The Unbearable Lightness of Being in Aberystwyth (10 page)

BOOK: The Unbearable Lightness of Being in Aberystwyth
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‘She’ll be back, Dad, don’t worry.’

‘I know.’

‘Couple of days, give her time to get a bit hungry, she’ll come back. They always do.’

‘I know son. I wasn’t even thinking about her.’ He continued looking out, lost in thought, across the landscape crawling by, and added, ‘Just can’t think where she could have got to.’

Mrs Prestatyn had visited Eeyore a week ago, and that was the reason he was here today and not searching for a wayward donkey. She’d received a letter from Frankie Mephisto in Shrewsbury
prison. It wasn’t the first time he’d written to her, she said. He’d been sending her letters on and off for the past few years. And she’d never told anyone. But he was due out this month and that changed things. Mrs Prestatyn’s daughter had been seventeen when she disappeared. It was just after the Great Cliff Railway Robbery, of which Frankie was the mastermind. She left one morning to go fishing in the estuary, as she normally did in summer, and never came back. A few weeks later they found out that the gang had used the Loothouse to count the money and in the cellar they found the missing girl’s shoe. It didn’t prove anything. She could have gone there herself, for any number of reasons, but the coincidence was too great for most folk. Eeyore had worked the case. Every old cop has a case like this: the one that stays with him long after he leaves the force. It binds him to Mrs Prestatyn in a way neither of them quite understands. Like a secret shared between two lovers from long ago. Once a month he walks past her house on the Prom and waves at her in the window, airing a room that has lain empty for twenty-five years.

The letters from Frankie were always the same. He said he had been visited by the Holy Ghost. That he had changed. And he asked for Mrs Prestatyn’s blessing.

‘It was never proved that Frankie’s mob killed Mrs Prestatyn’s girl,’ said Eeyore. ‘We never found a body or anything. Just the shoe. Frankie always said they had nothing to do with it.’

‘Do you believe him?’

‘No.’

‘Do you think he’s likely to change his tune now?’

‘Not really, but I feel as if I owe it to Mrs Prestatyn to try.’

‘Surely he’s not serious?’

‘It’s hard to say. I’ve seen cases like this before. It’s always damned difficult because people like Frankie devote a lifetime to the art of counterfeiting honesty and sincerity. So how can you tell? And yet you can’t dismiss it, because twenty-five years in
prison is a long time. It changes a man. Except for the irredeemable psychopaths, they all mellow to some extent; it’s not unknown for them to find the Lord. Or He finds them. If Frankie would just tell Mrs Prestatyn where her girl is buried, so her soul could find peace, that would be a Christian act about which there could be no dispute. And what would it cost him now? After all this time? Nothing as far as I can see.’

‘Asking for her blessing strikes me as a tall order.’

‘That’s because you only see her as she is now. You don’t see what a good woman she was before she lost her daughter. She used to be a lifeguard, did you know that?’

I shook my head.

‘Long ago, when she was a young woman. Saved a couple of drowning holiday-makers, gave them the kiss of life. We tried to give her a commendation, once, civic honour or something. But she spurned it; scorned the very idea of receiving a prize for saving a life.’ He nodded to himself. ‘I admire that.’

The train slowed down at the approach to Shrewsbury station and glided between the eleventh-century Abbey and the stadium of Shrewsbury Town Football Club. Two sacred arenas where men chanted and waited for a miracle that never came.

A group of hard-looking men stood at the platform’s end; men with shaven heads, and flattened noses that reminded me of the boxer at the funfair who takes on all-comers. And never loses. Crude, homemade tattoos adorned the backs of their hands. We walked up to them and Eeyore made a slight nod in recognition to the lead man and he returned the nod.

‘Archie.’

‘Eeyore.’

‘Long time no see.’

‘You’re looking well.’

‘You too.’

It was the highly deferential exchange of men who respect but
do not particularly like each other. The head man, Archie, was shadowed by two men who were obviously the muscle of the group. They stared at us through narrowed eyes, wary of trickery.

‘Frankie sends his regards,’ said Archie. ‘You’ll forgive me for asking, but are either of you carrying?’

We shook our heads and one of the tough guys ran practised fingers through my coat checking for ironware. He was about to start on Eeyore and Archie stopped him. ‘The old man’s OK.’

We were blindfolded and helped into the back of a car that smelt of old leather.

‘Are the blindfolds necessary?’ I said. ‘I thought Frankie was serving the remainder doing community service.’

‘His whole life has been a service to the community, only some sections of it don’t see it that way.’

After a short drive, the car stopped and we were ushered into a building in which everybody spoke in whispers and people’s feet made loud squeaking sounds. There was also a rustle of newspaper. We climbed some stairs and went through a spring-loaded door that smelt of brass polish and then the blindfolds were removed. I found myself looking into the eyes of an owl. A stuffed one, in a dusty case.

Frankie Mephisto came out from behind the case and reached out a hand in greeting to Eeyore. He was smaller than I expected, thin and wiry, but slightly rounded around the belly in the way old people sometimes get when they lose their flesh but still put it on around the waist. He was wearing a pale green paisley-pattern shirt and matching tie with a sleeveless maroon v-necked sweater. The sort that comes as a set in a cellophane-wrapped ensemble from British Home Stores. His face seemed amiable enough, and had that vague familiarity that notorious criminals share with celebrities. His pate shone with the patina that foreheads get from a lifetime of hitting noses.

‘Good to see you, Eeyore.’

‘Frankie.’

‘My boys been looking after you?’

‘Can’t complain.’

‘Come, we’ll go to my little cubbyhole and a have a cuppa.’ He led us through a room of glass cases, covered in dust, a natural history section that had been closed for a decade or more. His cubbyhole was piled high with papers and books. There were seats and a desk, a kettle and a jar of instant coffee.

‘You were lucky to be sent to a prison overlooking the station, given how you feel about trains,’ said Eeyore in a weak attempt at pleasantries.

‘Luck has nothing to do with it. It’s Home Office policy. It’s like a baby’s dummy.’

‘I thought maybe they would try and wean you off.’

‘No point; it goes too deep. Ask the Jesuits.’

‘The Jesuits?’ I asked politely.

‘It was them, wasn’t it? They said, “Give me the child until he is seven and I will give you the man.”’

I slid my gaze across to Eeyore who hardened his features with that expression meant to convey the instruction, ‘Humour him!’

‘Seventh birthday, that’s when it happens. That’s the day a crook discovers his vocation in life – banks or trains.’ Frankie poured the boiling water into the cups and stirred the instant coffee. ‘Rightly speaking, he doesn’t actually choose – that’s done for him by his aunt. Wouldn’t you agree? She’s the one who chooses the birthday card.’ He turned to Eeyore for confirmation, and Eeyore nodded as if it was kitchen table wisdom.

‘She’s the one.’ He stirred the coffees loudly with a dessert spoon. ‘You remember that card – all boys get it – either a racing car on the front, or – ah sweet memory – a puffing billy! And those gold embossed letters,
Now you are Seven
. And inside, the postal order for five shillings. That’s when the love is born.’

‘And you never lose it.’

He laughed wistfully, ‘No you never lose it. What was it Oscar Wilde said? “Each man robs the thing he loves.”’

I let my gaze wander across the glass cases that were piled higgledy-piggledy outside the room.

‘Why are you tormenting Mrs Prestatyn, Frankie?’ asked Eeyore. ‘Don’t you think she’s suffered enough?’

Frankie looked serious. ‘We’ve all suffered, Eeyore. All of us. She doesn’t have a monopoly on it.’

‘You took away her girl.’

‘So they say.’

‘Everyone knows it was you, Frankie.’

‘There was never any proof.’

‘They found the shoe at the Loothouse.’

‘So what? When’s the last time you walked along the beach and didn’t find an old shoe washed up? What does that prove?’

‘It’s buried in Llanbadarn Cemetery, a single shoe in a coffin; Mrs Prestatyn goes and puts flowers on the grave every week, waiting …’

‘Just like Cinderella.’

‘It was your mob, Frankie. The only thing we don’t know is what you did with her.’

‘Say it was,’ said Frankie thoughtfully. ‘Say it was. What of it? I was an angry man in those days, Eeyore. A man with a heart so full of fury I scarce knew myself most of the time what I was doing or why. But I’m not the man I was when I came here twenty-five years ago. I didn’t write to torment her; I sought her blessing, that’s all.’

‘She doesn’t believe you. You’ve made a lifetime career out of lying and deception.’

‘Oh, I know that. I know she doesn’t. She wrote and told me – I bet she didn’t tell you this: she wrote and told me I was putting it on so when I died I could sweet-talk my way round St Peter at the Gate. But she wouldn’t let me get away with it, she wrote. She said she would see me dead yet, and stand over my
corpse and then she would bend down and bite my tongue out so I couldn’t bamboozle my way into heaven. Bite my tongue out she said, like in that movie set in the Turkish prison.’

‘You can’t blame her for feeling like that.’

‘Let me tell you something, Eeyore. You see all this? This building?’ He flung out an arm. ‘This used to be the school where Charles Darwin studied, did you know that? That guy who said we were descended from the apes.’

‘I didn’t know that,’ said Eeyore.

‘That’s right, they laughed at him, but they obviously didn’t know anything about apes. I’ve been reading all about it. It’s shocking the things apes do in the wild. They kill their children and eat them; drive the elderly out and watch them starve; rape the girls; wage war on each other. Can anyone seriously doubt that we are descended from them?’ He motioned towards the cabinets with the hand holding the coffee mug, ‘They are our brothers to the last detail. We’ve even got one in there that died of a heart attack like my old man. And one that lost his eye in a fight like my mother.’

‘Where’s this leading, Frankie?’ I asked.

Frankie gave me a frigid stare, the sort of look that recalls a time when no man would have dared talk to him like that. He broke off and stared into the middle distance where problems of the ineffable are traditionally to be found.

‘I used to think that’s all there was. All we were. Apes in suits. But then one day, fifteen or so years ago, something happened. Something happened to change all that.’ Frankie paused a while and his eyes glistened with the beginning of tears. ‘You could say on that day I walked with Jesus. I know you will sneer. You will ask what on earth would Jesus want with a slag like Frankie Mephisto. But you would be wrong to think like that. Slags like Frankie are exactly the sort of sinner Jesus came to save. On that day he walked with me, and he told me, he said, “Frankie, I came down to earth to teach you lot how to love, and you fucking ignored me!”’

He wiped a sleeve roughly across his brimming eyes, stood up, and invited us over to the window. ‘That used to be the old prison over there a hundred years ago. And down there, where the car park is now, was the gallows. That’s one reason why they moved Darwin’s school. Because they thought it was inappropriate for the schoolboys to witness public executions in their school yard. Biggest mistake they could have made, if you ask me. Every school should have a gallows in the yard. That way the kids might learn something.’

Eeyore and I walked back towards the door.

‘Just tell the poor woman where her daughter is buried,’ said Eeyore.

‘I can’t do that, Eeyore,’ said Frankie. ‘I can’t do that. Even if I wanted to, I couldn’t. Because I don’t know. I had a
consigliere
who took care of things like that.’

‘And who was that?’

‘You know I can’t tell you.’

‘Can’t you at least ask him what he did with the girl?’

‘I have done. He says he can’t remember.’

We walked down to the river and along the footpath towards the Royal Salop Infirmary. It stood perched high on a hill overlooking the Severn, a building that had started life a century ago as the traditional home of the damned, a workhouse.

They had told us we were wasting our time. They said Brainbocs lived in his own cell now, one for which there was no key. A portable bubble that went wherever he did, enclosing him with a perimeter that stopped a foot or so from his outstretched fingertips. A bubble whose walls were made from the translucent membrane of a language no one understood. A tower of Babel with the entrance bricked up. They said he seemed happy enough in there but didn’t admit visitors.

BOOK: The Unbearable Lightness of Being in Aberystwyth
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