The Unbearable Lightness of Being in Aberystwyth (5 page)

I walked up Penglais and through the car park to Bronglais and into the cafeteria. She was sitting at a table sipping a tea and peering over the rim of the olive-green hospital china at a paperback novel. It was a ‘Doctor and Nurses’ romance. I watched her for a while before approaching: she read with a frown of concentration and ran her finger under the words to make sure she didn’t miss one. At two pound a book they were expensive. Her head had a slight bobbing motion as if nodding in rhythmic agreement with the text and every so often she would stop in mid-nod and her frown would deepen. Then she would put the tea down, take out a pen and scribble notes in the book, in her throat a soft strangled squeak of triumph. Perhaps one of the few people in the world who read this genre and wrote marginalia. The rim of the cup was imprinted with lipstick.

I pulled the chair opposite out from under the table and sat down. Mrs Prestatyn raised her eyes briefly from the page in a quick darting movement before returning to her reading. She winced slightly and scribbled something, saying with a tut-tut, ‘She’s put him on twenty ccs of tripanazetramol, previous nurse gave him sulphadextranaphase – he’ll lose his leg if they keep that up.’ She paused and added, ‘Come to empty some bedpans have you?’

‘I was thinking about it, why do you ask?’

‘Well, you’re not here for your health now are you, if you’ll pardon the pun.’

‘Anyone can visit a hospital.’

She snorted. ‘Try telling that to the security guard.’

She carried on reading and I said nothing more for a while. If I was ill in hospital I might resent the intrusion of someone like Mrs Prestatyn. But, as editor-in-chief of that loose-knit confederacy of gossips and tittle-tattlers known as the Orthopaedia Britannica, she was an indispensable source of information for me. As such, a professional relationship existed between us that was complicated and difficult to define, like that between the copper and his nark. And it was hard to despise a woman whose obsession derived from a time, long ago, when she had served with the St John’s Ambulance Brigade. Her recurring visits now were as pitiful as the dog who returns to the house of a dead man who years ago had given him a bone.

‘To tell the truth,’ she said, seemingly addressing the page, ‘I’m surprised you’ve got the nerve to show your face.’

‘What does that mean?’

‘Muriel at the nursing home is beside herself. I told her Myfanwy wasn’t safe with you.’

‘What did I do?’

‘Not much by the sound of it.’

‘I took her for an ice cream. If it hadn’t been for me she would never have got out at all, would have been stuck in that nursing home, staring at the wall all day.’

‘At least we’d know where she was.’

I winced.

‘Of course,’ she added, taking a mint toffee from her bag, ‘if it wasn’t for you she might never have ended up there in the first place.’

‘What’s that supposed to mean?’

‘If you and that Brainbocs boy hadn’t been squabbling over her. Making a love potion – never heard anything so ridiculous …’

‘He made it, not me. I was the one who saved her.’

‘In my day we gave a girl roses.’

‘She was fine afterwards.’

‘I seem to remember she was fine before, not after.’

She put the toffee in her mouth and continued to turn the pages, but too quickly now in the manner of one not really reading the words.

‘There’s no reason to believe her illness had anything to do with that. These things happen sometimes, people get ill, no one knows why, if we did …’ My words petered out, stopped by the look on her face – that particular breed of sardonic disdain that specialists adopt when amateurs venture an opinion in their field.

‘I’m sure you’re right,’ she said, meaning no such thing.

‘And anyway, I spoke to the new doctor, he said—’

‘I know what he said,’ she snapped. ‘He said you ask for certainty but I cannot give it. We are like little children lost on the shore of a dark mysterious ocean called disease, paddling in the shallows and imagining we understand the profound mysteries that lie beyond the horizon.’

‘He said that to you, too?’

‘They all say it. It’s the latest fashion. In the old days they just said you’d got mumps.’

I took out a handkerchief and dabbed the sweat on my neck. It was hot and stuffy in the cafeteria, or maybe it was just the knack Mrs Prestatyn had of making me squirm. From far away I could hear the dull click, thud and whirr of crockery being loaded into an automatic dishwasher. The air was hard to breathe, a fug filled with the faint smell of disinfectant, and industrial laundry soap, the stale scent of boiling cabbage and Mrs Prestatyn’s minty breath. Maybe it was just too warm. Hospitals were always like that, heated to keep sick people in pyjamas from shivering, like orchids in a hothouse. Mrs Prestatyn continued to feign reading. Finally she said, without looking up, ‘So now I suppose you’ve come to ask about Brainbocs.’

‘Meirion says he got sick.’

‘Royal Salop Infirmary. Top floor. Moved him off the cell block in February.’ She carried on reading her book, or pretending to. After a while she said, ‘You know my rates, Mr Knight. It’s not January so there’s no sale.’

I unfolded a five-pound note and put it on the table and she put her book down on top of it and said the single word, ‘Glossolalia.’

I waited for her to amplify but she didn’t even though she knew I hadn’t a clue what that was, so I said finally, ‘Do I get any more for my five pounds?’

She looked up. ‘You’ve never heard of glossolalia?’

‘You’d be mortified if I had.’

She grunted and said reluctantly, seemingly having already forgotten that I had paid for the information, ‘Glossolalia is the term used to describe people who create their own private language. Or, if you’re more of the Pentecostal persuasion, you might call it “speaking in tongues”. In Brainbocs’s case attended by intermittent dissociative auditory hallucinations.’

‘A private language?’

‘Won’t talk to anyone except in his new language. It shows clear signs of coherence and well-defined grammatical structures, possibly derived in part from the Finnish-Hungarian family. Dr Molyneux is transcribing it but progress is slow.’ She paused and added, ‘Also draws dinosaurs on the wall – makes his own ink from rennet and bird droppings.’

I stood up to leave and Mrs Prestatyn lifted her book and shoved the five-pound note across the table. ‘There, take it.’

I hesitated and she twitched. ‘Go on, take it before I change my mind. Or if you don’t want it there’s a box for the guide dogs by the door.’

‘What’s wrong?’

She forced herself not to look at me, lifted the book and said from behind it, ‘Just find Myfanwy and we’ll say no more.’

*     *     *

By the water’s edge, rendered colourless by the mist, were some policemen on hands and knees searching the sand. Occasionally one of them would put something into something else that looked like a sandwich bag. If I hadn’t known better I would have said they were collecting shells.

Drops of rain darkened the already damp sand like new stain on old wood. They fell on Calamity’s sou’wester with soft percussive thuds like someone learning to type. The outfit wasn’t new but I hadn’t seen it before.

I said, ‘Not much chance of seeing Paddington Bear this afternoon.’

‘Which way?’ asked Calamity.

I pointed in the direction of the marsh and the Waifery and we started walking away from the car with the same reluctance of people who have broken down in the desert and decide to abandon the vehicle.

‘If you feel like telling me why we won’t be seeing him, that’s fine, but I’m not going to ask.’

‘Who?’

‘Paddington Bear.’

‘He never goes out without his coat and hat, specially on a day like this. And now someone’s stolen it from him, poor guy.’

‘If you must know, my mum made me wear it. Why this way anyway?’

‘My instinct about these things says this way.’

‘You tossed a coin more like.’

‘Seventh rule of being a private eye: when faced with only two possibilities, both of which are hopeless, it doesn’t make a lot of sense to agonise over the decision.’

‘Rule number seven.’

‘I hope you’re writing these down.’

‘I’m sure rule number seven was something else.’

‘If you wrote them down you’d know.’

‘So this is Sospan’s brilliant idea.’

‘Yep.’

‘Are you sure you heard him right?’

‘I made him repeat it three times. He said to look for a sleeping gull.’

‘You could have misheard.’

‘If you can think of something that sounds like that we’ll start looking. But it has to be something you’d be likely to find at the seaside.’

‘Seeping hull.’

‘That’s good but I don’t think he said that.’

‘But you’re not sure.’

‘He said sea gulls always eat ice cream that’s melted on the pavement, it’s part of the evolution of their foraging habits, like foxes coming to the edge of towns to scavenge from litter bins.’

‘Polar bears do that too. In some parts of the world.’

‘Well, there you are, you see. They also scavenge from the bin next to an ice-cream van. Sure as eggs, he said, if the
gelati
man was using drugged ripple you’d get snoozing birds everywhere.’

‘Well, I don’t see any. In fact I don’t think I’ve ever seen a sea gull asleep, have you?’

‘No, but then I’ve never looked. And they must do it, I can’t believe they never go to sleep.’

‘Albatrosses can stay out at sea for seven years without ever touching dry land.’

‘They sleep on ships.’

The ground was spongy like a mattress, pools of water formed around our shoes wherever we stepped. We continued to walk, without heart or belief in our quest. After half an hour of aimlessly squelching about, Calamity spotted a gull. It was sitting in the gutter of the peat cutter’s cottage. And after a couple of minutes squabbling during which I was forced to pull rank, I gave Calamity a ‘bunk up’ and she peered at the fat grey bird that gave all the signs of being asleep in the gutter. Then she
poked it and it produced a beak that was vaguely s-shaped from within its feathers, made an angry sound and snapped at Calamity. She squealed and fell backwards and I took a step back to counterbalance her fall and she stood on me like a trapeze artist and we stood there wavering like Laurel and Hardy at the circus. And then the sun found a hole in the clouds and drenched the wet landscape with liquid silver. The roof of the peat cutter’s cottage flashed like a heliograph, sequins littered the grass, and beyond the hills of Aberdovey the crescent of a rainbow appeared, sharply outlined against the still brooding clouds.

‘Looking for eggs?’ said a voice from behind me.

I tried to turn but the jittery movement above my head as Calamity struggled to maintain her balance made me stop. The owner of the voice walked round and stood in front of me and I squinted down at a girl of about fifteen or sixteen. She was wearing wellingtons and a navy blue gaberdine mac buttoned at the throat. On her head she wore the distinctive chimney hat with the yellow ‘W’ insignia of the Waifery. Bright blond hair fell from beneath the brim down to her shoulders smearing the wetness of her coat like a dusting of pollen on a bee’s wing.

‘We’re looking for a sleeping gull,’ I said.

‘That’s a funny thing to be doing in the rain.’

‘Pretty funny in the dry as well.’

‘Rain’s worse. Although I like it really, but it’s hopeless for looking for things.’

‘We’re doing it for a bet.’

‘Oh I see. I don’t think I’ve ever seen one asleep.’

‘We were saying the same thing.’

She reached out her hand to shake, and then realising that I couldn’t take the hand stopped the motion halfway. ‘My name’s Seren.’

I crouched slowly and allowed Calamity to jump down.

‘I’m Louie and this is my partner, Calamity.’

Calamity shook her hand and said, ‘Pleased to make your acquaintance, ma’am.’

A shovel tingled on the silver air like a tuning fork and we all turned at the same time towards the cottage. The peat cutter was standing in the doorway. He was wearing brown corduroy trousers tucked into wellington boots, a tweed jacket and had a tough dark face surrounded by thickly curled blue-black hair, lightened here and there with tufts of silver like a badger. He might have been forty-five or fifty-five. He spoke to Seren in Welsh and walked off, carrying a spade.

Seren invited us into the cottage and we sat at a wooden kitchen table and waited for her to brew a pot of tea. I could see the peat cutter though the window walking off across the marsh. There was a book on the table: a scholarly tome about soil geology. I flicked through the pages, it was mostly tables and formulae and diagrams representing the various shapes of the ponds in the marsh and how they came to be formed by the wind and rain and tidal action.

‘Is the peat cutter interested in all this?’

‘He wrote it.’