She left shortly after and so I paid for my drink and followed at a discreet distance. By the time I got to the street she was gone, and someone else hailed me from just outside the gateway. It was Calamity, leaning against a lamppost. I looked at my watch - it was gone one and I was about to remonstrate with her for being out so late but then I saw the stricken look in her eyes, her complexion the pallor of cigarette ash.
I opened my mouth to speak but nothing came out and she opened hers silently too. Then she collapsed into my arms with the words 'Custard Pie'.
'It's OK,' I said. 'It's OK.'
Then she pulled herself away from me and looked up and told me in one long gushing stream, as if the faster she said it, the less damage it would do.
'He saw the bird seed and begged me for it and I said, "You have to buy it, buster." And so he said, "If you want to find the Dean, ask for the girl called Judy Juice." And so I sneered at him and said, "You expect bird seed for that? I've seen fresher news written on the side of a Babylonian tomb." And then he sort of danced a bit and said I was a cutey and said, "All right, little girl, you want some real news? Tell that smart-arse private eye to stick this in his pipe and smoke it." And then he got all excited and rubbed his hands together and said, "You want to know what the Ysbyty Ystwyth Experiment is all about? What's been going on at the sanatorium? What this 'thing' is that people keep seeing? You want to know that, little girl?" And I said yes and he said, "Give me the seed." So I made a deal. I gave him a quarter of it and said he'd get the rest when he told me about the Ysbyty Ystwyth Experiment. And so he did.' Then she stopped and said, 'I think you need a drink.'
'I've just had one.'
'I think you need another one.'
But before I could drink or she could speak there was a disturbance in the entrance to the club. Judy Juice walked out in a hurry, putting her coat on as she left. Behind her, arms outstretched in supplication, came Jubal. 'But Baby!' he cried. 'But Poppet!'
Judy Juice carried on walking and Jubal ran and caught her sleeve. 'Munchkin!' She shrugged off his hand and swept past us without noticing. He tried to grab her sleeve again, shouting, 'Look here, you bitch!' Calamity put a hand out to stop him. 'Lady doesn't want to talk to you, Mac' Jubal pushed her aside and she grabbed his arm. He shoved her roughly again and she kicked him furiously in the shin. Jubal threw out a backhand slap and in the same instant, before even I had time to react, Judy Juice spun round and shoved Jubal crying, 'Leave the little girl alone, you cockroach!'
Judy Juice was quite a big girl and Jubal fell back in surprise and over into some sacks of refuse left out for the bin men. Calamity made a move towards him but I held her back. He lay there dazed for a second or two as Judy Juice stepped into a taxi, and then he stumbled to his feet, ran towards the car and shouted, 'But Baby I'm sorry! Please, Baby ...' The car sped off and Jubal sank to his knees, shouting 'Baby, I'm sorry, I beg you!' And then, still kneeling, he buried his face in his hands and wept.
Back at the office, once I'd convinced her I'd had enough rum, Calamity told me what Custard Pie had said. Told me the news that made my heart stop for so long that I sat there listening for the beat to start again like a hundred-metre sprinter listening for the gun.
'This "thing" out at the sanatorium,' she said. 'It's Herod Jenkins, your old games teacher. He's still alive.'
Chapter 14
I tossed and turned all night and cried out in that half-asleep, half-awake state in which the night terrors visit us. And maybe an hour before dawn — the darkest hour — I slipped beneath the membrane of sleep and dreamed of a day in late January many years ago when the whole school was kept in during afternoon break. An eerie hush consumes the old school building, a silence so absolute you can hear the footfall of the spiders in the cupboards where the Latin books are stored. Forbidden to move from our desks, or even look at the window, we hold our breath and strain to hear above the deafening drumbeats of our own hearts ... and then there it is, at first so faint as to be almost imperceptible, but growing and growing, getting louder until there can be no mistake: thwump, thwump, thwump! The sound of choppers. Suddenly, in a cacophony of slamming desklids that drowns out the shouting of the teacher, we all dash to the window. Thwump, thwump, thwump! The dying sun has turned the frosty sky amber like a puma's eye; spread beneath it the iced-over games field sparkles like frozen lemonade... thwump, thwump, thwump! From far in the glowing west, growing all the time, getting bigger and bigger, that small speck that grows and slowly resolves itself into the shape of a helicopter, flying in low over the trees. Realities merge in the way they do in dreams, so that the chopper is now silhouetted against an orange tropical sky, like the film poster to Apocalypse Now, advertising a film about a journey upriver in a coracle to a Cambodian temple, in search of a crazy man in a track suit called Kurtz. Thwump, thwump, thwump! 'Get back to your seats this instant!' Mr Kurtz cries. We look out and gasp. Against the burning sky, almost overhead now, the chopper. And slung beneath the fuselage the bier of Marty, the one who never made it back from the cross-country run.
*
Llunos was hunched over a pint in the Castle pub, just inside wooden doors. He looked up, smiled, saw the expression on my face and lost the smile. 'Oh,' he said. 'Looks like you found out. Should have known you would.'
'All I want to hear from you is it's not true.'
'It's true. No one in town wants more than me to say it's not. But that doesn't change a thing. It's true.'
'Didn't we push him out of a plane?'
He nodded glumly. 'I thought we did.'
'How long have you known?'
'Six months or so. At first it was just rumours ...'
'Why didn't you tell me?'
He took a while to speak, as if he knew the answer but had forgotten it. 'What good would it have done?'
'How could this happen? From a plane, for fuck's sake!'
He picked up his pint and brought it to his lips and then stopped. He spoke over the top. 'It's not that rare to fall out of a plane and survive. Read the Guinness Book of Records. And this was over a lake, and we were flying in low for a bombing run. Work it out.'
'Wouldn't the concussion kill him?'
'A normal person, perhaps. But a games teacher ... ?' He stopped and took out a card and wrote an address on the back. 'Look, I can't say any more at the moment. It's better for you to hear the whole story. What you've heard so far is nothing. Meet me tomorrow at this address, at 10 am.'
He handed me the card and stood up to leave. The address was a room in the old college building. 'In the meantime, keep it under your hat. We don't want to start a panic'
*
The old college stretched along the Prom from the pier to the putting-green. With its massive stone walls and conical turrets it looked like a Rhineland castle and had stood up well to the flood. It had originally been built as a hotel and when they found they couldn't make it pay by accommodating folk taking a two-week vacation from the real world they used it instead to house the dons who took one for a lifetime. Inside the main building bronze statues of long-dead and forgotten academics gazed down at me with looks of stern and vague disapproval. An attitude built on the failsafe premise that whatever it was I was doing or thinking they would almost certainly have disapproved of it. The floor squeaked as all floors in buildings devoted to serious study should and the walls were hung with wooden boards gilded with forgotten acts of sporting glory. All from a distant time when athletic prowess for students entailed more than a run from the pie shop to the pub.