Don’t Cry For Me Aberystwyth (9 page)

What did the man see, that first Welshman on the top of that hill? The Welsh Cortez? He saw the cruel wisdom which had been available to him at his grandmother’s knee, but which he
had scorned because of her simple ways; and because knowledge only becomes wisdom once you have paid a high price, and traversed oceans for it. He saw a simple truth: that a man who arrives in the marketplace to sell dreams from atop a hastily upturned crate, and who casts anxious looks around every now and again as if in fear of arrest, is not to be trusted. He saw that a man who claims to have the cure for all known ills in his small bottle of cordial and wears clothes covered in patches is not to be believed. He saw that a man who has found what all men since the beginning of time have sought, a promised land, might reasonably be expected to go and live there himself; not sell tickets with an air of furtive desperation in the marketplace.

But hope, like love, is a powerful drug that subverts all calls to reason. Patagonia! Where the soil was so rich you could cook and baste with it; rivers so full of gold it took two people to carry a bucket of water; lambs which made the ground tremble as they walked, and arrived ready-seasoned from grazing in the vales of mint. A blessed grove where troubles were unknown; but which, strangely, only Magellan had heard of. A far-off land named after a race of Indians who had vanished from this world and whose only imprint in the sands of time seemed to have been – and oh, the cruel irony of it – the fact that they had big feet. What did he see from the top of that hill? The Welsh Cortez? No one knows. He disappeared into thin air. The very first settler: climbed to the top of the hill and was never seen again. Don’t tell me that isn’t an omen.

Meirion had said he’d bring the paper’s film critic along, but when he arrived there was only him. Then I saw he was wearing a different hat and I understood. He greeted me with a warm smile and took a stick of rock out of his pocket and went through the slow ritual of removing the cellophane. He pointed at Clip. ‘They say it’s the second most enigmatic smile in the history of art.’

‘After the
Mona Lisa
?’

‘That’s right, but without the guile.’

‘I didn’t know they used dogs in war.’

‘They used loads, they just don’t like to talk about it too much. They’re ashamed, you see.’

‘What of?’

‘Of what you have to do to get a dog to disobey his natural instinct and run headlong into machine-gun fire.’

‘What do you have to do? Throw a stick?’

Meirion smiled. ‘No. You have to use the dog’s deep love and devotion, his loyalty to and trust in his master. There’s nothing else on earth quite like a dog’s love for his master. And it’s freely given. A bit of food, a bit of kindness, a few soothing words and a pat on the head, some slippers to fetch, that’s all it takes. Then, once you’ve got it, once the dog loves you so much he will trust you absolutely and do anything you say, you can send him into the minefield.’

I grimaced at the picture Meirion had painted. ‘So what’s the story about the new movie,
Bark of the Covenant
?’

‘Technically it’s not new. It’s just been re-cut. The director’s cut, I suppose you’d call it – he’s dead now, but he left detailed instructions on how he wanted it. Clip was a kind of Lassie, you see. He used to star in the newsreels shot in the
What the Butler Saw
format. At first it was all factual stuff, but because the news was rarely good they started to embellish it a bit. Before long Clip became so popular back home no one wanted to hear about the war unless Clip was in the story. So they blurred the boundaries between fact and fiction. In fact, they didn’t so much blur them as blow them away. They started producing full-length features masquerading as newsreels.
Bark of the Covenant
and
Through a Dog Darkly
are the most famous. Last spring some workmen rebuilding the Pier found a walled-up room with a runic inscription above the door. Inside they found an archive of lost Clip footage. Some enthusiasts restored the movie and transferred the print to 70mm.’

‘What did the inscription say?’

‘I don’t know but I can guess: “A curse upon all who enter” or something like that.’ He laughed. ‘I mean, when you get a druid inscription above a sealed chamber it doesn’t usually say, “Come in and make yourself at home”.’

Before he left, Meirion gave me a newspaper clipping which he thought I might find interesting. It was from a few weeks ago and told the strange story of a man who had hung himself after seeing the premiere of
Bark of the Covenant
. He had been a taxidermist. Meirion gave me the address and said the man’s daughter was living there now. The house was nearby, on Bryn Road, and I decided to pay her a visit. The girl, her eyes still red with crying, peeped round the door at me and invited me in. I was shown to a chair in a small sitting room in front of a gas fire that hissed softly in the gloom. The mantelpiece was arrayed with the usual knick-knacks, stuff which I could tell had belonged to her dead father and mother: cheap silver-plated candlesticks, a Coronation mug, miniature brass elephants set beside a brass shell case from the Great War; framed photos of various dead people, and a south-coast seaside resort where a young couple grinned awkwardly into a camera forty years ago. A brass letter holder stuffed with letters and cards, none of them from abroad. The accumulated detritus of a life, all that was left of the good times two people had shared. Put them all together in a box and sell them through
Exchange and Mart
, you might get the cost of a second-class stamp.

‘I’m so sorry,’ said the girl, dabbing her eyes. ‘I . . . I . . .’

‘Take your time,’ I said gently. She was somewhere in her mid-twenties, wrapped up in a bilberry-coloured mackintosh which looked like it might be quite an expensive model, belted tightly at a narrow waist. Her hair was cropped in a pageboy bob, ivory colour, the way they did it in Flemish paintings back in the time when the Flems went in for painting. She was very pretty, with
clear blue eyes and tear-stained cheeks which some would describe as pellucid. It was the sort of complexion they use to advertise cosmetics even though you never get a complexion that good using powder. Two weeks ago her father had gone to see the new Clip movie and after that he had walked down to Trefechan Bridge by the harbour, attached a length of cord to the central light fitting, and hanged himself from it. He swayed like a pendulum in the breeze all night and was found in the early light by a fisherman going to work. If he’d been my dad, I would have cried, too.

She picked up a tissue and with a determined effort to move things along blew her nose with a sharp and unseemly ‘parp’ sound.

‘You say he hanged himself after seeing the movie, but does that imply simply a temporal relation like saying it was after the six o’clock news, or are you implying there is a causative connection?’

‘I’m sorry, I . . .’

‘I mean, when you say “after” do you just mean after the movie, or do you mean he killed himself because of something he saw in it?’

‘Because of what he saw, yes, there is no doubt about it. No doubt whatsoever.’

‘There’s usually doubt about these things . . .’

‘You didn’t know my father. His life was ruined by that dog.’ She gave me a look which challenged me to make light of such a claim. I left the gauntlet where it lay. ‘You’ve seen the stuffed Clip at the museum?’ she said.

‘Plenty of times.’

‘What do you think of it?’

‘I don’t generally think about it. To me it’s just a dog in a glass cage.’

‘What about the smile? Do you agree it’s like the
Mona Lisa
? Mysterious, enigmatic, but with perhaps a little less guile?’

‘Not really. All collies look like that.’

‘My father hated that expression. It destroyed him.’

‘That’s quite a strong opinion to have about a stuffed dog’s smile.’

‘For you perhaps. But my father was a taxidermist. He had a wonderful career ahead of him. He could have been one of the greats . . . perhaps the greatest of all. With work on show in Moscow town hall or the Sorbonne. But life is full of what-might-have-beens isn’t it?’ Her head was lowered but she raised her tear-filled eyes as if to seek my complicity in this bitter truth. ‘Oh yes, he never stopped finding fault with Clip. There was never a day when he did not criticise the piece for various technical failings: ears too sharply angled, tongue too pink, the line of the spine not straight enough . . . but he knew they were irrelevant, like criticising Michelangelo for getting David’s head out of proportion. Secretly he knew the truth: it was an act of divine creation. Angels must have reached down and anointed the stuffer while he worked. The day my father saw the unveiling of Clip at the museum he felt like Salieri when he first heard the music of Mozart. His heart was shattered. He spent the rest of his life on his allotment; never stuffed another piece. With time, of course, the pain subsided. But then they re-released the movie and it all started again. We tried to stop him going, but it was no use. He came home after the movie with a face the colour of ash. Fetched something from his room and walked out into the night. That was the last time we saw him alive.’

Christmas is a time of rituals, some that have lost their meaning and some that acquire new meaning as the years pass and folks’ memories assume new forms. After I left the girl’s house I went back to the office to prepare for a modern Christmas ritual, one which had only recently come into being and which had a deeply personal significance for me. It was the annual swinging of the cricket bat. That sacred wand of willow with which, five years
ago, I had knocked my old games teacher, Herod Jenkins, out of a plane door. For the rest of the year it stands in the corner of my office, in the place at the foot of the hatstand reserved for umbrellas and walking sticks. And once a year Gwynfor from the Rotary Club comes and takes it away. People pay 50p for a swing and with the proceeds some needy children acquire a new climbing frame or a day trip to Chester Zoo. Such are the quixotic strategies that Dame Fortune uses, planting the seeds of future joy in the loam of past tragedy.

Herod Jenkins survived the fall from the plane; Planet Earth just wasn’t hard enough. It’s only made of rock. Since then he had been on the run from the law with my former cleaner, Mrs Llantrisant. They made an improbable Bonnie and Clyde, robbing the same sub post offices from which they drew their pensions. Now, it appeared, they had taken employment at the circus, Herod using that famous upper body strength to earn his keep, to provide for his moll, as a strongman.

If only his victims had been possessed of such strength. The photo of my schoolmate Marty stands on the desk in the office. Propped next to it is a Christmas card from his mum which arrived two days ago. She never forgets. Just as none of us, not me nor Gwynfor nor anyone else who was there, will forget the time in the third year when Marty was sent off on that cross-country run into the blizzard and never returned. The weather had been vile that day; snow falling so thick the sheep on the hills suffocated as they stood. Herod was not hostile to the concept of postponing games in bad weather, but it never got bad enough on Earth. Only beneath the liquid methane clouds of Saturn, they said, where storms raged unabated for centuries at temperatures of minus 190°C, and winds howled at more than 2000 kilometres an hour did it start to look doubtful. A lightning bolt hits the ground-keeper’s hut and discharges in one flash more power than is generated on Planet Earth in ten years. OK, no games today.

I poured a rum and began to rub linseed oil into the talismanic
bat. Before long I heard footsteps on the stairs outside and Gwynfor walked in, red-faced, chubby, cheery. We shook hands, and said how good it was to see each other again. Even before the sentence was finished his eyes were trained on the bottle. We drank to our health and we toasted dead Marty. We used to laugh at his lack of athletic prowess, the silly way he ran. Marty the seer, the saint, the one the gods loved, but not much. The day he came back with the X-ray showing the shadow on his lung he was almost exultant, as if it proved what he had long been trying to tell people: he was not meant for this world. He was a poet and had the poet’s disease to prove it: consumption. The white death. That dark spot on the lung worn as a badge of honour by Shelley, Kafka, and that bloke played by Dustin Hoffman in
Midnight Cowboy
. He named his budgie Hans Castorp in honour of the diagnosis. ‘Who is that?’ I said. ‘Oh, he’s a bloke from a book called
The Magic Mountain
.’ Sometimes he liked to mystify. But if it hadn’t been for him, what would I be doing today? I didn’t know, but I knew I wouldn’t be a private eye.

Gwynfor took the bat and walked across to the door. I crumpled up a piece of paper and bowled. ‘Howzat!’ he cried, the ball of paper thudded against the window pane and, as if the gods were anxious for our party not to lose sight of its serious purpose, a van drove past outside with a loud-hailer on the roof inviting us to the circus at Ponterwyd. The shadow fell. Gwynfor looked glum. He nodded, finished his drink in one go, wished me a Merry Christmas one more time, and left with the bat.

PEOPLE WHO ARE afraid of the dark are not being unreasonable. Our deepest fears arise from instincts developed at the dawn of time when the world was much emptier. There were not many folks about. Human beings were the hairy guys in fur swimming costumes, stooping a bit because they were still getting used to standing on their hind legs. They were harmless to everybody except themselves. All the early indications were, they didn’t like themselves much. In those days, if you happened to be walking through the vast untamed wilderness and encountered that greatest of rarities, a stranger, someone from another tribe, the safest course of action was to kill him. That’s why they invented the police. But that experiment quickly turned sour, one of those cases where the cure was worse than the disease.