Last Train to Gloryhole (13 page)

‘You and I are going to do that! Are you mad?’ she asked. Rhiannon pointed over his shoulder. ‘But surely that one is practically down already, isn’t it?’

‘It is,’ he replied. ‘But it won’t finally crash to the ground until we begin to leave the woods.’

‘Won’t it?’ she enquired, now extremely curious to find out what her lover was actually aiming to achieve with all his hard slog and perspiration. With her forefinger she lovingly wiped a bead of sweat off Chris’s rib-cage

‘No. it won’t,’ he replied. ‘Look - Rhiannon. I’ll show you, shall I?’

Chris jumped up and approached the tottering tree, and spun a few rolls of strong twine around its trunk. He then picked up the radio-recorder, but, instead of carrying it away from the scene, he pressed down a few of its buttons, replaced it on the ground a few paces from the tree, and began to disguise its presence beneath a camouflage of small branches and a handful of grass fronds. Then, still holding tightly onto the ball of twine, Chris slowly retreated back towards Rhiannon, and reached out his hand for her to take it from him.

‘Hey! What do you think you’re doing?’ she asked, jumping to her feet.

‘Just hold it, Rhi!’ he commanded, before suddenly spinning round and racing off into the distance, his semi-naked torso quickly disappearing behind a clump of trees, where he paused for a moment, and called back to her. ‘Just don’t lose your grip now, that’s all,’ he reiterated, ‘otherwise we’ll just have to tie it all over again.’

Rhiannon was none the wiser, but, feeling that it was now high time that they did in fact make their way home, she decided to comply with his odd request. ‘You know, sometimes, Chris Cillick, you just make me want to scream,’ she told him, smiling.

‘Scream all you want, babe!’ replied Chris, turning, and then ambling away down the slope into the valley bottom, where, once found, the narrow path would thence lead him on homewards, towards
The Seven Arches
and his supper. ‘You’re in a thick forest, remember!’ he hollered back at her. ‘So who the heck is going to hear you? Don’t you get it?’ He felt she couldn’t have. ‘If you’re on your own, and there’s nobody there to hear the sound you make -’

‘Oh, I see. You know I think I get what you’re trying to do now,’ Rhiannon called back at him, smiling, and suddenly feeling quite admiring of his ingenuity, and now almost as fascinated as he clearly was to see how this strange, homemade Physics experiment of his own devising might actually turn out. ‘You’re not as thick as you look, Christopher Cillick,’ she remarked to no one, giggling away to herself at her use of a phrase that Chris had, more than once, used about her. ‘But, I will say this - you are definitely the fittest boy that
I’ve
ever known, and no mistake.’

A crow squawked agonisingly from a branch above Rhiannon’s head, and she halted and peered up at it, hoping that it wasn’t about to foul her. Yes, there’s little doubt about how fit you are, she mused. I’ll grant you that, Christopher Gareth Cillick, student, lover, future professor, husband. And do you know, young man, I believe you might even turn out to be one who could conceivably change the world with his hands behind his back, or with one hand behind your back, and the other one pressed snugly in mine, perhaps, she told herself, smiling. ‘Rhiannon Cillick,’ she whispered softly to the crow, then giggled once again as she deigned to repeat it in the face of superstition, adding, ‘And Christopher Cillick I do believe that you’ll be there for life.’

Gliding through the undergrowth deep in thought, Rhiannon suddenly let slip the ball of twine from her pale, delicate hands, and, in retrieving it, and lifting it again from out of the long grass, momentarily caught sight of the flashed-up image in her mind’s eye of her handsome, semi-naked lover catching, and supporting the trunk of a giant, slanting tree between his tanned, tight-muscled legs. Shocked, and more than a little ashamed of her stark, sensual reverie, Rhiannon began laughing loudly, and somewhat uncontrollably, to just herself and the odd crow, in the seemingly uncharted, deep, dark bowels of Vaynor Woods; the wonderful, mysterious woods that were to her - to Rhiannon Charlotte Cook, seventeen years young, and only daughter of Arthur Dylan Thomas Cook and Gwen Philomena Cook of Caerleon, Cemetery Road, Pant, Merthyr Tydfil - the hitherto, now, and foreverafter, sweet-scented, lush, green playground of both her own, and her brilliant, fearless, handsome first-lover’s youth.

Rhiannon followed her sweetheart’s trail down the shadowy, tree-covered hill towards the river, and when she finally caught sight of Chris, watching her slyly from among the trees, and with a ball of strong twine held firmly in his own grip, she sat herself down in the long grass, took up the slack on her own ball, and pulled as hard as she could with both hands. Then pausing for breath, and so as to assess the situation, she giggled quietly once more, realising that, although she could hear absolutely nothing in the woods that lay before her, that that didn’t necessarily mean that something fundamental hadn’t happened in there.

Chris soon skipped out of his makeshift lair and rejoined his girl, sitting close up behind her on the ground, knees wrapped tightly round her hips, and tenderly pecked her on the neck. Then together they gently intertwined their two separate spools to create one enormous, now much stronger, more powerful, line, and, heels set, and with considerable strain, and much puffing and panting, the youthful, laughing, care-free couple, unwittingly, began to pull their love apart.

Without question the most talented sixth-form student ever to attend Pennant Comprehensive School, Carla Steel hadn’t become a successful recording artist purely by chance. She understood only too well how music was in her very soul, and was convinced that she had acquired her talent from her mother, who had only recently passed away in her house in the Home Counties from the cancer which had long riddled her tired and aching body. And, in deference to her mother’s family, she had chosen to call herself by
their
family name, rather than by her birth-name - her father’s name, Davies - the surname of the man who had chosen to stay out of her life after her Mam elected to move from their family home in a small village in rural Breconshire to reside alone not many miles from where her daughter Carla was living in London, during that special time when she was preparing to record her first, her break-through, album.

It was already late afternoon, and Carla Steel was now returning home to Wales for the first time in years, hopefully to reunite, and perhaps even bond once again, with her father, just a few months after taking him completely by surprise, and sending him by post a six-figure cheque, large enough for him to buy himself the quiet, country home that he always craved, and which he could now happily live, then die, in. And now in his seventy-sixth year, and with failing health a genuine problem, Carla knew only too well that her father Tom might not have very long left to him on this Earth, but, since she knew she wasn’t the sort of person who could forever hold a grudge, she felt confident that, by going to see him, she might at last be able to forgive and forget, or at least move their fractured relationship on to a new, perhaps more tender, footing.

As she gazed out of the window of the train from London at the contented group of swans that seemed to circle endlessly round each other on the glistening waters of the River Thames near Reading, Carla reminded herself how the nature and the variety of her young life’s joys and tribulations had been what had yielded up for her the nutritious food upon which her musical abilities had voraciously fed, and that therefore, to Carla, her music was unquestionably her life.

On the two previous occasions that she had returned to her homeland Carla had elected to stay at a plush, five-star hotel on the outskirts of Cardiff, but this time she had decided to book herself into a relatively small motel in the heart of The Brecon Beacons, where she knew the air would do service to her lungs, and the lofty peaks would hopefully maintain her buoyant spirits, and perhaps even provide her with some sort of creative stimulus. The guitar-case she carried on her back on her stop-off for food in the centre of Merthyr was all the proof the town’s populace required to claim that the unmistakable, raven-haired, poet-minstrel had finally come home. To them it seemed to signify that her busy life on the road was done, most likely overtaken, superseded even, by her instinctive, feminine need to finally settle down, and perhaps pair up with a nice, dependable, local-born member of the opposite sex, and, like the majority of Welsh women around her age get herself married and bear fruit.

But babies and love happened to be the last things on the attractive young woman’s mind. Carla was in her home area purely for a reconciliation, and, as she deposited her leather-clad burden in the boot of the black Vauxhall Vectra outside Merthyr Station, and paid the driver his generous tip in advance, she was thinking only of waterfalls and Welsh-cakes, lofty peaks and rambling, and soft, Welsh water at last, and the thick, soapy lather that one could easily make with it at bath-time. But, gazing out at the figures on the bridge that were hurrying and scuttling across the River Taff for the comfort of hearth and home, most of all Carla was thinking about sleep - hours and hours of dreamy, peaceful, deep, forgiving sleep.

The crunching sound of the sandstone shingle, grinding itself ever smaller beneath the taxi’s wheels, as it pulled slowly into the motel car-park, gradually woke Carla from her brief, head-lolling nap, and warned her that her weary legs would soon be required to perform yet one more act - that of bearing her in the direction of
‘Reception.’
Inhaling deeply the cool, clean air that swept in from the west as she slipped from the car onto the bottom step of five that led up to the door, Carla momentarly felt enlivened, and thought that, if she could only concentrate long and hard enough, she might just be able to pour herself a hot, steamy bath and perhaps fall soundly asleep within it, head tilted to one side, and satisfactorily clear of its warm, comforting bubbles.

Leaning her body against the tall, chestnut desk, Carla paused, looking around her for a moment or two so as to take in the comparative solitude of her sparse, new surroundings, before finally writng the name ‘
Davies C.’
into the motel-register, as she had done now for the greater portion of her adult life. Once handed the room-keys, and being directed to her ground-floor apartment by an aged lady in a long cardigan and trainers, who drew her two items of luggage behind her on a trolley, the singer entered the suite through its polished door, guitar-case in hand, and flopped herself down beside all three on the pink eiderdown of the large, curtained bed, to drift, almost instantly, into the deep, forgiving slumber she so desperately craved.

It was well past one in the morning when Carla finally woke up again, and, after depositing her instrument and her unopened suitcases inside the closet, lay back down again - this time beneath the thick, warm blankets - and slept, and dreamed on, for at least seven hours more.

‘Oh, I see now. So home is where the art is,’ Drew announced, with a smile. The class were Year-Nines, - Mrs. Llewellyn’s form - so he guessed that none of them would get it. They didn’t disappoint him.

‘Yes, Sir,’ a boy at the nearest table replied. ‘I’m afraid I must have left it by my X-box in my bedroom. Sorry, Mr. Cillick.’

‘You do your Art homework in your bedroom, Ashley?’ retorted Drew. ‘Blimey! So where do you take your girlfriend, young man? To the garden-shed?’

‘I don’t have one, Sir,’ the fast reddening boy responded.

‘A girlfriend?’

‘No, a garden-shed, Sir,’ Ashley answered with a grin. ‘You know you’re hilariously funny sometimes, Mr. Cillick. Er - not! My girlfriend is in Year Ten, Sir. Marilyn Morgan?’

‘Marilyn Morgan,’ Drew repeated, rubbing his pointed chin. ‘Oh, I see. My, my, Ashley. Well done, by the way, boy.’ Many pupils laughed at this familiar aside. ‘You know, Ashley, I think you and I have something in common, after all. You see, it seems that older women have always hopelessly succumbed to my charms too, young man, although I can’t really explain why.’ More laughter ensued. ‘The homework is not of her, though, is it? It was supposed to be a still-life, young man, and I can assure you Marilyn Morgan has never sat still for five minutes in her entire life. Just watch. She’ll be in here looking for a pen for Maths again any moment now.’

‘Sir - guess who Nessa fancies,’ said a curly red-haired girl sitting opposite Ashley on the front-table.

‘I do not!’ the horrified, brunette girl sitting beside her ejaculated.

‘She hasn’t even said
who
, yet, Nessa. Give the girl a chance,’ said Drew. ‘O.K. We’re all ears, Catherine.’

There followed a short pause, during which Drew took the pile of homework sheets he had collected to his desk, and then returned to face the class. ‘Er - you
are
goimg to tell us, aren’t you, Catherine? You know, I can feel my ears expanding as we speak.’ Many children laughed at this. ‘Don’t be afraid, girl. Say, what’s the matter?’

‘I’m afraid - I’m afraid you might get angry with me, Mr. Cillick,’ Catherine told him.

‘You mean - you don’t mean she fancies
me
!’ he bellowed, and stared straight into the face of the red-faced girl sitting beside her. ‘God, Nessa - how sad is that, my dear!’

‘No, Sir, not you,’ Nessa replied, clearly wincing at her teacher’s typically risque suggestion..

‘Who, then?’ asked Drew.

‘Tell him, Ness,’ Catherine urged her friend. ‘It’s O.K. Mrs. Llewellyn already knows,
and
everyone else in here.’ Then looking at Drew, ‘She fancies Chris, Sir.’

‘Chris!’ exclaimed Drew, thinking fast. ‘You don’t mean the school-keeper!’

‘No, Sir. Chris, your son, Sir,’ announced Catherine. ‘Sir, tell her - tell her it’s hopeless, will you, Mr. Cillick? She’s gone completely mad with love for him since watching rugby-training last Tuesday evening. She said she thinks he’s ever so lush, Sir.’

At this comment Nessa suddenly let her head drop and began to sob.