‘No, no such person had ever existed.’ He paused and looked intensely at me. ‘You see?’
‘No.’
‘What more proof do you need?’
‘That he doesn’t exist?’
‘Evidence of his existence is being suppressed by the authorities.’
‘Not necessarily; lots of people don’t exist.’
‘Name one.’
‘Santa Claus.’
‘Yes.’
‘The Tooth Fairy.’
‘OK.’
I paused.
His eyes flashed in expectation of victory.
‘Fingal.’
‘Who?’
‘The giant who owned the cave in Scotland. Someone wrote a symphony about him.’
‘See! You struggle after three. Who has heard of this Fingal and his symphony? There is in fact hardly anybody who doesn’t exist in this precise manner.’
‘Neptune.’
‘Yes, I accept that Neptune does not exist.’
‘Jack Frost.’
‘I concede Jack Frost also.’
‘The Jabberwock.’
‘You are good at this.’
‘Little Miss Muffet.’
He swung an arm out as if catching a fly and clicked his fingers. ‘You see? You have already run out. The character of Little Miss Muffet is said by many scholars to be an allegory of Mary, Queen of Scots.’ He stood up in triumph and carried the glass over to the windowsill.
‘What makes you think Iestyn has come back to town?’
‘Two weeks ago there was an alien contact just outside Aberystwyth. A farmer reported seeing a flying saucer land in one of his fields. He was approached by the occupants of the craft, one of whom was an elfin woman with no thumbs and cat-like irises. She told him she wanted to make love to him as her race was dying and she wanted the earth-man’s seed to save it. This is a remarkably common feature of accounts of alien contact.’
‘Or of fantasies about alien contact.’
‘These stories occur too frequently and with too much consistency of detail to be fantasies.’
‘You could say the same about people who think they are Napoleon. The details there are usually pretty consistent: they always stick one hand inside their coat over the heart and claim to have a wife called Josephine.’
‘You are too cynical.’
‘You really think they need the earth-man’s seed? Surely after travelling all that way they could think of an easier way to collect it.’
Raspiwtin gave me the condescending smile such people reserve for those of us who err in darkness. ‘You may have a point, but the pertinent thing for our inquiry is this: they also asked for directions to Iestyn Probert’s house.’ He stood up.
‘Is that supposed to prove he is alive?’
‘The aliens evidently thought so. Are you saying they are wrong?’ He walked to the door, adding, ‘I’m staying at the Marine.’
‘This would be his old house, I take it?’
‘That’s right. It seems pretty clear, does it not, that some sort of rendezvous had been arranged.’
‘Where is this house?’
‘Out at Ystumtuen in the hamlet of Llwynmwyn.’
‘How do you spell that?’
‘I don’t know. You won’t find it on a map; it has been effaced.’
‘How convenient.’
‘You are familiar with the narrow-gauge railway to Devil’s Bridge that passes in the valley below Ystumtuen?’
‘Sort of.’
‘If you sit on the left-hand side of the carriage and look out across the valley just before Rhiwfron, you will note a discoloration in the grass of the distant valley side, caused by seepage from the lead mines; some people think it forms the shape of a duck. Iestyn used to live in a house that stood at the end of what those people would regard as the bill.’
‘Talking of the bill,’ I said, ‘this ?200 up front that you mentioned. Up front usually means right now, doesn’t it?’
‘So you take the case, then?’
‘Yes, I take the case.’
Chapter 3
The morning light had the bright lemony sharpness that you get in spring, the sun still in its original wrapping, not yet weighed down with the weary pathos, the sheer pointless repetitiveness of it all. A few people huddled on the beach; dogs chased things we couldn’t see; a caravan of donkeys plodded across my field of vision, in sharp silhouette against the sea. The man at the front was my father, Eeyore, wearing an old mac that flapped in the breeze, his outline made jagged by lightning bolts of straw.
At the north end of the Prom, beneath the shadow of Constitution Hill, Sospan was leaning on the counter of his ice-cream kiosk, squinting as he stared out to sea, as if the answer to the mysteries of life were encoded in the hieroglyphical waves. He saw me approach, pushed himself up and turned to the machine that dispensed the nectar that attracted us all to the wooden flower of his kiosk.
‘Everything OK?’ I asked.
He replied with a noncommittal grimace and handed me the ice cream. ‘Had to replace a few timbers in the north-west corner of my kiosk, it gets the brunt of the sea breeze there, you see. It always unnerves me, making repairs. We don’t like to be reminded of the advance of decay in our lives, do we?’
I made no answer, but put some change on the countertop with a sharp rattle. He took the money. Out of the corner of my eye I saw a girl appear, walking along the edge of the Prom near the bandstand. She wore jeans and a wind-blown military parka and was taking care not to step on the cracks between the slabs of paving stone. It was Calamity, my partner, who had just come back from a fortnight at Kousin Kevin’s Krazy Komedy Kamp in Pwllheli with her aunt. I watched her approach with a quickening sense of delight. Calamity was almost eighteen now and had been my partner for five years. During that time she had become the daughter I had never had. I had felt her absence keenly. She gave up the cracks-in-the-pavement game and ran the last few steps, skipping up to me and kissing me.
‘How was Kousin Kevin’s?’ I asked.
‘Great!’ A gust of wind blew the hood of her parka up and framed her with a halo of rabbit’s fur.
‘I sent you a food parcel via the International Red Cross in Geneva.’
‘I got it. I shared it out among the other holidaymakers. Did you hear about the flying saucer?’ She looked at me with a bright gaze, as pure and unsullied as the spring morning; her eyes shone and in them was an innocence and absence of guile. It was sometimes hard to believe that when I had first discovered her she had been one of those teenage troglodytes who haunted the caverns of the Pier amusement arcade, kids for whom fresh air was chlorine gas. It was a milieu in which slouching, moping and eye-rolling impatience with the manifest stupidity of adults were the lingua franca. In acting as a father figure to her I had acquired the father’s secret melancholy: watching her do her best to rush through the years of enchantment in the forlorn belief that adulthood was
