Last Train to Gloryhole (21 page)

And, despite it all, Tom knew that he truly loved his daughter just as he had loved her all her life, and as he had indeed loved the son he had also had - Will, her much older brother - and who had died when still a youth, because of
his
foolish actions, and not
hers
- no, not because of Carla at all, as she had always supposed - in that vast, deep, mysterious lake that sat, brooding, just a few short miles from the house where the two of them now sat conversing together.

Gifted like him, or not, Carla could usually tell when her father was contemplating her brother’s death. She leaned down and placed her slim body very close to his, and hugged him long and hard, until their concordant, plenteous tears, and his shuddering sobs which followed, were sung out and were finally at an end. Then her father was at last able to lean back and snooze again in the great, cushioned belly of the big yellow sofa, and Carla could take herself upstairs once more to replenish her daily needs, and climb into her soft, warm bed and sleep again, this time perchance to dream, of happier times to come for the pair of them.

And as Carla entered the bathroom, pulled the cord, and sat herself down once again on the side of the gleaming, off-white bath-tub, and stretched her hands over onto the flat, raised back of the gleaming, off-white wash-basin that stood alongside it, she contemplated sadly how this deadened cycle of shared, agonising pain certainly did not appear to have any end to it.

Chris had rung the number twice already. The first time his mother had walked into the bedroom to collect his soiled shirts, and complain once again about the coffee-beans he stored in bags beneath his bed but never seemed to use, and so he was reluctantly forced to abandon the task. The second time someone had answered, but chose not to speak. His last dealer - Dai Blaze - had done that same thing many times in the past when he had called him up to get ‘something for the weekend,’ Chris mused, and so he thought little of it, feeling sure that he would be bound to succeed in making contact with the guy, sooner rather than later. And in a way he was right.

Chris closed his bedroom-door and flopped himself down on an armchair near the window. He rang the number for the third time and waited, but when a girl answered he wasn’t at all sure what to do. He presumed she was a friend of Carla, but wasn’t clear how he could establish that. Then he had an idea.

‘Hello,’ he began. ‘I’ve got to drop something off for Carla. Tell me - can you accept it?’

‘Well, I should be able to,’ the female voice on the other end of the line replied.

‘Good,’ Chris told her. ‘Where
are
you exactly?’

‘You need to tell me what it is first,’ the girl commanded, ‘then I’ll see what I can do.’

‘It’s - well, it’s some shit, actually,’ Chris informed her, a tad abashed he was being so blunt.

‘You mean for the garden?’ the woman asked.

Chris was confused. ‘Look - I’m not bothered where she does it,’ he told her. ‘She can smoke it in
Asda’s
as far as I’m concerned. Say - we’re talking high quality skunk, here, lady. Fresh off the bone, do you get me?’

‘Fresh off the bone!’ the girl repeated with a slight giggle. ‘What is your name, by the way?’ she enquired.

‘Er - call me Chris,’ he advised her.

‘Oh. Is that your real name, then?’ she asked.

Chris realised how foolish he had been, and said, ‘Of course not. Do you think I’m stupid or something? Say, what is your name?’

‘What do you mean - ‘what is
my name
?’ ’ she asked him.

‘Well, is that a hard question, lady? I mean -’ He started laughing at her stupidity. ‘Listen - you need to tell me who I’m dealing with here. Otherwise we can’t do business, you get me?’

‘Oh, I see. O.K.,’ she responded politely. ‘Look - you can call me Carla, if you like.’

‘Can I, now?’ Chris asked, with a chuckle. ‘O.K. then, er - Carla. You’re in the Merthyr area, right?’

‘Yes, that’s right,’ she told him.

Chris heard a strange noise that sounded very like she had opened her purse with her free hand and dropped all the money she had inside it onto the surface of a table close to her.

‘Do you happen to know
Pontsticill Reservoir
, at all?’ Chris enquired.

‘Yes, I believe I do,’ she told him, now sounding as if she was counting out all her cash.

‘You do? Good,’ he told her. ‘Then I’ll meet you there with the stuff at seven tonight, yeah? Listen - I promise you won’t be disappointed - er, Carla.’

‘And you’re going to drive there, yes, Chris?’ she asked, making a quiet sound like she was giggling into her hand.

‘Of course,’ he replied, realising he had better not tell her he didn’t own a car, and hadn’t yet even managed to pass his driving-test. ‘But - but, as I’ll be already parked-up in the village, you won’t get to see me in the motor at all. No, I’ll be on foot when you first see me. On the dam, yeah? At the tower-end. By the way I’ll be wearing a white Swansea football shirt with - with -’

‘ - with
Chris
on the back, yes?’

This reply took Chris completely by surprise. ‘Do you know it does, as a matter of fact,’ he answered, as calmly as he could manage. ‘As well as a big number nine.’ He suddenly realised that the girl had tricked him into revealing his true identity, but he felt sure he knew just how to manage that too. ‘You see - I
am
called Chris, as it goes, so you - so you already know me, and so you already know you can trust me, yeah?’

‘That’s good, Chris.’ the girl replied. ‘Seven, then, yes?’

‘No - nine,’ he told her firmly. ‘A big black one.’

‘
The time
, Chris,’ she said, giggling again. ‘Say - can I ask you something? How come you knew that, er - that my friend Carla needed some dope, anyway?’

‘You being serious?’ Chris replied, laughing. ‘She
is
Carla Steel, right?’

A few seconds silence. ‘No, I mean that she needed some right now,’ she continued.

‘Listen, lady - you don’t actually need to know that,’ he told her. ‘It’s a secret, you see. As is my address and - and my supplier, and my car-registration and everything else.’ What was he saying? Chris asked himself. He could sense that, by now, his nerves were definitely beginning to get the better of him.

‘Oh, O.K., then, Chris,’ the girl replied. ‘Look, I know Carla will be delighted if your stuff turns out to be top-quality, as you claim it is, and I guess she will probably want me to give you a great stack of cash for it. So why don’t you bring a load of your gear along?’

‘A shit-load you mean?’ Chris giggled back. ‘O.K., then.’ he said, thinking fast. ‘Yeah, I might just do that. Look - she certainly won’t be disappointed, you can tell her that. Remember it’s -’

‘Fresh off the bone,’ she said, finishing the tele-sales advert for him, although he wasn’t actually intending to say that. ‘And I’m fresh off the phone right now, so I’ll be seeing you later on, Chris. Bye, then.’

‘Bye,’ said Chris, terminating the call, throwing his phone down onto the bed, and leaping up and down with excitement. Seconds later he was running off to the bathroom to get the ladder.

In the house next-door Carla tossed her phone down onto the bed and checked the clock. She saw that it was almost six o’clock already. Dressed only in her silk robe, she walked over to the window, opened it, and looked out across the back-garden at
The Seven Arches
, and at the lovely Taff Valley in the distance, and slowly moved her eyes a mile or so to the left to where she knew the vast reservoir was located, far behind the hill and the trees that presently obscured it. It was a place she rarely chose to visit on the odd occasion that she came back to Wales, but on this particular evening she felt the desperate need to get out of the house for an hour or so, and perhaps take a welcome break from the task of caring non-stop for her sick father.

So distant was the lake from her father’s home that Carla realised she would need to get a cab to make the rendez-vous. Minutes later, after getting properly dressed, and with the taxi on its way, Carla went over to the window to close it, and was more than a little surprised to see the wiry youth who lived next-door hurrying away at a trot across the viaduct, and off into the deepening gloom before her. She contemplated how she had only seen him once or twice before, and didn’t even know the boy’s name, but she smiled, admiring what she observed of his young, but manly, vigour, his resolve, and his fleetness of foot. Just then her train of thought was suddenly broken by the sound of a mature, female voice yelling out from the window in the neighbouring house that was opened up right next to her own.

‘Chris!’ the voice shrieked. ‘Chris - where on earth do you think you’re running off to at this time of night? It’s Sunday night, for heaven’s sake. You’ve got school in the morning, remember. And you told us you’ve still got homework to do.’

Carla laughed aloud, realising instantly what it was that had happened. She followed keenly the boy’s galloping, scarlet-jacketed form, but not once did she witness the said Chris turn round to reply to his mother, nor even so much as to glance back in her direction. No, she thought, the callow youth was off on his wild, solo mission to make some bread for himself, and she knew that he wasn’t going to let even a mother’s concerns for him hold him back. In that respect, thought Carla, he seemed to be very like how she herself had been at his age. She watched as his scuttling form left the bridge and disappeared round the bend in the direction of the woods, the long-abandoned tunnel, and the slowly rising valley that lay beyond it. Yes, she pondered, in a way the boy-next-door seemed to possess her much-admired strength of purpose, and most likely the type of impulsive, instinctive spirit that was at the heart of her own creative urges.

To Carla, who securely latched the windows shut, and drew the pastel curtains closed before them, the thought of buying a quantity of cannabis off a school sixth-former, who lived right next-door to her, was almost too hilarious for words. Ordinarily, she told herself, this would be the type of crazy exploit she would steer well clear of in the neighbourhood she lived in back in London. Still, she knew she was desperately in need of some puff, so, when the cab finally arrived, she paid the driver up front, with a handsome tip into the bargain, and climbed inside its sparse, but musty, interior, and raced off in the night to the secret rendez-vous at the head of the very same lake where her brother Will had tragically lost his life at her own hand years earlier.

That Sunday evening I remember I had left my daughter Rhiannon in the living room with her homework, and had taken the car to the lower gate of the cemetery so that I could leave some fresh flowers for my brother Sam, and pop over to visit long-deceased boxer Johnny Owen on the way back down the hill. I got back into the car and then drove north again, past the little narrow-gauge railway station, whose car-park sign bore a display announcing that it was soon going to be open to the public most days, now that the Spring Bank Holiday was well behind us.

I soon pulled up just after the narrow bend, and proudly sat myself down on the famous stone -
The Prince’s Seat -
from which prime view-point the sight of the valley of the Upper Taff is truly sublime, as the river curves its way west and away from you, carving out its impressive, ever deepening, elbow-of-capture as it does so, and flowing on again through Vaynor Woods, and up against the sandstone hill that supports
Gloryhole,
to run beneath the great viaduct there. Thereafter the river speeds down through its brief, thrilling course of waterfalls, cataracts and rock-pools, then, slowing once more at
The Blue Pool
, continues on for a couple of miles more towards Cefn, and then bends south through Merthyr, then towards faraway Cardiff and the sea.

Below me, and hidden away just off the main track of
The Taff Trail
- the former steam-railway line - lay the site of my elder brother’s tragic death. I let my eye drift left, towards the steep path down which, in 1974, I well remember I had run to find him, once the news of his death was abroad, and once the perpetrators had cowardly fled the murder scene, to cower, and hide, and shamefully lie and conspire, and so escape the blame that was theirs alone. I recalled again how three young ambulance-men and I had carried Sam’s broken body on a stretcher back up to this very spot, then, along the road by which I had just come, had transported it in a white van to
St.Tydfil’s Hospital,
where Sam was officially pronounced dead.

Sadly the actual cause of Sam’s death was unknown. His young torso bore no signs of his having been run down or assaulted, either on, or close to, the railway-line on which it was found, but the multitude of marks on his bruised, scarred hands, arms and legs bore witness to a violent struggle that had clearly ensued, a point which had been repeatedly denied by all who had accompanied him on the country walk that day, and the afternoon picnic, the purpose of which had been to celebrate his twenty-first birthday. But, instead of celebration, the booze-fuelled festivities had only heralded the tragic termination of Sam’s short life.

For my part. forgetting, let alone forgiving, had been well nigh impossible. The killers were, after all, his closest compatriots - college friends, no less - and I had met, and knew well, each of them. Indeed one - Anne - but a few months my junior, had once been my closest companion at school, where she had intermittently even answered to the sobriquet
‘Dyl’s girl.’
Anne was the only one of the four whom I ever chose to see again, and that many years later, when her daughter Bethan’s father deserted her, and I fancied I might be able to help her out, and ended up comforting her more intensely than I ever intended. But that brief, passionate relationship had terminated abruptly after she reunited with, and soon after, married a man whom she and my brother Sam had been friends with at university - an Englishman from Exeter, via Cardiff, called Drew Cillick, who was presently my daughter Rhiannon’s Art teacher at Pennant High School.