The Day Aberystwyth Stood Still Read online

  ‘You are too cynical.’

  ‘You really think they need the earth-man’s seed? Surely after travelling all that way they could think of an easier way to collect it.’

  Raspiwtin gave me the condescending smile such people reserve for those of us who err in darkness. ‘You may have a point, but the pertinent thing for our inquiry is this: they also asked for directions to Iestyn Probert’s house.’ He stood up.

  ‘Is that supposed to prove he is alive?’

  ‘The aliens evidently thought so. Are you saying they are wrong?’ He walked to the door, adding, ‘I’m staying at the Marine.’

  ‘This would be his old house, I take it?’

  ‘That’s right. It seems pretty clear, does it not, that some sort of rendezvous had been arranged.’

  ‘Where is this house?’

  ‘Out at Ystumtuen in the hamlet of Llwynmwyn.’

  ‘How do you spell that?’

  ‘I don’t know. You won’t find it on a map; it has been effaced.’

  ‘How convenient.’

  ‘You are familiar with the narrow-gauge railway to Devil’s Bridge that passes in the valley below Ystumtuen?’

  ‘Sort of.’

  ‘If you sit on the left-hand side of the carriage and look out across the valley just before Rhiwfron, you will note a discoloration in the grass of the distant valley side, caused by seepage from the lead mines; some people think it forms the shape of a duck. Iestyn used to live in a house that stood at the end of what those people would regard as the bill.’

  ‘Talking of the bill,’ I said, ‘this £200 up front that you mentioned. Up front usually means right now, doesn’t it?’

  ‘So you take the case, then?’

  ‘Yes, I take the case.’

  Chapter 3

  The morning light had the bright lemony sharpness that you get in spring, the sun still in its original wrapping, not yet weighed down with the weary pathos, the sheer pointless repetitiveness of it all. A few people huddled on the beach; dogs chased things we couldn’t see; a caravan of donkeys plodded across my field of vision, in sharp silhouette against the sea. The man at the front was my father, Eeyore, wearing an old mac that flapped in the breeze, his outline made jagged by lightning bolts of straw.

  At the north end of the Prom, beneath the shadow of Constitution Hill, Sospan was leaning on the counter of his ice-cream kiosk, squinting as he stared out to sea, as if the answer to the mysteries of life were encoded in the hieroglyphical waves. He saw me approach, pushed himself up and turned to the machine that dispensed the nectar that attracted us all to the wooden flower of his kiosk.

  ‘Everything OK?’ I asked.

  He replied with a noncommittal grimace and handed me the ice cream. ‘Had to replace a few timbers in the north-west corner of my kiosk, it gets the brunt of the sea breeze there, you see. It always unnerves me, making repairs. We don’t like to be reminded of the advance of decay in our lives, do we?’

  I made no answer, but put some change on the countertop with a sharp rattle. He took the money. Out of the corner of my eye I saw a girl appear, walking along the edge of the Prom near the bandstand. She wore jeans and a wind-blown military parka and was taking care not to step on the cracks between the slabs of paving stone. It was Calamity, my partner, who had just come back from a fortnight at Kousin Kevin’s Krazy Komedy Kamp in Pwllheli with her aunt. I watched her approach with a quickening sense of delight. Calamity was almost eighteen now and had been my partner for five years. During that time she had become the daughter I had never had. I had felt her absence keenly. She gave up the cracks-in-the-pavement game and ran the last few steps, skipping up to me and kissing me.

  ‘How was Kousin Kevin’s?’ I asked.

  ‘Great!’ A gust of wind blew the hood of her parka up and framed her with a halo of rabbit’s fur.

  ‘I sent you a food parcel via the International Red Cross in Geneva.’

  ‘I got it. I shared it out among the other holidaymakers. Did you hear about the flying saucer?’ She looked at me with a bright gaze, as pure and unsullied as the spring morning; her eyes shone and in them was an innocence and absence of guile. It was sometimes hard to believe that when I had first discovered her she had been one of those teenage troglodytes who haunted the caverns of the Pier amusement arcade, kids for whom fresh air was chlorine gas. It was a milieu in which slouching, moping and eye-rolling impatience with the manifest stupidity of adults were the lingua franca. In acting as a father figure to her I had acquired the father’s secret melancholy: watching her do her best to rush through the years of enchantment in the forlorn belief that adulthood was something worth rushing for.

  ‘I saw a flying saucer. It was silver, with red and green lights flashing round the rim. We saw it out at sea.’

  I turned to Sospan. ‘Did you hear that? She saw a flying saucer.’

  ‘Loads of people have,’ said Sospan. ‘Farmer out at Ynys Greigiog –’

  ‘It was in the paper,’ said Calamity, assuming possession of the story. ‘He was driving home from the Farmer’s Co-op in Aber’ with some seed in the back of the Land-Rover. The UFO buzzed the car for a while and then landed, filling the valley with a blinding light. Then the bloke found his engine stopped. He got out of the car and was approached by four aliens in silver suits. The lead one was a woman. Face like an elf, blonde hair and four fingers on each hand; probably a Nordic, but it’s possible they were Greys, it’s hard to tell.’

  ‘Wanted to make love to him,’ said Sospan, unable to hold back what for him was the most interesting aspect of the encounter. ‘Bold as brass.’

  ‘What language did she speak?’ I asked.

  ‘He didn’t say.’

  ‘Did they make love, then?’ I asked.

  ‘No one knows,’ said Calamity. ‘He said his memory of the incident was very hazy. Why did you chop up the desk?’

  I told her about the visit from Raspiwtin.

  Eeyore appeared, leading a train of donkeys. Sospan reached again for the dispenser, but Eeyore stopped him. ‘No, Sospan, not the usual. There is an ache in my heart today that vanilla won’t expunge. I need something special.’

  Sospan adopted the grave mien of the bespoke necromancer. ‘What sort of special?’

  ‘These are troubled times,’ said Eeyore. He always had a tendency towards melancholy, but this morning the glum tone had a sharper edge. Before becoming the town donkeyman he had been a cop for most of his life and had presided with great distinction over the processing of the town’s hoodlums, inhaling them one week, exhaling them the next from the iron lung of Aberystwyth gaol. Now he spent his years cleaning up after the donkeys, doing for them, some said, what for many years he had been doing for the people of this town.

  ‘Everything all right, Pop?’ I asked.

  He looked at me, still holding the bridle of the lead donkey, Mnemosyne. ‘I’m a bit troubled today, son, to be honest.’

  Sospan rubbed his chin thoughtfully. ‘I might just have a scoop or two left of the Absinthe.’

  Eeyore shook his head.

  ‘Or the Ambergris?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Mescaline?’

  Eeyore considered. ‘No, not that. Have you got anything to ward off the evil eye?’

  The light of understanding entered the ice-cream man’s eye. ‘I may have some blueberry made with water taken from the shrine at Lourdes. The blue is the colour of the famous stained-glass window in the apse of the chapel in Reims cathedral. That will put you right.’

  Eeyore looked unhappy. ‘I’ve heard a troubling rumour.’

  We all looked at him expectantly. He sighed. We waited. He shook his head.

  ‘What troubling rumour would that be, then?’ asked Sospan.

  ‘I’m not sure if I should say.’

  ‘Of course you should say,’ cried Calamity. ‘What’s the point in mentioning it if you aren’t going to say?’

  ‘It’s only a rumour,’ he said.

  ‘You might as well say it, Dad.’

  ‘Well,’ said Eeyore. ‘As I said, it’s just rumour, but I’ve heard they’ve put a Zed Notice on the town.’

  There was a moment’s silence as we allowed the news to sink in.

  ‘What’s a Zed Notice?’ asked Sospan.

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Eeyore. ‘All I know is, it’s very bad.’

  Sospan tut-tutted. ‘Who put it on us?’

  ‘I don’t know that, either,’ said Eeyore. ‘The people responsible for Zed Notices conduct their arcane rites in the shadows beyond the reach of the public gaze. Or, at least, that’s what this chap told me.’

  Even though nobody knew what a Zed Notice was, it was unsettling to discover one had been put on the town.

  Sospan broke from his trance. ‘I think I know what is needed. Something very, very special. Something from my under-the-counter “Katabasis” range. Of course, it’s not literally under the counter, that’s a figure of speech. I keep it off site, for obvious reasons.’

  ‘What was it called again?’ asked Calamity.

  ‘Katabasis; it’s the Greek word to describe a journey to the Underworld and, by extension, any journey through a dystopic realm. It’s made from the ayahuasca plant, which is a powerful hallucinogenic plant used by shamans of the Amerindian tribes in Peru, Bolivia and Ecuador. The name translates as “Vine of the Corpse” in their language. It comes highly recommended by Hunter S. Thompson and the Chilean novelist Isabel Allende.’

  ‘What does it do?’ asked Eeyore.

  ‘Opens doors.’

  ‘What sort of doors?’

  ‘Of perception, mostly. Look!’ Sospan crouched down and rummaged under the counter, then brought out a copy of National Geographic magazine. ‘This is an account by Kira Salak, an adventurer, of her experience:

  I will never forget what it was like. The overwhelming misery. The certainty of never-ending suffering. No one to help you, no way to escape. Everywhere I looked: darkness so thick that the idea of light seemed inconceivable.

  Suddenly, I swirled down a tunnel of fire, wailing figures calling out to me in agony, begging me to save them. Others tried to terrorise me. ‘You will never leave here,’ they said. ‘Never. Never.’

  I found myself laughing at them. ‘I’m not scared of you,’ I said. But the darkness became even thicker; the emotional charge of suffering nearly unbearable. I felt as if I would burst from heartbreak – everywhere, I felt the agony of humankind, its tragedies, its hatreds, its sorrows. I reached the bottom of the tunnel and saw three thrones in a black chamber. Three shadowy figures sat in the chairs; in the middle was what I took to be the devil himself.

  ‘The darkness will never end,’ he said. ‘It will never end. You can never escape this place.’

  Sospan looked up as if expecting the sale to have been clinched.

  ‘I think I’ll just have a strawberry,’ said Eeyore.

  Calamity, evidently bored with the Vine of the Corpse, asked Eeyore about the raid on the Coliseum cinema. ‘I remember it well,’ he said. ‘Iestyn Probert and the two Richards brothers from the garage at Llanfarian. A policeman was run over during the chase and they hanged Iestyn for it. Three of them were on the run for a while, out at Ystrad Meurig. For many of us that robbery marked a watershed. I suppose you could describe it as a loss of collective innocence. The takings were especially good because it was the opening week of The Sound of Music. The whole town went to see it, literally everyone: the streets were empty like on Christmas Day. They called it the day Aberystwyth stood still. Somehow it seemed below the belt to hit the cinema when Julie Andrews was playing.

  Calamity pulled a face and Eeyore put his arm on her shoulder. ‘It probably seems daft to you today.’

  ‘I’ve seen the movie,’ said Calamity, ‘my aunt watches it every Christmas. Just some kids in Austria singing and then they escape from the Nazis, but no one really tries to stop them.’

  ‘Stated baldly like,’ said Eeyore, ‘I suppose it doesn’t sound like much. Things were different in those days. They didn’t have so many explosions and stuff; things were more sedate. The scenery was very beautiful and the singing was nice . . . and . . . you see, Austria was a faraway place, people didn’t take foreign holidays or go skiing in the Alps. Just seeing the mountains on the big screen like that was a thrill, and the music . . .’ He sang a couple of bars of ‘The Lonely Goatherd’.

  Calamity said, ‘I can’t see why they had to escape from the Nazis just for teaching some lousy kids to sing.’

  ‘At the very least,’ I said, ‘you’d expect Julie Andrews to do some kick-boxing or something.’

  ‘Or dynamite the bridge so no one could follow them,’ said Calamity.

  Sospan put the magazine back under the counter.

  Chapter 4

  The waiting steam train snorted puffs of strongly perfumed smoke into the blue sky. A man and a boy stood next to the engine, both identically dressed in neatly pressed black trousers and white shirts, open at the collar. The boy was listening to the side of the engine with a stethoscope.

  Every railway station has a zone way out beyond the normal hubbub. Most people are too lazy to walk that far, but once you pass a certain point, beyond the front of the longest train, beyond the final pillar where the last awning peters out, the atmosphere changes; noise drops off, a wind that has been absent from the cauldron of the town centre cools your brow. The only sound comes from the soles of your shoes. This is where the narrow-gauge steam train to Devil’s Bridge stands awaiting orders.

  The boy wrote something down in a notebook.

  ‘I hope she’s well enough to travel,’ I said with a smile to his father.

  ‘I bring my boy up to be observant,’ said the man.

  Calamity and the boy stared at each other with the muted suspicion that kids of similar ages feel when a chance encounter brings their parents together.

  ‘Most trainspotters just write down the numbers,’ I said.

  ‘We are not trainspotters,’ said the man. ‘We just like machines.’

  ‘We’re not allowed to have them at home,’ added the boy.

  ‘Except the plough, and the hair clip and the gallows. Although, of course, in these corrupted times our gallows rot and the hangman’s children cry out for hunger in the night.’ The man put his hand gently on the back of his son’s head. ‘To us, a big train like this is almost like pornography.’

  ‘You must be Denunciationists,’ I said.

  The man smiled.

  ‘Are you Upper or Lower? I can never remember which is which.’

  ‘We’re Lower Denunciationist, from Cwmnewidion Isaf; we have no beards because the Lord in his mercy allowed us to use the engine of the scissor. It is those chimp-faced fools from Ynys Greigiog who abjure the very necessary act of grooming.’ He reached out a hand to shake. ‘I am James the Less.’

  ‘Louie Knight, and this is Calamity.’

  The engine wailed its impatience and the guard blew a whistle. I opened a compartment door and allowed the man and his son to enter. We climbed in after them and slammed the door. Calamity pulled a face, as I knew she would, when her bottom hit the hard polished wooden bench.

  ‘Just try and enjoy it,’ I said. ‘The scenery is nice at least.’

  ‘No upholstery,’ she said. Two words that encapsulated an entire world view.

  The engine squealed again, and tugged, picking up the slack like the anchor man in a tug-of-war. The carriages groaned like cows calling to be milked; unconsciously we clenched our muscles in sympathy. We began the long, slow trundle to Devil’s Bridge.

  ‘The line to Devil’s Bridge was built by Chinese immigrant labour between 1865 and 1869,’ said the boy.

  ‘And some Irish,’ added his father.

  ‘It’s like sitting on a roundabout in the park,’ said Calamity. ‘Even war chariots used to have upholstery; cushions are not a luxury.’

  James the Less received that statement with a look of surprise. In Cwmnewidion Isaf cushions were obviously kept on the top shelf at the newsagent’s next to the magazines on steam traction engines and those lawnmowers you can sit on.

  ‘Devil’s Bridge gets its name from a folk tale about the Devil, who used to exact tolls from travellers wishing to use the bridge across the gorge,’ said the boy. ‘The Irish navvies resented the Chinese workers, partly because they ate strange food: dried oysters, dried fish, dried abalone, seaweed and dried crackers, all imported from China. And they took baths in empty whisky kegs filled with rainwater, perfumed with flowers.’

  ‘That would offend me, too,’ I said.

  ‘Are you on holiday?’ said the boy.

  ‘We’re looking for the outline of a d . . .’ Calamity checked herself and looked at me, unsure whether she should divulge details of our intentions, and aware that it was to me that Raspiwtin had given the information about Iestyn Probert’s old house. I grinned and completed her sentence. ‘Duck. We’re looking for the outline of a duck in the hills, caused, they say, by the run-off from the old lead mines.’

  ‘We’re paleo-ornithologists,’ said Calamity.

  ‘How fascinating,’ said the boy. ‘What sort of duck exactly? Dabbling duck, diving duck, eider duck, ferruginous duck, harlequin duck, long-tailed duck, mandarin duck, Muscovy duck, ruddy duck, swallow-tailed duck, tree duck, tufted duck, velvet duck, wood duck . . . ?’

  ‘Just so long as it quacks,’ she answered.

  ‘I think there’s one by Iestyn Probert’s old house, out at Rhiwlas,’ said James the Less.

  The train moved so slowly across the landscape that its timetable might have been described in geological epochs. Yet for all the languor the engine itself was a source of fury, coughing a series of cumulonimbus clouds into the sky with each chuff, interspersed with wild Cherokee war whoops. The flood plain of the Rheidol passed gently by.

  ‘I met a Deunciationist priest once,’ I said. ‘He had a red beard.’

  ‘That would be Jude the Schemer. For many years I loved him as a brother and would have laid down my life for him, until the fever seized his brain.’