by Gwyn Thomas
‘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 rebellion 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 following 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 giving 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 healing work there is a flash of discomfort, and I have known surprised 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 scalloped 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 moving 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 have 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 Discussion 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 ‘Hallelujah 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.’
‘Put a light to Coleman’s fuse and shock Humphries out of his wits, you mean?’
‘No, no, no! Nothing like that at all.’
‘But isn’t Humphries dead against the bands? Isn’t his task to morally advise them clean out of existence?’
‘Not altogether. He says that while they strike him as pretty squalid, if they take people’s minds off class rancour, agnosticism and the Sankey award, he’s for them, always hoping for the day, he says, when the people generally will find the same release he does in a good funeral or a long argument about Baptism. So why don’t we approach Humphries and explain that Cynlais and his boys are puritans at heart and want nothing better than to get hold of some decent, God-fearing costumes so that they can turn out looking less repulsive and frightening to the pious. We could also add that Cynlais has given up his old promiscuity since he came across Moira Hallam and swallowed that draught of Caney’s cure. Then we can tap Humphries for some cash. He must have a soft side to his nature or he wouldn’t keep all those birds in his front room.’
Teilo Dew and Gomer stared at the chessboard and the stagnant pieces as if they found this game as inscrutable as they had always found Humphries.
‘Your mind’s just singing, Milton,’ said Gomer. ‘From what I know of Humphries he probably keeps those birds in his front room just to test for gas. When the birds die Humphries changes the potted shrubs and chalks up a new cautionary text on the wall. He was the grumpiest boy I ever met behind a counter, although I will say that iron at all levels is a pretty sombre trade. He was
the one ironmonger who sold paraffin that put out the match. But let’s go and see him anyway.’
Gomer and Milton left Teilo to brood over the blockage in the chess game and picked up Uncle Edwin who was sitting in the Reading Room humming a mossy old funeral chant over a brassily authoritative leading article in a national paper that was open in front of him. He invited Gomer and Milton to scan this article. They rushed their eyes down it. The writer had been dealing with the carnival bands and frankly felt that there was something potentially threatening to the State in having such masses of men, with nothing better to do, moving about the streets in march time. He suggested that a monster carnival to end all carnivals be organised, set it in motion with a strong platoon of Guards in the rear to ensure no getaways, then keep the whole procession in motion until it reached the South Pole where they could swap bits of political wisdom with the penguins. When Gomer and Milton finished reading the article they joined Uncle Edwin in humming the last verse of the funeral chant, coming out clearly with the words of the last line which praised the dignity and cheapness of the grave.
‘But never mind about that now,’ said Gomer. ‘Milton has an idea that Ephraim Humphries might supply the money to drag Coleman and his band up into the temperate zone.’
Edwin was not enthusiastic. He said about the only thing he could recommend in the case of Humphries was a load of hot clinker for the man’s bleaker and colder urges, but he responded to the glow of enthusiasm in Milton Nicholas’ face and we started the journey across the town to the house of Ephraim Humphries.
Humphries lived in one of a group of larger houses on some high ground just outside the town’s west side. There was a diamond-shaped pane of dark blue glass in the centre of his door which created an effect exactly halfway between sadness and intimidation. After our first knock we could see Humphries and his wife take up position in the passageway. They peered out at us and it was plain they felt no happiness or confidence at the sight of us. There was an open fanlight above the door through which we could hear most of what they said. They were speaking in whispers but whispers bred on long years in oratorio.