The Unbearable Lightness of Being in Aberystwyth (26 page)

I wanted to say yes to spare Haywire but there wasn’t a lot of point.

‘Look, Haywire, you’re not up at the Arts Centre now with the rest of those dodos in their corduroy jackets, talking hooey in front of a canvas that looks like someone has thrown a tin of Dulux at it, do you understand? When I ask you a question you’ll answer in words I can understand.’

‘OK, OK,’ said Haywire. ‘Basically it means they were conditioning monkeys to be scared of flowers.’

Llunos grabbed the arms of his chair in disbelief.

‘They did what?!’

‘Conditioned them to be scared of flowers,’ said Haywire weakly. He could tell this wasn’t going very well.

‘How can you be scared of flowers?’

‘That’s just the point. You can’t, normally. But if you give the
monkey an electric shock every time he sees one, well, I mean you can make him terrified of anything. We even made them scared of toy rabbits.’

For a while Llunos was too astonished to speak. Finally, he said, ‘B … b … but what’s the point?’

‘It’s to find out whether fear of things like snakes and things is innate.’

‘Where the hell’s that?’

‘No, it’s not a place. Innate. It means built-in. Look, I didn’t like it either, I was just doing what they told me.’

‘Oh right, you were following orders, just like Klaus Barbie. Look pal, this is Aberystwyth not Nuremberg.’

Haywire wisely kept his own counsel and there was silence in the room for a while as Llunos cogitated. An air of calm slowly took over but you could tell it wasn’t real calm, it was a thin layer over a boiling fury. He looked at me and I turned to Haywire.

‘Do you know anything about these postcards from Timbuktu?’

He nodded weakly. ‘I didn’t mean any harm. I was just trying to spare their feelings. You know, pretend the little guy was still alive.’

I stood up to leave, I needed some air.

‘So what happened to Bojangles then?’ said Llunos.

I paused in the doorway to listen to Haywire’s answer.

‘We sold him to the holiday camp out at Borth: they had a travelling booth in those days that they sent round the country trying to drum up custom. You know – to agricultural shows and fairs and things. They took him along to entertain the kids. His first gig was Shrewsbury Flower Show. Died of heart failure.’

The last thing I heard as I reached street level was the sound of Haywire falling off his chair again.

When I returned from my walk, Haywire was gone and Cleopatra was sitting in the chair. She looked scared. The chair
was too low and some phone books had been placed under her, but even so her chin was barely above the table top. Two tiny paws clutched the top of the table. Mrs Watkins was wearing the hat she normally wore to weddings and christenings. I explained the procedure to Cleopatra in a soft patient voice. And I asked Mrs Watkins to make sure she got the soft patient bit in the sign language.

‘Now look, Cleopatra,’ I began. ‘No one wants to hurt you, you understand, we’re your friends and we want to help you.’ I stopped to let Mrs Watkins catch up. Cleopatra nodded.

‘But we need you to help us and then everything will be all right, do you understand?’

Cleopatra nodded again, still wide-eyed with fear.

‘All you have to do is tell us where Mr Bassett is.’

‘She says she doesn’t know,’ said Mrs Watkins.

‘All right,’ shouted Llunos, ‘that’s enough of the pussy-footing about. I want answers and this mangy little fur-bag is going to start singing.’

Mrs Watkins sat there immobile, looking shocked.

‘Well, what the hell are you waiting for?’ he demanded.

‘You want me to say that?’

‘What do you think I brought you here for? Flower arranging? Just tell the monkey it’s time to cut the crap and start singing. Or signs to that effect.’

‘I’m not saying that!’

‘Saying what?’

‘Profanity. I won’t translate profanity.’

Llunos started to get annoyed, the genuine variety as opposed to the dissembled stuff. That was always the way with ‘bad cop’: you forgot you were acting. ‘Look, Mrs Watkins, I haven’t got time here to dance round your sensibilities. You either do what I tell you or I subpoena you and send you down somewhere you’ll hear enough profanity to blow your hat off.’

Mrs Watkins turned reluctantly to Cleopatra and translated.
Cleopatra answered and Mrs Watkins turned to us. ‘She says she understands.’

‘OK, ask her again. Where’s her master?’

‘She says she doesn’t know.’

Llunos slammed his fist down hard on the desk. Both Cleopatra and Mrs Watkins jumped. He got up and walked round and thrust his face up close to the monkey.

‘Right, listen to me good, fur-bag. We can do this the easy way or the hard way. Play ball with me and you walk out that door right now. You want to play silly buggers, go ahead, see where it gets you.’ He reached into the monkey’s jacket and pulled out a little plastic bag with some white powder in it. ‘What’s this? Drugs, is it? Are you a dealer, are you? Is that your little game?’

‘I saw that!’ shouted Mrs Watkins. ‘You planted it on her.’

Llunos turned the colour of a plum. He spun round and shouted at Mrs Watkins, ‘What was that!? You want some too, do you?’

He thrust the bag of narcotics under her nose, pulled off her hat and then dipped his hand in and pulled the bag of powder out. He tore the bag open, dipped his finger in and tasted.’ I can’t believe it! Mrs Watkins from the deaf school is peddling snow.’

‘I … I … I want a lawyer,’ stuttered Mrs Watkins. She was trembling violently and it smelled like she had involuntarily urinated. But it could have been the monkey.

Llunos paused and wiped the sweat off his brow. ‘What the hell are you talking about? You’re here to translate, you don’t need a lawyer.’

‘Well, stop bullying me then.’

Llunos spat on the floor and Mrs Watkins gasped. ‘We’re doing our best,’ she said.

‘Like hell you are.’

He looked at me and I took over.

‘Look Cleopatra,’ I said gently, ‘I don’t want to see you get hurt. This mess is none of your making, you’re just an innocent
monkey caught up in it. I want to help you, really I do. But you need to help me. You understand? I know you had nothing to do with the cocaine they found in your pocket, but who’s going to believe me unless you help me first? You have to tell me where Mr Bassett is then we’ll speak to the DA and see if we can cut you a deal. All you have to do is tell us where he is.’

Mrs Watkins answered, ‘She says why should she trust the word of a lousy cop.’

Llunos rushed over again and grabbed the monkey by her Ardwyn school tie.

‘Because I’m all you’ve got, fur-bag! I’m the only thing standing between you and zoo-time, do you understand? I got enough to put you behind bars for the rest of your life. And I’m not talking about a safari park here or an open-plan place. I’m talking about one of those mangy cheap places in a holiday camp where you spend your days in a concrete room with a rubber car tyre hanging from the ceiling that’s supposed to be a tree in Africa. You want that, do you? You know what happens to animals in zoos like that? They get so bored they chew their own paws off. I’ve seen it happen. Now you think about that.’

He stormed out of the room and I followed him. Outside, we looked in through the two-way mirror. Cleopatra sat in a pose of utter dejection, her head resting on her paws. Mrs Watkins was sobbing.

Llunos drank coffee from a plastic machine cup. ‘Do you think I’m riding her too hard?’

I shrugged. ‘Hard to say.’

He screwed up the cup and threw it with a metallic clang into the bin. ‘Come on, let’s get it over with.’

Ten minutes later a man in a fifty-dollar Swansea suit turned up and said he was the attorney for the Mephisto family and we were illegally detaining one of his clients. We had to let the monkey walk.

THE PAPERWEIGHT WAS still lying on top of the ring-binder files where Llunos had left it. I picked it up and shook. Snow fell above Aberystwyth at Christmastide. Just like it did that day in June when Myfanwy begged me to take her away from Aberystwyth. The day I needed more time – the myth that cripples all our attempts on happiness in this world. The day it snowed in June, big feathery flakes falling from a grey summer sky like tufts of kapok from inside a broken old teddy, a bear with one eye and stitches for a nose like the old streetwalker, Lorelei. I pulled a bottle of Captain Morgan out of the drawer and filled a tumbler. I drank slowly, thinking about things, shaking the paperweight idly now and again. Gradually, the room grew darker, the level of amber in the bottle descending gently like the sun, sinking like the level of oil in a lamp. I put on my hat.

Cambio
,
Wechsel
, change … tickets for the continent … The Cliff Railway station had that time-worn, forlorn air of railway termini everywhere, places that offered the illusion of escape, a door to a new life. The rails dropped from the sky, like the lowered ropes of a rescue party at the bottom of a collapsed mine shaft. I stood in the darkness of the doorway and stared.

It had a ticket counter with an arched window, a snack bar where you bought your beer or tea and stood at a chest-high table that had no seats; it had a departure board and a clock; a crumbling lattice of ironwork in the ceiling supporting filmy grey pieces of cracked glass, dirt and droppings, and brooding gulls. It had a shoeshine machine and an empty fibreglass kid, dressed
like a refugee from an Enid Blyton book, politely soliciting donations for a children’s charity; usually too there would be one or two women of the night soliciting with varying degrees of politeness; but what it didn’t have was a left luggage office. I felt a fool. I turned and headed down the Prom.

The lengthening shadows signified a change of shift as eternal as the reversing tides. Bathers scurried off to the sanctuary of their homes and the people who wandered the beach now had ugly coats and unwashed hair and were laden with bottles of sherry of a type unknown to the men of Jerez. The scent of fried onions began to impregnate the breeze – the perfumer’s sizzling overture to the coming night. At Sospan’s, the townsfolk gathered for a last ice like wildebeest at dusk round an African watering hole. Yet here they licked a nectar far sweeter than the brackish waters of a lake where hippos swim. Vanilla: the analgesic of the heart, the scent of lugubrious South Sea lagoons, and of the nursery. I ordered one. A workman stood on the roof of the kiosk fixing the illuminated cone and its neon motto,
Et in Arcadia ego
, and we watched him work for a while because there was nothing else to watch.

‘Let the lamp affix its beam,’ quoted Sospan to anyone who wanted to listen. ‘The only emperor is the emperor of ice cream.’

I took my ice and continued walking, filled with soft envy for the donkeys that drink from the waters of the Lethe at either end of the Prom, and thus begin every journey bright with hope, while we all struggled to escape the snare of the past and the power of events from long ago to blight us. I thought of Brainbocs, who had been crucified by a vision of play on a summer’s afternoon; the simple image of a girl that lodged in his heart like shrapnel. And I remembered Rimbaud, haunted by acts that time would not give back; the albatross of his missing years weighing so heavily precisely because the years were not missing. They never are, except perhaps for Bassett for whom fate has devised another torment: a choice. Knowledge or oblivion. To
throw away his past, never discover it, or to take the risk and look inside and be for ever stained by what he saw. He was doubly cursed. Damned if he opened and damned if he forbore. And I thought of Sospan and of the hidden sting in the tail of his Latin motto. Eeyore had explained it to me once. He said most people misunderstood it; the ‘
et
’ meant ‘even’ and not ‘also’ as was commonly supposed. Not ‘I too was in Paradise’, but ‘I was even in Paradise’. A subtle but crucial difference because the speaker was Death. Eeyore insisted that the ice man as secular priest was aware of the true meaning but I could never make up my mind. How much did Sospan really know? Did he receive that pale zigzag scar down his cheek from a brawl in a dark harbour-front bar in Marseilles? Or did he just fall on a cornet? Maybe his was the cruellest fate of all: that his soul was a blank; that he went into
gelati
to forget that he had nothing to forget.

I continued walking around castle point and chanced upon Lorelei sitting on one of the benches set into the wall below the war memorial. I said good evening and sat next to her. Her face was hard and shrivelled like last year’s conker, toughened by the vinegar of the years and the perennial diet of mockery and rejection. Poxcrop had said a nurse had been engaged for Myfanwy by whoever had kidnapped her, and that was good. But he had also said it was Frankie’s old
consigliere
and no one knew to this day who that was. But there was one source of information in this town, one oracle, that went back further even than the Orthopaedia Britannica. The girls who used to pull the tricks. No one, not even Meirion, knew more about the ancient criminal fraternities of Aberystwyth than Lorelei and so I asked about Frankie Mephisto and she seemed to recall the name from long, long ago. But since it’s thirsty work remembering that far back we went round the corner to the Castle pub and I bought her a pint of Guinness.