Don’t Cry For Me Aberystwyth

Chapter 10

THE NEXT DAY was Sunday and we drove to Lampeter, about half an hour’s journey south-east of Aberystwyth. Calamity had spoken on the phone to Emily’s roommate at the college and she was willing to talk to us. Her name was Eleri. On the way, Calamity tried to recap the case but there wasn’t much to recap.

‘We’ve got an old man dressed as Father Christmas. He goes to see the new Clip movie and afterwards gets whacked. Maybe intentionally, maybe accidentally.’

‘My money’s on accidentally. Could have happened to anyone – he just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. Simple drive-by slaying.’

‘My money’s on that, too. The Clip movie was made from footage found by workmen rebuilding the Pier.’

‘There was a druid inscription warning them not to open the room, so naturally they did just that.’

‘The movie is about the Mission House Siege. Something bad happened there, so bad no one wants to talk about it, although they don’t show it in the movie.’

‘The army chaplain went mad.’

‘A taxidermist saw the movie and hanged himself from Trefechan Bridge.’

‘A guy called Elijah turns up claiming to be the brother of the dead Father Christmas.’

‘We think the dead guy hid a ticket from the Pier hat-check office in the alley before he died. The item deposited is a photo of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. This angle is potentially very interesting.’

‘Or it’s a red herring.’

‘I’ve got a hunch it’s the key to the whole thing.’

‘I’ve got a hunch you’re only saying that because you’re star-struck about the Pinkertons.’

‘No, I’m not.’

‘Believe me, there’s nothing special about them. You may think so now, but one day when you run into one of them you’ll realise he’s exactly like anyone else: a tired, soul-weary, overworked guy in a crumpled suit, with a failed marriage and a suitcase in the attic in which he stores a load of dusty things that used to be the youthful ideals he started out with.’

Calamity looked at me askance. ‘Sounds like you know this guy.’

‘He’s every man who got past thirty without making something of his life. That’s most people in Aberystwyth, including me.’

She thought for a second and decided not to go down that route. ‘What about the Queen of Denmark?’

‘I’ve no idea.’

‘Think she’s for real?’

‘No, but then the whole thing is so crazy maybe she is.’

‘That’s what I think. It’s hard to believe someone would invent a routine like that if they were trying to trick you, because only someone really stupid would fall for it.’

‘Which means she must be for real, because if she’s not it means I’m really stupid.’

‘Don’t be like that. It means I’m really stupid, too.’

‘That’s all right, then. The odds against two people being so stupid are too formidable. She must be genuine.’

‘You really think so?’

‘I’m a hundred per cent certain she’s genuine. All the same, if you get a moment, speak to Llunos about getting the calls traced.’

We reached Lampeter College and drove under a stone arch into an inner court yard. We parked and approached the first student we saw. They weren’t hard to spot. They were all wearing the distinctive uniform of Lampeter College of Theology: a henna, beige and grey striped scarf over a tan duffel coat printed with a repeating pattern of crosses and coffins. The girl said Eleri was teaching Sunday School. Colleges don’t normally teach children on Sunday morning, but this was no ordinary college. They took seriously the scholar’s vocation of shining a light in the darkness. The girl walked us across a quad towards a low single-storey wing of the college, through an arched door into an old-fashioned schoolroom: rows of wooden desks scarred with years of wear and tear. Fuzzy yellow lights hung from the ceiling. It smelled of paraffin and that subtle mixture of sweetness and fart that collects around cloistered children. The children all stood up when we entered.

Eleri greeted us warmly and shook our hands. ‘This is home economics,’ she said. ‘Just the basic stuff at this age: weaving fabric from cobwebs, making soap from grit, anthracite perfume, penny hoarding, a hundred uses for stale bread, fifty simple one-cauldron dishes, making shoes out of slate. You know the sort of thing.’

‘It all sounds very impressive,’ I said. ‘My late mother, God rest her soul, always insisted on a traditional education.’

‘I knew it the moment I saw you,’ said Eleri. ‘Come, let’s try them with their catechism. You’ll be impressed.’ She turned to the class. ‘Right now, girls, who can tell me how the Soldiers for Jesus were founded?’

Hands went up around the room and the teacher pointed. ‘Yes, Meurig.’

‘Ma’am, there were three sisters from Llandre and they were walking one day and they chanced upon a woman who later scholars have revealed to have been an apparition of the Virgin Mary.’

‘Very good. And then what happened? Menna?’

‘Ma’am, she was drinking holy water from a brown paper bag and her speech was slurred.’

‘That’s right. Now who can tell us what she said?’

‘She revealed a sacred truth to the children.’

‘And what was it?’

Some of the hands went down.

‘Yes, Rhiannon.’

‘Miss, she said human happiness was just a fleeting will-o’-the-wisp; the tap of the hand on the window of a traveller in the night.’

‘A traveller who is running from the gallows, miss,’ another child added.

‘That’s right, very good. And what else did she say? Yes, Meryl.’

The girl stood up and recited with the air of one who is very proud of the words but has never really reflected much on their meaning. ‘She said that things are very bad, much worse than anyone thought. God didn’t have the heart to tell us just how bad things are and this was because He was a typical man. “We arrive as penniless beggars and beg for milk; we waste our lives pursuing empty dreams, deluded by myths of love and romance; the only thing that sustains us is hope, dangling like a carrot, the biggest lie of all. For how can there be hope for a race who will end their lives in a gabbling madness of disease and senility? Bereavement and mourning, loss and decay and despair; childbirth and betrayal; drunkenness and abuse; infant mortality, disease striking out of a cloudless sky at anyone; no warning, no indication; too little money, too great a burden; this is our lot. Denied fulfilment all our lives; haunted by desires that can never be stilled; robbed in our final days of all shreds of dignity; and heading for death, which spares none. And beyond? Oh, don’t even ask! It gets worse but I don’t have the heart in me to tell you poor blighters.” And they said, “Oh, go on, tell us, tell us,” and they wouldn’t leave her alone, so she vouchsafed them a vision of a Heaven which is like Blaenau Ffestiniog without the little railway: a lot of slate, and low cloud and drizzle, and a lot of gorse. The angels play tambourines and wear fustian. There’s also a small gift shop.’

‘That’s excellent, Meryl. Now who can tell us what happened next?’

Another girl supplied the answer. Two of the sisters, overwhelmed by the majesty of their vision, founded the Church of Our Lady of the Paper Bag. But because many people were too ignorant to see the beauty of the vision and said it didn’t sound very nice they needed to be forcibly persuaded for their own good, and thus was born the military arm of the Church of our Lady of the Paper Bag, the Soldiers for Jesus. Their job it was to open the eyes of the unbelievers. The third girl, seeing the message of the prophet as confirmation that all routes through this vale of tears are useless, took the third fork in the path, the route to Aberystwyth. She embraced the gaudy life and began to make seaside rock.

As Eleri showed us back out to the yard I said, ‘That was quite an interesting vision of Heaven. I’d never pictured it like that before.’

She giggled. ‘Yes, I expect you saw it more as angels and harps and puffy white clouds.’

‘Isn’t that how most people see it?’

‘Well, I expect parts of it are like that. The bit revealed to us was just the Welsh section.’

‘Do they have sections in Heaven?’

‘Oh yes, they have to. You see, it used to be nondenominational but it caused too many problems. People felt short-changed when they arrived and found that all paths to God were equally valid. It just didn’t seem fair if some people could wear brightly coloured clothes and take drugs and stuff and still get to Heaven, whereas people like us had to get fifteen hundred Sunday School attendance credits and wear shoes made of slate, and every Christmas get a stocking filled with rotten fruit to stand a chance. Especially if someone you hate also gets to be with God and you know they didn’t give a tinker’s damn about Him when they were alive. Don’t you agree? It’s an outrage really – I mean, it makes you wonder why you bothered. So now everyone arrives in their own segregated cordons and has the satisfaction of knowing that, of all the faiths and ways of believing, the one they chose was the only one that worked.’

‘How do you know all this?’

‘One of our saints told us, Mrs Llanfihangel. She was ever such a holy lady, so when she died we made her a saint and she turned up one day at a séance and told us all about Heaven. She said for a while she thought the Welsh were the only ones there, until one day someone left the gate in the fence open and she wandered out and met some Amish.’

We strolled back across the quad towards the car.

‘Do you know a girl called Tadpole?’ I asked. ‘She’s a Soldier for Jesus, too.’

‘In Aberystwyth, you mean? I’ve heard of her. I wouldn’t say I knew her – I don’t go to Aberystwyth very often, especially at this time of year. It’s such a bother finding a hat to wear.’

‘Why do you need a hat to go to Aberystwyth?’

‘Oh, come on, Mr Knight, don’t pull my leg.’

‘I’m not. Plenty of people don’t wear hats there.’

‘Yes, but we’re students, aren’t we? What happens if we see a student from Aberystwyth and we’re not wearing a hat? We won’t have anything to doff.’

‘You need to doff your hat when you see a student from Aber?’

‘Of course. It’s a college rule: we must always take off our hats when see a fellow scholar.’

I pulled a face and she continued, burning with conviction, ‘Oh, come on, Mr Knight. Don’t tell me you’ve never seen someone doff a cap before.’

‘I’m familiar with the custom, but not in this context. The normal way to make a man remove his hat in that town is to punch him on the jaw.’

We arrived at a construction like a medieval well; it had a bell hanging beneath the little roof.

‘This bell is from Patagonia,’ Eleri explained with evident pride. ‘It was rescued from the Mission House, and presented to us. It’s one of our most treasured possessions.’

‘What happened out there?’ I asked. ‘I hear things didn’t go quite according to plan.’

Eleri looked sad. ‘Oh. The Soldiers for Jesus had quite a difficult time of it, I’m afraid. The Indians had a vision of Heaven that featured orgies and human sacrifice and lots of cocaine. It was very hard to make them see that ours was better. Besides, their language didn’t contain a word for gift shop.’

‘Your version does sound a bit austere.’

‘It’s not really. Our Heavenly Father loves us, of course, but He also likes us to do what we’re told. We step out of line and we get smote.

Oh God of remorse

In your heaven of gorse

Who sent Noah a boat

While the rest got smote.

‘That’s our best prayer.’

‘And the Indians didn’t like it?’

‘They were strange heathens. They said, “In our heaven we’ve got Tequila and cocoa leaves and we have sex all day. And we eat people. What have you got in yours?”

‘And we said, “Well, we get to sing hymns all day – what could be nicer than that?” But they just sneered, so the schoolmarm showed them a picture of Blaenau Ffestiniog. Of course, she tried to point out it was like that without the train but they wouldn’t listen. They all pointed at the little steam train and said, “What’s that?” And she said, “It’s a puffing billy,” and they looked at her blankly so she asked for a Welsh–Spanish dictionary and translated. “El gran tren del choo-choo,” she said, and they all fell about laughing. Apparently, choo-choo is a very bad word in their language. After that news spread like wildfire: in the Welsh gringo heaven they have a big choo-choo. They used to come for miles just to laugh. The schoolmarm fainted when she found out what it meant.’ She stopped and looked slightly embarrassed at the failure.

We tut-tutted sympathetically. At least, I did.

‘I heard the chaplain went nuts,’ said Calamity.

Eleri blinked in surprise. ‘I beg your pardon?’

‘We heard something terrible happened and the priest went bananas.’

‘I’m afraid I don’t quite—’

‘Lost his marbles,’ she explained. ‘Cuckoo. We heard the priest went mad. Is that true?’

‘I . . . I’m afraid I’m not allowed to discuss military matters.’ Eleri had lost some of her composure and stammered slightly. ‘But I’m sure that couldn’t have happened. You must be careful about some of the things you hear. A lot of people are jealous of us and try to undermine our reputation with calumnious remarks.’

I changed the subject. ‘Tell us about your studies at Jezebel College.’

‘What’s there to tell? It’s really boring. We don’t get cadavers to dissect or anything, like the guys on the undertaking course. It’s just the usual stuff, mostly theory.’

‘About what?’

‘Oh, you know, about the differences between a trollop, a tart, a slattern, a flibbertigibbet . . . that sort of thing. It’s very boring. Mostly textbook.’

‘So why did Emily call us?’

‘She did some work for the Santa Claus who got murdered in Chinatown. He went to see her and she helped him with some stuff, trying to trace a child born out of wedlock a long time ago. Emily was good at that sort of thing – she understood about all these forensic techniques and things – but me, I never had the patience. She was into Kierkegaard as well – well, we all are of course – but Emily was nuts about the guy. The woman was called Etta Place and the baby born out of wedlock was christened Laura.’

‘Etta Place was the girlfriend of the Sundance Kid,’ said Calamity.

‘Who?’

‘You know, the Hole-in-the-Wall gang, the famous outlaws.’

‘No I’m not familiar . . .’

‘The movie – Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.’

Oh, we don’t watch movies. We have to study. Except Clip, of course. We all want to see that. Oh, but I’m forgetting my manners. You’ve come all this way, you must be waiting to see Emily.’

‘We thought she was dead.’

‘She is.’

We declined the opportunity to see the cadaver, and made our way back to the car.

Eleri held out a hand to shake and said, ‘You really mustn’t pay any attention to the bad things people say about the Soldiers for Jesus. It’s just the idle tittle-tattle of gossips. You see, Mr Knight, we do a lot of good work here: we give the girls a chance that normally they just wouldn’t get. For many of them Sunday School is the only way out of the ghetto.’

‘One other thing,’ I said before closing the car door. ‘If you qualify for a reward for the help you’ve given us, do you want the Lego?’

‘The what?’

‘The Lego. You know what that is, I take it.’

Eleri looked slightly hurt. ‘Don’t be silly. Of course I do. It’s Latin for “I build”, isn’t it?’