Last Train to Gloryhole (50 page)

Not many weeks after Carla had returned again to Wales, Death - that overseas relation, that foul-breathed reclamation-bailiff - had powerfully, but stealthily, appeared on the scene, and had now dealt his drastic, penultimate blow, which had all but taken from her father’s, already withering, frame what pulsing life his lungs and limbs still possessed.

The old man now lay almost constantly horizontal and enfeebled, but, thankfully, still in possession of a brain that could apprehend the tragic, physical drama that was enfolding about him, accept it - both in its power, and in its finality - and, unlikely as it appeared to Carla at first, was still able, by intermittent, selected reading, to shape it to his own spiritual needs; hence the orange-covered, hard-back book he now gripped onto as tightly as the tendons in his frail, trembling digits allowed; hence the silent whisper of the magical words of Jesus, which she recalled her first pastor had ofttimes claimed saved a man afresh each time he read them. Carla watched lovingly as, after several futile attempts, the frail man finally found the diaphanous, curved corner, and turned over the page, knowing how this meant her father would now be able to finish reading the multi-versed passage he had begun, and which he had no doubt been recommended to read by his more knowledgeable younger brother.

Presently Tom closed the book and looked about him. His only daughter’s lovely blue eyes were once more what he first caught sight of, and he smiled serenely in their direction. Yes, Tom told himself, he felt that he had lived a life that was packed full of love, even one punctuated liberally with single moments of heightened joy, and yet he realised that many other folk had been much less fortunate. In recent years he had seen first-hand what could happen to a nation when the world economy took its gloves off. And so, out of empathy for a people, who, in recent days, had felt cruelly traduced by those in whom, at the ballot-box, they had placed their trust, Tom was at least glad that it was at this gloomy time that he was being summoned to depart this life, on board the last, and final, train, fluorescently emblazoned,
‘Bound For Gloryhole
.’

The sound of the door-bell chimed three times throughout the house. Carla bent her head and listened, as the front-door was opened by her uncle, and then a woman, whose voice was, by now, very familiar to her, could be heard requesting entrance, and, not very many seconds after that, could be heard climbing the stairs towards them. Her Uncle Gary soon sent the uninvited guest into the bedroom ahead of him, and, very like a female sleep-walker, standing spellbound before them all in a plain skirt, jumper, and heels, their next-door neighbour, Anne Cillick, looked all about her in the interior gloom, then slowly approached the old man’s bed.

The light emanating from the single bulb above their heads spread like a pale, watery paint across Anne’s plain face. Seeing, and then suddenly recognising, precisely who his visitor happened to be, Tom let the orange-covered tome topple heavily to the carpeted floor. In an apparent effort to recover it, he forced his feeble torso to turn and swivel, his free arm very soon hanging low over the bedside, dripping thin, twitching fingers beneath it. But Carla, sensing the man’s desperation, lifted his body back into place again, and quickly reached down and secured the precious book for him, placing it, now closed and safe again, alongside his crumpled knees.

Carla turned and stared up at Anne, plainly unsure as to why it was that the older woman had disturbed them with her presence. She waited for an explanation, any explanation, but, when it eventually came, she was aghast to hear her ailing father deliver it from behind her back.

‘You finally came, then, girl,’ said Tom. ‘I knew - I just knew you would. Eventually, I mean.’

‘Yes. I hope you don’t mind,’ Anne replied, quickly glancing at Carla, and then at the reverend, both of whom she sensed might already know why she had arrived to see their reclining host. ‘I had just come home, you see, and had switched off the music that someone had left playing, and the computer, and the lights when - when you - when the call came.’

‘I’m sorry. Do you mean somebody phoned you?’ asked Carla, clearly perplexed. ‘Please take a seat,’ she said, pointing to the wooden rocking-chair that stood at an angle to the bed.

‘Thank you, dear. Yes. No,’ Anne told them senselessly, retreating unsteadily, then sitting down. ‘No - it wasn’t the phone. I think I must have fallen asleep in the chair for a moment, if I’m honest. Then I - then I heard the words.’

‘Words!’ repeated Carla.

‘Yes,’ Anne told her. ‘At first I thought my boy Chris was calling out for me - from inside this house, you know? But I can see now that - that he’s obviously not here.’

‘Well, he
was
here much earlier,’ Carla told her. Just then she heard the sound of a floor- board creaking overhead, and suddenly thought that he might now be moving around up above them in the loft, and perhaps even listening in to their queer conversation. ‘But I haven’t a clue where Chris is now, I’m sure,’ Carla told her.

‘Why, the young lad’s just tending the farm, I guess,’ Tom suddenly remarked with a grin, turning onto his side the better to see them, and then, from Catla’s look, suddenly realising the folly of the comment he had just made in the presence of the boy’s own mother. ‘Oh, I’m sorry.’

‘Farm! But we don’t own any farm,’ Anne told the old man, smiling. ‘I’m Anne from next-door, dear, remember. Anne Cillick.’ Then turning to his daughter, she remarked. ‘Your father seems a lot more fatigued tonight, don’t you think, Carla?’

Tom focused his ice-blue eyes on the visitor’s face. ‘But I recall you lived - you lived quite close to one back then, didn’t you?’ the man continued. ‘A little sheep-farm, wasn’t it?’

‘Back then? Oh, I guess you must mean in
The Sixties,’
Anne told him
.
‘Yes, that’s right, I did,’ said Anne, intrigued now, and pulling her chair a little closer to the old man’s bed.

‘Where, if I recall, and please forgive me for my bluntness, dear, I recall that your parents - well, your father, at any rate - often maltreated you quite appallingly, yes?’

Anne bit sharply into her lip at the sudden, painful memory of it. ‘Why, yes,’ she retorted.

‘Because back then I seem to remember you had cigarette-burns all over you,’ Tom continued. ‘Not to mention how terribly under-nourished you seemed to be for a girl of eleven.’

‘Yes, I guess I was rather skinny, but I don’t remember any burns,’ Anne replied, wincing.

Tom stared directly at her. ‘And yet you had the most perfect teeth, isn’t that right?’ he asked. He began to smile serenely as he gazed into the woman’s face, and at the little red mouth, whose teeth he was sure he knew almost as well as his own. ‘Not a single filling required, let alone a
‘straction,
’ he said. Tom smiled, then closed his eyes, recollecting it even more vividly.

‘Yes, that’s true,’ said Anne, shaking her head from side to side. ‘So it
is
you, then,’ she said, trembling. ‘You know, I had this odd feeling it might be when you - when you first moved in here.’

‘My dad is
who
, exactly?’ enquired Carla, her mouth agape, her blue eyes bulging, and now darting rapidly from one to the other. ‘Would someone kindly tell me what this is all about?’

Tom leaned across and smiled at his daughter. ‘Sweetheart, I was the man who checked Anne’s teeth in that junior-school back then. You know, in
The Sixties,
back in Aberfan.’

‘Oh, is that all?’ said Carla. ‘But what a fuss you seem to be making about it, Dad, since I guess you must have checked thousands of children’s teeth over the years, including many who came from there. And now that I recall it, didn’t you say you even checked many of the children who tragically got killed on that awful day in nineteen-sixty-six. Yes, I’m quite sure I remember you telling me that.’ Her father nodded in acquiescence of the fact. ‘Say, how sad is that, eh?’

‘Yes, he did,’ remarked Anne, turning away from Carla, and gazing lovingly into the sick man’s eyes, that she could see were lined and cracked far more deeply than were her own. ‘Twice every year, wasn’t it, Mr. Davies? A small, sinister spoon in one hand, and a bottle of pink poison in the other.’ She smiled at the distant memory her mind had just then recalled for her, then turned to look into the eyes of the old man’s daughter. And, taking the pretty girl’s pale, trembling hands between her own, she said, ‘But Carla, dear - much more importantly, your father was the man who saved my life.’

Leone Lewis wasn’t the young, bleach-blonde girl’s name when she got christened by her Gran in St. Helen’s Catholic Church back in her native Caerphilly, although it might easily have been. After all, many girls got given strange names in the early nineties, she told herself, like Sinead, and Peaches, and, of course, Madonna. But, either way, ever since the very first day she left home, and moved into a flat on a vast, windswept housing-estate in Merthyr, Leone was the name that everyone came to know her by, on the net, on the phone, and on the street.

And, in Leone’s case, that was the order in which things usually happened for her - work-wise, that is. I mean that was the way that she usually discovered that she was in demand, then confirmed she would be turning up to party, and then, well, partied hard and fast, invariably armed with at least one spare thong, a pair of thick, suspender-tights for cold surfaces, the obligatory maxi-pack of condoms (one size fits all), and, as a back-stop, a tab or two of morning-after pills. Designer-drugs she almost always left to her evening’s date to supply, and in this respect she rarely found herself let down. To Leone, going out partying was very like going into battle, and, just like war itself, it often turned out to be a highly profitable business for all parties concerned.

Volver usually rang up Leone whenever he found himself in Merthyr, and, on the occasions when he didn’t, and word of his presence reached her, far from feeling angry with him for his forgetfulness, or his indifference, she knew precisely how she could get hold of the man herself, and always ensured that she did. Leone knew only too well that the tall, rugged looking, South African drug-dealer made very good money, and, irrespective of where it actually came from, or of its general legality, Leone was determined that she would be getting her cut, her slice of it.

Although a woman around fifteten years Volver’s junior, the positive side of being desired by someone older, Leone thought, was that she now felt less like the ungendered marionette she had always believed herself to have been while a school-girl, and also throughout the two, mind-numbing years that followed, when she was employed stitching knickers and bras for a pittance at
Blossom’s
on the local industrial-estate, and awaiting, with growing anticipation, her land-mark, eighteenth birthday.

‘It’s not a bald patch at all, love. It’s a solar panel for a sex-machine,’ she suddenly heard Volver tell the fat, young barmaid in the tight top. Yes, she could easily tell that Gwenda Reilly was as smitten with her man as she was. What a plank the thick-hipped girl was though, she told herself; as out of shape as she was plainly out of her depth.

Boys! mused Leone in bewilderment. Though they seemed to want everything, what the boys her own age wanted she had never quite been able to work out. To be frank, she didn’t even think they had much idea themselves of what it was they were really after. On receiving the customary, leering stare from some horny, downy-faced, eighteen-year old, Leone invariably felt almost as if someone was having a party in her own home without inviting her along to share the experience. And yes, too often it simply wasn’t a two-way thing at all. And two-ways was how it had to be for Leone to be happy. Providing she had that two-way thing going on with a man, she knew she would be minded to agree to just about any suggestion that he might put to her. And with an older guy like Volver it thankfully always did go two-ways. Although, if asked himself, the lanky South African would most likely claim that the only choice involved was his own. You see, as Volver saw it, and was ever keen to claim, it had always been his way or the highway.

‘If she hadn’t been a nurse, I’d have felt a lot worse,’ Leone heard Volver declare loudly, on his return from the bar, armed with more drinks all round.

‘What was that, babe?’ she asked him. But she quickly saw how he seemed far too excited with it all to be interested in even listening to anything she had to say today, let alone replying.

‘You’re a bloody poet and you didn’t know it, Volve,’ Steffan told the man, with smile, taking his frothy pint off the small, round tray he held, and handing another one over to Jake. ‘Nurse and worse, I mean.’

Hangers-on, thought Leone, dragging from her Silk-Cut. Don’t they just make you sick! Were these two youngsters planning on staying around all night, then? she mused. She sincerely hoped not. You see, Leone had serious plans for tonight, and they certainly didn’t involve more than the one man - although, she mused, that sort of arrangement could always be accommodated at the right price, and in the right conditions. But these clearly weren’t the right sort of men, she told herself, grinning. No sir-ee. Neither one seemed older than her younger brother, for a start.

Leone moved her busty body much closer to Volver, placed both her hands around his hips, and cushioned her head on his muscular chest. She nuzzled there for five seconds or more, but, from the man’s total lack of reaction, she felt compelled to desist, smile up sweetly at him, then step back again. She quickly clocked that the coke the man had taken in the car had, by this time, fully kicked in, and so he didn’t seem able to keep his gob shut even for a minute.

‘I once got home from work and found my wife wearing this slinky number,’ Volver was telling the two boys. ‘I wasn’t impressed, I can tell you.’

‘Really? Why’s that?’ Jake asked him.

‘Well, as I told her, I reckon it only really worked when she was going downstairs.’ Volver sipped his drink, then looked from one to the other of them, then back round again. ‘Don’t you get it, lads?’ he asked. Steffan nodded, smiling.