‘Don’t be fooled,’ I added hurriedly. ‘He is a very mercurial man. One minute up, the next down. Soon this perception that you are united by a common bond of suffering will pass, as swiftly as a cloud passes in front of the sun, and then he will want to kill you again.’
Rwpert took the photo and brought it up to his face and peered. The look of fear and hostility on his face slowly melted, replaced by surprise and wonder. ‘Yes,’ he said softly. ‘That’s me, Joseph, father of baby Jesus. I look so . . .’ He stopped. He looked so . . . what was it? A look of concentration formed, the expression of a man struggling to call to mind a vital truth. He tried again. ‘You know, I was . . . I wanted . . .’ He stopped again. ‘I always thought that one day, I . . . I . . .’ He bunched his fingers into a fist and pressed it to his forehead. ‘Fuck,’ he said. He began to whimper. His heart had burst, ambushed by a tumult of anguish. What was he remembering? The little boy contemplating all the great things he would one day be? Or just a gate he played on as a kid? That can do it. I would have told him, if it had not been for the tears that now glistened on his cheeks and smudged the kohl- rimmed eyes, that sometimes we cannot find the words because they are not there. Words are such wonderful things that they deceive us, we fail to see how even the simplest things so often lie beyond their reach; we can describe spaceships and translucent sea creatures that live on the floor of the ocean trench, but we have no way to describe the subtly differing currents that sweep through the channels of our own hearts. Words are brass coal tongs with which we seek to caress butterflies. When the veils of memory are torn asunder, and the raw experience is released like scent in the mind, the coal tongs snap on empty air.
‘What do you want to know?’ he snivelled.
‘You remember this scene?’
‘Of course.’
‘This is you?’
‘Yes.’
‘The kid in the cardboard beak is Gethsemane Walters, right?’
‘Yes.’
‘What happened to her?’
‘She disappeared.’
‘We know, but where did she go?’
‘I was only fifteen.’
‘So you’ve had a long time to think about it, what do you think happened?’
Rwpert considered and said, ‘I saw in the paper that she’s back. Someone saw her down by the lake.’
‘That’s right, and someone handed in her hat.’
‘Was it really her?’
‘I’ve no idea. What do you think?’
‘I think she’s dead, buried in the concrete of the dam.’
‘Who killed her? Goldilocks?’
‘So they say.’
‘What do you say?’
He pressed his wet face into his hands. ‘I don’t know, I don’t.’
I addressed Uncle Vanya. ‘Has your melancholy subsided?’
‘I’m recovering.’
‘Better hurry up, Rwpert. See how he flinches when I mention your name?’
‘Look,’ said Rwpert. ‘Why not ask her mum, Ffanci Llangollen? She’s back in town, I saw her the other day at the public shelter with a Tesco’s trolley. She heard about the town reappearing and came back. This is her.’ He pointed to the schoolteacher in the picture.
‘OK, Rwpert,’ I said trying to be tough. ‘Forget about Ffanci Llangollen, tell us about Goldilocks.’
‘I don’t know. I think they were trying to nail it on him because they didn’t like him, but it takes more than that, doesn’t it? Even a bad guy like him is entitled to the protection of the law. That’s only fair. That’s what the law is for, isn’t it? To protect us against spite and vindictiveness and lies and stuff. To shield us from the malice of those who would denounce us for selfish reasons of their own.’
He looked up at Uncle Vanya whose entire life had been a testament to the simple Christian truth uttered by Rwpert. They embraced as brothers.
Uncle Vanya and I stood up to leave and, on impulse, I took out a ten pound note and stuffed it into the balled fist of Rwpert. ‘Hope things work out with the kid,’ I said. As I walked away he called me back.
‘There was something,’ he said. ‘The same day that Gethsemane went missing they found Gomer Barnaby, the heir to the Barnaby & Merlin rock fortune, wandering around in a daze in the streets of Abercuawg. His hair was standing on end like he had seen something terrifying, and all his teeth were broken.’
‘What happened to him?’
‘No one knows. But he never recovered his wits. His father has nursed him ever since. Some people said he’d seen a troll, others said the Slaughterhouse Mob had done something to him. No one knows what. I don’t know if it helps.’
We walked out of the station and hovered for a while at the wrought-iron gates of Elm Tree Avenue. The night had darkened and the breeze brought scents of summer: woodsmoke, new-mown grass, creosote. But the street lights were flickering on and the orchestra of wailing police sirens was building. It was time to measure the capacity of a Russian heart against the eternal encephalograph machine of Aberystwyth Prom.
Chapter 8
A donkey brayed maniacally. His eye sockets had been filled with glowing coals. The donkey stood in the bell tower of Notre Dame silhouetted against the blood-red sunset and febrile stormy sky, braying with malignant pleasure as the bell clanged and clanged and clanged . . . Each brazen clang was a demented hammer blow against the inside of my skull, like the nauseous pounding of blood in the ears of a man raving with fever. The clapper was fashioned from bone and carved into a form that filled me with an eerie and sickening sense of
I stood up and, fighting back waves of nausea, lurched as if across the pitching deck of a ship in a storm towards the place where I dimly remembered having left the door the night before. It was still there. I opened the door and saw Llunos. Despite the profusion of old wives’ tales about raw egg or oysters, nothing really works against severe hangovers apart from death. And maybe even death would not take away the pain of a man who had been so presumptuous the night before as to attempt to take a sounding of that bottomless cistern, the Russian heart. But of all the things that don’t work against hangovers, the one that doesn’t work the most is a visit from the cops. They always have conversation on the mind and seldom of a kind likely to knit up the ravelled sleeve of care.
I sat at the table holding my head in my hands. Llunos made tea: a symphony of discordant percussion and shrill violin notes that reminded me of the atonal music they sometimes had up at the Arts Centre.
‘You are a very unlucky man,’ said Llunos as he placed the teapot down. He had already observed from the way I flinched each time the clock stunned the day with its vicious ‘tock’ that normal sounds were amplified for me this morning; or maybe he had intuited it from the alcohol fumes in the room, which, he said, made his eyes water and his head a bit dizzy. Out of kindness he lowered the teapot on to the table with the gentle controlled descent of the lunar module approaching the surface of the moon; the cups like Harrier jump jets landing vertically on to the deck of an aircraft carrier.
‘One terribly unlucky man. Everyone you meet winds up dead. I need extra life insurance just to talk to you.’
I groaned.
