My First Colouring Book Read Online Free Page A

butterfly stitches. I asked him what had happened, and the plotline was pretty straightforward, as I’d anticipated: overcome with curiosity he’d visited ‘his’ house late one night, and since there were no lights on he’d tried the back door, which was open. While exploring the house in darkness he’d tripped over a prone figure and tumbled to the floor. Startled, the ‘tenant’ of the house had woken suddenly from a drunken coma, wielded and smashed an empty bottle frantically in the dark and (more by accident than design) had ‘bottled’ poor old Jonathan, severing the carotid artery in his neck.
    Nearly copped it – thank God I’m a doctor or I’d be dead, he mumbled through his swollen lips.
    The ‘tenant’ turned out to be an itinerant who’d been living there for many years: he’d got away with it because the neighbours thought he was the owner.
    Ironically, when the itinerant made a statement to the police he said he’d watched the house over several weeks, while living in nearby woods, and after seeing no signs of occupation he’d forced the back door and made himself at home. Me and Jonathan laughed over that, we just had to.
    I meet him now and again, and he’s getting better. He was never charged by the police; his profession saved him, I suspect, though I don’t know what sort of story he told them. As for my own ‘empty’ house, the one on the ninety-degree bend in the country, I still haven’t seen anybody moving there. And there’s a reason for that. Since Jonathan’s near-death incident I’ve given the place a miss – I still haven’t got a car, and there’s another road – with a bus route – to the place I visit; although it’s a bit of a detour it ensures I never see my house again. People think I’ve changed my route because of the accident. But no, it’s not that.
    It’s become strangely important that the scene remains undisturbed outside that gaunt little house with its red barn and tidy outbuildings. It’s a painting on an easel without an artist to finish it off. And there’s another thing. For some strange reason the thought has grown inside me that once I see any movement there I’ll die.

blood
    THERE is a place secreted in the hills of mid Wales which few people know about, and even fewer have visited. I suppose it’s best described as a miniature version of the wide tableland which stretches for countless miles in the Chang-thang region of Northern Tibet – a place so flat and featureless it’s been known to send men mad, overcome by their own smallness. But this place in Wales is no Shangri-La. Its long seclusion from the outside world has left it relatively unchanged for a thousand years, a bleak landscape flocked by countless sheep which drift in eternal silence below an old, forgetful sky. The shepherds who look after them have changed as little as the landscape; they while away their time in ancient ways, tending their sturdy speckled sheep, making a strong hard cheese in their mountain huts, and carving ornate bijou objects from soapstone with astonishing expertise: the finished article resembles a tiny catacomb, with perfect rooms and passageways, stairs and cellars within the stone. There are hardly any women, since all but the simple and deformed run off in their teens to become rugby wives in places such as Bradford and St Helens. It’s an unforgiving terrain peopled by strong and unusual people – as the explorer and wit Valentine Zappa noted, it’s a place where the women are monosyllabic, the sheep bipolar and the men trisexual.
    Out of this place, one day, came a man called Gwynoro. He became a close friend of mine, despite medical protocol – I was his surgeon. He arrived in my operating theatre in great pain, due to a colonic tangle caused by eating too much of the local delicacy, not unlike