by Lloyd Jones
Putting a finger to her lips, she says ‘Shh!’ and I look back. But the old dear is asleep.
‘Whisper,’ says Olly. ‘I don’t want her to know about this.’
So we talk in undertones.
‘This character Mr Cassini reminds me of someone,’ she says. ‘Have you ever heard of Bluebeard?’
‘No.’
She tells me a version of the story. Bluebeard’s wife Judith demands the keys to their castle’s seven locked doors, but her search for knowledge turns into a nightmare. The first five rooms are covered in blood and the sixth contains a lake of tears. Overcome by terror, she accuses Bluebeard of murdering all his wives – only to find them all in the seventh room, alive. As a punishment for her curiosity and doubt she is locked up with the others wives. Bluebeard is destroyed – he descends into his own dark world.
I’m silent for a while as I consider the story.
‘Is that all a fiction, all made up?’ I ask, checking the mirror.
‘I think so,’ she answers. She tells me about Gilles de Rais, executed by the Inquisition for heresy, sacrilege and offences against nature in 1440. He confessed to molesting and murdering nearly 150 children. It was rumoured he’d killed his wife when she discovered his terrible crimes. It was also rumoured that the Devil – appalled by his acts – turned his beard blue to distinguish him from other men.
So there were four of us in a car, heading north. Good feeling for me – I remember a couple of good wins at Hampden Park, and there’s that old camaraderie with the Scots. But our passage became a journey into darkness. Even as we entered England the sky thickened; I felt as though we were being trapped under the damp, dirty underbelly of a gargantuan rabbit and the crowding nimbus clouds were its clogged fur, pressing down on us, muffling our mouths. It got to me; the world scraped its fingernails on the car window. Every colour was sucked out of the landscape and the grey hurt my eyeballs; at one stage I touched my eyes, wondering if they were furring over with that fine downy mould which grows on rotting fruit. This was now a ride through a gun-barrel, and I could smell the nitric under-arm of the looming rain clouds. Holes and pits proliferated on either side of the motorway’s swishing gloom; some were deserted, others offered their entrails to scavenging hi-macs and JCBs. I thought of ruined, peasant-abandoned commonwealths churned up by retreating armies, pitted with shell-holes and trenches, running with rats and dark crimson mud. This landscape had the ruination of a vast allotment, or a beach after a ragworm dig. My spirits plummeted; I sank, quickly, into a tundra twilight. We were travelling with no hope of arriving.
‘She’s dribbling,’ said Olly. ‘Look, she’s dribbling.’
And she was too, her head skewed on the mannequin’s left shoulder. They looked quite cosy.
‘She doesn’t feel anything on her face,’ said Olly.
She meant her mother, presumably.
‘Your mother?’
‘Yes, her face is completely numb.’
Silence for a while.
‘Why’s that?’
‘It’s numb, that’s all there is to it. Neurological, probably.’
‘Really?’
‘Really.’
‘Why’s that?’
‘Don’t honestly know. It’s been like that for ages. For as long as I can remember.’
Again, I fell into a reverie. In the distance a jasmine tree in a long grey hedge reminded me of a yellow-adorned capital at the start of a line in the Book of Kells.
I was in strange territory here.
After a while, Olly asked me: ‘What are you thinking about?’
‘I…’
I was thinking mainly about the pubic clumps of down-curled, blackened hawthorns huddled in dark, pigmy clusters along the hard shoulder, and of an Afro-Caribbean girl in Bute Street – but I couldn’t say that, could I?
‘I was thinking… what’s up with your ma?’
Again, that strong pause.
‘It’s family stuff – don’t bother yourself with it.’
‘Only she looks rather poorly, and the wig – has she had cancer or something?’
‘Drop it for now. I’ll explain sometime – promise.’
‘OK.’
I let it be.
A splatter of rain hit the car, and I watched sperm-trails of water wriggling down the window. Against the darkened sky they were beads of sweat; my mind returned to the girl in Bute Street, and sex. Millions of ova and spermatozoon passing each other on this motorway every minute, sensing each other from our interiors, wondering if they would ever meet again in the incomprehensible roulette of mating.
By now the gloom was making a point of being gloomy. The cars floated around us in shoals, manta ray shadows on a deep-down ocean floor; the mist pressed onto my corneas: I felt as if I was going blind slowly; my eyeballs were being overgrown by a glaucous, grape-skin yeast bloom.
And then we were in the Scottish uplands, north of Carlisle. The country opened out, absorbing the dreich into blotting-paper blotches above the faraway shapes – the oystershell middens – of White Coomb, Hart Fell, Saddle Yoke and Ettrick Pen. The wind whistled in my window and now we were micro-fauna, lost in a fungal desert of greens and duns, rolling along the expanses of the Atlantic seaboard, the Scottish hills swelling around us as we shimmied between the goosebumps on a giant’s back. I saw a Celtic cross by the roadside but the landscape offered no succour – to be lost in these rippling folds was to be lost for ever, I suspected.
‘Anyway, I’ve got an appointment with Bond,’ I say cryptically.
‘James Bond? Of course, Connery was born in Glasgow. You know him then?’
‘No, I mean Derek Bond.’
‘Who’s he then?’
‘He’s a man who walked out into the snow once.’
‘For Christ’s sakes, explain yourself man.’
She’s getting tetchy again. So I explain it all in detail.
As part of my media studies course I’m making a short film, about five minutes long. I’ve already started it. Title: Picnic in the Snow. Five film characters meet in a snowscape, spread a cloth on the ground, have a picnic together. Don’t ask me why. So my first shot shows one of those famous moments in history – Captain Oates walking out into the snow, saying his immortal words to Scott: I am just going outside and may be some time. I tell her all about it.
‘Jesus, that’s strange,’ she says. ‘I wouldn’t like to see inside your head. But what’s this Bond geezer got to do with it?’
‘Actor born in Glasgow,’ I reply. ‘He played Captain Oates in the 1948 version of Scott of the Antarctic, with John Mills. James Robertson Justice played Edgar ‘Taffy’ Evans, chosen for his superhuman strength… he’s buried in the churchyard at Rhossili.’
‘But you can’t get Bond to do it all over again, just for you.’
‘No, you’re right there. I use a clip from the film, the bit where he walks into the snow, then I’ve filmed one of the students walking through a blizzard. I’ll do the same sort of thing with four other films, and then I’ll arrange for them all to meet in the snow for a picnic. Got it now?’
She has a good think about it.
‘Sounds OK, bit loopy. Can I be in it? You need a woman.’
‘Yes, sure, if you can think of a relevant film.’
‘Fine, I’ll think of something.’
Another long pause.
‘Why this snow thing, anyway?’
It’s my turn to pause and think.
‘I just love snow, that’s all. I like the feel of it and all that… I even like snow language. Did you know that icebergs calve when smaller icebergs drop away? Floes, icebergs, avalanches… it’s a different world. And it’s so clean.’
‘So you start off with Oates. Who next?’
‘Haven’t decided yet.’
But I have, really. I decided a long time ago who’d be walking out into the snow.
Olly’s mum wakes up and calls for a toilet stop; we need a break anyway, so we put i
n at the Abington service station, one of those modern motorway bazaars which claw money from your hand any way they can. After fighting my way through the trinkets I sit down in the eating area; on the next table two jovial Scottish Asians are talking in a weird but attractive mixed dialect. One of them is worried because his sister is adding custard powder to her baby’s milk to make the kid stronger. They’re friendly and lively. I’m relaxing with a fag and studying the menu when a face catches my eye, two tables away. I study it, surreptitiously. It must be him – Adam Phillips. Cardiff boy, expert on Freud, psychoanalyst, writer… one of the best brains in Britain. That craggy face reminds me more than ever of a reconstruction on Meet the Ancestor, a noble skull brought to life again with modelling clay and horsehair.
‘You’re staring again,’ says Olly.
‘It’s Adam Phillips,’ I hiss. ‘You know – the man who said a couple is a conspiracy in search of a crime. Sex is often the closest they can get.’
She glowers at me.
‘Hope you’re not getting any ideas about us.’
‘No! It really is him – look!’
She peeks, then shrugs.
‘Dunno. It could be him.’
‘I’m not hungry,’ says Olly’s mum. ‘I’ll just have a cup of tea.’
Olly goes to order and I eavesdrop. Phillips is talking to someone, and I catch a few words. Christ! He’s telling that story about the mullah and the tiger.
‘Listen!’ I say to Olly’s mum. She never seems to do anything else anyway. She’s hardly spoken.
We listen to the story. Mullah Nasrudin is standing in the yard outside his home one morning, throwing corn on the ground. A passer-by stops and says in a puzzled voice: ‘Why are you throwing corn on the ground, Mullah Nasrudin?’
‘To keep the tigers away,’ he replies.
‘But there aren’t any tigers here,’ says the passer-by.
‘Well it works then, doesn’t it?’ says the Mullah.
Adam Phillips asks his friend: Had there been tigers in the Mullah’s life, which he’d warded off with corn? Was it a symbolic ritual passed down through the generations? Or had the Mullah dreamt up this ploy in response to a threat from tigers in the past – a ploy which had co-incidentally worked?
It’s all about personal fears. We know very little about the actual things we fear. It’s like raising an arm instinctively to protect your face, not knowing how or when you’ll be struck, or who’ll hit you.
Olly returned and we drank our tea. The milk and sugar were in tiny cartons which were difficult to open; by the time we finished there was a mound of torn sachets and battered cartons on our tray. The clutter seemed to speak for the state of the world. Nonsensical and messy. But clutter is essential, according to Adam Phillips. By searching through the clutter of our lives we may find, often accidentally, what we’re looking for. It’s the searching that’s important, usually, not the finding.
I tried to catch Adam Phillips’ attention, but he was standing with his back to us, preparing to leave. We left too when the old dear had finished her brew, and headed for the car. As she got into the back she caught her shades on the doorjamb and dislodged them, so that they rested skew-whiff on her nose. It was then that I first saw the bruises around her eyes. I realised, immediately, what was going on, and I was silent all the way to Glasgow.
So that’s the game, I thought. That’s what I’ve been caught up in.
A chill crept towards me along the Scottish landscape.
Enormous blocks of flats lumbered towards us over the Motherwell skyline, and we were out of the country, slap bang in an urban bestiary – and the Motherwell beasts were magnificent, Star Wars impressive. We curled around the centre of Glasgow, and the sheer torrent of concrete was bigger than any aesthetic could grasp; it was just there, and that was it – my brain became small and asthmatic as it tried to cope with the size of this higgledy-piggledy asteroidal honeycomb.
And then we entered the city’s small intestines, sweeping off the M8 onto the old Dumbarton Road through Clydebank. Saturday afternoon – but the traffic wasn’t too bad as we followed a long straight road between shops. The red, white, blue and orange street lights stretching in a line of twinkling dots into the distance made me think of the flank of a newly-caught salmon, in its death throes on the banks of the Clyde long ago when this area was open country.
Olly found our destination – one of the few Clydebank tenements to survive the blitz – and after I’d carried the ridiculous mannequin upstairs all the women started a fierce jangle so I retreated back to the car and waited for her. It was getting late, and we’d have to stay the night somewhere. But I didn’t want to stay with Olly’s lot: I wasn’t in the mood for family dissections.
For some reason – maybe it was an overflowing rubbish bin on the pavement – my mind drifted to the writings of ap Llwyd, to another of his rambles in the foothills of paradise. In a chapter entitled ‘Small Gods, Big Promises’ he holds forth on a household god he has fashioned for himself:
I discovered that the word orts can mean a morsel of food left on a plate after a meal, and I recalled an old person who always left a tiny scrap of food on the edge of his plate after every meal, presumably as an offering to a long-vanished god.
Discussing this with my friend Stefano at his Italian café that evening, he smirked and told me about one of his Corsican uncles, an old-stager who had a highly unorthodox household god: lowering his voice, Stefano whispered the Italian word stronzo in my ear and said it described the last little glob of shit which – eventually – follows the main business during the toilet ritual. This stronzo, he indicated, was regarded by his uncle as an offering to the god of the toilet; that is, to the god of the hole.
Excited by now, I told him of my own household god, a creature of my own devising.
‘Imagine yourself buying a roll of binbags at your local store,’ I said to him volubly, causing him to flap his hand in a sign for me to whisper.
‘When you unfurl your roll of binbags, detach the first bag and place it in the bin,’ I said conspiratorially, ‘what’s the first item you put into the bin?’
‘Why, it could be anything,’ he said to me, his eyes searching my face as though I were going mad.
‘No!’ I replied. ‘The first item you put in the bin is the wrapper which held the binbags together – and that is an offering to the god of the bin!’
I looked at him, full of pride. His eyes sparkled with admiration at my inventiveness. I can trace our friendship back to that very moment, in his café, clutching my mug in both hands, listening to the espresso machine screeching its astral scream of appreciation as I unveiled my new creation…
Meanwhile, here I was on a mad mission with a woman I hardly knew, a mannequin and a beat-up mother with a wig. And my main motive, I suspected now as I watched the reds, whites, blues and oranges of the salmon’s flank, shimmering in a dozen roadside puddles, was to pacify the god of the trousers.
We quarrelled. She wanted to stay in her Scottish baronial tenement, I wanted out. I’d had enough wigs and bruises for one day.
‘Fuck it,’ I said when she finally re-appeared. ‘I’ll go to Dumbarton. Got a mate there. Can I take the car?’
‘Go on then,’ she said wearily. ‘Pick me up in the morning.’
Half an hour later I was outside the empty-looking home of a ginger-haired midfield terrier called Willie, with whom I’d hung around too many bars, so I had to settle for bed and breakfast on the Stirling Road. Jim, the host, was friendly and he filled me in on the local history. Run-down dockyard town, Cutty Sark built here, big whisky distilleries closing down gradually, one of them now the set for a popular TV soap, River Side. Small maritime museum, star attraction the Denny ship model tank, size of a soccer pitch, where they used to test hulls. Stag’s Head a Rangers pub.
Jim had a football stuck in an apple tree outside his back window, in a shaded corner of the garden. I didn’t know if that signified anything, though it lo
oked totemic.
Main attraction, without any doubt, was Dumbarton Rock – a gigantic Bactrian double hump rearing straight out of the marshes by the side of the Clyde. Basalt plug, the remains of volcanic activity. Ancient capital of the kingdom of Strathclyde, one of the old Celtic mobs allied to the Welsh and speaking the same language – the fabled men of the north. According to one legend this rock was visited at one time or another by the original Merlin; the real McCoy, a man who bore very little resemblance to the Hollywood Merlin – a man who went mad during battle and spent the rest of his miserable life hiding in the Caledonian Forest. His Scots name – Lailoken.
Late in the evening I brave the steady rain, which is coldly unsympathetic, and tramp into town. I knock back a few jars in the Stag’s Head. Then I decide – foolishly – on a Chinese meal, but by the time I trudge back the food is cold, my appetite has deserted me, and I don’t want to pong out my room, so I put my soggy box of grub in the boot of the car, thinking it might do for tomorrow. That’s what a bevvy does to you.
After a good breakfast I make my way down to the rock. There’s a bowling club at its base, laid out for a wedding feast, and I chat to a couple of men standing in the doorway.
‘So this used to be a Welsh stronghold,’ I say to them, jerking my thumb at the rock.
‘We’ll teek yor worrd for it,’ says one jovially, dousing his fag. After the gloom of yesterday we have a bright, light-blue day; it’s a shame to waste it so I jack up on a bit of fresh-air happiness.
I survey this magnificent mini-mountain lying by the cold waters of the Clyde; its twin mamillae bulge 240 feet straight up into the air, a big pair of tits jammed into a rock-hard bra. I enter the Governor’s House and pad around for a while in the baited trap of the knick-knack shop. I walk up through a deep cleft in the rock, between the twin mini-peaks, straight to the highest point, below a flapping, wind-ravaged saltire on its flagpole. To the north, up the Vale of Leven, I look towards Loch Lomond, about five miles away; Ben Lomond lowers in the distance. If I’d stood in the same position 1,500 years ago, my eyes would have scanned each fold of the landscape for approaching bands of Picts, my sworn enemy. To the north west lay the kingdom of Dalriada, equally hostile. Dumbarton comes from Dun Breatann, or fortress of the Britons. As a fortress it has a longer recorded history than any other in Britain. The earliest mention of it is in 450 when St Patrick reprimanded Ceretic, king of the Britons, for kidnapping Christians and selling them into slavery.
