The Truth Spinner Read online

  “Finally he entered the pub where that card game had taken place all those decades previously. And here I am! Yes, I’m not the first Castor Jenkins but the second, his son, grown to the precise age my father was when he left to use the cash machine. Remember that I was brought up to exactly resemble him in every way!”

  “You are him!” blurted Paddy.

  “You left one hour ago, not fifty years,” added Harris.

  Castor sadly shook his head. “I have some sad news. Paddy Deluxe and Frothing Harris are dead and buried. They were your fathers and they raised you in the way my message urged them to do, with the same names and identical thought processes. That’s the reason for your identity confusion. It was my father who left this pub to obtain money for your fathers, but it is the son who returns to pay the sons. The time difference also explains why you’ll find no evidence of a pirate raid when you walk home tonight: that incident happened a generation ago and the damage has long since been repaired. Now to more pressing matters! How much was owed in total?”

  “One hundred pounds,” answered Paddy and Harris together.

  “Would you like that sum in today’s money?”

  “Of course!” came the roar.

  Castor reached into his pocket and withdrew a single coin, a tarnished penny, which he slapped down on the table. “There you go. That penny was in my father’s possession during the original card game. Because of inflation over half a century it is worth £100 in today’s money.”

  Paddy Deluxe and Frothing Harris were speechless.

  “I’m glad everything is settled,” said Castor. “By the way, the machinery in the calendar factory was never fixed and the wrong year has been printed on every calendar since. Curious, don’t you think? Don’t trust dates from now on, whatever you do. I’m off to the bar for a drink. Then we can toast our ancestors. Come now, my friends, restrain yourselves! Are we not gentlemen? Fighting over a penny is most undignified!”

  Canis Raver

  Do glove puppets ever go travelling on their own? Castor Jenkins is probably the only person able to answer this question convincingly. Nobody else seems to know for sure. Maybe somewhere among the numerous pubs, bars and clubs of the world is another man who can give a straight answer without too looking nervous about it. Maybe not.

  But it’s no good talking about Kelvin as if he’s any old glove puppet. The moment you hear his story you’ll know he’s different – and even though you have never seen him, you’ll still feel certain there will be an instant connection if you ever accidentally meet up.

  But anyway… Glove puppets and travel…

  Can they do it at all? Real travelling, that is, not merely being carried from one place to another in a bag or a pocket, but setting off with their own bags and pockets and passports and whatever else they need, or prefer, to go with: maybe a toy hand or a book of international gestures or a wad of monopoly money or a bottle of gin for the cold lonely times.

  Castor has travelled a fair bit himself but never as far as Kelvin is rumoured to have ventured. Kelvin was sighted all over South East Asia in many different locations – cities, the jungle, on the coast, up mountains, in the ocean. He didn’t really have a favourite haunt and was happy to drift along and try anything new, but please don’t think he was reckless.

  Castor explains his involvement with Kelvin like this:

  * * * *

  It was Catherine who first tried to convince me that glove puppets are capable of going on adventures without needing an owner. I was staying in her house in Swansea at the time and I spent every day sprawled on her sofa before she came back from work, at which point I usually roused myself enough to engage her in conversation. During the course of my stay, we discussed some pretty profound things and she told me stuff about her adventures with Kelvin in Malaysia. Then she turned to me with a question.

  “Have you heard of the writer Flann O’Brien?”

  “You gave me his books, I think.”

  “So I did. Do you remember his theory about how men and bicycles are in danger of exchanging identities?”

  “I think I’ve forgotten,” I confessed.

  “When a bicycle is ridden down a bumpy road, the vibrations can cause an interchange of molecules between man and machine. The damage is cumulative and in extreme cases the bicycle takes on human characteristics and the human starts adopting the ways of a bicycle. This phenomenon is creating all sort of havoc in Ireland right now.”

  I was sceptical. “Is that so?”

  She brushed her fair hair back over her ears. “Many of the people I met in Kilkenny looked like they needed handlebars growing out of their shoulders to keep them steady.”

  “But how does this apply to Kelvin?”

  “Don’t you see? He’s a glove puppet and so probably has had lots of hands up him – no crude jokes if you please! – and those hands moved around inside to make it seem he was alive.”

  “I still don’t comprehend what you’re getting at.”

  “If we accept the molecule interchange theory, he must have picked up traces of all the people who ever controlled him, absorbed some of their personalities, mannerisms, even their essential life force!”

  “We’d have to track down every one of his previous owners to work out his average personality,” I speculated.

  Catherine pouted. “Yes and no. Kelvin has his own sense of self that is unique and greater than the sum of its parts. I don’t accept he’s just an amalgam of his operators. Besides I don’t know exactly how many people have ever played with him in that way.”

  “You might be the only one?” I ventured.

  She shook her head. “There were others, but I can’t specify an exact number. Maybe two or three, maybe a hundred.”

  “Do you believe he’s genuinely alive?”

  Catherine shrugged. “I don’t know, but he’s certainly capable of sentient thought and behaviour. That’s why he’s so independent and hates being stuck in the house all day.”

  “Where is he now?” I wondered.

  “Travelling again. Who knows where? He’s probably taking part in a week long rave on some exotic beach. That’s his scene sure enough, mixing it up with the other alternative puppets.”

  “Surely he’s too floppy for that?” I objected.

  “I know what you’re thinking – my hand played the part of Kelvin’s skeleton and he doesn’t have a spine of his own or any other supporting bones. That fact never bothered him when he was on his own. Maybe he has a way of stiffening up we can’t imagine. Or perhaps he maintains some sort of connection with the shape my hand made when it was up him.”

  “Like an electromagnetic imprint?”

  “Yes and my wrist is aching right now, which suggests he has been dancing for several days already at that rave.”

  “Do you miss him? Would you like to see him again?”

  “Yes, but I can’t imagine he’ll ever return to Wales of his own free will. It’s too grey here, too prosaic. Searching for him would take too long. He could be in Brazil or Goa or Madagascar...”

  I pondered this problem deeply. I tried to imagine a glove puppet, any glove puppet, dancing without an operator — handless — around a huge fire on a beach, adorned with tribal jewellery and henna markings, listening to pulsating music under the shimmering stars. It was not an unpleasing image but was it feasible? Personally I think they can do it, perhaps not without difficulties that humans don’t have, but with certain advantages too. Humans have to re-hydrate after so many hours. Puppets don’t.

  I thought I knew a way to entice Kelvin back, but before I could propose my idea, Catherine told me this story:

  “I once heard about a glove puppet, a panda, caught trying to smuggle drugs across the border, don’t know what drugs, which border or even what type of panda – giant or red – but that’s not important. Anyway it was arrested and hauled off to an interrogation room but it wasn’t forthcoming with its answers, sitting there in silence almost as if dead. Buckets
of cold water and slaps had no effect; it just wouldn’t move or talk, so one of the officers insisted on doing a body search. That was a mistake because the moment he thrust his hand inside it to feel around for the contraband, the panda came alive again – which is natural for glove puppets – and it began winking and pointing at the officer as if he was a secret partner in the crime.”

  “It framed the officer! How cunning!”

  Catherine nodded. “Don’t trust pandas too much, they’re about as reliable as owls. You look distracted, what’s up?”

  “It has just occurred to me that if we change the character of Swansea – turn it into an exotic place – more exotic than Goa or anywhere else – into the most exotic place in the world, then Kelvin might find himself drawn here regardless of the grey skies and drizzle of Wales.”

  “A good idea, but how can it be implemented?”

  “Let’s put our heads together,” I said.

  * * * *

  Castor Jenkins will usually pause at this point until someone buys him another drink. Whether he gets it or not, and he mostly does, he’ll gaze for a long time out of the window at the Porthcawl seafront, the rocks and the sea. This sea is actually the estuary of the broad River Severn and on the far side, the cliffs of Exmoor loom impressively. To the west are visible the lights of Swansea, that ugly-lovely, beery-leery, sentiment draped town. If cities are female, Swansea likes to rouge its nipples with lipstick.

  Unluckily for metaphors, extended or otherwise, cities don’t have a gender, that convention is just wishful thinking.

  “So what happened?” Frothing Harris will ask.

  “Did you come up with a plan?” Paddy Deluxe might add.

  Castor Jenkins never wipes his nose on a tissue if he can help it. The sleeve is the way he does it every time.

  “Yes, but we had to change everything, every last cultural atom of Swansea, or at least we thought we did. Turned out that once the chain reaction began, it did the job itself. The music, the food, the ambience: all were transformed in a way staggering to behold. We ended up with a place resembling a cross between Havana, Atlantis and Lwachtrop!”

  “Where the heck is Lwachtrop?”

  “A town on a distant planet... Orange skies... None of us have been there yet, but you’ll understand one day. Now I’m getting ahead of myself, a horrid habit! I’ll quickly explain what happened... Without Catherine’s organisational skills I don’t think it could have worked. First we interfered with the local music scene. Have you been to any gigs in Swansea?”

  “Never. Oh wait! I went to see the progressive combo King Crimson at the Top Rank on December 6th, 1972.”

  “We’re getting old, my friend... Anyway, the scene is dominated these days by folk duos and soft rock bands, most of them boring beyond belief. There are many good musicians1, but generally the standard is bland, the tempos are slow, the guitarists tend to noodle, the vocalists often warble in nasal fashion, not the sort of music one might expect to find in an exotic paradise... It was essential to give the scene a mighty kick up the bass drum, so Catherine and I hatched a plot that utilised the forces of chaos.

  “We got ourselves into an administrative position – I can’t recall how – and deliberately double booked, or triple booked, bands. In other words, more than one act would turn up at a given time to play on the same stage. The cacophony that resulted was mostly blisteringly bad, not always, but it sounded like nothing local, nothing Welsh. It sounded exotic, like nothing previously known above or below the equator. Then we set off as many fire alarms as we could. The people rushed into the streets while the music kept going (the musicians couldn’t hear the alarms above the polyrhythmic din). Swansea suddenly was a city of street parties, of dancing under stars.”

  “Stars? How do you expect us to believe that?”

  “You’re right, it was poetic licence. What I really meant was: the low-lying featureless nighttime clouds saturated with oily moisture. But under those the inhabitants of Swansea did dance, and the music pulsed, throbbed and squealed and gained a momentum of its own, started to fit together, to become funky and nice, and feet on the pavement slabs moved faster, and hips gyrated in the style known as sensual, and bosoms and groins were thrust back and forth, and it was astounding to behold, incredible to witness, invigorating to describe, and that’s how it was, and this was the beginning of the chain reaction I mentioned. Before an hour had passed, Swansea had metamorphosed in a way that not even I might have anticipated. The effect was extreme.

  “‘If this doesn’t summon Kelvin,’ I remarked, ‘then nothing will.’

  “Catherine nodded. ‘You know something? I feel he’s on his way already. My guess is that tomorrow he’ll be back.’

  “We joined the fun, drinking and dancing. The process was out of our hands now, beyond our control; the change was unstoppable and that’s the way I liked it. I fell asleep just before dawn on the beach, with a dune for a pillow. Sleeping on the beach in Swansea is unheard of – the place is just a venue for empty chip wrappers to blow along, isn’t it? I love chips but I loved the change more. When I awoke my head was light. I blinked in disbelief. The path parallel to the beach, where joggers and cyclists like to damage ankles and tyres, was shaded by palm trees. Where had those come from? Surfers rode giant clean waves, shark fins cleaved the blue water further out.

  “I found Catherine rocking in a hammock with a caipirinha in her hand, her eyes inscrutable behind sunglasses. She sipped her fruity cocktail and smiled in languorous recognition. I noticed that she was wearing a sarong. I seemed to be the only person in Welsh trousers.

  “‘This event defies logic. It’s too magical,’ I protested.

  “‘What’s the trouble?’ she purred.

  “‘Palm trees don’t spring up overnight, dirty seas don’t become clean in less than twelve hours, a whacking great Sugar Loaf mountain isn’t upthrust from the seabed quite so readily. I thought we might change the atmosphere of this town, not its actual landscape!”

  “‘Just accept it for what it is,’ she answered.

  “I didn’t find her attitude helpful, so I left her where she was, swinging in her sheen, and went off to find someone else I knew, anyone less susceptible to alchemy, more constant in behaviour, looks and odour, in short a Paddy Deluxe or Frothing Harris. But I failed. Everyone wore Hawaiian shirts, everyone had samba hips, there wasn’t a single example of Vitamin D deficiency to be found anywhere… I should have just gone with the flow, enjoyed it as a phenomenon, not worried about analysing it.

  “But I’m a born worrier I guess and I kept fretting. I found myself a bench in Cwmdonkin Park and I tried to ignore the orchids and hummingbirds, and even the strange insects, until one landed on the back of my right hand and stung me. I swatted it with my left hand and it stung that one too. I don’t know what the insect was, nothing native to the temperate climes, that’s for sure, but since that moment my hands have occasionally swollen up to gross dimensions. It doesn’t happen too often, and they don’t stay swollen for more than an hour or so, but when they do swell up I swear I have the second biggest hands in existence. I won’t say anything about Prime Time Kenny, the man with the biggest hands. He doesn’t belong in this story.

  “Anyway, I sat there for a long time, while the pseudo-tropical sun started to sink into the west, and then I felt a prickle on the nape of my neck, and I knew Kelvin was back. I looked up and there he was, ambling along the path, maybe twelve inches high with big ears and a bigger grin. He sat next to me and rolled a spliff and just for once I was stuck for words to say. Fortunately he broke the impasse with a simple observation:

  “‘Rather seasonable weather for the time of year’.

  “‘Indeed so,’ I said, ‘and quite contrary to normality. I’ve never known such a balmy afternoon at this latitude.’

  ‘“Climate is what you make it,’ he answered.

  “I took issue with this statement. ‘No it’s not! Climate is the result of several factors outside
human control. These factors include altitude, proximity to high mountains, average cloud cover, the thermohaline circulation of the ocean, solar heat absorption due to vegetation…’

  “‘Climate change is within human control,’ he interrupted.

  “I snorted in derision. ‘What do you know about humans? You’re just a toy, a piece of cloth cut and stitched in certain ways, with maybe an electromagnetic imprint of some kind to keep you going. I’m good friends with a former owner of yours, so watch your step!’

  “Then I felt bad for having threatened him, but he didn’t seem offended and continued airily, ‘The human race has been altering the climate since the first outpouring of industrial pollution. A blind process… But I’m Kelvin and know everything about manipulation, what glove puppet doesn’t? You can’t expect to use us as playthings and keep us ignorant of the mechanics of control. We learn the hard way, with a hands-up approach! Have you any idea what it feels like to be tickled from the inside?’

  “‘Actually I do, but let’s not go into that...’

  “Kelvin leaned closer, ignited his spliff and blew the smoke out of the corner of his fabric mouth. ‘I’ll tell you my secret. None of the changes that upset you so much are real. Don’t you get it yet? I’ve turned the tables on you humans and played a grand joke. The palm trees and breakers, the toucans and jellyfish, the hotter sun and higher mountains... They are all puppets, puppets of my devising! Even the coconuts are puppets!’

  “‘You mean that the azure sky and sweet zephyr...’

  “‘Made from cloth... The hammocks and grass skirts, the cavaquinhos2 and caipirinhas, the papaya and caramba, the sunburn and heatstroke, the coral and pearls, all of it animated cloth!’

  “‘What about the horrible sting on my hands?’

  “‘Even that is a puppet – the pus in your wound is a puppet, the poisoning of your blood is a puppet, everything!’