Last Train to Gloryhole (15 page)

‘Yes, and whose husband, I recall, was a great deal younger than she was,’ he replied chuckling.

‘The very opposite of you and Mam,’ Carla told him, with a precocious grin, and a twitch of her nose that still seemed to speak her love for him.

Yes, his beloved daughter certainly possessed his nose, Tom pondered A bit of a shame for her, that, though, he thought. ‘What do you mean - the very opposite of me and your mother?’ he enquired softly. ‘We were - we were just seven years apart, is all we were - Carys and me.’ He bit sharply into his top lip, and fought hard to stop himself from welling up again. ‘You know, I have never loved anyone like I loved your mother, Carla. And I’m damn sure I never will again.’

Carla decided that she wasn’t going to tease him again, but still couldn’t resist taking it just one little step further. ‘Oh, I bet you’ve got yourself a lover tucked away somewhere round here, Dad. Yeah? It was always your way, as I recall. Or at least that’s what my Mam used to say.’

‘She said a lot of things - your mother,’ Tom replied. ‘
Some
of them true, of course.’

‘How diplomatic you’re sounding, these days,’ said his daughter, a little sarcastically. ‘Do you mean to tell me that those things she used to say about you were lies after all, then?’

‘No, dear,’ he replied. ‘Just - just exaggerations, that’s all. I was much younger then, remember. I had plenty of money, friends, status.’

‘Status!’ stammered Carla, suddenly looking into his eyes. ‘What’s that when it’s at home? Well, I’d say you don’t seem to have a great deal of status about you at the moment, do you, Dad?’ To her mind, her father’s sense of taste was for ever a dark spot in Carla’s vision. ‘Why, look at all this old furniture for a start. It’s practically Victorian.’

‘But isn’t that good?’ he joked.

‘No, it isn’t,’ she retorted. ‘I can see I shall need to get you some new stuff, for sure, and then we can shove all this old rubbish up in the loft where it truly belongs.’

Tom started laughing. ‘Well, you can try if you like, young lady, but you’ll never manage to get that hatch open,’ he told her. ‘The removals’ men tried for me, and they couldn’t budge it an inch, so
we
certainly shan’t be able to.’

‘Well, we shall see, anyway,’ Carla told him. ‘We’ve got plenty of time. Hey Dad! Look at that man running over the bridge down there! God - he’s fair bombing along, isn’t he?’

Tom started laughing. ‘That’s a man on a bicycle, sweetheart,’ he told her. ‘You can only see his top half above the parapet, do you see. The old railway-line is a long-distance cycle-track these days, you know. I gather you can cycle all the way to Cardiff along it if you’re that way inclined. I did - I did tell you that’s where I’ve been living these last few years, didn’t I, love?’

‘Cardiff? Oh, Dad,’ of course you did,’ she replied. ‘Derrh! I must have written to you there more than twice, didn’t I?’

‘O.K., O.K.,’ Tom retorted. ‘It’s just that these days I’m a bit more forgetful than I used to be, sweet. Now what was I saying?’

‘I don’t remember. You see, I’m a bit more forgetful than I used to be,’ Carla told him, grinning like the Cheshire-cat, as she once again cuddled his frail body to her.

‘You know, I can still remember the line as it was when I was young,’ Tom told her. ‘And all the steam-trains that crossed it in both directions, pulling their long, open trucks full of iron and steel, and coal, and limestone - the cream-coloured rock cut from the quarry in the hill over there - which supplied them with the flux they used in all the blast-furnaces in Merthyr and Dowlais, and Cardiff even, so enabling them to manufacture, first the iron, then, later on, the steel, that was always, along with coal, the staple of our region’s economy.’

After telling her his history lesson, Tom suddenly began feeling weary, and so he sat back down in the rocking-chair, and made Carla sit down again on the stool beside it. ‘And I can remember, too, how the passenger steam-trains that used to travel up from Dowlais and Pant and over the viaduct often used to stop at the little station-halt just over the road from the front of this house. You know, Carla, we could wander down there later if you like, and then, perhaps, cross over the viaduct, then go up along the river again until we reach that same rickety, wooden bridge. The views are truly wonderful from the viaduct at this time of the year, before the trees get too thick and green and start obscuring the view. And it’s not going to rain today, either.’

‘Did they say so on The News, then?’ she asked him.

‘No, I don’t often turn on The News
,
love,’ her father replied, rather sheepishly.

‘And yet you still know that, do you?’ his daughter enquired, suddenly sitting up, and staring deep into his ice-blue eyes, her mouth beginning to fall open. ‘Because, if I recall, it was drizzling earlier when I got in the taxi.’ Tom looked down. ‘Tell me, honestly, Dad. Do you - do you still do -
all that
?’ Carla asked. She wanted the truth from him now, and not some shallow reply. ‘Can you really, truly
forecast events?
Can you, Dad? Or is it just like Mam said, and what I’ve always thought, too - just a load of old - old bollocks?’ She watched Tom as he stroked the long, white hairs that ran up his thin forearm. ‘You know, you can tell me now, Dad,’ she went on. ‘Confession is good for the soul, remember,’ as my Mam never seemed to tire of telling me.’

Tom looked over his shoulder and gazed out at the high, grey castle-ruins in the distance, perched way above, and beyond, the point where the old train-line curved to the left below its precipitous, protective slopes, and where the rail-cutting carved its way round to the north and skirted Vaynor Woods, where, a few days earlier, he had watched on helplessly, as a young couple who ventured there in the evening twilight, conspired together, unknowingly, to pull their love-tree down; and where the tape-recorder, which the boy had left hidden away in the bushes, now lay totally crushed under the impact of the fallen tree.

‘Listen Carla - I just feel there are certain things it’s best not to - not to interfere in,’ he told her, attempting the sharpest of smiles, but not quite pulling it off. And, at that, he decided to refrain from revealing any more to her, since the little she already knew about the
gift
he knew full well he possessed she certainly didn’t want to believe, and, anything more that he told her, he realised she was unlikely to appreciate hearing about. His sweet daughter was so very like her mother Carys, after all, he pondered.

In Carla’s eyes, he would, most likely, forever remain a disappointment, Tom told himself. And anyway, why should he bother attempting to dispel, or even interfere with, the lifelong assessment of his character that a fast-maturing Carla had gradually built up for herself in the years when she lived not many miles from her mother’s home in the green-belt near London. And why should he try to change it with - with positive things? After all, hadn’t his daughter twice memorialised his failings, both as a husband and a father, in songs she had written, and hadn’t both creations proved to be two of the most popular tracks on her first two albums?

And, to top this off, Tom felt sure that, by now, he knew exactly what the bulk of Carla’s millions of fans already thought of him, and he could even hazard a guess at what they would most likely want to do to him, should they discover - Heaven forfend - that he was, in fact, still alive, and, worse, perhaps, where it was that he presently resided. But even though Tom realised that his daughter’s up-coming, fourth CD would soon turn out to be, by far, her most successful and lucrative, he also knew only too well that, whatever powers he possessed, he still would not be able to live long enough to enjoy and share its glittering success with her.

‘Liar! Liar! Pant’s on fire! Throw on trees and build it higher!’

The two screeching boys from Year-Nine turned on their heels and sprinted headlong behind the hedge so as not to be recognised by her, although a shocked Rhiannon had a fair idea of their identity, since they were in the same house that she was in, and had often sat together on the far side of the room when she and the other officers had addressed the children, and tried to encourage them to be even more bold and hard working, so as to defend the spurious honour of the red house known as
Crawshay
. Carrying her little leather-case in her hand, and trying to maintain her composure, Rhiannon walked on past the crowded library, and the Food Tech. Block, where the hot, savoury aroma of the after-school cooking club wafted out seductively, and then disappeared inside the brand-new Music Block, where she had a flute-rehearsal with a group of fellow students of differeing ages who were, to all intents and purposes, the core of the P.S.O., namely
The Pennant School Orchestra.

With a look of simple pride on her face, Rhiannon unpacked her shining instrument quickly, but with loving care, and then picked up and carried, one-handed, an already erected music-stand, with her paper-score precariously balanced upon it, into the very centre of the room, where a few like-minded male and female musicians, all younger than herself, were already rehearsing the
G Major Concerto
by Vivaldi. It wasn’t long before Rhiannon began to ponder the annoying incident that had just occurred in the playground, and how it might easily have ruined her day completely had she not got something as uplifting, and as challenging, as this - the school’s music-club, and its upcoming
Annual Concert-
preparations - to look forward to.

Since the day that Chris had dumped her, (a text-based action that Rhiannon regarded as having been executed with a minimum of compassion or regret,) she had made up her mind that no boy - nay, no mere male - was going to hold sway in her life ever again, with the sole exception, that is, of her own dear father. Although her mother had not been well recently, and the strain within the family-unit appeared at times to be at breaking point, her dad remained, as always, the central pillar of her life, and the constant fount of her, much needed, reassurance.

Despite having recently been made redundant from his job as a guard on the railway at the age of fifty-six, and now unemployed for the first time in his life, Rhiannon realised that he was still managing to maintain the household by carrying out a variety of jobs that needed doing for both neighbours and friends, and was just about able to restrain himself from taking the ignominious ride downtown, that many of his age simply couldn’t avoid, to the local Job-Cemtre, and claiming the benefits that he was otherwise fully entitled to. Unusual though this might seem, at a time of severe austerity, and recurrent Con-Dem self-congratulation at the sharpness of the misery they were inflicting, Rhiannon respected her father’s humbling, unconventional course of action, knowing in her heart that she would forever gladly defend him with her life.

Rhiannon blew her nose and paused for thought. She couldn’t really understand why the two young boys who had screamed out their taunts at her had then turned tail and acted as timidly as they had done, since she was just a girl, after all, and clearly weaker than the pair of them, and, of course, quite alone. How she perceived it was that, when boys were hanging around in pairs, or, far worse, in small groups, they were far more apt to seek to impress each other, either with their fake courage, or their stupidity, or often both at the same time, the result then being that she often felt absolutely terrified by the sight of them when grouped together.

In recent months Rhiannon had begun to abhor the fact that just about everyone in
Crawshay House
, then in the entire school, now seemed to know where she came from. And, no doubt, having seen her parents standing alongside her on ‘parents’ evenings’ and ‘open-days,’ and having witnessed how desperately unpredictable, some might even say eccentric, her mother had sadly become in recent years, (a fact her dad seemed to have put down to possible bi-polar issues of an age-degenerative kind, of which her mother was, quite naturally, unaware,) Rhiannon unsurprisingly began to feel more and more self-conscious in the face of their gaze.

The sprawling, undulating village of Pant, where her family lived, was seen by some of those at her school as a less urban, more rural, perhaps more yokel, community than the adjoining towns of Dowlais and Merthyr to the south, although certainly not as rustic and behind-the-times as
Gloryhole,
Vaynor and Pontsticill in the more hilly north were generally perceived, even though very few children, except Chris that is, chose to travel to Pennant from so far afield, and that only because his dad happened to teach Art there.

Despite its rather odd name, Pant was a place that Rhiannon was exceedingly proud of, and a community she knew she would be very loath to move away from in two years time, when she would hopefully be graduating from school and going off somewhere else to futher her career.

Eyes lightly closed, her body firmly poised, but ever so slightly twisted to one side, Rhiannon cradled her pierced, silver rod in a horizontal plane between her pursed, hollow-whistling lips and her two slender hands, whose nails were no longer tinted, nor even varnished, and whose fingers wore no ring, but that given her by her dad when she recently reached the age of seventeen. Playing sweetly, and, for the first time, by heart, the Vivaldi second-movement’s hypnotic, swaying legato melody, Rhiannon suddenly felt as free and weightless as the chattering, melodious blue tits she had seen darting from bough to bough among the trees of Vaynor Woods, the time she last snuck along there after school with Chris - that time of - of love.

As Rhiannon circularly breathed her way through the oscillating, many-trilled, cascades of the ancient, haunting piece, that for Jenny, the young organist, seemed to go on forever, but for Rhiannon never quite long enough, she pondered over how she now wanted her future life to be. The joyous music that, to the flautist seemed to emanate from her very being, certainly did seem to aid her into viewing her current life much more clearly, and even seemed to assist her in beginning to draw the conclusions that might yet define her future actions, if not her life.