The Day Aberystwyth Stood Still

Chapter 12

The next morning when I arrived at the office there was a note scribbled on the deskpad, from Calamity. She said she was going out to Borth with Jhoe, to have a picnic by the remains of the submerged forest. As directions go, you couldn’t get much more specific than that. The phone rang; it was Mrs Bwlchgwallter.

‘I can’t stop,’ she breathed, ‘I’ve just popped out from the hypnotism. He’s still under. He’s been saying some terrible things. He says he murdered his brother.’

‘I wouldn’t pay any attention to –’

‘Buried him in the cellar. And killed the dog.’

I picked a bottle of rum up off the floor next to my chair and tried to unscrew the cap one-handed. ‘I shouldn’t worry about it. Evidence from a trance is not admissible in court.’

‘Shouldn’t I tell the police?’

‘What if he denies it?’

‘They can dig up the cellar, can’t they?’

I gripped the receiver between shoulder and ear and used both hands to open the bottle. I needed to refill my hip flask. ‘The problem you’ve got there is, two things can happen. A, they don’t find anything, in which case they throw you in the sneezer for wasting police time. B, they find something, in which case they start wondering how it is you know about it.’

‘But I can tell them about the hypnotism.’

‘Like I said, evidence like that isn’t admissible in court. That’s your alibi gone, you see? The farmer will deny it and you are all washed up high and dry on your lonesome. The cops, they don’t greatly care who they pin it on, it’s just paperwork to them.’

‘Oh dear.’

I rested the bottle cap in my lap and began to decant the rum. ‘My advice to you is finish the sitting and pump him about the flying saucer. We can think about contacting the police later.’

‘But what about my conscience?’

‘Conscience is a tricky thing, Mrs Bwlchgwallter. It has a rôle to play, but there are other voices in the mix that must be heard.’

Mrs Bwlchgwallter refused to listen to the other voices and persisted; an hysterical whine began to enter her voice. ‘Yes, but the dog, the dog! I knew that dog, I . . . I gave him biscuits.’

‘Mrs Bwlchgwallter, I want you to calm down. Are you calm?’ There was a pause. I could hear her on the other end of the line taking deep breaths. ‘Yes, I’m calm.’

‘We’re all sorry about the dog. But being sorry won’t bring him back to life. It’s a big bad, lousy, ugly world out there, Mrs Bwlchgwallter; some days I wake up with a taste on my tongue so bad it’s like a badger crawled into my mouth in the night and died. Times like that the only thing to do is get up, brush your teeth and face the mirror. I say this to all my clients, so it’s only right I say it to you: I can take you to Shrewsbury, but I can’t promise you a rose garden.’ I hung up.

I took a sip from my hip flask, screwed the top on and leant back. I closed my eyes; not even 9.30 and I was ready for a siesta. I dozed. Ten minutes later the phone rang. This time she sounded more distressed. ‘It’s getting very . . . racy!’ she said. ‘The angel wants him to . . . do it.’

‘Do what?’

She swallowed audibly. ‘I hardly like to say. You know . . . miscegenation.’

‘What’s that?’

‘I suppose you would call it a form of inappropriate sexual congress.’

‘Inappropriate?’

‘Yes.’

‘Who are the angels?’

‘That’s obviously what they are, isn’t it? From the saucer. He says there are three of them. Two men and a woman. They are all blond and beautiful. Seraphim, I’d guess.’

‘Why do they want to make love?’

‘I haven’t the foggiest.’

‘OK, that’s good. Now I want you to see if they told him anything about Iestyn Probert.’

I hung up and tried to sleep again.

Half an hour later she rang once more.

‘He’s got stuck.’

‘What do you mean by stuck, Mrs Bwlchgwallter? Stuck in his chair? Stuck in a rut? Stuck in the middle with you?’

‘Come again?’

‘It’s a song, don’t worry about that.’

‘I mean he’s stuck like the needle in the groove of a gramophone record. He keeps saying the same thing over and over again.’

‘What is that thing?’

‘Something about a tin opener. What should I do?’

‘Can’t you give him some sort of a jolt? What about smelling salts?’

‘That’s terribly dangerous in the middle of a trance –’

‘Why not give him a tin opener, see what happens?’

‘That’s a good idea.’

She hung up.

A minute later the phone rang again, but this time it was Eeyore. He asked me to meet him on the Prom, towards the castle. Normally you require more precise directions than that, but finding a man leading a train of donkeys is not so difficult. I picked up my hat but the phone rang again before I had time to put it on. I stared at the receiver, deliberating. If only it had rung just after I’d left. I answered.

‘It worked.’

‘What did?’

‘The tin opener. He’s talking again. He says they told him a lot about Iestyn Probert. One of their saucers crashed the same night as the raid on the Coliseum cinema. Skweeple – that’s one of their people – got separated from the others and wandered off. He was hit by the getaway car and Iestyn Probert got out to help. He took Skweeple to the doctor’s and not long after that Sheriff Preseli turned up and took Skweeple away. Two months later another saucer came looking for them and they resurrected Iestyn Probert to ask him what happened to Skweeple.’

‘And what did happen?’

‘I just told you, he went off with Sheriff Preseli.’

‘I know, but what happened then?’

‘I don’t know.’

I paused. Then said with extra intensity, ‘We’re almost there, Mrs Bwlchgwallter, almost there. Can you feel the heat of those footlights on your face? Can you smell it? The greasepaint? The thick, dusty reek of those heavy velvet drapes at the Shrewsbury Palladium? Of course you can. We’re in the home straight, just one little furlong left. Find out what happened after the sheriff arrested Skweeple.’ I hung up.

Ten minutes later the phone rang again. This time it was Mrs Pugh, the farmer’s wife. She was hysterical and told me to come right away; something terrible had happened.

Eeyore was standing at the railings at Castle Point, the train of donkeys happily idling. The wind had freshened and the surface of the sea was dancing with flame, green and silver like the verdigris patina of weathered copper, or the flecks in Miaow’s irises.

He heard me coming, turned and smiled. ‘I could stand here all day.’

‘What’s to stop you?’

He ran a hand along the mane of a donkey. ‘New one, Silenus. Named after the tutor to the wine god Dionysus. He rode a donkey and could only be bound with a chain of flowers. Isn’t that nice?’

I agreed it was.

‘Just been speaking to that chap Raspiwtin. He says we are children born on a submarine who have never seen the sea. On the bridge there’s a man looking into the periscope and he tells us what he sees: meadows and blue skies; white peacocks, avenues of wisteria; beautiful things. On and on we sail through this grey-green watery world; the sonar is our birdsong. Do you believe that?’

‘I don’t know, I’ve heard something similar.’

‘From time to time, he says, a Wildman runs amok, tries to tell us it is all a lie, that there is nothing beyond the metal skin of the sub except the stuff that comes out of the tap. This is a prophet. They take him away to be burnt. What do you think he means?’

‘I think he means our eyes and ears and noses send back electrical impulses and our mind turn them into images of a world outside, but it’s not a true depiction of it. It’s much better.’

Eeyore nodded. ‘I’m happy with it.’ He reached into the pocket of his raincoat and brought out a tube of rolled-up cardboard. He unrolled it like a scroll to reveal an old-style school photo; four tiers of children, thirty or forty abreast, the whole school assembled in front of the traditional schoolhouse. ‘I found it while I was clearing out. Can you spot your dad?’

I studied the sea of bleary gray, stared through the lens of time at a lost world that stared back. The faces were indistinct blurs, smudges of tone; noses and mouths were lost, and eyes reduced to shadows, but strangely, by some process it was impossible to understand, each little chalky ball, balanced like a golf ball on a school-tie-shaped tee, somehow contained within its various smudges enough information to evoke a person’s identity. Some faces were obliterated by filaments of spidery white where the thick gloss had cracked and creased. Finally I spotted a little boy who seemed to be the acorn from which my father had grown. I pointed with my thumb. He laughed. ‘You think so? What about this one?’ He pointed to a boy at the opposite end who also looked as if he had sprung from the same acorn. I flicked my eyes to and fro from the images. ‘Have you got a twin brother you never told me about?’

He laughed again. ‘They’re both me. It’s a trick, you see, we used to play in those days. To get the whole school in the shot, the camera moves, on a clockwork drive, and the shutter moves too, slowly across the plate. It means a naughty boy can jump down from the left end, run behind the chairs faster than the camera and then stand on a stool at the other end. You get in the same picture twice.’ He grinned with pleasure at the recollection of the ancient transgression. ‘I met a chap yesterday who asked about you,’ he said.

I looked at him with interest.

‘A felon from the old times. He mentioned you specifically.’

‘Who was it, Dad?’

‘One of the Richards brothers – the ones who took part in the raid on the Coliseum cinema. There’s only one surviving now. The other died in a knife fight, I think.’

My interest quickened, but I knew it did no good to hurry Eeyore. He would get there at his own pace.

‘He lives out at Taliesin.’

‘How exactly did he mention me?’

‘He heard you’d been asking about Iestyn. He wants to talk to you. That’s all. Most mornings he sits alone in the pub at Taliesin, the one on the right as you drive past the water wheel.’

‘I’ll find him.’

‘He’ll ask you about Frankie. Frankie was some gangland boss he crossed in Swansea once who took a dislike to him many years ago. He’s dead now, but that old fellah out at Taliesin won’t accept it. He thinks it’s a trick to catch him off his guard. Like those old Jap soldiers who refuse to come out of the jungle. Just thought I’d let you know.’

I took the road out of town and pondered the case. In one respect, it was baffling in a straightforward way. The Richards brothers raided the cinema and made their getaway. Somewhere out near Ystrad Meurig they ran someone over. Iestyn was kicked out of the car. He went to the aid of whoever it was they ran over and took him to the doctor’s. Preseli turned up and Iestyn escaped. Preseli took the other boy away. He was never heard of again. Now, twenty-five years later, Preseli’s brother is standing for mayor and he doesn’t want any one looking too closely into certain incidents buried in the past. The doc probably knows more than he is letting on. Simple. All straightforward except for one thing: the kid was wearing a silver suit that they couldn’t get off him. They say he was from a crashed saucer. Phooey.

I don’t have a problem with the idea of aliens visiting us. The universe is either empty and we are just an astonishing accident, unintended, unlikely, pointless and terrifyingly unnecessary. Or we’re not, in which case the place must be teeming with life. It doesn’t really beggar my belief that they might pop over for a look. I just can’t believe they crash. That’s the trouble with these sorts of stories; the technology seems remarkably prone to the same problems that bedevil us. You’d think a being from another world would be in a position to tell us things that we had never seen before, things that we had never heard of, that we couldn’t even begin to imagine. In the same way a man from Currys would appear as a demi-god to the first caveman. But it never works out like that. They always report things that seem straight out of a sci-fi B-movie: silver suits, goldfish-bowl helmets, consoles with flashing lights, dying races who, most improbably of all, need the seed of an earth-man to get them going again. And crashes. Prangs. Fender-benders.

So where did the kid in the silver suit come from? What is a silver suit, anyway? Do they mean like tinfoil? Or covered in sequins like the singer at Jezebels? Or a one-piece job made from one of those great alloys not found on Earth, the ones that were all the rage on Mars last spring? Did he have a goldfish-bowl helmet? Or was our atmosphere breathable for him? The odds are against it, but you sometimes get these lucky breaks when travelling in space. The same way sometimes the gravity is just right, like Goldilocks’s porridge. A few extra clicks on the dial in either direction and it makes things really difficult. Either you are too jumpy, like a gazelle with spring-loaded hooves; or you carry a few hundred pounds on your shoulders making it hard just to stop imploding.

When you think of the endless variety of life on Earth, the mind-boggling permutations, you have to reflect that there’s nothing special about the bipedal model; in fact it seems to be inferior in just about every department to other animals. Losing the fur was clearly a dubious idea; it means you have to get a job to pay for an inferior replacement made from stuff that isn’t as warm, isn’t as waterproof, doesn’t fit so well or wear so well. We’re covered in hide that cuts too easily and leaves purple welts where the cops interrogate you. Even on Earth our ascendancy seems to have been the fluke result of a pretty rare combination of circumstances. And yet the people from space seem to have followed the same improbable evolutionary path. They are bipedal and furless too, more or less. The areas in which they depart from the paradigm – pointy ears, slightly different eyes or different number of fingers . . . these things testify to the poverty of imagination of the beholder. Having hallucinated an alien that bears a remarkable resemblance to us, they add a few differences for good measure, but they take the first ones they think of. In the ’50s, Beings from Outer Space came from Mars and had dials and knobs on their consoles. Nowadays, the term ‘Outer Space’ has fallen into disuse; it’s passé and bespeaks a feeble grasp of the infinite possibilities of what lies beyond our planet. If we ask the farmer I’m sure he’ll say the aliens had liquid-crystal displays. When we get something more advanced, they’ll get it too. It seems in terms of technology we are always one step ahead of the aliens.

When Mrs Pugh opened the door to the farmhouse, her face was white and she was trembling. She looked at me with relief, but I don’t know why.

‘Thank God you’ve come,’ she said. She led me into the sitting room, past a hall table on which the business card I had given to Mrs Bwlchgwallter stood propped against the phone. Huw Pugh was crouching in a foetal position on the floor in front of the fireplace. He was sobbing.

‘There was a terrible scream,’ said Mrs Pugh. ‘And then Mrs Bwlchgwallter ran out past me into the garden. I found him like this. He’s been like it ever since. What should I do?’

I walked back to the phone in the hall and called an ambulance. At the same time, I slipped the business card into my pocket.

‘They’ll be here in a minute,’ I said. ‘There’s nothing more I can do here. I’ll go and look for Mrs Bwlchgwallter.’

She wasn’t in the garden and wasn’t on either of the main roads, the one that led to Ynyslas or the one that led to Tre’r-ddol, which meant she could have been anywhere. I decided the best option was to assume she would find her way home and look for her there. I drove to Borth to see Calamity and tell her what had transpired.

The ancient forest once belonged to the Iron Age kingdom of Cantref-y-Gwaelod, which, legend says, sank beneath the waters of Cardigan Bay. Geologists blame the Ice Age but folklore claims it was all down to some chap who got drunk at a party and left the gates to the dyke open. That was the end of the Welsh Atlantis. But we still have the tree stumps on the beach at Borth to remind us of the lost golden age. Even as I parked the car I could see Calamity and Jhoe at the water’s edge.

I walked across the sand to the discoloration that looked from a distance like rocks and no doubt was taken as such by the casual observer. They were both sitting in camping chairs, staring out to sea. As I got closer the tree stumps resolved from the mass of brown colour. They were like dinosaur teeth embedded in the sand and flossed with seaweed.

Jhoe looked up and recited,

The big blue tube’s just like Louise

You get a thrill from every squeeze

Burma-Shave

Calamity said, ‘He knows them all.’

Jhoe gave us another:

Don’t lose your head to gain a minute

You need your head; your brains are in it.

Burma-Shave

‘What are you up to?’ I asked.

‘Jhoe’s been telling me about Noö. He says the rainy season lasts for two centuries, and I’ve shown him the sand dunes and the war memorial. He didn’t like it. Too ingrokking.’

‘Earth-man,’ he said, turning to me, ‘your violence appalls us. Sometimes, on this planet, I feel so ingrokked. So terribly ingrokked.’

Calamity tried to help him up. ‘Please don’t be unhappy. We can take you back to where you came from, if you like.’

‘Such a thing would not be possible for many of your centuries.’

‘Are you from a hospital, Jhoe?’ I asked.

He shook his head. ‘I am from Elysium, beneath the moons of Noö.’

‘Why did you come to Aberystwyth?’ I asked.

‘As a penance. Once, many aeons ago, my people said the thing which was not. So here I must languish.’

‘Are you sure you are not from a hospital, Jhoe?’ Calamity asked. ‘It doesn’t matter if you are. We won’t tell anyone, unless you want us to.’

‘We have no hospitals, we have no need for them. I am so ingrokked.’ He knelt down at the water’s edge and put his hand on the seaweed mane that clung to the tree stump; he ran his fingers through it as gently as a mother stroking her daughter’s hair.

‘Because if you were from a hospital, we could take you back, couldn’t we, Louie?’

‘Yes, we would be happy to.’

‘And we would come to visit you.’

Jhoe seemed not to be listening but stared out across the remains of the forest, lost in a reverie. ‘I remember when all this was fields.’

Calamity looked at me in anguish. I put my arm on her shoulder and drew her to me for comfort. Who was Jhoe?

‘Over there,’ he said, ‘is where I kissed a girl once. We used to come on holiday to Cantref-y-Gwaelod. If only you could see Earth as she was then. In the days when . . . she was a shepherdess, and all this vale where now the sea churns the sand was the home of her flock.’ He looked round, his eyes filled with an intense longing. ‘If only you could have seen it before . . . before all the bad stuff, when the earth was young. You would have been so grokked.’

I told Calamity to get the bus back to town and check out Mrs Bwlchgwallter’s shop in Bridge Street. I set off for Taliesin. The one surviving Richards brother was not difficult to find. He sat in the corner of the pub, his head slumped forward, chin on chest, like a marionette with a broken string. I put a pint down in front of him and he turned to look at me.

Saliva dribbled over his bottom lip. ‘Did Frankie send you?’

‘Frankie’s dead.’

‘If it’s about the girl . . .’

‘It’s not about the girl.’

He heaved the sigh of a man for whom the act of inhaling is a chore. ‘What’s he doing these days? Still using the blowtorch is he?’

‘I bought you a pint.’

‘That’s kind of you.’ He took a deep draught. ‘Why now? I mean, after all this time, all these years . . . I thought . . .’ He stopped and shook his head. ‘No, Frankie never forgets. I just wondered, that’s all. Why did he never come sooner? I was waiting. I knew, after all the trouble . . .’

‘Frankie’s dead.’

‘To tell you the truth,’ he said, ignoring me, ‘I’m happy. Happy that this day has finally arrived. A life spent looking over your shoulder is not a man’s life, it’s a dog’s. I decided that long ago. When it came I would go quietly, and with dignity. Just make it quick, that’s all.’

‘Frankie’s dead. I saw him die. His last words were of you. He asked me to tell you: Of all the blags you pulled, that one on the Coliseum was the best.’

The old con twisted his head to face me. ‘He said that?’

‘Those were his very words. The silly old bastard was proud of you. He just wasn’t the kind to show it. He said, they don’t make them like Old Richards any more; old school. That’s what he said.’

He repeated the words in a reverential tone. ‘Old school.’

‘Caeriog and Siencyn, and Iestyn.’

He looked surprised. ‘Iestyn? He didn’t rate him, did he?’

‘He mentioned him.’

‘Iestyn was the reason I spent all those years inside sewing mail bags. Siencyn and me wouldn’t have stopped, you see, but Iestyn was driving. He was soft. He was no good. He got out to see what we’d hit. I mean, what sort of robber stops during the getaway to take a pedestrian to the doctor’s?’

‘So you left them both?’

‘I make no apologies for that. There was no other way. We was born on the wrong side of the tracks. They don’t thank people like us for doing a good deed. One thing I’ve learned in this life, the folk at the top are every bit as rotten as we are. They just wear nicer hats.’

‘I wouldn’t disagree with that.’

‘That doctor, spends all that time checking your heart, he should take a look at his own.’

‘You’re not wrong.’

‘He thinks he’s better than a man like me, but it isn’t so. Things I could tell you about him, they’d soon wipe the smile off his face.’ He turned to me. ‘If you see Iestyn, tell him I’m sorry about what we did. There was no way we could stop.’

‘I’ll tell him.’

‘They say he’s back in town. He’s been seen. Hard to believe. Just tell him. I’m too old for fighting battles.’

‘I’ll be glad to.’

‘I’m not scared. The Lord could take me this afternoon and I wouldn’t turn a hair. But, the thing is, I want to tell him. I want him to know, I’m not sorry for driving off like that because there was no way we could avoid it. But I am sorry that they hanged him and not us. That wasn’t right. Normally there’s nothing you can do about it. But if he’s alive, well, I could say to him, I’m sorry they hanged you. That would be something, wouldn’t it?’

I touched his arm and squeezed. ‘Yes, it would. The thing is, though, I need help to find him.’

‘I’m no good to anybody any more. Drink my pint is about all I can do.’

‘What do you know that would wipe the smile off the doc’s face?’

‘I never blab.’

‘I know, and that makes you a true man in my book. But sometimes you have to make exceptions. I’m not trying to trick you, but is it right that your silence protects a man like that? What’s he ever done for you? Tell me what you know, it may help me find Iestyn.’

His brow furrowed as he considered my words. After a while he seemed to make up his mind. ‘We were working in the garage, me and my brother, in Llanfarian. This was before Iestyn arrived in town. The doc bought his fiancée a car from us, a 1963 Austin A35 in petrel grey. When she walked out on him some folk said he’d done her in; Sheriff Preseli started asking questions. Then we did the cinema job and were banged up. A year later she returned to Aberystwyth for a couple of days to collect some things. Driving the same car and all, so that put the wagging tongues to rest, and Preseli went round personally telling the gossips to give it a rest. He said he’d met the woman and so the rumours that the doc had murdered her should stop. And they did, mostly. Funny thing was, though, the engine was in the habit of overheating so they left her car at our garage to have it checked out. My father told me about it. He said it was a different car. Almost identical, with the same number plate, but there were one or two differences only an expert would recognise. The car they originally bought from us had been a 1963 with a 1097-cc engine. But when she came back in 1966 the car was the 1962 with the 948-cc engine.’

I stared at him, wondering how much credence to give to his story. He sat, head still drooped forward.

‘Maybe they just changed the engine.’

‘Wouldn’t have fit in the chassis; it was differently configured.’

‘Or maybe your dad made a mistake.’

‘But what sort of mistake? The number plate was the same, couldn’t have been mistaken about that. The car was different. One thing my dad knew about was cars. I tell you, it wasn’t the same car but someone had gone to a lot of trouble to make it look like it was. Don’t you see? The woman who came back, who was she? Did anyone see her? Yes, I know, lots of people saw her from a distance, but who spoke to her? Who saw her up close? Only the doctor and Sheriff Preseli as far as I can tell. If he did kill her, and the rumours all got a bit too much, well this would be a way to stop them, wouldn’t it? Easy to arrange: find a similar car, get a woman to dress the part, make sure no one meets her . . . you see what I mean?’

‘Sheriff Preseli would need to be in on it.’

‘That’s right. And you’d need a woman to act the part. But no one else need know. I’m just saying, that’s all.’

I thanked him and stood up to leave.

He put his hand on my arm. ‘Is it true that Frankie’s dead?’

‘Yes, it’s true. I saw it happen.’

‘What were his last words?’

‘He cried out for his mum.’

A look of wonder stole across the old man’s face. He opened his mouth to speak but no words came. The image of Frankie Blowtorch on his deathbed, crying for his mum, robbed him of the power of speech.

Meici Jones was in my office when I got back. He stood up as I entered and raised his arms as if playing maracas, swivelled his hips to turn side-on to me and made a clicking sound with his tongue.

‘New suit – got it from Fosters. The mayor says I will be doing some public engagements when the human cannonball starts so I’ll need some new togs. What do you think?’

‘It’s very suave.’

‘Yeah, I think so too. They’ve given me an account. No one else in my village has an account at Fosters. I got these, too.’ He held out a small white paper bag. ‘Gobstoppers. Take one.’

As if mesmerised, I reached into the bag and took one. ‘Thanks, Meici,’ I said. I put the gobstopper on the desk, next to the phone. ‘I’ll have it later, with my tea.’

He walked into the kitchenette and brought two tumblers from the drainer. I was surprised; I didn’t think Meici drank. Before his mum was sent down for murder she oversaw every aspect of his life and was the sort of woman who would smell liquor on a man’s breath from 50 yards away. People like that can smell it tomorrow through a crystal ball.

Meici put the tumblers down and took a small bottle from the inside pocket of his jacket. The bottle contained a chocolate-coloured liquid. He waved the bottle. ‘It took me ages to find where she kept it.’

‘What is it?’

He giggled. ‘My mum’s cough mixture.’ He poured out two small measures, chinked the glasses and handed me one. ‘Made by Auntie Pebim. It’s got a special mushroom in it from the Amazon. Sospan uses it too in his under-the-counter ice cream.’

‘I haven’t got a cough.’

‘Who’s going to know?’

‘What are we celebrating?’

The lines of his cheeks flickered, the corners of his mouth quivered as he tried to bottle the irrepressible excitement. ‘You’ll never guess what.’

‘What?’

He reached under the table and brought out another Fosters suit, in a glistening polythene covering.

‘That looks to me dangerously like the sort of clothes a man might wear at his wedding,’ I said in genuine surprise.

He grinned. ‘I asked Chastity to . . . marry me . . . She said yes!’

I was dumbfounded.

‘What do you say to that, eh?’

‘That’s . . . that’s tremendous.’

‘Okole maluna!’ He raised his glass. ‘That’s Hawaiian for cheers.’

‘Okole maluna!’ I replied. I held my glass up to try and sniff without it being obvious. It seemed inoffensive: mushrooms perhaps or a wooden box used to hold vegetables. I sipped. It was sweet, woody, mossy, but not unpleasant. Meici knocked his back in one and exhaled with satisfaction, slapping his chest in that strange ritual of the amateur drinker.

‘When I was young,’ he said, ‘I sometimes used to pretend to have a cough even though I didn’t. Those were the times when . . .’ Two deep grooves formed at the bridge of his nose as he searched for the right word. ‘I suppose you could say, I was . . . it was . . . I was . . .’

‘Happy?’

His brow furrowed as he contemplated that possibility. Was it possible he had been happy once?

‘When’s the wedding?’ I asked.

‘Next week. I’m going to do my inaugural cannonball flight just before the service. We’re doing it down at Plas Crug, going to invite the whole town.’

‘Sounds like quite an affair.’

‘I think so. I think Chastity deserves it, don’t you?’

‘Isn’t it perhaps . . . oh, I don’t know, a little bit much to do in one day – first human-cannonball jump and getting hitched?’

‘What do you mean, Lou?’

‘It would be a lot on anybody’s plate.’

‘I want to make her proud, Lou. Chastity hasn’t had much of a life. I want to make it special for her.’

‘I can understand that.’

‘Birds, eh?’ he said with the wry detachment of the man of the world.

‘Yes,’ I replied, ‘birds!’

‘I bought her a present. One of those “women’s handkerchiefs”. From the catalogue. Didn’t have to hide it at the end of the lane neither. You should have seen the postman’s face when I told him. “You can come right up to the house, now,” I said, “mum’s not here any more.” Lord of the Manor he called me. Who’d have thought it? He says he might bring a lingerie catalogue next time. I’ll invite you round. You wouldn’t believe how brainy Chastity is. I think of all the birds I’ve had she is the best. She’s nuts about you.’

‘That’s nice.’

‘Always going on about you, she is.’ A thought clouded his brow as he considered the implications of that. He blinked it away. ‘I’m glad really because you are one of my best friends. She says we’re lucky to have found each other, me ’n’ you, Lou. Do you think that?’

‘Yes, we’re very lucky.’

‘I never had a friend before you so Chas says it’s incredible that I found such a good one. Thing is, Lou, I was wondering . . . I know we haven’t known each other that long, but I haven’t got any other friends, so I was wondering . . . will you be my best man?’

I froze and my grip tightened on the tumbler. Meici was so absorbed in the moment he didn’t notice.

‘Chas says we can all go on holiday together, to Caldey Island. I’ve always wanted to go there. I bet you’ve been, haven’t you?’

‘No, but I’ve had one or two clients who have.’

‘Chas has been. She says the best thing is the gift shop. They make their own toffee. Chas says anyone’s allowed to buy it.’

‘That’s what I’ve heard, too.’

Meici shook his head in wonder. ‘Imagine if my mum heard about that! She’d say it was made by Satan; he makes loads of stuff.’

‘How can it be made by Satan if it’s made by monks?’

‘I don’t know. I’ll ask Chas – she’ll know; she knows loads of things. It’s unbelievable really.’ Meici refilled his glass; I put my hand over the top of my glass. The cough mixture seemed to be making him garrulous.

‘You’re probably right, you’re not supposed to have too much of this stuff. Mum only let me have a spoonful just before bed. Auntie Pebim says, if you have a little bit it makes your cough go away and you see a funny shape in the distance but you don’t know what it is. If you have more the shape gets closer and closer until eventually it’s right in front of you and you see it’s a drawbridge to a giant’s castle. Then if you have more, you go across the bridge and Auntie Pebim says you see things on the other side that can really upset you. Sometimes you never come back. Do you believe that?’

‘It’s not how most cough mixtures work, but I guess it could be true.’

‘I can’t make up my mind whether I want to visit the castle. Sometimes I do and sometimes I’m scared to. Do you think we should try and help mum escape from prison?’

‘Who’s we?’

‘Me ’n’ you, Lou.’

‘No, I don’t think so.’

‘Chas says she knows a way to do it. Look!’ He pulled a paper from his pocket and unfolded it. The page had been torn from a children’s picture book and showed a prisoner in a dungeon hanging by his hands from rings set in the wall above his head. An archetypal dungeon-keeper with a big spade-shaped beard and baggy stripy trousers sat at a table eating the prisoner’s food, evidently tormenting him.

‘It’s Erik XIV of Sweden,’ he said pointing at the wretch hanging by his wrists. Chas has been telling me about him. He was in prison for something and his wife used to send him food but the guards ate it all in front of his face and laughed. So he got her to make some pea soup with arsenic in it and the guards ate that and died and he escaped. We could do that. Chas says you can find arsenic everywhere, in apple pips and fly killer and stuff. We could bake mum a cake on her birthday. Chas says she knew someone once who ate arsenic and he nearly died. She says he vomited so much his stomach came out of his mouth.’

‘Erik XIV?’

‘Something like that. It used to happen all the time in the olden days.’

‘What happens if the guards are nice and your mum eats the cake?’

‘But guards are never nice, are they?’

‘I think modern ones are usually OK. It’s not like it is in books, it’s more of a caring profession like social workers or something. Once upon a time it would have been a good plan, in the days when they had really big key rings and prisoners slept on straw, but the world has changed. Everyone eats in a refectory now and the meals are carefully planned according to the prisoners’ calorific and dietary needs as worked out by a team of dieticians; the guards get plenty of food, too, so they don’t have to steal from the prisoners.’

‘You don’t think it’s a good plan, then?’

‘Trust me, Meici, all that would happen is you would end up in gaol, too – for murdering your mum.’

He nodded solemnly. ‘Thing is, Lou, it’s quite lonely living in that house by myself. Do you know what I mean?’

‘Yes, but once you are married all that will change.’

He seemed not to hear me, lost as he was in a world of his own. ‘I sit there and think about things.’ He narrowed his eyes as he recalled his lonely thoughts. ‘You know, Lou, I don’t think my mum ever really . . . really loved me.’

‘I’m sure she did. Please don’t call me Lou.’

‘I never really saw much evidence of it.’

‘Some people find it hard to show.’

He continued to knock back the cough mixture in single gulps while I pretended to drink mine.

‘What did you want to see me about?’

‘There’s something I need to ask you, Lou. Man to man.’

‘Yes?’

‘I’ve been reading the manual, about conjugal duties.’

My innards froze. ‘Meici, I’m not the best . . .’

‘I didn’t know who to ask, and then I thought of you.’

‘Sometimes it’s best to explore without too much formal advice.’

‘It’s the most important part of the whole thing, I don’t want to mess it up. It’s Chastity I’m thinking of, really. I don’t know anything about it. So I thought I’d ask you, I thought old Lou will know what to do.’

‘Meici, as long as you love each other that’s all that matters. The rest is just, I don’t know, just . . .’

‘Just what, Lou?’

‘Just like . . . just like shaking hands, Meici.’

He nodded as a load slowly lifted from his shoulders. ‘So, there’s nothing to it? Not a big deal, like?’

‘No, not a big deal.’

‘Will you do it then?’

‘Do what?’

‘Be my best man.’

I responded with a smile of bogus delight, but my soul squirmed.

Meici said, ‘No, no, wait! Don’t answer. Hang on.’ He scooped the wedding suit up and ran to the kitchenette to change.

When he returned it was like witnessing a conjuring trick in which a stage magician sends a volunteer into a box and a different one comes out. The gauche ineptitude had gone, as if the outfit contained a built-in swagger the way corsets contain built-in stiffening.

‘I wouldn’t know you, Meici. I wouldn’t have recognised you.’

His eyes sparkled as tears of joy welled up. He sat back at the table and continued to drink the cough mixture. He forgot to ask me again about being his best man; perhaps he thought the deal had now been clinched. His words slowed and he began to babble.

‘Mum’s really my aunt. My real mum died and left me, and her two sisters had to decide which one would take care of me. They played Pooh Sticks for me. Mum lost. Auntie Meinir left and went to Liverpool. She’s got a fur coat and a chequebook and stuff. At Christmas we used to play Hansel and Gretel in the wood, but sometimes, it was funny, I would leave the trail of breadcrumbs and follow them but they led in the wrong direction. Once they went down the disused lead mine. Mum said the birds must have moved them. The woman from the social services asked me last week if I had any relations and I told her Auntie Pebim was sort of like an aunt and she told me to make regular visits to her. So I went round and she wouldn’t let me past the garden gate. She said, “What do you want?” and I said I’d come to visit her, and she said “A likely story.” ’ He took another drink from the bottle.

‘Are you sure you should be having so much?’

‘Sss-all right.’

‘I think your cough must be cured by now.’

‘I can see the castle.’

‘Maybe you should stop.’

‘I was thinking, you and me, Lou, are mates. You live on your own, don’t you?’

‘Yes.’

‘We could move in together. That would be good, wouldn’t it?’

‘Thing is, Meici . . .’

‘Lou! I’m at the drawbridge!’

‘Meici, stop!’

‘They’re raising the portcullis . . .’

‘No! Meici!’

‘Oh no!’ He made a strangled, gurgling sound in his throat and slumped back limp and silent in the chair.

I dragged him out to the car and drove him home. He was still unconscious when we reached his house. I slapped his face gently to rouse him. He blinked up at me and scratched his head. ‘I fell asleep,’ he said unnecessarily. He sat there, making no attempt to move, looking groggy. ‘Where are we?’

‘I’ve brought you home.’

‘Yes,’ he said distantly. ‘Yes. That’s good.’

‘You should go and lie down.’

He nodded. He looked down at his hand still holding the bag of gobstoppers. ‘Tell you what, Lou. I want you to have these.’ He reached forward and opened the glove compartment. A rag fell out and into his lap. It was a handkerchief. He stared at it in astonishment as if it were a religious relic. He stared and stared. It was Chastity’s handkerchief. He turned to me with fire burning in his eyes. ‘You dirty dirty double-crosser,’ he hissed. ‘You dirty double-crosser. You dirty dirty double-crosser.’

‘Meici,’ I said.

His hand reached to his side and fumbled with the door handle. He seemed to recoil from me, pressing himself against the door in his hurry to escape.

‘Meici, it’s not like you think . . .’

He opened the door and stepped out backwards, still staring at me in horror. ‘Don’t you say a damn word, Louie Knight, don’t you say a damn thing. You’ve really done it this time, good and proper. You’re in for it now, I can tell you. Just you wait and see what you get, you’ll see! Dirty double-crosser.’ He turned and walked up the path to the house, his right hand raised and twisted, pressed against his eye. I thought I should perhaps go in and see if he was OK, but even as I entertained the thought, I found my foot pressing down on the accelerator and my hands turning the wheel to leave.