Last Train to Gloryhole (2 page)

I shook my head at the glaring incongruity of his remark, and glanced up at the black, wooden clock on the wall just above the pastor’s head. I blinked my blurred eyes in disbelief, then regarded it again for confirmation. Its wide-splayed hands informed me that it was now exactly a-quarter-past-nine; just as it had been back then, I thought! Suddenly I realised that today was a Friday too, although on this occasion an unseasonably bright and sunny one, which had at least attempted to enlighten the mournful mood that had entered the room on the squeaking heels of the Sunday-best-dressed congregation’s shuffling footsteps, and had deepened still further with every stern, uttered word of God, each minor key, each sniffled sigh.

As so often before, my mind drifted back to that first tragic Friday in question. I recalled how an off-duty fire-man had later told me how none of the clocks - in any classroom, office or changing-room - had ever lived, or ticked, a moment longer than ‘a-quarter-past-nine.’ How on earth could they? I mused, when, after all, the hushed, but shuffling, columns and rows of dishevelled, jumper-ed and cardigan-ed, young time-learners were now long gone - the sternly ordered, stool-raised, winders of clocks forever now departed, perhaps to some timeless realm far, far away.

An ice-cold tear suddenly fell onto my cheek. I dabbed it away with a fore-finger, gazed down at my feet, and reflected on how, for all those poor children’s parents and siblings, and for all their many friends and loved-ones, an entire life-time must surely have ceased that day at precisely ‘nine-fifteen,’ and how, for so many of my fellow countrymen, that famous, fab, cool, Beatle decade had been swiftly curtailed at just ‘sixty-six.’

Then, looking down, I saw it. A small, frail, brown money-spider suddenly emerged from out of the red, cloth seat of the chair that stood vacant before me, and promptly toppled lightly to the polished floor below, then nimbly regained its frenzied gait, and marched on boldly between my black, laced-up shoes, and away to safety beneath my chair. I smiled inwardly at the creature’s dogged boldness, looked up at the clock once again, and then suddenly recalled how ‘nine-fifteen’ had to have been the time when my very own concussed, or, at the very least, sleeping, head had been rudely shaken awake, and my all-too-cocky, yet tender, young life inexplicably spared.

Searching in vain between the flapping legs of my black trousers for a last sight of the fleeing arachnid, it suddenly dawned on me how
just two legs
had proved sufficient for my salvation on that bleak and rainy, fateful day. And, boy, back then, I thought, was I able to shift on them!

But what I didn’t realise at the time was that one of the four killers was actually present there all along, standing beside the passenger-door of her tan Passat, which she had parked adroitly just across the road from the chapel. ‘
Anne of Green Gables
,’ I had often enjoyed calling her during our youth, since the green-doored, little house on the hill that she had grown up in, along with her mother and younger siblings, was to my young, impressionable mind reminiscent of the mansion in the novel that we had shared class-reading of in our first year at Grammar School. This was during the days when I discovered that I loved her in a different way, more deeply perhaps, than I had loved the dusky, tantalizing Rebecca from the Secondary Modern School, whom Anne somehow managed to repeatedly scare off about as effortlessly as she might have swished a money-spider from a radiator.

Looking up and down the main road, Anne listened to the echoing tones of the ancient, Welsh hymn, and construed that, for her, there was little that was divine or celestial either in its music or its lyrics. She drew thinly on her cigarette for the final time, and then adeptly stubbed it out on the multi-cracked pavement with the heel of her long, black stiletto. What on earth had possessed her to wear these uncomfortable shoes, anyway? she asked herself, with more than the usual tinge of frustration and self-loathing. After all she hadn’t even planned on stepping inside the chapel, or indeed within the walled confines of the hill-cemetery later on, where Sam’s crumbling body - his, by now, long disjointed and overly poked-over corpse - would soon be lowered down and buried in the good Welsh earth for the second sad time in almost forty years.

A young couple - the first fruits of the congregation’s impending mass-exit - idled out of the wooden double-doors, skirted the surrounding wall, and rounded the corner in search of their tightly-parked transport, while two teenage girls, arm-in-arm, in white blouses and black, pleated trousers, dashed between passing cars to cross the main road towards where Anne stood. ‘Don’t go getting yourself killed mow, Megan!’ one screamed, hurrying back to the middle of the carriage-way so as to grasp the hand of her far less lissom companion, and pull her, rather grudgingly, to the welcome safety of the opposite footpath.

For fear they might recognise her, and perhaps report her presence over tea and sandwiches to the assembled family at the customary post-funeral gathering, Anne ducked inside her car, nimbly shifted her bottom across to the driver’s seat, and switched on the engine. Glancing in the mirror at the ageing face she had made up as best she could that morning, Anne soon became aware of someone knocking feebly at the window on the passenger-side of the vehicle. On looking out, she saw that it was one of the two young girls. Anne froze for an instant, but a second bout of knocking finally persuaded her to reach down to her lap and press the black, plastic button that would gradually lower a steamy window to the world.

‘You couldn’t take us to the cemetery could you, lady?’ the pretty girl enquired, her companion’s head turned away in apparent shame. ‘I can see from how you’re dressed that you must be going there yourself, yes?’

Anne thought for a moment, then let the two girls inside. ‘Of course. It’s the least I can do,’ she told them, realising in an instant what else her words might indicate in a different context, and how, for her own tortured mind, this was an absolute truth, and something which might yet assuage a tiny portion of the guilt she had always felt, that she had mercilessly killed a man, and had knowingly buried the guilt of it far deeper than his own broken body would soon be plunged. Out of sight, out of mind, she had many times been wont to tell herself comfortingly; and, hopefully, still out of all suspicion too, she reflected. Anne reversed her car into an adjoining street, regained the main road, and drove away north, the glowing outline of the Brecon Beacons soon supplying a sudden, glorious backdrop, to her mind a glowing halo, for her first, and perhaps, solitary act of propitiation.

‘I could kill for a fag, Megan,’ the bottle-blond girl in the back of the car suddenly exclaimed. Open-mouthed, Anne held on steadily to the driving-wheel with her right hand, and, to the evident satisfaction of both girls, adeptly flicked open a packet of Silk-Cut with her left.

‘Should I lower the window again?’ the girl called Megan enquired from the passenger-seat, turning now to glance side-long at Anne’s thin, lined, and too heavily blusher-ed face.

‘No - that’s O.K. You only live once, right?’ replied Anne. She pursed her lips and decided not to even contemplate this, her second, incongruous comment in minutes. ‘Say - can you light me one?’ she asked her young companion. ‘Funerals do make you tense, I always feel.’

‘Sure thing,’ the girl in the back replied. ‘We might as well all go together, right, Megan?’

The tea and sandwiches had finally all been snatched up and consumed, the cups and plates washed and stacked to drain in the enamel sink of the back-kitchen, and all the family-members and other assembled guests had long gone home. Weary from the day’s activities, and reluctant to socialise any longer, I once again found myself hidden away upstairs, and trawling through the swirling ocean of my sad remembrance: ‘
My Back Pages
,’ my namesake, and one time hero, Bobby had called them, and so, naturally, I felt so inclined, at least mentally, to title them also.

I scanned the tiny thumbnail square that featured my ten-year, curly, fair, bespectacled face. The rumours that had swept the school back then, though denied by me repeatedly, (and too often over-vigorously,) were indeed true: I had indeed been named after a poet. And yet in my terrible teens I chose to be somewhat economical with the truth, denied my classmates’ assertions as bogus, and, instead, elected to re-brand myself after the world’s greatest living songwriter. That was cooler by far, I judged back then, in what were labelled ‘
the swinging sixties
.’ And anyway, my conscience could scarcely be pricked by doing something that few could claim a fallacious act in one so tender in years - I was barely twelve, after all, and still in the formative stages of honing and fine-tuning my, as yet, unripe skills of self-delusion and fraud.

Names and their meanings were so crucial to a boy’s image and self-worth back then, I recalled, and indeed, to my mind, seemed more than half the battle. Although I had read and enjoyed much of the great dead poet’s written work, the brilliant, crinkly-haired, though pug- nosed, and invariably monochrome, smoking bard had fortunately looked nothing at all like me, I judged, and so, understandably, I therefore felt no desire whatsoever to ape him or any of his curious mannerisms, whatever they might have been.

But the other Dylan, well, he was a different matter completely, I judged. Yes. I felt sure that I could take on his mantle as lightly and as carelessly as he himself had done, and, likewise, amble nimbly through the slushy, Buick-strewn streets of New York and New Jersey, or, in my case perhaps, nearby Newport and Newbridge with the best of them, armed, if not with a guitar-case, then perhaps with a portable typewriter clutched securely in my right hand.

Yes, the two great men’s names were the same, and I cannot deny that I went on to find each of their unique creative spirits inspiring, but I quickly realised that the name Arthur Dylan Thomas Cook was one that was as likely to set me travelling as writing, as my father Derek’s parents were often keen to inform me. And indeed, largely by way of hitched motorway rides and the occasional coach, to Cardiff, London, and other great cities much farther afield, it certainly had done, but then again, one might say that
by train
it brought me right back down to earth again.

‘Bobby,’
the girls in County School had called me - two rude sisters from Pant
‘Bobby Shafto,’
even. But the boys all called me
‘Cooksy,’
naturally -
‘Crafty Cooksy’
the bolder, meaner ones preferring. And
‘The Prophet Elisha,’
one thin, swatty lad called Delwyn, with a squished nose and no front teeth, announced one time to all and sundry on the school-bus back home. I raised my fist, and studied again the small scar on my middle knuckle – an indelible testimony, both to the times, and to the deplorable quality of dentistry in The Valleys back then. Delwyn had earned the surname
‘Dentures’
soon after that I recalled, and, yes, his renaming had caused me pain.

But it was not his classmates that the hapless Delwyn snarled at in the school-photograph I now held in my fingers, but in the general direction of the camera-man, for whose class-portrait we had grouped together in the July of 1966, in four shambling, tiered rows erected on the bare, grit-strewn, white-lined yard, long since gone, where nowadays stood a peaceful, tree-studded, memorial garden, within which, in pride of place, was the plaque that Queen Elizabeth herself had travelled all the way there to unveil, amidst those all too familiar, grey perimeter-walls.

My bent knees trembled from a combination of the cold and their cramped position on the thinly carpeted floor, but I was determined to remain there for as long as I could manage, or at least until I felt I had done service to the tender, but bitter-sweet, memories I still retained. Holding up the larger, creased, landscape black-and-white snap at an acute angle so as to view it in the final, faint light from the setting sun that now flared orange and dying through the bedroom window, my weary eyes darted left and right along the four separate tiers of laughing, smiling faces. Then my gaze paused at each one if only to judge whether that particular dead child could relate to me his, or her, personal tale of smothered hope and starved ambition.

‘Brenda, Byron, Stephen - oh, and there’s Anne!’ I proclaimed joylessly. At every fleeting glance I somehow felt I could still make out the echoing voice that each hair-blown child sang out in its high, shrill, dutiful reply.
‘Present, Sir.’
And, stranger yet, it now almost seemed as if I myself were our dear, departed Mr. Jones, undertaking the banal, twice-daily ritual that was our registration. ‘Arthur Cook? Are you listening, boy?’ ‘Yes Sir!’ ‘Well, why don’t you answer me, then?’ ‘Because -’ ‘Yes? Yes - Cook! Out with it, lad!’ ‘Because - because you’re dead, Sir! No offence intended, you understand.’ ‘And none taken, neither, boy,’ the balding, suited, old form-tutor seemed to reply from his grave, his thick, square glasses gleaming in the morning light.

My eyes welled still further as I realised with astonishment how the names of each and every one of my classmates were as clearly etched in my memory today as they were still on that broad, grey, weathered, slate-stone tribute that sat within the hillside shrine, less than four short miles from where I now bent kneeling in remembrance of it.

Not that
everyone
died in the tragedy, of course. I recalled how quite a lot of the children survived the turgid, black torrent that ploughed down the mountain on that fateful day, and somehow, to my mind quite miraculously, went on to live lives that mattered, that counted for something, and who even managed to enrich the lives of other, more fortunate, souls, who resided worlds away from the unfortunate Merthyr Valley, as well as, of course, the lives of their living contemporaries who still resided here, and who shared many of the same desperate memories that they did.

And yes, that certainly included me, of course, I mused, smiling. I had escaped Aberfan in a physical sense, even though I freely admit that, in the emotional sense, I had found it impossible to fully break out and flee the deep-clefted slough of despond that my brother and I were born into, and that, alive and kicking, I was plainly still heir to. Although dead today, Sam was, thank God, very much alive on that sombre day, I recalled - that wet and dreary Friday shortly after he turned thirteen, when he was given permission by the teachers of the grammar-school he attended to return to his junior-school, and share with its pupils and teachers alike his experiences; the week-day morn he dragged me out by my heels from under a steaming, lifeless, unimaginably putrid mire of saturated carbon, coal-grit, crushed glass and leaves, that my choking, fast-expiring brain must have already begun to feel surprisingly at home in.