Too Cold For Snow

We’re going to bring paintings to life. We’re going to start local, with some of my own Welsh faves, and if the idea takes off, I don’t know, we could end up bringing the Last Supper to life with De Niro as Jesus.’
    ‘I like your overvaulting ambition,’ replied Larry, who wasn’t his usual ebullient self. He was still smarting from a review of his latest mini-soap opera in the Sunday Telegraph in which A. A. Gill had said that it has as much drama as painting of a fruit bowl. The same fucker had said that his drama series the previous year had the plot of a gibbon colony. Gill was typical of the reaction from the rest of the snakes. So Larry didn’t just need to work on a new project, he needed something that would allow him to walk tall again. Louis’s project sounded as if it might have that power. It even sounded as if it was that rarity: a new idea for television, the stuff that drew awards like a magnet.
    ‘When do you plan to start?’ asked Larry.
    ‘Dispatch is my middle name. We start next week?’
    ‘We’ll need a writer P.D.Q. Someone I can sit in a room with for a day or two and then be back with a script that works like a Swiss watch. A tall order I know.’
    ‘I know the very man. If he’s on the wagon he can deliver. And if he’s canned when I ring, we’ll need to wait a day for him to get his shit together. Have you met Trefor Gruffydd? Old school in every way. Working on just one kidney but a man with a gift. He wrote the last Bond movie.’
    When he arrived the next day the screenwriter looked like the very epitome of an old soak. His face was a map of burst blood vessels.
    ‘Larry tells me you’re going to resuscitate dead painters, blow life back into them.’ The man smelled of cooking oil. He had more hair coming out of his ears than anyone Louis had ever seen before.
    ‘Something like that. Take a look at this…’ he handed Gruffydd a book called The Visual Culture of Wales and there was a photograph of the painting Louis wanted to start with.
    ‘It’s called “The Communist”. What we have to do is work out what brought all these people together and then figure out what happened next.’
    ‘It’s a strong image, no doubt about that. It’s a sort of crucifixion. The main figure is a sacrifice?’
    ‘That’s how I’ve always seen it.’
    That day they made their way through eight cafetières of coffee, a dozen bagels with cream cheese and smoked salmon and a large bowl of fruit. The surges of blood sugar made their brains race.
    ‘He’s about to soar up to heaven to meet his maker. Or his father. Or what if this was an early experiment with helium? The gas is a by-product of whatever’s made in this manufactory and the man in the red waistcoat...’
    ‘Let’s call him Thomas John.’
    ‘So Thomas John has just taken in a huge amount of helium or even a newly discovered gas that simply lifts you off the ground: “The Human Zeppelin” flies for the first time.’
    ‘A legendary circus act.’
    ‘And his claim to fame is that he can float over the crowds without the use of hidden wires as his great rival Mephisto employs.’
    ‘So instead of staging his act in a marquee like all the others – the hundreds of inferior performers who can only dream of achieving what he has – he allows the crowd to choose where exactly he’s going to perform. And this time it’s a factory. Somewhere in the Swansea valley, where they’ve parted with a sum of money far in excess of a guinea between them for the privilege of seeing him levitate above their heads. But this time he floats out the window and drifts away on the wind, so that the last thing they see is the merest speck of him heading over the Beacons towards the east.’
    A brief pause, a mouthful of bagel.
    ‘What if he’s the victim of some awful accident and that’s the way he’s now forced to stand?’
    ‘Being used as an example of the callousness of the factory owners when it comes to anyone who wants to kick-start a strike.’
    They had a good day, throwing up a legion of ideas, but at the end they had to settle for the obvious. Gruffydd went off to write it, a waver in his walk as if his body always remembered being drunk.
    The Locations Manager, Elen, scouted around the riven gulches of the south Wales valley looking for a suitable building with a view of smoke stacks. She searched the whole length of the Rhymney valley right up to where it merged into swathes of white moor grass. And found