Read The Unbearable Lightness of Being in Aberystwyth Online
Authors: Malcolm Pryce
The Unbearable Lightness of Being in Aberystwyth (32 page)
I said, ‘You thought up all this on your chamber pot?’
Brainbocs smiled. ‘Sherlock Holmes would have called it a three-pipe problem. I came to regard it as a “three-pot problem”. Considerably more than three actually.’
‘Did you really think you could save her?’
He didn’t answer for a while but regarded me with a look of piercing intensity. Then said, ‘Maybe I have.’
I looked back to the beeping mice and he added, ‘To tell the truth, it wasn’t really my intention to save her. Not really, not deep down. Deep down I had something else in mind.’ His voice drifted away slightly as if he had forgotten I was there.
‘Tell me, Louie, have you ever wondered what place there could be in a benevolent Father’s world for such a cruel device as unrequited love? Or for deformity?’
I looked down at him with pity and he said, ‘But of course you don’t. You never do. I know these things mean nothing to you, Louie. You are like Cadwaladr painting his bridge. You get to the end and look back and you see that it needs doing all over again, all your efforts have been in vain. And yet somehow you are not dismayed by this. You start again. You place your palms on the rock and start rolling. I admire you for it and yet sometimes I despise you also in the midst of my admiration. Because
being undaunted is easy for a man like you. Myfanwy looks at you and smiles. Yet for me she reserves the worst fate of all. Far worse than hate, or scorn or contempt. Far more cruel. For me she smiles too. But it is a smile born only of pity. And pity can never turn to love. Pity is withering to behold in the eye of one’s beloved because it makes clear for all time and irrevocably that one is but a cur in her eyes. A cur with a withered hind leg that limps and which she feeds because if she didn’t the other dogs would kill him.’
Tears appeared in his eyes.
‘Tell me, Louie, how does the Lord decide on the basis of a life not yet lived who should be blighted?’
‘I don’t know. I’m sorry.’
‘No, you don’t know. No one does.’
‘You tried to bring Jesus back to us and you didn’t want to save her?’
‘Being saved or not saved, who cares? It’s beside the point. The more I sat on my pot and thought about it, the more I came to realise how unimportant is the hour of our doom when set against the simple fact of it; the fact that we are doomed at all.’
‘So what was the point of all this?’
‘I wanted to ask Him a question.’
‘Jesus?’
‘Yes, Jesus.’
Brainbocs dipped his hand into a bowl of dried bluebell florets.
‘I love bluebells, the same way some people love snow. You awake one morning and the world is blue. Danycoed Wood transfigured by blue frost. The dreary grim lacklustre world made sublime with their fire. All the litter, the crisp packets, the cigarettes, and all that foul dross left behind by lovers who go there to couple in shame, all obliterated. There is no light more beautiful than the glow that suffuses the woods that week. It is like the intense distillation that shines through the stained glass in
medieval cathedrals, the ultramarine blue of Mary’s cloak. Or that hue, deeper than any found in life, that you get sometimes in Ilford transparencies. You know the ones? Lying in the backs of cupboards, underexposed, showing a scene on a beach from long ago where a child they say is us sits in a nappy and a sunhat and eats sand. If only it could always be like that. But it lasts a week, no more, and the pale blue sizzling fire of the scent lingers a while longer.’
‘I like bluebells too. What was the question?’
He scooped out a fistful of dried flowers and placed them down on the window sill like Scrabble counters and formed the letters of a question.
I read it and said, ‘I could have saved you all the trouble. He doesn’t know the answer Himself. That’s why He’s been hiding all these years.’
‘Go now, Louie, back to your people in Aberystwyth, they need you. There is nothing for you here. Take one of the chocolate bars I taped to the tree if you like. But they’re not very good. They keep melting.’
‘It’s hard trying to create a heaven on earth.’
‘Yes, isn’t it?’
I signalled to Cadwaladr to make ready the boat. And as I turned to leave, Brainbocs’s thin white arm shot out from under the rug and grabbed my wrist in a girlish grip. ‘You know, Louie, if He had made a better fist of the universe, you and I … you and I would have been friends – drinking nectar together in a sun-dappled harbour-side bar, and there would be Myfanwys for everybody …’
‘If He’d made a better job of it, there wouldn’t even be an Aberystwyth.’
Brainbocs looked taken aback. ‘Oh yes! There would, Louie, there would! … But not as we know it.’
He let go of my arm.
He was still sitting on the balcony as I sat in the boat and
glided across the water in which was contained another sky. And I thought about his question. The simple question that seeps like fog under the door down the corridors of our heart. The one Cleopatra had asked every day even though the wishing well of her eyes had long ago divined the answer. That simple ancient question, spelled out in dried bluebells: Why?
The sun flashed on his cane, and a lone gull cried and the only other sound was the soft splash of the oars dipping into the liquid blue silver as two men in a boat rowed across the sky. One man who manned the oars and one who opened the Woolies bag and took out the present he would shortly give to his partner. A small gift, just a token, really, to help her find her way in a confusing world. Just an old grey cowboy hat. He took it out and placed a small footprint on the brim.
Also available by Malcolm Pryce:
From Aberystwyth with Love
The latest instalment in the wickedly funny
Aberystwyth
series sees Louie Knight, Aberystwyth’s only private detective, swapping the train to Dovey Junction for the Orient Express and trying to unravel a murder mystery that is bizarre, even by his own exceptional standards . . .
It is a sweltering August in Aberystwyth: the bandstand melts, the Pier droops, and Sospan the ice-cream seller experiments with some dangerously avant-garde new flavours. A man wearing a Soviet museum curator’s uniform walks into Louie Knight’s office and spins a wild and impossible tale of love, death, madness and betrayal.
Sure, Louie had heard about Hughesovka, the legendary replica of Aberystwyth built in the Ukraine by some crazy nineteenth-century Czar. But he hadn’t believed that it really existed until he met Uncle Vanya. Now the old man’s story catapults him into the neon-drenched wilderness of Aberystwyth Prom in search of a girl who mysteriously disappeared thirty years ago. His life imperilled by snuff philatelists and a renegade spinning wheel salesman, Louie finds his fate depending on two most unlikely talismans – a ticket to Hughesovka and a Russian cosmonaut’s sock.
ISBN: 9781408801024 / Paperback / £7.99 (Published May 2009)
I would like to thank my editor Mike and agent Rachel for all their help and friendship.
Aberystwyth Mon Amour
Last Tango in Aberystwyth
The Unbearable Lightness of Being in Aberystwyth
Don’t Cry For Me Aberystwyth
‘Do-Re-Mi’ Words by Oscar Hammerstein II and Music by Richard Rodgers © 1959,
Williamson Music International, USA. Reproduced by permission of EMI Music Publishing,
London WC2H 0QY.
The epigraph is from ‘The Emperor of Ice Cream’ from
The Collected Poems of Wallace
Stevens
by Wallace Stevens, published by Faber and Faber Ltd.
Lines fom ‘Little Gidding’ are from
The Four Quartets
in
Collected Poems 1909–1962
by T.S.
Eliot, published by Faber and Faber Ltd.
Lines from ‘A Peasant’ by R.S. Thomas are from
Collected Poems 1945–1990
, published by J.M.
Dent, a division of the Orion Publishing Group.
First published 2005
This electronic edition published in September 2010 by Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
Bloomsbury Publishing, London, Berlin, New York and Sydney
Copyright © 2005 by Malcolm Pryce
The moral right of the author has been asserted
All rights reserved
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ISBN 9781408809020
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