The Day Aberystwyth Stood Still (10 page)

‘Tell me, do you follow the latest scientific developments?’

‘Not too closely.’

‘Just as well; you’d stick a paperknife into your heart if you did.’ He raised a feeble finger and pointed at Calamity. ‘Tell me, little girl, do you like flowers?’

‘They’re OK.’

‘Of course you do. You like bright colours, too, eh? All little girls do –’

‘She’s not so little.’

‘The soft peacock of the hills and sky; the deep, coagulated carmine of the rose; the custardy yellow of the daisy’s face, fringed with those perfect spears of white that yet somehow contain within their lucence a hint of the sky’s azure . . . You like colours, don’t you?’

‘Maybe.’

‘They are lies, all lies. Tricks and falsehoods, more deceiving than a lover’s tongue.’

‘I don’t believe you. How can colours be lies?’

‘Because you see, little girl, they are not properties belonging to the things we see, not intrinsically; they are fictions invented in our own heads. Yes, there is no doubt of it. Outside our bodies, beyond our skin, there is just electromagnetic radiation – radio waves that have no brightness nor colour. Ask yourself, where are these colours? If you chase them down the rabbit hole of the eyes, along the paths of nerves to their home in that porridge we call the mind, what do you find? Nothing but palpitating lumps of goo and slime.’ He swept his arm up and pointed through the window to his garden and, beyond it, the universe. ‘Everything we love about this world, all the beautiful things, are fictions our mind invents to conceal from us the insupportable truth: that the world is a colourless, seething quantum soup wrapped in endless night. Tree and flowers are just outlines we draw on to the darkness.’

‘If I felt like that I would find it hard to get out of bed in the morning,’ I said.

‘Do you think staying in bed would change anything? Mrs Lewis tells me you want to know about Iestyn Probert.’

‘You remember the case?’

‘Vaguely. He was lucky enough to be hanged young.’

‘Most people wouldn’t call it lucky.’

‘Of course not, but most people are fools who are scared of the dark and so persuade themselves that this torrent of empty days that we call life is preferable to the darkness that awaits them.’

‘We heard you certified his . . . er . . .’ Calamity paused.

‘Death? Can’t you say it? Are you frightened of a word? You poor, feeble, mouse-hearted things. Death is our friend, the only friend who keeps his appointment, who never lets us down. Death the lover who never forgets our birthday, who never jilts us for another, gentle death . . .’

‘Have you always been so unhappy?’ asked Calamity.

‘What makes you think I am unhappy?’

‘You hate flowers.’

‘No, you are wrong. I don’t. There is nothing to hate. It is not the flower’s fault. A flower has no intention, no more than a rock has. A flower is just a little machine that blind chance over endless geological epochs has contrived into an arrangement that produces copies of itself. What is there to hate? The only hateful thing is the myth of the flower that we create for ourselves.’

‘But have you always felt like that?’

He made a bitter smile and paused. ‘No, there was a time when I loved flowers too, when the colours of which we spoke brought the same uncomplicated joy to me as to the rest of my fellow herd.’ He reached across and picked up a photo from the bedside cabinet. ‘I keep a picture of Rhiannon to remind me of my conversion from that happy state. She left me, you see, when the world was young and we bestrode the sun-burned dunes like gods. We were betrothed and thus immortal like all young people, invincible, at least for an hour. She left me at the acme of my earthly bliss, beached on an Ararat of woe.’

‘Why did she leave?’ asked Calamity.

‘Who knows? They never tell you the true reason, do they? They think they want to spare you, but really they want to spare themselves. Suffice to say, for a season we played in our own walled garden of delight, and then autumn came and she was gone. Anon, the park keeper locked the gate and melted down the key.’ The muscles of his shoulders relaxed, he exhaled slowly, as if released from the grip of the memory. ‘Iestyn was nothing. A cheap crook who pulled off a cheap raid on a cheap fleapit of a cinema and somehow stupidly contrived to kill the poor policeman who gave chase. For this the boy was hanged. He was dead. They generally are once you’ve dropped them from the end of a string.’

Calamity looked disappointed. ‘You couldn’t be mistaken? We heard . . .’

He snorted. ‘You heard? You heard he was still alive? You heard perhaps the story of a strange alien-looking woman who bought his cadaver, paid for it with some antique coin, and lo! a week later, like Jesus, he walked among us again. You prefer such nonsense to the sober, evidence-based professional opinion of the physician who presided at his hanging, who noted, and marked it down on his report, that the fifth cervical vertebra had been snapped by the force of the drop, as indeed was inevitable. This doctor who in all his years never saw or heard of a case in which a hanged man with a broken neck came back to life. What contemptible superstitious nonsense you bring to my bedside.’ He put the photo back and turned it to face away. ‘You are worse than that imbecilic housekeeper of mine who no doubt at this precise moment has her ear pressed to the keyhole. They said I’d done my fiancée in, you know, those shrew-faced gossips from the village. Said she was buried in Tregaron Bog. How their pointy tongues wagged until the following spring when Rhiannon came back for a week. That wiped the smile off their faces. That’s the one thing they never forgive, letting them down like that. You can see it in their eyes, the look of reproach. How could you! How could you make us believe we had a murderer in our midst and then spoil it all like this? That’s the great paradox upon whose meat I daily feast: they cast me out, not because I murdered my fiancée, but because I didn’t.’

A man sat on the bench in that section of the castle that projects out into the sea. He was reading the Bible and waiting for me. He had called me the previous week and I had put the meeting off a number of times. The breeze flicked his thin, sandy hair into his eyes and made the collar of his tan-coloured mackintosh slap his face. I knew he had noticed my approach but he affected not to. He was the president of the remembrance society that had been formed to remember Marty, who had died on the cross-country run when we were in school. I sat down next to him and stared out to sea. It looked like porridge.

‘Funny thing about ruined castles,’ I said. ‘They always fill up with earth. Where does it come from?’

He said nothing.

‘It’s always cold up here, isn’t it? Do you ever wonder what it must have been like, standing on the tower wearing iron clothes?’

Glyn gently closed the Bible and said, ‘I didn’t come here today to talk about castles.’

‘What did you come for?’

‘You never come to our meetings.’

‘I don’t see the point.’

‘Only because you refuse to look for it. One evening two or three times a year, how much of a sacrifice is that?’

‘Why should I have to make a sacrifice?’

‘We all have to make a sacrifice. The world isn’t a theme park. We were put here for a purpose, even if we are but dimly aware of what it might be.’

‘That’s your opinion.’

‘It’s the Lord’s opinion.’

‘Marty was fifteen and had tuberculosis but no one knew. The inquiry cleared Herod Jenkins. I loved Marty and grieved for him, but I can’t hate. It just won’t come. I guess I’m not a good Christian.’

‘Don’t insult my religion.’

‘You are the one insulting it. Didn’t Jesus preach forgiveness?’

Glyn turned to me, his face strangely impassive. ‘Where? Where does he preach that?’

‘Forgiving those who trespass against us and stuff.’

‘He clearly didn’t mean it to apply equally in all cases. And besides, our community is not about forgiving, or blaming, it is about remembering and celebrating Marty’s short life. If you came along once in a while, you would know that.’

‘Didn’t Jesus also say something about worrying about the living, not the dead?’

‘He said the Lord our God is a God of the living, not the dead. But we are not Gods. You presume too much.’

‘You twist my words; what do you want?’

Glyn held the Bible up between his palms as if drawing inspiration from it. ‘You heard that Herod Jenkins is standing for mayor?’

‘Yes.’

‘A monster.’

‘So don’t vote for him. Vote for Ercwleff. One of God’s children, your ideal candidate.’

‘He’s a simpleton. A choice between a fool and a monster is no choice. We need a proper candidate, the town needs a proper candidate.’ He deliberated for a few seconds. ‘We want you to stand.’

The hairs on the back of my neck stood on end. ‘That’s absurd.’

‘Why is it absurd?’

‘I have no interest in politics.’

‘That is a recommendation.’

‘I already have a job.’

‘It need only be for a year.’

‘There are hundreds of reasons. I don’t want to.’

‘No doubt, but sometimes our desires and our duty do not coincide and in such cases a man, a real man, knows which is more important.’

‘I couldn’t do the human cannonball bit. I’m too tall.’

‘You think Ercwleff is doing it himself? We can supply a surrogate; that part is easy.’

‘And what about the fist fight in the pub car park?’

‘Ercwleff is going to take a dive in the fifth. That makes Herod the winner; you only have him to beat. Think of it! Think how old he is now, while you are young and in your prime.’

‘He would tear me limb from limb. Age has nothing to do with it; he’s my former games teacher. It doesn’t matter how old or frail or infirm he is, he will always be tougher than the boys he taught. That’s how it works. I would rather fight an anaconda.’

‘Do me a favour, Louie, think about it. For Marty . . . no, not for Marty, for Aberystwyth; do it for your beloved town.’

‘It’s not my beloved town. Where do you get that idea from?’

Glyn put the Bible up to his chin and pondered.

‘Anyway, what’s wrong with Ercwleff for mayor?’

He tried a different tack. ‘Have you never wondered why Preseli wants to elect his idiot brother as mayor?’

‘Yes.’

‘And what answer did you arrive at?’

‘None.’

‘He’s doing it to pay us back. For the humiliations they suffered as children. When Ercwleff was born, his father was too drunk to help and his mother sent Preseli to fetch the doctor. He was drunk, too, so drunk he could hardly see. He used the coal tongs as forceps and deformed Ercwleff’s skull. The mother died, but not before naming him Ercwleff and making Preseli promise to watch over him all his life. Preseli promised her he would, and throughout school he was his brother’s protector. They had a school rabbit and one day Ercwleff accidentally broke its neck, he wouldn’t stop hugging it, you see; even as a kid he was very strong. They made him spend the rest of the term in a dog kennel at the back of the class. Imagine the mockery. You know how cruel children can be – they discovered a wonderful trick for making Ercwleff cry. All they had to do was say the police were coming to take him away. The threat must have seemed very real to him because even by the age of nine or ten he had seen two uncles and a cousin depart the district in this manner. They teased Ercwleff relentlessly, and Preseli would get into fights protecting him; but he always seemed to be the one who got blamed for starting the trouble. You know what teachers are like in situations like that: they assume as a matter of routine that the boy from the bad family started the trouble. Such ignorant, unthinking dolts . . . so blinded by their own prejudice . . . They don’t see how by singling the child out, and treating him as a black-hearted good-for-nothing, they create the very thing they condemn. When the four o’clock bell rings, the teacher has forgotten all about the casually dispensed retribution earlier in the day, but the child remembers. Nothing festers in the heart more than such injustice meted out by adults, those towering figures who are forever declaiming their own moral infallibility. Yes, the child remembers.’