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Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England
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First published by Flamingo 1996
Published in Penguin Books 2014
Copyright © Rhidian Brook, 1996
Cover image © Jerry Mason
All rights reserved
The moral right of the author has been asserted
ISBN: 978-0-241-97215-1
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
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BY THE SAME AUTHOR
Fiction
Jesus and the Adman
The Aftermath
Non-fiction
More Than Eyes Can See
For my mothers and fathers, brothers and sisters
It may help the reader to note that the correct pronunciation of the main character’s name, Taliesin, is Taly-essin.
HIS LATEST BOOK is an atlas: The Atlas of the World. Its jacket depicts a bright blue spherical earth turning against a dark red background. He takes the protective jacket off and sees that the title of the book is embossed in gold lettering against a darker blood-red background. There is no earth on the hard cover. He strokes the cool surface of this expensive book and leaves a slight handprint – his hands hot with anticipation. Then he runs his index finger along the grooves of the gold lettering and feels the indentations: up and down the v’s of the W; round and round the O of WORLD.
He opens the book and releases a smell of paper, a fresh smell that reminds him of exercise books distributed at the beginning of a new school year: green for Geography, pink for Biology, grey for Religious Education. On the clear white page is a handwritten message. It reads: ‘Darling Taliesin, wishing you a very happy eleventh birthday, love Mum xxx’.
His mother’s writing is the sensible, flowing cursive of a Grown-Up; all her letters join without evidence of a break. It will be four or maybe five years before he can string his letters together like that. His mother’s writing is the acme of handwriting; it has a perfect lean, a consistent spacing and it is legible without being bland.
After the message she’s put three crosses, each with a value of one kiss. This is restrained for her. It represents a distinct decline in affection. Her letters are usually sprinkled with kisses that overspill to the outside of the envelope. Perhaps she was sobered by the seriousness and expensiveness of the book; she didn’t want to demean its science by covering it in too many kisses. Or perhaps these three kisses represent her new family unit: Mr Rapunzel, Leo the cat and herself.
He picks up the solid, satisfying book and smells it again, hoping that some molecules of perfume drifted from his mother’s wrist as she wrote and that he might now detect a whiff of her. But the book just exudes an overwhelming odour of newness; a distant coolness.
It came the day before his birthday, hand-delivered by the postman, in a promising brown envelope tied with string in a cross, and bearing the tantalizing instruction ‘Do not open until September 14th.’ He also received a rust-coloured, one hundred per cent Shetland Wool jumper fortified and waterproofed with lanolin to protect him from Welsh Rain. His mother always gives him fawn-coloured clothes because fawn colours are his colours, apparently. He was pleased with the book.
He turns the white, white pages which are so thick they give the impression of being more than one page stuck together. He travels through the title pages: past the Foreword, the Contents, a list of the countries and cities of the world, a section on stars with their alien names and patterns, a section on the universe which begins with the words ‘We do not yet know how the universe came about.’ He travels on through a section on the more local solar system and the planets that he knows in order from Mercury to Pluto.
Then comes The Earth in cross-sectional globes with God-sized bites taken out of them to reveal crusts, mantles and cores. The outer core and the red-hot inner core remind him of a peach.
A geological timescale spirals up the page and shows man arriving late, making his mark in the last fraction of the green coloured Tertiary period. He follows the names back through time: Cretaceous, Jurassic, on backwards past Devonian as far back as the inner swirl of the spiral which whirls through Cambrian and Pre-Cambrian and ends in a period called Archaean and speculative dates with question marks. Even this all-knowing, comprehensive book doesn’t have all the answers. There are no real explanations as to how the earth was made and what set it spinning on its axis, tilted at an angle of such vital precision.
A shaggy man with a spear stands at the top of the next chart leading a procession of animals that recede back through time: a monkey, a stunted horse, a blue whale, some shells, and then dinosaurs which cover a large section of the chart before legs become tails and flippers, and reptiles become fish. These in turn become shells and seaweed. After this there are blank years and question marks again.
On into the book. Continents splitting, volcanoes spitting, temperatures dropping and then rising. Different coloured maps of the world divided into many categories: minerals, vegetation, energy, food production. There are apples in Japan, apparently. And then the normal maps; the maps that just show where everything is.
The first map is of the world and it shows countries divided into pastel yellow, pink, orange, green and lilac and the sea a light blue. The world is an amazing series of shapes without symmetry. A massive Africa fills the middle of the spread, too close to the sun and too big; India points an exotic nose into a warm-sounding sea; North America bends like a tree in a fast-moving wind. No two places look the same.
He turns the page and moves closer to home – to Europe with its fine outlines and many borders. Where the pages meet in the centre a tiny pink Britain and an even tinier indistinct Wales are lost in the crease of the book. On the next page Britain appears big enough to show the beast-head shape of his home country. Is it a pig? Is it an ugly man? Is it a dragon? Every country has a shape. School teachers have told him that. Italy is a boot kicking a Sicilian football. His geography teacher described Wales as a boar’s head but he sees it as a dragon, which, when he half closes his eyes, has a snout that shoots fire.
He looks for the names he knows, for his own village and for the town where his mother now lives. His village is there somewhere, unmarked amongst the browns and the darkish relief greens. His mother’s town is big enough to be indicated (he sees it there, snuggling into the mouth of the dragon). But his own village isn’t shown. He gauges where it should be and measures the distance between it and his mother’s town as being a thumb and a half. In reality this is a distance of some fifty miles.
There is no larger scale map of Wales in the atlas, so to compensate for this he continues to increase the scale for himself, in his head. He moves his head slowly towards the page closing up like a camera, and then he continues the journey in his head, flying on and down. And as he magnifies the scale the distance between himself and his mother increases.
THROUGH THE still-growing eyes of Taliesin Jones, the morning village looks as if it will never wake from a particularly long summer. This year summer is oversleeping into autumn and The Man On The Telly talks about Indian Summer. Taliesin pictures Welsh Summer visiting India on a meteorological exchange and Indians walking around Bombay saying, ‘Ah, look, it is a Welsh Summer – what bad luck.’
There is a silver glint on the road. Cwmglum’s ugly houses blink at the low-angled sun which refracts through milk bottles onto mats. Some people have poked notes into the bottles to specify the number of pints they want, confident that there won’t be rain to wash away their requests. A cat rubs against the empties, time on its paws.
Taliesin knows that the houses are ugly because he has seen Villages of Britain – a book in his father’s bedroom. In that book the sun is always shining and the sky is a postcard blue. The houses are a too-good-to-be-true pretty, like houses that Hansel and Gretel might have lived in; black and white cottages that bend under the weight of oldness.
Cwmglum’s houses are not that old and they do not feature in Villages of Britain. To those who live here the village is neither beautiful nor ugly; exciting nor boring. How could they know when most of them have never read Villages of Britain? Ignorance has made the heart grow indifferent. Even Taliesin (who isn’t ignorant because he’s seen the book) thinks the village doesn’t look too bad when the sun is out like it is today. Its untimely rays forgive the ugliness, soften the colours and give everything a potential.
This morning Taliesin feels this potential like a bubble at the back of his head, lifting him up, willing him to see more of what is around him. This feeling is commissioning him to be a bard and to eulogise this village of his which has a name that sounds like the noise water makes in boots; its slate-roof houses, its pub, its double-Welsh bus timetable, its opulent greengrocer and its chapel, stubborn as a goat on the hill. It almost doesn’t matter that his village isn’t marked in his atlas, or that it doesn’t feature in Villages of Britain. This is his world. This is where he was put. He isn’t a goatherd in Afghanistan or a banana separator in Brazil. He is him here, not them there, and it feels planned that way.
Right now he feels his own significance more acutely than ever before. Almost as if the world has all been created for his benefit and that he is the only one who is aware of its existence. Everyone else is here for decoration. This moment now, the sun, the village, the way the sun falls on the village, the lateness of summer, the soft calm of the day – they are all for him. He could be the only person truly alive in the world.
Taliesin walks past the bus stop and swings a 360° on it. The bus stop is a post with an indistinguishable and unfathomable both-ways timetable in English and Welsh. Whatever the timetable may say there is always time before the bus comes. And this is his favourite time.
Across the road, pushing a broom along the pavement, the greengrocer’s wife sweeps the shop front. Taliesin can see her blue-rinse hair clearly this morning. Last week it was a confused white-grey, today it is a livid purple. It is also curly and short, the way old women’s hair is. He never sees an old woman with long hair. It’s always cut short or in a bun – and blue.
Handycott, the grocer, is arranging his fruit, talking to them and petting them as if they were his children. The sun bathes his display in an edible light. All the fare is laid out with an artist’s eye for colour and composition: the green apples contrasting with the red; the caulies and cabbages offsetting the broccoli; the potatoes lined up in ascending order of size; tomatoes, oranges and apples forming traffic light rows. The apples are prominent in the canvas. They are the grocer’s pride and joy; his choicest fruit. He is emptying a fresh box of them now, fussing and cosseting them as he would a youngest daughter. He says that his love for his fruit makes them taste better and Taliesin believes him.
The grocer is a big man, his frame comfortably carrying a middle-aged corpulence. His eyes have heavy bags, as does his chin. He has no hair on his head but plenty on his face. Taliesin calls him Walrus (never to his face), because of his massive build and delicate curling moustache. He has no children of his own. He can’t have them. According to Jonathan, Taliesin’s brother, Walrus had his balls raked in a game of rugby and that was it for him.
Taliesin crosses the road.
The grocer is humming and emptying apples into one of the display trays. He too is bathed in sunlight and Taliesin has to squint as he follows the big man’s movements. Taliesin is always his first customer of the day.
‘Good morning,’ the grocer says.
‘Hello,’ Taliesin replies.
‘And how are you this beautiful Tuesday morning?’
‘I’m tidy,’ Taliesin says. He looks and wonders at the polished fruit. He tries to think of all the countries they come from: bananas from Brazil, oranges from Spain, pears from England.
‘Good birthday?’
‘Yes. Thank you.’
‘So, how does it feel to be eleven?’ the grocer asks, now turning the apples stalk-up in the tray.
‘I don’t feel that different, really,’ Taliesin says.
‘Did you get what you wanted?’
‘Books.’ Taliesin nods to show that this is what he wanted.
The grocer’s wife, a frightening woman, walks to the front of the shop and takes the broom back inside. ‘Morning,’ she says, in a voice that is deep for a woman.
‘Morning,’ Taliesin says. No soubriquets for her, not even in his head. He cannot understand how a man as genial as the grocer could be married to a woman so fierce. The grocer is as fearful of her as Taliesin is; he has to check that she is out of ear and eye shot before conversing. The door closes and Walrus turns and places a hand on Taliesin’s head, measuring him.
‘You’re not exactly a bean are you? You’re more of a potato – you grow at a steady pace. Anyway, there’s no hurry. Make the most of being young, that’s what I say.’
Taliesin has never considered being anything else. The here and now is what matters to him, not tomorrow, nor even yesterday. It’s only those around him who show concern for their age and the passing of time: his brother with his attempts at shaving, his mother with her inappropriately youthful haircuts, his father with his plans for an impossible future.
‘The trick is to give up childish ways and still see things like a child: simply and clearly, without the clutter of opinion. You mustn’t be in a hurry to be grown-up.’ The man looks down wistfully at the boy, remembering his own quick ripe youth. He then bends over and pulls off some unripened bananas, still green.
‘Here, look.’ He snaps one from the bunch. ‘Nearly ready but not quite. If you ate him now he’d taste terrible – sour and hard and he’d give you indigestion. But give him some more of this sun and he’ll soon taste sweet. It doesn’t take long. Can’t force it, see. Things need time to perfect. You can’t trick time.’
‘It’s only other people who tell me to grow up,’ Taliesin points out. He thinks of his brother trying to be older than he is, wanting desperately to be a man. His balls have dropped, he constantly asserts his age advantage and athleticism. He shaves, even though the fluffy down isn’t bristle yet and he daily reminds his younger brother that being a child is a pathetic state that we have to suffer before gaining the freedoms of adult life. Taliesin thinks about the grocer’s crushed balls and his own balls waiting for the signal, the inevitable drop to manhood. No way of stopping it. Nothing he can do about it except wish for the Never Never dropping balls of Peter Pan.
‘I liked being seven. Things were easier when I was seven. No one told me to grow up then, they just let me be seven,’ he says.
The grocer laughs at this.
‘There you are! You’re talking like a real grown-up already, remembering the good old days when you were seven, when life was easier. That’s when you know you’re a grown-up, when you start to look back.’
Taliesin sneezes.
‘You could do with some vitamin C.’
‘What’s got the most vitamin C?’ Taliesin asks, assessing the various candidates.
The grocer doesn’t hesitate in taking an oval hairy fruit the size of an egg from a small box behind the bananas. He holds it in front of Taliesin’s nose. Taliesin takes it and is repulsed by the texture of it.
‘These are new. Don’t even have them in West Haven. Kiwi fruit, from New Zealand. It’s what keeps the All Blacks so fit. They’re never sick because they eat these all the time.’ Taliesin pictures the All Blacks but he can’t imagine them eating ugly egg shaped fruit. He sees them doing their dance, the Haka. They’re slapping their knees and waving their hands and making faces like cannibals and chanting, ‘Takani, takani, kanawi, hoopla, hoopla.’ It’s impossible to imagine them eating this peculiar little fruit with skin like an old man’s. Not everything the grocer says is true.
‘Feels funny. How do you eat it?’ he asks.
‘Some prefer to eat it with a spoon, like a boiled egg. But I like to eat it with the skin on, just like an apple.’
‘I’d prefer an apple,’ Taliesin says, handing back the kiwi.
‘Which one is it to be then?’ the grocer asks again.
Taliesin looks at the different apples on display, at the tempting American Reds whose flesh is always sleepy. This is the fairy tale apple; the apple that the Wicked Queen offered Snow White and that William Tell balanced on his son’s head. Next to these are some Golden Russets. The grocer says that the Golden Russet is an interesting apple, with a crisp and delicate taste. Then there is Taliesin’s own favourite: the yellow Golden Delicious, which the grocer insists is a bland apple with a misleading name. ‘It’s all juice and no flavour,’ he says. And at the end of the row, the red and green Cox’s Pippin, with the leaves still on the stalks.
‘Golden Delicious, please,’ Taliesin says.
The grocer is disappointed at this choice.
‘The young always seem to prefer it. But I think it’s about time you tried the king of apples. So much better than that bland Delicious. In fact, I insist that you do.’ The grocer leans over the appropriate carton and selects a Cox’s Pippin. ‘Here. Sshh. This one’s free. Don’t let my Missus see. This one’s good enough for Eve. “Have an apple, go to chapel,” as they say.’
Taliesin weighs the apple in his hand. With its leaf it looks the archetypal apple. Indeed, it could be the apple that Eve picked. He remembers the picture in his Illustrated Bible, the one where Eve, despite God’s prohibition, has taken the apple and a vast hand bursts through cloud to admonish her. That hand and Eve’s nakedness are the things that stuck in his mind. Jonathan told him that the story of Adam and Eve wasn’t true because there were dinosaurs before men. ‘That’s fuckin’ rubbish,’ he’d said. But Jonathan thought everything was fuckin’ rubbish these days. When Taliesin asked his usually talkative father he received only shrugs and from his mother a sympathetic pat for asking such a lovely question. Then Mr Tower, his RE teacher, said that the story was not to be taken literally. Apparently it was a creation story; a myth with truths, he said. Maybe Walrus will know for sure if it’s true or not – he knows about apples.
‘Is that story about Adam and Eve true?’ Taliesin asks.
The Walrus doesn’t flinch as others have done.
‘Yes, most certainly,’ he says. ‘It might not be accurate fact, like. It’s just a way of showing something; a way of explaining how man fell out with God. It shows how men and women have a choice to listen to God or ignore Him.’
The grocer takes the apple back from Taliesin and holds it up close spotting a blemish. He rubs it on his apron and looks again. Deciding that it isn’t clean enough, he takes another one from the box and does the same thing.
‘Would it have been a Cox’s that she picked?’ Taliesin asks.
‘Well, it would have to have been an apple that was too good to say no to; an apple that looked as good as it tasted. Most definitely a Cox’s. Had to be. The Red is too obvious. The Russet is too small. Perhaps if it had been a Golden Delicious she wouldn’t have bothered picking it and we might still be in Eden. Imagine that.’ The grocer enjoys this speculation and chuckles to himself. Taliesin tries to imagine it. There are no maps of Eden in his Atlas of the World. He looked for it in the Middle Eastern section – that was where he was told it might be. He couldn’t see it anywhere. His father told him that it might have had a different name then. Mesopotamia or something.
The grocer now holds an orange.
‘Now an orange wouldn’t have worked. Too messy and the wrong height. An orange would have been too much of a disincentive – all that peeling and juice squirting in her eye. No. It had to be an apple. Here. This is a better one.’ The grocer hands him an apple clean enough to be the first fruit plucked by man or woman. Holding it in his hand, Taliesin can see why Eve would have picked it. Impossible to resist. He would have done the same thing himself. Falling out with God was as simple as that. As he pictures it he sees his own mother as Eve reaching for the fruit.
‘Of course, some say that it was a pomegranate that she picked,’ the grocer says. ‘Now there is a complicated fruit. But I’ll go with the apple. It fits. Here take it before she sees,’ the grocer says, as his wife scuttles through the back of the shop. Taliesin spirits the apple away into his satchel just as she appears at the back, her head moving above the shelves like a shark’s dorsal fin.
‘Enjoy it,’ the grocer whispers.
The bizarre sun is rising, still tricking the village that it’s summer. Taliesin feels a thrilling certainty, although he’s not sure what he’s certain about. This talk of Eden and Eve fires him. He still has that sense of heightened potential like a lovely pressure in his head, lifting him up, helping him to see more in what is around him. He feels like Adam, before the apple was picked, when he saw things clearly and felt secure that everything had been created for him. In those pre-apple days, Adam could hear God walking through the garden in the cool and occasionally God would push His hand through a cloud to let him know He was there. There was no dispute with God then. There were no choices to make. That apple changed everything.