A thought flashed across my mind like a swallow through a barn. I realised a simple truth: I loved Vanya, although I was not sure why.
We reached the end of the Prom beneath Constitution Hill and we each placed a single foot upon the railing in accordance with a ritual whose origins are lost in the mists of time.
Vanya spread his arms and exclaimed, ‘Yet the bat is generally disdained by poets, even though bat-pollination is responsible for one of the greatest gifts from animals to mankind, namely tequila. As an analgesic for the soul it is far more effective than the breathless rose-scented summer night. In fact, it is precisely this quality of the summer night that tequila can cure. But the crowning glory of the bat-pollinator’s art is the durian fruit from Southeast Asia. It is something of an acquired taste. A Victorian traveller once described the experience of eating it as that of eating strawberries and cream in a public convenience. This is because the odour has a faint whiff of carrion about it. To which is added notes of civet, sewage, skunk spray, turpentine, caramel, onions, custard and gym sock.’
We turned and walked back, towards the bandstand. It is not likely that anyone would have eaten strawberries and cream in the convenience in the public shelter on the Prom, but as we passed it by an old woman emerged eating jam tarts. She pushed a shopping trolley across the zebra crossing. It was Ffanci Llangollen. In her trolley was a dirty woollen coat, black-and-yellow-hooped football socks, mitts and a fake sheepskin hat screwed up into plastic shopping bags from which all the lettering had worn away.
‘I love the old Prom,’ she said. The words weren’t really addressed to us, nor anyone, but said simply to the night. She had long ago learned not to expect a response.
I said, ‘We all do.’
Uncle Vanya offered her the bottle of vodka and she looked grateful and surprised. She took a drink and patted her chest as she registered the invigorating effect of the medicine. ‘Your smell reminds me of my time in the Stolypin car,’ said Uncle Vanya. ‘I do not mean that unkindly,’ he added quickly. ‘That was the greatest event in my life. We seek happiness with an insatiable hunger, like plants seek the sun, and yet it is the dark times in which we gain our real insight into the mysteries of life.’
Ffanci, whose entire life had been spent exemplifying this philosophy, did not deem it worthy of comment and took another drink. Vanya took Ffanci’s trolley and wheeled it over to the shelter. I left them and walked over to the Spar on Terrace Road to buy more bottles. I sensed it was going to be another of those nights. An old man in a charity shop suit stood by the door and asked me for the price of a cuppa. I gave him a fiver and told him not to waste it on tea or any other type of soft drink. He thanked me for the advice, and waited discreetly for me to leave before going in to buy something to slake his thirst.
When I returned they were absorbed in Uncle Vanya’s life story.
‘In the camps men would play cards and because they had nothing to wager they would stake your life. And you would not even know it until the moment came for the gambler to pay his debt. You could be in the same room and remain unaware that they were playing for the privilege of murdering you. This was the way of the two men Yuri and Ivan. They befriended me and showed me great kindness and I was too naïve to understand that no good could come from their solicitude. Instead, I was touched. No one had ever shown me kindness before. Perhaps the kindness of the wolf is better than nothing to a lonely man. The other inmates perceived this and watched in silence, striving to keep the mocking look from their faces as Yuri and Ivan gave me extra rations. They told me they were going without food themselves in order to help a fellow Christian soul and I was deeply touched. Of course they were not going without at all, some other poor wretch was. Since the food in the camps was never more than barely enough to keep a man alive, then it follows that the extra food they fed me must have led to the death of another man, and his death still weighs heavily on my conscience. But I loved these two men deeply because they fed me, which is the greatest act of love you can show to a man in the camps. They also used their power to get me an easy job as a clerk in the office, and that too meant the difference between life and death. If it was not for those two criminals I would surely have perished that first winter. I loved them, for how could I have known what they had in store for me? How could I have known that on the day of my arrival in the camp Ivan won me in a card game?
‘As winter approached its end they informed me they had an escape plan and I was invited to go along. Even then I was too ignorant to understand their scheme, to understand what evil, what horror these men had planned in their wicked hearts. We climbed over the wire in May at the first hint of spring. Escape was virtually impossible and successful escape, almost unknown. It is so far – thousands of square miles of empty tundra where even the wolves struggle to survive. There is no food and finding fuel is difficult. The local people if they catch you will turn you in. In the past it was not so; in the time of the Czars, there was a tradition that they would leave milk and bread out on the doorstep overnight to help escaping prisoners, because Siberia has always been the land of exile. But under Stalin those who aided or gave you succour would end up in a camp themselves; even for failing to report having seen you was enough to get them a ten-year stretch. The task was truly hopeless. But some there were who preferred to die trying rather than serve their twenty-five years of hell. Many were the times during that journey when it seemed that Death had finally come for me and each time some miracle intervention by my two companions stepped in to snatch me from the edge of the precipice. Each time they saved me, my love for them grew deeper. We crossed a frozen river and the ice cracked beneath us and I fell in; those two men, those two evil merciless murderers, both risked their lives to save mine. Then later we were attacked by wolves and this time I was surely done for, but my two friends fought them off with fire. Another time we were attacked by a bear and they drove the bear off with rocks. Thus in the company of these two scoundrels I crossed the vast frozen wastes of that land and also traversed the inner continent of the human heart. There I discovered the darkest wisdom ever to be found in such a vessel, far down in the deepest, dimmest cistern of the heart where only lunatics visit. I began that spring the journey that would bring me here to the Promenade in Aberystwyth, I discovered the terrible wisdom and became the most celebrated, most famous cartographer of the human heart, second only to the woman whose fate haunted me the whole time, the mother forced to abandon her suckling child and entrain for Siberia.’ His voice acquired a croak and we could tell without looking that his face was creased with pain. ‘Perhaps I shall not finish this story tonight.’
Ffanci put her arm round him and reassured him. We left the shelter and walked slowly along the Prom, taking turns to drink from the bottle. At the Pier Vanya suggested we go dancing. I expected the doorman at the Pier to create difficulties with regard to Ffanci but it appeared that Uncle Vanya had already befriended this man during his short stay in town. ‘He is a great bear of a man,’ explained Uncle Vanya, ‘and so am I. We have an understanding.’ We walked down the carpeted corridor with windows overlooking the blackness of the sea, towards the dark smoky cavern at the end. Disco balls twirled and threw flashes of light on to the corners and niches where couples hid. A man in a penguin suit holding a small flashlight showed us to a table near the back. The tables were set in a circle around an empty dance floor; it was not yet midnight, still early. Some druid wise guys were seated near the front with young girls eager to make an impression sharing their table. Here and there, dotted around, there were members of the cast of North Road, the grim ritual of determined drinking saying more eloquently than words that being a soap star was not much of a career to aspire to. Here and there too were waiters and chefs from the hotels’ grills, dressed up as far as their meagre wages would permit; and there were a few isolated souls, men drinking alone in a way that suggested they could no longer remember a time when that had not been the case.