CONSIDERING THE NUMBER of garden sheds and herbaceous borders that were swept away, how much of the season’s jam-making was ruined, there was surprisingly little rancour against the people who bombed the dam. Most people agreed justice had largely been done. Dai the Custard Pie, whose own joke shop had disappeared completely, was now imprisoned in a specially adapted dungeon, deep beneath Aberystwyth Castle. A clown of evil, doomed like a troglodyte never to see the face of the sun again. Mrs Llantrisant, the woman who swabbed my step for so many years, now exiled like Napoleon on Saint Madoc’s Rock fifteen miles out to sea. Lovespoon the druid and Welsh teacher, missing presumed drowned. Herod Jenkins, last seen falling from the plane. Only Dai Brainbocs had escaped. The evil schoolboy genius and chief architect of our soaking. Somewhere at large now in South America, the traditional holiday destination of fugitives and renegades: Butch Cassidy and Sundance, the officers of the Third Reich, the Great Train Robbers, and now Brainbocs. And with him also, that most unlikely moll – the girl who should have been mine – Myfanwy.
The cleaner from the Seaman’s Mission had hardly been specific. Meet me at the Game. But it was enough. There might be many games in town but only one began with a capital G: ‘Mrs Beynon Says’, also known as Fishwife’s Chess. The contest that depended on knowing more about your neighbour’s secret vices and indiscretions than anyone else in the street. It had once been a harmless parlour game played for matches at Christmas, but nowadays an entire week’s pension or a dead husband’s war medals could be staked on it. I wandered off in search of tonight’s game, somewhere in the ghetto. Down some back alley, under a line of washing and through a hole in a fence where the touch of creosote was just a memory, like the scent of an old love letter. But which washing-line and which fence?
I could hear the ghetto long before I reached it. That far-off sound of carousing sailors found in all the world’s great ports. And mingling with it, incongruously, the sweeter strains of the Sweet Jesus League out on their own shore patrol, singing hymns and warning the men of the dangers of unbridled fornication. A mixture of sounds that perfectly encapsulated the contradictions of the hour – captured the spiritual divide that the receding waters had left behind. To the puritans, the disaster had been a well-deserved punishment for our ill-defined iniquity. You saw them every night, singing hymns and carrying torches through the streets like columns of monks in a Gothic painting. Sometimes you caught the eye of one, who tried to avoid your gaze, and you’d think to yourself, isn’t that our postman? For other people, it was all just a reminder that our tenure here is short and that we should make the most of it. So the people of Aberystwyth gulped their pleasure giddily for a while, like Paris in La Belle Époque or Berlin in the Roaring Twenties, dancing like the marionettes on a music box playing at the wrong speed. Sospan capitalised on the mood with that innate understanding of the Zeitgeist by creating new recipes based on a suggestion that life is precious and fleeting: Dance of the Mayfly, Gossamer Happiness, and the ever popular Lost Eden. Or the saucy one that caused all the trouble with the Sweet Jesus League, Hornucopia. This was also the time when the Chief of Police had to confiscate a lot of large-print pornography.
* * *
As I walked up Bridge Street, the battered old Bentley belonging to the Philanthropist swept past. A cat darted across the road. There was a squeal of tyres quickly followed by a soft furry thud and the sad but comic sight of an inert cat cartwheeling through the air. The car stopped and the chauffeur got out. He picked up the cat by its tail and, with a loud clattering noise, slung it into a rubbish bin. Then he slapped his hands together and drove off. I strolled on and thought of some lonely old lady sitting at her kitchen table tonight, looking round sharply every time the wind blew open the catflap, a saucer of unlapped milk standing on the tiled floor. Or was it a little girl walking down the street with her mum, pinning notices to the trees saying: ‘Have you seen Bathsheba?’ Aberystwyth could get to you sometimes.
In the old days, of course, if we wanted to gulp our pleasure giddily we just went to the Moulin – Wales’s most notorious nightclub. A place that had stood for so much that was good and bad about the town. But they hadn’t reopened it, had moved it instead to the end of the pier. I’d never been and I said I never would. The Moulin without Myfanwy was Troy without Helen. The gods obviously thought so too because the swooping new Perspex entrance to the pier funded by the Bucket & Spade Aid concert blew away in a storm. And since then the front had been permanently obscured by builders’ plywood.
But tonight I needed only information. The sort that was supposed to be impossible to obtain, but could be bought in any of the pubs in the ghetto. I walked into the Angel.
It was crowded, hot and dark. And reeked of beer. Fishermen and sailors rubbed shoulders with town councillors and ladies of the night. Added to that was the usual haul of holiday-camp impresarios, bingo callers, whalebone dealers, shawl salesmen, out-of-work actresses from the ‘What the Butler Saw’ movie industry, and here and there, looking even more furtive than most, a few monks from Caldy Island. A typical early-evening crowd in the Angel. I pushed my way to the bar and ordered a rum and went to sit in the corner by the fireplace.
A figure detached itself from the shadows leaning against the wall and sauntered over to me.
‘Are you enjoying your holiday, love?’
The voice was soft with a husky rawness, the sort of rawness a voice gets when you see more before you are nineteen than most people see in a lifetime. The girl was wrapped up in a fur coat. The silky brush against my wrist suggested it was real, though probably full of moth-holes.
‘Like that, huh?’ she said when I didn’t answer, and sat down next to me. A syrupy thud filled the room as someone, somewhere, clumsily dropped a needle on to a record, and after a few seconds Jim Reeves struggled to raise his voice above the bacon-frying hiss and sing, ‘Welcome to My Home’.
‘It’s not a lot of fun, really, I know,’ said the girl. ‘The summer’s much better and that’s not a lot of fun either.’
I smiled. There seemed something familiar about her, although there was almost nothing physical to see in the darkness. Reflections of flames dancing in her eyes, an edge of gold outlining her cheek, giving her the air of a wench in a Rembrandt painting. It wasn’t her voice that was familiar and since I couldn’t see her face I couldn’t put it down to that, but still there was something. And when you work as a private eye in Aberystwyth you learn not to worry too much about where your hunches come from.
‘I could show you round if you like … show you things.’
‘So you’re a tour guide, are you?’
‘Well not exactly … no … well yeah, in a way.’
‘Is there much to see?’
‘There’s the castle. I could show you that.’
‘And I bet you know all about it, don’t you?’
‘Yeah, of course.’
‘The Romans.’
‘The Romans!’
‘Yeah, I s’pose. Or Robin Hood or someone. I don’t know – who cares?’
She took out a cigarette and a lighter and the flame gave her young features a tender wash of light. When the cigarette was alight she flicked the lighter again and held it up to my face. Through the harsh hot glare I could see the glints of her eyes as she scrutinised me. The flame went out.
‘You’re Louie, aren’t you?’
‘Yes, how did you know?’
‘I’ve seen you about. I’m Ionawr.’ She grabbed my hand in the darkness and shook it gently. ‘Nice to meet you.’ The hand was cold and smooth like a pebble on a beach.
‘Do I know you?’
‘We haven’t met, but I know you through my sister.’
‘Is she here?’
‘She’s dead.’
I peered at her intently through the blackness.
‘My sister was Bianca.’
We found the game in a cellar on Prospect Street. Ionawr, who had sold me the information for the price of a drink, insisted on coming with me, saying I wouldn’t get in otherwise, which was hard to believe. But she refused to come in herself, knowing better than me what sort of reception a girl like her would get in this crossroads for the world’s gossips, shrews, scolds and harpies. Inside, the air was fetid and moist, filled with the gamy fug of wet hair drying, infused with cellar smells of old stored potatoes, and Mintos, and camphor, cheap scent from grandsons at Christmas, ointment … and everywhere the air tingled with an intense, feverish mood of anticipation. It was partly the buzz you get at any big fight but also there was the build-up of static brought on by the rustling of pacamacs, and which had on occasion, so they said, given rise to the appearance of ball-lightning at these events.
The two contestants sat at a small kitchen table either side of a pot of tea. The audience was gathered round in rows of seats. We sat down as the umpire clumsily shuffled a pack of very big cards and called on a woman in the front row to draw. These were the Pleasantry cards and carried bonus points. The woman took three and the umpire read them out. ‘Well, that’s what I heard, anyway’ (murmur of disapproval from the crowd and shouts of ‘easy’). ‘Well you can’t be too careful now, can you?’ (more grumbling). And, finally, one that drew a ripple of applause: ‘’E’d have bloody flattened her if he’d found out, wouldn’t he!’
The bell dinged and the lady in the red scarf started.
‘Well, anyway, Mrs Beynon was just saying that it’s not her first one that Mrs Jenkins was talking about. It’s the elder one – she’s got two, hasn’t she? – the youngest one is still in Penweddig, isn’t it? And the eldest is out at Talybont married to the chap whose father ran the garage that was knocked down, anyway it wasn’t him it was his brother whose two boys were in the same class as the daughter of the one from the woman who lives above the bakers in Llanfarian –’
There were cries of ‘Logic! Logic!’ from the blue corner and after a quick conference among the judges the charge was upheld and points were deducted for logic. The woman in the red scarf picked herself up off the canvas and came out fighting: ‘Anyway, it was her niece what made the jam for the “bring and buy” after her husband came back from the mines with emphysema –’
There was a roar of delight from one section of the crowd and the other section looked on stony-faced. Two ladies in front of me turned to each other and swapped disapproving nods. Another lady in front of them turned round and said, ‘It wasn’t emphysema at all – it was nothing to do with the aureoles as such –’
‘I heard it was viral,’ said another spectator, ‘but they weren’t quite sure what.’
‘You’d think she’d test her weak spot with mumps and measles or something first, wouldn’t you!’
‘Or maybe sciatica, that’s always a good one, that is.’
‘You watch!’ the first one scoffed. ‘Mrs Jenkins will trump her now with the pneumoconiosis.’
People in the other rows turned round and told them to hush and I saw the cleaner from the Seaman’s Mission waving to me from the adjoining room.
I walked in and bought two paper cups of beer served warm from a party-sized can and handed one to the woman. She took a drink and let out a satisfied ‘Ha!’ as she patted her chest.
‘Needed that, I did.’ She nodded towards the next room. ‘Just the warm-ups, the real stuff isn’t until after eleven. Hang around a bit and …’ Her words trailed off as her attention was caught by the entrance of another woman. A very old, shrunken woman who carried herself with the regal air of an abdicated queen. Her face was bony and almost skull-like, with fine white strands of hair stretched with painful tightness across the dome of her head. The woman serving at the bar instantly poured out a gin and put it on the counter for her, saying ‘Evening, Champ!’
The cleaner nudged me. ‘It’s Smokey G. Jones. Won the treble in ’62. Fifty-eight bouts and never lost.’
I tried to look impressed and then asked her about the Dean. Tearing her admiring gaze away from the Champ, she licked her lips. ‘Well,’ she said, switching instantly into disapproval mode, ‘I knew straightaway there was something funny about him, like. He wasn’t like the usual ones you get at all. Always giving himself airs he was and saying the bathroom was dirty and moaning about the breakfast and he never wanted to watch the same TV programmes as everybody else. Well, I could see he wasn’t going to last long. “I didn’t know we had a member of the royal family staying with us,” I said to Mrs Jenkins so he could hear. But he didn’t take the hint of course. Them type never do. I mean if he was so high and mighty, why wasn’t he staying at one of the posh hotels down by Consti?’
I yawned. ‘You expect me to pay for stuff like this?’
She jerked her head back indignantly. ‘Well I’m not doing for me health now, am I?’
‘This isn’t gossip, it’s ancient history.’
‘I should hope so too, I’m not one to gossip.’ She leaned closer and whispered, ‘I haven’t got to the best bit yet.’
I forced another yawn. ‘Don’t tell me, let me guess: some man in a long back coat turned up asking questions about him.’
‘Yes,’ she hissed. ‘But the point is, what did he want to know?’
I shrugged.
‘The valise! He wanted to know what had happened to the valise.’
‘What’s a valise?’
‘A case, you idiot!’
‘Why didn’t you say that?’
‘I thought you were a private dick, that’s how they speak.’
‘Where?’
‘In LA.’
‘This is Aberystwyth.’
She snorted. ‘Fat lot of good you are.’
‘So tell me about the valise.’
‘It belonged to the monk.’
‘What monk?’
She leaned back slightly and beamed at me. Her eyes were making dramatic downward movements and, following her gaze, I spotted her left hand tucked in tightly to her side, palm up, and making fluttering motions with the fingers as if she was trying to tickle a trout. I put a pound coin on her palm and the hand disappeared into the pocket of her pinny.
‘I knew straightaway he was a monk,’ she continued seamlessly. ‘Even though he was pretending not to be. We’ve had his type before. Up from the monastery on Caldy Island for a good time. They were room-mates, you see.’
‘So what was in the valise?’
‘How should I know, I don’t go looking in other people’s cases.’
‘Not much you don’t!’
She flushed. ‘Well of all the … any more of that and I won’t tell you the rest.’
I nodded her to go on.
She held out her hand and tickled another trout.
I shook my head and turned to go. ‘Sorry, I can’t afford it.’
‘But don’t you want to know what happened to the valise, it’s the best bit.’
‘What was inside it was the best bit, but you say you don’t know. I don’t believe you, by the way. I don’t believe there’s a single bag, case, coat or drawer in that crummy hovel you haven’t stuck your nosey beak into. But if it makes you feel better to deny it, that’s up to you.’
‘Oooh you dirty rotten chiseller!’ She sniffed forcibly. ‘I should have known what to expect from the son of a donkey-man. Well suit yourself. Now you’ll never know what happened to the valise.’
‘I already know. There’s only one thing that could have happened to it.’ I walked out and threw over my shoulder as I left, ‘The Dean must have taken it, otherwise you wouldn’t have mentioned it.’
As I left the house I bumped into someone arriving in a hurry. It was the old lady from the bay window at the Excelsior. She was heavily wrapped-up to disguise herself and pretended not to know me, but it was her all right. I could feel the hot smothering shame that, underneath all the finery, the lorgnette and the etiquette, she was the same as the rest of them. Borne in on a floodtide of longing that she could no more defy than the beaver can stop himself from building a dam. That eternal drive to gather round the village well and pour scorn on her neighbours for failing to live up to a code that no one else had ever managed to live up to either.
I walked out into the street as the room behind me thundered with the explosive percussion of five hundred orthopaedic boots stamping on the boards, accompanied by shrill Red Indian whoops. Above the tumult, a voice rose exultantly, crying, ‘E’d have bloody flattened her if he’d found out, wouldn’t he!’
Out in the street Ionawr came up to me from the shadows and put her hand in mine. I could see now in the yellow streetlight she was dressed much like any other kid of her age. Faded jeans flared at the bottom over absurd platform shoes, too much make-up and too little on underneath the fur coat: a skimpy halter-neck top that didn’t reach down as far as her navel. You saw girls like this all the time walking down the street hand in hand with men old enough to be their fathers or even grandfathers. And they really could be were it not for that furtive air that marks them out and gives the game away: that strange awkwardness that comes from having to concentrate on the simple task of walking; and from the insane overwhelming belief that everyone in the street that night can read your thoughts. The walk of shame that only dissolves when the bedroom door slams gratefully shut.
The cold had deepened and stung our cheeks like the kiss of a jellyfish. We cut through the castle and headed for Pier Street. There weren’t many dining options at this time of night – if you discounted the 24-hour whelk stalls on the Prom.
‘We could go to the Indian,’ Ionawr said hesitantly, reading my face to gauge my reaction.
‘That’s not the sort of place to take a lady, even one …’
‘One what?’
‘Oh nothing.’
‘I know what you were going to say. Even one like me.’
‘No I wasn’t.’
‘Yes you were. Don’t deny it, it doesn’t matter. I know what I want to eat: something traditional Welsh like my grandmother used to make when I was a kid.’
‘That’s a bit of a tall order.’
‘They do caawl at the Chinese.’ She took my hand and pulled me. ‘Come on.’
I hesitated.
‘What’s wrong?’
‘Did you hear that?’
‘What?’
I thought for a moment and then said, ‘Oh nothing.’ We carried on. And then I stopped again.
‘We’re being followed.’
‘Are you sure? I can’t see anyone.’
‘I’ve felt it since we left the game.’
I sent Ionawr on ahead and slunk into a doorway and waited. The footsteps got louder and louder. When the guy passed I grabbed him and threw him into the doorway.
‘Oh my Lord!’ said a voice. It was Smokey G. Jones, her tiny head projecting from the collar in her coat like a light bulb. ‘Don’t kill me, please!’
‘Mrs Jones! What are you doing? I thought you were following me.’
‘I was. Only I didn’t mean any harm. I just wanted to ask you. No harm at all.’
‘Ask me what?’
‘If you’d have a word with her, please, Mr Knight, just a word. This arthritis is something terrible. It’s all them cups of tea in me fighting days.’
‘Have a word with who?’
‘Miss Calamity. She’s cut me supply down. I need me placebo, Mr Knight, I can’t get through a day without it. But she’s gone and cut me supply.’
Just then Ionawr reappeared and Mrs Jones stopped and looked at her. ‘Hmm.’ She sniffed. ‘What baggage.’ She walked off.
It was often mayhem in the small take-away but tonight it was quiet. A few students, a few locals sitting on the hard-backed chairs, stupefied by drink into a morose silence, killing time softly like holidaymakers at a strike-bound airport. At the counter a Chinese girl in her mid-teens was doing her homework, a curtain of silky black hair falling forward to protect her from the gaze of the customers, falling in a delicate curl like the clef on a musical score.
I coughed and she looked up.
‘Can I help you, sir?’
‘I hear you sell caawl now.’
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Would you like some?’
‘Is it good?’
‘People who know about these things say it is. Personally I’ve never tried it.’
‘Quite an unusual dish to find in a Chinese restaurant.’
‘We Chinese have to adapt.’ She wrote down the order and handed it through the serving-hatch. ‘And it brings in the crowds.’
‘Isn’t it a bit dishonest?’
She shrugged. ‘I don’t know, is it? In my grandmother’s province they have a tree that gets pollinated by bats, so the tree gives off a perfume of dead mice. No one complains about that.’
‘Except maybe the cats.’
She smiled and took our money. ‘Anyway, lamb stew with lumps of cheese – it’s not so very hard to make.’
‘Ah! but the cheese has to be added with love,’ I said.
Someone by the door farted and his mates burst into crude guffaws of laughter. I fought the urge to look round and waited for the prickle of shame to subside.
The girl said, ‘We add all our ingredients with love, our customers deserve nothing less.’ She took the cartons of caawl and placed them carefully in the paper bag. ‘I’ve seen you before somewhere, but you’re not a regular.’
‘With my father, maybe, on the Prom. He’s the donkey-man.’
‘Ah of course!’ She handed me the food. ‘You round-eye are so sentimental about your animals. Bon appetit!’
On the Prom the wind roared past our ears like a tube train rushing out of a tunnel. The tide had risen and each time the water thundered into the base of the sea-wall, spray flared up like a series of jack-in-the-box ghosts. I had one arm over Ionawr’s shoulders, clutching her against me for warmth, and I held the brown paper bag with its cargo of hot caawl at arm’s length like a lantern – two wayfarers lost in the night.
‘Do you know what she was talking about?’ I said. ‘Asking Calamity for some placebo?’
‘No idea, but if she’s getting it from Calamity, who knows what it is.’
Electro-illuminated dwarves danced drunkenly on the swinging cable overhead, and down by the bandstand we heard the sound of youths jeering. We walked on and as we got closer the jeering of the youths became punctuated by faint Spanish cries, ‘No, please leave us alone, Señores!’
The lads were dancing round in a circle, and in the centre there lay a man. Next to the man, on the floor, was a ripped-open suitcase.
‘Hey!’ I shouted. Slightly wrong-footed by the intrusion, they stopped and turned to face us. There was silence for a while, except for the sea exploding like distant artillery, and then I heard the Spaniard again, squeaking above the muffled roar. ‘Please, sir, we are just humble peasants!’ It was the dummy, Señor Rodrigo, and lying on the floor, battered and kicked and covered in cement grime, was Mr Marmalade. Ionawr gasped. One of the youths was holding Señor Rodrigo by his ankles, upside down over the railings. His eyes had rolled upward in their sockets and in the garish mix of bright lights and shadows thrown by the streetlamps and the overhead illuminations, his wooden face had acquired a cast of terror.
The youth gave him a shake and the other lads cheered. Mr Marmalade was making desperate attempts to get up, but every time he half-raised himself one of the lads would shove him back down with the sole of his boot.
‘Gottle of fucking geer!’ they shouted. Mr Marmalade was clutching his chest above the heart and gasping.
‘Somos solamente campesinos pobres, mi amigo!’ wailed the dummy.
‘You leave him alone, you bullies!’ shouted Ionawr. The leader of the youths shouted, ‘What the fuck do you want?’
‘Somos solamente campesinos pobres, mi amigo!’
‘And shut that fuckin’ dummy up!’
The kid smashed the dummy’s head twice against the metal of the railings. One of the eyes came out. Ionawr screamed. Mr Marmalade was now making obscene sucking sounds and holding his chest, his eyes bulging as if something was pushing them out of his head from the inside.
‘Somos solamente campesinos pobres, mi amigo!’
I stepped forward and punched the lead yob. Despite the swagger and posturing, he was probably not much more than eighteen or nineteen and slightly built. He fell sprawling on to the pavement. I kicked him viciously in the stomach and he grunted in pain. Across the road a casement window screeched open and a woman in a nightie leaned out and cried, ‘I’ve called the police, you bastards, they’re on the way!’ And as if in confirmation we heard the distant wail of a siren starting up. None of the lads had the guts to make a move on me. The leader got to his feet and, seeing the distant blue flash of the approaching prowl car, took to his heels, followed by his gang.
We kneeled down by Mr Marmalade. Over by the railings, like the dummy that continues talking as his master drinks a glass of milk, the shattered mannikin continued to plead for their lives.
‘Somos solamente campesinos pobres, mi amigo!’
Maybe it was the wind plucking strange notes from the musical stave of the seaside railings. Or maybe the terror of the night, working on our own dark fears and imaginings, had somehow transformed the voices of the approaching cops. Or maybe we just dreamed it. Because as we kneeled in the grime and Ionawr cradled Mr Marmalade’s head it was clear that the old ventriloquist’s heart had already given out and instead of milk he had drained the cup of life.
‘Somos solamente campesinos pobres, mi amigo!’