WHAT do you do when a friend goes missing? When the police have gone, when kith and kin have been comforted? When countless mugs of coffee have been drunk, shoulders shrugged, eyes wiped, hands held, blanks drawn?
Wait? Hope? Despair? All three of those emotions, in varying degrees?
Yes, we did all of those things, and more. But as I’ve told you already, Olly left a note for me at the end of her dream story (which I told no one about). She also left letters for her mother and Fit Boy.
I decided to do some detective work of my own. It was just something to do; I couldn’t sit around waiting for something to happen. I read psychology books, tried to find the cause of Olly’s marasmus. I remember that time very well: it was a cold period; we felt as though a huge finger had pulled down the Arctic Circle like a rubber band and snapped it over us, trapping us in an igloo of ice. The wind combed the trees too hard, and snowy furrows in the fields spilled onto the hedgerows as if they were slices of frozen bread. The trees were stark and bare, coathangers waiting for damp leaf-green pullovers to be draped over them in the spring.
Time collected in puddles.
Lost in a colourless, painting-by-numbers landscape, waiting for paint, I stood at my sea-facing window and kept watch for rainbows. I was waiting for a moment like Paul Klee’s moment in Tunisia, when he said, exultantly: Colour has taken hold of me; no longer do I have to chase after it. I know that it has hold of me for ever. That is the significance of the blessed moment…
And there’s a blue boat down there in the harbour, bobbing slowly on the ripples as its crewmen uncoil their ropes. I am ready to go with them under the wheeling gulls, under a parting plume of smoke. This leaving is inside me, perfectly formed, waiting for me to take it to the water’s edge.
I had no experience of detection work. Sure, we watched videos of the opposition before most of the big games, and I got pretty good at working out their patterns of play, set pieces, offside tactics and penalty preferences (left or right of the keeper). Call me naïve if you like, but at least I tried. What was I meant to do? Go to a psychiatrist and say: One of my friends has lost the plot and she’s done a runner. What do you think has happened to her? Where is she likely to be now? Yeah, sure.
Something had burst inside her. Those pipes linking us to the past can never be disconnected; washers can be changed and taps tightened, but when the burst comes it brings water from deep underground, from a long time ago.
I nearly wrote to Dear Deirdre in The Sun, honest to God. While I puzzled out what to do I worked on my fitness because I was getting plump. I also took a look at some famous detectives, to pick up some ideas. The Sherlock Holmes style was a possibility, I thought, until a few problems cropped up: I didn’t like the deerstalker image, I sure as hell couldn’t play the violin, and although I wasn’t averse to taking cocaine in a seven and a half per cent solution, like the great man, I eventually chickened out because I’m terrified of needles. There was another thing: Holmes was famous for his razor-sharp intelligence and his super-analytical brain. Regrettably, I am not. So I took a look at Raymond Chandler, and I liked him a lot, right away. When I was writing up my notes about Olly I could come up with some classic lines: The girl gave him a look which ought to have stuck at least four inches out of his back…
Doing it the Chandler way would give me an opportunity to come up with stuff like this bit in The Long Good-Bye:
A girl in a white sharkskin suit and a luscious figure was climbing the ladder to the high board. I watched the band of white that showed between the tan of her thighs and the suit. I watched it carnally. Then she was out of sight, cut off by the deep overhang of the roof. A moment later I saw her flash down in a one and a half. Spray came high enough to catch the sun and make rainbows that were almost as pretty as the girl.
But there was one big problem – Chandler’s hero. Initially, I could compare myself favourably with Philip Marlowe; just like him I was about forty and tall with grey eyes and a hard jaw. I too was a man of honour, a modern day knight in shining armour with a college education (almost). At this point, however, Marlowe and I diverged. He listened to classical music and played solo, imaginary chess games against the grand masters of history. Me, I hate classical music, and although I could give you a good game of draughts, I wouldn’t last long in a game of chess. I simply don’t have the concentration. Besides, Marlowe seemed to take regular physical beatings (from the good guys as well as the bad guys) and his hair was parted by a bullet nearly every day. I wasn’t into that at all. No, I wasn’t up to that Marlowe malarkey. So I cast my net into the waters again and this time I came up with an ideal role model. If I was going to be a detective, I was going to be just like Precious Ramotswe. We had many things in common. Both of us were sensible and down-to-earth but very cunning underneath our veneer of normality. Both of us lived in former British colonies – she in Botswana, me in Wales. I read all about her No 1 Ladies Detective Agency. She was dignified. She was humorous. And she got results every time. So I followed her example whenever I could and stuck to the tenets of her professional bible, The Principles of Private Detection. I thanked God that my enquiry was fresh, because this is what it has to say about stale enquiries:
A stale enquiry is unrewarding to all concerned. The client is given false hopes because a detective is working on the case, and the agent himself feels committed to coming up with something because of the client’s expectations. This means that the agent will probably spend more time on the case than the circumstances should warrant. At the end of the day, nothing is likely to be achieved and one is left wondering whether there is not a case for allowing the past to be buried with decency. Let the past alone is sometimes the best advice that can be given.
Precious Ramotswe concluded that there was far too much interest in the past, and people were forever digging up events which had happened long ago. What was the point in doing this if the effect was merely to poison the present? she asked.
But the past is inextricably connected to the present, as surely as ap Llwyd’s wells are linked in Water-Divining in the Foothills of Paradise. Everything that has gone before is fibre-optically linked with events happening around us now. Look at Olly. There were elements of her story which were eternal. Pretty girl meets pretty boy but her father puts all sorts of obstacles in the way; the boy must prove himself before the two can wed… they call on a hero to help them. Every story ever told seems to stretch way back into the past: nothing much changes, except that every age adds its own impressions and changes the fable slightly. So how do we construct a new story for ourselves from those seven basic strands mentioned at the start of our story? You tell me. Another thing: did Olly run away – or did she escape from something? Here’s Adam Phillips:
If you want to escape from someone, they have become very important to you… we map our lives – our gestures, our ambitions, our loves, the minutest movements of our bodies – according to our aversions… as though our lives depend, above all, on accurate knowledge of what we are endangered by…
Yesterday I was on a train. The girl opposite me – early twenties, mixed race – bought a bottle of water from the trolleyman for close on £1.50. The water was in a well-presented bottle and she sipped on it during our short journey. You’ll have to pardon me; I’m old-fashioned and I was born in the country, so I’m slightly perplexed when people buy water at exorbitant prices, especially when there’s good clean water on tap, free; after all, a huge chunk of the world has almost no water at all. But there’s something else, more important. I’m pretty sure that the girl on the train, typically urban, had never seen a well or a spring, never seen water bubbling to the surface; never witnessed its magic. To her it was a commodity, not a life-giving force; for a child born in the Kingdom of Advertising it was a liquid in a bottle, not a thing of beauty. To her, the bottle was more important that the contents. The age we live in is about euphemisms and avoidances, because few want to face reality – as if we were all living in a fairy tale without fairies.
I know, I’m going on a bit. But this fin-de-siecle feel to Britain at the moment – am I imagining it? A country in which 99 per cent of the population watches the least talented one per cent in a bread-and-circuses parable called Big Brother, or some such dull opiate? Over the pond many Americans, in a deliberate annulment of the brain, have abrogated any sense of intellect and returned to a dark age of religion and war.
Nothing changes. I was reading a book called The Age of Arthur last night and I came across these statements:
…for nations, like people, tend to form habits in infancy that their adult years harden and modify…
…as men began to lose respect for the state, they transferred their hopes to religion; and for the rest of the century, religious conflict mattered more and more in the political life of the Roman world…
…the core of the story has always been melancholy regret for a strong and just ruler who protects his people against barbarism…
No, nothing much changes. But man is never in stasis; he mutates constantly to fill the vacuums he creates in his never-ceasing motion. Like a plane’s aerofoil in flight, the force of his existence keeps him in perpetual motion – feeding, fighting, fleeing and fucking. I know, it’s time I had a lie-down. Binge thinking is bad for you.
I searched for Olly. The next thing I did was to comb our dreams for clues. I noticed that the rainbow messengers came from some of the old Welsh romances, such as The Dream of Macsen Wledig. Macsen was a Roman Emperor, handsome and wise, who dreamt he went on a great journey through many regions and across many seas, to a wonderful castle where a beautiful maiden lived. But as he was about to embrace her he awoke. Having fallen in love with his dream woman, Macsen sent messengers far and wide to find her, and they located her, eventually, in Wales.
I though about this story, long and hard. I wondered if Rome might have a part to play in my search for Olly: if I reversed the story, starting with a beautiful young woman living in Wales, I would end up in Rome. With this in mind I telephoned an old friend of mine, Dafydd Apolloni. Dafydd is a Llanrwst boy with an Italian father and, as a fanatical Roma fan, he certainly knows his football. When I phoned him he was cooling off on the balcony of his flat in the Testaccio district of Rome. Fresh in from teaching English to a businessman, and with a cool bottle of Peroni in his hand, Dafydd was in good form: Roma were on line to win the scudetto. After the initial greetings, our conversation went something like this (in Welsh, of course):
‘Dafydd, I need your help.’
‘OK – fire away.’
‘One of my friends has gone missing, and I’m trying to find her. We’re fairly sure she’s alive but she’s been very down recently – something bothering her – and she’s done a runner. Her passport’s gone too so I’m exploring every possibility. Something she said made me think of Rome.’
‘And you want me to find her? Do the words needle and haystack mean anything to you?’
‘No, I’ve got something in mind. We’ve been visiting some wells recently and I’ve been tossing a coin into each of them, making a wish and all that.’
‘That sounds like you, Duxie. Still playing games, eh?’
‘Don’t be cheeky Dafydd, or I’ll put a bottle of spumante in the fridge and support Lazio next time you play them…’
‘You wouldn’t do that to me Duxie, never!’
‘Are you listening to me, Dafydd?’
‘OK – carry on.’
‘This girl is very beautiful. She’s even more beautiful than your Italian girls (sound of raucous laughter on the other end of the phone). Anyway, if I wanted to toss a coin into a well in Rome where would I go?’
‘Duxie, there are dozens of wells in Rome. But you’re being a bit slow, aren’t you?’
‘How do you mean?’
‘Just think about it, you plonker. Where do people go in Rome to make a wish? It’s probably the most famous place in Rome.’
[he sings a snatch of song – Three coins in a fountain… ]
‘Shit! Of course Dafydd – the Trevi Fountain!’
‘Bloody right. Took you long enough.’
[sound of swigging from a bottle]
‘How often do you go anywhere near it?’ I asked.
‘The Trevi? Now and then, not very often. It’s snowed under with tourists all the time.’
‘Snowed under?’
‘OK, bad choice of words.’
‘If I send you a photo of the girl, will you go and check out the place now and again?’
‘Sure Duxie, I’ll keep an eye open. Just how beautiful is this girl? I think you’ve fallen for her yourself, Duxie. Am I right?’
‘No way.’
‘And she’s run away from you, like they all… [pause]’
‘Thanks for reminding me, Dafydd.’
‘Sorry, Duxie. Wasn’t thinking. Anyway, you send the photo, I’ll do the business this end, though I can’t promise anything. I’ll try to go there as often as possible, and I’ll tell my mates… on second thoughts, you’ll never get her back if they get to her first.’
‘Thanks Dafydd.’
We made smalltalk about Serie A soccer, then he hung up on me. He’d probably seen a bit of skirt going into the bar below him. I blame the hot Latino blood in him, only partially diluted by Llanrwst water (and there’s plenty of that, as we all know).
Let’s have a look at the scenario again.
As I’ve already told you, I’m trying to discover what happened to the first ten years of my life. My past is intangible. Somehow I must rig up an internal modem to Google my childhood – but it’s ciphered in a lost language. At the moment my past is a black hole. Deep Space, Deep Time, Deep Nothingness. Astronomers in Cardiff have discovered an invisible galaxy which is almost completely made of dark matter. With no stars to illuminate it, the galaxy was found using radio waves. Meanwhile, in Geneva, a 17-mile underground tunnel, nearing completion, will recreate the moment when the universe was about the size of Dr John Dee’s obsidian stone. In effect, scientists have built the world’s biggest microscope to find the most elusive fragment in the universe. And there’s a new breed of detectives called forensic astronomers who have identified the time and place in which van Gogh painted two of his most famous paintings, by analysing his notes and details in the pictures. Can you believe that? It’s so advanced – and there are people in this town who are still complaining about the Window Tax.
For a long time now I’ve been walking along an endless circular corridor, looking for my past. This corridor is made of glass: it’s like a neon halo, but on a much bigger scale – it could stretch all the way around the world, perhaps. It’s clear, but tinted a very light green. As I walk in my glass corridor I am surrounded on three sides – above me, below me and to my right – by deep space: planets and moons and stars twinkling in a vast bluey-black void. But I’m not scared. To my left is a black hole, and my circular glass corridor is bent around it. I’m walking along my own event horizon. Somewhere to my left, in the void, is my own singularity. If I move out of the corridor, to my right, I will be sucked into deep space. If I move to my left I will be sucked into my own singularity, triggering another big bang in my own history. But I’m safe as long as I keep on walking in the glass corridor. So I walk all day in the green-tinted corridor, and along the lefthand side, from beginning to end (I have never completed a circuit) there are millions of orange Post-it notes stuck to the glass. Sometimes I stop and read these notes. Some of them are from my past and some are from my future. None of them make any sense on their own, but I’ve a sneaky feeling that if I managed to get them in the right sequence they would tell me all about those lost years. Pulling them off the wall and trying to rearrange them, however, smacks of madness so I’ll carry on walking for now at least, until I’m impelled to tear down some notes and stick them in random order on the floor. People reading orange Post-it notes on the floor tend to attract attention. Self-absorbed? Yes, but we all are, aren’t we. Some want to hide it, some don’t.
Through the glass, in deep space, I can see a transporter ship carrying another little batch of genes to their destination. My own. Genes are never happy. After their raid on your body they always make a quick getaway. They always want to go somewhere else – inside someone else as quickly as possible.
A little question for you: from the amount of darkness surrounding us can we always assume that there will be a certain amount of light also; or is it the other way round? If we look at those little pinpricks of light within and without us, should we always infer a terrible and sucking darkness?
My dark past is behind me now… I made sure I let go of my past, accepting the fact that that part of my life was only a small fraction of my life. I knew the black hole was out there, waiting to suck me in and forever control my destiny – but only if I let it
– Dave Pelzer, A Child Called ‘It’.
OK, I’ve gone on a bit. I’ll stop now. A bit worked up, that’s all. So here’s something to soothe you – something about a hole: but it’s definitely not black. It’s very beautiful. I want to take you back to the annual fiesta – called Sa Cova (the cave) – which took place every year until recently at a small fishing village called Farol, on what is now the Costa Brava. Every year one of the village girls was chosen to be the central figure in a very old mystery; indeed, its meaning has long been forgotten. On the day of the fiesta the child and her mother were taken in a boat to a secret cave. Followed by several other boats, all of them full of women in fine clothes, the chosen one would be rowed several miles to Sa Cova, a sea cave containing beautiful water suffused with a strange blue light. There, the mother would strike her daughter lightly, the child would pretend to cry, and they would all return home. Make what you will of that tale. But it’s marvellous, isn’t it?
In early February I had gone for a picnic with Olly to the Glynllifon Country Park near Caernarfon. It’s set in the grounds of a mansion built by one of the old magnates who stole large chunks of land from the Welsh peasantry; I wanted to roam around it to see what we’d all missed out on. Before we went I cooked a special cake for our picnic. I don’t know if you like a dollop of dope in your chocolate cake, but my own belief is that the secret lies in the quality of the bud butter. I melt about a pound of butter in a pan and mix in the hash, then I leave the mix to mature. Don’t let it boil or you’ll ruin the taste. Then I make a chocolate cake the normal way. I’ve had very few complaints. My own cakes are guaranteed to get twelve people floating, eight people flying, or four people into outer space. I had a magic chocolate cake right there in my rucksack when I went with Olly to Glynllifon. We took a bus; it’s better that way sometimes. You get to feel the mood of the country.
We set off in a bitterly cold easterly wind and, judging by the number of seared plants and bushes on the wayside, it must have been a pretty smug little wind. The sky was split neatly into two, as if we were inside one of those plastic sweety eggs you get in 20p machines: grey to the west, blue to the east. The sea was on the way out, and it looked sharp and cold; if you stepped in that water you’d feel like a slipper in a basket full of puppies. As we waited for a bus we changed colour slowly, chameleon-wise, becoming purple and blotched to match the others in the queue. In their multi-coloured coats they were songbirds garbed too soon in mating plumage, dying now in starved flocks on the frozen ground.
A few blossoms had popped out in the hedgerows but the blackthorn bushes were making a real effort to keep their buds inside them, as if they were children desperate to go to the toilet but forced to stand around awkwardly, trying to keep it all in. February enfolded us; the defeated land was besieged in a garrison of greys. When the bus came we found a seat near the back, behind a group of youngsters who were chatting about stuff ’n’ fings. One of them had glitter on her face, the remains of last night’s fun scattered on her crusty make-up and around her spots. I felt a pang of envy. The old people vanguarded the front, front line fodder ready for slaughter. Rolling past the crematorium I wondered who’d be buried first: Mr Cassini or me?
A girl was trying to read a book but her mind was elsewhere. Another girl scrutinised a hospital letter; by the way she pored over the doctor’s scrawl I wondered if she was going in for tests. It could be the most significant day of her life. A horde got off at the hospital, hurriedly, as if they hoped to leave their diseases on the empty seats. No, it’s not mine, honestly.
Outside the window the estuary was a mud-wound; the leafless trees were stark and brachiated, upturned lungs in a medical textbook. Happy in a shit-spattered field I saw an orange pony, fat as a toffee apple and snug in a canvas coat pithed with dry white mud. I thought there was a mood of expectancy in the bus, as if we were all sitting in a cuckoo clock about to chime. I enjoyed the countryside flashing by. None of the kids looked out. Flicking from TV screen to computer screen to mobile screen, they live in a virtual world now. I felt sad… about my constant search for stories, symbols and similes hidden among the clouds, the seared plants, the emaciated branches. The Green Man on a dirty bus. A cherry tree snowed gently onto a hedge. Big deal. Perhaps the kids are right. What is blossom to them – bush-bling? Why bother with the real world. Perhaps their mobiles change tone subtly with the seasons, when it’s time to mate: Behold, O Fortuna, our Nokias sing of nookie and nippers.
We approached Caernarfon, and in that light the concrete came into its own; it bloomed in grey outbursts of melancholy. People thorned the streets, and in a pause between buses we had breakfast in Caffi Gronant. I listened to a conversation in Chinese on a nearby table. Cosmopolitan Caernarfon. Sometime between the sausages and the beans I talked to Olly about wells, for the last time. They had served no purpose in my quest to recover the past. Why should they?
You tease your personal history until you tire of it; and then it becomes an old toy in a cupboard, waiting for the final throw-out
– ap Llwyd.
I thought about the little girl in the news, trapped in a well far away. A shaft had been sunk; a local potholer had descended and was boring through the clay to connect the two holes; he was a yard or so away from her. No signs of life were being detected. Time was running out. The media swarmed all over the area; the nation paused and millions turned to face the well.
There are many ghostly stories about maidens falling down wells, or throwing themselves into the water below. These legends may echo human sacrifices long ago.
Some wells were oracular – people prayed by them and waited for guidance. A person who’d been robbed might throw bits of bread on the water and name a suspect; the bread sank if the thief was named. Prehistoric wells were sacred and may have been guarded by divine maidens or priestesses. In some legends, the well-maiden was a dark nemesis: if a warrior encountered her washing bloody linen he knew he was doomed. Some wells were guarded by sacred fish, dragons, serpents or eels. Killing or removing them brought dire consequences. Well-dressing is probably a residue of well-worship. According to one tradition a Waste Land was created when brutal men violated the well-maidens and stole their golden cups. The land became barren; trees withered and the waters dried up. The Waste Land was also a landscape of spiritual death. The chief Celtic well divinity was the three-in-one goddess Coventina, closely identified with the Greek goddess Mnemosyne, mother of the nine Muses, who personified memory. Mortals were given a choice after they’d consulted the Oracle: they could either keep their memories and drink from the Spring of Mnemosyne, or they could forget the past and drink from the Spring of Lethe. The Delphic Oracle could supposedly tell the future because of a sacred spring which emitted vapours. Science has an explanation: the fumes contain ethylene, a sweet-smelling gas with an intoxicating effect.
Olly and I enjoyed our breakfast at Caffi Gronant. Afterwards I popped into a store over the road to stock up on some grub for our picnic at Glynllifon. There was a special offer on the chicken salad sandwiches: chicken breast with mayonnaise and salad on malted wheatgrain bread. Sounded great. And there was a two packs for the price of one offer on the marshmallows, so that was that. To make sure that Olly was happy I grabbed a bottle of Ty Nant in its cobalt blue bottle – water drawn from a vast underground aquifer near Llanon, south of Aberystwyth. The aquifer was discovered below farmland by a noted water diviner in 1976; after a borehole was sunk through 100 feet of rock he declared it to be the purest water he had ever tasted.
Soon we were on another bus, heading out of town. An old headmaster of mine got on and slumped into the seat in front of me; he looked like a ghost among all the other pensioners, and my journey began to feel like a spectral ride into the past – to a museum, where we’d all be stuffed and propped up in cobwebbed corners, ready to whisper our polite conversations, like the dummies I’d seen on Dumbarton Rock. Mannequins again. During a lonely childhood Carl Jung – who felt compelled to live near water throughout his life – carved a comforting friend, a little wooden mannequin which he hid in the attic.
These passengers were different: as we changed longitude – travelled westwards, into old Wales – they became more direct, less formal with those around them; they bantered and pointed. The cadence changed; voices were higher.
Most of them looked ravaged – straggly survivors of a generation which had subsisted on black humour, booze and fags, but the good times still struggled inside them. At one bus stop an old man struggled for breath, his goldfish mouth filtering the thin air around his haunted face; he had two bundles of kindling wood in orange nets, and he looked as though he’d carried them all the way from Neverland.
It was a nice ride. I felt comfortable and happy. There was snow on the mountains – exposed bone in a tureen of hills – and I could see a little figure on each of the peaks, waving at me. I’d been to the top of each and every one of them. I loved it all that day. A few flakes of snow gyrated in the air. Some people say it’s harder to love your country when it’s cold. Do the Italians love Rome more than Inuits love the tundra? I’ll have to ask Dafydd Apolloni.
We arrived at Glynllifon in wan sunshine. If you like trees, this is a good place to go. There are trees from all over the world. Towering redwoods, tactile cypresses. There’s even a tree from China called the Seven Son Flower of Zhejiang. I probably climbed trees a lot during those lost ten years. Like that little boy with a bad haircut in The Singing Detective, whose parents quarrelled all the time. He escaped up trees, seeing things he shouldn’t see. Even now I like to sit in the branches of a tree, swaying gently in a breeze, looking at the world go by.
There are lots of sculptures in the park at Glynllifon, and an art installation in the shape of a ruined house with two trees growing inside it, and Welsh poetry on the wall, plus a picture of seven quarrymen from long ago. This is what the poetry says:
Voices come in waves daw lleisiau yn donnau
Along the white road, ar hyd y lon wen,
I have remembered yr wyf wedi cofio
And I have forgotten, ac rwyf wedi anghofio,
The fire is fading in the grate: mae’r tan yn mynd i lawr yn y grat:
I will go to bed, af i’m gwely,
Tomorrow will come fe ddaw yfory
And I will still be able to ask questions a chaf ddal i ofyn cwestiynau.
I am standing by the seven quarrymen: I say men, but two of them are just boys (one of them looks beaten, he’s so tired he can hardly hold himself up – his arms loll in front of him, exhausted). The men have big moustaches and Klondike hats or bowlers. There’s still a lot of humour in those faces, and some anger, also some bitterness, wariness, tiredness. They’ll never go home to study the fire and mull over hard times because they’re painted on a wall by the side of a large field. Close by them there’s a lake (a real lake). OK – it’s a pond, and its surface is green, clogged with watercress and weeds. Jutting out of this pond is a female arm, straight in the air, with outstretched fingers, as if a mermaid has stretched out, from under the slime, to catch a ball. There are two little holes in the wrist; I point to them and I say to Olly: ‘Look, those holes look like the needle marks on your arm after they took blood samples.’
She doesn’t say anything back.
In the palm of this metal, chocolate-coloured hand there’s a bolt. It’s obvious that the hand held a sword once, but the sword is no longer there. Stolen, probably. That would make sense.
Olly and me, we had our dinner among the trees. There’s a little picnic site at Glynllifon, and as the sun crept up the slats on our table I bathed in the shade of a magnificent evergreen oak. A farmer whistled to his sheep and they responded emotionally, bleating with pleasure as they ran towards him. The power of food. Murder me, steal my lambs, but first give me a handful of Ewe Nuts.
I don’t suppose you want to know this, but sheep can remember the faces of ten people and fifty other sheep for at least two years. That sort of information comes in handy when you’re standing next to a stranger at a bus stop and need to break the ice.
The snow on the mountains reminded me of marbled bathrooms, the sort you want to get in and out of quickly because they’re so inhospitable. The colours had been sucked from the fields, as if they were polar bear hides which had been gnawed by used-up Inuit women before they stumbled out into the snow to be eaten by bears. Or is that a pathetic fallacy, too? Recycled ancestors, their spirits passing through the bear and re-entering their children via succulent bear steaks. Alimentary, my dear Watson.
So many words for ice. But no words at all for modern, urban yearnings – for snow, for purity, for white bears and simple myths.
Olly and me, we ate two large slices of chocolate cake. After that we were extra happy. Olly became a bit strange. Sort of dreamy, and a bit giggly of course.
Duxie makes exceedingly nice cakes.
I remember the time I stood looking at the Lady of the Lake’s damaged hand. Olly was standing very close to me; I could smell her intricate femininity. I reached out and took her hand in mine, and she let me, but I sensed immediately, as you do, that it was an appeasement. She didn’t respond in the way I wanted, with one of those incredibly sophisticated messages which flit through you; the sort of message Schumacher gets when the lights turn green. We were standing by the water, and I thought of Jack and Jill, and the smell of vinegar and brown paper. According to a Scandinavian myth the moon god Mani captured two children while they were drawing water from a well and their shadows can still be seen, carrying a bucket on a pole between them, when the moon is full. My own children… they might as well be on the moon. Are they missing me? Do they ever cry in the night, as I do?
I relinquished Olly’s hand. That was probably the last time I tried it on with her.
She smiled her tired little smile, and the shadows under her eyes dragged me towards her, filling me with moonlight and desire. Perhaps it was the cake. I wondered if she was going to cry; I imagined the elemental, underground taste of her tears, the metallic tang of the water, its geyser warmth. A miniature Excalibur in every drop.
To bridge the silence between us, I made smalltalk about my picnic in the snow project. I’d already found two film characters to join me on the tartan rug – Captain Oates and Karol Karol, the Polish hairdresser; now I was searching for a third.
Olly suggested the little boy in The Road to Perdition, riding his bicycle through the snow. Within a few days his whole family would be wiped out by mobsters. I wasn’t sure about that one so we compromised with a good old-fashioned bit of schmaltz. Dr Zhivago. Yes, that snowed-up cottage on the steppes and two mournful eyes in the frosted window; the crazy dash by Yuri – Omar Sharif – as he escapes from the claustrophobic confines of his home, flees from his pregnant wife, and heads for the arms (and bed) of his lover Lara. Julie Christie. Yes, Dr Zhivago would do fine; I could have a clip from the film, and then a Sharif look-alike arriving at my picnic. And so we dreamed on…
Standing by our lake-pond, I made a sudden connection. A tremor ran through me.
‘Bloody hell,’ I said slowly, ‘I’ve just seen something.’
She peered into the pond, trying to see what I saw.
‘No, not in there,’ I said. ‘In here,’ and I tapped my temple.
She made a face. Olly could be quite hurtful, actually.
‘Go on then,’ she said.
I checked my pockets, found a tenpenny piece, and flicked it into the pond. She rolled her eyes. My offering disappeared in a silver flash and sank near the well-rounded shoulder below the swordless hand. I almost expected a swish, for the arm to salvage my coin and hold it aloft.
I’d made an intriguing connection. Slow, yes, I’ve always been a yard behind the rest, mentally. But I’ve been granted a few special favours on life’s great soccer pitch; that’s the way it seems to work.
I went through it all again.
Wells were probably seen as leading to the womb of an earth mother. The Celts probably believed in a well of knowledge. Nine hazel trees grew over Connla’s Well in Ireland and their nuts contained knowledge, wisdom and inspiration. When the nuts fell in the well they were swallowed by a salmon, and the spots on its flank revealed how many nuts it had eaten. In turn, anyone who drank the water of the well or ate the salmon attained knowledge, wisdom and inspiration.
The Celtic Well of Wisdom was a place of healing. Well-pilgrims drank the water in a special cup made from a skull, creating a direct link with the dead in the Otherworld.
Some wells had special powers on May Day or Midsummer’s Day when the gates of the Otherworld were open. Fairies or pixies were frequently sighted on these days.
Some wells overflowed when negligent maidens forgot to cover them, creating lakes such as Llyn Glasfryn on the Lleyn Peninsula. As a punishment, the maidens were changed into fish or swans.
Some wells held a malignant spirit which stole naughty children if they wandered away from their homes in a mist; this evil sprite was sometimes called Morgan.
The name Morgan is linked to Morgan le Fay, one of the three queens who escorted Arthur to Afallon. The three queens were another version of the triple-goddess Coventina.
Olly prompted me, again.
‘Well Duxie, come on, spill the beans.’ She smirked a bit and hurt me some more.
‘Who was the Lady of the Lake?’ I asked her. ‘Who exactly was she?’
‘You’re trying too hard,’ she said. ‘You need to take a rest. Why not go away for a while? Somewhere sunny, where you can relax. This business with the wells has messed up your brain.’
‘No, listen,’ I said. ‘I’ve cracked it.’
Olly waited, her arms folded (rather defiantly) across her chest.
‘The Lady of the Lake presented Arthur with his magical sword Excalibur and reclaimed it when Bedwyr hurled it into the lake after Arthur’s defeat at Camlan. Right?’
‘Yup. Get a move on, it’s getting cold.’
‘Arthur was escorted to Afallon by three queens, right?’
‘Trust you to mention an escort agency.’
‘You really are trying to hurt my feelings this afternoon, aren’t you?’
‘No, of course I’m not. Just joking, right?’
I continued. ‘The Lady of the Lake was a three-in-one figure just like Coventina. When we throw coins into a wishing well, what are we doing?’
She makes an idiot-face. ‘Doh! We’re making a wish, right?’
‘To whom, exactly?’
‘I dunno. Does it matter?’
‘Yes it bloody well does. We’re making a wish to Lady Luck. And who do you think Lady Luck is?’
‘Frankly my dear, I don’t give a fuck.’
‘The Lady of the Lake, dumbo! The Lady of the Lake has become Lady Luck. Get it?’
‘Sounds feasible to me. Yeah, OK, I’ll go along with that one. Can we go now?’
But I hadn’t finished.
‘So when I throw a coin into a well or a fountain and make a wish I’m going back a long, long way – into the distant past, when primitive people threw swords and other bits of metal into lakes, and to King Arthur himself and Excalibur. Clever, eh?’
‘OK smart arse, I’ll take your word for it. Now let’s go.’
We were both subdued on the return journey. Coming down a bit from the cake. We sat on the back seat, me in the middle and Olly sitting with her back to a window, with her feet on my lap. As usual, I ended up massaging her tootsies. Pretty feet, clean feet, so no problem. I sometimes think it was the sole (ha!) basis of our friendship. We were as close as moan is to groan when I stroked her feet.
‘You’re the best,’ she’d say coquettishly. And I ended up stroking her feet, for hours, all over the place, not just on buses – in pubs, on cliffs, even at lectures. It was the most pleasure I ever gave a woman, I’m pretty sure of that.
The old people were creaking to a halt; each movement was getting slower, jerkier, as they boarded or left the bus. Outside they froze into menhirs, propping up the bus shelters as if the tin roofs were cromlechs. Odd sights came our way: a huddle of garden gnomes, in committee, on the roof of a porch above a crooked pathway; a charnel of council houses, burnt onto the landscape with a poker; a man sitting in front of me wearing a cap inscribed Information Security Forum. That sounded spooky – perhaps he was Brains from Thunderbirds, fresh from dealing with another international incident in Nefyn.
Only one person got on the bus when we reached the hospital – the girl who’d scrutinised her doctor’s note earlier (all the rest had died, presumably). She looked a lot happier; I had a feeling that this particular day would be framed on the wall of her life for some time to come, possibly for ever.
Anyway, on with the story – and the search. I was about to quit the wells meditation; I’d hoped that a handful of recollections would come rattling into the sunlight, floating about in a rusty bucket, and if I was quick enough I could grab some of them before they escaped through the holes, back into the well. I read so much about wells my friends became worried about me. I even read some stories by HG Wells. Does that sound a bit nutty? Yes, I became a bit concerned myself at that point.
I was using wells as a symbol of the forgotten past, the unseen, the hidden, the unconscious, and the subterranean vaults in my mind, whatever. I was trying to use wells as a mnemonic, as a bradawl to bore into the past. But nothing was happening. I decided to have one last go, by reading one of the most powerful books ever written about wells – The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle by the Japanese author Haruki Murakami. The main character in the book is Toru, a young man living in a Tokyo suburb. Toru’s cat disappears and then his wife fails to return from work. His search for them involves a bizarre collection of characters, including two psychic sisters and an old soldier who saw many horrors during the Second World War. The book is all about trying to get answers – through wells, mainly – and it’s about responsibility, both personal and national. Atrocities committed by the Japanese army in China keep rising to the surface of the book, as if they were repressed memories bobbing about in a well-bucket. Toru enters a netherworld beneath the placid surface of Tokyo, and below the history of Japan itself. Wells play an important part in his search for his own true self, and for the truth behind his country’s past. Here are a few passages from the book:
‘I don’t mind fighting,’ he said. ‘I’m a soldier. And I don’t mind dying in battle for my country because that’s my job. But this war we’re fighting now, Lieutenant – well it’s just not right. It’s not a real war, with a battle line where you face the enemy and fight to the end. We advance, and the enemy runs away without fighting. Then the Chinese soldiers take their uniforms off and mix with the civilian population, and we don’t even know who the enemy is. So then we kill a lot of innocent people in the name of flushing out ‘renegades’ or ‘remnant troops’, and we commandeer provisions. We have to steal their food, because the line moves forward so fast our food supplies can’t catch up with us. And we have to kill our prisoners because we don’t have anywhere to keep them or any food to feed them. It’s wrong, Lieutenant. We did some terrible things in Nanking. My own unit did. We threw dozens of people into a well and dropped hand grenades in after them. Some of the things we did I can’t bring myself to talk about. I’m telling you, Lieutenant, this is one war that doesn’t have any Righteous Cause. It’s just two sides killing each other. And the ones who get stepped on are the poor farmers, the ones without politics or ideology…’
We travelled north for two hours or more, coming to a stop near a Lamaist devotional mound. These stone markers, called oboo, serve both as the guardian deity for travellers and as valuable signposts in the desert. Here the men dismounted and untied my ropes. Supporting my weight on either side, two of them led me a short distance. I figured that this was where I would be killed. A well had been dug into the earth here. The mouth of the well was surrounded by a three-foot-high stone curb. They made me kneel down beside it, grabbed my neck from behind, and forced me to look inside. I couldn’t see a thing in the impenetrable darkness. The noncom with the boots found a fist-sized rock and dropped it into the well. Some time later came the dry sound of stone hitting sand. So the well was a dry one, apparently. It had once served as a well in the desert, but it must have dried up long before, owing to a movement of the subterranean vein of water. Judging from the time it took the stone to hit the bottom, it seemed to be quite deep.
The noncom looked at me with a big grin. Then he took a large automatic pistol from the leather holster on his belt. He released the safety and fed a bullet into the chamber with a loud click. Then he put the muzzle of the gun against my head.
He held it there for a long time but did not pull the trigger. Then he slowly lowered the gun and raised his left hand, pointing towards the well. Licking my dry lips, I stared at the gun in his fist. What he was trying to tell me was this: I had a choice between two fates. I could have him shoot me now – just die and get it over with. Or I could jump into the well. Because it was so deep, if I landed badly I might be killed. If not, I would die slowly at the bottom of a dark hole. At last it dawned on me that this was the chance that the Russian officer had spoken of. The Mongolian noncom pointed at the watch that he had taken from Yamamoto and held up five fingers. He was giving me five seconds to decide. When he got to three I stepped onto the well curb and leaped inside…
How much time went by after that I do not know. But at one point something happened that I would never have imagined. The light of the sun shot down from the opening of the well like some kind of revelation. In that instant, I could see everything around me. The well was filled with brilliant light. A flood of light. The brightness was almost stifling: I could hardly breathe. The darkness and cold were swept away in a moment, and warm, gentle sunlight enveloped my naked body. Even the pain I was feeling seemed to be blessed by the light of the sun, which now warmly illuminated the white bones of the small animal besides me. These bones, which could have been an omen of my own impending fate, seemed in the sunlight more like a comforting companion. I could see the stone wall that encircled me. As long as I remained in the light, I was able to forget about my fear and pain and despair. I sat in the dazzling light in blank amazement. Then the light disappeared as suddenly as it had come. Deep darkness enveloped everything once again. The whole interval had been extremely short…
What happened down there? What did it mean? Even now, more than forty years later, I cannot answer all those questions with any certainty. Which is why what I am about to say is strictly a hypothesis, a tentative explanation that I have fashioned for myself without the benefit of any logical basis…
Outer Mongolian troops had thrown me into a deep, dark well in the middle of the steppe, my leg and shoulder were broken, I had neither food nor water: I was simply waiting to die. Before that, I had seen a man skinned alive. Under these special circumstances, I believe, my consciousness had attained such a viscid state of concentration that when the intense beam of light shone down for those few seconds, I was able to descend into a place that might be called the very core of my own consciousness. In any case, I saw the shape of something there. Just imagine. Everything around me is bathed in light. I am in the very centre of a flood of light. My eyes can see nothing. I am simply enveloped in light. But something begins to appear there. In the midst of my momentary blindness, something is trying to take shape. Some thing. Some thing that possessed life. Like the shadow in a solar eclipse, it begins to emerge, black, in the light. But I can never quite make out its form. It is trying to come to me, trying to confer upon me something very much like heavenly grace…
I would not have minded dying right then and there. I truly felt that way. I would have sacrificed anything for a full view of its form.
Finally, though, the form was snatched away from me for ever…
The light shines into the act of life for only the briefest moment – perhaps only a matter of seconds. Once it is gone and one has failed to grasp its offered revelation, there is no second chance. One may have to live the rest of one’s life in hopeless depths of loneliness and remorse. In that twilight world, one can no longer look forward to anything. All that such a person holds in his hands is the withered corpse of what should have been.
After reading The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle I decided to end my study of wells.
I had bored into the crust of my past, drilled with all the energy I had, but I had failed to tap any hidden memory – that’s assuming, of course, that I had any memories to uncover. For many months I had behaved like the solitary spiny mason wasp, which bores into sandbanks or into the mortar of old walls, stocking its nest with small caterpillars; or another digger wasp, ectemnius cephalotes, which drills into rotten tree stumps and then stocks its nest with paralysed flies. I had dug down too, but to no avail; I had failed to line my nest with a single grubby memory. There was either nothing there to discover or I had failed, miserably, to reach the subterranean river I had hoped to find. It seemed possible that I had put my past into a paper boat, while I was still small, crouching on a riverbank, and sent all my memories spinning into the darkness beyond. Or maybe all my memories had been taken – like nectar – to a glass beehive inside my brain, and the glass now prevented me from touching the honey.
There is a marked change of mood in chapter seven of Water-Divining in the Foothills of Paradise. The jaunty, optimistic air of the previous chapters is swept aside as ap Llwyd deliberates the pros and cons of embarking on a bold and dangerous descent into the heart of the mountain beneath him. Although he has discovered seven interconnected wells containing water of the highest purity, he feels impelled to go a stage further: as he sits in sombre mood by his campfire, at the mouth of a cave, he muses thus in his unfinished diary:
It is now, more than ever, that I need Stefano’s advice. The seven wells are fed by a deep and untraceable source which seemingly emanates from the centre of the Earth itself. Should I attempt to trace it? What would Stefano say? The cave behind me, sunk as it is in limestone, bears plentiful evidence of having been a water conduit in times past. It seems logical, therefore, to assume that it would take me to the source of the well water. But I am daunted by the many dangers I face. The cave is likely to go down a very long way, and I have only two spare batteries for my torch. I am alone, and there is no one to summon help if I become trapped or lost. I feel sure that Stefano would say: This is a foolish mission my friend, it is too dangerous for one man to face alone. Go in haste to the town, fetch your friends, they will wait at the mouth of the cave, and they will follow the rope down if you do not come back. But a voice inside me says: Now is the time. Seize the moment.
There is another issue, and I must face up to it now. If I am to discover the truth about what is inside me, True Self or False Self, this is the time to find out. In the dark bowels of the mountain I will discover which part of me will survive in a crisis; whether my True Self will emerge victorious through the mouth of the cave, or my False Self. That is the issue I must face alone, in the darkness beneath me. Perhaps I have been seized by a temporary madness, but of one thing I am utterly sure: tonight is the night when I will find out.
As I sat on the bus, studying the stark contours of Carnedd Llewelyn and the rest of the range around it, and massaging Olly’s feet (she was almost asleep now), I considered that last sentence again. It seemed as though a magnetic force was pulling him towards the cave, an irresistible power dragging him downwards. And it became clear, also, that a battle was raging inside him: a battle between two forces – one called True Self, the other called False Self. I had never heard those terms before. What, exactly, was ap Llwyd doing?
He was a diviner, a water witch whose preferred instrument was the hazel rod, rather than metal, or whalebone, or the pendulum, or even a twisted coat hanger.
Since that journey with Olly I have studied ap Llwyd’s Well Diary, which is kept in a vault at Aberystwyth. He was aware of the tendentious nature of his work, but he was a firm believer in its virtues. His own studies had been exhaustive. Ancient wall paintings in the Caves of Tassili in the foothills of the Atlas Mountains of North Africa depicted a tribesman dowsing for water. The Ohio Supreme Court ruled as late as 1861 that ground water was too secret and occult to be adjudicated by law. In the 1920s a Major CA Pogson, the Government of India’s Official Water Diviner, had ranged for thousands of miles finding wells and bores.
There was another branch of the science: radiesthesia, which attempted to locate missing people and detect illnesses. Medical diagnosis through dowsing was permitted in Britain and Europe but not in the United States. Some dowsers operated telepathically, using maps and pendulums. Some modern theorists believed that diviners became attuned to the object they sought; others believed the dowser’s nervous system was stimulated by electro-magnetism. Einstein was fascinated by dowsing.
It seems that ap Llwyd was an experimentalist, regarded as a maverick by his contemporaries. But he had some rare results. We can only speculate on what he discovered before he had that terrible accident deep inside the mountain. The misfortune put paid to all his adventuring; he worked for Stefano thereafter, in the Italian café at the top end of town, near the notorious 43 Club. He was noted for his limp, his acute sense of humour, and the inner radiance which shone from him throughout the rest of his life, after his recovery. For although he lost a leg he gained something else down there at three thousand feet below the foothills of paradise: he gained an inner awareness, a self-knowledge which brought him great happiness… a hidden lake of contentment.
I had such a lovely time that day at Glynllifon. But now I must put aside my memories of ap Llwyd and Olly, our trip on the bus, my wave of farewell to Olly as she slipped off homewards, still a bit zonked by the chocolate cake. It happened some time ago, and all that remains is a soft and muted remembrance of things past. When Olly disappeared I was forced to formulate a new plan. It was my turn, not Olly’s, to go to the dark side – to a sinister substratum in our tale. It was time for me to act on her behalf, before my tiredness overwhelmed me. Olly and I had failed to eliminate Mr Cassini, to eradicate him from our dreams and our daily thoughts. He had attached himself to us parasitically – and don’t forget, almost half of all living things are parasites. I had a cunning plan: in Olly’s absence I would continue the task on her behalf. I would purge the monster known to all of us as Mr Cassini. And I would do that by invoking a character in her dreams – PC 66. Who better? He was an accessory to the fact. At best he was guilty of inertia, at worst collusion. Maybe he and Cassini were crude symbols of the state and the church, I don’t know. The ambivalence of his number – 66 or 99 – seemed to point towards a central ambiguity. But he seemingly wanted to redeem himself. So I would give him an opportunity to do so now. I would send for him, metaphorically, and outline a possible plan of action. I would show him how he could get rid of Mr Cassini – a man who stole childhoods. But PC 66 needed some allies, since he couldn’t do it all alone.
I will weave a web to catch me some luck. Like the moon-struck Russian scientist Kozyrev I will train my telescopic mirrors to catch starlight in chorus from the past, the present and the future. I will fight back with words – for words are a form of witchcraft too, my friends. PC 66 – you are summoned to the police station, at once.