Last Tango in Aberystwyth Read online

  ‘Who’s me?’ I said as the hairs on the back of my neck stood to attention.

  ‘It’s me, oh Louie, it’s me.’ A voice so faint, drowning in a sea of static.

  ‘Who?’ I tried again.

  ‘Me, Louie, it’s me. Myfanwy.’

  ‘What?!’ I shouted. ‘I can’t hear you!’

  ‘Myfanwy. Oh, Louie, help me!’

  Then the line clicked dead. I sat frozen, immobile for a split second, and then jabbed my fingers uselessly on to the prongs of the telephone the way they do in the movies but that never works in real life.

  *

  Out on the Prom the breeze was moist and heavy with the tang of salt, and laced in tantalising bursts with another smell almost as primal: hot dogs. That oh so heartbreaking smell, the pure essential oil of night falling on the Prom, gathered long ago in those lost days when you were small, and on holiday with your mum and dad. Gathered in the magical falling dusk when the seagulls have gone to roost beneath the ironwork of the pier; and you all take a stroll after dinner, way past your normal bedtime, towards an amusement arcade that flashes and chimes and dings. Out at sea angry rumblings light up the clouds in distant flashes, like celestial pinball. You watch it all in awe, and little know that nothing in your life will ever be as good as this again.

  The smell of onions frying … a scent that years later still unleashes a craving – like the snatch of an unknown melody – for a lost Eden that has no gate. That has never had a gate. Because the truth about hot dogs is this: no smell in the world promises so much and delivers so little. Even as a kid when you buy it you find it tastes of nothing at all. Absolutely nothing. The biggest zero ever. A warm, bland mush as far removed from the perfume it adds to the night air as the lotus flower from the slime that spawns it.

  It’s as if some master perfumer and necromancer had foreseen all the broken promises of your life to come, all the pangs of unrequited love and unreturned letters; the torment of watching a phone that never rings; the bright expectancy of fresh hope at breakfast, in ruins by sunset … it was as if he took all these things and blended them into a single fragrance and called it whatever the French is for Disappointment – Désolé or Chagrin or something. The smell of hot dogs on the Prom at night. The scent of pure Chagrin.

  *

  There was a consternation at the pier. Police ‘scene-of-crime’ tape, a flashing blue light and Father Seamus taking charge. I worked it all out in the blink of an eye. The workmen rebuilding the pier had moved the entrance to the bingo parlour two feet to the left. A swarm of confused grannies were there now, buzzing around like bees who come home at the end of the day to find the hive has gone. The priest offering comfort. The ambulance just arriving. Down on the green slimy rocks, exactly below the point where the old entrance had been for fifty years, an old lady face-down and not moving. The sea washing over her, stained pink.

  I didn’t give a damn. There were a lot worse ways to go in this town. I just shrugged and walked under the arch of coloured lights, down the wooden tunnel that ran along the side of the pier, to the new Moulin at the end. Behind in the distance I could still hear Father Seamus giving comfort, could almost hear his two fingers swishing up, down, left, right – drawing crosses in the air as cheaply as a washed-up actress gives out air-kisses. I smiled grimly to myself. I had an appointment with him tonight but he didn’t know it yet. Tonight he would discover that wearing a brown dress with a rope round the belly didn’t guarantee immunity in this world. He wouldn’t like it, but I didn’t give a damn. There were plenty of things that I didn’t like too. And it wasn’t because he was a liar, or had spoken earlier with such unchristian contempt over the spot where Bianca died in my arms; and it wasn’t because I was heading down the corridor now to a club I had vowed never to visit. And it wasn’t because somewhere out there tonight, probably smelling the same fried onions, was a man in trouble called Dean Morgan, because I didn’t really give a damn about him either. Just as the lifeboatman doesn’t give a damn about the stupid fool he fishes from the sea. It wasn’t because of any of this, although it all helped. It was just because tonight I didn’t give a damn, the way sometimes you don’t. So I walked down the tunnel towards the new Moulin and squeezed my fingers into a fist in anticipation of the priest’s soft pink jaw.

  What makes a club? If it’s the spirit of the people who gather there, then the new Moulin was very much like the old. The décor was cheaper and more makeshift than the original; and perhaps there wasn’t quite the same panache about it; but it still had the most important ingredients: darkness and a mix of people from every walk of Aberystwyth life, all unified by the common desire to leave their scruples at the door. And most importantly there were the Moulin Girls lolling about in their stovepipe hats and shawls and not much else. Sweet soft things who for a little money would do sweet soft things.

  Just like in the old club, tough guys in penguin suits stood at the door, and once inside it was hot, crowded, loud and sweaty. Waitresses walked round with trays of food, others took drink orders or ushered you to a table. In the centre of the room there was a space cleared for dancing, and set around it were tables with flickering candles, and hanging from the ceiling were twirling disco balls. Towards the back was a stage and in front of this a private table for Jubal and his guests. I felt a rush of cool air over the top of my head and looked up to see two men in satyr trousers sitting on giant swings, arcing slowly and gracefully above the crowd. They were Bill and Ben. A cowgirl walked past lighting cigarettes with a cigarette-lighter pistol, and another girl took my hand and led me through the throng to a table. I sat down and ordered a rum as a squeal alerted me to the high jinks over at Jubal’s table. Father Seamus had arrived and by way of a welcome drink was drinking Vimto out of Mrs Bligh-Jones’s shoe. She was squealing at the depravity of it. Once he’d drained the shoe he leered and beat his chest like Tarzan and everybody laughed but when his gaze caught mine he lost some of his sparkle and sat down uncertainly. Never was it more truly said: a man is known by the company he keeps.

  My drink arrived and I looked around for Ionawr but couldn’t see her; no doubt she would find me easily enough. I watched the stage where there was an unknown starlet singing. A Myfanwy wannabe without the looks or the voice. But she sang all the usual songs and the crowd were pleased. And then Mrs Bligh-Jones took the mike. She made an improbable nightclub singer. She stood rather stiffly, the spotlight glinting on her Sam Browne; her tunic sleeve flapping emptily. One of her spectacle lenses had been taped over to cure a recurrent lazy eye. She spoke into the mike like a schoolgirl addressing assembly and explained that she wished to sing a few hymns to give thanks to her Lord and Saviour for her deliverance from the blizzard on Pumlumon. A murmur of pious approval drifted round the room. During her act Ionawr turned up and led me by the hand to the back.

  As we threaded our way through the throng Mrs Bligh-Jones took a bow. Applause erupted like firecrackers and was then cut instantly by the appearance of a man on the dance-floor. It was Jubal, in black tie and burgundy cummerbund. Everyone drew breath in expectation as he passed through them with slow determined steps – a comic pantomime, familiar to everyone, of the man who emerges from the swing doors of the saloon and walks down the dusty street to rescue his kidnapped bride. On the stage, half-blinded by the spotlight, Mrs Bligh-Jones simmered with expectation like a Saxon maid when the Vikings are banging on the door. Ionawr and I halted our progress at the edge of the room and watched. Jubal stopped at the lip of the stage, paused half a beat longer to milk the moment to the full, and then reached into the air and drew a figure of eight with his index finger. A collective sigh came from all the ladies around the floor. Jubal turned his finger into a pistol and fired an imaginary bullet at the bandleader who laughed, clutched good-humouredly at his heart, and in the same instant struck up the band. Mrs Bligh-Jones squealed and jumped down into her lover’s arms with the faith of a trapeze artist and was instantly swept away in a giddy tango.

 
; Ionawr tugged at my hand and we pushed our way through the doorway at the back and down the corridor, past the private rooms. The sound of revellers clapping in time to the Latin beat pursued us. But as we trudged deeper and deeper into the labyrinth of the pier the sound faded and gave way to the moan of the sea, a thick intoxicating boom – like blood pounding in our ears – as if the corridor was an artery leading us to a giant heart. At the very end, the entrance guarded by a curtain of clacking wooden beads, was the toffee-and-opium-apple den. We clacked our way through.

  The room was filled with hot sickly-sweet smoke and in near-pitch darkness, the only light a few candles and the red glow from the ends of the pipes. There was no music or any sound at all except the noise that recumbent people make when they change position or draw on a pipe; or suck a toffee apple before groaning softly.

  Ionawr led me to a man somewhere in the room, I couldn’t say where. He lay reclined on a mat on the floor, a tray of toffee apples before him, and next to it an opium pipe. He looked up slowly and the flickering reflections in his eyes said that he was still with us, after a fashion.

  ‘This is the man I was telling you about,’ said Ionawr, although it was unclear which of us she was talking to. He reached out a feeble hand and we shook.

  ‘You want to know about the Dean?’ His voice was husky and thin but steady.

  ‘Yes,’ I said.

  ‘It was all a terrible mistake,’ said the monk. ‘A terrible, terrible mistake. If the man is dead it will be on my conscience for ever.’

  ‘Tell me what happened.’

  The monk took a bite from one of the toffee apples and then said dreamily, ‘I just drifted into it, really. For a while I was a monk down at Caldy Island, until I found out how they had lied to me. All the tales about them making Benedictine – it wasn’t true. You never get near the stuff. All they sell in the gift shop is home-made mint sauce and scented soap. And the communion wine is piss … So I ran away and ended up in Aberystwyth at the Seaman’s Mission. And before long I became a gofer for the druids, a runner I suppose you’d call it. Doing errands and things, making drops and that. That’s how I got the valise. I was supposed to deliver it to a Raven. You know what that is, I suppose?’

  ‘It’s the name for a male agent who ensnares a female agent by seducing her.’

  ‘Yes, an assassination technique more properly known as a honey-trap, although it is more usual for the man to be the victim, for him to fall victim to a beautiful girl he unaccountably befriends in a bar. I was told to expect this man and to give him a valise.’

  ‘Who paid you to give him the case?’

  ‘I’ve no idea. I’m just a link in a chain. I know only the link that comes after me, not the one that comes after him nor the one that preceded me. That’s how it works.’

  ‘And you gave the case to the Dean by mistake?’

  The man cried out in pain. ‘But how the hell was I supposed to know, dammit!? Look out for a dark, cruel, cold-blooded killer, they said. With a feather in his cap. And then this chap turned up and I was having a drink with him that night in the bar and I said, ‘What do you do for a living, then?’ And he said, ‘My trade is death. To me it holds no sting; to me flesh is just meat and the cold impersonal cut of steel as commonplace as the pen is to the clerk.’ Well, what would you have done?’

  ‘But he was an undertaker.’

  The monk’s voice rose in anguish. ‘I know, I know! You think I’m not aware of that? It was just a harmless piece of shop talk to him. And the bloody feather he just found on his window-sill that morning. That’s pretty, he thought, it’s such a lovely day I think I’ll put it in my hat. The fucking idiot!’

  ‘And after that, the Raven turned up?’

  ‘That’s right. Wearing one of those coats they sell in Peacocks for nineteen ninety-nine. I thought it was a bit corny myself, dressing like that, but who am I to judge?’

  ‘And what was in the valise?’

  ‘How would I know?’

  ‘You mean you didn’t look?’

  ‘Are you mad? It was sealed. You think I would be stupid enough to break a seal, like?’

  ‘I would have.’

  ‘That’s because you don’t know these people like I do.’

  I stood up, dizzy and disorientated in the darkness, and made for the glimmer of light that betrayed the outline of a door. Just before I reached it a hand grabbed the edge of my trousers. I looked down and beheld a sight that has haunted me ever since. The wreck of man I had once known: Valentine. He lay there so thin and emaciated his face had become a gargoyle and on his lower arm the flesh had grown so thin you could see the candle shining through. Valentine the former style-guru of the druids, his Crimplene safari suit now filthier than the carpet in a pub toilet. His mouth pulled back in a rictus of pain like a snarling dog. I kneeled down, staring in wide-eyed horror at this shattered piece of humanity.

  ‘Valentine, what happened out there at the sanatorium? What did you see?’

  The words kindled a feeble light in the empty pits of his eyes. A tiny, quivering gleam like the stormlamp of a wanderer taking refuge from the tempest in an empty house.

  ‘What did you see out there? What was it, this Ysbyty Ystwyth Experiment?’

  The grip of his hand on my trouser-leg tightened slightly, like the claw of a wren. Then, slowly, his mouth opened and through teeth the colour of caramel he whispered, ‘The horror! The horror!’

  Then there was strength inside him for no more. His head fell back to rest on the bench; he closed his mouth, exhausted at the effort of those six syllables. I tugged my trousers away from his childlike grip and left him staring at the ceiling with eyes bigger than saucers, waiting for release of death.

  As I left the club I saw the cowgirl’s holster hanging up by the door and, making sure no one saw, I slipped the toy gun into my pocket. Outside, the pavements were wet with spray from the sea. Patrons were starting to leave. I kissed lonawr and pressed some money into her pocket and told her to go. I had things to do that night that it was better she didn’t see. But no sooner had she left than I was cheated of my dark design. In a riot of drunken giggling, Mrs Bligh-Jones climbed awkwardly into the back of Jubal’s car and stuck her legs through the wound-down window, wiggling them until a shoe fell off into the gutter. And Father Seamus, with whom I had an appointment tonight, got in the front and the car sped off.

  The shoe lay in the gutter next to the drain, a tawdry spoor of a Cinderella with size twelve feet. I took a half-step and scooped it up on to the pavement with the toe of my foot. Then I kicked it towards the cleansing sea. It toppled through the air like a rugby ball, over the white crossbar of the railings. It did little to lift my despondency. The moment called instead for an act of penance. I walked up to the stand and ordered a hot dog. As I waited, breathing in the rich perfume containing all the disappointments of my life, I thought of Myfanwy. Who had been on the other end of the line? Was it her? Where was she calling from? South America? How could it be and yet why could it not? There was no way of knowing, and yet my heart was deeply troubled. I took the hot dog and walked off into the night and thought of Mrs Bligh-Jones, the heroine of Pumlumon. True, she might have lost an arm up on that mountain, I thought grimly, but who could deny that in return she gained a kingdom?

  Chapter 12

  IT WAS JUST a comment passed in an Aberystwyth bar. After half a lifetime presiding over the mortal remains of Aberystwyth folk, he decided to go and see where the course materials came from. Just a passing comment made to a harmless stranger in the sort of bar where the strangers never are. My trade is death.

  I stirred the tea in the pot and set out two cups then leaned back in my chair and let the hot fug of the paraffin heater lull me. Calamity walked in and I poured the tea as she emptied her schoolbag on to the desk: copper wire, anti-rheumatics, nylons, chocolate, fake library tickets … and a packet of sugar marked ‘Property of the Red Cross, Geneva’. The last item out of the bag was a packet of bird
seed. I asked her what it was for.

  ‘Custard Pie asked me to get it.’ She looked at me slyly.

  ‘You went to see him, then?’

  ‘You said I could.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘It wasn’t as bad as you think. He was quite friendly, really. The guards think he’s lost it. Do-lally.’ She twirled an index finger next to her temple to demonstrate his mental state.

  ‘And he asked you for bird seed?’

  ‘There’s an air vent leading up to the ground, he thinks he can tame some birds like the Birdman of Alcatraz.’

  ‘I suppose he can’t eat it and fly out of there. But just be careful. Make sure you sell it dearly. Tell him to give you some information about the Dean and then when he does, say: “You call that good information! The whole town knows that, give me something I don’t know.” Or something like that, OK?’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘And be careful, whatever you do, don’t trust him.’

  Calamity took her tea and stood staring out of the window. ‘Actually, Louie, I was thinking, seeing how dangerous this project is, I may need a heater on this one.’

  ‘Put on a jumper, like your mum keeps telling you.’

  ‘You know what I mean, stop messing around.’

  ‘What are you talking about?’

  ‘Not that sort of heater – you know, a heater.’

  ‘A heater?’

  ‘Protection … an equaliser …’

  ‘A what?’

  She sighed loudly. ‘A rod, an iron, a gat …’

  ‘You mean a gun?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Sorry, kiddo, you’re only licensed to carry a catapult.’