From Aberystwyth with Love

Chapter 12

Once upon a time a man called Caxton transformed mankind’s destiny for ever by forging letters out of iron. Later the iron was replaced by molten lead. Thus were born those epistemological coal tongs we call printed words, and with them our ability to catalogue the contents of that mansion of infinite floors, the human heart. Our thoughts and dreams, our memories, the anguish of love, our inexpressible bafflement at the antinomies of space and time . . . all that had once been unnameable intimations were brought within the scope of the coal tongs. In those sturdy iron squiggles, all could be written down and communicated, not only to the living but to people who had not yet been born, to people who might not be born for many centuries to come. But, as we know, a cruel and pitiless contingency characterises our fate. We are chaff in the wind and the cup of life which, sooner or later, all must drink to the lees, is often more bitter than gall. And so to prevent this brute and inescapable fact from casting its shadow upon our summer holidays, it was ordained that the epistemological coal tongs in Aberystwyth would be fashioned from sugar. And men would call it Rock. In scarlet crystalline sweetness thereafter would all human thought be extruded. Or, as a very clever person once said, ‘Whereof the rock cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.’

At least that’s what it says in the free guidebook. Calamity read it with a frown creasing her forehead as we waited in the queue.

Barnaby & Merlin’s rock foundry occupies the southern wing of the Old College on Aberystwyth Prom. It is built from warm yellow blocks of stone in an eclectic architectural mixture of Teutonic castle, monastery, schoolhouse and St Pancras station. On the tower at the end is a mosaic of Archimedes, the man credited with having worked out in the second century how many grains of sand there are in the universe. For his reward he stands immortalised in little coloured stones, looking out upon a beach on which there isn’t a single grain of sand, only grit and smooth pebbles. They say the mosaic is not opaque, it just appears so from the outside, and in reality it is translucent and behind it sits old Barnaby counting his money. That’s what they say.

There was a queue of around ten or twelve holidaymakers. We followed them, up the steps and into a neo-Gothic foyer: stone spiral staircases, pale sandstone banisters, arched windows and circular skylights with stained glass. The floor was laid out of shiny red tiles. An old stone griffin stood sentinel and the building hummed, a sound that seemed to come from all sides and also from nowhere. The same sensation is experienced by people in the engine room of ships. At Barnaby & Merlin work continued round the clock throughout the year; in winter the rock was stockpiled like hay. The pink smoke never stopped belching from the modest chimney.

‘I’ve been looking into the troll bride angle,’ said Calamity. ‘It seems that a number of girls have gone missing from the area around Abercuawg over the past century. The old folk reckon they were sent to the trolls. Usually they got rid of unpopular girls, slatterns who gave the village a bad name. That’s what they say.’

‘I see.’

‘Traditionally it was the Witchfinder who organised it.’

‘That’s interesting.’

Mr Williams, the man who conducted the tour, seemed neither surprised nor disappointed at the small turnout; indeed he seemed to consider it reasonable. The decline of an entire way of life could be read in his resignation. The world had forgotten about rock, they had forgotten why they needed to eat it, and that was not difficult because there was no reason. People ate it because it was one of those things you did at the seaside, one of the things everyone else did. It answered no great need. If all the seaside rock in the world disappeared tomorrow, the seaside holiday which itself had all but disappeared would not be greatly diminished. The same would be true if the donkey rides disappeared because sitting on a donkey is not particularly essential; and the same would be true of eating hot dogs, and bingo, and countless other things. The experience of the seaside holiday would not be diminished if any of them disappeared but if they all did there would be no seaside holiday.

Each of the slim pink alabaster-smooth rods of confectionery was made in strict accordance with a secret recipe invented by founder Ephraim Barnaby and his partner Merlin who didn’t exist. Ephraim Barnaby had been a man with an acute understanding of Victorian business practice and knew that you couldn’t get anywhere in those days without an ampersand. It was universally acknowledged that B&M rock was superior to all other seaside rocks and this was the result of a secret formula that was passed down from father to son on his twenty-first birthday in a sealed envelope.

When the time came, the elder Barnaby would take his son for breakfast at the Belle Vue Hotel. There, amid the shining silver and the crisp white linen spread on an alcove table commanding a kingly view of the Promenade and Cardigan Bay, they would dine on dry toast and tea without milk and the young son would intuit from this that the meal embodied a moral about those twin cheats, triumph and disaster. After breakfast they would take the Cliff Railway to the summit of Constitution Hill and spend the morning discussing matters of business. The culmination of this ritual would be the handing over of the envelope that contained the secret formula. There would be a pause on top of that hilltop with its dramatic vista of Cardigan Bay and the boy would then open the envelope and read its contents, having first given his father a solemn undertaking, sealed with a handshake, to strive to make his life worthy of the legacy being entrusted to him, and also to take pains to bring into the world a son into whose care he could entrust the same legacy in a similar scene on top of Constitution Hill in years to come.

The boy would read the letter containing the secret formula and return from the mountain, like other prophets before him, with an expression composed in equal parts of astonishment and fear. The torch had been passed on this way for five generations without mishap until the current one when young Gomer Barnaby lost his wits the same day that Gethsemane Walters went missing. After this, the elder Barnaby became a recluse in the turret of the rock foundry and devoted his declining years to caring for his broken son and focussing his energies on the betterment of mankind by developing a better type of placebo. It came to be known as Ampersandium and people swear by it.

Mr Williams hurried through the first three halls because he knew from experience that no one cared. We rushed through a warehouse and unloading bay where the main ingredients, sugar, water and pink colour, were unloaded. We passed a kitchen in which people wearing hats and masks supervised steaming saucepans the size of small swimming pools. Inside the pans, constantly stirred by automatic spoons, was the hot mixture. At some point that was not disclosed the secret formula would be added from a glass phial by Ephraim Barnaby V personally; and some time after that would come the peppermint flavour and the pink colour. Lesser brands of seaside rock use a variety of artificial colours but B&M’s was a traditional firm and only used one. This was a mildly interesting discovery: the scintillating red of the letters, the pink of the outside and the white middle were all products of the same sugary dough. It was beaten and pulled and slowly aerated, a bit like bread, and the more it got aerated the lighter it became. Pulled and pulled and pulled until finally it was white. Along the way, a scarlet lump would be broken off for the letters, and further on down the line the pink casing would be set aside.

No one was interested in any of this. There is only one part of the tour that people care about, the typographer’s room; and only one question dominates all thought: how do they do it? How do they put in the letters? In keeping with the air of profound mystery that surrounds the letters passing through the rock we expected something equally impressive in the room where the rite was enacted: an enchanted grotto filled with bright shiny cogs and wheels and levers and all manner of fantastic machinery, but there was nothing: just a long table and tubes of the red, pink and white sugar-dough. But most importantly there were men. No machine can put the letters in seaside rock. There were three typographers, and a superintendent who I could tell was the ex-con from the Slaughterhouse Mob.

How do they do it? What is the great secret that baffles all those who have ever bitten into or just sucked a stick of seaside rock? Jam sandwiches are the secret. This is the visual analogy which will unlock the puzzle.

Imagine you have a jam sandwich, a square sandwich rather than one that has been cut into triangles for arranging on a plate. Look at it end-on and you will see a layer of red in between two layers of white. Now imagine that the white is not bread but white rock, and the filling is not jam but red rock. There you have it: this is your building block. All the lettering is created out of these sandwiches.

All the letters are in upper case and in Helvetica, or at least a sans serif face. This is because it already takes twelve years to teach a man to write A B E R Y S T W Y T H and that time would be even longer if he had to learn to do lower case as well with all its extra curves and flourishes. On its own, without need of any embellishment, a jam sandwich gives you the letter ‘I’. Put another one on top and you have a ‘T’. Add two more branches to the tree and presto! You’ve got an ‘E’. Already after six sandwiches you have the word ‘TIE’. Add two more sandwiches and you have ‘TILE’. In between individual letters you put spacers of white, which are sandwiches with no filling. Slightly more difficult are the ones where the cross-beams are diagonal: A, W, Y, and these require a certain degree of jiggery-pokery with your sandwiches, but nothing insurmountable to an enquiring mind. And that brings you to the tough ones, the ones for which the rock master spends twelve long years learning the craft: the ones with curves. But the principle is the same. Consider the letter ‘S’. To make this, first imagine wrapping the jam-filled sandwich around a tube of white, like a Swiss roll. Looked at from the end you will have a circle of red. Now bisect the circle with a knife to form two half circles. Move one up and you find you have an ‘S’, and it takes little skill to see how this arrangement can be adapted to make a ‘D’ and a ‘B’. All that remains is the Cellophane and a specially blurred, washed-out photo of Aberystwyth.

The tour petered out in the gift shop and we were free to wander round. Calamity went back to the office. I followed the chief typographer out into the yard and sat on a bench next to him as he had a smoke. I took out a brown paper bag that contained tongue lubricant without which in Aberystwyth the engine of detection grinds quickly to a halt.

I said, ‘Lovely day, isn’t it?’

He didn’t answer.

‘I guess you don’t get to see much of the summer, working inside all day.’

Still no answer.

‘Apparently this building was originally built by the railway company as a hotel, but no one came. Makes you think, doesn’t it?’

Apparently it didn’t.

‘Is it hard getting the letters in?’

Finally he spoke, without turning to look at me. ‘Ask a lot of questions, don’t you?’

‘I just like to talk.’

‘No, you like to make other people talk, I know. Spotted you the moment you walked in, knew straight away you were either cop or snooper. Spotted the brown paper package too. Cops don’t come bearing gifts.’

I let the top of the rum appear through the paper. ‘You mean this?’

‘That’s what I saw. You intend drinking it all alone?’

‘Would it be a bad idea?’

‘Drinking alone is the thin edge of the wedge, I generally advise against it.’

‘Know anyone round here who could help shoulder the burden?’

‘I’m not busy at the moment.’

I unscrewed the cap, took a drink from the bottle and handed it to him. He tried not to look too eager but his hand was shaking.

As he drank, I said, ‘I like a nice conversation when I drink.’

The typographer swallowed a third of the bottle in a series of glug-glug sounds. He let out a long gasp of satisfaction and held the bottle away from him and examined it as if he had never seen such a wonder before. He said, ‘I can get downright chatty when there’s liquor around.’

‘They tell me you used to be a member of the Slaughterhouse Mob.’

‘Yes, I was a bodyguard.’

‘Did you know Goldilocks?’

‘You could say he and I were acquainted.’

‘Story goes he escaped from prison while awaiting execution.’

‘I heard that story too.’

‘How did he manage to escape?’

‘By magic.’

‘Oh.’

He took another swig. I waited. He took another swig. It was one of those silences.

‘By magic, you say?’

‘Yup.’

‘Just like that.’

‘Yup.’

‘A mystery.’

‘Sort of.’

‘Care to throw any light on it?’

‘What sort of light?’

‘You know, the stuff made of photons.’

He nodded. ‘Oh that.’

I sighed.

‘Dewi Stardust,’ he said. ‘Conjuror to the mob. It was the Christmas party and he went to give the prisoners a little show. He was going to make someone disappear and needed a volunteer. Since Goldilocks was on death row he was the obvious choice. We all thought it was really funny. Dewi Stardust had a big animal cage on the stage and Goldilocks went inside; they shut the door. He threw a drape over the cage and waved his wand and stuff. Then there was a bang and a flash and that was quickly followed by the bark of a dog. He whipped off the drape and it seemed Goldilocks had been turned into a dog. Well, they all cheered and clapped thinking it was a pretty good trick.

‘Then at the end, when the show was winding up, Dewi tried to change the dog back into Goldilocks and it wouldn’t work. He tried and tried, using all the magic words he knew, but nothing happened.’ The ex-con paused for lubrication. ‘That was the last anyone ever saw of Goldilocks.’

We sat in silence for a while as I contemplated the story. ‘What happened to the dog?’

‘They put it in his cell for a few days, on the off-chance that it might change back spontaneously. After that, they gave it to the cook to look after. The dog was happy about that, was better fed than any of the prisoners, and was enormously popular around the cell block. The dog is the one character who ends up happy in this story. He was called Nipper.’

‘And no one ever saw Goldilocks again?’

‘Nope, or at least no one that I know of.’

‘How did you end up working here?’

‘I did old Mr Barnaby a good turn and he gave me the job.’

‘What did you do?’

‘I saved his son’s life.’

‘Most folk say you got the job because Barnaby must have lost his marbles.’

‘Most folk don’t know anything. They think the Slaughterhouse Mob tortured the son and broke all his teeth. I’m the one that took him to hospital.’

‘Why did they do that to him?’

‘Who?’

‘The Slaughterhouse Mob.’

‘Who said they did anything?’

‘You did. Or you implied it.’

‘My friend, I told you what folk say. I don’t take a position on it. About the only reason I am still alive, unlike every other member of that mob, is I don’t take positions on things. It’s not healthy. I found Gomer Barnaby wandering around in a daze, with his hair standing on end and all his teeth broken. I don’t know what happened to him, and nor did he. I thank that particular piece of shared ignorance for the long life that I have enjoyed.’

‘A little knowledge is a dangerous thing.’

‘Round here especially.’

‘This was the same day that Gethsemane disappeared, isn’t it?’

‘That’s right.’

‘Are those two things connected, do you think?’

‘Probably, but I don’t know how. I don’t take positions on that neither.’

‘Was Goldilocks as bad as they say?’

‘Depends on how bad they say.’

‘I guess you wouldn’t care to take a position on it?’

‘I’d say he was more misunderstood than downright bad. They say he got his sister pregnant as soon as Ahab the father left, but it wasn’t like that. He was the one protecting the sister from the drunken father; him and his brother. That’s why his big brother Shadrach got sent away. He came home and found the old man messing around with the sister and went for him. Nearly killed him, but not quite. He got sent to a mental asylum where he spent his days in a straitjacket. Goldilocks used to go and visit. Wasn’t supposed to, but he just went. Hitch-hiked. Then one day the father ran off and left Goldilocks and his sister alone. I don’t know what became of the sister. But she always said Goldilocks never laid a finger on her and I believe it.’

‘What happened to the mum?’

‘Disappeared one Christmas. Ahab put her shoes in the pig pen to make it appear like they’d eaten her. Goldilocks couldn’t have been more than ten or eleven when that happened. Some people reckon that’s why he went to work at the new slaughterhouse; get his own back on the pigs. Me, I don’t believe it, but they do say he loved killing those animals.’

‘What really happened to the mum?’

‘I don’t know. Maybe Ahab did her in, maybe she just couldn’t take it any more and ran away. Maybe Ahab lost her in a card game. Nothing would surprise me.’

‘Did Goldilocks kill Gethsemane?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Have you got a theory?’

‘Everyone’s got a theory.’

‘I haven’t.’

He took another drink. ‘This stuff is good!’

‘It doesn’t seem to be having much effect.’

‘It’s working fine, you are just too impatient.’ He paused again, and this time the silence was longer. I could see him thinking about it all, those days of long ago, a young man on the threshold of his life, filled with the hot-blooded lusts and desires that torment all young men. His memory insisted that the spotty youth of long ago was him, but it must have been hard to believe. ‘I don’t know whether he did or not, but I always found it strange that he would bury one of her shoes in his own garden. You’d have to be pretty stupid to do that and he wasn’t dumb.’

‘Of course if you wanted to frame him that’s exactly what you would do. I guess we’ll never know.’

‘There is one person who knows. The Witchfinder.’

‘Why him?’

‘While he was on death row the kid asked to see a priest. Said he had a confession to make. They sent the Witchfinder along. I guess they thought there was no point finding a real priest for a wretch like him. He made his confession and shortly after that he escaped. Something has always puzzled me about it. Strictly speaking, the Witchfinder was required by the seal of the confessional not to divulge what he heard. At the same time, if the kid had said on his deathbed that he was innocent, then the Witchfinder could hardly let that remain secret, could he? So it was sort of understood that if the kid was guilty the Witchfinder would say nothing, but if he was innocent he would make it obvious without actually saying it in words. Well, he said nothing, which sort of confirmed what everybody thought, that the kid was guilty. But, if that was the case, why didn’t he say where the body was? Why would you take the trouble to confess and not give up a detail like that? Always puzzled me, that.’ He finished the bottle of rum and handed it back. ‘Much obliged.’

I stood up and then remembered something. ‘So how did the kid escape?’

He held out a bunched fist. ‘This hand is Aberystwyth gaol.’ He held out the other hand. ‘And this is Aberystwyth. The question is, how to get from the one to the other, right?’

‘You seem to have outlined the problem with great economy.’

‘Exactly. Now, imagine it was a coin in one hand and you were a magician, how would you get the coin from one hand to the other? That’s the way to think of it.’

‘Maybe I should ask Dewi Stardust.’

‘That wouldn’t be easy. Dewi Stardust is not taking calls at the moment. Shortly after the escape he did a little disappearing trick of his own. A permanent one.’