David Bramwell begins the true tale of how he came to possess the glass-cased facial hair of a mysterious family acquaintance

ONE: A FREAKSHOW OF LONELINESS AND BROKEN BODY PARTS

In the early summer of 1991 my Great Aunt Sylvia slipped out of this world, fag in hand, leaving behind a half-smoked pack of Players No6, an unfinished jigsaw of the Eiffel Tower and a doleful cat. She made it to the heroic age of 96 before death finally paid a call, leaving her cold, brittle frame on the kitchen floor, curled up and lifeless. Sylvia had pottered her way through twenty-three prime ministers, four monarchs and two world wars.

‘But what did she ever do with her life?’ a heartless relative once remarked.

The youngest of five siblings, Sylvia never married. She was a taciturn soul, engrossed in her own private world. Our family visits were – I suspect – partly prompted by a sense of duty. My parents would arrive armed with books and magazines and the three of them would often sit reading in silence while I roamed the garden and fields in search of adventure. Sylvia was impossibly old, skeletal, sallow-skinned and slightly terrifying, but I did look forward to these trips; she always treated me with great kindness and plied me with stacks of cigarette and tea cards, which I collected with zeal.

Sylvia was – in many ways – the kind of textbook eccentric old aunt found rattling around mid-century murder mystery novels. Her house was overrun by cats, she consumed tea by the bucket-load, smoked for England and dabbled in spiritualism. Books on divination, psychic healing and the afterlife cluttered her living room shelves and tables. Such beliefs were not shared by my parents. Once, when I was ten, Sylvia’s offer to read my future with her Tarot cards had met with such vehement disapproval from my mum that it was never suggested again.

Over the decades a forty-a-day nicotine-stick habit had turned her teeth and fingertips the colour of mustard. The cigarette was always held between third and fourth finger like Noël Coward or sweary theatre critic Kenneth Tynan. For Sylvia, however, this wasn’t out of foppish affectation but necessity. When only five years old, she badly scolded her hands. Attended to by some Victorian quack, her hands were left tightly bandaged for so long that by the time the dressings came off, the newly formed flesh of her thumbs had fused into the palms. There they remained in the belly of her hand, curled up and lifeless. A cruel and unnecessary disability.

As a young boy I found it fascinating to watch Sylvia open a tin of cat food, peel an apple or light a match. Sometimes I would secretly try to imitate her – clumsily opening doors, picking up a pen or trying to eat a biscuit without dropping it. It was, I think, my first real lesson in empathy.

Sylvia’s weakness for cats meant that with every new visit to Woodhall [where she lived] we’d discover a new litter – half a dozen or so mangy bags of fur darting around the room, scratching at our ankles, vying for love and attention. As the sole occupant of a council house, Sylvia was bound by regulations. The Lincolnshire authorities took a dim view of all the interbreeding; theirs was a one cat per household rule. After the officials had threatened her with eviction yet again, Sylvia would gather every last bundle of fur, stuff them in a bag and send them to a watery grave in the coffee-coloured eddies of the River Witham and return home for a good cry. It was the only way she knew.

The only one to escape the drownings was Jack. Despite the ever changing cat population, he was easy to spot. A broken spring somewhere had furnished Jack with a miscreant tongue. It hung out helplessly, unable to find its way home. And that’s how I remember them, Sylvia and Jack, a freakshow of loneliness and broken body parts.

Sylvia had been dead a good while before Dad and I summoned up the courage to clear out her old house. A hoarder of heroic proportions, she left us a mammoth task. Armed with sandwiches, teabags and chocolate biscuits we got to work in early spring, boxing up the precious things, dumping whatever was beyond salvation and haggling with the knocker boys over sideboards, iron-framed beds and chipped crockery. It seemed a heartless endeavour: the rapid disposal of the evidence of a life, of a quiet existence that we barely understood, a funeral with scant attendance. What did she ever do with her life?

On the third day of clearing, Dad drove to Lincoln to execute the will, leaving me in the kitchen on my hands and knees, scraping thirty-year-old cat shit from under the cabinets and cooker. He returned a few hours later and, with a mysterious grin, fished something from one of the boxes we’d already packed and dropped it into my hands.

‘She left you and your sister a bit of money and specific instructions for you to have this, he said. Good job I didn’t chuck it away.’ Encased within a tatty glass-fronted box, nestled amongst scarlet silk material, lay a flamboyant moustache, similar in style to that worn by the great Catalonian surrealist Salvador Dalí. The hair had been pinned and waxed to hold it in place. Accompanying it was an old metal disc attached to a thin chain. On it, in spidery handwriting were etched the words:

Trust Absolute Unconditional.

I can’t pretend that I hadn’t seen it before. Once a prize exhibit on Sylvia’s mantelpiece, somewhere in time it had disappeared, replaced by some other mysterious artefact. I’d even tried to touch it once, receiving a slap on the wrist. You didn’t mess with Sylvia’s precious things.

Could dad shed any light on it? I wondered. Incurious around mysteries and a maths teacher his entire adult life – dad’s passions were: golf, John Wayne films, treacle tarts, gardening and algebra. And mum. He did his best.

‘I remember that daft thing sitting on her mantelpiece,’ he said, after a long slurp of tea. ‘Your great aunt always said it belonged to someone from the village. It were ’is moustache. He hosted one of them old freak-shows with dwarves and wotnot.’ Dad paused again. ‘She did like to tell us his name.’

‘Which was?’

‘Ambrose Oddfellow. I remember that.’ After this he seemed to show little interest in the matter and disappeared upstairs. The adolescent in me had shrugged his shoulders too, but who was I kidding? I’d just inherited £1000 and someone weird guy’s facial hair in a box.

This is an extract from The Haunted Moustache by David Bramwell (Gardners VI Books, £14). 

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A film version of The Haunted Moustache was released earlier this year, receiving a Special Mention Award at the CINECITY Brighton Film Festival.

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