The Day Aberystwyth Stood Still (5 page)

‘We wouldn’t want to be any trouble,’ I said.

She looked at me in wonder. ‘Trouble? To make a little cup of tea for the next mayor of Aberystwyth? How strangely you talk!’

I stifled a startled look and said, ‘I think you must be mistaken there. The next mayor of Aberystwyth will probably be Ercwleff.’

‘That’s what you think, is it?’

‘That’s what everybody thinks.’

‘It’s not what my cat thinks.’ She sat down with a groan, her rheumatic limbs clearly aching.

‘I think you must be feeding her too many kippers.’

‘Eightball doesn’t eat fish, and she’s never wrong about the mayoral elections.’

‘What do you do with the birds?’ Calamity asked.

‘Lots of things. I use the feathers for me cardigans, the feet to scratch me back, but mostly I use the croaks to black me hats.’

‘What sort of hats?’ asked Calamity.

‘Stoveys, of course. Best stovepipe-hat blacker in all of Wales I am. You ask them, they’ll tell you, get Auntie Pebim to black your stovey if you want it to stay black.’

‘Is it hard to black them?’ asked Calamity.

Auntie Pebim scoffed politely and rolled her eyes as she recalled the magnitude of the task. ‘It is if you do it properly. The hardest part is not the herbs, of course. If the spirit of the mountain wants to give them to you he will, or if he’s being a pest like today, he won’t. You also need a Bible that’s been used as a pillow on the deathbed of someone who died of meanness, but they are getting harder to find these days. People are turning away from God.’

‘What about the croaks?’ I asked. ‘How do you collect them.’

Auntie Pebim poured the boiling water into the teapot. ‘First you get the birds to build a nest and lay an egg; you can’t hurry that, you just have to make the circumstances right and wait for nature to take its course. Then, when the chick is about to hatch you put a bell jar over mother and egg and wait. Soon the chick hatches and the hen fills the bell jar with croaks of love, caw, caw, caw. Then you remove them and fill the jar with oil and from this you can distil out the caws. That’s not easy. Eventually you end up with a little drop like quicksilver.’ A cloud darkened her brow. ‘Of course, that’s the light way. There’s a darker way, too, where you put a poisonous spider in the jar and it kills the chick. Then you collect the lamentation of the mother, the
Stabat Mater
.’ She brought the teacups over to the table.

‘We were wondering who the house belonged to back there,’ I said.

‘Which house?’

‘Where we first met you.’

Auntie Pebim thought for a second. ‘A house, you say? I suppose it’s possible; but I can’t say I notice things like that, too quick for my old eyes, you see. One minute here, the next gone. I tend to notice slower things like the rise and fall of the mountains, the changing levels of the sea and the ice ages – things like that. Even the growth of trees is a bit quick for me.’

Calamity and I resisted the temptation to exchange glances. ‘That’s a shame,’ I said. ‘It must have been there quite a while; there’s lots of masonry lying around.’

Auntie Pebim’s voice took on a dismissive tone. ‘Masonry! To me stone is no more substantial than the fluff of a dandelion on a windy day.’

‘Most people find it quite substantial,’ I persisted. ‘Enough, at least, to build houses lasting hundreds of years.’

‘I wouldn’t trust it myself,’ she said.

I looked around at her croft, which seemed to have followed convention in being made from stone.

‘We heard Iestyn Probert used to live there,’ said Calamity.

‘Iestyn Probert? Oh yes, so he did. Nice boy. The family moved after they hanged him.’ She tutted and opened a packet of digestive biscuits, letting the contents fall onto a plate with plinking sounds like sonar.

‘How awful,’ said Calamity.

Auntie Pebim peered at her and considered for a while, then said, ‘If you have a little bird in a cage and you release the bird, does it matter if you damage the cage?’

‘I don’t know,’ said Calamity. ‘Probably not.’

‘There you are, then. Iestyn’s spirit is free now of the prison of the flesh; it has passed on to the real world. His body was just a broken beaker, no longer needed. I don’t imagine he pines too much for a moment’s pain when they stretched his neck and made him free. Would you like some jam to take back with you?’ She stood up and hobbled over to the pantry and brought back a jar of dark-coloured jam.

‘Isn’t this the real world?’ asked Calamity.

Auntie Pebim smiled indulgently at our spiritual impoverishment. ‘Oh Lord, no, who could bear it if it were? The only thing that makes our travail bearable is the knowledge that this – the material world, as you people from the city call it – is a chimera.’

Calamity looked confused. ‘I thought the material world had to exist because it’s made of . . . material.’

‘Is that what they teach you in school these days!’ Auntie Pebim turned to me. ‘You’ll have to do something about these schools when you are mayor.’

‘I really have no intention of becoming mayor.’

Auntie Pebim smiled. It was clear that my thoughts on the matter counted little against the opinion of Eightball. She wrapped the gift of jam in some muslin and showed us out. ‘You know, it’s funny you asking about Iestyn Probert. Some travellers were asking about him last week. They looked Norwegian, with four fingers on each hand. I couldn’t tell you much about them – it was Eightball who answered the door.’

Chapter 5

That evening
I went to Jezebels. There was a twinge of melancholy or some other unease in my heart, or wafting on the night breeze, and I struggled to construe it. Spring nights sometimes have this haunting quality, when the brightening day, having promised the joys of summer, still ends shipwrecked on the cold shoals of night. At such times hopes mingle in the soul with old memories of times better forgotten. Unease can stalk the heart. Or perhaps it was just something about this case that seemed out of joint. It appeared to be unfolding according to an unseen script, as if written by somebody who did not have my interests at heart. Two men enter my office and chop up my desk claiming they are punishing me for a case I am about to take on. After they leave, a client turns up with a fantastical story that cannot possibly be true. He offers to pay up front but somehow forgets this vital detail, and it seems to me that his entrance was so neatly timed following the desk-chopping that it seemed part of a double act. He sends me in search of a man called Iestyn Probert, and at Iestyn’s old house I find a business card from Jezebels. Ask for Miaow. I could feel the sharp-cornered card snagging the lining of my pocket as I walked. Two days old and already I did not like the taste of this case. If it transpired that Raspiwtin had put the card there, I would not be surprised.

Sospan was closing up as I arrived at the Prom. A hurricane lamp hung from the ceiling inside the kiosk; the sea had that cold spring-evening gleam; the sky above was indigo tinged with lime on the horizon. Sospan greeted me with a wan smile but carried on packing. It seemed that he too was touched by the strange quality of the spring night.

‘How are the new timbers holding up?’ I asked.

He paused as if considering whether to unburden himself. ‘To be honest, I find their presence a touch unsettling.’

‘How’s that?’

‘Pardon me asking, Mr Knight, but do you ever get a strange feeling, as if somehow you are here on this earth without an invitation?’

‘Yes, sometimes; we all do.’

‘You feel like an uninvited guest?’

‘On occasion. But it passes.’

‘Any disturbance to the integrity of my box affects me deeply.’

‘Wasn’t there an ancient Greek who had the same problem with his ship?’

‘Theseus, the chap who slew the Minotaur. While replacing every plank of his ship with a new one, he wondered if it was still the same ship. John Locke had a similar issue with the darning of his sock. Talking of the Minotaur, I see your old school games teacher, Herod Jenkins, is standing for high office.’

‘How high?’

‘Mayor. He’s standing against Ercwleff. They’re going to have a jamboree to decide the issue, sort of an Aberystwyth version of a presidential debate. They’ll be competing in three activities: human cannonball, a drinking game and a fist fight in the pub car park. Ercwleff and Herod Jenkins. The word on the Prom says Ercwleff is going to take a dive in the fifth.’

‘Herod Jenkins,’ I said softly, as if fearful that he might appear if I spoke too loudly. Even after thirty years the sound of his name made my skin prickle with a hot flush of anxiety. It was during his games lessons that we divined the bitter truths of this world, that suffering was the currency in which we all must trade. Progress through those years was done at a forced march with little time for stragglers, for the weak and infirm. The most infirm of all was my friend Marty, the consumptive schoolboy. Ordinarily that talismanic chit of paper, the note from your mam excusing you from games, should have been enough to save him. But one cold bleak January the note lost its power to charm and Marty was sent out alone, on a cross-country run into a blizzard. For Herod the important thing was to get as many boys across the ice floes of life as fast as possible, regarding it as inevitable that some would be left behind. Who knows how differently things would have turned out if he had been a kind man? Perhaps I would be a plumber now, happy in the docile simplicity of my pipes and spanners. I would not be kept awake at night by the wolves howling in the sewer beneath the city streets, nor by the nameless anxiety that flashed through my heart every time the headlights of a turning car raked the ceiling.

‘According to the publicity, it’s one of God’s children versus the Philosopher King,’ Sospan explained. ‘Lamb versus Lion.’

‘Herod is a philosopher king?’

‘He’s got lots of ideas.’

‘Like putting newborn babies on the roof overnight?’

‘Not sure about that.’

‘What about Ercwleff? What’s his manifesto?’

‘A rabbit in every pot.’

‘I’ll vote for that.’

I walked back to the office to pick up my Wolseley Hornet. I drove out of town, over Trefechan Bridge, and turned at the fire station; the road became a track and the street lights petered out. I slowed to a crawl. The track ran parallel to the sea, which lay to the right, invisible in the darkness. On my left, also invisible, brooded the hill of Pen Dinas and its Iron Age ramparts. Up ahead lights gleamed from the old mansion on a distant hill, Plas Tan-y-Bwlch, which had at various times billeted soldiers, lunatics, military brass, gentry, typhoid sufferers, consumptives and, finally, when all other uses had been exhausted, students. But before you reached it the road passed a straggle of caravans that seemed to have been washed up on the grass by a freak wave. This was Maelor Gawr caravan park. Facilities were minimal: an office and reception, a shower block and Jezebels. It was a simple club for people with uncomplicated desires, lost souls who didn’t even have anything to drink to forget. There was a cheap concrete floor, a disco sound system and low-end lighting rig retired from active service at weekly weddings, and a handful of girls in the inevitable stovepipe hats.

I sat at a table and picked up the drinks menu. A stovey girl slinked out from the shadows and stood in my light. I looked up, squinting, and said, ‘I’m looking for Miaow.’

‘I can purr.’

‘So can she. Is she here?’

‘Later.’

‘I’ll have a Jim Beam.’

She paused for a second, pulled a face of mock disappointment and went off to fetch my drink. I waited; there was not much to see. It was early, and these sort of places never get going until midnight, even then nothing happens. My drink appeared and I sipped it slowly.

Half an hour later another stovey girl slipped into the vacant chair opposite me. Her hat loomed over the table like a detonated factory chimney hanging momentarily in the air before it falls.

‘I’m Miaow,’ she said.

‘Louie.’ I reached out and shook her hand.

She wore the traditional folk costume of black-and-white checked flannel skirt, a red shawl and a white apron – and, less traditionally, under the apron, a black basque. She reached into the front of it, pulled out a shot glass and put it next to mine. A waitress clubbed the table with a bottle of Jim Beam and Miaow filled the glasses. ‘Chin, chin,’ she said. We drank. She knocked hers back in one and refilled it. I took mine more gently.