Island of Lightning (7 page)

I thought that. Maybe an idle thought. Maybe a foolish thought. But then I thought something else. Maybe God is the well itself. And then I thought God might be the pebble. That river-riven stone.

Then I thought that God might be the bucket. The water? The well? The bucket? The pebble, that river-riven stone? Yes, leaning against a wall in Babel, those thoughts certainly crossed my mind.

Antares

(for Trevor)

A few years after it happened I started going to Beachy Head. High cliffs, white cliffs looking south. And I'd go in summer, really late on, because those June nights don't get properly dark until after midnight.

I'd go to see Antares. You know what that is? Antares is a star. A red star. In the constellation of the scorpion. Most times, I can't see it. Nobody can. It's too southerly, even from Beachy. But sometimes – yes, if I'm lucky, if it's a perfect night – Antares is there. So I just look. I sit on the grass, that bitten down grass on the chalk, and look out into the night. The night that's like the ocean.

Yes, as big as the ocean. And those June nights full of cockchafers. Big bugs, scary at first, but just clumsy. Flying around at the edge of things. Back and forth over the precipice and into thin air with the sea three hundred feet below. The sea milky with the chalk. So at night, it's a white sea.

Then low down, if I'm lucky, there's Antares. There it is. A dusky red like a pheasant's eye. Red as the dust of Morocco. A star red as chili oil. A glimpse of Berber gold.

And I think, Christ, I'm alive. Alive! Alive in all this, with these bugs divebombing and the sea a white mist, and the Milky Way a net in the sky, and the June night hardly a night at all. And a star like a ruby. Yes, a ruby in the navel of the night. Because I was sure I was done for. I was gone.
Finito
, I'm telling you. Over and out. I couldn't believe it.

When it happened everything seemed in slow motion. I could look down and see myself in the water. On the black swell. And my boat disappearing, with no-one on board who knew what had happened. Yes I looked down at myself – a man overboard, a man waving, a man calling. In the black swell.

And soon one red light on the stern was all I could see of that boat. That's all there was. The boat chugging away and me left behind, shouting, waving. That one red light on the horizon, down low. Not even a star can get any lower than that, I thought. But Antares can. I've learned that now. Because there it is, tonight. Antares on the southern horizon.

And then that red light vanished. Christ, I thought. I'm done for. This is it. Here I am on the shoulders of the swell. Thirty minutes is all I have. And the boat disappearing out of sight. Gone. Gone absolutely.

But what I'm trying to say is, that light vanishing was a good thing. Because it meant the boat was turning. The red star had vanished because the boat was coming back for me. Me on that big swell. In the white line of the wake, out in that immense clean blackness. No wave breaking. A world of black glass.

And I suddenly knew, yes, that they'd missed me. That the boat was turning. Because the star had vanished. Because the light was gone.

And that's why I come up here. To look out at the ocean and the sky, another ocean. And sometimes I see it and sometimes I don't. Antares, that is, the red star. The star of the stern.

I Know Another Way: Walking To The Rhondda

“I know another way.”

He would say that. Wouldn't he? The thin man.

I knew he was going to say that. The moment I'm sure of the route, north and north-west, past the Butcher's Arms in Llandaff, or off the cathedral green, along by the BBC, or maybe across to Whitchurch and the house called
Khasia
, north and north-west anyway, he has to offer his own alternative.

Which will involve roads not marked on any maps. Not that the thin man ever consulted a map, not in his own country. Those roads frost-heaved and rutted by the iron rims of hay-wagons and death-carts. Roads with burned-out Cavaliers on the corners but always an absence of traffic. Roads with pink armchairs abandoned under oak trees. Roads where buzzards wait like dismal pensioners for the bus that is a century too late. Roads that turn west when you're seeking the north. Roads that pass farms with ragwort in the
beilis
. Roads that are building sites with sycamores seeded in the foundations. Roads that double-back so you're surprised you don't meet yourself coming the other way. Roads under hedges black with bryony where a green cockscomb grows up the middle. Roads so narrow you must walk sideways. Roads to places that are no longer places. Roads to places only he would know.

Yes, he would say that, wouldn't he, the thin man, who is already leading me out of the suburbs, or the villages that became suburbs, good places, expensive places, all gnocchi and nokias now of course, but in their time part of a vision, a creed that honoured life.
I know another way
, he says.
But we can't start here.

Yet start we must. Under the Llandaff Cathedral yews. I'm glad they're still here, alive and poisonous. Fifteen years ago I stood under these yews with a television journalist and local MP and talked about what acid rain was doing to the vitals of Wales. Frankly, I predicted doom. And was right. In a way.

Yet doom proves itself a cell by cell process. There was no apocalypse. So it's good to talk to the yews again, to acknowledge their reasonable health. Because the yew is a powerful tree. It comes out of the neolithic to us in an immemorial dynasty. Over its red dust we make our way, across to the Taff. We'll look at the river a while, then follow it north. The Taff's our compass needle. But the thin man needs no compass, he says. And we're travelling without the assistance of the Director General of the Ordnance Survey. What does he know and where has he been? So, not for the last time, let's stray a little.

The Taff in its time was a quilt of iron dust. It was a coal vein broken open to the light. The Taff was once so thick with coal, people claimed its waters looked like funeral crepe. But now the final indignity. They have taken away its tides.

Because the Taff drowns itself in the teaspoon of the Cardiff Barrage. Back there at Llandaff and now at Taff's Well it flows beside me, coming out of the carboniferous. It pushes through the circlet of limestone that rings the coalfield of south Wales on the geological map. That coalfield is coloured grey as a tumour, though as a Cardiff poet has told us, tumours might ripen into mauve.

So here it runs. Silver, suicidal. It has otters and trolleys and toilet paper, kingfishers and colliers on its conscience. And of children like poor Wiffin, there's no counting.

At the same time as in Taff's Well it is behind us at Llandaff. There in the cathedral, Epstein's Christ is squeezing himself out of an enormous toothpaste tube. Simultaneously the river is flowing through Bute Park and into the city's aboretum, and surely of the cities I know it's only Rio has a richer rainforest in its midst. On to our glass parliament it runs, and the Millennium Centre. So let's hear it for the Taff. Let's drown its own aria with an oratorio of our own, then allow the First Minister to offer a valediction as the river slumps into the dock beside him,
Guilty, your Honour, Guilty as Sin
, and its name is dissolved in the Bay's acid bath.

I'm walking north. But in less than a mile the way is blocked. Here's the motorway – a Serengeti for the age of speed. I stand on the M4 bridge below Radyr watching its metronome of life. And such life, a teeming ecology, the prey and the predatory mixed in together.

Usually, where there's no going over, I go under. Under at Kenfig to the sand-scoured castle. Under at Llewellyn Street where you might lean from the terrace windows and touch the concrete piles. Under at The Cymdda where the new Wales has been constructed overnight in the ultra violet of the Odeon and the sacristy of McArthur Glen. And when you stand under the motorway and read the writing on its pillars, when you hear the unrelenting wheels above your head, you know the motorway for what it is: a path of pilgrimage.

Because we all commute. The sea twice a day, the call centre Kayleighs, the DIY warehouse Garins, the planets in rare affiliation in the north west tonight, which is the direction we're taking. Commuters are the pilgrims today and if there's anything I've learned it's that we are pilgrims or we are nothing. There's white van man in the fast lane, that pilot fish of commerce, because if ever there was a pilgrim it is white van man, gunning it to destiny, 90, 95, the orgasmic ton.

And there stalled on the hard shoulder, the saleswoman's Focus. And you and I in the hayrattle meadow that is now the Grenada forecourt at Cardiff West. Ten minutes later we can be above The Cymdda where one day the cottongrass and peatwater black as espresso will be restored. Because this is it: our Great Barrier Reef. And there's no better place to observe it than this bridge. I suppose I could have dashed across, there are gaps in the traffic. Yet only the bridge permits this panorama. And what a place to stand. This is our balcony in the eye of the storm as the M4 disappears in its ribbon of platinum dust and the cherry blossom streams into the drains.

With me on the road through Gwaelod y Garth is Edward Lhuyd. We stopped at the pub, although the village hostelry considers itself an inn, and indisputably an inn it is, a stone tavern built from the stone that rises behind it and gives the village its name and purchase. But only for a couple, though already my legs are as heavy as my head is light, and now on the road through the fields our talk is of garlic.

My attention at the bar had been drawn by a young woman with a bowl of soup. How she sipped, gracefully as an avocet, her upturned spoon its upturned beak, over the gleaming mere. But Lhuyd had been arrested by garlic twiglets. By garlic mayonnaise. By the garlic-flavoured crisps, the scree and swarf scented with garlic in their sealed purses, the iron filings flavoured with garlic in saucers upon the counter, the limestone chews impregnated with garlic, the granite shavings immersed in garlic, the beechwood toast and oaken baguettes overwhelmed by garlic.

I had enjoyed our snack, but Lhuyd's teeth are not what they were. I try to stop his complaint. After all, there are bullfinches in the hedge, their breasts so red you'd think them naked, there are buzzards catcalling over the wood, and yes, Lhuyd is right, there is a white road of garlic that follows our road, that bends when it bends, that climbs as we rise.

There's no time to stop so we taste as we go. Certainly Lhuyd is right. This is garlic as it should be, this is garlic with the rain on it, wild garlic under its white veil, a wedding trail of garlic in the grass behind us, and here's the ghost of garlic on my fingers, a succulence that won't let go.

Common enough, I say, chewing another leaf.

“
Allium ursinum,
” he says.

“Ramsons,” I say. “Or is it ransoms. Ransoms is better. As in the poem. Sort of a wild onion. Long may it hold me to ransom.”

“Of the family
Liliaceae.
”

“Well answer me this,” I say. “Why did we never cook with it? Here it is, free food. A larder a mile long. And no recipes for wild garlic. Not poisonous, is it”?

“Pigs wouldn't eat it”

“Think,” I say. “We could have put in soups. In stews. Cooked our meats with it. All that tough mutton. All that bad cheese. It's crying out for ransoms. All that bread that smells like library books”.

“Horses wouldn't look at it.”

“We could sell it,” I say. “We could bag it up and sell it in Ponty market for a quid a bunch. Make us rich.”

Lhuyd goes quiet. The light, as we climb, devastates. The view grows with every step. But we see only as far as we allow ourselves. There are so many greens you'd need a National Gallery of Green to reproduce them.

“What's that?” I ask, pointing. There's another white flower following us. It's been there a long time. No matter how fast we walk, we can't throw it off.

“Ah”, says Lhuyd. “
Stellaria holostea
. Shirtbutton. In your language, the greater stitchwort. Adder's meat.”

“So we can eat it”?

Lhuyd says nothing.

Eventually we stop at the entrance to a wood. He tells me that the wood is filling like a butt of rainwater almost to the brim. He talks of enchanter's nightshade. He describes dog's mercury. He points to the twaybladed orchid with its undistinguished spire. We walk on. There are bluebells under the sycamores in a reef that stretches as far as I can see.

“On your knees,” says the botanist.

On our knees we breathe the scent. But I prefer looking. Yet looking is dangerous.

There is something hallucinatory about bluebells. As I gaze at these flowers I suspect a narcotic in the air. Such is their perfume, such is the quality of their blue. I am underwater now and the blue's a balm somehow inside my eyes and I am swimming in its lagoon. Surely these flowers are poisonous. Because soon I'm paralysed.

But my mind is walking on, though beside me Lhuyd lies down. This is as far as he goes, he says, for this wood is a bower quiet for us, and a sleep full of sweet dreams, and health, and quiet breathing.

It's not long before I reach Taff's Well. The village is engulfed by roads. Here's Omega Security, its dogs, its cameras, so many cameras on this route we might make a CCTV movie of ourselves stumbling out of the woods and into the revolution of consumer paranoia.

I've been a trespasser all my life, and pilgrim, you should be aware of that if you're following this trail. Under the barbed wire, away from the beaten track; watching for farmers on Suzukis, gamekeepers in Taff-coloured corduroy. Once it was child's play to leave their prosecuting voices behind. But they are the old enemy. It's a new game now and there's less of a future in trespassing as the cameras turn like flowers towards the sun and reveal who stirs in the stonewashed small hours.