Last Train to Gloryhole (37 page)

What on earth is he doing there? Chris asked himself. Even from a distance he could see that the man seemed to be very tall, and was wrapped in a short coat, the hood of which seemed to have fallen forward and almost down to his eyes. And why was he standing as still as a statue on the narrow path just above where the train-tracks had once run, and where a steam-engine that had just crossed the viaduct in the old days would have needed to slow before passing under the road-bridge, and entering the former station-halt, that was nowadays barely a cracked, pock-marked platform, so weathered and broken up was the stone it was built of.

Chris knew that he was just a hundred yards or so from the safety of his family and home. To his left and right the shoulder-high limestone walls, (a hundred feet or so below which the River Taff ran on in babbling solitude,) far from offering him security, told him only that he was completely hemmed in. In fact, should the gun-man spot him, and walk onto the great bridge towards him, or, worse, if an accomplice of the man were suddenly to approach him from the rear, then he would have little option but to jump, and most certainly to his death. Chris shivered again, and turned and looked along the trackway by which he had arrived so as to ascertain that there was indeed no such person approaching behind him. Thankfully all that he could see there was the wide, grey, cycle-way itself, curving away left into the great wood’s darkness.

The illumination of the moonlight gradually increased once more, and Chris suddenly became aware of a second hooded figure, who, unlike the first, was bending low, close to the fence of his parents’ back-garden, and clutching a longer implement of some kind in his hands. Chris narrowed his eyes and stared even more intently. The gleaming reflection that he soon glimpsed moving about urgently told him that the second, shorter figure was in fact busy cutting his way through the fence that belonged to his neighbour, Tom Davies.

Very soon Chris felt that he had more or less worked out what was happening, so he reached deep into his trouser-pocket, snatched up his mobile-phone, and key-ed in a nunber and rang it. Chris listened to it ring forlornly at least half-a-dozen times, then, thankfully, he heard Carla’s sweet voice answer, ‘Hi, Chris.’

‘Lock all your doors, Carla,’ he whisperted to her. ‘Yes, that is what I said. And yes, I do have to talk like this. Then turn off all your lights and phone the police. There are two men at the back of your house, and they’re both armed.’

‘What! Are you being serious! What on earth do they want?’ Carla asked him.

‘How would I know?’ Chris retorted. ‘Carla, I’m really sorry if it’s me that’s sadly got you dragged into this, but it could be that they plan to kidnap you.’

When she was bored, or expecting a phone-call, as now, Rhiannon liked nothing better than to write her little poems. She sat on her bed in her coat and best shoes and knocked off one in less than five minutes. But, as she inserted the punctuation, she knew full well that her best friend would be absolutely livid when she got to read what it said about her. Rhiannon put down her pen, held up the paper, and read aloud what she had composed.

‘Carmen McGra’ (th,)

Her eye travelled far,

Her ear caught the faintest of sound.

But tho’ strident and tall,

‘Twas no problem at all

To trip over what lay on the ground.’

Rhiannon giggled loudly, imagining the shape her friend’s face might gurn into, and the foul and abusive swear-words that would most likely fly from that great, tunnel-shaped hole Carmen possessed just under her nose, and which she invariably described as her ‘cake-hole.’ ‘Oh, my God!’ said Rhiannon. ‘There could even be sputum!’ At the very thought of it, she collapsed on her bed in a fit of laughter.

Suddenly her mobile-phone, which lay on the bedside-table, sprang into life, tinnily bawling out the latest rendering from Adele. From the next bedroom she heard her mother shriek, ‘Answer it, Rhiannon! Perhaps Carmen can’t get permission to go, after all.’ At this Rhiannon’s face made its very own gurn. ‘Her dad’s on the social, remember, love. Do you remember how Arthur found him that job, and then the silly man had the nerve to just -’

‘Why do you
call
him that
,
Mam?’ Rhiannon asked her, getting up from the bed.

‘Who, love? Dad?’ Gwen replied, sounding surprised.

‘Of course, Dad. His first name may be Arthur, but the whole world and his wife call him Dyl, Mam - me included - and they always have done, as far as I can recall.’

‘And?’ Gwen cut in, clearly narked by her comment.

‘And
you’ve
always called him Dyl, too, Mam, as far back as I can remember. But for the last couple of years you’ve been calling him Arthur, and I must say it’s incredibly weird and incredibly annoying for me, as I’m sure it must be far more annoying again for my dad.’ Then, much more quietly, ‘But, there again, you’ve not been well recently, have you? And he does love you, and so I guess he’s far too nice to just tell you to - stop doing it, you bitch!’

Anticipating a further response from her mother, yet not getting one, Rhiannon answered the ringing phone, but discovered that it wasn’t actually Carmen who was at the other end, but Chris. Her heart leapt for joy at his solitary ‘Hi babe!’ but she felt that she dared not speak a word this time, even quietly, as she had always felt that her mother could hear soil creep.

‘Tell her I’m going to be paying for the two of you,’ Gwen announced, suddenly walking into the room, opening up the purse she held, and taking out two ten-pound notes. She placed them neatly on the bedside-table, and walked back out again, clearly not wishing to restrict her daughter from carrying on, what was after all, a private conversation, although, from Rhiannon’s facial expression, it seemed to her that she might already have done. ‘You’d best get moving, you know, Rhiannon,’ Gwen called back, as she made her way downstairs. ‘The bus’ll be leaving in a couple of minutes. I dare say you can take your birds another time, perhaps.’

Rhiannon looked out of the window towards the terminus at the bottom end of the road, where no more than two or three people stood waiting, and wondered what on earth her mother could be chatting about this time. Birds! Birds, did she say? Rhiannon still hadn’t yet fathomed out the
Excalibur
-nonsense, which, thankfully, the police hadn’t chosen to investigate, or perhaps were still too totally baffled by, as she herself still was, to take seriously. But if one day they did manage to trace it all back to Pant, she thought, then her sick mother could either be arrested, or committed, or possibly both. At least I’m glad I managed to keep it all from my father, she told herself. He has his hands quite full enough at the moment, just looking after her.

Rhiannon spoke quietly into the phone. ‘Where are you now?’ she asked.

‘I’m in the pub over the way,’ Chris told her.
‘The Pant-Cad-Ifor.
What can I get you to drink?’

Rhiannon laughed louder than she had for weeks. ‘I’ll have a W-K-D, if that’s all right,’ she told him, turning to check that her mother had definitely gone.

‘Wicked!’ he shot back, far from ingeniously. ‘Look, I need to see you to tell you about something that happened last night,’ he continued. ‘Although, thankfully, it turned out O.K. in the end.’

‘Well, I’m glad,’ she told him, disinterested in any night-time activities he got up to that didn’t involve her. ‘Chris, it’s your lucky day, do you know that?’

‘Why?’ he replied. ‘Don’t tell me you’re wearing those crotchless pants I once bought for you off that stall in the market?’

‘No, I am certainly not!’ the girl screamed back at him. She picked up the two notes her mother had left behind and placed them in her pocket. ‘But perhaps I could do one day, I suppose.’ She silently winced at her shameful wickedness. ‘Are you saying that you and me are back together again, then?’

‘Well, I hope so, babe,’ he told her. ‘I’ve already gone and bought you your drink, now.’

Rhiannon giggled. ‘I see. Like I said, it’s your lucky day, Chris.’

‘And why is that, beautiful girl?’ he asked.

She warmed inwardly at this unwarranted reply, recalling how he had said this to her a few times before, and once especially near there. ‘Because, lover, for once I’m going to be paying.’

Less tham a minute later Rhiannon left the house and turned right to go off to meet Chris. But she suddenly saw that her mother, dressed now in a macintosh and scarf, and carrying something heavy with her in a polythene bag, had just emerged from the house and turned left, and was walking slowly up the narrow pavement of the winding road that led over
The Bryniau
moorland in the general direction of her school. Rather shocked, Rhiannon decided that she had best follow her, but at a safe distance. Since she realised she would be passing the field where her father’s horses were kept, Rhiannon spun round and returned to the house, and fetched from the kitchen a bag of stale bread, then shut the front-door once again, and walked after her mother, en route phoning Chris to tell him exactly what she was doing.

Gwen soon approached the field in which the two old, wooden railway-carriages stood side- by-side, and which served as rudimentary stables for Gavin and Stacey. However, instead of continuing up the road, she eased her body through the low wire-fence, and, with her little booted feet pumping, marched right past the ageing, equine pair, and right up to the site of the two horse-boxes that were their neighbouring homes.

Rhiannon knelt low and hid behind a bush that grew beside the footpath, and stared after her poor mother with an anxious and terrified look. She soon saw her set the bag down on the grass, and take from it a paint-tin and brush, that were plainly different ones from those she had seen her using in town, and which, back then. she had left behind her at the scene of the crime.

‘God! What on earth is she going to be writing this time!’ Rhiannon uttered in dismay.

Just then Chris ran up the pavement and joined the girl just out of sight of her mother. ‘I didn’t know your Mam was a painter,’ he told her, chuckling.

‘She isn’t,’ replied Rhiannon. ‘She’s about to do some crazy graffiti if you want to know. God, this is so embarrassing, I tell you. Hey - there’s nobody coming, is there, Chris?’

‘Well, no, but I can see the bus comng over
The Bryniau
,’ he told her. ‘And it’ll be driving past us any second now.’

‘Oh, no!’ stammered Rhiannon as, whirring loudly, the single-decker vehicle swung by. ‘Chris - are there many people on it? Can you see?’ she asked.

The red bus drove right past the crouching pair, carrying on it less than a dozen seated men and women, plus the driver. The passengers all turned and stared into the field to their right, but none seemed to raise so much as an eye-lid at the strange event that was nevertheless happening at the make-shift stables in the sheep-field that they no doubt passed twice daily.

Rhiannon puffed out her cheeks and blew heavily with relief. ‘Thank God
they’ve
gone!’ she told Chris. ‘It’ll be in Welsh, I bet you.’

‘What will?’ asked Chris, completely confused.

‘The graffiti - the red writing she’s doing,’ Rhiannon told him, watching Gwen like a hawk, to see what words she was daubing on the side of Stacey’s box. ‘Look!’ she stammered, ‘it starts with double-L. What did I tell you? Say, Chris, how good is your Welsh?’

‘Not bad,’ Chris replied. ‘But I’ve got Google on my i-phone. Just tell me what the word is, yeah?’

‘L-L-A-M-R-A-I,’ Rhiannon spelled out for him. ‘What the hell is that? Llamrai? Don’t tell me she’s doing anagrams now.’

‘Llamrai,’ Chris repeated. ‘Llamrai. In ancient legend Llamrai, or Llamrei with an ‘e’, is Arthur’s trusty mare. Wow! This shit is fascinating.’

‘Quiet!’ Rhiannon told him. She’s painting the other bloody box now. Here goes - H-E-N-G-R-O-E-N,’ she spelled out. ‘Hengroen!’

‘Hengroen. Hengroen, as you can probably guess, my love, is the name of Arthur’s stallion.’

‘Oh, my God!’ Rhiannon stammered. ‘My mother’s completely lost it!’

‘Oh, I don’t know about that,’ Chris replied with a smile, putting his arm around his girl in an effort to console her. ‘Because, after all, it is true, isn’t it?’

‘What is?’ Rhiannon shot back.

‘Well, the horses
are
both your dad Arthur’s horses, right? Can you see what I’m saying?’

‘Er - no!’ she responded sharply, completely mystified, and looking it.

‘O.K. But listen, Rhiannon,’ Chris continued. ‘Perhaps your mum just didn’t like ‘Gavin’ and ‘Stacey.’ Yeah?’ He smiled at her and added, ‘I know for a fact it was ages before
I
did.’

Carla spun round and, standing still in the middle of the field, looked back at the upstairs-window in her father’s house, waiting until she could at last see his familiar frame moving about once again, before taking hold of Chris’s hand and setting off for their afternoon walk. The path they had chosen took them over the hill and through a coppice of trees, and then down a steep path into the wooded, youthful valley of the narrow stream, whose watercourse flowed away to the left of where they stood, on its route down into the ‘
Blue Pool’
in the River Taff proper, there swelling the main river’s capacity not inconsiderably.

Late Spring in this part of Wales was customarily a season of wind and showers, but this had not been any customary year, pondered Carla, looking up. The skies were once again completely devoid of cloud, and the May temperatures were clearly more than ten degrees higher than one had any reason to expect at this time of year. She smiled, believing that the sunshine, which she already felt was warming her delightfully today, was just as likely to tan her skin as rapidly and as thoroughly as it did during the silent, blissful weeks when she got to stay at her little hill-top home in the village of Kalithea on the paradise island of Rhodes.

Chris looked over into Carla’s face, and she could tell that he was about to pose the question she had hoped he might skip asking, at least for the first hour or so of their walk. There again, she thought, it might be best to make a clean breast of things to him, and let him see for himself that she was, when all was said and done, a genuinely good person, who was at least trying to lead a decent life these days, and not allow a situation to arise again where total strangers felt they had the right to point fingers in her direction and scoff. And what is more, now that she had returned to the land of her birth, she simply wanted to make her dear father’s time a happy and comfortable one as his inevitable death drew ever nearer.