Don’t Cry For Me Aberystwyth

Chapter 4

THE PROM gleamed in watery golden sunlight like a newly washed doorstep. A thin dusting of crystalline snow speckled the pavement, glittered in the sun, and turned at the edges to water. Breath was fog and cheeks smarted.

Sospan stirred a steaming pan of mulled-wine-flavoured ripple. The vapour of cinnamon, cloves and rum made my eyes water and mingled with the sharp, sweet scent from the Christmas tree in the corner of his kiosk; on the roof the fibreglass cone had been squirted with snow from a can, smelling of pine. He lifted the wooden spoon and tested the mixture with the air of a chef, nodded approval and turned down the gas.

‘I love Christmas,’ he said. ‘Although it won’t be the same this year. Not with . . . without . . . you know.’ He looked away, avoiding eye contact, with a sheepish air. For once his unerring instinct had led him astray and he had brought up a subject which might be a breach of decorum. He had meant to say, ‘without Myfanwy singing at the Pier carol concert’.

Myfanwy was my girlfriend, a former nightclub singer from the Moulin. It was a cherished tradition in Aberystwyth that she sang every year at the carol concert, but this year it did not look like it would be honoured. In the summer she had been kidnapped by gangsters and I rescued her. When I found her she was very sick, but she could have been a lot worse – she could have been dead. For a while after, she had hovered on the edge of consciousness, in a way that suggested rejoining Aberystwyth life was a plunge into a deep pool for which you needed to summon up the courage. The light inside her flickered on and off like a faulty fluorescent light. And then one day she woke up and smiled and started eating and everything seemed fine except for one thing. She couldn’t sing. It was as if the town hall clock had lost its tick.

‘I was talking to the chap at the home,’ said Sospan, ‘and he says there’s nothing physically wrong – nothing wrong with her voice. It’s a mental thing. Blocked, she is.’

I nodded politely but said nothing and wished he would choose another subject. Mercifully he moved to the ice dispenser and started to polish it. Calamity stamped her feet to keep out the fresh cold. A man appeared from the direction of the Pier, ambling slowly, and leading a train of mules like a gold prospector arriving at the foot of the mountain. It was Eeyore, my father. I watched his gait for signs of the slowing that must inevitably come for a man now over seventy but he seemed unchanged, no more soporific than the donkeys who were sixty-five years his junior. There were only five this morning: Antigone, Erlkönig, Firkin, Sugarpie and Gretchen. A slimmed-down troupe to reflect the fact that no one ever bought a ride between late October and March. It was partly a bid to conserve feed and not unnecessarily wear out hoof metal, but also a statement by my father that maintenance of the ritual had a value beyond the money that accrued from the rides. A value which he might have found difficult to put into words but which he felt in his bones just as he would have felt something amiss, a sense of letting the side down, if he had let bad weather serve as an excuse for staying at home. Or perhaps it was a more deeply personal fear: the recognition that the day he first stayed at home would be the beginning of a pattern in which those days would gradually outnumber the days he worked. Until one day the time came when he didn’t go out at all, and we stood at his bedside and discussed in whispers what we would do with the donkeys once he was gone.

Calamity kissed him on the whiskery cheek and Sospan poured out another ice.

I put a hand on Antigone’s head and nodded a greeting. ‘Everything OK?’

‘I’m doing fine,’ said Eeyore. ‘The donkeys are a bit sad – it always happens.’

‘They don’t like Christmas?’

‘It’s the pain of exile. They feel it keenly, especially when the cold gets into their hooves.’

‘What are they exiled from?’

‘Originally donkeys are from Palestine, aren’t they? And Lebanon. Lands of heat and dust and shady cypresses and cedars. Olive groves and orange trees. Life, a long, pleasant travail along a series of oases like green and blue beads on a chain of sand; tinkling fountains, the glitter of the pure clean water drawn from the well in the hot sun, and laughing virgin girls bearing sherbet and feeding them figs from the palm of their unsullied hands.’

Sospan looked up at the mention of laughing virgins and said gloomily, ‘And now here they are in Aberystwyth.’

‘Not all donkeys come from Palestine,’ said Calamity. ‘Some come from Mongolia.’

‘Sure,’ said Eeyore. ‘But the ones that give the rides to the kids on the beach are from the Holy Land. The ones from the steppes are too bad-tempered – they bite and kick. You wouldn’t have caught Jesus riding one of those on Palm Sunday.’

I ran my hand down the mane. ‘Do they really miss Lebanon?’

‘Not in an obvious sense. Not like they’d miss their stable if we moved to a different part of town; but deep down in their souls they know, they remember a sunny land to which they’ll never return. It’s the darkness at this time of year, you see, the deadening of the spirit that accompanies the dying of the year.’

‘That’s what Christmas is all about,’ said Sospan. ‘It’s a winter festival to mourn the dying of the light, the sun slipping into the sea and leaving us in everlasting grey mournful twilight.’

‘That’s it,’ said Eeyore. ‘We have this awareness born into us, we don’t like it but we understand it, but they don’t. They come from a land of perennial sunshine.’

‘They look OK to me,’ said Calamity. ‘Did you get the thing?’ Eeyore looked puzzled for a second and then said, ‘Oh!’ as he remembered. He delved into his pocket and pulled out a brown envelope. In a bid to throw the old Jew off the scent we had given Eeyore the Pier hat-check voucher to redeem. He handed it to Calamity. It was unopened and she looked at me.

‘It was your hunch, kid.’

She tore off the end of the envelope and took out a photograph. It was old and torn and faded, in sepiatone. It showed three people, two men and a woman, posing in what looked like Victorian Sunday best, or Edwardian – I was never too clear about those things. It could have been fancy dress but something about the attitude of those posing suggested it was real, that this was one of those special occasions which don’t come along often in a lifetime. It was inscribed in the elegant, flowing script that even the milkmaid used in the days before Biro. It said, ‘Mr & Mrs Harry Place and their dear companion Mr Robert LeRoy Parker. DeYoung’s Studio, Lower Broadway, New York City. 1901.’

Calamity stared at it for a while and when it refused to surrender its meaning handed it to me. I turned it over. It was stamped ‘Ex Libris Mossad’

I gave it to Eeyore.

He chuckled and ran his thumb across the surface of the picture. ‘Didn’t think you were into this sort of thing,’ he said.

We looked at him.

‘Wild West. Didn’t think it was your cup of tea. Least, I don’t remember you ever being interested. Even as a kid it was always cops and robbers rather than cowboys and stuff.’

‘What are you saying?’

‘The photo.’

‘It’s from the Wild West?’

‘Oh yes. Last of the great outlaws.’

Calamity said, ‘Who?’

He tapped the picture with his index finger. This is Butch Cassidy, and this is the Sundance Kid. The woman is Sundance’s girlfriend, Etta Place. She and Sundance were travelling under the names Mr and Mrs Harry Place. Robert LeRoy Parker is Butch Cassidy – that’s his real name, although he often used the alias Santiago Ryan. DeYoung’s Studio, Lower Broadway, New York City. 1901. This is a famous picture, the one they took before catching the ship to Patagonia.’

Calamity tried to speak but her jaw was too far agape. I curled my index finger and held it gently under her chin, as if coaxing a bird to step on it, and slowly I closed her mouth.

‘Butch Cassidy!’ she gasped. ‘And Sundance!’

‘I thought they went to Bolivia. It was in the movie.’

‘That’s right,’ said Eeyore. ‘In the Hollywood version they go straight to Bolivia and within six months are dead in a blaze of gunfire. In real life they sailed to Buenos Aires on the SS Herminius. With the loot stolen from the Union Pacific Overland Flyer they bought a ranch out in Patagonia near the Welsh settlement of Chubut. Stayed there two years.’

‘It’s the Pinkertons’ greatest unsolved case,’ said Calamity.

‘What’s unsolved? They died in the marketplace in Bolivia.’

‘The Pinkertons have never accepted that,’ said Eeyore. ‘They think the outlaws faked their own deaths so they could return unmolested to the States. For the Pinkertons the case is still open. But the real mystery is what happened to the girl, Etta Place. She disappears from the historical record not long after this was taken. No one knows what happened to her. Although they say she was carrying Sundance’s child.’

Calamity gulped the remains of her ice cream down in one. ‘I’ve got to go.’

‘Where to?’

The post office. I’ve got to fax them.’

‘Who?’

‘The Pinkertons.’

She strode off, fired with the conviction of youth. I made to follow her but Sospan called me back. He grabbed my forearm and leaned forward out of the box, looking up and down the Prom as if enemies were all around and the secret he was about to divulge was too precious to risk. ‘I know it’s probably not a good time, what with you worrying about Myfanwy and all that, but if you’re interested, I might be able to get a few tickets for Bark of the Covenant.’