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 television 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, wayside 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.

He was out for a long time, and they were beginning to worry. But eventually he stirred, and after the preliminaries to consciousness he came to. He looked around him but failed to make any connection with his new surroundings. He was in a small room with uneven walls, painted in a bright yellow ochre. A few candles shimmered here and there, their flames wafted occasionally by a draught, or perhaps by someone moving. The air smelt of mud and straw; primitive, elemental. He struggled to focus, and on turning his head he saw two human faces looking at him, waiting for him to recover.

‘Sorry about that Llwyd,’ said a faraway voice. ‘We got a bit carried away, but you were destroying our food for the winter.’

He spent some more time defuzzing, and then he recognised the big man in denim sitting next to Catrin on a haybale. He was resting with his back to the wall, with his big hands behind his head and his legs jutting out in front of him. Lou could smell the leather of his footwear, big brown builders’ boots with steel toecaps. Lou realised who he was.

‘Big M,’ he whispered through cracked lips. He was thirsty, very thirsty, and suddenly he was sick. He managed to wriggle sideways before he brought up the burger meal on the floor by the side of his bed, which rustled as he moved – it was made of straw.

They helped him outside, so that he could get some air, while Big M cleared the mess inside with a spade.

Lou sat on a bale by the door to the building, which was small and round and squat. There were two others, completing a circle, and they looked more like hobbit homes than anything else. Lou and his companions could be sitting by a settlement somewhere in Africa, or in the Indian desert. Big M sat on a nearby bale and observed him.

‘They’re made of woven straw plastered with mud, six more behind us,’ he indicated with a thumb over his shoulder. ‘Nice and warm, but you have to be careful with the candles, and there’s a chance you’ll wake up sharing your bed with a mouse,’ he added nonchalantly.

Catrin was sitting on another bale, hunched in a posture which Lou knew well. She was upset.

‘I’m sorry about this Manawydan, I never thought he’d do something like this.’

She appeared on the verge of tears.

‘Hey, never mind, it wasn’t your fault,’ he replied softly. ‘Little shits like this all over the place. I’m used to it.’

Lou resented being called a little shit, but there again he was one, so he kept quiet.

He was chattering with cold, but his insides felt better now. It was strange being so close to Big M, in the flesh; Lou had dealt with an abstract and faraway heroic figure for so long that the man had reached some sort of mythological status in his mind. Coupled with his size and his rugby exploits, he seemed totemic and special. And pleasant, too, really nice. Anyone else might have been abusive, or aggressive, but the man in front of Lou was calm and dignified and urbane, if a touch withdrawn or resigned.

Lou wondered if he should apologise. Was he ready for that sort of thing? Would it mean anything to anyone – or would it sound like so many of the century’s empty mouthings, another fatuous apology?

Sorry all you little sardines, for putting you into tins...

‘I’m sorry,’ said Lou. He was talking to the ground.

‘Sorry for what, exactly?’ asked Big M.

Lou looked up into his eyes, blue and candid and clear. They held his gaze openly, inquiringly. He seemed genuinely interested in Lou.

‘Sorry about the fields,’ answered Lou. ‘Don’t know what got into me.’

Catrin got up, went over to him, and stooped down.

‘And the rest too, tell him about the rest. He deserves to know the truth, Llwyd.’

But he was unable to answer and she regained her seat. As they rested in silence, Lou gathered his thoughts. His eyes detected a faint light on the eastern horizon, and he realised that the dawn was approaching. The mice would be coming to the end of their shift now. Hundreds, maybe thousands of them, out there among the skyscraper stalks. Wizzing up and down in their invisible lifts, tiny furry citizens in their city of stems. They’d been around mankind for a long time, sharing his story; sharing his food and his home too. Perhaps they were the gods of old, made small. Perhaps that might happen to man too; he would be rescaled, cut down to size again in the ancient landscape. No bad thing, thought Lou. That would give the other animals a chance.

Maybe it would be easier to tell the whole story now, get it off his chest, clear the account. What was the point in dissembling any further anyway, playing a stupid game, messing with people. Wasn’t it easier to be frank and straightforward?

He began to tell them about the background: his research, the threat posed by Dermot Feeney’s book, academic competition, the race to shine in a field of excellence.

‘I wouldn’t mention fields of excellence right now,’ said Big M.

Again, Lou said sorry.

‘No point in saying sorry over and over again,’ said Big M, ‘just explain to me why you did it so that I can understand, that’s all I’m asking. You’ve just wiped out most of our winter store of food and I think we deserve to know why. Someone or other has had it in for us since we came here and we’ve just taken it every time, turned the other cheek, but now I really want to know what’s behind all this.’

Big M was perturbed, but not angry. He stood up and came to stand by Lou. He seemed very big, standing up to his full height, his close-cropped hair looking like stubble. His head was almost out of sight, he really was a huge man. How old was he? Lou tried to fix an approximate year but it was impossible, the man could be anything between thirty and a hundred. Some words came echoing out of the memory stick in his breast pocket. I’m a sex god you know. And yes, he was still very good looking, in a mature sort of way. He really did seem ageless.

Lou went through some of the reasons for his actions. But they didn’t ring true. Sitting in the stalled car, earlier, a simple realisation had appeared in the full beam of his headlights. He’d tried to destroy Big M’s story, not because he had anything against Big M, but because he was expressing his own sense of failure. He had known all along, inside himself, that he’d never been up to the task of writing a stand-out book about Big M. He simply wasn’t up to it. He maybe had the acumen, he maybe had the intellect, but he didn’t have the mental stamina or the dogged perseverance needed to write such a book. One needed intellectual slack to do such a thing. He had no depth, no intuition, no experience of probing and delving. His generation had never suffered, and unfortunately for mankind, most people became prescient and compassionate and accommodating only when they’d suffered a bit themselves.

‘What I did, really, was a bit childish,’ said Lou finally. ‘The anger inside me was the anger of a child. I wasn’t trying to hurt you Big M, you seem to be a nice kind of guy. But I was angry because I saw other people being successful around me and I was getting nowhere. When you see another academic being praised and admired and honoured, and all the time you’re sitting in your little room going nowhere, a little red monster enters you, pumps you full of envy and bile, you get hot and angry inside, you want to...’

Lou trailed off, knowing that he didn’t need to say any more.

‘And anyway, you provoked me,’ he added. ‘Why did you feed me the memory sticks, what was that stuff with the scarecrows, dressing them up like me?’

He looked round towards the other two; Big M had retreated to his bale and was sitting in his characteristic pose, lying back against the hut with his head resting in his hands. He’d found himself in this position many times over the last few years as various adversities had arrived.

‘I have absolutely no idea what you’re talking about,’ answered Big M, and Lou knew immediately that he was telling the truth.

‘And you, Catrin – was it you who did it?’

She looked aghast.

‘Me? Why the hell would I do that, Lou? I’m about to give birth to your child, for God’s sake. Do you think I’ve got nothing better to do than...’

She trailed off, and again Lou knew instinctively that she was telling the truth. So it had all been a co-incidence; paranoia and guilt had fed his imagination. As with most conspiracy theories, bigotry and ineptitude had been at the root of it all.

‘So this is what an avenging angel looks like,’ said Big M quietly. ‘Are you my avenging angel, Llwyd? Are you the angel of the bottomless pit? Were you behind the gunshot at the hotel that night?’

Lou lifted his head, and allowed himself a smile. ‘I had nothing to do with it, and you know it. You’ll have to blame that on Pryderi. He got in with the wrong crowd, I’m not that type,’ he answered.

‘No, you’re just an ordinary bloke, aren’t you Llwyd,’ said Big M, returning to his reflective head-in-hands pose. He was tired now, and feeling resigned again.

Resigned to man’s idiocies and petty squabbles.

‘You know something, Llwyd,’ said Big M quietly, ‘man’s reputation as an intelligent animal rests on a very few shoulders.’

Lou took a while to digest this.

‘Not everyone can be famous you know,’ continued Big M. ‘I quite liked it in the Middle Ages when artisans were anonymous, just part of the team. I also liked it when we had small gods for everything; we may have been misguided, but having a god for the trees gave trees some safety and having a god for the rivers gave rivers some protection.’

Big M went off on a riff about the western cult of the self. There was no attempt now at graft or per­severance or a personal journey, he said. The only way to reach immortality was via a pair of plastic tits or three minutes of prancing about on X Factor. And what about the past? Why had Wales turned its back on its own history and adopted the fables of a small Mediterranean country, a land of sand and burning sun? Why had they welcomed a foreign god, singular and seductive, but all the same very human?

Lou kept quiet. The man wanted to have his say. Let him rant. Let him put the world to rights. That’s what old men did when they couldn’t chase women or carouse any more...

Lou regarded the man uncomprehendingly. His size and obvious power created a mesmeric forcefield around him. Lou had met only one man like him: a Russian cosmonaut, Colonel Alexander Volkov, hero of the Soviet Union, who’d spent a year circling the Earth in Mir when the USSR disintegrated, leaving him to watch from above, unable to return until someone at Star City paid the bills. He’d gone up a Soviet citizen and come down a Russian. Lou had met him at a university party when Volkov had been on a British tour, and like everyone else he’d been drugged by the man’s presence. As everyone had agreed later, Volkov’s mass had seemed different; he had his own forcefield, you could almost feel the magnetic rings pulsing around him.

The scene changed again as they sat there mutely. The dawn had established itself, but at the same time the atmosphere had become opaque and whispy. Soon they were sitting in a thick cool sea mist which muffled the world and erased the landscape below them.

‘Oh bloody hell,’ said Big M wearily. ‘Not the sodding mists again. I thought they’d gone. I can’t stand the thought of walking around in skimmed milk for another year.’

The birds and the animals, which had just started their morning chatter, fell silent again. Only the smash and swash of the distant sea serrated the silence, threading in and out of their white linen world.

‘Look, a mouse,’ said Catrin. She didn’t fall into a panic, as she surely would have at home, thought Lou. Why was she different here?

The mouse was poised on the edge of a bale, sniffing the air, moving its uplifted head from side to side. Slowly, deftly, Big M moved his hand behind it and closed on it, then took it round for all to see. The mouse seemed unfazed; it sat in Big M’s massive paw, looking at them unseeingly with dark, clear little eyes, its whiskers tremulous and hyperactive.

‘Beautiful, isn’t it,’ said Big M. ‘The harvest mouse, Mycromys Minutus. Makes a marvellous little ball of woven grass high among the corn stalks for its summer home.’

He turned it over gently and moved a finger aside, to show them its white belly. The rest of it was covered in a soft brown fur, tinted with russet.

‘It’ll take some of our seeds and store them in a winter larder underground. Isn’t it wonderful?’

They admired it, snug in his hand, apparently unaware of its vulnerability.

Big M moved over to Lou’s bale and sat beside him. Lou felt a warm, solid form press against him but detected no menace. Looking sideways towards Big M, he noticed the mouse tattoo on his chest, under his shirt on the left pectoralis major; the trademark badge of the old Welsh rugby teams. It looked faded and mystical; a warrior’s scar, a man’s story etched on his skin. Lou felt a pang of nostalgia for this other man’s history; he heard the voices of a massed sepia crowd on the wind, and saw the blurred faces of his countrymen as they hurried in their thousands towards the field of battle. They were old or dead now, those people; their memories of Wales had seeped away into the past.

‘Open up,’ said Big M, unfurling Lou’s hand and transferring the mouse onto his palm before closing his fingers over the tiny body.

‘There,’ said Big M, ‘what does that feel like? You’re a god now Llwyd, you can do what you like with the mouse. Anything. You can kill it quickly, you can kill it slowly, or you can let it go. Up to you now Llwyd. Look how massive you are, how tiny it is. One movement from you and it’s dead. You can decide its fate Llwyd, you have the power of life or death over it. Decide!’

Lou sat on his bale in the mist, with the beautiful little mouse in his closed hand. Such a nice warm feeling. He raised and flipped his hand round so that he could look directly into its face; again, the mouse seemed unperturbed, or at least resigned to its fate.

Two little mouse eyes looked into his, and they stayed like that for a minute or so as Lou examined the face and the quivering whiskers, the implausible little mouth.

‘It’s the acrobat of the wheatfields, swinging through the corn stalks,’ said Big M. ‘It drinks from droplets of water on blades of grass. Such freedom. Such licence to roam and destroy our crops, but it takes only what it needs, Llwyd. It doesn’t destroy for fun. Only man does that on a regular basis. So do it, kill it if you feel like it. Break its neck and throw it into the hedge. You’re in control now Llwyd...’

Lou continued to look at the little face for a while, then he straightened his hand, lowered it to the ground, and opened it. The mouse stayed stock still for a few seconds, as if awaiting the rasp of the guillotine, then it vanished into the mist.

A round of gentle applause rippled behind Lou’s back, and he turned to see a group of about twelve people ringed around him. They were smiling, and a couple had glistening eyes.

‘There you are, Llwyd, now you know what it feels like to be a god. And you’ve learnt a lesson that all country children learnt in the old days – that the best feeling of all is to spare the mouse, to let it go,’ said Big M. ‘Don’t you think so, Llwyd?’

As he spoke, two figures came looming out of the mist, startling them. It took a few seconds for anyone to recognise them, because they weren’t expected, then Big M leapt to his feet, saying: ‘Pryderi! Rhiannon!’

Lou stayed silent, head bowed, his eyes still on the mouse’s path to liberation, as the people around him embraced each other, clasped hands, cried, all those things you do when you’re reunited with someone important to you after a long time. It was pretty emotional, figures moving in and out of the mist, throwing their arms around each other, filling the air with human feeling. They took a while to settle, then Big M introduced him to the assembly and told something of the story, beginning with the memory sticks and Lou’s quest for academic fame. He didn’t mention Lou’s attempt to eradicate Big M.

With an obliterating mist chalking out their features, Lou was reminded of a school production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, in which he’d played the malign Puck; and here they were again at the play’s ending, with Big M as Oberon the king of the fairies reunited with his queen Titania in her bower deep in the forest. It was uncanny.

Then, Big M asked one of the group to take Lou into one of the huts so that he could get himself together and prepare for whatever he was going to do next. And what was that? Go home, presumably, thought Lou, though his mind was blank. He hadn’t a clue what might happen next. And he needed to know what Catrin was likely to do. Was she going to stay here? Should he insist that his wife accompany him home, with their unborn baby still inside her? He’d never done alpha male before, and it was probably too late now. They’d all laugh at him probably, so he’d have to beg her. But on the other hand he wasn’t all that bothered if she stayed. She seemed happy with these people, and he sensed that their marriage was effectively over. He’d find someone else in no time anyway. The Polish cleaner perhaps, she could live in the attic.

‘Show him my collection,’ said Big M as Lou was ushered away. This time he was taken behind the hut where he’d lain earlier, to the centre of the settlement. He noticed that there were nine huts in all, grouped in threes: a sort of democratic round table of huts, since none was bigger or more prominent that the others. In the centre, however, there was a different structure: it was a tall square building, set on four stanchions so that the first floor was a good metre above the ground, leaving an open space underneath.

‘That’s to prevent the mice from getting in, and to allow a flow of air to dry the grain,’ said his guide, a young man of about twenty-five, dark and lean. ‘We were experimenting this year with native cereals – the first field you tried to destroy had einkorn in it, the second had spelt, so it looks like we’ll have to rely on emmer this winter.’

Lou mumbled an apology as they climbed a flight of steps to the first floor.

‘There’s a viewing area above, and this is where we keep the crop,’ he said, pointing to a pile of empty hessian sacks and a couple of full ones.

‘We’ll have to salvage what we can from the two furthest fields, you’re lucky that Big M is an easy-going guy, the rest of us wanted to kill you.’

Lou felt miserable, but remembered his mouse deliverance and felt a bit better.

From the ceiling hung a festoonery of boots and shoes, including a couple of rugby boots.

‘Big M’s collection of footwear, it’s a bit of a joke among us. That’s the only place where they’re safe, away from the mice. But Big M likes to have his tootsies well covered, he likes a bit of style in his life.’

They heard a shout from outside, so they joined the rest. The mist was clearing quickly and the air around them was warming. Wafts of wheaty smells and hedgerow vapours began to flow on the air. The landscape below them was clearing, and they all seemed to be relieved.

‘Come into my hut Llwyd,’ said Big M. ‘I’ve got something to show you.’

They went inside one of the buildings, just the two of them this time, and sat down on facing bales. It was nice in there, with bunches of herbs hanging from the rafters and a drift of flower petals, mainly rose, on the floor between them.

It was a homely kind of place, sweet smelling and comfortable, with a couple of exquisite rugs hanging on the walls. In the centre, between them, was a low wooden table which held a large bowl filled to overflowing with fruit. In between the apples and pears and plums, Lou could see objects glinting in the growing light. He watched them, and wondered what they were.

‘Memory sticks, Llwyd. Flash drives, whatever you want to call them. I think you know what they are,’ said Big M. ‘Take a closer look.’

He was sitting in his usual pose, with his feet resting on the table. He had changed into a pair of brightly coloured moccasins.

Lou dropped to his knees and shuffled up to the bowl. He dipped his hands inside it and picked up some of the memory sticks. They were all identical, pearly white with the same silvery innards as the green, red and blue sticks which had led him such a merry dance. He piled them up in his left palm and played with them, then raised his eyes towards Big M, who said:

‘You tried to destroy me, Llwyd. Is that right?’

Lou returned his look.

‘I wasn’t really trying to destroy you, I was trying to kill off everybody else’s version of your life so that only mine was left.’

‘And then you’d get all the credit, right?’

‘Yes, I suppose so.’

‘Llwyd, you can murder people, you can kill them off, but you can’t kill off their stories. It’s impossible.’

Lou looked down at the memory sticks and wondered what was inside them. He had some sort of idea.

‘How many versions of my life do you think there are?’ asked Big M.

He answered his own question. ‘Dozens, hundreds, thousands... there’s a version of me for everyone I’ve met.’

Lou allowed the memory sticks in his hand to cascade slowly back into the bowl.

This time it was Big M who dropped to his knees and shuffled to the table.

He fingered through them, picking fruit out of the way as he went, until he found one particular memory stick. He held it up to the light and grunted softly. Then he handed it to Lou.

‘That’s the one I like best. It’s the most complete. I wrote it myself, actually. Of course, it could be the least reliable of all the versions. You yourself will have to decide on that.’

Lou held it reverentially and stared at its inner corridors. He imagined the treasures inside: the whole story, unexpurgated, warts and all. Big M’s mythologial childhood, his great rugby days, his life afterwards as celebrity cook, comedian, style guru, all-round nice guy. Big M, the great giver of gifts, had probably given him the most valuable gift of all.

‘You know Llwyd, it’s actually much easier to be laid back and pleasant. It takes so much less energy, and you don’t have to spend half your life looking for alibis or avoiding people. It really is better for everyone, and you get to enjoy life more. Why not give it a try?’

Big M was back in his familiar pose. He looked content, at ease with himself.

‘It’s yours if you want it, Llwyd.’

Lou’s head jerked upwards, shocked.

‘What, this?’

Lou held the memory stick in the air between them.

‘Yes, my life story, complete. You can have it. Use that stick to write the story yourself. You can claim unprecedented access, original sources, the story as never told before...’

Lou began to splutter, but Big M waved aside his protestations.

‘No Llwyd, don’t bother with all that stuff. Just take it, do it. It’s my present to you, but on one condition.’

Lou knew immediately what that was.

‘Of course Big M, I won’t destroy it, I won’t mess around any longer. I’ll play it straight, I promise.’

Big M sat still for a while, his eyes gleaming.

‘We’ll see, Llwyd, we’ll see what you’re really made of. And do you know something, Llwyd? You could actually change my story a bit. Every story is warped with time, even our own individual stories. In the old days this story would have ended with Catrin returning home with you obediently and living a rather sad life, never fulfilling herself. But you can give it a new ending, Llwyd. It’s up to you and Catrin to change the ending, not to be helpless individuals swatted this way and that by the gods. Correction, it’s up to the whole of the human race to sort it out now.’

‘You sound as if you’ve given up,’ said Lou.

‘I haven’t given up on life, but I’ve almost given up on humanity,’ answered Big M. ‘Anyway, when this project is up and running I’m thinking of retiring. I’ll go back to Ireland, or maybe to the Isle of Man. That’s where my family comes from, you know. Sea all around me, I need the sea. It’s very important to me.’

‘Why?’

Big M gave him a wry smile.

‘Oh, I don’t know. Wide open spaces? Mystery? Very few people? The sea’s a huge sleeping monster. I like its power, its beauty.’

‘You don’t like people very much?’

‘I like them individually, but as a mass they’re so destructive. They’re a plague, really. But they think they’re gods. That’s what mirrors are for, to remind them every day that they’re gods.’

‘And there aren’t any real gods?’

Big M took off his moccasins and massaged his feet. After a while he looked up at Lou and said:

‘You know that song about the three blind mice? My mother used to tell me a story about those mice when I was a kid. Bedtime story. She said the first mouse was a messenger from the vast plains of the North, at a time when there were many gods, gods of small things like rivers and trees. The mouse announced that all the small gods were going away and they would never return to Earth again, but that one of the gods would stay behind in the South, just in case...

‘Then a second mouse came from the South and said that the sole god who’d stayed on Earth had become lonely and had decided to join the rest, but he’d left a mouse in the East to act as a messenger between mankind and the gods...

‘Then a third mouse came from the East and told the people of Earth that all the gods were dead, but they needn’t worry because a fourth mouse would come from the West one day to save mankind...’

‘And what does all that mean?’ asked Lou, puzzled.

‘Not really sure. Mum was a great one for stories. I think she was trying to warn me that humans are a race of fibbers who are constantly changing the story to suit themselves. God was the best alibi they ever invented. But Lou, they really do have to face up to their responsibilities now and realise it’s up to them. No excuses.’

Big M replaced his moccasins, got up, and stretched.

‘Anyway, that’s enough moralising for now. That’s another human minefield, preaching. Come on, let’s join the rest of them.’

Lou walked along, thinking about their conversation. He really did mean it; he was sincere when he made his pledge to Big M. But then his mind clouded over when he thought about his promise to Catrin about the baby and being a good father. Still, he really meant it this time.

They joined the rest of the group, who were still celebrating the return of Pryderi and Rhiannon. They looked different, more engaged and vital than the urbanites who usually milled around Lou. They were as sleek as the mice, more in tune with their surroundings.

A simple breakfast had been prepared and laid out on a table made of haybales. They were discussing the day’s plans, how they’d try to save what they could of the crop, who’d do what. The woman called Rhiannon pointed to the world below them and said: ‘Look, I can see the road again, and some walkers over there on the coastal path. People again!’

Lou left them and went to stand at the edge of the compound, trying to formulate some plans of his own. Below him the mist had cleared and the landscape had emerged extra sharp, clear and very beautiful. Fields stretched as far as the eye could see: there were countless vales with rivers between them; trees and hedges stitched together in a quilt of classical beauty. Lou felt very big and very small at the same time. He was a giant with a great story inside the miniature world of the memory stick, and he was also a midge in the rolling landscape of Wales. He might stay here himself, if they let him. If he could stand the country life. Town mouse, church mouse, country mouse. He’d probably scuttle back to brickwork eventually. Up to now he’d been a man who liked to gnaw his way through other people’s walls, other people’s cables. Perhaps it was time for a change. Time for a nice relaxing time in the country, a hammock slung between two trees, siestas in the afternoon sunshine. But there again, he’d have to work hard and that might not be quite so...

Lou turned round to see what the rest were doing. He swivelled, and held the scene in a long stare.

There was nobody there. Perhaps they’d gone down to the fields to start work. Perhaps they’d disappeared into the memory stick again. He had no idea, but he wanted to find them. In passing the breakfast bales he picked up a small, flat, freshly baked loaf, and took it with him as he started walking by the edge of the ripe corn, towards the second field. He tore off chunks of bread and ate them as he went, picking off blackberries and wild strawberries on the way. At some point he took his digital camera from a pocket and took a picture of the cornfield still standing, yellow under blue. It would be ideal as a screensaver if he went back to his college desk, to start all over again.

At some point he found himself calling, calling out a name.

‘Manawydan... Manawydan...’

It was the first time he’d ever used his full name, unconsciously, without thinking.

In that moment, his lips red with raspberry juice, alone in the cornfield under a vast blue sky, he felt like a small child calling out to his father.