‘Yes, sometimes; we all do.’
‘You feel like an uninvited guest?’
‘On occasion. But it passes.’
‘Any disturbance to the integrity of my box affects me deeply.’
‘Wasn’t there an ancient Greek who had the same problem with his ship?’
‘Theseus, the chap who slew the Minotaur. While replacing every plank of his ship with a new one, he wondered if it was still the same ship. John Locke had a similar issue with the darning of his sock. Talking of the Minotaur, I see your old school games teacher, Herod Jenkins, is standing for high office.’
‘How high?’
‘Mayor. He’s standing against Ercwleff. They’re going to have a jamboree to decide the issue, sort of an Aberystwyth version of a presidential debate. They’ll be competing in three activities: human cannonball, a drinking game and a fist fight in the pub car park. Ercwleff and Herod Jenkins. The word on the Prom says Ercwleff is going to take a dive in the fifth.’
‘Herod Jenkins,’ I said softly, as if fearful that he might appear if I spoke too loudly. Even after thirty years the sound of his name made my skin prickle with a hot flush of anxiety. It was during his games lessons that we divined the bitter truths of this world, that suffering was the currency in which we all must trade. Progress through those years was done at a forced march with little time for stragglers, for the weak and infirm. The most infirm of all was my friend Marty, the consumptive schoolboy. Ordinarily that talismanic chit of paper, the note from your mam excusing you from games, should have been enough to save him. But one cold bleak January the note lost its power to charm and Marty was sent out alone, on a cross-country run into a blizzard. For Herod the important thing was to get as many boys across the ice floes of life as fast as possible, regarding it as inevitable that some would be left behind. Who knows how differently things would have turned out if he had been a kind man? Perhaps I would be a plumber now, happy in the docile simplicity of my pipes and spanners. I would not be kept awake at night by the wolves howling in the sewer beneath the city streets, nor by the nameless anxiety that flashed through my heart every time the headlights of a turning car raked the ceiling.
‘According to the publicity, it’s one of God’s children versus the Philosopher King,’ Sospan explained. ‘Lamb versus Lion.’
‘Herod is a philosopher king?’
‘He’s got lots of ideas.’
‘Like putting newborn babies on the roof overnight?’
‘Not sure about that.’
‘What about Ercwleff? What’s his manifesto?’
‘A rabbit in every pot.’
‘I’ll vote for that.’
I walked back to the office to pick up my Wolseley Hornet. I drove out of town, over Trefechan Bridge, and turned at the fire station; the road became a track and the street lights petered out. I slowed to a crawl. The track ran parallel to the sea, which lay to the right, invisible in the darkness. On my left, also invisible, brooded the hill of Pen Dinas and its Iron Age ramparts. Up ahead lights gleamed from the old mansion on a distant hill, Plas Tan-y-Bwlch, which had at various times billeted soldiers, lunatics, military brass, gentry, typhoid sufferers, consumptives and, finally, when all other uses had been exhausted, students. But before you reached it the road passed a straggle of caravans that seemed to have been washed up on the grass by a freak wave. This was Maelor Gawr caravan park. Facilities were minimaclass="underline" an office and reception, a shower block and Jezebels. It was a simple club for people with uncomplicated desires, lost souls who didn’t even have anything to drink to forget. There was a cheap concrete floor, a disco sound system and low-end lighting rig retired from active service at weekly weddings, and a handful of girls in the inevitable stovepipe hats.
I sat at a table and picked up the drinks menu. A stovey girl slinked out from the shadows and stood in my light. I looked up, squinting, and said, ‘I’m looking for Miaow.’
‘I can purr.’
‘So can she. Is she here?’
‘Later.’
‘I’ll have a Jim Beam.’
She paused for a second, pulled a face of mock disappointment and went off to fetch my drink. I waited; there was not much to see. It was early, and these sort of places never get going until midnight, even then nothing happens. My drink appeared and I sipped it slowly.
Half an hour later another stovey girl slipped into the vacant chair opposite me. Her hat loomed over the table like a detonated factory chimney hanging momentarily in the air before it falls.
‘I’m Miaow,’ she said.
‘Louie.’ I reached out and shook her hand.
She wore the traditional folk costume of black-and-white checked flannel skirt, a red shawl and a white apron – and, less traditionally, under the apron, a black basque. She reached into the front of it, pulled out a shot glass and put it next to mine. A waitress clubbed the table with a bottle of Jim Beam and Miaow filled the glasses. ‘Chin, chin,’ she said. We drank. She knocked hers back in one and refilled it. I took mine more gently.
‘You’re disappointed,’ she said.
‘About what?’
‘Because I’m flat-chested. It runs in the family. This is my gran’s corset. It’s made from real whalebone. She won a lot of Sunday School attendance medals wearing this.’
‘Why don’t you invite her over?’
‘She’s dead, silly. All those hymns wore her out.’
‘I bet the hat is hers, too.’
‘Of course. It’s antique, real beaver. That makes it waterproof.’
‘Such a shame to turn beavers into hats – they build excellent dams.’
Miaow rested her chin on her palm and gave me a cool stare. ‘I hadn’t thought about that. Guess which part of the beaver the Eskimos use.’
‘Surprise me.’
‘The bollocks.’
‘Really?’
‘As a painkiller. Beavers chew lots of willow trees, which is where aspirin comes from, isn’t it? They store it in their . . . glands.’
‘Do they have willow trees at the North Pole?’
Miaow considered the question and frowned slightly as if this rather obvious thought had not occurred to her. ‘I’m sure they have trees in Greenland, and that’s where Eskimos come from, isn’t it?’
‘I don’t know. I thought in the real world they came from Canada.’
‘There you are, then. They’ve definitely got willow trees in Canada.’
‘Maybe they trade seal furs for the willow bark.’
I sipped my Jim Beam and peered in the gloom at her face. The twisting disco ball picked out her cheek’s edge with a line of silver; the line moved and shimmered but remained in the same place like the stripes on a barbershop pole or the moonlit sea going in and out but not really going anywhere. The line curved up from her chin with the delicate grace of an Egyptian vase, an amphora, one specially created to hold the frankincense hauled by caravan across the desert from Nubia. Her skin was pale and marked with that barely perceptible dusting of freckles that the Celts left behind along with the grey-green eyes and the sacrificial stones. Her hair was the colour of mahogany, dishevelled not through the absence of a brush but in a different way, the sort acquired from standing in the howling wind on the ramparts waiting for the first sight of a returning sail. She was one of those girls whose loveliness pierces your heart with a strange melancholy. It shone like a star in this sordid club and made me think about the men of the Iron Age hill fort who used to drink their mead here beneath a disco ball of real stars. I understood the source of this melancholy. It was born of the knowledge that in this shabby world we could never hope to be the man at the helm of that returning ship.
‘My real name is Penardim, but I think Miaow is much better, don’t you?’
‘Honestly? No, Penardim is a very beautiful name.’