Don’t Cry For Me Aberystwyth (18 page)

‘You’ve been drinking, haven’t you?’

‘Don’t tell me you don’t approve.’

‘It’s not even nine thirty.’

‘I bet the Vikings never worried about things like that.’

‘Oh dear.’

‘Stop saying “Oh dear.”’

‘Goodness!’

‘I’m not a fan of that expression, either.’

‘No? How about this one: go stick your head up your ass!’ She hung up.

I went down to the Spa to buy some liquor. When I got back the phone was ringing. It was the Queen of Denmark.

‘I’m sorry I said that.’

‘It wasn’t very queen-like.’

‘We don’t always do it like the ones in Hans Christian Andersen. He was Danish, too, by the way.’

‘Or maybe you’re not a queen.’

‘What am I, then?’

‘That’s what I don’t understand. Someone who’s got it in for me, maybe. You know, it never occurred to me, but putting that ad in the paper has sure landed me in a lot of trouble with the cops.’

‘Is that what this is about? The ad?’

‘It’s about lots of things.’

‘Why don’t you go home to bed and put your head under the pillow and make the bad world go away.’

‘I might just do that?’

‘They told me you were a man.’

‘They lied to you.’

‘Clearly.’

‘They always lie; it’s the only thing you can count on.’

‘You’re really feeling sorry for yourself, aren’t you?’

‘If you were me, you would, too.’

‘Aw, diddums!’ She hung up again.

I put the cap on the bottle and drove home to my caravan in Ynyslas. Sometimes it’s good to put your head under the pillow and make the bad world go away. But there are times when the balm of sleep won’t come, and then you need stronger medicine. Eeyore gave it to me once; the bottle lies under the bed in my caravan. Toulouse-Lautrec’s favourite tipple: absinthe. The green goddess, green as the sea when it snows in February; it turns milky in water like the eyes of a blind girl I once knew. I sat at the caravan table, drizzled the liquor over a spoonful of sugar and incanted my favourite poem. It’s called ‘Ingredients’. Angelica, hyssop, melissa, lemon balm, veronica and cardamon, liquorice root . . . such beautiful soothing names, like girls we once loved on summer days . . . angelica, melissa, veronica . . . and wormwood. The bitterest substance known to man. In Ancient Rome the victor in the chariot race had to drink a cup to remind him that life had its bitter side, too. As if anyone needed reminding. Wormwood on the nipple: that’s one hell of an overture. How could life disappoint after a start like that? Poor old Juliet.

Never blame the parents, though. They do their best to make it up. They give you childhood. It wears them out but they don’t complain. Every child starts life on the stage and never notices Mum and Dad running back and forth, wheeling on the sets, wheeling them off. Stage managing. Two big productions every year: summer holidays and Christmas. Payback for the wormwood.

They take you to the seaside to live in caravans: tin boxes painted hospital green, bathroom blue and lemon curd; with chintzy curtains and bad TV reception; rooms synonymous elsewhere with failed lives but which for a while become palaces. Set in dry scrubby land on breeze blocks, amid sandy spiky grass that not even camels could eat. The tea tastes of plastic cups; sand in
wasp-tormented jam sandwiches grinds against tooth enamel; the milk comes warm from a shop that smells of inflatable plastic trash. The sun never shines and the sea is the same colour as the run-off from a washing machine. Every morning the inside of the caravan drips with condensation, and yet it is all so unutterably lovely.

For Christmas they slave all through autumn, taking in extra sewing, to give you a cornucopia. Your heart’s desire. Just ask, and you get it. It defies all the rules you are later forced to learn about life. You never see how tired those grown-ups are. Is there something they aren’t telling you? There are tell-tale signs, of course. There’s something odd about Santa’s beard; it doesn’t look real. And he smells. You don’t expect that of someone from Magic Land. Half the stuff you want doesn’t turn up and they say it’s too expensive, but how can that be if Santa’s paying? But kids are smart. They know it’s better not to enquire too deeply about some things. They know better than to look behind the sets. The crucial thing is not to let inquisitiveness jeopardise the coming miracle, the one compared to which later ones, such as first love or the miracle of birth, are but pale shadows: that delirious ecstasy of an empty pillow case left overnight that fills through some magic parthenogenesis with spontaneously generated presents, each wrapped in paper, bright blue or red, bearing repeating motifs – holly and berries, bells, cartoon reindeers – images sweeter than a mother’s face, which are torn apart amid a blizzard of fake snow. Flakes from a can drift and pile up inside the house and smell, inexplicably, of pine bath salts. They gather on the tree, the cards, and on the bauble that contains the uncomprehending face of a boy in pyjamas. Two flash-lit eyes, bright pinpricks of bafflement in a nimbus of coloured lights that twinkle as if a rainbow had been sawn up into logs, and ground to dust. There he lives for ever imprisoned in a silver bubble of memory, the boy that was me. The irises of his eyes darken across the years as the photographic dyes slowly age and the snow deepens,
until one day it sets loose in the heart an avalanche of melancholy which nothing can assuage.

All men collaborate in the noble, selfless counterfeit. It’s a code even criminals honour. Murderers, tyrants, footpads . . . they never let on. They keep mum. Only a very few, the sickest sociopaths who have to be locked away in special wings to protect them from the wrath of other prisoners, are exempt. So every time you wander back, get too close to a cardboard backdrop, there is a kindly guiding hand, a policeman, old lady, or bank robber, to push you gently back towards the footlights.

Until the day you slip away; wander past the two-dimensional scenery flats and see them from the other side. See the carpenter’s tools and tins of paints. The wires and pulleys. The discarded manikins and cups of instant coffee. Back into the bowels where all is painted black, down the stairs through the door marked Exit, into the cold wet street. Drizzle, gasometers, factory hooter. Newspaper gusting down the street. Life . . .

The long walk to the client’s chair.

Next morning I stepped gingerly over the empty bottles that rolled around the floor with unpleasantly amplified sounds. I fried some eggs, drank some coffee, and drove to town taking care to avoid my face in the driving mirror. The office was as I’d left it; smelling faintly of rum but probably not as much as I did. There were no messages and no indication that anybody had called, or cared, which didn’t greatly surprise me, so I went for a walk. I had no goal in mind but my steps took me along the Prom towards the harbour and then I turned in after the castle and walked past the Castle pub. Another block and I was in Prospect Street. I didn’t remember taking any decision to go there but here I was. The curtains of Calamity’s office in the front room were closed but a light indicated she was open for business. I went to the front door and stood for a while, my hand in my pocket forming a fist to knock on the door. Then I walked
back to the office. It seemed bigger. And emptier. Captain Morgan stared at me from the bin; he’d lost the power to spell the world away; the flames of the torch had gone out and the wolves howled. I spent the next three days like that. I walked along the Prom and down to the harbour, and back via Prospect Street, where I always paused but didn’t knock. A couple of times I thought I saw the man in the fedora, but I couldn’t be sure.

On the fourth day I passed a vagrant playing a violin on the pavement outside the entrance to the Pier. There was a hat at his feet but nothing in it. The familiar words passed through my head in accompaniment to his playing. ‘Brightly shone the moon that night, though the frost was cruel. Then an old man came in sight, gathering winter few-oooh-el.’ I stopped. The man was Cadwaladr, the old veteran of the war in Patagonia. He stopped playing and said, ‘Bring me flesh and bring me wine, bring me pine logs hither.’ I showed him a bottle of rum in my Spar bag and he packed up the violin.

‘Follow me,’ he said. ‘I know just the place.’

We walked down towards the harbour.

‘I thought you were painting the railway bridge across the Dovey estuary.’

‘I was.’

‘You said it was a job for life.’

‘It was. Finish one end, and time to start again at the other end. Like Sisyphus, only better scenery.’

‘What happened? Get tired of it?’

‘Nope. They invented a new kind of paint. Lasts ten years.’

‘I’m sorry.’

‘They gave me redundancy money – I bought a van. See.’

He took me to a van parked on the Prom across from the Yacht Club. It looked like a superannuated ambulance or a furniture van or something. It looked like a lot of the vans that got parked here: mobile homes for people whose dogs had string for a leash. The poor man’s Winnebago. He opened the back, pulled
out a folding table and two matching chairs and set them up on the pavement. I put the bottle down and sat.

‘What was it before, a furniture van?’

‘Mobile library. Cost me two hundred quid.’ He brought out two cups and we sat on the Prom, drinking rum in the dim light of midday.

‘Mobile library.’

‘I like that. There’s an air about it, hard to define, an air of learning, of scholarship. And a hush like you get in a proper library.’

‘You got a bed in there?’

‘Got a bed and a cupboard and a primus. Got some water and some candles. Got some petrol. Got everything I need. Might even try a different country in the new year.’

‘Still got the hush, huh?’

‘I know it sounds strange.’

‘I don’t think it does.’

‘You going to the carol concert this year?’

‘Hadn’t thought about it.’

‘They say Myfanwy won’t be singing.’

‘Doesn’t look like she will. She’s lost her voice.’

Cadwaladr leaned back in his chair and stared at sea darker than an evergreen tree. ‘Won’t be the same.’

‘She knows that.’

‘Every year Myfanwy is the high point.’

‘She knows that. I think the pressure of expectation is part of the problem.’

‘Won’t be the same, even if Hoffmann does turn up.’

‘You think he will?’

‘Me? No. But everybody else does. Tickets are already sold out. Doesn’t matter to me one way or the other. I gave up hope of redemption many years ago, after I came back from Patagonia and found that no one would look me in the eye. The way I see it, we’ve done nothing to deserve our fate in the first place. We
shouldn’t even be in this position. If God wants to redeem us, he can just go ahead and do it. No need to make us jump through hoops first.’

‘This Hoffmann stuff is pure craziness. It’s a word written by a dead man in blood. No one’s going to come and redeem us.’

‘Your dad’s supplying the donkey.’

‘He supplies the donkey for the nativity scene every year.’

‘They’re going to have a torchlight procession led by Clip.’

‘Is it true something terrible happened in the war—’

‘Of course.’

‘I mean at the Mission House siege. They say the priest went mad.’

Cadwalader rolled a cigarette. ‘That definitely didn’t happen. He was mad before he went.’

I touched the violin. ‘Did you learn to play this in the war?’

‘Learned as a kid. Do you know what the secret of a Stradivarius violin is?’

I was about to tell him but then I thought better of it. The world is full of smart alecs. ‘No, I’ve no idea.’

So he told me.

‘I always think of that story at Christmas. Those spruce trees growing slowly somewhere far away in the Alps. No noise at all, just silence and the sound of a tree growing slowly. Sounds mad, doesn’t it?’

‘No.’

‘That’s all there is. Just emptiness, bright grey light; the sound of snowflakes landing, the rustle of sifting snow. The tiny noise of a wolf’s paw in the fresh snow. Must have been beautiful. Maybe far off there is a post horn, if they had them then. Two travellers, perhaps, wandering lost in the blizzard, calling with their horns.’ He paused and looked sad. ‘The man who told me that story about the violins used to make rocking chairs.’

‘Yes, I met him. He once asked me if I’d ever ridden on an escalator.’

‘They found the poor chap dead in the snow above Talybont yesterday.’

‘The rocking-chair man is dead?’

‘Someone smashed his head in with a tyre iron. They found him in the trees behind his house. Never had an enemy in the world, that bloke. Just a mystery.’

‘He was a nice old man.’

‘Every Christmas I’ll think about him, too, from now on. The wolf, the post horn, and the rocking-chair man face down in the snow.’

They say the human heart is a mansion with many locked rooms and wings which are closed to the public. All the nice furniture is in the parlour at the front; the one that gets plenty of sun through those fine bright Georgian windows; the one that looks out onto a gravel forecourt and beyond to neatly clipped privet hedges and topiary.