Last Train to Gloryhole (16 page)

Yes, in a way life was very like a forest, Rhiannon told herself, as she shook a loose strand of her fiery, red hair from out of her eyes, and, holding head and flute high, began to play with heightened sensitivity the exquisite, final section of the concerto. And as with some of the more timorous birds who nested and lived within a forest’s lush, organic system, her inclination in future days would be to flit timidly amongst only the canopy’s loftier, safer branches; patient and alone, yet still triumphantly alive.

And so Rhiannon mused on, her back now arched divinely, as the wondrous music that inspired her florid train of thought slowed to its serene finale. Lips tightly pursed, the flautist pledged herself to henceforth shun the thicker, greener bushes, and the seductive long grass of the lower realms, which hitherto she had explored only hand-in-hand, and mouth-to-mouth, with man; and in whose domain, after all, the devilish magpie and the carrion crow hold sway, and where as tender a heart as hers would, as like as not, become too easily tumbled to the ground, pecked, pierced through, and torn, and left to rot, in situ, like some long-discarded, satin glove.

A curled-up Carla slept soundly and silently in the small bedroom at the back of the house, while her father, asleep on his back at the front, was a veritable symphony of whistling, snoring, and raucous, seemingly choking, noises. Tom suddenly choked himself awake with a bizarre, but strangely familiar thought in his brain, and words on his lips, that said, ‘Old urologists never die, they only peter out.’ He opened his eyes and chuckled loudly at the strange, old, witticism which he had just unaccountably recalled, then, second later, when reality finally registered, the old man reached out a frantic hand, and patted and felt the cotton sheet upon which his spindly old body lay, so as to verify that he hadn’t, in fact, wet himself.

Dry, and now suitably reassured, Tom suddenly remembered that he presently had company in his little house by the bridge - the sweet company that his heart had long desired. He lay back and smiled serenely at his good fortune, then closed his eyes and tried to summarise what his daughter Carla’s life must have been like for her up to this point in time, and the part that her native Wales might have played in it.

Tom reminded himself that it was against the wishes of his wife Carys that he had elected to send Carla to school at Pennant. Having himself had to commute to Merthyr daily from his Breconshire villlage, and, while there, having been told of the school’s good academic reputation and its friendly environment, he quickly chose to act and enrolled her there, and had long since known that the decision he had made to move her had been the right one. Tom recalled how Carla had thoroughly enjoyed her brief time at the school, and, once she had passed all her GCSE’s, was one day sat down and told by her music teacher - an acclaimed choir-master called Omri.Jones - that he believed she possessed all the essential qualities to succeed in music as a full-time career, providing that she was prepared to put her mind to it.

Tom recalled how he had laughed aloud when Carla had recounted to him this observation, not because it seemed comical or unrealistic, but because it confirmed what he himself thought of Carla’s astonishing musical ability. He remembered having sat down with Mr. Jones at a parents’ evening later that year, and, while Carla was off speaking with some of her friends in the orchestra, he had held a deep conversation with the bearded, old man, and which, to his complete surprise, he found he could now recall almost word for word.

‘As far back as I can recall, Mr. Jones, my Carla was always musical,’ he had told the man. ‘You know I remember how she began to play Mozart at about the same age as Mozart had begun to play Mozart.’

‘Do you mean on the violin or on the piano?’ a stunned Mr. Jones had responded.

‘No, no - on the stereo-gram,’ Tom had replied with a smile. ‘Forgive me, Sir, but you see, I bought a job-lot of the composer’s finest symphonies and concertos on twelve-inch discs from a warehouse somewhere down in Cardiff, and I rememder how Carla used to like to listen to them when she was writing, or playing with the cat, or colouring in her picture-books. You know, I can even remember her, eyes closed, lying in the bath with the door open.’

The Head of Music looked up with something of a start. ‘Er - too much information there, I think, Mr. Davies,’ he retorted, using his handkerchief to wipe up the drops of tea he had spilt.

‘How do you mean?’ Tom had asked, a tad confused. ‘No, you see, Carla showed very early signs of appreciating, and, seemingy, even understanding, musical compositions, but, though Carys and I paid for her to get piano lessons with a lady in Brecon, it was a small guitar that took her eye, in the window of a shop across from the cathedral, as it goes, and so we went straight in there and got it for her, on hire-purchase, of course. And since then I believe that Carla has never really looked back. Music - well, it all seems to come so naturally to her, don’t you agree?’

Tom recalled how Mr. Jones had nodded, and then smiled in accord with his own summation. ‘I believe that, one day soon, Carla will make all of us in Merthyr very, very proud,’ the old chap had told him. ‘And I, for one, can’t wait to see it, should the Good Lord grant that I live that long.’

Tom could still remember how he had felt huge satisfaction with what he had heard that night, and no small amount of pride, but then recalled how the old teacher had gone and dropped dead suddenly the following term, and so was never actually able to see the predictions he had made about the young girl’s future come true.

And yet so it had proved, in spades. Carla Steel, as she was soon to become known to us, went on to release three universally acclaimed solo-albums in less than ten years - all of which went platinum - and made enough money from her astonishing success to purchase houses in London and Rhodes, a flat in New York, and now, at last - Tom chuckled heartily at this - even a humble, three-bedroom terraced property in a hamlet known affectionately to its local residents as
Gloryhole,
for the benefit of her dear old dad.

Tom eased his thin torso into a position where he was very nearly lying on his side and waited to see what the effect might be. So far so good, he told himself. All in all, he thought, he had good days, and he had bad days. Still, even the worst morning, was considerably better than the best night. The man’s nights were nowdays very often like long, drawn-out periods of severe torture; indeed if he were locked up in Guantanamo. Tom felt he couldn’t really have fared much worse. And, what is more, even his mental clarity seemed to depend on something as simple as whether he had lain on his back or his side for the duration of the night.

The multiple sclerosis which Tom now suffered from had developed quite quickly soon after he returned from a spell working abroad. Around that time Carys had moved away to the Home Counties, and, with Carla’s help of course, had bought herself a nice house in the country.

Tom recalled how a year earlier he decided that he needed to get away from the UK in order to deal with the emotional pain and the mental anguish he was feeling, and so first moved abroad to take up a job teaching English in Taiwan, and there worked in a small school in Taipei called, in translation, ‘
Happy Tongues
,’ where he would teach boys and girls during the daytime followed by their parents in the night. Despite the low wages, he had enjoyed the life there, and he felt it had probably served its purpose of, at least to some extent, rehabilitating him mentally.

Then the great earthquake hit! Tom had never given a thought to the possibility that this might happen, and the unexpected event shattered a lot more than the tall building in the northern suburb of
Shi-lin
that he shared with his fellow-teachers. This six-storey structure was severely split apart by the jolt, although, quite miraculously, everyone who was inside at the time managed to get out alive. But despite his deliverance, Tom, not unsurprisingly, felt he was not prepared to carry on working there, and so, just a day or so later, he took himself off to the airport and purchased a seat on the first plane he could board that would get him off the island.

Via a long, circuitous tour that took in Thailand, Australia, Peru, and then Mexico, Tom finally arrived at, and settled on, the Caribbean island of Tobago, where he discovered that he was able to purchase a wooden house near the sea relatively cheaply. And so that is what he did, and he ended up residing there for a just over a year, quite alone, and yet a popular and accepted member of the local community nevertheless, often pulling teeth and treating oral infections in exchange for gifts of fuel, food and drink, the use of a donkey, motor-cycle, and such like. All in all, everything seemed to be going well. That was until Tom went and fell in love.

Carol was a widow, or so she had told him, but her husband Benjamin was, in fact, still alive and well, and living with their sons on the nearby island of Trinidad. Then one day, when Tom was away in town buying provisions, Carol’s husband arrived back on the island, with the sole purpose of reclaiming his side of the marital bargain, or, failing that, of at least driving out her new lover. But the, now much wealthier, Carol, who had convinced herself that she now loved her older, but wiser and more talented, Welsh partner, wasn’t having it, and repeatedly repelled her husband’s still flourishing advances, including his train of strange, but generous, gifts that arrived in a single delivery by postal-van, including lipsticks, cheese, see-through underwear, and potted-plants. And so, perhaps unsurprisingly, Benjamin felt forced to resort to the only course of action he now believed was left open to him.

The spell that the old lady from the hill cast on Tom happened on two separate occasions, he recalled. The first occurred at the outer, perimeter fence of his property when Tom was home alone, and when two large dogs belonging to a very tall man he had never met before called Benjamin were found to have trespassed onto his property, and Tom had had to brandish a gun just to let everyone know that the land they were straying onto was his. The old lady in black certainly didn’t seem to appreciate this, and soon began waving her thin arms about, and declaring, in patois that he couldn’t interpret, whatever it was she needed to get off her chest.

Of course Tom had no idea that this strange speech might be of significance, but when the same old biddy carried out the same, strange performance close to the beach-market less than a week later, Tom decided that maybe his Caribbean sabbatical could be coming to an end. Then one morning, on hearing a car-door slam, Tom rose to find that his paramour Carol had disappeared from his house with her property in a clutch of bags, and, just days later, Tom elected to take a slow boat to Trinidad, and a flight to Miami, and thence flew back home again to Europe. No, Tom told himself, he had never been one for drawn-out periods of deliberation.

Tom found that the MS had set into his body not long after that, and, over the years, it degenerated to the point where, these days, he was grateful that he still retained the powers to read, write, and move about slowly. He understandably had to desist from driving cars - changing gears, and using the hand-brake, being functions that were well nigh impossible using just his right, his strongest, hand alone. Then, in the last year or so, having decided that it would be best all round for him to live, and, ultimately, to die alone, he made the difficult decision to ask his daughter for help for the first time ever. To his great surprise, Carla soon wrote back to inform him that she would provide him with whatever cash amount he felt he required, and so Tom was able to purchase for himself the humble, rural abode in which he now resided.

And when Tom paid a visit with an estate-agent to the all-too-familiar, little hamlet of
Glo-Ar-Ol
for the first time in decades, and he saw, from the frost-fringed, back-window, not only the resplendent stone-viaduct that he so vividly recalled from earlier, much happier times, but who the dark-haired, middle-aged woman happened to be who resided with her family right next-door, Tom decided that this simply had to be the place where he was meant to dwell.

Life at home with my wife Gwen had become extremely fraught, to say the least, but now that Spring had arrived, and with it the sort of temperatures that were more akin to the month of August than April, I decided that I was able to come away from
Caerleon
of an evening just to take a break from it all. Hill-walking was my chosen therapy.

From the most northerly point of the limestone castle’s crumbling walls on
Morlais Hill
, I looked down and surveyed the sight of the majestic viaduct which, running away from me towards the north-west, crossed its lovely valley, and then gazed beyond it towards the little hamlet of
Gloryhole,
and the fast-greening mountains of
The Beacons
that lay, piled high like a scattering of great, lime-coloured pillows, both above and beyond it.

Pulling my jacket-collar a little tighter round me in the face of the cool evening-breeze that blew in from the northern quarter, and whistled its way amongst the ruins of the once great fortress, I contemplated all the historical information that my wife Gwen had bombarded me with over the last few years, during the period which coincided with what I had come to regard as her time of protracted, mental deterioration.

It was on the orders of the Norman-English king Edward 1 that
Morlais Castle
had been built, I remember her telling me. And it had been that same king, known as ‘
Longshanks
’ by friend and foe alike, who had one time, somewhat bizarrely, commanded that the tombs at Glastonbury of my more notorious namesake, Arthur, and his wife Guinnevere, be opened up, and the contents removed and transplanted in a far more ornate receptacle, that has henceforth been left in its place at that same location.

Gwen told me that the reflected glory which King Edward believed that this action would bring him, by way of his performing such a monumental, albeit sacrilegious, disinterment of the one time great Celtic chieftain, (from whom Edward, highly spuriously, of course, claimed descent,) was most probably the key factor in his decision to proceed with it. But even more important than that, or so my wife had insisted, and repeated to me countless times, was the fact that he could now, as had his father - Henry-the-Second - attempted to do before him, remind the Welsh people, in the most stark fashion possible, that their beloved Arthur was indeed dead, and gone forever, and so was no longer able to be summoned by them to their aid, and, spiritually, at least, lead them in their rebellion against the despised Norman, now English, invaders.