by Lloyd Jones
Lou heard the doorbell ring and a huge adrenalin rush set his heart racing. Was that Catrin, returning? But no, she had a key of course. The police? Would you like to sit down Mr Evans, we have some news for you...
He took the stairs in a rapid shuffle and opened the door to a young female face. It took quite a few seconds for him to recognise their Polish cleaner, Anka. He waved her in, but she immediately flustered and started to retreat. What could be the matter with the silly bitch? She stammered something in Polish and fluttered her hand apologetically, adding a confused sentence in broken English: I come again tomorrow maybe if Mrs McNamara here...
Then he remembered that he’d goosed her neat little bottom when he’d passed her in the hallway on his way to work the last time they’d met. Stupid girl, didn’t it go with the job?
He closed the door on her and returned upstairs, where he retrieved the memory stick and put the computer to sleep. After that he made himself a sandwich and sat in the kitchen, trying to form a plan. He’d have to do something about Catrin, or their relationship would be buggered for ever. That’s if it wasn’t already. And if she had genuinely disappeared the police might wonder why he hadn’t tried to find her. But where was she? West Wales, probably – her note had mentioned the coast, and her sister had a caravan not so far from Hotel Corvo. He’d mentioned the hotel to her so many times that she’d been fascinated by it. It seemed that fate was about to lead him back there again. Twice the place had drawn him in and enthralled him. Now, for a third time, he would have to return there to finish the matter.
He considered the word fate, and dismissed it. No, he was sure by now that he was being pulled into a man-made web. He would have to find out who was responsible. He put his plate in the sink, without washing it, and got ready to go.
VII
Driving westwards in his BMW, Lou broke down. He hoped it wasn’t a sign. By the time he’d been lugged home on a breakdown lorry it was late, so he bedded down for the night. A full moon illuminated the nursery as he passed it, and the empty, silver-washed room held an unearthly stillness which unnerved him. He slept badly.
Wales was basking under a warm autumnal sun when he recovered his car from the garage the following day. The sky was blue with a train of clouds on the horizon ahead of him as he drove; he couldn’t help but think of the blue memory stick in his pocket, which like the other memory sticks held a huge empty world within it, vast tracts of uninhabited land dotted with small bands of men on horseback and occasional plumes of woodsmoke, passed over silently by flocculent clouds, beautiful and mysterious. Once again he was struck by a vision of worlds within worlds, a triple mandala in which he saw a big blue Earth as seen from space, then his small blue car on its revolving surface, then a tiny blue capsule within the moving vehicle. Ever diminishing circles. Three dimensions, three whorls of related matter. Then his mind drifted to an early Celtic speciality, the triple death – ritual murder by wounding, strangulation and drowning. One after the other. You’d be completely dead after that. He felt his neck and imagined a stranger’s hand gripping his hair, pulling his head back, preparing to kill him. Lou feared death squeamishly, terribly.
All around him Wales was changing hue; a slow colour wash was bleaching out the sharpness in the reds, greens and blues. Mellow and slightly melancholic, a series of duns and browns came into view; the landscape became a rag rug lying in rucked buffs and ochres. The wheatfields swayed towards him and then swayed away from him drunkenly in various fawny shades. On both sides of the road, in fields dipping and slanting under huge rolling cumuli, he could see kine chewing the cud contentedly or sheep, plump and shorn, moving slowly along as they enjoyed a brief siesta before their annual lamb-bearing cycle started all over again. The country around him was huge and beautiful, yet Lou felt no joy in looking at it. He was a town mouse by nature, more at home in the brick conduits of man-made structures, which was probably why he preferred the fairy world of the memory sticks to the Olympian vistas now opening up in front of him. He struggled to cope with the scale of the natural world, its monumental cycles of birth and death, its absolute indifference to him. As Catrin had noticed, Lou was one for scuttling into the countryside for brief circular walks recommended by the Sunday supplements, and after buying an expensive pair of walking shoes – which he’d use maybe half a dozen times in his life – he liked to dart back home again, feeling virtuous.
This time, feeling not in the least bit virtuous, he was heading for Hotel Corvo again, and for no particular reason he was driving too fast: screeching through the bends, rocking along the straights. Was he trying to add a bit of drama to his search for Catrin? Or merely being childishly Top Gear about his journey? Maybe the contents of his mind were responsible: he was dwelling once again on his reasons for trying to obliterate all the alternative versions of the Big M story before he wrote his own. He was already aware that university arts faculties were small Petri colonies, at best polemical, at worst parasitic; a minor national poet or novelist might occasionally feel the grazing snout of a collegiate shark touching his skin, while a famous figure such as RS Thomas, cast into the Well of Knowledge, would have his body stripped to the bone within minutes in a pirhana frenzy. His own college had become a capitalist sausage machine, squeezing as many plump little middle-class kids as it could through the machinery and then making extravagant claims on the packaging when they flopped out on the other side. Little more than a rubber stamp, really – the kids largely taught themselves online and emerged three years later, thirty grand in debt and feeling mugged. As his own professor had admitted at a party, three sheets to the wind, modern learning was all fur coat and no knickers. But who wanted to read fusty old books about the past when you could get all you needed in seconds via Wiki?
On the other hand, Lou wanted to establish a reputation, and a good book bearing his name would set him on the road to success. That meant elbowing the competition aside and shouting loudest. That was the main reason, probably, for his ungentlemanly conduct with the memory sticks. But he’d been upstaged by someone else, and he wanted to know who it was. Maybe that was the reason for his urge to reach Catrin as quickly as possible. It certainly wasn’t a need to find her. On the contrary, he feared seeing her again because he knew it would mean some sort of showdown.
Anger erupted inside him. Failure, failure, everything he touched had been a failure. Why had he sold his soul to the education factory? Damn and double damn. In Mitteleuropa one could still see vestiges of the Enlightenment – excited young faces, fresh and hopeful, picking lush fruits from the tree of knowledge in a celebration of beautiful intellects; but here in Britain the students had been herded into a side-chapel and conned into buying indulgences and expensive relics from the pardoner’s seventh cousin removed. Meanwhile, Lou had jumped onto every gravy train passing but had missed the boat, the main boat, the big silvery boat which took a select few to literature’s island of apples. Hunched in his car – a small and transient object like himself – he saw clearly now that his time had come in an instant and had gone in an instant, like a moment in the life of a circus – his pitiable existence little more than a single subtle foolery by the clown; he had blinked and missed it.
Tired but no longer angry, looking drawn and defeated, Lou finally arrived at Hotel Corvo and sat for a while, listening to a white silky silence being embroidered by the songbirds. In the distance he could hear the faint boom of the sea when it struck the cliffs. A flight of noisy jackdaws swirled and left the building, which had closed yet again and was boarded up. It looked as derelict and abandoned as his memory sticks had recorded. He looked up at the missing sign and it was still missing; the only changes he could spot were graffiti scrawls left by local louts who’d wandered there on drug and drink expeditions, their modern initiation rites. The scene held one unexpected item though, a large pantechnicon with a satellite dish on its roof; two rampant red dragons emblazoned on its flanks were overwritten with the name of a well-known Welsh tel
evision company, Ystrad Fflur. Locked up and left to its own devices, it squatted on the potholed tarmac like a huge blind beetle waiting to be eaten from within by another insect’s parasitic eggs, already hatching in its bowels. Above it, the sky was patterned with vapour trails. Which poet had compared those high, silent jets to small perfect gods on the run from adoration? Lou couldn’t remember.
He walked around the abandoned hotel, peeping through holes in its boarded-up windows; then he stared at the rusty brackets which had once held the Hotel Corvo sign, when the place was in its pomp – before that fateful gunshot. Nostalgia crept through him and he longed to be there once again when he was a young pimply thing, with the world at his feet, every girlie in the land available to him. He threw individual chippings at the bracket lamps on either side of the main door and eventually smashed the thick glass panel around one of them. He squatted among the weeds and pieced together the fragments, which spelled the name of an old brewing company long since swallowed up by another. He realised how pathetic he was being, and retreated to the car. He’d better be going, though the thought of coming face to face with Catrin again sent an acidic jolt through him. So he wasted some more time by going up to the lorry and examining it at close quarters. He tested the doors and kicked the tyres, but the vehicle ignored him patiently. Turning away from it, he looked at the landscape below him, which featured a series of small brackened fields slipping away towards the cliffs. Looking southwards he could see the coastal path weaving its way alone the lip of the land before dipping away out of sight. He knew from his adolescence that the pathway left the cliff at that point and moved slightly inland, skirting a plateau of small fields which sheltered in the lee of a clifftop ridge; he remembered a beautiful enclosure or glade surrounded by scrub oak and bracken, overlooking the Dyfed landscape with its blanket of tiny fields stretching into the distance. Staring towards this plateau, which was just out of sight, he caught sight of someone, so he decided to walk towards the figure. The man or woman stood gaunt and unmoving, leaning towards the sea, with only the head and torso visible. One of the film crew, maybe, thought Lou as he ambled towards it. But as he entered the plateau he realised that the figure was a scarecrow, standing slightly awry on its one good leg. Walking up to it through the crop, he was struck by a similarity between the scarecrow and himself. The likeness was created by the scarecrow’s clothes, which might have come from his own wardrobe. In fact, the closer he examined them the surer he was that they had indeed come from his clothes cupboard back home. The hat, too, was surely one of his – a sou’wester he’d worn on his stag night; and to complete the scarecrow’s air of idiocy someone had slung a revolting green rucksack on its back – a rucksack remarkably like one of his own. Lou’s face flushed with embarrassment and anger. Was someone taking the piss? And who was the clothes thief? The answer had to be Catrin. Was she in on the conspiracy too? Lou thrust his hands in his pockets and started to sulk. He was standing in a small triangular field of corn, ready to be harvested by the look of it, and the scarecrow was planted right in the middle of it. It bore a comical, triumphant air, as if a grimacing clown, in tripping over his ridiculous shoes in the centre of a ring, had managed to convey in the moment of falling an ironic message – I told you this was going to happen.
Lou walked onwards through the corn, not caring how much damage he did, and entered a second field which was bigger than the first, a thorax which continued the triangular shape of the plateau. Again, there was a scarecrow in the middle, which also bore a resemblance to Lou; this one wore a suspiciously Lou-like coat and another ridiculous bag was slung over its shoulder, this one red. Lou carried on towards another field, in a high dudgeon by now, but then he changed course and slunk towards the blackthorn hedge on the landward side when he saw a group of people at the far end of the third field.
Moving towards them with cat-like movements in the shade of the stooped bushes, which had been bent into old men by the sea winds, he began to pick up snatches of conversation. Are you ready now... the sound boom’s in vision... can you move right into the corn please, it looks better...
He got as close as he could without being spotted, and surveyed the scene. By now a tall man and a young woman were standing up to their thighs in the golden crop, he with a hand around her waist, guiding her into the corn. He was a big man, broad and powerful, dressed in blue denim. The woman was Catrin, dressed in a fresh white muslin dress, and she looked radiant. Lou watched them with a cold, steely hatred. Between his lair and the two subjects stood a camera crew, in a small clearing cut ready for them in the corn, and they were about to start filming.
‘Right, ready when you are,’ said a voice from somewhere. Then the man in denim began to talk to camera.
We came back here after being chased out of England yet again...
‘Cut!’ said the disembodied voice. ‘Can we leave out the England bit please, no point in being antagonistic, they’ll only switch off...’
The man in denim thought about this for a few seconds, adjusted his stance, and then started again.
We came here originally to run Hotel Corvo, but we had to close the hotel and find other work. There were four involved in the business originally, but two had to have psychiatric care because they couldn’t cope with failure, and to be honest the general state of the world around us also had a negative effect. After trying a number of ideas we decided to set up our own sustainable smallholding, here on this farm by the sea. Three years down the line we’re all feeling much happier, more in control of our lives, and the two who spent time in care are almost ready to rejoin us, because this venture has given them hope. A number of other people have joined us and we’re a small commune now – meet our newest member, Catrin McNamara, who got fed up with worsening social conditions and joined us only this week. She wants a better, more natural life for her unborn baby...
He turned to her affectionately, and continued:
The great capitalist dream is ending, as it was bound to. Nothing is for ever, and though we had a good time in the material world we realised that we had to become self-sufficient as the West’s dependence on oil and consumerism hit the buffers. It’s not all sweetness and light here, there are constant worries over health care and food, and we have to defend ourselves against maurading gangs, but we’re a lot happier as a small co-operative. We feel that we all count in one way or another, we can see democracy in action every day. We all have something to contribute, and we live in a very beautiful place – which is good for the soul...
Here he swept a hand towards the amazing view below them.
Lou could take no more, so he crept away in the shadow of the hedge, until he was safely out of sight. Then he careered across the fields, uprooting the scarecrows and grabbing wildly at corn stalks, flinging them into the air around him. After he’d finished his mad dervish dance through the cornfields he went to the car and sat in it for a while, planning his next move whilst removing ears of corn from his clothing. He realised that he was in a near-psychotic state by now, but he didn’t care. The adrenalin rush he’d got from his mini-rampage had merely fuelled another onslaught, which would come later. He knew now what it was like to be part of a riot. He’d enjoyed the power surge, the sub-erotic pleasure of wanton destruction. Smashing things was fun, and he’d be back later to enjoy some more. University researcher? Sod it, this was much more enjoyable. Smiling grimly to himself, he started the car and headed for the nearest town to get some grub. He’d be back later, under the cover of darkness, and he knew what he was going to do.
It was close to midnight, the witching hour, when Lou – still trying to digest a greasy burger meal – fired up his saloon in the Hotel Corvo car park. The film crew had gone and he’d sat there alone, watching the last few jackdaws settling down for the night, a noisy gang jostling among the chimneys high above him. The place was theirs now; it was unlikely to open again as a going concern. Such places were disappearing all along Britain’s coastline, waysid
e markers for a lost way of life. Nowadays, inside their expensive little huts, the people of Britain watched placebo TV, swigged cheap supermarket beer or boxed wine, and obediently forgot how to commune with either nature or their fellow humans. The ersatz world screened to them daily presented a nostalgic dream of a country which existed only in miniature now, a ship in a bottle.
Lou revved up the car and headed for a cart track he’d spotted earlier, which would take him towards the sleeping cornfields and their busy mice. After wrenching the gate off its hinges in the glare of the headlights he entered the first field and started his rampage. Startled rabbits shot through the hedges as he mowed his way through the corn in anarchic loops, his headlights sweeping across the countryside and out to sea in crazy, spyrographic patterns. Grasping the steering wheel at arm’s length, Lou screamed and shouted as he went, bouncing and rattling in his seat, destroying the crop in a mad orgy of destruction. Even then, as his vengeance peaked, his mind was elsewhere – inside one of the memory sticks, racing up and down the silvery circuits, wiping out the contents, erasing all the memories, mowing down Big M and ejecting him into the dustbin of history. As he entered the second field he decided to try his hand at a crop circle which would spell his name, but he gave up after a while because it was too difficult. An owl, white and spectral, crossed his headlights. Bats flitted out of his way. And then, as his pillage in the second field reached a crescendo and he prepared to enter the third, the whole world jarred to a halt. He hadn’t seen it until the last moment – a rock lying in its own little glade within the corn, a large granite mouse crouched in the crop. He’d driven straight onto its back and the car had become stranded on it, its mechanical belly hooked by two large granite ears which held it firmly. The wheels continued to whirr in a high-pitched scream, and then the engine stalled. Lou sat there in his poleaxed saddle, sitting on the back of a fossilised Precambrian supermouse. Then a hairy hand wrenched open the door nearest to him and pulled him out of the vehicle. After that, the world went black.
