Last Tango in Aberystwyth

'Just the one.'

I sighed. 'OK, surprise me.'

'Ventriloquist.'

*

I walked up Great Darkgate Street and through the castle grounds towards the bed-and-breakfast ghetto down by the harbour. This was where the ventriloquists tended to stay, along with the out-of-work clowns, the washed-up impresarios and the men who ran away from the bank to join the circus. At the castle, I wandered through the piles of shattered stone and climbed up on to the hill by the war memorial. The sky was filled with bulbous shiny clouds hinting of a storm to come and churning the sea into soapy dishwater. Down below I could see Sospan's new kiosk — repositioned and re-established after the short-lived fool's errand of selling designer coffee to a town that hungered only for vanilla. And south towards the harbour, but moving north towards Sospan's stall, with the slow but inexorable tread of a glacier, was my father, Eeyore, and the donkeys. Every day he would be there, even in the depths of winter when there were no tourists, plodding up and down the Prom, from Constitution Hill to the harbour and back. A pendulum of fur, wound by a key of straw.

I walked down and Sospan hailed me.

'Bore da! Louie. Usual, is it?'

'No, give me something I haven't tried before.'

He wagged his index finger at me. 'Got just the thing for you.' He turned to the dispenser and I turned too, placing my back against the counter, and stared out to sea. Down below, etched into the slimed rocks, were the remains of an Edwardian sea-water bathing-pool. Less than a hundred years old and already there was almost nothing left: just an outline in the rocks like the bones of a fossil; proof that the poison that did for Nineveh and Troy had no intention of sparing Aberystwyth. Sospan handed me a pale green ice cream. 'You'll like this!'

I licked. It was like nothing I'd ever tasted before. 'What is it, frog?'

'Absinthe.'

'You're kidding!'

'Lick it slowly now!'

He made one for himself and leaned forward to join me.

I said, 'I thought we'd lost you for a while — given up on the ice-cream trade.'

He pulled a wan face. 'You never really can, though, can you? It was like running off with a dizzy blonde. You know, fun for a while but she can't cook and after a time you find all you really want is a nice bowl of caawl and someone to wash your socks.'

'I don't think I've ever had a woman wash my socks for me since my mother died when I was a baby.'

'You've missed out on a fine feeling there, Louie; washing a man's socks, it's what love's all about in the end.'

'I'll slurp to that.'

'You've just missed Father Seamus. He was asking after you.'

'That's nice of him.'

'He loves the new absinthe - of course I don't tell him what's in it. I say it's green tea.'

I looked at the faint, impenetrable smile that Sospan wore to meet all occasions. The same smile worn by the undertaker and the brothel-keeper and others with a professional understanding of the hearts of men and a policy not to interfere.. It was good to have him back in business, we'd felt his absence keenly, just as we still miss the song of Myfanwy that no longer echoes down the streets at night.

'I thought Father Seamus liked to take his ice down the other end of the Prom,' I said.

'Oh very sad, that is,' said Sospan, hissing softly in sympathy. 'It's on account of this rejection of the teachings of the Church you find nowadays. A lot of the other kiosks refuse to serve men of the cloth.'

'That seems a bit drastic, doesn't it? It wasn't the Christians who started this flood, it was the druids.'

'I know, but they're upset, aren't they? Because there was no rainbow this time as a mark of His covenant. A lot of people are angry about that. 'What's wrong with us,' they say. 'Why don't we get one?''

'He probably just doesn't want to waste a good rainbow.'

'That's what I tell them.'

'Still, it's nice of you not to go along with the rest of them.'

'You know me, Louie, I never take sides.'

'Your kiosk is a moral Switzerland.'

'Everyone's welcome, you know that. It's an understanding I have with Evans the magistrate: I won't judge you and he won't serve ice cream in court.'

I looked at him. It was the first time I'd heard him attempt a joke and for once his smile almost became warm.

Eeyore arrived and ordered a 99. We nodded to each other and I patted the flank of Sugarpie and tied her halter to the lamppost. Eeyore had worked for the police for years before retiring to the gentler company of the donkeys. The only animals in the world, he once told me, with absolutely no agenda. In his time his fingers had been worn smooth from fingering the collars of the local hoodlums and he still had an encyclopaedic knowledge of their ways. I asked him if he knew anything about men in ankle-length Peacocks' coats, with black feathers in the cap. He nodded and a troubled look stole over his old, lined face.

'Yeah,' he said with a heaviness in his voice. 'I've seen something like that, once, a long time ago. He was a druid assassin called the Raven. The feather was his badge of office. Ravens were special agents, skilled philanderers, trained to seduce female agents and then kill them.'

'Do you think this could be the same guy?'

Eeyore shook his head wearily, the memory was obviously painful. 'No the Raven I arrested got five terms of life and died seventeen years ago in a knife fight in the maximum-security wing of Cwmtydu Pen. But these are a class of agent, a type. There are always more. For most of the time they live among us as sleepers. Lying dormant, in a sort of hibernation — going about their everyday business like you and me. Sospan here could be one and we wouldn't know.' He indicated the ice-cream man with his half-eaten cornet. I looked at Sospan who was polishing the Mr Whippy dispenser and pretending not to be listening. He smiled. Somehow I couldn't see him as a sleeper, except in the ordinary sense of the word.

'Then someone activates one and you can rely on some pretty unpleasant things happening. These men don't get activated for commonplace jobs.'

'They sound grim,' I said.

Eeyore nodded. 'They are. The worst thing is, once you set one loose, they can't be recalled. The mission can't be aborted. Even the person who activates them can't do it.'

The Seaman's Mission had been built by the church in the last century with a non-specific Episcopal architecture of bare stone arches and dark stained wood. The word 'seaman' had widened in scope since those days and now referred to any of the human flotsam shipwrecked by life and washed up on the shore of Aberystwyth. Vagrants and veterans of the Patagonian War; sea captains and stokers lost in a world where there is nothing left to stoke; monks on the run from their order at Caldy Island; lighthouse men whose lights had been doused or automated; and always there was a smattering of unemployable ventriloquists.

Downstairs there was an empty room with a notice-board and some hard seats set against a wall. Behind, towards the kitchen from which there came the strong odour of boiling cabbage, was a refectory-style dining-room. Five pence for a meal and don't forget to help with the washing-up. Upstairs there were dormitories and private rooms for those with modest means; and in the corridor outside was a lady in a housecoat and headscarf mopping the tiled floor. I asked after Father Seamus who ran the place but she said he was out. She also said the Amazing Mr Marmalade was in Room 3 at the top of the stairs.

The door at the top was slightly ajar and the sound of soft sobbing came from within. I hesitated. I could also just hear the squeaky voice that I'd heard coming from the case.

'There, there, Mister Marmalade. Everything will be all right, just you watch.'

'It's finished Seсor Rodrigo, I tell you. All gone.'

'Say not the struggle nought availeth, Mister Marmalade!'

'Where did the years go, my dear friend?'

'For a while we held them in our fist, Mister Marmalade, we held them close to our hearts, we did!'

There was a half-chuckle of remembrance. 'Yes, we certainly did! But we couldn't stop them, we couldn't