Last Train to Gloryhole (34 page)

‘Except for the ones who crawled out alive, that is,’ he reminded me, smiling.

‘Like me, you mean?’ I said, staring down at the table. ‘It was my brother Sam who saved me, remember, Jack. But, you know, what I could never work out is, how a girl who loved school so very much, and never missed a single day of it, that I can ever recall anyway, should be absent on the very morning the school had its life crushed out of it.’

There followed a long pause during which we both looked out of the pub-window at a young couple on a tandem trying to negotiate the steep hill, going down, and who were wobbling, and swerving from one side of the road to the other, in their jolly, joint efforts to do so.

‘Dyl, can I ask you something?’ Jack suddenly asked. ‘Do you think their boy - do you think their Christopher - looks anything like me? Do you? You can be absolutely honest now, you know, Dyl. Because, you see, not very long before the time she got with child -’

‘Jack, don’t say another word,’ I ordered him. I stood up and walked across to the bar, placed my elbow on it, and then turmed and stared straight back at him. I held his gaze for what must have been at least a minute, then said, ‘You’ll have a whisky-chaser with me, won’t you, Jack? I know you want to. Let’s forget about walking home tonight. We can always get a taxi back to Pant. You see, there’s some things you and I need to talk about. And now’s a good time I’d say.’

Soon after Anne found the poem in her husband’s jacket she was so shocked that, without questioning the wisdom of it, she took off her coat and hat, and called Chris into the living-room, and shared the news with him. ‘Chris, come and look at what I found in your Dad’s pocket. You don’t think he’s seeing another woman, do you?’ Tell me I’m being stupid, won’t you?

‘Daddy Drew!’ her son retorted with horror. ‘Aw, come on, Mam. Who’d want
him
?’

‘ Well,
I
did,’ Anne replied. ‘I do - I still do, I mean. But who do you think could be writing to him?’

‘Let me see it,’ Chris commanded her. ‘Well, it’s definitely a girl’s handwriting, I can see that,’ he told her calmly.

‘Well, that’s a comfort, at least,’ said Anne ironically, peering over his shoulder at the looping blue words carefully set out on the lined paper. ‘Do you think it’s a school-uniform she’s referring to? Blue and green
is
Pennant, isn’t it?’

‘Yes, but the staff don’t wear it, do they, Mam?’ he told her.

Anne looked into her son’s face in horror. ‘You mean - you mean you think this poem could be from a girl? A pupil? No, ne-ver. Let me see. Let me see.
‘Images obscene,’ ’
she read aloud. ‘Well, at least she admits she’s got a dirty mind, doesn’t she? The baggage.’

‘I think she’s saying
he
has,’ put in Chris.

‘Oh. Well, at least she’s got that right,’ she exclaimed. ‘Though she’s got a bloody nerve suggesting it, if you ask me.’

‘Mam, I don’t wish to shock you or anything, but the writing looks a lot like - like Rhiannon’s,’ said Chris, swiftly turning so as to examine his mother’s reaction to this block-buster.

‘Rhiannon Cook! What! But how can it be?’ Anne replied, eyes wide, body shaking. ‘He teaches her Art, for God’s sake. And wasn’t he her form-tutor last year?’

‘Yes, he was,’ her son replied.

Oh, hell’s bells! And just look - she says she’s had him
thrice
already. Good God alive! Drew will go to jail. I bet they’ll lock your dad up, darling. They will, you know.’

‘Step-father, Mam. Step-father,’ Chris corrected her. ‘But hang on - Rhiannon is over sixteen, now, remember.’

‘Oh, so that’s all right then, is it?’ his mother asked him,

‘No, but at least it’s not illegal, Mam. In fact, in that case it’s what they call
‘consensual sex.
’ ’

‘Oh, is it now? Is it, clever dick? Well, he didn’t ask
my
consent, did he? Well, if the law can’t punish him, then I’m damn sure I shall have to do it myself, won’t I?’

Anne grabbed her purse from the table and took out some money. ‘Look, I think you’d best make yourself scarce, young man. Here’s a tenner. Go down the pub for an hour or two, or something, will you? But don’t go getting paralytic again, or else. God alive! Just wait ‘til he gets back. Just
wait
‘til your father gets home.’

‘Do you mean - what’s the meaning of the tribute carved on his stone?’ I asked her. Rhiannon nodded, and waited patiently for my explanation. ‘Well, you see Derek, my father - your grandfather - was serving in Iceland during the war,’ I told her, placing the lovely bunch of flowers we’d brought beside his grave.

‘In Iceland!’ she replied, eyes wide. ‘But I didn’t know they had supermarkets back then, Dad,’

I got to my feet again and met her quizzical gaze. I felt this wasn’t a terribly clever reply on her part in the circumstances, and I pitied her. ‘The country - not the shop!’ I exclaimed. ‘Oh, Rhiannon. What are you like, eh?’

‘Well,
I
didn’t know what you meant, Dad, did I?’ she responded, slightly hurt by my rebuke. ‘Remember I dropped History for Child-Care.’

‘For what?’ I asked her. ‘Child-Care! Is that a subject, then?’

‘How do you mean?’ she asked.

‘Well, don’t you need a baby to practise all that stuff on?’

‘Well, Mrs. Coffey sometimes brings her grand-son Ryan in when she gets to have him off her step-daughter. The rest of the time we just make do with our dollies.’

‘Dollies!’ I stammered, making a face..

‘Yeah. They’re very realistic, Dad. They wee and poo, and can even throw tantrums if you know how to press their buttons.’

‘Press their buttons!’ I stammered. ‘You don’t mean -’

‘I do,’ she retorted. ‘They’ve got these three tiny little switches under the curls on the back of their necks. The red one sends them into a sort of fit, while the yellow one and the brown one -’

‘Have different functions completely?’ I suggested.

‘Exactly,’ she replied, smiling sweetly at the comical perception that she could clearly tell our two minds now shared.

I decided to move our conversation onto more solemn things. ‘Your Mam says she wants to lie just here, you know,’ I told her.

‘But she’s not unwell in that way, Dad, surely?’ she asked me.

‘No, no, don’t be silly,’ I told her. ‘I mean when her time finally comes. You know, love, if you ask her, she doesn’t seem to think there’s anything up with her at all. But, sadly, the doctor’s got a completely different opinion, I’m afraid. Like me, he doesn’t seem to know what the problem actually is, but he’s convinced that something’s definitely not right.’

‘Yes, it certainly appears that way,’ said Rhiannon. ‘In fact I’m beginning to think that, perhaps mentally, she’s beginning to get a lot worse.’

A skylark suddenly shot up and trilled majestically somewhere in the blinding, white clouds above us, and I looked up to see if I could pinpoint where it was hovering. ‘It’s a lovely spot here, don’t you think, Rhiannon?’ I said. ‘Whenever our time comes, and whoever is first, your mother and I will be able to see The Beacons over the wall there, and hear all the birds, and even smell the trees and the wild flowers in the summertime.’

‘If you’ve still got your senses, which I very much doubt,’ she said, smiling. ‘But if you do then you’ll also have to put up with all the cars zooming along the road past the pub there, and all the visitors arriving in the car-park for the narrow-guage railway.’

Over the eastern, lower wall of the cemetery I could see that a long fleet of cars had arrived, which, for some strange reason, had elected not to venture inside. This puzzled me greatly as, to my eyes, it certainly resembled a funeral-cortege that had accidentally missed its turn, and had instead driven much further along the road. The cars then trailed onto a muddy track that led up to the largest sheep-field belonging to a neighbouring farm. I smiled at what seemed to me to be a monumental blunder on the part of the leading driver, but decided to pay them no further heed. Instead I took my daughter’s hand and proceeded to walk with her back the short distance towards our family-home in Pant. Of course, neither of us was to know that the cortege of cars that we had seen driving past were actually involved in conducting a serious police investigation.

Anne and Chris gripped each other’s hands tightly as they crept cautiously into the empty living-room of Tom’s house from the back-kitchen, where the back-door still stood ajar. She then dragged her son, against his will it seemed, towards the large book-shelf beside the wall, from which she began taking out novels, and paper-backs, and other much larger books, which she started opening up individually, and whose contents she avidly scrutinised.

‘We can’t start moving things about, Mam,’ Chris told her. ‘It’s bad enough that we’ve sneaked straight in here so soon after seeing them go out. Some of these are proper, expensive dentistry-books, you know.’

Anne looked into her son’s eyes and said, ‘You mean for a proper dentist, right?’

‘Well, look at them,’ he replied, helping her to slot them back into their rightful places, and at the correct angle, so that their slightest movement wouldn’t get noticed. ‘They must have cost the man a fortune all told, I reckon, even back in the days when he was a student.’

‘Do you mean a student of dentistry, then?’ she asked him. ‘For someone who qualified to practise?’

‘Well, what do you think?’ Chris shot back. ‘Derrh!’

‘But he couldn’t have been,’ she replied. ‘No, that’s quite impossible, that is. Not from what Carla told you, anyway, about where they used to live, and the jobs he did to support her and her mother back when she was young.’

‘Not a dentist! But why do you say that, Mam?’ her son enquired, a puzzled look across his face.

‘Well, take that silly sheep’s skull we just saw, with all those holes drilled right round its jaw, for a start,’ she explained to him, pointing back to the kitchen, where the sudden find had just caused the pair of them the surprise of their lives. ‘What sort of dentist would ever resort to a crazy thing like that, eh? It’s quite absurd, is what it is, if you ask me. No, the old man is either mentally out of it, or he - or he just -’

‘Or what, Mam?’ Chris asked.

‘Or perhaps he just never did make it as a dentist in the first place.’

‘But now
you
are the one being absurd, Mam,’ Chris told her, shaking his head, and pointing his finger, then running it along the neat row of dentistry text-books arrayed before them. ‘Just look at these, won’t you.’

‘
Am
I being absurd, though? Anne asked, suddenly. turning round to stare into her son’s eyes. ‘Do you really think I am? Listen, Chris. You know how you always say to me - ‘Mam, why do you always read those little books of childrens’ stories that are written for the underfives?’ And - ‘Did you ever want to be a school-teacher, then?’ ’

‘Yeah,’ Chris answered her, smiling, ‘And you always reply -’Of course not, dear. Whatever gave you that idea?’ ’

‘Well, guess what, son of mine?’ Anne continued, her eyes suddenly opening wide, and scaring him for a brief moment.

‘What - Mam?’ asked Chris.

‘Your mother, was lying, dear,’ she told him, biting her lower, quivering lip tightly so as to stop herself from crying.

‘You were lying!’ he asked, shocked by her comment.

Anne turned and sat herself down on a solid, wooden chair that stood with its back to the book-shelf. ‘Yes, love, I’m afraid I was,’ she told her son. ‘You see, I always wished that I had been a teacher just like your step-dad, dear,’ she told him in a voice that was audibly shaking. ‘It had long been my ambition to teach ‘Infants’ ever since I was a very little girl back in Aberfan. I had a lovely teacher back there, you see, who was sadly lost. But, as the years went by, I was soon to discover - rather like - rather like I imagine old Tom, the would-be dentist here, discovered - that I just wasn’t up to it.’

Carla sat next to her Dad in the back of the black police-car, waiting for the tractor, and the three loaded trailers it was slowly dragging behind it, to pull out of the sloping, green field they sat facing, and let the courtege of cars inside. The constable with the bleach-blond hair pressed his foot on the accelerator, and forced the shuddering vehicle the pair were in onto the muddy path, and followed its course round to where it reached an aluminium fence which overlooked the sharp slope that dropped steeply into the deep, green, river-valley over a hundred feet below.

Carla could tell straightaway that her father didn’t wish to get out of the car. Even when the other officer with the grey hair, the hook-nose, and the local accent opened the door for him, Tom’s weak eyes looked back into his daughter’s instead, and, without the need for words, told her plainly that the afternoon’s excursion was all a wild goose-chase.

‘Let me help you, Mr. Davies,’ Sergeant Foley told Tom in as sympathetic a tone as he could muster, gently grasping the older man’s thin, calloused wrist, and encouraging him to step out of the car and join him on the long grass.

‘There’s nobody here, you know,’ Tom announced with bold assuredness from the back-seat, but then electing to step out of the car anyway, out of a sense of duty. ‘I may be able to locate people over considerable distances away, as you’ve already witnessed, but even I can’t conjour up a body for you if there simply isn’t one around. Although I
can
certainly tell you where there are several others you might be interested in, if you like.’

‘Bodies you mean! Where?’ enquired the sergeant and the constable almost in unison.

‘Just over that wall, back there,’ the old man told them, smiling thinly. ‘Pant Cemetery. Thousands of the buggers, if truth be told. And two or three freshly interred this morning, I think you’ll find. Say - what was the boy’s name again?’ he asked the sergeant.

‘Jake Haines,’ Sergeant Foley replied, reading from a clip-board he was carrying. ‘Sixteen-years old, thin, wiry, fair hair, and could be wearing a t-shirt, jeans and trainers. Missing from school for a week, and last seen two days ago at his home in Victoria Street, Dowlais.’

‘You know, there are two boys over on the stone-seat who appear to match that description, Sir,’ the bleach-blond constable suddenly announced, pointing them out to the sergeant and the others with his long arm outstretched.