Don’t Cry For Me Aberystwyth Read Online Free Page B

conflict the dog had been stuffed and now sat obediently in a glass case in the museum on Terrace Road, his muzzle permanently fixed in the bright smile that they said was a high-water mark of the taxidermist’s art. The movie was a re-release, the director’s cut. The other poster bore a different sort of smile, the grin of a man less beloved than Clip: it was the face of my old games teacher, Herod Jenkins. The bogey man who haunted all our nightmares. Years ago in school I had watched him send my consumptive schoolmate Marty off on a cross-country run into a blizzard from which he never returned. In later years Herod had tried to blow up the dam and drown our town. His face, too, was famous for its smile, or rather the horizontal crease across his face that he called a smile.
    Calamity and I watched the two men dip their brooms in watery wallpaper paste and sweep them rhythmically across the paper. The long, slow arcs, like windscreen wipers, smoothing out thehorizontal crease in the paper, but doing nothing for the one in Herod Jenkins’s face. According to the poster Herod Jenkins had found work at the circus: ‘Samson Agonistes, half man, half bear!’ It was a role created bespoke by the tailors of fate. Circus strongman, the last refuge for a renegade games teacher who has run out of options. The circus was parked about twenty miles outside town, at Ponterwyd. They didn’t dare cross the county line and come any closer to town because Herod was a wanted man in Aberystwyth. Although wanted only in the technical legal sense. I shivered.
    ‘What do you reckon?’ said Calamity.
    I put a fatherly arm across her shoulders. ‘If he was telling the truth, and he really doesn’t know what the item you found is, he doesn’t know it’s a hat-check receipt, right?’
    ‘Right.’
    ‘So there’s no reason why we should tell him. We’ll come back and pick it up another time.’
    ‘I’m aching to know what it is.’
    ‘Me too, but sometimes you just have to be patient about these things.’
    ‘So what do we do now?’
    ‘We’ll go to the Kamp and then talk to Father Christmas’s girlfriend.’
    We drove out to Borth with heavy hearts. We hated going to Kousin Kevin’s Kamp; we always got thrown out. It was only a matter of how far we got inside the perimeter gate before it happened.
    After the turning at Rhydypennau we bade farewell to the sun. The world was grey. It was just one of those accidents of geography. All the rocks found along this coast are grey, buff, beige or dirty mauve. In other parts of the world the hills are quarried for bright, shining Carrara marble. Just a little accident of geography,that’s all, but it is surprising how much it can affect the contents of the human heart. Try as you may, you can’t imagine people lolling about in togas and sandals, drinking wine, in buildings made of slate. Just as it’s hard to imagine them beneath the bright hills of Liguria, in their halls of white marble, sitting in crow-black rags, stirring cauldrons and tending spinning wheels like they do in Talybont.
    We drove in through the perimeter fence and past the guard house, under a bleak wrought-iron sign, and on to the car park. The snow that had fallen a few days ago still remained here on the north-facing slope. Against the whiteness the buildings looked darker and more sombre, a world of two tones which reminded of those arty photography exhibitions they sometimes held up at the Arts Centre on campus. The sort of blurred, out-of-focus snaps that normal people threw away but that won prizes if you exhibited them.
    ‘You can get rickets if you stay at this place too long,’ said Calamity.
    ‘How do you know?’
    ‘I read about it in the paper. They recommend you to eat mackerel while you’re here because it’s high in vitamin D.’
    I reversed into a parking space and butted the rear of the Wolseley Hornet up against a wire-netting fence on which was stapled a metal sign showing an Alsatian dog