Day Aberystwyth Stood Still, page 21
The rain eased off and the wet scent of its passing filled the night. A man walking saw me and came over. It was Raspiwtin. He sat down. We turned to face each other, but it was as if we were both lost for words.
‘We’re almost there,’ he said at last. ‘I can feel his presence. He is close.’
‘Why do you seek Iestyn?’
He considered for a moment. ‘Tell me, Louie, did you contemplate the koan? About the bombing raid on Nagasaki?’
‘I did, but all I could see was the book of puzzles from which you cribbed it and made it your own. Just as you probably took the Burmese story from a newspaper and almost certainly never spent even so much as a day in the Vatican laundry.’
‘Is that what you think?’
‘Everything you say sounds second-hand, like someone cobbling together a false biography.’
Raspiwtin turned and waved his finger at me. ‘Even if what you say were true, what would it matter? The koan is still true. Men think, because they have been taught to think it, that this is the way the world is and no other way is possible. But it is an illusion. It could disappear with the swiftness of a soap bubble bursting. All it takes would be the discovery of an alien species – a humanoid, seemingly not all that different from us. The realisation that we were not alone, that instead of being composed of numerous warring and bickering tribes, we were really and truly the brotherhood of man . . . Who, having gained such knowledge, could continue to regard another human being as his enemy? What would be the purpose of armies? Humanity would wake from its trance and on that morning nothing would ever be the same again. War would be over. This is the quest that brought me to Aberystwyth. One alien we know escaped from the crashed saucer in December 1965, unaccounted for. Where is he? Could he be alive? Even the skeleton would be enough. The physical, undeniable evidence that we are not alone.’
‘You don’t want much for your £400, do you?’
He shrugged weakly and avoided my gaze.
‘Normally my clients want me to spy on an errant spouse. Or trace a missing shoe. Once I saved Aberystwyth.’
‘Now you can save Humanity.’
‘So that’s it? Four hundred pounds – including a down payment of two hundred which you seem to have forgotten about – and for that I find Iestyn Probert so he can tell you where to find the body of the alien, assuming it’s still here. And the shock revelation will cure humankind of its addiction to war. Millennia of barbarism wiped out in a trice?’
‘It’s easy to mock my plan, but in truth I think it is quite straightforward and possesses a good likelihood of success. You see, I don’t think humankind would have any other choice in the circumstances. The revelation would be overwhelming; they could not fail to feel a sudden upsurge of brotherhood. In your heart can you deny it?’
My head fell forward and I caught it in my palm.
‘Are you all right?’
‘Just feeling a little under the weather. It’s probably something I ate.’
‘You should get home out of the cold and damp.’ He stood up.
Just something I ate. The image of the wedding cake surrounded by dead wasps rose before my inner vision and that was followed, as I uttered up a silent cry, by another image: Meici in my office telling me about the plan to spring his mum from gaol using a poisoning idea devised by Erik XIV of Sweden. Dirty double-crosser . . .
Raspiwtin wished me good night and walked off towards the public shelter leading to South Road.
Ten minutes later another man appeared, walking inverted in the rain-glazed pavement. It was the mayor. He seemed pleased to see me.
‘Louie Knight!’ he cried. ‘Not out shooting people?’
I looked but didn’t have the strength to answer.
‘I must say, you don’t look all that well, you look a bit peaky. Maybe you should get yourself a new job; all this running around playing cops and robbers . . . it’s not good for a man of your age. You should get a nice desk job.’
‘I’ll look into it.’
‘I’ve been finding out about you. It seems you are lucky to earn enough in a month to pay the rent on that crummy caravan you live in. Why do you even bother getting out of bed?’
‘I do it because I like it. I can live happily in a caravan or anywhere else, it doesn’t matter how lowly, whereas you can’t be happy anywhere, because you can’t look in the bathroom mirror without hating what you see.’
He forced a laugh. ‘Is that so!’
‘We both know it’s true.’
‘You couldn’t be more wrong. I love myself.’
‘On the surface you do, but deep down where it counts you don’t and never can. And I know why too, and the why is what eats you up.’
‘Is it that I am unkind to my dog?’
‘A dog can give you what you want, but no man can. This is what gnaws away at you. Everything is easy for people like you. If you see something you want, you take it. But there’s one thing that troubles you, and try as you might you can’t get the worm out of your soul. It eats you up when you wake in the night without anyone there to comfort you, and you lie waiting for the first glimmer of light, counting the loveless days until they throw you unmourned into a hole. What eats you up is the knowledge that other men don’t live their lives like you do. They resist the temptation to live by abusing other people. You cannot understand what it is in their hearts that makes them abjure riches and power. What do they get out of it apart from the easy conscience and the ability to look themselves in the eye in the mirror each day? You can’t understand it. These men are admired, loved even, by other men for this quality of their character. People like you are feared but never loved, not even liked. Why should you give a damn? It’s because this love is the one thing in the world you will never taste. Except when you give biscuits to your dog.’ As I spoke I could feel the needle dropping slowly to empty. I was finished. The shivering had reached my teeth. Over the mayor’s shoulder I could see Eeyore leading the donkeys on the last traverse. There was strength left for one last lie, to send the mayor in the wrong direction, away from my father on whose donkeys I could ride away. ‘Please help me, my car is down by the Cliff Railway. Will you help me to it?’
He laughed and slapped his thigh. ‘Of course I will.’ He rose to his feet. ‘I’ll get a nice policeman to help you.’ And off he went, as I knew he would, in the wrong direction. I waited a while, then stood up and stumbled to the railing. I walked along holding on until I reached Eeyore and fell into his arms.
The donkey that took me back to Miaow’s was called Tampopo.
When I awoke I was in bed and Calamity was sitting watching me. Eeyore was standing by the door. I moved my eyes and took in the contours of the room. It was small with white-washed stone walls. I lay in a narrow bed with a crocheted cover. At the foot of the bed was a chair upon which my clothes had been neatly folded. It was dusk; soft yellow light could be seen outside the bedroom door, from the staircase. The sound of a TV could be faintly discerned. I went back to sleep.
When I opened my eyes again it was night. I was drenched in sweat and Calamity was dabbing my brow with a face towel. Eeyore stood sentinel at the door, unmoving, watching me intensely. Doc Digwyl came in and walked over to my bedside. My instinct was to recoil, for surely his presence meant the game was up? But I had no strength to do anything and Calamity seemed unperturbed by his appearance.
‘Any change?’ he asked.
Calamity shook her head. ‘The fever still rages and he’s been raving again, saying really crazy things.’
‘Like what? I need to know.’
‘He said we’d all misjudged Herod Jenkins and then some things about Erik XIV of Sweden.’
Doc Digwyl pressed his lips together in concentration, as if this was the final confirmation of what he had long suspected: Erik XIV poisoning. ‘We have no choice,’ he said and nodded at someone outside the door. ‘We must use the Katabasis ice cream.’
Sospan walked in carrying a tray upon which there was a glass dish containing ice cream and wafers. The ice cream had green ripple. Sospan seemed to be wearing his Sunday-best ice-cream outfit. The white coat was crisply starched; he wore a tie and white gloves and bore a serious mien. He handed the tray ceremoniously to the doctor, who passed it to Calamity.
‘Are you sure it’s safe?’ she asked.
‘Of course not! All pharmaceutical interventions carry an inherent risk; I cannot conceal the truth so that you might sleep better. But in times such as this, we must be brave and trust to God. Please!’ He jerked the tray towards her. She picked up a wafer and scooped some ice cream onto it, then brought it up gingerly to my lips.
‘Go on, girl!’ said the doc. ‘Screw your courage to the sticking-post!’
She pushed the wafer between my parted lips. I closed my eyes again.
Chapter 17
I awoke encased from chin to toe in short-crust pastry. There were other men, lying next to me, each encased in a similar sarcophagus. The scullery maid moved along the row of human pasties dipping a brush into a bowl of egg yolk and coating the pastry. She sang a ditty about the ruination of a milkmaid who met a squire on the road to the fair. The pastry was still soft and malleable. I sat up. The maid shrieked and dropped the bowl of egg onto the stone flags, where it shattered into jagged shards. I wriggled like an escapologist and the front of my casing began to unzip. I pulled my arms free and pushed the pastry down like a sleeping bag with my hands and stepped out of it. The maid shrieked again. I walked past the other pasties; the faces stared up at me, blank and immobile, like prey that has been stunned by the sting of a giant spider and awaits its fate bound neatly with silk. They were the faces of my companions from the fourth-year rugby class. I jumped down from the tabletop onto a wooden stool, then let myself hang by my fingers from the edge of the stool and dropped to the floor. I rolled over and stood up. The maid continued to squeal. I looked round, searching for a means of escape; the door to the giant’s counting house was ajar and I ran towards it, but the floor was vast, like many football pitches side by side, and I suddenly knew how a mouse feels running across the kitchen floor. Suddenly the giant loomed up in the doorway and howled with laughter at the sport before him. His feet formed a suede mountain range. The suede stopped at the knee in a big, floppy turnover, and beyond that twin pillars clad in green tights rose like gasometers to the leather jerkin, cincted at the waist with a thick iron-chain belt from which the heads of children hung, dripping gore. High above this in a place where only eagles dare was his face, cloven by the horizontal crease we children of the damned had learned to call a smile. It was Herod Jenkins, my former school games teacher. He spat out a chewed-up bag of bone and gristle and indigestible rugby jersey and roared with laughter; he jabbed out with a foot in an attempt to stamp on me. Fortunately the dim-witted maid had not bothered to take away my belongings before encasing me in pastry. I still had my leather purse. I tugged at the strings and pulled out a talisman, a piece of paper. I held it out towards the giant. ‘I’ve got a note from my mam!’ I cried. ‘I’ve got a cold.’ But Herod Jenkins just laughed and told me boys with colds were even more delicious. The magic had failed. I turned and fled. The giant came in pursuit, trying to stamp on me as I zig-zagged wildly across the stone floor. Up ahead the maid swatted down with a sweeping brush and now my way was blocked by the hem of her skirt, which lay in folds on the ground. I lifted them and climbed in. She screamed again, but the sound was muffled now in the pitch-black, strangely warm bell chamber in which I found myself. I ran blindly and blundered into a foot; it lifted as she began to hop. I clung on to her shoe and climbed up, using the walls of her sock as rigging to get out of harm’s way. The hopping became wilder, each jolt stunning my consciousness and threatening to dislodge me, but I held on. I reached the knee, which was raised high so that the thigh was horizontal to the ground. Daylight flooded the cathedral of underlinen; the giant had lifted her skirt and was peering up now from the floor and laughing. Just above the knee the flesh was encircled by an elasticised rope thicker than a man’s waist and from it folds of cloth ballooned upwards like the sails of a galleon. Except this galleon had perhaps belonged to the Flying Dutchman or the Ancient Mariner: the cloth was grey and mottled with the overlapping smudges of ancient stains. It did not seem that maid washed her drawers more than annually. The giant’s hand swooped in and grabbed me as easily as a butcher grabs a rabbit from a hook and drew me out into the air. The maid screamed once more. The giant held me aloft, gripped by his tree-like fingers. He peered at me quizzically and I stared with dread and terror and grisly fascination into the twin dark eyes. They say that the way to fend off shark attack is to punch the shark’s nose, and I considered this possibility now. Before I could decide whether it would only madden the giant further, he opened his mouth and I found myself plummeting down a manhole without end.
I fell through the darkness, tumbling slowly, biffed and butted by half-chewed tomatoes and boulders of Rice Crispies which rained down like a meteor shower. It came as no surprise to me to discover that my former games teacher bolted his food, but the revelation that he ate Rice Crispies in the afternoon was a dagger to my heart. Down and down I fell into the abyss. Then there was a splash and for a while I was unconscious.
I woke up on the shore of an inland sea, washed up like a Robinson Crusoe, above my head a domed, cavernous roof. The water lapped gently, rocking me back and forth; the surface sparkled like a moonlit lake. I crawled up the beach, which had the texture and polished, bulbous surface of lamb kidney. I struggled to my feet. Up ahead I saw a light flickering and moved towards it. The noise of conversation reached me, the light began to dance and resolve into flames. A group of women were gathered round a fire, three old crones with Punch-and-Judy hooked noses and hair wilder than the quills of a porcupine. They were stirring a cauldron set on a tripod over a fire of brushwood. The flashes from the fire revealed in brief half-glimpses sparkling pac-a-mac coats above blue suede orthopaedic boots. They were singing:
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 . . .
As I approached they stopped stirring their cauldron and turned to me.
‘Hssst! He comes!’
FIRST CRONE
All hail, Louie Knight, Thane of a caravan in Ynyslas.
SECOND CRONE
All hail, Louie Knight, Thane of Stryd-y-Popty.
THIRD CRONE
All hail, Louie Knight, Mayor of Aberystwyth.
LOUIE
What nonsense you talk, weird sisters. Aberystwyth already has a mayor.
FIRST CRONE
Has yes, and soon will have anew.
More to the point, ’twill be you.
LOUIE
It is an honour that I dream not of.
SECOND CRONE
Oh yes, that’s what they all say.
ALL (Singing)
You should have been a chimney sweeper,
Your bottom warmed by fire.
Instead you were a dirty peeper
With a halo and lyre.
The fire went out, and suddenly there was silence, except for the far-off din of the giant’s heartbeat.
‘Tarry a while, midnight hags!’ I said. ‘I would talk with you.’ But the only answer was the echo of my own voice returning to me from the white cliffs of rib.
I continued walking. My eyes grew accustomed to the dark and I came upon a hall and in the centre of the room a vast round table; around it were seated boys in the decaying cobwebs that had once been school uniforms; their arms were wires of pale flesh poking like coat hangers through the torn shirts. Their eyes had the stare of dead fish. All of them were there, all those boys whose notes from their mums had been rejected over the years, preserved at the age they’d been when they’d run out across the threshold of this world. A boy put a gentle hand on mine. I looked round. It was Marty.
‘Hello, Louie,’ he said.
‘Marty!’ My voice rasped with awe.
‘I told them you would come, but they didn’t believe me.’
‘Where are we?’
‘With friends.’
‘I dreamed I was eaten by Herod Jenkins.’
‘It was no dream, Louie.’
‘What’s the table for?’
‘We are the Counsel of the Swallowed. You mustn’t fret. It’s not so bad here.’
‘What do you do?’
‘We do what we can, Louie.’
One of the wraiths, his face half-obscured by the black webs of his decaying school cap, piped up, ‘We have found a way to give him indigestion.’
