The Unbearable Lightness of Being in Aberystwyth

by Malcolm Pryce

  ‘There was never any proof.’

  ‘They found the shoe at the Loothouse.’

  ‘So what? When’s the last time you walked along the beach and didn’t find an old shoe washed up? What does that prove?’

  ‘It’s buried in Llanbadarn Cemetery, a single shoe in a coffin; Mrs Prestatyn goes and puts flowers on the grave every week, waiting …’

  ‘Just like Cinderella.’

  ‘It was your mob, Frankie. The only thing we don’t know is what you did with her.’

  ‘Say it was,’ said Frankie thoughtfully. ‘Say it was. What of it? I was an angry man in those days, Eeyore. A man with a heart so full of fury I scarce knew myself most of the time what I was doing or why. But I’m not the man I was when I came here twenty-five years ago. I didn’t write to torment her; I sought her blessing, that’s all.’

  ‘She doesn’t believe you. You’ve made a lifetime career out of lying and deception.’

  ‘Oh, I know that. I know she doesn’t. She wrote and told me – I bet she didn’t tell you this: she wrote and told me I was putting it on so when I died I could sweet-talk my way round St Peter at the Gate. But she wouldn’t let me get away with it, she wrote. She said she would see me dead yet, and stand over my corpse and then she would bend down and bite my tongue out so I couldn’t bamboozle my way into heaven. Bite my tongue out she said, like in that movie set in the Turkish prison.’

  ‘You can’t blame her for feeling like that.’

  ‘Let me tell you something, Eeyore. You see all this? This building?’ He flung out an arm. ‘This used to be the school where Charles Darwin studied, did you know that? That guy who said we were descended from the apes.’

  ‘I didn’t know that,’ said Eeyore.

  ‘That’s right, they laughed at him, but they obviously didn’t know anything about apes. I’ve been reading all about it. It’s shocking the things apes do in the wild. They kill their children and eat them; drive the elderly out and watch them starve; rape the girls; wage war on each other. Can anyone seriously doubt that we are descended from them?’ He motioned towards the cabinets with the hand holding the coffee mug, ‘They are our brothers to the last detail. We’ve even got one in there that died of a heart attack like my old man. And one that lost his eye in a fight like my mother.’

  ‘Where’s this leading, Frankie?’ I asked.

  Frankie gave me a frigid stare, the sort of look that recalls a time when no man would have dared talk to him like that. He broke off and stared into the middle distance where problems of the ineffable are traditionally to be found.

  ‘I used to think that’s all there was. All we were. Apes in suits. But then one day, fifteen or so years ago, something happened. Something happened to change all that.’ Frankie paused a while and his eyes glistened with the beginning of tears. ‘You could say on that day I walked with Jesus. I know you will sneer. You will ask what on earth would Jesus want with a slag like Frankie Mephisto. But you would be wrong to think like that. Slags like Frankie are exactly the sort of sinner Jesus came to save. On that day he walked with me, and he told me, he said, “Frankie, I came down to earth to teach you lot how to love, and you fucking ignored me!”’

  He wiped a sleeve roughly across his brimming eyes, stood up, and invited us over to the window. ‘That used to be the old prison over there a hundred years ago. And down there, where the car park is now, was the gallows. That’s one reason why they moved Darwin’s school. Because they thought it was inappropriate for the schoolboys to witness public executions in their school yard. Biggest mistake they could have made, if you ask me. Every school should have a gallows in the yard. That way the kids might learn something.’

  Eeyore and I walked back towards the door.

  ‘Just tell the poor woman where her daughter is buried,’ said Eeyore.

  ‘I can’t do that, Eeyore,’ said Frankie. ‘I can’t do that. Even if I wanted to, I couldn’t. Because I don’t know. I had a consigliere who took care of things like that.’

  ‘And who was that?’

  ‘You know I can’t tell you.’

  ‘Can’t you at least ask him what he did with the girl?’

  ‘I have done. He says he can’t remember.’

  We walked down to the river and along the footpath towards the Royal Salop Infirmary. It stood perched high on a hill overlooking the Severn, a building that had started life a century ago as the traditional home of the damned, a workhouse.

  They had told us we were wasting our time. They said Brainbocs lived in his own cell now, one for which there was no key. A portable bubble that went wherever he did, enclosing him with a perimeter that stopped a foot or so from his outstretched fingertips. A bubble whose walls were made from the translucent membrane of a language no one understood. A tower of Babel with the entrance bricked up. They said he seemed happy enough in there but didn’t admit visitors.

  The secure wing was on the top floor and an orderly showed us to the door.

  ‘Lives in his own private world,’ he said. ‘Sits and talks all day to an invisible interlocutor.’

  He reached into the pocket of his white coat and drew out a set of keys and let us in. It was bright and sunny inside the room. Brainbocs sat curled up in a foetal position in the corner, rocking gently on his haunches and intoning something to himself. All around were images of dinosaurs, crudely scribbled on every wall.

  ‘They brought him from the prison in this state. We’ve never seen anything like it before.’

  Brainbocs looked up at us as if a few rays of light from our world had managed to penetrate the membrane.

  ‘Why dinosaurs?’

  ‘Who knows? Some chthonic zoomorphic associations … salvific anamnesia perhaps …’

  ‘Maybe he just likes dinosaurs,’ said Eeyore.

  The orderly looked surprised and he stroked his chin. ‘Mmmmm, we hadn’t thought of that,’ he said. ‘It’s conceivable, I suppose.’

  ‘What made him go like this?’ I asked.

  He considered his reply. ‘He was given a task when he arrived in prison. To solve a problem for Frankie Mephisto.’

  ‘What sort of problem?’

  ‘A metaphysical one.’

  ‘It must have been a hard one,’ said Eeyore.

  The orderly agreed. ‘Clearly. Chaps like him normally have a tough time of it in prison, as you know. They are much in demand as … er … as … bedtime companions. Frankie offered the boy his protection in return for which he had to solve the metaphysical problem. He was locked in a tower with nothing but a chamber pot on which to sit and cogitate. When they opened the door three months later this is how they found him. Fascinating case. We’re hoping it will make us famous.’

  The clinical detachment with which the orderly talked of the boy’s suffering struck me as callous. But, to be fair, it would not have rankled with Brainbocs. He embodied perhaps better than anyone the Promethean arrogance and moral ambivalence of the scientist. Since leaving the cradle he had been obsessed with the need to peer through doors the gods have closed to us, to pick the locks, and tamper with forces better left alone. Pandora, Baron von Frankenstein, the men from the Manhattan Project … the roll call of Man’s dishonour is long but they were mere trick cyclists in a circus compared to Brainbocs and the forces he once tried to let out of the bottle.

  I unzipped my travelling bag and took out, with a faint prickling of embarrassment, a Myfanwy ‘walking-talking’ doll I’d picked up earlier from Siop-y-Pethe in Great Darkgate Street. Eeyore watched me, his brow curving in what might have been a look of interest or a frown. I pulled the cord and the doll started to sing in a squeaky voice.

  ‘Myfanwy, boed yr oll o’th fywyd

  Dan heulwen disglair canol dydd …’

  Brainbocs stopped rocking and listened, eyeing us sideways, like a bird.

  ‘Anghofia’r oll o’th addewidion.’

  ‘That’s amazing!’ said the orderly. ‘The doll speaks the same language!’

&
nbsp; We turned to face him in joint surprise.

  ‘How can it be possible? The same language?!’

  ‘It’s Welsh,’ said Eeyore.

  ‘What?’

  ‘It’s Welsh.’

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘They speak it over there in Wales.’ He pointed through the wall, vaguely westward.

  ‘You mean those people have their own language?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Well bugger me! We thought he was making it up.’

  Brainbocs started to sing along. And then so did Eeyore in a soft melancholy baritone.

  ‘A rho dy law, Myfanwy dirion

  I ddim ond dweud y gair Ffarwel.’

  ‘It’s the song Myfanwy,’ I said. ‘Something like, “Give me your hand, my sweet Myfanwy, But one last time, to say farewell.”’

  The orderly scratched his head, then picked up a sheaf of papers and threw them down in disgust on to the bedside cabinet. ‘Dr Molyneux will be devastated. He’s been transcribing it for the Lancet.’

  I walked over and placed the doll gently in the hand of Brainbocs. He gazed at me with the trusting eyes of a child; then returned his gaze to the doll. I directed his hand to the draw-cord at the back and showed him how to make her sing. He tugged and released the cord. The homunculus Myfanwy crackled into life, her china blue eyes flicking open like those of Frankenstein’s monster when the lightning hits the gothic spire above the lab. Brainbocs’s eyes, too, shot open but in purest wonder. A sound like a baby’s chuckle came from his throat and from the throat of Myfanwy a different sound emerged: tiny and tinny, as if she had fallen down a manhole and was singing from far away in the labyrinth beneath the city, the song we knew her by twittered forth. Brainbocs stroked his doll.

  ‘At least he’ll have someone to talk to now,’ said Eeyore. We turned to leave. At the doorway I picked up the transcripts of Brainbocs’s private language and shoved them into my bag. ‘I don’t suppose Dr Molyneux will be needing these now, he can take notes direct from the doll.’

  We walked down a corridor where once only the damned had trod; the echoes of our footfalls pursued by the plaintive sound of a boy and doll singing a duet.

  ‘Myfanwy, boed yr oll o’th fywyd

  Dan heulwen disglair canol dydd …’

  Chapter 7

  LLUNOS WAS WAITING outside the railway station in a prowl car, and he had a photographer with him. He nodded to me and I climbed in.

  ‘So what are we doing then?’ I asked

  ‘We’re doing something we should have done a long time ago. We’re closing down Aberystwyth.’

  ‘Uh-huh,’ I replied distantly. I was tired after the journey to Shrewsbury. The sky had turned the colour of geraniums, which was soothing to stare at, but they were flowers from a hothouse and thunderclouds were piling up above the rooftops. I could still hear the strains of Brainbocs singing, echoing down the corridors in the workhouse of my head.

  ‘Five days she’s been gone, and so far not a squeak from anyone. Which isn’t right. Someone knows. Someone always knows. There’s a new game in town. It’s called Llunos plays hardball.’

  ‘How does it differ from the old one?’

  ‘The people of this town will look back on the old version as a golden age; they’ll think they were blessed.’

  I noticed a police van fall in behind us. ‘You reckon hurting people will make them tell us what we want to know?’

  ‘Usually does in my experience.’

  ‘How does closing things down help?’

  ‘It hurts them where it hurts most. The wallet. Everywhere you go in this town someone is making money. Some straight, some crooked. But either way the tough guys take a rake off. From tonight they don’t get anything. Not until they tell me what they know. The town is closed.’

  He wiped the back of his hand across a brow slimy with sweat, but achieved no relief. His shirt stuck to him; his eyebrows were sodden; it was going to be one of those nights. A night for the policeman to sit with feet on the desk in the blast of a fan. A night to listen without interest to the scuffles and shouts from the entrance hall as the flatfoots bring in the evening’s trawl. A night when even the sea is too tired to move and clings to the face of the earth like petroleum jelly; and the stones of the beach release the heat of day like the lining of a kiln, or one of those authentic tandoor ovens the Indian restaurants boast of possessing (that ancient method of cooking savoured by long dead moguls and pissed people). A night to sit in the febrile air, torpid, motionless so as not to quicken the metabolism like those lizards that lick their own eyes. A night in which the only movement should come from the hammer, anvil, and stirrup in the policeman’s ear as he listens to the confessions of lonely farmers from empty hills whispering on the edge of sanity on the late-night radio phone-in. A night to do nothing at all except hope for it to pass and for tomorrow’s freshening breeze. A night to do nothing, least of all close down a town.

  We pulled up outside Alexandra Hall.

  ‘We’ll start with the bivalves,’ said Llunos as if the bottom of the evolutionary chain was the obvious place to start. We walked up to the twenty-four-hour Whelk Stall. The kid in charge was setting out the evening’s selection: pools of vinegar in crinkle-sided cardboard trays in which floated the shrivelled viscera of the sea; wooden spoons; jars in which more bits of sea flesh floated like preserved organs in a ghoul’s laboratory; the stench of seaweed on rocks uncovered at high tide.

  ‘Are you sure they are bivalves?’ I said.

  The kid looked on warily as the phalanx of uniformed police closed in. Llunos banged his palm on the counter top and said ‘Shop!’

  The kid pointed to the menu pinned to the outside of the kiosk.

  ‘Whelks,’ said Llunos.

  The kid pointed.

  ‘Are they bivalves?’

  The answer was a blink.

  ‘You got a tongue in your head?’

  ‘They get ’em from over there.’ He pointed to the rocks.

  Llunos stuck his fingers into the vinegar and took out something that looked like gristle. He popped it into his mouth, grimaced and spat it out. Then he picked up the tray and held it out to me.

  ‘Take one.’

  ‘I’d rather not.’

  ‘I need a second opinion. Don’t want to bust this kid for something he didn’t do.’

  The look in the kid’s eyes wavered between fear and uncertainty. I took a whelk and crunched it. ‘Just like usual – a vinegary gritty rubbery knot of nothing.’

  ‘What do you think the grit is?’

  ‘Sand in the intestine I suppose.’

  ‘That’s what I thought.’ He shouted to one of the deputies. ‘Throw him in the cell. Impound the kiosk.’

  ‘What’s going on?’ shouted the kid. ‘What did I do?’

  ‘Stealing sand from the beach,’ said Llunos and walked off.

  We wandered up to the bandstand. A handful of pensioners sat in deck chairs arrayed in a semi-circle, a coach party from somewhere far away that was worse than here. They were watching a woman sing. She was in her forties – heavily made up and wearing jeans cut for her granddaughter – singing, to an audience that probably didn’t need the advice, ‘Don’t sleep in the Subway’. The audience looked on with stony, expressionless faces; grim masks of politeness concealing resentment and shame. They knew no one was seriously expected to enjoy this singing, it was charity. This was no superannuated seaside entertainer brought low by life – a fate that might have echoed their own. It was not someone whose name had once topped the bill and then slipped season by season, rung by rung, down the ladder until it reached the bottom line on the poster, to share billing with the birdsong man and the balloon twister. This woman had never sung professionally in her life and was here because she volunteered to a group of people who spent their lives organising teas for the donkey derby. A committee of fools who, in a different lifetime, would have administered the Poor Law and collected alms to buy bars for the workh
ouse windows.

  We watched in disgust and sorrow for these kindly people who perhaps last visited Aberystwyth more than twenty years ago and danced at the Pier, or dodged a fist fight between a mod and a rocker. Llunos signalled to the deputies to close the metal concertina doors of the bandstand and, in an act of genuine charity, took the mike out of the singer’s hand. He said, ‘Show’s over folks, back to your lives.’

  Up near the Pier we stopped at the hot-dog barrow. Llunos rolled up his sleeves and then mimed the action of a competition weight-lifter dusting his hands in chalk. He squatted down, put his hands under the barrow, took the strain, grunted and slowly rose keeping his back straight and powering with his thighs the way the work safety posters teach you. The kid in the barrow made a ‘Wh … wh … wh …’ sound before gravity finished the work that Llunos had started and the barrow crashed on to its side.

  ‘King of exercises: the squat,’ he said.

  Frying sausages and anaemic buns spilled out across the pavement. The vendor crawled out and watched from the floor as Llunos proceeded to stamp on the food like a grape-crusher. The deputies grinned in awed disbelief and Llunos shouted at them, ‘Well, don’t just stand and gawp, help me!’ They jumped to attention and joined in the trampling. The vendor made a token verbal protest but wisely left it at that. I felt sorry for him but I knew there was no point saying anything. This was Llunos’s way of finding Myfanwy and the strange thing was, it was just as likely to work as anything I had done. We closed down the hot-dog stall for selling food that failed to meet various hygiene regulations and moved on. But before we did, Llunos cursed the hotdog vendor for the mustard on his shoe and made him clean it off.

  The Punch and Judy man was charged with unlawful assembly and conspiracy to shout ‘Oh no he didn’t!’

  From there we turned inland and walked down Eastgate Street to the Indian. It was still early, a time when the eye of the hurricane is passing over the restaurant and a deceptive, preternatural calm reigns. Through the window we saw real candles on the tables and linen that was starched and crisp and white. Three hours from now and the linen would have been replaced by builder’s polythene. The only diners were couples on their first dates. They sat opposite each other and talked stiffly in undertones about trivia. You passed them, sometimes, these people sitting in the window, and long after you got home the image danced before your eyes, of two ghosts whom you dimly remembered from a time long, long ago at infant school. You hadn’t seen either of them for thirty years, life had changed them beyond all recognition from the toddlers they had been, and yet you recognised them instantly. For a brief moment you were struck by the coincidence of seeing them sitting opposite each other in the window, and then you realised that, given the limited pack life had to deal, it was inevitable. Like horses on a merry-go-round, you tried them all in the end. The only way off was to marry or die.