Island of Lightning (18 page)

It took time to find my bearings. There's a new route system in this part of the capital, but eventually I stepped back on to the beach. I hadn't been there for years and the views have changed.

Yet the beach was the same. Like a shelf in the salvage yard, all swarf and glowering agglomerations, steelworks sinter and the taste of rust sharper than seasalt. For rust is Tremorfa pollen, the rust from the wreckage at Bird Brothers, that emporium of rust where I tallied what we tipped the tattermen for their scrap cars, checking the comptometer print-out and filing the dockets on a spike. I was back at the beach, on Cardiff's cankerous brink. It crumbled underfoot like wirewool. The darkness seeped in.

A mile west but in another dimension is ‘Cardiff Bay'. The Wales Millennium Centre was a beacon in the rain. For someone like me who opposed the building of the Cardiff Barrage and sentimentalises the lost Hogarthian tableaux of the Mount Stuart Hotel, it's a welcome sight in a capital of overpriced apartments and theme-bars. Gwyneth Lewis was commissioned to write two verses integral to the Centre design. Now her poetry shone enormously into the night. Upstairs I stood behind the words and each was a lens of a lighthouse:
awen horizons ffwrnais stones.
And
gwir
, a difficult word to understand, especially when it's a sequin sewn into the Cardiff skyline. But there it is. An honour board that cannot be taken down. Lewis's most momentous publication.

How badly needed it is in a development described as ‘the most exciting waterfront in Europe'. Soon it will illuminate Wales's first dedicated parliamentary building for seven hundred years, a political aquarium for the poor dabs who rule us and a glass tank in which the aspirations of the country will be revealed.

Mark Jenkins's monologue, ‘Playing Burton', was running as the Millennium Centre's first studio play. It has the elements of real tragedy. With two hundred others I listened to a man the spit of Richard Burton but who lacked the sinew of his voice. No matter. I shut my eyes and remembered an actor aspiring to academia, a lion bored with the pride.

Burton spoke two endangered languages: Afan Valley Welsh and Marlovian English. We learned about his retinue: Dic Bach, Philip the svengali, Elizabeth Taylor.

And about vodka which by the end literally inhabited him. In hospital for an operation, surgeons had to scrape crystallised alcohol from his backbone. But the play's eighty minutes never contained a silence. Not once was Burton simply
there
. Not a facial muscle or gesture indicated his incredulous despair. He was swaddled in words like mummy-cloths.

At Bird Brothers, the tattermen were usually Irish gypsies. They would park twice on the weighbridge while I subtracted. Around us the drams dragged past and the shears hung in silhouette over my hutch. Cardiff was khaki then, the morfa of Tremorfa ashen as Saskatchewan.

Now Birds' is a way of life. For those who can interpret such things, its gantry lights spell their own poems. Two million new cars are bought each year in the UK. The oxides await.

That day on the shore I had let my feet read the scrappies' industrial braille. From there you can see the city going up like a field of mushrooms. And even if it appears an environ-mentalist's apostasy, I say let it prosper. Let all its poetry burn.

What They Take

I think I was eight. The man said turn over and lie on your tummy. So I did. He rubbed his wet finger along my spine as if he was looking for something.

Then he said this might hurt. I wondered why he would want to hurt me. And anyway, I'd gone sort of numb.

You're brave, aren't you? he asked. I've heard you're very brave.

The man said don't look. So I stared at the pillow which was thin and striped. A hard pillow, harder than at home. But out of the corner of my eye I'd already seen what he was holding. I must have cried. And I could feel his hand on the small of my back.

How cold I must have seemed to him. A boy of eight, white as a wood shaving. And skinny, because I was skinny then. My ribs showed, my back was no wider than a white line in the road. I must have looked like a wishbone on that bed. Yes, legs spread, arms outstretched. And me white as a wishbone.

No, the man said. And he laughed. You don't lie flat. You must be a squirrel. You're a squirrel with your tail in the air. With your chin on your chest and your paws in front.

So I became a squirrel. How horrible it was, I thought, to be a squirrel. How wrong it felt. But I could see what he was going to do. It was big as a bicycle pump, that hypodermic and I might have cried. Or whimpered, because that's the proper word. Isn't it?

Don't look round, he said. And stay very still. You don't move a muscle. All you have to do is count. Be brave now and count. So I counted.

No, he said. Count slower. And don't move. So I counted more slowly. More slowly like this.

Oooone.

Twooo.

Threeee.

Like that. And his hand was as wide as my back and the needle went into my skin between his fingers. I imagine that's the way he did it because that's the way I would have done it. And then the needle went into the bone.

When I think about it now what I see is an aspen leaf. The underside of a leaf with the veins showing. A pale leaf. Because that was me. I was a squirrel no more, I was light as a leaf. So light I might float away if his hand didn't hold me down. Didn't press me down into that starched sheet. My face above the striped pillow. Which was wet, I can feel it now. Wet somehow.

I had counted so long I couldn't believe it. There was no such number as eleven. When I had reached ten I thought he would be finished. Ten was the number I had been aiming for. And when I stopped he said count, keep counting. And keep still.

You see, he said, this isn't your medicine. I'm not putting medicine into you. No. I'm taking something out. Of you. Something very precious. Away. I haven't found it yet. But when I find it I'll take a little of it and then we'll test it and that will tell us everything. Tell us what is giving you these dreams. And then we'll know how to stop them.

Because I was ill, I knew that. I was ill with dreams. At home my mother had placed her hand on my forehead, her nurse's hand, and she knew I was dreaming. And my father sat me down in the rocking chair and he asked “Do you see the animals? Do you see the animals?”

We had all been out for a walk. We were in the aspen wood. When I walked into the wood I was myself. Unchanged. When I came out of the wood I could feel the sunlight turning to ashes in my head. I felt stiff. There was a steel reinforcing rod pushing up through my spine. One of those rusty rods you see in concrete.

And yes, I could see the animals. I could see the weasel with his magician's white gloves. And I could see the viper, and its hollow tooth. The tooth full of delirium.

The needle was in me still. I could feel it between those blue stones of my back. That was why they had brought me to the fever hospital. Because I came out of the wood with my head on fire they brought me to the fever hospital and put me behind the glass. Where I sat and watched every day as the cars arrived and the mothers delivered their children wrapped in linen, holding them to their breasts. Holding their children like the long stems of roses, the thorns clinging a moment to their sleeves.

That's it, said the man. And I could feel the needle slide out of me and I imagined it as an icicle because what else could a boy of eight imagine, the steel of that needle so thin it was invisible.

Here it is, he said. No, don't move. And he came from behind me to show the hypodermic and in the hypodermic was a golden liquid.

Yes, it had come out of my body. Out of my spine. What a colour it was. Oh yes, it was molten gold. I was rich.

From your nervous system, he said. A dangerous place. A very dangerous place to meddle with. But needs must.

I remember that phrase. Needs must. And there was the golden water. There was the molten gold and I was still crying and maybe I was still counting, still counting, one million and twelve, one million and thirteen… But I was proud. I know I was proud.

Because that golden water made me who I was. And I thought, yes, like Jason and the Argonauts. I'd seen the film in the old Palace, which is pulled down now. And nothing was ever built where the Palace stood. They could never replace the Palace.

The argonauts met a giant on an island. An iron giant. And the only way to beat the giant was to open the valve on the giant's heel so that his golden water ran away, ran steaming and fizzing into the sand, the giant growing weaker and desperate, the elixir pouring out of him, that smoking jism, until he crashed down.

The giant was dead, I suppose. And ever since, I've had that fear. It's inevitable that I've had that fear. That the water in me, my elixir, will drain away. Through my skin. Through a cut. That I might piss it away, that golden water, wherever it comes from. By mistake. Somehow purge myself of that golden water. Expel myself from myself. The best part of myself. The real part.

No, he said. No, don't move. We don't want to do this again, do we? We don't want to take too much. And then he was gone and the nurse allowed me to lie on my side and she pulled the sheet over me, and she whispered into my ear.

But I could still feel the man's hand on my back. Could still imagine I might float away. I was a leaf, you see. An aspen leaf.

Such a tree, the aspen. You must have seen aspens. They sigh in the wind, they never stop moving. Swaying and sighing, that's aspens. Like that man, standing over me. Like the nurse. What did she say?

But there are some people who call aspen trees girls' tongues. Yes, girls' tongues. And other people who call aspens old women's tongues. Is that because aspens sigh? Or because aspens are never still?

Because aspens are not pieces of wood. When I see aspens I see the sap inside them. A circulation of sap that doesn't stop. Because to me aspens are like fireworks that never burn out. Their sap never dries up. You know, they crucified Christ on an aspen tree. And gave him vinegar to drink.

And I could feel the nurse's breath on my neck. I could feel her girl's tongue, or was it her old woman's tongue, and her hand now in that cold place of my back. I could hear her saying something.

Then I must have fallen asleep. Or should I say I must have woken up. Anyway, I exchanged one dream for another. Because the bed was moving around on its wheels. And the nurse was pushing the bed, pushing it through the stream where I played, catching gwrachens with my hands, pushing it through that fierce stream until we reached the sea. And then the ocean. She was pushing me through the ocean and whispering to me.

But even as I slept I was awake. And I knew that somewhere in the fever hospital, the man was walking down a corridor and the sun was shining through the windows and bathing him in light. He was carrying a bottle and in that bottle was a teaspoon full of golden soup.

And the man would pause and hold up the bottle to the light to look at what he had stolen from me. Because I know now what it was. There's no doubt about it. He had stolen a drop of my soul.

Scavenger

1.

A night of fat stars.

The sky full of blister packs.

2.

Just like the sea. There are times when the sea's as clean as I can remember. Others when it tries to spew everything out of itself. I could build a city from the plastic I kick through at the caves. A million sandwiches still in their packaging. Thousands of planks, six months, twenty years in the water, and yet I smell the forest. Those jewels of resin.

3.

Zigmas drowned. That's what they said. Even before the deluge and the biggest waves. He could have escaped like the rest but he ran to the ghost train and hid in a carriage on the rail. In the dark.

He was one of the Lits, we all knew, from somewhere in the south of that country. Not the Baltic, where people would have understood the ocean.

Someone said Zigmas had never seen the sea before he arrived at the fairground. He told people his father was a mushroom seller. It seems he thought he might have been safe. But in the ghost train? What can you say about people like that? There was also a girl drowned in the subway, under the school mural. You know, I think they get what they deserve. Why should I worry about those simple kids?

4.

Breathing. That's what I can hear. The stone, breathing. It's what I've always heard in Pink Bay. No, not the sea sighing, because sometimes the tide is far away. But in this place, where the limestone meets the sandstone, the red bleeds into the grey, I can hear the stone itself. Its ancient exhalation.

I didn't think like that as a child. It's something I've gradually learned I'm able to do. If I pay enough attention. Because that's something I'm good at. Paying attention. Yes, if I listen long enough I hear the sound of stone breathing.

But there are so many voices we never hear. Because we've forgotten how to listen. I mean really listen. Which is what I do when I come here.

Never alone now, are we? I mean, properly alone. That's vanished. Think about most people. They have no idea what it's like to be solitary. Or singular, a better word. What singularity can mean. Another reason to pity them.

5.

We used to bring cheese and bread. Packets of chocolate biscuits with milk for the morning. And booze, of course, that was the point. Dregs of sloe gin, the peppermint schnapps nobody ever drank, advocaat, grenadine. Anything we could filch unnoticed.

How bright those bottles were, our terrible cocktail. When I think of it now, they were the colours in the cave itself, yellows and purples, like bruised flesh. And the stone too, how alike it is to the human body, voluptuous and intricate.

In the candlelight we sang and played guitars, and I'd find my fingers straying to the stone. I'd stroke the stone as if it was alive. No matter the weather, that rock was always wet. And fissured like flesh, I discovered. Yes, one of my great discoveries.