Aberystwyth Mon Amour

by Malcolm Pryce

  And the question was not whether he found her or not but why he went all that way just to die? I looked out over the quiet grey landscape, the colour slowly leeching out. The answer is etched in all the faces you meet in Aberystwyth. No one has the courage to be saved. Not the Moulin girls seeking escape in the one place they’ll never find it. Nor Sospan grinning sadly behind the invisible bars of his vanilla prison.

  A lone figure came running along the beach from the direction of Borth. One tiny figure running with the arrow-straight desperation of one whose errand might still save the world. I watched her approach, a school satchel swinging at her side, as she ran up the beach over the stones and into the foothills of the dunes. Her pace suddenly halved on the soft sand as her footholds gave way and the air around her turned to treacle. But she just redoubled her efforts, racing against the tumbling mounds of sand and contemptuous of their attempts to thwart her. It was Calamity and the fire of belief within her still burned strong. At the top she ran up to me and threw herself into my arms, she was sobbing uncontrollably.

  ‘He … he …’

  ‘It’s OK.’

  Her face was washed over with a silver film of tears and her efforts to speak juddered into nothing as each time a fresh bout of sobbing took her.

  ‘He … he …’

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘He’s going to destroy Aberystwyth!’ and at the thought of it she squealed and burst into another fit of weeping.

  I reached into my pocket and found a pack of tissues to hand to her. Staring out over Ynyslas sands in the deep calm of this night, I was able to receive the news that someone was going to destroy Aberystwyth with strange detachment. I waited patiently as the sobs slowly subsided. Calamity took out a tissue and blew her nose. She looked up at me, her face wet and glistening.

  ‘He’ll destroy everything!’

  ‘Who will?’

  ‘Lovespoon.’

  Another sob interrupted but through the tears she said:

  ‘You said you didn’t know how he was going to get the Ark to the sea?’

  I nodded.

  ‘It was the wrong question. He’s going to take the sea to the Ark!’

  As we retraced our steps, carefully now as all the light from the world had gone and the paths through the dunes had disappeared, we saw a bonfire burning on the horizon, somewhere in the direction of Tre’ddol. In the dark midsummer night there was something unnervingly ancient and pagan about the sight. We watched for a long time until our reverie was startled by the mewing of a cat at our feet, the sharp scent of burned fur pricking our nostrils. It was Julian, with a badly singed ear. An entire story was contained in that sharp burned cat smell and we apprehended it in an instant. We set off at a run across the hills in the direction of Ma Evans’s house, through the caravan park, across the road and out along the bog towards the railway line. I knew what to expect before I got there. Mrs Llantrisant had outwitted me yet again. When we arrived the area was bathed in the familiar flashing blue light. A team of firemen was hosing down the house and some ladies from the St John’s Ambulance Brigade were reassuring Ma Evans who sat huddled under a blanket drinking tea. Some yards away stood the makings of an ugly pyre. And beyond that, held back by the police and making angry grumblings, was the mob of disgruntled villagers who had no doubt set the pyre. I didn’t know what Mrs Llantrisant had said to them – such a task would have been child’s play for an agent of her experience. Sheep not lambing, or cows not calving, or milk going inexplicably sour; any of the myriad natural mishaps of everyday life could have been ascribed to witchery and used against Ma Evans. The pyre had been extinguished but the house, set on fire deliberately but made to look like the work of an accidental spark, was beyond saving. As I surveyed the scene, Ma Evans looked over to me, the tears still glistening on her cheeks, and tried to somehow explain things to me with her expression. I waved it aside; it was me who should be doing the explaining; I had brought all this upon her. A group of men walked over and pointed shotguns at me and I slowly raised my hands. From behind the house came a figure, an old lady who used to be a hunched and bent old spinster but now walked with a back ramrod straight and an authoritative purposeful air. It was Mrs Llantrisant, her sense of having achieved her destiny compromised only by the big black gap in her front dental plate which made her look like a cartoon pirate. Julian the cat ran up to her. A wave of despair and fury hit me as she took a large kipper out of her shopping bag and handed it to the cat. ‘You fucking Judas!’ I screamed, and ran forwards, lashing out viciously with my foot at the ring of Julian’s arse. The cat yelped and jumped out of the way just as the stock of a shotgun smashed into the side of my head. I twisted slightly as I fell and the last thing I saw before losing consciousness, as I looked up, was Herod Jenkins and that horizontal crease in his face they called a smile.

  Chapter 22

  I OPENED MY eyes in a dark room, my cheek pressed against a cold, gritty concrete floor. Three stripes of light ran down the wall from a barred window and my head and ribs throbbed. I drifted back into unconsciousness. When I woke again the shadow of the bars was fainter as the first pale glimmer of dawn filled the room. I dragged myself to my feet, wincing at the shooting pains from my ribs and shuffled to the window. The view was from the side of Pen Dinas overlooking the harbour towards the station. It was Blaenplwyf prison. I felt the ribs with my fingers – they didn’t appear to be broken, but someone had given me a good kicking. From my vantage point I could see Victory Square between the station and the museum and I could see what it was that had so upset Calamity. The Lancaster bomber was gone. Finally, when it was too late to do anything about it, I understood. That dramatic change of course in Brainbocs’s research that started all the trouble. It could mean only one thing. All along we had been puzzled how they were going to get the Ark to the sea. And Calamity had worked it out. They were going to take the sea to the Ark. After all, everyone knows you need a deluge to launch an Ark. And Brainbocs’s Promethean ego was going to supply one. Brainbocs was going to reunite Lovespoon’s old bomber crew, the one that flew the mission over Rio Caeriog, and blow up the dam at Nant-y-moch.

  The sounds of a prison slowly coming to life filled the air. Iron doors clanged open and shut, and harsh voices echoed down the hard corridors; keys jangled; men moaned. Calamity had worked it out as well. And it had been too much for her. She didn’t need to be a Dai Brainbocs to know what the mountain of water released with the destruction of the dam would do to the town. I had sent her off in search of Llunos in the faint hope that he might have some officers still loyal to him. Maybe they could do something. Stop the plane or devise a plan to get the townspeople to higher ground. If they commandeered the Cliff Railway, it might be possible. But it was all beyond my control now. Shortly before 8am the door opened and a tray with bread and a brown drink in a plastic beaker was placed inside. The drink was sweet and warm but I couldn’t tell whether it was coffee or hot chocolate. Maybe it was neither. The beaker had chew marks all along the rim. Some time after that the door opened again and the guard told me my lawyer was here to see me.

  I followed the guard down a long corridor through a series of barred doors, until eventually I was shown into another cell at the end, smaller than mine and with a simple wooden desk in the middle. A little man with a boyish face sat at the table. He was smartly dressed in a well-cut three-piece suit and was resting his two small hands, both gloved, on top of a malacca cane. A mauve handkerchief billowed out of his top pocket. He stood up as I entered and pointed to the chair.

  ‘Please, sit down.’ His voice was thin and weaselly. ‘Smoke?’ He took out a packet of cigarettes and held them aloft. I shook my head and he threw the pack down on the table. ‘Neither do I; beastly habit. Still didn’t quite know what else to take a man in prison. Not much practice at this sort of thing.’

  I said nothing, just stared at him. There was something unpleasant, almost otherworldly about him, like those pictures of aliens said to be li
ving in Area 51.

  He looked at me and smiled weakly. ‘Do you know who I am?’

  ‘I know you’re no lawyer.’

  He chuckled. ‘We’ve never been introduced, of course.’

  The side of my head where I was hit with the shotgun was sore and pounding, but my mind was becoming clear. A suspicion slowly took concrete shape in my mind, a suspicion that had been floating there like fog for some time now. I had no reason to know he was, but I did. It was simple really.

  ‘You’re Dai Brainbocs.’

  He giggled.

  ‘I suppose it was a spare calliper you threw in the vat at the cheese factory?’

  ‘No. I just made a replacement – out of Meccano – quite an improvement on the original design actually; much better articulation. I might apply for a patent.’

  ‘And the teeth?’

  ‘They were real too; milk teeth. Shows you what a wanker that police pathologist was.’

  I nodded as I slowly took it in.

  ‘Why go to all that bother of pretending to be dead?’

  ‘Because Lovespoon was going to kill me.’

  He walked over to the window and looked out. ‘You should get a good view of his Ark from here, that’s one of the reasons I chose this place.’

  There was something in his tone that made my skin crawl. A sort of wheedling, taunting, smugness that suggested he had planned everything right down to what shirt I wore this morning.

  ‘Eight cubic kilometres of water. I calculate it will take about twenty minutes to reach Aberystwyth. A very respectable effort for one’s first deluge, don’t you think?’

  ‘It’ll destroy everything.’

  ‘No great loss to architecture.’

  ‘Why are you here?’ I said bluntly.

  He paused. I knew the answer already: he was here to boast.

  He looked at me and tapped the top of his cane.

  ‘I wanted to thank you.’

  ‘What for?’

  ‘For saving my life.’

  ‘I thought you were already dead.’

  ‘Ah! But for how much longer would I have been allowed to rest in peace?’

  I shook my head. ‘I thought Lovespoon adored you.’

  He began talking to the air, as if rehearsing his defence in case St Peter ever asked.

  ‘Herod Jenkins, Custard Pie, Zachariah Lovespoon and Arthur Frobisher. One dead; the other three respectable members of Aberystwyth society. Each one well known. Each one in the phone book. But where was the fifth member of the crew, where was Gwenno?’ He turned to face me and wagged his finger. ‘If only I hadn’t asked that question. If only.’

  I said nothing but watched him intently. Impressed despite my disgust that this tiny fragment of humanity, a boy with the physical presence of a grasshopper, could have created such a whirlwind in the affairs of men through brain power alone. I was conscious of despising him, not for the evil that he wrought, but for his pale, sickly decrepitude. I who had automatically taken the side of such people against the steamroller insensitivity of Herod. Was this how Herod felt about me?

  Brainbocs continued. The wistful tone in his voice suggesting that he was already addressing posterity rather than me.

  ‘When I found out it was Mrs Llantrisant, I couldn’t believe it. It was impossible. That daft, weather-obsessed, step-swabbing moron? The leader of the ESSJAT? How could it be? That’s why I devised the poisoned apples and the deathbed confession: I needed to be certain. All I wanted was her to say yes or no. But the silly old bag had other ideas. She was convinced she was going to die and said she had this terrible secret on her conscience which she didn’t want to take to the grave. I tried to shut her up but she wouldn’t listen. I suppose she saw it as her big moment and wasn’t going to be cheated of it.’

  ‘And you found out that Rio Caeriog wasn’t a military triumph after all?’

  Brainbocs shook his head sadly. ‘Oh no, far worse than that. I already knew it was a military disaster. That much I could have come to terms with. No, I found out something far worse. Something that spelled death for the whole project. The land reclamation, the beautiful boat, the whole Exodus – kaput!’

  It was as if the air was slowly drained out of him. He leaned forward, put an elbow on the table and placed his chin softly into his cupped hand. The messianic fervour was gone and he looked at me; almost as if he was appealing for help.

  ‘Lovespoon is English.’

  I gasped. Brainbocs nodded his head slowly and closed his eyes.

  ‘Imagine how I felt? The man to whom I had devoted my life, for whose glory I had created my masterpiece, the Cantref-y-Gwaelod reclamation scheme, was an impostor. From Slough.’

  For a while neither of us spoke. A quiet so absolute filled the room that I could hear the sound of each of us breathing. Gradually Brainbocs gathered himself together again.

  ‘There were five of them in the bomber. Mrs Llantrisant, Dai the Custard Pie, Herod Jenkins, Lovespoon and Frobisher. Lovespoon is actually Frobisher.’

  ‘The English volunteer?’

  ‘Yes. The real Lovespoon died when the Lancaster ditched in the Rio Caeriog after the mission. Or rather, he died soon after it. Apparently he wasn’t going to make it anyway, so they all helped him along a bit. They were all in it. They hit on the plan to finish him off and Frobisher would take his identity. Then after the war they would share the money. The real Lovespoon was rich, you see. As the icing on the cake, they cut off his John Thomas and stuffed it in his mouth to make it look like the work of Indians.’

  ‘Don’t tell me, it was Herod who did that.’

  ‘Gwenno … er … Mrs Llantrisant actually.’

  I nodded gently as I slowly absorbed the enormity of what he was telling me.

  ‘This is what Mrs Llantrisant told me during her deathbed confession. It might still have been OK. But I was so staggered by what I heard that right in the middle of the confession I cried out “fucking hell!”’ He smiled sadly. ‘I’ll say one thing for Mrs Llantrisant: she’s a smart woman. She knew instantly what was up. That was when I made my first mistake: my only one, in fact. I should have killed her right there in the bedroom.’ He looked at me. ‘I could, you know. I know how.’

  I nodded and Brainbocs continued.

  ‘But instead I ran away. From that moment on it was only a matter of time before Lovespoon came to hear about it.’

  ‘So what was all this stuff about the tea cosy?’

  Despite his gloom, Brainbocs chuckled. ‘The tea cosy depicted Mhexuataacahuatcxl, the Mayan shape-shifter. He was supposed to represent Frobisher because he had taken the form of a man who had had his John Thomas cut off. It wasn’t a serious blackmail attempt. But you get the idea. I needed to find out how Lovespoon would react to his secret being out. So I led him to think Evans and his cronies had copied my essay and were trying to blackmail him – test the waters sort of thing. When he killed all four of them I knew the water was pretty hot. So what was I supposed to do? You can imagine my problem. The police couldn’t be trusted – I was sure they would hand me straight over to the Druids. That’s why I thought of you. And now I just wanted to thank you.’

  ‘But I haven’t done anything – I failed. Didn’t I?’

  He smiled, stood up and walked over to the door. ‘Actually, you’re playing your part very well. Even if you don’t know what it is.’

  As the guard let him out, I called out:

  ‘So when does the plane take off?’