Day Aberystwyth Stood Still, page 14
I rested the bottle cap in my lap and began to decant the rum. ‘My advice to you is finish the sitting and pump him about the flying saucer. We can think about contacting the police later.’
‘But what about my conscience?’
‘Conscience is a tricky thing, Mrs Bwlchgwallter. It has a rôle to play, but there are other voices in the mix that must be heard.’
Mrs Bwlchgwallter refused to listen to the other voices and persisted; an hysterical whine began to enter her voice. ‘Yes, but the dog, the dog! I knew that dog, I . . . I gave him biscuits.’
‘Mrs Bwlchgwallter, I want you to calm down. Are you calm?’ There was a pause. I could hear her on the other end of the line taking deep breaths. ‘Yes, I’m calm.’
‘We’re all sorry about the dog. But being sorry won’t bring him back to life. It’s a big bad, lousy, ugly world out there, Mrs Bwlchgwallter; some days I wake up with a taste on my tongue so bad it’s like a badger crawled into my mouth in the night and died. Times like that the only thing to do is get up, brush your teeth and face the mirror. I say this to all my clients, so it’s only right I say it to you: I can take you to Shrewsbury, but I can’t promise you a rose garden.’ I hung up.
I took a sip from my hip flask, screwed the top on and leant back. I closed my eyes; not even 9.30 and I was ready for a siesta. I dozed. Ten minutes later the phone rang. This time she sounded more distressed. ‘It’s getting very . . . racy!’ she said. ‘The angel wants him to . . . do it.’
‘Do what?’
She swallowed audibly. ‘I hardly like to say. You know . . . miscegenation.’
‘What’s that?’
‘I suppose you would call it a form of inappropriate sexual congress.’
‘Inappropriate?’
‘Yes.’
‘Who are the angels?’
‘That’s obviously what they are, isn’t it? From the saucer. He says there are three of them. Two men and a woman. They are all blond and beautiful. Seraphim, I’d guess.’
‘Why do they want to make love?’
‘I haven’t the foggiest.’
‘OK, that’s good. Now I want you to see if they told him anything about Iestyn Probert.’
I hung up and tried to sleep again.
Half an hour later she rang once more.
‘He’s got stuck.’
‘What do you mean by stuck, Mrs Bwlchgwallter? Stuck in his chair? Stuck in a rut? Stuck in the middle with you?’
‘Come again?’
‘It’s a song, don’t worry about that.’
‘I mean he’s stuck like the needle in the groove of a gramophone record. He keeps saying the same thing over and over again.’
‘What is that thing?’
‘Something about a tin opener. What should I do?’
‘Can’t you give him some sort of a jolt? What about smelling salts?’
‘That’s terribly dangerous in the middle of a trance –’
‘Why not give him a tin opener, see what happens?’
‘That’s a good idea.’
She hung up.
A minute later the phone rang again, but this time it was Eeyore. He asked me to meet him on the Prom, towards the castle. Normally you require more precise directions than that, but finding a man leading a train of donkeys is not so difficult. I picked up my hat but the phone rang again before I had time to put it on. I stared at the receiver, deliberating. If only it had rung just after I’d left. I answered.
‘It worked.’
‘What did?’
‘The tin opener. He’s talking again. He says they told him a lot about Iestyn Probert. One of their saucers crashed the same night as the raid on the Coliseum cinema. Skweeple – that’s one of their people – got separated from the others and wandered off. He was hit by the getaway car and Iestyn Probert got out to help. He took Skweeple to the doctor’s and not long after that Sheriff Preseli turned up and took Skweeple away. Two months later another saucer came looking for them and they resurrected Iestyn Probert to ask him what happened to Skweeple.’
‘And what did happen?’
‘I just told you, he went off with Sheriff Preseli.’
‘I know, but what happened then?’
‘I don’t know.’
I paused. Then said with extra intensity, ‘We’re almost there, Mrs Bwlchgwallter, almost there. Can you feel the heat of those footlights on your face? Can you smell it? The greasepaint? The thick, dusty reek of those heavy velvet drapes at the Shrewsbury Palladium? Of course you can. We’re in the home straight, just one little furlong left. Find out what happened after the sheriff arrested Skweeple.’ I hung up.
Ten minutes later the phone rang again. This time it was Mrs Pugh, the farmer’s wife. She was hysterical and told me to come right away; something terrible had happened.
Eeyore was standing at the railings at Castle Point, the train of donkeys happily idling. The wind had freshened and the surface of the sea was dancing with flame, green and silver like the verdigris patina of weathered copper, or the flecks in Miaow’s irises.
He heard me coming, turned and smiled. ‘I could stand here all day.’
‘What’s to stop you?’
He ran a hand along the mane of a donkey. ‘New one, Silenus. Named after the tutor to the wine god Dionysus. He rode a donkey and could only be bound with a chain of flowers. Isn’t that nice?’
I agreed it was.
‘Just been speaking to that chap Raspiwtin. He says we are children born on a submarine who have never seen the sea. On the bridge there’s a man looking into the periscope and he tells us what he sees: meadows and blue skies; white peacocks, avenues of wisteria; beautiful things. On and on we sail through this grey-green watery world; the sonar is our birdsong. Do you believe that?’
‘I don’t know, I’ve heard something similar.’
‘From time to time, he says, a Wildman runs amok, tries to tell us it is all a lie, that there is nothing beyond the metal skin of the sub except the stuff that comes out of the tap. This is a prophet. They take him away to be burnt. What do you think he means?’
‘I think he means our eyes and ears and noses send back electrical impulses and our mind turn them into images of a world outside, but it’s not a true depiction of it. It’s much better.’
Eeyore nodded. ‘I’m happy with it.’ He reached into the pocket of his raincoat and brought out a tube of rolled-up cardboard. He unrolled it like a scroll to reveal an old-style school photo; four tiers of children, thirty or forty abreast, the whole school assembled in front of the traditional schoolhouse. ‘I found it while I was clearing out. Can you spot your dad?’
I studied the sea of bleary gray, stared through the lens of time at a lost world that stared back. The faces were indistinct blurs, smudges of tone; noses and mouths were lost, and eyes reduced to shadows, but strangely, by some process it was impossible to understand, each little chalky ball, balanced like a golf ball on a school-tie-shaped tee, somehow contained within its various smudges enough information to evoke a person’s identity. Some faces were obliterated by filaments of spidery white where the thick gloss had cracked and creased. Finally I spotted a little boy who seemed to be the acorn from which my father had grown. I pointed with my thumb. He laughed. ‘You think so? What about this one?’ He pointed to a boy at the opposite end who also looked as if he had sprung from the same acorn. I flicked my eyes to and fro from the images. ‘Have you got a twin brother you never told me about?’
He laughed again. ‘They’re both me. It’s a trick, you see, we used to play in those days. To get the whole school in the shot, the camera moves, on a clockwork drive, and the shutter moves too, slowly across the plate. It means a naughty boy can jump down from the left end, run behind the chairs faster than the camera and then stand on a stool at the other end. You get in the same picture twice.’ He grinned with pleasure at the recollection of the ancient transgression. ‘I met a chap yesterday who asked about you,’ he said.
I looked at him with interest.
‘A felon from the old times. He mentioned you specifically.’
‘Who was it, Dad?’
‘One of the Richards brothers – the ones who took part in the raid on the Coliseum cinema. There’s only one surviving now. The other died in a knife fight, I think.’
My interest quickened, but I knew it did no good to hurry Eeyore. He would get there at his own pace.
‘He lives out at Taliesin.’
‘How exactly did he mention me?’
‘He heard you’d been asking about Iestyn. He wants to talk to you. That’s all. Most mornings he sits alone in the pub at Taliesin, the one on the right as you drive past the water wheel.’
‘I’ll find him.’
‘He’ll ask you about Frankie. Frankie was some gangland boss he crossed in Swansea once who took a dislike to him many years ago. He’s dead now, but that old fellah out at Taliesin won’t accept it. He thinks it’s a trick to catch him off his guard. Like those old Jap soldiers who refuse to come out of the jungle. Just thought I’d let you know.’
I took the road out of town and pondered the case. In one respect, it was baffling in a straightforward way. The Richards brothers raided the cinema and made their getaway. Somewhere out near Ystrad Meurig they ran someone over. Iestyn was kicked out of the car. He went to the aid of whoever it was they ran over and took him to the doctor’s. Preseli turned up and Iestyn escaped. Preseli took the other boy away. He was never heard of again. Now, twenty-five years later, Preseli’s brother is standing for mayor and he doesn’t want any one looking too closely into certain incidents buried in the past. The doc probably knows more than he is letting on. Simple. All straightforward except for one thing: the kid was wearing a silver suit that they couldn’t get off him. They say he was from a crashed saucer. Phooey.
I don’t have a problem with the idea of aliens visiting us. The universe is either empty and we are just an astonishing accident, unintended, unlikely, pointless and terrifyingly unnecessary. Or we’re not, in which case the place must be teeming with life. It doesn’t really beggar my belief that they might pop over for a look. I just can’t believe they crash. That’s the trouble with these sorts of stories; the technology seems remarkably prone to the same problems that bedevil us. You’d think a being from another world would be in a position to tell us things that we had never seen before, things that we had never heard of, that we couldn’t even begin to imagine. In the same way a man from Currys would appear as a demi-god to the first caveman. But it never works out like that. They always report things that seem straight out of a sci-fi B-movie: silver suits, goldfish-bowl helmets, consoles with flashing lights, dying races who, most improbably of all, need the seed of an earth-man to get them going again. And crashes. Prangs. Fender-benders.
So where did the kid in the silver suit come from? What is a silver suit, anyway? Do they mean like tinfoil? Or covered in sequins like the singer at Jezebels? Or a one-piece job made from one of those great alloys not found on Earth, the ones that were all the rage on Mars last spring? Did he have a goldfish-bowl helmet? Or was our atmosphere breathable for him? The odds are against it, but you sometimes get these lucky breaks when travelling in space. The same way sometimes the gravity is just right, like Goldilocks’s porridge. A few extra clicks on the dial in either direction and it makes things really difficult. Either you are too jumpy, like a gazelle with spring-loaded hooves; or you carry a few hundred pounds on your shoulders making it hard just to stop imploding.
When you think of the endless variety of life on Earth, the mind-boggling permutations, you have to reflect that there’s nothing special about the bipedal model; in fact it seems to be inferior in just about every department to other animals. Losing the fur was clearly a dubious idea; it means you have to get a job to pay for an inferior replacement made from stuff that isn’t as warm, isn’t as waterproof, doesn’t fit so well or wear so well. We’re covered in hide that cuts too easily and leaves purple welts where the cops interrogate you. Even on Earth our ascendancy seems to have been the fluke result of a pretty rare combination of circumstances. And yet the people from space seem to have followed the same improbable evolutionary path. They are bipedal and furless too, more or less. The areas in which they depart from the paradigm – pointy ears, slightly different eyes or different number of fingers . . . these things testify to the poverty of imagination of the beholder. Having hallucinated an alien that bears a remarkable resemblance to us, they add a few differences for good measure, but they take the first ones they think of. In the ’50s, Beings from Outer Space came from Mars and had dials and knobs on their consoles. Nowadays, the term ‘Outer Space’ has fallen into disuse; it’s passé and bespeaks a feeble grasp of the infinite possibilities of what lies beyond our planet. If we ask the farmer I’m sure he’ll say the aliens had liquid-crystal displays. When we get something more advanced, they’ll get it too. It seems in terms of technology we are always one step ahead of the aliens.
When Mrs Pugh opened the door to the farmhouse, her face was white and she was trembling. She looked at me with relief, but I don’t know why.
‘Thank God you’ve come,’ she said. She led me into the sitting room, past a hall table on which the business card I had given to Mrs Bwlchgwallter stood propped against the phone. Huw Pugh was crouching in a foetal position on the floor in front of the fireplace. He was sobbing.
‘There was a terrible scream,’ said Mrs Pugh. ‘And then Mrs Bwlchgwallter ran out past me into the garden. I found him like this. He’s been like it ever since. What should I do?’
I walked back to the phone in the hall and called an ambulance. At the same time, I slipped the business card into my pocket.
‘They’ll be here in a minute,’ I said. ‘There’s nothing more I can do here. I’ll go and look for Mrs Bwlchgwallter.’
She wasn’t in the garden and wasn’t on either of the main roads, the one that led to Ynyslas or the one that led to Tre’r-ddol, which meant she could have been anywhere. I decided the best option was to assume she would find her way home and look for her there. I drove to Borth to see Calamity and tell her what had transpired.
The ancient forest once belonged to the Iron Age kingdom of Cantref-y-Gwaelod, which, legend says, sank beneath the waters of Cardigan Bay. Geologists blame the Ice Age but folklore claims it was all down to some chap who got drunk at a party and left the gates to the dyke open. That was the end of the Welsh Atlantis. But we still have the tree stumps on the beach at Borth to remind us of the lost golden age. Even as I parked the car I could see Calamity and Jhoe at the water’s edge.
I walked across the sand to the discoloration that looked from a distance like rocks and no doubt was taken as such by the casual observer. They were both sitting in camping chairs, staring out to sea. As I got closer the tree stumps resolved from the mass of brown colour. They were like dinosaur teeth embedded in the sand and flossed with seaweed.
Jhoe looked up and recited,
The big blue tube’s just like Louise
You get a thrill from every squeeze
Burma-Shave
Calamity said, ‘He knows them all.’
Jhoe gave us another:
Don’t lose your head to gain a minute
You need your head; your brains are in it.
Burma-Shave
‘What are you up to?’ I asked.
‘Jhoe’s been telling me about Noö. He says the rainy season lasts for two centuries, and I’ve shown him the sand dunes and the war memorial. He didn’t like it. Too ingrokking.’
‘Earth-man,’ he said, turning to me, ‘your violence appalls us. Sometimes, on this planet, I feel so ingrokked. So terribly ingrokked.’
Calamity tried to help him up. ‘Please don’t be unhappy. We can take you back to where you came from, if you like.’
‘Such a thing would not be possible for many of your centuries.’
‘Are you from a hospital, Jhoe?’ I asked.
He shook his head. ‘I am from Elysium, beneath the moons of Noö.’
‘Why did you come to Aberystwyth?’ I asked.
‘As a penance. Once, many aeons ago, my people said the thing which was not. So here I must languish.’
‘Are you sure you are not from a hospital, Jhoe?’ Calamity asked. ‘It doesn’t matter if you are. We won’t tell anyone, unless you want us to.’
‘We have no hospitals, we have no need for them. I am so ingrokked.’ He knelt down at the water’s edge and put his hand on the seaweed mane that clung to the tree stump; he ran his fingers through it as gently as a mother stroking her daughter’s hair.
‘Because if you were from a hospital, we could take you back, couldn’t we, Louie?’
‘Yes, we would be happy to.’
‘And we would come to visit you.’
Jhoe seemed not to be listening but stared out across the remains of the forest, lost in a reverie. ‘I remember when all this was fields.’
Calamity looked at me in anguish. I put my arm on her shoulder and drew her to me for comfort. Who was Jhoe?
‘Over there,’ he said, ‘is where I kissed a girl once. We used to come on holiday to Cantref-y-Gwaelod. If only you could see Earth as she was then. In the days when . . . she was a shepherdess, and all this vale where now the sea churns the sand was the home of her flock.’ He looked round, his eyes filled with an intense longing. ‘If only you could have seen it before . . . before all the bad stuff, when the earth was young. You would have been so grokked.’
I told Calamity to get the bus back to town and check out Mrs Bwlchgwallter’s shop in Bridge Street. I set off for Taliesin. The one surviving Richards brother was not difficult to find. He sat in the corner of the pub, his head slumped forward, chin on chest, like a marionette with a broken string. I put a pint down in front of him and he turned to look at me.
Saliva dribbled over his bottom lip. ‘Did Frankie send you?’
