Last Train to Gloryhole (69 page)

‘That Sam would find it just as funny as they did,’ I told him.

Tom nodded, and continued, ‘The three of them walked up to the tunnel-entrance, only to discover that their dearest friend seemed to have burst his little heart asunder in his strenuous efforts to avoid being crushed alive.’

Gripping my top lip tightly between my teeth, I ducked my head and wept. ‘Can you - can you see it all, then, Tom?’ I asked the frail old man.

‘I can, Dyl,’ he replied, reaching up and stroking my temple with his bony hand. ‘But, you know, your brother wants you to know he made it there after all, Dyl. I guess he means
heaven
, right?’ I nodded, recalling the unique pledge my brother had made to me all those years before. ‘Yes, Sam wants you to know that he made it, and that he’s in heaven right now,’ the old man told me. ‘And he’s saying - he’s telling you right now, Dyl - ‘I’m in the wonderful arms of Jesus.’ ’

A loud crack suddenly sounded, and Carla’s deep reverie was rudely ended. She pulled the duvet from off her head and, sitting up on the bed, stared wildly about her. For two or three seconds she had absolutely no idea where the large, dark room was that she found herself in, or what the cause of the scary noise might have been that had awoken her. Then, on jumping down onto the bare floor and staring out of the grimy window, the sight of Abram Volver on a grassy patch of ground about thirty or so yards away, showing Jake and Steffan how to load and shoot his revolver, told her all that she had no wish to know. The previous night’s crazy events suddenly flashed back into Carla’s mind - the gig, the abduction, the van with the great hole through its floor - and, paralysed with fear, she bent her knees, and crouched out of sight on the floor-boards beside a smashed-up guitar that still bore her monogram and smiley face.

‘And there was that night behind
The Riverside Studios
in Hammersmith,’ Volver was telling them, ‘I stabbed this druggie to death who kept giving me the v-sign and swearing at me all the time he was buying off me. Oh, I think I told you guys about it, didn’t I?’

‘Yeah, but like I told you then, the dumb guy was showing you no respect, right?’ snarled Steffan, whipping out a knife from his back-pocket, and switching it deftly from hand to hand.

Volver took hold of Steffan’s knife and straightaway threw it, powerfully and accurately, and spinning wildly over and over itself, into the trunk of a tree ten yards or so away from them. He then calmly walked over to the tree and, with his left hand pressed against its bark as a fulcrum, pulled the knife out again. ‘And it wouldn’t surprise me if he’s still a fully-functioning part of the estuarine food-chain, boys,’ he told them. ‘Primary consumer level, naturally.’

‘Hey - I never knew you were a fuckin’ environmentalist,’ said Steffan, chuckling maliciously

‘Producer layer,’ said Jake.

‘What’s that?’ asked Volver, gazing across at the skinny Welsh boy who was still standing on the yard in front of the house.

‘He’d be the producer layer,’ said Jake.

‘Naturally. He’s hardly consuming a lot, right?’ said Volver, laughing. ‘Producing, yeah. Cronin.’

‘Cronin?’ asked Steffan, puzzled.

‘Yeah - Cronin, I was told the dead guy’s name was. The name suddenly came back to me.’ He handed the knife back to Steffan. ‘Yeah - Dave Cronin. That’s it.’

At this, the seated Carla winced painfully, as if she too had been stabbed right through the gut. She rolled over onto her side, and began to cry her eyes out on the thread-bare carpet, whose loosened threads cut into her face like glass-paper, causing a pain she could not feel.

‘Don’t go letting on to you-know-who, though, right?’ added Volver, more quietly now, and pointing at the first-floor window overhead, behind which Carla lay, and which he imagined was shut tight. ‘Because those two had a sort of thing going for a couple of years, as I recall. Hit her really badly, it did, if truth be told.’ Volver looked up at the sky and smiled at the memory. ‘Then, within just a month or two she was living with me. Christ! Women, eh?’

My flapping, human burden held out before me, (a weight, incidentally, considerably less than that of my daughter Rhiannon,) I climbed the creaking stairs, and carried the old man through towards the bedroom that sat at the front of the house, its white door already wide open, as if welcoming us.

‘Dyl, let me look for one last time, would you?’ Tom whispered, his blood-red eyes staring up at me, and so I spun my feet round, and instead walked him across the hall and into the back-bedroom, clearly his daughter Carla’s room, and where items of her clothing hung from hangers and hooks in all corners. From the window there we were both now able to look out and view the great, grey viaduct that straddled the wooded valley below us in all its morning glory. Never did it quite look as majestic as it did that day, I thought, or indeed the cream-coloured castle that sat perched on
Morlais Hill,
some way above and behind it.

‘O.K., Dyl. Best now take me back to my own room at the front,’ said Tom, and so I turned and carried him into the larger bedroom across the hallway. Placing the old man’s slight, robed torso gently upon the bed before me, and easing his small, grey head back onto the double- pillow, I lifted a glass from the bedside table to offer him some water. He declined it and looked away.

‘Take the Spaniard off the wall for me, would you Dyl?’ he asked, pointing up at a large, colourful picture behind me. ‘Old Francisco is me, you see, when all is said and done,’ he added.

‘I turned about and approached the large print that hung on the wall, and, lifting it high, brought it over to him.

‘Place it here on the floor against the wall so that I can see it properly, there’s a good man,’ Tom told me. ‘That’s right, Dyl,’ he said, approving my effort. ‘Bless you, my friend. You see, now I can touch it.’

The old man lifted a trembling arm, and, turning his body round, used his thin, brown-speckled fingers to stroke the hirsute giant’s broad, rippling shoulders, then opened his hand as wide as he could so as to span the crowd of men and women who appeared to be fleeing the rustic scene of fearful death. ‘And the sheer power of it infuses me,’ he whispered, ‘and its message inspires me.’ Soon after he looked up at me. ‘And it is good,’ he said, smiling.

Reading the title, I asked, ‘And what message does the Goya Colossus give you, then, Tom?’

‘Its message? Well, like me, Dyl, he has gripped his fear of death within his fist, and sqeezed hard, and wrung from it every drop of its terrifying power. And so, you see, mortal man is triumphant, and can leave this world unafraid, the moment that his God summons him.’

Inebriated, and perspiring profusely, Volver put his bottle down on the trestle-table next to the others, and handed a roll of bank-notes to Steffan, then smiled at Jake, who quickly realised that he would have to wait until a later date to get his cut from his governor and colleague in crime.

‘You know, quite soon, now, boys, I plan to be going straght.’ announced Volver.

‘You - straight! As if,’ said Jake, for whom the alcohol he had consumed seemed unquestionably to have gone to his head.

‘No, you don’t understand, buddy,’ said Volver. ‘I intend getting into
‘legal highs’
big time, and I have plans to set up a network of shops across South Wales and the west of England in which to legitimately sell them all.’

‘Yeah,
‘legal highs’
is where the money’s going to be made in the future,’ said Steffan. ‘That’s what I heard anyway. Although I must admit we seem to be doing pretty well right now with the other kind.’ He waved his roll of notes in the air and grinned broadly at the pair of them.

‘Yeah, you guys seem to have done very well through your association with me,’ said Volver.

‘That’s not even it, Boo,’ Jake told the Afrikaner.

Volver stabbed him with a look. ‘Boo! Why boo! Are you trying to scare me or something, bell-end?’

‘Yeah man!’ the boy retorted, smiling broadly, believing, mistakenly, that his harmless comment had been one that the Afrikaner was, in reality, amused by.

‘Only scary thing about you is your pimply-ass face,’ said Volver. The other two males laughed loudly at this, and Jake swiftly responded by flushing a rose colour, and turning round and walking back inside the farmhouse. As he retreated up the hall, sniffing repeatedly, he pondered how he had felt this way several times before, and almost always when his head was befuddled with drink, but, for some reason he couldn’t fathom, this occasion seemed a lot worse. He felt he urgently needed to talk with someone about it, but since Steffan seemed to be treating him in much the same way that Volver was, he felt he was left with little choice.

Jake climbed the stairs and tried the wooden door at the end of the shadowy hall, but found it locked. He remembered why, then, pausing to consider the situation, he went to the hall-cupboard and collected the key that he knew was presently stored on a hook there. Then he went back and opened up the door, quickly locking it behind him, before approaching the grubby spot on the floor of the room where he saw Carla was lying. He prodded the toe of his trainer into her side. ‘Hey, get up!’ Jake exclaimed, moving round her prostrate torso so as to look into the girl’s face with the window’s light behind him. He quickly saw that she was sobbing, and he felt uneasy with the sight. ‘I wanted to speak to you, Carla!’ Jake began. You don’t mind do you?’

‘Carla rolled onto her back, and then, straining her stomach-muscles to the limit, sat up. Remaining reclined wasn’t an option, she thought. She wasn’t sure how much of a threat this skinny lad was to her on his own, but she wanted to be prepared for the worst, just in case.

‘ ‘Don’t walk on by me,’
said Jake, seating himself on the small table. ‘That’s not really what you called your latest single, is it?’

‘Well, yes,’ replied Carla, drying her eyes with the corners of her fists. ‘What about it?’

‘Hardly what you might call an edifying title is it?’

Carla gazed up at him. ‘How do you mean?’ she asked, puzzled.

‘Well, isn’t it just an unashamed appeal to folk passing by to fork out their hard-earned money on the single and buy it?’

She blinked momentarily, then looked up into the boy’s eyes. ‘You mean
‘Don’t walk on by me?’ ’
she asked, ruminating. Then she suddenly announced in a comic voice. ‘Don’t walk on, mister! Buy me, please.’ Carla chuckled once. ‘Yes, I guess you’re right. Though it went and reached number-five in The States, so I figure its title was probably justified.’

‘And what number is it here?’ asked Jake. ‘In the U.K.?’

‘It hasn’t been released yet,’ she told him.

‘No?’

‘No. That all very much depends - well -’ Carla raised her knees up to her chin.

‘On you getting out of here, and back up the smoke. To where - to where the action is.’

‘Quite,’ she replied. ‘And do you happen to know when that might be?’

‘The note hasn’t even been delivered yet,’ he told her.

‘You mean - do you mean a ransom-note?’ Carla asked, her mouth falling open.

‘That’s right,’ he replied. ‘Just a short one, but very much to the point, you know.’

‘You mean
you
wrote it?’ she asked him.

Jake licked his lips. His mouth was getting very dry. How the hell was she to know that? he asked himself. Jake feared that he might be telling the woman too much, but he recalled how, the night before, Volver had been so familiar with the singer in Jack’s van that he, Jake, had quite naturally assumed that he could be too. But perhaps he was wrong on that score after all, Jake mused, biting into his lip. And worse, by what he’d just said, let slip, perhaps he had spoiled the Afrikaner’s plan, whatever that might turn out to be.

Snatching a glance at the door-key he held in his fist, Carla said, ‘You’re Jake, aren’t you?’

Jake nodded. Yes, he definitely felt he wanted to be known by her, he thought. Who wouldn’t want it? This was Carla Steel, after all, he told himself. This was the singer off the TV. The girl who had enthralled
The Railway-
crowd without even trying, in fact, by deliberately
not
trying to. She had gripped them all as firmly, and as completely, as she had gripped the neck of her guitar. And she was lovely too; very lovely. No, there was no point in denying that, Jake reflected.

‘My name’s Carla,’ the singer said. ‘In truth it’s Carla Davies, you know. That wouldn’t be your name, would it?’ She smiled at him. ‘Davies, I mean. No?’

Jake felt his face getting uncomfortably warm, his hands begin to shake of their own accord, a sudden movement perhaps in the leg of his jeans, which made him lift one of his feet up onto the table for shame’s sake. ‘No, my surname’s Haines,’ he told her, then thought - was that wise? But the woman wanted to know who I was, and so I told her. That’s no great shakes, surely. He licked his lips again. ‘You know, it’s easy to see why people like you,’ he told her.

‘Aw, what a lovely thing to say,’ said Carla, smiling once again.

‘Do you think so?’ he enquired, smiling back, though not quite as masterfully.

‘Yes, I do, Jake,’ she told him. ‘That, I believe, was a really
genuine compliment
.’

Jake paused to consider this. ‘From the heart,’ he said, grinning tenuously, scratching his cheek with the sharp prongs of the key.

‘Yes, from the heart,’ she told him, grinning too. ‘At least I took it as such. And so rare are they these days that you could be sending unicorns out to find them.’ A beaming smile this time.

Jake’s face changed to a blank. ‘Unicorns!’ he stammered. ‘I certainly don’t believe in those.’

‘Do you not?’ asked Carla, not at all expecting that particular response. She thought fast. ‘Then do you believe in - in monsters?’

‘Well, dinosaurs, yes,’ he responded. ‘And pterosaurs, too, of course. Although a great, big, massive asteroid put paid to the whole lot of them.’

‘O.K.,’ she said, not having been aware of that fact. ‘Then how about angels?’

Jake stared at the woman’s lovely pink cheeks, and then at her soft, wavy, black hair, desiring to stroke it, and said, ‘Human angels do you mean?’ Carla could tell instantly from his spaced-out look that he was possibly thinking of her. ‘I’ve seen a few human ones,’ he told her.