Meici looked at me with an expression of desolation and took my hand. ‘Come on, Lou. We have to go upstairs.’
I had hoped to ask his mum about Gethsemane and Goldilocks but I found myself instead following him up the dim stairs to a little bedroom at the top. We trooped in and sat on the single bed, covered in a patchwork quilt coverlet. Underneath the window there was a little table covered with a cloth like a small altar. A photo of Arianwen was propped up and next to it were some hair slides.
I wondered what happened next. During my years as Aberystwyth’s only private eye I had been involved in some strange adventures but this was the first time I had been sent to bed without my supper.
‘Bugger,’ said Meici. ‘How on earth did she find it?’
‘Mums have a sixth sense for this sort of thing,’ I said.
‘She thinks you are my brother Esau. He died when I was three. We slept in the same bed. I woke up one day and he was stone cold. They called him Esau because he was born very hairy.’ He slid off the bed and kneeled on the floor. He looked under the bed. ‘Phew!’ he said. ‘At least she hasn’t touched my correspondence course.’ He pulled a book from under the bed and handed it to me. It was a textbook with a cover bearing a photograph of a suave-looking man wearing a jacket and polo-neck sweater, holding court to a group of attractive and admiring ladies. The title said, The Old Black Magic: From Dumbo to Don Juan in Four Weeks. He pulled out another book. ‘This is one of the set texts you have to read to build up your vocab. Pollyanna. Remember me telling you about it?’
‘What did he die of?’
‘Who?’
‘Esau.’
‘He was smothered in the night.’
‘Who by?’
‘I don’t know. A goblin. They never caught him.’
‘A goblin?’
‘Yes. That’s what the policeman said. The front door was locked but goblins have magic keys, you see. They found Esau next morning in my arms, cold as stone. Mam has never got over it – honestly! The way she goes on about it sometimes anyone would think I’d done it.’ He nudged my arm with the back of his hand. ‘You should read this, it’s ever so good. You’d like the Glad Game. Do you want to have a go?’
‘No.’
‘Don’t be like that. There’s no use crying over spilt milk. Come on, we’ll play the Glad Game. It’ll cheer you up in no time. It goes like this: I’m sad that mam sent us to bed but I’m glad she didn’t send us to the cow shed.’
‘OK, I’m glad we had no supper because it helps us have compassion for the starving children around the world.’
‘Hey, you’re good at this. I’m glad we got sent to bed because I get to talk to my new friend Louie.’
‘And it’s good, too, because we don’t really have to go to bed.’
Meici looked puzzled. ‘What do you mean?’
‘It’s not like we have to put pyjamas on or anything, is it?’
He examined my face for a hint that I might be pulling his leg. ‘Are you mad?’ he said. ‘Of course we have to go to bed.’
I stood up and walked downstairs and out through the front door. As I crossed the smear of grit that passed for a garden path my muscles stiffened in anticipation of a challenge from Meici’s mum. But none came. I relaxed and cast a brief look back. In the upstairs window Meici’s face was pressed to the glass, eyes gleaming with awe or fear at my act of treason. Or maybe it was the sharp gleam of spite and the dim vestigial memory of a crime he committed on the threshold of his life; one so terrible they had to pin it on a goblin. I fumbled with the latch on the gate, hands shaking like those of an alcoholic reaching for the first drink of the day.
Chapter 14
It was a long walk to the bus stop and Calamity had gone by the time I got to the office. Eeyore had left a book open on my desk. It was Llewellyn’s History of the Welsh Stylite, with a passage referring to the spiritual malaise called acedia underlined. It said, ‘And when this has taken possession of some unhappy soul, it produces dislike of the place, disgust with the cell, and disdain and contempt of the brethren who dwell with him or at a little distance . . .’ This must be the sickness that afflicts the private detective in the lurid electric-blue desert night, the neon wilderness of Aberystwyth.
I took the envelope that had held the séance tape out of the drawer and smelled it. I explored the feeling of disquiet that had taken up abode in my heart.
Had the reappearance of Abercuawg made everyone aware of the void in their lives and the stratagems they employed to conceal it? Faith, ice cream, arresting people . . . Each chooses his own road. One man makes Ampersandium, the world’s greatest placebo. Others set sail for promised lands such as Patagonia, Hughesovka . . . Ffanci Llangollen, they say, has wheeled a shopping trolley around the coast of Britain in search of the daughter she lost. Vanya, too, had filled his life with a quest, and yet I got the impression that he did not seriously expect it ever to be resolved. The important thing was the quest.
I left the office and walked down Terrace Road. The cries of children from the beach became discernible as the light slowly changed hue; there was always a subtle change in the children’s voices at this time of the afternoon, as if in a recess of their hearts they were registering the subliminal decline of the sun, the soft, barely perceptible transition from a hot summer day to the edge of evening. The ability to perceive it is innate, the way the knowledge of the river of birth is hardwired into the soul of a salmon.
All seaside towns are in a state of permanent autumn. This is evident in the ruins of the former great civilisation that once built Aberystwyth: a scar in the hillside beneath Pen Dinas too smoothly curved to be the work of nature, it turns out to be the cicatrice of a lost railway line. If you consult an old map you discover with a shock that it was built long ago to Milford Haven; you can’t even get a bus there now. Other archaeological relics left by this vanished race of super-beings include the bandstand which now has a padlocked concertina door like an old garage. Once it had its own silver band, in a town that boasted two orchestras, one at the Pier and one at the winter gardens on top of Constitution Hill. Now no one even knows what a winter garden is. I don’t. Is it really a garden or does it mean just a park of some sort? According to the old guidebooks, the ones that tell you to eat kidneys for breakfast and give advice about buying your fishing licence, there used to be a winter garden on Constitution Hill. But you will look in vain for any trace of it now.
Nowhere is the emptiness more acutely symbolised than in the institution of the pleasure pier where no pleasure is to be had. Originally piers were functional constructions, built to tie boats up to, boats that once plied the main with big smokestacks and restaurants and children in sailor suits or miniature frock coats; but the boats have gone and the projections into the sea remain like those towers they built to enable passengers to alight from Zeppelins in the early years of the twentieth century. The forlorn holidaymakers still walk to the end and back, partaking in a ritual whose meaning escapes them, unaware that there had once been a purpose to this two-hundred-yard walk out to sea. In the absence of anything else to do they buy ice cream or spend money in the amusement arcade and after a while this becomes the point.
The spiritual befuddlement that dogs the man of Aberystwyth at every turn is thus an unavoidable part of his fate because it is written into the very stones of the town in which he dwells. Other talismanic cities of the world such as Timbuktu, Troy and Gilgamesh grew out of the imperatives of trade and commerce or war but, like Babylon, and the towns of the American gold rush, Aberystwyth grew as a town of pleasure. A town in which human felicity was perverted into the singing, carousing, giddy tarantella, the vertiginous stovepipe hat debauch.