Last Train to Gloryhole (46 page)

‘Volver’s late again,’ said Steffan through a mouthful of chicken-drumstick and chips. He swallowed hard, then wiped both of his greasy hands on the bleached thighs of his jeans. ‘He said sale-or-return, didn’t he?’

‘ ‘Coffee-powered car breaks world speed record,’ ’
Jake read aloud from the tabloid newspaper he held, adeptly balanced on the steering-wheel before him. He then began laughing wildly.

‘Didn’t you hear what I said, cloth-ears? I was talking about Volver. What is that shit, anyway?’ Steffan asked him, ripping the paper away from him with both hands. ‘Oh, it’s the Daily Shite again. I thought so.’ He read out the next headline hinself. ‘ ‘
OAP dies of spontaneous combustion in his living room.’
Wow! What a way to go, eh?’

‘Poor old bastard,’ chimed in Jake. ‘I bet he didn’t see that one coming.’

Steffan turned and stared at him. ‘Well, of course he didn’t see it coming, twat-head!’ he yelled. ‘That’s the point of the story, innit? It was
spontaneous,
do you get me?’

Jake leaned across towards Steffan in the passenger-seat and read the headline that was nearest to him, ‘ ‘
Evil Sat Nav sends car into water-ditch.’
Christ! Just imagine that.’ He picked up the sat-nav that was sitting on the dash-board before him and banged it a couple of times on the steering-wheel. ‘We’d best keep an eye on this one, too, I reckon. Look where it’s gone and brought us this time.’ He gazed out of the window and shook his head from side to side.

‘Yeah, just exactly where we asked it to go. You know, I bet it wasn’t the sat-nav that sent that car into the ditch, though, like they’re saying it did,’ said Steffan. ‘I bet you anything she was a female driver. That’d be par for the course for one of them, don’t you think? Say - how about this one?
‘Unmarried mother stole Facebook pictures to convince her ex her son was theirs.’
There you go, Jake. See how evil women are.’

‘Yeah,’ Jake concurred. ‘You’d never catch a man doing that.’

‘Er - men don’t have babies, Jake,’ said his friend. ‘Listen - don’t worry, mate. I’ll tell you about it one day.’

‘You’re funny,’ said Jake.

‘Apparently, and with the minimum of effort,’ Steffan replied. ‘Listen to this, will you?
‘Doctor claims he can turn brown eyes blue, but he can’t change them back again.’
Good God!’

Jake began singing. ‘Don’t you make my brown eyes blue.’ That was on
‘The Voice,’
that one was.’

‘You know, I reckon that’s seriously colour-prejudiced, that is,’ Steffan told him. ‘Try this one.
‘Dead Man had the words ‘DO NOT RESUSCITATE’ tattooed on his chest.’ ’

‘Eh? But why would somebody do that to him?’ asked Jake. ‘I mean kill him - yeah, if you have to, but don’t go messing with his corpse, right? I mean, we’d never go doing stuff like that, would we? And anyway it would take at least an hour to complete the whole thing.’ He stared down at the white, polystyrene container that his friend held, and at what were now the cold remains of barbecue-chicken-and-chips and a set of cheap, white, plastic cutlery splayed inside it. He eyed the leg of greasy chicken, that by now lay severed in two and half-consumed. ‘Hey - give us a chip, mate,’ he asked his friend.

‘You can have them all, if you like,’ Steffan replied, staring into his comrade’s eyes.

There was something about the way his friend said this that made Jake reconsider. Although starving now worse than ever, he stared down at the takeaway-meal and decided that the chips looked remarkably like a troop of slain and decimated soldiers, lying around soon after a battle, and still oozing ketchup liberally at every knife-wound.

‘Too late!’ Steffan exclaimed. He decided he wouldn’t oblige his friend, but instead wrapped the container inside the folded newspaper, rolled down the passenger-window, and threw the whole package out onto the farm-track that ran beside them.

A disappointed, still hungry, Jake resorted to turning on the car-radio instead.
‘Labrinth!’
he cried. ‘Yeah, man! I love
Urban
.’

‘Jake - what do you know about
Urban?
’ Steffan asked him, reaching down and switching it off again. ‘Seriously, man. You’re about as Urban as a second-home in Tuscany.’

But Jake wasn’t listening to him any more. He had suddenly remembered something that was, to his mind, at least, far, far more important. ‘You know, Steffan, he lied to us about what happened to Danny, didn’t he?’ he declared to his friend.

‘Who? Volver?’ asked Steffan. ‘How do you reckon that?’

‘Well, he told us he died of natural causes, didn’t he?’

‘Well, I guess he meant natural to the line of work he was in,’ replied Steffan. ‘Your pal Danny Flynn sold drugs, right? Coke, for starters.’

‘Well, he dabbled, yeah,’ Jake told him. ‘Lots of guys dabble, don’t they? I - we dabble, right? Still, whatever happened, he definitely didn’t deserve to die with a knife through his lung did he? And with his own soddin’ lunch-box stuffed inside his mouth. What the hell is
natural
about that?’

‘But he must have upset Volver somehow,’ replied Steffan. ‘And how many times has he told Danny and the two of us how nobody does that to him and gets away with it. So I guess he was warned, wasn’t he? And so I guess he probably got what was coming to him, don’t you think?’

For almost a minute neither of them spoke. Then Jake switched on the radio again. This time it was ‘
Goldie Lookin Chain’
singing a song they knew well about Newport.

‘Now this is what
I
call Urban,’ said Steffan, grinning. ‘An urban district council.’

Jake didn’t get it, and soon posed his friend another question. ‘Say, have you got any tattoos, Steffan?’

‘No. Why?’ enquired his colleague, smiling. ‘Are you thinking of getting one?’

‘Well, I admit I’ve just started thinking about it,’ Jake replied. ‘Just the one word, of course.’

‘Do you mean one with Chinese characters?’ Steffan asked him.

‘Christ no!’ cried Jake. ‘It would have to be in English otherwise the paramedics would be bound to get confused.’

‘Paramedics! I don’t get it,’ said Steffan. ‘Do you mean it’s for them? What on earth is it going to say, for Christ’s sake?’

‘Well, it’s going to have to be in massive capitals, I reckon,’ Jake announced. ‘And it’s going to read ‘
RESUSCITATE.’ ’

The quilt of stars folded over the sleeping countryside, and the moon, to which filthy Trefechan seemed to have given hepatitis not very long after it rose, lit up the isolated farms and scattered hamlets which colonised the rolling hills between the Taff Valley and The Brecon Beacons, which lay beyond and to the north. Chris looked up briefly at the end-terrace home that his mother, his step-father and a major, recently recovered, bank owned, and wondered how he could possibly manage ro tell them the truth about what he and Rhiannon had discovered in the subterranean rock-pool, little more than a mile-and-a-half from Gloryhole.

To his mind Chris had already chickened out, and, dropping down once again onto the track he had been skirting, as he made his weary way back across the
Bryniau
moorland from seeing Rhiannon back home, and circling the silent house he lived in, he climbed over the fence into his back-garden, and began searching for an empty stretch of soil in which he might bury the stiff, cold body he held.

The kitchen-light came on. Chris quickly realised that he was left with nowhere to hide, and so, instead of skulking back over the fence once again, he rose meekly to his feet, and walked onto the patio, and watched, as his mother, dressed only in her silky, cerise dressing-gown and curlers, unbolted the back-door, and came outside to find out what all the noise was about.

‘It’s only me, Mam,’ Chris told his mother, but decided that it was impossible for him to approach her, since the smell that had blown away behind him on his way home, was now infusing the night-air around the pair of them, and so had become impossible to conceal.

‘What have you got in that bag, Chris?’ Anne asked, folding her bare arms across her chest so as to fend off the cold breeze that blew up from the river.

Anne watched Chris gently slip the bag from his shoulders and lay it on the ground before them, then with two hands unclip the straps, open up the flaps, and lift from inside it the stretched-out torso of Emily the cat. She approached her son and, placing one arm on his shoulder, studied the almost unrecognizable head and patched colouring of her favourite pet.

‘Oh, my God! Oh, my God! She’s dead, yeah? Chris - where on earth did you find her?’ Anne asked him, turning away, her whole body shaking.

‘In the
‘Merlin’s Cave,’ ’
he told her. ‘She was just floating in the shadows in the great pool there. You know, Mam, it seems the old man was right, after all.’

‘What old man?’ asked his mother, stroking the, no-longer-sleek, but still dappled, body of her deceased cat.

‘Tom, our would-be dentist, next door,’ he replied, pointing at the fence. ‘Carla’s dad.’

‘
He
told you she was there!’ his mother asked, mouth agape.

‘Well, not exactly,’ Chris retorted. ‘But everything he did tell me about her turned out to be true. That old guy has a genuine gift, I reckon. It makes you wonder what else he’s predicted.’

‘Does it?’ asked Anne, suddenly feeling a shiver pass through her. ‘Chris, let’s just put the poor cat into a bag or a sack of some kind for the night, shall we? Then we can come out here and bury her properly in the morning.’

‘O.K., then,’ said Chris, going indoors to search for something suitable they might use.

Leaving the cat’s curled torso lying on the patio, Anne walked slowly over to the fence, and peered through it into the lit-up kitchen of the house next door. Inside it she could make out the old man sitting in a wicker-chair, his thin, pale feet buried in a bowl of steaming water, and his daughter Carla, crouched on her knees before him, gently washing them. Anne watched as Carla lifted his dressing-gown from off his lower body, and gently, and ever so carefully, washed her father’s thighs and genitals, and, after bidding him to stand, and rinsing out the sponge again in the bowl, washed his thin, white posterior and his lower-back. This was something she herself had to do all the time at work, Anne pondered, and so she empathised with Carla to the point of almost wishing to call out to her to let her come inside and finish the task for her.

Anne suddenly heard Tom cry out in pain, and she felt herself wince with the agony of it. Very soon she found herself beginning to weep, and, when her son returned outside to join her, Anne silently called him over to her, and showed him the touching, family scene being played out in the house next-door.

Chris sadly, and predictably, saw it from a different angle completely, soon telling his mother, ‘Crikey! The man’s not wearing any pants! Carla shouldn’t have to do all that, should she? After all, she’s a wealthy woman.’

‘Chris,’ his mother replied tenderly, ‘she only does it because she wants to - do you understand? Because she loves him so. You don’t know, my boy, but you might need to do the same for
your own
dear father one day.’

‘My step-father, you mean,’ he replied.

‘Yes - Drew,’ she answered. ‘Or your real father, even, if one day you finally get to know him.’

‘Who
is
my real dad, Mam?’ Chris asked her. ‘I know you don’t want to tell me, but I’m determined to find out for myself one day, you know.’ He gritted his teeth together. ‘But, Mam, don’t you think it would be so much easier for me if you were to just tell me right now?’

Anne cast a final look towards her new neighbours and considered her son’s request, which at that particular moment seemed a not unreasonable one. ‘Do you really want me to tell you who your dad is, then?’ Anne asked her son, turning to gaze into his face to verify for herself the fact that the boy did indeed resemble him.

‘Of course, I do,’ Chris retorted. ‘Look, I can understand you being reluctant to tell me when I was young, but I’m a lot older now, aren’t I? More mature and everything.’ Chris watched as his mother suddenly looked away again, seemingly to consider the matter, the moonlight lighting up her face quite alarmingly. But this time he was determined that he wasn’t going to let it drop. ‘You know, I think you just won’t tell me because I might have a brother in my own class at school, or something. Say - is that true? Do I, Mam?’ Anne turned to look back at him. ‘Go on - tell me, Mam. Because now I know you can’t possibly hurt me if you do. Please tell me. Please.’

‘Darling, it’s not a brother that you have at school,’ Anne told Chris, trembling more than ever.

‘Do you mean - do you mean I have a sister!’ he cried. ‘Oh, my God!’

‘A younger one, yes,’ Anne said, finding herself beginning to form her lips into a smile. ‘Though rather less than a year.’

‘You mean I’ve got a younger sister?’ he asked her. ‘Wow! You know, that’s quite exciting, as it goes. Please, Mam - tell me what her name is. Go on. Don’t be afraid.’

‘Anne grasped Chris by the shoulders, and, smiling broadly now, and staring deeply into her son’s dark eyes, she told him, ‘It’s Rhiannon.’

It must be said that the Reverend Gary Davies seldom sang
The Blues,
but he was indeed a very real local personage, with an active spiritual presence, not only within, but beyond, the country parish that included the hamlets of Vaynor, Pontsticill and, of course,
Gloryhole.
And on the night on which Carla’s father became confined to bed, for what she feared might be the very last time, it was the rural preacher whom Tom asked his daughter to summon: a Welsh uncle whom the singer had rarely seen, and, as far as she knew, as an adult had never spoken to.

Uncle Gary more or less saw his brief in this way: after initially reconciling with his sole living sibling, (and, of course, with his, now celebated, daughter,) to help, and offer comfort to, the far weaker man as he drew closer towards his final passing. And then, he mused more solemnly this time, to follow this up by hopefully aiding his estranged niece in finally committing Tom’s body to the good Welsh earth in the very fashion that her father had requested of her.