Last Tango in Aberystwyth Page 14

I opened my mouth to speak but nothing came out and she opened hers silently too. Then she collapsed into my arms with the words ‘Custard Pie’.

  ‘It’s OK,’ I said. ‘It’s OK.’

  Then she pulled herself away from me and looked up and told me in one long gushing stream, as if the faster she said it, the less damage it would do.

  ‘He saw the bird seed and begged me for it and I said, “You have to buy it, buster.” And so he said, “If you want to find the Dean, ask for the girl called Judy Juice.” And so I sneered at him and said, “You expect bird seed for that? I’ve seen fresher news written on the side of a Babylonian tomb.” And then he sort of danced a bit and said I was a cutey and said, “All right, little girl, you want some real news? Tell that smart-arse private eye to stick this in his pipe and smoke it.” And then he got all excited and rubbed his hands together and said, “You want to know what the Ysbyty Ystwyth Experiment is all about? What’s been going on at the sanatorium? What this ‘thing’ is that people keep seeing? You want to know that, little girl?” And I said yes and he said, “Give me the seed.” So I made a deal. I gave him a quarter of it and said he’d get the rest when he told me about the Ysbyty Ystwyth Experiment. And so he did.’ Then she stopped and said, ‘I think you need a drink.’

  ‘I’ve just had one.’

  ‘I think you need another one.’

  But before I could drink or she could speak there was a disturbance in the entrance to the club. Judy Juice walked out in a hurry, putting her coat on as she left. Behind her, arms outstretched in supplication, came Jubal. ‘But Baby!’ he cried. ‘But Poppet!’

  Judy Juice carried on walking and Jubal ran and caught her sleeve. ‘Munchkin!’ She shrugged off his hand and swept past us without noticing. He tried to grab her sleeve again, shouting, ‘Look here, you bitch!’ Calamity put a hand out to stop him. ‘Lady doesn’t want to talk to you, Mac.’ Jubal pushed her aside and she grabbed his arm. He shoved her roughly again and she kicked him furiously in the shin. Jubal threw out a backhand slap and in the same instant, before even I had time to react, Judy Juice spun round and shoved Jubal crying, ‘Leave the little girl alone, you cockroach!’

  Judy Juice was quite a big girl and Jubal fell back in surprise and over into some sacks of refuse left out for the bin men. Calamity made a move towards him but I held her back. He lay there dazed for a second or two as Judy Juice stepped into a taxi, and then he stumbled to his feet, ran towards the car and shouted, ‘But Baby I’m sorry! Please, Baby …’ The car sped off and Jubal sank to his knees, shouting ‘Baby, I’m sorry, I beg you!’ And then, still kneeling, he buried his face in his hands and wept.

  Back at the office, once I’d convinced her I’d had enough rum, Calamity told me what Custard Pie had said. Told me the news that made my heart stop for so long that I sat there listening for the beat to start again like a hundred-metre sprinter listening for the gun.

  ‘This “thing” out at the sanatorium,’ she said. ‘It’s Herod Jenkins, your old games teacher. He’s still alive.’

  Chapter 14

  I TOSSED AND turned all night and cried out in that half-asleep, half-awake state in which the night terrors visit us. And maybe an hour before dawn – the darkest hour – I slipped beneath the membrane of sleep and dreamed of a day in late January many years ago when the whole school was kept in during afternoon break. An eerie hush consumes the old school building, a silence so absolute you can hear the footfall of the spiders in the cupboards where the Latin books are stored. Forbidden to move from our desks, or even look at the window, we hold our breath and strain to hear above the deafening drumbeats of our own hearts … and then there it is, at first so faint as to be almost imperceptible, but growing and growing, getting louder until there can be no mistake: thwump, thwump, thwump! The sound of choppers. Suddenly, in a cacophony of slamming desklids that drowns out the shouting of the teacher, we all dash to the window. Thwump, thwump, thwump! The dying sun has turned the frosty sky amber like a puma’s eye; spread beneath it the iced-over games field sparkles like frozen lemonade… thwump, thwump, thwump! From far in the glowing west, growing all the time, getting bigger and bigger, that small speck that grows and slowly resolves itself into the shape of a helicopter, flying in low over the trees. Realities merge in the way they do in dreams, so that the chopper is now silhouetted against an orange tropical sky, like the film poster to Apocalypse Now, advertising a film about a journey upriver in a coracle to a Cambodian temple, in search of a crazy man in a track suit called Kurtz. Thwump, thwump, thwump! ‘Get back to your seats this instant!’ Mr Kurtz cries. We look out and gasp. Against the burning sky, almost overhead now, the chopper. And slung beneath the fuselage the bier of Marty, the one who never made it back from the cross-country run.

  *

  Llunos was hunched over a pint in the Castle pub, just inside wooden doors. He looked up, smiled, saw the expression on my face and lost the smile. ‘Oh,’ he said. ‘Looks like you found out. Should have known you would.’

  ‘All I want to hear from you is it’s not true.’

  ‘It’s true. No one in town wants more than me to say it’s not. But that doesn’t change a thing. It’s true.’

  ‘Didn’t we push him out of a plane?’

  He nodded glumly. ‘I thought we did.’

  ‘How long have you known?’

  ‘Six months or so. At first it was just rumours …’

  ‘Why didn’t you tell me?’

  He took a while to speak, as if he knew the answer but had forgotten it. ‘What good would it have done?’

  ‘How could this happen? From a plane, for fuck’s sake!’

  He picked up his pint and brought it to his lips and then stopped. He spoke over the top. ‘It’s not that rare to fall out of a plane and survive. Read the Guinness Book of Records. And this was over a lake, and we were flying in low for a bombing run. Work it out.’

  ‘Wouldn’t the concussion kill him?’

  ‘A normal person, perhaps. But a games teacher …?’ He stopped and took out a card and wrote an address on the back. ‘Look, I can’t say any more at the moment. It’s better for you to hear the whole story. What you’ve heard so far is nothing. Meet me tomorrow at this address, at 10 am.’

  He handed me the card and stood up to leave. The address was a room in the old college building. ‘In the meantime, keep it under your hat. We don’t want to start a panic.’

  *

  The old college stretched along the Prom from the pier to the putting-green. With its massive stone walls and conical turrets it looked like a Rhineland castle and had stood up well to the flood. It had originally been built as a hotel and when they found they couldn’t make it pay by accommodating folk taking a two-week vacation from the real world they used it instead to house the dons who took one for a lifetime. Inside the main building bronze statues of long-dead and forgotten academics gazed down at me with looks of stern and vague disapproval. An attitude built on the failsafe premise that whatever it was I was doing or thinking they would almost certainly have disapproved of it. The floor squeaked as all floors in buildings devoted to serious study should and the walls were hung with wooden boards gilded with forgotten acts of sporting glory. All from a distant time when athletic prowess for students entailed more than a run from the pie shop to the pub.

  The room looked out over the ocean through arched, leaded lights with panes of stained glass. There were seven people waiting in the room when I arrived, seated around a table on which stood a movie projector. Llunos motioned me to take a seat and introduced me to the others. There was professor of some sort from the Clarach Institute. A Tillamook Indian with a face the colour of polished rosewood and wearing a racoon-skin hat. There were also two lab technicians and some men in dark suits who looked like they came from the security services.

  ‘The first thing you need to know about this meeting’, Llunos began, ‘is it never took place.’ The people round the table nodded grimly. ‘We never met, we
never spoke, and we’re not here now.’ More nods. ‘I don’t wish to make this any longer than it has to be, but not everyone is up to speed here and so I will need to fill in some of the background.’ He walked to the front and stood in front of a blackboard.

  ‘At first it was just a few rumours. Some of the peasant communities in the hinterlands beyond Nant-y-moch started reporting strange sightings. A manlike creature loping through the forest, usually at dusk, a shy creature that shunned human contact and used the cover of twilight to get about. Such reports were easy enough to dismiss at first – especially by people who didn’t want to look too closely. Then there were the odd footprints – big ones, and even the deep wide imprint in the mud of a waterhole of his backside.’ Llunos gave a signal to the lab technicians who lifted a plaster-of-Paris cast the size of a small card-table. Llunos continued. ‘Farmers also reported losses among their livestock, but of course such things are commonplace.’ He turned towards the man in the racoon-skin hat. ‘Laughing Bear has experience with the sasquatch of North America, popularly known as Bigfoot. Laughing Bear, I imagine the pattern I’m outlining is familiar to you?’ The man nodded gravely and lines appeared in the corners of his eyes.

  ‘As I said, it was easy enough to dismiss at first. But then this happened.’ He gave another hand signal and the blackout curtains were drawn. One of the technicians started up the projector and we watched a grainy, ghostly 8mm film of a family horsing around beside a lake at nightfall. They had that awkward jerky movement of people shot with old cine cameras and were laughing and playing tag and pulling faces for the camera the way all families do.

  ‘At the time they saw nothing unusual but when the film came back from the chemist, they saw this.’ He pointed his stick at the tree-line behind the family antics. It was a forestry plantation with the characteristic uniform rows of conifers. Where the tree-line stopped there was a wire fence and some fire-beating equipment. And there, moving uncertainly between the trees, was a figure. If it had been any more shadowy it would have been imperceptible. If it had stood still it probably would have never been noticed. But the very act of moving detached it from the background gloom and give it substance.

  ‘The quality’s terrible, of course. But anyone can see that this is no fox, or deer, or any of the explanations people normally like to pin on things like this. We had it image-enhanced and analysed and all the usual stuff. The boffins couldn’t tell us much, except to say it’s definitely a biped.’ Llunos paused for a second and pressed his fingertips together as if the next sentence was especially difficult for him. ‘Gentlemen, we had reason to suspect, and we soon came to know, that this was Herod Jenkins. And that he had survived his fall from the plane.’ No one said anything and the film ran out, filling the silent room with the repeated clack, clack, clack of the revolving celluloid whipping the tabletop.

  The man in the racoon-skin hat was invited to take the stand. I half-expected him to speak with the heap-big Hollywood accent used to accuse us of speaking with forked tongue. But he just sounded like any other well-educated Canadian.

  ‘This is the point where I was called in,’ he began. ‘I spent some weeks in the Nant-y-moch badlands tracking the creature. I found out that although the adults were scared of him, the children knew him well. They called him Mr Dippetty-doo – a helpless happy old fool eating dirt and wearing clothes of woven twigs. In stark contrast to his former persona, about which you are all better informed than me, Dippetty-doo would happily tousle the hair of the village urchins, or pull out pennies from behind their ears … even the farmyard dogs would no longer bark at his passing but would scamper up and lick his hand … in short, gentlemen, it became clear to me that the fall from the plane had caused him to lose his memory and no trace of it remained. He was in fact harmless.’

  The woodsman sat down and there was a mild ripple of table-rapping in applause, although I didn’t see what for.

  Llunos stood up and cut the applause with his hand. ‘This left us with a serious problem. What guarantee was there that at some point he wouldn’t recover his memory? The prospect was alarming and in order to allay our fears we contacted Doctor Pritchard who is an expert on neurophysiology at the Clarach Institute of Behavioural Neuroscience. What he told us hardly put our fears at rest. Doctor.’

  The man in the white lab-coat stood up and smiled thinly. ‘I’ll try and do this in lay terms as far as I am able. No doubt you are all familiar with the TV-soap version of memory loss. The patient lies on a hospital bed and his family sit around him showing him old photos and playing the records that were once his favourites in the hope that some emotionally charged event will somehow turn the key that opens the gates of memory. It’s actually not as fanciful as it seems and is a well-proven clinical technique. But have you ever wondered what would happen if the family sitting round the hospital bed were impostors? And the lost memories they patiently tried to coax back were bogus? All those old songs he never sang and the specially doctored photos showing cherished childhood moments that never took place? That in essence was what we did.’ There was a subdued gasp round the table at the audacity of what the doctor was telling us. He continued unabashed as if used to such a reception and perhaps slightly proud. ‘The project was conducted under the supervision of Doctor Faustus from the sanatorium – a very brilliant and unconventional neuroscientist who has done some pioneering work on false-memory syndrome and who kindly agreed to undertake the mapping of Herod’s psyche.’

  One of men in dark suits asked a question. ‘How did you get him to the sanatorium?’

  The scientist smiled in acknowledgment, pleased at being given another opportunity to show off.

  ‘Good question! Actually, it wasn’t too difficult, we used a technique suggested to us by our friend here from the Tillamook Indians. Basically the same used for trapping mink. Laughing Bear told us that during his observation of Dippetty-doo he noticed his quarry was secretly engaging in an occasional lover’s tryst with a local woman. We approached her and outlined to her out desire to make Herod well again and she was happy to assist us in our efforts by acting as a form of bait. I believe some of you may know this woman, Mrs Bligh-Jones from the Meals on Wheels.’

  This was greeted with snorts from around the table of the sort that suggested ‘rather you than me, mate’.

  There were no further questions so Doctor Pritchard carried on. ‘Once we had successfully installed the subject in the sanatorium we invented a new past for him and hired a group of actors to sit round his bedside from dawn till dusk pretending to be his family. They were called the Flying Laszlofis – a troupe of Magyar circus performers. Day by day they sat there drip-feeding him the sweet balm of memory of all those lost tender cherished moments – hunting the black bears of the Carpathian Hills with his grandfather, Vadas; learning to dance the polka in the rustic parlour at the age of six; his old dog Öcsi, and that first sweet kiss with the seventeen-year-old Ninácscska. It was an audacious undertaking but, amazingly, it started to produce results. Before long Herod took up the violin and soon mastered the rudiments of a number of Hungarian folk songs. He began to express pangs of homesickness for those far-off Carpathian Hills. He refused to eat the hospital food and insisted on goulash and pickled cabbage. In short, the experiment had been an astonishing success; or to put it another way, gentlemen, Herod Jenkins had gone from this world, and in his place stood Zsigácska Melles.’ He paused and fought down a half-smile that was twitching the edges of his mouth. ‘Er … those of you who think us scientists are a rather cold-blooded, humourless lot might be amused to learn that Melles is the Magyar term for big-chested.’ There was a ripple of chuckling, and he continued, ‘It was an epoch-making moment in the annals of neuroscience; until, that is, the morning when the nurse went to his room and found him gone.’ The doctor made an apologetic gesture with his hands and walked to the window and spoke to the sea and the sky: ‘Since then there have been rumours and the occasional reports of him standing at the edge of the
woods at sunset, staring, so they say, with a strange yearning at the rugby on TV in the darkened houses …’

  *

  I walked with Llunos down Pier Street and accompanied him to his office. As we strolled he told me about Harri Harries. The two men from the Kamp were currently in protective custody, down at the station.

  ‘They thought it was a trick,’ said Llunos. ‘And Harries hasn’t reported to work. Don’t know where he is. I’ve sent a fax to Cardiff about it.’

  ‘Why did they send him here in the first place?’

  ‘It’s because certain people down in Cardiff are not happy with me.’

  ‘I thought you were doing fine.’

  His step unconsciously followed time with mine. ‘First the flood and now Herod … black marks against my name … it all adds up.’

  ‘They surely can’t blame you for … for all this?’

  ‘It happened on my watch. Plus they think I’ve gone soft. Got old. They say I don’t run a tight ship any more, all this aggro between the druids and the Meals on Wheels. They can’t see, it’s a different world after the flood, all the old certainties have gone … time was you knew who was bad and who was good, even if you could never prove it you still knew it. But now, life being such a struggle, the line is blurred. And then there’s the problem of you.’

  ‘Me?’

  ‘They see me having coffee with you and generally … fraternising they call it, and they say that proves it. Once upon a time I would have run you out of town every now and again just to keep you on your toes.’

  ‘It’s true, you would have.’

  ‘I know. But after a while …’ He stopped at the corner and looked at me. ‘I mean, what’s the point?’

  When we got to his office we sat in contemplative silence. ‘We’re going to make a posse, if you’re interested,’ said Llunos after a while. ‘The boffins say he’ll probably make for some place sacred to him.’

  I tried to look hopeful. ‘I suppose that’s something.’