Don’t Cry For Me Aberystwyth (22 page)

‘There are a lot of rumours going about,’ she said. ‘They reckon he’s coming. Some say he’ll turn up at the carol concert.’

‘Pure craziness.’

‘I know. Who would fall for a thing like that?’

‘Who?’ Who indeed, I thought. Tinker, tailor, Soldier for Jesus, gaoler . . . Take your pick. The people in the client’s chair have one more stop on the run from the wishing well to the priest.

‘Where did you get the money for a bail?’ I said.

‘It was only fifty quid.’

‘I know. Where did you—’

‘Oh! Before I forget,’ said Calamity, ‘I need to tell you . . . I did something . . . I did a tail job on the boy who collects the pies. He takes the empties to Erw Watcyns.’

‘Really?’

‘Yes.’

‘That’s very interesting. Where did you get the fifty quid?’

Silence.

‘Calamity?’

‘Oh, you know . . .’

‘Oh, no! You didn’t . . . Not the book . . . ?’

‘It’s OK.’

‘You haven’t sold it?’

‘I pawned it. I can get it back if you don’t jump bail.’

‘That’s good.’

‘Yes.’

‘I’m going to jump bail.’

‘I know.’

*     *     *

It’s the one thing they never tell you about in the movies: the hard manual labour. You see people walking around all the time – shaking martinis, playing tennis, clutching long cigarette holders – but they never tell you about the problems you get when you kill one of them, when you take away their means of self-propulsion. It’s a can of worms. It’s like having a dead cow in the living room. And then there’s the mess. That’s another thing they don’t talk about. When people can still move about they have a thing called delicacy. They go to secret places to empty themselves. It’s not the same when they’re dead. They don’t care any more. They’re just offal. They spill themselves all over your carpet. You can spend all morning mopping up the blood, but a lifetime is not enough. The forensic boys will come along and laugh at you. They spray the room with special chemicals and turn on an ultraviolet light and hey presto! the stains are back, shining in glorious Technicolor. The floor is as clean as a new pin and guess what? Something red seeped through the gaps in the floorboards. All you did was give him a little bang on the head; you put newspaper down; there was no mess. But it forms an invisible aerosol cloud and floats around unseen like a thought bubble; ten million microscopic droplets. They only need to find one and you’re off to the chair. The forensic boys laugh at you; they love you; they eat you for breakfast.

What are you going to do with all that meat, anyway? All that gristle and cartilage, and bone, a stomach full of undigested food and an arse full of shit? Where are you going to put it? What are you going to use? Kitchen utensils? It’s like demolishing a piano with a pair of scissors. The only one that’s any good is the ice-cream scoop to take out the eyes. And even then one of them rolls under the sofa and won’t turn up again for years. And boy, do they struggle! They flail and scratch and gurgle; they bite and kick; they stick a finger in your eye and pull your hair . . . Those poor crazed African dictators couldn’t take it any more. Just couldn’t watch. They came up with a better idea: put two people
in a cell with a sledgehammer and tell them to sort it out between themselves. One of you goes free. You decide. And hose the place down afterwards.

It’s the one thing they never mention in the movies. We’re too effete these days: we don’t have the strength. Just ask old Doc Sawbones in his frock coat and blood-spattered top hat how hard it is to remove a limb: he’ll tell you. Try using an axe. Chop, chop, chop . . . They’ll still get you. You’ll run out of bin bags. Or a bit of bone goes in your eye and turns sceptic. The surgeon who takes it out is an amateur sleuth. The worst sort. Sticks it under the microscope and knows it all: it’s amazing what they can see. Young female, early twenties, five foot six in her socks, blonde hair, blue eyes, twenty-six-inch waist, had cornflakes for breakfast. All from a splinter. OK, Louie, let’s go through it again, and this time skip the fairy stories. How did you get DOA’s thigh bone in your eye? I don’t know, I keep telling you, I was chopping wood and I must have slipped. How do you explain the cornflake? It’s from your packet, the lab boys gave us a perfect match . . . Yes, it’s the one thing they never mention in the movies. You can’t burn them, you can’t hide them, you can’t cut them up; you can’t do anything with them. They’re made from the toughest substance known to man: man. In case you’re wondering, it’s why I will never kill Erw Watcyns.

BESIDES THE CHAPLAIN there were four mourners at Miss Evangeline’s funeral: the director of the nursing home, one of the patients, a woman from the social services, and, standing some distance away, Lorelei, the one-eyed street-walker who used to visit Miss Evangeline. A small lane runs through Llanbadarn cemetery, and in the late afternoon gloom the streetlamp was already lit. She stood like a sentinel under the lamp, surrounded by swirling white moths of snow; her mouth a scarlet fissure across the powdery moonscape of her face. It was as if she was reluctant to get too close, as if a life being made to feel unwelcome at any sort of respectable gathering had led to ingrained habits that were hard to dissolve, even for the funeral of an old friend. We stood together and listened to the drone of the chaplain’s words. Watched them lower the coffin into the ground. Listened to the thud of dirt on hollow wood. When there was nothing more to watch we walked down Elm Tree Avenue together and on down Queen’s Road to the Prom.

We went to the Cliff Railway station café and ordered two teas just as they were closing. Teas served with sullen ill-will because the appearance of two customers at this hour would make the woman late closing. Lorelei took out a metal flask and poured shots of whisky into the tea. The woman closing up with unnecessary bangs and accusatory crashes threw a look of disapproval. This was an unlicensed café, I could lose my licence. The last train of the evening clanked down to rest on the buffers. No one got off, no one got on. On a night like tonight there was no point trying to escape. Better to drink. To wassail.

‘Not much of a turn-out,’ said Lorelei.

From the radio in the kitchen came the haunting anthem of all troubled Christmases:
Silent night, holy night. All is calm, all is bright
. The simple ditty that made the soldiers in the Great War lay down their arms and play football. Then pick them up and start shooting each other again. There is no better cameo in all the annals of human history for demonstrating the futile insanity of war.

‘Mind you, I’ll be lucky to get four turn up when I go.’

I squeezed her hand in an attempt to reassure. ‘Does it really matter, once you’ve gone, who turns up to the funeral?’ I said.

Lorelei considered. ‘We were quite close in school. Then we lost touch.’

‘How long have – had you been visiting her at the nursing home?’

‘About ten years. I left town for a while, then when I came back I heard about her from someone, so I started going to see her.’

‘She kept talking about a child.’

‘Yes. I never knew about it at the time.’

‘I promised her I’d try and find it.’

She nodded.

‘Was I wrong, do you think?’

‘It’s not for me to say.’

‘A dying woman’s wish. I could hardly say no.’

‘No, I suppose not. That Erw Watcyns . . . Someone should do something.’

I asked her if she had heard of a soldier called Caleb Penpegws, because all boys who fought in that war, as in all wars, must have passed on their way to the front through the arms of someone like Lorelei.

‘There were so many boys,’ she said. ‘I never remembered the names. But there’s a man at the Pier, Eifion. He might know.’

I paid for the teas and just before we stood up to leave Lorelei said, ‘Will you kill Erw Watcyns?’

I looked at her in surprise, unsure whether she was asking me to do it or asking if I planned to. She saw the look on my face and nodded and said, ‘It’s all right. I know. I’m sorry I said that.’

We walked out into the falling snow; the Prom was hushed and filled with a soft luminescence. Light was a thing you had to be very wary of. In summer it flashed in strange, haunting fashion off the hot chrome bumpers of distant cars turning at Castle Point. All cars have chrome, so why should a flash like that stop you and make you long for things you cannot name? We stood at the brim of the Wishing Well, maintained by the Round Table, and heavily padlocked against wish-thieves.

‘Make a wish,’ I said.

‘I could do with some shoes that don’t pinch.’ She looked down at her feet, clad in old grey vinyl trainers, the ones put out by one of the high-street chains in a forlorn attempt to imitate a famous brand.

‘That Salvation Army shop has plenty on display.’

‘Army Surplice? They always charge me double.’

‘You never find charity where they advertise it.’

‘Oxfam are nice enough.’

I threw in a 50p piece and made a wish about Myfanwy and Christmas and snow.

Son of God, love’s pure light
, and then the line I liked best:
Sleep in Heavenly peace
. But only children know the secret of how to do that. It’s a different country when you grow up.

An old man approached the Wishing Well and stopped when he noticed us. I could understand; being caught making a wish is undignified, like reading pornography. It was Elijah and he was crying. Instinct or tact made Lorelei step away into the shadows.

Elijah said, ‘I am sorry about your little girl, what I did: pulling the gun.’

‘It’s OK.’

‘I am astounded at what has become of me.’

‘You just got carried away.’

‘That is what astounds me most. All my life I have made it a point of principle not to get carried away. Giving in to passion is for fools.’

‘And for human beings.’

‘This, you see, is the poison of Hoffmann. May the ever-merciful Lord blight and curse that fiend.’

‘They say he is coming. They say the name means Hopeman.’

Elijah scoffed. ‘They! Who are they? The peasants of Aberystwyth? What do they know, the poor ignorant fools? They see a word painted in blood and they think their troubles are over.’

‘You don’t think he’ll come?’

‘You ask that of me, a man who has spent a lifetime searching for this chimera? You think this ignis fatuus will just turn up and sing “Away in a Manger”?’ He scoffed again.

‘If that’s the case, why don’t you give up your quest? Can it really be so important now, after all these years? Surely most of the people involved must be dead?’

‘Two brothers I have lost to this cause. Two lovely brothers, two of the noblest men ever to walk the earth . . . First there was delightful Ham the poet; and then delicate Absalom, the prophet and scholar. I never knew a human heart so little visited by the vice of pride as Absalom’s. He was willing to wear the ludicrous red robes of a Christian icon and work in a department store in order to fill his belly with bread – honourable bread – rather than shame his family by begging. Both those boys were superior to me in so many ways. Sometimes I wish God had taken me in their stead. You ask me to give up my quest, after such a price has been paid? After my family has lost so much? I should pack my bag and go home to the grave of my dear beloved Mama and tell her I could not save her sons; I could not find them because I lacked the strength to carry on when so near my goal? You ask me to do that? You ask me to dishonour myself.’

‘But if he’s not coming . . .’

‘Did I say that? You asked if I thought he would turn up and announce himself to the people of Aberystwyth and I said no. But all the same I feel that he is here. And so must my brother Absalom have felt it, too. Otherwise, why would he have come?’

‘But Absalom came in search of Ham.’

‘Yes, and Ham was seeking Hoffmann. By finding one you find the other. Such are the perplexities that confront me. And yet you could so easily lift my burden by telling me what your girl found in the alley.’

‘Why don’t you lift my burden and tell me what was in the coat pocket, the one stolen from Eichmann?’

‘You offer to trade?’

‘That’s fair, isn’t it?’

‘The item in the pocket was the list of names of people who attended Eichmann’s weekly card game.’

‘Just a list of names?’

‘Ah, but think who would be on that list. Think who would want to see it. Every Nazi fugitive in Patagonia would be on it. What wouldn’t the Israeli secret service give for that information? What wouldn’t Odessa give to see that they did not get it?’

‘So why did the Americans want it?’

‘Because the Israelis wanted it. And the Russians wanted it because the Americans wanted it.’

‘Who is killing all these people?’

‘The Pieman.’

‘Who does he work for?’

‘Hoffmann.’

‘And who does he work for?’

‘Welsh Intelligence.’

‘Do they also want the list of names?’