The Unbearable Lightness of Being in Aberystwyth (21 page)

Llunos walked to the door and stopped and turned. ‘You and me aren’t supposed to get on, you know that? We’re supposed to be adversaries because there’s a stupid book somewhere that says snoopers are jerks who need to be kicked out of town. But I threw that book away a long time ago. For a long time now I’ve loved you like a brother, you know that? I never say it because blokes like me don’t. That’s the way I was brought up and it’s too late to change now. But I did … and now … I can’t believe what I’ve heard here today, I really can’t. After working this festering moral sewer together for fifteen years, you throw the white fucking hat crap at me?!’ He turned in disgust and walked down the stairs shouting as he went, ‘White fucking hat!’

I ran to the door and shouted down the stairwell, ‘It was a miscarriage of justice, Llunos!’

‘So?!’ he shouted back.

‘So? I suppose she should have kept it to herself and hoped no one noticed!’

‘Why not?’ he shouted now from the street level. ‘That’s what I did when I found out!’

For a while I stayed there staring down at the empty stairwell and then walked back inside.

‘Sometimes it’s hard to do the right thing,’ said Calamity.

‘Well, you sure failed today.’

I walked to the window and stared out at Llunos turning at the junction with Great Darkgate Street. After a while the distant hum of the traffic outside faded and I became aware of a
soft squeaking sound, the noise of stifled weeping. I turned and walked over to Calamity and knelt down. She looked at me, eyelashes heavy with tears like raindrops on a branch. ‘Oh Louie, what have I done?’

MOMENTS WHEN I felt no fear:

At night, in the gaps between dreams, where time is extinguished.

Emerging from sleep – that instant of awareness before opening the eyes. I have learned you can prolong this instant in the same way yogis can lower their body’s metabolism.

Two occasions when people knocked me unconscious with a shovel. I must remember to write and thank them.

And, sometimes, under the ocean.

The caravan was warmer than blood when I got back. There was a parcel on the caravan step. It was from Siop-y-Pethe – a translation of Brainbocs’s ‘invented language’. I left it untouched on the table, put on my swimming trunks, and left the doors and windows open to clear the air. The sand was hot under foot and the wind warm and blustery, heavy with grains of salt. The tide was out, and the high-water mark demarcated by a wavy line of wet sticks tangled with blue nylon netting, plastic bags, and shampoo bottles from which all the writing had been washed away. I dropped my towel on the hot stones and walked through avenues of evaporating jelly fish. My feet hissed on the sand like a snare on drumskin, and then I reached the silver film of water, waded in and lay back. The water dancing next to my ears tinkled like a xylophone. And then I went under and the world was removed, sounding far away like the thumping of someone moving boxes in a cellar.

After my swim I returned to the caravan and began to read. The accompanying note explained that it appeared to be the
beginning of an epic poem about Myfanwy and, although it was always difficult rendering poetry in a different language, they had done their best to capture the mood.

Cider with Myfanwy

Like to the dog hit by the truck whose leg is withered
I scavenged at the bins of her love …

Note: this part has been crossed out, with the words, Damn! Damn! Damn!

Neither ask me about the colour of her hair,
Demand instead the conker—

This part is also crossed out

As the unclaimed coat left hanging on the pegs
Half an hour after the 4 o’clock bell
Does she esteem me …

The attempted poem is abandoned here and turns into a letter

Mama,
I watched from the Prom, once, as she wrestled in the sea with a boy. She was fifteen. Her bikini top came off and she brought her forearms forward and huddled inside them, and the boy tried to prise them apart. They both laughed so much. They did not know it at the time, and perhaps it would take a lifetime for them to grasp the truth of that hour. But it was available to me in its entirety as the gift of the outcast. I knew then that this was a moment that comes but once in a lifetime; this was the day they drank their cider with Rosie. And there would never be such a moment for me. Never anything sweeter than Lucozade.

I gathered the sheaves of paper together, lifted them and banged them on the table to align the edges. Myfanwy had sat at a table like this a few summers ago. We had played ludo and she told me between interminable waits for her first double six how Brainbocs had haunted her steps, smitten beyond the power of words to describe. Smitten with a depth of suffering that carefree Myfanwy whose life had been anointed with the love of others freely given couldn’t even begin to imagine; his torment a country she had never visited and which I had occasionally glimpsed in the eyes of the people who sat on my client’s chair. The seekers after benediction who, when the priests failed them, came to haunt my door and begged me to damn them with the truth about their cheating spouse. They would take out the sixpences collected in coronation mugs and spread them on my table and say, ‘Take it all,’ as if the silver mined from twenty years of Christmas puddings was a fortune too great for mortal men to count. Take it, and find out.

I can’t bear it any longer, it’s torture.

You think so? What do you know about torture? Have you ever been to a museum and seen an iron maiden? They used them for entertainment in the Middle Ages – a great time to be alive. A nice big metal sarcophagus that they stuck you in if they didn’t like you, with vicious inward-pointing spikes on the door. They made them shaped like a woman, too, which was a nice touch. And, when they closed the door, two spikes pierced your eyes and one went through your heart.

Is it worse than that?

Yes, it is.

The knock on the door was so soft it barely rose above the hiss from the gas lamp. I stopped breathing and listened. It came again. It couldn’t be a twig brushing against the aluminium skin of the caravan because it wasn’t loud enough. Maybe a dandelion had been blown against the door. I stood up, walked slowly
across and opened the door. Sister Cunégonde stood there and whispered, ‘Can I come in?’

I nodded and stood aside and went to put the kettle on. I also unscrewed the top of the rum bottle.

‘Nothing stronger than plain old tea for me,’ she said.

I took the tea cups over and put them down.

‘Seren’s gone,’ she said.

‘Gone?’

‘Run away.’

‘I haven’t seen her.’

She nodded.

‘Tell me what happened to her the other night.’

‘Which other night?’

I spluttered with the scorn that had been simmering near the surface for too long. ‘Oh let me see!’ I cried. ‘Which one could it be now? Oh, I know! What about the night when I came round and heard a girl screaming and saw Seren covered in blood fighting with two nuns and someone hit me over the head with a shovel?’

‘It wasn’t a shovel, it was a warming pan. And, anyway, I told you, she had a nosebleed – someone punched her on the nose.’

‘So why was she struggling?’

‘She was hysterical. She gets fits, you see.’

‘I don’t blame her.’

She shot me a glance and then looked down and pretended to be coy. ‘It’s partly your fault too.’

‘That’s a good one!’

Sister Cunégonde hesitated and looked down at the cup, then bit her lip.

‘I wouldn’t give you fifty cents for your acting.’

‘Sometime last year the girls played truant and went to Aberystwyth. They went to see that spot down at the harbour where the prostitute was killed. The stain in the tarmac that they can’t wash out. You know what adolescent girls are like.’

‘Not really, it’s been too long.’

‘Are you always so dark and bitter?’

‘Mostly.’

‘I’m sorry we hit you with the shovel.’

‘Don’t worry about it, being clouted with garden tools is my latest hobby. Tell me what adolescent girls are like.’

‘Highly impressionable. They think there is something romantic in such squalid stories.’

‘What stories?’

‘A lady of the night being murdered. Her lover, a handsome private detective – oh yes we read all about it in the newspapers. The girls knew instantly who you were that night you came round. They weren’t fooled for an instant by my story about you being from the gas board.’

‘If you’re talking about Bianca, I wasn’t her lover.’

‘It’s all one. The newspapers said you were. They said a lot else besides. Then when you started showing an interest in Seren the other girls were jealous.’

‘Since when have I taken an interest in her?’

‘She met you down at Meredith’s cottage, didn’t she? It’s OK, you don’t have to say anything, I know she probably asked you to keep it a secret and, like the gallant private eye that you are, you agreed. She thinks old Cunybongy is old and stupid and doesn’t know what’s going on. But I know she goes down there even though I’ve told her not to. The sand down there is a different colour, you see, and someone is traipsing it in to the Waifery two or three times a week …’

‘Maybe you should examine the bottoms of your shoes first.’

She winced. ‘What do you mean?’

‘You’re not averse to the odd midnight visit either, are you?’

She stared at me in genuine surprise and then hissed, ‘I s’pose I should have expected something like that from a … a … snooper!’

‘I wasn’t spying on you. I saw you by accident. It’s none
of my damn business and I don’t care tuppence where you go or what you do. As long as it remains not my business. Trouble is I’m starting to think there’s something funny about you that is my business. And before you start hatching any nasty little thoughts in your busybody mind, there’s nothing between me and Seren. Nothing that anyone has any call to hide from the light of day. I met her at Meredith’s, that’s all. It was a harmless meeting. I don’t know what she told the other girls but—’

‘Yes, yes, of course. I wasn’t suggesting anything like that. Not suggesting you did anything to encourage her or anything … it’s just that the story no doubt got embroidered a bit in the telling, and the other girls were jealous, that’s all. I mean I expect so. I don’t know. I’m just guessing but it’s not hard to guess sometimes how things are. I was her age once as well, despite what people think, and I wasn’t particularly different. I was just as good at climbing the wall, thinking no one knew. I wonder if there ever was a time when no one knew …’

‘So one of the girls thumped her.’

‘She was boasting that she was your … your friend and a fight broke out. As I’ve told you, she’s not particularly popular at the best of times. The fight caused her to have a fit. She has them sometimes. That’s all it was.’

‘All it was.’

‘Yes.’

‘I’m glad we cleared it up. Two girls fight over some petty squabble, one gets a nosebleed, and then a fit. So naturally the only thing to be done is hit me over the head with a shovel.’

‘We didn’t know what to do.’

‘You’re a lousy liar, Sister Cunégonde.’

‘You must think what you wish.’

‘And now she’s run away.’

‘Yes, it seems so.’

‘You don’t seem too bothered.’

‘It’s not the first time. She normally comes back after a few days.’

‘So where does Frankie Mephisto fit into all this?’

‘I’ve no idea what you mean.’

‘Stop trying to take me for a fool. Frankie Mephisto is a gangster serving time in Shrewsbury jail. He’s just your type actually – a good Samaritan. They say he’s got a little sideline helping people in trouble. But every time he does that he stores up a debt for them in a little bank account in the name of Faust. Folk say he’s about to be released. He did the crime, he did the time. Now he’s on his way to Aberystwyth. Some people say he’s already out. I wouldn’t know. They say he’s planning one last, final job. His swansong. I wouldn’t know about that either. And frankly I wouldn’t care. Except that the girl I love went missing from Ynyslas and, for some reason that no one has been able to explain to me, one of the girls at your Waifery planted a locket on the dunes meant to throw the search off the scent. And I might be able to not care a damn about that too, might be able to put it down to a silly adolescent prank, but then you come into the picture and every instinct I’ve got tells me you are one strange kettle of fish. And maybe I could manage not to care about that if it wasn’t for this awkward fact that Frankie Mephisto is calling in the favours, drawing cheques on that account marked Faust, and something tells me you are one scared old woman. Any of that mean anything to you? It doesn’t make much sense to me at the moment. Maybe you can help me work it out?’

‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’