Last Train to Gloryhole (23 page)

The moon was full, but dark night had drawn in, and the cold breeze began to blow in through my open window from The Beacons to the north. I drove my car up the steep incline and left Ponsticill behind me, then changed down and sped along the only fast stretch on my route, and then braked hard as I began to enter the un-lit gloom of the two tight bends that ran down towards Vaynor. It was then that it happened. Yes, it was at that moment that my life was about to suffer a severe jolt, and, in all truth, was never to be quite the same again.

After rounding the first curve at little more than twenty miles per hour, I suddenly saw two figures walking ahead of me in the middle of the road. There were no footpaths alongside the narrow carriageway, and I could just make out that the two individuals were smoking a long cigarette between them, and idling their way along almost unconsciously, very like two drunken companions rendered hard of hearing, and possibly stupefied, by the effects of their indulgence.

I tried to steer my car to the side, but, sadly, it was too late. The loud thud on the front-wing told me that I had struck the male of the pair, and knocked him to the side of the road, and head-first into a fence that protected the vast sheep-field that stretched away for some considerable distance behind it. How on earth could the pair not have seen me? I asked myself, angrily. In a tormented screech of brakes, I pulled up a few yards past them, leapt out, then instantly realised that I had been driving the last mile or so without any lights.

With a mixture of horror and self-blame, I grabbed a torch from the dash-board and sprinted over to where the fallen boy now lay upon his side. He was deposited, bleeding and bedraggled, upon a large, grassy bank, toppled over it somewhat uncomfortably, and with his two legs just above the level of his head. With his female companion’s earnest help I managed to gather the boy up onto his back, and soon flashed my torch onto his face. Thankfully he was still alive, and he soon began breathing deeply, and opening his flickering eyes to look about him. I recognised him instantly. His name was Chris, and he was a close school-friend of my daughter Rhiannon.

The girl I also recognised a few minutes later as Carla Steel, (or Carla Davies - as the Merthyr Valley community had long known her,) whom I had seen performing on stage alongside Rhiannon and the rest of the school-band only a week or so before. The pungent odour that swept around us on the road-side as she cursed aloud, and screamed unrepeatable profanities at my alleged stupidity, and my lack of driving skills, told me more or less instantly that they had been smoking a cannabis-joint together, and this same item I soon saw the singer fling away into the long grass beside the poor young man’s flattened torso. Whether or not the boy was stoned out of his mind that night, or whether his senses were just slightly impaired, as it appeared mine were, I could not say I cared overmuch. But I was nevertheless horrified at what I had done, especially as I could plainly see that it was my very own son that I had almost killed that night.

The room at
Prince Charles Hospital
was just off the ward in which many male patients seemed to be already asleep. Chris had a leg-wound and was concussed, and so presently asleep too, but thankfully, he was otherwise unscathed, and, when I heard that his parents had just driven up, I thought it best that I should leave. My bedside companion, Carla, showed no inclination to stay there a moment longer either, and so we walked off down the silent corridor together, took the lift down to the entrance, and in the bright moonlight made our way back to my car.

When we reached the main road I asked Carla where she would like me to take her, and to my surprise she said that she wanted to be driven back to
Gloryhole
, where, she informed me, she had been staying for a fortnight or so with her father. Minutes later, and still greatly surprised by her comment, I carved my way up, in first gear, from the eternally gushing
Blue Pool
towards the tight, hairpin-bend above it, and then, swinging right, motored right up to Chris’s front-door, and let the singer out of the car.

Carla turned and waved goodbye to me, and I eased off the brake and drove on once more, and made my way home again by the longer route - the route along which the accident had occurred just a few hours before - via the now silent hill-top village of Pontsticill, and the steeply dropping lane that ran back south-east from it towards Pant.

Sitting in my car, in the full glare of the street-lamp that stood looming above me outside my front-door in Cemetery Road, I pondered long over the strange events of the evening just passed, and realised that it had all begun because I had quaffed a solitary pint of ale more than usual, and had simply forgotten to switch on my car-headlights before setting off for home and tragically colliding heavily with the hapless Chris Cillick. But just as strange, I felt, was the fact that Carla Steel had implied that she was staying with the boy and his mother Anne at her father’s house, and so I quite naturally assumed that Chris, although well over ten years her junior, was, in fact, Carla’s step-brother, and that she was presumably the daughter of Drew, the eccentric, somewhat refractory, Art teacher I had many times conversed with at Pennant.

There had long been rumours that, before his marriage to Anne, English-born Drew had fathered another child with someone while living in Cardiff, but, for some reason, I had always assumed it to be a son. But, in light of what I had just witnessed, it certainly appeared that Drew was the father of a woman whom the whole world knew and loved as Carla Steel. Well, the pair of them were both well-educated and artistically inclined, after all, I mused, and so I felt reluctant to question the sudden discovery I had made. And yet I was still unwilling to share what I had unearthed with another soul, not even with the other members of my family, well, at least not until I had myself confirmed its veracity.

The Willows
C
are Home
: a place where fifty shades of grey managed to live out the fag-end of their lives largely asexually, though frequently frustratingly, in fifty single-bedrooms geometrically arranged alongside each other on a single floor. In a rest-room that looked out on the garden at the rear of the building Anne sipped her jasmine-tea and read silently to herself one of the Sunday papers she had found lying on a table there.

‘Is it fair that only people in England are being charged for prescriptions,’ asked
The Mail on Sunday
, in its
‘Today’s Poll’
feature. Anne was feeling heartily sick of the pathetic lack of common sense implicit in this sort of shallow question, and which appeared to have been devised and presented with a specific, preconceived outcome presumed. Mail readers would no doubt reply that it wasn’t fair, when all the Coalition Government had to do was bring in the same sort of bill that had been passed in the Celtic nations and then just about everyone in the U.K. would be happy. Anne felt that they might as well ask if it was right that the Welsh and the Scots decided against forcing their school-leavers to pay tuition fees, which, after all, those in her year at school who went on to attend Uni never had to pay anyway as young students, in the good old days when the local councils picked up the bill, and so charged the rate-payers accordingly. It was a self-financing method that appeared sensible and fair back then, she thought, so why wasn’t it so any longer?

And the newspaper might as well ask why the Welsh had the nerve not to charge car-parking fees for people who were visiting their sick and dying loved-ones in hospital, or why supermarkets in Wales charged customers a small fee for each polythene-bag they chose to use. As far as Anne was concerned it was all a question of priorities. The priorities decided upon by the Celtic nations, and expressed through their specific assemblies and parliaments, simply appeared to be very different ones to those that the Coalition in Westminster chose to adopt for England. There they elected to spend their money on things she imagined perhaps they cherished more, and therefore prioritised. So why couldn’t the London press acknowledge this fact, she wondered, and simply respect the rights of the Welsh people to choose for themselves what they wanted to spend their scarce resources on, and stop inciting their readers like this.

Anne sat back and pondered over what these priorities might be that the English committed their finance on instead. Well, there were all the road speed-cameras for a start, she thought, that seem to have sprung up on every conceivable by-way. And what about all those pot-holes that had opened up like earthquake-fissures on virtually all the main roads over the previous winter. Didn’t it occur to the people with power that endlessly filling them in would simply prove expensive and futile? Anne wondered why, when repairing the road, the councils didn’t choose to lay down the sort of surfaces that didn’t suddenly peel off the road whenever winter temperatures fell below freezing. That way they might get to save themselves millions that they could then elect to spend on free prescriptions, hospital-parking, and the rest of the things that the Welsh did that those on the other side of Offa’s Dyke seemed endlessly to complain about.

There was one area, however, where Anne thought the Welsh might like to prioritise soon, and which she bet the English already did. She had worked at the care-home for some years now, and was appalled at the poor standard of the facilities there, especially the depressing quality of the bedrooms and bathrooms provided for the use of the fifty old people who had invariably been forced to sell their homes in order to afford the extortionate charges that were made on them so as to finance their living costs. And, she mused, an improvement in the wages paid to those who worked there might even result in them not having to employ the less than dedicated, and, too often, far from patient, younger folk who had recently been despatched to them from the Jobcentre to work the shifts alongside her, they having been judged as failing to satisfy the new, harsher conditions by which the unemployed qualify for benefit payments.

Anne looked out of the wide bay-window and saw a large group of nurses, including Gareth, who, these days, seemed to be more or less in charge of the home, helping a group of aged women to seat themselves in the garden in an attempt to take advantage of the unseasonably warm Spring sunshine, which made
The Willows
feel more like Dubrovnik than Dowlais. Anne felt moved to smile at the respectful air of authority that Gareth seemed to display when around them. She suddenly recalled how the man had quite recently told her that he had fallen in love with her, but, by way of reply and rebuff, Anne had told him that, as she loved her husband dearly, she could never in a million years entertain such an idea. As ever, though, Gareth’s attitude to her rebuke was both principled and generous, and she had told him how she felt it was so good of him to have even said such kind, loving words to her. Yes, there was nobody in her work-place whom Anne respected more than Gareth Marshalsea, and the sight of him showing kindness to the old and the dying alike was, for her, a most tender sight to behold.

All of a sudden Anne heard a male voice let out a fearsome shriek in a room just along the corridor from where she was taking her break. She leapt to her feet, and went out and hurried quickly along the passage-way in the direction from which she felt sure the sound had come, and very soon she found she could hear the voices of two young males talking animatedly together above a background of loud music.

Arriving at a partially-open door, Anne peered inside it, and could clearly see two young men in white jackets, sitting at a computer-screen, and apparently smoking two cannabis joints. She could see straightaway that they were the two work-experience students from Year-Eleven at Pennant School, who had only been working at the home for just a few days, and whose names she was still unsure of. Anne wondered what the two young boys could possibly be doing that seemed to arouse in them such a high level of excitement.

A calling-bell was being sounded inside the room the boys occupied, but, instead of responding immediately, as was the care-home’s policy, they simply chose to ignore it. One of the pair, whom Anne believed was named Steffan, walked over to the window, forced it open, and tossed his smoking joint out into the flower-beds that were sited just outside. Then, seeing something that seemed to take his interest, he suddenly began laughing derisively at the group of old people on zimmer-frames, whom Gareth and the other nurses were patiently entertaining with songs, and stories, and pots of nice hot tea.

Steffan then spun round and, approaching his young friend at the computer, cursed loudly and repugnantly at the recurring sound of the bell. ‘Aw, shut the fuck up, will you!’ the boy suddenly screamed at the tannoy above his head.

Anne was horrified. She opened the door a little wider, peered in more intently, and soon found that she could just make out on the computer-screen a close-up of what appeared to be the moving face of an attractive young, dark-haired woman, whose music was playing loudly in the background. She quickly realised that the two boys were playing a video of the local-born singer known as Carla Steel. Anne watched, astonished, as the taller, much thinner youth, who was seated at the computer’s keyboard, and who she suddenly remembered was called Jake, started squirming around oddly on his chair, and crudely simulating masturbation, while drinking what Anne pesumed was alcohol from a large, red tumbler.

Just then an old woman called Victoria very slowly approached the room’s window from the area of the garden where Gareth was working, seemingly attracted there by the noise of the music inside. She raised her thin, frail, heavily wrinkled arms and pushed open the window a little further so as to peer inside, seemingly fascinated, not just by the music, but by the sight of the colourful, flashing video that was playing on the table-top screen.

‘Who’s that then?’ she suddenly called out to the two boys. ‘Who’s that woman, there?’

‘What the fuck do you want, you old slut?’ the stouter boy called Steffan shouted back at her.