The Day Aberystwyth Stood Still

Chapter 10

I had said I would pick Miaow up at 9.00 for our trip to the escalators of Shrewsbury, but like a kid on his first date I was early. I parked outside the shop at the caravan site and waited. Then I grew impatient and walked across to the office. A fat man sat wedged behind the reception desk, eating a bacon sandwich. The grease that dribbled over his knuckles glistened in the sharp morning light. The expression on his face said that, whatever it was I needed, he probably had it but couldn’t be bothered to go and get it. It was the face of someone whose synapses sparked at a slower speed than other people’s. The face a tortoise wears the first morning after hibernation as he walks downstairs to collect the post from the mat. It was the face of a man who doesn’t care less and has made it his specialist subject; everyone needs something they can be proud of. I told him I was looking for the caravan of Miaow and his face betrayed no sign that the question meant anything at all. Maelor Gawr was the caravan park at the world’s end.

I took a deep breath and said, ‘You know, my friend, to look at your face you probably wouldn’t believe this, but you are a lucky man. Yes, you are. This may come as a surprise. All your life you have gone to bed at night convinced that nothing good ever happens to you and yet here am I claiming you are lucky. Why? How can a man like you be lucky? I’ll tell you. Because on any normal day I would now grab your tie and stick it into the roller of that typewriter you are busy dripping bacon fat onto. Then I would give the barrel a violent twist and keep turning until your nose was touching the keys. Then I would type out a letter to the Cambrian News. That’s what I would normally do. But today I have a date beneath a pellucid May sky with a girl whose eyes are so beautiful that they elevate this day so far above the common herd of days that it would be a shame to write a letter. But that doesn’t mean I won’t come back sometime when it is raining and the wonder of this day is but a poignant memory, do you understand?’

‘You want a caravan?’

Before I could answer, she appeared in the doorway.

‘Sorry I’m late; I couldn’t decide which hat to wear.’

‘You’re not late and you are not wearing a hat, but you can tell me about it in the car.’

She was wearing a cream cardigan over a simple cotton frock patterned with tiny lemon flowers. It was belted at the waist and reached demurely to just below that most underrated bone, the patella. She was wearing cream sandals and carried a cream handbag. Her hair was kept away from her face with a cream hairband. She was also holding a plastic Co-op bag which I knew contained our picnic. We drove in my Wolseley Hornet over Trefechan Bridge and turned right towards the station.

As traffic slowed on the approach to the roundabout I turned to her and said, ‘You look lovely.’

Instead of denying it or accusing me of saying it to all the girls, she smiled and said, ‘No one’s ever said that to me before.’

In the slightly awkward pause that followed, I patted my coat pocket and said, ‘I’ve got the tickets.’

‘You must tell me how much I owe you.’

‘Don’t be silly, it’s my treat.’

‘How many rides do you get?’

‘What do you mean?’

‘On the escalator.’

‘As many as you like.’

‘Really?’

‘The tickets are for the train.’

‘Oh!’

‘You get a special day return to Shrewsbury and it includes unlimited rides on the escalators.’

It is no coincidence that train windows are shaped like the celluloid frames of a movie. All rail journeys are adventure stories, which is why fate reserves her grandest statements for them. Without this tendril of steel linking us to Vladivostok and all stations between, Aberystwyth would be bereft: no Pier, no camera obscura, few hotels, and the tourist information office would almost certainly have been deprived of its proudest boast, namely that on 7 May 1904 Buffalo Bill came to town.

Miaow kept her nose pressed to the window for most of the journey and stared with a sense of wonder that made me regret I could never again take this journey for the first time. As we glided into Shrewsbury the track curved gently round the main signal box; once, no doubt, the red bricks and white-painted window frames would have gleamed like a mansion on a chocolate box, and an entire extended hierarchy of workers would have beavered away at the clockwork intricacies of directing trains. Today it stood in chest-high weeds like an abandoned house in an abandoned field; as with most businesses that have seen their best days, the first to go is always the guy who cuts the lawn. There is still a man up there, moving behind the filmy grey glass, drinking tea and reading the paper resting against rows of levers that don’t work. He doesn’t know the war is over.

The tracks converged onto a bridge across the river before the entrance to the station, and two buildings, one of pink Shropshire sandstone, the other of red Victorian brick, stood sentinel. Miaow pointed, but didn’t speak.

‘Guess what those buildings are,’ I said. ‘Home to two branches of the same family.’

Miaow gave me a look of inquiry.

‘Both been in business a long time, the same business in fact, although it goes by different names. The people from the one on the left quite often go and stay with the ones on the right, but it seldom happens the other way round.’

‘OK, I give up.’

‘That one is the castle, that one is the prison.’

‘That’s silly, the people in prison are thieves and murderers.’

‘So are the ones in the castle. How else do you get to own a castle?’

‘No!’

‘If you steal small things, you get a room on the right with a view of the river and the railway station. If you steal big things – like counties – you get a room on the left also with a view of the river and the railway station. The room is bigger, and the food is better. You have about as equal a chance of having your throat slit while you sleep.’

‘The people in the castle are lords and ladies with coats of arms and pointy Rapunzel hats. All through my childhood I dreamed of wearing one of those pointy hats.’

‘Trust me, the pointy hats are all stolen.’

‘How can you say that?’

‘Along with ermine stoles, gold-painted furniture, pheasants and oil paintings. Do you think they worked for it?’

‘Didn’t they?’

‘No, they were just smarter than the rest of us, or meaner. The way I see it, they are just descended from the better armed robbers. It’s like a great Welshman once said: “Who made ten thousand people owners of the soil and the rest of us trespassers in the land of our birth?” ’

She pulled a face. ‘So why didn’t anyone complain?’

‘The pointy-hats were smart. They invented the priesthood to preach to the multitude the great spiritual benefits of being penniless; they taught them not only to accept their misery but to love it, and to regard it as evidence of their spiritual superiority. In addition, for those who found themselves unconvinced by these fine sentiments, they had a rather persuasive complaints office in the basement of the castle.’

‘That’s what they teach us in the Denunciationists as well – to regard poverty as evidence of our spiritual superiority. Are we wrong?’

I smiled and pulled her closer. ‘No, of course not.’

Where do you take a girl for her first ride on an escalator? Marks and Spencers, Boots, Woolies? We did all three. We went up and down ten times in Boots, Miaow clutching the moving handrail with a grip slightly too tight, pausing too long each time before she stepped on. When the security guard asked us if everything was all right, we moved on to the other shops, and so threaded our way down town towards the river and the park along its banks. We chose a tree to sit under and began to unpack the picnic, but then Miaow changed her mind and we tried two more trees until we found one that satisfied.

‘I hope it’s OK, I’ve never made a picnic before. Back in Cwmnewidion Isaf such things are considered frivolous.’

‘It’s perfect.’

‘Don’t tease me.’

‘I’m not. You have every detail right. The thermos flask should always be tartan, the tea should be stewed and the plates bright yellow plastic. Sandwiches can be jam or on special occasions you can use that paste they sell in little glass jars, the one that smells like the harbour and has the texture of wet newspaper.’

‘I don’t know that one.’

‘They grind it up from the bits of the fish the glue factory rejects.’

For a while everything was still save the soft movements of our jaws, the quivering grass and the shadow of a cloud drifting across the lawn. The cloud revealed the sun and the heightened brightness caused an instant upsurge in my breast. A rowing team from the local boys’ school slid past.

‘Tell me about being a private eye.’

I leant back and spoke to the sky. ‘You get hit on the head a lot; it’s boring; there’s no money. Clients walk into my office clutching the pieces of their lives like the fragments of a broken vase. They expect me to fix it, but normally I can’t. This is usually their first introduction to the strange notion that the world is unfair. They think that by paying for a few hours of my time they will be able to buy some sort of redress; the amount they pay me is trivial, I can barely survive on it, but to the people who sit in my client’s chair it’s a fortune they resent parting with. Sometimes they want me to make everything all right, but most of the time they don’t even want that; they just want the world to take cognizance, they want to tell someone about the bad thing that has happened to them. They always think they are the first person since the Garden of Eden to have a bad thing happen to them.’

‘What’s the point of telling you if you can’t fix it?’

‘Telling me is the point. It’s like telling tales to a teacher at school. They say, look what happened to me, that’s not right. And I agree, yeah, that’s not right. But in my heart I think, so what? These things happen. There’s no reason for it, no intent, the universe didn’t set out to upset you; but neither did it set out not to; it doesn’t greatly care. The universe is like the rest of us, it just gets on with the business of whatever it is it does, slowly winding down, I guess, increasing entropy, and it just so happens that your suffering is a side-effect of that process, like the squeak of a rocking chair. They want me to oil the universe.’

‘I don’t see what satisfaction there is in just telling.’

‘It’s the most fundamental human need of all, the act of bearing witness. Think of all the people in history who have been massacred. The bad guys drive into the village and round everybody up. They load them onto the back of a truck. They drive off into the forest and stop at a clearing. The villagers are forced to dig graves. They do it because they know there is no redemption. They listen to the scrape of the shovel on dirt, the birds calling in the woods, then straighten up at last from the digging, aware of the puzzling paradox that they are proud of having done a good job of the hole, and then the crack of rifle shots sends the startled birds flapping into the air. What is the last thing the poor victims think before tumbling down? They hope someone from the village escaped and will tell the world what happened. Even though that knowledge, that acknowledgement, won’t make any difference to them, won’t save them and won’t make their deaths easier, it is still the last hope. They couldn’t bear for the world to never hear of it, the terrible way they died.’

‘So are you a Christian?’

‘No, but I admire Christ. Even though he did his best to put me out of a job.’

A park keeper walked past. Miaow reached into her handbag, took out a camera and rushed over to the man. He took the camera and peered through the viewfinder. Miaow sat down again but this time nestled her head onto my shoulder and we both squinted into the blue sky. The man clicked the shutter and brought the camera back, but, seeing or sensing that now was not the time for Miaow to move from her position, head pressed to mine, he bent down shyly and put the camera on the tartan rug. It was like watching someone place an offering at a shrine. It was a simple Instamatic camera, without adjustments except for the shutter press. But this meant that, paradoxically, it was the acme of the camera-maker’s art, because the inevitable fuzziness of the image would perfectly mimic the effects of memory.

‘What brought you to Aberystwyth?’ I asked.

‘Do I need a reason?’

‘No.’

‘I told you, I’m studying.’

‘I thought you might be looking for Iestyn Probert.’

‘I’ve never heard of him.’

‘I found your card in the ruins of Iestyn’s house. You’d written “Ask for Miaow” on it.’

‘Someone else must have done it, not me. It could have been anyone, couldn’t it?’

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I suppose it could.’

It was evening by the time we got back to Aberystwyth. It had grown chilly and the streets were empty, the damp tarmac gleaming beneath the street lights. We walked along Terrace Road towards the sea, without thinking about it. The same invisible force that sucked the water back from the land pulled at us too. The sound of a public speaker drifted over from the Prom, getting louder as we walked. Miaow slipped her hand in mine. On the Prom the emptiness became less stark, couples walked past holding hands, and a group was gathered round a man on a small raised platform who was addressing them with a microphone. He was short and squat with arms that seemed disproportionately long for his torso. A quiver ran involuntarily through my loins, it was Herod Jenkins, my old school games teacher. Miaow turned sharply.

‘Louie, what is it?’

‘Nothing.’

‘You’re squeezing my hand so hard . . .’

‘It’s Herod Jenkins, he used to teach me games.’

‘He can’t hurt you now, silly.’

‘I know, I know. It’s . . . it’s like a dog that was beaten once long ago who sees his old master in the street again. Even if he saw his old master in a coffin being lowered into the ground he would still tremble. It’s involuntary.’

His words reached us; he was talking about the New Sparta he would build in the ruins of Aberystwyth once elected. Did we need one? The original Sparta didn’t sound very attractive.

Miaow frowned, sensing that something about the mood had changed, as if it was our wedding day and someone had reported seeing the Ancient Mariner at the bar. I turned and smiled. ‘On our first day at big school he gave us a talk about how it was going to be. He called us all milksops and pansies and told us we had had it too good for too long but things were going to change. He offered us a choice: shape up or ship out. We were eleven.’

‘They always make that speech, Louie.’

‘On that first day at school he said there would be no more free rides, those who lagged behind would be left behind. One boy put his hand up to ask if this applied to him because he suffered from asthma. He said he had a note from his mum.’ I peered into her eyes as if my words contained an urgent revelation. ‘Herod pretended to be sympathetic and related a story of his time as a prisoner of war in Patagonia. He told how one morning the commandant called the prisoners together and appealed to them for help. He said a number of llamas had died in the night and they didn’t have enough to pull the plough so they were appealing for volunteers. He said it would be a great help to them and also a nice day out on the farm, but if they didn’t fancy it or were too busy he would understand and would make sure the table-tennis room was left open back at the camp for them to amuse themselves.

‘ “You, boy, no talking at the back!” Herod called out to me; heads turned to look.

‘ “If you’ve got something to say,” he said, “perhaps you’d like to share it with the rest of us.”

‘ “Mr Jenkins, I just wanted to ask, in this New Sparta you describe, will there be room for everyone, the weak as well as the strong?”

‘He peered at me over the heads of the throng. People began to mutter, as if my question had chimed with their own misgivings. Herod Jenkins raised his arm and swung it across, appealing for calm. He paused for effect, then said, “There is no such thing as weakness.” The muttering started again. “Weakness is a state of mind, born of sloth and idleness. Those who truly want to be strong will be strong. And those who can’t be bothered, who prefer to sit on their backsides and shirk their duty, they will be weak. But it is their choice.”

‘ “What about sick people?” I asked. “Are they sick because they are too lazy to get well?”

‘He stepped towards the edge of the podium and screwed his eyes up. He nodded as he recognised me.

‘ “It’s you, isn’t it? Louie Knight. I remember you. The troublemaker. Of all the milksops that ever crossed my path, you were the worst. Yes, I accept some are too sick to play their part. But you? Louie Knight? What excuse do you have for standing on the sidelines and mocking? Oh yes, I remember you well. You were not sick or halt or in any way infirm. The Lord blessed you with healthy thews. And yet you refused to take part. What excuse do you have?”

‘ “Quite often I was sick, I had a note excusing me from games, but you mocked me for it. What right did you have? Are you a doctor?”

‘He flashed with indignation. “A note from your mum, you say? Let me tell you the truth of this world, boy. If you take a lion cub and separate it from the pride and bring it up in a marble palace, if you feed it milk and dainty roasted goat flesh each day of its life such that it never learns to hunt, is that a kindness? No! And if you then turn it loose into the wild, having no comprehension of the struggle that awaits it, will it survive, do you think? Has your kindness, your diet of milk and kid, helped the lion to make its way in the world? Just so does it come to pass with men. When I was fighting in Patagonia, I learned that on the field of battle, which is but a metaphor for life, there is no note from your mum!”

‘ “But this is Aberystwyth,” I shouted. “We’re miles away from Patagonia!”

‘ “There is no distinction in the geography of the soul. All places are one. In Patagonia when I thirsted I drank the tears of the penguin; when I felt the ravening pains in my belly I chewed on the tapir’s foot. When I was weary I did not take the chinchilla for my pillow, but the armadillo! Not once did I cry out in the night for a note from my mum. When I fell into captivity I did not waste time cursing my fate, my thoughts were only for escape. I did not petition the commandant with notes from my mum! You know what would have happened if I had done that? You know what he would have said?” Herod Jenkins sneered and shouted, “You want to know what a note from your mum got in Patagonia? This!” And he ripped his shirt off to show us the stripes on his back.’

We wandered down to the wooden steps where they post the tide tables. Out in the darkness the end of the Pier hung over the water, studded with lights like an ocean liner. Is there any sight more calculated to thrill the heart than a big ship at night? There is something deeply affecting about those lights floating over the watery wilderness. Maybe it is the contrast, the interface of two worlds separated by a membrane of painted steel. Outside salt, and flung spume, endlessly dark, an abyss so profound it would take you twenty minutes to reach the bottom. On the other side of the steel, men and women in evening dress, warmth and light and a theatre performance in which they act out the play called Don’t Mention the Iceberg. We carried on walking until the harbour. The jetty brooded and the beacon standing proud at the end flashed like the light of an angler fish. The symmetry of the concrete was broken by the silhouettes of two fishermen, a man and a boy; the dark lines of their rods waved like the whiskers of a dim-bodied crustacean. A breeze rose, fish-scented, from the water and raised goose bumps on Miaow’s arm. She shivered and pressed herself against me. I linked my arms behind her and she turned to look up at me.

‘Do you know why they call me Miaow?’

‘No.’

‘Because of my green eyes.’

‘They’re nothing like a cat’s eyes.’

‘Why not?’

‘The green is the wrong shade. Cats’ are more like the digits on a luminous watch.’

‘What are mine like, then?’

‘Do you really want to know?’

‘Of course!’

I pushed a filament of hair away from her cheek as if it were blocking my view and stared intently into her eyes. ‘The green is paler, like a phial of seawater held up to the light, and there are flecks of grey radiating like the striations in a slice of lime. At the rim of the iris there is a thin dark band that acts as a frame around a grey-green disk . . . it’s like watching the full moon through a bottle of absinthe.’

‘Do you want me to cry tears of absinthe?’

I shook my head. In the black waters of the harbour the town lay inverted like a nebula; skeins of shining gas hung like a necklace from the street lamps of the Prom. It was beautiful. Miaow peered into my face, her hair drawing forward like curtains to block out the world. She kissed me lightly on the lips. ‘I won’t let Herod Jenkins hurt you.’