Last Tango in Aberystwyth (12 page)

Calamity slowly drew the coat out of the bag, taking care not to let the paper disturb the moment with a rustle.

‘You know,' said Cadwaladr, still lost in thought, ‘sometimes, when you stick a blade into a man, you can feel it grating on the bone like a spade hitting the pavement when you shovel snow.' He clenched his fists tightly and added, ‘Now when I look out over this beautiful estuary in November and see snow-clouds forming over Barmouth, my heart fills with winter.'

There was a pause and Calamity looked at me. I nodded and she slowly unfolded the coat on the dunes, saying, ‘Have you ever seen something like this before?'

Cadwaladr glanced at it and his face darkened. He made a clicking sound deep in his throat as if this coat confirmed all the bad things he had ever thought or suspected about the world. ‘Yes, I've seen one like it.'

‘We're looking for a man who is being followed by someone
wearing a coat like this. We were told it's something to do with the Ysbyty Ystwyth Experiment. Do you know what that is?'

He didn't answer immediately and we waited patiently. Then he said, ‘I don't know too much about it.' His words sighed out of him more wistfully than the sand sifting in the wind. There was always an air of soft, otherworldly melancholy about Cadwaladr but today he seemed even more remote.

‘The people who know a lot can't tell you.'

‘Why not,' I asked. ‘Are they scared?'

‘Possibly. Terror can do that, so I've heard. But who knows? They can't speak about it. They can't speak about anything really, just like babies before they learn to say Dad.'

‘So what was the Ysbyty Ystwyth Experiment?'

The old soldier took out a scrap of newspaper and a polythene bag filled with salvaged cigarette ends. I wondered where he got them from – ash-trays in buses, the cinema floor … or maybe the maternity waiting-room where the fathers sit and wait for news.

‘Officially it doesn't exist. And never did. Which is strange because I know some men who volunteered for it. It was some sort of military psychological experiment. In Patagonia we called that sort of thing “Psyops”. It was based at the old sanatorium out at Ysbyty Ystwyth.'

‘The old sanatorium was bought by the Philanthropist,' said Calamity. ‘He's the new owner.'

‘Is he anything to do with this experiment?' I asked.

‘Maybe,' said Cadwaladr. ‘Maybe not. I don't know. All I know for sure is the guys who came back were not the same as the ones who went.'

‘In what way?'

‘They were just different. Quiet, and brooding, and when you looked into their eyes you saw a sort of emptiness – as if all the life had been sucked out of them and all that remained was a husk of a man … That druid chap from the clothes shop was one of them, what was his name?'

‘Valentine?'

Cadwaladr nodded. ‘Yeah, him. They say he went cuckoo after it. And there was Waldo, of course. Poor Waldo.'

For a second or two he said nothing more, staring beyond our little group to the infinite ocean.

‘Who was Waldo?' asked Calamity.

Cadwaladr pressed his eyes closed with a deep weariness of the soul. ‘Waldo was the saddest man ever to serve in that war. His road to Calvary began on Christmas Day when we organised a game of football in no-man's-land with the enemy. Ah! What a day that was! I remember it as if it was yesterday. When the shelling stopped and the silence rang in our ears so loud it almost hurt. Meeting our enemies face to face and clasping them in the embrace of true brotherhood. The smell of sherry and cinnamon and mince pies, mingling with the wild heather, the fresh sharp tang of distant snow. The sweet strains of ‘
Stille Nacht
' drifting across to us … And then the football. What a glorious kick-about it was. Four all after ninety minutes, both sides evenly matched, you couldn't separate them. And then, alas, in injury time one of their guys dived in the box – typical South American player. The ref awarded a penalty and they scored and that was it. They'd won. We didn't say anything, of course, because it was Christmas but a lot of guys were not happy about it. And the incident became the cancer that ate away at Waldo's soul. Waldo was the goalie, you see.'

Cadwaladr shuddered and violently lofted his cornet, jerking back his head like a penguin catching a fish. He crunched off the pointy base with the venom of a wolf cracking a thigh-bone with its chops, and then sucked greedily on the vanilla marrow. ‘One day I will tell you the rest of it,' he said, the ice cream bubbling in his mouth like lava from a fissure on the ocean floor. ‘But not today, my heart is too full.'

ONCE UPON A time you just went mad and gave everyone a good laugh. They created a special position for you – the village idiot. You didn't mind too much because you were mad and being a buffoon was probably no worse than tilling the squire's fields for a living. Later when the world got more enlightened they got rid of the job and called you a fool or an idiot or an imbecile. And it was still OK to laugh. They weren't squeamish about where they put you either, or what they called it. Asylums for criminal lunatics, asylums for incurable lunatics, hospitals for the insane, pauper asylums, workhouses for lunatics … If you were rich you might end up in a chancery asylum, but it was still a madhouse. Then someone had the bright idea of charging for the privilege of laughing at you. It was quite a popular pastime for a while, even more than the zoo. By the outbreak of the Great War and the new age of science they had managed to discern four grades of madness: idiots, imbeciles, feeble-minded people and moral defectives. And nowadays, of course, there are hospitals for the mentally ill, and no one is mad any more. Although when you walk down the streets of Aberystwyth on Saturday night you could be forgiven for thinking otherwise.

After we left Cadwaladr we picked up the car and drove out to Ysbyty Ystwyth to take a look at the old sanatorium. You might have called the Georgian country house with its ivy-covered redbrick exterior handsome if you didn't know the history. But there wasn't anyone for miles around who
didn't. It's a taint by association that a house can never shake off.

It hadn't always specialised in the insane. After 1918 the house was taken over by a charity set up to treat victims of shellshock. And after that, when that particular malady lost its fashionable appeal, even though the victims didn't lose their shock, it became a sanatorium treating TB patients who couldn't afford to go to Switzerland. Later still, in the fifties and sixties it reverted to treatment of the mentally ill, and especially the fashonable new cure for depression – electro-convulsive therapy. People living nearby claim the lights in their sitting-rooms used to flicker during a busy day.

The grim, forbidding prospect instantly squashed the mood in the car. It was only a building, of course, just bricks and mortar and ivy and joists of dry wood and crumbling plaster. And yet it seemed impregnated like a sponge with all the woe that had been spilled there. The windows were dark and filled with an emptiness like the eye sockets in a skull. The deserted grounds seemed still alive with broken men from the trenches being wheeled around in bath chairs by nurses in funny uniforms. Cadwaladr's especial distaste for the place was understandable: many of the soldiers from the Patagonian conflict had been brought here and left to rot. The perimeter was enclosed by a stone wall, green with ivy and lichen and topped by newly installed rolls of razor-wire. Signs were placed at evenly spaced intervals along the wall warning us of various dire things. Private. Keep Out. Guard-dog patrols. And one sign said chillingly: ‘Trespassers will be shot. By Order The Philanthropist'.

I dropped Calamity off in town and spent the rest of the afternoon flashing the top of the fudge box round places where the girl might be recognised. There was nothing remarkable about the picture. A young girl sitting at a spinning-wheel in an old cottage. Dressed in a shawl, coarse woollen skirt and of course the
stovepipe hat. The girl was pretty, they always were. Might even have been beautiful but you couldn't tell with all the make-up. For a man whose only contact with female company was theology students she might have been attractive, bewitching even.

The same pattern of polite boredom was repeated everywhere I went. One swift uninterested glance at the picture and then a shrug. Sure they'd seen girls like this before, hundreds of them, but they couldn't say if they'd seen this one. They were ten a penny. No, make that a hundred. Stick around in Aberystwyth and you'll see a busload every week. Simple unlettered farm girls from up beyond Talybont, playing the one half-decent card life had dealt them – their looks. Nothing spectacular, but good enough. Girls who dreamed of making it big as a model, maybe featuring in the ads for the tourist board or on the cover of the Cliff Railway brochure, but all they ever got were the knitting patterns and the fudge boxes. But of course you can't make a living out of modelling fudge boxes no matter how frugal you are, but a pretty girl in a stovepipe hat can always make a bit extra on the side in the druid speakeasies down by the harbour.

The men from the cheese yards were bent over the counter of Sospan's even further than usual, huddling together for the collective warmth. As if the inside was a brazier and they were watchmen sick of watching. I dropped by and mentioned the Philanthropist, but even Sospan, for once, had little to say on the subject. Everyone agreed that only a foreigner would have bought the haunted house. But they couldn't agree on where he came from. Some said he was a Texan and others a Saudi prince. All agreed he had made his money in oil. Or white slave trafficking. ‘I heard he's got an idiot wife locked away there,' said one man. ‘Who hasn't?' answered another, and someone else added, ‘He can have mine if he wants!'

* * *

I passed round the picture of the girl and again it was the same response. Why get upset about a particular one when you can get any number down at the harbour and they all look the same anyway don't they? Once they've got the hat on and the make-up and the wig. Then someone wishing to be helpful suggested I try Spin Doctors on Chalybeate Street, and wishing to be polite I said I would. ‘You mind she doesn't put a spell on you!' someone shouted after me as I left.

The shop smelled of must and dry cardboard. It could have been an ironmonger's or a bike shop but the frames in the window and hanging from the ceiling had one wheel and four legs. A bell tinkled in the back as I walked in, ducking under the foliage of hanging spinning-wheels. In the centre of the shop there was a space cleared among the bric-à-brac and a wheel stood on a podium. Even knowing nothing about them I could see this one was special. The frame was a modern carbon fibre composite, fitted with a derailleur gear-change made by Shimano of Japan. There was a racing-style aluminium footgrip on the treadle, and an alloy hub on the wheel. An enamel logo on the main frame tube said ‘The Sleeping Beauty'.

‘She's a beauty that one, sir!'

I looked down and saw the old lady, no bigger than Mrs Pepperpot, four feet nothing perhaps, clad in the traditional witches' livery of black: ebony puritan shoes with shiny buckles; charcoal stockings and black skirt, blouse, bodice, shawl and fingerless mittens; obsidian beads and studs in her ears and a sable knitting needle through a bun of hair now silver but that no doubt had once been black. She stroked the Sleeping Beauty lovingly. ‘Handcrafted titanium distaff. None of your injection-moulded tat. Last for ever this one will.'

‘That's good, I hate it when they fall apart halfway through a spin.'

‘Is it for yourself, or are you looking for a gift?'

I took out the fudge-box top. ‘I was actually looking for a driver.' I pushed the lid under her nose and she cast an eye over. Her face fell slightly.

‘I'm afraid we don't sell girls. It's too much trouble feeding them up.'

‘Yeah I know, they leave a trail of your best bread all the way home; tell me about the wheel.'

‘Cheap plastic wood, probably Taiwanese. You wouldn't get very far spinning on it but then the people who take these sort of snaps don't care too much about that, do they?'

‘You ever sell one like this?'

‘I'm afraid we don't handle that end of the market.'

‘What about the girl?'

‘What about her? She's no spinner, that's for sure. Her seating position's all crooked, and her hands are in the wrong place. The way she's clutching the distaff like that you'd think it was a man's “you know what”. Still, you can hardly blame her, I suppose, it's probably what she's used to, isn't it! Treadle trollops we call them.' And then added, ‘I've just put the cauldron on, if you'd like a cup of tea?'

‘No thanks,' I said turning to go. ‘I'm in a hurry.'

‘Well, would you like to sign the petition?'

‘Petition for what?'

‘Mrs Llantrisant. We're hoping to get her sentence reduced.'

‘But I'm the one who put her there.'

‘Oh I know, but you couldn't have known they would stick her on that cold damp island. It's giving her all sorts of problems with her joints.'

‘I'm sorry,' I said, ‘I don't think I can sign it. I mean, what if she starts another flood?'

She followed me to the door and held it open. ‘Are you sure I can't interest you in the Sleeping Beauty? We do hire purchase.'

‘I'll let you know, I still need to look at a few others first.'

She smiled knowingly, and shouted after me, ‘Good luck with your search. If you bring me a piece of the girl's hair I can probably ask the spirits for you.'

If the girl was selling herself down by the harbour, the best man to ask was the one who had a professional interest in fallen women – Father Seamus. I strolled with renewed sense of purpose up Great Darkgate Street towards the ghetto in the shadow of the castle. I bumped into him coming out of one of the houses where he made pastoral visits. Like many of the houses that had managed to withstand the flood, it now had five or six families instead of two or three. He greeted me and we shook hands. The problems he had to deal with were not that different from the ones his medieval forebears had faced and had the same cause: too many families living in one room, the clothes drying on one radiator, the horrible thick unhealthy fug poisoning the air. But he soldiered on.