found Esau next morning in my arms, cold as stone. Mam has never got over it – honestly! The way she goes on about it sometimes anyone would think I’d done it.’ He nudged my arm with the back of his hand. ‘You should read this, it’s ever so good. You’d like the Glad Game. Do you want to have a go?’
‘No.’
‘Don’t be like that. There’s no use crying over spilt milk. Come on, we’ll play the Glad Game. It’ll cheer you up in no time. It goes like this: I’m sad that mam sent us to bed but I’m glad she didn’t send us to the cow shed.’
‘OK, I’m glad we had no supper because it helps us have compassion for the starving children around the world.’
‘Hey, you’re good at this. I’m glad we got sent to bed because I get to talk to my new friend Louie.’
‘And it’s good, too, because we don’t really have to go to bed.’
Meici looked puzzled. ‘What do you mean?’
‘It’s not like we have to put pyjamas on or anything, is it?’
He examined my face for a hint that I might be pulling his leg. ‘Are you mad?’ he said. ‘Of course we have to go to bed.’
I stood up and walked downstairs and out through the front door. As I crossed the smear of grit that passed for a garden path my muscles stiffened in anticipation of a challenge from Meici’s mum. But none came. I relaxed and cast a brief look back. In the upstairs window Meici’s face was pressed to the glass, eyes gleaming with awe or fear at my act of treason. Or maybe it was the sharp gleam of spite and the dim vestigial memory of a crime he committed on the threshold of his life; one so terrible they had to pin it on a goblin. I fumbled with the latch on the gate, hands shaking like those of an alcoholic reaching for the first drink of the day.
Chapter 14
It was a long walk to the bus stop and Calamity had gone by the time I got to the office. Eeyore had left a book open on my desk. It was Llewellyn’s
I took the envelope that had held the seance tape out of the drawer and smelled it. I explored the feeling of disquiet that had taken up abode in my heart.
Had the reappearance of Abercuawg made everyone aware of the void in their lives and the stratagems they employed to conceal it? Faith, ice cream, arresting people . . . Each chooses his own road. One man makes Ampersandium, the world’s greatest placebo. Others set sail for promised lands such as Patagonia, Hughesovka . . . Ffanci Llangollen, they say, has wheeled a shopping trolley around the coast of Britain in search of the daughter she lost. Vanya, too, had filled his life with a quest, and yet I got the impression that he did not seriously expect it ever to be resolved. The important thing was the quest.
I left the office and walked down Terrace Road. The cries of children from the beach became discernible as the light slowly changed hue; there was always a subtle change in the children’s voices at this time of the afternoon, as if in a recess of their hearts they were registering the subliminal decline of the sun, the soft, barely perceptible transition from a hot summer day to the edge of evening. The ability to perceive it is innate, the way the knowledge of the river of birth is hardwired into the soul of a salmon.
All seaside towns are in a state of permanent autumn. This is evident in the ruins of the former great civilisation that once built Aberystwyth: a scar in the hillside beneath Pen Dinas too smoothly curved to be the work of nature, it turns out to be the cicatrice of a lost railway line. If you consult an old map you discover with a shock that it was built long ago to Milford Haven; you can’t even get a bus there now. Other archaeological relics left by this vanished race of super-beings include the bandstand which now has a padlocked concertina door like an old garage. Once it had its own silver band, in a town that boasted two orchestras, one at the Pier and one at the winter gardens on top of Constitution Hill. Now no one even knows what a winter garden is. I don’t. Is it really a garden or does it mean just a park of some sort? According to the old guidebooks, the ones that tell you to eat kidneys for breakfast and give advice about buying your fishing licence, there used to be a winter garden on Constitution Hill. But you will look in vain for any trace of it now.
Nowhere is the emptiness more acutely symbolised than in the institution of the pleasure pier where no pleasure is to be had. Originally piers were functional constructions, built to tie boats up to, boats that once plied the main with big smokestacks and restaurants and children in sailor suits or miniature frock coats; but the boats have gone and the projections into the sea remain like those towers they built to enable passengers to alight from Zeppelins in the early years of the twentieth century. The forlorn holidaymakers still walk to the end and back, partaking in a ritual whose meaning escapes them, unaware that there had once been a purpose to this two- hundred-yard walk out to sea. In the absence of anything else to do they buy ice cream or spend money in the amusement arcade and after a while this becomes the point.
The spiritual befuddlement that dogs the man of Aberystwyth at every turn is thus an unavoidable part of his fate because it is written into the very stones of the town in which he dwells. Other talismanic cities of the world such as Timbuktu, Troy and Gilgamesh grew out of the imperatives of trade and commerce or war but, like Babylon, and the towns of the American gold rush, Aberystwyth grew as a town of pleasure. A town in which human felicity was perverted into the singing, carousing, giddy tarantella, the vertiginous stovepipe hat debauch.
When I reached Sospan’s stall there was a sign saying, ‘No specials until further notice’. Uncle Vanya was there, looking worried. Sospan wore the face of a man whose hour has come.
‘What’s wrong?’ I said.
‘Something’s happened,’ said Vanya.
‘Something?’
‘Oh, Mr Knight,’ cried Sospan. ‘Something terrible, something awful, the worst, the absolute worst thing that can befall an ice-cream man has befallen me. I may have to leave town under an assumed identity.’
‘Oh dear. And no specials today either?’
‘No specials. It may be that there will never again be specials.’
‘Not even a Fish Milt Sundae?’
‘Yes, mock me in my hour of need,’ said Sospan. ‘The Fish Milt Sundae was the cause of my downfall. As you know, it was not exactly popular; possibly the most despised flavour I have ever served. But there was one customer who liked it. A very devout and religious woman of advancing years, not normally given to levity, who came every afternoon for three weeks to eat my special Fish Milt Sundae.’ The ice man paused and exhaled in despair. ‘Today I have received news that she is pregnant.’
I said, ‘You can’t get pregnant like that . . . can you?’
‘Mr Knight, I will be frank with you. I assumed that you couldn’t. But, as you know, biology is not my strong suit.’
‘There must be another explanation,’ I said.
‘She is not the sort who would be mistaken about such a thing. She used to work for the St John Ambulance Brigade.’
‘Maybe she got pregnant by the conventional route.’
‘Impossible.’
‘Who is it?’
‘That I cannot tell you.’ He put a plain vanilla cornet on the stands in front of me. ‘On the house. I might as well use up the stock before I leave town.’
‘Are things really that bad?’
‘What can I do?’ he replied. ‘What would you do?’
‘If it was me,’ I said, ‘before I made such a drastic move I would first demand a paternity test. And then, if it was established that I was the father—’
‘I’ve spoken to her doctor, there is no doubt about it.’
‘I’m not doubting her condition,’ I said. ‘Just the cause. Sospan, sometimes in situations like this even respectable ladies do not always tell the truth. It is not unknown, for example, for a lady of good reputation to fall victim to the sugary lies of some passing Don Juan and later when her belly gets big she seeks out a decent and
