Last Train to Gloryhole (4 page)

Drew hurled the clump of string-tied sketch-books into the car’s leather back-seat, followed by his empty looking brief-case, climbed inside, tilted down, then, (spying his brown eyes looking back at him,) re-set to its default position the broad rear-view mirror, and switched on the ignition. The tones of Roy Orbison’s
‘Candy Man’
rang out to dispel the morning-fog, and disrupt, for just a second or two, the wondrous, trilling song of the tree-dwelling blue tits and robins that, unlike Drew and his wife of fifteen years, were the rightful residents, the legitimate owner-occupiers you could say, of this, most southerly, quarter of Powys - or
Breconshire
, as it was more familiarly known in those parts - the rural, relatively peaceful, and ofttimes glorious, upper reaches of the largely urban and industrial Taff Vale.

Smoothing down flat with his long, thin fingers what little remained of the curly, fair locks, that had for decades crowned, if not adorned, his pronounced, tanned forehead, Drew donned his brown-tinted driving-glasses and instantly felt himself once again. With a firmly depressed, right, leather lace-up he accelerated his much cherished, three-litre saloon-car down the hill, and away from the short row of terraced homes that sat adjacent to his own. The loud, booming blast from the vehicle’s double-exhaust duct belched out a swirling cloud of gas and steam that raised a thick layer of dust from the crevasses in the carriageway and adjoining pavement, and rattled the tall, slanted estate-agent’s
‘SOLD’
sign, which stood, forlornly flapping like a cardboard flag of surrender, pinned for dear life to the wooden fence that fronted the house next to his own.

Within seconds Drew had sped past the village-sign that read ‘
Glo-Ar-Ol
,’ and rounded the hair-pin bend which led one down alongside a fenced-off tract of the precipitous valley-side and towards the old, stone bridge that traversed the river’s torrential waterfall, and which bore almost as many cracks in its grey walls as it did limestone blocks. One of the largest and most conspicuous of these cracks, Drew recalled, as he changed down into first-gear, happened to have been of his own creation, and this painfully embarrassing recollection swiftly caused him to grimace, just as it had done on virtually every previous morning of his working life.

Window agape, Drew coasted silently towards the bridge so that he could listen to the gushing sound of the river’s youthful torrent, with its many-pooled cataract, that flowed in the deep gash beneath its ancient, limestone structure. Once the sleek, black body of his BMW had slid through the tight gap and then rounded the right-hand bend at a snail’s pace, Drew kept the car in low gear, and then, foot down, thrust it powerfully up the steep incline of the opposing valley-side, past the solitary cottage, whose exterior wall was the road’s kerbside, thrashing it on through the rising hair-pins in much the same way that he believed he had seen the great Sebastien Loeb do one school-day morning a year or so before, most probably on his way to the
Spar Shop
or
Asda
for an early snack, before returning to his check-point in the mountain forests just north of there, and resuming his quest for yet another
World Rally Championship
.

Leaving the gaping limestone-quarry, and the even loftier ruins of the hill-top Norman castle, behind, and to his left, Drew now caught sight of the rising sun for the first time that morning, and felt, as in recent times he frequently did, that the day ahead would be the thrilling Thursday that thankfully followed what had, yet again, been another woeful Wednesday. At last changing up into fourth, Drew took the bull by the horns and shot past a line of four or five aged, shaggy sheep that were approaching, single-file, where a footpath might one day be constructed, no doubt returning from some late-night watering hole, or perhaps another rough night on the town. Drew smiled proudly at his anthropomorphic conception as he coasted his car down the gentler slope towards inhabited Wales again - to his mind the world of worries and work, yet, for the vast and growing minority in the Kingdom of Coalition, the land of the enveloping dole-queue.

But for Drew Cillick the world that his gleaming chariot was fast approaching was a world of teaching and learning, of classroom celebrity and staff-room stardom. At
Pennant Comprehensive
he felt he had found the very medium in which to glean for himself a large portion of what his wife and two children no longer gave him - an untainted self-image of wisdom and grace, the garnished status of a minor icon, and, more vitally in recent years, a necessary reason to simply go on living. No longer, Drew mused, would he permit himself to feel like a piece of paper that had once had coherent writing on it, but had since been through the wash.

As he sped along the hill-road within sight of the cemetery wherein his former college-friend’s recently exhumed, and now re-interred, body now lay finally at peace, Drew changed down and slowed his comfortable, gleaming car to a crawl. He then closed his eyes, (as he didn’t even realise he had been doing twice-daily for some considerable time now,) and once again asked the God he didn’t even believe existed to forgive both him and his second wife Anne for their cruel and callous murder, almost forty years before, of poor, unfortunate Sam Cook.

The purple-tinged panoply of the three major peaks of
The Brecon Beacons
had by now become clearly visible through the broad, curtained picture-window of Anne’s large lounge. Outside it a bright orange helicopter, with the loud, incessant buzz of a furious hornet, suddenly swooped low overhead, scattering the morning’s songbirds from the very branches of the trees they nested in. Through the open door to the adjoining room, Anne watched, blinking, and quite horrified at the sight. She then moved in quickly from the kitchen, carrying in her slender, bare arms a bright-yellow breakfast-tray, on which she had carelessly, but understandably, spilt a little of the cereal milk on hearing the cursed rotor-blades sweeping nearer once again, and, with a deafening hum, shuddering the very walls of her precious, much loved, country home.

‘Chris!’ Anne shouted at the top of her voice. ‘Chris! It’s time for school, you know. Come on now, there’s a good boy. You know, my lad, I wouldn’t be surprised if that orange thing flying around outside wasn’t one of those new-fangled drones sent out to check up on you, because - well because I’m sure I couldn’t see any driver.’

A five second pause, during which both mother and teenage son separately contemplated this, then the boy replied weakly from his bedroom upstairs, ‘But Mam - can’t I go in tomorrow?’

‘You’ll be there again tomorrow, my lad,’ replied his mother. ‘Don’t you worry about that now. Because I’m certainly not having the nonsense we had last term, I can tell you.’ Quieter this time, and to herself, ‘Bullying, indeed. The size on the boy!’

‘They’re homophobic, I tell you,’ her son announced.

‘Huh! No more than you are, my lad,’ she responded with a shake of her pretty head.

‘What!’ he cried. ‘But you know I’m gay, Mam. Didn’t I tell you already?’

‘Yeah. And so was Henry Tudor I heard. But that never stopped him, the old goat.’ Then more quietly to herself, ‘Last term it was his weight, and now it’s his - his orientation.’

‘You shouldn’t make fun, Mam,’ she heard her son complain. ‘Really, you shouldn’t.’

‘Don’t you remember your Dad telling you how he went through the same baloney when he was your age?’ she told him. ‘It’s only natural for a growing boy, after all. He had a crush on loads of his teachers, he told us. Especially that shaggy-maned Music master with the curly-handled cane and the strange penchant for pentatonics and Percy Grainger.’

‘Mam - listen!’ Chris went on. ‘Is that why you - why you cane Drew some nights?’

‘What was that!’ Anne yelled out, staring, open-mouthed, at the ceiling that separated them.

‘I’m never asleep before midnight, you know,’ he countered.

‘Don’t be a silly billy,’ Anne called out, eyes wide. ‘Your Dad deserves to get his bottom smacked every so often. He can be a very naughty man you know.’ Her eyes lit up. ‘One time he even chased me right the way round - anyway, never you mind about all that. Say - are you coming downstairs today or what? Daddy Drew must have gone off to work almost an hour ago.’

To the accompaniment of feet banging on the ceiling, Anne heard her son demand, ‘Mam, why do you call him that?’

‘You mean Drew?’ she replied. ‘Because it’s his name, of course, dear. Drew. Though I admit it’s incredibly comical, given his job I mean. But there again I suppose we both have odd names, don’t we? My middle name is Florence, for all the good it’s ever done me at
The Willows
.’

Anne’s son Chris suddenly walked into the room, still dressed in his black dressing-gown and pyjamas, his dark hair a-frazzle. ‘I don’t mean
Drew
, Mam - I mean
Dad
. Why do you say that?’

Anne turned and looked at her teenage son askance. Her blue eyes suddenly flared. ‘Look, we had all that out last week, didn’t we?’ She handed the boy a comb. ‘Get your blazer and jeans on, and - and get to school right now!’

‘Oh, but Mam, can’t you drive me?’ he pleaded, dragging the comb across his head.

Anne banged her little fists down on the table, and turned and stared straight at him.

At this Chris turned his whole body away from her. ‘O.K., O.K. Just don’t spear me again with those - those scary eyes you’ve got, please, Mam.’

‘Whatever do you mean?’ Anne asked him, first scowling, then smiling thinly. ‘Drew is always saying how he loves my blue eyes. They’re beautiful, he’s always telling me. And
he
should know if anyone should. Artists know what beautiful things look like, don’t they?’

‘Well, not all of them,’ put in Chris. ‘
He
certainly doesn’t, for a start. Didn’t he tell you he had to go to
Specsavers
last Saturday? I bet he didn’t, did he, Mam?’

‘
Specsavers!’
exclaimed Anne.

‘That’s what I said,’ Chris told her. ‘And when he was there guess who he bumped into?’

‘Oh, I don’t know,’ his mother replied, plainly alarmed at this news. ‘Who?’

‘Everybody,’ Chris told with a laugh. ‘Get it?’ The boy swiftly ducked and turned away as Anne picked up an apple from the table and hurled it at him, but only succeeded in striking the sofa. Then, recalling something, she ran towards the sofa and reached behind it for the cane she always kept there, and, bending it adroitly between her hands like a practised school-master, proceeded to chase her son out of the room with it, and back again up the carpeted stairs.

Dressed in skinny, black jeans, black trainers and a black fleeced-jacket, Chris, walked out of his end-of-terraced house and slammed the front-door behind him in his customary, care-free fashion. He suddenly halted on the footpath and watched, intrigued, as a large furniture-van slowed down, then pulled up in the road outside. Chris pulled the gate shut behind him, and, after spinning round a few times to take in the unexpected scene, he began to walk off briskly in the direction of a pretty, red-haired girl in full school-uniform, who, having just climbed out of a battered, old car, now stood further down the road, clearly waiting for him. Chris approached and kissed the girl on the neck, patted her bottom affectionately, and shouldered her bulging school-bag for her. The pair then walked off together, hand-in-hand, as happy as two young larks.

From the front-bedroom window above and behind them, Anne watched on like a hawk. She was no less intrigued than her son was at the large van that now sat, parked, outside in the road. Suddenly the orange helicopter began returning, and very soon, whirring as loudly as before, hovered overhead, scattering loose leaves and twigs all around. Anne felt compelled to shut out the noise which had interfered with her subtle act of spying, and, after reaching up and slamming the window, and setting the catch, she quickly moved back a little from the glass, and watched the developing action from behind the safety of a thin, red-flowered curtain.

Anne soon hurried downstairs and went into the front-parlour, believing that this might be a much better vantage-point from which to view and assess the new arrivals, whom she felt would most likely turn out to be her new neighbours. But her decision was sadly the wrong one, as she found she was now only able to make out the hats and caps of the three men above the flat summit of the hedge, one of whom was clearly just the driver, and another his removals-assistant. Straining now on tiptoe, Anne longed to see a female head appear, but, gaze as hard as she dare, there didn’t appear to be one. Oh, dear, she thought, surely it wasn’t going to be a single male resident again, like the last but one gentleman they had had, she mused unhappily, grimacing at the despondent memory she still harboured of the wheel-chair bound sergeant who had got injured in Iraq, and who had had to go off to Cardiff for the more constant care she had always known he desperately required. Decent and friendly though he was, this was no place for Sergeant O’Keefe or for any of his solitary, secluded kind, she told herself.

Minutes later, dressed now with just an unbuttoned grey macintosh covering her navy-blue uniform, Anne shut tight and locked her blue front-door and walked hesitantly down the flag-stoned path. Conscious all of a sudden that she might be being watched from the neighbouring house, she thought better of peering over the adjoining hedge, and instead, closing the gate on the latch, she approached her small red Nissan Micra that sat parked at the kerbside, and, after depositing her bag on its passenger-seat, she climbed inside, belted herself in securely, started the engine, and, after gazing briefly into the rear-view mirror, drove cautiously away.

The noise of the car’s engine still audible in the distance, an old, white-haired man, clearly waiting for Anne to leave, suddenly emerged from his new front-door, tipped over to the ground the
‘Sold’
sign that stood right beside it, and spun round to confront the set of a dozen or so cardboard boxes that still remained to be carried into the house, and which had been left scattered over his crazy paving by the disappointingly lazy, now departed, removals-men.