Don’t Cry For Me Aberystwyth an-4

by Malcolm Pryce

‘I can understand that.’

  ‘We need to coax her back. We need to help her see that life is worth living and she will be happy again.’

  ‘How do we do that?’

  The doctor put the cards down and made a steeple of his fingers as he warmed to his theme. ‘One thing you could do is bring in an item with sentimental value for Myfanwy, something that has associations of happier times. It doesn’t have to be anything dramatic – a photo or an ornament or something. Just leave it in her room. It could help.’

  ‘I’ve got some of her records, she gave them to me after our first date. I think she would like those.’

  ‘Excellent. That would do splendidly. We could play them to her; music has the most remarkable curative properties in this respect.’ He returned his attention to the dog. The next card showed two dogs copulating and the patient wagged his tail.

  Downstairs in the hallway I ran into the nurse again.

  ‘Hello, Glenys,’ I said with forced cheeriness.

  ‘The name doesn’t mean a thing to you, does it? No one ever called me that. You all used to call me Tadpole.’ Her eyes watered at the memory and she stuck a pudgy fist into the socket and screwed it round. ‘Tadpole,’ she repeated and her mouth became distorted into the shape of a figure-of-eight lying on its side.

  I still couldn’t remember her but the sight of her pain, still vivid after so many years, made me squirm. ‘Oh, now I remember. I’m so sorry, kids can be very cruel, it shocks me when I think about it.’

  ‘You never cared about me at all.’

  ‘Oh, that’s not true. I really liked you.’

  She looked at me. ‘Really?’

  ‘Of course. We all did.’

  The hand shot back up to the eye and she began to cry. ‘Now I know you’re lying. You never cared about me. Maybe if I’d been called Hoffmann, that would have been different.’

  I blinked in surprise.

  ‘That got you, didn’t it? Yeah, that got you.’

  ‘Did you say “Hoffmann”?’

  ‘Might have done,’ she snivelled.

  ‘Do you know something about Hoffmann?’

  ‘Maybe I do and maybe I don’t.’

  ‘Oh, come on.’

  ‘I saw the ad in the paper. I don’t want your lousy books, if that’s what you’re thinking.’

  ‘Tell me what you know.’

  ‘I used to nurse a man who had been a soldier in the war in Patagonia. They tortured him with an electric telephone generator. He used to cry out in the night, cry out the name “Hoffmann”. Bet you didn’t know that.’

  ‘No, I didn’t. Who was this soldier?’

  Her face lit up in triumph. It was a small victory but I suppose people like Tadpole take what they can get. She minced off, seething with glee. ‘That’s for me to know and you to find out.’

  I ran after her. ‘Look, Nurse Glenys, I’m sorry the kids in school called you Tadpole—’

  ‘That’s it butter me up, now I’ve got something you want.’

  ‘You saw the ad in the paper. You know I’m looking into the murder of Father Christmas. It was a shocking crime.’

  ‘Yeah, I know. They cut off his doodah and stuck it in his mouth. I know how that feels. But I don’t care about him.’

  I sighed. ‘OK, Tadpole, if you don’t want to tell me, I can’t make you.’

  She paused and considered for a second, then said with a sly edge to her voice,

  ‘I could take you to see him if you want.’

  ‘To see who?’

  ‘The soldier who used to cry out “Hoffmann” in his dreams. That’s if you give me what I want.’

  ‘How much do you want?’

  ‘I don’t want your lousy money.’

  ‘What do you want, then?’

  ‘A date.’

  I looked at her in surprise, which she mistook for disdain. Her face crumpled up and the fist shot straight to the eye. Her voice rose to a whine. ‘See, I knew it. Just a lousy date and look at you . . .’

  ‘You mean, like dinner at the Indian or something?’

  ‘What’s the point? You can’t bear the thought of it, can you? It’s written all over your goddam face. I’m a leper, I know. Eugh! Look at him! He’s going out with stinky Tadpole!’

  I touched her arm softly. ‘I’d love to. It would be great to catch up after all these years. We could have dinner and maybe go to the Pier afterwards for a dance. Would you like that?’

  She smeared the tears away with the back of her fist. ‘That . . . that would be nice, but . . . but . . . there’s something else, something else I really want.’

  ‘Yes, what?’ I said with a cold feeling of dread. ‘Tell me what you really want.’

  ‘I want to go and see the new movie about Clip.’

  Chapter 6

  ‘YES,’ I SAID. ‘I will accept a reverse-charge call.’

  ‘Hold on, please. Go ahead, caller.’

  Pause. Click. Rustle. Flustered breathing.

  ‘Oh, my goodness! What have I done? What have I done?’ said the Queen of Denmark. ‘I couldn’t find a coin. Can you believe it? My head’s on ten million of the damn things but there isn’t a single one in the palace.’

  ‘That’s OK, just keep it brief; international phone calls don’t come cheap.’

  ‘Yes, of course. I’m sorry. I was just wondering if you’d had any responses to the advertisement.’

  ‘Not many, I’m afraid.’

  ‘How many?’

  ‘Well, not any, actually.’

  ‘Oh dear . . . Do you think the newspaper will give us the money back?’

  ‘I would be highly surprised.’

  ‘Oh, dash it all. It cost forty pounds.’

  ‘I’m sorry but the problem is the reward. This philosopher—’

  ‘Kierkegaard.’

  ‘It’s not a great motivator.’

  ‘I suppose I’m a bit out of touch. What if I were to offer them a duchy or something? Or a bit of Africa – we’ve still got some somewhere.’

  ‘That might be interpreted as taking the mickey.’

  ‘You must think I’m a dreadfully silly old woman—’

  ‘Not at all. I think it’s great that you’re showing an interest.’

  ‘I really called because I was bored.’

  ‘Don’t you have anything to do?’

  ‘Opening a shopping mall this afternoon. How dull is that? My mum used to launch ships.’

  ‘You build ships in Denmark?’

  ‘Begging your pardon, Mr Knight, we are a race of seafarers. Have you never heard of the Hanseatic League? Where do you think the Vikings came from?’

  ‘Never really thought about it.’

  ‘Our boys used to come over in their longboats and whup your sorry asses. Oh, God! What have I said? I’m so sorry—’

  ‘There’s no need to be. I underestimated your nation – I thought you just made bacon.’

  ‘Despite our small size our influence on the world stage has been quite considerable. We invented Lego.’

  There was a pause and then she burst out laughing. ‘Oh Lord! What have I said? I’d better get off the line and stop wasting your money. I’ll call you next week when you might have something for me.’

  ‘See if you can find some coins next time.’

  ‘I’ll get some specially minted.’

  ‘Did the Danes really invent Lego?’

  ‘Stop teasing.’

  ‘I’m not, I was just thinking about the reward in your ad. Forgive me for saying this, but Lego’s a lot more popular in Aberystwyth than the works of Kierkegaard.’

  ‘You think it would make a better reward?’

  ‘I think so.’

  ‘My God, what a brilliant idea. We could offer the centenary set.’ She hung up.

  I left the receiver cradled against my cheek and watched Calamity. She was writing out index cards with a marker pen, a frown of deep concentration on her face; acrid inky fumes surrounding her in a cloud.
She wrote ‘Dead Santa, name: Absalom’ on one and pinned it to the incident board. She wrote ‘Butch Cassidy’ and pinned it to the board. She followed that with the ‘Queen of Denmark’, ‘Rocking-chair Man’ and ‘Emily’.

  She felt my gaze on her and looked across. ‘Every scrap of information has to go up because you never know which ones are the significant ones. If you just concentrate on what you think is important you often overlook the crucial stuff.’

  ‘Is that so?’

  She slapped the Pinkerton manual. ‘It’s all in here. Incident-board tectonics. It’s a new science.’

  I nodded. ‘Makes me wonder how I survived all these years without that book. Where did you get it, anyway?’

  ‘Eeyore gave it to me. He got it from the police library.’

  ‘I didn’t know he was still a member.’

  ‘He isn’t. It’s a rarity, this book. The man at the antiquarian bookshop offered me fifty quid for it.’

  ‘How did he know you had it?’

  ‘He asked me to get it.’

  ‘From the police library? What’s Eeyore going to say?

  ‘He gets fifty per cent. He needs a new manger.’

  ‘Is there a chapter in there on fencing stolen goods?’

  Silence.

  ‘So what went wrong?’

  Silence.

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘Huh?’

  ‘Why didn’t you get the fifty quid?’

  ‘I started reading it.’

  I watched her work, aware of a strange feeling fizzing inside my chest. It wasn’t one of those feelings we easily find names for; none seems quite right. An emotion which, paradoxically, has a physical representation: pins and needles of pride. When I first met Calamity she was an amusement-arcade hustler, with the bad complexion and glassy look that come from a troglodytic life spent in dimly lit caverns staring all day at fruit machines. She would have regarded a trip to the town library with about the same relish as dogs view their monthly bath. She was the sort of kid who was going nowhere and had it all mapped out. The sort you tend to look warily at when they congregate in groups, the sort you damn at first sight and regard as evidence that the world is going to pot. And yet.

  ‘You don’t believe in it, do you?’

  ‘I didn’t say that. If it helps you work, that’s fine. I keep my incident board in my head.’

  ‘It’s supposed to help you see the links and interconnections between the pieces of the puzzle. Things which aren’t obvious.’

  ‘I’ve got a guy in my head who does the links for me – he works the night shift.’

  She pinned up another card.

  And yet. And yet here she was: focused and determined. And with less cynicism than a newborn puppy. After removal from the amusement arcade her eyes had acquired a natural brightness; it would dim with the coming years, I knew, but it was still good to behold. Having her around was a tonic and I didn’t want to do anything to curb that bright heart. But sometimes I had to.

  ‘You do understand about what I said? Faxing the Pinkertons and that?’

  ‘Sure.’

  ‘I know you’re pretty excited about it, but really you can’t just dance off with a fresh piece of evidence and spill the beans – even to the Pinkertons.’

  ‘It’s all right. I understand.’

  ‘I mean, it’s not like they’re going to be interested or anything.’

  ‘It’s all right, Louie.’

  ‘I don’t like to stop you, but . . .’

  ‘Can we drop it?’

  ‘As long as you’re OK about it.’

  ‘You’re the boss, right or wrong.’

  ‘Honestly, Calamity, this time I’m not wrong. Who’s Emily, anyway?’

  ‘She rang earlier when you were visiting Myfanwy. She’s a student at the theology college in Lampeter. Apparently, everyone out there is pretty excited about the Kierkegaard books. She says she’s got information on the Father Christmas case.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘He went to see her last week.’

  ‘Did you tell her the last student we had from Lampeter ended up with a “Come to Sunny Aberystwyth” knife between the ribs?’

  ‘I thought it better to gloss over that bit. Anyway, she’s not from the Faculty of Undertaking. She’s from Jezebel College.’

  ‘I don’t know that one.’

  She consulted her notebook and said without understanding, ‘Comparative ethnography of the icon of the fallen woman in Cardiganshire.’

  ‘They study that?’

  ‘Seems so.’

  ‘Kids of today, eh? We never had the opportunities when I was young. What’s that roll of celluloid in the corner?’

  ‘Acetate film. Anti-glare coating for the incident board. A guy dropped it off here earlier.’

  ‘What sort of guy?’

  ‘Just a guy. He was a salesman. Left it as a free sample. He said it would work well on our incident board.’

  ‘In case you get snow blindness from staring at it.’

  ‘It was free, what are you worried about?’

  I called Meirion at the Cambrian News and we arranged to meet at the museum in half an hour. I arrived early and stood for a while pondering in the gloom and enjoying the calm that fills the soul in a world of musty linen, penny-farthings, and whalebone corsetry. Clip the Sheepdog stood mutely in his glass tomb, ear permanently cocked for the Great Farmer’s whistle. The dead Santa had been to see him and afterwards said his life was fulfilled. That had to mean something. Was it something about the dog or the war? The casual visitor could visit the town and leave without ever knowing about the war that had been fought in 1961 for the colony of Patagonia. It was one of those things kept hidden from view, a war no one wanted to talk about – the Welsh Vietnam.

  The settlers left Wales in the middle of the nineteenth century to start a new life. They sent letters home complaining how hard and unforgiving the land was; wresting potatoes from the soil was like wrenching coins from a miser’s hand. And yet, paradoxically, when the war of independence erupted they spent three years irrigating the land with their blood, rather than surrender the colony. Some people saw it all as a monument to an essential truth about the human condition: to contrariness, or man’s deep-seated need to moan. But not me. For all the names of obscure battles we memorised in school, the campaigns and mountain ranges, the lamas and lamentation, the one image that has remained with me across the years is the strange story of their arrival on those far off shores. The story of the first day. The good ship Mimosa was anchored out in the bay, men were wading ashore; and one man – the perennial early bird – ran ahead and climbed a nearby hill to view the promised land. What happened next must surely have crushed their spirits and made them want to turn back. But emigrating in those days was a life sentence against which there was no appeal. Everything you had was sold to buy the dream, the one-way ticket; there was no surplus and no returning. You had to admire their guts; or their desperation . . .

  What did the man see, that first Welshman on the top of that hill? The Welsh Cortez? He saw the cruel wisdom which had been available to him at his grandmother’s knee, but which he had scorned because of her simple ways; and because knowledge only becomes wisdom once you have paid a high price, and traversed oceans for it. He saw a simple truth: that a man who arrives in the marketplace to sell dreams from atop a hastily upturned crate, and who casts anxious looks around every now and again as if in fear of arrest, is not to be trusted. He saw that a man who claims to have the cure for all known ills in his small bottle of cordial and wears clothes covered in patches is not to be believed. He saw that a man who has found what all men since the beginning of time have sought, a promised land, might reasonably be expected to go and live there himself; not sell tickets with an air of furtive desperation in the marketplace.

  But hope, like love, is a powerful drug that subverts all calls to reason. Patagonia! Where the soil was so rich you could cook and baste with it; rivers so
full of gold it took two people to carry a bucket of water; lambs which made the ground tremble as they walked, and arrived ready-seasoned from grazing in the vales of mint. A blessed grove where troubles were unknown; but which, strangely, only Magellan had heard of. A far-off land named after a race of Indians who had vanished from this world and whose only imprint in the sands of time seemed to have been – and oh, the cruel irony of it – the fact that they had big feet. What did he see from the top of that hill? The Welsh Cortez? No one knows. He disappeared into thin air. The very first settler: climbed to the top of the hill and was never seen again. Don’t tell me that isn’t an omen.

  Meirion had said he’d bring the paper’s film critic along, but when he arrived there was only him. Then I saw he was wearing a different hat and I understood. He greeted me with a warm smile and took a stick of rock out of his pocket and went through the slow ritual of removing the cellophane. He pointed at Clip. ‘They say it’s the second most enigmatic smile in the history of art.’

  ‘After the Mona Lisa?’

  ‘That’s right, but without the guile.’

  ‘I didn’t know they used dogs in war.’

  ‘They used loads, they just don’t like to talk about it too much. They’re ashamed, you see.’

  ‘What of?’

  ‘Of what you have to do to get a dog to disobey his natural instinct and run headlong into machine-gun fire.’

  ‘What do you have to do? Throw a stick?’

  Meirion smiled. ‘No. You have to use the dog’s deep love and devotion, his loyalty to and trust in his master. There’s nothing else on earth quite like a dog’s love for his master. And it’s freely given. A bit of food, a bit of kindness, a few soothing words and a pat on the head, some slippers to fetch, that’s all it takes. Then, once you’ve got it, once the dog loves you so much he will trust you absolutely and do anything you say, you can send him into the minefield.’

  I grimaced at the picture Meirion had painted. ‘So what’s the story about the new movie, Bark of the Covenant?’

  ‘Technically it’s not new. It’s just been re-cut. The director’s cut, I suppose you’d call it – he’s dead now, but he left detailed instructions on how he wanted it. Clip was a kind of Lassie, you see. He used to star in the newsreels shot in the What the Butler Saw format. At first it was all factual stuff, but because the news was rarely good they started to embellish it a bit. Before long Clip became so popular back home no one wanted to hear about the war unless Clip was in the story. So they blurred the boundaries between fact and fiction. In fact, they didn’t so much blur them as blow them away. They started producing full-length features masquerading as newsreels. Bark of the Covenant and Through a Dog Darkly are the most famous. Last spring some workmen rebuilding the Pier found a walled-up room with a runic inscription above the door. Inside they found an archive of lost Clip footage. Some enthusiasts restored the movie and transferred the print to 70mm.’