Don’t Cry For Me Aberystwyth

Chapter 17

IT WAS A QUIET night in the Pier arcade. The machines flashed unattended. The evening bingo had finished and the midnight game was still a couple of hours away. The money-changer girl sat in her booth, watching a portable TV that had once been a prize in the bingo. We walked past her, past the video games, towards the back and the more traditional machines. A lone man sat on a stool in front of a glass case, inside which sat a crudely articulated doll of a policeman. You put in a shilling and the doll became animated and laughed. The laughter was staccato and unconvincing, the movement not much more than a shake, the eyes blue and wooden; and that was all. After a minute or so the laughter stopped and you put in another coin.

The man who sat on the stool wore a cloth cap and a tan tartan scarf like the coats that pampered lapdogs wear. His raincoat was old and greasy. He was thin and hunched on the stool, his expression blank like the face of a statue in a public square whose features have been worn away by wind and rain. The only part of him that moved or exuded a sign of warmth or ability to emote was white and protruded from the breast pocket of his coat. It was a mouse. When the policeman’s laughter reached its zenith the man would look down at the mouse and the mouse, whose eyes were glittering with enjoyment, would break off gazing at the policeman and peep up at the man and there passed between them a look of complicit understanding; as if there was a secret to this pastime, a layer of meaning which was unavailable to people like me, but which would, if only I possessed the key, unlock a rich seam of humour hidden away in the pantomime. Or at least it must have been something like that since the laughter of policemen on its own has never in my experience been a source of entertainment to the recipient. It is usually sarcastic and sneering and hopelessly narcissistic and worlds away from the genuine variety that makes the eye twinkle.

We stood and watched for a while. When the laughing ceased the man dug around in his coat pocket and found another coin to reanimate the doll. He did it without visible sign of pleasure, or of having had to deliberate. It was automatic: the action of a man who has no choice, like a chain smoker who starts the next cigarette before the current one is finished. Once he had found the coin and allowed the evident relief to shimmer around the edges of his mouth, he looked up and offered a look of polite enquiry to Lorelei.

‘This is Louie. He’s asking about a man called Caleb Penpegws. Louie this, I believe, is Eifion and Tiresias.’

There was a pause, slightly awkward, because protocol demanded that the man on the stool speak but he didn’t.

I tried a light-hearted comment. ‘Which one’s which?’

The man looked annoyed. ‘You should read your Greek tragedy, then you wouldn’t have to ask.’

‘You’re probably right, but they refuse to give me a ticket at the library.’

‘Tiresias was the blind soothsayer. Do I look like a soothsayer?’

‘So you’re Eifion.’

‘Yes.’

‘Is the mouse blind?’

‘All mice are practically blind, but Tiresias has sinus problems which means he can’t smell very well; if you’re a rodent, not being able to smell is like being blind, isn’t it? That’s how they find their prey.’

‘And their cheese.’

‘It’s a myth that mice love cheese.’

‘Can he see the future?’

Eifion furrowed his brow in mild annoyance and looked at Lorelei.

‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘It’s not important. I wanted to ask you about your buddy from the war, Caleb Penpegws.’

Eifion slipped off the stool and walked past us and out onto the Prom. I said goodbye to Lorelei and followed him home. He lived in the old hall of residence at the end of the Prom, the one earmarked for demolition. He walked round the side of the ugly grey building to the entrance that would have been called the tradesman’s entrance in the days when tradesmen knew their place. He knew I was following him but made no attempt to stop me. A piece of composite board hung across the back door. He pulled it aside and walked through. I followed. He walked across floors covered in cement grit and dusty, fallen roofing joists. Here and there my foot detected in the darkness the smoother traction of municipal floor tiles. The only light came from holes in the roof and the sheen of street lamps outside squeezing past the boards that had been nailed over windows.

He climbed the stairs, rising flight by flight, until he reached a final landing and then walked down a corridor past a kitchen where now only ghosts wrote their names on the cartons of milk in the fridge. He stopped outside a room that had a padlock on the door, unlocked and went in leaving it open for me to follow.

Inside, he flicked a lighter and began to light a forest of candles glued by spilled wax to the surface of a coffee table. The golden light warbled and made the shadows dance. There were some beaten-up easy chairs, rescued from a dump, perhaps, and now spilling their horsehair innards onto the floor. There were bottles and plates and silver trays of take-away food. Pet food for the mouse spilled out onto the table top. On the floor there were saucers of what had been milk but that had been licked away by a small tribe of cats which peered from the shadows, their eyes gleaming like pale green candle flame. In the corner was a dirty mattress lying on the floor. Cobwebs brushed my face. It was grim, but probably no worse than in the days when the place had been a hall of residence.

Eifion motioned me to sit and I eased myself gingerly into an armchair.

‘Aren’t the cats a threat to Tiresias?’ I asked.

He shook his head. ‘I’ve brought them up to respect the sanctity of all life. That’s a lesson I learned in the war.’ He took a tin of throat lozenges from his pocket and prised off the lid; but carefully, as if he was worried he might spill the contents. I peered forward and he held the tin out for me to see. It contained dead flies. He picked one out with a pair of tweezers and went over to feed a spider. ‘Come on, my beauties,’ he said. ‘Dinner time.’

‘What about the sanctity of the fly’s life?’

‘The flies aren’t real. I make them out of soya.’

I watched as he worked. It wasn’t easy to get the dead ‘fly’ to balance on the spider silk, but he was methodical and patient; soon he had fed his entire herd of spiders.

‘Caleb Penpegws,’ I said, feeling a great weariness manifest itself in all my limbs.

He sat down and said in the dreamy tone that sometimes accompanies reminiscence but more often play-acting. ‘Yes, I seem to remember a man of that name, but it’s all so long ago, you understand.’

I sighed; the weariness was now so great even sighing felt like weightlifting. ‘Yes, I understand. This is the bit where you have trouble remembering and I say, “Oh maybe a five-pound note will help you recall,” and miraculously it does for a while. But then, once we get halfway through your story, the lights go out again and I have to put some more money in the meter. And so it goes on until a few simple pieces of information – the sort which a normal person would be only to happy to volunteer – end up costing me twenty quid. Yes I think I know how this story goes. It has a depressingly familiar ring to it; perhaps it’s déjá vu, or perhaps it’s . . . What do they call it? Reincarnation? Or is it transmigration of souls? . . . As a classical scholar you will surely know . . . Yes, something like that. Maybe we met in a different lifetime; you were a priest officiating in a minor temple beside the Nile and I was a palace shamus working for King Otephep III or something. Or maybe it’s not that at all, maybe it’s just I’ve spent way too much of my shitty life playing this scene: sitting in a filthy pigsty room with lowlife nobodies, asking simple questions and getting in return wisecracks or a feigned amnesia that slowly lifts; or just gouts of infuriatingly imprecise Talmudic wisdom; when all I asked for was a simple sentence composed of easily understood English words. I don’t know, it feels like I’ve spent my whole life doing this and know the script off by heart.

‘But tonight it’s going to be different. I’m sick of that story; I’m re-writing the script. I’m tired of risking my life on behalf of the people of Aberystwyth; trying to help them; trying to bring justice to birth; trying and failing – but failing heroically – to somehow wrest the tiller from the hands of fate once in a while and make things better than they should be, or than the people of this town ever have the right to expect; and doing it all for so little money I’d be ashamed if people found out. Tonight is not going to be like that. Tonight I’m going to ask you a civil question and you are going to give me a straightforward answer; the sort you would give to your mother if she asked you what you wanted for your tea. And the reason you are going to do it is simple. You will do it because it’s the right thing to do; because it’s the decent thing to do; because two men who have no reason to hate each other should be able to sit in a room and have a nice conversation, one in which the one helps the other for no other recompense than the joy that comes from offering a hand of help to a wayfarer lost in the gloom of this world.

‘You’re going to do it because of all these things I have mentioned and because you are a good person underneath it all, a man who has suffered for sure, but still a man. I can see that from the very fact that you are here in front of me today. You are a man who fought and looked into the abyss in Patagonia, where many men forfeited their wits; and yet returned, it seems to me, with most of them intact. Thus you are a man, but being a man entails certain duties and responsibilities, chief of which is to bear your suffering well and sort it out alone; and never make it a burden to another man, who will assuredly have pain of his own in his soul which decency forbids him from showing you. You must, alas, shoulder your cross and not whinge. It is not easy, but being a man is not easy. For all these reasons you will help me here tonight and for one other reason, which I hoped I would not have to name, but I see alas! from the look in your eye that I do; namely this: you will help me, because if you don’t I’m going to make you eat that mouse.’ I finished and exuded a long, long sigh, almost completely enervated by the effort of what I had said.

There was silence for a long time after my speech ended. I smiled. He said nothing. I smiled again. He chewed a nail and looked at Tiresias; kissed the little rodent. He picked up a box of fire lighters and made a small fire in the grate. It gave me an idea what I might do if he refused to co-operate. It wasn’t a nice idea and made me hope Tiresias wasn’t blessed with the gift of prophecy. It never does you any good, anyway. Ask Oedipus. Finally, Eifion spoke.

‘Caleb Penpegws and I were wounded at the Mission House siege. We lay side by side on stretchers in the field hospital. One day some men turned up and took him away. I didn’t see him again until five years later, back in Barmouth. He told me they tortured him for a week about some coat they said he’d stolen. They wanted to know about this Hoffmann guy who everybody’s talking about. I said, “Hey, great to see you again, buddy,” and all that. I could see he wasn’t happy, so I suggested we go on the Fairbourne railway together. Thought it might cheer him up. We used to love riding that train. But he didn’t seem interested. He went all sort of misty and stuff, and said, “What’s the point?”’ Eifion looked baffled. ‘I guess it must change a man being tortured.’

‘Where can I find him?’

‘Not in this world, that’s for sure.’

‘Dead?’

‘For many years now.’

‘Is it true an angel appeared on the eve of the battle?’

He picked up the mouse and held him in one hand and stroked with the other. ‘Yes, it is true’

‘You really saw it?’

‘I really saw it.’ He put the mouse down and rested his chin in his cupped hands.

‘There was a little girl up in the mountains, a little goatherd. There was a spring up there, where she used to water the herd. The angel used to appear there to her and tell her stuff. She was famous and the peasants for miles around would go to see her and listen to her describe her angel. So me and some of the guys went along and spoke to the girl. We told her how scared we were and could she ask her angel to watch over us during the coming battle. Because, you see, we all knew the mission was madness. We knew none of us would come back alive. The little girl said she would ask her angel. And lo! on the eve of the battle she appeared among us, riding a shining white horse. It could have been a different angel, but what are the odds of there being two of them in Patagonia at the same time? Beautiful, she was, all shining white and pure and holy and all sorts of shit. Looking at her was like . . . I don’t know . . . It was like how you feel as a kid in church on Christmas Eve when you looked at the beautiful image of Christ in the stained-glass window. As a kid you’re not listening all that closely to what’s being said, but at that moment you look at Him in the window and you hear the words, “Once in Royal David’s City” or something and you just feel for that moment that there really is a greater Father who loves you and will make it all right in the end.

‘That’s what it was like looking at this angel on her horse. She stirred up our hearts and filled us with courage, and I suppose you could say she filled us with the Holy Ghost – all of us, the non-believers, too. At that moment our fear evaporated like dew on a summer’s morn; death no longer held terrors for us. What would it mean, other than a transition to the state of Grace the angel had given us a glimpse of? How could a man whose life is normally full of trouble and vexation fear such a thing? The next morning we arose at dawn and went out to fight with the hearts of lions. Nothing could dismay us.’ He paused and wiped the back of his sleeve across his nose. I realised he was crying silently in the darkness. His cheeks glistened with silver snailtrails in the candlelight. He snivelled and spoke in a voice that warbled out of control.

‘What the fuck was she thinking?’ He shuddered as sobs swept through him. He repeated the words, but this time in a pitch nearer that of a whining dog. ‘What was that angel thinking?’

I sat and watched the man weep into his hands. Tiresias climbed up his sleeve and put a tiny mouse paw of comfort on his finger, but to no avail. I stood up and said, ‘Is that what made the priest lose his wits?’

He shook his head behind the hands and said in a muffled voice, ‘No, it was what came next.’

‘What did come next?’

He opened his hands and looked through them at me. ‘I can’t tell you; my lips cannot utter it. All I can say is this. If I was that angel, I would never have gone back.’