‘Of course they don’t, you stupid fool. That’s just idealistic nonsense. You know that in your heart. Even if you thought they deserved it, would you want to be the one who told them? The world might be in a mess at the moment, but it’s a familiar sort of mess, it’s a mess that works, and we get by after a fashion. If the President of the United States addressed the people of the world tomorrow and told them aliens were official, it would be as cataclysmic as a comet hitting the Pacific Ocean and generating a tsunami 5 miles high. It would be like the end of the dinosaurs. They’ll have to disclose it one day, but I sure as hell don’t want to be around when they do.’
‘Of course, because once people find out the government have known for forty years and not told them, they might not be too happy about it.’
‘For sure! But trust me, Louie, your head will be the first on a stick. People like you and me will be the first to get that honour because we are the stupid ones who will put up a fight when the mob arrive. When they turn up with their torches flickering in the night, the same ones who used to leave flaming crosses as their calling cards, you’ll be there saying, “This is my house, no one crosses this threshold, you’ll have to kill me first,” and they’ll be happy to oblige you. You and me are in the same business, you just don’t want to believe it.’
‘I don’t think so.’
‘You wage your war every day against the heads-on-sticks guys, the cross-burners. You get paid peanuts, risk your life for people who don’t deserve it, you get banged over the head with tyre irons . . . You don’t realise how close we are to the sharpened sticks. The only thing holding back the tide is the cops. You’ll say they are venal and corrupt, and I wouldn’t disagree, but they do the job that someone has to do. However bad they get, they will never be as bad as what happens if they don’t show up to work tomorrow. And this is the golden uplands as far as humanity is concerned. In the past it was much worse. It wouldn’t take much for us to regress a few centuries. That charlatan Raspiwtin says we are all in thrall, imprisoned in a cage of our own imagining, bars of delusion that we could blink away if we awoke from our trance. He’s right, mostly. We are all held in thrall, but the magic spell is the delusion that the status quo I just described is robust. The head-on-sticks guys keep a low profile, they lurk in the shadows, but really, what’s stopping them taking over? Almost nothing. It’s just a realisation away. Have you seen how little it takes for them to take to the street and start looting? That’s always where it starts. Sure, we conceal the truth. But only because we are not in the slightest doubt about what would happen if it ever got out.’
‘Maybe there would be anarchy for a while, but humanity would be better off in the long run.’
‘I’m sure you are right, but we’ve only got one life. It’s like planting a tree that won’t fruit in your lifetime. What’s the point?’
‘So you are saying it would be like that here? Aberystwyth would be like the inside of that locked-down prison you told me about?’
‘Not Aberystwyth, Louie, the whole world.’
I drained my tea, crushed the cup into a ball and put it to rest on the ashtray. A puff of wind blew it away.
‘The letter Raspiwtin gave me, the interdepartmental Aviary memo. I took it to a kid, a forensic linguist. He said it was a fake. But according to you it told the truth?’
‘Exactly! The investigation into the story of Iestyn, the discovery that he had been resurrected, was true. So we faked the account of it.’
‘In order to discredit the truth. And the Buick?’
‘The Buick and the Men in Black are just a little hocus-pocus we do to blow smoke in the eyes of the masses. After all, if a man has an alien contact some people will believe him. But who’s going to believe that man when he reports visits from the Men in Black and nonsense like that? Jhoe dresses like one because he is delusional. I’m the genuine article. I’ve got the car, the hat and the suit. I wear it to funerals too, and get to charge it on expenses. It’s one of the perks of working for the Aviary.’
‘Mrs Bwlchgwallter made a tape of the hypnotism. How come you are not worried about it? Shouldn’t you suppress that too?’
‘I’m not worried because I already know where it is. In the boot of my car.’
‘Calamity guessed it was hidden in the gingerbread alien, but someone got there first. Was it you?’
‘No, it was Miaow, while you were sick. She offered to trade: she would give me the tape in return for me getting you off the charge of attempted murder. I was going to anyway, but it suited my purpose to agree. That’s how the gun ended up in the mayor’s possessions.’
I absorbed the information. It made sense. ‘There are two things I don’t get. You must have kept Iestyn’s whereabouts concealed from the Aviary all these years. Why do you protect him? Your job should be to deliver him up to them.’
He looked at me and became serious. ‘I guess you could call it atonement. You remember me telling you once I’ve never killed anyone? It’s true, but I was once responsible for a man’s death. A very cruel death. He was from the Denunciationists out at Cwmnewidion Isaf, and he got arrested for stealing a tractor. They put him in the penitentiary at Tregaron Bog, just in transit. It was only for a few days, and we were heaving at the seams, so I put him in the segregation block. It was the weekend the riot broke out. He was the one I told you about in the end cell.’
I let out a soft gasp as the horror of that sank in.
‘Besides, I’ve grown quite fond of Jhoe over the years.’ He looked at his watch and said, ‘Time, I think, to drive Jhoe and Miaow home to Cwmnewidion Isaf.’
I placed my hand on his arm. ‘What made him go like this in the first place? What made him lose his sanity, do you know?’
He grinned as if he’d been hoping I would ask the question. ‘The aliens showed him something . . . something wonderful . . . too wonderful. A thing not of this earth, a thing so beautiful, so glorious it blew his mind the way a 40-watt light bulb pops when you put too much current through it.’
‘Am I supposed to know what it was?’
‘They showed him the engine to the flying saucer.’
And then Calamity appeared over the brow of the hill, walking with the gentle gait of one for whom many of the mysteries of the world are slowly being resolved. She held her arms folded tightly in front to keep her parka closed in the fierce wind, and hobbled at a half-trot half-walk up to meet me. She grinned, and the hair blew across her gentle face.
‘I’ve seen the Buick,’ she said, eyes sparkling with excitement. ‘It’s amazing. You must come. It’s on the track over the hill.’ She took me by the hand.
Viewed from behind, the car in the lay-by had the streamlined profile of a crouching hare: bulbous, muscular thighs swelled out on either side above the rear wheels, and a tiny rear window was inset like a porthole. The panels of metal were painted in deep, lustrous black like the lacquered lid of a Steinway concert grand. They don’t paint cars that way any more, they don’t make anything like that any more. It was an old car, hailing from a time when every part had to flair or swoop or shine, and the nose had to grin like a chromium shark. It was the sort of car that had spent its youth at drive-in movies beneath the huge, flickering, popcorn-scented faces of Humphrey Bogart and Katharine Hepburn. You wouldn’t hitch a caravan to a car like this, that would be heresy; instead you would choose one of those beautiful silver zeppelins, the Airstream trailers, made from aluminium skin and riveted like the fuselage of an aircraft. Together you would make the pilgrimage to the Promised Land along Route 66, the Mother Road, the one Steinbeck called the Road to the Great Second Chance, where Burma-Shave signs flickered along the way. Or you might, as today, make a different journey along the B4576 to Cwmnewidion Isaf. It was a beautiful old glossy black American car and looked about as unobtrusive on the verge of the road on top of Constitution Hill as Flash Gordon’s rocket. They say you never forget your first sight of a black 1947 Buick.
Two people were standing next to it. Jhoe and Miaow. Jhoe came running up to us like a fawn, while Miaow held back shyly. Jhoe took my hand and shook it warmly. ‘I have a daughter . . . she’s taking me home,’ he said. ‘Home with my daughter. I’m so . . . so . . .’
‘Grokked?’ I offered.
His eyes filled with tears. ‘Yes, so very grokked.’
‘Jhoe says we can go and visit him in Cwmnewidion Isaf whenever we like,’ said Calamity.
‘That would be great,’ I said. My words drifted as my gaze sought Miaow in the background.
Jhoe stood aside. ‘Go and talk to her.’
I struggled into the wind. She stood on the summit, outlined against the sky, much as I had imagined her in
