The Day Aberystwyth Stood Still (29 page)

‘And who are the good guys?’

‘Man called Big Nose George Parrott. But that wouldn’t mean anything to you. Big Nose George Parrott is one of the people they never tell you about.’

‘They told me, he ended up as a pair of shoes. Is that what you want out of life? Your greatest ambition is to be a pair of shoes?’

‘You would never understand.’

He began to slide sideways and shuffled his body to get upright again. ‘You really going to leave me tied up here while my little girl waits for her daddy to call?’

I gave him a stony stare and he laughed. ‘I love you, Louie, I really do. Only a man too decent for his own good could come up with a plan as crap as that. You need to be a tough guy, you see, but you’re not a tough guy, so there’s no point trying to play one when you’ve got a heart made of white chocolate candy.’

‘You can push that button once too many times. I’m not
that
nice.’

‘Let me tell you about Big Nose George Parrott. I spent ten years once living among the Big Nose George Parrotts. A long time ago I was a prison guard out at the Cardiganshire State Penitentiary at Tregaron Bog. You know that place?’

‘Tregaron Pen? Who doesn’t?’

‘They’ve closed it now, but when it was still going it was a bad prison, full of terrible brutality. You think I’m no good, you should have seen the rest of the guards. Your old school games teacher was one of them.’

‘Herod Jenkins?’

He laughed. ‘They never told you that? Oh yes. He was in charge of the chain gang, sat all day on his horse, holding a shotgun. With a sour look on his face.’

‘I know that look.’

‘I have to say, building a place like that in the middle of Tregaron Bog was a nice touch; whoever thought of that knew what he was doing. There were a lot of shallow graves in that bog, and the people who had dug them were inside the prison.’

‘They say criminals always return to the scene of the crime.’

‘They do say that, don’t they? What do they call that?’

‘Ironic.’

‘No, there’s a word for it . . .’

‘Living above the shop?’

‘No, it’s biological, like parasitical.’

‘Symbiosis.’

‘That’s it!’ He looked pleased, like someone completing the crossword. ‘Symbiosis.’

‘I guess it would have made it hard to tunnel out. Prisoners are a superstitious lot.’

‘That’s true. They were happy to risk the gunshot from the man on the horse, but most of them drew the line at tunnelling through a bone yard.’

‘Where does Big Nose George Parrott fit in?’

‘Whole place was full of people like him. I was there the day they took over. Many of the inmates were in for terrible crimes, on multiple life sentences without possibility of parole. That means there was no hope, and without hope a man loses interest in behaving like a civilised person. It was a pressure cooker and one day it blew. There was a riot. The procedure in a situation like that was straightforward: we got out of there as fast as we could and locked it down. Leave them to have their fun and work off the excess energy. No hurry. Turn the electricity off, call up the national guard, and order the pizzas. You think you know me, but you don’t know the half of it. You can’t know until you know what I’ve seen. Any chance of a coffee?’

‘Nix.’

‘How about a cigarette – they’re in my jacket pocket.’ I nodded assent and fished a packet out of his pocket and a lighter. I put the cigarette between his lips and lit it. A moment of unsettling intimacy. He stared up at me, his face less than a foot away.

‘Thanks,’ he said, the cigarette still between his lips. I took it out for him and he carried on with his story.

‘A few guards were trapped on the inside, but they were lucky. They died quickly. The ones who weren’t so lucky were in the segregation wing. That was where we kept the prisoners who had to be protected from the others. Some of them were in on sexual charges, with minors, but many were there because they had given evidence against the other inmates at trial. Normally, they shouldn’t have been in the same prison as the folks their testimony sent down, but this wasn’t a normal sort of prison.’ He stopped and I put the cigarette back between his lips. He took a couple of puffs and so we carried on.

‘Once it all kicked off, the first thing everybody did was raid the infirmary. They drank the rubbing alcohol and filled their mouths with fistfuls of drugs, any drugs, it didn’t matter. If it was pharmaceutical they took it. Soon they were insane. They knew the national guard would show up and retake the prison, but they also knew it would be a few days before that happened. In the meantime, they were going to let off some steam. The prison was laid out in concentric rings with the segregation block at the centre. We surrendered two rings but kept to the outer one, which had the towers. It gave us a ringside seat. So we sat up there eating pizza and watching. It’s not something you would want to watch, but somehow you just can’t tear your gaze away. Even if you did, you could still hear it and that was worse.’ He paused and looked at me and it was as if the mask of facetiousness and irony slipped from his face and I saw fear.

‘Crazed on alcohol and drugs and the pent-up fury that comes from years of brutal abuse in a prison which you are never going to leave save in a wooden box, they broke into the segregation block. It took a while because they had electrical central locking and the power was down. They were all carrying torches like in a medieval witch hunt. At first, all they could do was hurl abuse at the segregated prisoners. The block was one long corridor, with the cells arranged down one side, with floor-to-ceiling bars. So although they could see each other pretty good, the men couldn’t get in to the cells. This went on for a while until one of the prisoners turned up with oxy-acetylene cutting gear they’d found somewhere. They started cutting. The bars in a place like that are toughened steel; it’s not easy to cut. It takes a while. You’ve got to remember, the guys trying to get in knew the segregated prisoners personally. They saw them in court and they had seen them from a distance, sometimes, through a window, across a yard. They knew them. These were the men whose evidence had sent them down for life without parole. And now they were inches away. All they had to do was wait until the torch cut through the steel. Eventually it did, and the mob poured into the first cell. While this was all going on, the people in the other cells on the same corridor couldn’t see anything, but they sure could hear it. They could hear what happened in that first cell. Then the mob moved on to the second cell. And the same thing would be repeated, and all the guys in the cells further down got to listen to it. A process like that takes time, but they all knew no rescue was going to happen, the cavalry were not going to show up that night. The men in the cells towards the far end had to listen to it all night; it took until dawn to do the whole block, they had to listen. When I lie awake at night I picture what goes through the mind of a man in a night like that. You know what’s going to happen to you, you know there is no power on earth that is going to save you; all you have is hours and hours of listening and waiting your turn.’ He paused and added simply, ‘I knew one of the guys in the end cell.’

I put the cigarette back between his lips. He drew on it, then spoke with it still clenched between his lips. ‘That’s what the Big Nose George Parrotts will do to you given half the chance. I call them the heads-on-sticks guys. You’re fighting the same battle against them as . . . I . . . am.’

The hesitation in his voice lasted no longer than the beat of a gnat’s wing, a glint slipped across the waters of his eyes. I understood. I knew what was coming, but by the time the understanding had taken shape, four strong, hard hands emerging from the cuffs of combat jackets appeared and grabbed my arms. I had seen these hands before and I flinched as I recalled the slam into the hard basement wall. But it never came.

‘I’m sorry, Peeper, I really am.’

‘Don’t be, I should have known you’d arrange to have me followed.’

‘They were here before me. Once you turned off just before Ponterwyd it was pretty obvious where you were heading.’ One of the soldiers cut through the gaffer tape that bound Sauerkopp. He walked over to me, massaging the circulation back into his wrists.

‘So why the pantomime?’ I asked.

‘I needed to ask you for something.’ He reached into my pocket and took out the gun. ‘This.’ He smiled again and told them to let me go.

I drove back to town. The downpour continued unabated. On the passenger seat the wedding cake lay forlorn; the wasps were asleep amid the rubble of crumbs, or maybe they were dead, chilled by the dropping temperatures. The roads became greasy, wet ribbons and I passed a man with a broken-down car on the Lovesgrove straight. The bonnet was raised and he was standing bent over looking at the engine. I pulled up and reached over to wind down the passenger window. The man walked over and peered in. We both gasped in shock. It was Herod Jenkins. He opened his mouth to speak, but no words came. We stared at each other, open-mouthed, gripped by the same paralysis. Eventually the bubble burst.

‘You,’ he said.

‘Mr Jenkins.’

We both paused again in bafflement.

‘Lovely weather for ducks,’ he said.

‘Let me give you a lift to the garage.’

‘I couldn’t possibly trouble you.’

‘It’s no trouble, Mr Jenkins. I’m going that way anyway. Can’t leave you standing in the rain.’

He was torn. In one way accepting help from a boy he had so often reviled as a milksop was a blow to his pride, that pride whose fierce fire burns in the breast of every school games teacher. But the alternative was an afternoon of misery. I moved the cake to the shelf beneath the windscreen and brushed the wasps onto the floor. He climbed in.

‘You strap yourself in, Mr Jenkins, can’t have you falling out.’ I released the clutch and pulled out onto the main road.

‘It’s very kind of you, Knight. I’m obliged to you.’

‘Don’t be silly. You keeping well?’

‘Can’t complain. How about yourself?’ He looked at me and frowned. ‘Hope you don’t mind me saying, but you look a bit unwell.’

I shook my head. I was fine. Or was I? The truth was, I was becoming aware of a strange malaise rising through my body. ‘I’m fine, just tired, that’s all.’

He wouldn’t be put off. ‘Bit green about the gills if you ask me. You should take better care of yourself.’

‘How’s the mayoral campaign going?’

‘Not too well, to tell the truth. A lot of people have complained about the suitability of my candidacy. They say I am a brutal man, a man with no conscience and no heart. Can you believe it?’

‘Politics is a dirty business, Mr Jenkins. People make all sorts of things up.’ My conscience grew two heads and battled in my heart. This was the man who had sent Marty to his death on that cross-country run during the blizzard. Should I be giving him a lift? Should I be offering him succour? And yet . . . surely in the raging storm all men are brothers?

‘They say I set out to humiliate and oppress my boys on the games field. They say that their suffering gave me pleasure, but it wasn’t like that, it wasn’t.’

‘You mustn’t let it get you down.’

‘They don’t understand how it was. You were there, Knight. You know.’

‘Yes, but I have to admit, don’t take this the wrong way, it did sometimes seem like . . . like you were . . . were enjoying our suffering.’

He turned in the seat to face me. He was not a tall man, but he was large-framed with the repressed power and top-heavy musculature of a gorilla. He was too big for my Wolseley Hornet, and squirmed in the confined space in a way that reminded me of those terrible images from the animal-cruelty charities of black bears in cages in China, daily harvested for their gall-bladder bile. He spread his hands out in supplication, and his big, prognathous head tilted to the side in a way that I had seen once before, somewhere long ago. I struggled to recall the provenance of the image that rose up to the surface of my mind. And suddenly I knew: it was that moment when King Kong, clinging to the top of the Empire State Building with one arm and holding Fay Wray gently in his meaty paw, brings her close to his eyes to peer in wonder. The moment when the blessed sacrament of love enters the dark heart of the beast. Herod’s eyes shone in the gloom like two lanterns in the night. Across his wide face, confusion and uncertainty mingled with the ache to explain, to be redeemed. ‘Don’t you see, it had to be that way. You thought I was cruel and monstrous, but life is cruel and monstrous. Because of this, I had to hurt you in order to save you. I had to forgo your love in order that I might deserve it. In order to save you from the beast in man’s heart, I had to give you the beast’s cunning. Don’t you see?’ He shifted again and the safety belt across his huge shoulder became taut like a ship’s hawser. ‘I’ve been there, been to the nethermost cistern of man’s heart. I’ve seen the hobgoblins that live there. Do you know what I did before I became a games teacher? I was in charge of the chain gang out at the Cardiganshire State Penitentiary at Tregaron. You remember that, don’t you? When you were a kid, your dad must have taken you out there to see them, digging the peat in their hooped pyjamas. I saw the worst that man could do to his neighbour out there. I wish I could forget what I witnessed, but the horror of it will remain with me always. It was for that reason that I had to abjure the downy pillow, the grace and frivolity of the damasked path through the woods. Don’t you see? I was saving you from the chain gang.’