Last Train to Gloryhole (11 page)

‘Oh, I thought that particular picture was of the boy,’ Chris told the woman timidly. ‘Sorry, I should have labelled it ‘vagina.’ ’

‘Wrong again!’ the mad woman repeated, shaking her head this time, so much so that three- and-a half-feet of straight, black hair whipped across some of the girls’ faces, and yet none of them chose to move a muscle, or voice any objection. ‘Tell him what that is actually called, girls,’ the teacher commanded.

‘Vulva!’ came the chorus-ed reply. Not a single one of the girls said another word, yet their combined stares in his direction simply spoke volumes, and slayed him completely.

Chris was on his own from here on in, and he knew it. Now he was more determined than ever to spring himself from this bear-trap - this ursine, no feline, no bovine stall, that by now he felt tightly tethered inside. Chris found that he couldn’t look anyone in the face, and so instead he stared down at the two anatomical sketches for some jot of inspiration - some opening, perhaps, by which to squeeze through. But the opening - the particular aperture - at which he found himself staring happened to be the urethra on the end of a man’s cock, and he couldn’t, for the life of him, see a glimmer of hope for him down there.

Chris glanced at the tall, slender sketch of
Everywoman
standing asexually alongside it and thought instantly of Rhiannon. Except for the rather hirsute lower exterior, it certainly did remind him of the soft, pink folds of the girl he had in recent weeks grown to adore. What did it matter if she happened to be his relation? he told himself. Yes, what if she did turn out to be the step-sister he had heard Daddy Drew talking to his mother about while he played hide-and-seek with a young friend in the rambling flower-garden of Cyfarthfa Park just five or so years earlier? This, after all, was the real reason that he had found it impossible to stand up for her in front of his mother in town last Saturday, he mused, because she knew far more about it than he did, even if Rhiannon knew absolutely nothing.

Chris continued to study the paper. It was indeed a beautiful pudenda, he told himself, and one that he decided he was entitled to stand up for. His eyes looked up. The females at his table were all still staring at him, much as if the teacher had asked him another stupid question and they were awaiting an equally inane reply. Chris suddenly decided that he didn’t feel like disappointing them. No, not at all. In fact he decided that he would give them all precisely what they wanted, even the students idling on the adjoining table, and the other groups of boys and girls scattered in the far corners of the room, who had no idea whatsoever of his pain. Well, here goes, he told himself. Never before had he felt more entitled to scream out the
c
-word for the opening that it presented him. So he did. He just sat back on the stool and let it come.

‘Cunt!’
shouted Chris abruptly, and closed his eyes to fully experience the class’s reaction.

‘Who is!’ Denver Probert suddenly bellowed from the adjoining table.

‘Who is he calling a cunt, Denver?’ Denver’s equally thick-set brother Dallas enquired from way across the other side of the lab.

‘You two,’ a girl told them mischievously. ‘He said you
both
were.’

Oh, my God, it was Fat Ange! Chris told himself, giggling. What a stirrer that girl could be. And yet, as always, he still adored her, and instantly forgave her for it, because it was the sort of blatant lie that Chris knew that he would have claimed for himself, if he had been in her position, and given half the chance.

‘Fat Ange with the equally wide flange!’ Chris called out blindly but gleefully. He knew full well that Ange would be utterly shocked by this, but would most likely smile proudly at it, nevertheless - that’s just how she was - but at least Chris now knew for certain that it was going to truly kick off. He just hoped Brynmor wouldn’t decide to hit him in the face again. He had done so in a rugger match the term before, and Chris’s jaw had never felt quite the same since.

Now whereabouts was the nearest male teacher? Chris asked himself nervously. He knew that Mr. Dobie always went for refuge to the library on a Monday, and he was sure that the female student with the nose-piercing was the only other teacher on the floor. Then it was definitely on, he decided. Yes, Carina Hussain had more chance of one of her beloved, six-inch, pink, plastic bananas piercing one of her plain, unribbed condoms than of her managing to stop him in his tracks today, he thought.

Chris felt that about half of the boys present would probably stand by him, but that there would still be a total massacre in the laboratory all the same, and so he had best get plenty of glass-ware and a few of the acid bottles stacked up behind him just in case. So he jumped to his feet, then nimbly leapt up onto the bench, and reached up to the shelf high above it in order to secure for himself his ammunition.

As expected, the Proberts came at him like the prop-forward combination the boys always were in a maul of a Saturday morning, and, to the sound of shattering glass, Chris suddenly felt himself flying, feet first, from the shattered window, down through the cool, damp air, and into the long, wet grass that covered the ground below. Rolling through a full circle into the thick, sharp bushes, and ending up with his multi-grazed head under a privet hedge, Chris quickly scrambled to his feet and ran for the school-gate. Although largely unhurt, he felt he now had the excuse that he sought, and, he quickly decided that, if he ran hard over
The Bryniau
moorland at the cross-country pace he was accustomed to, then down past the castle, and over the viaduct, then he might just make it home before either one of his working parents did.

But as Chris’s legs began to tire, and, sadly, well before he had even reached
The Bryniau
, he instead took the undulating road that wound its way east towards Pant Cemetery, and, walking boldly with his torn jacket under his arm, past the rugby pitch where he had scored his first try for the school, (despite landing, as he had done, in a steamy green pile of sheep manure,) paid a surprise call on his truant and ailing lover, who, in night-dress and slippers, explained that she had only just risen from bed, yet nevertheless got dressed on his account, and decided that she would go out walking with him wherever it was he decided to take her.

Leaning, with the palms of his hands on a long, stout piece of wood, Tom at long last stood on the very summit of the hill where the Normans had built their once soaring, cream-colured, limestone castle, and which now lay all about him in abject ruin. Still breathing heavily from the long, hard climb up the stony path, which wound its way round to the top, he blinked continually as he looked all about him, and surveyed what features he could still recall from his last visit there, which he knew had to have been well over thirty years before, and not very long after the last train chugged its way across the viaduct that he could see below him, on its passage from Brecon in the north, through
Gloryhole,
and right around in a giant semi-circle and down into the Merthyr Valley, that now lay to his left, from which direction the sun was holding sway.

Nowadays it seemed only the castle’s ancient crypt remained to venture inside, and this Tom had earlier adjudged to be as much a vast, dripping cave as a holy room. Yes, he had felt deeply saddened to find it just a dank, stepped cellar, rather than the proud, twelve-walled chapel which the revered, continental Christians from Normandy had initially constructed, and then ordained for spiritual purposes, in this wild, western outpost of empire almost a thousand years before.

Yet it was not so much the distinctive architecture, nor the way in which the rocks had been dressed in cuboid forms and fused together, which fascinated Tom most of all, but the very rocks themselves, and the hilly outcrop out of which they had been plucked. He therefore ambled right round the steep, circuitous perimeter, and, occasionally stooping low, turned over much of the grey, tumbled rubble in his search for ancient, sea-living creatures of the shell-fish kind. Within minutes Tom was thrilled to have found brachiopods aplenty, but, try as he might, he was unable to find any of the crinoidal sea-lilies and sea-urchins that were always his prime goal when he worked limestone sedimentaries such as these, and, to him, this felt a crushing disappointment. Nevertheless, Tom filled his knapsack with a dozen or so large stones that were chock-full of shell-casts and other such delights, along with one enormous jaw-bone, which was clearly not any kind of fossil per se, but was all that remained of a hapless sheep that had tumbled to its death from an overhanging ledge on the vertical cliffs nearby. Imagining the sudden avalanche of loose rock that might have accompanied its fall, Tom’s thoughts suddenly turned to Aberfan.

An hour later, (by which time his tears had finally dried in the wind,) as Tom made his steep, precarious descent back towards viaduct and home, he paused for breath many times, and then stopped completely in order to investigate
The Key-hole Cave
, which he soon discovered was possessed of two entrances, and not just the one that the handbook he had consulted about the the area’s geology, had reported. On peering down from the cliff-top into what appeared to be a sort of blow-hole at the cave’s lofty rear, the old man soon concluded that the aperture was much more likely to have been made by man, rather than produced naturally, (as the handbook again had claimed,) and he was thrilled to discover, during his subsequent examination of the cave from the inside, that his assumption in this regard did, in fact, appear to be borne out.

With a great deal more pain than he had imagined possible, Tom bent his aching joints, and sat his, plainly ageing, body down astride a large, smooth rock, which he fortuitously found lying right beside the key-hole shaped cave-entrance, after which the queer rock-feature had taken its name. Sipping the final drops of cool water from his plastic bottle, he chuckled quietly to himself, recalling how, just minutes before, he had witnessed a solitary, shaggy sheep emerge head first from out of the lofty, upper exit, then skip on to graze at a yet higher altitude, and well within the castle’s domain. Biting his lip as he pondered this, Tom soon came to the conclusion that, with regard to the feature’s formation, perhaps nature might indeed have played a vital role after all, but in nothing like the manner that he, or indeed the handbook, had previously imagined!

Gazing north towards the distant Brecon Beacons, and then westwards, to where the afternoon sun peered out from amidst a woolly blanket of cumulus clouds, Tom felt that he could just make out the distinct and separate, but clearly related, shapes of two people who seemed to be making their way towards him across the, once great, railway-viaduct, at the far end of which his new cottage-home was located. Who the two individuals might be was a mystery to him, but, if they were indeed a couple, as he thought, then he figured that the male of the pair was most likely the one who had dashed on ahead of his companion, and now stood idly flinging stones over the top of its stone parapet and down into the fast-flowing river, which, though unseen from where Tom presently sat, he well knew lay around a hundred feet or so directly below it.

Tom rubbed his stubbly chin and smiled broadly at the sight: he envied the young male his youth, his vigour, his fearless, care-free spirit, and his healthy exuberance. He and his girl were probably newly returned from school, he mused, and most likely making hay in the Spring afternoon’s gradually fading sunlight, in much the same way, he tenderly recalled, that he and his childhood love, and future wife, Carys, had ofttimes done in the shadow-strewn hours after the home-bell had sounded at the tiny village-school they had both attended in his native, Breconshire home, not many miles away to the north. Tom wiped away the tear that came rolling down his cheek as he pondered what the said woman had meant to him during the twenty or more years that they had lived together as man-and-wife. And he wept again for their parting, and their divorce, and the immense distance that the dreadfully sad circumstances had put between them. And finally, he wept bitterly for Carys’s cruel, painful, and protracted death.

‘What film are you showing them, then?’ Anne asked Gareth, as she carefully guided the wheel-chair bearing the crazy-haired, elderly lady in the shawl into the already crowded common-room. ‘We hope it’s something fun today - something exciting, don’t we, Doris?’

‘Aye, something romantic, I hope,’ the old woman replied, wiping her wet chin with the bib that was still hanging from her neck. ‘But not too sexy, you know. It’s the middle of the afternoon, after all, and things don’t ever get hot around here until after all the men have been fed and rested and had their tablets.’

‘It’s ‘
Camelot
,’ ’ Gareth informed them, moving away from the plasma-screen with the slender remote in his hand.. ‘Vanessa Redgrave, Richard Harris, you know.’

‘Oh, I do like him,’ Doris told them, licking her dry lips with an even drier-looking tongue. ‘I just hope he wears his right size tights this time, that’s all. My dead husband - God rest his soul - never looked quite right in mine, I felt, whatever colour he wore. But he just wouldn’t take telling, you know.’

‘O.K.,’ said Gareth grinning at Anne with his eyes, but with his palm endeavouring to cover his mouth.

‘Patrick was six-feet-four and a scaffolder, you see. And you can just imagine how awfully windy it can get when you’re sitting on top of a tower-block or a pointy church-spire, can’t you?’

‘Painful, too, I’d imagine,’ Gareth replied in a quieter voice that this time only Anne could make out.

‘Oh, look! Here comes your daughter to see you, cariad,’ announced Anne, suddenly tensing up, and wondering how she might get away quickly from the infernal little woman who was approaching quickly on her little, booted legs. After all, she was married, unhappily, by some accounts, to Rhiannon’s dad Arthur Dylan - a man who had expressed his love for Anne on two separate occasions during her lifetime, and to whom she had returned the favour more than abundantly just the once, to the extent that, completely unbeknown to his wife Gwen, Arthur, (or Dyl as he was far better known,) was the real father of Anne’s only son Chris.