‘But there might be something nice inside.’
He looked at me thoughtfully, as if giving this suggestion due consideration. Then he shook his head. ‘No.’
‘If it was me, I’d look.’
‘I did look once, you know. On the day I first got it, five years ago. But I’ve never had the courage to look again. It almost destroyed my life last time. This time God won’t give me a second chance, I just know it.’
‘Tell me what happened.’
He stared at me for a second or two, nodding his head slightly – either because he was working out whether I could be trusted or maybe just plucking up the courage to make the leap. Finally he gave a bigger, more affirmative nod, and said, ‘It was on a day just like today – in the middle of June five years ago. I was standing at Sospan’s stall eating an ice cream and I found to my embarrassment that I had no money to pay for it. There wasn’t a single cent in any of my pockets. Sospan said I could pay him later and asked me for my name and address. And I said, “Sure, my name is … my name is … my … er … name is …” And do you know what? I didn’t know my own name. I didn’t know who I was or where I came from. I had absolutely no memory at all. I didn’t even know how I came to be standing at his stall. I didn’t remember ordering the ice cream. It was as if I had just dropped out of the sky or walked through a door from another dimension five minutes previously. The police were called and I was taken to the Enoc Enocs Foundation in Llanbadarn – you know the place I suppose? Where they give distressed gentlefolk a new career by training them to work a barrel organ.’
I nodded. ‘When I was in school we used to collect milk-bottle tops to buy a monkey.’
‘That’s right, everybody did.’
‘I could never understand why organ-grinding and not basketry or something more suitable for an old person.’
‘It’s because they’re not allowed by the terms of their charter. Captain Enocs was very particular. He got the idea in Palermo in 1873. The Sicilians told him organ-grinding is the perfect career for people who have fallen on hard times. All you have to do is turn the handle and leave the rest up to the monkey. What could be simpler? They told him an organ-grinder never starves because people will always pay you if they like your music and, if they don’t, they will pay you to go away.’
‘Seems to make sense.’
‘The people at the Enoc Enocs Foundation were very kind to me. They searched my pockets for clues to my identity but all I had on me was my jacket from Gabriel’s, the gents’ outfitters in Portland Street, and a packet of Bassett’s Liquorice All-Sorts. There was just one left – the jelly-centred one with the coating of tiny blue beads. There was also a small red chit of paper in my trouser pocket: a receipt from the left luggage office at the Cliff Railway base station. This was how I came by my name: Gabriel, Bassett.’
‘I suppose you’re lucky they didn’t call you “Lefty Luggage”.’
He looked at me blankly and then continued.
‘It was arranged for the chit to be redeemed and the suitcase brought to me. A cheap brown cardboard suitcase, scuffed and marked. A bit tatty. And so naturally I opened it. Can you imagine what that feels like? To have no idea who you are, to be totally divorced from that reservoir of memory that constitutes the essence of who you are? And then to open a case containing, or so you believe, the answer to this baffling mystery? To come face to face with a man who is utterly strange and unknown, utterly alien to you, and yet who shares with you the most intimate bond a human being can share with another. Can you imagine that? I’m sure you cannot. But I have experienced it. Picture to yourself the anticipation. With trembling fingers I lifted the lid and looked down and there lying in the case was …’
I fell asleep.
Lord knows how I did it. Maybe it was the heat or the hypnotic droning of the traffic like far-off wasps or perhaps it was the after-effect of the knocks on the head, but I awoke half an hour later to find Calamity in a strange pitch of excitement and Gabriel Bassett and his suitcase gone. Calamity was pinning a new card to the wall. She looked at me and then rushed out saying, ‘Can’t stop, I think we’ve cracked it!’
With a head stuffed with cotton wool I made a coffee and then walked to the Devil’s Bridge train station. I bought a ticket to Nantyronen – the special saver return that includes admission to the Iago Prytherch ‘home-stay’ – and took a pew on the train alongside the loco-spotters and families on holiday.
At Nantyronen I followed the National Trust signs. They led through the village street and then over a stile and across a field. The track was bounded on one side by a raised earthen bank covered in gorse, and by a straggly wire fence on the other. After a hundred yards or so there was a drystone wall and another stile with a sign that said, ‘You are now entering Iago Prytherch Country’. The cottage was further down in the valley. Along the way I passed some sheep who were chewing cud and smelling of dung. The sign in their midst said, ‘A few sheep penned in a gap of cloud’. Further on was an arrow pointing west and a sign that read, ‘The bald Welsh hills’. Just before the cottage was a ploughed field that I was informed consisted of ‘a stiff sea of clods that glint in the wind’. And then I came to the cottage. Chunks of undressed stone beneath a roof of smooth mauve slate. A rusty nail knocked into the wall held the end of a washing line that stretched to a slanting pole in the garden. The sign said, ‘Clothes, sour with years of sweat and animal contact’. It began to drizzle and I made for the door and ducked under a low lintel made lower by the sign ‘Warning: spittled mirth’.
Iago sat motionless in the chair beside the fire. He fixed me with a stare but said nothing and then leaned slowly across and spat into the flames. There was a little hiss in the grate. Then he resumed his position and stared ahead with a look that had a frightening vacancy, like the hollow of a cave where the wind gnaws on an old bone and where the call of its passing leaves knowledge accreted like scale or scar tissue, its meaning subsisting interstitially, between words, gathered slowly across the centuries like the fat drops of rain dripping from the dead husk of last year’s hive. I watched hypnotised. It was amazing how he did it. His witch-black chair extended beneath him like rotting tubers and he clutched with udder-blasted hands to steady himself in the giddying tarantella of the years such that his whole frame trembled like a tree on a ridge, whose sharp twigs scratch the face of the toothless moon. The worn-out rag of his soul was draped on a toasting fork before the fire, in the black-snouted, life-blasting corners of the year, but drew no warmth from the dry brown dregs of summer coughing consumptively in the grate. He turned once more to stare at me, and I beheld not a man but the devil shrouded in the rook’s cloak, and wearing Glyndwr’s hat. His mouth opened and it was as if the earth was cloven to reveal the grey viscera wherein were interred, gloved in clay and shame-marrowed, the sweet corpses of the men whom Merlin betrayed. No words came, just the chthonic yelp of a heart that yearns for the gruel of love.
‘Hello,’ he said.
I shook my head and rubbed my eyes to break the spell and, when free of the grip of the enchantment, managed to utter, ‘It’s OK, mate, you can skip the Iago Prytherch routine – I’m a private detective.’
He jerked with sudden animation, threw his hands up and laughed and said, ‘Well bloody hell, a peeper! Why didn’t you say?’
‘I wanted to ask you a few questions, if you don’t mind. You don’t have to answer them.’
‘I played a peeper once, or rather I auditioned – didn’t get the part.’
‘Trust me, you wouldn’t have enjoyed it.’
‘What do you want to know about, then?’
‘Some of the work you did before you did this.’
‘There was nothing else. Been Iago Prytherch all my life.’
‘Sure,’ I said and put a fiver down on the kitchen table next to the ‘Reluctant Swedes’. ‘I hear you did a part in a movie of Myfanwy’s funeral?’
‘The night club singer?’ He reached over and took the mo
ney. ‘I didn’t get the part. Would you like a cup of tea? Sorry the kettle doesn’t whine, it just whistles.’
‘Whistling’s fine.’
He stood up and I followed him into the kitchen. He shoved some root vegetables across the wooden table and fetched down some cups and saucers.
‘These are mangels for the cows. I have to dock them with a half-witted grin of satisfaction, but it’s not my favourite bit, it feels a bit stagey if you ask me. It was my spittled mirth that got me the job. Would you like to see it?’
I moved back slightly and said, ‘Maybe next time.’
He nodded, ‘Probably wisest.’
We went back into the parlour and he said, ‘They told me it was a movie of her life. They were shooting the funeral and wanted someone to play the gumshoe. Private detectives weren’t my strong suit, to be honest, so I rented some Humphrey Bogart videos.’ There was a sudden strange transformation of his face as if an invisible hand had stuck a finger in the corner of his mouth and pulled it to one side. He spoke through a mouth shaped like a horizontal keyhole.
‘I never met a dame yet who didn’t undershtand a shlap in the kisser or a shlug from a .45.’
I forced a smile.
‘Having met you I can see that real private detectives aren’t like that, are they?’
‘We almost never hit ladies, or shoot them.’
‘When I turned up for the audition, I walked in and the director shouted “Next!” “Next,” I said, “I haven’t done me Bogart yet.” “You’re too short,” he said and then told someone to throw me out on my fanny.’
‘What exactly was the role?’
‘They said the important thing was not to look too gloomy. I was a bit unsure about that bit because people are supposed to be gloomy at funerals, aren’t they? So I asked the agent and he said this isn’t a normal funeral and I said, “Oh a modern reinterpretation or something, is it?” And he told me not to say things like that because the director didn’t like smart alecks.’
‘Who was the agent?’
‘I don’t know, just a guy I met in a bar. You know how it is.’
‘Did the private eye have a name?’
Iago furrowed his brow as he struggled to recall. ‘He did, but I’m damned if I can remember it. Began with L. Leopold or something daft like that.’
The fake Iago Prytherch walked me back to the station. ‘Thank you for coming,’ he said. ‘You’re a lot more cheerful than the last visitor I had. You probably heard about him on the radio – the war veteran who had the fight with the policeman.’
‘You mean Rimbaud?’
‘That’s the one.’
‘What was he doing up here?’
‘He’s the technical adviser on the project. On account of how deeply he has suffered – he wrote The Vale of Tears Handbook. It’s our textbook. But the bugger ran into a spot of bother with police down in Glanwern, didn’t he? They tried to take him in but he escaped and then baited some traps in the woods with his own pollution, so I heard.’
‘Did he tell you about his missing years?’
‘He would have done, but to tell you the truth I wouldn’t let him. “Oh God!” he said. “Don’t make me tell you about my missing years!” And I said, “I wasn’t going to.” And he looked a bit disappointed and said, “You can if you really want to.” And I said, “Actually I don’t think I do.” It was not long after that he had the fight with the policeman – I guess he didn’t want to hear about his missing years either.’ We arrived at the last stile and the fake Iago Prytherch stopped and reached me his hand to shake. And then a bright smile appeared on his face. ‘That’s it! I remember now. Louie Knight! That was the name of the private eye I had to play. Louie Knight.’
I shook his hand one more time and thanked him and just before he turned away he said, ‘What did you say your name was?’
‘Luggage,’ I said. ‘Lefty Luggage.’
I went back to the office and opened the book the postman had given me for Sister Cunégonde. It was a biography of Pope Gregory the First, written by someone called Ulricus. Inside it was inscribed: ‘To Sister Cunégonde, in the hope that the life of this great man will prove as inspirational to you as it has to me. Fond regards from your loving brother, Frankie Mephisto.’
Chapter 11
THE POOLS AND channels of water of the marsh blazed with the dawn sun as if the ground had torn in places to reveal the fire burning at the centre of the earth. Meredith was already up, and slamming the shovel down into the sodden peat, placing a wellington boot on the rim of the shovel and pushing down, then levering and prising the chunk of turf free like a kid trying to wiggle a milk tooth molar. I stood behind him and watched for a while and then not wishing to surprise him cleared my throat loudly. He eased up and turned to face me. A slight nod of acknowledgement.
‘Seen Seren round here recently?’ I said.
‘No.’
‘I was looking for her.’
He nodded as if such a revelation was devoid of significance.
‘Thought she might have come this way.’
‘Why would you think that?’
‘I heard she likes to play over here.’
‘I haven’t seen her.’
I took a step closer and stared into his sunburned face, eyes dark as tar. ‘Just trying to find out what happened to Myfanwy. They say Seren knows this area well, maybe she could give me some help.’
‘She can’t help you.’
‘Probably not, but sometimes you never know. Kids often see things we grown-ups miss. She might know where they could have taken her.’
‘Could have taken her across the water there to Aberdovey. Could have taken her on the train there to Shrewsbury. Could have taken her back to Aberystwyth in a car. Could have taken her out there to Ireland. Or maybe they didn’t take her anywhere, just left her here.’ He slung the spade on to his shoulder. ‘Don’t need no girl to tell you that.’
‘Which one do you think it is?’
‘I don’t.’ He made to move past me.
‘Seren was in trouble the other night.’
He stopped, but showed no interest.
‘I was over at the Waifery. She was bleeding, it looked pretty bad. They told me it was a nosebleed.’
‘And what makes you think it wasn’t?’
‘Blood was all over her face.’
He shrugged and walked past me.
‘Thought maybe Sister Cunégonde might have told you what was going on.’
He carried on walking and spoke with his back to me. ‘Why would she do that?’
‘I thought she was a friend of yours.’
He stopped and turned and took a step up to me. I thought he was going to hit me but he didn’t. Underneath it all he was a rough but gentle man.
‘We’re not friends.’
I considered his answer and then said, ‘What’s it like to kiss a nun?’
That’s when he hit me. He didn’t do it immediately. He paused long enough to make it appear that the moment had come and gone and then swung fast and viciously. I lay on the ground, head swimming, my cheek half-submerged in cold wet pond water. He stood over me and looked down. I climbed slowly to my feet, looked at him and said, ‘Mind if I get my hat.’ He said nothing so I bent down to retrieve it but picked up a wooden stake instead and swung it against the side of his head. It connected but didn’t seem to do much. I pulled back for a second blow and swung again but this time he caught the stick in his hand and twisted it out of my grip. It didn’t look like it cost him much effort. He dropped the stick and swung the back of his hand into my face. This time I lay with my back in the water and looked up at a man looking down whose shovel was at my throat and whose wellington boot was poised gently on it. One slight heave was all it needed. I swallowed, my Adam’s apple grinding against the cold steel edge. He grunted and removed the spade. By the time I got to my feet he was walking back to the cottage with the spade hoisted on to his shoulder.
I followed at
a distance and he knew I was there even though he didn’t look round. And, since he didn’t tell me not to, I followed him into the cottage. He hung up his coat, put the shovel down in the corner, and put the kettle on. I sat at the table.
‘Anything going on between you and Seren?’
‘Like what?’
‘Thought maybe you were sweet on her.’
I tensed in expectation of a fist, but he just sat at the table and said, ‘No you don’t. Stop trying to bait me.’
I let the tension ease from my clenched muscles. ‘Sister Cunégonde doesn’t like her much, does she?’
‘There’s nothing wrong with that girl. She likes to be on her own a lot, so what? So do I. They say she’s strange, they say she’s awkward and wayward. I don’t. She plays truant now and again, but then which kid has never done that? Sometimes she goes out at night, I’ve seen her in the pub in Aberystwyth on occasion. Probably smokes too. She shouldn’t be there, of course. But I used to go to the pub when I was her age and I don’t know many people who didn’t. Sometimes they catch her and she gets punished, and sometimes they don’t. Either way it doesn’t stop her and that’s hardly surprising either. She tells a few fibs, I know that. So what? It can’t be much fun living at that Waifery and if she wants to dress it up a bit, that’s fine with me. They say she needs special treatment because she’s difficult and has special needs. To me, all it means is she’s a normal kid. I like having her around. I wish there were more people around like her.’
It was probably the longest speech of his life. He stood up and walked over to a dresser against the wall. He opened a drawer and took something out. He put it on the table in front of me. It was an old photo, black and white, creased and torn, with a thin white border. It showed a teenage girl being crowned Borth carnival queen. Judging by the parked cars and the hairstyles in the crowd it was taken sometime in the Fifties. It was Cunégonde.
The Unbearable Lightness of Being in Aberystwyth Page 13
