Last Train to Gloryhole (17 page)

‘But, isn’t he?’ I asked Gwen the very first time she had told me all this. ‘Dead and gone, I mean. Arthur.’

‘Of course he isn’t, silly,’ was her astonishing reply. ‘After all, the two skeletons in the tomb in Glastonbury that Edward opened up weren’t really theirs, were they?’

‘Weren’t they?’ I enquired, mouth agape, and as clueless as before.

‘Of course, they weren’t,’ she continued. ‘Do you really think that, if the skeletons housed there hadn’t already been known, and accepted by everyone at the time, to be complete fakes, the Welsh wouldn’t have disinterred them themselves, and carried Arthur off across the Bristol Channel once more, and back to his own homeland? It stands to reason, don’t you think?’

‘Well, yes, I can see your point,’ I told her, admiring the logic of the argument she was making. ‘So were Arthur’s remains buried somewhere else, then?’

‘What are you talking about?’ my wife replied, glaring at me in the oddest fashion. ‘There aren’t any remains that
could
be buried, are there?’

‘No remains!’ I asked, somewhat aghast. ‘But how come?’

‘How come? Because Arthur is still alive, my love. And he is with us here in Wales, even today,’ was my wife’s calm, and worryingly assured, response.

‘Is he?’ I asked, astounded by her declaration. ‘Is he, really? Well, where is he now, then?’

‘Why, what a silly question, darling,’ she replied, smiling serenely. ‘And from
you
of all people, Why, he’s living in Caerleon, of course, dear, where he’s meant to be.’

‘In
Caerleon!
Do you mean - do you mean he’s down in Newport then?’ I asked.

‘Not Newport, silly.’ Gwen retorted, her eyes closing, her thoughts now seemingly transported, and leaning her body forward and spreading her arms wide to enclose me. ‘He’s living here with me.’

‘With you!’ I ejaculated.

‘Yes, with his Gwenhwyfar - his beloved wife’s original, un-corrupted name. Although she’ll always answer to Gwen to you, naturally, my love.’

‘Gwenhwyfar? Gwenhwyfar! Oh, I see,’ I told her. ‘Not Guinnevere, then? Because I guess that’s the name you tell me the French or the English went and changed it to, and continued to call her when they rewrote the most famous of Arthur’s stories during the later, medieval times.’

‘It is, my love,’ she replied. ‘And the name Guinnevere is what is called ‘a corruption,’ and there have been far, far too many of those in this traditional Welsh tale for my liking.’ She spun round again, this time indicating with a sweeping arm the lounge we were standing in. ‘And, God willing, my love,’ she told me slowly, ‘Arthur will go on living here with me until the day that I die.’

I looked back at my wife askance. Surely Gwen was having me on, I thought. ‘Oh, will he now?’ I asked her, smiling at the thought that suddenly came to me of the rather more crowded table this would inevitably create for us at breakfast-time.

‘Of course, he will,’ Gwen declared firmly. She leaned in close to me and proceeded to kiss me on my cheek. ‘Why on earth wouldn’t you, dear? You’re very happy living here in
Caerleon
with your Gwen, aren’t you?’ And, to my utter astonishment, and almost as if bewitched, she suddenly reached out and grasped my right hand firmly in hers, and placed it deep inside her woollen jumper, then, studying my flushing face, said brazenly, ‘Yes, I thought you were, dear.’

When had it happened that her father had become the child who went to bed early? Carla asked herself; the one who was now calling down to her for help from his bed upstairs. When on earth had this magnetic-pole of life switched exactly? Gripping the bannister, she swung her body around it and shouted up, ‘What is it, Dad? Do you need help getting your sweater on again? Make sure you’re decent this time, won’t you, because I’m coming up.’

Carla began to make her way up the staircase to assist him, moving slippers, an empty polythene-bag, and a plastic box containing a dust-pan and brush into the corner near the foot so that she could pass by, and so that in future her dad might reach the front-door from time to time without tripping over. He had, in just a matter of a few weeks, Carla felt, managed to create a home-life for himself that seemed to scream out
‘sick old man barely able to cope any more.’

Once she had satisfied herself that Tom was properly dressed and more or less ready for a trip to the super-market, Carla peeked out of his bedroom-window to verify that the mini-cab she had summoned had already shown up. She decided that the sun-glasses she always chose to wear in all weathers when out and about in London might look equally chic for a sunny morning such as it was, and so Carla pinned them high on her forehead, helped her father button up his overcoat, and, within a short time, the rather unlikely pair locked the door and set off.

For well over an hour father and daughter walked arm-in-arm around the twenty or so aisles that comprised
Asda’s
vast shopping-floor, and gathered up in a large trolley all the provisions they imagined they might need for the week ahead, then slowly made their way towards the tills.

‘Have you swiped your card?’ the automated voice at the check-out asked him.

‘No, I bloody haven’t!’ Tom replied in anger. ‘The cheeky bugger! They sent it me through the post like everybody else.’

Carla shook her head and smiled at him. ‘They mean you need to push it - swipe it - through the groove, Dad,’ she told him, ‘otherwise your purchases won’t go through you see.’

‘What a palaver, eh?’ shot back Tom. ‘I don’t see why we couldn’t have gone through the normal check-out, Carla, love. I know there’s a queue, but it isn’t any longer than normal, is it?’

‘I know, Dad, but this is how I always do my food-shopping in London. It’s quicker, for a start.’

‘As your mother was apt to remind me, not everything that’s quicker is a brilliant idea, you know,’ he told her.

‘Tell me about it,’ Carla replied, giggling. ‘You know, I’ve always found that in a race to orgasm the man will invariably win.’

But her aged father wasn’t referring to anything of the sort. He had heard her cute reply, but as she was his daughter, he didn’t feel able to look her in the eyes, less acknowledge it. ‘You know, I don’t actually know what you’re talking about half the time, girl,’ he told her, studying the new receipt in his hand, which he couldn’t read without his other glasses, then looking away. ‘But, seeing as how you seem to have succeeded in your career so quickly, and - and so effortlessly, perhaps the least I should do is listen to what you have to say every now and again.’

In the taxi back to
Gloryhole,
Carla began to contemplate this last observation her father had made. She recalled how years before she had moved into a poky little flat in Fulham, with views over a school playground, in order to concentrate on writing new material, and put down higher quality, more professional demos. And yet, from that moment, she recalled, it had still taken her almost three years to actually achieve her first big break. That had been the most trying time of her life, she reminded herself, and it was fortunate that her dad knew next to nothing about it. She had initially left Oxford for London in order to find herself, but after after just six months she was virtually suicidal. She had found herself all right, she thought - found herself utterly alone.

Her first album, entitled
‘Introducing Carla Steel,’
had been by far the hardest task she had ever had to undertake, despite the fact that more than half of its songs were composed when she was still at school in Pennant. Although she regarded her short spell studying Music and Literature at Oxford as having been misguided and pointless, and the three years in Fulham that followed taxing, laborious, and so stressful that resorting to using substances to mask the pain she felt was more or less inevitable, the warm reception she received upon the record’s release, by music fans and critics alike, took her genuinely by surprise, and had made her instantly realise that the tough decisions she had taken, and the sacrifices she had made to get where she was, had finally all been worthwhile.

Fame followed fast behind. Initial visits to a diaspora of music-festivals in The States helped get Carla’s music heard far more widely, and her album-sales swiftly quintupled as a result. Soon it seemed that people the world over simply could not get enough of Carla Steel. As one noted critic wrote at the time,
‘The Welsh girl’s sudden and unexpected rise to fame has been nothing less than meteoric. It was very much as if there were some colour previously missing from our musical spectrum, and Carla alone possessed it and supplied us with it. In fact it seemed that Carla Steel was indeed that colour.’

Yes, the young girl from Talybont, via Merthyr, had done it. And, quite unexpectedly, and somewhat bizarrely, she promptly forgot all about the folk who had helped her get started, those who had made it possible for her, and whom she really ought to have thanked, but instead she neglecred even to contact again. In hindsight, however, this was now her deepest regret, she told herself, that she had acted so selfishly and so arrogantly while under the spotlight, too often believing the hype which the music papers piled on, all the nonsense she had read about the natural flair and sensitivity she appeared to possess being some sort of bi-product of her Welsh heritage and its cultural landscape: a certain something they had claimed must be
‘in the water.’

There was probably just as much chance of it being
‘in the rain,’
of course, Carla told herself, gazing at the ponds that sat alongside the main road, known locally as ‘The Heads-of-the-Valleys Road, along which they now drove. Carla looked up at the bright, blue sky overhead. Well, there was certainly no rain around today anyway, she thought. And there was no rain or even cloud in prospect for the remainder of the week, the weather-forecast suggesting that 2011 was going to turn out to be a far warmer, drier year than any of the previous ones had been. Well, this would be a welcome change for Wales, anyway, she mused, and even for herself perhaps, since her own personal plans were simply to lie low, and remain in
Gloryhole
with her father for an indeterminate period, while Charlie Furlong - her agent back in London - dealt with the issues and complications that had arisen from her recent cancelled concert-tour, and at least until she had a clearer idea about what her father’s precise medical prognosis turned out to be, and what his immediate prospects were. Well, these were Carla’s immediate plans, anyway.

It wasn’t that Rhiannon had really done anything to upset him, or to cause him to suddenly hate her, Chris told himself. For a start, he felt she had never so much as looked at another boy in that way, and he knew she would most likely keep to the promise he had persuaded her to make him, and that she simply never would. No, it was just that he suddenly felt an animosity of some kind towards the girl that he found he genuinely couldn’t explain, and, such was its ferocity, and, perhaps, its inevitability, that he decided that he wasn’t even going to bother to attempt to rationalise it, or try to explain it, or even dwell on it too often, if he could actually manage that.

With the fingers of his right hand, Chris pulled the thin, brown thread of tape from the plastic cassette-case that he held in his left, and let it drift of its own accord down onto the duvet, at the same time, and certainly without wishing to, recalling almost everything he knew about Rhiannon. On the evening in the woods when he was intimate with her for just the third time, he recalled how, in the very motions of their coupling amongst the rushes and the lush grass of the moist river-island hidden deep within the woods, his urgently dipping head had become filled with strange, malevolent thoughts that he had never before experienced, and his flared nostrils with odours which, henceforth, he forever would relate, not to love-making, or even to the sweet girl who had been the object of his love, but to failure, to lies, to self-deception and self-loathing.

Chris recalled clearly how, lying prone on his damp, muddy palms, just inches above his lover’s splayed torso, he had begun experiencing that same strange, nauseous feeling he could recall having experienced whenever, at his mother’s request, he had agreed to shell peas for her, and had decided to taste first one, then another, and frequently ended up consuming a goodly portion of the collander, leaving little more than a handful for the saucepan and the evening’s dinner. To his keen senses that feeling was unquestionably a horrible, sickly one, and right now it was one that he could not help but associate in his mind with Rhiannon.

In addition, Chris winced horribly each time he recalled the sharp reprimand that his mother had given him after she discovered, possibly from his step-father, where it was that he had been spending virtually all of his after-school time in recent weeks, and with whom. For years there was little doubt that Rhiannon Cook had been a sort of
persona non grata
in the Cillick household, and for reasons that Chris initially had very little idea about, except that it appeared to relate in some way to who the girl’s parents were, or perhaps to the way that her family lived their lives down in Pant, but other than that it was all a complete mystery to him. Then, quite out of the blue, he got to overhear the truth.

Having quickly lost interest in the laborious task he had just set himself, Chris pushed the unspooled trail of audio-tape completely off the bed, and was now sitting quite alone on his duvet, legs-crossed, watching the flaming, satsuma sun go down over the fields beyond the old station-halt, and smoking a home-made joint of a particularly fine girth, while carefully blowing the smoke from it clear out of the bedroom-window that was pinned wide open before him.

Just then Chris saw a dark-haired woman in sun-glasses, who, in some respects, resembled Carla Steel, the singer, ambling very slowly towards him down the road from Vaynor, and appearing to be escorting by the arm an ancient-looking man, who looked remarkably like his new neighbour. Almost instinctively, Chris’s nimble fingers adjusted the button on his i-pod, and, within seconds, he found that he could hear the powerful strains of Carla’s own languid, soulful voice, singing a song called
‘Don’t walk on by me,’
that had recently taken the music-charts by storm. ‘Either that is Carla Steel, or this is some powerful shit!’ Chris told himself, chuckling loudly, and squinting a few times, so as to clear his bleary eyes and verify the facts.