The Unbearable Lightness of Being in Aberystwyth (17 page)

‘I know him,’ he said. ‘But he never rides the boxcars these days. On account of he can’t get up in time. A hobo needs a train with real wagons and the only one left now is the milk train. That goes pretty early and Rimbaud has demons in his soul that make it difficult for him to respond to the sound of an alarm clock. A psychologist would say that he was blocked.’

‘My partner, Calamity, suffers from the same blockage. She used to get it worst during term time. Now she’s left school so she gets it all year round.’

‘I see I am being mocked.’

‘I’m sorry, I just thought it was funny to use a fancy name for something so common as—’

Haywire thrust his arm out and pointed his finger at me, his face hot with anger. ‘Did I say everyone who can’t get up is blocked? No! I said no such thing. Sometimes I can’t get up but I have never entertained the idea that my problem has psychopathological origins. If you had taken the courtesy to mark my words, the actual ones I used rather than your fanciful interpretation of what you imagined I might have meant, and taken the courtesy to inquire into their meaning with an honest disposition rather than the crude desire to mock someone for his erudition, you would know that I never said this phenomenon applies in all cases where someone has difficulties in getting up. Such was your idiotic induction. I simply said Rimbaud was blocked. I took you for an educated man and shared with you some of my great learning. It was a stupid thing to do.’

‘You seem to know a lot about psychology.’

‘Once long ago I was a neurobiologist. Adviser to the space programme. You remember the monkeys?’

‘Funnily enough, I do.

‘Perhaps you think a hobo cannot possess great learning?’

‘I don’t think that at all. Tell me why is he blocked.’

‘Because they executed his brother at dawn. And the episode has haunted him ever since.’

‘Did he watch?’

‘No, he did not watch. But he planned to. Now I know you will probably ask yourself who on earth would want to go and watch his brother’s execution? But the problem is, what else are you going to do? It’s not like you’ve got anything more important on at the time is it? So he promises his little brother to be there and kiss him before he dies. But, alas, he oversleeps. He opens his eyes at noon and runs down to the prison but everyone has gone home and all he sees is the mound of lime by the wall giving off steam – that thin evanescence that betokens the departure of his brother’s soul.’

‘Have you heard about his missing years?’

‘Oh yes.’

‘Do you know where he went?’

‘No. But I wouldn’t book a holiday there, wherever it was.’

‘Do you think they’ll keep us here until after lunch?’

‘I hope so. Mondays is minestrone soup.’

Ten minutes later a different deputy walked in with a bunch of keys and opened the door.

‘Which one of you is Haywire?’

‘He is,’ said Haywire, and I walked out. The deputy held out a form for me to sign and I wrote the initials H. W.

The barrel organ was parked outside; the cheap cardboard suitcase stood in the doorway; and Gabriel Bassett’s hat hung from the stand. But there was no monkey.

‘She’s not well,’ he said.

I nodded.

‘It’s because of the shock you gave her last time. Saying you’d seen Mr Bojangles.’

‘I can’t tell you how sorry I am about that. It was such a blunder.’

‘I know it was just a mistake but, you know, she keeps saying, “Maybe Mr Knight really did see him. Maybe he’s keeping it secret until my birthday or something.”’

‘It won’t happen again.’

‘I’ve just popped round to remind you – just another week.’

‘No problem,’ I lied, ‘Calamity has it almost sewn up.’

I could tell he didn’t believe me so I changed the subject. ‘I see you brought the old case along.’

‘Yes,’ he said sadly. ‘I know you think my case is funny.’

‘No I don’t. I just don’t understand how anyone can carry a case round all day and not know what’s in it.’

He looked at me but said nothing.

‘Aren’t you tempted to take a peek?’

‘Of course I am, you bloody fool!’ he shouted, suddenly
overcome with passion. ‘All the damn time! But I can’t, don’t you see? I damn well can’t!’

‘But why the hell not?’

‘Because I’m too scared.’ He looked at me with a fierce anguish burning in his eyes. ‘I can’t take the risk. Sometimes, late at night when everyone has gone to bed, I stare at it and I stare and it’s … it’s almost as if I can see inside it. Almost as if … I … I just concentrated a little bit harder, just a tiny little bit harder, I could see inside. Then I’d know. And then I go up to it and put my hand on the clasp to open it … and then … and then … I always stop myself. Always stop, just in time.’

‘But there might be something nice inside.’

He looked at me thoughtfully, as if giving this suggestion due consideration. Then he shook his head. ‘No.’

‘If it was me, I’d look.’

‘I did look once, you know. On the day I first got it, five years ago. But I’ve never had the courage to look again. It almost destroyed my life last time. This time God won’t give me a second chance, I just know it.’

‘Tell me what happened.’

He stared at me for a second or two, nodding his head slightly – either because he was working out whether I could be trusted or maybe just plucking up the courage to make the leap. Finally he gave a bigger, more affirmative nod, and said, ‘It was on a day just like today – in the middle of June five years ago. I was standing at Sospan’s stall eating an ice cream and I found to my embarrassment that I had no money to pay for it. There wasn’t a single cent in any of my pockets. Sospan said I could pay him later and asked me for my name and address. And I said, “Sure, my name is … my name is … my … er … name is …” And do you know what? I didn’t know my own name. I didn’t know who I was or where I came from. I had absolutely no memory at all. I didn’t even know how I came to be standing at his stall. I didn’t remember ordering the ice cream. It was as if I had just
dropped out of the sky or walked through a door from another dimension five minutes previously. The police were called and I was taken to the Enoc Enocs Foundation in Llanbadarn – you know the place I suppose? Where they give distressed gentlefolk a new career by training them to work a barrel organ.’

I nodded. ‘When I was in school we used to collect milk-bottle tops to buy a monkey.’

‘That’s right, everybody did.’

‘I could never understand why organ-grinding and not basketry or something more suitable for an old person.’

‘It’s because they’re not allowed by the terms of their charter. Captain Enocs was very particular. He got the idea in Palermo in 1873. The Sicilians told him organ-grinding is the perfect career for people who have fallen on hard times. All you have to do is turn the handle and leave the rest up to the monkey. What could be simpler? They told him an organ-grinder never starves because people will always pay you if they like your music and, if they don’t, they will pay you to go away.’

‘Seems to make sense.’

‘The people at the Enoc Enocs Foundation were very kind to me. They searched my pockets for clues to my identity but all I had on me was my jacket from Gabriel’s, the gents’ outfitters in Portland Street, and a packet of Bassett’s Liquorice All-Sorts. There was just one left – the jelly-centred one with the coating of tiny blue beads. There was also a small red chit of paper in my trouser pocket: a receipt from the left luggage office at the Cliff Railway base station. This was how I came by my name: Gabriel, Bassett.’

‘I suppose you’re lucky they didn’t call you “Lefty Luggage”.’

He looked at me blankly and then continued.

‘It was arranged for the chit to be redeemed and the suitcase brought to me. A cheap brown cardboard suitcase, scuffed and marked. A bit tatty. And so naturally I opened it. Can you imagine what that feels like? To have no idea who you are, to be totally
divorced from that reservoir of memory that constitutes the essence of who you are? And then to open a case containing, or so you believe, the answer to this baffling mystery? To come face to face with a man who is utterly strange and unknown, utterly alien to you, and yet who shares with you the most intimate bond a human being can share with another. Can you imagine that? I’m sure you cannot. But I have experienced it. Picture to yourself the anticipation. With trembling fingers I lifted the lid and looked down and there lying in the case was …’

I fell asleep.

Lord knows how I did it. Maybe it was the heat or the hypnotic droning of the traffic like far-off wasps or perhaps it was the after-effect of the knocks on the head, but I awoke half an hour later to find Calamity in a strange pitch of excitement and Gabriel Bassett and his suitcase gone. Calamity was pinning a new card to the wall. She looked at me and then rushed out saying, ‘Can’t stop, I think we’ve cracked it!’

With a head stuffed with cotton wool I made a coffee and then walked to the Devil’s Bridge train station. I bought a ticket to Nantyronen – the special saver return that includes admission to the Iago Prytherch ‘home-stay’ – and took a pew on the train alongside the loco-spotters and families on holiday.

At Nantyronen I followed the National Trust signs. They led through the village street and then over a stile and across a field. The track was bounded on one side by a raised earthen bank covered in gorse, and by a straggly wire fence on the other. After a hundred yards or so there was a drystone wall and another stile with a sign that said, ‘You are now entering Iago Prytherch Country’. The cottage was further down in the valley. Along the way I passed some sheep who were chewing cud and smelling of dung. The sign in their midst said, ‘A few sheep penned in a gap of cloud’. Further on was an arrow pointing west and a sign that read, ‘The bald Welsh hills’. Just before the cottage was a
ploughed field that I was informed consisted of ‘a stiff sea of clods that glint in the wind’. And then I came to the cottage. Chunks of undressed stone beneath a roof of smooth mauve slate. A rusty nail knocked into the wall held the end of a washing line that stretched to a slanting pole in the garden. The sign said, ‘Clothes, sour with years of sweat and animal contact’. It began to drizzle and I made for the door and ducked under a low lintel made lower by the sign ‘Warning: spittled mirth’.

Iago sat motionless in the chair beside the fire. He fixed me with a stare but said nothing and then leaned slowly across and spat into the flames. There was a little hiss in the grate. Then he resumed his position and stared ahead with a look that had a frightening vacancy, like the hollow of a cave where the wind gnaws on an old bone and where the call of its passing leaves knowledge accreted like scale or scar tissue, its meaning subsisting interstitially, between words, gathered slowly across the centuries like the fat drops of rain dripping from the dead husk of last year’s hive. I watched hypnotised. It was amazing how he did it. His witch-black chair extended beneath him like rotting tubers and he clutched with udder-blasted hands to steady himself in the giddying tarantella of the years such that his whole frame trembled like a tree on a ridge, whose sharp twigs scratch the face of the toothless moon. The worn-out rag of his soul was draped on a toasting fork before the fire, in the black-snouted, life-blasting corners of the year, but drew no warmth from the dry brown dregs of summer coughing consumptively in the grate. He turned once more to stare at me, and I beheld not a man but the devil shrouded in the rook’s cloak, and wearing Glyndwr’s hat. His mouth opened and it was as if the earth was cloven to reveal the grey viscera wherein were interred, gloved in clay and shame-marrowed, the sweet corpses of the men whom Merlin betrayed. No words came, just the chthonic yelp of a heart that yearns for the gruel of love.

‘Hello,’ he said.

I shook my head and rubbed my eyes to break the spell and, when free of the grip of the enchantment, managed to utter, ‘It’s OK, mate, you can skip the Iago Prytherch routine – I’m a private detective.’

He jerked with sudden animation, threw his hands up and laughed and said, ‘Well bloody hell, a peeper! Why didn’t you say?’

‘I wanted to ask you a few questions, if you don’t mind. You don’t have to answer them.’

‘I played a peeper once, or rather I auditioned – didn’t get the part.’

‘Trust me, you wouldn’t have enjoyed it.’

‘What do you want to know about, then?’

‘Some of the work you did before you did this.’

‘There was nothing else. Been Iago Prytherch all my life.’

‘Sure,’ I said and put a fiver down on the kitchen table next to the ‘Reluctant Swedes’. ‘I hear you did a part in a movie of Myfanwy’s funeral?’

‘The night club singer?’ He reached over and took the money. ‘I didn’t get the part. Would you like a cup of tea? Sorry the kettle doesn’t whine, it just whistles.’

‘Whistling’s fine.’

He stood up and I followed him into the kitchen. He shoved some root vegetables across the wooden table and fetched down some cups and saucers.

‘These are mangels for the cows. I have to dock them with a half-witted grin of satisfaction, but it’s not my favourite bit, it feels a bit stagey if you ask me. It was my spittled mirth that got me the job. Would you like to see it?’