The Unbearable Lightness of Being in Aberystwyth

by Malcolm Pryce

  ‘Mrs Gittins, we’ve known each other ten or fifteen years. You see me every week somewhere in town. Do you really think I need a room?’

  ‘That’s what people normally come to a guesthouse for.’

  ‘I want to talk to you about Gabriel Bassett.’

  ‘He’s not home.’

  ‘Can we come in and chat? I’ll pay for the gas.’

  Inside the small parlour, the gas fire hissed, and the air was hot and fuggy with stale frying smells and the cloying absence of a husband, now long gone either to his grave or some illusion of a better life in Shrewsbury. Somewhere in the direction of the kitchen there would be a sitting room preserved in silence, as little visited as a sealed pharaoh’s tomb, and reserved for special occasions the like of which never came to anyone who lived on this stretch of the Prom.

  ‘Is he a friend of yours?’

  ‘Yes, sort of.’

  ‘Hmmmm.’ She bid us sit down on the sofa and frowned deeply at the revelation that Gabriel Bassett had a friend. Normally, the lonely human flotsam that passed through her establishment seldom had such luxuries, especially ones that came visiting.

  ‘Hmmm, I’m not sure.’

  I took out a pound coin and let the Queen’s face catch the light. ‘As I said, I’ll be happy to pay for the gas.’

  She tilted her head back slightly and looked down her nose at the coin, nodding methodically as if slowly parsing the thought that my business with Gabriel must be respectable if I was willing to throw money around after it. In truth, the opposite was more likely to be the case. She took the coin.

  ‘I’m afraid you’re out of luck for all your fancy money, I haven’t seen him for a few days.’

  ‘How many days?’

  ‘I couldn’t say for sure because he has his own key, but it must be getting on for a week. I wasn’t too worried because he pays in advance. That’s partly why I let him take the room. Of course, if I’d known the sort of company he would keep I might have thought twice about it.’

  ‘I would have thought he would make an ideal tenant.’

  ‘That’s what I thought, too, but anyone can make a mistake. A man is judged by the company he keeps is what my late husband always used to say. Only intelligent thing he ever said.’

  I took out another coin. ‘Did he keep company, then, Mrs Gittins?’

  ‘No women if that’s what you’re thinking. I run a respectable house.’

  ‘Of course you do.’

  She took the coin. ‘If I’d known he was going to receive visits from people like that, I never would have shown him houseroom.’

  ‘People like what, Mrs Gittins?’

  ‘That fellah that robbed the Cliff Railway. Frankie Mephisto. They let him out early, didn’t they? Only been in twenty-five years, not much of a price to pay for a young girl’s life is it?’

  ‘I expect it feels a lot longer on the inside.’

  ‘Should have sent him to the gallows. I’m not a vindictive person, Mr Knight, like some of them other women in this street, but I’m a mother and I know how I would feel if I lost my daughter like that. She was only seventeen when it happened, still a child. Ever such a nice girl she was. Just like her mam, Mrs Prestatyn. Lord knows how she has suffered over the years. I know some people says she’s a bit sour now, but can you blame her? She never used to be like that I can tell you. She had a good heart she did. Worked her fingers to the bone for the St John’s Ambulance. Makes you wonder, doesn’t it? If this is her reward. Spends her life teaching the kiss of life and going to church every Sunday and the Lord takes her daughter from her and won’t even tell her where the poor thing is buried. And this gangster, Frankie Mephisto, comes over all repentant at the last minute so he can sweet-talk his way past St Peter. She says she’s going to bite his tongue out like in that movie in the Turkish prison. That’ll stop him. And I wouldn’t blame her neither.’

  ‘So Frankie Mephisto came to see Mr Bassett?’

  ‘That’s what I said, didn’t I?’

  ‘And when was this?’

  ‘Maybe three weeks ago.’

  ‘Do you know what they talked about?’

  ‘Of course I don’t. It was a private conference between the two. They even made the monkey leave the room. I didn’t like it much, though, I can tell you.’

  ‘But you don’t know what they spoke about?’

  ‘The door was closed.’

  I reached into my pocket and pulled out a fiver. ‘You couldn’t overhear anything on purpose, but sometimes you can’t avoid it, if you happen to be cleaning near the door. Not that you would want to listen, of course, but sometimes it can happen by accident. Especially if you were cleaning the keyhole. Most people don’t bother but I can see how spick and span you keep this place, Mrs Gittins, so I suspect you’re not the type to neglect a detail like that.’

  ‘I do like to keep a clean house, if that’s what you mean.’ She took the fiver. ‘It’s the little things like that that make the difference, isn’t it? A dirty keyhole is like grime on the cuffs, or not polishing the heels as well as the toes. A dead giveaway.’

  ‘That’s what I thought.’

  ‘Sometimes you can’t help but hear what goes on.’

  ‘Exactly.’

  ‘Even when you’d really rather not. But what choice do you have? You can’t close your ears like you can close your eyes, can you?’

  ‘So what did they talk about?’

  ‘I do seem to remember Frankie Mephisto had a big box with him covered by a cloth so you couldn’t see what was in it. It seemed quite important. Frankie Mephisto was saying how he had a job for Mr Bassett only he didn’t call him that, he called him Eli. And Mr Bassett said something like “Oh, I don’t know what you are talking about, I don’t know you, you must have made a mistake. My name is Bassett.” But, of course, Frankie Mephisto wasn’t having any of that and I don’t blame him neither, because, if he didn’t know who he was, why did he let him in and send the monkey out of the room?’

  ‘Good point, Mrs Gittins.’

  ‘So then Mr Bassett says, “What you got in that box under your arm, then?” And Frankie said, “I don’t want to show you what I’ve got in this box. And what’s more I won’t need to because you are going to help me on this job without me having to show you.” And Mr Bassett said again he didn’t know what he was talking about and Frankie laughed and said, “I don’t believe you, Eli. Old Frankie is not a mug. People who take a favour from Frankie Mephisto are warned in the clearest possible terms of the consequences of their debt. No escape is allowed, including loss of memory, feigned or real. The only loss of memory that has any currency is if I lose mine. And then you are all off the hook. But my memory is functioning perfectly and I remember you Eli Cloyce as if you were my brother. So my recommendation to you is, if you have lost your memory you had better find it again quick. And I make this recommendation safe in the knowledge that your loss of memory is bollocks, the oldest trick in the book, a book that Frankie Mephisto read cover to cover years ago and threw in the bin.” Well, of course, those aren’t the exact words but near enough.’

  ‘And then what happened?’

  ‘Then Mr Bassett started sort of pleading with him and saying things like, “No, no, Mr Mephisto, you have made a mistake, I am not the man you think I am, I can’t help you with this job.” And Mr Mephisto said … he said …’ Mrs Gittins frowned as she hammed up the posture of a woman struggling to remember. ‘Now what did he say, let me see, what was it now?’

  I tucked another fiver into the breast pocket of her housecoat. ‘I hope your memory is better than your acting, Mrs Gittins.’

  ‘Oh yes, now I remember, he said, “Eli, look at me, Frankie. Frankie, remember? All those years we spent together, don’t try and tell me you don’t remember Frankie Mephisto, because he remembers you and he has a job for you.” And Mr Bassett said, “I can’t do it, Frankie, I can’t.” And Mr Mephisto said, “If you won’t think of yourself, Eli, think of the little mon
key who is sitting so patiently outside this door. Do you really want to hurt her? That nice little monkey?” And Mr Bassett said, “No, you leave her out of this, Frankie.” And Frankie said, “Well, Eli, I don’t want to bring her into this, God knows I don’t want to hurt the little monkey, but what choice do I have? I’ve tried being nice but it doesn’t seem to be working, so why don’t we have a look in the box? The box I had so hoped we wouldn’t have to look in. But, ah, such is life. What are we all but poor wayfarers on the Via Dolorosa?” And there was a pause and then Mr Bassett cried out and Frankie said, “Everything’s arranged, Eli. My boys will collect you. And please don’t insult me by trying to leave town.” That was it really.’

  We thanked Mrs Gittins and walked back along the Prom towards the Pier.

  ‘So what have we got?’ said Calamity.

  ‘It looks to me,’ I said, ‘like we now have the set. I’m not sure what it’s a set of, but I’m sure it’s a set of something. We have Frankie Mephisto smiling beatifically at Ynyslas the day she disappeared. I suppose he must have slipped away from his community service at the library to drive there. And we have him experiencing an epiphany in the presence of Myfanwy fifteen years ago. We have Sister Cunégonde at the Waifery who is Frankie’s brother and is being blackmailed by him. And we have a man turning up in our office the day Myfanwy disappears, a strange man with an even stranger request, to solve a mystery which he is willing to pay five hundred in cash up front to have solved by a certain date. The mystery seems to concern a crime committed 150 years ago involving a bent cop. It turns out our friend Bassett is an old friend of Frankie Mephisto. And, although he pretends to have lost his memory, he nonetheless seems to remember this acquaintance. The man we need to talk to is Mr Gabriel Bassett. Clearly he knows more than he is saying because so far he hasn’t said a damn thing.’

  ‘What if he doesn’t want to talk to us?’

  ‘Then I am afraid it is time for us to take off our white hat, Calamity, and put on the grey one with the footprint on the brim.’

  How could we find a way to lean on Bassett? It was simple really. Just ask Torquemada. Bassett loved Cleopatra and she loved her missing son, Mr Bojangles, and the person who might be able to tell us about him was Professor Haywire – hobo, neuroscientist at the college, and one-time adviser to the space programme. I’d seen him recently working at the crazy golf as the resident pro. I wasn’t sure how we would make him talk, but one of the golf clubs might come in handy. We walked down to Smith’s in Terrace Road to pick up a Stanley Gibbons catalogue and then doubled back to the crazy golf course.

  He put clubs and score cards on to the counter without looking up from the book he was reading. Behind him hung the tattered placard, ‘Aberystwyth Crazy Golf. You don’t have to be mad to work here but it helps.’

  I cleared my throat. ‘Professor Haywire?’

  He looked up, his old watery eyes slightly bewildered at being called professor after so long.

  ‘It’s fifty pence each. No reductions for minors.’

  ‘We don’t want to play, we wanted to ask you some questions.’

  ‘Questions is it? What would they be about then?’

  ‘About the old days, working on the space programme.’

  He looked at his watch with the vain air that it might be lunchtime. It was 10.30. The worst time of all for a man like Haywire: too late for breakfast, too early for lunch. A time when only bank tellers eat.

  ‘Answering questions is hungry work,’ he said.

  ‘These aren’t hard questions.’

  ‘That’s for me to decide.’

  ‘It’s not really a mealtime at the moment, though.’

  ‘Elevenses.’

  We walked to the Cabin and ordered some sandwiches and listened patiently as he spoke through mouthfuls of food.

  ‘I guess you want to hear about the monkeys. Most people do. “Can they really talk?” they ask.’

  ‘It is hard to believe.’

  ‘Of course. Some people say impossible. The people from the philosophy department certainly did. They used to say, “Imagine we made a machine with three buttons: one red, one green and one blue. Then we teach a dog to press the buttons with his paw. Now imagine he presses on the green, the red and the blue in that order and nothing happens. Then he presses on the blue, the red and the green and the machine gives him a bone. So he does it again. And he gets another bone. After ten tries he knows the only sequence worth a bone is blue, red, green. Now you write the words Give, Me, and Food on the blue, the red and the green. Someone else comes in and sees the dog press out the sentence ‘Give me food’ and the machine feeds him a bone. Hey presto,” they said, “he’s learned to speak. But does he really understand language or have you just trained him to make noises that sound like speech?” They were a bunch of gits in that department. We said, “OK, smart alecks, why don’t you make your little machine and see what you get?” And they said, “Oh, we don’t need to, it’s a thought experiment.” And we said, “Sure that’s always the way with you people, isn’t it? You sit around jabbering all day asking things like how do I know the colour I see as green in my head is the same colour that you see as green in yours? Whereas we go and make our machine and send it into space.” Assholes.’

  ‘Did all the people working on the project know sign language?’

  ‘No, we had Mrs Watkins from the deaf school working with us at Mission Control. She translated. The wise-guys from the philosophy department gave us a hard time about that too. They said, “You’re breaking the frontiers of science here, going where no man has gone before, making new discoveries that may change our understanding of the Cosmos for ever, but how do you know Mrs Watkins isn’t a liar?”’

  Haywire shook his head in frustrated recollection and then bent down towards the plate and scooped the last crumbs into his mouth with his fingers.

  I took out the Stanley Gibbons catalogue and opened it to the commemorative stamp of Major Tom. ‘Do you remember this little guy?’

  He glanced down at it. ‘They all look the same in them suits.’

  ‘We know it’s a long time ago, but if you could just try.’

  He considered for a second and then gave a slight shrug. He picked up the plate and licked it clean, saying, ‘He never made it back. Oxygen ran out.’

  ‘How can you be so sure?’

  ‘Oxygen ran out on all of them. It was designed that way.’

  Calamity gasped. ‘But that’s horrible. Why couldn’t you give them some oxygen to come home?’

  ‘I know. To a lay person it doesn’t make sense. You’d think the trip back would cost the same as the outward journey, just like the train to Shrewsbury. But it doesn’t work that way. It’s all to do with the weight of the payload, and the weight of the fuel, every extra gram you want to send up, every extra second it has to be there, the costs rise exponentially, which is a mathematical term meaning “a fuck of a lot”. Add a few more kilos of fuel, plan for the return journey, and well it turns out cheaper to get a new monkey. We never told them that, though. It helped having monkeys who knew about sign language rather than maths.’

  ‘So, they just run out of air?’

  ‘It was the only way. Even if they’d come back what were we supposed to do? Send an aircraft carrier to the South Pacific to pick them up? Read your history – all those dogs and chimps the Russians and Americans sent up in the Sixties, how come none of them made it back? It’s all about money. Research always comes down to that in the end.’

  ‘Seems a crummy way to treat the little guys for all their loyalty and hard work,’ I said.

  The old professor flinched, ‘I’m not proud of it, but I don’t spend the long winter nights grieving about it neither, my life’s already lousy enough. And, if you really want to know, it was a pretty crummy way to treat the humans as well. Look at what happened to me: world-renowned neuroscientist, and now scratching a living on the crazy golf circuit. At least when the project was wound up they sent
the chimps for vocational training. What did I get? A letter saying I had to clear my desk by noon.’ He stood up to leave and I grabbed the sleeve of his coat. ‘Major Tom had a son called Mr Bojangles. Do you know what happened to him?’

  He jerked his sleeve free and walked briskly past us and through the door, snarling, ‘Even if I did, why should I give a damn?’

  Chapter 15

  THE DONKEYS WERE tethered to the side of the kiosk but there was no Eeyore. Cadwaladr was there instead, putting nose bags on them. He told me that Eeyore had rushed off when he received word that Miss Muffet had turned up at the stable. She was a bit bedraggled and thinner, he said, and had lost an ear in a fight but otherwise she was OK. And best of all, she was with foal.

  ‘Never guess who else was here yesterday,’ Sospan said over his shoulder as he watched the fluted torrent of ice loop and twirl into the cone. I wondered what they put in it to make it so shiningly, translucently white, whiter even than Dulux gloss paint. Whiter than the smiles of the starlets in the What-the-Butler-Saw movie studios. It had to be a chemical, nothing natural ever looked so pure.

  ‘Surprise me then,’ I said.

  ‘Frankie Mephisto, the gangster. Came up to the kiosk cool as you like and ordered an ice. Said he’d been waiting twenty-five years for this moment. Dreaming of it every day.’

  ‘And I bet you gave him credit, didn’t you?’

  Sospan looked a bit uncomfortable. ‘What would you have done?’

  I bought an ice for Cadwaladr and went to lean against the railings and savour the bright windy day. For once I wanted to think about nothing. Nothing at all. Like a donkey with its face in the bag.

  The stiff breeze raised goosebumps on the flesh of my arm and some quality in the glitter of light on the sea brought unbidden the soft melancholy of summer afternoons in childhood. That moment when the heat loses its edge and with a stomach sick with ice cream, and hair lank with salt, you roll up wet trunks in a soggy, gritty towel and climb the steps home. At the top you always paused, like Lot’s wife, and something about the late afternoon light on the sea, whose shade of blue had inexplicably deepened, would catch at the heart and whisper of pleasures still to be sucked from the rind of the day. Perhaps that was how Brainbocs felt from that vantage point on the Prom. The day that still haunts him when he saw Myfanwy in the soft love-play of adolescence. Who could blame him if his heart had never recovered from the blow? There was a basic design flaw in the universe: God had ordered something strong and durable to create the human heart, like carbon fibre, or polypropylene, and they’d sent flesh by mistake. Just a mix-up in despatch. No one was to blame, could have happened to anybody.