The Day Aberystwyth Stood Still (16 page)

‘Story was, they found exo-biological remains at the crash site, and alien debris which was taken to the RAF base at Aberporth. They said it was a weather balloon, but since when do you need an armed escort for a balloon? The lady from the sweet shop found a bit of the saucer in her garden and used it as a doorstop. It was some sort of black volcanic glass, like obsidian, inscribed with markings reminiscent of the Assyro-Babylonian cuneiform scripts dating from around 2800 BC, and it hummed like the fridge. Two days later they came and took her away, doorstop and all.’

‘Who did?’

‘The Aviary.’

‘The Aviary?’

‘Two men dressed all in black, driving a black ’47 Buick.’ She turned away from me and leaned on the railings, looking into the blackness where slept the sea. ‘I’ve never spoken about this. Even though I knew it was wrong. I’m not a brave woman, Mr Knight.’

‘Didn’t you ask the doctor about it?’

‘I didn’t dare. Not long after that they caught the two Richards brothers, and a week later they caught Iestyn. I read about it in the papers, but there was no mention of the boy in the silver suit. Then the doctor received a visit from the men in black. It was a private meeting and I don’t know what they discussed. But after they left he was trembling, and his face was white. And then when Nora Dettol disappeared, I knew better than to open my mouth.’

‘Who’s Nora?’

‘She was the cleaner at the base. She was hoovering and walked by accident into a room that should have been locked. It was like a hospital room. There was a chap in there wearing olive-green military pyjamas. He had a bulbous head and big almond-shaped eyes. She said he looked so sad and lonely. She said she startled him and made him jump. “I’m so sorry,” she said, “I thought the room was empty.” Then he stared at her and it was as if he was looking straight through her and into her soul, and burrowing down through the layers of the past searching for something. All of a sudden she saw a vision of her mother’s face and an overwhelming sensation of peace and loving kindness flooded her being; she heard the voice of her mother, who had been dead for many years, saying, “Please do not be afraid, Daughter of Earth. We bring you love.” ’ She stopped and folded her arms aggressively saying, ‘You’ll never guess what he said next. It’ll cost another quid.’

Mesmerised, I handed over a pound.

‘He said, “Can you take a message to your president?” ’

Chapter 10

I
had
said I would pick Miaow up at 9.00 for our trip to the escalators of Shrewsbury, but like a kid on his first date I was early. I parked outside the shop at the caravan site and waited. Then I grew impatient and walked across to the office. A fat man sat wedged behind the reception desk, eating a bacon sandwich. The grease that dribbled over his knuckles glistened in the sharp morning light. The expression on his face said that, whatever it was I needed, he probably had it but couldn’t be bothered to go and get it. It was the face of someone whose synapses sparked at a slower speed than other people’s. The face a tortoise wears the first morning after hibernation as he walks downstairs to collect the post from the mat. It was the face of a man who doesn’t care less and has made it his specialist subject; everyone needs something they can be proud of. I told him I was looking for the caravan of Miaow and his face betrayed no sign that the question meant anything at all. Maelor Gawr was the caravan park at the world’s end.

I took a deep breath and said, ‘You know, my friend, to look at your face you probably wouldn’t believe this, but you are a lucky man. Yes, you are. This may come as a surprise. All your life you have gone to bed at night convinced that nothing good ever happens to you and yet here am I claiming you are lucky. Why? How can a man like you be lucky? I’ll tell you. Because on any normal day I would now grab your tie and stick it into the roller of that typewriter you are busy dripping bacon fat onto. Then I would give the barrel a violent twist and keep turning until your nose was touching the keys. Then I would type out a letter to the
Cambrian News
. That’s what I would normally do. But today I have a date beneath a pellucid May sky with a girl whose eyes are so beautiful that they elevate this day so far above the common herd of days that it would be a shame to write a letter. But that doesn’t mean I won’t come back sometime when it is raining and the wonder of this day is but a poignant memory, do you understand?’

‘You want a caravan?’

Before I could answer, she appeared in the doorway.

‘Sorry I’m late; I couldn’t decide which hat to wear.’

‘You’re not late and you are not wearing a hat, but you can tell me about it in the car.’

She was wearing a cream cardigan over a simple cotton frock patterned with tiny lemon flowers. It was belted at the waist and reached demurely to just below that most underrated bone, the patella. She was wearing cream sandals and carried a cream handbag. Her hair was kept away from her face with a cream hairband. She was also holding a plastic Co-op bag which I knew contained our picnic. We drove in my Wolseley Hornet over Trefechan Bridge and turned right towards the station.

As traffic slowed on the approach to the roundabout I turned to her and said, ‘You look lovely.’

Instead of denying it or accusing me of saying it to all the girls, she smiled and said, ‘No one’s ever said that to me before.’

In the slightly awkward pause that followed, I patted my coat pocket and said, ‘I’ve got the tickets.’

‘You must tell me how much I owe you.’

‘Don’t be silly, it’s my treat.’

‘How many rides do you get?’

‘What do you mean?’

‘On the escalator.’

‘As many as you like.’

‘Really?’

‘The tickets are for the train.’

‘Oh!’

‘You get a special day return to Shrewsbury and it includes unlimited rides on the escalators.’

It is no coincidence that train windows are shaped like the celluloid frames of a movie. All rail journeys are adventure stories, which is why fate reserves her grandest statements for them. Without this tendril of steel linking us to Vladivostok and all stations between, Aberystwyth would be bereft: no Pier, no camera obscura, few hotels, and the tourist information office would almost certainly have been deprived of its proudest boast, namely that on 7 May 1904 Buffalo Bill came to town.

Miaow kept her nose pressed to the window for most of the journey and stared with a sense of wonder that made me regret I could never again take this journey for the first time. As we glided into Shrewsbury the track curved gently round the main signal box; once, no doubt, the red bricks and white-painted window frames would have gleamed like a mansion on a chocolate box, and an entire extended hierarchy of workers would have beavered away at the clockwork intricacies of directing trains. Today it stood in chest-high weeds like an abandoned house in an abandoned field; as with most businesses that have seen their best days, the first to go is always the guy who cuts the lawn. There is still a man up there, moving behind the filmy grey glass, drinking tea and reading the paper resting against rows of levers that don’t work. He doesn’t know the war is over.

The tracks converged onto a bridge across the river before the entrance to the station, and two buildings, one of pink Shropshire sandstone, the other of red Victorian brick, stood sentinel. Miaow pointed, but didn’t speak.

‘Guess what those buildings are,’ I said. ‘Home to two branches of the same family.’

Miaow gave me a look of inquiry.

‘Both been in business a long time, the same business in fact, although it goes by different names. The people from the one on the left quite often go and stay with the ones on the right, but it seldom happens the other way round.’

‘OK, I give up.’

‘That one is the castle, that one is the prison.’

‘That’s silly, the people in prison are thieves and murderers.’

‘So are the ones in the castle. How else do you get to own a castle?’

‘No!’

‘If you steal small things, you get a room on the right with a view of the river and the railway station. If you steal big things – like counties – you get a room on the left also with a view of the river and the railway station. The room is bigger, and the food is better. You have about as equal a chance of having your throat slit while you sleep.’

‘The people in the castle are lords and ladies with coats of arms and pointy Rapunzel hats. All through my childhood I dreamed of wearing one of those pointy hats.’

‘Trust me, the pointy hats are all stolen.’

‘How can you say that?’

‘Along with ermine stoles, gold-painted furniture, pheasants and oil paintings. Do you think they worked for it?’

‘Didn’t they?’

‘No, they were just smarter than the rest of us, or meaner. The way I see it, they are just descended from the better armed robbers. It’s like a great Welshman once said: “Who made ten thousand people owners of the soil and the rest of us trespassers in the land of our birth?” ’

She pulled a face. ‘So why didn’t anyone complain?’

‘The pointy-hats were smart. They invented the priesthood to preach to the multitude the great spiritual benefits of being penniless; they taught them not only to accept their misery but to love it, and to regard it as evidence of their spiritual superiority. In addition, for those who found themselves unconvinced by these fine sentiments, they had a rather persuasive complaints office in the basement of the castle.’

‘That’s what they teach us in the Denunciationists as well – to regard poverty as evidence of our spiritual superiority. Are we wrong?’

I smiled and pulled her closer. ‘No, of course not.’

Where do you take a girl for her first ride on an escalator? Marks and Spencers, Boots, Woolies? We did all three. We went up and down ten times in Boots, Miaow clutching the moving handrail with a grip slightly too tight, pausing too long each time before she stepped on. When the security guard asked us if everything was all right, we moved on to the other shops, and so threaded our way down town towards the river and the park along its banks. We chose a tree to sit under and began to unpack the picnic, but then Miaow changed her mind and we tried two more trees until we found one that satisfied.

‘I hope it’s OK, I’ve never made a picnic before. Back in Cwmnewidion Isaf such things are considered frivolous.’

‘It’s perfect.’

‘Don’t tease me.’

‘I’m not. You have every detail right. The thermos flask should always be tartan, the tea should be stewed and the plates bright yellow plastic. Sandwiches can be jam or on special occasions you can use that paste they sell in little glass jars, the one that smells like the harbour and has the texture of wet newspaper.’

‘I don’t know that one.’

‘They grind it up from the bits of the fish the glue factory rejects.’

For a while everything was still save the soft movements of our jaws, the quivering grass and the shadow of a cloud drifting across the lawn. The cloud revealed the sun and the heightened brightness caused an instant upsurge in my breast. A rowing team from the local boys’ school slid past.

‘Tell me about being a private eye.’

I leant back and spoke to the sky. ‘You get hit on the head a lot; it’s boring; there’s no money. Clients walk into my office clutching the pieces of their lives like the fragments of a broken vase. They expect me to fix it, but normally I can’t. This is usually their first introduction to the strange notion that the world is unfair. They think that by paying for a few hours of my time they will be able to buy some sort of redress; the amount they pay me is trivial, I can barely survive on it, but to the people who sit in my client’s chair it’s a fortune they resent parting with. Sometimes they want me to make everything all right, but most of the time they don’t even want that; they just want the world to take cognizance, they want to tell someone about the bad thing that has happened to them. They always think they are the first person since the Garden of Eden to have a bad thing happen to them.’

‘What’s the point of telling you if you can’t fix it?’

‘Telling me is the point. It’s like telling tales to a teacher at school. They say, look what happened to me, that’s not right. And I agree, yeah, that’s not right. But in my heart I think, so what? These things happen. There’s no reason for it, no intent, the universe didn’t set out to upset you; but neither did it set out not to; it doesn’t greatly care. The universe is like the rest of us, it just gets on with the business of whatever it is it does, slowly winding down, I guess, increasing entropy, and it just so happens that your suffering is a side-effect of that process, like the squeak of a rocking chair. They want me to oil the universe.’