Gazooka Read online

  So it was decided by the group that met at Tasso’s that the time had come to arrange a new deal for the Dervishes. It was agreed that they were altogether too inscrutable for an area so in need of new and clear images.

  It was left to Mathew Sewell, who knew more about the bands than anybody else and had operated as a judge in half a dozen smaller carnivals, to put the matter to Cynlais.

  Cynlais came along to Tasso’s one Thursday night for a talk with his critics. It was still July but Tasso had his big stove on full in the middle of the shop because he had a group of older clients who had never been properly warm since the flood of 1911. Tea all round was ordered and Mathew Sewell stood in the middle of the room, with his hand up, ready to start, but he had to wait a few minutes for the hissing of the tea urn and the rattling of teacups to abate. As a specialist in the head voice, he hated to speak in a shout.

  After a sip of tea Sewell summarised for the benefit of those who were new to this issue of Cynlais’ band the findings of Smayle and the other censors. Then he addressed Cynlais directly:

  ‘So you see, Cynlais, there are no two twos about it. You’ve got to put a stop to this business of going about half nude. It’s out of place in such a division as this. I speak as an artist and without malice. But it’s about time you and the boys dressed in something a bit more tasteful. Something soft and sensuous, that’s what we want.’

  Cynlais drank his tea while Uncle Edwin stroked the back of his head, encouraging him to be lucid. Then Cynlais put up his hand to show Edwin that the message had worked and he said:

  ‘I say to you, Mathew, what I said to Uriah Smayle and Ogley Floyd the Flame and those other very fierce elements. Get us the costumes and we’ll all be as soft and sensuous as you like. Like cream.’

  ‘That’s the spirit,’ said Mathew. ‘Think it over now, and when you’re fitted out consult me about the music and I’ll pre scribe some tune with a lullaby flavour that you can march to.’ Mathew threw such hints of the soporific into the word ‘lullaby’ that some of the people in Tasso’s looked disturbed, as if afraid that if Sewell were given a free wand Cynlais’ band would be the first in the area to wind up asleep on the kerb halfway through the carnival. Mathew saw their expression and, always averse to argument, said: ‘I’ve got to go now. Bono notte, Signor Tasso.’

  ‘So long, Mathew,’ we all said, feeling a certain shabbiness on our tongues. Cynlais was staring at the door that had just shut behind Mathew.

  ‘Did you hear that?’ asked Cynlais. ‘Oh he’s so smooth and operatic, that Sewell the Sotto. A treat.’ He turned to Tasso, who was leaning over the counter in his long white shop coat, his toffee hammer sticking out of the breast pocket, his face grey, joyless but unwaveringly sympathetic. ‘Don’t you like to have Sewell come out with these little bits of Italian, Tasso?’

  ‘It is true, Cynlais,’ said Tasso. ‘More than once Signor Sewell the Sotto has eased the burden of my old longing for Lugano.’

  Gomer Gough the Gavel got order once again by tapping with his cup on the cast-iron fireguard.

  ‘Now let’s get down to this,’ said Gomer. ‘We’ve got to fit Cynlais up with a band that will make a contribution to beauty and keep Uriah Smayle out of the County Clinic. We can’t leave the field undisputed to Georgie Young and his Boer War fancies.’ There was a silence for a minute. Hard thought scoured the inside of every head bent towards the stove as history was raked for character and costume suitable for Cynlais and his followers. Tasso tapped on the counter with his toffee hammer to keep the meditation in rhythm. Then Gomer looked relieved as if he had just stepped in from a high wind. We all smiled to welcome his revelation but we stopped smiling when he said:

  ‘Have you got any money, Cynlais?’

  ‘Money? Money?’ said Cynlais and our eyebrows backed him up because we thought Gomer Gough’s question pointless at that point in our epoch.

  ‘Forget that I asked,’ said Gomer. ‘But I think it’s a shame that a boy like you who made so much at the coal face and at professional running should now be whittled down to a loin cloth for the summer and a double-breasted waistcoat for the winter.’ Gomer’s eyes wandered around the room until they landed on Milton Nicholas. ‘Come here, Milton. You’ve been looking very nimble-witted since you were voted on to the Library committee. How do you think Cynlais Coleman could get hold of some money to deck out his band in something special? I mean some way that won’t have Cynlais playing his last tune through the bars of the County Keep.’

  ‘Well, he’s still known as Coleman the Comet for his speed off the mark. Wasn’t it Paavo Nurmi, the great Finn, who once said that it wouldn’t surprise him if Cynlais Coleman turned out to be the only athlete ever to be operated on for rockets in the rear?’ We all nodded yes but felt that Milton had probably never heard of this Nurmi until that morning and was only slipping in the name to make a striking effect. Gomer urged Milton to forget the Finn and get back to the present. ‘Let him find somebody who wants to hire a fast runner,’ added Milton.

  ‘In this area at the moment, Milton, even an antelope would have to make Welsh cakes and mint toffee on the side to make both ends meet. Be practical, boy.’

  ‘I’m being practical. I heard today that a group of sporting elements in Trecelyn with a definite bias against serious thought are going to stage a professional sprint with big cash prizes. Comes off in three weeks.’

  ‘Don’t forget that Cynlais is getting on a bit,’ said Teilo Dew, ‘for this high-class running anyway. I’ve heard him wheeze a bit on the sharper slopes.’

  ‘Trust Teilo Dew the Doom to chip in with an item like that,’ said Milton bitterly. ‘Whenever Teilo talks to you he’s peering at you from between his two old friends, Change and Decay. In three weeks Cynlais could be at his best and if you boys could take up a few collections to lay bets on him we’d have a treasury.

  ‘That’s a very backward habit, gambling,’ said Uncle Edwin.

  ‘Remind me to hire a small grave for the scruples of Edwin Pugh the Pang,’ said Gomer. ‘Right. That’s how we’ll raise the cash. Off to bed with you now, Cynlais. You’ve got to be as fit as a fiddle for the supreme test. No more staying up till twelve and drinking hot cordial in Tasso’s.’

  Cynlais had heard very little of all this. He had been staring into the fire and pondering on what Mathew Sewell had said. He was shocked when he suddenly found supporters coming from all over the shop and helping him to his feet and leading him with half a dozen lines of advice at the same time.

  ‘Don’t sleep crouched, Coleman; it obstructs the pipes.’

  ‘Keep even your dreams chaste, Cynlais; if the libido played hell with Samson, what mightn’t it do to you?’

  ‘An hour’s sleep before midnight is worth two after.’

  ‘Slip Coleman some of those brown lozenges, Tasso, the ones that deepen the breathing.’

  ‘A foot race is a kind of battle, Cynlais. Make a plan for every foot.’

  Then Teilo Dew the Doom waved them all to silence and started to tell Cynlais about some very noted foot runner in the zone who had raced and died about two hundred years ago after outpacing all the fleeter animals and breaking every record. Everybody was glad to hear Teilo Dew opening out on what for him was a comparatively blithe topic but expressions went back to normal when Teilo reached the climax of his tale. At the end of this man’s last race his young bride had clapped him on the back and the runner had dropped down dead.

  ‘I know that you are not married, Cynlais,’ said Teilo, ‘and that you have few relatives who would want to watch you run or do anything else, but there are several voters in Meadow Prospect who would find real relish in hanging around the finishing tape and giving you a congratulatory whack just in the hope of sending you lifeless to the ground.’

  Cynlais shook himself free from his supporters and was going to ask the meaning of all this fuss but Tasso just raised his toffee hammer solemnly, which is what he always did when he wished to say that he, too, was
foxed.

  We all joined in the task of helping Cynlais regain his old tremendous speed. We got him training every night up on the waun, the broad, bleak, wind filled moorland above the town. Sometimes Cynlais was like a stag, and our only trouble was to keep up with him and give him tips and instructions and fit his neck back when he went flying over molehills. At first he was a bit stiff around the edges owing to a touch of rheumatism from standing in too many High Street breezes in the role of dervish. Milton Nicholas got some wheel-grease from the gasworks, where he was a leading fitter, and Uncle Edwin, whose sym pathy of soul made his fingers just the thing for slow massage, rubbed this stuff into Cynlais until both he and Cynlais got so supple they had to be held upright for minutes on end.

  We looked after Cynlais’ nourishment, too, for his diet had been scraggy over the last few months. Teilo Dew approached that very sullen farmer Nathan Wilkins up on the top of the hill we called Merlin’s Brow, and asked him for some goat milk. Wilkins took pleasure in saying no loudly for as long as Dew was within earshot, and even the goat was seen to shake its head from side to side. So Teilo bypassed Nathan Wilkins and approached the goat direct, and in no time we had Cynlais growing stronger daily. But there was still something jerky and unpredictable in some of his movements. So Gomer Gough and Uncle Edwin decided to consult their friend Willie Silcox. He was called Silcox the Psyche because he was the greatest tracker in our valley of those nameless beasts that roam our inward jungles. If Silcox saw anyone with a look of even slight perplexity on his face he would be out with the guidebook and fanning them with Freud before they could start running. He had analysed so many people into a state of dangerous confusion that the town’s joint diaconate had advised him to go back to simple religious mania as being a lot safer and easier on the eyes because you could work up to full heat without reading a word. Silcox had just told the joint diaconate that he was watching them closely and making notes.

  A week before the race at Trecelyn we met Willie Silcox at Tasso’s. Silcox was leaning over the counter and we all saw as we came in that he had never looked or felt more penetrating. Tasso, who was all for indirection and compromise as the right climate for the catering trade, had shifted away from Silcox and was standing very close to the urn. People claiming to be forthrightly wise frightened the wits out of Tasso. At the sight of us Silcox waved us to stillness while he finished off a quick note he was giving Tasso on what he thought the joint effects of exile and the cash nexus would be on a middle-aged Italian. Tasso said nothing but put his head right against the urn for greater comfort.

  ‘Have a beef extract with us, Willie,’ said Gomer. ‘Glad you were able to come, boy.’

  ‘Thank you, Gomer. What mental stoppage have you got for me to disperse now?’

  ‘Oh I’m all right. My pipes were never more open. It’s Cynlais Coleman I’m worried about.’

  ‘Look, Gomer. Before we go any further, let me make this clear. To prescribe a pill for the mentally ill the patient must have a mind. That’s in the rule book and that’s the first smoke signal I would like you to send out to Coleman. That element, mentally, is still unborn. What makings of a mind he might still have had he not dropped into the bin years ago by trying to outrun the wind, and setting up as a great lover in an area that favours a slow humility in affairs of the heart.’

  ‘Don’t quibble, Willie. Cynlais isn’t running as well as he should and we want the cure.’

  ‘All right. Take me to where I can see him and if I can find a pole long enough to reach the end of Coleman’s furthest cranny I’ll give you a report and charge you for the pole because I’ll never get it back after a journey like that.’

  The next night we went with Willie Silcox up to the waun. Cynlais and a group of supporters were already there and Cynlais was finishing a trial sprint. We could hear as we approached shouts like: ‘Come on, Cynlais.’ ‘Let’s have you Cole man.’ ‘Don’t look around, boy.’ ‘Show us your real paces, Comet.’

  Then we heard Cynlais run headlong into the group around the tape, sending several of them spinning, and we could see that he himself was lurching and gasping painfully. ‘Well done,’ said Uncle Edwin without conviction.

  Cynlais was making noises like a pump, and writhing. Milton Nicholas was standing over Cynlais and looking as if the cam paign had reached some sort of crisis.

  ‘Put your head between your legs and squeeze hard, Cynlais boy. That’ll cool you off.’

  Cynlais tried to do this and went into a brief convulsion. Several voters told Milton Nicholas to mind his own business, which was gas fitting. And there were a few very shrewd elements in the group who said they would not be surprised to find that Milton Nicholas had laid a week’s wages on all the other runners but Cynlais in that race at Trecelyn.

  ‘The aim of Nicholas,’ I heard one of them say, ‘is to get Coleman into a knot and let him choke.’

  Gomer Gough turned to Willie Silcox, who had not taken his eyes off Cynlais.

  ‘Well, Willie. What’s your diagnosis?’

  ‘Easy,’ said Willie, and from the offhand, flippant way in which he said it we thought he was going to suggest that Cynlais be saddled in harness with Wilkins’ goat and told to forget about foot-racing. ‘Easy. Do you notice the way he seems to pause sometimes in his running and look back?’

  ‘He does it all the time,’ said Uncle Edwin. ‘He hardly ever looks straight in front.’

  ‘That’s a habit he got into while acting as the Mad Mahdi. All fanatics are persecution maniacs and anybody who introduces Mahometan overtones into the Celtic fringe was bound to hit some kind of top note. Cynlais has now got into the way of looking over his shoulder even in the middle of the waun where his shoulder is about the only thing in sight. And again, that band of Cynlais’ contains some torpid boys even for gazooka players, and Cynlais is so fleet he has to keep turning to make sure that he and they are still in the same town. But Coleman’s real trouble is love.’

  ‘Love?’ asked Gomer Gough and Uncle Edwin and it was clear from their tone that they were now both sorry that they had brought Silcox up the mountain at all.

  ‘Love,’ repeated Willie Silcox in exactly the voice of a sanitary inspector making a report to the borough surveyor.

  ‘But Cynlais told me only two days ago that he was no longer worried about this impulse.’

  ‘I’ve only got to look at a man and I can sniff the urge to love and be loved, however deep and quiet it flows. For months Cynlais has been hopelessly in love with that girl, Moira Hallam.’

  ‘Moira Hallam? That dark, blazing-eyed girl from Sebastopol Street?’

  ‘That’s the one. The thoughts that that girl inspires in a single day would fill a whole shelf in the Institute and you’d need a strong binding to keep them in the case.’

  ‘And she’s turned Cynlais down?’

  ‘She looks at him with disgust and treats him with contempt.’

  ‘But wouldn’t this make Cynlais run even better, to show off?’

  ‘You don’t know, Gomer, what a cantankerous article the mind is. Even as he runs Cynlais looks down at the fine, big chest under his singlet and becomes aware of his frustrated passions. It’s a wall, a cruel blank wall. His heart breaks his nose against it. His limbs wince and they lose pace.’

  ‘Willie,’ said Gomer, ‘I can never listen to you without feeling that you put a new and terrible complexion on this planet.’

  ‘Anything to oblige. And let me warn you about this Moira Hallam. She is an imperialist of the flesh, very ruthless. You know that old widower, Alfie Cranwell. He had money saved to provide the deposit on a headstone for the grave of his de ceased wives. Blew the lot on a watch for this Moira Hallam. But he would have found the headstone softer. She works in that cake shop they call the Cosmo. Cranwell kept hanging about the shop nipping in and wolfing cakes despite strong warnings about sugar from his doctor. Died of a surfeit. All this Moira did was boast about the bonus she had from the man ageress of the Cosmo on the b
risk selling she had done to Cranwell in the last weeks of his passion.’

  Gomer and Uncle Edwin tut-tutted as if this girl was just another in a long series of obstructions they had found giving life a dark and strangled look.

  ‘Well, thank you, Willie. We’ll bear your report in mind.’

  But Willie Silcox was not listening. He was staring past Gomer at some member of the group around Cynlais, beneath the apparently bland surface of whose days Willie’s dowser had sensed some concealed runnel of trouble. This man was smiling quite broadly at something Milton Nicholas had just said and he did not know how lucky he still was with Willie Silcox standing at a safe distance from him.