My First Colouring Book (23 page)

They take me in the boat to my Home and we go to the big house, they make me better. Did you kill her they ask, I say no but I put her in the Earth, custom. Every night when she comes home from the Food Land she sits by me, Beth, and asks me the same thing. Did I kill her. No I say. I promise her. She makes me tell her many times, over and over again. I tell her about the slates, and the paint on her face, the Words in the Earth. I tell her about Love.

At last they let me go, with my Spade but it is brown now, rust on it. My Spade is My Friend, but I am No Hope again, I do not dig in the Food Land with the rest. All day I walk in the woods with the animals and the birds, I go thin and weak.

Beth comes to find me and sits with me under the trees, we talk about Goog and my only Love in all the world, Dog who is Dead. I am without need for my Spade, I do not want to Labour in the Food Land, but Beth brings me a bit of food and a skin to keep me warm in the wood when it is dark. I am No Hope, I walk about in the green wood, I call to the birds and the animals, making their noises and whistles.

When the Season ends the men from the boats look for me with guns but I hide. In the rain and the mud I make a place to hide, cover it with branches and leaves. When it rains I sit there and listen to the rain on the green leaves, and the sound of the wind in the green trees, I listen to it for ever. My Spade is with me, it is brown now. I look at it and ask if I will use it in the Food Land again, with the others. No is the answer in my head, never again. I am thin and my hair is long, my beard on my chest. I paint my cheeks blue, a picture like Dog made, and I make my hair in a rope. I look for slates in the ruins and I make Words I know, Spade and Dog and Tent. In the days of sun I collect stones from the ruins and I make a House of Stone with a roof of branches and mud. I beat the earth to make a floor, I cover it with sand from the beach. On my slates I draw pictures with my Knife, pictures of me and Dog and our Days of Love. It was the best Love in all the islands, in all the world. I will tell my story on the slates. On the biggest slate I make a picture of Dog. In the Big Slate Picture she has a green dress made from moss stain I rub in with my finger. Her hair is real, made from Beth hair. I do not know how to fill her smile, I have no gold for her tooth. I have asked Beth for gold, she has seen the picture. I have been in the mines and there is yellow in the rock, I will make a tooth for the Big Slate Picture and She will be perfect. Beth says for me to go to the big house now, they want me to Dig again with my Spade but I will stay here. If I go with her the boat men will find me and take me away, custom.

I have been to the mines but I can't make Gold. Beth brings me no food now and I am thin, weak from roots and berries, no hot food. In the nights I think how to get Gold and I see a way. When the boat men are here to tell us what to do I will steal a boat and go back to Dog, take her gold tooth out and bring it here to the Big Slate Picture, put it in the stone. Make candles all round it, go to it every morning and talk to her, my only Love in the islands.

Today they come from the big house for my Spade and I am angry, My Spade is My Friend. I kill two of them fighting, there is rust on their faces, a strange light in their eyes. I beat my Spade with a stone and shout My Spade is My Friend. Black crows all around me, they will feed well tonight. Many I fought, strong was my arm, two will sleep forever tonight. As the crows fatten there will be many tears in the big house, no fire on the hearth, my brothers and sisters will cry in the dark. In the morning they came boastful, shaking Spades, shouting Come Out No Hope, fight with us or we will take your Spade. And I answered them: no pup will take my Spade, I will fight with you. And they came from all around me through the green trees shouting and waving their Spades, but I met them fast and strong, I killed two where the crows walk in their cold black blood. Crying tonight in the house of their sisters and wives, their rooms will be cold and their children hungry. I talk to Dog in the small light before dawn, she tells me to have Hope. She will look after me. She says I must kill Beth to get Gold, she has a ring on her finger.

I have killed Beth in the afternoon. She brought me food and I killed her outside the House of Stones. She was not looking, I did it quick but not with my spade. My Spade is My Friend. Then I looked at her and cried, no Love now for me or her. Her gold ring I beat flat with a stone, it is in the picture of Dog. My Love is pleased with me, my work is good. I take the dead people to the mine and cover them with stones. After many days I take my Spade to the Food Land and start to dig. The others stay away from me, they leave me alone. I beat my Spade with a stone and shout My Spade is My Friend, custom. They gather round. I tell them what to do now. Goog is no good now. When the men in boats come we will kill them. I am the Goog of the big house now, Goog of the Spade Men and I Love all the women, destiny. All the women have blue paint on their cheeks, pattern like Dog, every woman has her hair like a rope on her head, custom. Every day I talk to Dog and she is Happy with what I have done, I have Hope.

Written in the House of Stones, in the First Year of Dog.

Custom.

pink

A
N old man sits in a room, alone. He lives in the country, in a house set apart, grey and silent. Autumn's infringing sadness billows the turquoise curtains with earth-cooled air and invades the house with spores, invisible moulds and nostalgia; another tired year is turning over in bed. Time has tipped to over-ripeness.

The old man feels sad. After dinner, in an infant gale which doesn't know its own strength, he watches the Sunday afternoon film without moving once – without taking a sip of water or nibbling a biscuit. Of all the films in all the world, it's Casablanca. He considers the great romantic films. He can't remember many.

After tea on his own, sardines on toast and a tin of rice pudding straight from the can, cold, because he can't be bothered any more, he sits down in his deep armchair and imagines his own Love Story. A strong evening sun, beating through the window behind him, projects a yellow screen onto the wall in front of him and he sets his own film in motion – his own
Cinema Paradiso
, or maybe
The Last Picture Show
.

Then, in his imagination, he stops the film and makes a few
telephone calls. Still sitting there, he looks at the yellow screen on the wall and invites some friends round to watch his film. He needs a Love Committee: a handful of people who've been around him for a long time, to sit in the room with him and mediate.

He mumbles to himself as he picks his Love Committee. He chooses them in the way playground captains pick their football teams at school, instinctively and cunningly.

Big burly Tom the policeman, red with effort and drink but still functioning in the upstairs department – Tom will be able to jog his memory and remind him of his first days of love. Primavera. They're the same age; he rewinds the tape some fifty years, to the time when Tom was a rookie copper on the night shift. Every night for a summer, when the town clock struck twelve, Tom would rap his friend's bedroom window with his truncheon to wake him up so that he could run barefoot across the dewy fields to Morfudd in her father's barn.

He will need Frances there – the librarian: proud, punctilious, much too frank with the drink inside her, tragically dismayed at her own marriage. Impeccably dressed in plum or serge, her perfume armorial, not an invitation… her miniature affairs dotted on her skin, freckles of ardour. Three decades of calm punctuated by a handful of brief volcanic eruptions; frantic couplings separated by years of formality and politeness, her inner heat invigilated by the lifeless books in her library. Her passion was governed by the laws of diminishing returns, since
every Heathcliff or Darcy in the town had aged or gone grey with doubt. But real love was all in the mind; real love was different. She mourned it and put a spade in the ground every night, wanting to find it like a crock of gold.

And who else should be there in his Love Committee? Jonty, undoubtedly. A haggard man, thin and secretive – retired from the sea but still in love with the waves. He seemed to live in a crow's nest near the top of the cliff, a niche on the path which dropped to the shore, his berth a double seat carved into the rockface. He sat there every day with his binoculars, on a waterproof cushion which he stuffed into his coat when he left the place, if he ever did. He knew about the creatures of the deep, and their watery romances. Whales tended to be promiscuous. Dolphins copulated belly to belly after lengthy foreplay. Like humans they had sex just for fun occasionally, and got fruity with other animals, even humans. Dolphins could be gay, too. Jonty divulged all this in a sad monotone, never looking at the listener, his eyes forever scanning the sea for fins and spumes.

Why was Jonty invited to the screening? Because maybe he had a woman in every port once. No, that was unlikely. Because he watched and waited so patiently? The old man has no idea why he wants Jonty there, but he does.

The old man sits in his crimson chair, watching the square of yellow moving slowly along the wall. He clears his throat politely and addresses the phantom Love Committee in a level, dispassionate voice. He no longer smokes, but feels the event would be more atmospheric if Frances – perhaps – smoked moodily in the corner, looking like Anais Nin, fresh from another wanton sexual encounter. He would watch the curls of smoke wafting across the screen – yes, that was appealing. They would need plenty of drinks on his long low table, in glinting decanters; a bucketful of ice and some tumblers.

Everyone settles into a chair. Frances lets the ice clunk and swish in her glass then she sucks neat vodka from a hole in her cube – a little trick of hers; a trademark drinking habit. She looks round at the old man and her eyes gleam in the murk. They're ready. He starts talking…

My friends – the fragrance of new-mown hay is the nation's favourite smell, I'm told. But did you know that only one type of grass leaves that distinctive tang in the air?

He hears Frances whisper its name.

Yes Frances, sweet vernal grass. When it dies it leaves a wonderful fragrance. Once the old people made bonnets from it, and whenever the bonnets got wet they gave off the same sweet smell, months or years after the plant's death. And that's what I want to show you first, on my screen – an evening in a garden, many years ago. It has stayed in my mind, vividly. As soon as I think of it the smell of a freshly mown lawn seems to fill my nostrils, and I'm taken back to that time. My memories of one particular aspect of the evening are as powerful as they were then.

Jonty sits in his chair unmoving, staring at the screen with an intensity he usually reserves for the boundless sea. He considers an unlikely fact: ambergris, expelled from the intestines of the sperm whale, is a powerful source of perfume. Jonty knows he'll get drunk and quite probably aggressive… will he make a fool of himself in this place too? Will he have to move on again, to another solitary cliff in a strange place, full of people who won't know him? His secret crouches inside him – a ship in a bottle, broken and irreparable. Wife beater. Child bruiser. He blocks it out again, sinks another finger of Scotch and listens to the old man, his ridiculous testimony. How could anyone his age be so naive, so romantically stillborn?

It was summer
.
A warm evening in June, in the Marches, where
Wales meets Shropshire, by a river. I'd walked along a water meadow by the Severn, picking my way through marsh marigolds and thistle clumps. At some point I was surrounded by a herd of young heifers: I was enveloped in a cloud of milky cowbreath, with insects buzzing and chirring, the smells of warm mud and cowpats on the riverbank…

Frances closes her eyes and joins him on the screen, walking by the river. She sketches in a kingfisher darting from the bank and a trout rippling the water, then she adds some sound effects – the swish of the heifers' tails, the suck and gurgle of the river, a woodpecker cackling in a spinney above…

The old man continues...

I was on my way to a party thrown by the editor of a local newspaper, who lived in a large Victorian manse – crumbling a bit, with a portico and balustrades, plinths and statues. Catholic family, used to be posh but struggling to keep it all together – I think perhaps the party was a big family effort, their once-a-year attempt to stamp some order on a place beyond their energies or bank balance. The terraced garden fell in folds to the riverbank. I remember a row of weeping willows, and yellow roses in full bloom. Old English, probably. We were coming to the end of a long hot summer, and when I arrived the event was in full swing. Butterflies and silky insects shone in the air around us. This was about thirty years ago, so most of the people were formally dressed – the men in white shirts and grey slacks, many with ties… most of the women in print dresses, with pastel patterns or flower designs. Diaphanous in that light – quite exciting for a young man. People were in motion everywhere – moving between groups, forming into clusters then disbanding, veering erratically from one centre of attraction to the next.

Tom grips his glass and contemplates the party on the lawn. He thinks of water coming to the boil, atoms becoming more and more volatile under the influence of heat. The people on the lawn are over-excited atoms, coming to the boil under the influence of alcohol. Tom hates parties and leaves them as soon as he can. People became unpredictable, ungovernable. He seemed to bore them. Standing with his back to a pillar or a wall, he'd await a darting visit, try hard to be interesting, then watch crestfallen as the visitor darted away again without probing him for his meagre nectar. What did they feed off? They perplexed him. He eavesdropped on conversations, hoping to pick up some know-how, but the conversations seemed trivial and vapid. Perhaps it was the delivery and presentation that counted. He should giggle and wiggle his eyes around, perhaps. He couldn't be bothered any more, didn't even try.