by Dai Smith
‘They didn’t tell me they were going, honest. Gomer and Edwin were working off their own bats, and you know what a pair of terrors they are for being deep and unexpected. Can I see you tonight, Moira?’
‘Not tonight or ever. I’m meeting Moelwyn Cox in front of the Gaiety at seven. Plush seats, back row, one and three, made to measure. Have you ever seen Moelwyn in his bullfighter’s uniform? After that you’ll always look very colourless to me, Cynlais. Has your heart ever been in the orange groves of Seville?’
‘Never. You know that, Moira. The furthest I’ve been is that bus trip to Tintern Abbey with the Buffs.’ The last word came out like a sort of groaning gasp, as if someone had knocked all the wind out of Cynlais from behind. I thought this a very poor augury for the race and I was on the point of giving Cynlais a monitory kick on the shin when Moira let out a laugh that was so loud, contemptuous and yet passionately stimulant it put her instantly under the same shawl as Carmen. Gomer Gough was making that very point when we got back into earshot of the Meadow Prospect group.
‘You hear that laugh?’ Gomer was asking. ‘The sight of Moelwyn Cox’s satin breeches has got that girl into a state where she could give a night-school course on lust as a tactic. Come on, Cynlais. Forget about Seville and get your knicks on. The only answer to Moelwyn Cox showing his cloak to the bull is you showing your butts to all humanity by leading the field here today.’
‘I don’t go all the way with Nietzsche,’ said Uncle Edwin, ‘but the only recipe is the brutal force of triumph for that sort of girl.’
Cynlais looked puzzled by that statement and Gomer had to explain. Then Cynlais looked downcast again.
‘I couldn’t look at my knicks today, Gomer, not after that. I haven’t got the heart. Not after that.’
‘Come on,’ said Milton Nicholas. ‘Think of the prize money.’
‘Aye, and the stinging way those judges spoke to you last Monday,’ said Gomer. ‘One of them said that your band had undone a whole century of progressive work by the Sunday School union. And he said, too, that as soon as they could raise the fare to Africa the whole pack of you would be on the boat addressed to the jungle.’
Uncle Edwin was staring into the further distance and following the movements of a very large man who was clearly an official and wearing the type of multilateral hat worn by Sherlock Holmes, but this hat was in a kind of tweed material and untidier than the hats we have seen on Holmes.
‘Look over there,’ said Edwin. ‘There’s that big auc tioneer, Erasmus John the Going Gone, wearing a cloth hat and shaking his gun to show that he’s the starter.’
‘He’s a very cunning boy, that Erasmus John,’ said Milton, ‘and not only at auctions either. I hear he’s got a favourite of his own competing here today.’ Milton jumped forward and frightened the wits out of the abstracted Cynlais by urgently grasping his sleeve. ‘Keep your eye on Erasmus John the Going Gone, Cynlais. Watch that he doesn’t confuse you. Politically and morally that man has for thirty years been master of the false alarm. See that he keeps his auctioneering slogans out of the formula used for starting this race.’
‘All right then. For your sake that’s all. That Moira… Just one look from her and she scoops the heart right out of me, leaving not even the wish to whistle.’ Cynlais straightened his back and gave his head a little shake. ‘But I’ve got it in for that Erasmus John. He was one of the judges at Tregysgod last Monday. He came to see us after the judging, sneering and laughing.’
‘I was there,’ said Milton. ‘I heard him and the things he said were a disgrace for a man who’s supposed to keep an open mind. He said that he would like to lay Cynlais as a wreath on the grave of General Gordon who was speared to death by dervishes in the unlimited phase of our imperial adventure. He also said, that as a Christian, he was arranging to have the final mark won by Cynlais’ band announced direct by muezzin if the Tregysgod council could throw up some sort of rough minaret. You can imagine how all these references foxed Cyn lais and the boys and made them feel that they were standing in a chilling draught of contempt and rejection.’
‘Hellish things for draughts, those bits of loose sheeting,’ said Cynlais. He waved his arm in goodbye and made his way towards the ramshackle pavilion where the athletes were to change.
‘Good luck, Cyn,’ we all shouted.
‘And watch that Erasmus John,’ said Milton Nicholas ‘With that length of gun and that style of hat he won’t consider today complete until he’s shot somebody. Somebody from Meadow Prospect for preference who turns out in carnivals in an overtly anti-British costume. So watch out.’
‘I will,’ Cynlais shouted back. He tried to make his voice cheerful but we could see that not even his little spurt of re bellion against the insolence of Erasmus John had given him back anything like his usual vim.
‘That soul balm of Caney’s is wearing off,’ said Uncle Edwin.
‘Caney should have doubled the dose,’ said Gomer, ‘but he said it was a tricky mixture. Misery, said Caney, who is a fair hand with an axiom when he tries, has been our favourite tipple for so long it will take a thousand years of experiment with applied gladness to dispel the flavour.’
Uncle Edwin was pointing again. His eye had the aptitude of hawks for singling out significant figures in crowds. ‘Isn’t that Caney the Cure over there now, Gomer? He’s waving at you.’
A man with the hair style of Lloyd George at his bushiest was making his way towards us, holding aloft a stick carved like a totem pole. He had prodded a few voters with this stick to get them out of the way and a few of these people were fol lowing Caney with angry faces and telling him to be careful. Caney was gasping and agitated.
‘What is it, Mr Caney?’ asked Gomer.
‘The stuff I gave you for Coleman.’
‘The balm,’ said four or five voices.
A grimace flashed across the face of Caney the Cure of which we could all taste the unhappiness.
‘Balm, balm,’ he said, as if trying to reassemble the fragments of a dream that had that very instant been kicked to death. ‘I’ll tell you about that. The stuff I gave to Coleman wasn’t the soul balm after all.’
A wreath of grave expressions formed around Caney and the deep, cautionary voices of the Meadow Prospect group rolled out like drums: ‘Buck up, Caney.’ ‘Have a care there, Kitchener.’ ‘This is no talk for a magician.’
Caney chuckled but there was no hint of amusement or flippancy in it. We could see that Caney meant this chuckle to be symbolic, a hint that this kind of idiot laughter was the last kiss and farewell of the tragic impulse, that all things, death, love, the senseless plume of space and stars, would all at last come to rest in some kind of cut-rate giggle.
‘My wife made a mistake with the gummed label on the bottle. We have a lot of labels and my wife does a lot with the gum because my tongue tickles. She’s a fine woman, my wife, but the taste of gum makes her giddy.’
We were all nodding in the most compassionate way because the mention of anyone in a fix even with stuff like gum brought us running up with our sympathy at the ready and fanning away for all we were worth. We urged Caney with our eyes to go on with his statement.
Caney chuckled again, but Uncle Edwin told him that he had our permission to remain sombre.
‘That was some very funny stuff that Coleman took actually,’ said Caney.
Uncle Edwin put his hand on Caney’s shoulder as if to tell him that we were with him all the way, that if Cynlais should now drop down dead before he should even hear the starting gun of Erasmus John the Going Gone, the fact was simply that the angry rat that paces around and around at the heart of the life force had just given Caney one with its shorter teeth, that Coleman and that wrong mixture had been speeding towards each other through space since the moment when the absurd had decided to mould a whole species in its own image. Uncle Edwin tried with very quiet words to make these ideas plain to Caney. But either his words were too quiet or Caney had been too long in traffic
with herbs to operate properly in a social context. He looked blank.
We all looked to Gomer Gough. We expected him, after a minute or two of preparation, to peel the ears of Caney with a jet of Old Testament wrath. But Gomer was just looking to wards the part of the field where Cynlais and the other runners were reporting to Erasmus John and a clutch of other voters with badges and bits of paper. When he spoke it was in a voice of such softness we were glad that our cult of hymn-singing at all hours had left us with pity sleek and trained as a greyhound on the leash.
‘Cynlais is out there, Mr Caney, faced with the hardest race of his life. His running knicks are ill-cut and will expose him to ridicule if not to prosecution. He is flanked by a biased and malevolent body of starters and judges who are not above giv ing orders to have Coleman strangled with the finishing tape if he should happen to come in first. On top of that, the libido of Coleman is tigerish and currently his head is between the tiger’s teeth. His girl is that element with the red blouse stand ing at the foot of that flagpole. She is five square feet of licence and her name is Moira Hallam. A few minutes ago she gave him a laugh that for sheer contempt and coldness would have frozen a seal. Now you tell me, very jocose, that he has some sinister herb under his belt. What is it?’
‘A stirring draught for lazy kidneys,’ said Caney, very softly.
‘Speak up, Caney,’ called the voters on the outer fringe of the group, and Caney repeated what he had said, taking off his slouch in case this might be muffling some of the sound.
‘How will it take him?’ asked Gomer. ‘This draught, how does it operate?’
‘It varies,’ said Caney. ‘Sometimes when it begins its heal ing work there is a flash of discomfort, and I have known sur prised clients come back to me hopping.’
‘Hopping? What do you mean, hopping? Let’s have the truth, Caney.’
‘One leg seems to leave the ground as if trying to kick the kidneys into a brighter life.’
We all drew more closely around Caney and said very quietly: ‘Duw, duw, duw!’, which was a way we had of invoking God without committing ourselves unduly.
We turned to the part of the field where the sprint was shortly to begin. Erasmus John was entering into the brutal phase of his life as an official. He was dissatisfied with the rate at which the athletes had been coming out of the pavilion and he was prodding the various runners into position with his gun. He was putting some of them, including Cynlais Coleman, on edge and they were threatening to go home if Erasmus did not point the barrel of his weapon the other way.
‘The only boy he isn’t prodding with that flintlock,’ said Milton Nicholas, ‘is his own favourite, Keydrich Cooney, that red-thatched, chunky element on the side there, with a scal loped vest and the general bearing of a tamed ape. His speciality used to be cross-country events on muddy terrain and a chance to shove slower rivals into lonely ditches. But he emerged as a runner in sprints when he outpaced two bailiffs who were trying to shove an affiliation writ into Cooney’s pocket. Erasmus John will handicap Cooney forward until he is practically biting the tape when the gun goes. See how he’s edging on now while Erasmus keeps the other runners in a sweat of anxiety. What Herod did for child welfare Erasmus John will do for foot-racing.’
The gun went off. The crowd surged forward around me and I could see nothing of the race’s details. Then there was a shout and a groan and I saw Cynlais Coleman shoot into the air, well in sight even above the taller heads around me. I jumped, too, to see if there was any sign of fresh smoke from Erasmus John’s gun because Cynlais looked to me as if he had been shot. For a second the crowd broke and in the gap I saw the red head of Cooney flash past the tape.
It was not until that evening that I learned with any accuracy what had happened. We had led Cynlais home between us. He had refused to get out of his running costume and he looked shattered. He refused to say a word. After we had delivered him to his home we met at Tasso’s Coffee Tavern.
Normally when we went into Tasso’s the conversation was in full cry even before Tasso got his hand on the hot-water tap. But that night every topic seemed to be lying dead just behind us. Gomer Gough and Uncle Edwin stared at each other, at Tasso and then at themselves in the gleaming side of the urn. Tasso was very much slower than usual getting to work on the taps. He took down a large bottle, fished into it and brought out a wrapped toffee.
‘Accept this rum-and-butter toffee, Mr Gough,’ said Tasso. ‘It will sweeten your mood.’ He waited until Gomer had the sweet in his mouth and the first traces of softening in his eye as the sugar struck his palate. ‘And what was the foot-race like, Mr Gough? What befell Mr Coleman the Comet?’
For a few moments Gomer could not marshal his words. Then, as the voters of Meadow Prospect often do when they have some outrage to describe, he highlighted some of the principal incidents of his story, with gestures as broad and dramatic as the size of Tasso’s shop and the position of the urn would allow.
First he dropped into a crouching position on the floor to invoke the image of Cynlais making ready for the start. Tasso leaned over the counter, concerned, and Uncle Edwin had to tell him that Gomer was all right, just acting. Then Gomer jumped erect, with a cruel, arrogant look on his face to imitate Erasmus John. Gomer’s arm was outstretched and his index finger was working violently on an imaginary trigger. He had his hand pointed at the door. Three customers outside peered through the door’s glass panel, saw Gomer, and moved up the street, at speed, thinking that Tasso had now had what for a long time had been coming to him, encouraging such clients as Gomer Gough and Uncle Edwin. Tasso told Uncle Edwin that he thought Gomer had now made his point and would he please point whatever it was he was supposed to have in his hand at some other part of the shop.
‘In their long history, Tasso, the Celts have done some dubious and disastrous bits of running, but this thing today opened up a new path altogether. Erasmus John the Going Gone, that auctioneer who acts as an official at these events, fired his gun. Cynlais flashed into action and for five seconds he went so fast everybody thought he had left by way of Erasmus’ gun. Didn’t he, Edwin?’
‘Fact,’ said Edwin. ‘He seemed to be in flight from all the world’s heartbreak and shame.’
‘Then Caney’s cure struck,’ said Gomer, and you could almost see the rum-and-butter toffee parting in his mouth to make way for the bitterness of his tone. ‘Have you, Tasso, ever seen a man trying to finish a hundred-and-twenty-yard dash on one leg?’
‘Not on one leg. Always in Italy both the legs are used.’
‘It was a terrible sight. Cynlais gave some fine hops, I’ll say that for him. On that form I’d enter him against a team of storks, but against those other boys he was yards behind. And that Erasmus John the Going Gone running alongside and ask ing sarcastically if Cynlais would like the stewards to do some thing about the leg he still had on the ground. I fancied I also saw Erasmus taking a few sly kicks at Cynlais as if he wished to further desolate the parts of the boy’s spirit that hadn’t yet been laid flat by Caney.’
‘And where is he now, the Cynlais?’ asked Tasso.
‘In bed, trying to explain to his kidneys, which are still mov ing about inside him like jackie jumpers, about Caney, Caney’s wife and her reaction to the gum on the labels that plays such hell with her.’
‘It was Moira Hallam that did it,’ said Uncle Edwin, sounding as angry as a minor key human being ever will. ‘Compared with this business of physical love the Goodwin sands are a meadow. I’d like to make her sorry for the way she flicks acid over the hearts of boys like Cynlais.’
Gomer seconded this, and Tasso did something to set the urn hissing, which was his way of saying that he was behind the motion too.
The following night Milton Nicholas came into the Library and Institute and after a short spell of walking about among the bookshelves and thinking hard about the carnivals, went into the small anteroom where Gomer Gough and Teilo Dew the Doom were locked in a game of chess that seemed to ha
ve been going on for several winters.
‘I’ve been thinking about Ephraim Humphries the ironmonger,’ said Milton. Gomer Gough and Teilo Dew did not look up or seem surprised. Humphries had for years lived out on a kind of social tundra and his fiats against the pagans of Meadow Prospect were always high on the agenda of the Dis cussion Group. Ephraim was very comfortably off and he had a great weakness for budgerigars of which he had a front room full. He had three of these birds that could do rough versions of temperance hymns and missionary anthems like ‘Row for the shore, sailor, pull for the shore, Heed not that stranded wreck but bend to the oar.’ And he had one bird, a very strong, loud performer which had learned the first two bars of the ‘Halle lujah Chorus’, but this had done something to the bird’s tail feathers and it had died. Ephraim’s cordial urges had been cooled long since by handling so much cold metal in a shop full of draughts, and he really didn’t see why the average human should want to eat, wander or love more than the average budgerigar.
‘You know that Ephraim is moral adviser to the carnival committee,’ said Milton.
‘Yes, we know,’ said Gomer. ‘Those two bruises on his brow he got from two faints he had when watching Georgie Young’s women’s band, the Britannias.’
‘That’s it. He ranks nudity above war as a nuisance. I was at a short meeting tonight after tea. The regional carnival committee. Ephraim was there with a cutting edge. Most of what he said was about his visit last week to the Tregysgod carnival. If he ever gets the sight of Cynlais Coleman and his boys out of his mind his mind will go with it. As for the Britannias he says it’s time Georgie Young changed their costume to that of women in purdah so that they can operate from behind some kind of thick screen. But his main phobia is about Coleman, because Willie Silcox the Psyche kept interrupting that Ephraim’s obsession with the way the wind kept blowing the Union Jacks against the bodies of the Britannias and show ing up their shapes meant that Ephraim was working up to the sexual climax of the century, and that as soon as he caught the Britannias without their gazookas he would proceed to some act of massive ravishment and he would spend the rest of his life dancing on Calvin’s grave. At this point that lecherous and bell-like baritone, Dewi Dando the Ding and the Dong, said that if Ephraim did any dancing on Calvin’s grave after a session of roistering with those girls in the Britannias it would be strictly by proxy through four bearers. This enraged Ephraim and you could see from his face that his mind had been wallowing a bit in the notions sketched forth by Silcox so he changed tack and stuck to Cynlais Coleman. He’s convinced now that what Fawkes was to parliament Coleman is now to morals, a one and fourpenny banger waiting for November. That gave me an idea of how we might get Ephraim to help us.’