Gazooka (3 page)

‘In this area at the moment, Milton, even an antelope would have to make Welsh cakes and mint toffee on the side to make both ends meet. Be practical, boy.'

‘I'm being practical. I heard today that a group of sporting elements in Trecelyn with a definite bias against serious thought are going to stage a professional sprint with big cash prizes. Comes off in three weeks.'

‘Don't forget that Cynlais is getting on a bit,' said Teilo Dew, ‘for this high-class running anyway. I've heard him wheeze a bit on the sharper slopes.'

‘Trust Teilo Dew the Doom to chip in with an item like that,' said Milton bitterly. ‘Whenever Teilo talks to you he's peering at you from between his two old friends, Change and Decay. In three weeks Cynlais could be at his best and if you boys could take up a few collections to lay bets on him we'd have a treasury.

‘That's a very backward habit, gambling,' said Uncle Edwin.

‘Remind me to hire a small grave for the scruples of Edwin Pugh the Pang,' said Gomer. ‘Right. That's how we'll raise the cash. Off to bed with you now, Cynlais. You've got to be as fit as a fiddle for the supreme test. No more staying up till twelve and drinking hot cordial in Tasso's.'

Cynlais had heard very little of all this. He had been staring into the fire and pondering on what Mathew Sewell had said. He was shocked when he suddenly found supporters coming from all over the shop and helping him to his feet and leading him with half a dozen lines of advice at the same time.

‘Don't sleep crouched, Coleman; it obstructs the pipes.'

‘Keep even your dreams chaste, Cynlais; if the libido played hell with Samson, what mightn't it do to you?'

‘
A
n hour's sleep before midnight is worth two after.'

‘Slip Coleman some of those brown lozenges, Tasso, the ones that deepen the breathing.'

‘
A
foot race is a kind of battle, Cynlais. Make a plan for every foot.'

Then Teilo Dew the Doom waved them all to silence and started to tell Cynlais about some very noted foot runner in the zone who had raced and died about two hundred years ago after outpacing all the fleeter animals and breaking every record. Everybody was glad to hear Teilo Dew opening out on what for him was a comparatively blithe topic but expressions went back to normal when Teilo reached the climax of his tale. At the end of this man's last race his young bride had clapped him on the back and the runner had dropped down dead.

‘I know that you are not married, Cynlais,' said Teilo, ‘and that you have few relatives who would want to watch you run or do anything else, but there are several voters in Meadow Prospect who would find real relish in hanging around the finishing tape and giving you a congratulatory whack just in the hope of sending you lifeless to the ground.'

Cynlais shook himself free from his supporters and was going to ask the meaning of all this fuss but Tasso just raised his toffee hammer solemnly, which is what he always did when he wished to say that he, too, was foxed.

We all joined in the task of helping Cynlais regain his old tremendous speed. We got him training every night up on the waun, the broad, bleak, wind filled moorland above the town. Sometimes Cynlais was like a stag, and our only trouble was to keep up with him and give him tips and instructions and fit his neck back when he went flying over molehills. At first he was a bit stiff around the edges owing to a touch of rheumatism from standing in too many High Street breezes in the role of dervish. Milton Nicholas got some wheel-grease from the gasworks, where he was a leading fitter, and Uncle Edwin, whose sym pathy of soul made his fingers just the thing for slow massage, rubbed this stuff into Cynlais until both he and Cynlais got so supple they had to be held upright for minutes on end.

We looked after Cynlais' nourishment, too, for his diet had been scraggy over the last few months. Teilo Dew approached that very sullen farmer Nathan Wilkins up on the top of the hill we called Merlin's Brow, and asked him for some goat milk. Wilkins took pleasure in saying no loudly for as long as Dew was within earshot, and even the goat was seen to shake its head from side to side. So Teilo bypassed Nathan Wilkins and approached the goat direct, and in no time we had Cynlais growing stronger daily. But there was still something jerky and unpredictable in some of his movements. So Gomer Gough and Uncle Edwin decided to consult their friend Willie Silcox. He was called Silcox the Psyche because he was the greatest tracker in our valley of those nameless beasts that roam our inward jungles. If Silcox saw anyone with a look of even slight perplexity on his face he would be out with the guidebook and fanning them with Freud before they could start running. He had analysed so many people into a state of dangerous confusion that the town's joint diaconate had advised him to go back to simple religious mania as being a lot safer and easier on the eyes because you could work up to full heat without reading a word. Silcox had just told the joint diaconate that he was watching them closely and making notes.

A week before the race at Trecelyn we met Willie Silcox at Tasso's. Silcox was leaning over the counter and we all saw as we came in that he had never looked or felt more penetrating. Tasso, who was all for indirection and compromise as the right climate for the catering trade, had shifted away from Silcox and was standing very close to the urn. People claiming to be forthrightly wise frightened the wits out of Tasso. At the sight of us Silcox waved us to stillness while he finished off a quick note he was giving Tasso on what he thought the joint effects of exile and the cash nexus would be on a middle-aged Italian. Tasso said nothing but put his head right against the urn for greater comfort.

‘Have a beef extract with us, Willie,' said Gomer. ‘Glad you were able to come, boy.'

‘Thank you, Gomer. What mental stoppage have you got for me to disperse now?'

‘Oh I'm all right. My pipes were never more open. It's Cynlais Coleman I'm worried about.'

‘Look, Gomer. Before we go any further, let me make this clear. To prescribe a pill for the mentally ill the patient must have a mind. That's in the rule book and that's the first smoke signal I would like you to send out to Coleman. That element, mentally, is still unborn. What makings of a mind he might still have had he not dropped into the bin years ago by trying to outrun the wind, and setting up as a great lover in an area that favours a slow humility in affairs of the heart.'

‘Don't quibble, Willie. Cynlais isn't running as well as he should and we want the cure.'

‘
A
ll right. Take me to where I can see him and if I can find a pole long enough to reach the end of Coleman's furthest cranny I'll give you a report and charge you for the pole because I'll never get it back after a journey like that.'

The next night we went with Willie Silcox up to the waun. Cynlais and a group of supporters were already there and Cynlais was finishing a trial sprint. We could hear as we approached shouts like: ‘Come on, Cynlais.' ‘Let's have you Cole man.' ‘Don't look around, boy.' ‘Show us your real paces, Comet.'

Then we heard Cynlais run headlong into the group around the tape, sending several of them spinning, and we could see that he himself was lurching and gasping painfully. ‘Well done,' said Uncle Edwin without conviction.

Cynlais was making noises like a pump, and writhing. Milton Nicholas was standing over Cynlais and looking as if the cam paign had reached some sort of crisis.

‘Put your head between your legs and squeeze hard, Cynlais boy. That'll cool you off.'

Cynlais tried to do this and went into a brief convulsion. Several voters told Milton Nicholas to mind his own business, which was gas fitting. And there were a few very shrewd elements in the group who said they would not be surprised to find that Milton Nicholas had laid a week's wages on all the other runners but Cynlais in that race at Trecelyn.

‘The aim of Nicholas,' I heard one of them say, ‘is to get Coleman into a knot and let him choke.'

Gomer Gough turned to Willie Silcox, who had not taken his eyes off Cynlais.

‘Well, Willie. What's your diagnosis?'

‘Easy,' said Willie, and from the offhand, flippant way in which he said it we thought he was going to suggest that Cynlais be saddled in harness with Wilkins' goat and told to forget about foot-racing. ‘Easy. Do you notice the way he seems to pause sometimes in his running and look back?'

‘He does it all the time,' said Uncle Edwin. ‘He hardly ever looks straight in front.'

‘That's a habit he got into while acting as the Mad Mahdi. All fanatics are persecution maniacs and anybody who introduces Mahometan overtones into the Celtic fringe was bound to hit some kind of top note. Cynlais has now got into the way of looking over his shoulder even in the middle of the waun where his shoulder is about the only thing in sight. And again, that band of Cynlais' contains some torpid boys even for gazooka players, and Cynlais is so fleet he has to keep turning to make sure that he and they are still in the same town. But Coleman's real trouble is love.'

‘Love?' asked Gomer Gough and Uncle Edwin and it was clear from their tone that they were now both sorry that they had brought Silcox up the mountain at all.

‘Love,' repeated Willie Silcox in exactly the voice of a sanitary inspector making a report to the borough surveyor.

‘But Cynlais told me only two days ago that he was no longer worried about this impulse.'

‘I've only got to look at a man and I can sniff the urge to love and be loved, however deep and quiet it flows. For months Cynlais has been hopelessly in love with that girl, Moira Hallam.'

‘Moira Hallam? That dark, blazing-eyed girl from Sebastopol Street?'

‘That's the one. The thoughts that that girl inspires in a single day would fill a whole shelf in the Institute and you'd need a strong binding to keep them in the case.'

‘
A
nd she's turned Cynlais down?'

‘She looks at him with disgust and treats him with contempt.'

‘But wouldn't this make Cynlais run even better, to show off?'

‘You don't know, Gomer, what a cantankerous article the mind is. Even as he runs Cynlais looks down at the fine, big chest under his singlet and becomes aware of his frustrated passions. It's a wall, a cruel blank wall. His heart breaks his nose against it. His limbs wince and they lose pace.'

‘Willie,' said Gomer, ‘I can never listen to you without feeling that you put a new and terrible complexion on this planet.'

‘
A
nything to oblige. And let me warn you about this Moira Hallam. She is an imperialist of the flesh, very ruthless. You know that old widower, Alfie Cranwell. He had money saved to provide the deposit on a headstone for the grave of his de ceased wives. Blew the lot on a watch for this Moira Hallam. But he would have found the headstone softer. She works in that cake shop they call the Cosmo. Cranwell kept hanging about the shop nipping in and wolfing cakes despite strong warnings about sugar from his doctor. Died of a surfeit. All this Moira did was boast about the bonus she had from the man ageress of the Cosmo on the brisk selling she had done to Cranwell in the last weeks of his passion.'

Gomer and Uncle Edwin tut-tutted as if this girl was just another in a long series of obstructions they had found giving life a dark and strangled look.

‘Well, thank you, Willie. We'll bear your report in mind.'

But Willie Silcox was not listening. He was staring past Gomer at some member of the group around Cynlais, beneath the apparently bland surface of whose days Willie's dowser had sensed some concealed runnel of trouble. This man was smiling quite broadly at something Milton Nicholas had just said and he did not know how lucky he still was with Willie Silcox standing at a safe distance from him.

Later that evening I was walking along the main street of Meadow Prospect with my Uncle Edwin, helping him to make a casual check on the number of people who seemed to be at ease on the earth. The first person we found who really seemed to be so was Gomer Gough the Gavel, and before Edwin could tell Gomer about this Gomer was hurrying the both of us down a side street.

‘Where to now, Gomer?' asked Uncle Edwin tartly.

‘Moira Hallam's.'

‘What for?'

‘To talk her out of this nonsense of frustrating and slowing down Cynlais Coleman the Comet. You heard what Willie Silcox said. Between being a dervish and a disappointed lover, it's a wonder Cynlais can walk, let alone run at his old Powderhall lick.'

‘Oh leave me out of this, Gomer. Here were Iolo and I, on a serious social beat, staring at the voters and trying to estimate how many mental inches separated them from the County Clinic. Leave us be. I'm not interested in Cynlais anymore and I don't know this Moira Hallam, except to feel vaguely grate ful to her for having helped to shuffle off Alfie Cranwell, who was, as a ram, indiscriminate, irrational and a nuisance.'

‘I want you to come along to Moira's house for the very reason that you're called Edwin Pugh the Pang. You are so full of pity the sight and sound of you would bring tears even to the eyes of Nathan Wilkins, the only gorsedd stone ever to opt for hillside farming and working in trousers of heavy corduroy. You can play on the feelings of this Moira. Don't be surprised if, at the door of the Hallam home, I introduce you as Cynlais Coleman's father, who took up thinking instead of sprinting.'