by Rhys Hughes
The girl looked up. The tears stopped flowing. Tony drew back. She broke into a high pitched laugh. “Actually, I lied. You were right the first time. I’m an angel in disguise. The Archangel Gabriel, to be precise. And yes, you are going to burn in Hell after all. I’m not a mortal so the contract still holds. Sorry! Just a little joke of mine. Can’t help it, I’m afraid. What else am I supposed to do on my day off? Now don’t lose your temper. Just a little joke. Nothing to get upset about, eh?”
Later, as Tony left the waterfront, he began whistling. A new number had already come into his head. ‘Broken Angel Blues’ would surely help him regain his rightful place as the greatest jazz musician in the world. But would he ever be known as the king of jazz again? Perhaps it was time for a change. Slowly, he held up a long burnished trumpet and an auburn wig. He wondered.
8: Anna and the Dragon
The TALL STORY is one of the most cosmopolitan pubs in creation. Every night, men and women of a hundred different creeds and colours from all parts of the city mingle together as equals. The Docklands have always been a melting pot of cultures and its reputation for lawlessness is certainly undeserved. Hywel has always encouraged the local Somalis, Yemenis, Chinese, Poles, Greeks, Swedes, Scots, Indians and even the English to enjoy each other’s company and to exchange ideas.
He is even willing to serve students – one of the most mistrusted of all minorities. They often come in and treat themselves to a glass of cider – between ten. When they are feeling particularly flush, they will even splash out on a packet of crisps. Because they are disliked by so many, they make ideal scapegoats and the Government is able to grind them under the heel with few voices raised in protest. The poorest student who ever lived was called Michael, and the only thing he ever owned was a bad idea, but he doesn’t drink in this story.
Some of these students are young couples – filled with an idealism and enthusiasm that have long since abandoned Hywel and myself. They often sit by tables near the windows, arguing politics and philosophy and the merits of tinned vegetables. Hywel regards their colourful clothes, their scarves and books of bad poetry as a father might regard the toys of a favourite child.
“See those four over there?” he said to me one day. “Well I could tell many a tale about them that would make your hair stand on end! Some of the oddest tales I have ever heard!”
Business was quiet that evening. In front of the fire, the three climbers still rested their weary limbs, one of them shunned slightly by the other two. And there were only three writers present: James Joyce, Dylan Thomas and Gabriel García Márquez. They were engrossed in their own affairs, laughing and joking. There was also Dr Karl Mondaugen, the mad scientist of Munich, who was busy building a new machine from spent matches which he picked out of the ashtray.
Apart from these, there was a quartet of students, chatting by the window. I knew their names but had never spoken to any of them. I am less tolerant than Hywel (I foolishly believe that students have easy lives.) There was Claire and Peter Elliot and Anna and Gareth Thomas. I had heard that Peter was not a nice man; Gareth, on the other hand, was a friend of Billy Belay and had a reputation as a practical joker.
The girls were both quite shy and I knew very little about either. Hywel had hinted that Claire had already been married once – to Alan Griffiths. But it was Anna he wanted to talk about.
He said: “You would never guess, would you, that she is an expert on dragons? I mean, real fire-breathing dragons! Let me tell you how and why. Ever since she was little, she has been fascinated by stories of knights and dragons. You know the sort of thing: fierce dragon takes up residence in a cave and terrorises local village; village leaves a helpless maiden each year as a sacrifice to placate dragon; brave knight slays dragon and rescues maiden. Usually the knight then marries the maiden and they live happily ever after.”
“I know the type of story,” I replied. “The old tales of chivalry and heroism. St George and all that.”
“Exactly. But for Anna they were much more than mere stories. She believed implicitly in them. She amassed an enormous collection of books about the subject. Secretly, you see, she envied those maidens and wanted to be one. She wanted to be rescued by her very own handsome knight.”
I studied the group of students more closely. I was always amazed at how Hywel seemed to know so much about his patrons.
“But she ended up with Gareth instead?” I asked, innocently.
Hywel waved me aside. “Wait for it! Anyway, as I was saying, she longed to be a helpless maiden in peril, a damsel in distress if you like, and thought about little else. One day she was reading such a tale for the umpteenth time in an old story book – one of those collections of legends with illustrations on every page – when a voice spoke to her. Do you know what it said?”
I had to admit that I did not.
“Well it was a magic voice and it said something like this: ‘Anna, there are few of us left now and we need your assistance. Will you help us?’ And at the same time, the picture in the book came alive. It was the picture of a maiden chained to the entrance of a cave, watched over by anxious villagers. A dragon was emerging from the cave and, in the distance, a dashing knight was riding into view.”
“That seems a bit unlikely,” I muttered. “Are you sure this story is entirely accurate?”
Hywel ignored me. “As she watched breathlessly, the mystical voice continued. This time it said: ‘Anna, few people are willing to take our place and we desperately need volunteers.’ Although Anna couldn’t be sure, she was convinced it was the maiden who was talking. So she replied: ‘Yes, of course I will help you. Of course I will take your place.’ And she clapped her hands for joy.”
I mumbled and rapped my fingers doubtfully on the counter. But I knew better than to protest too vehemently at this stage. “So she was drawn into the picture and became a maiden?” I asked cynically. “And I suppose the knight rescued her and they were married?”
Hywel shook his head vigorously. “Not at all. She was drawn into the picture, sure enough, but when she looked down, it wasn’t the body of a maiden that she saw. Oh no!”
“What then?”
Hywel stamped his foot and roared with laughter. “Scales of course! It was the dragon who had spoken to her!”
This was too much even for me. I refused to join in Hywel’s mirth. Very soberly, I straightened my tie and replied calmly: “That is the most absurd tale you have ever told me. I simply refuse to believe it. If it really happened, then how come Anna is sitting over there now? I demand you tell a sensible story for once.”
Hywel was suitably chastened. “Would you like to hear about those other two and their disastrous trip to Ireland?”
I responded in the negative and gestured at the mountain climbers. “Tell me about those. Why are two of them so wary of the third?”
“Ah, the Three Friends! By all means, if you insist, but you may wish that I hadn’t afterward. Just a friendly warning.”
“Why?” I asked.
Hywel squinted up his eyes. “Wait and see,” he said menacingly. And those eyes twinkled.
9: Three Friends
The three friends were mountain climbers who had trekked to the roof of the world. They had encountered many dangers on the way and each had taken a turn to plunge down a crevasse. Bound together by ropes as well as friendship, it seemed they had all escaped death by the narrowest of margins. One by one, they had praised their luck and had agreed that teamwork was wonderful.
After the end of one particularly difficult day, as the crimson sun impaled itself on the needle peaks of the horizon, the three friends set up their tent on a narrow ledge. The first friend, who had survived the first crevasse, boiled tea on his portable stove and lit his pipe. Stretching his legs out as far as the ledge would allow, he blew a smoke ring and said:
“The wind whistles past this mountain like the voice of a ghost, shrill as dead leaves. The icy rock feels like the hand of a very aged corpse. Those
lonely clouds far away have taken the form of winged demons. Everything reminds me of the region beyond the grave. I suggest that we all tell ghost stories, to pass the time. I shall go first, if you like.”
Huddling closer to the stove, the first friend peered at the other two with eyes like black sequins. “This happened to me a long time ago. I was climbing in Austria and had rented a small hunting lodge high in the mountains. Unfortunately, I managed to break my leg on my very first climb and had to rest in the lodge until a doctor could be summoned. Because of a freak snowstorm that same evening, it turned out that I was stuck for a whole week. The lodge had only one bed. My guide, a local climber, slept on the floor.
“Every night, as my fever grew worse, I would ask my guide to fetch me a drink of water from the well outside the lodge. He always seemed reluctant to do this, but would eventually return with a jug of red wine. I was far too delirious to wonder at this, and always drank the contents right down. At the end of the week, when my fever broke, I asked him why he gave me wine rather than water from the well. Shuddering, he replied that the ‘wine’ had come from the well. I afterward learned that the original owner of the lodge had cut his wife’s throat and had disposed of her body in the obvious way...”
The first friend shrugged and admitted that his was a very inconclusive sort of ghost tale, but insisted that it was true nonetheless. He sucked on his pipe and poured three mugs of tea. Far below, the last avalanche of the day rumbled through the twilight. The second friend, who had survived the second crevasse, accepted a mug and nodded solemnly to himself. He seemed completely wrapped up in his own thoughts. Finally, he said:
“I too have a ghost story, and mine is true as well. It happened when I was a student in London. I lived in a house where another student had bled to death after cutting off his fingers in an heroic attempt to make his very first cucumber sandwich. I kept finding the fingers in the most unlikely places. They turned up in the fridge, in the bed, even in the pockets of my trousers. One evening, my girlfriend started giggling. We were sitting on the sofa listening to music and I asked her what was wrong. She replied that I ought to stop tickling her. Needless to say, my hands were on my lap.
“I consulted all sorts of people to help me with the problem. One kindly old priest came to exorcise the house. I set up mousetraps in the kitchen. But nothing seemed to work. The fingers kept appearing on the carpet, behind books on the bookshelf, in my soup. I grew more and more despondent and reluctantly considered moving. Suddenly, in a dream, the solution came to me. It was a neat solution, and it worked. It was very simple, actually. I bought a cat...”
The second friend smiled and sipped his tea. Both he and the first friend gazed across at the third friend. The third friend seemed remote and abstracted. He stared out into the limitless dark. In the light from the stove, he appeared pale and unhealthy. He refused the mug that the first friend offered him.
The first two friends urged him to tell a tale, but he shook his head. “Come on,” they said, “you must have at least one ghost story to tell. Everybody has at least one.” With a deep, heavy sigh, the third friend finally confessed that he did. The first two friends rubbed their hands in delight. They insisted, however, that it had to be true.
“Oh it’s true all right,” replied the third friend. “And it’s easily told. But you might regret hearing it. Especially when you consider that we are stuck on this ledge together for the rest of the night.” When the first two friends laughed at this, he raised a hand for silence and began to speak. His words should have been as cold as a glacier and as ponderous. But instead they were casual and tinged with a trace of irony. He said simply:
“I didn’t survive the third crevasse.”
10: The Rake and the Fool
“I didn’t like that story,” I said to Hywel, after he had finished the tale of the three mountain climbers, “and I no more believe it than any of the others you have told.”
While he had been talking, the TALL STORY had filled up slowly with faces new and familiar. I recognised various workers from the nearby County Hall. They rattled their chains and gnawed at their manacles as they waited to be served.
“Actually that tale is absolutely true,” Hywel insisted, “but I admit that I made up the nonsense about the dragon. In fact, I could tell you another story about Anna and Gareth.”
“Only if you make it brief,” I mumbled.
“It concerns a goblin...”
To be honest, I was tired of Hywel’s more outrageous flights of fancy. I said: “Put that one on hold and try something more culturally relevant than usual, will you?”
“Cross my heart,” Hywel replied, but he did no such thing. “This one is so true you can have a year’s supply of free drinks out of me if you disprove it, I swear!”
I grimaced at this prospect, for a TALL STORY year is made up of twelve bitter months, and eight is my usual limit. Unlike ordinary months, in which all the days are used up before moving onto the next one, Hywel’s variety always leaves a few at the bottom and he collects the dregs into whole Winters of Discontent, Summers of Love, Broken Springs and long Falls down the Stairs. It is awful.
“Go on then,” I stammered.
Hywel stretched and gestured at his customers, seated at various tables throughout the tavern. People were chatting to each other, making plans or jokes, loathing or loving comrades, rivals and relatives, exchanging trivial or profound insights, just spouting gibberish when necessary. They included Byron and Julian, the former delving in his pockets as if searching for lost dice, a criminal frown on his brow.
Also Claire and Peter Elliot, crouched over a map of Ireland, marking out possible hiking routes with little flags on pins. Under the map, heads creased the paper at the right places to represent the hills. Two of these heads belonged to Flann O’Brien and James Stephens and this incidental acupuncture had cured them of sundry ills. Alas, most of that ill was their talent.
The main point which Hywel’s gesture jabbed into me, though without medical justification, was that his patrons were communicating, however inelegantly. All except one, who sat alone. He was a pale individual with white eyebrows and colourless eyes, though he didn’t seem old or unhealthy. It was almost as if he was a new type of human being. I thought he was drinking Guinness, but in fact he cradled an empty glass. Despair at his inability to make contact had filled it with a black swirling bile.
“A tragic situation,” whispered Hywel.
I rolled my eyes. “He doesn’t have any friends. I suppose you want me to go over and talk to him?”
“You misunderstand. He’s not a lonely man. He’s the loneliest man, and that’s more serious than having no friends, in the same way that a knob of butter is worse off than a pint of milk. The latter can be returned to a cow’s udder with a syringe, but the other is forever divorced from the mother beast. Why? Simply because butter is a fatal illness of milk. When milk is badly shaken on a voyage it becomes travel sick and vomits its own content outside its form. Thus butter will never get better!”
“Are you implying that society can reabsorb lonely men if they have luck and faith, but that the loneliest man is fated to stay isolated for eternity because he has curdled himself beyond the typical definition of humanity? I’ll soon fix that!”
I was about to walk over to the peculiar fellow, but Hywel held me back. “It’s a cultural thing. That’s what you wanted, isn’t it? A story about diverse ways of living. Anyway, it’s impossible to befriend that wretched soul. Shall I tell you his name? It’s pronounced something like this: Asdgfxfkh Kuhfoashfubv.”
I frowned. “What language is that?”
Hywel flicked away a slave with his grimy cloth. “Now we’re getting to the point. That man is a Faskdhfgasdhian, from a little known, indeed completely forgotten, ethnic minority. Where is Faskdhfgasdhia, you ask? It’s not a foreign country but the original name of that island you see across the bay. No need to look.”
The windows were too misty anyway,
and the TALL STORY is always at least one narrow alley and three imaginary corners away from the Cardiff waterfront. But I knew which island he was referring to. In our language it is called ‘Flat Holm’ and is hardly a noteworthy feature of the local horizon. Slurping waves like a greedy saucer a few miles south of the city, its only claim to glory is as the site of the first reception of speech by radio transmission. On 11th May 1897, Guglielmo Marconi sent the three words ‘Are you ready?’ to his assistant George Kemp, who was standing on the island and presumably was.
“That’s an arrogant twisting of history!” boomed Hywel, as if he’d read my thoughts, “for in very olden times Flat Holm, or as we ought to call it from now on, Faskdhfgasdhia, had a lustrous civilisation all its own, unique and bashful, brave and odd, spicy and tortuous. When it was suddenly destroyed, sometime between the Dark and Magnolia Ages, it was as if it had never existed! For the inhabitants kept no written records and their dwellings and artefacts were constructed from seaweed. Without physical evidence of their culture, they were wiped from the official annals of human endeavour!”
“And yet there were some survivors?”
“Quite a few at first, yes. They emigrated across the shallows to Cardiff. One of their most respected Prophets had said that the island would sink into the waves for a washing. That’s what happens when your homeland resembles a saucer. A hundred families made the crossing in a huge canoe. They settled in an obscure part of the city, between Blanche Street and Beresford Road. Later the island rose again but they didn’t go back. The same Prophet predicted it would eventually be haunted by a disembodied voice. Maybe he anticipated that radio message, or possibly I invented that bit. I can’t remember.”
“Did they flourish in their new enclave?”
“Not really. They were an introspective people and found it easier not to mix with outsiders. They didn’t even bother to learn any other languages. So inbreeding and nostalgia became their guiding principles. They were ignored by Cardiff Council and this neglect was taken to such extremes that people actually found it difficult to see them. You know how it is when you stop noticing the wallpaper in your house, however exotic the pattern? That’s because it doesn’t try to interact with you. It just hangs around aimlessly.”
