I am a liar.
Yes, of course you are, you say – You’re a
storyteller.
No, it’s worse than that. You see, I’m not a
storyteller at all. That’s the lie – or at least one of them. Though maybe, if
I’m a liar, and I say I’m a liar, then I’m not telling the truth when I say it,
which would mean – it would mean I’m somebody who sometimes tells the truth and
knows it, and sometimes tells a lie and doesn’t, and vice versa – and that
would mean I’m a normal human being, and we both know that isn’t true.
I know I’m not a storyteller because I’ve been told
so. What a storyteller is, is well-defined. I certainly make up stories. That’s
true. And I speak them out loud, so that people can listen. But the trouble is,
I write them down. Ouch. That’s the problem. Real storytellers don’t. Real
storytellers remain in touch with their roots in oral culture. Real
storytellers go out and find spoken stories in all kinds of places where
they’re still told and hold them in their heads and pass them on, barely changed
at all.
The stories they tell are often ones that their
audience already knows, so they can chant along. Or if they don’t actually know
them, the structure is so clear – three sons, three challenges, three
daughters, three kinds of helpful animals – that it doesn’t take long before
the audience cottons on and chants along anyway. It reminds me of a church
service, with the vicar doing the first bit, and the congregation responding,
only it’s more cheerful than that, but not quite as rowdy as a revivalist
meeting – and certainly no one stands up and tries to take over with their
personal witness.
You can see what kind of a miserable bastard I am,
and how I want imperialistic absolutist hegemony over my listeners, and no
democratic interaction. The truth is, I want the story to be there, and the
storyteller to disappear. I write mine down in order to get them right, and
once they’re right, I don’t see any reason to change them. I do, of course,
when I’m reading them to different audiences. I simplify the vocabulary if I
think they won’t understand, I drop the recherché references when I suspect
they’re not going to be understood, I slip in a good joke if it occurs to me
and it’s appropriate, I am a performer, for goodness’s sake! But
my stories are well-tailored clothes, and the stories that storytellers tell
are saris. They’re a bolt of cloth, pretty cloth, with a bold but simple
pattern and a lot of glitter, and you wind it round the waist a few times and
tuck it in so it sticks and doesn’t fall down, then you throw the loose end
over your shoulder, and Rabindranath’s your uncle. My stories have tucks and
folds and darts and pleats and French seams that you can’t see, and they’re
made to fit like a glove and the person they fit is me. Me, me, me. Their sentences
go up and down like my voice, because that’s the way I hear them in my head and
that’s the way I say them to myself before I write them down.
I was at a storytelling festival in Hay on Wye last
year. Oh, what a town! If the chippie stayed open after nine o’clock at night,
it’d be perfect. There’s a nice little car park down by the river, where you
could stay overnight illegally in your camper and no one would notice – at
least, not out of season. And the walks along the Wye are just made for my pack
of dogs. (One dog is a dog, two dogs are a pair, beyond that it’s a pack, and
they know it.) The posh clothes and furniture shops don’t exactly do it for me,
but with any luck they’ll go bust and be turned into second-hand bookshops like
all the rest... And the pubs, I was thinking to myself, will repay
investigation...
I was just finishing my first pint. I’d arrived late
the evening before, missing the opening event unfortunately, and I’d spent a
romantic night on my own (apart from the dogs) in the camper, parked in a
passing-place on a wide stretch of road up towards the Gospel Pass. Then I’d
come down, found somewhere sensible to stay, and attended all the events of the
day – I had the Maxi-Ticket, you know, like the Full English Breakfast,
including everything.
The shows had all been good, but everybody seemed to
know everybody else already, whoever they were, bookers for Arts organisations,
or storytellers, or cultured alternative people with kids, so that was why I
was drinking alone. Better than not drinking at all. And better than drinking
in the camper. I try not to set a bad example for the dogs.
“Please help me,” said the woman, as she sat down at
my table. She was pretty, though her hair-style didn’t suit her – long,
straggly, natural, distracting from the Modigliani-shape of her face.
“What’s happened?” I said. I’d seen her in the
audience at two of the three shows, watched her having a fag outside in
between, admired the Celtic pattern of her homemade cloth bag. I wondered why
she’d picked on me. Perhaps it was the beard, I thought. I’ve cultivated quite
a large one, to do Merlin. One of Kipling’s female character says that kissing
a man without a moustache is like eating an egg without salt. Kissing me is
probably more like eating salt without an egg – but that’s only guesswork. I
have no independent evidence.
One of the storytellers had done an intro analysing
the audience into those who knew, and knew that they knew, those who knew, but
didn’t know that they knew, those who knew they didn’t know and those who
didn’t know they didn’t know. I was the only one cocky enough to put my hand up
for the first category. Was that why she thought I could help?
“It’s Andrea,” she said, “I tried something – I
mean, she asked me to – and – and – ” – she burst into tears.
“Where’s Andrea now?” I asked.
“Still in the hall,” she said, “in that little room
at the back where they put people who get taken poorly.”
“So she’s comfortable and warm and dry?” I asked. It
was late November, and one of the periodic downpours (Hay is in Wales, after
all) was lashing the windows of the pub so hard it was louder than the jukebox
and the one-armed bandits together. “Then tell me what happened.”
“Well,” she said, “Andrea was – a bit – nervous, you
know. Look, you won’t tell anybody else, will you?”
“I don’t know anybody else to tell,” I said, “and I
wouldn’t if I did.”
“She was worried – that she was – losing her gifts.
As a storyteller. You know. She said she couldn’t find the stories any more.
She said she looked and looked and looked, but they just weren’t there.”
That really scared me. I couldn’t actually imagine
anything worse. Amputation, paralysis, death – fine. But not that.
“So what did you do?” I asked.
“I just did some visualisation, you know – you
imagine a landscape, and you get taken through it and have a particular kind of
experience and then you come back and you feel better. She said she didn’t want
the crystals.”
“But she didn’t come back,” I said.
“No, she didn’t. She said she didn’t want to. She
said she was happier where she was. That’s not the way it’s supposed to work,
you know!”
“No, I know,” I lied, never having got involved with
any of this stuff before. The nearest I’d ever come was a trip to Glastonbury,
to visit the Abbey ruins and the Tor. Where every other shop in Hay sells
second-hand books, two shops out of every three in Glaston offer you New Age
Books, CDs, joss-sticks, mind-concentration matrices, tantric mobiles and DIY
crystal kits. I expected to run into people on street-corners asking if I’d
like my aura polished.
“The rain’s stopped,” she said. “Can we go to her?”
We did. She was lying on the metal-framed
fever-hospital bed in the little back room, a pillow under her head and a thin
grey blanket over her, which she didn’t really need because she was still
wearing her fun-fur coat. Her breathing was smooth and regular, as if she were
asleep, and her pale, slightly drawn face was smiling.
At the head of the bed there was one of those
old-fashioned metal-framed chairs with a cloth seat and back that are much more
comfortable and much less sweaty than the modern plastic stacking kind. I sat
down in it, put my hands in my lap, rotated my shoulders to loosen them and
closed my eyes.
“Take me where you took her,” I said.
To begin with, I listened to the voice, and tried to
conjure up the scenes it was describing, but fairly rapidly I found myself in a
landscape of my own, and simply began to explore it. First of all, there was a
river. It would have been a good trout stream, I judged, if anyone had bothered
to imagine the fish in it. It frothed and babbled over substantial stones that
lay on a bed of fine gravel. Between them, pebbles of various sizes shifted and
bumped and grated. There was hardly any weed. The stream obviously flowed fast
and kept up its speed and volume all year. Feathery birch and different kinds
of willow overhung it, in bud or early leaf. The air was crisp and chill, but
the sun (at which I was reluctant to look, in case it wasn’t there) was warm on
my back. I began to walk instinctively upstream, with the river on my left.
That’s what good storytellers do – they go to the source.
On my bank, there was a muddy path, with fresh
footprints. If I’d been Sherlock Holmes, I’d have checked Andrea’s shoes before
I set out. As it was, who else could they belong to?
The longer I walked, the more it began to remind me
of Dovedale. I expected to see a dipper at any minute. Then I came to a gorge,
and the path went up the rocks, away from the river. I followed the path, which
was rocky now, and showed no tracks. I had to follow it. There was nowhere else
to go. It went through woods, which had a muddy floor that showed me occasional
footprints again. Then it came out into the open, on a meadow, which was
crossed by the meanders of a small purling stream that emerged from a dark
opening in the rock face on the far side of the meadow. Only it wasn’t really a
meadow. It was a large area of bright green grassy marsh, very squidgy under my
feet but not, as far as I could tell, likely to swallow me. When I looked
closer, I could see enough large stones scattered about to afford me passage
dry-shod wherever I wanted.
I went to my left first, and saw where the stream
plunged over the edge. Actually, I didn’t go far enough to see that. I saw the
wind whipping spray up into the air, and deduced the rest. I don’t like
heights. Then I went to my right, towards what I took to be the cave that was
the stream’s source. Andrea was standing in the mouth of it, her shoes and
socks off, paddling, her coat on a nearby rock. As I approached, she retreated
towards the cave, so I stopped and called to her from where I stood.
“Your friend’s worried,” I shouted.
“There’s no need,” she called back, “I’m where I
want to be – where I’ve always wanted to be.”
“Oh yes?” I said. “And where’s that?”
“It’s a story-mine,” she said, gesturing to the
darkness behind her. “I haven’t been in very far yet, but I’m going to go in
all the way.”
“And will you be able to come out again?” I asked.
“Who cares?” she cried, tossing her hair. “I’ve
found the stories – the source of all the stories in the world!”
“But no one else will hear them!” I shouted.
She turned round and looked at me. “Who cares?” she
said again, but softer and lower this time. “You’re a storyteller, too,
otherwise you couldn’t have followed me this far – where do you get your
stories from?”
“I wait,” I said, “I wait till they get washed down
into the valley, and shaped by the water, and rubbed against each other.
Sometimes I find them in the ground, and I have to get the earth off, very
carefully, so as not to spoil the shape, so as not to take away something that
belongs to them.”
“No one has ever handled these before,” she said,
“no one. They have patterns inside them you wouldn’t believe.”
“But there’s no one to show them to,” I said.
“There’s me,” she said. “There’s me.” And she turned
and walked into the darkness.
I felt the cave drawing me. I put my hand down and
picked up a pebble from the shallow bed of the stream. It glinted in the light
as the water dripped from it, and then I began to see the patterns, the whorls
and shapes that drew me in. I closed my hand tight on it, and turned back
towards the path, one foot after another, barely opening my eyes, not choosing
my way, but splashing through the ooze till I reached the wood, then bumping
into branches till I reached the rock, then keeping my eyes fixed firmly on the
ground as I ran and hopped and stumbled and slithered, until the river was
beside me and the birch and willow around me, and I could look at the large
stones just sitting there while the braided current wove itself around them.
Then I opened my eyes, and was back in the little
room in the church hall.
“Call an ambulance,” I said, “I’m afraid there’s
nothing I can do.”
Then I walked out into the night, and back to my
camper, past the closed chippie and past that pub on the corner of the road
that leads down to the bridge which looks as though it’s closed down most of
the time, and yet occasionally sounds as though it has people in it.
I stayed for the rest of the festival, but I didn’t
see Andrea or her friend at any of the other events, which wasn’t surprising.
So I left Hay on Wye with two unanswered questions:
Does that pub on the corner of the road down to the
bridge really serve customers?
And where did the pebble come from that I found in
my hand when I got back to the camper that night?
19.00-22.50 27.iii.2002