Last Train to Gloryhole (32 page)

‘Paracetamol doesn’t cure headaches in Space,’
the headline on page-four of the morning-paper declared in bold, but shaking type. Chris wasn’t yet sure if it would work on Earth either, but he went into the bathroom anyway, and took another two in a glass of water, and sat on the toilet’s lime-green seat, reading the remainder of the newspaper for an extended period, until the pain finally started to ebb away.

‘Depressed man saws off his finger then eats it for dinner,’
was the headline on page-six. Chris shook his head slowly. God - how disgusting! Wasn’t there anything positive in the news today, he asked himself. He turned the pages until he reached the
‘Music Section,’
wherein he was instantly shocked to see a surly-faced image of his new best friend Carla, holding her electric guitar across her naked thigh, and staring straight back at him. Well, he had seen that look for real only yesterday, he told himself, so nobody could question its authenticity. Sadly the two bottles of wine they had consumed when her father had finally retired to bed, and they were left kicking it in the kitchen, and jamming together on electric-piano and guitar, had rendered him in the sorry, hung-over state he was in right now.

Chris looked once again at the photo of Carla, then closed the paper and laid it down flat on the floor before him.
‘His mobile-phone caught the sound of her scream in the woods,’
was the second-headline that he noticed at the foot of page-one. He picked up the paper again and read the article which he soon discovered concerned a man whose wife had been kidnapped, raped, tortured, then brutally killed in a forest somewhere in the north of England. Her husband was a drug-dealer it appeared, and he had failed to take seriously some warnings that a gang had been sending him via text-messages. ‘Wow!’ Chris shouted ‘That’s some scary shit, that is.’

‘What’s scary, Chris?’ his mother called through the bathroom-door. ‘You haven’t gone and caught something again, have you? If you have, don’t worry, darling. Doctor Pocock or Doctor Jain will take care of it for you, I’m sure, and I won’t even need to come down the clinic with you.’

‘Mam, what on earth are you talking about?’ responded Chris angrily. ‘It’s just something I found in the paper, that’s all.’

‘Really?’ she replied. ‘Chris, dear - tell me something, will you? Why do men all seem to take the newspaper with them into the bathroom? You know I’ve never heard of a woman doing that.’

Chris suddenly remembered something, turned over to page-three, then quickly shut the paper once again and stuffed it behind the basin. ‘I wouldn’t know, Mam,’ he replied. ‘Ask Dad, why don’t you. He’s the teacher in the family, after all. As you’re so often fond of saying, he knows just about everything there is to know about everything there is to know. And, you know, I bet
he
does it, too.’

‘Does what? Chris, how dare you!’ Anne replied, more than a little hurt. ‘What are you implying about your step-father? He’s a married man for heaven’s sake. Look - get out of there now, will you? I desperately need the toilet.’

‘But it’s stuck to the floor, Mam,’ Chris retorted, sniggering loudly. ‘I’m sure I’ll need a pair-of-gloves and a screw-driver, at the very least, if I’m ever going to shift it.’

‘Out - I said!’ Anne commanded him. ‘And - and leave all the fittings where they are.’

Just then Chris thought he heard a foot-step in the loft above his head, and so he flushed the toilet and dashed out of the room, letting his mother past him as he went. He was suddenly in a frightful panic, and he only hoped that it wasn’t the police who had paid him a visit. ‘Oh, God! Let it be Carla - let it be Carla!’ he repeated to himself, as he hopped about near the window in the front-bedroom, gazing down to check there wasn’t a police-car in the road below. At least he couldn’t see one anywhere, so perhaps he had mis-heard the sound, he told himself, as he lay back on his bed and pondered long and hard about the girl who lived next-door. It was that sexy picture in the paper that had started it, he mused. Feeling his blood rise, he turned onto his side.

Was he really too young for her? Chris asked himself. Well, she didn’t seem to have any boyfriends, and she was quite easily the most alluring woman he had ever met. And you could probably count on one hand the number of men who had seen her emerging from the shower, as he had recently done. Chris didn’t know whether he ought to feel fortunate on account of that, or accept that he should be rightfully damned to a brief life of misery and failure, and then a protracted spell in hell, as a result of the sweaty, libidinous feelings he undeniably felt for the girl, and which his demented mind had understandably, most likely erroneously, interpreted as love.

Chris turned onto his back, reached over to the radio, and switched on the local radio-station. Playing aloud was Carla’s very first single release, which was, of course, no longer in
‘The Charts,’
but was regarded highly enough by the local disc-jockeys that they continued to play it at least once each day. ‘
You scream in the trees,’
she sang,
‘ - in the trees where we found our love. But now it sounds more like a tease - to the girl who you rose above.’
Chris felt he must have heard the song countless times over the years, but on this occasion he was taken aback by its lyrics - words which now seemed to him to somehow be freshly composed, and sung solely for his sake - his own personal experience - his own recent, brief relationship with Rhiannon.

Did Carla really write the words that I just heard? he asked himself, now in quite a fluster to find out the truth. He rifled through his bed-side drawer, found the CD that the song was on, and began playing it. But when it got to the song’s chorus, he soon discovered that the lyrics were quite different to what he was convinced he had heard just minutes before.

‘Holy cow! Is this how it starts?’ an alarmed Chris asked himself, suddenly shaking his head about, and leaning across to see the somewhat distorted image of his drawn, worried face in the large mirror on the bedside table. Could this be the onset of short-term memory-loss, he wondered, and perhaps the related paranoia that were what his science-teacher at school had so graphically showed him and his class were the terrible, mental consequences - the inevitable scenario - of smoking large quantities of high-grade skunk on a regular basis, and which was even more worrying than the physical condition his class-mates jokingly referred to as ‘skunk-eyes.’ This latter phenomenon, Chris told himself, he already knew Steffan and Jake, and a number of other of his school-colleagues, had developed to a greater or lesser degree, (including the Flynn brothers - Danny and Brian - who, like himself, were habitual users.) And now for the first time Chris was forced to concede that he could tell from his own bleary-eyed reflection which stared back at him that - yes - he had now also begun to be afflicted with it.

Or perhaps, thought Chris, swivelling his body round to retrieve the CD again, the problem was simply that he wasn’t able to accurately recall the song’s lyrics - the words he had listened to less than two minutes before. Yes, that could be it, he thought, smiling, since that must happen to everyone an awful lot of the time. Then, if that was indeed the case, he might not need to go and see someone about it after all. His A-level exams were now only just over a year away, and his whole future depended on the levels of the grades he achieved at the time, and so, he told himself, he would probably be better advised to put the brakes on, and start to get a firm grip on his usage. Yes, he would simply moderate it, that is what he do, he decided, since panicking about it, as he had just been doing, wasn’t likely to help him one bit in the end.

The door to Chris’s room opened slightly, and he instinctively called out Emily’s name, forgetting that the cat had been gone now for weeks. Suddenly he recalled what Carla’s father had told him about her whereabouts, and he was suddenly filled with a need to locate her, irrespective of whether she was dead, as the old man had suggested she was, or indeed still alive. Suddenly the thought struck him that perhaps it was Emily that was, in fact, the cause of the noise he had heard in the loft. Maybe the sound that he had heard had simply resembled a human foot-step, but had actually been their Persian cat moving about up there, as she had been used to doing. At least the notion sounded very plausible to him anyway. And if indeed it
was
Emily up there, he told himself, then he decided that some time later in the night, when his parents were fast asleep, he would endeavour to climb up there and fetch the poor thing down.

After almost half-an-hour of pushing and thumping and lifting, a precariously balanced Carla heard an enormous crash in the loft above her head, and straightaway discovered that she was able to force open the hatch for the very first time. Carefully maintaining her balance on the narrow, flat summit of the step-ladder, and slowly edging the top half of her body inside, the dazzlingly bright H.I.D. and sodium-lamps, and the extractor-fan’s gushing sound, though disorientating in themselves, intrigued her right away. The step-ladder creaked eerily, and even wavered a little beneath her weight, but Carla found that she had enough courage, and possessed sufficient fascination with the strange, powerful, but familiar, odour that emerged from inside the room, to enable her to carry on and pull herself up. Within seconds she had finally managed to stand erect, and soon began to glance around her into the bright, glowing interior, where the cannabis-factory was clearly earning its corn by operating noisily at full-pelt.

‘So this is where you grow it all, you wicked boy, you!’ she exclaimed to herself, shaking her head about ruefully, but admiringly.

‘Carla!’ her father suddenly called out from below. ‘Carla, dear. What are you doing?’

‘It’s all right, Dada,’ she replied, looking down into the hall-way below her dangling feet, ‘I’m just getting something from the loft for us. I won’t be a minute, I promise.’

‘But we’ve got nothing up there, sweetheart, I told you,’ he retorted. ‘Nobody has even set foot up there. And anyway, I thought they said it was stuck fast.’

Carla stood up on the attic-floor, and, with a slipper-ed foot, carefully pushed the hatch back into place. She then bent low and picked up the two large potted-plants, which she had earlier spilled onto their sides when she had forced her way in, and that she could now see boasted healthy, shiny-green leaf, and placed them in a safer location. Carla reached up on tip-toes and lifted the latch on the fan-light in the roof, so allowing a stream of cool, fresh air to drift in to the low room from outside, quite possibly, she mused, for the first time in a very long while.

All in all, Carla was staggered by the tremendous lengths to which Chris had gone to get his little business venture off the ground. Yes, this was a fully operational cannabis-farm if ever there was one, she told herself, and it was clear that the boy had taken full advantage of the many months, or years, perhaps, that the house next-door to his own had remained vacant, in order to convert its dusty attic into the
Aladdin’s Cave
that it clearly now was for him. She was, however, at least heartened somewhat on seeing that the precious electricity-cables, without which none of this one-man enterprise would have been possible, were still connected to The Cillicks’ own power-supply, and not to their own.

The many coloured balloons and little magical lanterns that caught Carla’s eye surprised her just as much as everything else she saw there. They seemed to float as free as birds in the air-conditioned breeze that now rushed about them from all sides. Carla suddenly remembered that she had experienced something akin to this once before: she recalled it was the day when the record-company’s chaffeur-driven car had broken down in the middle of the Severn Bridge, and she had sat back in the plush, yellow-leather, upholstered haven and let the sea-wind burst into her warm, insulated world like a great, fierce dragon’s breath, and with such immense power that her floppy, cotton hat had soon flown out of the window, and had fallen, rolling and tumbling, into the dark, icy waters of the estuary’s high-tide over two-hundred feet below her.

What
was
this place, anyway? Carla asked herself. Was it possible that this slant-roofed room, in some strange way, happened to mean a whole lot more to the boy next-door than just the roof-top hiding-place where he grew his drugs? Could this magical place in some weird way represent the play-room that the sweet boy had perhaps never had, or that he had once owned, but now sorely missed? She smiled at the curious scenario her imagination had just devised. To Carla’s eyes, this strange, multi-coloured loft might easily be a place of sensual, if not actual, retreat, for someone who could never have imagined that it would so soon be discovered.

Carla lifted the hatch once again and soon heard her father’s remote, sad voice complain. ‘I’m not feeling too good, sweet. I think perhaps I’d better take a lie down. Perhaps it’s the coffee.’ Carla contemplated this last statement of his for a few moments, then turned again to survey the room, and swiftly registered the three large tubs of coffee-beans that the boy had set there in the hope of disguising the plantation’s distinctive, clammy odour from anyone in the houses below. With her sharp finger-nails Carla nipped off some mature cannabis-leaves from a tall plant that grew in a large tray near the wall, folded them carefully in her deft fingers, and placed them, for short-term storage, stems-downward, in the sleeve of her grey, woollen jumper. Then, approaching the hatch once more, Carla eased her feet through the gap, and, slowly and cautiously, made her way down the step-ladder, and back into her father’s house.

When I’ve finally got Dad off to sleep I think I’ll come back up here again, and see if I can discover how crafty old Chris manages to get in himself, Carla told herself, smiling.

A blue-and-green uniformed Carmen was sitting on the bench just inside the school-gates, holding the tabloid newspaper - that had earlier held pie-and-chips - wide open before her, and addressing a similarly clad Rhiannon, who, having completed her work-experiennce week too, now stood facing her, paring her nails. ‘Listen to this one, Rhi -’ ‘
Don’t wear uniform on the way to school - you’ll attract perverts,’ police advise girls.’
God streuth! What do they mean? ‘Cause I bet you, if we took ours off right now we’d be far more likely to attract attention, don’t you think? And not just Brian Flynn’s, neither.’