From Aberystwyth with Love (19 page)

‘
The Old Black Magic?
’

‘That’s right. Have you read it?’ He dug me in the ribs with his knuckles. ‘You’ll never guess what?’

‘What?’

‘I’ve bought one of those condoms. It’s hidden in my room for when she comes round.’

I changed the subject. ‘So, near Bwlchcrwys, you say?’

‘Not that close. Maybe five or six miles. We used to live in Abercuawg before they built the dam.’

‘That’s the town that reappeared because of the drought.’

‘That’s right.’

‘Quite eerie, isn’t it?’

‘Yeah,’ said Meici. ‘It is. Gives me the willies.’

‘Did you know the girl who disappeared?’

‘I wasn’t born then, but mam knew her.’

‘What about the boy they accused of murdering her?’

‘Goldilocks? She knew that family, too. She’ll tell you some stories you wouldn’t believe. The father was a lay preacher, called Ahab; always drunk. The mother ran out one Christmas.’ He turned to me. ‘You know what the father did? He put her shoes in the pig pen and told the children the pigs had eaten her.’

It was a small cottage built from the grey local stone. Meici turned into a rutted farm track and stopped the car. He got out and fetched a bag from the boot. He took off his trousers, rolled them up and put them on the back seat, then took a pair of short trousers out of the bag and put them on.

‘They were cut down from my granddad’s Sunday best,’ he explained. ‘I’ll cop it if I don’t wear them. I’m not allowed to wear long trousers. Mam says maybe next year when I’m thirty-five.’

I took the present out, a gift-wrapped, rectangular slab. ‘Happy birthday!’

Meici looked at me and smiled uncertainly. It was as if the meaning of the ritual escaped him but he did not want to let on. I pushed the present towards him, against his chest. ‘It’s for you.’

‘What is it?’

‘A present, of course.’

He blinked and then a smile began to spread across his face. ‘A present? You mean like in
Pollyanna
?’

It was my turn to look puzzled.

‘That’s a book I’m reading. It’s ever so good. It’s about a little girl who always sees the bright side of things. When things go wrong she plays the Glad Game. Like one Christmas she had a present, but it was a pair of crutches. Instead of getting upset she played the Glad Game and said she was glad because she didn’t need crutches. I play it too, sometimes.’ He clutched the present in both hands and stared in wonder. ‘I didn’t think real people got them.’

‘Maybe you should open it.’

He unwrapped the gift with hesitant, unpractised fingers, taking great care not to tear the paper. Finally, he held the box out at arm’s length and admired it. ‘A model plane,’ he said, eyes brimming with tears of joy. ‘I’ve seen them in the shops.’ He paused and then said, softly, in a reverie, ‘Best to keep it in the car. If mam sees it she might . . . she might . . . well, we don’t really have much room for it at home.’

We drove on and pulled into a hole in the hedge and parked in front of the cottage. In the space of a twenty-minute drive from town Meici’s confidence had drained away; now he seemed nervous and unsure. As we approached the cottage his stature diminished, helped perhaps by the short trousers, and he started to tremble like a dog who has fouled the lounge carpet and knows what is coming. He walked past the front door which was clearly only used ‘for best’ and round to a kitchen door that hung on one rusty hinge. Many years ago it had been painted green but almost all trace of that paint had gone. Meici pressed down the latch with his thumb and walked in. I followed. The kitchen smelled of camphor and anthracite smoke, stale bacon fat and unwashed flesh turning sour with age. His mum sat with her back to us, ram-rod straight at a simple kitchen table that had been set for tea. She wore black with her grey hair spread across the shoulders. She made no attempt to turn round. We walked round to one side, still she stared straight ahead. She was thin and bony with sallow skin and a bitter expression on her face. The atmosphere was frosty and even without knowing either of them I could sense something was seriously amiss.

‘Mam,’ said Meici, ‘this is my friend L . . .’ his tongue froze as he noticed something unusual about the supper scene. There was a condom lying with mute accusation on his plate. He gasped.

Meici’s mum articulated her sentence slowly and trembled slightly with repressed fury as she spoke. ‘What is this filth I found in your room?’

Meici opened his mouth to answer but nothing came out but a puff of air, the ghost of a sigh.

‘Answer me directly, boy, or it’ll be the worse for you.’

He stammered the beginnings of a word but could get no further. He pressed his thighs together and thrust his backside backwards in the posture a child adopts to control its bladder, but which I had never seen deployed by an adult before.

‘I’m waiting,’ said his mum.

‘It’s a French letter,’ he said finally.

‘It’s an engine of Satan,’ she corrected him. ‘Explain how this abomination came to be in this house.’

‘I . . . I . . . Louie gave it to me,’ said Meici, ‘I didn’t want it.’

His mum considered. The progress of her cogitations were revealed by a slight clenching of her cheeks. ‘A likely story! Do you remember what I told you would happen if I caught you messing around with harlotry?’

‘Yes,’ said Meici almost inaudibly.

‘Speak up, boy!’

‘Yes.’

‘Bring me my stick.’

‘No, please, Mam. Please.’

‘Fetch me my stick and go into the shed.’

‘Please send me to bed instead.’

‘You’ll go to bed directly.’ She turned and looked at him, her eyes glinted with anger. The look crushed all further protest and Meici went out. His mum gathered herself and rose slowly, and, still affecting not to notice me, walked out. A minute passed and I heard swishing sounds followed by yelps. When Meici came back in he was wiping tears from his cheeks with his sleeve and snivelling. His mum followed and said, ‘Now get to bed, and take Esau with you.’

Meici looked at me with an expression of desolation and took my hand. ‘Come on, Lou. We have to go upstairs.’

I had hoped to ask his mum about Gethsemane and Goldilocks but I found myself instead following him up the dim stairs to a little bedroom at the top. We trooped in and sat on the single bed, covered in a patchwork quilt coverlet. Underneath the window there was a little table covered with a cloth like a small altar. A photo of Arianwen was propped up and next to it were some hair slides.

I wondered what happened next. During my years as Aberystwyth’s only private eye I had been involved in some strange adventures but this was the first time I had been sent to bed without my supper.

‘Bugger,’ said Meici. ‘How on earth did she find it?’

‘Mums have a sixth sense for this sort of thing,’ I said.

‘She thinks you are my brother Esau. He died when I was three. We slept in the same bed. I woke up one day and he was stone cold. They called him Esau because he was born very hairy.’ He slid off the bed and kneeled on the floor. He looked under the bed. ‘Phew!’ he said. ‘At least she hasn’t touched my correspondence course.’ He pulled a book from under the bed and handed it to me. It was a textbook with a cover bearing a photograph of a suave-looking man wearing a jacket and polo-neck sweater, holding court to a group of attractive and admiring ladies. The title said,
The Old Black Magic: From Dumbo to Don Juan in Four Weeks
. He pulled out another book. ‘This is one of the set texts you have to read to build up your vocab.
Pollyanna
. Remember me telling you about it?’

‘What did he die of?’

‘Who?’

‘Esau.’

‘He was smothered in the night.’

‘Who by?’

‘I don’t know. A goblin. They never caught him.’

‘A goblin?’

‘Yes. That’s what the policeman said. The front door was locked but goblins have magic keys, you see. They found Esau next morning in my arms, cold as stone. Mam has never got over it – honestly! The way she goes on about it sometimes anyone would think I’d done it.’ He nudged my arm with the back of his hand. ‘You should read this, it’s ever so good. You’d like the Glad Game. Do you want to have a go?’

‘No.’

‘Don’t be like that. There’s no use crying over spilt milk. Come on, we’ll play the Glad Game. It’ll cheer you up in no time. It goes like this: I’m sad that mam sent us to bed but I’m glad she didn’t send us to the cow shed.’

‘OK, I’m glad we had no supper because it helps us have compassion for the starving children around the world.’

‘Hey, you’re good at this. I’m glad we got sent to bed because I get to talk to my new friend Louie.’

‘And it’s good, too, because we don’t really have to go to bed.’

Meici looked puzzled. ‘What do you mean?’

‘It’s not like we have to put pyjamas on or anything, is it?’

He examined my face for a hint that I might be pulling his leg. ‘Are you mad?’ he said. ‘Of course we have to go to bed.’

I stood up and walked downstairs and out through the front door. As I crossed the smear of grit that passed for a garden path my muscles stiffened in anticipation of a challenge from Meici’s mum. But none came. I relaxed and cast a brief look back. In the upstairs window Meici’s face was pressed to the glass, eyes gleaming with awe or fear at my act of treason. Or maybe it was the sharp gleam of spite and the dim vestigial memory of a crime he committed on the threshold of his life; one so terrible they had to pin it on a goblin. I fumbled with the latch on the gate, hands shaking like those of an alcoholic reaching for the first drink of the day.

Chapter 14

It was a long walk to the bus stop and Calamity had gone by the time I got to the office. Eeyore had left a book open on my desk. It was Llewellyn’s
History of the Welsh Stylite
, with a passage referring to the spiritual malaise called acedia underlined. It said, ‘And when this has taken possession of some unhappy soul, it produces dislike of the place, disgust with the cell, and disdain and contempt of the brethren who dwell with him or at a little distance . . .’ This must be the sickness that afflicts the private detective in the lurid electric-blue desert night, the neon wilderness of Aberystwyth.

I took the envelope that had held the séance tape out of the drawer and smelled it. I explored the feeling of disquiet that had taken up abode in my heart.

Had the reappearance of Abercuawg made everyone aware of the void in their lives and the stratagems they employed to conceal it? Faith, ice cream, arresting people . . . Each chooses his own road. One man makes Ampersandium, the world’s greatest placebo. Others set sail for promised lands such as Patagonia, Hughesovka . . . Ffanci Llangollen, they say, has wheeled a shopping trolley around the coast of Britain in search of the daughter she lost. Vanya, too, had filled his life with a quest, and yet I got the impression that he did not seriously expect it ever to be resolved. The important thing was the quest.

I left the office and walked down Terrace Road. The cries of children from the beach became discernible as the light slowly changed hue; there was always a subtle change in the children’s voices at this time of the afternoon, as if in a recess of their hearts they were registering the subliminal decline of the sun, the soft, barely perceptible transition from a hot summer day to the edge of evening. The ability to perceive it is innate, the way the knowledge of the river of birth is hardwired into the soul of a salmon.

All seaside towns are in a state of permanent autumn. This is evident in the ruins of the former great civilisation that once built Aberystwyth: a scar in the hillside beneath Pen Dinas too smoothly curved to be the work of nature, it turns out to be the cicatrice of a lost railway line. If you consult an old map you discover with a shock that it was built long ago to Milford Haven; you can’t even get a bus there now. Other archaeological relics left by this vanished race of super-beings include the bandstand which now has a padlocked concertina door like an old garage. Once it had its own silver band, in a town that boasted two orchestras, one at the Pier and one at the winter gardens on top of Constitution Hill. Now no one even knows what a winter garden is. I don’t. Is it really a garden or does it mean just a park of some sort? According to the old guidebooks, the ones that tell you to eat kidneys for breakfast and give advice about buying your fishing licence, there used to be a winter garden on Constitution Hill. But you will look in vain for any trace of it now.