ash and humming a reggae tune as he wandered among jewel-eyed serpents and giant flowers. He was headed in the direction of the beach. I imagined him wandering along the shoreline, stopping to examine the big conch shells, waiting for sunset and the throbbing trance parties, rolling another spliff and sending scented smoke in a lazy spiral towards the emerging summer stars. I felt sure he would bump into Catherine in her hammock on the way.
“And talking about summer stars, I know plenty about astronomy and I know the names of many constellations. Some are named after dogs, Canis Major for instance, which means ‘the great dog’, and Canis Minor, ‘the little dog’, but I reckon there ought to be a dancing dog too and it should be named after Kelvin. He was definitely a Canis Raver.”
* * * *
Castor Jenkins will finish his pint at this point, wipe his lips and gaze longingly at the bar. A newcomer (just like you, dear reader) who wants to hear the rest of the tale will think it’s the right time to buy him another drink, but Paddy Deluxe and Frothing Harris will know that to stop him telling it, they need to buy him two drinks, one each. That’s what they’ll do, but he’ll tell it anyway, yawning, rolling his eyes and shrugging.
“How long do you think Swansea remained tropical? Kelvin’s puppets were good quality, designed to last a lifetime, and in theory there was no reason at all for grey skies and drizzle to return.
“But it did. It always will in Wales.
“Kelvin made one mistake – he misunderstood human psychology. Although the tropical environment was highly desirable, men and women just get bored of puppets after a while. We only put up with them for so long, however realistic and clever they are. And that’s what happened. Gradually people stopped going to the beach to surf and dance, the hammocks were left empty and the cocktails undrunk. Desolation set in. There’s nothing more desolate than paradise gone to seed, and at some point Kelvin must got disillusioned, packed it all up and left, because one morning I woke to find Swansea back the way it was. Since then it has never been tropical again.”
How can Paddy Deluxe and Frothing Harris respond to this ridiculous story? Only with extreme derision.
“Puppets don’t come in such unlikely types. People would notice if even the hot sun was made of cloth!”
“Would they? But you haven’t noticed your own puppet status.”
“What do you mean?”
“Both of you – glove puppets, nothing more or less!”
“Don’t be absurd! Prove it!”
“As you wish. Look towards the front door. Who is that coming in? The real Paddy Deluxe and Frothing Harris. Watch what happens when they join me at the table. Then you’ll be convinced.”
“By all the gods, he’s right! They are coming over!”
Castor now smirks and calls, “Good evening, Paddy. Good evening, Harris. I note you are shamefully late.”
“Yes, sorry about that, old boy. What’s that you’ve got there, Castor? A pair of deflated puppets in our image!”
“Yes and very nicely made, aren’t they?”
“Extremely sinister. But we can’t imagine anyone using them. Such a person would need enormous hands.”
Castor lays his own hands on the table. “Mine are normal.”
And so they are, right now.
1 Huw Rees, Kate Ronconi, Stuart Ross, Monica Konggaard, Neil Woollard, Richard Cowell, Dai Godwin, Nick Moore... The list is endless, not quite endless perhaps, but endless all the same. Not quite the same, agreed, but just enough. And not quite just, unjust in fact. This is called wordplay but it’s an obscure example, best avoided.
2 Little guitars played in tropical lands.
The Plucked Plant
Castor Jenkins has a bad habit of advocating outlandish ideas and even his mildest beliefs are routinely uncommon. If you ask him about the Primeval Soup he’ll insist it was leek and potato. He denies the existence of the colour purple, the number seven and the note G#. Once he went to great lengths to prove that mice are related to parsnips. The list is long and disturbing, not quite as long and disturbing as one of his neckties, but sufficient to elicit cries of dismay from the average citizen of the town of Porthcawl.
Given the extreme oddness of his concepts, it was with some relief that his friends greeted his relatively mundane announcement that reincarnation was his afterlife philosophy of choice. With Castor it was more than a question of faith. He knew that reincarnation was the correct theory because he remembered several of his previous lives. He was, so he claimed, an inhabitant of Ancient Greece. When pressed for details, he provided them in exchange for beer. In his slightly slurred words this is the story he told:
“I was a disciple of Pythagoras and I lived in a commune in a garden and it should have been a pleasant existence but I wasn’t a particularly nice person. A quick historical lesson might be appropriate here. Pythagoras wasn’t just that mathematical chap who devised the theorem about the square of the hypotenuse, he was also the founder of a mystical cult. His followers had to be sober, celibate and vegetarian, and fully committed to the doctrine of the transmigration of souls, which is a fancy term for reincarnation.
“Anyway, I was such a bad person that I wanted to kill myself, because I thought it was the only way to prevent myself doing more damage to the world I lived in. But suicide seemed a terrible sin. I thought about hiring someone else to do the job, a freelance cutthroat or unemployed executioner, but I didn’t want to pass off the responsibility. The guilt was mine, the judgment also, and it was only fair that any bad karma in the offing was mine too. I couldn’t endanger the souls of any poor assassin with the task.”
“Hang about!” protested Frothing Harris. “Did they have the notion of karma in Ancient Greece?”
Castor drained his glass and sighed. “There’s evidence that the Pythagoreans were influenced by Buddhism and that’s not as unlikely as it sounds. Greece had trading links with India.”
“Continue with the tale,” said Paddy Deluxe.
“Well then, I was stuck with an insolvable problem. How does one kill oneself without committing suicide? I fretted over this question for weeks, months, years; and all that time I continued not being a nice person but hiding it well, so that nobody in the commune ever suspected there was anything malign about me. The answer eventually came to me and it surprised and delighted me because it was so easy. It was a three-stage solution. The first stage involved making no changes to my present character, none at all.”
“You remained a bad sort?”
“Thoroughly. I continued to be what I was, a hypocrite, a cheat, a sly and devious manipulator of my fellow human beings. I grew old and my body twisted to match the shape of my mind, but still I felt no remorse. At last I died, asking forgiveness from nobody, for it was important to my plan that I didn’t weaken at the final moment. The chill of extinction sprang up in my bones. My flesh decayed, became food for worms and nourishment for roots under the soil.
“My body was gone but my soul soon found a new home. The walls of muscle and nerves that had imprisoned it
