Last Train to Gloryhole (41 page)

‘Only when you’ve been to town for a curry again after work,’ she said, smirking, ‘and your flatulence is keeping me awake.’

‘Flatulence!’ said Drew, feigning bemusement as to what she was referring. ‘Moi - flatulent?’

‘You could fart for Wales and you know it,’ she told him. ‘You scored a hat-trick the other night.’

‘How gross you valley-girls are,’ he told her. ‘If only I’d taken that job in Barry, life could -’

‘You could captain the team,
and
kick all the goals.,’ she added. ‘We had to move the budgie downstairs, remember. Poor Joey would have been a lot safer down a coal-mine, I reckon.’

‘Is there anything else you’d like to have a go at me about, now you’ve started?’ Drew asked, grasping the remote, and switching off the television. ‘Well, I guess there must be something, because I can clearly see it in your face.’ He sat down opposite his wife in the easy-chair, and stared directly into her eyes. ‘Speak to me, my heart. What is it?’

‘Why don’t you try telling
me
?’ his wife said, licking her lips nervously. ‘Tell me what you’re thinking now, for a start, why don’t you?’

‘All right, then,’ Drew replied. He got up with a little leap and walked over to the cabinet in the corner of the room, pulled open a drawer in it, and brought out a sheet of paper, swiftly returning to Anne with it gripped in his hand. ‘What on earth is this poem about, eh?’ he asked her. ‘Are you - tell me straight, have you been cheating on me, Anne?’

‘Me!’ she screamed.

‘Why, yes,’ Drew told her aggressively. ‘Because I found this hidden away in your private drawer. Yes, you had no idea I looked in there sometimes, did you? It’s very - it’s quite passionate, wouldn’t you say?’ He dropped the paper into Anne’s lap, and turned and walked boldly back to his seat. ‘Tell me - who is this boy who’s writing to you? Do I know him?’

‘Boy!’ shrieked Anne. She felt compromised and somewhat undone by his sudden action, and was furious with him for that too. ‘Drew,’ she began, ‘I found that poem tucked away in
your
jacket-pocket. Yes, I did. Don’t go pretendong now. It’s obviously from a girl who
you’ve
been seeing. Methinks a school-girl, yes?’

‘A school-girl! You’re crazy,’ yelled Drew.

‘No, I’m not,’ Anne retorted. ‘Listen - I recognise the handwriting. I do, you know. It’s Rhiannon, isn’t it?’

‘Rhiannon!’ yelled Drew. ‘Rhiannon Cook! Don’t be so stupid. You know, I reckon you’re only saying that because
I
found it first.’

‘No,
I
found it first,’ she retorted. ‘That’s why it was in
my drawer
, remember.’

‘As if. Look - who is the boy? Drew asked. ‘Tell me, please, because I need to know. Not that fellow on work-experience at your care-home, surely. Steffan, is it?’ Anne shook her head, but not in response to the question he had asked. ‘Or one of the other two, maybe? Jake Haines, is it? Or - or that twat of a mate of their’s, Danny Flynn?’

‘Eh? That young boy is dead now, remember?’ she told him.

‘Oh, God!’ Drew said. ‘Yes of course, that’s right. Danny Flynn in Year Ten. The poor bugger. Just imagine - they found his body in the old railway-tunnel. Mutilated, and - and a lot more besides. Shocking that is! Shocking! O.K., Anne. I take back what I said. Will you forgive me?’

‘I will,’ Anne responded.

Drew got up and crossed to her chair and embraced his wife. ‘I’ve not been cheating on you, sweetheart, I swear. You just have to trust me on this. Where is Chris, by the way?’ he asked.

‘I don’t know. Out larking with some girl or other, I suppose,’ Anne told him. ‘Or Rhiannon, even.’

Drew.dipped his head, and considered her words. ‘I’ve just had a thought,’ he said, suddenly turning to face his wife.

‘What?’ asked Anne, her mouth agape as she began to contemplate the very same thought.

‘What if - what if the poem was -’ he raised an eye-brow.

‘For Chris,’ said Anne, reading his mind while declaring her own.

Drew nodded. ‘Yes. What if it was meant for him?’

Chris and Carla were sitting in Tom’s living-room playing music together - she on guitar, he on electric-keyboards - and sharing a long, lumpy, hastily-rolled joint together. The pair forever kept stopping and re-starting the song that they were practising. They told each other repeatedly that they were beginning to get the hang of it, but, since the chord-changes were tricky, Carla patiently offered Chris plenty of helpful advice, and gently encouraged him every time he messed up.
‘You could shake me from sleeping -’
they sang together, with a harmony that was, by this time, becoming quite accomplished -
‘and I would tell you that I love you - for the very last time.’

The pair looked up on hearing the sudden creak of a loose floor-board above their heads. Carla leaned across, switched off the tape-machine, and threw her guitar down on the sofa beside a few scattered reams of sheet-music that they had waded through earlier that evening, when Chris had tried to find some music that he actually knew.

Carla leaned back and dragged deeply from the thick spliff he had handed her. ‘I’m sure you can see why I wasn’t able to invite the police in here that night, Chris,’ she told him. ‘You see, everything was just lying around much as it is now, and Dad’s room was smelling even more strongly of puff than this one is right now.’ Chris dipped and shook his head a fraction and giggled at the queer picture she painted. ‘And if I’d gone and got myself arrested, then you can be sure it would have been all over the papers within hours, and, as a result, I can tell you there would have been hell to pay.’

‘Yes, maybe you’re right.’ Chris told her, rubbing his tired eyes in an effort to prolong his powers of concentration.

‘You know, Chris, I suppose it was lucky in a way that the men managed to spot you standing back there on the bridge,’ Carla told him. ‘Even though I’m sure you must have been terrified, alone and exposed as you were. You see, arriving back home at just that moment, and from the direction you came, seems to have made the two men think twice about whatever evil act they’d got planned for me. And that alone I guess probably caused them to vanish back into the night.’

The door beside the pair suddenly opened, and a pale-faced Tom slowly walked into the room dressed only in a pair of well-worn, and crudely-buttoned, striped pyjamas. The two young people shot out of their seats to support him.

‘Call the police for me, would you sweetness?’ Tom told his daughter, before collapsing sideways onto the settee, scatttering cushions of varied colours and patterns all over the floor. ‘Tell them there are bodies buried in a mass-grave, just up the road here, not far frm Vaynor.’

‘Dead bodies, Dada!’ ejaculated Carla.

‘That’s what I said, girl,’ he told her, puffing from his exertions ‘And that’s what I saw.

‘But in Vaynor!’ stammered Chris, in a tone just as animated as the old man’s.

‘Yes,’ Tom replied. He raised both his bony knees up close to his chest and began to shiver. ‘And be sure to say that every one of them is male, won’t you? And - and that the very weapons they were murdered with are buried there, in the shallow grave, right smack alongside them.’

The two young people exchanged horrified glances.

‘What sort of weapons did you see, Dad?’ Carla put in, trembling perceptibly at his startling declaration.

‘What kind? Why, the usual, I’d say,’ her dad replied, stretching out his hands to aid his description. ‘They were long knives and machetes for the most part, and one great, long sword.’

‘Do you mean a samurai-sword?’ asked Chris. He had seen Steffan wielding one in the park one time, and it had badly scared him. He suddenly thought Volver might have done for him.

‘I’ve no idea what the damn thing is called,’ retorted Tom, ‘but one poor blighter is lying there decapitated.’

On dry, clear days when the sun is shining - and there are surprisingly more of these than you might at first think in South Wales - for my money there is no more beautiful place on the face of God’s Earth than the upper Taff Valley. On such mornings I often found myself circling the narrow roads and bushy lanes in my new firm’s van, dropping off supplies for the building trade, while carrying out my prime job of checking that construction and renovation tasks on the various sites that we had were not falling behind schedule, and that the occupants of the homes and business premises we serviced were content that the work they were paying for was getting done, and progressing more or less as agreed.

My jobs done, I would invariably find myself pulling up at the gate of some lovely field or forest glade, and, from there, watching the different farm-animals, (among them the year’s growing lambs,) going about their business, or simply surveying the lovely, rolling landscape that comprised these green and pleasant foothills of The Beacons.

On one such sunny morning in May I was driving down from the hill-top village of Pontsticill, and skirting past Vaynor, as one does, when I spied a fleet of cars coming towards me from the direction of the viaduct at
Gloryhole
, looking just like any other gleaming funeral-cortege that was making its winding way up towards Vaynor churchyard at a suitably crawling pace.

Then the sudden sight of the boy I had long ago learned was my own son, barely managing to ride his wobbling, red bicycle towards me on the wrong side of the road, took me completely by surprise, and, in my efforts to avoid him, almost caused me to collide with the first of the cars he was overtaking, whose driver I saw was a blond-haired policeman. It was then that I realised that they were police-cars, and the reason for their slow progress was the fact that they were lost. The first car appeared to contain within it a woman who looked remarkably like Carla Steel, along with a group of much older men, two of whom had white hair, and all of whom wore tired, harrowed expressions on their faces, that seemed to speak to me of world-weariness, and care, and, more than likely, unrequested overtime.

I drove on, but looked back at them in my rear-view mirror, fascinated enough to wish that I might have been invited to join them on their detective quest for whoever-knows-what.

Anne scuttled along the quiet High Street and tapped once on the door of the
Café Giotto,
then pushed on the latch and went inside. Through the glass panel she could see that the women were already there.

‘Sorry, but is this where the witches’ coven are meeting this week?’ she asked with a grin.

Zeta quickly rose and beckoned her to come and join them. ‘I’m glad you could make it Anne, love,’ she told her. ‘I know you’ve probably got a million-and-one things you’d rather be doing on the weekend.’

‘Not really,’ Anne replied. ‘Apart from all the usual, that is. So what have I missed then? What were you girls discussing?’

‘Well we were talking about Dick,’ said Maggie Scratch, rubbing the glowing red patch on the back of her neck.

‘Oh, my God!’ shot back Anne. ‘It’s Sunday remember. If I’d known you were -’

‘Dick Plant,’ said Janie.

‘As was,’ said Bobbie. ‘Since the fella calls himself Riccardo Pantheon these days, of course.’

‘That was Gwen’s first hubbie, you know,’ chipped in Zeta, by way of clarification. ‘Before she married Dyl Cook. I was just saying to the girls that the fellow was born a man.’

‘He was born a -’ Anne was convinced she had mis-heard the comment Zeta had just made. ‘What you’re trying to suggest, Zeta, is that he was born a woman, yes?’

‘No, no!’ exclaimed Zeta. ‘Of course he wasn’t born a woman. Does he look like he was?’

‘Not at all,’ said Maggie. ‘He’s male all right. Zeta was only telling us how he always seemed to have been a man virtually from the day he was born.’

‘Do you understand now?’ Zeta asked Anne. ‘You see, I mean he sort of missed out on his childhood, if you like,’ she told her friend. ‘Mario’s cousin in Genoa had the same problem, so his family say. Only he was gay with it.’

It was Bobbie’s turn. ‘I had an English pen-friend who was in school with him in Gloucester - Dick Plant, you know,’ she told them. ‘And as soon as he could read and write, and had learned how to do his adding and taking away, well, he was into his
Times
, wasn’t he?’ she told her.

‘His times-tables, do you mean?’ enquired Anne.

‘No, no - ‘
The Times
,’ ’ replied Bobbie. ‘The daily.’

‘She means the broad-sheet newspaper that comes out every morning,’ said Maggie. ‘I heard there’s a man in Cefn buys it regular. Even owns shares he does.’

‘Oh, I get it now,’ said Anne.

‘Do you get it now, do you?’ said Maggie. ‘And so you see, Dick never really got to play like we did.’

‘Or like our brothers did, she means,’ added Zeta.

‘Or with girls like us,’ chipped in Loose Linda, who, up until then, had remained quiet, scoffing away at a sandwich. ‘Because I was in school with a boy like him, you see, and God, I felt sorry for the poor mite, so I did. Never let me kiss him once.’

‘So where’s Gwen now?’ asked Anne. ‘I thought you told me you’d invited her round here too.’

‘Well, I did.’ Zeta told her. ‘The same time as you.’

‘But she’ll be in church now, won’t she?’ said Maggie. ‘God, you should have known that Zeta, shouldn’t you? You’re a catholic yourself, right? You know, I’m surprised that you aren’t there yourself, if I’m honest.’

‘Maggie - don’t be like that,’ said Anne. ‘You’re allowed to miss once in a blue moon, right, Zet? The Pope’s not going to come round with his purple dictate, now, is he?’

‘Papal,’ said Linda, correcting her.

‘Oh, I’m sorry,’ said Anne. ‘Anyway, that long wooden thing he carries round with him that everyone scurries away from.’

The women around her all tried to visualize what Anne was referring to, but none of them could manage it with any success.

‘If you want to know, I went with the kids at half-eight, like I always do,’ replied Zeta. ‘Leaving Martin to have a long sleep, you know. And when was the last time you saw the inside of a church, Maggie?’

‘Me! You’re picking on me now then, are you?’ the woman said angrily. ‘Just before Christmas, as a matter of fact,’ she announced proudly. ‘When I went to give blood. Unless you count ‘
Orlando Bingo’
Friday nights, of course, which use that big chapel down at the bottom of town. We go there together, regular, you see - Linda and me. Oh, it’s lovely in there. He worked in there a couple of times, you know. Replacement staff during the hols, as I recall.’