This is a story that fades and wriggles into and out of a dream state, a kind of fugue, a kind of flat country with unexpected hills that weren’t there a moment ago but which are suddenly there, really and indisputably there. Until they’re not. The story happens in the past and the present at the same time, like the pages of a diary flapping in a stiff breeze.
We’re in Llandudno, one of our favourite coastal towns; me, my wife and our three children. Look more closely. In the evening light, if you look hard enough, it could be that we’re a different family from many years before: my mam and dad and me and my brother because Llandudno was one of our special places then too. The ghosts of the people we were are walking just a little ahead of us and just a little behind us, occupying more or less the same space as us, like Velcroed shadows.
Me and my wife and the kids are just walking back to the guest house we’re staying in and we’re all tired; the sun and the wind have sucked the energy from us and I’m looking forward to the half-sleep I’ll get tonight as the street lights and then the sun push their way through the undecided curtains.
We’d been in a café where a carton of Ribena my younger daughter had had was so out of date it should have been in a museum and when I pointed it out to the owner, a man who seemed to be at least half beard, he went into a back room and returned with a souvenir pencil, which he gave me by way of apology. Sometimes the pencil still turns up in a drawer and I think about that holiday.
As we make our steady way towards the Tan-y-Marian Guest House I notice something on the floor, something brown and leathery that could, from a distance, be a small tortoise or a dropped gauntlet. It’s a wallet, the sort that could have been a constant and well-loved companion for its owner. Well, until it met the pavement.
I bent down and picked it up and my dad bent down too; he bent to pick up a different wallet at a different time in a different coastal town, Portree on the Isle of Skye. Yes, he is part shadow and part balaclava-made-of-midges because this is August in the Islands. And because he is in that place called The Past.
My dad briefly uses the found wallet as a midge-bludgeon but only succeeds in hitting his own face, which offers him a little relief and the rest of us a cheap chortle. I decide that, despite the fact we are all tired and craving sandy sleep, we should take the wallet to the police station; after all, as I reason to the rest of the party, if I lost my wallet and somebody found it I’d be very pleased if they handed it in. I ask a man where the police station is and from his pointing and detailed directions I decide that it’s on the way back to the Tan-y-Marian. This, sadly, is not the case. The Cop Shop seems to be closer to my house in South Yorkshire than it is to the guest house’s comforting smell.
We realise this as we walk round and round in the concentric circles I’m sure the man wasn’t indicating with his broad-brushstroke hand gestures. In the past, my dad is clutching the wallet he’s found as the sun goes down reluctantly and the gulls sing in Gaelic. A man approaches us; from the past’s vast distance I can remember that the man has a black eye and a cut on his chin. He’s drunk and swaying to invisible crooning music.
The kids are desperate to go to bed, but ahead of us, not too far away, I can see the police station. The wallet feels bulgy and I am living a kind of fantasy that it contains an old man’s life savings and that he’ll be so grateful for the return of his dosh that he’ll give us a reward; not too much, but let’s face it, the kids need new school shoes. We enter the police station; a man stands behind the desk and for a moment, because I’m tired and sun-bleached, I think he’s a glove puppet.
Back on the Isle of Skye, the drunk and bloody man approaches my dad, points at the wallet and says something slurry and vowel-heavy. My dad shakes his head and puts the wallet in his pocket for safekeeping. The man stands and shouts at my dad, inches from his face, his breath enveloping us all, then he wanders off, exaggerating the motion of the earth. We walk towards the police station to hand the wallet in. I ask my dad what the man said to him and my dad replies ‘He was asking for the train fare to Perth’ and he and my mother exchange a loaded glance.
In Llandudno, I hand the wallet over to the cardboard cut-out copper and he moves. As I’m handing it over I remember my dad finding the wallet in Portree and I entertain a fantasy that maybe this is the same wallet, lost again and found again so that it becomes like one of those folk tales/urban myths about the man who lost his wedding ring in a deep lake and years later caught a trout in the same deep lake and when he cut it open to cook it there was the ring.
Suddenly my dad and I are signing forms in police stations far from home. Names and addresses are taken and we are thanked, a generation apart. The wallets are placed in evidence bags and two families, with me the only common conduit between time frames, trudge back to B&Bs.
And I never got a reward; not that I’d have wanted one, of course. Of course.