Last Tango in Aberystwyth

by Malcolm Pryce

  ‘And she had no sense of humour, either! After we laughed at her she wouldn’t talk to us. I mean, just imagine it! Putting on airs like that and thinking you’re a somebody when you don’t even have a mum or dad! So then Clarissa – that’s me and Morgana’s friend – called her a chimney sweep and, dear Lord! Do you know what she did? She punched Clarissa in the mouth. Unbelievable! So of course we had to report her. It was for her own good, wasn’t it? That’s when she made the allegations.’

  ‘What allegations?’

  ‘Well … you know!’

  ‘About the Dean?’

  ‘She was a lying bitch.’

  ‘What did he do? Make a pass at her?’

  ‘Not only him, quite a few of them. Men! I don’t know. See a girl in a short skirt and they can’t control themselves, worse than goats, aren’t they? But it wasn’t true of course.’

  ‘Oh of course.’

  ‘No really!’

  ‘How do you know?’

  She rolled her eyes as if the answer was obvious. ‘Oh come on, Dean Morgan wasn’t like that!’

  ‘So you keep saying. What did this girl look like?’

  ‘Oh I don’t know. Tall I suppose, with long blonde hair, and … and …’

  ‘Was she pretty?’

  She sniffed. ‘She might have been, I suppose, in a cheap, slatternly sort of way –’

  ‘Very pretty? Sexy even?’

  ‘Some people said so but I could never see it myself.’

  ‘But she wore a short skirt?’

  ‘How do I know what she wore! I can’t remember.’

  ‘You just told me she did.’

  ‘No I didn’t.’

  ‘OK, forget it, what was her figure like?’

  She flushed. ‘Oh please!’

  ‘Come on, you’re a grown-up, aren’t you? Tell me what she was like!’

  ‘But … but I don’t … how am I supposed …’

  ‘She had a figure like an hour-glass, didn’t she?’

  ‘See, you’re just like all the rest, typical!’

  ‘All the rest of what?’

  ‘Men.’

  ‘Which men? The ones at the college?’

  She didn’t answer.

  ‘Look you might as well tell me, I’ll find out anyway. She was blonde and cute and had curves in all the right places, yes? And she was a bit wild and all those dusty pieces of human parchment at Lampeter in their silly black hats drooled like dogs at a butcher’s window whenever she appeared, isn’t that right?’

  Gretel banged her fist on the desk. ‘No it wasn’t like that! It wasn’t, it wasn’t!’

  ‘And all the rest of you girls were jealous and so you ganged up on her –’

  ‘No! We didn’t! She was a horrid, low-class orphan and she had to leave and we all said good riddance!’ And with that, Gretel stormed out.

  *

  About half an hour after Gretel left for her haunting tutorial the Philanthropist’s butler turned up. I was sitting staring at the ceiling doing a rough piece of mental arithmetic – it’s an exercise I frequently do with my clients and involves guessing certain building dimensions then working out the approximate size of the client’s belfry and then computing the amount of bats in it. Then I put clients in order of bat population. Gretel had just gone straight into the charts at number one.

  The butler wore an old-fashioned coat, a bit like the ones worn by the Beefeaters in the Tower of London but black in colour as opposed to red. He also wore a stubby top-hat like a sawn-off stovepipe. He had mutton-chop whiskers, reading specs perpetually in his hands, a face that managed to be intelligent, obsequious and calculating all at the same time, and he spoke with an artificial plum in his mouth in a language that was vaguely reminiscent of Jeeves and yet which couldn’t quite disguise, for all the exaggerated English country manor of it, his Welsh origins. If I’d ordered a Welsh butler straight from a catalogue he would have been it.

  We shook hands and he told me he represented the Philanthropist who had recently purchased the old sanatorium and he had come on an errand on his behalf. I offered him some rum and he accepted and I duly filled up two glasses.

  ‘The Philanthropist is a great collector of various things – ornaments, antiques, knick-knacks and memorabilia …’

  ‘How charming.’

  ‘Indeed. In particular he is an avid collector of all sorts of memorabilia concerning a certain nightclub singer, one known to you, I’m sure. Myfanwy Montez.’

  I managed to keep almost all trace of a reaction at bay but there was the slight narrowing of the eyelids and the tightening of my grip upon the rum tumbler. I don’t know which one he noticed. It hardly mattered.

  His voice had a wheedling, insinuating tone that I took exception to. ‘Yes I see the name is not without an effect on you.’

  ‘What do you want?’

  ‘My master has bought up a lot of the usual stuff on the market. Signed record covers, posters, programmes, evening gowns, etcetera. But he finds his hunger undiminished. He is looking for something more intimate and personal, evidence of the private Myfanwy rather than the public persona. It is known that you had an affair with her …’

  I stood up and walked around the desk and took hold of his glass and pulled it out of his hand.

  ‘Don’t get me wrong, Mister Knight –’

  ‘I’m getting you wrong so loud it’s making my ears hurt.’

  ‘The Philanthropist would pay handsomely. Perhaps an item of clothing left behind such as a T-shirt or a sock … or even something more evocative … shall we say, moist and intensely fragrant –’

  I grabbed his coat collar and dragged him upwards from his chair offering him the choice of leaving under his own steam or under mine. He chose his own, but I gave him some help from my foot anyway.

  Ten minutes later Bill and Ben turned up. It was a busy afternoon. All I needed now was a new client and I’d have full house. They’d brought me a Quietus witness form to sign.

  ‘OK,’ I said, ‘you know what the deal is. Tell me about the Dean.’

  The two old men swapped glances and then Bill spoke, ‘If we tell you, you sign the form, right?’

  ‘If I like what you tell me.’

  They looked confused. ‘But you saw it, you saw the Quietus!’

  ‘Some days I think I saw it, some days I think it was just the wind whistling, amigo. Which day it is today is up to you, but get on with it, I’m bored of talking to you.’ They both drew themselves up and said defiantly, ‘He went to join the Johnnys.’

  ‘He did what?’

  ‘He went to be a Johnny – a Clown’s Johnny,’ explained Ben.

  ‘He wanted to join the circus, you see.’

  ‘Just like them all. They all want to do that. We see them, don’t we?’

  Bill nodded. ‘All the time. Everyone wants to be a lion tamer.’

  ‘Or walk a tightrope.’

  ‘Or eat fire.’

  ‘Or even just balance balls on the sealion’s nose.’

  ‘But all they get to do is be the lousy Johnny.’

  ‘But of course, what they don’t realise is, there’s only one way into the circus …’

  ‘Oh yeah, and what’s that?’

  They hesitated. Some strange force was holding them back.

  ‘Go on! What is it?’

  ‘We can’t say.’

  ‘You want the prize for reporting the Quietus, don’t you?’

  ‘Of course we do, but we can’t say, it’s rude!’

  ‘OK, suit yourselves. I’ve got three other ventriloquists coming round later on. I’ll sign their Quietus forms instead.’

  Bill leaped up and shouted, ‘No! You big swine! We got there first!’

  ‘So what’s the only way of getting into the circus?’

  ‘OK then, you asked for it,’ said Bill. ‘It’s … it’s … it’s through a lady’s thingummy!’

  ‘A lady’s thingummy?’

  ‘We don’t know the proper n
ame,’ said Ben. ‘It’s Latin.’

  I took out my pen and signed the form.

  Chapter 7

  MEICI MOONDUST LAUGHED. ‘Basically,’ he said, ‘the only route into the circus is through the birth canal. You have to be born into it, you see, born to a family of maniacs. A family so fucked-up they have you on the tightrope as soon as you can crawl. People who buy you sequins for your birthday and a safety net for Christmas.’ He lifted the cornet above his head and adroitly licked the globules of melted vanilla as they ran down before they reached his knuckles. ‘If you can’t do the act, whatever it is, absolutely perfectly by the time you are four you’ll never be good enough for the circus. But you’ll always be good enough to be Mr Johnny. He’s the stooge, you see. All he does is have pies put in his face or ladders swung round at him, or he gets slapsticked on his arse all season. The only reason the job even exists is because after years of taking it themselves the clowns decided they’d had enough and created the post of Mr Johnny. And people queue up for it.’ Meici Moondust turned aside and spat. ‘When I was a compère out at the Kamp I saw five or six get off the train from Shrewsbury every month. Accountants and clerks and insurance salesmen … you name it.’ He spat again. ‘Clown’s Johnny. If you see one look the other way.’

  *

  Calamity and I stepped over the remains of the demolished wall and on to the field of cleared debris that had once been Woolie’s. A thriving market had grown up in the rubble.

  ‘I just can’t believe it’s gone,’ said a confused old lady.

  ‘Neither can any of us,’ said the woman from the Saint John’s Ambulance Brigade.

  ‘It’s been a terrible blow for everyone.’

  ‘We used to come to Woolie’s every year. Used to drive all the way from Walsall.’

  ‘A lot of people did.’

  ‘They said I was daft because I work in Woolie’s in Walsall. But it’s nice to have a change, isn’t it? And now it’s been washed away.’

  ‘Drink your Bovril love, drink your Bovril – you’ll be all right.’

  We ordered some tea from a stall and Calamity took out her list. ‘Bucket, spade, mess-tin …’

  ‘We need a mess-tin?’

  ‘That’s what it says in the brochure.’

  ‘This is scarier than I thought.’ As a sleuth in Aberystwyth I generally went undercover a lot less than people imagined. And when I did it was usually to dress as someone come to read the meter or something. Not as a means to go and stay at Kousin Kevin’s Krazy Komedy Kamp in Borth. The brochure was specific on this point: Children and pets welcome. No private investigators.

  ‘Why can’t we just go and talk to the Johnnys down at the pub in the village?’ asked Calamity glumly, even though she knew the answer.

  ‘They don’t allow them out. You know that.’

  The first spots of rain fell from the dim, grey sky.

  She tutted with resignation. ‘I suppose we’d better learn our catchphrases then. The first one’s “Bore da! How’s your pa!”’

  I winced. Calamity dug me in the ribs. ‘Go on, say it.’

  ‘OK, then, here goes,’ I said as if about to swallow medicine. ‘Bore da! How’s your pa!’

  ‘Yeah not bad,’ said Calamity, ‘but try and sound more as if you mean it.’

  The windscreen wipers made a gloomy whine and our spirits sank lower and lower as Aberystwyth receded in the rear-view mirror. We drove over Penglais Hill and down through Bow Street, turning left at the garage for Borth. Calamity skimmed through the brochure.

  ‘Do you believe the stories about this place?’

  ‘Which ones?’

  ‘The one about the zoo?’

  ‘I’ve heard a few about the zoo.’

  ‘They say an animal charity donated some toys and the monkeys gave them to the holidaymakers out of pity.’

  ‘I heard last winter all the animals got eaten.’

  ‘What about the one about the birds not singing?’

  Before I could answer we rounded the bend and saw the outline of the Kamp up ahead. Suddenly, unaccountably, we stopped talking, as if we had just walked into the room in a haunted house where once, long ago, someone had been walled up alive.

  ‘Gulp!’ said Calamity.

  A guard checked our reservation at the first checkpoint and then raised the red-and-white painted bar and waved us on. A quarter of a mile further on we were at the main Kamp perimeter. We parked and, as thousands of holidaymakers before us must have done, looked up at the grim wrought-iron gates and above them, written in the same black iron, the words, ‘Welcome to Kevin’s’.

  After we’d checked in and spread the straw out in our room we went for a walk round. The place was quiet, maybe because it was low season or because most of the inmates were off on a work party. The enamel hot dog sign squeaking in the wind, the doors banging and the newspapers gusting across the cheap concrete crazy paving lent a strange unsettling air to the place. Like a ghost town, or … or … Calamity put her finger on it: ‘Everyone’s been abducted aboard a UFO.’ We walked into a store selling milk and newspapers to ask directions. It was open but empty, no customers and no one behind the counter. We moved across to the amusement arcade. It seemed even emptier, the bingo section shrouded in a gloom that suggested it had been many years since the lights flashed and a river of prizes fell into the excited laps of chip-guzzling families from the Midlands.

  In the centre of the Kamp we found a darkened entertainment complex. Rows of seats set in clusters round tables in arrangements intended to disguise the fact that the seats had been bought wholesale from a cinema. There was also a stage with the curtain down. Finally in an adjoining saloon we found some human beings. A clown sat hunched over the bar guzzling glasses of vodka. The barman in a tatty magenta blazer filled it up each time without asking. We sat at the bar, a couple of stools down. They both looked at us with a glare of hostility before returning to their drinks.

  ‘Can I get you men a drink?’ I asked cheerily.

  The clown halted his glass midway to his mouth and looked inquiringly at the barman. The barman gave a tiny almost imperceptible shrug. The clown slowly turned to me. He wore a filthy lime-green jacket with orange patches crudely stitched on. Underneath there was no shirt, just a grubby vest, with food stains on it. His face had a U-bend of a laughing mouth painted on in bright red, but his real mouth was set in a bitter sneer that went in the opposite direction, as if one of the mouths was a reflection in water of the other.

  *

  I gestured to the barman to give the clown a drink. ‘And one for yourself – that’s if you drink while you’re on duty.’

  Wordlessly the barman poured the clown a drink, then himself one, knocked it back and washed the glass.

  Finally the clown spoke. ‘Just because I take your drink doesn’t make you my friend.’

  I shrugged.

  ‘It doesn’t mean I like you.’

  ‘Of course! it means you like to drink.’

  ‘Exactly. If I said no, I would be cutting off my nose to spite my face. You wouldn’t want me to do that, would you?’

  ‘You never know, it might be an improvement.’

  Calamity nudged me and pointed at a woman passing the window. She walked, almost marched, with military stiffness and wore a Prussian-blue tunic and matching skirt set off by a well-polished Sam Browne belt. The left sleeve of her tunic swung emptily. I said to the barman, ‘Isn’t that Mrs Bligh-Jones from the Meals on Wheels?’

  He pretended to glance over his shoulder and without even looking said, ‘No that’s Mrs Parker from Mansfield.’

  I screwed up my eyes. ‘No I’m sure it’s Mrs Bligh-Jones. You can tell because she’s only got one arm.’

  ‘No you’re wrong, mate.’

  ‘But you didn’t look.’

  ‘Yes I did.’

  She walked up to a chalet and the door opened. A man stood in the doorway in a dressing-gown. It was Jubal.

  ‘Doesn’t half look
like Mrs Bligh-Jones to me; and that’s Jubal isn’t it?’

  The barman leaned across and grabbed my chin in the vice of his index finger and thumb, jerked my face towards his and said in a cold, bitter voice, ‘Are you calling me a liar?’

  I snatched my face free and signalled with my eyes to Calamity that it was time to try somewhere else. We walked out and carried on walking into the centre of the dreary Kamp.

  We passed a small collection of fairground rides, the horses and miniature spaceships covered with dusty tarpaulins. There was a flash of movement from behind the centre of the carousel. It was a little girl, grubby and bedraggled, her hair long and wild and matted; she must have been one of the feral children said to live on the fringes of the Kamp. On seeing us she darted behind one of the cars. We stopped and I crouched down and called to her. Slowly she moved forward and peered at us from behind a prancing pony.

  ‘Are your mummy and daddy around?’ I asked.

  She shook her head.

  ‘Are you on your own?’

  She nodded.

  ‘We’re looking for the clown’s Johnny. Do you know what that is?’

  She nodded.

  ‘Will you take us to him?’

  She considered.

  ‘I’ll give you some money to buy a hot dog.’

  She nodded and scampered off, assuming without even bothering to check that we would follow. We did.

  The colony of Johnnys was located towards the back of the Kamp, in the cages that had formerly housed the animals. There were four of them, sitting idly about on upturned boxes and staring boredly into space. None of them wanted to talk to us, but eventually a man who said I could call him Bert came to the bars. I showed him the picture of the Dean and he confirmed that he had been a Johnny for a while.

  ‘But he had no interest in learning the art,’ said Bert morosely. ‘He was just a dilettante. Kept going on about the fact that he was a professor and deserved better. I mean, big deal! I used to be an actuary but I don’t ram it down your throat –’ The man stopped suddenly, his attention distracted. I heard the sound of feet scraping deliberately on the pavement behind me and the miasma of cheap aftershave enveloped me. I turned and found myself face to face with a thin bony man in a black tie and dinner jacket. Next to him stood two Kamp security guards twirling their nightsticks. One of them went up to the bars and ran the truncheon along like a child rattling a stick along some railings. Bert leaped back and joined his friends.