‘They say you shouldn’t.’
‘Sure.’
‘I don’t usually drink. It made me feel sick.’
And then she was. I tried to reposition her so she could throw up over the ledge of the pavement, onto the beach, but it wasn’t easy. She didn’t have the will to try, so the stuff flowed down over her shoulder. I took out a handkerchief and wiped her mouth. I brushed a wet straw of hair aside; her tear-stained cheeks glistened in the streetlamp.
‘Better?’
She nodded. ‘Louie?’
‘Yes?’
‘Kiss me.’
I tried not to react.
‘Just for Christmas. A Christmas kiss. I’ve never had one. Please.’
I bent forward into the fumes of her ammoniac breath and gave her a peck on the corner of her mouth.
She smiled. ‘Thank you.’
I helped her to her feet, rearranged her coat, like a mother getting a kid ready for school.
‘Louie, let’s go away.’
The sinews of my body stiffened.
‘Take me away, now, tonight. We could go to Shrewsbury, or London. I’ve got fifty pounds in the bank. You can have it . . .’ The words trailed off. ‘Louie.’
‘It’s not possible.’
‘Why?’
‘It just isn’t.’
‘You said you liked me.’
‘I do.’
‘It’s because of her, isn’t it? Myfanwy?’
I thought for a second. I was about to deny it, but that felt like a betrayal. ‘It’s because of her and lots of things. I said I liked you, that doesn’t mean—’
She jerked herself away from me and said, ‘I was going to tell you about Hoffmann, but I’m never ever ever ever going to tell you now, you bastard. Never.’
She waddled drunkenly off along the sugar-white railings of the Prom, that railway line where they shunt human woe all through the night.
When Lorelei returned she looked stricken; maybe that was normal after a trick. She gave me a slight nod and we left. Outside the Old College she said, ‘Hang on a sec,’ and pulled an eye dropper from her bag. She tilted her head back and let some drops fall onto her glass eye. ‘Artificial tears. My tear ducts don’t work – it’s called Sjögren’s syndrome.’ She strode off, newly wetted eyes glistening like a rain-slicked street after a storm. I followed thinking, In Aberystwyth it’s not just the harlot’s smile that is bought.
Chapter 17
IT WAS A QUIET night in the Pier arcade. The machines flashed unattended. The evening bingo had finished and the midnight game was still a couple of hours away. The money-changer girl sat in her booth, watching a portable TV that had once been a prize in the bingo. We walked past her, past the video games, towards the back and the more traditional machines. A lone man sat on a stool in front of a glass case, inside which sat a crudely articulated doll of a policeman. You put in a shilling and the doll became animated and laughed. The laughter was staccato and unconvincing, the movement not much more than a shake, the eyes blue and wooden; and that was all. After a minute or so the laughter stopped and you put in another coin.
The man who sat on the stool wore a cloth cap and a tan tartan scarf like the coats that pampered lapdogs wear. His raincoat was old and greasy. He was thin and hunched on the stool, his expression blank like the face of a statue in a public square whose features have been worn away by wind and rain. The only part of him that moved or exuded a sign of warmth or ability to emote was white and protruded from the breast pocket of his coat. It was a mouse. When the policeman’s laughter reached its zenith the man would look down at the mouse and the mouse, whose eyes were glittering with enjoyment, would break off gazing at the policeman and peep up at the man and there passed between them a look of complicit understanding; as if there was a secret to this pastime, a layer of meaning which was unavailable to people like me, but which would, if only I possessed the key, unlock a rich seam of humour hidden away in the pantomime. Or at least it must have been something like that since the laughter of policemen on its own has never in my experience been a source of entertainment to the recipient. It is usually sarcastic and sneering and hopelessly narcissistic and worlds away from the genuine variety that makes the eye twinkle.
We stood and watched for a while. When the laughing ceased the man dug around in his coat pocket and found another coin to reanimate the doll. He did it without visible sign of pleasure, or of having had to deliberate. It was automatic: the action of a man who has no choice, like a chain smoker who starts the next cigarette before the current one is finished. Once he had found the coin and allowed the evident relief to shimmer around the edges of his mouth, he looked up and offered a look of polite enquiry to Lorelei.
‘This is Louie. He’s asking about a man called Caleb Penpegws. Louie this, I believe, is Eifion and Tiresias.’
There was a pause, slightly awkward, because protocol demanded that the man on the stool speak but he didn’t.
I tried a light-hearted comment. ‘Which one’s which?’
The man looked annoyed. ‘You should read your Greek tragedy, then you wouldn’t have to ask.’
‘You’re probably right, but they refuse to give me a ticket at the library.’
‘Tiresias was the blind soothsayer. Do I look like a soothsayer?’
‘So you’re Eifion.’
‘Yes.’
‘Is the mouse blind?’
‘All mice are practically blind, but Tiresias has sinus problems which means he can’t smell very well; if you’re a rodent, not being able to smell is like being blind, isn’t it? That’s how they find their prey.’
‘And their cheese.’
‘It’s a myth that mice love cheese.’
‘Can he see the future?’
Eifion furrowed his brow in mild annoyance and looked at Lorelei.
‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘It’s not important. I wanted to ask you about your buddy from the war, Caleb Penpegws.’
Eifion slipped off the stool and walked past us and out onto the Prom. I said goodbye to Lorelei and followed him home. He lived in the old hall of residence at the end of the Prom, the one earmarked for demolition. He walked round the side of the ugly grey building to the entrance that would have been called the tradesman’s entrance in the days when tradesmen knew their place. He knew I was following him but made no attempt to stop me. A piece of composite board hung across the back door. He pulled it aside and walked through. I followed. He walked across floors covered in cement grit and dusty, fallen roofing joists. Here and there my foot detected in the darkness the smoother traction of municipal floor tiles. The only light came from holes in the roof and the sheen of street lamps outside squeezing past the boards that had been nailed over windows.
He climbed the stairs, rising flight by flight, until he reached a final landing and then walked down a corridor past a kitchen where now only ghosts wrote their names on the cartons of milk in the fridge. He stopped outside a room that had a padlock on the door, unlocked and went in leaving it open for me to follow.
Inside, he flicked a lighter and began to light a forest of candles glued by spilled wax to the surface of a coffee table. The golden light warbled and made the shadows dance. There were some beaten-up easy chairs, rescued from a dump, perhaps, and now spilling their horsehair innards onto the floor. There were bottles and plates and silver trays of take-away food. Pet food for the mouse spilled out onto the table top. On the floor there were saucers of what had been milk but that had been licked away by a small tribe of cats which peered from the shadows, their eyes gleaming like pale green candle flame. In the corner was a dirty mattress lying on the floor. Cobwebs brushed my face. It was grim, but probably no worse than in the days when the place had been a hall of residence.