Last Tango in Aberystwyth an-2

by Malcolm Pryce

  'Yes.'

  'So why didn't you tell me?'

  'You know damn well why I didn't. Because if I had, the next minute you would be down there visiting him.'

  'And what's wrong with that?'

  'Everything's wrong.'

  'That's not an answer.'

  'I don't want you having anything to do with him. It's too dangerous.'

  'I'm not a kid, you know.'

  'So you keep telling me. You're sixteen and three quarters. It may seem a lot to you but, believe me, it isn't.'

  'What happened to us being partners?'

  'The first job of a partner is to take care of the other one.'

  'But what can he do, he's behind bars?'

  'I don't know what he can do. I'm not smart enough to think of anything, but he is.'

  'Louie, you know I have to go, we're on a case.'

  'There's no point going anyway.'

  'No point?'

  'Of course not. You think he's going to tell you something that will help us?'

  'No point?'

  'Not even a microscopic one.'

  'Well you're a crap detective then,' she said, eyes watering with resentment and confusion.

  My eyes widened in surprise. 'What's that all about?'

  'Well, you went to see him, didn't you? Why did you waste your time if there was no point?'

  'I ... er ... It was only after I went that I realised that there was no point.'

  She blew a raspberry.

  'How did you find out anyway?'

  'I'm a detective.'

  I sighed and Calamity stood up. 'I'm going.'

  'I forbid you!' I said as she left, knowing full well that nothing I said would make any difference. But I said it all the same. 'I forbid you.' It was an old trick I'd learned from King Canute.

  I sat there staring at my tea for a while and then ran out and down Pier Street towards the sea. I could see Calamity just about to turn left on to the Prom, so I turned into King Street behind the old college and cut through the Crazy Golf. From there I walked across the road and turned towards the pier. A few steps and she almost bumped into me. She turned and started to walk away but I caught her arm and pulled her over to the railings. She stood there not struggling but keeping her gaze stolidly averted, finding something improbably fascinating in the side of the pier.

  Neither of us spoke and finally she said, 'What do you want?'

  'I just want to tell you to be careful.'

  She turned and looked at me, her eyes wet and gleaming. 'So I can go then?'

  'What's the point of stopping you, you were going to go anyway, weren't you?'

  'No, I wasn't. You forbade me.'

  I put my arm over her shoulder, 'Just be careful and keep away from the bars, and whatever you do, don't believe a word he says. OK?'

  She nodded.

  *

  Meirion was enjoying his usual early-evening aperitif at the Rock Cafe, his big belly wedged in between the immovable plastic seat and the edge of the table. Spread out before him a gazette of English and Welsh seaside towns preserved in pink sugar: Blackpool, Llandudno, Tenby, Brighton. I sat down and ordered the aniseed one with black and white stripes.

  He had just finished a piece for the morning edition on the death of Mr Marmalade. It was, he said, a typical Meirion piece — hard-hitting, authoritative, tough but fair, and like all Meirion's hard-hitting, authoritative, tough and fair pieces it would never be published for fear of upsetting all the bigshots who owned the town. Still, he had to write them if he wanted to collect his salary.

  He told me what he had managed to dig up on the Ysbyty Ystwyth Experiment. 'I spoke to the chap who covered the story,' he began. 'It seems to have been some advanced neuroscientific research conducted by the military at the sanatorium. They chose that place because folk were already scared of it so they would keep away. Then something went badly wrong and the project was wound up in a hurry. It's all officially denied, of course.'

  'So where does this Philanthropist fit in, the one who bought the place?'

  'Dr Faustus? He was in charge. No one knows much about him, he's supposed to be some sort of experimental neuroscientist who had some pretty far-out theories about false memory syndrome. Apparently he was thrown out of the scientific establishment for being too crazy. After the thing was wound up the folks living out there started seeing things. Well a "thing" actually. A monster they said, or a ghost or something, living in the woods. The most celebrated case was a family out at Pontrhydygroes who saw something while on a picnic. They were making a home-movie. Didn't notice anything at the time but when the film came back they saw something in the trees behind them, something moving. That's what they say, anyway. The whole family disappeared not long after that. Their breakfast half-eaten on the table, the tea still warm in the pot. Never seen again. No sign of the film either. A lot of people who made statements to the police were later by questioned by a strange otherworldly man, dressed in medieval dress. He sounds a bit like this chap you mentioned in the Peacocks' coat. They didn't say what he wanted but after that they all withdrew their statements.' 'So there's a time-traveller walking around in the woods.' Meirion tore off a piece of bread to scrape up the last bits of rock from his plate. 'That's what they say. Of course, I prefer rational explanations myself. It may be possible that the military have been experimenting with some sort of time-travel device, and now there's a sixteenth-century Jew haunting the woods of Ysbyty Ystwyth; but if you ask me, it is far more likely to be a prowler wearing one of those coats they sell in Peacocks.'

  The Heritage Folk Museum was housed in an old whalebone godown overlooking the harbour. In a series of rooms various scenes from seventeenth- or nineteenth-century rural life were acted out by the sort of people who couldn't hold down the type of jobs the twentieth century had to offer. Sitting at a spinning-wheel, lying on a bed pretending to die in childbirth, or with a face covered in fake smallpox weals ... It wasn't very demanding so long as you didn't have to say anything.

  In the entrance hall there was an artist in dungarees putting the finishing touches to a mural of Mrs Bligh-Jones. It was done in that heroic style you get in Warsaw Pact town halls, where the worker holds aloft a hammer and leads forward the proletariat to a Socialist promised land. The artist had chosen to depict the moment just after the fateful decision to abandon the van: Mrs Bligh-Jones, Mrs Gorseinon, Mrs Tolpuddle and Mrs Montgomery strung out against the backdrop of the mountain; roped together at the waist, and wearing bowling shoes instead of crampons. I smiled politely at the artist but, to be honest, it was pretty crap.

  Someone touched my arm lightly and I looked round. It was Marty's mum.

  'Hello, Louie. How are you? Haven't seen you for so long.'

  'I know, I've been meaning to visit, but ...'

  She squeezed my arm. 'It's O K. I understand how busy you must be.'

  We stood side by side and looked at the picture and when the artist went out for a cigarette Marty's mum glared at her. 'I would never say anything but, if you ask me, it's wrong. It didn't ought to be allowed.'

  'What didn't?'

  'What they've done to Mrs Cefnmabws! She's not there.'

  She nodded indignantly at the mural. She was right, there should have been five figures in the landscape, not four.

  'I know she lost her bottle,' Marty's mum continued, 'and ran off raving into the blizzard, but that didn't happen until later, did it? When they left the van she was still in charge. Mrs Bligh-Jones should be at the back, not the front.'

  'Maybe it's something to do with perspective or something.'

  'Perspective my foot! They've airbrushed her out of history, that's what they've done. That Mrs Bligh-Jones is such a busybody!'

  I took her for a cup of tea and in the cafe she told me what brought her to the museum.

  'There's been some fresh evidence about Marty.'

  I turned and looked more closely at her. 'Fresh in what way?'

  'They've released some
of the official papers from the inquiry. The statute of limitations is up, isn't it? I finally found out the answer to a mystery that has haunted me ever since that morning he left for school and never came back.' She leaned closer and lowered her voice. 'That night before the cross-country run, he was out in the frosty woods collecting kindling for his granny. Away for hours he was. When he got back home he was half-starved with cold and his new coat was torn in half. I wasn't half angry with him, the perisher, but he wouldn't say how he did it. But now I know, don't I?'

  'So what was it?'

  'Apparently there was this piece of evidence at the inquiry that they didn't release for fear of embarrassing the Church. It was the testimony of a friar — one of them mendicant ones — and he had been lost in the woods that same night. Blue with cold he was, because he didn't have a proper coat. Well, they're not supposed to, are they? It's all part of the mortification. It seems when Marty saw him he tore his own coat in two and gave half to the friar.'

  I patted her hand. 'He was a fine boy.'

  'They kept quiet about it so as not to upset the poor chap. He was embarrassed, you see, because he thought all the other mendicants would laugh at him for taking charity from a little schoolboy.'

  'I expect he would have been mortified.'

  Marty's mum nodded without understanding and then carried on excitedly, 'Anyway, I've just been speaking to the people who run this place and they're thinking of making a tableau of it -to illustrate the theme of suffering and charity through the ages. I've just been giving them some of his old clothes.'

  After Marty's mum left with my promise to visit her soon I wandered into the exhibit hall. I showed the pictures of the Dean and the girl to the doctor carrying a jar of leeches. He recognised them, and said he seemed to vaguely remember them working there for a while, drifting in and drifting out as people tended to do. Workers seldom stayed long — life there was hard and the working conditions primitive. The girl had been spinning and the man had mended coracles. The last he'd heard the Dean had got a job working as a satyr in the Beltane speakeasy.

  Chapter 11

  As I sat in the office that evening I felt my spirits sinking with the barometer and then a phone call from Llunos sent them lower still. One of his men had pulled in some junior tough guy who had been boasting about the hit on Marmalade. He said it had been pre-planned and meant to scare him off talking to me. The kid wouldn't say who paid for it. Of course, it would be stupid to blame myself but that didn't stop me doing it. The actual cause of death might have been a weak heart, but he was an old man who would still be alive today if I hadn't gone to see him. If I wasn't to blame, who was? I put on my hat and coat and then the phone rang again. I snatched the receiver and barked into it and then listened. The line was awful: hissing and squawking faded in and out as if I was tuning a short-wave radio and a girl's faint voice said, 'Louie, it's me.'

  'Who's me?' I said as the hairs on the back of my neck stood to attention.

  'It's me, oh Louie, it's me.' A voice so faint, drowning in a sea of static.

  'Who?' I tried again.

  'Me, Louie, it's me. Myfanwy.'

  'What?!' I shouted. 'I can't hear you!'

  'Myfanwy. Oh, Louie, help me!'

  Then the line clicked dead. I sat frozen, immobile for a split second, and then jabbed my fingers uselessly on to the prongs of the telephone the way they do in the movies but that never works in real life.

  Out on the Prom the breeze was moist and heavy with the tang of salt, and laced in tantalising bursts with another smell almost as primal: hot dogs. That oh so heartbreaking smell, the pure essential oil of night falling on the Prom, gathered long ago in those lost days when you were small, and on holiday with your mum and dad. Gathered in the magical falling dusk when the seagulls have gone to roost beneath the ironwork of the pier; and you all take a stroll after dinner, way past your normal bedtime, towards an amusement arcade that flashes and chimes and dings. Out at sea angry rumblings light up the clouds in distant flashes, like celestial pinball. You watch it all in awe, and little know that nothing in your life will ever be as good as this again.

  The smell of onions frying ... a scent that years later still unleashes a craving — like the snatch of an unknown melody — for a lost Eden that has no gate. That has never had a gate. Because the truth about hot dogs is this: no smell in the world promises so much and delivers so little. Even as a kid when you buy it you find it tastes of nothing at all. Absolutely nothing. The biggest zero ever. A warm, bland mush as far removed from the perfume it adds to the night air as the lotus flower from the slime that spawns it.

  It's as if some master perfumer and necromancer had foreseen all the broken promises of your life to come, all the pangs of unrequited love and unreturned letters; the torment of watching a phone that never rings; the bright expectancy of fresh hope at breakfast, in ruins by sunset ... it was as if he took all these things and blended them into a single fragrance and called it whatever the French is for Disappointment — Dйsolй or Chagrin or something. The smell of hot dogs on the Prom at night. The scent of pure Chagrin.

  *

  There was a consternation at the pier. Police 'scene-of-crime' tape, a flashing blue light and Father Seamus taking charge. I worked it all out in the blink of an eye. The workmen rebuilding the pier had moved the entrance to the bingo parlour two feet to the left. A swarm of confused grannies were there now, buzzing around like bees who come home at the end of the day to find the hive has gone. The priest offering comfort. The ambulance just arriving. Down on the green slimy rocks, exactly below the point where the old entrance had been for fifty years, an old lady face-down and not moving. The sea washing over her, stained pink.

  I didn't give a damn. There were a lot worse ways to go in this town. I just shrugged and walked under the arch of coloured lights, down the wooden tunnel that ran along the side of the pier, to the new Moulin at the end. Behind in the distance I could still hear Father Seamus giving comfort, could almost hear his two fingers swishing up, down, left, right — drawing crosses in the air as cheaply as a washed-up actress gives out air-kisses. I smiled grimly to myself. I had an appointment with him tonight but he didn't know it yet. Tonight he would discover that wearing a brown dress with a rope round the belly didn't guarantee immunity in this world. He wouldn't like it, but I didn't give a damn. There were plenty of things that I didn't like too. And it wasn't because he was a liar, or had spoken earlier with such unchristian contempt over the spot where Bianca died in my arms; and it wasn't because I was heading down the corridor now to a club I had vowed never to visit. And it wasn't because somewhere out there tonight, probably smelling the same fried onions, was a man in trouble called Dean Morgan, because I didn't really give a damn about him either. Just as the lifeboatman doesn't give a damn about the stupid fool he fishes from the sea. It wasn't because of any of this, although it all helped. It was just because tonight I didn't give a damn, the way sometimes you don't. So I walked down the tunnel towards the new Moulin and squeezed my fingers into a fist in anticipation of the priest's soft pink jaw.

  What makes a club? If it's the spirit of the people who gather there, then the new Moulin was very much like the old. The decor was cheaper and more makeshift than the original; and perhaps there wasn't quite the same panache about it; but it still had the most important ingredients: darkness and a mix of people from every walk of Aberystwyth life, all unified by the common desire to leave their scruples at the door. And most importantly there were the Moulin Girls lolling about in their stovepipe hats and shawls and not much else. Sweet soft things who for a little money would do sweet soft things.

  Just like in the old club, tough guys in penguin suits stood at the door, and once inside it was hot, crowded, loud and sweaty. Waitresses walked round with trays of food, others took drink orders or ushered you to a table. In the centre of the room there was a space cleared for dancing, and set around it were tables with flickering candles, and hanging from the ceil
ing were twirling disco balls. Towards the back was a stage and in front of this a private table for Jubal and his guests. I felt a rush of cool air over the top of my head and looked up to see two men in satyr trousers sitting on giant swings, arcing slowly and gracefully above the crowd. They were Bill and Ben. A cowgirl walked past lighting cigarettes with a cigarette-lighter pistol, and another girl took my hand and led me through the throng to a table. I sat down and ordered a rum as a squeal alerted me to the high jinks over at Jubal's table. Father Seamus had arrived and by way of a welcome drink was drinking Vimto out of Mrs Bligh-Jones's shoe. She was squealing at the depravity of it. Once he'd drained the shoe he leered and beat his chest like Tarzan and everybody laughed but when his gaze caught mine he lost some of his sparkle and sat down uncertainly. Never was it more truly said: a man is known by the company he keeps.

  My drink arrived and I looked around for Ionawr but couldn't see her; no doubt she would find me easily enough. I watched the stage where there was an unknown starlet singing. A Myfanwy wannabe without the looks or the voice. But she sang all the usual songs and the crowd were pleased. And then Mrs Bligh-Jones took the mike. She made an improbable nightclub singer. She stood rather stiffly, the spotlight glinting on her Sam Browne; her tunic sleeve flapping emptily. One of her spectacle lenses had been taped over to cure a recurrent lazy eye. She spoke into the mike like a schoolgirl addressing assembly and explained that she wished to sing a few hymns to give thanks to her Lord and Saviour for her deliverance from the blizzard on Pumlumon. A murmur of pious approval drifted round the room. During her act Ionawr turned up and led me by the hand to the back.

  As we threaded our way through the throng Mrs Bligh-Jones took a bow. Applause erupted like firecrackers and was then cut instantly by the appearance of a man on the dance-floor. It was Jubal, in black tie and burgundy cummerbund. Everyone drew breath in expectation as he passed through them with slow determined steps - a comic pantomime, familiar to everyone, of the man who emerges from the swing doors of the saloon and walks down the dusty street to rescue his kidnapped bride. On the stage, half-blinded by the spotlight, Mrs Bligh-Jones simmered with expectation like a Saxon maid when the Vikings are banging on the door. Ionawr and I halted our progress at the edge of the room and watched. Jubal stopped at the lip of the stage, paused half a beat longer to milk the moment to the full, and then reached into the air and drew a figure of eight with his index finger. A collective sigh came from all the ladies around the floor. Jubal turned his finger into a pistol and fired an imaginary bullet at the bandleader who laughed, clutched good-humouredly at his heart, and in the same instant struck up the band. Mrs Bligh-Jones squealed and jumped down into her lover's arms with the faith of a trapeze artist and was instantly swept away in a giddy tango.