A Read online

  Black even against the trees, there were walls of tractors and kitchen tiles, stacks of oak, beech and cedar, bicycles, the remains of a Greyhound bus, a clothes mangle, a trailer-load of gravel with weeds growing out of it and, everywhere, heap upon heap of roofing stones.

  Fay and Angus hesitated a moment, glancing at one another, lit by the window. Angus’s left collar was poking from the neck of his jumper and he pressed it back inside, then attempted to flatten his hair. He reached for the large, fish-shaped knocker, and tapped it against the door.

  At once there was a racket, like hundreds of people had sprung awake in every room and were arming themselves, erecting barricades.

  With a clack from the latch, the door swung open. A man stood on the doormat, inspecting them, his clothes baggy and his bald head reflecting a white globe lampshade behind him. A ring of white hair ran around the back of his head and smothered his lower face, like a halo that had fallen suddenly and become stuck.

  – Hello! he said. He had a trace of a Scottish accent. How are you doing? Come in!

  He turned back into a small tiled hall, opening a door on the left-hand side and waving them into a living-room.

  The room they entered was entirely consistent with the yard outside it. Every inch of wall was crowded with photographs and paintings. Books were double-parked on ceiling-high bookshelves. LPs ran in a bank the entire length of the end wall. On the thick florid carpet, five unrelated armchairs were arranged in an arc around a woodburner. An ecstatic yellow labrador – apparently source of the earlier noise – was weaving among their legs, lashing at bottles and other fragile objects with its tail. In a couple of corners, Thelonious Monk was quietly playing Hackensack.

  – Er, hi, Angus started. We’re, er, sorry to bother you.

  – Oh, never mind all that, said the man. Here. Have a seat. You’re not in a rush, are you?

  – Not especially, said Fay, perching on the edge of an armchair.

  – Then you’ll join me in a Scotch? said the man.

  – I’d love to, said Fay.

  – Er… Sure, said Angus, sitting. Thanks very much.

  The man opened a low cabinet in the corner, exposing a collection of whiskies that Angus gawped at.

  – Imperial okay?

  – Oh, yes… said Angus.

  The man took three heavy, cut-glass tumblers from a lower shelf, holding them up to a standard lamp to check for dust. His hands were gnarled, like a carpenter’s or an old folk guitarist’s.

  – The wife’s down in Hay, he confided. Then, with a faint edge of reserve, Either of you want… anything in it?

  – Oh no, thanks, said Angus. Fay?

  – Huh? said Fay. She seemed to be absorbed in a large photograph just to the left of the mantelpiece.

  – You want anything in your whisky?

  – Oh… I wouldn’t mind a drop of soda, if you’ve got one.

  – Soda? Sure, said the man, depositing a glass on the coffee table beside Angus and heading off into the hall.

  – Not if it’s any trouble…

  – No trouble! he said, his voice faint already.

  Fay looked around the room, then at Angus and raised her eyebrows.

  – This is alright! she whispered.

  Their eyes stayed meeting for a second.

  – Hey, did you see these? he said, pointing at a bookshelf behind him. Look! Every Kerouac in alphabetical order! And Kesey! And back here, Kafka… Kavanagh… Keats… The entire house must be full to keep this up!

  – Oh, it is, said the man, reappearing with a soda fountain and a tray of ice cubes.

  He grinned and sat down. Angus glanced again at the book shelf, pulling out a hardback copy of Nat O’Hara’s Tales from Aran and flicking through the first few pages.

  – Thanks very much, said Fay politely as she received her whisky. I’m Fay, incidentally.

  – I am sorry to hear that, said the man Scottishly. He then looked slightly embarrassed. Er… I’m Angus.

  He held out his hand.

  – I’m Angus too, said Angus, when they finished shaking.

  – Another Angus! Delighted! Great race that we are! Well, here’s to, er… Anguses!

  The older Angus drank deeply from his whisky.

  Angus closed the book and did the same.

  – Tell me, he said. You wouldn’t remember that line by Nat O’Hara about this stuff? Whisky, that is…

  – And purity’s preserve should be/The woman and the malt whisky?

  – That’s the one, said Angus.

  Fay looked at him.

  – Are you having a go at me? she said, running a hand along the passing labrador.

  – Oh no! said Angus. Just a slight lapse of memory.

  – It is a great thing, said the older Angus judiciously, that we can approach these things in our own different ways.

  – Indeed it is, agreed Angus.

  Fay cleared her throat, then turned back to the photograph beside the mantelpiece.

  – That photograph, she said, gesturing at it. The black-and-white one. That’s not… That’s not Wavy Gravy in the middle there, is it?

  – Yeah! said the older Angus. It is! God. How on earth did you know that?! And, believe it or not, the bloke on the left is me… The one with all the hair.

  He patted his pate ruefully. Three men were standing in a line outside a small, thick-walled stone hut with a bare sweep of mountain cutting across the prospect behind them. They were squinting against the sun – semi-bearded, skin hardened by the elements, clothes ragged and darned repeatedly.

  – Afghanistan. He sighed, taking a swig from his whisky. Truly a wild place.

  – Fay, said Angus. How the hell do you know who Wavy Gravy is?

  – He’s not that obscure, she said. He did the announcements at Woodstock, apart from anything else…

  – I know that, he said. I didn’t know you did.

  – You think it’s likely, she said, that you’d know whether I’d know who did the announcements at bloody Woodstock?

  The older Angus sat back in his chair, watching them amusedly.

  The darkness of the wood lined in tight around the cottage. Angus could picture the place in winter, shielded from the furious snow on the mountains: the days of blindness, revealing themselves on sudden pale, crystal mornings. His namesake and his wife would be up here, battened down, driven – not entirely reluctantly – into the living-room’s thick-curtained warmth.

  Going by the photographs, his wife was something of a force. Line by line, a wide-eyed, ’60s blonde had evolved into a harder, more resilient kind of beauty. You could see how they might complement one another. She seemed sharper than he did, more mercurial, more attuned to reality. You could see, too, how a different history might have found him here alone.

  – So, you’ve got a puncture, he said, when they finally got round to the point of the visit. He cradled his refilled glass. What’s the vehicle?

  – It’s an ambulance, said Angus. An old ambulance.

  – How old?

  – Um… Fourteen years?

  – So… It’s a modified Ford Transit, basically?

  – Yeah, that’s right.

  – Then I may just be able to help you. Hang on a sec. I’ll get my coat.

  Angus followed Fay down the hall and into a russet-walled, hexagon-tiled kitchen. A Rayburn was smouldering on the left-hand side. At the far end was another sturdy oak door.

  – So how’s London these days? said the older Angus, reappearing from the hall with a newish fake Barbour and the labrador trailing behind him. It’s been years since I last went down there.

  He opened the door, picking up a torch and a socket set from an open toolbox and leading the way into a yard.

  – It’s… said Angus.

  – It’s fast, said Fay. Fast like it’s hyperventilating.

  – Yeah, said Angus. It’s fast and, like, fragmented. The social scenes and the music scenes and the political scenes. Everyone’s rus
hing around in different directions, you know… Unconcerted.

  Skeletons of old machinery were stacked on either side of them, coloured in the twitching beam of the torch. The arm of a crane was black against the open patch of sky.

  – Mmm, said the older Angus. I wish I could tell you I missed it.

  They’d stopped beside an old Ford Transit with pictures of a huge, grinning, painted face looking out through mould on every panel. Beneath each picture were the words Willo the Clown! Just beyond it were the deep black shadows of the quarry where he made his living.

  – There, he said, pointing at the well-inflated, front left tyre. You can have that if you want. It should do the job.

  – Really? said Angus stupidly.

  – Sure, said the older Angus.

  – Well… God. Can we give you some money for it or something?

  – No… No. Look. I’ve not seen Willo in years. I bet you anything you like this thing’ll still be sitting here in thirty years’ time, when its tyres have rotted into the ground. Just give us the old wheel off the ambulance.

  – We really weren’t expecting this! said Fay. Thankyou!

  – Oh, it’s no problem. He handed Fay the torch. I’ll just go and get a jack. Loosen up the wheelnuts, yeah?

  – There’s another couple of friends of ours up there, Fay was explaining carefully. They’re both a little… touched right now. In the head, if you see what I mean.

  She cleared her throat.

  – Oh, I shouldn’t worry too much about that, said the older Angus equably. You get pretty used to mushroom casualties, living in these parts… Not to put words into your mouth, of course.

  – Oh no, Fay agreed.

  He coaxed the engine into a roar and pulled out of the gateway, stopping his Escort in the road while Angus swung the gate to – restraining himself from swinging on it – and retied the baler twine.

  Angus climbed into the back seat quickly, hoisting the door upwards so it would stay closed. Fay looked back over the passenger seat and smiled. Behind her the headlights were colouring in the grass and shining back from the distant sheep’s eyes, giving them a completely misplaced look of malevolence. The ambulance too was shining over a ridge or two of common.

  It was then that it struck Angus that he’d been spiked. The notion appeared suddenly and, despite unmistakable ecstasy rushes in his stomach, he tensed immediately – his mind racing back through the past few hours like a low-grade search engine.

  Why in God’s name would anyone have spiked the Imperial? It was all he’d consumed in the past two hours. And who had any pills up here anyway? He looked again over the older Angus’s bald, white-ringed head, Fay’s chaotic hair, the floodlit stretch of road in front of them; and realised, to his astonishment, that he was just feeling happy.

  Tim had stabilised somewhat in their absence, and was able to stand up and greet them as they climbed out of the car. He had a half-spliff in a corner of his mouth – possibly the same one, probably another.

  – You want a go on this, Ang? he offered.

  – Oh no, said Angus. No thanks. Better get this wheel on, you know.

  Tim waved it at Fay, who made similar noises, then at the older Angus, who hummed and ha-ed then accepted, declaring through the smoke that was his first in five years.

  Belle, it seemed, was asleep.

  There was an acuteness in the air. A sense of focus and clarity. Angus carried the lorry jack from the boot of the Escort to the ambulance, aware for the first time of muscles he’d developed over the past three months: from woodcutting, he supposed, and his routine scything of the lawn.

  Fay loosened the wheelnuts and Angus had the nose of the ambulance up within seconds. They swapped the wheels together, Fay hand-twisting the nuts back on while Angus ratcheted them tight.

  The older Angus was chuckling as he drove away down the hill. Behind him, the moon had moved a little way westwards but it continued to light the world in black and white. The patch in the Escort’s headlights was the only colour before the odd line of streetlights on the other side of the valley.

  t: a man in a maestro

  I can see it in your eyes.

  I can hear it in your sighs.

  Feel your touch and realise

  The thrill is gone.

  PC Andrew Price approached the Gospel Pass at slightly less than a walking pace. He was singing along to the Inkspots in a clear, Eisteddfod prize-winning tenor, mouthing in the spoken lulls.

  – Yeah. Yeah. The night is cold. Yeah. For love is old. Yeah. That’s what I thought. Yeah…

  He turned in his seat, looking back towards the full moon close above the back of the Twmpa; then he flipped off the headlights.

  Approaching the dark split between the mountains, PC Price tried to imagine the Inkspots in performance: the four of them, in a row onstage. They’d be black, of course; but black like black people used to be, before they were Naomi Campbell, and Ian Wright, and Lenny Henry, who were basically just the same as everyone else. The Inkspots would have been different. They’d have grinned unnaturally, contorted their bodies, looked out at the audience through fathomless eyes.

  Reconstitute the bodies from the eyes, and there you’d have the truth of it. The Inkspots beneath the Inkspots – histories of love agony, slavery agony, suppression agony – an aching shackled by formality. That was why they sang so well. PC Price had for years had a conceit that proper black people and proper Welsh people amounted to very much the same thing; though for the sake of his professional reputation he did try and keep this to himself.

  They were in unison now – PC Price and the Inkspots – their voices slipping into falsetto:

  I’ll find you in the morning sun,

  And when the night is new……

  I’ll be looking at the moon,

  But I’ll be seeing you.

  The piano and the backing vocals died away and the tape came, for the third time that day, to an end. In the silence, PC Price cleared his throat and switched off the stereo. He listened a moment to the gentle hum of the engine, then pressed his foot a little way down on the accelerator, gratified by the rise in pitch.

  In the darkness, the walls of the Gospel Pass came apart like curtains. Swinging the wheel with the sudden right of the road, the moonlight caught PC Price’s face: his pale skin, spotted with stubble and the blackness of sideburns, his disordered hair a mesh of shadows. He steered right again and ducked the car into a passing place.

  The radio instructions had come through near the beginning of the tape’s first side. Halfway through Street of Dreams, as it happened, which he’d been singing along to in his usual impassioned manner.

  – PC 192. A male, Welsh voice. Come in, PC 192. Please confirm your location. Over.

  PC Price was elsewhere, strolling down the sunny side of the Street, his best girl on his arm and a trilby tipped jauntily on his head. Now and then the two of them would perform a synchronised skip or spin which neither of them either prompted or acknowledged.

  – Andy! said the voice, much louder. Oy! Andy! Where are you, boy?

  PC Price snapped awake and reached hastily for the radio.

  – PC 192, he stated. Continue. I was investigating a, er, suspicious-looking deserted vehicle.

  – Were you hell, said the voice.

  – I’m just outside Llanthony, said PC Price. On the Capely-ffin side.

  – Got a bit of a job for you, Andy. Alright? You’ll love this one.

  – What’s that, then?

  – Get yourself up towards Hay Bluff, right? There’s an ambulance up there – decommissioned ambulance, it is – about halfway across the common at the bottom, next to the road there. You can’t miss it. They’re broken down either ways, so they’re not going to be going anywhere. Word is they’re druggies or something. I dunno. Arrest them, yeah? There’ll be an ’elicopter out to back you up.

  PC Price thought a moment.

  – What if they’ve got guns? he said.

&n
bsp; – Aw, don’t worry about it, boy. No-one’d be sending you up there if they’d got guns now, would they, eh?

  – Alright, said PC Price uneagerly. I’m onto it.

  The moon hadn’t yet made it above Tarren yr Esgob, so the trees and fields and bracken were still in darkness. He loved this road at night. The way the Milky Way followed it, straight above the black arch of the valley.

  Sure enough there was an ambulance down there, its paint bright against the grey ripples of the common, the shadow from the moon long behind it. Lights spotted the hills as far as PC Price could see.

  Standing in the middle of the narrow road, he was watching the figures busying themselves on the common – forms only at this distance. Apparently they were involved in changing the left front wheel. They seemed too to be moving things from and into another vehicle parked behind the first. A car of some sort, although he couldn’t see enough of it to determine what.

  It was the same ambulance, though, that much he was sure of. And Colin had talked about people, not person, driving it. That meant there were others beside the freak with the dreadlocks and the eyes pointing in different directions, who had in fact struck him as an alright sort of bloke. Too obviously suspicious to really be dangerous. So far as he could make out, anyway, there were a good four people down there. Probably there were more in the vehicles.

  Well, he was buggered if he was going to start wading in there with his truncheon. Even if he didn’t get shot or assaulted or something, what the hell was he supposed to do with more criminals than there were seats in his car? And besides, the nearest open police station was in Brecon, which was well over half an hour’s drive away; and he didn’t even know what to charge them with even if he did manage to get them there. He’d been on duty now for thirteen hours one way or another. All he really wanted was a nice pint of Cointreau and lemonade down at the Wheatsheaf – which, he resolved, he would be going to get the moment this lot left.