See How They Run (15 page)

Here he swept a hand towards the amazing view below them.

Lou could take no more, so he crept away in the shadow of the hedge, until he was safely out of sight. Then he careered across the fields, uprooting the scarecrows and grabbing wildly at corn stalks, flinging them into the air around him. After he’d finished his mad dervish dance through the cornfields he went to the car and sat in it for a while, planning his next move whilst removing ears of corn from his clothing. He realised that he was in a near-psychotic state by now, but he didn’t care. The adrenalin rush he’d got from his mini-rampage had merely fuelled another onslaught, which would come later. He knew now what it was like to be part of a riot. He’d enjoyed the power surge, the sub-erotic pleasure of wanton destruction. Smashing things was fun, and he’d be back later to enjoy some more. University researcher? Sod it, this was much more enjoyable. Smiling grimly to himself, he started the car and headed for the nearest town to get some grub. He’d be back later, under the cover of darkness, and he knew what he was going to do.

It was close to midnight, the witching hour, when Lou – still trying to digest a greasy burger meal –
fired up his saloon in the Hotel Corvo car park.
The film crew had gone and he’d sat there alone, watching the last few jackdaws settling down for the night, a noisy gang jostling among the chimneys high above him. The place was theirs now; it was unlikely to open again as a going concern. Such places were disappearing all along Britain’s coastline, wayside markers for a lost way of life. Nowadays, inside their expensive little huts, the people of Britain watched placebo TV, swigged cheap supermarket beer or boxed wine, and obediently forgot how to commune with either nature or their fellow humans. The ersatz world screened to them daily presented a nostalgic dream of a country which existed only in miniature now, a ship in a bottle.

Lou revved up the car and headed for a cart track he’d spotted earlier, which would take him towards the sleeping cornfields and their busy mice. After wrenching the gate off its hinges in the glare of the headlights he entered the first field and started his rampage. Startled rabbits shot through the hedges as he mowed his way through the corn in anarchic loops, his headlights sweeping across the countryside and out to sea in crazy, spyrographic patterns. Grasping the steering wheel at arm’s length, Lou screamed and shouted as he went, bouncing and rattling in his seat, destroying the crop in a mad orgy of destruction. Even then, as his vengeance peaked, his mind was elsewhere – inside one of the memory sticks, racing up and down the silvery circuits, wiping out the contents, erasing all the memories, mowing down Big M and ejecting him into the dustbin of history. As he entered the second field he decided to try his hand at a crop circle which would spell his name, but he gave up after a while because it was too difficult. An owl, white and spectral, crossed his headlights. Bats flitted out of his way. And then, as his pillage in the second field reached a crescendo and he prepared to enter the third, the whole world jarred to a halt. He hadn’t seen it until the last moment – a rock lying in its own little glade within the corn, a large granite mouse crouched in the crop. He’d driven straight onto its back and the car had become stranded on it, its mechanical belly hooked by two large granite ears which held it firmly. The wheels continued to whirr in a high-pitched scream, and then the engine stalled. Lou sat there in his poleaxed saddle, sitting on the back of a fossilised Precambrian supermouse. Then a hairy hand wrenched open the
door nearest to him and pulled him out of the
vehicle. After that, the world went black.

He was out for a long time, and they were beginning to worry. But eventually he stirred, and after the preliminaries to consciousness he came to. He looked around him but failed to make any connection with his new surroundings. He was in a small room with uneven walls, painted in a bright yellow ochre. A few candles shimmered here and there, their flames wafted occasionally by a draught, or perhaps by someone moving. The air smelt of mud and straw; primitive, elemental. He struggled to focus, and on turning his head he saw two human faces looking at him, waiting for him to recover.

‘Sorry about that Llwyd,’ said a faraway voice. ‘We got a bit carried away, but you were destroying our food for the winter.’

He spent some more time defuzzing, and then he recognised the big man in denim sitting next to Catrin on a haybale. He was resting with his back to the wall, with his big hands behind his head and his legs jutting out in front of him. Lou could smell the leather of his footwear, big brown builders’ boots with steel toecaps. Lou realised who he was.

‘Big M,’ he whispered through cracked lips. He was thirsty, very thirsty, and suddenly he was sick. He managed to wriggle sideways before he brought up the burger meal on the floor by the side of his bed, which rustled as he moved – it was made of straw.

They helped him outside, so that he could get some air, while Big M cleared the mess inside with a spade.

Lou sat on a bale by the door to the building, which was small and round and squat. There were two others, completing a circle, and they looked more like hobbit homes than anything else. Lou and his companions could be sitting by a settlement somewhere in Africa, or in the Indian desert. Big M sat on a nearby bale and observed him.

‘They’re made of woven straw plastered with mud, six more behind us,’ he indicated with a thumb over his shoulder. ‘Nice and warm, but you have to be careful with the candles, and there’s a chance you’ll wake up sharing your bed with a mouse,’ he added nonchalantly.

Catrin was sitting on another bale, hunched in a posture which Lou knew well. She was upset.

‘I’m sorry about this Manawydan, I never thought he’d do something like this.’

She appeared on the verge of tears.

‘Hey, never mind, it wasn’t your fault,’ he replied softly. ‘Little shits like this all over the place. I’m used to it.’

Lou resented being called a little shit, but there again he was one, so he kept quiet.

He was chattering with cold, but his insides felt
better now. It was strange being so close to Big M, in the flesh; Lou had dealt with an abstract and far
away heroic figure for so long that the man had reached some sort of mythological status in his mind. Coupled with his size and his rugby exploits, he seemed totemic and special. And pleasant, too, really
nice. Anyone else might have been abusive, or
aggressive, but the man in front of Lou was calm
and dignified and urbane, if a touch withdrawn or resigned.

Lou wondered if he should apologise. Was he ready for that sort of thing? Would it mean anything
to anyone – or would it sound like so many of the century’s empty mouthings, another fatuous
apology?

Sorry all you little sardines, for putting you into tins...

‘I’m sorry,’ said Lou. He was talking to the ground.

‘Sorry for what, exactly?’ asked Big M.

Lou looked up into his eyes, blue and candid and clear. They held his gaze openly, inquiringly. He seemed genuinely interested in Lou.

‘Sorry about the fields,’ answered Lou. ‘Don’t know what got into me.’

Catrin got up, went over to him, and stooped down.

‘And the rest too, tell him about the rest. He
deserves to know the truth, Llwyd.’

But he was unable to answer and she regained her seat. As they rested in silence, Lou gathered his
thoughts. His eyes detected a faint light on the
eastern horizon, and he realised that the dawn was approaching. The mice would be coming to the end of their shift now. Hundreds, maybe thousands of them, out there among the skyscraper stalks. Wizzing up and down in their invisible lifts, tiny furry citizens in their city of stems. They’d been around mankind for a long time, sharing his story; sharing his food and his home too. Perhaps they were the gods of old, made small. Perhaps that might happen to man too; he would be rescaled, cut down to size again in the ancient landscape. No bad thing, thought Lou. That would give the other animals a chance.

Maybe it would be easier to tell the whole story now, get it off his chest, clear the account. What was the point in dissembling any further anyway, playing a stupid game, messing with people. Wasn’t it easier to be frank and straightforward?

He began to tell them about the background: his research, the threat posed by Dermot Feeney’s book, academic competition, the race to shine in a field of excellence.

‘I wouldn’t mention fields of excellence right now,’ said Big M.

Again, Lou said sorry.

‘No point in saying sorry over and over again,’ said Big M, ‘just explain to me why you did it so that I can understand, that’s all I’m asking. You’ve just wiped out most of our winter store of food and I think we deserve to know why. Someone or other has had it in for us since we came here and we’ve just taken it every time, turned the other cheek, but now I really want to know what’s behind all this.’

Big M was perturbed, but not angry. He stood up and came to stand by Lou. He seemed very big, standing up to his full height, his close-cropped hair
looking like stubble. His head was almost out of
sight, he really was a huge man. How old was he?
Lou tried to fix an approximate year but it was
impossible, the man could be anything between thirty and a hundred. Some words came echoing out of the memory stick in his breast pocket.
I’m a sex god you know.
And yes, he was still very good looking, in a mature sort of way. He really did seem ageless.

Lou went through some of the reasons for his
actions. But they didn’t ring true. Sitting in the stalled car, earlier, a simple realisation had appeared in the full beam of his headlights. He’d tried to destroy Big M’s story, not because he had anything against Big M, but because he was expressing his own sense of failure. He had known all along, inside himself, that he’d never been up to the task of writing a stand-out book about Big M. He simply wasn’t up to it. He maybe had the acumen, he maybe had the intellect, but he didn’t have the mental stamina or the dogged perseverance needed to write such a book. One needed intellectual slack to do such a thing. He had
no depth, no intuition, no experience of probing
and delving. His generation had never suffered, and
unfortunately for mankind, most people became
prescient and compassionate and accommodating only when they’d suffered a bit themselves.

‘What I did, really, was a bit childish,’ said Lou
finally. ‘The anger inside me was the anger of a child. I wasn’t trying to hurt you Big M, you seem to be a nice kind of guy. But I was angry because I saw other people being successful around me and I was getting nowhere. When you see another academic being praised and admired and honoured, and all the time you’re sitting in your little room going nowhere, a little red monster enters you, pumps you full of envy and bile, you get hot and angry inside, you want to...’

Lou trailed off, knowing that he didn’t need to say any more.

‘And anyway, you provoked me,’ he added. ‘Why did you feed me the memory sticks, what was that stuff with the scarecrows, dressing them up like me?’

He looked round towards the other two; Big M had retreated to his bale and was sitting in his characteristic pose, lying back against the hut with his head resting in his hands. He’d found himself in this position many times over the last few years as various adversities had arrived.

‘I have absolutely no idea what you’re talking about,’ answered Big M, and Lou knew immediately that he was telling the truth.

‘And you, Catrin – was it you who did it?’

She looked aghast.

‘Me? Why the hell would I do that, Lou? I’m about to give birth to your child, for God’s sake. Do you think I’ve got nothing better to do than...’

She trailed off, and again Lou knew instinctively
that she was telling the truth. So it had all been a
co-incidence; paranoia and guilt had fed his imagination. As with most conspiracy theories, bigotry and ineptitude had been at the root of it all.

‘So this is what an avenging angel looks like,’ said Big M quietly. ‘Are you my avenging angel, Llwyd? Are you the angel of the bottomless pit? Were you behind the gunshot at the hotel that night?’

Lou lifted his head, and allowed himself a smile. ‘I had nothing to do with it, and you know it. You’ll have to blame that on Pryderi. He got in with the wrong crowd, I’m not that type,’ he answered.

‘No, you’re just an ordinary bloke, aren’t you Llwyd,’ said Big M, returning to his reflective head-in-hands pose. He was tired now, and feeling resigned again.

Resigned to man’s idiocies and petty squabbles.

‘You know something, Llwyd,’ said Big M quietly, ‘man’s reputation as an intelligent animal rests on a very few shoulders.’

Lou took a while to digest this.

‘Not everyone can be famous you know,’ continued Big M. ‘I quite liked it in the Middle Ages when artisans were anonymous, just part of the team. I also liked it when we had small gods for everything; we may have been misguided, but having a god for the trees gave trees some safety and having a god for the rivers gave rivers some protection.’

Big M went off on a riff about the western cult of
the self. There was no attempt now at graft or per
­severance or a personal journey, he said. The only way to reach immortality was via a pair of plastic tits or three minutes of prancing about on X Factor. And what about the past? Why had Wales turned its back on its own history and adopted the fables of a small Mediterranean country, a land of sand and burning sun? Why had they welcomed a foreign god, singular and seductive, but all the same very human?