The Day Aberystwyth Stood Still

Chapter 15

The next morning there was a beautiful dawn. This was often the way: the gods played games with us. Under such a burning sky, pink and crimson, who could be unhappy? Even a condemned man waking on the morning of his execution to a sky like this would take extra care over the brushing of his teeth. Was it George Orwell who described a condemned man stepping aside to avoid a puddle on his way to the gallows?

I left Miaow still sleeping and drove at first light out to Penparcau to pick up Calamity. She was already standing on the pavement outside her auntie’s house, yawning like a hippo. We drove to Ginger Nutters in Bridge Street and retraced our steps down the side alley to the back door. This time the TV was switched off. Mrs Bwlchgwallter was gone, but otherwise upstairs was the same as we had left it: the gingerbread alien, the brimming chamber pot, the room airless and smelling rank. We opened a few drawers, looked under a few cushions, but did so in a manner that said we thought the task of finding the tape was futile. As futile, perhaps, as our next mission: to go and see Meici and appeal to his better nature.

‘Thing is,’ said Calamity, ‘if the portable tape recorder was in her handbag, then so is the tape, and she probably has her handbag with her.’

‘Maybe she hid the tape.’

‘If she did, it could be anywhere. It doesn’t have to be here.’

I nodded.

‘I wonder what the farmer said under hypnosis that made her scream.’

We gave up and drove to Machynlleth to kill time and to eat breakfast somewhere I was less likely to be recognised. We read the paper and drank coffee, and when it was coming up to 10.00 we drove to the caravan park at Clarach. Chastity was sitting on a kitchen stool at the water’s edge. The day was starting to get hot. She had a forlorn air, her feet dangling in the bright water that reached her chair on each successive inflow. I coughed and she turned and looked up, squinting. Her spectacles were broken, and repaired with Sellotape; her left eye was half-closed, swollen and a mixture of yellow, green and mauve.

‘Do you know the land where the lemon tree flowers?’ she asked.

‘All we’ve got is rhubarb. What happened to your eye?’

‘I . . . I fell.’

‘Really? How?’

‘You know, I just fell . . . into a door.’

‘Meici did it to you, didn’t he?’

She pretended to be indignant. ‘No! Of course not. Meici would never do a thing like that.’

‘Yes, he would.’

‘You don’t know him, he’s under so much strain with this new job. It was an accident. He just . . .’

‘He just punched you in the eye. That’s the sort of guy he is.’

‘Don’t you dare say anything bad about Meici, don’t you dare!’

Calamity knelt down and put her arm around Chastity’s shoulders. ‘We don’t want to upset you, we’re your friends . . .’

‘No, you’re not. Meici said you would say bad things about him. He was right. I hate you both. I thought you were nice, but you’re not. You’re a murderer, Louie Knight, I saw you on the TV. Murderer!’ She hid her face in her hands and wept. But it was the fake dry sobbing of a child throwing a tantrum. I waited until she stopped and peeked from behind her hands. She raised her face, sniffing inauthentically.

‘Is he here?’

‘Who?’

‘Meici.’

‘No,’ she said, but her eyes betrayed her, darting for a fraction of a second towards the caravans parked on the grassy verge overlooking the beach.

I turned to look. ‘Which one is it? The blue one?’

‘No, I said he’s not here.’

‘You might as well say –’

Calamity nudged my arm. Meici Jones appeared walking down the road carrying a pint of milk. He entered one of the caravans. We followed.

He was standing in the kitchen area, reading a copy of the Daily Mirror propped up on the cooker while eating baked beans from a tin with a fork. When he saw us, he looked frightened.

‘Hi Meici,’ I said.

‘Hi Louie,’ he said with forced joviality. ‘How are things?’

‘Oh, not bad. How are the beans?’

He looked at them as if the answer to the question required deliberation. He became lost in thought. ‘Good,’ he said distantly. ‘The beans are good, Lou.’

‘You’ll be getting married soon.’

‘This afternoon, actually.’

‘Chastity sure will look lovely in a white dress. Pity about that black eye.’

He feigned innocence. ‘Which one’s that?’

‘The one you gave her.’

‘Is that what she said?’

‘She said she walked into a door.’

‘That’s right, that’s what she did.’ He forced a laugh. ‘You should have seen it, Lou! She’s so clumsy . . . I guess that’s why I love her.’

‘I need your help, Meici.’

‘Sure, Louie, anything . . .’

‘I’m wanted for attempted murder, did you know that?’

‘Yes, I saw it on the TV.’

‘I saw it on TV, too. I saw you on TV saying I was the murderer. Do you remember doing that?’

Meici didn’t say anything. His eyes narrowed. Perhaps he realised being nice was not going to get him out of this one. ‘Since you ask, Louie, I don’t remember that.’

‘I need to clear my name. Whatever quarrel you think you’ve got with me is . . .’

‘You had her handkerchief.’

‘Yes, her handkerchief was in my car. It doesn’t mean anything.’

‘You would say that.’

‘It doesn’t mean a thing. I gave her a lift.’ I pulled out my hip flask and proffered it. ‘Drink?’

He shook his head as if to say it was too late for such things. ‘I trusted you, I thought you were my friend, you were nothing but a dirty double-crosser. You can’t wriggle out of this one.’

‘It’s a serious charge, Meici.’

‘You should have thought about that before you started messing about with my girl.’

‘Will you withdraw your testimony?’

‘I was brought up not to tell lies. I’ll tell them exactly what happened. You shot me.’

‘Meici, I know you’ve had a hard life –’

‘What would you know about it?’

‘Meici –’

‘I’m sorry, Louie, I have a lot to do today.’ He put the bean tin down on the hob.

I stared at him for a long while; he fidgeted, then picked the tin up again.

‘OK,’ I said. ‘Nothing I say is going to make a difference.’ I reached out my hand.

He jumped back. ‘What are you going to do?’

‘I’m going to shake your hand. What do you think I’m going to do?’

‘You could do judo or something.’

I gave an exasperated sigh. He stared uneasily at my hand, the way a dog regards a stick that has been used to beat it in the past.

‘I just wanted to congratulate you on your wedding.’

Confusion flooded his eyes.

‘It’s not a trick, for God’s sake.’

He reached out his hand, gingerly, as if expecting an electric shock. We shook. His hand was pudgy and moist and childlike.

‘Hope it goes well,’ I said. ‘I hope you and Chastity will be very happy together.’

His eyes misted, and he swallowed so hard he could hardly speak. ‘Thanks, Lou, ’ppreciate it.’

‘And thanks for asking me to be your best man. Sorry it didn’t work out.’

He swallowed another lump. ‘I got Ercwleff to do it.’

‘He’s a good choice. Dependable.’

Meici nodded. He opened his mouth to speak but the muscles quivered and his mouth assumed the shape of a figure-of-eight lying on its side.

‘So long,’ I said as I left.

‘Bye Louie,’ he squeaked, looking as shocked as a child waiting at the school gate for a mother who doesn’t come. That’s how it can happen sometimes. Just when you thought there was nothing left for Fortune to throw at you, she deals you a low blow. Kindness.

It rained in the afternoon. The day turned cold and squally with gusts of wind that turned umbrellas inside out and made the canvas doors of the marquee in Plas Crug slap together viciously. The ceremony was held in Llanbadarn church and afterwards there was a reception for two hundred in the marquee. I stood among the trees at the edge of the park watching, the ghost at the feast. After the toasts and speeches the crowd gathered outside in the rain to watch Meici’s human-cannonball flight. He wore his silver space-cadet suit. A compère dressed as a circus ringmaster gave a running commentary through a public address system. He told us as Meici stepped out from the dressing tent and strode along the field of the great danger Meici was placing himself in. The crowd were dubious and it seemed many secretly hoped for a disaster. From white to black on the same day. No one had ever seen a human-cannonball wedding before; no one had ever seen a human-cannonball funeral. No one had seen both on the same day. Normally brides have to do a quick change of clothing into their going-away outfits but this would be something even more dramatic. No one liked Meici, and no one even knew Chastity, but everyone had to be there in case he entered the Guinness Book of Records.

Meici climbed up the stepladder and inserted himself in the cannon barrel, which pointed up and in the direction of a net for landing some twenty yards away. Chastity, in white rain-sodden taffeta, watched with eyes sparkling, half in fear, half in excitement. No man had ever done this for her before and would ever be likely to again. A recording of a drum rolled, the compère gave the countdown, the heavens opened. There was a pyrotechnic bang and flash from the fat end of the cannon and Meici sailed regally into the darkening sky, describing a gentle arc towards the net. The crowd held its breath. Meici held his arms out and landed neatly in the middle of the net. Chastity squealed with delight and the audience broke into spontaneous applause. A group of ushers helped Meici down and carried him shoulder high through the throng towards the bar; girls threw flowers and confetti over him. It was a moment of triumph and no one who had ever known Meici in his previous incarnation would ever have predicted it. A man who had known no friends, and no girls, who had lived for thirty-four years with his mum and been regularly beaten with a cane, had performed the most unlikely turnaround of fate. Later in the afternoon a hire car took the couple off to the mayor’s holiday cottage in Aberdovey.

I spent the rest of the day walking in the rain. I was a fugitive; my description had been issued to all law-enforcement officers, along with the caveat that I was dangerous and caution should be used when approaching me. Anyone could have seen me, anyone could have reported me. I no longer cared. Sometimes you don’t; it takes too much energy. I walked from the recreation field down Elm Tree Avenue, past the station to the harbour and from there along the Prom to Constitution Hill. I walked along North Road and up the steps to the top of Bryn Road and past the big red house that can be seen from every part of town. I walked up over the golf course and took the long route past the farms, the one that emerges at the top of Penglais Hill. And I walked across to Cefn Llan and down to Llanbadarn, and once I reached the recreation ground again, I did another circuit. It didn’t stop raining. It was a good time to think about the human race. It’s not something you would normally choose to join, a club full of snivellers, crybabies, back-stabbers, disapprovers, oafs and inquisitors, snoops and witch-burners, prigs, puritans, Pharisees, pardoners, pie-eaters, tell-tale tits, teacher’s pets and curtain-twitchers. No, you wouldn’t choose to join it, but once they cast you out from the fold, once they pass the writ of outlawry, there is no ache like the one in your heart to be allowed back in. It’s one of the paradoxes for which this universe is famous.

I walked and walked because sometimes walking is slightly less painful than lying down. Given how low society sets the bar indicating who is allowed in, being deemed beyond the pale is a damning verdict. It’s a bitter pill to swallow. All outlaws know this; don’t believe the nonsense you read in the papers or from their twelfth-century counterparts, the balladeers. The romance is all phooey. Ten centuries of being sung about by troubadours in tights is not worth one night in a warm bed safe in the knowledge that no one will come and arrest you. In the movies Robin Hood and his men were always laughing in the face of misfortune, incorrigibly happy, sitting around the fire gnawing chicken and throwing the bones over their shoulders, cackling witlessly. You try sleeping in a tree in the rain. The outlaw doesn’t steal because he wants to, but because he has to. He certainly doesn’t do it to give to the poor. He doesn’t give a damn. He steals from whoever’s coming along the path and keeps it all. There is only one thing the outlaw wants: to go home, take his wet things off and drift asleep in front of the fire with a mug of cocoa. That’s what I wanted to do. But home is the one place you can’t go at times like this. They would definitely be watching the house and the office. In some ways, to be arrested as I walked through the afternoon drizzle would have been a blessing, but I couldn’t bear to be taken at night, in my own bed. I shouldn’t have slept at Miaow’s either, but where else could I go? To sleep like an outlaw in the wood, on the wet ground, or in a cave so damp the whole hillside has rheumatism . . . no man is an island, no matter what he thinks. When the tough guys are gunned down in the street, with their last words they cry out for their mums. This is also true in battle, so they say; they lie dying on the field of slaughter and call out for the woman who brought them into this vale of tears. My heart couldn’t bear, did not possess the strength, to sleep alone now. In the night, when the world hates you, it helps to sleep in the arms of someone who doesn’t.

At the harbour end of the Prom the asphalt gives way to the wooden prosthetic of the jetty; this is where the outsiders park. Those people who have not renewed their membership of the human race. VW campers, old travelling library vans converted into homes, ancient ambulances from the days when they painted a red cross on the side so thick that no amount of painting over with white house paint will ever efface the outline. They don’t paint red crosses on ambulances any more, it’s one of those things that give the world its comforting familiarity and which they change without telling anyone. One day you wake up and notice all the ambulances are fluorescent green and yellow. They say it’s safer, it enhances visibility, but they are wrong. In an ambulance you are never at risk from other traffic. There is only one danger to watch out for in an ambulance, and it was for this that the red crosses were painted on them: attack by dive bomber.

It must be odd sleeping in one; you would surely dream about all the people who didn’t make it, who went to sleep permanently en route. You know you are in trouble if they switch off the siren. As long as you can still hear it, there’s hope. For many of us it will be the last earthly sound we hear, the technological plash of Charon’s oar. What thoughts rush through your mind as they carry you out through the front door of the house you will never return to? As they slam you into the back of the fluorescent funerary chariot, the eternal bread van? Do you know this will be the last time you see blue sky? What thoughts go through your head?

A man approached as I leant on the railings and watched the harbour lights glitter on the water. I thought he would ask for a cigarette, but it was Eeyore. He didn’t say anything, just patted me on the shoulder, then leant on the railings next to me and stared out to sea. After a while, I said, ‘The police are looking for me.’

‘I know, I saw it on the news.’

‘I’m tempted to go and give myself up. What should I do?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘When you were a cop, how did you keep going?’

He thought for a while and said, ‘I used to think about Big Nose George Parrott.’

‘I’ve never heard of him.’

‘Not many people have. Big Nose George Parrott was one of the people they never tell you about.’

‘Tell me about him.’

‘He was a cattle rustler from Wyoming at the end of the nineteenth century, with a $20,000 bounty on his head for killing a Union Pacific Railroad detective. They sentenced him to hang, but the townsfolk snatched him from the gaol and strung him up from a telegraph pole. After his death they sent his hide to the tannery, where they made it into a pair of shoes. The shoes were given to a fellow called John Eugene Osborne, a surgeon for the Union Pacific Railway, who wore them to the inaugural ball after being elected the first governor of Wyoming. I don’t really know much more about him, but you don’t really need to. I’m sure he was a swell fellow, a real darling. The first governor of Wyoming. I’m sure everywhere he went they loved him.’

‘You say the man shot a detective?’

‘A Pinkerton, I believe. It could have been you or me, I know, so it doesn’t make sense that I should admire him.’

‘It makes a sort of sense.’

‘Sure, he never should have shot that Pinkerton, but it’s not like he wanted to. He did it because he probably couldn’t see any way out of things, and didn’t have enough brains in his head to figure one out. They were hiding away in some bolt-hole, surrounded; their discovery was a surprise, I think. I’m sure if he’d had a choice he wouldn’t have wanted to shoot that man. But people like Big Nose George Parrott never have a choice; they spend their lives in a corner with nowhere left to run, and the cards they hold are always twos and threes; it’s the first governors of Wyoming who get the picture cards. The names change but the story never does. In 1950 builders doing alterations to the Rawlins National Bank across the road from the gaol found the shoes in a barrel. That’s how it goes. People like that governor spend their lives walking all over the little guys. He just took it one stage further and made it literal.’

‘Big Nose George Parrott, eh?’

‘The thing about people like that first governor of Wyoming is they get all the breaks in life, sleep in a nice feather bed, go to the best schools, and it’s easy for them; I don’t mind that. It’s the automatic sense of entitlement that goes with it that I despise. The presumption that they get all those good things because they are special people, that they are better than others. As far as I can see, there is only one difference between that governor in his fancy waistcoat and Big Nose George Parrott. He was luckier. That governor stuck his head out of the womb in a nicer room.’ He turned to me and whispered, ‘Son, all you can do sometimes is try and wipe the smile off their faces.’

Miaow held the door ajar on a safety chain that stretched across the bridge of her nose, her face twisted in the scowl of the householder disturbed late at night. She was wearing striped men’s pyjamas: pink vertical bars sandwiching thinner lines of grey. There were three buttons on the jacket, the bottom one missing. Without the button the fabric parted, revealing the taut satin of her midriff. In the dim light it shone like antique amber.

‘I’m worn out,’ I said.

She put on a pair of spectacles and focused on my face.

‘You’re soaked through.’

I followed her in and sat at the Formica table. I placed my elbows on the tabletop and my head in my hands. Miaow slipped next to me and put her palms on my cheeks. Her hands were cool and soothing, like the hands of an alabaster saint. ‘Poor you,’ she whispered. I sat there and let myself be soothed. She moved her hands and pressed her head against mine. Her breathing took on the rhythm of the sea out in the darkness; the earth slowed, ceased its pointless celestial whirligig. She pressed her head closer, pulled tighter with her arms, but said nothing. Just breathed, like the ocean, with a hint of Jack Daniels.

‘I just want to sleep.’

‘You can.’

‘They’ll find me here.’

‘If they do, I’ll shoot them. I’ll make some cocoa.’ She stood up, moved over to the stove and began to boil milk. I went and stood next to her, slumped against the wall.

‘Where did you get the gun?’

‘It used to belong to my father.’

‘What did he need it for?’

She smiled. ‘He was an outlaw like you.’

‘What sort of outlaw?’

‘His name was Iestyn Probert.’

I looked at her in astonishment, mouth agape in the dark. ‘Well, I’ll be . . . all this time you . . . you’ve been . . . I don’t know what to say.’

‘I’m so sorry. I hated lying to you. I’m just a little kid, Louie. I don’t think I’d be strong enough to stand on that battlement.’

I took her face in my hands and kissed her. ‘You would, trust me.’

‘Iestyn spent a week on the run before they caught him. My mother hid him in her cottage. Nine months later I was born.’

‘And now you are looking for him?’

‘Yes.’

‘Even though they hanged him.’

‘A lot of people say he’s alive.’

She carried the two mugs of cocoa over to the table. I followed and sat down. She topped them up with Jack Daniels.

‘And you are here in Aber now because you think he will come back because of the flying-saucer reports?’

‘Yes. It’s worth trying, isn’t it? I want to see him. Wouldn’t you want to see your father?’

‘Yes, but –’

‘I’m sure he would come if he could.’

‘Do you know why Raspiwtin is here?’

‘He’s looking for Iestyn, too. He thinks I know where he is, so he watches me. But I don’t. He’s watching and waiting. What are you going to do now?’

‘I don’t know. I’ve run out of ideas.’

‘You need to rest.’

Stupefied with tiredness, I followed her across the caravan to the bed. I slumped down and said, ‘I’ll be gone early tomorrow. I have something to do.’

‘You said you’d run out of ideas.’

‘I’m going to see Sauerkopp. Two days after Mrs Lewis was murdered he turned up in my office with a Polaroid of her body. His people must have been following me the night she was murdered. He must know who did it. He pretends he doesn’t, but he must do. I’ll ask him. If it was the mayor, I can use that to get him to make Meici drop the accusation against me. If it was Doc Digwyl, then that must have something to do with the mayor.’

‘What makes you think he will help you?’

‘I’ll make him. I need to borrow the gun.’

She kissed me and said, ‘OK.’

I watched through the obscuring gauze of my drooping eyelashes as she gently undressed me. Girl on the battlement; angel in pyjamas; her hands were cool and soothing like the apse of a church on a summer’s day.