Don’t Cry For Me Aberystwyth an-4

by Malcolm Pryce

  ‘What would they do?’

  ‘The first thing they’d do is do nothing. That’s rule number one. Whatever you do, don’t make it worse. Then you consider your options. Maybe case the joint. I was thinking we could buy time by staging an argument in front of the incident board – you throw a tin of paint at me, and it goes over the board. That way we can take it down without arousing his suspicion.’

  ‘Why don’t we forget about the Pinkertons for the time being?’

  ‘After what the girl in Lampeter said? She practically confirmed it. Absalom was trying to find the granddaughter of Etta Place and Sundance. In Aberystwyth! How can you say just forget about it?’

  ‘Please give it a rest. This isn’t their case, it’s ours; and despite the generous measure of autonomy I give you, I’m still the boss.’

  She opened her mouth to protest but saw my expression and thought better of it.

  Eeyore turned up a few minutes later and seeing the look of pain on my face, asked, ‘What’s up?’

  Calamity, misunderstanding, said, ‘We’ve got a Pieman.’

  ‘What’s that?’ he said and so she explained.

  ‘I don’t think I’ve heard of one of those before,’ said Eeyore.

  ‘That’s because they’re pretty rare,’ said Calamity. ‘We have to proceed with great subtlety; otherwise you can frighten the Pieman off. The best way to handle a Pieman—’

  ‘The best way is to walk right up there and kick his ass,’ I said.

  ‘Don’t be crazy!’ said Calamity. ‘Do that and you’ll ruin everything. You’ll spook Hoffmann and then we’ll never find out who . . .’ The words petered out.

  ‘Who what?’

  ‘Nothing.’

  ‘Who what?’

  ‘Who . . . who Hoffmann is.’

  ‘I know what you were going to say. You were going to say “Butch Cassidy” or “Sundance” or something.’

  ‘I wasn’t.’

  ‘You were. I thought I told you not to mention the Pinkertons again, but all I’ve heard from you on this case is Butch Cassidy this and Sundance that.’

  ‘Louie, that’s not true.’

  ‘You just couldn’t do it, could you?’ I was still upset about Llunos and the Queen of Denmark. But as so often in life it is someone else who pays the bill. This time Calamity.

  ‘Louie, I—’

  ‘You just wouldn’t listen. You had to go on and on. Well, let me tell you something. When you set up your own outfit you can be associate partners with whoever you want, but for the time being it says “Louie Knight” on the door and the only associate partner we’ve got is Captain Morgan. I’m sorry if it cramps your style, but those are the rules and if you don’t like them you can always walk away.’

  ‘Right,’ said Calamity. She looked at me, mouth clenched tightly, eyes smarting with the beginning of tears. ‘Right, then, I will.’

  We watched her walk up the Prom towards the office and Sospan said, ‘Don’t worry, Louie, things will be better around here once he comes.’

  I said nothing and then, as the import of his words made an impression, asked ‘Who?’

  ‘Our redeemer.’

  I looked at him with a mixture of disbelief and anger. ‘What are you talking about?’

  ‘When he comes to redeem us.’

  ‘Who’s going to do that?

  ‘Who do you think?’ Sospan shrugged slightly as if to disassociate himself from the words. ‘That’s what people are saying, isn’t it? He who is coming to save us. . . . Hoffmann.’

  ‘Hoffmann?’

  ‘It means Hopeman in German, you see. That’s what folk are saying. They’ve worked it out. It’s a message to us. He’s coming.’

  ‘Hoffmann’s coming?’

  ‘He’s going to redeem us, Louie. Hopeman. Everything is going to be all right.’

  Chapter 13

  TINKER, TAILOR, Patagonian sailor, ex-Nazi . . . Hoffmann. He’s coming to save the townspeople. Hopeman. A false prophet, cut-price Messiah . . . the man they send when the town clock forgets to tick.

  The people who sit on my client’s chair, who are they?

  In books the first thing the PI says is ‘I don’t do divorce stuff.’ But that isn’t right. Does the greengrocer say, ‘I don’t do potatoes’?

  I’m thinking of changing the name on the door. Pandora Inc. That’s what I’m thinking of calling the place. I’m tired of the Knight Errant nonsense. It gives a false impression. It leads the unwary to believe I might be able to help. Pandora Inc on the frosted glass. That way they’ll know what they’re letting themselves in for. I can find out the truth for you but it won’t set you free.

  The people who sit on my client’s chair, why are they there? It’s because everyone wants to run to teacher when things go wrong.

  I tell them about two men I once knew. The two men I pity most in all the world. One was Sospan’s friend: a bald chap, a bit on the short side, but he never let that get him down. For a while he was the happiest man alive. Had everything anyone could want, always smiling and waving, the most popular guy in the street; never a care in the world. Then one day it all changed. Cut a tooth and needed to be weaned. They moved him on to solids. Poor guy never recovered. With time you learn to deal with the vicious blows life metes out. But not that one. Ask Sospan, he’ll tell you.

  His brothers and sisters didn’t even try to hide their glee at his fall from grace. What? You thought it was going to be like that all along, did you? Welcome to life. First thing you learn, milk isn’t free. You can never really trust anyone after that. You just lie there in the cot trying to work it out. The betrayal. All the time we were doing that ‘never a care in the world’ routine, she must have known. She knew and she never said a word. Wormwood on the nipple. No wonder babies cry so much. And the other guy? Ah, you don’t want to know about him.

  We stood stiffly in the early-morning frost, our breath visible like dragon smoke. Above our heads the Pieman’s light burned, a dark orange star; neither of us looked up.

  ‘Well, I guess this is it,’ Calamity said, the fingers of her small hand, clad in pale-blue fingerless mitts, twitching on the handle of the suitcase. ‘Thanks again for everything.’

  ‘Nothing to thank me for, it’s . . . it’s been great. I’m sorry you’re going.’

  ‘I think it’s for the best. I was thinking about the things you said . . . I feel I have to see the Pinkerton thing through; otherwise I might regret it one day.’

  She wore a drab military green parka with the hood up; fake grey fur framing her face in a sweet oval.

  ‘Louie?’

  Like a vignette from the old-time photographers who used to be on the Pier.

  ‘Louie? Are you listening?’

  ‘Yes. Sorry, I was looking at your hood.’

  ‘I was saying I could regret it otherwise.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘You don’t often get a break like this.’

  ‘No, you don’t. Have you got an office?’

  ‘I’m using my auntie’s front room in Prospect Street for the time being, until I can find somewhere more permanent.’

  ‘You don’t want to rush it; the right office makes all the difference.’

  ‘That’s what I thought. I’ll probably need to talk to the people in LA about it, anyway.’

  ‘Yes, they’ll have some ideas. What about the anti-glare acetate – do you want to take that?’

  ‘Don’t you need it?’

  ‘I’ve managed without for most of my life.’

  ‘I was thinking it might be smarter to leave it; that way the guy might come back and try and sell me some stuff in the new office. Might be able to get a better look at him this time.’

  ‘That’s a good idea.’

  We stood and stared at each other. Calamity’s fingers still twitched on the suitcase handle. In the sharp early-morning cold her skin glowed and her cheeks were crimson like a carol singer’s in an illustrated Christmas card.

&nb
sp; She held out her hand. ‘So long, then.’

  We shook.

  ‘So long. Just call if you need anything.’

  She walked off down the street towards the library; flakes of snow fluttered down from the grey dawn. I turned and walked up the stairs to the office, sat down with a sigh, and put my feet on the desk. I pulled open the drawer and took out my associate partner, Captain Morgan.

  The phone rang. I picked it up at the wrong end and got the flex tangled round my hand. Fixing it meant using the other hand but that would mean relinquishing my hold on the bottle of rum, which wasn’t a great idea. I leaned forward across the desk and grunted into the phone.

  ‘Gloria in excelsis Deo!’ said the voice. It was the Queen of Denmark.

  ‘Not round here, it isn’t.’

  ‘Oh dear, have I caught you at a bad time?’

  ‘The odds were in favour of it.’

  ‘I’m sorry?’

  ‘It was statistically inevitable that you would, sooner or later.’

  ‘You’ve been drinking, haven’t you?’

  ‘Don’t tell me you don’t approve.’

  ‘It’s not even nine thirty.’

  ‘I bet the Vikings never worried about things like that.’

  ‘Oh dear.’

  ‘Stop saying “Oh dear.”’

  ‘Goodness!’

  ‘I’m not a fan of that expression, either.’

  ‘No? How about this one: go stick your head up your ass!’ She hung up.

  I went down to the Spa to buy some liquor. When I got back the phone was ringing. It was the Queen of Denmark.

  ‘I’m sorry I said that.’

  ‘It wasn’t very queen-like.’

  ‘We don’t always do it like the ones in Hans Christian Andersen. He was Danish, too, by the way.’

  ‘Or maybe you’re not a queen.’

  ‘What am I, then?’

  ‘That’s what I don’t understand. Someone who’s got it in for me, maybe. You know, it never occurred to me, but putting that ad in the paper has sure landed me in a lot of trouble with the cops.’

  ‘Is that what this is about? The ad?’

  ‘It’s about lots of things.’

  ‘Why don’t you go home to bed and put your head under the pillow and make the bad world go away.’

  ‘I might just do that?’

  ‘They told me you were a man.’

  ‘They lied to you.’

  ‘Clearly.’

  ‘They always lie; it’s the only thing you can count on.’

  ‘You’re really feeling sorry for yourself, aren’t you?’

  ‘If you were me, you would, too.’

  ‘Aw, diddums!’ She hung up again.

  I put the cap on the bottle and drove home to my caravan in Ynyslas. Sometimes it’s good to put your head under the pillow and make the bad world go away. But there are times when the balm of sleep won’t come, and then you need stronger medicine. Eeyore gave it to me once; the bottle lies under the bed in my caravan. Toulouse-Lautrec’s favourite tipple: absinthe. The green goddess, green as the sea when it snows in February; it turns milky in water like the eyes of a blind girl I once knew. I sat at the caravan table, drizzled the liquor over a spoonful of sugar and incanted my favourite poem. It’s called ‘Ingredients’. Angelica, hyssop, melissa, lemon balm, veronica and cardamon, liquorice root . . . such beautiful soothing names, like girls we once loved on summer days . . . angelica, melissa, veronica . . . and wormwood. The bitterest substance known to man. In Ancient Rome the victor in the chariot race had to drink a cup to remind him that life had its bitter side, too. As if anyone needed reminding. Wormwood on the nipple: that’s one hell of an overture. How could life disappoint after a start like that? Poor old Juliet.

  Never blame the parents, though. They do their best to make it up. They give you childhood. It wears them out but they don’t complain. Every child starts life on the stage and never notices Mum and Dad running back and forth, wheeling on the sets, wheeling them off. Stage managing. Two big productions every year: summer holidays and Christmas. Payback for the wormwood.

  They take you to the seaside to live in caravans: tin boxes painted hospital green, bathroom blue and lemon curd; with chintzy curtains and bad TV reception; rooms synonymous elsewhere with failed lives but which for a while become palaces. Set in dry scrubby land on breeze blocks, amid sandy spiky grass that not even camels could eat. The tea tastes of plastic cups; sand in wasp-tormented jam sandwiches grinds against tooth enamel; the milk comes warm from a shop that smells of inflatable plastic trash. The sun never shines and the sea is the same colour as the run-off from a washing machine. Every morning the inside of the caravan drips with condensation, and yet it is all so unutterably lovely.

  For Christmas they slave all through autumn, taking in extra sewing, to give you a cornucopia. Your heart’s desire. Just ask, and you get it. It defies all the rules you are later forced to learn about life. You never see how tired those grown-ups are. Is there something they aren’t telling you? There are tell-tale signs, of course. There’s something odd about Santa’s beard; it doesn’t look real. And he smells. You don’t expect that of someone from Magic Land. Half the stuff you want doesn’t turn up and they say it’s too expensive, but how can that be if Santa’s paying? But kids are smart. They know it’s better not to enquire too deeply about some things. They know better than to look behind the sets. The crucial thing is not to let inquisitiveness jeopardise the coming miracle, the one compared to which later ones, such as first love or the miracle of birth, are but pale shadows: that delirious ecstasy of an empty pillow case left overnight that fills through some magic parthenogenesis with spontaneously generated presents, each wrapped in paper, bright blue or red, bearing repeating motifs – holly and berries, bells, cartoon reindeers – images sweeter than a mother’s face, which are torn apart amid a blizzard of fake snow. Flakes from a can drift and pile up inside the house and smell, inexplicably, of pine bath salts. They gather on the tree, the cards, and on the bauble that contains the uncomprehending face of a boy in pyjamas. Two flash-lit eyes, bright pinpricks of bafflement in a nimbus of coloured lights that twinkle as if a rainbow had been sawn up into logs, and ground to dust. There he lives for ever imprisoned in a silver bubble of memory, the boy that was me. The irises of his eyes darken across the years as the photographic dyes slowly age and the snow deepens, until one day it sets loose in the heart an avalanche of melancholy which nothing can assuage.

  All men collaborate in the noble, selfless counterfeit. It’s a code even criminals honour. Murderers, tyrants, footpads . . . they never let on. They keep mum. Only a very few, the sickest sociopaths who have to be locked away in special wings to protect them from the wrath of other prisoners, are exempt. So every time you wander back, get too close to a cardboard backdrop, there is a kindly guiding hand, a policeman, old lady, or bank robber, to push you gently back towards the footlights.

  Until the day you slip away; wander past the two-dimensional scenery flats and see them from the other side. See the carpenter’s tools and tins of paints. The wires and pulleys. The discarded manikins and cups of instant coffee. Back into the bowels where all is painted black, down the stairs through the door marked Exit, into the cold wet street. Drizzle, gasometers, factory hooter. Newspaper gusting down the street. Life . . .

  The long walk to the client’s chair.

  Next morning I stepped gingerly over the empty bottles that rolled around the floor with unpleasantly amplified sounds. I fried some eggs, drank some coffee, and drove to town taking care to avoid my face in the driving mirror. The office was as I’d left it; smelling faintly of rum but probably not as much as I did. There were no messages and no indication that anybody had called, or cared, which didn’t greatly surprise me, so I went for a walk. I had no goal in mind but my steps took me along the Prom towards the harbour and then I turned in after the castle and walked past the Castle pub. Another block and I was in Prospect Street. I didn�
��t remember taking any decision to go there but here I was. The curtains of Calamity’s office in the front room were closed but a light indicated she was open for business. I went to the front door and stood for a while, my hand in my pocket forming a fist to knock on the door. Then I walked back to the office. It seemed bigger. And emptier. Captain Morgan stared at me from the bin; he’d lost the power to spell the world away; the flames of the torch had gone out and the wolves howled. I spent the next three days like that. I walked along the Prom and down to the harbour, and back via Prospect Street, where I always paused but didn’t knock. A couple of times I thought I saw the man in the fedora, but I couldn’t be sure.

  On the fourth day I passed a vagrant playing a violin on the pavement outside the entrance to the Pier. There was a hat at his feet but nothing in it. The familiar words passed through my head in accompaniment to his playing. ‘Brightly shone the moon that night, though the frost was cruel. Then an old man came in sight, gathering winter few-oooh-el.’ I stopped. The man was Cadwaladr, the old veteran of the war in Patagonia. He stopped playing and said, ‘Bring me flesh and bring me wine, bring me pine logs hither.’ I showed him a bottle of rum in my Spar bag and he packed up the violin.

  ‘Follow me,’ he said. ‘I know just the place.’

  We walked down towards the harbour.

  ‘I thought you were painting the railway bridge across the Dovey estuary.’

  ‘I was.’

  ‘You said it was a job for life.’

  ‘It was. Finish one end, and time to start again at the other end. Like Sisyphus, only better scenery.’

  ‘What happened? Get tired of it?’

  ‘Nope. They invented a new kind of paint. Lasts ten years.’

  ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘They gave me redundancy money – I bought a van. See.’

  He took me to a van parked on the Prom across from the Yacht Club. It looked like a superannuated ambulance or a furniture van or something. It looked like a lot of the vans that got parked here: mobile homes for people whose dogs had string for a leash. The poor man’s Winnebago. He opened the back, pulled out a folding table and two matching chairs and set them up on the pavement. I put the bottle down and sat.