The Day Aberystwyth Stood Still (23 page)

‘Mum’s really my aunt. My real mum died and left me, and her two sisters had to decide which one would take care of me. They played Pooh Sticks for me. Mum lost. Auntie Meinir left and went to Liverpool. She’s got a fur coat and a chequebook and stuff. At Christmas we used to play Hansel and Gretel in the wood, but sometimes, it was funny, I would leave the trail of breadcrumbs and follow them but they led in the wrong direction. Once they went down the disused lead mine. Mum said the birds must have moved them. The woman from the social services asked me last week if I had any relations and I told her Auntie Pebim was sort of like an aunt and she told me to make regular visits to her. So I went round and she wouldn’t let me past the garden gate. She said, “What do you want?” and I said I’d come to visit her, and she said “A likely story.” ’ He took another drink from the bottle.

‘Are you sure you should be having so much?’

‘Sss-all right.’

‘I think your cough must be cured by now.’

‘I can see the castle.’

‘Maybe you should stop.’

‘I was thinking, you and me, Lou, are mates. You live on your own, don’t you?’

‘Yes.’

‘We could move in together. That would be good, wouldn’t it?’

‘Thing is, Meici . . .’

‘Lou! I’m at the drawbridge!’

‘Meici, stop!’

‘They’re raising the portcullis . . .’

‘No! Meici!’

‘Oh no!’ He made a strangled, gurgling sound in his throat and slumped back limp and silent in the chair.

I dragged him out to the car and drove him home. He was still unconscious when we reached his house. I slapped his face gently to rouse him. He blinked up at me and scratched his head. ‘I fell asleep,’ he said unnecessarily. He sat there, making no attempt to move, looking groggy. ‘Where are we?’

‘I’ve brought you home.’

‘Yes,’ he said distantly. ‘Yes. That’s good.’

‘You should go and lie down.’

He nodded. He looked down at his hand still holding the bag of gobstoppers. ‘Tell you what, Lou. I want you to have these.’ He reached forward and opened the glove compartment. A rag fell out and into his lap. It was a handkerchief. He stared at it in astonishment as if it were a religious relic. He stared and stared. It was Chastity’s handkerchief. He turned to me with fire burning in his eyes. ‘You dirty dirty double-crosser,’ he hissed. ‘You dirty double-crosser. You dirty dirty double-crosser.’

‘Meici,’ I said.

His hand reached to his side and fumbled with the door handle. He seemed to recoil from me, pressing himself against the door in his hurry to escape.

‘Meici, it’s not like you think . . .’

He opened the door and stepped out backwards, still staring at me in horror. ‘Don’t you say a damn word, Louie Knight, don’t you say a damn thing. You’ve really done it this time, good and proper. You’re in for it now, I can tell you. Just you wait and see what you get, you’ll see! Dirty double-crosser.’ He turned and walked up the path to the house, his right hand raised and twisted, pressed against his eye. I thought I should perhaps go in and see if he was OK, but even as I entertained the thought, I found my foot pressing down on the accelerator and my hands turning the wheel to leave.

Chapter 13

Four days
passed. Meici didn’t reappear and didn’t answer the phone when I called. I didn’t greatly care. I was more worried about Mrs Bwlchgwallter, who hadn’t been seen either. Calamity asked her neighbours each day, but they said she hadn’t returned home. On the fifth morning I got a call from Calamity from the telephone kiosk across the road from Ginger Nutters in Bridge Street. She said she had forced the back door and found Mrs Bwlchgwallter, she’d been there all along, sitting in the dark. I said I’d come right away and she told me to steel myself.

I found Calamity standing in front of the shop, feigning interest in the window display. Normally it was crowded with gingerbread men – but now it was in darkness. A mouse nibbled at the remains of a confectionery foot. I pressed my face against the glass and looked in. Calamity walked down the alley at the side of the shop and I followed. The brick walls on either side glistened with moisture, our footsteps making sharp sandpapery rasps on the concrete. The alley led to a walled-in yard, barely big enough to hold the rig of a rotating washing line. The arms of Mrs Bwlchgwallter’s laundry reached up like ghosts in a stick-up.

We walked into a dark kitchen. Burnished copper pans gleamed from the wall, a black iron oven like a steam engine filled half the kitchen but was cold as ash. We walked through across a floor that was sticky with discarded food. The sound of a TV was coming from above us. We climbed the creaking stairs up to a small sitting room. Mrs Bwlchgwallter sat in an armchair, facing the TV and watching the Test Card. A plate of half-eaten Heinz spaghetti sat on her lap, covered in green fur. On a side table next to the arm of the chair was an empty bottle of tablets, a cup of cold tea in a metal camping cup and an empty quarter bottle of gin.

‘I think she’s been here the whole time, working on that –’ Calamity pointed at the fireplace. In the grate there was a full chamber pot and next to it, reaching almost to the ceiling, was a 7-foot gingerbread alien.

‘It’s a Grey,’ whispered Calamity.

‘Mrs Bwlchgwallter,’ I said.

She turned her head slowly and focused her watery eyes. ‘We’re closed . . . Forever.’

‘We didn’t come for gingerbread,’ I said.

‘The time for gingerbread is passed.’

‘You mustn’t think that,’ I said. ‘None of us knows what lies in the womb of time.’

She narrowed her eyes, trying to comprehend. Then she parted her lips a fraction and breathed the words, ‘The horror! The horror!’

‘What was it?’ asked Calamity. ‘What did you discover in the hypnotism?’

Mrs Bwlchgwallter shook her head sadly and mouthed the word
horror
.

I threw the contents of her teacup into the chamber pot and filled the cup with rum from my hip flask. I held it out to her, but she was too enfeebled to grasp the cup. I pushed it towards her mouth, but the rum dribbled down her chin. I broke a finger off the gingerbread ‘Grey’, dipped the finger in the rum and used it as a makeshift teat. She sucked greedily and a fire was illumined in the depths of her eyes. It shone weakly from behind the wide panes of her spectacles like the pilot light on a stove. The frame of her glasses was made of semi-translucent pale blue plastic.

‘Tell us what happened,’ I said, withdrawing the gingerbread finger. She reached out feebly and I pushed her hand down. ‘Let it go down first,’ I said. ‘Tell us about the horror.’

‘I can’t,’ she whispered, ‘I can’t. Not for as long as I live.’

‘Please, Mrs Bwlchgwallter,’ said Calamity, ‘we need to know; it’s very important.’

Mrs Bwlchgwallter pointed at the gingerbread finger, using the last few dregs of her strength to drive a better bargain. I dipped the finger in the rum and gave it to her. She sucked greedily, making sounds like a coffee percolator.

‘That’s the last until you tell us what we need to know,’ I said losing patience. She ignored me, continuing to suck. I dragged the rum-soaked finger away. ‘OK, talkie talkie first, then drinkie drinkie.’

She took a deep breath, then said, slowly inserting an agonising pause between the syllables, ‘The horror!’

‘Come on now, Mrs Bwlchgwallter,’ said Calamity. ‘Just think of the applause at the Shrewsbury Palladium.’

I scowled at Calamity, indicating that this was not the time for the good agent/bad agent routine. She stared down at her feet.

I said, ‘Fantastic idea! Barney and Betty Hill. How did it go again? It’s the classic UFO contact from America in the early ’60s. They were hypnotised by the military and –’

‘How was I supposed to know this would happen?’ said Calamity.

‘That’s what I keep asking myself.’

‘What’s that supposed to mean? When they hypnotised Barney and Betty Hill they drew a picture of the star system Zeta Reticuli. The aliens were puzzled by Barney’s false teeth. Everyone was OK afterwards, they didn’t curl up in a ball and cry or make giant gingerbread aliens.’ I could tell from her voice she was near to tears. ‘How was I supposed to know?’

‘I don’t know. I told you it was a dumb idea.’

‘You tell me all my ideas are dumb.’

‘Most of them are.’

‘Louie!’ She shot me a look of appeal.

‘We’ll talk about it later.’

‘Are we just going to leave her?’

‘You want to bring her along?’

She shook her head. We walked down the stairs taking care for some reason not to make a noise. We walked out onto Bridge Street where the fresh air came as a relief, lifting our low spirits and leaving just a mild sense of guilt. Once we had put sufficient distance between us and the shop, around the top of Great Darkgate Street, we stopped and looked at each other.

‘I think we should give up the case,’ said Calamity.

‘Me too.’

‘I’m scared.’

‘Me too.’

‘Do you think Raspiwtin is really looking for Iestyn?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Do you think Iestyn is alive?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Do you think Raspiwtin is who he says he is?’

‘He might well be since he hasn’t really said who he is.’

‘Has he paid us?’

‘No.’

‘Do you think he will?’

‘No.’

‘Why are we carrying on?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Don’t you think we should stop?’

‘Yes.’

‘Will we?’

‘Yes.’

‘When?’

‘I just need to do one thing first. Call an ambulance. Don’t give your name, just tell them she’s up there and hang up.’

‘What are you going to do?’

‘I’m going back to see the farmer.’

‘According to Mrs Pugh, he’s curled up like a baby.’

‘I’ll uncurl him.’

‘What if he doesn’t know anything?’

‘I’ll make him remember.’

Calamity grabbed my arm. ‘Louie, I’m sorry about Barney and Betty Hill.’

I ran my hand over her brow and smoothed down her hair. ‘I know. Don’t worry about it.’

I drove and thought about Eeyore’s school photo. There is something profoundly disturbing about that means of outwitting the universe. It violates our trust. Still photos record an instant, whatever an instant is, but this trick fuses two instants and makes them one. And that one fused moment becomes the truth, the official footprint left in the sands of time. I recalled the words of the old con out at the pub in Taliesin, about the woman who left in a 1963 Austin A35 and came back in a 1962 model with the same number plate. He could have been lying; most people who didn’t know better would say you can’t trust a word of a man like that. But the paradox is, you can. Precisely because he never spoke about it all these years. Normal people would have done nothing else but talk about it, but Caeriog Richards was a man who didn’t blab. That didn’t mean he didn’t know things, it just meant in the absence of a compelling reason to do otherwise he wouldn’t talk about them. That was the code by which he lived. It didn’t indicate moral approval or disapproval. It was the code: you didn’t speak about the things you knew.

I wondered about the pictures of Doc Digwyl’s fiancée in the front room of his house. The picnic on the dunes. Behind, in the distance, the sea roars unchanging. The girl stands with one foot pointed slightly inward and her weight shifted a bit, to compensate for the shifting sand perhaps. The strand of hair across the eyes and the slight blur of the left hand that is about to make the journey up to brush it away. At her feet the picnic basket, on a tartan rug from the boot of the Austin. Was she the original Rhiannon? Or the one who came back in the wrong car? Where was the original one now? I saw a vision of the white bones, the skull filled with earth, lying in a shallow grave beneath the gorse on a hillside somewhere. That’s how I would do it. In the middle of gorse bushes so thick no one, not even a dog fetching a stick, would venture there.