The Unbearable Lightness of Being in Aberystwyth (31 page)

‘Oh yeah,’ laughed Frankie. ‘I bet you would, wouldn’t you? You’d happily watch me die.’

‘I’ll shoot you, Frankie Mephisto,’ said Mrs Prestatyn. ‘You killed my girl.’

Frankie Mephisto laughed and played his trump card. The one no one even suspected he had. ‘What makes you think she’s dead?’

There was a moment’s stunned silence. And he made a noise that was like laughter but which froze the heart. ‘Go on shoot me, you silly bitch, then you’ll never know, will you? Maybe it’s better you don’t. There are fates worse than death you know. Ask Mooncalf.’

A look of despair swept over Mrs Prestatyn’s face. She let the gun fall and looked across at us. ‘I’m sorry …’

Frankie’s sidekick retrieved the gun and Frankie jerked his in our direction. Mrs Prestatyn duly obeyed and walked over to us.

Frankie walked over to Meredith and crouched down beside him. ‘Where were we? Oh yes, Cunybongy’s little secret. You’d like to know Cunybongy’s little secret, wouldn’t you?’

‘You bastard,’ said Sister Cunybongy. ‘A dying man.’

But Frankie just smiled. It was clear he held no especial reverence for dying men. And probably not live ones either.

He looked up from his crouch and said, ‘I want the name of the father.’

‘I’ve told you I don’t know. I swear. You know what she’s like. Why would she tell me?’

‘She wouldn’t have to tell you. You’d know all the same – you know everything else that’s going on, you nosy bitch.’

Sister Cunégonde made another desperate attempt to run over and shut her brother Frankie’s mouth. The sidekick slammed the barrel of his shotgun into her ribs and she fell to the floor and this time stayed there, holding her chest with one hand, supporting herself with the other and gasping for breath.

Frankie shook his head in mock sadness. ‘You never told him, did you?’

He turned to Meredith and grabbed his chin and pulled it round to face him. ‘She never told you, did she? That wonderful summer when she won the carnival queen. Why she sent you the letter and told you never to see her again. Broke your fucking little heart, didn’t it?’

Sister Cunégonde sobbed.

‘She was carrying a child, you see. Oops! Did I forget to mention that? Don’t ask me where it ended up.’

‘She was just sixteen,’ said Mrs Prestatyn. ‘Poor mite. She did nothing wrong, it was the Mother Superior who made her get rid of it. Made her write the letter.’

Frankie spoke again to Meredith. ‘You never knew, did you? Never knew you had a child?’ He grinned sourly.

And Meredith parted his lips and formed the silent shape of a word. Frankie bent down to listen. ‘What was that?’

Meredith formed the voiceless word again with the last few ounces of strength left to him. Frankie bent his ear next to his mouth. ‘Say it again, son.’ And Meredith took a slow final breath, his eyes half-closing as waves of pain racked him, and he groaned the words which, this time, everyone in the room could hear. ‘I knew.’

Even Frankie looked surprised. He shrugged and stood up.

The kitchen door swung open again and this time a girl stood in the doorway, a girl wearing the coat of the Waifery.

‘Why don’t you ask me who the father is?’ she said. ‘It’s my baby.’

Sister Cunégonde looked up from her kneeling position and gasped, ‘Seren!’

But I could see that it wasn’t Seren. It was a girl who’d borrowed her coat.

‘Is this the girl?’ said Frankie.

‘He’s down there.’ Calamity pointed in the direction of the stable. ‘It was Rimbaud.’

‘Who’s Rimbaud?’

‘The man who’s been on the run. He’s been hiding in the stable.’

A sly grin stole over the face of Frankie Mephisto. He walked sideways like a crab across the kitchen and grabbed Calamity. He pulled her in front of him with the shotgun now held against the side of her head. Again it looked as if he’d spent his lifetime rehearsing manoeuvres like this. He nodded to the sidekick. ‘If
anyone moves, shoot them.’ Frankie and Calamity walked slowly backwards towards the stable. We watched them both disappear down the rough path leading to the shed and then go inside. There was more silence. The sidekick eyed us warily. He didn’t feel so sure of himself on his own. There were a lot us. And it takes time to reload. The thunder of gunshot came from the shed, and the slate tiles of the roof shattered and flew up in fragments. The gunshot was followed in the next instant by a young girl’s scream and the long-drawn-out moan of a man in great pain. Instinct overcame caution and we all rushed outside. Calamity ran out of the shed, her face and coat spattered with blood, she ran up to me and buried herself in my arms and I could see the blood was not hers. The sidekick looked on bewildered. A man stumbled out of the stable wading through the air as if through treacle. His progress was made slow and difficult by the strange wooden encumbrance he had acquired and by the difficulty in catching one’s breath that comes from having three sharpened stakes of a man-trap stuck in one’s chest like a giant fork; three chest wounds that froth and suck. His mouth was open wide and blood slathered down his chin. He cried like a newborn infant and slowly pirouetted and sank to the sandy floor; his bellows and groans ebbing and getting softer and softer until they were no more than tiny moans and he finally lay back on the ground and said no more.

No one said a word. And then, suddenly, from nowhere, a woman in a plastic fold-up coat and headscarf rushed past us and over to the body of Frankie Mephisto. She threw herself down into the sandy grass beside him and bent down over him. Her mouth met his in that most intimate of communions and we watched in disbelief his cheeks quiver as if being kissed and probed with her tongue. I saw her jerk her head back, arch her back and pull away and gasp for air. She threw me a glance, her lips smeared with Frankie Mephisto’s gore, and then dived down and pressed her lips to his again like Juliet in the tomb. And it
was only then as she blew, withdrew and pressed her ear against his chest that I realised that she was not fulfilling that long sealed promise to bite out his tongue. She was giving him the kiss of life.

I walked over and knelt down and placed a gentle hand upon her back. She looked up from his lifeless chest and shook her head to communicate to me that Frankie Mephisto was dead. And then a strange look disfigured her face as perhaps she realised the full enormity of what she had just done and she opened her mouth, still covered with blood, and made to speak, but she couldn’t think of anything to say. And then the spell was broken again and the sidekick hefted his gun but that was as far as he got because the sound of a shovel hitting a head, a sound that had become so intimately familiar to me, clanged on the night air and the sidekick slumped to the ground. Sister Cunégonde stood over him and looked down to make sure that she had put him beyond the capacity to act and then threw the shovel to one side. And a second later cheers erupted from the bushes and a troupe of girls in Waifery coats stood up and out from the shadows and applauded, shouting ‘Bravo for Cunybongy!’

Dawn broke upon an estuary so quiet and glass-smooth that, like a mirror, it contained the sky. Two skies separated by the hills above Aberdovey. The only blemish in the wide mackerel-silver surface was the wheelchair of Dai Brainbocs, left there by the receding waters like the rotting piles of an old jetty, or a sunken ship. Like Jonah, he had been swallowed by the sea and with him had passed, it seemed, the last custodian of the secret of Myfanwy’s last resting place.

SISTER CUNÉGONDE DROVE us back to Aberystwyth in the Waifery minibus. Llunos followed in the prowl car. No one spoke. The door to Eeyore’s cottage was ajar, the kettle warm, but no one was around. I walked through the kitchen into the stable. Miss Muffet was licking a newborn foal – all white like a unicorn still waiting for its horn. She looked at me and there was fierce pride in her eyes. I continued on out the back and found Seren sitting on a lobster pot cradling a mug of tea with both hands. She looked up at me and smiled.

‘Eeyore had to go out. He got a call earlier on. He said he wouldn’t be long.’

I nodded. ‘This dream you had about Myfanwy. How did it go again?’

‘A chocolate tree and a dog called Hector. And a Kerplunk set and a view of Ynyslas from the window.’

Sister Cunégonde joined us saying, ‘I didn’t know you could get albino ones.’

‘Eeyore said it’s the first he’s seen in forty years,’ said Seren.

‘The Lord moves in mysterious ways,’ said Cunégonde.

There was the sound of a car pulling up and I walked back through the cottage. Up by the main road I saw Eeyore and Llunos engaged in conversation. I walked up the path and Eeyore came up to me with a heaviness to his step. He looked deeply unhappy.

‘I’ve got some good news for you, son.’

I waited. He didn’t look like a man with good news.

‘The charred body they found at Mooncalf’s, it’s not Myfanwy. Too old.’

I said nothing, waited. He sighed. ‘Just wish telling you didn’t make it the hardest day of my life. Looks like I’ve got to go and tell Mrs Prestatyn we’ve found her daughter.’

I took Eeyore’s car and drove back to the office. There was a letter addressed to Calamity lying on the mat. It was from Swansea and contained her detective’s badge. I put it on the desk and opened the drawer and took out the photocopy of the stolen essay. Myfanwy’s idea of heaven. I guess if you are going to resurrect someone you need to pay some attention to details like this, where they open their eyes. You don’t want them panicking and thinking they’ve gone to the wrong place. Some people can be quite literal about these things. I skimmed the essay again. A chocolate tree; Kerplunk; a view of Borth and Ynyslas across the water; the white bones of Hector. It was quite simple really. Where else can you enjoy a view of Ynyslas across the water? Not in Ynyslas that’s for sure. I went back to the car and drove to Woolies and made a small purchase and then drove up Penglais to Borth.

I turned left at the top to take the slow route. I was in no hurry and I always preferred to go this way when there was time. A road full of happy memories, of a time far away when Myfanwy and I drove together up and down the green dales like a ship tossed on an ocean of grass. A journey on a day that you could say was my idea of heaven. If anyone ever wants to go to the trouble of creating it for me. But I’m happy to wait. The same cows as before, or maybe their descendants, chequer-boarded the fields, and every so often there was the same tantalising glimpse of Borth down below, beyond the hills, stretching north and away to Aberdovey. I drove in a dream, my spirit dancing away in the past where the best things are kept as well as the shadows that haunt us. I pulled up on the sands of Ynyslas and drove up to the water’s edge. A man stood with his back to me and turned round at the sound of the car door. His army greatcoat flapped
in the wind and wild hair splayed out across his shoulders. He was holding a tin of creosote.

‘I was just wondering where I was going to get the price of a cup of tea,’ he said, ‘and they sent you.’

‘Price of a cup of tea for the ferryman.’ I put fifty pence in his hand and stepped into the boat.

Cadwaladr rowed me across and I sat in the stern and stared at the Loothouse across the water. There was a flash from the upstairs balcony, the sort that a pair of binoculars might make in the sharp morning light but which was actually the morning sun flashing on the silver top of Brainbocs’s cane. We hit the jetty with a gentle thud and I climbed ashore. Some wet clothes were hanging on the line – small sizes that would be suitable for a boy of about Brainbocs’s build. And there was something that I had mistaken in the dark last night for a heavy fisherman’s coat but was actually a life jacket. I walked up the garden, past a tree with what looked like chocolate bars taped to the branches. A dog barked and bounded up to me and placed his paws on my chest. ‘Down Hector,’ I said. ‘Go back to Troy.’ French doors were opened and I walked into the lounge. A video of the children’s TV series
Hector’s House
was playing on the TV and on the table next to it was a brand new Kerplunk set, still unopened. Also next to the television was a What-the-Butler-Saw machine and, lying on top, a tape labelled, ‘My Funeral’. I guess that’s one of the best bits about dying – seeing who comes to the funeral. And hearing all the nice things they say about you. It’s the only time in your life you can guarantee that people won’t say a bad word and that’s quite ironic, since it’s not in your life.

From somewhere in the house came the sound of mice squeaking. I walked through into the kitchen and then into the hall and up the stairs. The noise of the mice grew louder. At the front was a bedroom overlooking the estuary, a view of Borth and Ynyslas. The rhythmic beeping of mice came from a medical machine with an oscilloscope display. Next to that was a bed.
Myfanwy lay attached to a weeping willow of wires and drips that shone bright silver in the morning light, falling like creepers in an enchanted bower above the place where she slept. She was smiling. I kissed her and she sighed in a dream. Her cheek had lost its former pallor and in its stead was the soft translucence of honey.

Brainbocs was sitting in a wicker bath chair on the balcony. He was wearing a well-cut tweed shooting jacket and holding a cane between the fingers of his small hands. The early morning sunshine looked delightful. I walked out and he looked up as if he had only just noticed my presence, even though he had been following the progress of my boat the whole time.