Last Tango in Aberystwyth Read Online Free PDF Page A

get idiots like that. Now once you know what he was dressed like, you can guess where he was going.’ He stopped and looked at me blankly.
    I put my last coin down. He shook his head. ‘This one I have to charge by the syllable.’
    â€˜How many words is it?’
    â€˜Just the one.’
    I sighed. ‘OK, surprise me.’
    â€˜Ventriloquist.’
    *
    I walked up Great Darkgate Street and through the castle grounds towards the bed-and-breakfast ghetto down by the harbour. This was where the ventriloquists tended to stay, along with the out-of-work clowns, the washed-up impresarios and the men who ran away from the bank to join the circus. At the castle, I wandered through the piles of shattered stone and climbed up on to the hill by the war memorial. The sky was filled with bulbous shiny clouds hinting of a storm to come and churning the sea into soapy dishwater. Down below I could see Sospan’s new kiosk – repositioned and re-established after the short-lived fool’s errand of selling designer coffee to a town that hungered only for vanilla. And south towards the harbour, but movingnorth towards Sospan’s stall, with the slow but inexorable tread of a glacier, was my father, Eeyore, and the donkeys. Every day he would be there, even in the depths of winter when there were no tourists, plodding up and down the Prom, from Constitution Hill to the harbour and back. A pendulum of fur, wound by a key of straw.
    I walked down and Sospan hailed me.
    â€˜ Bore da! Louie. Usual, is it?’
    â€˜No, give me something I haven’t tried before.’
    He wagged his index finger at me. ‘Got just the thing for you.’ He turned to the dispenser and I turned too, placing my back against the counter, and stared out to sea. Down below, etched into the slimed rocks, were the remains of an Edwardian sea-water bathing-pool. Less than a hundred years old and already there was almost nothing left: just an outline in the rocks like the bones of a fossil; proof that the poison that did for Nineveh and Troy had no intention of sparing Aberystwyth. Sospan handed me a pale green ice cream. ‘You’ll like this!’
    I licked. It was like nothing I’d ever tasted before. ‘What is it, frog?’
    â€˜Absinthe.’
    â€˜You’re kidding!’
    â€˜Lick it slowly now!’
    He made one for himself and leaned forward to join me.
    I said, ‘I thought we’d lost you for a while – given up on the ice-cream trade.’
    He pulled a wan face. ‘You never really can, though, can you? It was like running off with a dizzy blonde. You know, fun for a while but she can’t cook and after a time you find all you really want is a nice bowl of caawl and someone to wash your socks.’
    â€˜I don’t think I’ve ever had a woman wash my socks for me since my mother died when I was a baby.’
    â€˜You’ve missed out on a fine feeling there, Louie; washing a man’s socks, it’s what love’s all about in the end.’
    â€˜I’ll slurp to that.’
    â€˜You’ve just missed Father Seamus. He was asking after you.’
    â€˜That’s nice of him.’
    â€˜He loves the new absinthe – of course I don’t tell him what’s in it. I say it’s green tea.’
    I looked at the faint, impenetrable smile that Sospan wore to meet all occasions. The same smile worn by the undertaker and the brothel-keeper and others with a professional understanding of the hearts of men and a policy not to interfere. It was good to have him back in business, we’d felt his absence keenly, just as we still miss the song of Myfanwy that no longer echoes down the streets at night.
    â€˜I thought Father Seamus liked to take his ice down the other end of the Prom,’ I said.
    â€˜Oh very sad, that is,’ said Sospan, hissing softly in sympathy. ‘It’s on account of this rejection of the teachings of the