Last Train to Gloryhole (71 page)

‘Give ‘em here,’ commanded Volver. ‘The boys will know someone who’ll buy ‘em. Failing that they can take them down that care-home they used to work at. The last load they took there caused a bigger stir than a Barry Manilow concert I heard. Now, Leone, piss off inside and get the girl upstairs undressed and showered, O.K.? Then get some fucking clothes on.’

The blond-haired girl did as she was asked, but with her head thrown back confidently, and a swift turn of the hips as she cast an impish glance behind her. Volver opened up the bag, examined the contents, and detached a single tablet from its sachet. He then snapped the tab into two separate halves between his fingers and swallowed one. ‘Your things are all in the dryer, right?’

‘My thongs?’ called back Leone from the door-step, giggling.

‘Your things, I said,’ he replied. ‘And be careful with Carla in the bathroom too. She’s taken so much dope today she could easily fall over and hurt herself. Again, I mean.’

Cigarette in hand, Steffan stepped out and joined his older compatriot on the door-step. ‘What time do you reckon we need to be up for tomorrow, boss?’ he asked him.

‘Let’s think. Tomorrow is Tuesday. We’re going to have to call up the old man early before he’ll have worked out what to do about his dirty stop-out of a daughter. Then we’ll wait here for the return call on the new mobile. I guess it’s then that the real fun will start. But no worries. It’s all going to work out fine, I promise you. Although I guess it’s possible that one of you two might have to help the old fella get the money out of the bank. What do you think?’

‘One of us!’ exclaimed Steffan. ‘How the hell do you figure that?’

‘Hey. Don’t go wetting yourself now,’ the Afrikaner replied, raising his head. ‘After all it might not come to that. But the geezer’s a hell of a lot older and frailer than our Jack is, right? How is he going to collect the dosh from a bank on his own?’

‘But we could use Jack again, couldn’t we?’ said Steffan. ‘The old man trusts him, doesn’t he?
And
he’s got the transport.’

‘Yeah, but I already paid Jack off,’ said Volver. ‘He’s been told now he’s finished with.’

‘Well tell him again,’ said Steffan. ‘Or if you don’t want to, I will. Look - you don’t want to have me and Jake hanging round
Gloryhole,
for Christ’s sake. Not now. His neighbour - Bed-pan Anne - knows the two of us from our time at
The Willows
. She works there, remember. No, it’s definitely best if Jack does it. Unless, of course, the old man gets out of bed and goes and gets the money on his own.’ Steffan chuckled and threw his cigarette-end onto the dusty surface of the yard, that stretched away to the trees before him.

Volver nodded, slapped Steffan on the shoulder, and went inside with him, shutting the front-door firmly behind him, and locking it.

Within seconds, and even before the light in the hall had been extinguished, a group of squirrels had run out from the cover of the trees, and began picking at the rubbish and remnants of food that had been thrown out front over the last few hours by the raucous band of newcomers. One of the squirrels had even retrieved the cigarette-butt that Steffan had thrown, but soon dashed it down once again on discovering that it was still alight.

Tom looked down from the top-corner of the only window in the room. He gazed below him and to his left at a large bee that was sitting perched on a short horizontal strip of the wooden window-frame. He knew that soon it was going to leap up insanely and attack the glass in its mad, insatiable quest to get outside. When it did so, albeit with a far greater volume of irascible frustration than he had imagined, Tom smiled inwardly at his newly-found power of prediction.

The bumble-bee sat and rested silently on the ledge just above the one that he had left. Tom could see that the black-and-tan creature was now located just a few short inches below the large opening gap from which it seemed incapable of sensing the in-rush of a breeze that he himself could see was clearly bending inwards the corner’s cobwebs, and fluttering the curled edges of the flock wall-paper where it was no longer stuck down. Tom vowed that he would make sure he attended to this defect the next time he got the opportunity.

Tom decided to give his friend the bumble-bee a bit of a hand by pushing the window-frame down a little, and ever so gently, so that the insect wouldn’t be unsettled, and could achieve its greatest desire and fly out. So he turned, and, facing the gap above the window, made the usual, necessary effort, but nothing happened. Tom tried again, but to no avail. Shocked beyond belief, he looked about him, and searched high and low, but however hard he tried, and wherever he looked, he quickly discovered that he possessed no arms with which to accomplish it; nor legs; nor a body of any kind, for that matter. As a last resort, Tom made an attempt to close his eyes, but, to his sheer delight, found that not a single lash now obscured his sight.

Suddenly sensing what had happened to him, Tom smiled, inwardly, and majestically, at his good fortune. His brain was whirring. A pertinent thought arrived. ‘Then - I saw as through a glass darkly,’ he told himself. ‘Only now -’

But before he could complete his final words, the orange-and-black bee leapt up from its ledge and flew straight out of the window. For a brief moment Tom watched it soar off over the road and the corner of the green field across from the house, then hover briefly above the site of the old station-halt, where Tom saw that no train could possibly stop, and then, as if spotting the huge orange sun setting in the distance, soared away again along the course of the old railway-line that ran away west towards it. Amazed, and earnestly desiring the same, Tom leapt up and, passing swiftly through the same gap in the window, soared away there too.

The telephone in the lounge of
Coral
had been ringing for some time. But the old man who lay upstairs wasn’t going to be getting out of his bed to answer it this evening, or going anywhere else for that matter, least of all to the bank. No, the lately-bathed shell that had been Tom Davies, and which, just a matter of hours earlier, had encased his very soul, now lay covered with a clean, white bed-sheet on his still, white-sheeted double-bed.

I had been up since five that Monday morning - a day that I rarely worked - and had, at last, manged to empty the loft completely of its rickety, rudimentary farm. The plants I had found there, and that I had painstakingly carried downstairs, were now all lying, confused and rootless, on their sides amongst the trees and the bushes on the steep, grassy slope that ran from the back of the house down to the river; and all the glass, and all the plastic and metallic trays and equipment that Chris had been using to cultivate his crop had been taken away for good and safely dumped at the council’s recycling plant in Dowlais. And so now, with this done, I felt that Chris was safe from any possible threat, or accusation even, that might otherwise be made against him, once Anne and I had called up the authorities, which we still hadn’t yet done, to report that a death had taken place in
Gloryhole.

As I walked up the path from my parked van I could easily hear the telephone ringing inside. To me it seemed that it could have been ringing for some time, because I noticed that Anne was there waiting at the lounge-window of her home next-door, the curtains drawn, looking anxiously in my direction. I waved towards her, beckoning her to come and join me, unlocked the door, and, with her alongside me, made my way inside Tom’s house once more.

Even before I got through the door, Anne dashed in to the lounge and sat on the sofa beside the phone. I glanced at her, and, without further delay, I picked up the receiver. We had each expected, and of course hoped, to hear Carla’s voice on the other end of the line, but instead we listened as a gruff-voiced man proceeded to speak and, quite frankly, terrify the pair of us.

‘Take down this number old man!’ the stranger bellowed, clearly thinking that it was Tom who had answered the phone. Anne passed me a pen and paper and I hastily scribbled down the eleven digits he recited. ‘If you don’t ring back within the hour, then we’ll know you don’t care about what is going to happen to your daughter. But that’s all right, geezer, because it so happens that we don’t either.’ That was all the man said before he ended the call, not even providing me with the chance to ask him any questions.

‘God, that was cold!’ said Anne.

‘Yeah, short and sweet, but to the point,’ I added. ‘They would seem to have all the angles covered, don’t you think? And it’s even possible they knew about Chris’s skunk-farm in the loft, and so knew how unlikely it was her dad would call in the police to conduct a search for Carla.’

‘Yes, I see what you mean,’ said Anne. Then grasping my hand, she added, ‘Listen - you’ve done really well, Dyl, you really have. I feel sure Tom would have been very proud of you for all your kind efforts. And you were there with him at the end too, weren’t you, and so at least he had someone present to unburden himself to, and to share his fears.’

‘Which reminds me, Anne,’ I said. ‘Before Tom died he told me something that was, to say the least, a shock for me. Though how on earth he knew about it, to even tell me, I’ve no idea.’

‘What was it?’ asked Anne, her mouth falling open.

‘Well, he told me that your boy Chris wasn’t my son after all. Say - how about that?’

‘Did he really say that?’ she asked, plainly astonished. ‘My God!’ She paused and stared down at her lap to consider this. ‘And did he - did he say who he thought I’d been - I’d been, you know, carrying on with? Because, apart from you, Dyl, I don’t believe there was ever anyone.’

‘Anne - are you sure about that?’ I asked her.

‘Yes, of course,’ she replied. ‘Well, apart from a bit of fun I once had at work around Christmas one year, or maybe it was New Year. It might have been.’

‘Oh. With Gareth, was it?’ I enquired.

‘How the hell would you know that, Dyl?’ she replied.

‘Well, I didn’t,’ I told her. ‘But I do now, girl.’ I grinned mischievously.

‘Oh, hell!’ exclaimed Anne, getting up and walking away from me, and then down the hall into the kitchen. ‘And I thought - I stupidly thought I’d never have to tell a soul about that.’

I got up and trailed after her. ‘The person you actually need to tell, love, is Gareth,’ I said.

Anne slowly poured herself a glass of water from the tap, sipped some of it, then spun round to face me. ‘
And
Chris,’ she said. ‘I need to tell him just as much. He thinks you’re his dad, you see. That’s what Drew and I have just told him, anyway.’

‘Well, now you’re going to have to tell him he isn’t my son,’ I said. ‘And do you know what? You can be sure he’ll be overjoyed when he discovers that, after all, Rhiannon
isn’t
his sister.’

‘Look - Dyl. I don’t mind telling the boy that,’ she went on, ‘but telling him that one of my colleagues at work is his real father - well, that is going to be a real block-buster for him to take, don’t you think?’

‘Nevertheless it has to be done,’ I told her. ‘And then, when you’ve done that, you will need to talk to Gareth.’

‘Oh, hell’s bells!’ she exclaimed. ‘And what if he doesn’t believe me?’

‘Look - don’t go fearing the worst,’ I told her. ‘It’ll be fine. But then there’s Drew, of course.’ I watched, as Anne dipped her head low and covered it with both hands. I smiled at her child-like timidity. ‘You know, love, I reckon this might have to be a job for D.N.A. in the end,’ I said.

‘And maybe for Jeremy Kyle, too,’ Anne added, spinning round in a full circle, and uttering, at the top of her voice, by far the most vulgar curse imaginable to womankind, plainly visualizing the future prospect of what she felt her immediate family would most likely make of it all.

The crazies that the Welsh singer-songwriter encountered in the pubs of west London eyed her at first like schoolboy butterfly-collectors might eye a
‘Painted Lady’
or a
‘Camberwell Beauty’
on the wing. And Carla wasn’t usually displeased that they had, and quite often was not averse to calling for a drink at the bar for such admirers, or even, on occasions, asking them to join her at her table, if they weren’t already inebriated, or looked the type to provoke her unduly with innocent-sounding conversation about music, or politics, or Wales, or women’s rights. Carla couldn’t count the number of times she had fallen foul of this sly tactic, and frequently felt regretful of her youthful naivety, and her predictable, helplessly ingrained, gregarious nature.

Rarely questioning her habitual use of alcohol as a daily shock-absorber, and recreational drugs as sleep-defying stimulants, too often for Carla the webs of the past night’s dreams and follies were recalled, and painfully disentangled, amidst a drawn-out, wakeful reverie that usually extended way past the point when the hands of her digital wall-clock had crossed the vertical plane. And, once the stinging rays of the afternoon sun had managed to slide past the ends of her thick bedroom-curtains, she invariably found herself forced to turn her body round in the bed, and occasionally even to rise and face courageously what little was left of the capital’s day.

Well, musicians, artists and writers are not exactly an abstemious lot, thought Carla, one reason obviously being the acute mental pressure that goes hand in hand with the act of creation. Since the singer-songwriter’s basic raw materials were, more often than not, her own personality, her own thoughts, emotions, and state of mind, she found that she could not be easily shut away from her work, as say a scientist could close behind her the laboratory door, or a lawyer might lock up her briefs for the night, perhaps in her knicker-drawer, or her boyfriend’s even. She giggled at the schoolgirl humour involved in this last thought.

And very soon Carla was to come to the conclusion that her situation was fast becoming much worse, indeed intolerable. Four individuals eking out their existence in a flat built for two was always going to be far from ideal, but now, as Leila grew older, and therefore bigger and more demanding, the more hampered Carla felt in a creative sense, and the more her thoughts seemed to turn to the notion of moving out, if only to give her two adult friends a lot more space. But the notion of Carla proceeding in this way was not lightly countenanced by the others, for self-centred reasons, she felt, rather than for financial, or indeed any other justifications.