Nowhere Near Milkwood (9 page)

Southerndown is a village maybe fifteen miles west of Cardiff; a windswept, dramatic place with towering sea cliffs and a rocky shore that is like the surface of the moon. There are few coastal areas in the whole country that can compare with it for natural beauty. The tides are enormous and the breakers pound the sloping beach like monstrous tongues, refilling rock pools with wide-eyed crabs and starfish and breaking open new caves in the limestone walls.

Billy Belay had set off from Southerndown toward Nash Point with a bag that contained an anvil and a rope. He passed Dunraven – with its mouldering castle and picnickers – and carried on for another mile or so. The weather was warm and perspiration dripped the length of his nose. When he had found an isolated spot along the cliff-top path, he took the anvil out of his bag, secured it to his neck with the rope and hurled himself over the edge.

What he was really trying to achieve is anyone’s guess, although the obvious should not be overlooked. At any rate, destiny had different plans for him; the tide was in, but somehow he was washed up onto a patch of dry sand, anvil and all, suffering no more injury than a bruised nethermost. At the same instant, he fell into a kind of swoon and it was some long minutes before he regained his senses.

When he did, he was bewildered. There seemed to be no explanation as to why he was still conscious. “But I’m dead!” he cried. As far as he was concerned, the fall had killed him outright. “I must be a ghost,” he finally decided. As he thought about the prospect more carefully, it began to delight him. As a ghost he was released from all earthly ties and constraints. He would be able to do as he pleased. There were no rules anymore. He was free.

“I’m a ghost!” he repeated. He picked himself up and removed the anvil from his neck. It did not suit him anyway. He brushed the sand from his clothes and gazed around warily. Nobody had witnessed his demise, and yet his body had disappeared. If he was a ghost surely he would be floating above his mangled frame at this very instant?

Dismissing the question from his mind, he made his way painfully along the beach back toward Dunraven. He supposed that he was not the first ghost to haunt this particular stretch of coastline. Indeed, he remembered a legend about a wrecker who used to lure ships to their doom with false beacons and whose spectre was still said to fret and howl on stormy nights.

Billy wondered if he would meet this wrecker, whose name he had forgotten. He did not know if ghosts were confined to the area in which they had died, but he assumed that they were. A professor had once come to Cardiff to give a lecture on this subject; Cherlomsky was his name, but Billy had slept all the way through his talk. He pressed on regardless and before long had reached Dunraven. Here he paused and scratched his insubstantial chin.

Throughout his life, he had never played a single practical joke on anyone. This was not because he held such pranks in contempt but simply because of cowardice. He had been frightened of reprisals. Certain of his acquaintances, such as Alan Griffiths and Gareth Thomas, were forever tormenting each other with elaborate tricks and he had always viewed their antics with a measure of jealousy.

Now, however, he was safe from reprisals. As a ghost, he could cause as much mischief as he liked to anyone and everyone. Ghosts were allowed to do things like this and nobody criticised them for it. Indeed, it was acceptable behaviour on their part and sometimes even encouraged.

As he pondered on this, he happened to espy a lone fisherman sitting on a rock and gazing out to sea. He resolved to flex his ghostly muscles at once and crept up behind him. Placing his mouth to the man’s ear, he yelled: “Boo!”

Instantly, the fisherman leapt up, dropped his rod and line and began running down the beach – his face as white as a summer cloud. Billy felt very pleased with himself. It works! he thought. I’m a real ghost! I’m a real phantom!

His second victim was a boy who was busy eating an ice-cream. Billy snatched the ice-cream away and thrust it into the boy’s face. The boy burst into tears and the tears mixed with the ice-cream smeared on his cheeks. He too fled, arms waving.

I’m a ghost! Billy thought again. He was truly elated now. He opened his mouth and cried: “I’m a GHOST!” It was as if he wanted the seagulls to take up his cry and spread it far abroad, so as to leave no doubt in anyone’s mind that here was a phantom not to be trifled with, unless of course the trifle was a strawberry one. (Billy wondered if ghosts needed to eat; he hoped they did.)

While he congratulated himself on his quick thinking in hurling himself over the edge of the cliff, becoming a ghost and adapting to his role with such alacrity, he came across a bizarre sight. On his hands and knees a strange figure was engaged with a peculiar contraption. As he moved closer, Billy saw that it was made of two glass bottles joined neck to neck. The figure was muttering to himself: “Common hourglasses have sand on the inside and the world all around – my hourglass will have the world on the inside and sand all around!”

Billy knew the man as Karl Mondaugen, the mad scientist of Munich, who now lived in Ogmore by Sea. Billy peered closer at the glass device and frowned as he seemed to see moving figures within it. Shrugging, he reached out his ghostly hands and gave the eccentric academic a spooky tickle with his icy phantasmagorical fingers. The scientist shrieked and fell onto the contraption, smashing both bottles beneath his body and wailing in terror and dismay.

Billy rubbed his hands together and walked on. By the time he had reached the village of Southerndown, he had committed another eleven acts of ghostliness, including disrupting a group of geology students by dancing around them with great whoops and hideous chuckles. As he headed inland towards the village, he had already acquired a considerable taste for mischief and saw no earthly reason why he should not gorge himself sick on yet more courses.

Ruining a funeral was next and snatching a postman’s sack, casting letters all over the road, came after that. The main feast, however, was the incident with the poodle. Out of the Church Hall, haunt of the local Amateur Dramatics Society, came ungainly Mrs Featherstonehaugh, carrying her poodle under her arm. She had been rehearsing
Blithe Spirit
with her colleagues – a delicious irony, although Billy was unaware of this. He simply crept up behind her and...

At this point it may suffice to relate that she was found not more than ten minutes later by a policeman, with the end of a lead protruding from her gaping maw. She was quite blue and bloated. By this time, Billy had entered a shop selling cream cakes and was busy hurling them, one at a time, at the frightened owner of the establishment. The constable who had discovered Mrs Featherstonehaugh instantly repaired to the shop and confronted Billy. He was attacked with an unsheathed chocolate éclair. His eye was poked. Cream spurted.

To a casual observer newly arrived at the village, the sight of a wild-eyed figure being chased by a vengeful mob made up of ham actors, geologists, mourners, postmen, pastry cooks, a battered policeman and sundry others, may have been amusing. Billy also found it amusing – he grinned, chuckled and span as he ran. “You can’t harm me, I’m a ghost!” he called back. “I’m impervious to mortal blows!”  But his pursuers seemed disinclined to abandon the chase. Somehow they were able to see him. Perhaps Mrs Featherstonehaugh had also turned into a ghost and was directing their pursuit. He wondered.

Eventually, of course, he reached the cliff-top path that led from Southerndown to Nash Point. This was the course he had earlier followed. He raced down the path, but now he was puffing and panting. The crowd behind him was catching up. He tried to imagine what would happen if they caught him. Perhaps they would entrap him in a bottle and take him to an exorcist. Perhaps, when they had collected enough ghosts like him, they would force him to pay a hefty fine. There was, after all, duty to be collected on imported spirits...

There was only one thing left to do. Reaching the point he had already jumped off once, he launched himself into space again. “I’m a ghost!” he cried once more. He fell in a graceful arc, tumbled head over heels and flapped his arms with gusto. No harm could come to him. He had already died once; he could not possibly die a second time. He was certain that his logic was watertight.

This time, however, the tide was out.

Not all the writers who drink in the TALL STORY are dead and from Ireland. Many are local and very much alive. Among the published names, however, are a good few unpublished authors who languish in the beer garden, trying to outwit each other with bitter observations on the injustice of life. One day it might occur to them that for their work to be printed, they first have to send it off. Until then, they seem content to grumble and moan about the same things.

I can see one of these hacks from here, crouched over a napkin with a pencil. I don’t know if he’s writing anything, but his dietary habits must be gross; his dribble contains the legs of ants. That’s typical of the revolting standards of these so-called literary types. It’s doubtless the reason why Hywel insists that they sit outside in the beer garden, even in winter, and why he encourages the jazz musicians who play in his pub every week to make as much noise as they can.

“Did I ever tell you the strange tale of Walter’s Head?” Hywel asked me one night. The worthy in question had just tottered out of the bar, his open neck glistening with the frothy bubbles of his stout.

“No,” I replied, “and you have never told me the tale of the three mountain climbers either.” I indicated the group of battered adventurers who had unlaced their boots and were warming their woolly socks by the roaring log fire, two of them eyeing the third suspiciously.

“Well that will keep, I dare say. Until then, let us drink each other’s health, for as Omar Khayyám almost said:

Come fill the cup, and in the Fire of Spring

The Winter Garment of Repentance fling

The pig of Time has but a little way

To fly – and Lo! the pig is on the Wing.”

“I don’t know about that,” I responded, “but I’m quite amenable if you’re paying. Besides, Omar never had a taste of Mrs Owen’s elderberry wine. It would have turned him teetotal overnight.”

Just at that moment, I felt a hand clamp down on my shoulder. I was sure for a moment that it was Mrs Owen herself, and that she would punish me by making me take home a year’s supply of stinging nettle marmalade, her answer to the tongue-searing curries Hywel had started serving in the bar.

As I cowered in fear, a rasping voice tickled the nape of my neck and I heaved a sigh of relief. I recognised the voice as belonging to Madame Ligeia, the resident clairvoyant and mystic who had done much to throw her profession into disrepute. As I turned around, I found myself confronted by a veiled figure. No-one knows what Madame Ligeia looks like; she wraps herself so tightly in a cloak of mystery, complete with hood, that only her two eyes are ever visible – glowing like dim coals.

“What is the meaning of this?” she demanded. “I want that woman out of the pub now! Do you hear? Now!” She pointed a quivering finger at an empty chair around an empty table.

Hywel sighed and gave me a knowing look. “I’m pleased that you two have decided to become friends. Mutual trust is so important these days.”

“Either you kick her out or I’ll box your ears, you ill-mannered lout!”

“And to think that only yesterday you were insisting that I throw her out and threatening to box me around the ears!”

During this conversation, I was less bewildered than might be expected, for I knew something about Madame Ligeia which explained everything. Madame Ligeia is a mystic who can only see into the past. She never knows what is going on in either the future or the present. Consequently, she lives a whole day behind everyone else. That is why holding a conversation with her is so difficult: you have to provide answers to questions she will not ask until tomorrow.

The reason why she had her hand on my shoulder and was talking to me as if I were Hywel was because Hywel had sat on this particular stool the previous day – during one of his many breaks. To clarify matters further, it is best to linger awhile in this previous day and to note what happens:

Hywel is sitting on my stool and I am standing at his place behind the bar (just to help out, you understand) when a dishevelled figure enters the pub and walks up to us. I am astonished by this figure’s appearance. It resembles a banshee, with long tangled hair and wild eyes.

Now the banshee, as everyone knows, is a spirit that follows old families about and wails before a member of that family is about to die. However, it is not quite as sinister as some people like to make out. Indeed, the day before, I had discussed the matter at some length with W.B. Yeats, who told me: “The banshee differs from the general run of solitary fairies by its generally good disposition.”

So I am not too afeared when it comes up to Hywel and points a finger at an empty chair around an empty table.

“That woman keeps glowering at me and making rude comments,” it says. “I want you to tell her to stop.”

Hywel shrugs his shoulders and blows his nose in a handkerchief. “It is very heartening to see that you have resolved your differences. Life is too short for bickering.”

“If you don’t tell her to stop I shall twist your ears off!”

“And to think that tomorrow you were planning to twist my ears off and telling me to force her to stop sitting in that chair!”

After it has left, I turn to Hywel with a quizzical look. Hywel taps his forehead with a smile and winks.

“She is my guest. I invited her here personally.”

I am dumbfounded. “What do you want a banshee for? Isn’t Mrs Owen frightening enough for you?”

Hywel chuckles and explains that it is not a banshee but Madame Berenice, a mystic who can only see into the future. She never knows what is going on in either the past or the present. Consequently, she lives a whole day in front of everyone else. She is as difficult to talk to as Madame Ligeia is – for the opposite reason.

“But this is a disaster!” I cry. “You know how much Madame Ligeia hates rivals! There will be trouble over this, mark my words!”

Hywel shakes his head emphatically. “They both hate the idea of each other, true enough. But when they meet, the day after tomorrow, something will click into place. Madame Ligeia can only see into the past, whereas Madame Berenice can only see into the future. When they meet, they will both cancel each other out. At long last they will be able to see into the present!”

I scratch my head and pour myself a glass of cognac. “You mean like a seesaw of time? Madame Ligeia on one end and Madame Berenice on the other?” I am impressed when Hywel nods. “And you did this as a favour for them?”

“Wait until the day after tomorrow and then we’ll see how things have turned out.” Hywel snatches my cognac away and downs it himself, handing me back an empty glass. “Keep your fingers crossed until then.”

The day after tomorrow comes soon enough and this time I am sitting on my stool while Hywel is behind the bar. It is a Tuesday night and musicians from far and near are setting up their equipment ready for the weekly jazz session. There is a lot of excitement in the air. A rumour has gone round that Tony Smith – one of the greatest jazz guitarists of all time – is due to make an appearance.

But above all the noise and hubbub of musicians tuning up and music lovers murmuring in anticipation, the raucous laughter of two women seated around a table drowns out all else.

“What did I tell you?” Hywel leans over the counter and gives me another one of his sly winks.

As I gaze at the two women, I can only shake my head in admiration at Hywel’s ingenuity. The two women leave their seats and come over to join us. This time they address themselves directly to Hywel.

“We just want to thank you for introducing us to each other. We have so much in common. It really is incredible!”

Hywel puffs out his cheeks in pleasure. “It is very heartening to see that you have resolved your differences. Life is too short for bickering.”

“For the first time in our lives we are able to live like normal people!”

“And to think that only two days ago you were insisting that I throw one of you out and threatening to box and twist my ears!”

Before I lose track of my senses completely, I decide to change the subject. I gesture toward a bottle of wine standing full among empty fellows. “I have heard this conversation before, or one very much like it. Now what was it that Omar never said?”