Last Tango in Aberystwyth an-2

by Malcolm Pryce

  'Was he a friend of yours?'

  'No. I've been hired to find him.'

  'But you said no cops, right?'

  'No cops.'

  'I'm sick of cops. They either want to lock you up or fuck you up.'

  'Usually both.'

  'What makes you come here?'

  'The Dean used to have one of your fudge-box tops — he lit a candle to it every night.'

  She refilled the gin glass, took a violent swig, and a drag on her cigarette. 'Yeah, he was sweet like that.' She took another life-saving drag. 'Is he dead?'

  'Not as far as I know.'

  'Well, there's not much I can tell you. I haven't seen him for weeks. Met him at the Heritage Museum. I was spinning and he got the part as the coracle man for a while. But he didn't stay long, they never do. He was different from the others, though. I wondered what he was doing there, and then I realised it was because of me. I meet plenty of guys like that.'

  'Anything going on between you two?'

  She looked slightly puzzled for a second and then let out a laugh. 'Me and him?! Are you nuts?! What do I want with a man?'

  I waited while she refilled the gin glass and then lit another cigarette. Between puffs she asked me, 'Is it true he was a professor?'

  'Yes, he was.'

  'I'd rustle something up from the fridge for you but they took it away.'

  'We could go out, if you're hungry.'

  'I haven't got the energy to dress, but thanks anyway.'

  'I could get a take-away. Chinese.'

  She smiled. 'You worked out I like Chinese food all on your own?'

  'It was a hunch.'

  I returned to the trailer half an hour later laden with a set meal for two that was so good the girl at the take-away assured me even a real Chinese person might have eaten it. Judy Juice peeled away the lids and threw them on the floor. Then she picked up a knife with a 'Come to Sunny Aberystwyth' handle and used it to scrape the rice on to some plates.

  'The girl at the Chinese knows you, says you eat there every day.'

  'It's all I eat. You ever been there?'

  'The take-away?'

  'No, China.'

  'Do I look like I can afford to go to China?'

  'How would I know how much it costs? Someone told me the other day, when they open this tunnel to France you'll be able to get a train all the way from Aberystwyth to Peking. Is that right?'

  'As far as I know.'

  She nodded, somehow relieved. 'One day I'll go there; get on that night train to Shrewsbury and never get off. Yes sir!' The bright look faded and she said, 'You know, some other guy came asking about the Dean.'

  'Was he wearing a Peacocks' coat?'

  'I wouldn't know where he bought it, but it was long and black and he was a bit creepy. He wasn't sweet like you so I told him to sling his hook.'

  'What did he want?'

  'Oh, you know, asking about the Dean and when I last saw him. And then he said the Dean had taken a case that belonged to him and asked me for it. And I said why would I have it, and he said he knew the Dean had left it here. I said shows you how much you know, buster, and then he said, "Don't give me the runaround, you tart." So I called Lester the guard here and he threw him out. Lester looks out for me because I get quite a few cranks turning up.'

  'Did the Dean ever mention this case?'

  She sighed at the memory. 'Yeah, he mentioned it. He was always going on about "them", how they were after him because he had something that belonged to them. He once said they would kill him if they caught him. Then one day I got tired of hearing it and I told him to prove it. So he showed me some papers. One of them was official-looking and written in runes. I couldn't understand it, but he could. I said, so what is it? And he said it was an official druid death warrant. And I said, who's it for? And he said, if I told you that, you'd be on it too.'

  She reached for the gin bottle again. 'To tell you the truth, it all went in one ear and out the other. He was always full of crap. They all are.'

  *

  From Judy Juice's I drove down to the harbour and parked by the railings, facing out to sea. The favourite spot for people from the Midlands to eat their chips; people who drive for three hours for this view and never get out of the car to take a closer look. But tonight neither did I. It was raining again and I sat there, the wipers humming, and stared at the light on the end of the jetty, thinking about what Marty's mum had said. About the question the dissident lighthouseman dared to ask, but no one dared answer. About the suspicion that had haunted him every day since that moment when they found his wife preserved in a block of ice, frozen in time like a fly in amber, and Mr Cefnmabws peered into the sarcophagus of ice and saw that expression on her face. Was that terrible frozen snarl on her face simply the agony of her death-mask? The cruel hand of hunger and cold? Or did it hint at a different explanation for her death than the official version? Something else, something altogether darker? Was it a look of horror? The terror of someone who fled down that mountain because she saw something up there no decent person should be forced to witness? The question that Mr Cefnmabws wanted answered was a simple one. They had survived for three months up above the snow-line, alone with the bodies of their dead comrades, stranded in a world where not even the birds could survive. So what did they eat?

  Chapter 16

  When I opened up shop the next morning, Llunos was standing on the doorstep. He walked straight past me and up the stairs without a word. He threw his hat on the desk and slumped into the client's, chair and said, 'Is the girl here?'

  'Calamity? Not yet.'

  'What time are you expecting her?'

  'Oh I don't know, some time this morning. You know Calamity.'

  'Yes,' he said in a voice without warmth or inflexion. 'I know Calamity.'

  His tone began to worry me. 'What's up?'

  He grimaced. 'They've sprung Custard Pie.'

  I jerked back slightly as if he'd held smelling-salts out to me. 'Sprung him, who has?'

  He ran tired fingers through his thinning hair. 'I don't know, someone, some people ... I mean, who gives a fuck, he's out!'

  'I can't believe it — a Triple-A-category prisoner in a maximum-security dungeon ...'

  His face became flushed with anger and he shouted at me in a way I hadn't seen since the old days when we were adversaries.

  'Now don't you start on me,' he shouted. 'I'm the one who put him away, remember? How do you think I feel? I'm not the one who's been giving him bird seed.'

  'What are you saying?'

  'I ought to have your licence for this.'

  'You telling me he used the bird seed to escape?'

  He picked up his hat and thrashed it down on the tabletop.

  'Yes I'm telling you he used the bird seed to escape. The Birdman of Aberystwyth. How stupid can you get? How on earth could you fall for a stupid trick like that?'

  'So what did he do, dress up as a seagull and fly away?'

  He didn't answer but gave me a cold stare.

  I went and fetched some glasses from the draining-board and poured two glasses of cold water.

  There was a knock on the door and Llunos shouted, 'Enter.' One of the guards from Custard Pie's prison came in looking pretty much as you'd expect for a man charged with the task of standing guard over a single prisoner who had now escaped. He look hesitantly from Llunos to me and back again.

  'Just tell it, officer,' said Llunos.

  The guard fidgeted and wrung his hands. 'Well it's not ... I don't know where ... I mean the point ...'

  'I said tell it, for Christ's sake!'

  'He ... he ...' And then it all came out in a rush. 'He kept asking us to cook his eggs extra runny, said his stomach couldn't take cooked eggs. Every day raw eggs ... I mean, how were we supposed to know?'

  Llunos gave him a scowl of thunder.

  The guard hopped from foot to foot. He knew he was for the high jump for this.

  'Well he was keeping them, wasn't he? You
know that horrible stringy bit you get, like an umbilical cord or something, that sticks the yolk to the shell? He was saving them up. And there was the play-acting as well, so we thought he must be mad, like

  'What play-acting?' asked Llunos.

  'He was rehearsing for a part ... kept learning his lines, Little Red Riding Hood or something, it was.'

  Llunos gave me a look of enquiry, wondering whether this meant anything to me, but it didn't.

  'Maybe he was just trying to act the nutter. Go on.'

  'That's what we thought, but we was wrong, see. It was the birds, you see, I mean we just never noticed. Well you wouldn't, would you?'

  'Officer, if you don't get to the end of this story in one minute I'm going to throttle you.'

  "Well, there he was like, taming these little sparrows and wrens and chaffinches and things and getting them to perch on his finger and sit on his head — it was really touching, or so we thought. Such gentle creatures, birds. But then we noticed there was something really strange about them. They found their way in all right, but they had terrible difficulty finding their way back out. It was as if they couldn't see the flue any more. And they kept flying into the wall and squawking. But now we know, don't we? All that time he was billing and cooing with them he was gouging their little eyes out and then saving them up in the jar meant for his cod liver oil capsules. Then when he had enough he used the boiled egg strings and the albumen and all the little sparrow eye jelly and made himself a set of those fake gouged eye kits you get from the joke shop. I mean, what a nutter! Anyway, next thing you know we get woken in the middle of the night by this blood-curdling screaming and there's Custard Pie standing with his eyes all bloody and streaming down his cheeks. He screams, "I've done my eyes, I've clone my eyes, get me an ambulance!" That's about it really.'

  'That's it!?' I shouted. 'That's it!? You just thought, oh he's done his eyes. We'll call an ambulance. You didn't, like, take a look or anything?' I tried to sound harsh but there was no point. No point whatsoever.

  The guard answered, 'I know it sounds daft. But what would you have done at 3 am? Maybe if you was an optician it would have been different but there was us, like, woken up in the middle of the night with this nutter screaming and his whole face gushing sparrow viscera mixed with boiled egg ... So we rang for an ambulance. Anybody would've.'

  Llunos turned to me. 'Five minutes after the first ambulance left, a second one turns up. Seems the first was phoney. They found it burned out in Commins Coch this morning.'

  *

  I asked at the pier and down by the station where the apprentice toughs hang out. And I asked in the burger bars and cafes and amusement arcades. And I asked at the harbour and round Trefechan. But no one had seen Calamity recently. I even rang the school but they just laughed at me, they thought she had left the country. Llunos tried to reassure me, saying she would be fine. Custard Pie couldn't get far because every way out of town was being watched. The railway station, the Cliff Railway, the narrow-gauge railway, the bus station and the harbour. But we both knew Custard Pie was already gone. Probably already with Herod, wherever he was. There was no reason to suppose Calamity was with them, but all the same it didn't smell good to me and when I finally gave up wandering round town asking people if they had seen her, I went back to the office and picked up the keys to the car.

  The only thing I remember about the drive to Ynyslas were the looks of horror on the people's faces as they darted out of the way in Bow Street; and then the fists raised in anger in my rear-view mirror. Ten miles and thirty junctions and not once did the accelerator leave the floor. Not once were the brakes engaged until I was driving on sand. And I don't remember the dash across the wide sands of the estuary or through the sharp marram grass. All I remember is the relief that exploded inside me when I finally saw Cadwaladr.

  He sat wind-blown on the dune top, a can of Special Brew in his hand. He pondered for a while what I had told him, and then said, 'Are you sure they've got her?'

  I took a deep breath and spoke in monotone as if reciting a ghoul's shopping-list. 'Calamity has been visiting Custard Pie. He tricked her into helping him escape. Now Calamity has disappeared and no one can find her. What does it look like to you?'

  'It's possible they haven't got her, it could be she's on a damn fool's errand to bring Pie in herself. Maybe she blames herself for him escaping and wants to make amends.'

  'I'd love to believe that. But I don't.'

  Cadwaladr sipped the beer and considered the situation. 'If Custard Pie has teamed up with Herod it will be tough to catch them,' he said.

  'Are they really that good?'

  He didn't answer immediately, but stared out to sea, eyes watering in the breeze and focusing on infinity as his thoughts drifted back across the years.

  'In Patagonia I fought alongside them for a while — in the early campaigns. I used to watch them go out on night patrol - faces all smeared up with charcoal and paint. When they came back at dawn they'd always have a prisoner with them, some poor terrified conscript, trussed up like a turkey at Christmas. We never asked who he was or where he was from; we just knew if we wanted any peace and quiet that day we'd better stay out of earshot of the interrogation block.' He shook his head sadly. 'I can still remember the cries coming from those cells. They say in all that time there was never a man Custard Pie couldn't break.' He paused and took another sip of beer. 'But if you really want to know what they were like, just look at what happened to Waldo. Remember me telling you about the goalkeeper in the Christmas Day football match?'

  I nodded. 'You never finished your story.'

  Cadwaladr took a long drink from the can, as if to impart the necessary gravitas to the story of Waldo. Then he started to speak with a slow shake of the head, as if even now he couldn't believe it.

  'Waldo was an Everyman. He stood for all of us. Just a little kid thousands of miles from home in a land he'd never heard of, seeing things that were too much for his heart. They say the reason he signed up for this psychological experiment at the sanatorium was he'd heard it was something to do with memory and all his life he'd been trying to lose his — trying to banish the memory of a certain week. Just one week. It didn't seem like a lot to ask. Like a lot of guys he tried to drink it away. But no matter how much he drank, it would still be there in the morning, like his shadow.

  'The incident took place right at the end of the war. A few weeks before we were shipped home. Waldo was cut off in the wilds, alone, and pinned down in a ravine by a sniper. That sniper in turn was pinned down by Waldo. It was stalemate, neither could move without getting shot by the other. This went on for a week until finally the other guy's morale collapsed and he made a break for it and Waldo shot him. The bullet got him in the stomach - the wound we all feared most - but it didn't kill him. Waldo spent the next three days listening to his cries of pain coming from behind a rock. At the end of the third day, as the man's moans were getting fainter and fainter, a dispatch rider turned up and told Waldo the armistice had been signed a week ago. Waldo was shocked. All that time they had been trying to kill each other, and yet the war was over; they had been brothers all along. A tremendous burst of love surges through the veins of Waldo and he rushes over to the stricken man and weeps. He takes out his first-aid kit and tries to save him. "My brother," he cries, "my brother! It's late in the day, but do not despair!" Waldo reckons if he can staunch the bleeding, and stabilise him, they can get him back to a hospital, and he might make it. In that instant saving this man becomes the most important undertaking in his whole life. It's as if the sun has burst through the cloud in his heart. Ever since he was a kid he has been confused about who he is and what he was put on this earth for. And now he sees with a rare clarity that for one tiny fragment of time he can perform an act that has meaning, a truly moral act — perhaps the only one he will ever perform in his life. Waldo was not a bookish type, not a thinker, but squatting down in the mud of I hat ravine holding a wound-compress to the bullet holes
in the man's stomach he understood it in a way that was deeper than words. This pure human act of salvation that could stand as a bigger symbol: to redeem all the terrible carnage and slaughter of the past three years. Then the dispatch rider comes over and says, "Hey, isn't that the guy who dived in the box?" And by God it was. Suddenly, the piercing sharp clarity of Waldo's vision has fled. The idea of salvation and brotherhood have vanished. Instead lying at his feet is the little jerk who fucked up the Christmas Day game.

  '"You dived didn't you!" they shout at him.

  '"Save me, my brother," he pleads. "Save me that I might go back to my little farm in the Sierra Machynlleth."

  '"Don't change the subject, you're the little rat that dived in the box, aren't you?"

  '"Holy Mother of God," he cries. "I swear on all that is holy that I didn't."

  '"Yes you bloody well did!"

  '"No, it wasn't me. It was someone who looks like me. My cousin Gabriel — he is a bad man, always making trouble, a bastardo!"

  "That's it!" they cry. "Turn your comrade in to save your skin."

  '"No, my friends, it is not true. Please save me. Think of my wife and daughter Carmencita who is only two and knows nothing of the villainy of this world. Must she grow up an orphan because of Gabriel's treachery?"

  '"You should have thought about that before you dived in the box!" Both are incensed now. Not only that he did the terrible deed but that he should lie about it here on his death-bed to the only men in the world with the power to save him.

  'So they try to extract a confession. They write it out for him and hold it under his nose. "Go on," they said. "Admit to the dive, and we'll save you."

  '"On the bones of the saints, I swear I didn't," he cried, his breath getting weaker and weaker, since Waldo has removed the wound-dressing now and the man's rich crimson gore is staining the bed of that ravine.

  '"You Latin footballers are all the same," says Waldo. "You're always diving! This is your last chance to absolve yourself before you go to meet your maker."

  'But he refuses. And while he slowly dies, they break open a bottle of tequila and drink to victory and then dip their arms in his blood and laugh. They laugh. Two years ago on the shores of Lake Bala, Waldo would have cried to see a bird hit by a car. And now he laughs. Who can ever fathom the mysteries of the human heart? The enemy soldier went to his grave refusing to accept that it was a dive and left behind a daughter Carmencita and a legacy of knowledge concerning the villainy of the world about which she had known nothing and now knew all.