The Day Aberystwyth Stood Still (32 page)

I looked up and around at the cavern walls.

‘What do you think?’ he asked in a reverential whisper.

‘It’s . . . it’s eerie.’

‘Yes, precisely. That’s where we are: in the giant’s ear.’

‘Why have you brought me here?’

‘Follow me!’ He took me by the hand and dragged me into the cavern. In front of us on a raised dais there was a hospital bed upon which lay a girl in a wedding dress being attended by anxious nurses.

The bride groaned and a nurse placed a compress on her brow. She looked at me and waved feebly. It was Chastity. ‘I didn’t see you at the wedding, Louie.’

‘I was at the back, in the trees.’

‘Did you enjoy it?’

‘It was beautiful.’

She emitted a groan and the doctor rushed forward; the baby’s head appeared from beneath the white taffeta and was drawn out by a nurse, who handed it to Doc Digwyl. The baby was silent, regarding the room through wide, unblinking eyes colder than a fish’s. It wore a little suit, with short trousers and a jacket, and all was sodden and slicked with natal slime.

‘Looks just like Meici,’ I said.

Chastity grinned.

Doc Digwyl tied the umbilical cord, then fished out a pair of wallpaper scissors and cut. Chastity applauded: ‘Bravo!’

The baby turned to me and said, ‘Remember, Louie, the giant is wrong: the community must make sacrifices for the weaklings, not the other way round.’

The nurses wheeled the hospital bed away as Chastity waved like the Queen in the back of a golden coach.

‘It was nice knowing you, Louie.’

‘It was nice knowing you, Chastity.’

‘Come!’ said the doctor. ‘There is no time to lose. I just heard the bell.’ He clambered forward over boulders of wax up to the hole. I followed and stood beside him in the earhole. Cool air streamed through. Doc Digwyl nudged me. ‘You see, the cochlea is the seat of our sense of balance; we are well-placed. I’ve got money on Herod Jenkins to go down in the second.’

We looked out onto a boxing ring. Ercwleff, in silk shorts, sat on the stool in the red corner. The referee turned towards us, reached down and hoisted Herod Jenkins’s gloved fist up past us. ‘In the blue corner, all the way from Talybont, the tracksuited Torquemada, scourge of our school days and mocker of our manhood –’ boos rang out and doughnuts were hurled onto the canvas. ‘The only full-time professional Jungian archetype of horror, the dimly demonic and sincerely satanic, half-man half-troll, the hairy, the scary, don’t ever call him a fairy, ladies and gentlemen, it’s your friend but not mine, school games teacher and honorary Neanderthal, Herod Jenkins!’ Boos rained down and the seating thundered with a thousand stamping feet. The referee held up Ercwleff’s hand. ‘And in the red, the ponderous pachyderm from Pontrhydyfendigiad, the gormless, grinning, gaping, gurning, goofing, suet-souled, swede-faced
Über
-dumpling, one of God’s children but thankfully not one of mine . . . Ercwleff!’ Cheers filled the arena, the bell rang, and Herod Jenkins stepped forward and punched Ercwleff on the nose. There was a split second as the world waited to see what Ercwleff would do. The crowd held its breath. And then he slowly turned the other cheek.

‘Looks like I’ve lost my bet,’ said the doctor.

Chapter 18

The trees
and grass glittered and dripped beneath a sky dyed a deep and perfect indigo. The morning glistened like a chick emerging from the fragments of its shell, its feathers still wet with albumen. It was how I felt too as I ate my boiled egg and drank the coffee that Calamity had made. She talked as I ate. ‘You were in the Giant’s Castle for two days.’

‘I thought the game was up when I saw Doc Digwyl.’

‘Eeyore went to fetch him. He said he was delighted and couldn’t wait to make you well again so he could shake your hand. “I want to shake the hand of my deliverer,” he said.’

‘What did I deliver him from?’

‘Servitude or something. He has had one of those conversions like the bloke on the road to Damascus. He said he’d been in prison all these years and you released him.’ She refilled my coffee.

‘And how did I do that?’

‘After the hypnotism, Mrs Bwlchgwallter went to stay with her sister –’

‘I know, and then she disappeared.’

‘Still hasn’t been found. Tore off all her clothes and ran into the woods, they say. She told her sister about Farmer Pugh murdering his own brother and burying him in Tregaron Bog. So the sister told the police and they started looking for the body. The doc saw them and thought you’d told them about his missing fiancée and they were looking for her. For a moment he panicked, but then he realised the prospect of being able to tell the truth brought him joy. It was a terrible weight off his mind, he said. He wrote a confession and was going to post it to the police. I don’t know whether he has or not.’

I spread butter over another piece of toast. It was hungry work being in the Giant’s Castle. ‘What else has happened?’

‘I had a brainwave about the missing tape. I worked out where Mrs Bwlchgwallter must have hidden it.’

I gave her an expectant look.

‘In the gingerbread alien. I went round to see, but the alien had been broken in half. I think someone beat us to it. There’s something else, but I’ll wait till you finish your breakfast.’

I could sense repressed excitement. ‘Just say what’s on your mind, Calamity. I can listen and eat at the same time.’

‘Not until you finish your breakfast.’

‘If you don’t tell me, I won’t finish.’ I put the egg-covered soldier down on my side plate.

‘OK,’ said Calamity. ‘I think I’ve found a way to get Meici to drop the charge.’

‘Get the mayor to lean on him.’

‘Right.’

‘But we don’t know how.’

‘I think we do. Iestyn has been spotted. He’s been seen up by his old house; lots of people have seen him. And there were reports of lights in the sky two nights ago up there. He’s up there, Louie. If we can find him he can tell us what happened to Skweeple after Preseli took him into custody. The boxing match is this afternoon. There’s still time.’

‘How on earth are we going to find him by this afternoon?’

‘We smoke him out. Iestyn is from the Denunciationists’ community, right? Ran away to become a mechanic. So we use bait. We use a piece of technology that no self-respecting Denunciationist could possibly resist. Something so wonderful it’s like pornography to him.’

‘And what’s that? The Devil’s Bridge train?’

‘Better than that. Sospan’s ice-cream van.’

I stared at her wide-eyed.

‘Remember you telling me he’s got an emergency van hidden away in Bow Street? We take that and drive up to where the sightings are and play the tune. What do you think?’

I grinned in delight. ‘I think it’s so daft it might even work.’ I paused and added, ‘As long as Sospan doesn’t mind.’

‘He doesn’t mind, as long as . . .’

‘Yes?’

‘He said as long as you don’t object to him writing about you and the Katabasis ice cream in the autumn issue of
The Iceman Cometh
.’

Half an hour later we were in Bow Street lifting the garage door. The concrete counterweight gave off a dull, scraping roar. Inside, the beast glimmered mystically in the dark like a fish in an enchanted pond. We reversed out of the garage and headed first for Clarach to fill up at the petrol station. As we did so, Calamity sitting beside me in the cab put a hand on my arm in surprise. Up ahead was a woman walking towards us, down the centre of the road. She wavered from side to side and had the air of a sleepwalker or someone in a trance. She was wearing a wedding dress that was muddy and torn. I stopped and we jumped out.

‘Chastity,’ Calamity cried and dodged into her path with arms outstretched to catch her. ‘What on earth has happened?’

Chastity struggled to speak through sobs. Her hair was wild like candy floss and a few tresses fell untidily from a broken hair slide into her face. She had lost her broken spectacles and stared at us myopically. She snivelled, and snot dribbled down over her top lip. I observed through eyes narrowed with scepticism, wondering if this was just more playacting. ‘Thanks for the cake,’ I said.

She gasped softly. ‘Oh dear, you’re angry with me, aren’t you? I knew you would be. I said to Meici you’d be upset about the cake.’

‘Not at all, it was very nice. It was kind of you to think of me.’

‘Everything has turned out horrible. Everyone has been complaining; they’ve all been sick. I told Meici we should have bought a cake from a shop, but he said he knew how to make one. Damn and bother.’

‘You mean,’ said Calamity with eyes widening in surprise, ‘everyone else was sick too?’

Chastity nodded and squeezed her eyes tight shut as more tears threatened to brim over. ‘He ran out of sultanas so he used some shellfish he found. I’m so sorry.’

Calamity turned green at the thought.

‘Where is your aunt?’ I asked.

‘She’s gone home to Shawbury. She was very unhappy about me marrying Meici.’

‘Where is Meici now?’ I asked.

She wrung her hands. ‘I don’t know. For two days he was sick and all the while he was so upset about you; after you shook his hand like that he cried and said you were the best friend he had ever had. Yesterday he called the mayor and said he didn’t want to lie any more and send you to prison. The truth is, he doesn’t know who shot him, he didn’t see. The mayor was really angry. He said he would fire Meici from the human-cannonball job. So last night Meici drove up to see him; he took his human-cannonball uniform to hand back, he was going to quit. But he hasn’t come home.’

We put Chastity in the cab, squeezed in between me and Calamity. Each time I changed gear my hand rustled past the muddy silken cloth of her wedding dress. We turned the van round and headed for Capel Bangor. Before we could make the long cross-country trek to Ystumtuen we had to head south first, to Ystrad Meurig, where the mayor lived. It was probably the only time an ice-cream van ventured so far into those badlands.

The house stood at the interstice of dry-stone walls which held the hill in a net of rock. With its neat white-washed walls the place looked like a piece of cotton wool caught in a spider’s web. The hills had the dry, faded green that betokened a wiry coarseness of grass in the deep country, one that paralleled the lives of those who walked across it. It was a world where compassion was atrophied by the bitter wind that never seemed to stop keening. The lane to the farm narrowed to a single track and dropped beneath the level of the fields till it was almost a groove; on either side, spiky yellow grass scratched against the sides of the van, and above our head curious sheep looked down imperiously from behind wire fences. We drove over a cattle grid and onto the muddy expanse of cleared ground before the house. Away to the right at the foot of a stone wall Ercwleff was digging.

We made Chastity stay in the van, got out and walked over to him. He seemed not to have heard the van arrive and carried on digging, oblivious. A pile of clothes lay at his feet.

We coughed and he stopped and turned.

‘Hello Louie and Miss Calamity,’ he said. He looked pleased to see us.

‘Hi Ercwleff, are you having fun?’ I asked.

He grinned.

‘Not chopping desks up today?’

‘That was a good game, wasn’t it?’ he asked.

‘Yes, I really enjoyed it, didn’t I, Calamity?’

‘You sure did. I’m really sorry I missed that game.’

‘We’re playing a hiding game today,’ said Ercwleff.

‘Wow!’ said Calamity. ‘You’re so lucky. You’re burying clothes.’

Ercwleff made an enthusiastic hurr-hurr sound. He pushed the pile at his feet into the hole. As it tumbled in we saw that it was a human-cannonball outfit, together with a white, blood-stained shirt. ‘Meici had a nosebleed,’ said Ercwleff, ‘and ruined Preseli’s shirt.’

‘Where is Meici?’ I asked.

‘He’s sleeping. Preseli has taken him to the lake where we took the angel.’