Mr Cassini Read online

  Apparently this well – used as a bathing pool, and famous for its healing powers – had a canopy resting on ornamental pillars long ago. It fell into disrepair after Henry VIII took his revenge on the Church. The ruin is in a pleasant, almost enchanted dingle, with butterbur and bamboo growing around a stumble of fallen stones, damp and mossy. As the sun played among the bubbles I trailed my fingers in the soft, lime-rich water and, such was the old-world feel of the place, I imagined I was in a realm of water-nymphs and dryads. You may condemn my description as fey, but I am merely trying to describe the nature of that particular day.

  Olly had been silent for long periods. Had I been more observant I might have noticed the sag in her shoulders, the droop of her head. But I hadn’t. As we ate the first of our sandwiches (ham, coleslaw and Branston Pickle on rye bread) and pored over children’s prayers which had been written on scraps of paper – now mouldering – and placed in a hole in the chapel wall, I had no idea that Olly was being oppressed by an inner turmoil. I was serene and contented under my feeble winter sun, and totally impervious to her personal unhappiness. You needn’t chide me. I have reproached myself often enough. So when I turned to talk to her, only to see tears running down her cheeks, I was shocked. For a moment I sat with my hand frozen in mid-air, clutching half a sandwich. My mouth was already open, ready to take a bite from the bread; I put it down immediately and moved closer to her. I put my arm around her, and we sat like that for a few minutes. She felt very slender, very vulnerable, and her body’s little judders and spasms travelled down my arm, into my heart. She cried soundlessly, and then stopped, sniffed, wiped her nose with her sleeve, and stood up. She smiled, and said sorry. Neither of us had a tissue so I handed her some of the kitchen towel lining the bottom of the sandwich box. Reddish patches spread around her eyes and nose.

  ‘Sorry,’ she said again. ‘I don’t know what’s wrong – I keep breaking into tears unexpectedly, without any reason. It happened in Bangor High Street yesterday. Quite embarrassing. I was just walking along... ’

  She smiled again, and started packing the picnic into her rucksack.

  ‘Come on,’ she said. ‘Let’s find the caves.’

  As I trudged behind her I wondered what I should do. Let it pass? Press her for more information? Something told me to bide my time. She’d said only a few words – but they were enough to trouble me considerably. We moved upwards slowly through a hanger of ash trees and holly, with the River Elwy glinting below us. Eventually we came to a clearing, a dome-like knoll overlooking the valley. We sat on two soft green tussock-stools and admired the view. Directly opposite was a hanging valley which cupped an emerald-green field and a smoking farmhouse. Curtains of rain drifted down the cwm in white pillars which toppled slowly onto the floor of the valley in slow-motion, silently, as if drifts of talcum powder were falling onto the floor of a bathroom, or flour was being sifted through a sieve. Inexplicably, we were left dry.

  ‘Come on,’ she said with a hint of mock gaiety. ‘Let’s explore.’

  She led me down a steep, overgrown path. Soon we were among a plethora of limestone caves. A few years ago one of them had yielded a haul of ancient bones: bear, rhinoceros, wolf, leopard, deer and bison – and the earliest human bones ever found in Wales, from an early form of Neanderthal Man (with a large, powerful jaw and heavy eyebrows) who lived here a quarter of a million years ago.

  She led me into a cave, using a key-ring torch, but when the cave narrowed sharply, forcing me to wriggle through a constriction, I lost my nerve and headed straight back to the entrance. Yes me, Superman, captain of the Welsh football team not so very long ago. Mr Nerves of Steel himself.

  ‘Not very good in tight holes – claustrophobia,’ I shouted back into the cave.

  She followed me out, and led me to the mouth of another cave. This time I was better prepared, so I followed her along a longish stretch of tunnel which snaked through the rock. When we emerged into the sunlight, I realised quickly that we were back where I’d stood panting and palpitating after my earlier, aborted attempt – the two caves were linked. I looked sheepish, but she didn’t tease me. So we wandered in and out of caves and caverns, pointing to striations and red-ochre tinges in the limestone. I made silly noises in the caverns so that I could enjoy the echoes. Childish, I know. But although it was February, a black winter month, nature’s sudden burst of optimism had warmed my bones.

  Then we headed back towards the car, along the valley floor, through a calm, reposeful meadow. On our way home, thrumming along the expressway, she revealed more to me about her state of mind. She’d been feeling very low. Sleeping badly. Lately, each day had been a challenge. She had felt estranged from society, and there had been physical symptoms: tiredness, and a flu-like sensitivity of the skin. She often felt like crying, suddenly and without warning. She was clearly stressed, or seriously depressed. I knew that she was due to be married in the spring. Was she worried about the wedding?

  No.

  Health?

  She was checking that out.

  Something to do with college?

  Yes, in part. She’d fallen behind with her essays.

  I asked her why, since she was always in the library when I went there.

  A long pause. A squall hit the car and a few hailstones slithered down the windscreen – a tetchy reminder that winter was still with us.

  ‘Can I ask you a favour?’ she asked.

  ‘Yes, of course.’

  She flicked the wipers onto double speed.

  ‘I need to take my mother to Glasgow next weekend, and I could do with some company on the way back. It’s a long way to drive alone. And since you know about the crying... (pause)... I’m also having panic attacks.’

  ‘Sure I’ll come. No problem.’

  I wondered what her boyfriend was doing. Had they fallen out? All the girls at college were mad about him. He was the best-looking man around.

  I didn’t pursue the topic.

  On the white of her arm I noticed two circular Elastoplasts, wheat-coloured, which reminded me faintly of crop circles. I imagined a tiny alien craft landing on her arm in the night, leaving an exotic pattern in the soft, almost invisible down. I felt an urge to lean over and tease the sticky edge of the Elastoplast where it clung to the flat warm plain of her forearm, in the way we all want to pick at fresh Elastoplasts.

  ‘Did you hurt yourself?’ I asked her.

  ‘Pardon?’

  ‘Your arm – the plasters.’

  ‘Blood tests,’ she said, with a hint of annoyance. ‘I’m not completely bloody helpless – I can just about get myself to a doctor, you know.’

  And that was Olly all over – calm and composed one second, but a coil of barbed wire the next if you stepped on her.

  Again, I let sleeping dogs lie. We drove to my home, where she dropped me off.

  ‘See you in college tomorrow,’ she said after refusing my offer of coffee.

  Indoors, I sat in silence for a while, pondering the day’s events. I had a smoke, too – it always helps me to relax.

  I had never seen Olly in that state before. Normally she was reserved, quick-witted and funny in a droll sort of way. She experienced every single botheration suffered by the very beautiful: midge-clouds of men, and a continuous need to walk everywhere with the shield of her intelligence held up in front of her, to protect her from the regiments of fools who besieged her body.

  Why she turned to me I have no idea. One of her friends – another woman – might have made better sense of it all. But it was me she chose, and the unravelling took me on a vertigo ride to the North and the South, to the East and the West. There was something the matter with Olly. I would have to wait some time before I found out what it was.

  That night, the winter returned with a vengeance.

  I would like to tell you the whole story. I want to tell you about my dreams and my daydreams too. I want to tell you about the snow. I want to tell you about love and the opposite of love, whic
h isn’t always hate.

  Perhaps I should talk about everyday matters, but I don’t want to now. I want a change. I want to talk about the big things... about whales, because they mourn, and about polar bears, because they’re left-handed – southpaws – all of them. I want to talk about little things too – about iceworms and wormholes. I want to describe spiders, hanging in their nets like fallen acrobats. I want to describe silence, that sheet of glass on which the universe is painted.

  I will have to tell you about Mr Cassini too. It was not my wish to include him in this story but he’s a stubborn man who won’t take no for an answer. He is obdurate. He won’t go away. Sometimes he bangs about at night and keeps me awake. He calls at inconvenient times and takes up hours of my time. He refuses to leave until I give in to his demands. Mr Cassini has forced his way into my account. When I told him he was in my story he rubbed his hands and smiled.

  In this world so large I have a little room. I will sit here and tell you what happened. You may want to know, for instance, why I have a telescope in my sea-facing window, pointing at the sky. If you ask me about my telescope, I will focus all the lenses in my mind and I will look into the past: I will go back four hundred years, to a town in Holland, where an obscure spectacle-maker called Hans Lippershey is sitting in his room, watching two small children at play. They are amusing themselves... they put two of his lenses together and they peer at a church tower in the distance. They see it wonderfully magnified. They laugh and they giggle... the telescope is born.

  I will look again into the past. Not far away from Hans Lippershey, some of the most important discoveries in the history of biology have already been made by a tradesman called Antonie van Leeuwenhoek. Working alone in his room, driven by boundless curiosity, he has fashioned a microscope with skill and diligence; he has discovered bacteria, sperm cells, blood cells, and much else. He has discovered a world of microscopic life. How marvellous it would be if we could view ourselves, see ourselves squirming and darting on the glass plate of the past.

  My own telescope helps me to look at what has happened already in the universe; after all, every single telescope trained on the stars is looking into the past. Take Saturn. When I focus on the planet’s stupendous rings I am looking at something which happened up to 84 minutes ago.

  The cosmos swirling around us in its incalculable vastness, the miniature cosmos under our fingernails: is there anything left to be discovered by the common man, sitting in his room? Or are we reduced to discovering a few small things about ourselves, of no import to anyone else: and if so, is the spirit of discovery dead?

  Is that why we worry about weeds and wallpaper?

  There is a point to all this pondering. I am about to go on a small personal voyage of discovery, and I must use every tool and artifice available to me. For instance, if I cannot actually be inside the Cassini spacecraft as it circles Saturn (a planet with seven main rings) following a voyage of seven years through space, then there are ways of simulating the experience. I am not referring to drugs alone, but they have their place of course. Paul Theroux went to South America to retrace William Burroughs’ notorious trip to the rainforests in search of the holy grail of psychotropics, the final fix – yage:

  ... vine of the soul, secret nectar of the Amazon, the shaman’s holy drink, the ultimate poison, a miracle cure. More generally known as ayahuasca, a word I found bewitching, it was said to make its users prescient if not telepathic. Rocket fuel is another active ingredient: in an ayahuasca trance, many users have testified, you travel to distant planets, you meet extraterrestials and moon goddesses.

  “Yage is space time travel,” Burroughs said.

  With or without drugs I will go on a journey through time and space. I assure you that I was free of any hallucinogenic when the swans passed through the rainbow. But since the number seven is my number, as they say; since I seem to choose it before all other numbers in draws and lotteries, I will use it too in my quest for personal discovery. There are no more than seven basic plots to the human story, according to some, and every tale ever told fits one of seven categories. Maybe this fable of mine is the eighth – my own. Now is the time, surely, for me to mix my own colours. What do painters say? Start with black and then move, shade by shade, towards the light. If you want to make white whiter, add a little blue.

  In the harbour a fishing boat waits for me, placid in the pancake ice – its wooden hull, a bright new shade of powder blue, is dreamy and distorted in the water. A plume of diesel blue drifts from its exhaust. A million mirrors dangle from the sky.

  I have seen such scenes in lonely fjords. But this is Wales, and I am leaving for the island. Something is happening inside me. I want to go back, to where the sum went wrong. My memories have been eaten away, moths plucked from the air by a night owl. My life is an ending without a story. They say the human body undergoes a complete change of cells every seven years. And this is it – a change is happening. I can feel it.

  Lime-green catkins ooze from the trees like toothpaste escaping in fine whorls from cracks in the tube. The past is about to ooze out of me too.

  This is my year of magic.

  Part 1

  Dreams

  1

  THE TIDE GOES OUT

  The journey begins

  I SLAMMED the boot lid, hard, and the car rocked.

  Then I noticed something – a head, nodding rhythmically in the back seat.

  A wig... my mind imagined... was that a wig? The hair was ash blonde and coarse.

  There was something slightly unnatural about it. And I wasn’t expecting anyone else to be with us.

  My eyes moved from the wig to Olly’s face.

  Standing by the driver’s door, with the keys in her right hand, she watched me with bemused eyes; smile lines were forming, delicately, at the corners of her eyes.

  Her mouth parted and she laughed softly, looked down, and I heard a soft blip as she disabled the central locking system. There was a scrunch of chippings as she got in. Walking towards the passenger side, I glanced sideways at the person sitting in the back of the car.

  Then I eased myself into my seat and belted myself in.

  The interior of the car was cold and impassive: left to stand alone in an unpeopled landscape, I imagined it would guard itself, defend its own squat metal kennel for a thousand years. I sensed a foreboding – this box, trimmed in factory grey, had something about it that day which hinted at a cold, robotic future.

  Her body was suddenly next to me, close. My stomach muscles tensed slightly as she swished her belt across her midriff. This accentuated her breasts, and I averted my eyes courteously. I was aware of small currents of air, sent by her movements, brushing coolly against my skin. As she leant towards me, head down, looking for the belt-snap, a swathe of hair fell from behind her right ear and curtained her face; it swayed in a graceful curve and my biology admired its rich cascade. There was a slight hint of shampoo; I thought of the shoulder underneath her hair, white, unclothed.

  ‘Ready?’

  I nodded, and our eyes locked momentarily. I had to look up slightly – she was higher in her seat than I expected. Then she started the car and we began our long journey north, the roads salty and white. Indicating, she steered us towards the expressway’s churning, dyspeptic canal. My mind flitted from subject to subject.

  Why was I needed now, yet again? Just when I was getting some peace and quiet – at last. I was so fed up with being needed all the time. People are so needy. Can’t they ever sort out their own problems? Their voices gnaw at me: on my mobile, through the letterbox. Pleading. And I’m not getting any younger. Sometimes I feel as if I’m walking in a glass corridor, a circular tube of memories, walking round and round, getting tired...

  ‘You’re very quiet today,’ she said.

  ‘Just thinking.’

  She was a fast driver, I noticed. But good. An easy, experienced competence. For a while, as we overtook in the fast lane, we were level with a car full
of youngish men, uber-chavs in baseball caps. They studied her, dispassionately: an ordnance party, measuring her topography in trigs and chains. One of them said something and they all laughed. She was unaware of their interest; I shifted my eyes away from them.

  ‘Something bothering you?’ she asked.

  ‘Oh, not really.’

  Small clouds, greyed by the windscreen, travelled in a ghost-train of reflections across her face. The sky was a Brillo factory, puffing out small neat cloud-parcels on the horizon’s conveyor belt. Above us, on the pockmarked cheek of the hill, gorse erupted in zit clusters.

  ‘Are you absolutely sure you want to do this?’ she asked in a carefully controlled voice.

  ‘For God’s sake yes, absolutely. I really want to – I promise.’

  ‘I just thought then, for a moment, you were having second thoughts.’

  ‘No, absolutely not. I’m looking forward to it, really. Life was getting far too boring. I need a new challenge.’

  Liar. New challenge? Christ, hadn’t I dealt with enough challenges – solved enough problems?