Last Train to Gloryhole (8 page)

‘Well, that would depend on a number of things,’ she told him, visualizing in her mind’s eye a large brown bull she had once seen her grandfather releasing into a field for the sole purpose.

‘If they made them that big, I mean,’ added Chris, pouting his lips to stop himself from breaking out giggling. ‘Jerseys, I mean. A polo-neck would look good, don’t you think?’ Unable to help himself, Chris started laughing, but this time he made sure he pinned back Rhiannon’s arms to prevent her from retaliating. ‘You know, I believe that’s why I love you so much, babe.’

‘You mean because I love cows?’ asked Rhiannon, smiling, and suddenly embracing him.

‘Yes, that’s probably it,’ he replied, grinning. ‘Because, if people don’t love them then I dare say they could all die out before long, couldn’t they?’ He rolled his shirt-sleeves a little higher.

‘Why? Are they endangered, then?’ she asked, more than a little perturbed by his comment.

‘What? You mean you didn’t know that?’ Chris enquired, feigning horror. ‘I’m very surprised, Rhiannon, especially as you seem to know so much about them.’

Rhiannon was seventeen, the same age as Chris was, but, because she had failed dreadfully in her GCSE examinations, she had been persuaded to re-take them all, and had elected to leave Chris’s class and year, and move back to join the Year-Eleven class below her, whose students were therefore a year younger than she was.

Chris embraced his red-haired lover and drew her with him towards the open gate across from his home, and then down the short path that led to the deserted station-halt. There, turning smartly through a semi-circle, and ambling arm-in-arm past the north side of his home, Chris walked Rhiannon eastwards onto, then across, the lofty viaduct. As they slowly proceeded, he decided to tell her a bit more about the subject which seemed to fascinate her so much.

‘Listen, Rhiannon,’ said Chris, ‘three of the most endangered species living in Britain today happen to be cows, and - and pandas, oh - and dinosaurs. You know, I nearly forgot those altogether.’ As the sudden breeze that swept up the valley sent strands of his long black hair all about his face, Chris suddenly lost interest in his teasing tale. ‘Say, have you got any crisps left?’ he asked her. ‘I’m starving, and I don’t plan on going in for a while, yet. How about you?’

‘I’m not eating today, I’ve decided,’ Rhiannon told him firmly, taking a small packet from her pocket and handing it over to him. ‘Chris, do you mean - do you mean you aren’t going to go home
at all
tonight?’

‘No, you see I don’t see any reason to.’ he replied, taking his fiery-headed girl’s slim, pale hand firmly in his own, and pulling her even closer. ‘How about you? Say, let’s do what we did the other day, shall we?’

‘And what’s that?’ enquired Rhiannon, starting to tremble with a mixture of fear and anticipation, as it gradually dawned on her what it was that he was proposing.

‘Let’s go down the line,’ replied Chris, tugging both of her hands down firmly inside his own.

The confident, boyish smile that followed these words, and which set Rhiannon’s heart beating faster, she quickly sensed was too much for her to consider offering up even the faintest of objections. So, unlike on the previous occasion, she didn’t protest. And so, with tousled heads dipped, and slim, bare arms gripped tenderly round each other’s waists, the two young people continued strolling eastwards along the dusty, tarmacadam lane that ran across the top of the great, seven-arched viaduct, into the teeth of a gathering breeze, and away from the setting sun, which quickly threw their long, single shadow way ahead of them down the line of the ancient railway-track, and, with just a single zig-zag, caused by the structure’s perimeter walls, right on over the side of the head-high, stone parapet, and away faintly into the distant woods.

The entrance to the tunnel was now little more than a huge, round, concrete wall with a steel door at its base, which was supposed to be locked shut, but was invariably left wide open for intruders and ordinary passers-by to peer in, sniff the dank, humid air inside, and think better of interrupting their pleasant country stroll for a dim, cavernous step back in time.

In the Sixties this wide, curved passageway beneath the limesone hill provided a route by which steam-trains were able to reach the industrial town of Dowlais, and so carry away from it, in a long caravan of open trucks, both its steam-coal and its iron and steel products, for which the locality was rightly renowned right across the world. Indeed in early Victorian Times the
Dowlais Ironworks
had been the largest ironworks on the planet, and the very rails that the trains ran on from Dowlais towards Cardiff, to London, to Paris, and even further afield towards Berlin, Moscow, and Outer Mongolia for that matter, were all etched indelibly with the small Welsh town’s famous name, the term
Dowlais Steel
being, as Isambard Kingdom Brunel had claimed at the time, nothing less than a by-word for quality product.

The steel-door creaked like a banshee as it was pushed open, and soon Chris’s head peered out into the darkness which by now had enveloped the entire river valley, and which would inevitably make their one-mile walk back rather more harrowing than before. After Chris, emerged Rhiannon, holding on to her lover’s shoulder with her left hand, while in her right she carried her scarf and blazer, from the pockets of which hung limply her blue-and-green striped tie and blue tights. Chris swung the door shut behind them, and the pounding clang of its closure echoed eerily around them, causing unseen sheep to gallop away raucously along the track, or to scramble noisily up the hill’s steep slope in the direction of the castle for their very salvation.

‘It’s O.K., babe,’ Chris assured her. ‘It’s just the pesky sheep. I think there’s only two of them. You know, they’ve probably been doing much the same as we have, if you ask me, only amongst the trees.’ He turned towards Rhiannon and giggled heartily at the thought, but quickly saw that she wasn’t quite as amused as he plainly was. ‘I’m sorry, babe. I forgot - you only know about cows, don’t you? And horses, of course, since your dad’s got two of them, you tell me.’

Rhiannon’s ice-blue eyes met his own. ‘I don’t want to come here again, Chris,’ she told him firmly, bending now, and lifting one bare leg up onto the bank so as to pull on her tights. ‘And anyway, I bet this is where you brought Pippa Jenkins that time. And don’t go denying it, neither, Chris, because I got to hear all about it. Do you know she told everyone on
Facebook
that you two went all the way? What? You didn’t know? I thought not.’ Rhiannon picked specks of grit from the netted fabric as she pulled the blue hose up around her hips and waist. ‘Only I didn’t know she meant all the bloody way down here. God! It’s no wonder she’s your ex now, is it?’

‘It wasn’t like that,’ retorted Chris, sharply. ‘It was the other way round, completely. In fact, let’s not even talk about her, Rhiannon. She was - she was just to
o easy
if you want to know the truth. She was, I’m telling you. Pippa Jenkins, pah!’ He shook his head at the memory and pointed at the bricked-up wall of the tunnel. ‘You know, we didn’t even have to go inside there. And, if I remember, it wasn’t even properly dark. Christ! I could tell she didn’t care
where
it happened. Just that it -’ Chris suddenly tossed a stone at the steel door and it clanged loudly, reverberating starkly throughout the surrounding, now deathly silent, valley. ‘You know, I thought that maybe
I would
. But I guess it’s different when it’s your first time, isn’t it?’

‘Is it?’ replied Rhiannon bitterly. ‘Chris, will you promise me you won’t make me next time?’

‘But I thought you liked it, Rhi?’ he asked her, now disgruntled somewhat by her comment.

‘Make me come down the tunnel again, I mean….not the other thing,’ she replied, crossly. ‘God, we had to walk for ages just to get here.

‘But it’s not really that far, babe,’ Chris announced. ‘And it was still light when we first arrived. Anyway, nobody could ever bother us inside the tunnel, could they?’

‘Oh, really? Except the ghost, perhaps,’ Rhiannon told him, throwing on her scarf, doing up every button of her school-blazer, and turning up its narrow collar against the stiff, cold breeze that now swept up at them round the curve of the wide river vale. ‘After all, the tunnel runs under the cemetery, doesn’t it?’

‘What ghost?’ Chris asked her. ‘Whose ghost do you mean, babe? Aw, don’t tell me you actually believe that old wives’ tale, Rhiannon? Nobody else does, so why should you?’

‘Well, he
was
my uncle, for a start, wasn’t he?’ she told him, biting into her lip.

‘Yes, but you never even met the man,’ Chris retorted scornfully. ‘Your Uncle Sam is about as relevant to us now as - as, say, J-F-K, or John-the-Baptist, if you want my opinion.’

‘Look, I can’t say I do, as it goes, Chris,’ she retorted. ‘I don’t happen to want your opinion at all. Really, please don’t talk about my Uncle Sam like that,’ she pleaded, taking both his hands in hers. ‘He was my dad’s only brother, after all, you know. And everyone says he saved my dad’s life when they were just young boys, back in that school that got destroyed, down in Aberfan.’

‘O.K, O.K., but my Mam went there too, remember,’ put in Chris, by way of balancing things, but he could easily tell that Rhiannon wasn’t really listening to him any longer.

‘And anyway,’ she continued, ‘his body only got re-buried again the other day. And I was there, remember. We all were. Listen - I know you didn’t go, Chris, but did I tell you I saw your mother, rambling about over in the cemetery some time later that evening? Creeping away like some vagabond between the grave-stones, she was, I swear. Like a - like some criminal. Why on earth was she doing that, Chris? Do you know?’

‘What the hell are you talking about, Rhiannon?’ the boy retorted sharply. ‘That couldn’t have been my Mam. She said she went to work as usual that day, so I guess you must be mistaken.’

‘Really?’ said Rhiannon, suddenly dropping his hand, and walking on ahead of him onto the rough, stony, cycle-way that comprised their route back towards the Gloryhole-viaduct. Not many seconds later she had turned the corner and was gone.

‘You know, it’s not just reading-glasses you need, babe,’ Chris called after her. ‘God help you in your driving-test next week. Yeah. I mean it, babe. Crash! Bang!’ Chuckling loudly to himself, he reached the corner, and looked about him in both directions, but in the black darkness the boy could see neither hide nor hair of his pretty, young lover, and had no idea where she had gone to. ‘Where are you babe?’ he shouted, but his blood froze when just his own deep, urgent voice echoed back at him, and much louder now than he had expected. ‘Rhiannon!’ Chris called out, but less shrilly this time. ‘You’ll get lost, you know. And without me I bet you’ll never find the way. Though you just need to keep to the cycle-path, you do. Rhiannon! Babe, please don’t go!’

The large ram that Chris suddenly saw standing stolidly in the path, staring back at him, made the hairs on his head stand up. The robust animal’s complete lack of temerity in response to his repeated calls to ‘skidaddle!’ finally caused Chris to clamber his way up onto the bank, and to creep all the way round him amongst the trees in a sort of broad semi-circle. To the boy’s relief he finally sighted Rhiannon, flashing a torch at him from about fifty yards farther up the track, and so, although his legs now ached sharply at the joints, Chris dashed off in her direction, not once daring to turn and look back from whence he had come, at the stone-faced, hoary, old creature that had somehow managed to scare the boy witless.

A second, much leaner sheep suddenly ambled across the track and took up position alongside her male companion, and the two animals turned their heads in unison, and watched, as the two young lovers, of a different, perhaps more primitive, species completely, walked away from them, now arm-in-arm once more, in the direction of
The Seven Arches
.

The incessant drizzle had coated the black head-stone in a myriad of bright, silver, pearl-droplets, reflecting liberally the light from the broad, bright, white-clouded sky which covered Pant just as thinly as it enveloped the upper Taff Vale and the broad sweep of The Brecon Beacons to the north. I laid the parcel of chrysanthemums - Sam’s favourite flowers - on the narrow, grass-less mound, beneath which his recently recovered, re-examined, and re-packaged corpse now lay at rest for the second time, and then stood upright and still alongside it, so as to pay a personal tribute to the courageous elder brother I had lost in tragic circumstances when he was a final-year student at University College Swansea. I myself had failed to achieve the grades
I
needed to get there, and instead, out of frustration, took a job as a guard on the railway.

The car-horn blared out a sullen note, and I was suddenly aware that my daughter Rhiannon, who was sitting less than thirty feet from me, in smart clothes she had no desire to dampen, let alone allow to get soaked through, had become eager for my return. The yellow, second-hand Ford Fiesta she sat inside I had bought over a week before, and, once I had got it repaired and serviced, I planned to give her as a reward for having passed her driving-test at the first attempt. And this she had now achieved. Yes, despite what many of her school-friends had predicted, and recalling how more successful they had been in their GCSE exams than she had, I always kept faith in my only daughter that she would surprise us all on the day itself, perhaps because it was I who had given her her first half-a-dozen lessons.

‘It was only the man’s request for me ‘to turn the car round’ which threw me, Dad,’ she had told me, as we sat together in my Rover earlier that morning, and I delivered my triumphant girl back home again to her nerve-wracked mother.

‘How do you mean?’ I had asked.

‘Well, you always told me to do ‘a three-point turn,’ didn’t you? But apparently that is not what it is called these days. Derrh! You have ‘to turn the car round,’ is what you have to do. Honest. And so to avoid driving up over the kerb, which ‘three points’ would undoubtedly have forced me to do in the dreadfully narrow lane we were in, I took six or seven goes at least, and, odd though it must have looked to the people who stood around watching, I can only think the examiner must have rewarded me as much for my patience as for anything else.’