The Unbearable Lightness of Being in Aberystwyth

by Malcolm Pryce

  I put another fiver in Poxcrop’s pocket and ran for the train.

  They call it the train you take when your life has gone wrong. The Aberystwyth Cliff Railway. It creeps up the hill at the speed of lichen. You get off at the top, fortify yourself from a styrofoam cup with tea the colour and strength of a horse, and walk to Clarach. If Borth is the poor man’s Aberystwyth – and it isn’t – then Clarach is the poor man’s Borth. And that’s about as poor as you can get without selling a kidney. It’s not a one-horse town, not even a hoof, maybe the imprint left by a horseshoe nailed once long ago to a fence or maybe just a handful of oats.

  After a short walk over the hilltop you arrive at the top of a valley that the sun never kisses; never even shakes hands with or even acknowledges with a curt nod. On the way down you pass dung-caked sheep with contempt in their eyes. Animals so destitute they spend their whole lives on an incline, front legs higher than the back in the morning, back legs higher than the front in the afternoon, eating gorse and perhaps grass on special occasions; and they give you that look. Pity or contempt? It’s hard to tell but when the sheep lets out a loud blaaa and a fraction of a second later the whole hillside erupts in answering bleats you can’t stop yourself thinking: in your heart you know it’s impossible, but it sounds suspiciously like laughter.

  Down below, I found a few grubby bits of land on which caravans were anchored with bricks and strung together with a cat’s cradle of washing lines and TV aerials; white pebbles from the beach were laid out to signify territorial possession. The one store sold homogenised milk, the Daily Mirror, buckets and spades and suntan lotion in anticipation of the day when continental drift returned Clarach to the spot it had once occupied near the equator. Aeons ago it had been part of the supercontinent called Gondwanaland and the imprint of fossilised tropical ferns in the rocks of Constitution Hill testify to the good times that had been and may one day come again. But not this summer. And probably not the next.

  This was Clarach. For entertainment you can lose some money at the amusement arcade situated in a breeze-block room that anywhere else on earth would be called a garage. Or you can take a car out to the main road and drive fast over the humpbacked bridge near the church. Or, if the melancholy fit is upon you, you can walk to the patch of grit smeared against the land’s edge which the map describes as the beach and walk out to the end of the rocks and look to your left. If the tide is low enough, and you can go out far enough, you can see a little bit of Aberystwyth peeping out from behind the cliff. In that moment you regret all the bad things you ever said about her.

  I stood and rapped my knuckles on a caravan door that was thinner than the lid on a tin of throat lozenges. I waited and listened. A tinkling sound of chain came from the shed, and a rustle of straw. A dog whimpered. The shed door was ajar and I threw the bone in and knocked again on the caravan. Footsteps came from inside, a TV was turned down, and then the door opened and a rat ran out gasping for air.

  Leave a dish of clotted cream in the sun for a month and break the crust and breathe in. Then you’ll know what opening that door was like. It was like the mouth of a corpse opening and emitting a puff of air that has lain for weeks in the nutrientrich chamber of the decaying thorax. The hand that held the door open was clawed up with arthritis and clad in a fingerless mitt. The sort that is standard issue for people who fence stolen goods. The face that belonged to the mitts was half-concealed by the collar of a raincoat. I’d never met Mooncalf before but everything about him had a strange familiarity. His coat was the colour of a diseased lung used in those explicit anti-smoking posters they hang in doctors’ waiting rooms. His hair was from the leaflet the school nurse hands out about nits. His face was the one they use on the posters that warn kids not to accept sweets from strangers. He fished out a torch from inside his lung-coloured coat and shone it on the mark that Poxcrop had made on my hand. Then he beckoned me into his crypt. The air was so thick and rich and foetid you could chew it. After one breath you wanted to brush your teeth. And your nose. I followed him to the table at the far end. The curtains were closed and flies buzzed unseen in the darkness. On the table was a plate on which lay a slab of cheese. The cheese seemed to be pulsating and, as my eyes grew accustomed to the murk, I realised it was crawling with maggots. The surface of the table was stuck with fur like a half-sucked boiled sweet kept in a pocket for a month. He saw the shock on my face and explained,

  ‘I like a bit of company.’

  ‘Yeah, that’s the great thing about maggots, they’re not fussy.’

  ‘Take a seat.’

  I said I preferred to remain standing. I wanted to keep the minimum amount of surface area in contact with the caravan. At the moment it was just the soles of my feet and I could always burn the shoes.

  ‘I was just making a cuppa. Would you like one?’

  He poured tea into a cup smeared with green fur and plonked a spoon into a milk carton and ladled out a heaped spoonful.

  ‘No thanks, I’ve just had my lunch.’

  ‘How much money did you bring?’ he asked.

  ‘I’ve got enough. What is it you are selling?’

  ‘It costs a thousand pounds. I don’t want to deal with timewasters.’

  ‘I asked you what’ve you got.’

  ‘And I asked you how much you’ve got.’

  I pulled out what was left of the five hundred Bassett gave me. ‘There’s five hundred here, I can get the rest if I like what you’ve got. And skip the serial number check. Now show me.’

  He peered at the bundle of notes and nodded to himself. Then he walked down to the bed part of the caravan and pulled a roll of material down off the top of the wardrobe. He brought it over and placed it in my hands like a cloth merchant in an Arab bazaar.

  ‘It’s her winding sheet,’ he said.

  I looked at him with a face of childish horror. ‘Her what!?’

  ‘Winding sheet. Look.’ He took it off me and walked back to the other end of the caravan. There was a short washing line strung between the two walls. From it hung the decaying and threadbare rags that were his underlinen, grey and sepulchral like moth pupae fastened to the wall of a tomb. He pulled the underwear from the pegs with soft snapping sounds and pegged up the sheet. He came back and turned on a lamp that emitted a faint mauve light.

  ‘Ultra-violet,’ he explained. ‘See? Like the Shroud of Turin.’

  In the weird, otherworldly light a pattern became visible in the cloth. The faint, negative image of a girl lying full-length with her arms crossed upon her chest like a knight carved on a stone tomb.

  ‘She looks so peaceful, don’t you think?’

  ‘Where did you get it?’ I hissed.

  ‘It’s genuine, if that’s what you’re wondering.’

  ‘Where did you get it?’

  ‘I won’t say.’

  ‘I’ll beat it out of you.’

  ‘Be my guest. I’m not afraid to die. Are you?’

  ‘I’m serious.’

  ‘And so am I. Do you really want to risk your life by beating me up?’

  ‘You think you could kill me?’

  ‘I’m sure of it. All I need to do is give you a little bite. I’m like a komodo dragon. Have you heard of them? You find them on the island of Sumatra. Their saliva is so dirty that they just have to give their prey a little nip and wait for it to die of blood poisoning. It doesn’t take long.’ He giggled and made a token snap with his teeth in my direction. I jumped backwards and he giggled again. I rushed to the door and ran out choking on the fresh air. And then I fell to my knees and was sick.

  Two hours later, after having showered and scrubbed myself clean, I made a small pyre for my clothes on the beach near Constitution Hill. I was poking the fire with a stick when a man hailed me from the Prom and came hurrying up to me. It was Llunos.

  ‘If I’d have known,’ he said, ‘I would have brought some marshmallows to toast.’

  ‘You wouldn’t if you knew where these clothes have been. Hav
e you ever come across a man called Mooncalf?’

  Llunos jumped backwards and spluttered. ‘Mooncalf! You went to see Mooncalf? This is hazardous waste, mate, you shouldn’t be burning that here.’

  ‘You know him then?’

  ‘Oh yeah, I know Mooncalf. I never miss his cheese and wine parties.’

  ‘I’m serious.’

  ‘Small-time fence, deals in religious artefacts – icons, relics, things like that. Most of it junk palmed off on gullible old ladies. He trades off the myth that he’s somehow at a deeper level than the other fences in town, that he never gets arrested because the police don’t know about him. Truth is, the reason he never gets arrested is we do know about him. There are only so many things a man will do for a policeman’s salary. He keeps a dog chained up in the shed at the back – the whining keeps the neighbours awake. Talk about a dog’s life. You must have wanted a picture of the Virgin Mary pretty badly to go and see Mooncalf.’

  Llunos left me to my bonfire, telling me he’d put the Myfanwy locket on my desk and reminding me to get a permit to burn this sort of stuff next time. I poked the flames again with the stick and watched the sparks fly and wondered. Llunos usually knew about these things so if he said the guy was a fraud he no doubt was. And making a fake shroud probably isn’t all that hard. But one thing bothered me. I’d only held the shroud for a second or more. And now my hands smelled of bluebells.

  Chapter 9

  THERE WERE SOME unusual items on the desk when I got back from my bonfire. A locket. A pig’s head. A hammer. And a newspaper cutting sent by Meirion. I picked it up and read. It was a photocopy from their archives about the Nanteos fire.

  Behold Othniel Parry, a simpleminded mute who cleaned the stables. One of God’s children they said. He loved his horses and adored his mistress. In fifteen years he never so much as kicked the stable cat. And yet we are asked to believe that all of a sudden he took it into his head to climb into my lady’s bedchamber, ravish and brutally murder her, set the room afire, and then, calm as you like, pocket her gems and climb out of the window and down the ivy. And on what marvel of detective work are we supposed to build this credulity-straining hypothesis? The bumbling ineptitude of that oaf, Syracuse Obadiah Griffiths, the worse advertisement for this newfangled idea of a peeler that it is possible for human wit to conceive. And in support of this, nothing more substantial than the medical fact attested to by her physician, Dr Weevil, that Crangowen was found not to be virgo intacta. Certainly, if the rumours are to be believed, you will find no one who could speak with greater authority on the subject than Dr Weevil. We are not well versed with the classics down on Cambrian Street where this journal is printed so we tend to call a spade a spade. And a girl who puts herself about like our lady Cranogwen is – if we may make use of a term derived from French – known as a velocipede. And what are we to make of this curious piece of evidence, the bridle found under the mattress? Did the stable boy really leave it there, for reasons we only gawp at? Or do we prefer his version of events: that he was in the habit of lending it to the doctor who liked to indulge in a little horseplay with my lady? Sadly, none of this seems to matter one jot with the authorities and so we must prepare ourselves for a singularly unedifying prospect: that we shall hang for violating my lady’s honour the only man in the district innocent of the charge.

  Calamity came in from the kitchenette with a cup of tea.

  ‘I see the butcher called,’ I said, glancing at the pig’s head.

  ‘It’s what the Feds use, for blood-spatter analysis and things.’

  ‘The Feds?’

  ‘FBI. I was thinking about the marks on the wall above the bed. The legend says it’s ghostly blood – but it’s probably just damp. Just trying to eliminate it from the inquiry.’

  ‘Where does the pig fit in?’

  ‘You have to bludgeon him on the head with the hammer and examine the different blood-spatter patterns. The real forensic guys do it all the time. Pigs and humans have very similar bludgeon characteristics. I’m hoping to establish that the ghostly bloodstains are inconsistent with a frenzied assault.’

  ‘And what will that prove?’

  ‘I’m working on the theory that the ghost is a phoney, the work of agent or agents unknown, for purposes unknown.’

  I picked up the locket and walked to the door. ‘Are you really going to hit him with the hammer?’

  ‘I thought you would do it.’

  ‘I’m not hitting a pig with a hammer.’

  ‘I’ll put him in the fridge in case you change your mind.’

  ‘I won’t.’

  I walked down Canticle Street to the Aberystwyth Yesterday museum that had recently moved to the old Coliseum cinema. The girl told me Mr Lewis, the curator of the Myfanwy exhibits, was on the second floor. I climbed the narrow stairs that once led to the circle, and reflected on the long-lost Saturday mornings spent here absorbing the lesson that a man’s essential moral character is reflected in the colour of his cowboy hat. Today, amid the earthenware hot-water bottles in two shades of brown, and the bronze-age vistas in papier-mâché, the lessons were different but the didacticism hardly more subtle: Clip the sheepdog, who served the people of the town loyally and obediently and never bit anyone, now stuffed and put in a glass case as his reward. And Mr Lewis working on a new tableau entitled ‘Myfanwy’s Goodness’. He was trying to find the best position for a framed photo of her patting a guide dog. I asked him about the recent activity on the memorabilia black market and he pretended not to know anything about it. So I put the price of a few pints of beer in his top pocket and he recovered his memory. A number of items had been stolen recently from private collections. Of particular note was the essay written when she was nine entitled ‘My Idea of Heaven’. He pulled down a book and opened it to a page showing a photographic copy of the essay. It was only a fragment, most of the original manuscript having been lost, but the pieces that remained had been reassembled with the same painstaking care normally reserved for scraps of Babylonian papyrus. Mr Lewis ran his finger along the lines, and translated Myfanwy’s childish handwriting. ‘“My idea of Heaven. A house with a chocolate tree, a view from my bedroom of Borth, permission to play Kerplunk all day long …” All fairly conventional. But this is the interesting bit, here, see.’

  I leaned closer.

  ‘See this, just a fragment but fascinating. “Where we collected the white bones of Hector.”’ He beamed at me. ‘It’s a classical allusion. To The Iliad.’

  ‘The Iliad?’

  ‘Homer. The greatest Greek of all – Hector, Achilles, Ajax on the windy plains of Troy, two mighty nations at war for ten years over the hand of beautiful Helen. Quite appropriate in a way don’t you think?’

  ‘Are you sure it’s a reference to the ancient Greeks?’

  ‘No doubt about it. Book Twenty-four. Achilles and Priam, line 931.’

  ‘It doesn’t sound like her.’

  ‘It certainly overturns a lot of previous Myfanwy scholarship, that’s for sure.’

  ‘I don’t remember her reading much apart from the problem page in Just Seventeen.’

  ‘Hidden depths, Mr Knight. Hidden depths. One in the eye, don’t you think, for all those who sneered that she was thick?’

  I thanked him for his time and just before I left he gave me a photocopy of the essay.

  ‘It might help,’ he said.

  There was a stretched Austin Montego parked outside with blacked-out windows. I stood and admired and the rear window wound down in awkward jerks as someone inside struggled with a stiff handle.

  ‘It’s more impressive if they’re electric,’ I said.

  A man in a Swansea suit and aviator shades stared ahead and spoke to me out of the corner of his mouth.

  ‘Fancy a little ride, peeper?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Just a little ride and a chat, I’ve got a message from Ll.’

  ‘From who?’

  ‘Ll.’

  ‘Sorry?’


  ‘Ll.’

  ‘Sorry, I don’t understand.’

  The stooge turned to face me. ‘It’s his initial, like “M” or “Q”, the boss right?’

  ‘That’s not an initial, it’s two letters.’

  ‘Not in Welsh. It counts as one.’

  ‘It doesn’t, it’s a phoneme, it’s two.’

  ‘Just get in for fuck’s sake.’

  ‘Do I have any choice?’

  ‘We just want a word.’

  I walked round and got in the back. The car eased out into the traffic flow and turned left into North Parade.

  ‘So what’s his name then?’

  ‘Look, peeper, give us a break from the comedy.’

  ‘Why won’t you tell me?’

  ‘Because it’s a bloody secret, that’s why.’

  ‘Can’t be hard to guess if it begins with Ll. Llewellyn?’

  ‘Give over.’

  ‘Lloyd?’

  ‘Not even close.’

  ‘Llunos?’

  ‘That’s right. The boss of the criminal underworld is the chief of police.’

  ‘I bet you don’t know either.’

  ‘Yes I do.’

  ‘Llyr?’

  ‘Look we’re not going to tell you, so give up.’

  ‘Tell me what he’s the boss of then and maybe I can work it out.’

  ‘He’s the boss of everything. The whole town, now shut up.’

  We turned right and followed the one way to the station and then turned into the Devil’s Bridge train marshalling yards.

  ‘How come I’ve never heard of him?’

  The car pulled into a dirty red brick engine shed and stopped. They motioned me to get out.

  ‘You’re not important enough. He wants to give you a message for Llunos. This thing about closing the town down. It’s hurting our business. Tell Llunos we don’t know who took Myfanwy and to open up the town again otherwise he’ll be wearing a pair of concrete swimming trunks.’