The Day Aberystwyth Stood Still

Chapter 20

Up beyond the summit of Constitution Hill, past the place where the Cliff Railway ends and past the wooden hut that serves teas, past the post embedded in concrete that holds the coin-operated telescope that ends as suddenly as life, there’s a track that leads across the cliffs to Clarach. And up there too is a small radar station, unmanned but with a small place for parking off a track that leads past the many farms that dot the hills overlooking Aberystwyth. The wind never stops blowing up there, even in the depths of summer, and the grass is yellow and spiked and long and never stops dancing. This was where Sauerkopp had parked his car one afternoon at the end of May.

The old wooden carriage of the Cliff Railway creaked and groaned. From under my feet the trundle of the cable vibrated through the wooden floor. Like the brass weights of a clock, the two cars swapped places six times a day. This was the heartbeat of Aberystwyth. The up car ticks, the down car tocks . . . The town fanned out in the rear window, tiny and remote; the respiration of the sea was suspended. The car shuddered and groaned, emitting a bellow like a cow at dusk to signal arrival at the summit. I clambered out onto the inclined platform and struggled into the wind. Up here you could discern the curvature of the earth so clearly; one big circle, a globe, a planet.

Sauerkopp was sitting at the wooden picnic table outside the café, drinking tea from a styrofoam cup. There was one there for me too. He was dressed in black: black suit, black tie, black silk handkerchief peeping out of his jacket pocket, black pigskin gloves and black shoes. He had a charcoal fedora with a black band on the table and wore a black flower in his buttonhole.

I sat down.

He looked up and smiled. ‘I bought a tea for the new mayor.’

I picked up the styrofoam cup slowly, twirled it between my palms and enjoyed the stinging heat.

‘So Jhoe is Iestyn,’ I said. ‘We finally find him and are still none the wiser because he can’t tell us anything apart from weather reports from Noö. Apparently the rain has stopped.’

Sauerkopp chuckled. ‘It looks like the rainy season is over, at least for another three hundred years.’

‘Yes, now would be a good time to visit.’

Sauerkopp stared out to sea; in the wind his eyes narrowed and glittered.

‘So, is it true?’ I asked. ‘The revelation that drove Mrs Bwlchgwallter nuts? Did Ercwleff violate Skweeple?’

He shrugged. ‘Who knows? Preseli left Ercwleff to watch over him and he got the silver suit off with a tin opener. Maybe he was just being friendly. Either way it looks like Skweeple didn’t survive the ordeal, so they threw him in the lake.’

‘So he never made it back to Noö.’

‘I don’t know that either. The aliens came back and resurrected Iestyn to ask him what happened. I don’t know if they found Skweeple again. Maybe they did: if they could resurrect Iestyn then I don’t see why they couldn’t do the same for their own kind. Unless too much time had passed. Maybe he’s still in the lake. Who knows?’

I bowed my head into the steamy warmth of the tea. ‘Calamity believes it all happened just like you say, but I’m not so sure.’

‘She’s a smart kid, smarter than you.’

‘Someone once told me the Aviary disseminates disinformation.’

‘It’s true.’

‘And one way they do that is forge the truth in order to discredit it. It seems to me,’ I said, ‘that if there really were such things as genuine contactees and the organisation you work for wanted to prevent anyone taking them seriously, if you wanted to somehow suppress the truth like Raspiwtin says . . .’ I paused.

He looked at me. ‘Go on.’

‘A good way to do that would be to spread stories like this. Maybe even arrange for the contactee to be hypnotised and claim later that he disgorged all manner of nonsense. After all, a person under hypnosis would have no way of knowing afterwards whether it was true or not.’

‘No way at all,’ said Sauerkopp.

‘You could claim he said anything you liked.’

‘Yes, it would be like someone claiming you talk in your sleep. How could you dispute it?’

‘The poor bloke coming out with a story like that would be mocked.’

‘What you describe is a classic disinformation campaign. But that’s not what happened with the farmer. What he described in the hypnosis with Mrs Bwlchgwallter really happened. And now, a quarter of a century later, they came back to see Iestyn.’

‘For old time’s sake, I suppose?’

‘Why not?’

We both sat hunched over, anchoring the styrofoam cups with our hands lest the wind tipped them over.

‘And yet,’ I said. ‘And yet . . .’

‘The “and yet” is always the interesting bit.’

‘If there was nothing to hide, why would you be here hiding it?’

Sauerkopp looked up and over my shoulder into the distance. ‘Out there somewhere in the far reaches of our universe there is a planet identical to ours in every detail except that the two men sitting here on the summit of Constitutional Hill this afternoon are drinking rum.’

I took out my hip flask and poured rum into the tea. ‘Where does Raspiwtin fit into all this?’

‘Officially he’s an ecclesiastical policeman from the monastery on Caldey Island, investigating the rumours about Skweeple. If he finds out it’s true that Ercwleff violated Skweeple, he’ll put a Zed Notice on the town. Have it razed and ploughed into the ground. But he’ll never find any evidence. Old Sauerkopp is too smart for him.’

‘What about unofficially? What is he really up to?’

‘What did he tell you?’

‘Lots of things. He told me about his time in Burma, and in the Vatican laundry, but mostly he said he was here to save humankind from making war. He said if he could prove there were aliens out there we would all stop killing each other. Was that all moonshine he was telling me?’

‘No, I think he’s serious.’

‘It sounds like quite a noble plan.’

‘It is. The trouble is, it wouldn’t work out the way he thinks. It would be a catastrophe. That’s what my job is all about. Keeping well-meaning fools like him in check.’

‘Why? If there are aliens, why are we not allowed to know?’

He looked at me as if the answer was obvious.

‘Why?’ I asked again.

He sighed. ‘Yes, I know. People think the revelation that we are being visited by aliens would be just so wonderful for Planet Earth; but the truth is, it would be a disaster. Do you own stock?’

‘Couple of share certificates in the Rock Factory left to me by my aunt. That’s about it.’

He forced a smile. ‘How much do you think they would be worth the day after the aliens landed at Cardiff Arms Park? Believe me, the reaction from the mob wouldn’t be pretty. I don’t care greatly for religion, but I’m not sure I’d want to wake up the day all those billions of people who had devoted their lives to it suddenly found out it wasn’t true. For a lot of them it is the bedrock of morality, the reason they don’t kill or steal or violate your daughter. Would you like to be around when they find out they’ve been duped? The ultimate sanction, the penalty you pay in the next life, is no longer valid? Goodbye governance, law and order, goodbye everything. We’ll all be finished, including you.’

‘Don’t humanity deserve to know the truth?’

‘Of course they don’t, you stupid fool. That’s just idealistic nonsense. You know that in your heart. Even if you thought they deserved it, would you want to be the one who told them? The world might be in a mess at the moment, but it’s a familiar sort of mess, it’s a mess that works, and we get by after a fashion. If the President of the United States addressed the people of the world tomorrow and told them aliens were official, it would be as cataclysmic as a comet hitting the Pacific Ocean and generating a tsunami 5 miles high. It would be like the end of the dinosaurs. They’ll have to disclose it one day, but I sure as hell don’t want to be around when they do.’

‘Of course, because once people find out the government have known for forty years and not told them, they might not be too happy about it.’

‘For sure! But trust me, Louie, your head will be the first on a stick. People like you and me will be the first to get that honour because we are the stupid ones who will put up a fight when the mob arrive. When they turn up with their torches flickering in the night, the same ones who used to leave flaming crosses as their calling cards, you’ll be there saying, “This is my house, no one crosses this threshold, you’ll have to kill me first,” and they’ll be happy to oblige you. You and me are in the same business, you just don’t want to believe it.’

‘I don’t think so.’

‘You wage your war every day against the heads-on-sticks guys, the cross-burners. You get paid peanuts, risk your life for people who don’t deserve it, you get banged over the head with tyre irons . . . You don’t realise how close we are to the sharpened sticks. The only thing holding back the tide is the cops. You’ll say they are venal and corrupt, and I wouldn’t disagree, but they do the job that someone has to do. However bad they get, they will never be as bad as what happens if they don’t show up to work tomorrow. And this is the golden uplands as far as humanity is concerned. In the past it was much worse. It wouldn’t take much for us to regress a few centuries. That charlatan Raspiwtin says we are all in thrall, imprisoned in a cage of our own imagining, bars of delusion that we could blink away if we awoke from our trance. He’s right, mostly. We are all held in thrall, but the magic spell is the delusion that the status quo I just described is robust. The head-on-sticks guys keep a low profile, they lurk in the shadows, but really, what’s stopping them taking over? Almost nothing. It’s just a realisation away. Have you seen how little it takes for them to take to the street and start looting? That’s always where it starts. Sure, we conceal the truth. But only because we are not in the slightest doubt about what would happen if it ever got out.’

‘Maybe there would be anarchy for a while, but humanity would be better off in the long run.’

‘I’m sure you are right, but we’ve only got one life. It’s like planting a tree that won’t fruit in your lifetime. What’s the point?’

‘So you are saying it would be like that here? Aberystwyth would be like the inside of that locked-down prison you told me about?’

‘Not Aberystwyth, Louie, the whole world.’

I drained my tea, crushed the cup into a ball and put it to rest on the ashtray. A puff of wind blew it away.

‘The letter Raspiwtin gave me, the interdepartmental Aviary memo. I took it to a kid, a forensic linguist. He said it was a fake. But according to you it told the truth?’

‘Exactly! The investigation into the story of Iestyn, the discovery that he had been resurrected, was true. So we faked the account of it.’

‘In order to discredit the truth. And the Buick?’

‘The Buick and the Men in Black are just a little hocus-pocus we do to blow smoke in the eyes of the masses. After all, if a man has an alien contact some people will believe him. But who’s going to believe that man when he reports visits from the Men in Black and nonsense like that? Jhoe dresses like one because he is delusional. I’m the genuine article. I’ve got the car, the hat and the suit. I wear it to funerals too, and get to charge it on expenses. It’s one of the perks of working for the Aviary.’

‘Mrs Bwlchgwallter made a tape of the hypnotism. How come you are not worried about it? Shouldn’t you suppress that too?’

‘I’m not worried because I already know where it is. In the boot of my car.’

‘Calamity guessed it was hidden in the gingerbread alien, but someone got there first. Was it you?’

‘No, it was Miaow, while you were sick. She offered to trade: she would give me the tape in return for me getting you off the charge of attempted murder. I was going to anyway, but it suited my purpose to agree. That’s how the gun ended up in the mayor’s possessions.’

I absorbed the information. It made sense. ‘There are two things I don’t get. You must have kept Iestyn’s whereabouts concealed from the Aviary all these years. Why do you protect him? Your job should be to deliver him up to them.’

He looked at me and became serious. ‘I guess you could call it atonement. You remember me telling you once I’ve never killed anyone? It’s true, but I was once responsible for a man’s death. A very cruel death. He was from the Denunciationists out at Cwmnewidion Isaf, and he got arrested for stealing a tractor. They put him in the penitentiary at Tregaron Bog, just in transit. It was only for a few days, and we were heaving at the seams, so I put him in the segregation block. It was the weekend the riot broke out. He was the one I told you about in the end cell.’

I let out a soft gasp as the horror of that sank in.

‘Besides, I’ve grown quite fond of Jhoe over the years.’ He looked at his watch and said, ‘Time, I think, to drive Jhoe and Miaow home to Cwmnewidion Isaf.’

I placed my hand on his arm. ‘What made him go like this in the first place? What made him lose his sanity, do you know?’

He grinned as if he’d been hoping I would ask the question. ‘The aliens showed him something . . . something wonderful . . . too wonderful. A thing not of this earth, a thing so beautiful, so glorious it blew his mind the way a 40-watt light bulb pops when you put too much current through it.’

‘Am I supposed to know what it was?’

‘They showed him the engine to the flying saucer.’

And then Calamity appeared over the brow of the hill, walking with the gentle gait of one for whom many of the mysteries of the world are slowly being resolved. She held her arms folded tightly in front to keep her parka closed in the fierce wind, and hobbled at a half-trot half-walk up to meet me. She grinned, and the hair blew across her gentle face.

‘I’ve seen the Buick,’ she said, eyes sparkling with excitement. ‘It’s amazing. You must come. It’s on the track over the hill.’ She took me by the hand.

Viewed from behind, the car in the lay-by had the streamlined profile of a crouching hare: bulbous, muscular thighs swelled out on either side above the rear wheels, and a tiny rear window was inset like a porthole. The panels of metal were painted in deep, lustrous black like the lacquered lid of a Steinway concert grand. They don’t paint cars that way any more, they don’t make anything like that any more. It was an old car, hailing from a time when every part had to flair or swoop or shine, and the nose had to grin like a chromium shark. It was the sort of car that had spent its youth at drive-in movies beneath the huge, flickering, popcorn-scented faces of Humphrey Bogart and Katharine Hepburn. You wouldn’t hitch a caravan to a car like this, that would be heresy; instead you would choose one of those beautiful silver zeppelins, the Airstream trailers, made from aluminium skin and riveted like the fuselage of an aircraft. Together you would make the pilgrimage to the Promised Land along Route 66, the Mother Road, the one Steinbeck called the Road to the Great Second Chance, where Burma-Shave signs flickered along the way. Or you might, as today, make a different journey along the B4576 to Cwmnewidion Isaf. It was a beautiful old glossy black American car and looked about as unobtrusive on the verge of the road on top of Constitution Hill as Flash Gordon’s rocket. They say you never forget your first sight of a black 1947 Buick.

Two people were standing next to it. Jhoe and Miaow. Jhoe came running up to us like a fawn, while Miaow held back shyly. Jhoe took my hand and shook it warmly. ‘I have a daughter . . . she’s taking me home,’ he said. ‘Home with my daughter. I’m so . . . so . . .’

‘Grokked?’ I offered.

His eyes filled with tears. ‘Yes, so very grokked.’

‘Jhoe says we can go and visit him in Cwmnewidion Isaf whenever we like,’ said Calamity.

‘That would be great,’ I said. My words drifted as my gaze sought Miaow in the background.

Jhoe stood aside. ‘Go and talk to her.’

I struggled into the wind. She stood on the summit, outlined against the sky, much as I had imagined her in the night club: hair wild and blowing freely in the wind, her gaze scanning the horizon for that sail. She flung herself into my arms and hugged me. We broke off and kissed, and then she pulled away and looked down.

‘When I found your caravan empty, I thought you were going to leave without saying goodbye.’

‘I was, but I changed my mind.’

‘Why not change it again and stay?’ I asked.

‘You know I can’t.’

‘Why?’

She looked at me and shook her head gently. ‘I’m going back to Cwmnewidion Isaf, to be with my people. I’m going to look after my dad.’

I stared into her eyes, trying to think of things to say.

‘I don’t fit in here in this town, Louie, I was just visiting. I’m a bit like Skweeple.’

‘Maybe you should stay a bit longer.’

‘I want to look after my dad. I’ve never had a dad.’

‘I could move to Cwmnewidion Isaf. Do they allow caravans?’

‘Only horse-drawn ones.’ She smiled.

‘I don’t want you to go.’

The smile faded. ‘You would never fit in among us Denunciationists.’

‘I could try. They allow stills. We could make gin.’

‘I wouldn’t want you to. It wouldn’t be you. A rabbit and a fish can fall in love, Louie. But where will they build a home?’

‘Couldn’t we build a dam, like beavers?’

‘They might turn us into hats.’

‘As long as we were the same hat, I would be happy.’

She shook her head, kissed me sadly and prepared to climb into the back of the Buick. She paused, and said, ‘I think it’s great that you’re the mayor now.’

I smiled. ‘It feels strange.’

‘You’ll get used to it. When is the human-cannonball flight?’

‘One day,’ I said. ‘One fine day.’

‘On that day I’ll come back.’ She climbed into the car and sat next to Jhoe.

Sauerkopp shook our hands and wished me well with the new job. He parted from us with the heavy heart of one who knows our paths will not cross again and feels regret for it, but knows too that there is no remedy because there are many things in this world that must be borne and cannot be helped. I put my arm round Calamity’s shoulder and drew her close to me as we watched the white-walled tyres grip the turf and the great car turn with regal ease. As it drove off, two faces peered through the small porthole of a back window and we watched until they shrank to dots and passed over the hill. Calamity looked up at me. ‘Please don’t be ingrokked about Miaow.’

I hugged her and told her how glad I was that, despite the truly terrifying odds thrown up by the universe, Calamity and I happened to be sharing the same planet, the same epoch and, best of all, the same office. And in a region of the solar system where the rain seldom lasts for more than a week. She pressed her face against me and spoke into the folds of my trenchcoat, saying how grokked she was that I was the new mayor. I laughed, and together we walked slowly off into the wind that never stops blowing.