My First Colouring Book (15 page)

My companion elbows me, almost savagely. Has she guessed what I'm doing, with my wanton mind? Probably. She knows me well enough. But what of it? The maid is dead, I cannot take her. More's the pity. Look at them all, trying to be righteous. Every man kneeling in this chanting-room would join me in the act, given a chance. The shadows of the cloister echo with confessions, and as we all know my friend, confessions are the best aphrodisiac.

This is the oldest church in Wales, according to some. It felt old that day: we, the congregation, were sown in rows like corn, rising from the stony soil, but the church's past rested profoundly on me, a heavy boulder pushing me back into the earth.

They sang, they prayed: I listened fitfully as I sat on the stone bench; the cleric extolled the spirit of the bell, and my mind drifted in and out of the service. Dressed in his holy vestments he stood in a beam of weak wintry sunshine, and his words flowed melodiously. They were well-construed words, finely-wrought, seductive and powerful; mesmerised, almost drowsy by now, I felt the phrases pillow my head, lull me with their wonderful, soothing power. While my mind was being stroked I must have nodded off, for I was woken suddenly by my partner, nudging me discreetly. When my thoughts cleared I realised, with a flush of hot realisation, that the cleric's voice had seduced me. As I fingered my hair into place again and adjusted my garb, I noted that he had used the very same devices that I had used on many occasions to sway women and entice them into my bed. I smiled at him as we departed, saluting a true equal. He smiled back innocently, little realising my true thoughts.

As we left the church I recalled, in the genial hubbub, that this church was once the spiritual home of Gwladus Ddu's mother, Joan of England, before Llywelyn built another church at Trefriw down below us, to save her the long walk uphill. He must have loved her. Remembering my companion's notes, I recall these words:
I gave my womb to politics like every king's daughter. There is no room for love's disorder in ruling a family and a land.

We headed homewards, as the day declined. Her heavy black vehicle looped downwards into the valley and we turned towards the sea which looked – at a distance – like the polished surface of a vast marble floor: in the last light of day a couple of boats seemed no bigger than broken toys, abandoned by children who'd been called suddenly to bed. We were both silent, because on the steep hill leading down to Trefriw we had seen a strange and ominous sight – supernatural, chilling. What we saw, coming towards us, was a crooked man, in the later stages of life yet ageless, with a gnarled face and mystical eyes which saw everything, yet nothing. He was dressed in black, in the manner of an eighteenth century peasant, with a white collarless shirt buttoned or studded tightly below his prominent Adam's apple. His dark hair was slicked backwards without a parting, glistening in an old-fashioned and defunct style, which gave him the appearance of a Corsican fisherman taking his catch home. He was clean-shaven, but his skin showed the craterous evidence of acne, or maybe scarring from smallpox. His face was angular, aesthetic, with shadows where his cheeks were sucked in thoughtfully.

His trousers were mud-spattered around the rims and his boots were old, black leather, slightly tipped up at the front, hobnailed and battered with use, yet in good repair. He seemed not to see us in passing, as if we were beneath his attention, undeserving of his acknowledgement. He carried an enormous hessian sack on his back: stooped under its weight he passed us by, as if we weren't there, as if we were stones or weeds by the wayside.

He was not of this world. He would frighten any living person who saw him.

My companion said he was the Gatherer of Sins.

We park up at a spot overlooking the Menai Straits. A pot of reddish-orange paint has been thrown at the horizon westwards, so we sit awhile admiring the sunset, recreating those few minutes in time when the Gatherer of Sins passed us by on a hill, far away from anyone. As usual, we share a last few thoughts. As I have said, we have nothing to hide, though others might misconstrue this weekly rite of ours. It is, after all, the behaviour of small town adulterers. She talks to me quietly, enumerating and annotating the main points of the day, the main conclusions. A red tinge spreads over the land. Curlews sadden the shore.

I consult my companion's notes, trying to check the facts. It is easy to imagine Joan of England standing outside the car, shivering in a white linen nightdress, looking out to sea with a grotesque image in her mind: she has just seen the Marcher lord William de Breos hanged by his neck in the village behind us – at Abergwyngregyn, the estuary of the white seashells. Joan had a home here, with her husband Llywelyn. During a visit, during the long dark night, de Breos was apparently discovered in Joan's chamber, an unthinkable crime in medieval society. He was hanged in front of eight hundred onlookers.

We listen again to the curlew's haunted cry on the long shore and I picture the scene: a hemp rope creaking tautly from an oak branch, the sudden silence, the dangling body, the barking of distant dogs. One thing was certain, I tell my friend; we would never know the truth. But as a libertine I have my theories.

Tired, both of us, we drive back to my home and I leave the car with hardly a word.

Before I retire I spend a few minutes in my study, ordering my new material on Gwladus Ddu, she of the dark eyes, so that I can work in the night. The wind is back, rattling my windows, invading my bedchamber. The piss-dog splatters my panes again. I light a candle and undress, ready for the night ahead. Alone in my bed there is nothing to do but sleep, fret, or rekindle the past. In the night I will be visited again by the gaunt man we saw carrying his sack up the hill near Trefriw. He will stand at the foot of my bed and he will talk to me, as he does every night now. He will say to me in his quiet voice: I am the Gatherer of Sins: it is your own transgressions which occupy my sack. I will return when you least expect me: I have already passed you on many hills in many lands. You will recognise me, standing in the shadows, with a quaking heart. I am not the fifth horseman, nor the first day of the apocalypse, nor the first child killed on the first day of every war: I am here, I am now, I am always and for ever. I am everywhere, I am hidden in dust, in fire, in presidential semen. Do not try to avoid me or to cheat me: this would be futile, for I am the Gatherer of Sins and therefore the greatest sinner of all. I will reap you as your skin rubs the cold stone floor, in the immeasurably short moment before your final breath clouds the cold air. But it is not for depravity nor immorality that you will be punished, no, nor will I rebuke a single soul, not once, in the whole span of time, for the brief pleasures they have winnowed from the world's troubles. You will be punished for living. And you have lived long and you have lived well. Farewell for now, my friend. Wait for me in the shadows, for I am the Gatherer of Sins.

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ON THE morning of his sixtieth birthday, as he looked in the mirror, he decided to fall in love for the last time.

The decision came suddenly, as he fingered the stubble on his jaw and prepared to shave – a chore he loathed, but which he completed dutifully every morning in the cold gloom of the bathroom. His face had to be smooth, as soft as a baby's bottom, and completely kissable, before he left the house. Finally, he'd dab himself with some
Loverboy
aftershave, sent to him in an act of futile irony by his ex-wife on the first Christmas after their divorce. He'd used it every day since, because it was the first present from her he'd ever really liked. He was completely unaware of the double irony.

Falling in love again: the thought had lain dormant for some time, but now it kicked like a baby inside his still reasonably flat belly. In recent weeks he'd watched his own daughter fall in love for the first time, and he'd loved the feeling it gave him, watching her eyes brighten, her complexion clear; she'd buzzed around him with the golden pollen of love clinging to her body, glowing softly in the sunlight. The birthmark on her left cheek had faded and almost vanished, or so it seemed to him as he watched her. Sometimes he felt an urge to go to her council flat and peep through the window, to witness her strange new capacity for love. Of course he didn't, but he yearned to see love's colours around her body, inside the room, irradiating the glass in her windows. He imagined a nectarous scent wafting from her door every morning when she opened it to the world.

Now, in the bathroom, as he filled the basin with lukewarm water and spread shaving foam over his wet face, he started to enlist the qualities he would like in his new lover, as if he were ticking boxes on a dating agency form. He was too old to be fussy, but nevertheless he began to build up a photofit picture of his ideal woman – a blueprint as it were, because he was a builder after all, and he was still at the planning stage.

She would have to be slim and smallish, almost boyish, but with all the female bits in all the right places. He was drawn to tomboys, and if they had light red hair and green eyes all the better. He seemed to remember the term
Irish Sheelagh
being used to describe his dream woman in the local newspaper's Looking for Romance page.

Next on his mental list, as he drew a disposable razor from the window shelf and damped it in the water, came humour: he liked women with a bubbly sense of fun and a lively disposition. So, as he lifted the razor to his right forelock – he started in exactly the same spot every morning – he was in a position to begin his advertisement in the newspaper:
Pocket Venus/Irish Sheelagh, lively & GSOH, wanted for…

And so he dreamt on as he scraped his upper right cheek, clearing it of foam and beard, and after swishing his blue plastic razor in the sink a residue of bristles drifted on an island of foam, making him think of tiny tree stumps in a miniature avalanche.

That night he started to sleepwalk, for the first time in his life. He woke up stiff and sore, naked and curled in a foetal position, in the hallway five floors down from his flat. His first memory of the day was the postman stepping over his body, on his way to the postboxes…

Day 2:
Still bleary-eyed, and greatly troubled by this new development in his life, he stood in the bathroom, dressed by now, looking in the mirror and slapping shaving foam onto his face, dabbing it carefully over his upper lip. He wasn't particularly shy, and the whole village knew he'd nothing to be ashamed of in the trouser department, but he didn't want to go a-wandering at night again because he didn't want a dodgy reputation, like that fat little writer with bulgy eyes who'd allowed his dressing gown to open, more than once, as he opened his front door to the paper boy.

Should he use the same razor as yesterday? He swished it in the water and started off on his right cheek, as usual. Trying to steady his hand, he thought again of his quest for love, and his shopping list. He liked intelligent women, but how to put that across? Clever? No, that wasn't right. Smart? Bright? Professional? How about Educated (bit snobbish) or perhaps Curious? That sounded too much like bi-curious, which he assumed meant people who wanted to try a bit of AC/DC, and he certainly didn't want that. He decided on Inquisitive, which covered a multitude of sins. He didn't want a happy-clappy, so he'd put in Secular, and he didn't want an ice maiden, so he'd put in Warm. So far he had:
Warm, inquisitive Pocket Venus/Irish Sheelagh, secular, lively & GSOH, wanted for…

That night he walked again, down the stairs, through the hallway, up the high street and into someone's garden near the newspaper shop. He was woken, naked again, by a milk float growling and clinking along the road. Fortunately, covering himself with his hands, he managed to return home unseen. He was acutely cold and had nettle stings all along his left hip. Disturbing.

Day 3:
Very worrying, he muttered to the mirror as he cut a swathe to his chin with a new razor. Some of the foam strayed into his mouth as he talked to himself, so he pulled a face and spat it out. What was going on? Should he go to the doc's? No, he'd leave it for a day or two, it was bound to stop. Mind turbulent and agitated by thoughts of love perhaps. Something below the surface, like the silver below the glass in the mirror (which reflected a red-eyed wreck). He got thinking about mirrors. Why did they need glass? Who cared, he thought moodily. He scraped away at his top lip, vertically then laterally, contorting his face into all sorts of shapes to help the process. He'd done that hundreds of times now, didn't have to think about it. But today he nicked his upper lip (always problematic) and he was forced to start the day with a twist of toilet paper stuck there to staunch the flow of blood. Sitting on the toilet, brooding about his impending love affair, he added a few more items to his shopping list. He and this virtual woman would have to share some interests. He liked pubs, so he'd put Pubbing. And Holidays Abroad because he'd had a good time picking potatoes – and girls – during a spring in Jersey when he was much, much younger. And Cinema because he often took out a DVD on the way home, to help him go to sleep. How about Walks on the Beach? They all seemed to like that, and it wasn't too strenuous.

Warm, inquisitive Pocket Venus/Irish Sheelagh, secular, lively & GSOH, into Pubbing, Holidays Abroad, Cinema, romantic walks on the beach, wanted for…

That night he sleepwalked all the way up the high street, along the same route presumably, and woke up in a bus shelter at the bottom of Mount Road. He smelt of piss when he got home and had to take a shower. Someone saw him, he thought. A face at a window, a curtain falling from someone's hand. Time to seek help? No, walking home naked might revive his reputation. People had talked of retirement. But you never retired from Love. Not him, anyway. This time he wanted the real thing, not make-believe. A final grand passion, a French kind of thing. It was possible, surely.
You often read about two old codgers in a home, over ninety both of them and shaking so bad you'd think they were having it off on a washing machine, getting married and saying it was lovely, just like they were young again.