one of the high passes in the range of mountains. On the other side, I paused to look down. Astonishment sent my tiredness to bed. I was fully alert now and aghast at the scene below. Two armies clashed on a field. Bent shields and snapped pikes soon littered the ground. Each side carried lanceolate flags, by which I mean rounded at their ends, but these displayed no symbols of creed or nationality. They were different colours, but blank. As I watched, men died in sordid ways. Within the hour, there were only a few dozen left and I deemed it safe to begin my descent. By the time I reached the field, the battle was down to just two fellows, who took it in turns to hit each other with axes. Both were bearded and dressed in similar attire, though one wore a blue scarf around his neck and the other a red. They stopped when I appeared.
“Agly matent,” said the first.
“Shell wi koll hom?” asked the second.
“O’ll du ot!” the first insisted.
“Nu, ot wes my odie. Lit’s foght fur thi roght!”
At this point I understood what had happened to language. Vowels had evolved. If monkeys, ragtime and milk can evolve — into humans, jazz and butter — then why not vowels? The problem was that they hadn’t evolved into anything else. There was simply nothing for them to change into other than themselves. They were only letters, after all. But they had done their best with what they had. Each vowel had turned itself into the next one along in the alphabet. The last one had looped round to the beginning, like a sequence of support bands in a Swansea pub. The instant I worked this out, I had less difficulty grasping the meaning of such sentences as I heard in my subsequent adventures, which is why I now render them in an ordinary manner, for these subsequent adventures began almost immediately.
I said: “Don’t slay me. For some reason, I love life.”
Together they cried, “Which cause do you support? The rebels or the revolutionaries?”
“Neither,” I returned. “I’m a musician.”
They stroked their beards. “That’s feasible. There was a musician once who was washed up on the Aracknid Islands. He had many arms. Word went round he was available for gigs and many theatre managers booked him. They assumed he would be able to play lots of instruments at the same time. But his arms were tentacles, and he just stood there on stage, unable to play anything!”
“I’m better than that,” I confessed.
“They pitched him back into the sea,” came the reply.
I said, “My destination is the Isle of Chrome.”
The one with the blue scarf declared: “That’s the only decent place in this land. Follow the path to its end. It forks once. Choose the right road. The left goes all the way to Paraparapara.”
“Which is beyond a joke,” said his opponent.
“Beyond three jokes,” corrected the other, though he didn’t specify what they were.
Then they returned to fighting.
I didn’t loiter to watch who won. That’s too immature a thing for me to do. I stole clothes from some dead warriors and continued along my way and the path became a road and I reached the fork I’d been warned about, and I bore to the right.
Now the landscape was softer and more civilised. The sky was filled with balloons and aeroplanes with mystic pictures painted on their wings. Groups of men marched up and down beside me. It made me nervous. I wore no scarf and thus was safe, for it quickly became apparent that the colours blue and red represented the similar but opposed philosophies of rebellion and revolution. With neither hue about my neck I declared my neutrality, trusted by none, but keeping my heads on my shoulders, apart from my long lost one, rather than on poles or plates or pickled in jars, all of which I saw when I passed the camps of one or other of these armies. I’ve never been a political animal, just a beast of mysterious origin and equally peculiar sorts. Safer that way.
I passed through small towns and then larger, and I slept
in orchards and stole fruit. My health was adequate by the time I approached the outskirts of a vast city. It occupied a whole island and was reached across a bridge of tarnished gold. I walked along it and found myself standing at the entrance of a gateway which had been left open. A note fixed to one of the stone lintels announced: GONE TO LUNCH, PLEASE REPORT TO POLICE STATION ON YOUR OWN. And I passed through and searched for the building in question. Few citizens were out, for it was lunchtime, but I soon found the specified edifice. I assumed I had to register my presence there. The Station also featured a gate, but this one was guarded. A small boy levelled a primitive gun at me and I raised my hands in excessive surrender.
“Just following instructions,” I said.
He shook his head and wiped his running nose with a dirty sleeve.
“Will you let me in?” I asked.
He prodded one of my stomachs with the barrel.
“Then I shall leave,” I sighed.
He shook his head again and I grew annoyed.
“Listen here, young man,” I began, “I can’t stand here for the rest of the day, or for however long you think I ought to, because I’ve come a long way, through time as well as space, and I want to do the right thing and settle down here and find some work, for I’m a musician, so let me register my arrival, or whatever I’m supposed to do, and do it fast so I can be on my way looking for gigs, or I’ll be forced to snatch that gun from you and break it over my knee, do you understand?”
He didn’t, so I did. And he burst into tears.
A tall man came swaggering out of the building. He was imposingly absurd in his uniform, which was faded and unwashed. He wore a helmet of patently daft design and a long truncheon on his belt which interfered with his walking. He cried:
“What’s going on here then?”
And I answered, “The youth of today have no respect, neither in the today of the past nor the today of now. It’s the same lack.”
“I might dispute that,” he cried with a frown, “for everything changes over time, and in our era we make much use of chrome, whereas former civilisations favoured flint, iron and plastic. Thus I declare our modern lacks are more shiny than ancient ones.”
