Last Tango in Aberystwyth an-2

by Malcolm Pryce

  'Oooh you dirty rotten chiseller!' She sniffed forcibly. 'I should have known what to expect from the son of a donkey-man. Well suit yourself. Now you'll never know what happened to the valise.'

  'I already know. There's only one thing that could have happened to it.' I walked out and threw over my shoulder as I left, 'The Dean must have taken it, otherwise you wouldn't have mentioned it.'

  As I left the house I bumped into someone arriving in a hurry. It was the old lady from the bay window at the Excelsior. She was heavily wrapped-up to disguise herself and pretended not to know me, but it was her all right. I could feel the hot smothering shame that, underneath all the finery, the lorgnette and the etiquette, she was the same as the rest of them. Borne in on a floodtide of longing that she could no more defy than the beaver can stop himself from building a dam. That eternal drive to gather round the village well and pour scorn on her neighbours for failing to live up to a code that no one else had ever managed to live up to either.

  I walked out into the street as the room behind me thundered with the explosive percussion of five hundred orthopaedic boots stamping on the boards, accompanied by shrill Red Indian whoops. Above the tumult, a voice rose exultantly, crying, 'E'd have bloody flattened her if he'd found out, wouldn't he!'

  Out in the street Ionawr came up to me from the shadows and put her hand in mine. I could see now in the yellow streetlight she was dressed much like any other kid of her age. Faded jeans flared at the bottom over absurd platform shoes, too much make-up and too little on underneath the fur coat: a skimpy halter-neck top that didn't reach down as far as her navel. You saw girls like this all the time walking down the street hand in hand with men old enough to be their fathers or even grandfathers. And they really could be were it not for that furtive air that marks them out and gives the game away: that strange awkwardness that comes from having to concentrate on the simple task of walking; and from the insane overwhelming belief that everyone in the street that night can read your thoughts. The walk of shame that only dissolves when the bedroom door slams gratefully shut.

  The cold had deepened and stung our cheeks like the kiss of a jellyfish. We cut through the castle and headed for Pier Street. There weren't many dining options at this time of night — if you discounted the 24-hour whelk stalls on the Prom.

  'We could go to the Indian,' Ionawr said hesitantly, reading my face to gauge my reaction.

  'That's not the sort of place to take a lady, even one ...'

  'One what?'

  'Oh nothing.'

  'I know what you were going to say. Even one like me.'

  'No I wasn't.'

  'Yes you were. Don't deny it, it doesn't matter. I know what I want to eat: something traditional Welsh like my grandmother used to make when I was a kid.'

  'That's a bit of a tall order.'

  'They do caawl at the Chinese.' She took my hand and pulled me. 'Come on.'

  I hesitated.

  'What's wrong?'

  'Did you hear that?'

  'What?'

  I thought for a moment and then said, 'Oh nothing.' We carried on. And then I stopped again.

  'We're being followed.'

  'Are you sure? I can't see anyone.'

  'I've felt it since we left the game.'

  I sent Ionawr on ahead and slunk into a doorway and waited. The footsteps got louder and louder. When the guy passed I grabbed him and threw him into the doorway.

  'Oh my Lord!' said a voice. It was Smokey G. Jones, her tiny head projecting from the collar in her coat like a light bulb. 'Don't kill me, please!'

  'Mrs Jones! What are you doing? I thought you were following me.'

  'I was. Only I didn't mean any harm. I just wanted to ask you. No harm at all.'

  'Ask me what?'

  'If you'd have a word with her, please, Mr Knight, just a word. This arthritis is something terrible. It's all them cups of tea in me fighting days.'

  'Have a word with who?'

  'Miss Calamity. She's cut me supply down. I need me placebo, Mr Knight, I can't get through a day without it. But she's gone and cut me supply.'

  Just then Ionawr reappeared and Mrs Jones stopped and looked at her. 'Hmm.' She sniffed. 'What baggage.' She walked off.

  It was often mayhem in the small take-away but tonight it was quiet. A few students, a few locals sitting on the hard-backed chairs, stupefied by drink into a morose silence, killing time softly like holidaymakers at a strike-bound airport. At the counter a Chinese girl in her mid-teens was doing her homework, a curtain of silky black hair falling forward to protect her from the gaze of the customers, falling in a delicate curl like the clef on a musical score.

  I coughed and she looked up.

  'Can I help you, sir?'

  'I hear you sell caawl now.'

  'Yes,' she said. 'Would you like some?'

  'Is it good?'

  'People who know about these things say it is. Personally I've never tried it.'

  'Quite an unusual dish to find in a Chinese restaurant.'

  'We Chinese have to adapt.' She wrote down the order and handed it through the serving-hatch. 'And it brings in the crowds.'

  'Isn't it a bit dishonest?'

  She shrugged. 'I don't know, is it? In my grandmother's province they have a tree that gets pollinated by bats, so the tree gives off a perfume of dead mice. No one complains about that.'

  'Except maybe the cats.'

  She smiled and took our money. 'Anyway, lamb stew with lumps of cheese - it's not so very hard to make.'

  'Ah! but the cheese has to be added with love,' I said.

  Someone by the door farted and his mates burst into crude guffaws of laughter. I fought the urge to look round and waited for the prickle of shame to subside.

  The girl said, 'We add all our ingredients with love, our customers deserve nothing less.' She took the cartons of caawl and placed them carefully in the paper bag. 'I've seen you before somewhere, but you're not a regular.'

  'With my father, maybe, on the Prom. He's the donkey-man.'

  'Ah of course!' She handed me the food. 'You round-eye are so sentimental about your animals. Bon appetit!'

  On the Prom the wind roared past our ears like a tube train rushing out of a tunnel. The tide had risen and each time the water thundered into the base of the sea-wall, spray flared up like a series of jack-in-the-box ghosts. I had one arm over Ionawr's shoulders, clutching her against me for warmth, and I held the brown paper bag with its cargo of hot caawl at arm's length like a lantern — two wayfarers lost in the night.

  'Do you know what she was talking about?' I said. 'Asking Calamity for some placebo?'

  'No idea, but if she's getting it from Calamity, who knows what it is.'

  Electro-illuminated dwarves danced drunkenly on the swinging cable overhead, and down by the bandstand we heard the sound of youths jeering. We walked on and as we got closer the jeering of the youths became punctuated by faint Spanish cries, 'No, please leave us alone, Seсores!'

  The lads were dancing round in a circle, and in the centre there lay a man. Next to the man, on the floor, was a ripped-open suitcase.

  'Hey!' I shouted. Slightly wrong-footed by the intrusion, they stopped and turned to face us. There was silence for a while, except for the sea exploding like distant artillery, and then I heard the Spaniard again, squeaking above the muffled roar. 'Please, sir, we are just humble peasants!' It was the dummy, Seсor Rodrigo, and lying on the floor, battered and kicked and covered in cement grime, was Mr Marmalade. Ionawr gasped. One of the youths was holding Seсor Rodrigo by his ankles, upside down over the railings. His eyes had rolled upward in their sockets and in the garish mix of bright lights and shadows thrown by the streetlamps and the overhead illuminations, his wooden face had acquired a cast of terror.

  The youth gave him a shake and the other lads cheered. Mr Marmalade was making desperate attempts to get up, but every time he half-raised himself one of the lads would shove him back down with the sole of his boot.r />
  'Gottle of fucking geer!' they shouted. Mr Marmalade was clutching his chest above the heart and gasping.

  'Somos solamente campesinos pobres, mi amigo!' wailed the dummy.

  'You leave him alone, you bullies!' shouted Ionawr. The leader of the youths shouted, 'What the fuck do you want?'

  'Somos solamente campesinos pobres, mi amigo!'

  'And shut that fuckin' dummy up!'

  The kid smashed the dummy's head twice against the metal of the railings. One of the eyes came out. Ionawr screamed. Mr Marmalade was now making obscene sucking sounds and holding his chest, his eyes bulging as if something was pushing them out of his head from the inside.

  'Somos solamente campesinos pobres, mi amigo!'

  I stepped forward and punched the lead yob. Despite the swagger and posturing, he was probably not much more than eighteen or nineteen and slightly built. He fell sprawling on to the pavement. I kicked him viciously in the stomach and he grunted in pain. Across the road a casement window screeched open and a woman in a nightie leaned out and cried, 'I've called the police, you bastards, they're on the way!' And as if in confirmation we heard the distant wail of a siren starting up. None of the lads had the guts to make a move on me. The leader got to his feet and, seeing the distant blue flash of the approaching prowl car, took to his heels, followed by his gang.

  We kneeled down by Mr Marmalade. Over by the railings, like the dummy that continues talking as his master drinks a glass of milk, the shattered mannikin continued to plead for their lives. 'Somos solamente campesinos pobres, mi amigo!' Maybe it was the wind plucking strange notes from the musical stave of the seaside railings. Or maybe the terror of the night, working on our own dark fears and imaginings, had somehow transformed the voices of the approaching cops. Or maybe we just dreamed it. Because as we kneeled in the grime and Ionawr cradled Mr Marmalade's head it was clear that the old ventriloquist's heart had already given out and instead of milk he had drained the cup of life.

  ' Somos solamente campesinos pobres, mi amigo!'

  Chapter 5

  IT WOULD BE naive to say Aberystwyth ever had much innocence left to lose, but the death of the Amazing Mr Marmalade struck many people as a watershed. Old man kicked to death on the Prom, they said, never thought I'd live to see that. Perhaps it was all those fresh graves on the side of Pen Dinas dug in the wake of the flood that contributed to the mood, or maybe just the casual brutality of the attack. Or perhaps it was the recognition that the optimism that many people felt after the flood had deceived us. As a town we had stared death in the face and prided ourselves on the fact that death had blinked first. But the murder of Mr Marmalade confirmed what we secretly suspected all along: it was all at best a reprieve, a stay of execution. The optimism was snake oil.

  Walking home after the attack, I kept thinking about what a senseless act it was, and how easily it could have been avoided. What was an old man like Marmalade doing there at that time of night? Where did he think he was going? It didn't make sense. When I got home I found the answer. It turned out he had been going to see me. There was a note from him saying he had called and that he had information. And I had to wonder, was this a coincidence, a motiveless attack of the sort that could happen to anyone? Or did it have something to do with me? As far as I knew, the police didn't know about his visit but they soon would, and once that happened they'd haul me in for questioning. The smart thing to do was tell them before they found out, that way they would know I wasn't holding out on them. Trouble was, holding out on them was what I did for a living. It was part of the unwritten code: protecting the client's privacy. But I could only go so far and murder was definitely beyond the line in the sand. Not that the new broom at the police station would be much for fine distinctions anyway. His type were always itching to revoke your licence. And they generally had a preferred technique for doing it: making it fall out from your pocket as you tumbled down the police station steps.

  I let Ionawr take my bed and I took the sofa. And then I put Myfanwy's LP on the turntable, unscrewed the cap on my friend Captain Morgan, and tried to beat back the louche imaginings that all men feel in the presence of a girl who sells herself for a living. The look of reproach in her eyes didn't help. That sweet, sharp pang and slight surprise that you maybe don't find her attractive ... ah if only she knew! As if any man would not ache and burn inside for such a lovely girl. But you cannot say it, because the act of protecting her has no meaning if you say the words. I'd love to but ... it's not that I don't want to but ... But what? Your sister died in my arms once? To speak the words is to ask to be absolved. To disavow your cake on moral grounds and then eat it anyway. Bianca's sister, probably not much more than eighteen. The same age as Bianca when she walked into my life and almost immediately out of her own. A waif from the Moulin who, they said, never did anything from a pure motive, but who tried to help me on a case without any motive at all other than kindness. A quality so rare in those days most people didn't recognise it when they saw it. I couldn't save her — had to watch helplessly instead as they ran her over down at the harbour. And of all the cars in town they could have chosen to kill her with, they chose mine. So sleep alone, Ionawr, and don't ask why; in case the answer you get is the simplest one: that three years ago I shared the same pillow with your sister. Captain Morgan stared at me. I didn't know who he was but I could guess what he would be doing right now in my shoes. He winked and I turned the bottle round and forced my thoughts elsewhere, far away from Aberystwyth Prom, to Myfanwy, stuck with the creep Brainbocs in some cockroach-infested cantina in Patagonia. Singing those bitter-sweet ballads of love and loss to the half-Welsh half-Indian mestizos. On the front of the record cover, for no apparent reason, the characters were spaced out: M.Y.F.A.N.W.Y. Seven scarlet letters running through the seaside rock of my heart.

  *

  Next morning I put a call through to Gretel's hall of residence. It was a bit early to expect students to be up but they were made of different mettle in Lampeter and the porter told me she was out giving alms. I left a message for her to call me before evensong at the latest. Then I made some coffee and called Meirion, the crime reporter at the Gazette. He'd heard about the attack on Marmalade but no one knew what the story was. The police were just treating it as routine. He promised to let me know if he heard anything. I asked him about the man in the Peacocks' coat. Did it ring any bells? He chuckled. We both knew that on matters like this he had a whole cathedral belfry at his disposal.

  'I seem to remember some sort of incident out at Ysbyty Ystwyth a while back,' he said. 'Something to do with the military, called the Ysbyty Ystwyth Experiment or something. Apparently some civilians saw something they shouldn't have and afterwards they got a visit from someone dressed the way you describe. I didn't cover the story so I don't know much but I'll dig up what I can.'

  I thanked him and went downstairs to fetch the post. There was a card from Mrs Llantrisant. If ever there was a demonstration of the fact that we never really know anyone, she was it. Ten years swabbing my step and general cleaning and all along she had been planning to blow up the dam at Nant-y-moch. She'd been on Saint Madoc's Rock for eighteen months now, standing, they said, all day long on the cliff-top like a statue from Easter Island, staring out towards Aberystwyth. On fine days you could charter a boat from the harbour and look at her through binoculars. She must have earned some privileges through good behaviour to be allowed to send mail. This was the second in four months.

  A pair of puffins have taken up residence in the eaves of the old wool shed. I have called them Gertie and Bertie. They dote on each other madly. Their cooing and billing fills me with joy in the gleam of the morning sun. But when evening falls and a gentle melancholy descends upon their preening a fear creeps into my heart and I have to close the shutters and banish them. Ah yes! love, that beautiful demon that devours us all in the end. I think of you and all that has passed between us and I forgive you freely with my heart because only love —for that harlot whose
name I will not utter — could have made you betray me the way you did. Banished from the hearths of those I love and confronted daily with the rubble of my life, this is the truth I publish abroad: love will corrupt us more assuredly than sin.

  Yours

  Gertrude Ophelia Llantrisant

  I dropped the card on to the table and said to the empty room, 'Wow!' Despite all that had happened I found no hatred in my heart for her. Only pity. Was her middle name really Ophelia? I put on my hat and coat, left Ionawr sleeping, and walked out.

  It was a grey, damp morning and the light on the end of the harbour jetty winked sleepily. I walked to the very end of the Prom and then doubled back, my steps taking me unwittingly, or perhaps because they knew better than me where they wanted to go, to the place on Harbour Row where Bianca had died: the stigmatic stain in the tarmac that commemorated the short blasted life of an Aberystwyth harlot. The mark had faded now but the faith that her outline would return was strong among the pilgrims. The nearby guest-houses were already booked out for the week of the anniversary next summer and it didn't matter how much Domestos the ladies from the Sweet Jesus League poured on the tarmac. There was a man standing at the spot, staring down and deep in thought. It was Father Seamus. He bent down and picked up a wreath, one of the donation from the Abergavenny Rotary Club, and put it in the bin. He looked slightly embarrassed to find himself observed.

  'Best place for it,' he said lamely.

  'You think so?'

  'We could do without this sort of nonsense.'

  I nodded. 'You're a sceptic, then?'

  'Don't tell me you're not, Louie?'

  I shrugged. 'I am, of course, but it really did look like her, you know. And this is the exact spot where it happened.'

  'It's just a stain. You could probably find one on your toilet floor that reminded you of someone if you screwed up your eyes and stared long enough. And had enough to drink.'

  'True, but no one has been murdered on my toilet floor.'