by Lloyd Jones
But success came at a price, as per usual. In the same way as Hay-on-Wye became a book town, Ziggy’s success turned the town around Gracious in Defeat into a shoe-shop sensation. The new shops arrived overnight, menacing the walkways with rack after rack of cut price footwear. Moccasin Mecca. Then came Cobblers! Afterward they arrived in droves: The Athlete’s Foot, Shutopia, R. Soles, Sock ‘n Sole, Footloose and Fancyfree, The Shoe Must Go On, Sole Proprietor, Walk on the Wild Side...
Soon the town seemed to offer nothing except shoe shops and charity shops selling second-hand shoes to a shoe-obsessed population.
Just wait, said Big M, we’ll be getting a brick through the window any day now.
He acquired a couple of low-maintenance dogs to warn of intruders in the night, two jet-black terriers which he named Left and Right in a sardonic reference to the little bootees they sold to teach tots their left from their right. And when he returned from one of his buying missions, sure enough he was met by a boarded-up window, splinters of glass on the pavement and three very glum faces sitting upstairs in the living quarters. The rest is history, as they say. After the inevitable sale came the inevitable escape. Once again Pryderi wanted to put up a fight. But once again Big M said nothing, packed his stuff and slept in the Bentley until they were all ready to join him. A week later they were on the road again, this time heading back towards Wales. They’d had enough of the English blowing hot and cold on their ventures. God knows how long it took them to sight Hotel Corvo and the cliffs of West Wales again, but when they did it was a blessed relief, however derelict the hotel looked.
Lou closed the chapter and moved it to the recycle bin, ready for deletion. After a short examination of his desktop picture he decided it was time for a change, the photo of Hotel Corvo was beginning to depress him. He’d have to take another pic. In the meantime he flicked through the folder of alternative backdrops which came with the computer. One of them showed an autumnal scene by a lake. It looked like somewhere in Canada, though he’d never been to North America: he was merely responding to previous pictures he’d seen of lakes in Canada. That was globalisation for you. Instead he selected a photo of a field: a generic, undulating tract of greenness with a blue sky above it. A bit bland, really, good on the eye but meaningless. That was the way of the world.
Lou closed down his computer and went to stand by the window, in what had become a nightly adieu to the scene outside, a vista which he increasingly liked and admired. Roof ridges reddened below him when the sun set, purple and mauve slates glinted whenever it rained; he loved the narrow estuary with its flotilla of colourful fishing boats, the broad sea beyond, the distant islands and headlands, and towering above it all, the mountains. Perhaps he would take a picture of the scene tomorrow, or on the first fine day, and put it on his desktop. But wouldn’t that be odd, since the view was always there for him? How could he capture the essence of the place, its numen – the picture behind the mirror? He imagined a ghostly assembly of matter constantly forming and reforming behind the glass facades of mirrors everywhere around the world; a secret alternative world of almost-images. Did some people leave more of themselves behind mirrors than others? Surely Big M did. If Lou was supposed to breathe in molecules from Julius Caesar or whoever on a daily basis, how many molecules from Big M were there floating around in the world? A lot, thought Lou. He was beginning to like the bloke. Why was he trying to obliterate him, anyway? What was the issue?
Lou examined the horizon, now without a vestige of clouds, and went back to his desk. After restarting his computer he put all three chapters in the recycle bin and pulled the plug on them. Was he sure? asked the machine. Yes he bloody well was, answered Lou with his mouse. Finitio. His revenge motive had lost its attraction so he would cut and run before it was too late, before he’d spent too much time on the project. And by killing off Dermot Feeney’s magnum opus he’d queer the pitch for anyone else.
Lou checked the green memory stick and it was empty. Micro-dust would be gathering on the empty desks and chairs inside its miniature world; someone’s lunchbox would be lying there with a titchy banana beginning to mould over (at this point his eyes flitted to his own fruit bowl); maybe there would be a pile of virtual junk mail clogging up the main vestibule. In the corner by the reception desk he imagined a family of microscopic woodlice in a huddle, becalmed, their robotic segments glinting dully in the pale afterlight of a nuclear winter.
Lou closed his computer again and prepared to leave for home. He’d pop over to the professor’s room in the morning and realign his project; he’d say that Dermot Feeney’s work was useless, the product of a diseased mind etc. His Skype conversation with Colin Dorton had given him a new direction. Perhaps he could compare Welsh literature in the end days of the Roman Empire to Welsh literature in the end days of the American empire; there were distinct similarities. As he prepared to go home he realised that he’d lost his car keys, and it was raining. He stood in the main vestibule for a while, wondering what to do. Then he walked quickly downwards through the darkening town, towards the taxi rank.
Travelling home, he watched the raindrops as they followed their strange cometic paths along the glass, and he thought of Dermot Feeney’s words slipping one by one into the void.
V
Lou knocked on the door and heard a faraway voice. When he entered, the professor was standing at the only window, facing the outside world and looking out over the sea.
‘Seems to be an important part of academic life,’ said Lou to the professor’s back.
‘What’s that?’
‘Looking out through windows,’ said Lou. ‘I seem to do quite a lot of it myself.’
The prof turned towards him and released his hands from behind his back, then waved Lou towards a seat. Professor Williams had an aesthetic goatee, neatly trimmed, and a fine fall of perfectly white hair cascading backwards onto his shoulders. He looked every inch the part. Lou had long since wondered if the Professor Williamses of this world became academics because they looked like academics, or whether they became academics because they wanted all the visual trappings which went with the job. Lou was reminded of the Jehovah’s Witness who called on him every month; he was convinced she’d become a Witness because her headscarf, her serf’s appleskin face, her belted brown gaberdine, dense nylon stockings, oedema-bloated legs and open-toed white sandals were so archetypically suited to her role.
Lou started his preamble but got no further than the opening line before the prof interrupted. Lou winced because he’d sounded like a Witness himself, standing on someone’s doorstep, getting ready to make a pitch.
‘Ah, the Big M project,’ said Professor Williams, professorially. ‘Great timing, I’ve got something for you. Nearly forgot about it.’
He swivelled, opened a drawer, scrabbled around in it, closed it, then went through every drawer in the desk before exclaiming theatrically; Lou watched him prance towards a brown enamel jug with a lustrous blue band, sitting on an upper bookshelf.
‘Should’ve remembered, I always put them in here,’ he said, before sitting down again and plonking something on the desk between them. He kept his hand over it, protectively, while he explained its history.
‘Sent to me anonymously through the post, not even a note,’ said the prof, but his cunning blue eyes said otherwise. Lou felt a chill wind blowing through him. Something odd was happening. He was being set up; he felt it in his bones. Forces far beyond his control were moving outside the windows of the college. He was just a pawn in the game, he could sense it now. Suddenly he felt very small. Alone in one of those tiny deserted rooms in the green memory stick, waiting for the tannoy voice.
Professor Williams moved his hand and revealed a memory stick, identical to the one in Lou’s fruit bowl, but this one was red instead of green. Uncanny. Lou had anticipated what was coming, except for the colour difference.
‘Medical records,’ said the prof. ‘Illuminating. Very little mention of Big M a
s far as I could see, though I didn’t look right through it. But Pryderi’s all over the place. Didn’t know he’d been inside a loony bin, that’s a new one on me.’
Lou studied the memory stick, then picked it up off the desk. It seemed heavier than the green one. He enjoyed its smoothness in the dry dock of his hand, a tiny caravel, freshly come into harbour from a voyage of discovery. Perhaps he should give them names like Nina and Pinta – but that would imply a third, the Santa Maria: battered little ships with cargoes of knowledge (or misinformation) in their holds instead of yams and coconuts and gold. He examined the vessel’s interior and imagined the invisible chambers of his newly acquired microworld.
Professor Williams anticipated his next question.
‘Why us? No idea Llwyd, no idea at all. Someone must have heard about your research, someone who wanted the true story told perhaps. Or someone with a grudge? Agenda? Your guess is as good as mine, Llwyd. Make what you will of it.’
And with that it became clear that Professor Williams wanted him gone.
‘By the way,’ he added as Lou made his way towards the door. ‘You’ve disappeared off the radar. Someone asked me who you were the other day, seems you’re invisible. Perhaps you need to get out more.’
Lou nodded sharply and closed the door a little too firmly.
His room seemed smaller when he returned to it. But he felt glad that the view from his window was grander, more sublime than the view from Professor Williams’ room. His own view took in the estuary, the coastal strip and the mountains as well as distant headlands and an offshore island. The prof’s view was less interesting: a panorama of the sea and little else. The prof’s view was a captain’s view as he steered his ship towards new lands, whereas Lou’s view was a pioneer’s view, the vista from a newly erected log cabin on an alien shore.
Now, back inside his cabin, he contemplated his fate, for he felt absolutely sure that he was being observed and manipulated – yes, cued up like a ball on a snooker table. And he felt utterly helpless, because he was effectively bound and gagged by the constraints of his project. Was he part of a social experiment? Or was academia exerting its customary vice-like grip on history?
The prof’s steely blue eyes had betrayed him, but Lou suspected that the strings were being pulled by someone else. By the politicans maybe, who might be looking – as per usual – for a precedence to justify a progrom or a power grab. Modern history wasn’t a beautiful construct made of stainless steel and glass; it was a tatty boxful of cold plasticine rolled into childish shapes by a classroom of idiot children who had long ago merged all the different political colours into one grey mass. Lou would have to be careful now. His every move was being watched. He felt like a sheep being chanelled through different pens towards the final abattoir chamber.
After a few minutes of thought by his window he stabbed the new memory stick into his computer and moused its contents onto the desktop. Just the one document this time, an official-looking report with the name of a West Wales hospital underscored with warnings about privacy and access. It was a mental assessment, and the client was one Pryderi Jones. There was something pornographic about ogling a man’s state of mind many years after the event; a man in a state of absolute vulnerability, sitting in a closed room with strangers. It was easy for Lou to enter the memory stick and pass through its wormholes. He’d been inside a psychiatric unit himself, many times. As a visitor of course, wandering through corridors where time had congealed into a thick albumen inside the nestbound eggs of mental illness.
Nowadays most modern psychiatric units nestled close to the main regional hospital, and Lou thought of them as latter-day leper huts, huddled by a wayside church. The inmates he saw as pilgrims shuffling towards the holy grail of sanity, fooled by yet another chimera. If religion had been a serum self-administered by the poor and sick to bring on numbing bouts of fatalism, then modern psychiatry was no more than a rodeo with fancy-dressed cowboys trying to herd and brand a few enraged steers let loose below the blinding high-noon sun of madness. You could smell the fear of those poor creatures, penned in their pastel-painted corrals, jabbed at by overpaid psychiatrists as they entered the arena.
Lou padded down a silent corridor inside the memory stick. Piss and Fear and Factor X. The same smells pervaded psychiatric units all over the land. Almost every inmate left his sense of humour at the door, as shoes might be left outside a mosque. The rituals were high church – pills as communion wafers, TV cables removed and taken to the sacred office like vestments at the end of each neverending day. Papal visits by consultants; ex cathedra pronouncements on psychiatric mantras. Food trays with indents to match each course, every hymn having its allotted place in the service.
Lou searched inside the memory stick, read its testimony, and encountered various scenes within. A young man talked animatedly to the hot water geyser in a kitchen, his half-made mug of tea filming over on the sink before him. A dark, beautiful young woman journeyed between the tables, perfecting one of her wonderful fables of paranoia. A small sallow woman, pickled in alcohol and little more than a shrunken ju-ju head, sat in a chair by the television, smelling of vodoo rites and chicken feathers.
Lou turned a corner in the rose-coloured gloom of the memory stick and started travelling away from the centre. A short, stout man with a florid face and a mournful moustache thudded past him without looking up. The bland carpetscape became so boring that Lou started to notice dead spiders curled up in corners, and a cobweb of hairline cracks in the paintwork.
He reacted badly to the kitsch on the walls – paintings donated by village art clubs and landscapes churned out by amateur photographers, scenes from a forever beautiful, idealised country on the other side of the compound wall, as if to stress the inmates’ isolation. Then he arrived at a small, oddly shaped room where three corridors collided; there was a table and some chairs, a dishevelled magazine rack, and some half-hearted foliage which was probably repro. A set of French windows, slightly ajar, led to a garden set inside the belly of the unit, surrounded on all sides by a high Legoland of bricks and wall-eyed windows.
It was a strange little garden, concentric with benches around its outer rim, interspersed with bay trees and flower tubs; then there was an inner courtyard protected by a high raised bed of flowers, mostly nasturtiums, whose riotously happy orange looked rather manic. Inside all this, like a bosse on a shield, lay a miniature gold-coloured fountain with a faux marble lip on which two people were seated, facing each other. Lou was reminded of a Victorian painting, Alma-Tadema’s Ask Me No More perhaps. A trickle of unenthusiastic water ululated softly as it throbbed in the pipehead. Lou studied the scene. A man with a certain brooding presence was slouched with one haunch on the marble, his other leg jutting out for balance. A woman was stooped over him and they seemed to be conversing, but then Lou realised that the woman was the only one talking. The man, who was large and powerful with a mess of hair, sat there listening, with his head bowed. He looked like an exhausted rugby player sitting in the changing room after an unexpected drubbing – and that’s what he was, in a way, because Pryderi had once been the pride of Welsh rugby. The woman had a mop in her hand, and she appeared to be a cleaner. Her free hand rested for a while against his unshaven cheek, before moving up to play with his hair. They seemed to be on the verge of intimacy, had Pryderi not been so distracted. She moved off, leaving him alone. Occasionally he raised a mug to his mouth, but then he seemed to fall into a reverie and the mug became glued to his lips.
Lou entered this imaginary garden inside the memory stick and sat down on one of the outer benches, well away from the fountain, though he could see by now that it was a cheap garden-centre version. Doubtless it was lit up at night in a selection of lurid colours. The French windows opened and a young man walked up to Pryderi, spoke to him soothingly and prised the mug from his hand. After a little coaxing he guided Pryderi down the path, towards the corridors. Lou sat still and let them brush past him; he got
an inquiring look from the nursing attendant, but Pryderi’s eyes seemed dead to the world, fixed on a trouble spot a few inches in front of him. The poor bloke had evidently suffered a breakdown; the skin on his face was flaking badly and his mouth had lost its shape. Lou noticed another disturbing sight: Pryderi’s pants were damp around the crotch and seat, though this may have been caused by the fountain. Still inside the memory stick, Lou followed them through the intestines of the unit, until they reached a side room where a small assembly of people sat waiting. An invisible, indiscernible badge or colouring marked them out as staff members, as a hawkmoth’s markings might distinguish it from a lacewing. Then someone saw the state of Pryderi’s pants and he was whisked away to be changed. It was clear that a meeting was about to take place, so Lou left the scene and returned to his room at the college. On his screen he could see a mental health assessment form filled in by Pryderi’s case worker, probably one of the moth people in the side room.
It started with a synopsis of Pryderi’s general appearance on the day of admission. The person who’d compiled the report had a young, naive style which noted that Pryderi had been in a right old state, dirty and smelly when he arrived at the unit. No shoes on his feet, in need of a haircut. He was physically unresponsive, withdrawn, and unwilling or unable to speak. He’d sat in his chair, head down, mute.
The assessment in the memory stick tried to describe his condition by using a number of different criteria under sub headings.
General appearance
Looks like he’s been in a rugby match, earth and mud stains all over his clothes, moss and leaves and bits of briar sticking to him. Face very sad. Movements slow and directionless. Social interaction nil.
