The Unbearable Lightness of Being in Aberystwyth (14 page)

‘I’ve been speaking to a fence. Not one of the usual ones. This guy is a deeper level. Maybe the deepest. The police don’t know about him. If they find out, he’ll know it was you who told them. If that happens he’ll know it was me who told you. Then I’m dead. That’s why I need the money, y’see. Insurance. For my mum in case something happens to me.’

‘Tell me what the guy has got and I’ll see how deserving a cause your mum is.’

‘Take the train to the top and walk over to Clarach. Count the fourth caravan from the stile. Watch out for the dog in the shed, sometimes it’s not chained up. That’s what you need the bone for. The guy in the caravan has something. I can’t tell you what it is, you have to see for yourself. He’s expecting you, so just knock and say I sent you. His name’s Mooncalf. And here—’

Poxcrop took out a marker pen and put a cross on my hand. It didn’t leave a mark.

‘What’s that?’

‘Ultra-violet light like they use in the discos. Just for security.’

‘OK. What else? You said there were two things.’

‘My sister has been offered a part in a movie. Special production for the What-the-Butler-Saw format.’

‘You must be very proud.’

‘She met someone on the set who’d recently auditioned for a part in a different movie. I think it might interest you.’

‘Go on.’

‘I think you need to sit down first.’

‘I’m OK standing.’

‘No, trust me, you need to sit down.’

He pulled me over to the waiting room and we went inside.

‘This movie they were shooting,’ he said. ‘Look, Mac, get upset but don’t get upset with me, I’m just the messenger, I didn’t write the message.’

‘Get on with it.’

‘They were shooting a movie of Myfanwy’s funeral.’

He paused and scrutinised my face to see how I would take the news and whether he needed to duck. He didn’t. I said nothing. It was too bizarre.

‘Her funeral?’

‘That’s what the guy told my sister.’

‘Where can I find this guy?’

‘Believe me, Mac, I want to tell you, really I do, but these are dangerous times and I have to think of my poor mam.’

I took out the roll Gabriel Bassett had left on my desk and peeled off a fiver. Poxcrop produced a sheet of paper from his coat pocket. It was a photocopy containing a list of numbers with the crest of the Bank of England at the top. He read the serial number of the note and searched for it on the photocopied list. ‘No offence, but I’ve been done like this before.’

‘Where do you get that?’

‘Official police issue – to the Penparcau bureau de change.’

‘Is there a bureau de change in Penparcau?’

‘You’re looking at it, Mac. You want dollars? I can get you a good rate.’

‘Not today, as far as I know they still use pounds in Clarach.’

‘You know where to come if you do.’ And then, finally satisfied of the note’s authenticity, he slipped it into his coat pocket and said, ‘Ever hear of a guy called R. S. Thomas?’

‘No.’

‘He’s a poet. Writes about rain and sheep and abandoned farmhouses. Quite popular. I don’t get it myself, they told me art was the stored honey of the human soul, not gooseberry jam.

‘Dust in-breathed was a house
The wall, the wainscot and the mouse.

‘Now that’s what I call a poem, you want to know why?’

‘Because it rhymes?’

‘No, you’re getting me all wrong. I’m agnostic on the rhyme question. What matters for me is how the poet touches your soul, not whether he can rhyme seesaw with Margery Daw. It’s a poem because it embodies an eternal human truth, Mac.’

‘Doesn’t a poem about an abandoned farmhouse do the same? Doesn’t it make you ask why they left?’

‘Of course but not every human truth deserves to be embodied, that’s the point I’m trying to make. Take the other fellah, the one who wrote about the anthracite horses and the dog in the wetnosed yard. Now there you have something worth embodying! Our dog did that before he got run over. Wet-nosed yard, it touches you somewhere deep.’

‘Tell me why I might be interested in this particular poet.’

‘Because he wrote a poem about a chap called Iago Prytherch.

‘Iago Prytherch his name, though, be it allowed
Just an ordinary man of the bald Welsh hills,
Who pens a few sheep in a gap of cloud.
Docking mangels, chipping the green skin
From the yellow bones with a half-witted grin
Of satisfaction—’

‘All right, all right! If I want the rest I’ll go to Galloways. What’s it mean?’

‘The best bit’s where he gobs in the fire.’

‘Get on with it. I’ve missed two trains since standing here discussing poetry.’

‘Point is, a lot of people like that poem. A lot of people here and a lot of people not here.’

‘And who would they be?’

‘People from overseas. American college kids, mainly. They come over here with their Yale sweatshirts and baseball caps and they want to meet Iago Prytherch. I don’t see why myself. When I go to America I don’t ask to meet Hiawatha, but there you go.’

‘I think maybe you should give me some of that money back.’

‘Don’t be in such a rush, I’m filling you in on the background so you don’t get caught out later. The point I’m trying to make is this, all these people – literary pilgrims they call them – come here and want to meet Iago Prytherch. So what do you do? I’ll tell you what you do. You make their dream come true, just like for the kids who write to Father Christmas at the North Pole. You ever been to the North Pole? I tell you, there’s nothing there. Not even a post office. Not even a box to post your letters in. In fact the only way you can tell you’re there is by looking at your compass.’

‘But a compass won’t work at the North Pole.’

‘That’s it! That’s exactly what I’m trying to tell you. It won’t work. So as soon as it stops working you know you’ve arrived. But don’t expect to find a post office. But the funny thing is, all those kids get replies to their letters. It’s the same with the literary pilgrims. They get off the Devil’s Bridge train at Nantyronen and who do they meet? Iago Prytherch is who. It’s
a home-stay, you see. The real and only official Iago Prytherch home-stay.’

‘And how exactly does this information deserve five pounds?’

‘Think about it. The guy’s a fictional character so how can they meet him? Same way you can go to a department store at Christmas and meet Santa. They get someone to play him. And who do they get? They get the ghost-train howler.’

‘And who’s he?’

‘You’ve been on the ghost train, right? The one that comes every autumn with the funfair. You’ve seen it?’

‘Yeah I’ve seen it.’

‘What does it arrive in?’

‘A Pickfords van.’

‘That’s right. Track, train, castle, landscape and ghosts. All in the back of a Pickfords van. How scary can that be? It can’t. In fact that’s the first thing you notice. It’s not scary at all. The second thing you notice is this: even though it’s not scary there’s always a guy sitting at the front when it comes out of the last tunnel screaming his head off. He’s the howler. He’s a stooge. And the guy who plays the howler is usually one of those bit part actors who hang around on the fringes of the What-the-Butler-Saw industry. And last autumn’s howler usually turns into next season’s Iago Prytherch in what is known as a perennial cycle of birth and renewal. One that testifies, like the barbershop pole, to the vanity of all human striving.’

‘I don’t understand.’

‘Read your Bible, Mac. Vanity of vanities, saith the preacher. All the rivers run into the sea; and yet the sea is not full.’

‘What’s that got to do with a barber shop?’

‘Not the shop, the pole. Did I say shop? Have you never noticed? It turns and turns, the red spiral stripes move ever upwards, but they never get anywhere; nothing changes. That’s like you and me, Mac. We never get anywhere. Like the waves on the sea always coming in but the sea stays in the same place.
Like Cadwaladr creosoting his bridge. Like the cars of the Cliff Railway perennially changing position. One up, one down. Vanity of vanities, and the phoney Iago Prytherchs pass over the face of the earth like the leaves on the trees.’

‘What’s any of this got to do with Myfanwy?’

‘I’m trying to tell you but you keep interrupting. The guy playing the current Iago Prytherch is the guy that auditioned for a part in the movie of Myfanwy’s funeral.’

I put another fiver in Poxcrop’s pocket and ran for the train.

They call it the train you take when your life has gone wrong. The Aberystwyth Cliff Railway. It creeps up the hill at the speed of lichen. You get off at the top, fortify yourself from a styrofoam cup with tea the colour and strength of a horse, and walk to Clarach. If Borth is the poor man’s Aberystwyth – and it isn’t – then Clarach is the poor man’s Borth. And that’s about as poor as you can get without selling a kidney. It’s not a one-horse town, not even a hoof, maybe the imprint left by a horseshoe nailed once long ago to a fence or maybe just a handful of oats.

After a short walk over the hilltop you arrive at the top of a valley that the sun never kisses; never even shakes hands with or even acknowledges with a curt nod. On the way down you pass dung-caked sheep with contempt in their eyes. Animals so destitute they spend their whole lives on an incline, front legs higher than the back in the morning, back legs higher than the front in the afternoon, eating gorse and perhaps grass on special occasions; and they give you that look. Pity or contempt? It’s hard to tell but when the sheep lets out a loud
blaaa
and a fraction of a second later the whole hillside erupts in answering bleats you can’t stop yourself thinking: in your heart you know it’s impossible, but it sounds suspiciously like laughter.

Down below, I found a few grubby bits of land on which caravans were anchored with bricks and strung together with a cat’s cradle of washing lines and TV aerials; white pebbles from the
beach were laid out to signify territorial possession. The one store sold homogenised milk, the
Daily Mirror
, buckets and spades and suntan lotion in anticipation of the day when continental drift returned Clarach to the spot it had once occupied near the equator. Aeons ago it had been part of the supercontinent called Gondwanaland and the imprint of fossilised tropical ferns in the rocks of Constitution Hill testify to the good times that had been and may one day come again. But not this summer. And probably not the next.

This was Clarach. For entertainment you can lose some money at the amusement arcade situated in a breeze-block room that anywhere else on earth would be called a garage. Or you can take a car out to the main road and drive fast over the humpbacked bridge near the church. Or, if the melancholy fit is upon you, you can walk to the patch of grit smeared against the land’s edge which the map describes as the beach and walk out to the end of the rocks and look to your left. If the tide is low enough, and you can go out far enough, you can see a little bit of Aberystwyth peeping out from behind the cliff. In that moment you regret all the bad things you ever said about her.

I stood and rapped my knuckles on a caravan door that was thinner than the lid on a tin of throat lozenges. I waited and listened. A tinkling sound of chain came from the shed, and a rustle of straw. A dog whimpered. The shed door was ajar and I threw the bone in and knocked again on the caravan. Footsteps came from inside, a TV was turned down, and then the door opened and a rat ran out gasping for air.

Leave a dish of clotted cream in the sun for a month and break the crust and breathe in. Then you’ll know what opening that door was like. It was like the mouth of a corpse opening and emitting a puff of air that has lain for weeks in the nutrientrich chamber of the decaying thorax. The hand that held the door open was clawed up with arthritis and clad in a fingerless mitt. The sort that is standard issue for people who fence stolen
goods. The face that belonged to the mitts was half-concealed by the collar of a raincoat. I’d never met Mooncalf before but everything about him had a strange familiarity. His coat was the colour of a diseased lung used in those explicit anti-smoking posters they hang in doctors’ waiting rooms. His hair was from the leaflet the school nurse hands out about nits. His face was the one they use on the posters that warn kids not to accept sweets from strangers. He fished out a torch from inside his lung-coloured coat and shone it on the mark that Poxcrop had made on my hand. Then he beckoned me into his crypt. The air was so thick and rich and foetid you could chew it. After one breath you wanted to brush your teeth. And your nose. I followed him to the table at the far end. The curtains were closed and flies buzzed unseen in the darkness. On the table was a plate on which lay a slab of cheese. The cheese seemed to be pulsating and, as my eyes grew accustomed to the murk, I realised it was crawling with maggots. The surface of the table was stuck with fur like a half-sucked boiled sweet kept in a pocket for a month. He saw the shock on my face and explained,

‘I like a bit of company.’

‘Yeah, that’s the great thing about maggots, they’re not fussy.’

‘Take a seat.’

I said I preferred to remain standing. I wanted to keep the minimum amount of surface area in contact with the caravan. At the moment it was just the soles of my feet and I could always burn the shoes.