The Unbearable Lightness of Being in Aberystwyth (16 page)

‘I’ll tell him. Anything else?’

‘Yes,’ the man in the Swansea suit moved round in front of me and spoke directly to my face. We were alone, the three of
us in a vast sooty brick cathedral built in more confident times to house the narrow-gauge trains that brought the lead from the hills. ‘Tell the girl to lay off the Nanteos case. She’s treading on toes a kid of her age didn’t ought to tread on.’

‘It’s ancient history, why should anybody care?’

‘There’s no such thing as ancient history. Just call her off or she could get hurt.’

‘There’s no point me saying anything – it won’t make any difference. She never listens to a word I say.’

‘Look, peeper, we’re serious. If she doesn’t remove her snout she’ll get hurt.’

‘Is there anything else?’

‘Yes.’

Clang. It was the noise a shovel makes when it hits a head.

The shadows were lengthening in the engine shed when I opened my eyes. I must have been out about an hour. I ran my fingers over the back of my head. There was a little dried blood and a swelling. And a headache. But all that was good. Normally when you get hit with a shovel you don’t expect to have any head left at all. I spotted the sepulchral whiteness of a washbasin glimmering in the gloom and went over to throw cold water over my face. I walked out into a world turning gold with the setting sun.

I drove slowly to Borth, not wishing to put too great a strain on my recently battered head. Allowing time for it to recover. By the time I reached Ynyslas the sky was buttercup-coloured and veined with bars of gold like a butterfly’s wing. The silhouette of the Waifery was a dark stain on the wing’s edge. I parked in the lane and walked up towards the main gate. The sweet descant of girls’ singing drifted on the air like the scent of flowers at dusk. It was accompanied by something I hadn’t encountered for many years: the smell of school dinner. Cabbage boiled to the colour of bone; the smell of water drunk from a glass made from car windscreen material; brown food colouring
and flour and fat congealing into the brown tapioca that is called gravy.

As I reached the gate, the postman cycled up and asked me to take a parcel. It was addressed to Sister Cunégonde. On the front there was a decorative frank advertising the Shrewsbury Flower Show, and on the back was scribbled the name of the sender. F. Mephisto. The wrought-iron gate squealed like a gull as I opened it and pretended to walk through. I watched the postman cycle away. And when he was gone I went back to the car and put the parcel in the glove compartment. I would be in hot water for this in the next world, that was for sure.

A nun showed me to the corridor and pointed to the end where Sister Cunégonde had her office. The door was slightly ajar and I stood outside with my knuckles poised to knock, but the sound of a conversation from within made me hold back.

‘I could have had any man in the village … Oh yes I could! They were queuing at the door for me. But oh no! For you I turned them away! For you I spurned their hot desire. Do you hear? For you, you worthless wretch. And now after all I’ve done for you, I find you going behind my back. In my own house, with one of my own girls! With her of all people! Her! That little trollop … that little hussy who doesn’t care tuppence for you nor anyone else … Oh, you thought I didn’t know? Thought I was too stupid to notice? Thought I didn’t know about you and your new playmate? Well that just goes to show you’re not as smart as you thought, doesn’t it? You … you … twerp!’

The words faded into the squeaky sound of stifled sobs.

I found my head easing quietly forward towards the gap in the door. Who was she talking to? Who was this man for whom she had sacrificed everything, this twerp? Was it Meredith? I eased my head forward with the slow control of a lizard about to shoot its tongue out at an insect. Slowly, slowly, slowly. My eyes cleared the edge of the door and I saw inside. Sister Cunégonde was standing with her back to me in the middle of
the room. Her wimple had been cast aside and her silver hair loosened so that it fell across her shoulders like a silver fleece. She was combing it with the air of a miser counting a secret treasure. And I saw with a slight shock that the twerp she was talking to was not Meredith, but someone much older. And made of alabaster, hanging from a cross of wood fixed to the wall.

My foot squeaked on the polished wooden floor and I jerked my head back. The sound of weeping stopped. There was silence and I could tell she was listening, straining her ears to try and divine what the noise portended. I coughed and rapped my knuckles on the door. ‘One moment, please,’ came the response, and then, ‘Come in!’ The voice was artificially cheery. I pushed the door open and saw Sister Cunégonde kneeling in prayer before the cross. She looked round from her devotion with an air of deep piety and slight annoyance at being disturbed. She was good, I’d say that much.

I said I’d come back but she waved the suggestion aside and bid me sit across from the desk. The sky in the window behind her head was cobalt blue. The sound of children practising recorders drifted in and soothed my head, which had begun to throb again.

Doe– a deer, a female deer …

‘It’s a contagion, you know,’ said Sister Cunégonde, ‘worse than German measles.’

‘What is?’

‘Love, Mr Knight. Trust me, I’ve seen it. A pathogen in the Petri dish of an adolescent girl’s heart.’

She waved an airmail envelope and pushed it towards me across the desk. ‘Seren really has gone too far this time. First the nonsense with the locket, and now this. I just don’t know what gets into her.’

Ray– a drop of golden sun …

I rested my fingers on the envelope. ‘What is it?’

‘Goodness knows. It’s a letter to a someone in South America
about a love affair, begging some woman to be reconciled with her estranged husband. Who does she know in South America? Nobody. She doesn’t even know anyone in Talybont.’

‘Maybe she met someone here on holiday.’

‘Nonsense!’ She picked up the letter and read. ‘“To the Mayor of Fray Bentos, please pass on to the French teacher.” Where does she get this stuff from?’

Me– a name I call myself
,

Far– a long, long way to run …

‘Where did you get it from?’

‘The postman was kind enough to return it. Heaven knows what might have happened if he’d sent it.’

‘I thought his job was to deliver them, not intercept them.’

‘He just exercised some common sense. It’s a pity more people don’t.’

‘I think it’s a rotten trick steaming open someone’s mail.’

‘I didn’t steam it open. It fell on the kettle.’

‘All the same—’

‘Come on, Mr Knight, you’re a private investigator. Don’t tell me you’ve never intercepted someone’s mail.’

‘No, never. There are certain things I would never stoop to.’ My neck felt hot and sticky as I remembered the parcel in the glove compartment.

‘Bully for you. What do you want, a medal?’

Sew– a needle pulling thread
,

La– a note to follow sew …

‘She may be just a kid but she has a right to privacy doesn’t she?’

‘No, actually, she doesn’t. Not while she is a pupil at the Waifery. If this had been sent it could have caused all sorts of trouble. Just look at it. What does she mean by it?’

‘Why don’t you ask her?’

‘She refuses to speak. She says I had no right.’

I made no attempt to read the letter. It sat there on the desk
between us like all letters that aren’t our business – begging to be read. I couldn’t see what was so bad about living in a dream world when you’re sixteen. Not when you considered what the real one was like.

Tea– a drink with jam and bread …

‘So now she has to eat bread and water.’

Sister Cunégonde put the envelope in the drawer of her desk and stood up. ‘I suppose she told you that as well. It’s actually sandwiches and Ribena. That’s a lot more than most people in this world get to eat.’

I couldn’t argue with her there. I put the locket on the desk. She walked to the window. ‘Come and look. See? Out there. Venus hanging low over the sea, always the first star out. I remember watching it when I was Seren’s age. How it used to throb and burn. I’m sorry if you find me over-strict. But you don’t understand how it is here in Ynyslas, it’s different – not like Aberystwyth. Everything seems magnified out here somehow. Everything … there’s something carnal about the nights here … that makes the spirit ache … The stars like hot snowballs … and … and the grassy dunes, like a bearded chin, rasping your thighs as you walk …’ Sister Cunégonde shuddered and then checked herself and shot me a glance containing a wild untamed fire.

We remained staring at the slowly appearing evening stars. The recorders continued to lay a soothing hand on our troubled hearts.

That will bring us back to doe!

And then there was a scream. Long and piercing, followed by a chorus of more adolescent screams. Then came shouts, the sound of doors banging. Sister Cunégonde and I both spun round to stare at the closed door of her office, as if the explanation might be written on it. The screams stopped and gave way to the sound of general commotion. More doors banging, shouts, footsteps running. Sister Cunégonde ran to the door but not to open
it, but to hold it closed. But I got there a fraction of a second ahead of her and as I swung it open she could only grasp the handle and be swept aside. I ran down the corridor, pursued by Sister Cunégonde. Girls stood on the minstrel’s gallery looking down, dressed in sheer white nightgowns that shone like spectres in the gloom. They looked on in horror as across the way, outside the door to a dormitory, two sisters wrestled with another girl, whose white nightdress was smeared with blood. It was Seren and she was sobbing. She looked across at me and raised her hands, palms outwards, and there was blood in the palms. Half a second later the two sisters managed to overpower her and drag her into the dormitory and slam the door. But the image of her with bloody palms hung in the air long after the door had been closed, like the spots before the eye that come from staring at the sun. Another sister shooed the awe-struck girls back to their rooms and Sister Cunégonde, seemingly unsurprised at what had just taken place, caught up and planted herself squarely in front of me.

‘I think it’s time for you to go.’

‘What happened there?’

‘Nothing happened. Nothing. Please go.’

‘Not before I find out what happened.’

‘No. Nothing happened. It was nothing. She’s had a nosebleed that’s all. You must go.’

I was about to tell her to move aside when a flash in a wall mirror caught my attention.

It was a shovel-shaped flash. There was probably a clang when it hit my head. There usually is.

IT WAS MID-MORNING when I woke up. I was staring at the sole of a shoe. It was resting on a desk and belonged to the desk sergeant of Glanwern police station, probably the same big-belly who had arrested Rimbaud. In between us was the iron grid of the bars that ran from floor to ceiling. There was another man asleep in my cell. He looked like a hobo. I rubbed my hand over the back of my head, and felt two bruises, each about the size of half a golf ball. About average. I stood up.

‘That’s a nice shoe,’ I said.

The sergeant nodded.

‘How much longer do I have to stare at it?

He picked up a box of Swan Vestas, took one out and started to use it as a toothpick. He spoke through his cupped hands. ‘What were you doing there?’

‘Where?’

‘The Waifery.’

‘I was selling encyclopaedias.’

He sawed away at his gums. ‘Selling encyclopaedias. That’s good. I like that. Education. Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day; teach him to fish … Yeah that’s good.’

He stood up, wriggled a light mac over his shoulders and walked out.

The hobo woke up half an hour later. He had been snoring softly for a while and then gave a grunt and a snort, and then a louder snort as if something was stuck in his nose and he was trying to dislodge it and the effort or the noise woke him. He raised his head slowly from a pillow made from his rolled-up coat, swivelled his
head round to examine his surroundings, and then nodded as if this was what he expected or was at least fairly accustomed to viewing when he woke up. Then he noticed me. I did a little wave.

‘Any coffee?’ he asked.

‘Sorry. I’ve been ringing room service for the past hour but there’s no answer.’

He stuck out a hand. ‘Haywire.’

‘Louie. What are you in for?’

‘Riding the boxcars. Between here and Porthmadoc. Not many of us left.’

‘The world’s changing in ways we cannot comprehend. Only the young understand.’

‘That’s about the way I see it too. What they get you for?’

‘Being hit over the head with a shovel.’

‘Yeah, that would work, but it’s a high price to pay for room and board.’

Haywire reached into his coat and brought out a crumpled paper bag and offered me a gobstopper. I declined and he popped one into his mouth and spoke with a bulge in his cheek like a hamster moving his bedding. For a while I listened to the gentle scrape of gobstopper on Haywire’s tooth enamel. Then I asked him if he knew Rimbaud.