through the lemon mist above the estuary like a nightwatchman's lantern. Patches of water in the peat glistened and looked as if they had been cut out of the sodden turf with a giant pastry cutter. To the west beyond the dunes the sea was silent. At times like this the sight of the estuary in all its beauty made the heart gasp and long to turn back, a last final coquettish trick from that old whore Aberystwyth. Like a lover who catches you with a packed bag, tiptoeing down the stairs before sunrise, and calls to you from the landing, looking like she used to all those years ago when you first met at the Borth Carnival dance.
The rickety, tar-stained wooden bridge appeared out of the mist. We were approaching Dovey Junction, the great fork in the road for British Rail caravans. One route led north, hugging the rocky, castle-studded coast, the other went over the mountains to Shrewsbury. Bert pressed his face against the cold glass, straining his eyes to make out features in the soft misty world. 'Never thought I'd finally do it,' he said. 'Never, thought I'd leave like this, never in a million years ...'
'Get used to it, pal,' I said, already tired of his moping. 'It's Aberystwyth not Monte Carlo.'
At Dovey Junction we all stepped out on to the deserted platform and faced each other in a huddled group.
'You got the money?'
I nodded. 'You got the name?'
He grimaced. 'No I don't have the name. I told you. All I got is the box-top.'
'That's an expensive box of chocolates. Twenty quid.'
'If you didn't like the deal you shouldn't have got on the train. You want to go and find her yourself, be my guest. There are only about ten thousand girls like her.'
I took out the four crumpled-up fivers and straightened them out. He pulled out a piece of cardboard from his bag. We exchanged them. The cardboard had once been the top of a fudge box. And on the front, as always, a girl at a spinning-wheel in Welsh national dress. We all looked at it.
'I don't go for that type, myself, mind. But there are plenty that do. The old professor couldn't get over her. Always staring at her and begging me to give him the box. 'Isn't she a beauty?' he would say. Soon as he left I knew where he was heading. I've seen it before.'
In the distance we heard the feeble lowing of the train from Machynlleth. The clown's Johnny shuffled his bag over to the edge of the adjacent platform, ready to jump aboard and swing north over the bridge to a better life. He turned to face us.
'Well, so long then.'
'Good luck.'
One lone, broken man against the huge clear backdrop of mountains and sky.
We caught the train back to Borth and took the bus outside the station, down the arrow-straight road that bisects the golf course, towards Ynyslas. On Calamity's lap was a bag from Peacocks containing the sort of coat that used to be popular with medieval Jews and that had now come back into fashion with druid assassins. Meirion said he thought it had something to do with the military. And in West Wales there is only one military. The Welsh Foreign Legion, famous or notorious depending on the way you looked at it, for the campaign to liberate the former Welsh colony of Patagonia in 1961.
It was all more than a quarter of a century ago now, but for the army of broken ghosts that haunted the fields and lanes of West Wales the memory burned as fiercely as ever. Five minutes in a recruiting office above Boots was all it took to seal their fate — farm boys who'd never been further than Builth Wells rubbing shoulders with a rag-bag of foreign intellectuals, artists and soldiers of fortune. Five minutes to think of a
For two miles the scene was the same, a long line of rolling dunes, unending and unchanging, fringed with tufted marram grass like a lion's mane. The eternal dunes that were really nothing of the sort. Under the coat of scrubby grass the sands were shifting and moving even as we spoke. Come back in a year and if you had a photographic memory you would be shocked at how much everything had changed. Compared to the geological slowness with which mountains altered their shape, the dunes of Ynyslas shifted at high speed: bubbling and boiling like the cloudscapes in time-lapse photography, or like the rippling sinews of a well-fed lion.
When we reached the end we got off and walked past the man in the kiosk on to the wide flat sands of the estuary. A few cars were parked here and there was an ice-cream van with no one to serve. We spotted Cadwaladr outlined against the sky like a Red Indian on the ridge of the dunes; behind him the houses of Aberdovey across the estuary glinted like milk teeth left on a blue-green pillow.
Calamity and I fetched some ice creams from the van and then walked to the top of the dune. Cadwaladr raised an arm in greeting and we sat down on the sandy top.
'You live up here all the time?' I asked.
'Until it gets too cold. Then I spend the winter being chased out of barns by angry farmers.'
'Where do you sleep?' said Calamity.
'Just a bivvy bag. That's all I need.'
'But where do you keep your things?'
'I haven't got any.'
The ice-cream man had smothered the ices in a home-made raspberry sauce that scented the wind with a pungent tang.
Cadwaladr sniffed. 'There's a smell that takes me back,' he said. 'Wild raspberries. It's the smell of spring in Patagonia. They used to grow everywhere.' His eyes misted over. 'Beautiful sight. At a time like that, even when you're a skinny seventeen-year-old, you don't half wonder about the point of travelling round the world to die in such a beautiful place.'
'And then you come home and there's not even a bed for you to sleep in.'
'They promised us a land fit for heroes but when we got back from Patagonia the only work they'd give us was building all these horrible holiday camps and caravan parks. All we got was a land fit for Noddy. But how can a man forget what he has seen when surrounded by such tawdry things?'
He looked at me with an urgency that suggested I might have the answer.
'How can he forget? A lifetime is not enough time, but ... but ... a lifetime is all we are given.'
Calamity slowly drew the coat out of the bag, taking care not to let the paper disturb the moment with a rustle.
'You know,' said Cadwaladr, still lost in thought, 'sometimes, when you stick a blade into a man, you can feel it grating on the bone like a spade hitting the pavement when you shovel snow.' He clenched his fists tightly and added, 'Now when I look out over this beautiful estuary in November and see snow-clouds forming over Barmouth, my heart fills with winter.'
There was a pause and Calamity looked at me. I nodded and she slowly unfolded the coat on the dunes, saying, 'Have you ever seen something like this before?'
Cadwaladr glanced at it and his face darkened. He made a clicking sound deep in his throat as if this coat confirmed all the bad things he had ever thought or suspected about the world. 'Yes, I've seen one like it.'
'We're looking for a man who is being followed by someone wearing a coat like this. We were told it's something to do with the Ysbyty Ystwyth Experiment. Do you know what that is?'
He didn't answer immediately and we waited patiently. Then he said, 'I don't know too much about it.' His words sighed out of him more wistfully than the sand sifting in the wind. There was always an air of soft, otherworldly melancholy about Cadwaladr but today he seemed even more remote.
'The people who know a lot can't tell you.'
'Why not,' I asked. 'Are they scared?'
'Possibly. Terror can do that, so I've heard. But who knows? They can't speak about it. They can't speak about anything really, just like babies before they learn to say Dad.'
'So what was the Ysbyty Ystwyth Experiment?'
The old soldier took out a scrap of newspaper and a polythene bag filled with salvaged cigarette ends. I wondered where he got them from — ash-trays in buses, the cinema floor ... or maybe the maternity waiting-room where the fathers sit and wait for news.
'Officially it doesn't exist. And never did. Which is strange because I know some men who volunteered for it.
