Don’t Cry For Me Aberystwyth

Chapter 13

TINKER, TAILOR, Patagonian sailor, ex-Nazi . . . Hoffmann. He’s coming to save the townspeople. Hopeman. A false prophet, cut-price Messiah . . . the man they send when the town clock forgets to tick.

The people who sit on my client’s chair, who are they?

In books the first thing the PI says is ‘I don’t do divorce stuff.’ But that isn’t right. Does the greengrocer say, ‘I don’t do potatoes’?

I’m thinking of changing the name on the door. Pandora Inc. That’s what I’m thinking of calling the place. I’m tired of the Knight Errant nonsense. It gives a false impression. It leads the unwary to believe I might be able to help. Pandora Inc on the frosted glass. That way they’ll know what they’re letting themselves in for. I can find out the truth for you but it won’t set you free.

The people who sit on my client’s chair, why are they there? It’s because everyone wants to run to teacher when things go wrong.

I tell them about two men I once knew. The two men I pity most in all the world. One was Sospan’s friend: a bald chap, a bit on the short side, but he never let that get him down. For a while he was the happiest man alive. Had everything anyone could want, always smiling and waving, the most popular guy in the street; never a care in the world. Then one day it all changed. Cut a tooth and needed to be weaned. They moved him on to solids. Poor guy never recovered. With time you learn to deal with the vicious blows life metes out. But not that one. Ask Sospan, he’ll tell you.

His brothers and sisters didn’t even try to hide their glee at his fall from grace. What? You thought it was going to be like that all along, did you? Welcome to life. First thing you learn, milk isn’t free. You can never really trust anyone after that. You just lie there in the cot trying to work it out. The betrayal. All the time we were doing that ‘never a care in the world’ routine, she must have known. She knew and she never said a word. Wormwood on the nipple. No wonder babies cry so much. And the other guy? Ah, you don’t want to know about him.

We stood stiffly in the early-morning frost, our breath visible like dragon smoke. Above our heads the Pieman’s light burned, a dark orange star; neither of us looked up.

‘Well, I guess this is it,’ Calamity said, the fingers of her small hand, clad in pale-blue fingerless mitts, twitching on the handle of the suitcase. ‘Thanks again for everything.’

‘Nothing to thank me for, it’s . . . it’s been great. I’m sorry you’re going.’

‘I think it’s for the best. I was thinking about the things you said . . . I feel I have to see the Pinkerton thing through; otherwise I might regret it one day.’

She wore a drab military green parka with the hood up; fake grey fur framing her face in a sweet oval.

‘Louie?’

Like a vignette from the old-time photographers who used to be on the Pier.

‘Louie? Are you listening?’

‘Yes. Sorry, I was looking at your hood.’

‘I was saying I could regret it otherwise.’

‘Yes.’

‘You don’t often get a break like this.’

‘No, you don’t. Have you got an office?’

‘I’m using my auntie’s front room in Prospect Street for the time being, until I can find somewhere more permanent.’

‘You don’t want to rush it; the right office makes all the difference.’

‘That’s what I thought. I’ll probably need to talk to the people in LA about it, anyway.’

‘Yes, they’ll have some ideas. What about the anti-glare acetate – do you want to take that?’

‘Don’t you need it?’

‘I’ve managed without for most of my life.’

‘I was thinking it might be smarter to leave it; that way the guy might come back and try and sell me some stuff in the new office. Might be able to get a better look at him this time.’

‘That’s a good idea.’

We stood and stared at each other. Calamity’s fingers still twitched on the suitcase handle. In the sharp early-morning cold her skin glowed and her cheeks were crimson like a carol singer’s in an illustrated Christmas card.

She held out her hand. ‘So long, then.’

We shook.

‘So long. Just call if you need anything.’

She walked off down the street towards the library; flakes of snow fluttered down from the grey dawn. I turned and walked up the stairs to the office, sat down with a sigh, and put my feet on the desk. I pulled open the drawer and took out my associate partner, Captain Morgan.

The phone rang. I picked it up at the wrong end and got the flex tangled round my hand. Fixing it meant using the other hand but that would mean relinquishing my hold on the bottle of rum, which wasn’t a great idea. I leaned forward across the desk and grunted into the phone.

‘Gloria in excelsis Deo!’ said the voice. It was the Queen of Denmark.

‘Not round here, it isn’t.’

‘Oh dear, have I caught you at a bad time?’

‘The odds were in favour of it.’

‘I’m sorry?’

‘It was statistically inevitable that you would, sooner or later.’

‘You’ve been drinking, haven’t you?’

‘Don’t tell me you don’t approve.’

‘It’s not even nine thirty.’

‘I bet the Vikings never worried about things like that.’

‘Oh dear.’

‘Stop saying “Oh dear.”’

‘Goodness!’

‘I’m not a fan of that expression, either.’

‘No? How about this one: go stick your head up your ass!’ She hung up.

I went down to the Spa to buy some liquor. When I got back the phone was ringing. It was the Queen of Denmark.

‘I’m sorry I said that.’

‘It wasn’t very queen-like.’

‘We don’t always do it like the ones in Hans Christian Andersen. He was Danish, too, by the way.’

‘Or maybe you’re not a queen.’

‘What am I, then?’

‘That’s what I don’t understand. Someone who’s got it in for me, maybe. You know, it never occurred to me, but putting that ad in the paper has sure landed me in a lot of trouble with the cops.’

‘Is that what this is about? The ad?’

‘It’s about lots of things.’

‘Why don’t you go home to bed and put your head under the pillow and make the bad world go away.’

‘I might just do that?’

‘They told me you were a man.’

‘They lied to you.’

‘Clearly.’

‘They always lie; it’s the only thing you can count on.’

‘You’re really feeling sorry for yourself, aren’t you?’

‘If you were me, you would, too.’

‘Aw, diddums!’ She hung up again.

I put the cap on the bottle and drove home to my caravan in Ynyslas. Sometimes it’s good to put your head under the pillow and make the bad world go away. But there are times when the balm of sleep won’t come, and then you need stronger medicine. Eeyore gave it to me once; the bottle lies under the bed in my caravan. Toulouse-Lautrec’s favourite tipple: absinthe. The green goddess, green as the sea when it snows in February; it turns milky in water like the eyes of a blind girl I once knew. I sat at the caravan table, drizzled the liquor over a spoonful of sugar and incanted my favourite poem. It’s called ‘Ingredients’. Angelica, hyssop, melissa, lemon balm, veronica and cardamon, liquorice root . . . such beautiful soothing names, like girls we once loved on summer days . . . angelica, melissa, veronica . . . and wormwood. The bitterest substance known to man. In Ancient Rome the victor in the chariot race had to drink a cup to remind him that life had its bitter side, too. As if anyone needed reminding. Wormwood on the nipple: that’s one hell of an overture. How could life disappoint after a start like that? Poor old Juliet.

Never blame the parents, though. They do their best to make it up. They give you childhood. It wears them out but they don’t complain. Every child starts life on the stage and never notices Mum and Dad running back and forth, wheeling on the sets, wheeling them off. Stage managing. Two big productions every year: summer holidays and Christmas. Payback for the wormwood.

They take you to the seaside to live in caravans: tin boxes painted hospital green, bathroom blue and lemon curd; with chintzy curtains and bad TV reception; rooms synonymous elsewhere with failed lives but which for a while become palaces. Set in dry scrubby land on breeze blocks, amid sandy spiky grass that not even camels could eat. The tea tastes of plastic cups; sand in wasp-tormented jam sandwiches grinds against tooth enamel; the milk comes warm from a shop that smells of inflatable plastic trash. The sun never shines and the sea is the same colour as the run-off from a washing machine. Every morning the inside of the caravan drips with condensation, and yet it is all so unutterably lovely.

For Christmas they slave all through autumn, taking in extra sewing, to give you a cornucopia. Your heart’s desire. Just ask, and you get it. It defies all the rules you are later forced to learn about life. You never see how tired those grown-ups are. Is there something they aren’t telling you? There are tell-tale signs, of course. There’s something odd about Santa’s beard; it doesn’t look real. And he smells. You don’t expect that of someone from Magic Land. Half the stuff you want doesn’t turn up and they say it’s too expensive, but how can that be if Santa’s paying? But kids are smart. They know it’s better not to enquire too deeply about some things. They know better than to look behind the sets. The crucial thing is not to let inquisitiveness jeopardise the coming miracle, the one compared to which later ones, such as first love or the miracle of birth, are but pale shadows: that delirious ecstasy of an empty pillow case left overnight that fills through some magic parthenogenesis with spontaneously generated presents, each wrapped in paper, bright blue or red, bearing repeating motifs – holly and berries, bells, cartoon reindeers – images sweeter than a mother’s face, which are torn apart amid a blizzard of fake snow. Flakes from a can drift and pile up inside the house and smell, inexplicably, of pine bath salts. They gather on the tree, the cards, and on the bauble that contains the uncomprehending face of a boy in pyjamas. Two flash-lit eyes, bright pinpricks of bafflement in a nimbus of coloured lights that twinkle as if a rainbow had been sawn up into logs, and ground to dust. There he lives for ever imprisoned in a silver bubble of memory, the boy that was me. The irises of his eyes darken across the years as the photographic dyes slowly age and the snow deepens, until one day it sets loose in the heart an avalanche of melancholy which nothing can assuage.

All men collaborate in the noble, selfless counterfeit. It’s a code even criminals honour. Murderers, tyrants, footpads . . . they never let on. They keep mum. Only a very few, the sickest sociopaths who have to be locked away in special wings to protect them from the wrath of other prisoners, are exempt. So every time you wander back, get too close to a cardboard backdrop, there is a kindly guiding hand, a policeman, old lady, or bank robber, to push you gently back towards the footlights.

Until the day you slip away; wander past the two-dimensional scenery flats and see them from the other side. See the carpenter’s tools and tins of paints. The wires and pulleys. The discarded manikins and cups of instant coffee. Back into the bowels where all is painted black, down the stairs through the door marked Exit, into the cold wet street. Drizzle, gasometers, factory hooter. Newspaper gusting down the street. Life . . .

The long walk to the client’s chair.

Next morning I stepped gingerly over the empty bottles that rolled around the floor with unpleasantly amplified sounds. I fried some eggs, drank some coffee, and drove to town taking care to avoid my face in the driving mirror. The office was as I’d left it; smelling faintly of rum but probably not as much as I did. There were no messages and no indication that anybody had called, or cared, which didn’t greatly surprise me, so I went for a walk. I had no goal in mind but my steps took me along the Prom towards the harbour and then I turned in after the castle and walked past the Castle pub. Another block and I was in Prospect Street. I didn’t remember taking any decision to go there but here I was. The curtains of Calamity’s office in the front room were closed but a light indicated she was open for business. I went to the front door and stood for a while, my hand in my pocket forming a fist to knock on the door. Then I walked back to the office. It seemed bigger. And emptier. Captain Morgan stared at me from the bin; he’d lost the power to spell the world away; the flames of the torch had gone out and the wolves howled. I spent the next three days like that. I walked along the Prom and down to the harbour, and back via Prospect Street, where I always paused but didn’t knock. A couple of times I thought I saw the man in the fedora, but I couldn’t be sure.

On the fourth day I passed a vagrant playing a violin on the pavement outside the entrance to the Pier. There was a hat at his feet but nothing in it. The familiar words passed through my head in accompaniment to his playing. ‘Brightly shone the moon that night, though the frost was cruel. Then an old man came in sight, gathering winter few-oooh-el.’ I stopped. The man was Cadwaladr, the old veteran of the war in Patagonia. He stopped playing and said, ‘Bring me flesh and bring me wine, bring me pine logs hither.’ I showed him a bottle of rum in my Spar bag and he packed up the violin.

‘Follow me,’ he said. ‘I know just the place.’

We walked down towards the harbour.

‘I thought you were painting the railway bridge across the Dovey estuary.’

‘I was.’

‘You said it was a job for life.’

‘It was. Finish one end, and time to start again at the other end. Like Sisyphus, only better scenery.’

‘What happened? Get tired of it?’

‘Nope. They invented a new kind of paint. Lasts ten years.’

‘I’m sorry.’

‘They gave me redundancy money – I bought a van. See.’

He took me to a van parked on the Prom across from the Yacht Club. It looked like a superannuated ambulance or a furniture van or something. It looked like a lot of the vans that got parked here: mobile homes for people whose dogs had string for a leash. The poor man’s Winnebago. He opened the back, pulled out a folding table and two matching chairs and set them up on the pavement. I put the bottle down and sat.

‘What was it before, a furniture van?’

‘Mobile library. Cost me two hundred quid.’ He brought out two cups and we sat on the Prom, drinking rum in the dim light of midday.

‘Mobile library.’

‘I like that. There’s an air about it, hard to define, an air of learning, of scholarship. And a hush like you get in a proper library.’

‘You got a bed in there?’

‘Got a bed and a cupboard and a primus. Got some water and some candles. Got some petrol. Got everything I need. Might even try a different country in the new year.’

‘Still got the hush, huh?’

‘I know it sounds strange.’

‘I don’t think it does.’

‘You going to the carol concert this year?’

‘Hadn’t thought about it.’

‘They say Myfanwy won’t be singing.’

‘Doesn’t look like she will. She’s lost her voice.’

Cadwaladr leaned back in his chair and stared at sea darker than an evergreen tree. ‘Won’t be the same.’

‘She knows that.’

‘Every year Myfanwy is the high point.’

‘She knows that. I think the pressure of expectation is part of the problem.’

‘Won’t be the same, even if Hoffmann does turn up.’

‘You think he will?’

‘Me? No. But everybody else does. Tickets are already sold out. Doesn’t matter to me one way or the other. I gave up hope of redemption many years ago, after I came back from Patagonia and found that no one would look me in the eye. The way I see it, we’ve done nothing to deserve our fate in the first place. We shouldn’t even be in this position. If God wants to redeem us, he can just go ahead and do it. No need to make us jump through hoops first.’

‘This Hoffmann stuff is pure craziness. It’s a word written by a dead man in blood. No one’s going to come and redeem us.’

‘Your dad’s supplying the donkey.’

‘He supplies the donkey for the nativity scene every year.’

‘They’re going to have a torchlight procession led by Clip.’

‘Is it true something terrible happened in the war—’

‘Of course.’

‘I mean at the Mission House siege. They say the priest went mad.’

Cadwalader rolled a cigarette. ‘That definitely didn’t happen. He was mad before he went.’

I touched the violin. ‘Did you learn to play this in the war?’

‘Learned as a kid. Do you know what the secret of a Stradivarius violin is?’

I was about to tell him but then I thought better of it. The world is full of smart alecs. ‘No, I’ve no idea.’

So he told me.

‘I always think of that story at Christmas. Those spruce trees growing slowly somewhere far away in the Alps. No noise at all, just silence and the sound of a tree growing slowly. Sounds mad, doesn’t it?’

‘No.’

‘That’s all there is. Just emptiness, bright grey light; the sound of snowflakes landing, the rustle of sifting snow. The tiny noise of a wolf’s paw in the fresh snow. Must have been beautiful. Maybe far off there is a post horn, if they had them then. Two travellers, perhaps, wandering lost in the blizzard, calling with their horns.’ He paused and looked sad. ‘The man who told me that story about the violins used to make rocking chairs.’

‘Yes, I met him. He once asked me if I’d ever ridden on an escalator.’

‘They found the poor chap dead in the snow above Talybont yesterday.’

‘The rocking-chair man is dead?’

‘Someone smashed his head in with a tyre iron. They found him in the trees behind his house. Never had an enemy in the world, that bloke. Just a mystery.’

‘He was a nice old man.’

‘Every Christmas I’ll think about him, too, from now on. The wolf, the post horn, and the rocking-chair man face down in the snow.’

They say the human heart is a mansion with many locked rooms and wings which are closed to the public. All the nice furniture is in the parlour at the front; the one that gets plenty of sun through those fine bright Georgian windows; the one that looks out onto a gravel forecourt and beyond to neatly clipped privet hedges and topiary.

This section is open to the public.

Towards the back there is a roped-off section, leading to stairs and a labyrinth of dim corridors. The sun doesn’t shine here; the doors are locked; the furniture is covered in sheets. Sometimes at night you can hear moans and cries echoing down the empty corridors, the cries of long-dead people. And you can see an ancient white-haired servant taking a tray of food and collecting an empty one. He has a key to the final set of locked doors at the corridor’s end. Someone lives there, someone they would rather you didn’t see. A man in a tracksuit. The school games teacher.

Reluctantly, I decided it was time to pay a visit to the circus. If I was lucky maybe I could get in and out during the strongman’s performance. I would not have to meet my former games teacher. But I needed to speak to his moll, Mrs Llantrisant. For years she had swabbed the steps of my old office in Canticle Street, and had given every indication of being a dim-witted, gossiping busy-body in her headscarf and curlers; we were later surprised to learn that she was a criminal mastermind at the top of the hierarchy of druid gangsters. As such, unless she had lost her power it was inconceivable that the Moth Brothers could have done a hit on Santa without her foreknowledge or consent. Unless it was an opportunistic slaying, but even then she would know about it. Although the chances that she would tell me what she knew were small.

If you are leaving town, the road east along Llanbadarn is not the prettiest, but it gets the job done. You drive past some nice houses for a while, then follow the floodplain of the Rheidol; before long you begin to climb through ancient hills where the eternal contours are obscured by undifferentiated rows of Forestry Commission conifers. The dark rows between the trees flicker past at the periphery of your field of vision, dark enchanted aisles into oblivion. The manufactured uniformity of the trees is unpleasant and conceals like a cheap suit an immemorial world; ancient stone hills criss-crossed with the tracks and the stone remains of our ancestors. The world here is old and misty, always misty, and it feels pagan. Somewhere beyond Ponterwyd you fall off the map into a desolate place designed for fugitives to hang out in and slowly starve; the sort of land where someone on the run would eventually get so spooked by the emptiness that he would turn himself in, even if it meant going to the chair; because the touch of the man who applies the electric conducting jelly to your temples is still a form of human contact.

I drove onto the grounds of the circus and parked behind some bales of hay. A passing dwarf pointed out the trailer belonging to Mrs Llantrisant. I went over and knocked. Her voice, thin and feeble, bade me come in and I found her lying on a bed, propped up by pillows, and watching a small portable black and white TV. Her hair was loose and fell across her shoulders in drab grey skeins like darning wool. On her forehead in the centre was a livid red sore.

‘I wondered how long it would be before you showed up. I said to Herod, “You mark my words, he’ll be here before Christmas.”’

‘You were right.’

She pulled her glasses higher on her nose and scrutinised me. ‘You’ve lost weight around the jowls. And your hair is thinner, and I can see some grey.’

‘That must be me getting old.’

‘You don’t know the meaning of the word. You’ve still got that pleasure to look forward to.’ She reached out, pulled back the curtain, and sighed with exasperation. ‘Mist still hasn’t lifted.’

The Perspex window was so scratched it was difficult to tell whether the mist had gone or not; but I didn’t say it.

‘You can take some lion droppings home if you want, put them on your garden. Not that there’s anything worth growing this time of the year. I’ve always hated winter. It’s the spring I like. But will I see another one?’

‘You should go home, where people can take care of you.’

‘I’d rather die out here than be in prison.’

‘I haven’t come to turn you in.’

‘It wouldn’t be up to you.’

‘If you’re sick—’

‘What I’m dying of no hospital can cure. There’s a hex on me.’ She touched the red spot on her forehead, uncannily close to the place where Tadpole’s mum had stuck her pin. She took a glass of water from the side table and drank slowly, making loud gulping sounds. From far away there came the sound of cheers and gasps. An elephant trumpeted in vain for the far-off plains of Africa.

‘Do you believe time is an illusion, Mr Knight?’

‘I don’t see how it could be.’

‘Some people say so. All the moments of time exist at once, like the different cards in a deck. The sequence is a human construct. Do you believe that?’

‘It means nothing to me.’

‘Me neither.’

The hand holding the glass fell to her chest, as if the effort of holding it was too great.

‘I know why you’re here. It’s about Father Christmas. You want to know who killed him.’

‘I know who did it: the Moth Brothers. I want to know why, who authorised it.’

‘No one authorised it.’ She sighed. ‘Yes, I see the doubt in your eyes.’

‘Father Christmas has always enjoyed immunity in this town.’

‘You think only I could give permission to change that. You think his death means I’m losing my power. Rest assured, Mr Knight, my sceptre is not broken, despite the scene you see before you. The people who did it have been punished.’

‘I know. They were found in a fishing net.’

The elephant trumpeted again and there were more thin, distant cheers. Mrs Llantrisant’s attention was diverted for a second.

‘He’ll be on soon. You shouldn’t hang around, Herod won’t take kindly to seeing you here.’

‘I have no more quarrel with him.’

‘Is that why you knocked him out of the plane with a cricket bat?’

‘My lawyer says he jumped for the ball.’

‘Don’t joke with me, Mr Knight. You’ve never understood how much it grieves him, have you? It crucified him, that boy not coming back from the cross-country run. He never got over it.’

‘He got over it the same afternoon.’

‘That’s how much you know about it. I hear you’ve raffled the cricket bat.’

‘No, I lent it to the Rotary Club just like I did last Christmas. You pay fifty pence to take a swing with it; the money goes to the deaf school.’

‘Who’d pay fifty pence for that?’

‘A lot of men in this town passed through his games lessons over the years. They still remember. It’s surprising how many want a go with the bat. They bought a new adventure playground with the proceeds last Christmas.’

‘They should go down on their knees to thank him, not mock him.’

‘Thank him for what? The nightmares?’

‘For preparing them for life. It’s a teacher’s job to prepare the child for what he finds beyond the school gates. It’s not a bed of roses, in case you haven’t noticed. You need guts and vim in the heart. He gave them that; he didn’t like it, but he knew where his duty lay. Nobody would have thanked him for turning out milksops like you.’

‘This is Aberystwyth not Sparta.’

She snorted.

‘I think it’s time I went. Are you going to tell me why the Moth Brothers did the hit?’

‘There’s nothing to tell. There’s no mystery. They did it of their own volition, without authority. For kicks, I suppose. Well, they won’t do it again.’

‘Is there anything you need from town?’

‘Nothing that lies in your power to give.’ She took her eyes off me and spoke to the ceiling. ‘You know, I expected disillusionment at the end of my life. But I thought it would be better than this.’

I bought a ticket and took a seat at the back. Herod stood inside a large cage placed in the centre of the ring, wearing a leopard-skin suit. He was in his sixties now and the leonine locks that were part of his act were stained with dark dye. Thick mascara lent him a freakish aspect like Bela Lugosi in some long-lost silent horror movie. Torn-up telephone directories littered the sand around his feet. He preened and displayed his muscles while a smaller cage was rolled into the arena and wheeled into the bigger cage containing Herod. Inside, asleep, was the Methuselah of tigers. The fur round his muzzle was snow white with age, and elsewhere his coat was ragged and threadbare like a boardinghouse carpet. One ear was missing; the tail was half the length it should have been; ribs poked through the skin. There was a roll of drums, the door to the cage dropped open with a dramatic clang, the crowd gasped, and nothing happened. Herod walked over to the cage and bent down to pick up an iron stick. Despite his age his body seemed in good condition and probably had many more telephone books left in it. But you could see the real toll of his life was on the spirit. It showed in every sinew of that bear-like body.

He jabbed the iron stick through the bars at the tiger’s rear end. The beast stood up, took a lazy step forward and slumped down again. Herod jabbed again, harder, and with a growl of irritation the tiger rose with great weariness and hobbled forth. He walked on all threes and kept one hind leg aloft betokening some injury or thorn contracted years ago and never removed. The crowd held its breath and the tiger continued to walk straight ahead towards the bars of the big cage, towards the audience. They began to pull back in fear, even though a wall of iron staves stood between them. The tiger walked straight into the bars and growled once more in irritation, taking a lazy swipe with a paw. It was clear he was blind. He lay down to sleep and Herod walked over and grabbed him and started wrestling. The tiger permitted this latest indignity with an air of weary submission. Perhaps he was too tired of the routine to care any more. Herod performed a judo throw and thrust the big cat down hard onto the sand of the arena. The crowd gasped again. The person in front of me turned to his companion and said, ‘They can smell fear, you know.’ But it was not clear whether he was referring to tigers or games teachers. Herod stood victoriously with one foot on top of the inert animal and preened to the crowd. I left my seat and made for the exit. The last I saw was Herod bending down, with a worried look on his face; pressing his ear to the tiger’s chest, checking for a pulse, and then applying mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. The crowd hissed its dissatisfaction.