Last Tango in Aberystwyth

kidneys. This isn't actually kidney on the plate, it's liver, but I think you will get the idea.' He picked up a remote- control device and pressed. There was a flash from the belt and a crackle and then the room filled with the acrid smell of burning meat. 'Well I think you may start serving us lunch now, Rhodri.'

*

Brainbocs dabbed the thick starched white napkin to his mouth and threw it to the table. In his other hand he clutched a crystal goblet of dessert wine and gulped greedily from it. It was Chateau d'Yquem, the same stuff that God drinks at Christmas. He closed his eyes with delight at the exquisite nectar and then cried as if the word was even sweeter than the wine, 'Love, Louie, Love. Love, love, love oh lovey love, love! That old-fashioned obsession of the poets and dreamers but so rarely the province of the white-coated research scientist.'

'You've been researching love?'

'I was exploring the furthermost frontiers of the human psyche. I was going to change the world.'

'By conducting research into the neurological basis of love?'

'Precisely!'

I was about to ask the obvious question 'why?' But the sight of Rhodri replenishing Brainbocs's glass took me back to that day he appeared in my office asking about the memorabilia and suddenly I knew the answer.

'Myfanwy,' I said.

Brainbocs grinned and then the joy slowly seeped away and became replaced by a wistfulness as he recalled the events of the past three years. 'You see, it never really worked out for us in Patagonia. Myfanwy was happy enough for a while, all that singing and being a star and that, but deep down she was never really content. Deep down, I realised, as things stood she never really could be.' He put down the glass as if its contents were too sweet to accompany this particular memory.

'I did everything for her, gave her whatever she desired. She was always talking about you, you see. Always going on about how she wished she had run away to Shrewsbury with you.'

He paused and stared out of the window, the silence in the room broken only by the soft crackle of the fire in the grate. He said, 'She really was so desperately in love with you, so girlish. She was always trying to write to you and things. Even though I arranged that her letters, which of course were never sent, were returned stamped 'Not known at this address'. When the newspaper cuttings from the Cambrian Gazette arrived with news of your wedding and later the tragic accident that left you cruelly brain-damaged and imprisoned in an intensive-care unit for the rest of your life, it was still to no avail. The silly girl just blamed herself for driving you away and said it served her right. It was all terribly troublesome.' He stopped and looked up. 'Would you like a cigar? Or a brandy?'

I shook my head. 'The dessert wine is just fine. Tell me about Myfanwy.'

'Of course! Of course ...' He smiled with benign understanding, and continued: 'Galling though the situation was, I realised that my predicament was far from being unique in the annals of human woe, indeed my reading taught me that it was such a common affair as to be virtually the norm. But none of the ancient texts I consulted were able to offer a remedy. And so I set about creating my own remedy. I decided to make a love potion.' He pointed an admonitory finger at me. 'You think the idea absurd, I know, because the words conjure up the image of some simplistic old witch's brew. But I am talking about a love potion with rock-solid scientific credentials, one drawing on the very latest neurophysiological and neuropsychological research. Could such a thing be possible? To the poets love is ineffable, but to the scientist emotions are just physical or chemical states of the brain. Could it be brought about by design?' His voice took on a distant, dreamy quality as if he were not really here but far away in his ivory tower grappling with the philosophical ramifications of his genius. 'I had to be careful, of course. I was only too well aware of the danger posed by the cold and analytical nature of scientific experimentation. My wide-ranging study of the literature on this subject made it clear to me that love was by its very nature a spontaneous thing, a wild horse that would not be caged. How then to balance the demands for scientific control and spontaneity? It was like manoeuvring a tornado, taming the tidal wave. Not just difficult but possibly impossible. For it is a paradox, is it not? By harnessing the maelstrom you exert a form of control that extinguishes precisely that which makes it a maelstrom?' He looked at me and raised his hand. 'I know what you're thinking, Louie. You wish no doubt to object that the propensity to fall in love is predicated on ideals of beauty which we store in our soul since childhood; images which we derive from the earliest memory of the soft, cherished face of our sweet mother. Is that not so? And since these things are set in stone at the very dawn of consciousness, how, you ask, could I alter them? How could I possibly erase what time had written in the foundations of Myfanwy's existence more than twenty-five years ago? It's a good question, Louie, and I'm glad you raised it. I think you will be impressed by my solution.

'I managed it by artificially stimulating that sensation commonly known as dйjа vu. I created mental sensations, coated them with the texture of 'pastness' and implanted them in the psyche by suggestion. Although bear in mind this early work was done with prairie voles; it would be quite a while before I was ready to work with Herod, let alone Myfanwy.'

'You used Herod for your experiments?'

'Of course! And prairie voles — charming creatures. Did you know they mate for life? Faithful until they die, never once straying. We could learn a lot from them.'

'This is crazy.'

Brainbocs ignored me. 'I have to say the results were quite unnerving. Any policeman will tell you how unreliable our memories are. Show three people the same scene and they will remember it with wildly differing accounts. This is well-known; all the same, I was quite shocked — even frightened — by just what a cobweb our sense of identity is. Our little worlds are built on eggshell, Louie. Our deepest beliefs and convictions may be entirely false. I started to question the fundamentals of my own existence. Was my recollection of a childhood at my mother's knee in Talybont remotely trustworthy? The squeak of the spinning-wheel on long winter evenings; the faint musk-like odour of her body; the crackle in the fireplace and the tap of wind-blown twigs against the window pane like the ghost hand of a dead child pleading to be let in? Were these really my memories or had some poetic madman implanted them in me along with the ersatz conviction that they were my childhood remembrance? What if someone had done to me what I was about to do to Myfanwy? I couldn't know.

'The rest was just a bit of O level biochemistry. A cocktail of three key hormones. Serotonin, phenylethylamine and oxytocin — which is the one responsible for the bonding between a mother and her baby. With their help I was able to effect the basic re-architecturalisation of the cortical superstructure.'

'So where does Herod fit into all this?'

'He was my experimental model, along with the prairie voles which are also most suitable. You see, in my research at the National Library I came into contact with some of the government scientists who were working on him trying to prevent him regaining his memory. It was just happenstance really that I was working on the neurobiological basis of love at the same time that they were dealing with the problem of Herod's lost memory. Well, you know what scientists are like, we got to talking in the canteen and, realising how this could benefit me, I offered to help. Herod was moved to the sanatorium where he stayed for many weeks. He was perfect for research purposes, you see. A man who had no memory, a tabula rasa, so to speak. The result was a triumph in the annals of bio-engineering. I made him love. Do you understand the full implications of that? I gave him the power to love.'

'And what about Mrs Bligh-Jones?'

'Oh that was simple. Mrs Bligh-Jones was well-known to have hot pants for the gentlemen, especially those of a rugby-playing persuasion. She was a useful means of control. It was their regular trysts here that kept him docile.'

'You thought by teaching Herod to love you could do the same for Myfanwy? Make her love you? It's insane.'

'Not only that, but I also managed to make a few design modifications, to improve on the original. As you know there are a number of things seriously wrong with love. For a start it has a built-in statute of limitations, as evinced by Herod's return to his former self. Any weeping schoolgirl will tell you true love never lasts. It's really a problem with the instability of the oxytocin molecule. But there is a more fundamental flaw, one that is central to love's very essence: fleeting, inconstant and hostage to that cruelly arbitrary quality popularly known as 'handsomeness' — mere physical appearance that serves as an indicator of our reproductive potency. Which means, basically, that chaps who look like me never get a look in.' He paused and then added, 'And that's where you come in.'

He signalled to Rhodri to refill the wine glasses.