Free The Unbearable Lightness of Being in Aberystwyth by Malcolm Pryce Page B

It’s just a figure of speech – we still use it over here
.
    ‘Over where?’
    The Shadow-Aberystwyth
.
    ‘What do you do down on the estate, anyway, feed the ducks?’
    ‘He’s a gardener’s assistant,’ whispered Calamity.
    ‘I know your sort: all those lonely nights on your own in the potting shed, made you feel a bit frisky, didn’t they? And there she is every night changing in full view of everyone in the bedroom window, all that fancy French lace and finery—’
    She was a penny-farthing, I wouldn’t touch her with a martingale
.
    ‘Tell it to the fairies, Gluebone, you did her in and tried to pin it on the stable boy—’
    Says who?
    ‘The lamplighter.’
    You mean Pigmallow? That swill-pouch? Ha that’s a laugh!
    ‘He’s no swill-pouch.’
    I say he is
.
    ‘He’s worth ten of you Gluebone …’
    There was a pause, and then:
    Oh I get it – the old soft peeler, hard peeler routine …
    There was no more movement from the tumbler.
    ‘Guess I must have leaned on him a bit too hard.’ I smiled and Calamity frowned as if she thought I’d done it on purpose but couldn’t say so. She gathered the cards together.
    ‘We just need to work him a bit more. I reckon he’s almost ready to give up the goods.’
    I leant back in my chair, laced my fingers behind my head, and stared out of the window. The sound of traffic throbbed in the distance hypnotically, and slowly my eyelids slid down and Ifell asleep. I awoke about ten minutes later to the sound of the phone ringing. Calamity answered. ‘Knight Errant Investigations … Yes … Yes … Oh hi! … Fine and you? … Yeah we’re fine … She what? … Oh. No … sorry not yet. But we’re looking. Yeah, I can imagine. Tell her we’re sorry. OK. Yeah and you too. Bye.’ She stared at the phone for a second, lost in thought, and then looked up. ‘That was Gabriel Bassett. Cleopatra was asking if we’d seen Mr Bojangles.’
    ‘The air out at Ynyslas certainly tires you out, doesn’t it?’
    ‘You can say that again, we had a complaint from the coastguard about your snoring. They couldn’t hear the helicopter.’
    She took a card over to the incident board and pinned it on.
    ‘What’s that?’
    ‘Just some stuff about one of my witnesses.’
    ‘Which one?’
    ‘Oh, you know, just background.’

Chapter 6
     
    EEYORE LEANT HIS head against the wall of cheap Formica and viewed the world through that lozenge of grey the railway company call a window. Normally, trying to hold a conversation in these old diesel multiple units was like trying to talk in the engine room of a ship, but it was always eerily silent when the train slowed down as it approached Borth. We glided to a halt. One person got on, one got off. It never changed, as if they only sold one ticket per train. Eeyore peered out. ‘Always looks like the town has got its shirt on back to front, doesn’t it?’
    I knew what he meant. Borth had length but no width. It was like a fake Dodge City constructed by a movie studio in which all the buildings were frontages and the train line was built on the wrong side.
    We pulled out of Borth and continued gliding silently, hardly picking up speed, towards Ynyslas and Dovey Junction. The morning sun had just cleared the horizon above the flat watery world and threw a horizontal beam that made us squint and duck the dust particles that appeared from nowhere like swarms of gnats. The light had the colour of lemonade – not the stuff from the sweetshop, but the homemade drink, chilled and left on the sideboard in a glass pitcher and craved by children in the Famous Five books with the desperation of cocaine addicts. It filled the carriage with warm pale honey and gilded the golf course and beach and sea, and turned the marram grass on the dunes to golden stubble along the chin of the sky.
    The track curved gently to the right and the carriage leaned slightly to accommodate the centrifugal forces, and we leaned,too, stiff as insects preserved