The Unbearable Lightness of Being in Aberystwyth by Malcolm Pryce Page A

shot that afternoon.’
    He handed me a photo. It was landscape taken pointing inland towards Ynyshir. My car was in the foreground. And standing next to it, seeming to be leaning in as if talking to the passenger, was a man. It looked like one of the old soldiers from the Patagonian War.
    ‘He’s been on the run for a few weeks now,’ said Llunos. ‘You might have heard it mentioned on the radio. You can keep the photo.’
    *     *     *
     
    There were seven people sitting in the auditorium waiting for the Great Osiris’s show. And one private eye sitting on stage staring into the dazzle of a spotlight. He was the sort of gumshoe who had been taught by life to be sceptical of occasions like this; he knew all about the sorry extent of people’s credulity, and about the charlatans who made their living exploiting it. But his partner, Calamity, had asked what was the prospect of a little humiliation set against the chance that he might be able to retrieve a telling detail from his memory of the day Myfanwy disappeared. It was a fair point and hard to answer. Even though he knew she was saying it because she wasn’t the one who had to sit in the chair.
    The Great Osiris took out a fob watch and let it dangle in front of my face, commanding me in a voice that dripped syrup to keep my eyes on the watch. It was such a familiar routine I could have recited it myself. Soon you will begin to feel sleepy, veerrry sleeeeeepy … I tried to play ball. The watch glittered and flashed in the light like a salmon jumping a waterfall and evading the paw of a grizzly bear. Then it flashed like a lighthouse at night, and then slid across the sky like a full moon behind rags of scudding cloud. Then it slowed down – I don’t know how he did it, but I had to admit it was a good trick. The air through which the watch described its arc congealed and turned to aspic. Now the watch was hardly moving, rising, rising, rising with agonising slowness and then remained poised at the acme as if the chain had turned into a solid rod of brass. Suddenly, as if a trapdoor had opened, it fell and swooped and my eyes followed the motion, swivelling from side to side. And then the watch stopped again, and turned into a setting sun; the world grew dim and night came on and the first few stars came out, muffled by the autumn fog that seeped up from the heath, and the golden pale orb of light flickered and pulsated on the end of the stick that I seemed to have acquired. An owl hooted and my breath steamed in the frosty fog. The gas lamp seemed to be safely alight and so I moved on to the next: another fifty and Icould go home. Horses whinnied and I leaped aside as a carriage sped past with a silvery jingling of harness and clopping of hooves. I raised my fist but the carriage had already disappeared into the murk. Stupid nobs, I thought, think they own the turnpike. I moved on to the next streetlamp. And then the world was filled with blinding light and I was staring out at eight people who were standing up and applauding.
    As we threaded our way back through the buildings of Kousin Kevin’s Krazy Komedy Kamp, Calamity explained with eyes sparkling with awe what she had witnessed. ‘It was unbelievable! He said he knew all about hypnotic regression so I told him to take you back to the day in Ynyslas but he sort of overdid it and you went back too far. He said it’s a bit like tuning a radio – sometimes you sort of overshoot, and sometimes you undershoot. After a while you started talking in the voice of a little boy and the Great Osiris tried to make you come back, but you just carried on and on. Soon you were crying like a baby and then all of a sudden you were talking in a strange voice and the Great Osiris asked you what the date was and you said it was 1065. And he said, “Oh, so just before the Norman Conquest” and you said, “What Norman Conquest?” And then he brought you forward a bit and you said you couldn’t stop to talk