‘What did the inscription say?’
‘I don’t know but I can guess: “A curse upon all who enter” or something like that.’ He laughed. ‘I mean, when you get a druid inscription above a sealed chamber it doesn’t usually say, “Come in and make yourself at home”.’
Before he left, Meirion gave me a newspaper clipping which he thought I might find interesting. It was from a few weeks ago and told the strange story of a man who had hung himself after seeing the premiere of Bark of the Covenant. He had been a taxidermist. Meirion gave me the address and said the man’s daughter was living there now. The house was nearby, on Bryn Road, and I decided to pay her a visit. The girl, her eyes still red with crying, peeped round the door at me and invited me in. I was shown to a chair in a small sitting room in front of a gas fire that hissed softly in the gloom. The mantelpiece was arrayed with the usual knick-knacks, stuff which I could tell had belonged to her dead father and mother: cheap silver-plated candlesticks, a Coronation mug, miniature brass elephants set beside a brass shell case from the Great War; framed photos of various dead people, and a south-coast seaside resort where a young couple grinned awkwardly into a camera forty years ago. A brass letter holder stuffed with letters and cards, none of them from abroad. The accumulated detritus of a life, all that was left of the good times two people had shared. Put them all together in a box and sell them through Exchange and Mart, you might get the cost of a second-class stamp.
‘I’m so sorry,’ said the girl, dabbing her eyes. ‘I . . . I . . .’
‘Take your time,’ I said gently. She was somewhere in her mid-twenties, wrapped up in a bilberry-coloured mackintosh which looked like it might be quite an expensive model, belted tightly at a narrow waist. Her hair was cropped in a pageboy bob, ivory colour, the way they did it in Flemish paintings back in the time when the Flems went in for painting. She was very pretty, with clear blue eyes and tear-stained cheeks which some would describe as pellucid. It was the sort of complexion they use to advertise cosmetics even though you never get a complexion that good using powder. Two weeks ago her father had gone to see the new Clip movie and after that he had walked down to Trefechan Bridge by the harbour, attached a length of cord to the central light fitting, and hanged himself from it. He swayed like a pendulum in the breeze all night and was found in the early light by a fisherman going to work. If he’d been my dad, I would have cried, too.
She picked up a tissue and with a determined effort to move things along blew her nose with a sharp and unseemly ‘parp’ sound.
‘You say he hanged himself after seeing the movie, but does that imply simply a temporal relation like saying it was after the six o’clock news, or are you implying there is a causative connection?’
‘I’m sorry, I . . .’
‘I mean, when you say “after” do you just mean after the movie, or do you mean he killed himself because of something he saw in it?’
‘Because of what he saw, yes, there is no doubt about it. No doubt whatsoever.’
‘There’s usually doubt about these things . . .’
‘You didn’t know my father. His life was ruined by that dog.’ She gave me a look which challenged me to make light of such a claim. I left the gauntlet where it lay. ‘You’ve seen the stuffed Clip at the museum?’ she said.
‘Plenty of times.’
‘What do you think of it?’
‘I don’t generally think about it. To me it’s just a dog in a glass cage.’
‘What about the smile? Do you agree it’s like the Mona Lisa? Mysterious, enigmatic, but with perhaps a little less guile?’
‘Not really. All collies look like that.’
‘My father hated that expression. It destroyed him.’
‘That’s quite a strong opinion to have about a stuffed dog’s smile.’
‘For you perhaps. But my father was a taxidermist. He had a wonderful career ahead of him. He could have been one of the greats . . . perhaps the greatest of all. With work on show in Moscow town hall or the Sorbonne. But life is full of what-might-have-beens isn’t it?’ Her head was lowered but she raised her tear-filled eyes as if to seek my complicity in this bitter truth. ‘Oh yes, he never stopped finding fault with Clip. There was never a day when he did not criticise the piece for various technical failings: ears too sharply angled, tongue too pink, the line of the spine not straight enough . . . but he knew they were irrelevant, like criticising Michelangelo for getting David’s head out of proportion. Secretly he knew the truth: it was an act of divine creation. Angels must have reached down and anointed the stuffer while he worked. The day my father saw the unveiling of Clip at the museum he felt like Salieri when he first heard the music of Mozart. His heart was shattered. He spent the rest of his life on his allotment; never stuffed another piece. With time, of course, the pain subsided. But then they re-released the movie and it all started again. We tried to stop him going, but it was no use. He came home after the movie with a face the colour of ash. Fetched something from his room and walked out into the night. That was the last time we saw him alive.’
Christmas is a time of rituals, some that have lost their meaning and some that acquire new meaning as the years pass and folks’ memories assume new forms. After I left the girl’s house I went back to the office to prepare for a modern Christmas ritual, one which had only recently come into being and which had a deeply personal significance for me. It was the annual swinging of the cricket bat. That sacred wand of willow with which, five years ago, I had knocked my old games teacher, Herod Jenkins, out of a plane door. For the rest of the year it stands in the corner of my office, in the place at the foot of the hatstand reserved for umbrellas and walking sticks. And once a year Gwynfor from the Rotary Club comes and takes it away. People pay 50p for a swing and with the proceeds some needy children acquire a new climbing frame or a day trip to Chester Zoo. Such are the quixotic strategies that Dame Fortune uses, planting the seeds of future joy in the loam of past tragedy.
Herod Jenkins survived the fall from the plane; Planet Earth just wasn’t hard enough. It’s only made of rock. Since then he had been on the run from the law with my former cleaner, Mrs Llantrisant. They made an improbable Bonnie and Clyde, robbing the same sub post offices from which they drew their pensions. Now, it appeared, they had taken employment at the circus, Herod using that famous upper body strength to earn his keep, to provide for his moll, as a strongman.
If only his victims had been possessed of such strength. The photo of my schoolmate Marty stands on the desk in the office. Propped next to it is a Christmas card from his mum which arrived two days ago. She never forgets. Just as none of us, not me nor Gwynfor nor anyone else who was there, will forget the time in the third year when Marty was sent off on that cross-country run into the blizzard and never returned. The weather had been vile that day; snow falling so thick the sheep on the hills suffocated as they stood. Herod was not hostile to the concept of postponing games in bad weather, but it never got bad enough on Earth. Only beneath the liquid methane clouds of Saturn, they said, where storms raged unabated for centuries at temperatures of minus 190°C, and winds howled at more than 2000 kilometres an hour did it start to look doubtful. A lightning bolt hits the ground-keeper’s hut and discharges in one flash more power than is generated on Planet Earth in ten years. OK, no games today.
I poured a rum and began to rub linseed oil into the talismanic bat. Before long I heard footsteps on the stairs outside and Gwynfor walked in, red-faced, chubby, cheery. We shook hands, and said how good it was to see each other again. Even before the sentence was finished his eyes were trained on the bottle. We drank to our health and we toasted dead Marty. We used to laugh at his lack of athletic prowess, the silly way he ran. Marty the seer, the saint, the one the gods loved, but not much. The day he came back with the X-ray showing the shadow on his lung he was almost exultant, as if it proved what he had long been trying to tell people: he was not meant for this world. He was a poet and had the poet’s disea
se to prove it: consumption. The white death. That dark spot on the lung worn as a badge of honour by Shelley, Kafka, and that bloke played by Dustin Hoffman in Midnight Cowboy. He named his budgie Hans Castorp in honour of the diagnosis. ‘Who is that?’ I said. ‘Oh, he’s a bloke from a book called The Magic Mountain.’ Sometimes he liked to mystify. But if it hadn’t been for him, what would I be doing today? I didn’t know, but I knew I wouldn’t be a private eye.
Gwynfor took the bat and walked across to the door. I crumpled up a piece of paper and bowled. ‘Howzat!’ he cried, the ball of paper thudded against the window pane and, as if the gods were anxious for our party not to lose sight of its serious purpose, a van drove past outside with a loud-hailer on the roof inviting us to the circus at Ponterwyd. The shadow fell. Gwynfor looked glum. He nodded, finished his drink in one go, wished me a Merry Christmas one more time, and left with the bat.
Chapter 7
PEOPLE WHO ARE afraid of the dark are not being unreasonable. Our deepest fears arise from instincts developed at the dawn of time when the world was much emptier. There were not many folks about. Human beings were the hairy guys in fur swimming costumes, stooping a bit because they were still getting used to standing on their hind legs. They were harmless to everybody except themselves. All the early indications were, they didn’t like themselves much. In those days, if you happened to be walking through the vast untamed wilderness and encountered that greatest of rarities, a stranger, someone from another tribe, the safest course of action was to kill him. That’s why they invented the police. But that experiment quickly turned sour, one of those cases where the cure was worse than the disease.
So humanity tried something more sophisticated. They invented something called the greeting. Just a little form of words, a comment on the weather, made as an opening gambit, trivial in content but far-reaching in its implications. It allowed men and women to come together and live in things called towns. Because they discovered a strange thing about the greeting. Nutters were incapable of exchanging pleasantries of this sort. It’s the same today. There has never been a more effective way of singling out the benign from the malign.
But it doesn’t work so well at night. If you encounter a stranger at night in a place where there are no street lamps, it is always an unnerving experience. Tadpole lived in a copse beyond the top of Penglais Hill where there were no lights, where the sun seldom reached, where families were often closely knit in ways proscribed by the Bible. A world with a high likelihood that anyone you encountered in the dark would be a nutter.
I had to leave the car at a five-bar gate held closed by a wire and counterweight strung over a pulley. The path was overgrown, a dark tunnel through wet black trees. I traced the route by gingerly testing the texture of dead leaves under my feet. Up ahead was a dark shape which might have been a clearing or quarry, or maybe the back door to Pluto’s realm. There was no light, except for a brief glimpse every now and then through gaps in foliage of the rectangular green direction sign at the side of the main road. It got smaller and smaller. The sounds of cars getting more and more muffled. I’ve always found those signposts strangely comforting, with the myth of order in the chaos that they suggest. You may be leaving town, they seem to say, but you will always be connected by the ribbon of tarmac, and you can’t go anywhere that those most prosaic of people, the council road menders, have not been before. But it was clear from the path beneath my feet that they hadn’t been here. An owl hooted. A lone star glimmered through a black cobweb of twigs and branches that groaned in the invisible breeze as if shaken by a giant’s hand. In my pocket my hand clutched the jar of Eye of Newt pesto that Tadpole had phoned and asked me to bring.
I came to a clearing in which stood a cottage. The windows were dark apart from one downstairs: black curtains edged with a glimmer of light. A man stood in the yard sharpening an axe at a grindstone, sending a flurry of blue sparks into the night. To the side of the house, there was a washing line hung with items that instinct warned one not to scrutinise; beyond that was a lonely grave. An invisible dog growled; the man stopped grinding and looked up.
‘Evening!’ I said.
There was no answer.
He was a fully grown man, maybe fifty or so, doing a man’s chore. But there was something about him that suggested a boy. It was difficult to say what it was, his demeanour perhaps, or his wardrobe – something about the cut or style of his clothes told you, in a way you couldn’t define, that here was a man in his fifties who was still dressed every morning by his mother. A man who lives his life in the feverish embrace, in too close and suffocating a communion with a mother’s love. A man who says little except for occasional grunts, and whom people refer to as ‘one of God’s children’. Until the time, that is, when the sheriff arrives late at night at the back door with a posse of men with frightened faces. The family sit in scared silence round the supper table, listening as Mother talks long and low under the porch. Then she comes back, her face having aged ten years in the space of that conversation, and says, ‘Billy will be going away for a while.’ And the men come in and take him away, their eyes narrowed and glittering with hate; and Mummy has no one else to dress and must face the terrors of this world alone.
I knocked on the door and Tadpole opened with the air of someone who has been peering impatiently through the curtains for the past hour. Yet when you finally arrive she makes you wait before answering to make it appear that she has forgotten that you were coming. The smell of Tadpole’s house was a sour mixture of infrequently washed flesh, soot, onions and dripping smells from the pantry; and the stultifying thickness of air breathed in rooms where the windows had years ago been sealed shut by paint, and the only fresh air that arrives enters via the chimney.
I’m not sure exactly what I had expected. A gauche attempt at dolling up, perhaps; a moth-eaten dress stored in the back of a wardrobe in a room no longer used; a dress last seen in a sepia vignette of Gran and Granddad on a day trip to Llandudno. But I was wrong. She was wearing military uniform. She had black trousers, sharply creased, with red piping down the inseam; a black military tunic with gold braid on the sleeves and epaulettes and medals on the chest. The whole ensemble mirrored in the brightly polished convex toes of her shoes. She looked like a bandsman who plays the French horn in a gazebo on Sunday afternoons. Her hair, the colour of wet straw, was parted manstyle and plastered down with something that might have been Brylcreem but could just as easily have been beef dripping. In the porch light I saw with grisly fascination that little flakes of dandruff were scattered in the furrow of her parting, like cornflakes from Lilliput.
She noted my surprise and mistook it for delight. ‘Not bad, huh?’ she said doing a pirouette. ‘I felt really stupid trying on a frock so I thought I would wear my Soldiers for Jesus uniform. It’s the one we wear for ceremonial occasions.’
She led me into the small sitting room. Her mum was sitting in an armchair at the fireside, knitting. She gave me a look of appraisal but registered no verdict on her face, neither approval or disapproval.
‘Mum, this is Louie, remember? The boy from my class in school.’
Again there was no hint as to how she received the news. The man from outside came in and Tadpole’s mum said something to him in Welsh and he went to the kitchen and started to brew tea. In the light of the sitting room I saw his face had a strange brightness which suggested that, although he watched the same events through the windows of his eyes as the rest of us, the narrative he invented to explain them was utterly alien.
I stood by the fireplace and, because no one spoke, said: ‘Was that a grave I saw outside under the washing line?’
‘Yes,’ said Tadpole. ‘It was the lodger.’
‘What did he die of?’
‘Happiness.’
There was another silence and I examined a photo above the fireplace. It was a school photo from long ago. ‘Upper School 1927’, said the caption. I ran my gaze across the sea of lost faces, faded into fuzzy bl
ack-and-white and no doubt many of them faded into the grave by now. In the back row there was a face that stopped me. It seemed vaguely familiar and there was a vicious pin right through it, between the eyes. I stopped and peered closer.
‘It’s Mrs Llantrisant,’ said Tadpole brightly.
I touched the pin. ‘Is this witchcraft?’
‘Yeah. Mum’s trying to whack her.’
‘Mrs Llantrisant used to swab my step,’ I said stupidly.
‘We know. Now she’s run away to the circus with Herod Jenkins.’
‘Mrs Llantrisant is a nasty old busybody,’ said Tadpole’s mum.
Tadpole took me upstairs and showed me her room. It was a shrine to Clip. The walls were festooned with memorabilia: film posters, publicity shots, Clip scarves and Clip toys. In pride of place over a bed with a Clip coverlet was a framed paw print. ‘It’s real,’ said Tadpole. ‘The man at the museum did it for me with the stuffed Clip. What do you reckon?’
‘It’s fantastic,’ I said.
‘Yeah, I think so too. Mum says I love Clip almost as much as I love Jesus.’
‘High praise coming from a Soldier for Jesus.’
‘Ha ha, Louie you’re so funny.’
All tickets for the movie had long ago been sold, but Meirion in his role as Cambrian News film critic had managed to pull a few strings for me, a fact which seemed to impress Tadpole to an unusually high degree. The queue wound down Portland Street and onto Queen’s Road. Tadpole talked the whole time about Clip and her other obsession, Jesus. I tried to ask about the tortured soldier but she wouldn’t be rushed. In the manner of obtaining the solicitude of men, life had obviously taught Tadpole to bargain hard and to use what little resources she had frugally.
Don’t Cry For Me Aberystwyth Page 7
