The Day Aberystwyth Stood Still (19 page)

James the Less gave the Aviary document to Samson, much like a proud parent cajoles his son to play the recorder for a visitor.

‘Interesting case,’ the boy said earnestly. ‘The story about the alien woman buying the cadaver of Iestyn Probert is widely circulated. I’d never paid much attention to it and had assumed it to be the invention of superstitious fools. This puts a different complexion on the matter.’ He brought out a jeweller’s loupe and screwed it into his eye. We all held our breath as he pored over the document. He began to mutter to himself as if not pleased with what he was seeing. Calamity looked at me and pointedly rolled her eyes. Finally the boy looked up and removed the loupe.

‘The Documents appear to be of dubious provenance,’ he said. ‘The stamp
TOP SECRET/AVIARY EYES ONLY
appears to be one of those stamps with changeable letters – see, the V and the Y are slightly out of line – this is wrong; official Aviary stamps have always been solid rubber specific to the purpose. Similarly, there are references to the necessity to conceal events from the media; in 1965 this word would not have been current, and the more usual “press” would have been used, or “newspapers”. By the same token, the document refers to extraterrestrials instead of aliens, again not current in the 1960s. The typefaces are anachronistic – Helvetica subheads and Times for the body – these would not have been used in Aviary documents until the late ’70s and the advent of IBM Golfball electronic typewriters. In the ’60s all such documentation would have been produced on Smith Coronas with Prestige Elite fonts. And this is a carbon copy but has been folded. This is unusual: carbon copies were for filing only. I regret to say that my initial examination forces me to conclude that the item is a forgery. Although do not discount the possibility that the source of the forgery may, paradoxically, be the Aviary itself. Sometimes they forge the truth in order to discredit it.’

James the Less clapped his hands. ‘Bravo!’

‘Could you repeat the last bit?’ I asked.

‘These people are not acquainted with your advanced theories,’ said James the Less. ‘You must be patient.’

The boy made a great play of summoning patience.

‘As you know,’ he said loftily, ‘the Aviary exists in the main to suppress truth and keep the masses docile and unsuspecting, happy with their lives of meaningless and unending tedium. No doubt you have observed them yourself: walking up and down Aberystwyth Prom each day, dispensing the requisite oohs and ahs at the sunset each evening, unaware that it is not significantly different from the one they praised the evening before. Taking an ice cream and exchanging tittle-tattle with the lowly stall-holder . . .’

I saw myself doing exactly as the boy described. Admiring the sunset, taking an ice cream at Sospan’s the same time each day. Was it unendingly tedious? I quite liked it.

The boy continued. ‘A time-honoured technique for suppressing the truth, for getting the self-satisfied burghers of Aberystwyth to ignore the truth before their eyes, is to discredit that truth, to make a mockery of it. It is my belief, derived from my researches into the works of those cunning artificers of invented testimony the Aberystwyth police, that many of the more bizarre accounts of alien contact reveal the hand of the authorities at work. By inventing a story that contains the truth but which is demonstrably absurd, they in effect undermine any credence that might attach to it. The famous flying-saucer abduction account of Barney and Betty Hill from 1961 is a case in point. Most of it came out under hypnotism. We must ask ourselves who supplied the hypnotist. The answer? The military supplied the hypnotist. I leave you to draw your own conclusions from that.’

A rain cloud followed us back to town. It was roughly puma-shaped and had the same deep, lustrous colouring of blue-black silk that glistened and glinted.

‘It’s gaining on us,’ said Calamity, who had her own small cloud left in place by the boy’s speech.

‘Cheer up,’ I said.

‘I’m fine, really I am. The kid obviously doesn’t know the first thing about the Barney and Betty Hill case.’

It sounded to me like he knew quite a lot about it, but sometimes you need to help your partner just as there will be times when your partner needs to raise you from the trough. That’s what partners are for.

‘No,’ I said. ‘He was talking through his hat. We’ll definitely go and see Mrs Bwlchgwallter and get her to hypnotise the farmer.’

Calamity grinned.

The cloud overtook us on the long straight down into town at Penparcau and was already in place on the Prom when we reached the bandstand. Mrs Bwlchgwallter moonlighted here in the afternoons from her rôle as official maker of gingerbread to the town. She stood on stage, clutching the mike and backed by her three cousins, the Gingernutjobs. The arrival of the rain threatened to bring an end to the gig. The audience consisted of a coach party of pensioners who moved and acted as a single organism, like a colony of bees or a shoal of fish responding to some unseen, unvoiced communication, telepathic perhaps, or pheromonic. As soon as the first raindrop registered its presence on the spectacle lens of one person, this information was communicated to the colony. They leapt up in unison from their deckchairs, perfectly synchronised, and began the intricate reverse-origami of unpacking pac-a-mac coats. We stood entranced by the spectacle. Their hands worked feverishly like the mandibles of leaf-cutter ants sawing away at a cellophane rose. All of a sudden the bond which held the rose closed was broken, whereupon something even more extraordinary happened: a huge science-fiction dragonfly of polythene squirted upwards and attacked them. Gauzy wings caught the breeze and fanned out enveloping the pensioners in plumes of gossamer. Mrs Bwlchgwallter, in a bid to win back the crowd’s attention, launched into a rousing version of her trademark song, ‘Blue Suede Orthopaedic Boots’:

You can burn my house, you can steal my car

Drink my liquor from an old fruit jar

But don’t you step on my blue suede ’paedies . . .

The pensioners completed their pac-a-mac dance and the crisis passed as soon as it had begun. A shaft of sunlight broke through the cloud and spattered the Prom with molten solder. The audience turned once again towards the stage, everything was as it had been, and yet they were all now mummified, side by side like giant moth pupae, shimmering with iridescent colour from the blue end of the spectrum: cobalt, ultramarine, mauve, electric blue. On their wet faces the spectacles glinted like slices of cucumber.

We caught up with Mrs Bwlchgwallter in the dressing room after the performance. She sat before the horseshoe of light bulbs around the mirror, pulled off a wig to reveal her own hair matted down underneath a close-fitting net. She tore off the fake eyebrows and picked up a tissue to wipe away the caked-on greasepaint. ‘If you want me to sign something, you’ll have to wait a mo,’ she said to our reflections in the mirror. We had already decided to give her the good agent/bad agent treatment. It was Calamity’s turn to be bad.

‘The only thing we want to sign is your contract for the Shrewsbury Palladium,’ I said.

She stopped wiping her face. ‘What was that?’

‘That’s if you want to be famous. Not everyone does.’

‘Forget it, boss,’ said Calamity speaking through the side of her mouth. ‘I told you we were wasting our time. We should have gone for the squeaker in Penrhyncoch.’

‘What’s a squeaker?’ asked Mrs Bwlchgwallter.

‘Squeaker. That’s what they call balloon-twisters –’

‘As if she didn’t know,’ scoffed Calamity.

‘W . . . who are you?’

‘This is the Shirley Temple Kid, you remember her, don’t you? Course you do. Best child star Cardiganshire ever produced. She’s retired now, wants to give something back.’

‘What about you?’

‘All you need to know is who I work for.’

‘Who do you work for?’

‘The Man.’

Calamity picked up a tin ashtray and examined it with distaste. She chucked it down with a clatter. ‘Hmm,
un problema muy grande
,’ she said. ‘It doesn’t look like this lady likes nice things.’

‘Not everyone likes money, you should know that.’

‘I like money,’ said Mrs Bwlchgwallter.

‘So why spend your life making stinking gingerbread?’ asked Calamity.

For a moment, the slur upon the gingerbread-making trade, in particular her little shop, stirred the spirit of rebellion in Mrs Bwlchgwallter. ‘I’ll have you know that shop has been in my family three generations . . .’

‘How much do you make in a month?’ said Calamity. ‘Four-fifty? Four-ninety? Five maybe? I’d say five-ten tops.’

‘But that’s not the point is it?’

‘Isn’t it? You tell me, then, what is the point of spending your life turning sugar, eggs and flour into little brown homunculi? Because I’m damned if I can see it.’

‘It’s a service to the town . . .’

‘It’s a higher calling, isn’t that right?’ I asked.

‘In a pig’s valise,’ said Calamity.

I gave her a puzzled look and she returned a scowl that said, That’s what they say in Chicago; how come you don’t know that?

‘Mrs Bwlchgwallter,’ I said, ‘I’ll be straight with you. I’ve seen your act. It’s top drawer. I’ve seen a lot of acts, but it’s not often I meet someone as gifted as you. At the moment you are burying it beneath all that crowd-pleasing blancmange. It’s time to take the gloves off. The Kid here doesn’t always express herself very nicely. That can happen. You spend too long in Acapulco, it can happen. Maybe to you as well. Tell her how many millions you made last year.’

‘You know I can’t count higher than nine,’ said Calamity.

‘That’s what happens when you take them out of school to put them on the stage. She made fourteen million but only because of the three-month holiday in Acapulco. You ever been to Acapulco?’

‘No, I –’

‘Cancun is better. But how many months at a time can you spend in Cancun? Acapulco is the fall-back option. We can get you there.’

‘But first you got to go Shrewsbury,’ said Calamity.

‘And before that you have to go to Ynys Greigiog. Just for an hour.’

‘But what for?’

‘Exposure. I need some newspaper headlines I can take to the Big Kahuna.’

‘The deal is so simple, even you can do it,’ said the Shirley Temple Kid. ‘You know the farmer who saw the flying saucer? We want you to hypnotise him.’

‘That used to be your thing didn’t it? Part of your act back in the old days. Yes, I know all about you, I’ve done my homework. I’ve read the reviews: Borth Holiday Camp, Pwllheli Butlins, Barry Island . . . they say you were good. They say you were the best. The Kid says you’re washed up, I’ve got five bucks that says you’re not. First you have to go and speak to the farmer. Put him under and find out his story, then report back to us. We get you in the paper and from there it’s a short step to the Shrewsbury Palladium. What do you say?’

‘Well . . .’

I grabbed her hand and pumped. ‘I knew I wasn’t wrong about you. Throw the boots away, you don’t need the props any more.’ I handed her a business card, blank except for a telephone number. ‘If you need to get in touch, call this number and ask for Louie Knight. The Kid will write down the farmer’s address and give you the bus fare.’

We walked to the door.

‘One more thing,’ said Calamity. ‘You need a better name. Something that won’t make the neon sign-writer want to stick a gun in his mouth.’

Chapter 12

The next
morning when I arrived at the office there was a note scribbled on the deskpad, from Calamity. She said she was going out to Borth with Jhoe, to have a picnic by the remains of the submerged forest. As directions go, you couldn’t get much more specific than that. The phone rang; it was Mrs Bwlchgwallter.

‘I can’t stop,’ she breathed, ‘I’ve just popped out from the hypnotism. He’s still under. He’s been saying some terrible things. He says he murdered his brother.’

‘I wouldn’t pay any attention to –’

‘Buried him in the cellar. And killed the dog.’