‘I promise.’
She fumbled for my hand, and squeezed it. ‘I think it’s time. Do you know the bench outside the gate that overlooks the town?’
‘Yes.’
‘Will you walk me to it?
‘Of course.’
‘I go every day. I’ve got a friend. But she’s not allowed in here.’
We walked down the path to the bench. Miss Evangeline’s friend was already there, waiting, sitting with her back to us, looking out at the prospect of Cardigan Bay. It was Lorelei, the one-eyed streetwalker. She allowed the thick powder on her face to crack in a thin smile of recognition when she saw me; a look of understanding passed between us, the look shared by two people who have spent too many hours of their lives walking the Prom late at night. She had take-away tea in Styrofoam cups and placed them on the bench between us.
‘I’m sorry there’s not one for you,’ she said. And Miss Evangeline said, ‘He can have some of mine. Don’t forget the . . .’
Lorelei took a quarter-bottle of spirits from her bag and fortified the tea. We drank a toast to the new year.
‘Me and Lorelei went to school together,’ said Miss Evangeline. ‘Sometimes we just sit here and don’t say a word.’
I left them to their tea and silent communion, went down the steps that led to North Road, and headed for my own personal confessor. Sospan. He was still there, leaning over an empty counter, staring out to sea.
‘Not closing early for Christmas?’ I said.
‘You should know me better than to ask that.’
‘No one would hold it against you if you did.’
‘Does the wolf take Christmas off?’
‘Not as far as I am aware.’
‘So how, then, can the shepherd?’
‘Is that what you are?’
‘Not precisely, but I have my role.’
‘And what is that?’
‘I provide spiritual sustenance.’
‘With ice cream?’
‘That is the vehicle.’
‘But it’s just frozen milk, isn’t it?’
A hint of annoyance darkened his countenance. ‘You think milk isn’t important? Milk is the staff of life.’
‘I thought that was bread.’
‘The spiritual staff.’
‘I see.’
‘It’s the first food you ever taste, the essence of the bond between mother and infant. The bond before the great betrayal.’
‘What was the great betrayal?’
‘It’s what your mother did to you, and you never forgave her.’
‘I never even met mine. What did she do?’
Sospan paused and blinked, as if it was difficult even now to talk about it.
‘What did she do?’
‘Weaned you, didn’t she. Took away her breast.’
‘Oh, I see.’
‘You never really get over the shock of that. Did you know in some cultures the mother puts wormwood on her nipple to make it taste nasty? It’s in Romeo and Juliet: “When it did taste the wormwood on the nipple / Of my dug, and felt it bitter, pretty fool”
‘So how do you differ from the milkman?’
Sospan winced and a look of resignation stole across his face, as if the realisation was dawning that he had chosen the wrong person to try and express the ineffable to.
‘Mr Knight, I’m surprised at you. I can only assume you are trying to provoke me. That’s like asking how the wine the priest gives with the sacrament differs from the stuff you get in the pub. In one sense it may not differ at all, in the purely technical sense of its provenance. But it is invested with symbolic freight of the most far-reaching consequences for those who believe. For them it represents the blood of Christ.’
‘What does your ice represent?’
‘Balm.’
‘Balm?’
‘A mother’s love.’
‘So you are like the big mother figure?’
‘I prefer to regard my role as that of a shaman.’
‘What about the flake?’
‘What about it?’
‘What does that symbolise?’
‘Nothing, you big twit. Not everything has to mean something. You should read your Freud. You know what he said? Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar. It’s the same with the flake.’
I took my ice cream and wandered down the Prom towards the harbour. At Castle Point I found Eyeore standing across from the Old College, looking flustered. Three donkeys, led by Ariadne, waited patiently.
‘What’s wrong, Dad?’ I said.
‘Barbarians in the citadel,’ he said. ‘That’s what we are.’
‘Are we? How so?’
He held out the book he was carrying. A guidebook to Wales published in the 1920s. ‘Read this and it breaks your heart, to see how things used to be, and what we are now. It’s like those pictures of a peasant farmer in Egypt, ploughing his field with oxen, irrigating his field with water from the Nile. A timeless ritual unchanged for centuries, like African farmers everywhere, except for one thing: He’s got the Great Pyramid of Cheops at the bottom of his field. He doesn’t know how it got there, nor what it is. No one knows. It’s been there for hundreds of years, left by a vanished race of superior beings. He’s a barbarian in the citadel. Just like us.’
He pushed the book toward me, opened to a page. ‘You see? The Royal Pier Pavilion; in those days it was seven hundred feet long and had its own orchestra. What is it now? Thirty feet, the rest blown away by a storm and never replaced. And then there’s the bandstand, home to “first-rate municipal bands” and “excellent London companies”. It was an age in which they were not ashamed to do things properly.’
Eeyore looked at me, brows furrowed in a pain almost palpable as he struggled to articulate the urgent truth hidden among the seeming pleasantries about bathing machines, 6d a time.
‘At what point did we change from being the people who built the wonder of the pleasure pier to the ones who couldn’t be bothered to repair it after a storm blew the end away?’
He paused as if expecting an answer and then continued, ‘And look at this: “To get the best view of Snowdon eighty miles north of Aberystwyth, stand on the Prom outside house number 7.”’
He looked at me in astonishment, silent, unable to find the words to convey what that discovery meant. What did it mean? That a guidebook should actually put someone’s address and tell you to go and stand on their doorstep to view distant Snowdon? Such a thing was inconceivable now. They’d call the police. A hundred years ago they would probably have invited you in for tea. And lent you a telescope.
‘Barbarians in the citadel,’ he said again.
‘Where’s the pyramid?’
He turned and pointed across the road at the Old College. ‘There.’
It was a lovely building, but architecturally it was the equivalent of a kid in a fancy-dress costumier’s who tries on everything at the same time. It had Rhineland castle and gothic turrets, battlements and mosaics, statues and garrets. It would have been absurd but for the warm yellow stone from which it was constructed. It soothed the incongruity and lent it a strange beauty. You could forgive a lot of architectural sins with stone like that.
‘It didn’t use to be a college, it was built as a hotel by the railway company.’
I understood his astonishment. It was impossible to envisage a modern railway company possessing the self-belief to build something like that. Nowadays they just unbuilded things. The old Great Western Region terminus on Alexandra Road got smaller every time you went; like a family of impoverished aristocrats who had closed down all the rooms and were living in the scullery. One day the train from Shrewsbury will arrive and find nothing there.
‘You got a week’s free bed and board if you bought a return ticket at Euston. Nowadays they can’t even cut the grass between the tracks. You know what it is, don’t you?’ said Eeyore. ‘It’s like that movie with Charlton Heston about the apes. You know the scene at the end when he rides t
hat horse along the beach and sees the torch of the Statue of Liberty projecting out of the sand? Suddenly he realises he’s been on Planet Earth all along, after it has been taken over by apes. That’s Aberystwyth.’
He shoved the book into my hands. ‘You keep it, it just annoys me.’ He tugged Ariadne’s halter free from the railing. ‘Barbarians in the citadel,’ he muttered and led the troop away, on the never-ending traverse of the ruined Prom; the Ozymandias of Cardigan Bay.
I cast my gaze back down at the pages of the book and found the text that had most upset him; words of almost inexpressible poignancy. Aberystwyth, it said, was superior to many fashionable continental watering holes in being entirely free of such meteorological nuisances as the mistral, the sirocco or dust storms. In fact, said Sir James Clark, the court physician, it was better than Switzerland.
The words stabbed the heart. Free from the effects of the sirocco, that hot dry desert wind that blows in off the Sahara and ruins your picnic. It was impossible to imagine a guidebook writer expressing such sentiments today; and there was only one reason the man fifty years ago could write them: it would never have occurred to him that his audience might laugh. And they for their part would never have dreamed of responding to his kindly homilies with such impertinence. And that was it, the essence of our malaise: our forefathers were entirely free of that despicable modern vice, facetiousness. I stood transfixed for a while, infected with Eeyore’s melancholy. He had reached the Pier now, or what was left of it after the storm forty years ago: a dilapidated shed bathed in thin grey drizzle, and Matterhorned with seagull droppings; but still undisturbed by those hot, dry Saharan winds.
Chapter 10
THE NEXT DAY was Sunday and we drove to Lampeter, about half an hour’s journey south-east of Aberystwyth. Calamity had spoken on the phone to Emily’s roommate at the college and she was willing to talk to us. Her name was Eleri. On the way, Calamity tried to recap the case but there wasn’t much to recap.
‘We’ve got an old man dressed as Father Christmas. He goes to see the new Clip movie and afterwards gets whacked. Maybe intentionally, maybe accidentally.’
‘My money’s on accidentally. Could have happened to anyone – he just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. Simple drive-by slaying.’
‘My money’s on that, too. The Clip movie was made from footage found by workmen rebuilding the Pier.’
‘There was a druid inscription warning them not to open the room, so naturally they did just that.’
‘The movie is about the Mission House Siege. Something bad happened there, so bad no one wants to talk about it, although they don’t show it in the movie.’
‘The army chaplain went mad.’
‘A taxidermist saw the movie and hanged himself from Trefechan Bridge.’
‘A guy called Elijah turns up claiming to be the brother of the dead Father Christmas.’
‘We think the dead guy hid a ticket from the Pier hat-check office in the alley before he died. The item deposited is a photo of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. This angle is potentially very interesting.’
‘Or it’s a red herring.’
‘I’ve got a hunch it’s the key to the whole thing.’
‘I’ve got a hunch you’re only saying that because you’re star-struck about the Pinkertons.’
‘No, I’m not.’
‘Believe me, there’s nothing special about them. You may think so now, but one day when you run into one of them you’ll realise he’s exactly like anyone else: a tired, soul-weary, overworked guy in a crumpled suit, with a failed marriage and a suitcase in the attic in which he stores a load of dusty things that used to be the youthful ideals he started out with.’
Calamity looked at me askance. ‘Sounds like you know this guy.’
‘He’s every man who got past thirty without making something of his life. That’s most people in Aberystwyth, including me.’
She thought for a second and decided not to go down that route. ‘What about the Queen of Denmark?’
‘I’ve no idea.’
‘Think she’s for real?’
‘No, but then the whole thing is so crazy maybe she is.’
‘That’s what I think. It’s hard to believe someone would invent a routine like that if they were trying to trick you, because only someone really stupid would fall for it.’
‘Which means she must be for real, because if she’s not it means I’m really stupid.’
‘Don’t be like that. It means I’m really stupid, too.’
‘That’s all right, then. The odds against two people being so stupid are too formidable. She must be genuine.’
‘You really think so?’
‘I’m a hundred per cent certain she’s genuine. All the same, if you get a moment, speak to Llunos about getting the calls traced.’
We reached Lampeter College and drove under a stone arch into an inner court yard. We parked and approached the first student we saw. They weren’t hard to spot. They were all wearing the distinctive uniform of Lampeter College of Theology: a henna, beige and grey striped scarf over a tan duffel coat printed with a repeating pattern of crosses and coffins. The girl said Eleri was teaching Sunday School. Colleges don’t normally teach children on Sunday morning, but this was no ordinary college. They took seriously the scholar’s vocation of shining a light in the darkness. The girl walked us across a quad towards a low single-storey wing of the college, through an arched door into an old-fashioned schoolroom: rows of wooden desks scarred with years of wear and tear. Fuzzy yellow lights hung from the ceiling. It smelled of paraffin and that subtle mixture of sweetness and fart that collects around cloistered children. The children all stood up when we entered.
Eleri greeted us warmly and shook our hands. ‘This is home economics,’ she said. ‘Just the basic stuff at this age: weaving fabric from cobwebs, making soap from grit, anthracite perfume, penny hoarding, a hundred uses for stale bread, fifty simple one-cauldron dishes, making shoes out of slate. You know the sort of thing.’
‘It all sounds very impressive,’ I said. ‘My late mother, God rest her soul, always insisted on a traditional education.’
‘I knew it the moment I saw you,’ said Eleri. ‘Come, let’s try them with their catechism. You’ll be impressed.’ She turned to the class. ‘Right now, girls, who can tell me how the Soldiers for Jesus were founded?’
Hands went up around the room and the teacher pointed. ‘Yes, Meurig.’
‘Ma’am, there were three sisters from Llandre and they were walking one day and they chanced upon a woman who later scholars have revealed to have been an apparition of the Virgin Mary.’
‘Very good. And then what happened? Menna?’
‘Ma’am, she was drinking holy water from a brown paper bag and her speech was slurred.’
‘That’s right. Now who can tell us what she said?’
‘She revealed a sacred truth to the children.’
‘And what was it?’
Some of the hands went down.
‘Yes, Rhiannon.’
‘Miss, she said human happiness was just a fleeting will-o’-the-wisp; the tap of the hand on the window of a traveller in the night.’
‘A traveller who is running from the gallows, miss,’ another child added.
‘That’s right, very good. And what else did she say? Yes, Meryl.’
The girl stood up and recited with the air of one who is very proud of the words but has never really reflected much on their meaning. ‘She said that things are very bad, much worse than anyone thought. God didn’t have the heart to tell us just how bad things are and this was because He was a typical man. “We arrive as penniless beggars and beg for milk; we waste our lives pursuing empty dreams, deluded by myths of love and romance; the only thing that sustains us is hope, dangling like a carrot, the biggest lie of all. For how can there be hope for a race who will end their lives in a gabbling madness of disease and senility? Bereavement and mourning, loss and decay an
d despair; childbirth and betrayal; drunkenness and abuse; infant mortality, disease striking out of a cloudless sky at anyone; no warning, no indication; too little money, too great a burden; this is our lot. Denied fulfilment all our lives; haunted by desires that can never be stilled; robbed in our final days of all shreds of dignity; and heading for death, which spares none. And beyond? Oh, don’t even ask! It gets worse but I don’t have the heart in me to tell you poor blighters.” And they said, “Oh, go on, tell us, tell us,” and they wouldn’t leave her alone, so she vouchsafed them a vision of a Heaven which is like Blaenau Ffestiniog without the little railway: a lot of slate, and low cloud and drizzle, and a lot of gorse. The angels play tambourines and wear fustian. There’s also a small gift shop.’
‘That’s excellent, Meryl. Now who can tell us what happened next?’
Another girl supplied the answer. Two of the sisters, overwhelmed by the majesty of their vision, founded the Church of Our Lady of the Paper Bag. But because many people were too ignorant to see the beauty of the vision and said it didn’t sound very nice they needed to be forcibly persuaded for their own good, and thus was born the military arm of the Church of our Lady of the Paper Bag, the Soldiers for Jesus. Their job it was to open the eyes of the unbelievers. The third girl, seeing the message of the prophet as confirmation that all routes through this vale of tears are useless, took the third fork in the path, the route to Aberystwyth. She embraced the gaudy life and began to make seaside rock.
As Eleri showed us back out to the yard I said, ‘That was quite an interesting vision of Heaven. I’d never pictured it like that before.’
She giggled. ‘Yes, I expect you saw it more as angels and harps and puffy white clouds.’
‘Isn’t that how most people see it?’
‘Well, I expect parts of it are like that. The bit revealed to us was just the Welsh section.’
‘Do they have sections in Heaven?’
‘Oh yes, they have to. You see, it used to be nondenominational but it caused too many problems. People felt short-changed when they arrived and found that all paths to God were equally valid. It just didn’t seem fair if some people could wear brightly coloured clothes and take drugs and stuff and still get to Heaven, whereas people like us had to get fifteen hundred Sunday School attendance credits and wear shoes made of slate, and every Christmas get a stocking filled with rotten fruit to stand a chance. Especially if someone you hate also gets to be with God and you know they didn’t give a tinker’s damn about Him when they were alive. Don’t you agree? It’s an outrage really – I mean, it makes you wonder why you bothered. So now everyone arrives in their own segregated cordons and has the satisfaction of knowing that, of all the faiths and ways of believing, the one they chose was the only one that worked.’
Don’t Cry For Me Aberystwyth an-4 Page 10
