Last Tango in Aberystwyth

by Malcolm Pryce

  I walked in and bought two paper cups of beer served warm from a party-sized can and handed one to the woman. She took a drink and let out a satisfied ‘Ha!’ as she patted her chest.

  ‘Needed that, I did.’ She nodded towards the next room. ‘Just the warm-ups, the real stuff isn’t until after eleven. Hang around a bit and …’ Her words trailed off as her attention was caught by the entrance of another woman. A very old, shrunken woman who carried herself with the regal air of an abdicated queen. Her face was bony and almost skull-like, with fine white strands of hair stretched with painful tightness across the dome of her head. The woman serving at the bar instantly poured out a gin and put it on the counter for her, saying ‘Evening, Champ!’

  The cleaner nudged me. ‘It’s Smokey G. Jones. Won the treble in ’62. Fifty-eight bouts and never lost.’

  I tried to look impressed and then asked her about the Dean. Tearing her admiring gaze away from the Champ, she licked her lips. ‘Well,’ she said, switching instantly into disapproval mode, ‘I knew straightaway there was something funny about him, like. He wasn’t like the usual ones you get at all. Always giving himself airs he was and saying the bathroom was dirty and moaning about the breakfast and he never wanted to watch the same TV programmes as everybody else. Well, I could see he wasn’t going to last long. “I didn’t know we had a member of the royal family staying with us,” I said to Mrs Jenkins so he could hear. But he didn’t take the hint of course. Them type never do. I mean if he was so high and mighty, why wasn’t he staying at one of the posh hotels down by Consti?’

  I yawned. ‘You expect me to pay for stuff like this?’

  She jerked her head back indignantly. ‘Well I’m not doing for me health now, am I?’

  ‘This isn’t gossip, it’s ancient history.’

  ‘I should hope so too, I’m not one to gossip.’ She leaned closer and whispered, ‘I haven’t got to the best bit yet.’

  I forced another yawn. ‘Don’t tell me, let me guess: some man in a long back coat turned up asking questions about him.’

  ‘Yes,’ she hissed. ‘But the point is, what did he want to know?’

  I shrugged.

  ‘The valise! He wanted to know what had happened to the valise.’

  ‘What’s a valise?’

  ‘A case, you idiot!’

  ‘Why didn’t you say that?’

  ‘I thought you were a private dick, that’s how they speak.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘In LA.’

  ‘This is Aberystwyth.’

  She snorted. ‘Fat lot of good you are.’

  ‘So tell me about the valise.’

  ‘It belonged to the monk.’

  ‘What monk?’

  She leaned back slightly and beamed at me. Her eyes were making dramatic downward movements and, following her gaze, I spotted her left hand tucked in tightly to her side, palm up, and making fluttering motions with the fingers as if she was trying to tickle a trout. I put a pound coin on her palm and the hand disappeared into the pocket of her pinny.

  ‘I knew straightaway he was a monk,’ she continued seamlessly. ‘Even though he was pretending not to be. We’ve had his type before. Up from the monastery on Caldy Island for a good time. They were room-mates, you see.’

  ‘So what was in the valise?’

  ‘How should I know, I don’t go looking in other people’s cases.’

  ‘Not much you don’t!’

  She flushed. ‘Well of all the … any more of that and I won’t tell you the rest.’

  I nodded her to go on.

  She held out her hand and tickled another trout.

  I shook my head and turned to go. ‘Sorry, I can’t afford it.’

  ‘But don’t you want to know what happened to the valise, it’s the best bit.’

  ‘What was inside it was the best bit, but you say you don’t know. I don’t believe you, by the way. I don’t believe there’s a single bag, case, coat or drawer in that crummy hovel you haven’t stuck your nosey beak into. But if it makes you feel better to deny it, that’s up to you.’

  ‘Oooh you dirty rotten chiseller!’ She sniffed forcibly. ‘I should have known what to expect from the son of a donkey-man. Well suit yourself. Now you’ll never know what happened to the valise.’

  ‘I already know. There’s only one thing that could have happened to it.’ I walked out and threw over my shoulder as I left, ‘The Dean must have taken it, otherwise you wouldn’t have mentioned it.’

  As I left the house I bumped into someone arriving in a hurry. It was the old lady from the bay window at the Excelsior. She was heavily wrapped-up to disguise herself and pretended not to know me, but it was her all right. I could feel the hot smothering shame that, underneath all the finery, the lorgnette and the etiquette, she was the same as the rest of them. Borne in on a floodtide of longing that she could no more defy than the beaver can stop himself from building a dam. That eternal drive to gather round the village well and pour scorn on her neighbours for failing to live up to a code that no one else had ever managed to live up to either.

  I walked out into the street as the room behind me thundered with the explosive percussion of five hundred orthopaedic boots stamping on the boards, accompanied by shrill Red Indian whoops. Above the tumult, a voice rose exultantly, crying, ‘E’d have bloody flattened her if he’d found out, wouldn’t he!’

  Out in the street Ionawr came up to me from the shadows and put her hand in mine. I could see now in the yellow streetlight she was dressed much like any other kid of her age. Faded jeans flared at the bottom over absurd platform shoes, too much make-up and too little on underneath the fur coat: a skimpy halter-neck top that didn’t reach down as far as her navel. You saw girls like this all the time walking down the street hand in hand with men old enough to be their fathers or even grandfathers. And they really could be were it not for that furtive air that marks them out and gives the game away: that strange awkwardness that comes from having to concentrate on the simple task of walking; and from the insane overwhelming belief that everyone in the street that night can read your thoughts. The walk of shame that only dissolves when the bedroom door slams gratefully shut.

  The cold had deepened and stung our cheeks like the kiss of a jellyfish. We cut through the castle and headed for Pier Street. There weren’t many dining options at this time of night – if you discounted the 24-hour whelk stalls on the Prom.

  ‘We could go to the Indian,’ Ionawr said hesitantly, reading my face to gauge my reaction.

  ‘That’s not the sort of place to take a lady, even one …’

  ‘One what?’

  ‘Oh nothing.’

  ‘I know what you were going to say. Even one like me.’

  ‘No I wasn’t.’

  ‘Yes you were. Don’t deny it, it doesn’t matter. I know what I want to eat: something traditional Welsh like my grandmother used to make when I was a kid.’

  ‘That’s a bit of a tall order.’

  ‘They do caawl at the Chinese.’ She took my hand and pulled me. ‘Come on.’

  I hesitated.

  ‘What’s wrong?’

  ‘Did you hear that?’

  ‘What?’

  I thought for a moment and then said, ‘Oh nothing.’ We carried on. And then I stopped again.

  ‘We’re being followed.’

  ‘Are you sure? I can’t see anyone.’

  ‘I’ve felt it since we left the game.’

  I sent Ionawr on ahead and slunk into a doorway and waited. The footsteps got louder and louder. When the guy passed I grabbed him and threw him into the doorway.

  ‘Oh my Lord!’ said a voice. It was Smokey G. Jones, her tiny head projecting from the collar in her coat like a light bulb. ‘Don’t kill me, please!’

  ‘Mrs Jones! What are you doing? I thought you were following me.’

  ‘I was. Only I didn’t mean any harm. I just wanted to ask you. No harm at all.’

  ‘Ask me what?’ />
  ‘If you’d have a word with her, please, Mr Knight, just a word. This arthritis is something terrible. It’s all them cups of tea in me fighting days.’

  ‘Have a word with who?’

  ‘Miss Calamity. She’s cut me supply down. I need me placebo, Mr Knight, I can’t get through a day without it. But she’s gone and cut me supply.’

  Just then Ionawr reappeared and Mrs Jones stopped and looked at her. ‘Hmm.’ She sniffed. ‘What baggage.’ She walked off.

  It was often mayhem in the small take-away but tonight it was quiet. A few students, a few locals sitting on the hard-backed chairs, stupefied by drink into a morose silence, killing time softly like holidaymakers at a strike-bound airport. At the counter a Chinese girl in her mid-teens was doing her homework, a curtain of silky black hair falling forward to protect her from the gaze of the customers, falling in a delicate curl like the clef on a musical score.

  I coughed and she looked up.

  ‘Can I help you, sir?’

  ‘I hear you sell caawl now.’

  ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Would you like some?’

  ‘Is it good?’

  ‘People who know about these things say it is. Personally I’ve never tried it.’

  ‘Quite an unusual dish to find in a Chinese restaurant.’

  ‘We Chinese have to adapt.’ She wrote down the order and handed it through the serving-hatch. ‘And it brings in the crowds.’

  ‘Isn’t it a bit dishonest?’

  She shrugged. ‘I don’t know, is it? In my grandmother’s province they have a tree that gets pollinated by bats, so the tree gives off a perfume of dead mice. No one complains about that.’

  ‘Except maybe the cats.’

  She smiled and took our money. ‘Anyway, lamb stew with lumps of cheese – it’s not so very hard to make.’

  ‘Ah! but the cheese has to be added with love,’ I said.

  Someone by the door farted and his mates burst into crude guffaws of laughter. I fought the urge to look round and waited for the prickle of shame to subside.

  The girl said, ‘We add all our ingredients with love, our customers deserve nothing less.’ She took the cartons of caawl and placed them carefully in the paper bag. ‘I’ve seen you before somewhere, but you’re not a regular.’

  ‘With my father, maybe, on the Prom. He’s the donkey-man.’

  ‘Ah of course!’ She handed me the food. ‘You round-eye are so sentimental about your animals. Bon appetit!’

  On the Prom the wind roared past our ears like a tube train rushing out of a tunnel. The tide had risen and each time the water thundered into the base of the sea-wall, spray flared up like a series of jack-in-the-box ghosts. I had one arm over Ionawr’s shoulders, clutching her against me for warmth, and I held the brown paper bag with its cargo of hot caawl at arm’s length like a lantern – two wayfarers lost in the night.

  ‘Do you know what she was talking about?’ I said. ‘Asking Calamity for some placebo?’

  ‘No idea, but if she’s getting it from Calamity, who knows what it is.’

  Electro-illuminated dwarves danced drunkenly on the swinging cable overhead, and down by the bandstand we heard the sound of youths jeering. We walked on and as we got closer the jeering of the youths became punctuated by faint Spanish cries, ‘No, please leave us alone, Señores!’

  The lads were dancing round in a circle, and in the centre there lay a man. Next to the man, on the floor, was a ripped-open suitcase.

  ‘Hey!’ I shouted. Slightly wrong-footed by the intrusion, they stopped and turned to face us. There was silence for a while, except for the sea exploding like distant artillery, and then I heard the Spaniard again, squeaking above the muffled roar. ‘Please, sir, we are just humble peasants!’ It was the dummy, Señor Rodrigo, and lying on the floor, battered and kicked and covered in cement grime, was Mr Marmalade. Ionawr gasped. One of the youths was holding Señor Rodrigo by his ankles, upside down over the railings. His eyes had rolled upward in their sockets and in the garish mix of bright lights and shadows thrown by the streetlamps and the overhead illuminations, his wooden face had acquired a cast of terror.

  The youth gave him a shake and the other lads cheered. Mr Marmalade was making desperate attempts to get up, but every time he half-raised himself one of the lads would shove him back down with the sole of his boot.

  ‘Gottle of fucking geer!’ they shouted. Mr Marmalade was clutching his chest above the heart and gasping.

  ‘Somos solamente campesinos pobres, mi amigo!’ wailed the dummy.

  ‘You leave him alone, you bullies!’ shouted Ionawr. The leader of the youths shouted, ‘What the fuck do you want?’

  ‘Somos solamente campesinos pobres, mi amigo!’

  ‘And shut that fuckin’ dummy up!’

  The kid smashed the dummy’s head twice against the metal of the railings. One of the eyes came out. Ionawr screamed. Mr Marmalade was now making obscene sucking sounds and holding his chest, his eyes bulging as if something was pushing them out of his head from the inside.

  ‘Somos solamente campesinos pobres, mi amigo!’

  I stepped forward and punched the lead yob. Despite the swagger and posturing, he was probably not much more than eighteen or nineteen and slightly built. He fell sprawling on to the pavement. I kicked him viciously in the stomach and he grunted in pain. Across the road a casement window screeched open and a woman in a nightie leaned out and cried, ‘I’ve called the police, you bastards, they’re on the way!’ And as if in confirmation we heard the distant wail of a siren starting up. None of the lads had the guts to make a move on me. The leader got to his feet and, seeing the distant blue flash of the approaching prowl car, took to his heels, followed by his gang.

  We kneeled down by Mr Marmalade. Over by the railings, like the dummy that continues talking as his master drinks a glass of milk, the shattered mannikin continued to plead for their lives.

  ‘Somos solamente campesinos pobres, mi amigo!’

  Maybe it was the wind plucking strange notes from the musical stave of the seaside railings. Or maybe the terror of the night, working on our own dark fears and imaginings, had somehow transformed the voices of the approaching cops. Or maybe we just dreamed it. Because as we kneeled in the grime and Ionawr cradled Mr Marmalade’s head it was clear that the old ventriloquist’s heart had already given out and instead of milk he had drained the cup of life.

  ‘Somos solamente campesinos pobres, mi amigo!’

  Chapter 5

  IT WOULD BE naïve to say Aberystwyth ever had much innocence left to lose, but the death of the Amazing Mr Marmalade struck many people as a watershed. Old man kicked to death on the Prom, they said, never thought I’d live to see that. Perhaps it was all those fresh graves on the side of Pen Dinas dug in the wake of the flood that contributed to the mood, or maybe just the casual brutality of the attack. Or perhaps it was the recognition that the optimism that many people felt after the flood had deceived us. As a town we had stared death in the face and prided ourselves on the fact that death had blinked first. But the murder of Mr Marmalade confirmed what we secretly suspected all along: it was all at best a reprieve, a stay of execution. The optimism was snake oil.

  Walking home after the attack, I kept thinking about what a senseless act it was, and how easily it could have been avoided. What was an old man like Marmalade doing there at that time of night? Where did he think he was going? It didn’t make sense. When I got home I found the answer. It turned out he had been going to see me. There was a note from him saying he had called and that he had information. And I had to wonder, was this a coincidence, a motiveless attack of the sort that could happen to anyone? Or did it have something to do with me? As far as I knew, the police didn’t know about his visit but they soon would, and once that happened they’d haul me in for questioning. The smart thing to do was tell them before they found out, that way they would know I wasn’t holding out on them. Trouble was, holding out on them was what I did for a liv
ing. It was part of the unwritten code: protecting the client’s privacy. But I could only go so far and murder was definitely beyond the line in the sand. Not that the new broom at the police station would be much for fine distinctions anyway. His type were always itching to revoke your licence. And they generally had a preferred technique for doing it: making it fall out from your pocket as you tumbled down the police station steps.

  I let Ionawr take my bed and I took the sofa. And then I put Myfanwy’s LP on the turntable, unscrewed the cap on my friend Captain Morgan, and tried to beat back the louche imaginings that all men feel in the presence of a girl who sells herself for a living. The look of reproach in her eyes didn’t help. That sweet, sharp pang and slight surprise that you maybe don’t find her attractive … ah if only she knew! As if any man would not ache and burn inside for such a lovely girl. But you cannot say it, because the act of protecting her has no meaning if you say the words. I’d love to but … it’s not that I don’t want to but … But what? Your sister died in my arms once? To speak the words is to ask to be absolved. To disavow your cake on moral grounds and then eat it anyway. Bianca’s sister, probably not much more than eighteen. The same age as Bianca when she walked into my life and almost immediately out of her own. A waif from the Moulin who, they said, never did anything from a pure motive, but who tried to help me on a case without any motive at all other than kindness. A quality so rare in those days most people didn’t recognise it when they saw it. I couldn’t save her – had to watch helplessly instead as they ran her over down at the harbour. And of all the cars in town they could have chosen to kill her with, they chose mine. So sleep alone, Ionawr, and don’t ask why; in case the answer you get is the simplest one: that three years ago I shared the same pillow with your sister. Captain Morgan stared at me. I didn’t know who he was but I could guess what he would be doing right now in my shoes. He winked and I turned the bottle round and forced my thoughts elsewhere, far away from Aberystwyth Prom, to Myfanwy, stuck with the creep Brainbocs in some cockroach-infested cantina in Patagonia. Singing those bittersweet ballads of love and loss to the half-Welsh half-Indian mestizos. On the front of the record cover, for no apparent reason, the characters were spaced out: M.Y.F.A.N.W.Y. Seven scarlet letters running through the seaside rock of my heart.