Last Train to Gloryhole (36 page)

All of this was, of course, true, Chris told her, turning, as he did so, to survey the back-garden with a far more relaxed, but characteristically mischievous, smile on his face. (He had never been properly invited inside her house in all the time he had known her.) Chris told her that he had meant to admit the truth to her of all the points she had just re-listed, but he found that whenever his phone hadn’t needed re-charging, he was inexplicably out of credit.

Instead of replying, Rhiannon smiled a pinched grin at Chris’s typically ludicrous confession, but closed the side-door anyway, stole away upstairs, and only dared gaze lovingly at him from her bedroom-window once he had negotiated safely the cemetery-wall, in a style very similar to what her high-jump instructor had called ‘a western roll.’ Removing her school-uniform, the girl continued to watch, wide-eyed, and with a mixture of wonder and trepidation, as her lover’s lithe young body limped its way away from her through the green and yellow grass, typically threading its way in and out of the toppled, and standing, grave-stones, around statues of angels, turf-piles and tombs, finally disappearing from her line of sight as he traversed the hill and rounded the huge tree beside her grandfather’s grave, (which, for Rhiannon, would now always have tender and erotic significance,) on his long and winding trek back to
Gloryhole
.

In the study of her house Anne stopped typing on her computer key-board, and once again unfolded the piece of paper that she had first discovered in the car on the way to
Sketchley’s
, when she had taken some of Drew’s school-clothes to be cleaned. Nervously folding down its four corners with her finger-nail, she recalled how she had dragged the grubby handkerchief out of a pocket, and as she did so, a few of Drew’s inky pens, and the folded love-poem that encircled them, had literally fallen into her lap. It had made her cry at that moment, she recalled, and now it did so again.

Anne had meant to confront her husband about it, but, though she had confided in her son, and even succeeded in getting him out of the house, Drew hadn’t returned home again until well after mother and son had gone off to bed, and so the matter had sat unresolved, suspended, not unlike a certain stale smell in one of the bedrooms in the house, which, if investigated, would more than likely require far more of her time and effort to clean up than she felt she could honestly manage at present.

This was the second time in their married life that this sort of thing had happened, Anne reminded herself. Rightly or wrongly, she had let the first one go. And anyway, just a week or two later the young, and overly pretty, French teacher had packed away her false-lashes and nails, her red, plastic tongue-piercing, and her coulottes, her
Cacherel
perfumes, and her eaux-de-colognes and fled back, by way of ferry, to Dieppe. And not a moment too soon, to Anne’s mind. But forgiving her husband a second time was something that Anne had sworn to herself that she would never ever do. Perhaps her mother had been right about him after all, she pondered: perhaps Drew did possess both the stability, as well as the complexion, of sick.

‘He can’t do anything except paint,’ her mother had shouted at her from the top of the stairs one day. ‘His nails are so short he can’t even undo a simple knot in his shoe-laces unless you’ve started it for him. And what good is Drew going to be if there’s a flood in your house, for heaven’s sake! He has no idea where the stop-tap is. He’ll probably end up doing what Noah did, and let his whole house and family just float away to - to Babylon.’

‘But we live on a hill, Mam,’ Anne had told her, partially in his defence, but knowing in her heart of hearts that she was right.

‘Then the house is sure to end up at the bottom of it - mark my words, girl,’ Betty had told her. ‘And, do you know, I’m not sure the man would even care, to be honest. Why is he like this, eh? Tell me. Look, I know he’s English, but isn’t his mother’s family from near Swansea?’

‘Mumbles,’ Anne corrected her, for what it was worth.

‘Yes, and that gets on my nerves, too,’ Betty had added. ‘Especially when he does it at table.’

‘Mumbles, Mam! Mumbles by
‘The Gower,’
Anne had told her. ‘Got their own yacht, and everything.’

But Betty had carried on just as if her daughter hadn’t spoken. ‘You know, I can’t see what you didn’t like about Dillwyn Graff, the undertaker’s son from Bedlinog. He had a steady job, so he did, a suit-allowance, shaved twice-a-day, and he was very, very good with the horses. And, unlike Drew, he always drove his car very carefully,’ she told her daughter.

‘Far too slowly, you mean, Mam,’ Anne had replied. ‘You wouldn’t know how annoying it is to be stared at doing forty on the M.4.’

‘Well, you can’t be breaking the speed-limit if you’re carrying a great big box in the back, now can you?’ Betty had continued. ‘What on earth would the traffic-police say, for a start, not to mention the dead’s relatives? No, you missed a trick there with Dillwyn, young lady, and by now I’m sure you know it. Yes, you’d have been living in paradise by this time, so you would. Me, as well, perhaps, if he’d have had me. And in a house full of flowers, too. Nice.’

‘That forever need watering,’ Anne had retorted sharply. ‘Instead, here I am surrounded by walls and walls of Drew’s lovely paintings. And some of them are so romantic too, and so colourful, that you feel transported by them, so you do. ‘
To The Gulag’
and the beautiful ‘
Algerian Pissoir’
are my favourites. No, when all is said and done, I couldn’t wish for better.’

Back then, that had shut Betty up, for a while at least, mused Anne, since she had agreed to attend their wedding, and had stood for the formal family-photographs alongside a very young Chris and the happy couple, and even smiled on occasions, when reminded to.

Anne turned her head so she could once again view the wonderful portrait on the wall that Drew had painted of the red-haired girl with the ringlets, but whose subject now suddenly looked to her remarkably like Rhiannon Cook. Then, gritting her teeth more than usual, she peered down at the three simple verses neatly written out in pen, and quite clearly conceived in the throes of love, and read each of the young girl’s blue, flowing lines softly and lovingly to herself, as if she herself had felt urged to compose them.

Yes, Rhiannon might indeed have written this poem, she thought, on concluding, but, if she did, then what could be her reason for her spending so much time sneaking around with the teacher’s own son? Anne’s eyes suddenly lit up with comprehension. Why, so as to get closer to her Drew, of course, she proffered. I can’t be certain, of course, but if this turns out to be true, and if the vain, middle-aged sick-bag I’m married to
has
fallen hook, line and sinker for her tender, but devious, ruse, as I fear he probably has, well, then I imagine that it’s all over between us, Drew Cillick. Over and out, and no mistake, I’d say. If only I had some arsenic in the house then I’m sure I’d aquiesce to cooking your favourite stew for you tonight. And then I might need to make contact with that nice Dillwyn Graff after all, if only to bury your sorry arse in the morning.

Chris had read the story through twice now, but kept returning to the second paragraph.
‘The body was that of fifteen-year old Danny Flynn, younger brother of Brian, and youngest child of thirty-five year old single-mother, Susan Flynn, of Edward Street, Pant, Merthyr Tydfil.’
Chris dropped the broad-sheet newspaper from his grip, and watched it fall to the carpeted floor in a more or less triangular heap of separating pages. For a few seconds he could only look down at the queer shape he had made, but didn’t even recognise it as a mess that needed to be cleared up, as the dozen or so other patients in Doctor Jain’s surgery, with their sick, red, glaring eyes, unquestionably did.

‘Christopher Cillick!’
the tannoy’s high, feminine voice suddenly called out. Chris came to, slowly bent low, and in considerable pain, tried to gather up all of the newspaper’s pages and put them back together again. Yes, there it was, he told himself, sitting back once again, and folding over page-one - the story of the killing of a younger boy from his own school, who had lived just a few hundred yards from the southern end of the bricked-up tunnel that Chris had visited three times in total now, and that the boy was finally discovered lying dead in.

‘Are you next?’ the old woman in the wheel-chair called across to him, with an anxious look on her drawn face that suggested that she knew he might well be. ‘You’re Anne Cillick’s boy aren’t you? Works in
The Willows
. Lovely girl, she is, aye. Ooh, you’re the dead spit.’

Chris’ mind was racing. ‘I’m the what!’ he stammered, not at all having followed what she was saying.

‘You know, the spitting image,’ she retorted. ‘You’ve got her nose and everything.’

‘Oh, he has, Margaret,’ a middle-aged woman in the corner concurred. ‘I was in big-school with Anne in County. Pretty, she always was, mind. But her nose - well, I’d say it was always a bone of contention.’

‘Chris couldn’t help but smile at this comment, then watched, rather alarmed, as two women in white coats approached from a side-room, bent over him, and put their huge, flabby arms round his shoulders.

‘Shall we get you a wheel-chair, darling?’ the one in the spectacles asked him. ‘Or do you think you can manage it yourself? Eh? Do you want to try?’

‘Oh, I can walk all right’ Chris answered them. ‘I got here all the way from
Gloryhole
without hardly any trouble at all.’ He got to his feet and slowly walked forward, but halted again as he started to wobble. ‘I’m much better on the grass,’ he told them.

‘Do you want your newspaper, sweetheart?’ the shorter woman asked, studying the front-page as she lifted it. ‘Oh, there’s awful what happened down by the junior-school, isn’t it?’

‘I know,’ her friend replied. ‘They say the blade went right through his lung, the poor little mite.’

Chris swallowed, and straightaway felt he might have to throw up on the floor.

‘And guess what they found in his mouth, Edith,’ she went on. ‘Oh, hang on. Let’s wait ‘til we’ve taken the boy in to doctor, shall we? Otherwise we’ll have another right mess to clear up.’

The two women released Chris’s arms, stood back, and let him walk on ahead of them, and by his own steam, into Dr. Nita Jain’s little office, smiling serenely at him as he went. Before he had fully closed the door behind him, Chris could hear Edith tell the other woman, ‘Yes, I dare say they went to the same school, you see. And, you never know, perhaps they were a lot closer than that.’

Carla tugged gently on her father’s dressing-gown, but could tell that he was already sleeping. She lovingly turned down the coverlet over his cold hands, and let him lie there on his back, so that he might fully absorb what remained of the pungent gas that still enveloped the large bedroom. Finally she picked up the joint and drew from it herself, and then, turning off the light, returned with it downstairs.

Carla too had a note to unfold and read, and which she had left open on the kitchen-table an hour or so before. And this one had arrived a day or so earlier in a more conventional fashion, by way of a post-man and a letter-box. In London she had had CCTV outside the house, she reminded herself, but here, in leafy
Gloryhole
, there wasn’t even a camera to catch speeding motorists, let alone people who appeared to be threatening your life and that of your own dear father. But threaten them they seemed to be doing nevertheless. The scribbled letter, which she had read over an hour before she began tending to her father, had more or less said as much.

Yes, this is what you get if you are blessed with the curse of celebrity these days, Carla told herself. Determined to remain strong, she sat herself down on the sofa, picked up her guitar, and began strumming the very chords that had just come into her head. This one was a sad song, she told herself, almost a lament of farewell. She hoped it wouldn’t be the last song she ever wrote with her father in mind, but feared that somehow it just might be.

Carla decided that she would stay up all night, if need be, just so that she could finish it. After all, it was her father’s song, and not hers, she told herself, and she was now of the opinion, as was he, that the sick man was now entering the beginning of his last days with her. She called the song she created that night ‘
Shake Me From Sleeping,’
and, though never released, or even recorded, little did Carla realise that one day it would become one of her most famous songs of all, as, suitably inspired by its discovery on
You-tube
, and being encouraged by a local newspaper journalist to simply follow my nose, and advised by my evening-class tutor in creative-writing to simply jot down everything very much as I remembered it, I would one day get to write a whole book about it!

And then, just to top it all, one night soon after the following Christmas, I dreamt a strange, numinous dream that, on the very night that the girl’s dad - Tom Davies - finally passed away, he flew down from the sky - from outer space, it seemed - and discovered that the choir of angels, clad in white, linen robes, that, along with his own deceased parents, his son Will, and his deceased wife Carys, greeted him when he stepped off the landing craft, were singing that very same song! Yes, it’s the sort of story that’s far, far stranger than fiction, I’m sure you’ll agree, but I swear it was what I dreamt nevertheless. There again, I must admit I do sometimes dream the most peculiar things when I’ve spent the whole night out on the ale.

Standing pefectly still for many minutes, with his back to the windy parapet of the great viaduct, the coldness Chris felt seemed only to alter in increments of freezing. He had gone to school that day without a coat, and he now bitterly regretted it. He looked up as if for comfort. There were places in the sky where the clouds were parting very like the fingers of an enormous hand, once clasped, but now very slowly letting go. The enormous waxing, gibbous moon seemed suddenly to leap into one of these divisions, and instantly transfigured the river’s valley beneath it with a glow that lit up every tree, bush and fern, every bird, lizard and rodent, indeed every living thing that concealed itself silently beneath its thick foliage, as well as those creatures that didn’t, which included the man, cowering, but no longer concealed, at the top of the bank behind his family-home, and whom Chris could now clearly make out was holding a gun. .