My First Colouring Book (14 page)

The Englishman had talked of London. He had mentioned Edmonton more often than anywhere else. I had no money, so I hitched along an arterial motorway, floating past many tributaries, onwards in the great stream which flowed southwards.

Eventually I was flung on an alien bank, an ugly place where I found somewhere to cling to. I begged by day, putting the stone in front of me: for some strange reason it drew people towards it. I told my story to them and they gave me money. By night I slept under an archway, with others, my beautiful stone bulging inside my clothes, warm against my belly.

The days went by, one year became two.

I failed to find the Englishman. Every day as I sat with my stone I studied each face that passed, but his was not among them. I made enquiries about Osho and the sannyassins, but they had left India: I was told they had settled in a valley in Oregon. The Englishman, I felt sure, would be among them, moving as a nomad does from one spiritual tent to another.

I hit upon a plan. Every evening I combed the public houses around me, listening to accents. I wormed my way into conversations, put my stone on the table, and told my story. I listened for North American voices, and I talked to many before I found someone from Oregon. It took many encounters with Oregon people before I found the right person: he was slight, he was in his seventies, he was quick, and most importantly, he was prepared to help me. I invited myself to his hotel room, bought two bottles of the finest red wine, and told him what I wished of him. Fortunately, he was intrigued. He too had travelled through the steppes and had stood in Red Square; miraculously, he too had been among the orange people. He agreed to help me, and I told him my plan. We drank the wine and talked late into the night, then I left him.

I left the stone with him too. I returned home, but this time I followed the lesser tributaries as I moved slowly towards my motherland.

The days went by, one year became two. By now my disgrace had dimmed in everyone's memory and I was accepted back into the fold. My journey was seen as an expiation, and since I had seen things which no-one else had seen I was accorded some dignity. I got a job in the sawmill again and fathered another child, but this time I not only remembered his name I also treasured him. I showed him to everyone I met and extolled him to all who would listen. I played snooker with Mr Smart.

For many nights, as we stooped over the green baize, we conjectured about the stone egg. Was there a meaning to it all? A message perhaps? Mr Smart thought he saw an allegory, but it faded as soon as he tried to express it in words.

I learnt to accept the events which had overtaken me.

My own life swelled and ripened. I sought out the first child I had fathered and learnt her name. Gradually I was allowed to become part of her life. I put the stone egg to the back of my mind; it paled in my memory.

And then, one day, the Englishman came back. No-one saw him arrive. My daughter, on her way to school, noticed smoke curling from his chimney.

The next week saw much activity: new curtains, a freshly-washed doorstep, a tidied garden. Within a very short time the house looked as though it had never been abandoned. Callers were amazed: the Englishman behaved as if he had never left.

He was much the same: fleet of foot, clear-eyed, sharp-witted. And although his physical movements were fast and fluid he held within him a lacuna of calm.

He had gifts for everyone he knew: toys for the children, books for the readers, baubles for the vain. Of course, I expected nothing. After all, I hardly knew him. But one day, as I passed with my two children, he waved from his front door, gestured me to stop, and disappeared inside. Soon he was back, striding towards the low wall which separated us. Standing between two radiant bursts of crocuses he smiled, stooped, and chatted with the children before handing them each a gift. Finally he stood up straight and looked at me with his clear grey eyes. He handed me a package also. He asked me to open it later, when I was alone.

There was no meaning to it, I'm sure. These coincidences do happen, I'm told.

But that night, while the children slept, the seven rivers roared, and the stars quivered under the leaf of heaven, I opened the packet and found a wooden egg, of exactly the same shape and dimensions as the stone egg I had passed on to another in a London hotel. It was beautifully polished and the grain swirled in lovely patterns. I put it on my mantelpiece, tentatively, hoping that no new calamity was approaching me.

None did.

My wooden egg still rests there, and no strange indent has appeared inviting it to nestle within. However, I must tell you one strange fact. Although the wood, honey yellow and serene, almost orange, is quite distinctive, it was some time before I could identify it.

Mr Smart was the one who recognised it. Bending over the snooker table one night, in a pool of light, he paused over his shot and remarked, in passing, that my wooden egg was made of Oregon pine.

black

I AM waiting for a woman.

On a chilly day in December, with a drunkard wind reeling along the alleyway, fumbling at my door.

I am tired of waiting. Dirty raindrops liver-spot the window – the panes are old and the horizon pitches up and down in grey waves beyond the glass. The tide wanders in and out in senile drifts, fractious and lost.

It's going to be a black day, and I'm glad.

My day's work is already done. I have been in my study since the small hours, as always. I lit a candle shortly after three and began work immediately on my manuscripts. I love silence and shadows, the naked dance of the flame. This is how the past speaks to me. I write to you from the monastery of my books, where so many words are sworn to silence. As you foretold, the day has come when I must review my own past. Time, the great despot, is about to overrun my mind; it has already subjugated my body. Never one for solitary pleasures, I want to share my experiences; this woman who comes to me every week, on Sundays, is my confidante. We share the same intimacy as lovers, without the coda; I am prepared to forgo the finale because each culmination draws us a little closer to the last. Together, we have viewed the antics of others coming and going on the great bed of life, but we have never been lovers. I am worn and depleted now; the force has left me. But it was you, I think, who told me that real love – immortal love – sometimes arrives after sensual pleasure has departed…

She is here. I walk out of the house, slowly, into the wind; it paws me insistently and tries to knock my stick away. I say nothing as I enter her black estate car, then we set off for today's destination, the Conwy Valley. As we drive onwards the roads flood into shallow silver canals and the town becomes a temporary Venice; I glimpse a sudden flash of bright red disappearing down an alleyway. We pass a floating café with faces looming out of a vaporous mist, then we travel in silence, through the rainworld. Eventually we yaw into a side-road and hiss uphill towards the foothills of the Carneddau mountains. Our objective is the lake at Llyn Geirionydd, in summer a hellhole overrun with tourists, now a tub of freezing peat-water. We cower in a forest siding, waiting for the great sky-dog to lower his leg, to stop pissing on us. Through my window I watch shark-grey clouds swimming overhead as a wet-nosed wind pushes its cold muzzle into the day's underskirts.

I need information from this woman who sits quietly by my side. Her body is useless to me, but she is mentally rapacious: she is my go-between. Saturnine by nature, she is dressed sombrely in the sables and duns of winter. She has information for me, written carefully on lined notepaper. On Wednesday evening, during our discussion on the telephone, I imparted my regular weekly instructions; and as usual I sensed a shiver of anticipation at the other end of the line. I wanted to know more about Gwladus Ddu, born to the Welsh prince Llywelyn Fawr eight hundred years ago. Black Gwladus fascinates me unduly. She seeded many illustrious descendants, among them two American presidents: George Washington and Franklin D Roosevelt. She got her name, probably, from her dark eyes. I have a mental picture of her: she has long straight hair, black as coal, and paper-white skin. A beauty of the old Welsh courts, haughty and coolly intelligent; skilled in the social arts, adept in company, dressed in golds and greens, booted in expensive cordovan leather. Beautiful and accomplished; ill-starred in love: destined to be pared off with cruel, aggressive lordlings, the bastard sons of warrior kings. Secretive. Kind to her dogs only, and to her faithful old nurse.

I lay my fingers on the woman's arm and thank her quietly. She has obtained some excellent information, which will be the thrust of a new entry in my manuscripts. I have already uncovered an unusual fact about Gwladus' parentage. No, the name of her father was never in doubt – it's her mother who's in question. Some say her mother was Tangwystl Goch, who later bled to death during a premature childbirth, brought on by a fall. Others, the majority, say her mother was Joan, illegitimate daughter of the English king John. Why do I pursue such inconsequential things? I have wondered many times. The thrill of the chase, perhaps, with a different quarry: discreet facts instead of indiscreet acts.

A rip in the clouds reveals a blue chemise – the sky – so we coat ourselves, stooping into hail-needles as we circle the water, anti-clockwise. The lake laps avidly, hawking spittle onto the shore… and I recall another lakeside, a place from my youth. In my mind's eye I see two figures standing by the fringe of the lake, near a small group of stunted weather-beaten trees.

I watch them quarrel suddenly, violently. She turns her back to him with a supple movement, evening shadows moving along her spine as she runs away between the trees, still naked, and to my eyes she is still porcelain white. I'm stupefied by the nectarine viol of her arse. Her companion calls; she stops and turns. Forty years apart, young man by a blue summer lake and old man by this lake now, we admire the girlish upturn of her breasts, the rosebud nipples. He raises her lace camisole, waves it, hides it behind his back, provokes her, presses it to his face, inhales her absence. There is summery silence in the heather, then a bee glides by.
The drone sways drowsily and she's fooled by his little drama: she returns to their love nest in the springy moss… sun-drugged, they continue their intimacy, stroking each other's skins, rekindling the fire. Her final cry threads between the silver birches and fades into the lake's lapping waters…

I pause on the lakeside path, touch my companion's shoulder, and we stop.

I share the memory. She turns away from me and continues along the path.

Slower, I must go slower. I want to recover all those valuable episodes strewn around my brain, littering the floors of remembrance.

Having circled the lake slowly we wandered onwards, conversing freely and agreeably on various subjects touching our lives; upon reaching a certain point of vantage, with bosky slopes on either side, she called a halt and hushed me into silence. Craning to listen, we heard a bell tolling in the distance, the gentle sound alluring, so we walked towards it, summoned by its appeal. Insistently, the muffled metal called us – and drawn by its magnet we found ourselves among a merry band of people, chattering sweetly as they filed through a gate. It transpired that we had arrived – miraculously – in time for the Christmas service at the lonesome little church at Llanrhychwyn, marooned since the sixth century in the upland fields of this sequestered parish. God's little acre in a kingdom of sheep and silence. Miniature fields and strips of bracken pleated into a recognisable national costume. Since this was the only meeting of the month, our chance encounter with all these people was indeed remarkable. They were in festive mood, cheerful and gregarious, a troupe of mastersingers on their way to a morality play. There was but one choice for our pagan souls: we would never get closer than this to God's little kingdom, so we entered with the rest, in the spirit of the occasion, which was greater than us all. I smelt soap, and face-powder clinging in fine chalky particles to the women's face-hairs, lavender and eau-de-cologne mingling with the fusty smells of the rudely-awakened church. Some of the girls looked back at me over their shoulders and nudged each other, giggling. My partner indicated with her eyes that they were smirking at my yellow-dyed hair, which makes me look younger and more vigorous than I am. I made a lewd gesture to them and I heard a stifled giggle. The bell-ringer wore a seraphic grin but he seemed sinister, a gargoyle knotted to his rope, rocking in a hunchback sway; he continued for a long time after we had all sat down, until the cleric's nod. I sensed the age of the building in the odour of its shadows; I nudged my companion and whispered a suggestion. Dutifully, she jotted a note on the lined notepaper she always carries with her when she's in my presence; and I felt smug, briefly, knowing that I had another page-in-waiting for my magnum opus, the great work I will be remembered by,
A History of Shadows
.

Sitting on a stone bench built into the wall, my feet rest on the grave of a woman who's been dead for three hundred years. Swathed in their simple music, hidden from their collective gaze, I fantasise over her once-young flesh…

She giggles from the shadows behind the font; my mischievous maid, freckled, wild strawberry stains on her hot mouth. Her milkmaid's hands are cracked and calloused but they shan't touch me much. I can smell the cowbreath in her hair. Ducking down, I unbuckle my shoes and quietly slip between the pews, the cold stone pressing against my bare feet, shocking, sensuous, my toes meeting folds of her still-warm clothes on the chilled slabs. My flesh prickles with excitement and my blood surges in a high tide which fills all those unknowable creeks and inlets along the shores of my body. Circling her half-hidden shape I see a hint of her, a suggestion, a swell of hip, shoulder and black hair tumbling. Coming up behind her suddenly I encircle her with my left arm, pressing her to my body while muffling her cry with my right hand…