Don’t Cry For Me Aberystwyth

Chapter 21

I WASN’T SURE WHAT I was going to say to Caleb, but something would occur to me. It generally did. Whatever it was, his first answers would be a pack of lies. People never told the truth these days, it was a point of principle. But that didn’t matter. I would find some way to bring truth to birth; I just didn’t know what. Something told me Tiresias might help me. Maybe I would have to hurt him. I didn’t want to. I didn’t even want to be here on the last Tuesday before Christmas, walking along a near-deserted Prom, in the drizzling rain, the grisly cold wet collar scraping my chin and channelling clammy drops of rain into the precious hoard of warmth beneath. I didn’t want to be here, but here I was, aware without looking, without the heart to look, that I was being watched by the old people in the front windows of the seaside hotels.

They were happy: in a room filled with warmth, stomachs full of too much lunch, and the faint tizzy feeling that comes from an afternoon of sherry. A real fire crackles in a real grate and Christmas decorations festoon a room that boasts a real Christmas tree in the corner. They’re happy because they are here; on the other side of the glass; they have the money to stay in a decent hotel where the people will go to the necessary effort to make it Christmassy. They know a lot of other people their age are sitting at home with nothing because they don’t have the heart any more to put up a Christmas tree; and its absence, even though they have decreed it with pointless Spartan austerity, rankles in their soul more than anything.

The old people, watching me through the windows of the seafront hotel, they know it will never be like it was all those years ago. How could it? Christmas is defined by the poignancy of loss. But all the same they are happy in the knowledge that it is still pretty good and the next salver of sherry is just a raised eyebrow away. Oh yes, I didn’t want to be here, walking along an empty Prom in the season when only the broken-hearted walk like this, but here I was, trying not to look, head bowed, ploughing into the icy rain.

A man put a hand on my arm. It was Eeyore.

‘Come,’ he said. ‘Have a pint with your father.’

We went to the Marine Hotel and sat in the bay window. The room glistened with gold foil, paper chains and crackers, balloons, Santas, silver stars. It was awful, cheap, tacky kitsch . . . it was glorious. I loved it. There was an angel above our heads and I asked Eeyore if he believed in the story from Patagonia.

‘Angel of Mons,’ he said. ‘That’s what it was, the Angel of Mons.’

‘I don’t understand.’

‘It’s one of the great legends of the First World War. Mons is a place in Belgium, I think, or France or wherever it was all those poor blighters lost their lives. The story goes that an angel appeared to the troops on the eve of the battle there; an angel on a white horse, holding a flaming sword aloft.’

‘You mean you think it was the same angel?’

‘Of course not, son. Your dad’s not that daft. But it is possible, I think, to use the one to explain the other. You see, it’s a funny thing. Although the original story is a timeless myth, no one has ever been able to produce a soldier who claims to have seen the angel with his own eyes. Plenty of them knew someone who had been there but there was never a proper eye witness. In fact, the story seems to have originated not on the front but with a spiritualist in London, who claimed to have heard it from an officer on leave. Many people suspect this officer was involved in black propaganda. They made stories up, you see. There was one about a Canadian soldier crucified by German troops. And they planted a fake diary on a dead German soldier in which he described working in a factory that rendered the dead bodies of fallen soldiers for use as glycerine. You see what I’m saying? This Angel of Mons rumour appeared at a time when British fortunes were at a low ebb; morale on the home front was waning. There’d been a series of battlefield setbacks; poison gas and tanks had both been recently introduced. I reckon the story was concocted to boost morale.’

‘Trouble is, with the Patagonian angel there are people who claim to have seen her with their own eyes.’

‘That’s right, but just think of it. As a military man General Llanbadarn would have known the story of the Angel of Mons. Maybe he went one better. He wanted to send the men out on a dangerous mission; there were rumblings of mutiny. An angel might have been just what the doctor ordered. He knew, too, about the story in the local papers concerning the goatherd girl and her visions. Maybe it gave him the idea. Maybe he thought, why not treat the lads to a visit from a real angel?’

‘You mean, you think he actually had a girl ride a horse through the camp pretending to be an angel?’

Eeyore nodded. ‘Why not? Soldiers are notoriously superstitious. It wouldn’t be difficult to fool them. A bit of fancy dress, moonlight, a girl on a horse.’ He paused and said softly, ‘I’m glad you never had to go off to war, son.’

Caleb was asleep on a pile of empty liquor bottles. Tiresias was running in his wheel but stopped and stared when I walked in. It was his big day, but he didn’t know it yet. Caleb snored. I shoved him with my foot and he rolled off the bottles; he snored some more. I glanced around the room and my eyes alighted on a hammer and some nails left behind by the council workmen who had boarded the place up. I picked them up and began nailing Caleb to the floor. Not through the flesh, because I didn’t want to wake him, but through the fabric of his clothes. I’d seen this done before and knew that after a few nails it was impossible to get up without assistance. I put five nails into the sleeve of the right arm and moved over to the left.

He woke and blinked as he tried to work out what was happening. He tried to move but his right arm was pinned and I was sitting on his left, nailing it into the floor. He raised his legs and kicked but you need good abdominal muscles to keep that up and you don’t get them from a lifetime watching laughing policemen.

‘What on earth are you doing?’ he said.

‘I’m nailing you to the floor.’

‘I can see that. What I mean is, why are you nailing me to the floor?’

‘I always do this to people who lie to me.’

‘Have I lied to you?’

‘You told me your name was Eifion.’

‘It is.’

‘That’s not what I hear. I hear your name is Caleb Penpegws.’

‘Whoever told you that is a liar.’

‘Well, that’s possible. Everyone is a liar in this town; it gets on my nerves sometimes.’

‘Why are you here?’

‘To wish you a happy Christmas.’

‘Sod off.’

‘Yes, I’d like to. I really would. There’s nothing I’d like more than to walk out of your sty and back down the Prom to my partner, Calamity, who I love dearly and who I have missed terribly. And then to take her and maybe that Joe guy, because I like him too, even though we’ve only just met, take them both down to the harbour to my father’s house and eat some mince pies and, you know, generally wassail among friends. While Eeyore poured the drinks I would phone Myfanwy and tell her to come and join us because there’s no one in all the world I would rather be with right now than her. But alas! Here I am standing wet and cold in your filthy room and really not happy at all.’

I finished the left arm and moved on to the feet. After five minutes he was pinned down like Gulliver in Lilliput.

‘Why don’t you go and join them all, then? Leave me in peace?’

‘Because of all the people who will be spending miserable Christmases this year on account of me. A nice family I met out near Talybont, for example. The guy there made rocking chairs for a living and now he’s dead. Why is he dead? No reason that I can see apart from the fact that his name went up on my board. And there was this Absalom guy, lying dead, brutally mutilated, the Chinese meal still undigested in his stomach. Why is he dead? Someone knows, but I’m damned if I do. And there was a girl who answered an ad in the paper, a girl called Emily, a fan of Kierkegaard. I never met her because she’s dead, too. I never met her, but she was probably a good kid. Studious and sober. I mean, when was the last time you met a trouble-maker who read Kierkegaard? Then there was poor Miss Evangeline. And so it goes on. The reason I am here and not enjoying the company of friends is all these dead people are dead because of something to do with me and a guy called Hoffmann; and something terrible that happened out in Patagonia, something so awful it made the chaplain lose his wits.’

‘I don’t know anything about nothing.’

‘You mean you don’t know nothing about anything. If that’s true the next half-hour is going to be very painful for you.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘The best way to find out if someone’s telling the truth is to hurt them very badly and see if they stick to their story. Never fails.’

‘What are you going to do?’

‘Don’t be so impatient. you’ll find out soon enough.’

‘Go and fuck yourself.’

I laughed. ‘You know, for a man nailed to the floor you’ve got a lot of chutzpah.’

There was a Pyrex salad bowl lying in the corner of the room. I’d seen it the first time I came and now as I looked at it a plan took shape in my mind. I ripped open Caleb’s shirt and exposed a belly of quivering lard. Then I picked up the salad bowl and up-ended it, placing it firmly on his belly. The fat pressed upwards and sealed the bowl. I fetched some firelighters. Caleb followed me with his eyes.

‘Watch closely, now, you’re going to enjoy this.’ I opened the door to Tiresias’s cage and picked him up by the tail.

‘What are you doing? You leave Tiresias alone.’

I lifted the salad bowl and popped the mouse under it then remade the seal. The mouse ran round in frantic circles in his new glass prison, occasionally jumping up and testing the glass walls with his paws.

‘What are you doing?’

‘You’re a Classics scholar, you should know this one. I think the Romans invented it.’

I lit the firelighter and held it aloft, a waxy brick of greasy white chemicals which burned with a fierce but almost invisible flame. I put it on top of the dish. I took another firelighter and added it to the pyre. I rolled up my sleeve and placed my elbow on the Pyrex dish to test the temperature. It was starting to get hot in there for poor old Tiresias.

‘I read about it somewhere so I can’t absolutely guarantee it will work, but theoretically what is supposed to happen is this: the mouse starts to get hot and goes a bit nuts and then he starts to get very hot and tries to escape. And the only way out he can see is to burrow through the floor. Normally that’s not too great a problem, but, as you will be aware, the floor in this case is your stomach.’

‘You’re mad. Tiresias would never do that.’

‘You know him better than I do, but I wouldn’t be too sure of his loyalty. Rodents can be very fickle. Rats, especially, who are but distant cousins to the mouse, are notorious turncoats when their life is threatened. They sail with you in the hold all the way from Byzantium; eat your grain and drink your water; and then the first sniff of smoke they’re off down the gangplank.’

Caleb leaned forward and watched in horrified fascination. ‘He’ll never do it.’

‘I’ve got ten quid that says he does.’

‘He loves me.’

‘Each mouse kills the thing he loves.’

Caleb glared.

‘Anyway,’ I continued, ‘you mustn’t take it personally. Instinct drives him to it. It shouldn’t be interpreted as a waning of his love.’

We watched the mouse scurrying around frantically, trying to get away from the heat. Then he turned his attention to Caleb’s belly. Caleb screamed. Who wouldn’t? Mice have got sharp claws and sharp little teeth and Tiresios was gnawing Caleb’s belly, his tiny muzzle already frothing pink with blood.

‘Apparently they can gnaw through steel.’

Caleb yelled again.

It turned my stomach just watching, but I forced myself to appear unconcerned. A picture of nonchalance.

‘What do you want to know?’ he cried.

‘What’s the terrible thing that drove the priest mad?’

‘I can’t say.’

‘You mean you won’t.’

‘All right, I won’t. My lips are sealed . . . Oh!’ he groaned at the pain.

‘Who’s killing all these people?’

‘The Pieman. Please make it stop.’

‘Who is the Pieman?’

‘He’s dead.’

‘I know he’s dead, you fool; this is not a good time to split hairs. Who was the Pieman?’

‘Make it stop,’ he screamed, ‘and I’ll tell you.’

I considered.

‘Please!’ he screamed.

I continued to consider. The mouse was tearing up strands of human tissue now, like a heroin addict whose stash has fallen between the floor boards. Caleb screamed again. I lifted the bowl and took out the mouse. I put him back in his cage. Caleb panted heavily as he tried to capture his breath.

‘The Pieman,’ he said, ‘was one of us. There were five of us who survived the Mission House siege, me, Erw Watcyns, the Pieman and two others who have since died. We did something terrible – I can’t tell you what it was – and we swore a vow of silence. We swore that so long as we all lived we wouldn’t speak about the shameful thing we did. But because of this Hoffmann guy we keep getting people every now and again who turn up asking about what happened. Sometimes they’re spooks or spies, sometimes Wild West nuts – you know the type: looking for the lost grandchild of the Sundance Kid. Erw and the Pieman were the assassins. Anyone who turned up and got too nosey, they took care of it.’

‘You mean killed them?’

‘Yes.’

‘What was this terrible thing you did, the reason so many harmless innocent people had to die?’

‘I can’t tell you.’

‘You will.’

‘I can’t.’

‘Don’t make me put the mouse back.’

‘I can’t tell you. I’ve sworn an oath to my buddies, my brothers in arms. There’s no finer fellowship to be found on God’s lousy earth, no bond of love more unbreakable than that. Compared to that, a man’s love for a woman is nothing. It can grow cold with time, even with the best intentions it can, but the love forged in the crucible of battle never dies and never wanes. I would happily die rather than betray those beautiful comrades.’

I took the mouse out of its cage and popped it under the Pyrex dish. ‘Beautiful speech, Caleb. I’m touched. It’s not often a man gets to express such noble sentiments on his deathbed. For most of us in this mundane quotidian fallen world, the best we get to say is, “Please find a good home for the cat.” But you! You, my friend, are different. You have transmogrified this bleak grey December afternoon with the beauty of your requiem. You have transfigured this filthy evil-smelling room you inhabit, and turned it into a palace. On this day, though you are about to die unpleasantly, you should scorn to change your state with kings.’ I relit the firelighters.

This time Tiresias went straight to work on the tunnel project. Caleb began to scream.

‘I’m leaving now,’ I said. ‘Is there anything you want to say to me?’

‘Go and jump in the lake!’

‘You’re a brave guy, Caleb, I’ll say that much. I’ll tell them at your funeral.’

I stood up and walked to the door. ‘Bon appétit, little mouse.’ I walked out and listened. He screamed a couple of times and then said, ‘Wait! Come back.’

I went back in. ‘Yes?’ ‘Over there by the window, there’s a knapsack . . . Oh my God, this hurts. Please!’

I took the mouse out of the glass bowl. ‘What about the knapsack?’

‘In the front pocket on the right, there are some ampoules of morphine. Can you fetch them?’

‘Huh?’

‘For the pain.’

‘What are you talking about?’

‘I don’t think I can bear the pain.’

‘That’s the whole bloody point.’

‘No it isn’t.’

‘Yes it is! It’s supposed to hurt so much that you scream and yell and cry out for your ma and eventually, unable to bear it any longer, you tell me what I want to know. It’s called torture.’

‘But I’m not going to tell you, I would die before I told you. All I’m asking is for you to give me a dignified death.’

‘You don’t give someone morphine if they’re being tortured. It wouldn’t be torture if you did.’

‘No one will know. I won’t tell. I’ll be dead.’

‘What is wrong with you? I don’t care about that! I’m torturing you. You can’t have morphine. Jesus!’

‘All right. Keep your hair on. I only asked.’

‘The whole point is you tell me because you can’t bear the pain. That’s what torture is.’

‘Look, I understand that you’re upset. But I can see you are a merciful man.’

‘No, I’m not. I’m not!’

‘You are. You are driven to do this by some desperate need that I do not ask about. I can see the gentleness in your soul. And because of that I ask for some relief from the pain.’

‘The answer’s no. No morphine under any circumstances.’

‘In that case, you may as well proceed.’

‘Caleb, please tell me about your secret shame. Don’t make me do this.’

‘I cannot.’

I reached for the mouse.

‘One other thing,’ he said.

‘Yes?’

‘You’re doing it wrong.’

‘Doing what wrong?’

‘The torture. If you carry on like that the mouse will die of suffocation. You’re supposed to use a cage – that’s what they did. And you’re wrong, it wasn’t the Romans, it was the Spanish Inquisition. If you use a metal cage, the mouse can still tunnel through the flesh but he gets plenty of air.’

I looked at him and was unable to control my expression. It was one of the purest astonishment. ‘But why should I care if the mouse dies?’

‘Because it’s me you want to torment, isn’t it? This has got nothing to do with Tiresias.’

‘What if I spare the mouse? Will you talk?’

‘Don’t be stupid. I just thought—’

‘Look, you fool, all I want is to hear the story. I don’t care if I have to kill you to get it, so why should I give a damn about the mouse? OK, I tell you what I’ll do. I’ll put a little wedge under the edge of the dish so some air can get in. How does that sound?’

He thought about it and said. ‘Yes, that should do it. And please, when I’m dead, don’t let the cats get him.’

‘Is there anything else you want? You strike me as a pretty damn fussy guy.’

‘Despite everything I believe you are a fair man, a merciful man.’

‘Don’t bet on it.’

‘A Christian.’

‘Definitely not that.’

‘Ah, yes, you deny it but I’ve presided at scenes like this too often in the past to be fooled. And because I can see the goodness in your heart I want to make one final request.’

‘If it’s cigarettes I’m fresh out.’

‘No, I want a strop.’

‘A strop?’

‘You know, a piece of leather to bite on so my screams don’t upset Tiresias. Loud noises spook him.’

‘What about my shoe? You could bite on that.’

‘I am in no position to bargain. The offer of your shoe is acceptable.’

I took it off, held it over his mouth and looked with horror as he raised his head towards it. He said, ‘I’m sorry, it might scuff the polish a bit.’

‘It’s OK, there’s a shoeshine kid at the Cliff Railway Station.’

‘Make sure he doesn’t overcharge you. Farewell, Tiresias, I forgive you.’ He clenched his teeth on the shoe and closed his eyes.

I watched for a second or two, holding the struggling mouse by its tail. I put the mouse back into its cage and tore the shoe out of Caleb’s mouth. I sat down onto the floor, defeated by either his magnificent spirit or a magnificent bluff.

Caleb opened his eyes and saw my dejection. ‘Please don’t take it to heart,’ he said. ‘It isn’t easy to torture a man to death. Very few people are capable of it. I tried telling those people from Odessa, they were the same when they tortured me. I said to them, “Don’t regard my refusal to tell you what you want as a criticism of your skills. You are excellent torturers, all of you.”’

I smiled weakly and said, ‘I bet they were glad to see the back of you.’

‘They were.’

I began to wrench to nails from the floor. Once one arm was free Caleb used it to pull the other one off the nails.

‘Would you like a drink?’ he asked. ‘It is Christmas.’

I nodded dully and he brought a bottle of sherry from out of the shadows and took a swig from the bottle. He handed it to me. ‘Sorry I don’t have glasses. I never get visitors.’

I drank from the bottle. We sat on the floor and said nothing for a while. Scenes like that are hard to follow. The torturer drinking a Christmas toast with his victim – there’s no protocol to observe.

Eventually Caleb said, ‘This Hoffmann guy, he sure has caused a lot of trouble.’

‘If he exists.’

‘’Course he exists. He stole my bleeding coat, didn’t he?’

‘Then why don’t you know who he is?’

‘I do know.’

‘You know?’

‘Yes.’

‘And you let me do the “mouse tunnelling through your stomach routine” and you wouldn’t say?’

‘You didn’t ask me who Hoffmann is, you wanted to know about our secret shame. I will never tell you that.’

I looked at him once more in astonishment.

‘Oh, Lord, yes! I can remember it as if it was yesterday – I was lying wounded in the field hospital and he came and took my coat and left me to freeze to death. I told my interrogators all about that bit. I didn’t tell them that the item they were looking for was no longer in the coat, that I had taken it out.’

‘Let me guess: you can’t tell me what it was because it’s connected to your secret shame.’

‘That’s right.’

I sighed. This was turning into a very exasperating Christmas.

‘Are you OK?’

‘I’m just a bit taken aback that you were prepared to die a few seconds ago and now you’re telling me this.’

‘But there’s nothing to hide any more about Hoffmann. You can walk down to the Pier and see him.’

‘Don’t tell me he’s the laughing policeman.’

‘He’s appearing at the carol concert tonight.’

‘I thought that was just a wild rumour.’

‘Oh, no. That Tadpole girl has been giving out leaflets. Come and be redeemed. Hoffmann will expiate the sins of all towns-people who turn up tonight. Tickets five pound. There’s a leaflet here somewhere.’

‘I guess they’ll have sold out by now. Just my luck.’

‘You’re better off not going. There’ll be a riot when they find out who it is.’

‘So who is it?’

‘Hoffmann’s not his real name. That is just a . . . what do you call it? Acronym or something. It’s from my torture dossier. That’s quite a famous item in the world of the spooks. Those guys who tortured me wrote everything down in German. The name comes from the letters HFM which were scribbled as an abbreviation on my dossier. From “Horizontalischer Falte Mensch”. Do you speak German?’

‘No.’

‘I told them, you see, about the coat. How I lay there coming round from the anaesthetic and everything was all misty and confused; I looked up and saw this blurry face. The only thing I could remember about him was the horizontal crease in his face that looked like a smile. So they called him “Horizontal Crease Man”. In German that’s “Horizontalischer Falte Mensch”, which becomes HFM. Or Hoffmann.’