‘I don’t generally think about it. To me it’s just a dog in a glass cage.’
‘What about the smile? Do you agree it’s like the
‘Not really. All collies look like that.’
‘My father hated that expression. It destroyed him.’
‘That’s quite a strong opinion to have about a stuffed dog’s smile.’
‘For you perhaps. But my father was a taxidermist. He had a wonderful career ahead of him. He could have been one of the greats . . . perhaps the greatest of all. With work on show in Moscow town hall or the Sorbonne. But life is full of what-might-have-beens isn’t it?’ Her head was lowered but she raised her tear-filled eyes as if to seek my complicity in this bitter truth. ‘Oh yes, he never stopped finding fault with Clip. There was never a day when he did not criticise the piece for various technical failings: ears too sharply angled, tongue too pink, the line of the spine not straight enough . . . but he knew they were irrelevant, like criticising Michelangelo for getting David’s head out of proportion. Secretly he knew the truth: it was an act of divine creation. Angels must have reached down and anointed the stuffer while he worked. The day my father saw the unveiling of Clip at the museum he felt like Salieri when he first heard the music of Mozart. His heart was shattered. He spent the rest of his life on his allotment; never stuffed another piece. With time, of course, the pain subsided. But then they re-released the movie and it all started again. We tried to stop him going, but it was no use. He came home after the movie with a face the colour of ash. Fetched something from his room and walked out into the night. That was the last time we saw him alive.’
Christmas is a time of rituals, some that have lost their meaning and some that acquire new meaning as the years pass and folks’ memories assume new forms. After I left the girl’s house I went back to the office to prepare for a modern Christmas ritual, one which had only recently come into being and which had a deeply personal significance for me. It was the annual swinging of the cricket bat. That sacred wand of willow with which, five years ago, I had knocked my old games teacher, Herod Jenkins, out of a plane door. For the rest of the year it stands in the corner of my office, in the place at the foot of the hatstand reserved for umbrellas and walking sticks. And once a year Gwynfor from the Rotary Club comes and takes it away. People pay 50p for a swing and with the proceeds some needy children acquire a new climbing frame or a day trip to Chester Zoo. Such are the quixotic strategies that Dame Fortune uses, planting the seeds of future joy in the loam of past tragedy.
Herod Jenkins survived the fall from the plane; Planet Earth just wasn’t hard enough. It’s only made of rock. Since then he had been on the run from the law with my former cleaner, Mrs Llantrisant. They made an improbable Bonnie and Clyde, robbing the same sub post offices from which they drew their pensions. Now, it appeared, they had taken employment at the circus, Herod using that famous upper body strength to earn his keep, to provide for his moll, as a strongman.
If only his victims had been possessed of such strength. The photo of my schoolmate Marty stands on the desk in the office. Propped next to it is a Christmas card from his mum which arrived two days ago. She never forgets. Just as none of us, not me nor Gwynfor nor anyone else who was there, will forget the time in the third year when Marty was sent off on that cross-country run into the blizzard and never returned. The weather had been vile that day; snow falling so thick the sheep on the hills suffocated as they stood. Herod was not hostile to the concept of postponing games in bad weather, but it never got bad enough on Earth. Only beneath the liquid methane clouds of Saturn, they said, where storms raged unabated for centuries at temperatures of minus 190°C, and winds howled at more than 2000 kilometres an hour did it start to look doubtful. A lightning bolt hits the ground-keeper’s hut and discharges in one flash more power than is generated on Planet Earth in ten years. OK, no games today.
I poured a rum and began to rub linseed oil into the talismanic bat. Before long I heard footsteps on the stairs outside and Gwynfor walked in, red-faced, chubby, cheery. We shook hands, and said how good it was to see each other again. Even before the sentence was finished his eyes were trained on the bottle. We drank to our health and we toasted dead Marty. We used to laugh at his lack of athletic prowess, the silly way he ran. Marty the seer, the saint, the one the gods loved, but not much. The day he came back with the X-ray showing the shadow on his lung he was almost exultant, as if it proved what he had long been trying to tell people: he was not meant for this world. He was a poet and had the poet’s disease to prove it: consumption. The white death. That dark spot on the lung worn as a badge of honour by Shelley, Kafka, and that bloke played by Dustin Hoffman in
Gwynfor took the bat and walked across to the door. I crumpled up a piece of paper and bowled. ‘Howzat!’ he cried, the ball of paper thudded against the window pane and, as if the gods were anxious for our party not to lose sight of its serious purpose, a van drove past outside with a loud-hailer on the roof inviting us to the circus at Ponterwyd. The shadow fell. Gwynfor looked glum. He nodded, finished his drink in one go, wished me a Merry Christmas one more time, and left with the bat.
Chapter 7
PEOPLE WHO ARE afraid of the dark are not being unreasonable. Our deepest fears arise from instincts developed at the dawn of time when the world was much emptier. There were not many folks about. Human beings were the hairy guys in fur swimming costumes, stooping a bit because they were still getting used to standing on their hind legs. They were harmless to everybody except themselves. All the early indications were, they didn’t like themselves much. In those days, if you happened to be walking through the vast untamed wilderness and encountered that greatest of rarities, a stranger, someone from another tribe, the safest course of action was to kill him. That’s why they invented the police. But that experiment quickly turned sour, one of those cases where the cure was worse than the disease.
So humanity tried something more sophisticated. They invented something called the greeting. Just a little form of words, a comment on the weather, made as an opening gambit, trivial in content but far-reaching in its implications. It allowed men and women to come together and live in things called towns. Because they discovered a strange thing about the greeting. Nutters were incapable of exchanging pleasantries of this sort. It’s the same today. There has never been a more effective way of singling out the benign from the malign.
But it doesn’t work so well at night. If you encounter a stranger at night in a place where there are no street lamps, it is always an unnerving experience. Tadpole lived in a copse beyond the top of Penglais Hill where there were no lights, where the sun seldom reached, where families were often closely knit in ways proscribed by the Bible. A world with a high likelihood that anyone you encountered in the dark would be a nutter.
I had to leave the car at a five-bar gate held closed by a wire and counterweight strung over a pulley. The path was overgrown, a dark tunnel through wet black trees. I traced the route by gingerly testing the texture of dead leaves under my feet. Up ahead was a dark shape which might have been a clearing or quarry, or maybe the back door to Pluto’s realm. There was no light, except for a brief glimpse every now and then through gaps in foliage of the rectangular green direction sign at the side of the main road. It got smaller and smaller. The sounds of cars getting more and more muffled. I’ve always found those signposts strangely comforting, with the myth of order in the chaos that they suggest. You may be leaving town, they seem to say, but you will always be connected by the ribbon of tarmac, and you can’t go anywhere that those most prosaic of people, the council road menders, have not been before. But it was clear from the path beneath my feet that they hadn’t been here. An owl hooted. A lone star glimmered through a black cobweb of twigs and branches that groaned in the invisible breeze as if shaken by a giant’s hand. In my pocket my hand clutched the jar of Eye of Newt pesto that Tadpole had phoned and asked me to bring.
I came to a clearing in which stood a cottage. The windows were dark apart from one downstairs: black curtains edged with a glimmer of light. A man stood in the yard sharpening an axe at a grindstone, sending a flurry of blue sparks into the night. To the side of the house, there was a washing line hung with items that instinct warned one not to scrutinise; beyond that was a lonely grave. An invisible dog growled; the man stopped grinding
