Last Tango in Aberystwyth Read online

  The man in the dinner jacket spoke. ‘I’m awfully sorry to interrupt your fun, sir, but it appears your holiday has come to an abrupt end.’

  ‘Really? It’s a bit sudden isn’t it?’

  ‘That’s often the way of it on holiday; it seems like you’ve only just arrived and already it’s time to go home.’

  ‘We have only just arrived.’

  ‘As I say it can often seem like that. It’s a trick the mind plays.’

  ‘And we were having such a nice time. I can’t believe it’s over.’

  ‘You’re not the first, sir, to remark on the fleeting nature of human happiness. If I may be permitted the observation.’

  I looked at Calamity and she responded by dramatically stretching her eyebrows and chin in opposite directions. I turned back to the manager. ‘Nice aftershave.’

  ‘Thank you, sir, I mix it myself. Nothing fancy, just a few things I find in the garden.’

  ‘Next time go easy on the slugs.’

  He winced slightly. ‘Most comedic, sir. Now if you would care to make your way to the carpark.’

  ‘Couldn’t we just extend our stay by half a day?’

  He shook his head in bogus melancholy. ‘Sadly not, we’re fully booked. No room for any more guests and alas, although you would be highly suitable for the role, we are already supplied with a clown.’

  ‘And if he goes sick you could always recite your aftershave recipe, couldn’t you?’

  He winced again.

  ‘I want to see the manager.’

  The security guard answered. ‘You’re looking at him, pal, this is Kousin Kevin, he owns the Kamp.’

  ‘Don’t sound so impressed, he can’t even spell!’

  Kousin Kevin took hold of my cuff. ‘If you wouldn’t mind, sir.’

  ‘What if I do?’

  The security guard waved his nightstick. ‘Actually, bigmouth, we’d prefer it if you did. We don’t like snoopers in our camp.’

  We filed our way back in the direction of the car, guards on either side marching in step. No one spoke and the silence was lightened only by the soft strains of a dance tune from the swing era drifting over the eaves. As we cleared the last of the chalets we stopped involuntarily and stared before the guards urged us on. In the auditorium – deserted only a few minutes before – the ellipse of a single spotlight could now be seen bobbing across the darkened dance-floor like a drunken moon. And stepping jauntily through it, as if their shoes were glued to the light, were Jubal and Mrs Bligh-Jones, dancing to the ‘Chattanooga Choo-Choo’.

  On the drive back to town I pondered the significance of what I had just seen. Mrs Bligh-Jones was the Commander-in-Chief of the Meals on Wheels, which made her a pretty powerful person in town. But it hadn’t always been so. Two years ago she was just another bit player ladling anaemic gravy over sprouts that had been boiled to death.

  Her rise to prominence neatly illustrated one of the many ironies of the flood: so often the chief casualty had not been bricks and mortar, but things more intangible, like reputation. In this case the credibility of the druids. For as long as anyone could remember, they had been the town’s official gangsters: running the girls, the gambling, the protection, and sending so many of their enemies to ‘sleep with the fishes’ it made the sea snore. But it all came to an end with Lovespoon’s vainglorious Exodus aboard his ark. They lost a lot of good men on that boat and the ones left behind, their credibility shot, were never quite able to compete. This was when the carpetbagger gangsters moved in and no one had a bigger carpetbag than Bligh-Jones. She alone had been the one to recognise the simple truth: in the moonscape of rubble and potato soup kitchens that followed the receding waters there was a new weapon abroad. Hunger. And the casually issued threat of a withheld bowl of gruel could be far more effective than any blow from a druid’s blackjack.

  We might never have heard of her, either, if it wasn’t for the tragedy on Pumlumon mountain. A story that has since become one of the defining legends of the rubble years. It started out as just a routine sweep in the Meals on Wheels van, the sort they often made into the foothills, looking for wayfarers to succour. But then a storm blew up and they received a mayday from high up on the mountain. Common sense told them to turn back, but they pressed on and before long they had passed the Bickerstaff line, that imaginary line that demarcates the point beyond which a safe return is no longer possible. Morale soon snapped in the sub-zero temperatures and the leader, Mrs Cefnmabws, lost her grip completely and ran off ranting into the storm. Then as the women argued in the fierce blizzard with icicles hanging off their eyebrow ridges it was the ruthless will of Mrs Bligh-Jones that forced them on, forced their rebelling sinews and surrendering flesh to scorn the pain. They were stranded for three months on that cruel mountain. Two of them died from pneumonia and Mrs Cefnmabws turned up the following spring preserved in a block of ice like a mammoth. The only ones to make it down were Mrs Tolpuddle, who refused to talk about it; and Bligh-Jones, who lost an arm to frostbite. It didn’t hold her back, though. She returned to town a heroine and promptly began carving it up into mini-fiefdoms for her lieutenants.

  The only things she didn’t contest were the girls and the drinking-clubs. Either out of an inherent puritanical streak or maybe out of a respect for tradition: because everyone knew that getting drunk was essentially a pagan activity and thus the birthright of the druids. And, no matter what else had changed, Bacchus was still the most popular god in town.

  We drove slowly up towards Waunfawr in a slow file of traffic stuck behind a caravan. The windscreen wipers droned hypnotically, the rain sluiced down, and the sky above Aberystwyth turned the colour of bluebottles. Perfect weather for a day at Kousin Kevin’s. I thought again of what I had seen. Jubal, the man with a finger in all the pies in town, dancing with the woman who baked them.

  Chapter 8

  I WALKED DOWN the dimly lit, green-tiled corridor in a pair of paper socks given me at the door and a one-piece paper suit that rustled softly as I went. I had no keys and no watch and no coins and nothing made of metal nor any material that could be filed to an edge or moulded into something that could be used to bludgeon with. If the guards could have taken my fillings they would have done. I was thirty feet beneath ground level, under the castle, in a suite of rooms designed by Owain Glyndwr for people he didn’t like. I was on my way to see Dai the Custard Pie.

  It felt more like a hospital than a prison, the faint smell of disinfectant and a distant generator hum emphasising the otherwise total silence. Only the elaborate electronic locking of the huge steel doors made it clear that it was a prison. But perhaps at this end of the spectrum of penal incarceration there was no real difference. The psychologists might spend their lives trying to disentangle the Gordian knot of hate, insanity, malice, neurosis, psychosis, intent and irresistibility, genes and environment that made up the peculiar evil of men like Custard Pie, but whatever their conclusions you still needed a strong door on the room.

  Thirty feet beneath the town; a tomb of steel and concrete that was fitted out like an ICBM silo and manned by guards who underwent the same psychological testing to get the job. Going to see a man whom I was responsible for putting here and who I knew would never talk to me. But all the same, for the sake of the Dean – way out of his depth in the maelstrom of Aberystwyth and maybe already dead – I had to ask.

  The Dean, like thousands of misguided fools before him, had dreamed of becoming a clown and then leaped into the abyss in an act that suggested that he already was one. And there was no one in all of Wales who knew more about the psychopathology of the clown’s mind than Custard Pie.

  I don’t know what I expected, but I was shocked when I saw him. He stood just a couple of feet away from me, a wall of bars from floor to ceiling separating us. He stared with eyes glittering crazily above the leather muzzle they had forced him to wear. He wore a bright orange prison-issue boiler suit and underneath it a knitted tank-top over a paisley pattern shirt. He smelle
d sour and unwashed; his fingernails were a couple of inches long and had started to turn yellow and curl. Most upsetting of all, the floor of his cell was littered with excrement. I turned in disgust to one of the guards who sat a few feet away playing Solitaire.

  ‘It’s OK, mate,’ the guard said. ‘They’re not real. They’re fake ones, like in a joke shop.’

  ‘You allow people to give him things like this?’

  ‘He makes them himself.’

  ‘But the regulations?’

  ‘Regulations against most things but there’s not one against making fake poo.’ He returned his attention to the cards and I looked at Custard Pie. The last time we had met we had been dropping through the incandescent white clouds, flying in low towards the lake of Nant-y-moch.

  ‘I know why you’re here,’ he said in cold monotone devoid of any inflection or feeling. ‘You’re looking for the Dean.’

  ‘You’re well-informed.’

  ‘There’s nothing that happens in this town I don’t know about. The only thing I don’t know, in fact, is why you think I will help you.’

  ‘He may have gone to join the clowns.’

  ‘Of course he’s gone to join the clowns. But why should I help you? The man who took away my liberty?’

  I looked at him and considered. ‘He threw away forty years of scholarship to go and get his arse slapsticked all day in front of a jeering crowd. Most people wouldn’t understand what drives a man to do something like that. I certainly wouldn’t. But you would.’

  ‘So?’

  ‘So you could probably find him. You could predict his next move better than anyone else in the whole world. It would be a feat of such audacious brilliance that I thought an egotist like you wouldn’t be able to resist.’

  A contemplative look appeared in his eyes. ‘As a project it would not be without interest. I might even enjoy it, but what of it? I have passed the stage of doing things for the sake of enjoyment.’

  ‘With your genius for understanding the comic mind –’

  ‘Or even the deranged comic mind –’

  ‘If you say so.’

  ‘Tell me, Louie, do you think I am mad?’

  I hesitated.

  ‘Or are you smart enough to see the sadness where others see madness or badness?’

  ‘All I see are good guys and crooks. I don’t need it any more complicated than that.’

  ‘Oh but you do, Louie. You do.’ His voice took on an insinuating quality that suggested that he had thoroughly examined my psyche and found it wanting. ‘You do. That’s your curse. I know you, Louie. I know that sometimes you lie awake at night and try to fight off this monstrous thought that just won’t be driven away. How can we really be held responsible for our actions? Whether it is nature or nurture that fashions us it makes little difference, does it not? Give me the child for seven years and I will give you the man. Can I be blamed for becoming what I became? For what I had no power to avoid becoming? And if not, how can you justify punishing me?’

  I smiled. ‘Maybe. And maybe not. But if you helped save the Dean no one could argue about the rightness of that.’

  ‘Are you really such a fool that you think he can be saved? Yes, I can find him and send him back to his college to spend another twenty years marking essays, but do you really call that saving? Some people might call it the opposite. They might say only now is he truly saved.’

  ‘Except that his new world won’t make him happy. It may even kill him.’

  ‘You’re right. There is no happiness for him now. He has entered the world of the clown and discovered to his dismay that, laugh as he might, there is nothing funny about it. Nothing at all. We huddle round the camp fire and laugh merely to drown out the howl that comes in the night. Save the Dean? Louie, I can’t even save myself.’

  I waved to the guard; the interview was over and had accomplished about as much as I imagined. As I walked away the prisoner hissed a word. I stopped and he hissed it again. Three words, or four. I turned and he said, ‘The girl! Suffer the girl to come to me!’

  My brow furrowed. ‘Which girl?’

  And then he flung himself at the bars like a furious caged beast and rattled and kicked them and screamed, ‘Calamity! Calamity! Calamity!’

  As I climbed the steps up to the street level I could hear far off from the depths of the dungeon the sound of a wolf howling.

  *

  There was a message waiting for me when I got back, from Llunos asking me to go down and bail Calamity. I groaned. This was the third time in six weeks, and I knew I’d just about run out of favours. It had taken me ages to explain to his satisfaction how I came to be in that cupboard at the Rock Wholesaler’s.

  A little hole had appeared in the threadbare woollen jersey of cloud, and a disc of light bathed the length of the Prom from the castle to the harbour. The railings and chrome bumpers of the cars sparkled. Eeyore was leaning against the kiosk, reading to Sospan from a book. He closed it when I arrived and greeted me.

  ‘He’s been telling me about Sitting Bull,’ said Sospan. ‘Very interesting man. What’ll you have?’

  ‘What’s good this week?’

  Eeyore held up his ice.

  ‘Flavour of the month,’ said Sospan.

  ‘Looks like chocolate.’

  ‘But it sure doesn’t taste like it. It’s Xocolatl. The original Aztec recipe. That flavour dispensed elsewhere on the Prom under the name of chocolate is but a vulgar abasement.’

  ‘What’s in it?’

  ‘Cocoa, pepper, chillies, vanilla, honey and dried flowers. They used to drink it out of a golden beaker that was used once and then thrown in the lake.’

  ‘Are you going to introduce that system?’

  ‘I’ve no objection so long as you bring your own cup.’

  I ordered and when it arrived Eeyore and I chinked cornets like they were mugs of beer.

  ‘So what’s with the book, Pop?’

  Eeyore placed his hand on it and said, ‘Medicine Line.’

  ‘Oh yeah, what’s that?’

  ‘It’s a concept from the Old West, you see. From the old days when there weren’t any frontiers and things. Apparently they had this team of men who crossed the continent surveying the boundary between America and Canada and marking it with little cairns of stones. When the Red Indians asked them what they were doing they said they were making medicine for Queen Victoria, the Great Mother across the Ocean. That’s what I was reading about.’

  ‘So what’s so interesting about it?’

  ‘Well, the funny thing was, them Indians weren’t all that impressed at the time – little piles of stones … it didn’t seem like powerful medicine at all. But when they went horse-stealing south of the border the following spring, they made an amazing discovery. They found that when the sheriff and his men chased them the posse stopped up short at the piles of stone and couldn’t pass. It was as if there was a glass wall there or something. For the life of them, those Indians couldn’t see what was stopping the lawmen, but they had to admit the Great Mother across the Water had heap big powerful medicine. They called it the Medicine Line. That’s where Sitting Bull took them after the Battle of the Little Bighorn. Up beyond the Medicine Line to Canada where they’d be safe.’

  ‘That’s a nice story, Dad.’

  ‘I was just saying to Sospan, I reckon a lot of people in this town have medicine lines inside their heads.’

  ‘I don’t get you.’

  ‘You know, they live their lives penned in by fear – never get to know more than a tiny part of who they are … never realise the things that distinguish a man in this life lie wrapped in danger and wonder in the continent beyond the line.’

  ‘I’ve never really thought about it like that,’ I said. And added, ‘But I wish someone would put a medicine line round Calamity!’ I put some money down, gave Eeyore’s shoulder a squeeze, and walked off in the direction of the town lock-up.

  It was still only late afternoon but the cell was
full with the usual smattering of drunks, handbag thieves, black marketeers and an old lady who looked out of place. Calamity sat at a small table playing cards with a stoker. He was sitting in a singlet, anchors tattooed on each bicep, and, neatly folded on Calamity’s side of the table, was his shirt. Calamity dealt with a stern businesslike mien and he stared at the cards, mesmerised like a child being shown a conjuring trick. It was five-card Ludo which meant he would soon be losing his ship as well, because although he was cheating there was no way on earth he could cheat better than Calamity. No one could.

  The warder jangled the keys and let her out.

  ‘Thanks for bailing me! Where did you get the money?’

  ‘Out of your salary for next month.’

  ‘Hmm. Maybe it’s better if I stay inside.’

  ‘Do that and you don’t get a salary at all. And give the man his shirt back.’

  ‘But I won it fair and square! By the rules.’

  ‘You don’t even know what the rules are! What do you want with a dirty old sailor’s shirt anyway?’

  ‘Merchandise, Louie. For every object there’s a buyer, it’s just a case of bringing them together.’

  I smiled and said, ‘Go home and arrange a deal between your head and the pillow. We’ve got an early start tomorrow.’

  Chapter 9

  THE TRAIN ROLLED gently to a halt at Borth station. The platform was empty except for a lone figure standing in the dawn mist. The figure of a man with a suitcase, a man who had once been a clown’s Johnny. Calamity, eyes bleary with sleep, yawned like a small hippo.

  The man walked down the platform and climbed aboard, the clunk of the door the only sound disturbing the early morning stillness. The guard shouted and the diesel grunted and strained and slowly pulled us out of Borth towards the bright sky in the east.

  Bert spotted us and sat down in the seat in front. ‘This isn’t what we agreed on the phone,’ he said over his shoulder. ‘I thought I said come alone.’