The Day Aberystwyth Stood Still

Chapter 9

Sospan ran a damp cloth along the counter and talked of escape. I lifted my elbow to let the cloth pass. ‘Everything is prepared, ready for the moment should it ever come,’ he said. ‘An ice-cream van, anonymous and untraceable, secreted in a lock-up garage in Bow Street. Behind the row of council flats, with the red door. The key is hanging from a string taped to the water pipe at the rear. There is ice cream, money, food and clothing in the van. Enough to last a month or more.’

‘What are you expecting to happen? Armageddon?’

‘You mock, perhaps, but my family came to this country after the St Bartholomew’s Day Massacre. We lost a lot of customers during that dark period. An experience like that makes an impression that lasts for many generations. It’s like people who knew starvation during the war; they never forget it, do they? Always haunted by the fear that such a time might come again. They can’t even throw away a crumb of bread.’

‘Are you really worried you might be massacred in your beds?’

‘I worry about the unforeseen and make what allowances I can. No one knows what lies in store, no one can predict. The wise man prepares.’ He wrung out the cloth and put it away. He leaned forward onto the counter, supporting his face with his hands. ‘But to tell you the truth, physical escape is the easy part, isn’t it?’

‘What other types are there?’

‘I mean relocation of the physical body makes little difference if the soul is in prison, does it?’

‘I guess that’s true. Is your soul in prison?’

‘None of us are truly free. At least, not until we have slain the dragon that lives in all our hearts. You remember me mentioning a special ice cream to you before. The one I keep off-site. The ice-cream man’s Katabasis.’

‘I remember.’

‘This ice cream facilitates escape via the inner route. Not the road of the flesh, across mountain ranges and deserts, but a journey of the spirit, inward and downward.’

‘It sounds . . . interesting.’

‘There is nothing quite like it. I can let you have a scoop if you like, by appointment of course.’

‘Perhaps not today.’

‘Most people who take it describe a vision of a journey into a giant’s castle, I don’t know why.’

‘Aren’t you tempted to take it yourself?’

‘I did once, many years ago, when I was young and frightened and going through a period of great emotional turmoil. I too sought the way of the giant’s castle. What happened? A curious thing. I met a lady at the door to the castle who sent me back. She said, “No, Sospan, you are not ready for the way of the giant’s castle, this route is barred to you. We have other things in mind. You must return to the surface, return to Aberystwyth. There, on that frontier between the world of flesh and that kingdom of salt beyond the Prom, ruled over by my cousin Pluto, you must pitch your tent, a little wooden pillbox. From there you shall cast forth your wares, principally cold sticky sweetmeats perfumed with vanilla, emblem of paradise and the Lotus Isles, and with this will you ensnare the hearts of men and make them whole with your ministry of love. And for those whose wounds are too grievous, that cannot so easily be remedied, you will send them here to the Giant’s Castle, and we will minister to their heart’s ache.” So I came back.’

‘What was it called again?’

‘Katabasis. £1.25 a scoop. By appointment only.’

‘Do you get a flake?’

‘It can be arranged, but I consider it gilding the lily. It’s got green ripple.’

A new customer arrived and Sospan changed the subject. ‘Mr Raspiwtin! Lovely evening.’

Raspiwtin gave me a sheepish nod and ordered a choc ice.

‘Mr Raspiwtin was explaining earlier today that the world is an illusion.’

‘If it is, it’s a convincing one,’ I said.

‘Every day we have to invent it afresh,’ said Sospan. ‘That’s what you said, isn’t it? Every morning when you awake you groan in torment.’

Raspiwtin’s voice took on a wistful tone. ‘Ah yes! How I crave that exquisite annihilation of the ego we call sleep. But I wake instead and begin once more the terrible Sisyphean labour of fabricating a universe. But once, many years ago, I saw the world as it really was. A series of mornings lasting perhaps a year or more when the trick by which one resurrects the façade failed and my soul was naked before the darkness as a tortoise who has lost his shell. I shudder still to recall it, although, truth be told, it was principally that experience that brought me to these shores, and to this fine meeting with a hero such as you, Mr Sospan.’

‘I think you may be overstating it a bit there,’ said Sospan, turning aside the extravagant compliment. ‘Me a hero?’

‘Not at all! I look at you opening your kiosk every day, feeding the insatiable maw; like a fat sow you parade your teats to the biting snouts of your litter; you suffer in silence, performing the essential sacrament of your trade. The day wanes and you close. The sun sets and you are miserable once more, you who were formerly so glorious are now dross; pathetic. A contemptible jester, nothing more. But for a while – temporarily, yes; provisionally, indeed; fragmentarily, of course! – for a while you created your own meaning. You transcended your fate. You were a hero. Truly you, Mr Sospan, are an Absurd man.’ Raspiwtin made a small flourish with the choc ice and walked off chuckling with the light heart of a man who believes himself to be on the verge of discovering the truth that eluded him all his life.

A squeal erupted from the beach. It was Chastity running across the sands, chased by a man in a space cadet’s outfit. ‘No, Meici, no,’ she squealed in mock terror. Two young lovers playing the game that all young lovers play in the days before their minds are informed of what their hearts have decided. Too early to acknowledge their love, they express it obliquely through rough-and-tumble games that serve as disguised caresses. The sight was as familiar on this beach as a dog stealing a toddler’s ice cream, but it had more poignancy here because the two actors, Meici and Chastity, would no doubt be appalled if you had made explicit to them the truths embodied in their chase. Chastity was a hopeless runner, and Meici, though not much better, gained on her easily. When she reached the water’s edge she found, like many people before her, that her fleeing feet had betrayed her; there was nowhere left to run. She stopped and huddled; Meici caught up and stopped, unsure what to do next. ‘No, Meici,’ she squealed. As if remembering the rest of the role, Meici grabbed her and began to tickle her. ‘No, no, no, stop it, no, don’t hit me,’ she squealed in play, unaware, as were we all, that one day she would say it in truth.

The Pier began to blink with light; to ping and ding and tinkle; to emit the hot smell of scorched ozone, which mingled on the night breeze with the heavier reek of fried onion and grease-encrusted hot-dog van. Under the Pier, hidden in the gloomy forest of ironmongery, roosting starlings emitted a collective mutter. I walked up the Prom in search of Raspiwtin and found him playing crazy golf. Of all the rituals of the seaside holiday it must be the emptiest. It isn’t crazy; not really. Despite the discordant primary colours painted on the concrete, it isn’t zany or madcap or subversive or anarchic; it doesn’t encroach upon the line separating genius and madness. It is simply dull. The grass is made of cement, which gives no purchase to the ball, and therefore it is impossible to aim with any precision. The ritual survives for one reason only: in our hearts we notice a subtle resonance with our own fates. We too careen around a concrete rink for a while, ping from side to side across a garishly painted world the colours of which betoken fake joys, driven by insane forces, subject to incomprehensible laws and rules in which merit plays no part; eventually, once chance and Brownian motion have exhausted all other possibilities, we drop into a hole and have to hand our putter back to a bearded loon in a kiosk. He ticks a cheap pink scorecard. There is no bar afterwards.

Raspiwtin bent over his putter and lined up his shot with needless precision.

‘Who do you work for?’ I asked.

‘No one any more.’

‘Who did you used to work for?’

‘An organisation.’

‘In what capacity?’

‘In many capacities.’

‘How about naming one?’

‘I have been many things in my time: healer, mystic, prophet, mendicant, heretic, counsellor.’ He stood up and walked towards the hole. ‘If we cannot help one another on our journey through this dark night they call life, what good are we?’ He prepared to putt again.

I grabbed the club and wrenched it out of his surprised hands. I threw it across the concrete floor. ‘Look here, you infuriating mystic in flannel. Since you walked into my life I’ve lost a desk and a door and been thrown violently against a wall by a group of people claiming to be the Aviary. Does that mean anything to you?’

‘Naturally, I have heard of the Aviary.’

‘Who are they?’

‘They are part of the Welsh Office.’

‘That tells me nothing.’

Without the golf club to hold, his hands twittered with uncertainty; he reached into his pocket and brought out a pack of Parma Violets. ‘I’m not sure if information regarding the Aviary is relevant to your inquiry.’

‘You don’t get to decide what is and what isn’t. When someone throws me against the wall and threatens much worse, it’s my decision. Either that or there is no inquiry.’

‘If you cancel our arrangement now, you won’t get the £200 back.’

‘And that’s another thing – you haven’t paid me yet.’

‘I haven’t?’

‘You know damn well you haven’t.’

Raspiwtin smiled.

‘Just start talking. What are you doing in Aberystwyth?’

‘I told you, looking for Iestyn Probert.’

‘He’s dead.’

‘I have grounds to believe he is still alive, having been resurrected by aliens, and that he will return to this area for a rendezvous with them.’

‘So far you have produced no grounds whatsoever apart from a load of gossip and rumour.’

‘I have more substantial grounds –’

‘Where are they?’

‘In my pocket.’

I blinked. ‘In your pocket? Perhaps you might like to take them out.’

‘I do not think the grounds –’

I slapped the pack of Parma Violets out of his hands. He looked taken aback by the sudden violence.

‘Look,’ I said. ‘Either you start co-operating a bit or I play crazy golf with your head.’

He stared at me in fear or wonder and reached into his jacket pocket. He brought out an envelope and handed it to me. ‘Be very careful with this. It is a top secret interdepartmental memo from the Aviary dated 1966 detailing the conclusions of their investigations into the Iestyn Probert case. Do not ask how I came to have it in my possession.’

I waved the envelope. ‘But this, you say, is about Iestyn Probert. Back there at Sospan’s you said something different.’

‘I did?’

‘You know damn well you did. Some cock-and-bull story about resurrecting the universe every morning –’

‘Hardly cock-and-bull –’

‘You have two stories, one cock, one bull. They can’t both be true.’

‘Of course they can. It all has to do with what we call proximate and ultimate causes. If I tell you I am hungry and you ask why, I could give two different but not contradictory explanations. I could say, “Because I haven’t eaten since breakfast.” Or I could say, “I am prey to a bodily discomfort resulting from fluctuating levels of the hormones leptin and ghrelin,” and I might add that, in truth, my hunger was the result of an evolutionary survival strategy developed to ensure that this particular agglomeration of self-replicating molecules called a human being acquired sufficient fuel to continue the chain of replication. That would be the ultimate as opposed to the proximate cause of my hunger.’

‘Why stop there? Why not go back to the Big Bang?’

‘Because I don’t want to try your patience. I merely wanted to explain that, yes, I am here because I seek Iestyn Probert, but above and beyond that desire lies the landscape of my spiritual desolation, which plays a major role in this particular desire. What I referred to back there at Sospan’s was my apostasia – the fall from the grace of belief that resulted in my conviction that the redemption I sought could only be supplied by Iestyn Probert. My apostasia had many stages.’

‘Start with the first.’

‘The first . . . the first . . .’ his words trailed off, it seemed that a thought that caused him pain had slid into his consciousness. ‘I guess you could say I am here because of a girl, a love affair that ended tragically, as do they all, I am told.’

‘Finally you make sense.’

‘It may please you to think so, but in truth the fate of this girl was an early chapter in that book whose summation was that nothing makes sense. She was Burmese. I was working among the Karen refugees on the Thai border. She was perhaps fourteen or fifteen years old, working as a maid in a household where we can be sure maids from Burma were not treated very well. I used to see her occasionally around the village. There was no one lower on the social ladder than this girl, and yet she smiled often and seemed to me to embody in its purest form the simple piety and meekness that we were told characterised that carpenter’s son from Nazareth. She was not a special girl, there were thousands like her living similar lives of sheer hopelessness, and yet for me at that time she became special. I confess I developed a passion for her that went beyond mere wonder at her simple piety. In truth, she ravished my soul. I flattered myself she found my attentions not unwelcome, and, though not a word had ever passed between us, I fancied that a secret accord had arisen between us, a bond of love silent, unvoiced, but burning in each breast. I arranged for a message to be passed to her, assuring her of my earnest in this matter and sounding her out. She did not reply in kind, for to do so would have been too indiscreet, but the day after she gave me an even more beautiful smile than any she had given before and I knew then my cause was not hopeless. The next day she left town and it was communicated to me that she had gone to visit her parents in Hpasawng to ask their permission in this matter. It was a day’s trek to the border, which was nothing unusual, and she set off at first light carrying with her the money she had earned through six months’ toil. To us it would have been a miserable pittance, perhaps as much as £50, maybe a bit more. Possibly even less. By evening she had arrived at the border post, where the captain of the Burmese guard called her into his office and took her money away. Then he raped her and shot her.’ Raspiwtin paused and dabbed his eye with the knuckle of his index finger. ‘Of course, nobody cared, apart from the peasants who were powerless to do anything. The captain was not even disciplined. But I cared. When the news of what had happened filtered back to my mission, I held out the cross which was attached by a chain to my neck and spat on it. And nothing happened. That’s when I knew: He didn’t care.’ He rubbed his sleeve across his face; he was crying openly. ‘I’m so sorry,’ he said. ‘I’m so terribly sorry. Forgive me. When I think of that poor girl, it is too much, too much.’ He turned his back and walked off towards the castle.

I picked up the putter and ball and returned them to the kiosk. I read the document. It was a fragment, a mimeographed mimeograph of a typewritten carbon copy, covered in marks and obscure annotations and signatures next to meaningless numbers and letters. TOP SECRET/AVIARY EYES ONLY. It described the interrogation of the woman who had laid out the body of Iestyn. She admitted handing over the cadaver to a tall blonde Scandinavian-looking woman with four fingers and piercing blue eyes with catlike irises. The woman paid her with an Iron Age coin. The document looked authentic enough, but how would you know? I walked back to the office and left it for Calamity to read.

A distant clock struck 9.00 and the sound of Welsh hymn-singing drifted across on the night breeze: ‘Nid wy’n gofyn bywyd moethus.’ The words of the old hymn ‘Calon Lân’, which I had sung in school with only a vague idea of what the words meant. Something about a pure heart being worth more than gold or pearls. Mrs Lewis would be singing it tonight while awaiting her bribe, unaware of the irony.

The crowd gathered to sing every night at the public shelter that cut into the face of the hill beneath the castle. Except for the front few rows, it was open to the skies, and the water slapping against the rocks across the road provided a gentle percussion section in accompaniment. When it rained the singers got wet, but this didn’t seem to diminish their ardour. I joined the back of the throng and stood erect with the self-consciousness one feels as an outsider among the faithful. Mrs Lewis sidled up to me, nudged my elbow and indicated I should follow. She crossed the road and walked up to the railings where they formed a sharp angle and from where you could see both sections of the Prom in their entirety. The tide was in and the sea gently butting the wall gave off a fine aerosol which puffed across the town like the fluid a gardener uses to spray aphids; it fizzed orange round the street light and collected on Mrs Lewis’s spectacles.

‘Did you bring the money?’ she asked.

‘I brought the money. Tell me what you’ve got.’

‘Let me see it first.’

I dug into my pocket and scooped out a fistful of screwed-up five-pound notes. She peered at them longer than I thought necessary, her tongue flicking in and out like a lizard’s; she nodded. I stuffed them into the breast pocket of her coat. She cast a glance around us even though it was clear no one was within earshot and took a step closer.

‘It was the night of the robbery,’ she said. ‘Whole county was looking for them. We heard it on the radio in the kitchen; they said the robbers were armed and dangerous, and had been spotted heading east towards Ystrad Meurig. There we were, huddled round that radio, gripped with fear when there was a knock on the door. Of course, it could have been anybody, but we all jumped. We knew straightaway it must be the robbers. The doctor told me to wait in the kitchen while he fetched his gun. Then he opened the door. On the step was this Iestyn Probert and this other chap. Iestyn Probert said there had been a car accident and his friend needed help. The friend was a strange-looking fellah. Not very tall, no more than 5 foot, if that, with a pretty, boyish face, more like a girl, and blonde hair to his shoulders. His eyes were piercing blue and his ears seemed slightly pointy. He looked frightened. The doctor told me to phone Preseli Watkins at the police station. They took the boy upstairs and put him in the guest bedroom. I made some hot soup and took it up to them. Iestyn Probert was very hungry and wolfed it down. He was not much more than a boy himself; so young and scared. And his friend, there was something very uncanny about him.’ She stopped talking and stared at me intensely. I noticed her hand was held out, palm upwards. I dug out a handful of coins and placed them on her outstretched palm. She continued with the story with the seamless automaticity of a laughing-policeman machine.

‘He was wearing a strange metallic suit – covered him from toe to neck – and we couldn’t get it off, so the doctor couldn’t examine him. He looked so lost and frightened. The doctor asked him where he was from and he wouldn’t answer. Iestyn said he was called Skweeple and was from somewhere called Noö. Skweeple was watching us with fear in his eyes like a timid deer. Then, all of a sudden, he cried out – more of a shriek really, just once. Iestyn Probert must have guessed straightaway that this meant danger, so he made a run for it, leaving the boy with us. Immediately after that we heard the sound of a car pulling up outside. Preseli came straight in through the door while Iestyn was still climbing through the bathroom window. He escaped over the garage roof.’

‘What happened to the boy in the silver suit?’

‘Preseli took him away. He said he would find a way to make him talk.’ She stopped and looked out across the sea. She shook her head. ‘I knew what he meant. Violence. I could never abide it. Not then, not now.’ She paused and licked her lips, then said in a whisper, ‘For another £3 I’ll tell you about the lady from the sweet shop in Ystrad Meurig.’

I made a look of slightly bored inquiry. She pinched my lapel between index finger and thumb and hissed, ‘They disappeared her!’

‘Disappeared?’

In answer, she gave me the sort of emphatic nod gossips deploy to indicate that the information, though it sounds far-fetched, is nonetheless true. ‘Off the face of the earth.’ She pushed her upturned hand towards me and I deposited three pound coins in her cupped palm.

‘Story was, they found exo-biological remains at the crash site, and alien debris which was taken to the RAF base at Aberporth. They said it was a weather balloon, but since when do you need an armed escort for a balloon? The lady from the sweet shop found a bit of the saucer in her garden and used it as a doorstop. It was some sort of black volcanic glass, like obsidian, inscribed with markings reminiscent of the Assyro-Babylonian cuneiform scripts dating from around 2800 BC, and it hummed like the fridge. Two days later they came and took her away, doorstop and all.’

‘Who did?’

‘The Aviary.’

‘The Aviary?’

‘Two men dressed all in black, driving a black ’47 Buick.’ She turned away from me and leaned on the railings, looking into the blackness where slept the sea. ‘I’ve never spoken about this. Even though I knew it was wrong. I’m not a brave woman, Mr Knight.’

‘Didn’t you ask the doctor about it?’

‘I didn’t dare. Not long after that they caught the two Richards brothers, and a week later they caught Iestyn. I read about it in the papers, but there was no mention of the boy in the silver suit. Then the doctor received a visit from the men in black. It was a private meeting and I don’t know what they discussed. But after they left he was trembling, and his face was white. And then when Nora Dettol disappeared, I knew better than to open my mouth.’

‘Who’s Nora?’

‘She was the cleaner at the base. She was hoovering and walked by accident into a room that should have been locked. It was like a hospital room. There was a chap in there wearing olive-green military pyjamas. He had a bulbous head and big almond-shaped eyes. She said he looked so sad and lonely. She said she startled him and made him jump. “I’m so sorry,” she said, “I thought the room was empty.” Then he stared at her and it was as if he was looking straight through her and into her soul, and burrowing down through the layers of the past searching for something. All of a sudden she saw a vision of her mother’s face and an overwhelming sensation of peace and loving kindness flooded her being; she heard the voice of her mother, who had been dead for many years, saying, “Please do not be afraid, Daughter of Earth. We bring you love.” ’ She stopped and folded her arms aggressively saying, ‘You’ll never guess what he said next. It’ll cost another quid.’

Mesmerised, I handed over a pound.

‘He said, “Can you take a message to your president?” ’