Rhiannon Jones walked over and stood next to me, admiring the cosies.
'Prynhawn da, Mr Knight!'
I turned and smiled. 'Prynhawn da, Mrs Jones, lovely day!' She put on an epiphanic expression. 'Oh isn't it!' I needed to pump her for information but first I had to negotiate my way graciously through the introductory pleasantries. Too much haste here and she might stonewall me later.
'Oh yes, turned out beautiful, it has,' I said. 'Let's hope it stays like this for July.'
The sun slid behind a cloud on Mrs Jones's brow as some long-forgotten trauma from her childhood rose to the surface. 'Ooh you wouldn't say that if you'd seen it in '32! Lovely June that was, then first day of July it rained and didn't stop until August Bank Holiday.' She shuddered. 'I still haven't got over it!' 'Still,' I said consolingly, 'we can't complain about today.' 'Oh no,' she smiled, 'it's turned out nice all right. But then . . .'
She paused and slowly lifted her index finger to the bridge of her nose in a gesture that the women of Aberystwyth absorb at their grandmother's knee. It was a gesture designed to add a courtroom emphasis to a certain caveat that was coming. Coming unavoidably, and with the predestined certainty of a piano falling on to the head of a cartoon cat. I watched mesmerised. Oh yes, it was indeed a lovely day, she conceded, her rib cage filling up with air. 'But!' She wagged her finger in front of my face. 'But .. . but then it was nice yesterday, too, chwarae teg!'
Her eyes sparkled with the fire of victory. It was nice yesterday too. Of course it was. Or was it? To be honest I couldn't remember, but it didn't really matter. We were dealing here with that linguistic get-out-of-jail-free card 'chwarae teg'. It translated as 'fair-play' and if you put one in your sentence there was nothing, no solecism, platitude or canyon-bridging leap of logic you couldn't get away with.
Having verbally checkmated me, Mrs Jones returned her attention to the tea cosies, becoming a model of magnanimity towards her vanquished foe.
'Oh yes, beauties these are,' she said. 'This set was knitted by the Sisters of Deiniol at the Hospice in '61. It was part of the war effort to buy the Lancaster.' She gave a slight nod towards the window that looked out on to Victory Square.
'It was because we didn't have any air cover, you see.' 'Must have taken a lot of knitting to buy a bomber.' 'Oh yes, but those Sisters of Deiniol are nothing if not disciplined. Ever so strict they are. You know Mrs Beynon from the lighthouse? They wouldn't let her work in the gift shop when her monthly courses were on her!'
*
The cream in the cakes was mashed up from margarine and sugar. The tables and chairs came from a school assembly hall. And the high, church-like ceiling was filled with an echoey din, softened by the fug of steam and accumulated minto-flavoured breath that resides in places like this even in the depths of summer. It was the Museum cafe. Red plastic tomato-shaped ketchup dispenser on the table. Polished tea urn on the counter along from the display where canoe-shaped doughnuts bore scars of fake jam. In the corner there was a one-armed bandit for which you had to change money into old pennies at the till.
Mrs Jones wiped her little finger along the rim of her prune-like mouth. Traces of cream still clung stubbornly to the grey moss-like growth on her upper lip.
'You know,' I said, 'I used to come here a lot as a kid.'
'Oh yes, we used to be very popular with the schools.'
'My favourite part', I added with exaggerated casualness, 'was the Cantref-y-Gwaelod section.'
Mrs Jones stopped chewing her doughnut and put it down on the plate. Her hand shook. 'I'm afraid', she said softly, 'that's not one of my specialities.'
'Still over by the section on two-headed calves is it?'
The trembling got worse. 'Y . . . Yes, I 'spect it is.'
'Perhaps we can walk over there, later.'
'I ... I ... I think it's closed'
'Oh what a pity, I've been thinking of doing some research; a sort of twentieth-century reassessment —'
Mrs Jones cut me off sharply. 'I'm sorry, I can't help you.'
'It wouldn't be any bother. Mostly theory. I'd be approaching the subject from a modern oceanographical perspective. I'd need the tide tables for the Dark Ages, of course —'
She put her hands to her ears and whined like a child.
'No, no, please stop, I don't know anything about Cantref-y-Gwaelod, really I don't.'
'What are you scared of?'
'Nothing, nothing ... I ... please, I have to get back.'
She stood up suddenly, the squeal of her stool making the whole room stop talking and look round. Then, lowering her voice to a harsh whisper, she hissed: 'Just fuck off, right?'
I grabbed her arm before she could escape, the dirty white wool coarse under my hand. 'Not until you tell me what you're hiding.' I tightened my grip on her bony arm and she winced in pain. Everyone in the room was watching in astonishment.
'Nothing!' she hissed. 'I'm not hiding anything. I know nothing about Cantref-y-Gwaelod.' Again she tried to struggle free, but I held on grimly.
'Who killed Brainbocs?' It was wild card thrown in to see if it had any effect on her. It did.
She gasped and cast an involuntary glance over to the fireplace by the door. I followed her gaze. There was a rectangle of bright paper above the mantelpiece where a picture which had been hanging a long time had recently been removed.
'You want me to end up like him? Like Mr Davies? Is that it? Is that what you want?'
'The old curator?'
'Yes!'
'Did he help Brainbocs with his essay?'
She whined and struggled like a cat caught in a trap.
'Where is he now? Mr Davies?'
'Just fuck off!'
My grip broke and Mrs Jones rushed through the tables, knocking drinks over as she went. Oblivious to the stares, I sat looking at the fireplace and the spot where Mr Davies's portrait used to hang.
* * *
The next day they re-opened the Ghost Train and Myfanwy rang to tell me she had two tickets. I met her outside the railway station, next to the sign saying 'What is the purpose of your journey to England?' There was something I wanted to ask her, but it was such a stupid question, I kept avoiding it. 'After Myfanwy's next scream,' I told myself. And then when she screamed, I put it off until the next. There was no shortage of screams; this was the only ghost train in the world with real ghosts. Before privatisation it had been the only ghost train operated by British Rail. It started life as an educational project by the Cardiganshire Heritage Foundation. A disused lead working had been turned into a theme ride depicting the history of lead mining in Cardiganshire. Narrow-gauge steam trains hauled holiday-makers and school-trippers up to the mine and then were exchanged for pit ponies which pulled the wagons through the galleries. It even won an award from UNESCO for responsible tourism, but then came the terrible accident. A wheel spun off and hit a pit prop bringing the roof down and killing a party of day-trippers from the Midlands. When the place re-opened two months later funny things started happening. The ponies whinnied eerily from their stables every night and in the morning they shied and refused to enter the mine. Strange sounds were heard and disembodied lights were seen floating inside the tunnels. Soon passenger numbers dwindled and it looked like the train had reached the end of the line. But then word began to spread and a new breed of passenger arrived: not people with an interest in industrial archaeology, but UFO-hunters, megalith lovers, spontaneous human combustion ghouls and lads on stag nights. And so was born the world's only genuine ghost train. In addition to the curtains of fluorescent sea weed, and plastic skeletons through which the electrically driven wagons now trundled, thrill-seekers could also look out for a woman carrying a head under her arm with peroxide blonde hair. Or a man asleep on a bench with a copy of the Daily Mirror over his face. And, in the cafeteria, an ectoplasmic woman breast-feeding her baby.