Last Train to Gloryhole (43 page)

‘
Bob Dylan
did!’ stammered Chris, wincing in disbelief.

‘No, Dylan Thomas, silly,’ said Carla. ‘It was during the war, you see, when Londoners, whatever nationality or faith they happened to be, or gender, or age, or sexual orientation - and as often as not that was carefully concealed - were united together in a way I am quite certain they have never ever been since.’

The big window behind Carla was lensed with rain. Chris smiled lovingly at the dusky, buxom, intriguing little woman, who was sitting cross-legged, and curled up before it. He was grateful to her for allowing him to call her his friend, but totally in awe of her unique and considerable musical talent, that seemed to enrich, not just his own life, but that of the whole world about him.

The singer slowly, methodically, rolled a joint that this time would be big enough, and would burn long enough, to enable the pair of musicians to kick back and relax from their musical exertions for a while. What had always made drugs so essential - so sexy - to Carla, she thought, was the very real opportunity to be
other
. She looked across and studied her new-found friend closely, and wondered if he might be experiencing much the same. Carla wasn’t sure, but she sensed that the effect the drug was having on Chris was to liberate his mind, since his deep, brown eyes - the windows of his young soul - seemed to be panning, with no discernible focus, the dim, shadowy room they were presently sitting in, almost as if slowly scanning the new, yet tediously bland surface of another planet. She leaned across and took the joint from between his fingers, laying it carefully within the saucer on the floor, and spoke to him.

‘Tell me, Chris,’ she asked. ‘At this moment is there a particularly significant girl in your life?’

‘Well yes, I suppose there is,’ he replied. ‘But I’d hardly call my mother a girl.’

‘
You
know what I mean, smart-ass,’ she told him, smacking the gashed, denim-clad knee that now lay languidly rolled against her own.

Chris so wanted her to smack him again - anywhere, on his arm, his face, even on his bare behind. Why exactly, mattered not to him. All he knew was that he craved more of this blessed intimacy that the artistic, musical duo already seemed to share, but which he had not yet found with the young Rhiannon, with a lover, with any other person.

Through liquid, fast closing eyes, Chris watched as Carla lifted and cradled her instrument, and once more tried to complete the song that they had first devised together not yet an hour before. Entranced, he watched her fingers thrumb, her moist lips pout and part, and then he lay back and listened as her deep, mellifluous voice once more filled the whole house. How Chris envied the young woman’s assuredness about all that she set her hand to, while he, sad failure that he felt he was, hadn’t even been able to discover whether or not a single sound was emitted in the woods as a tree fell, and there was no one there to hear it.

As Chris saw it, Carla’s largely solitary life in the British capital had seemed to provide her with the perfect opportunity - the ideal setting - to open her box of lyrical matches, ignite around a dozen of various colours, and set the musical world alight. Her first album-release had gone platinum after just a year, he recalled, the second -
Candice Farm
- in less than a month. Economy was clearly the singer’s watchword, he mused. Why else had Carla lived apart from people these last years, he thought, if not to say not a syllable more than was in her songs.

Yes, in truth, Carla Steel was economy personified, Chris mused, blazing the cannabis joint he held. She
was
the song; vocal
and
guitar; three island-choruses with a bridge in between. And there she now sat, relaxed, suitably reclined, smiling serenely, at peace and buzzing, in fact every bit as stoned as he knew he plainly was. Plucking the strings of her battered old guitar, and seemingly fusing the chatged elements about her, the boy beheld Carla perform her musical alchemy, which, as ever, solidified in mere minutes into a hard, gleaming band of purest gold.

‘We were on a break, remember,’ Chris told her.

‘I thought it was a lunch-time,’ replied Rhiannon.

‘Not that kind of break, stupid,’ he retorted, throwing his gum-ball across the room, and watching it soar straight into the bin, where it landed with a metallic clunk.

Deep within the bowels of the school-library the pair sat huddled together in matching, facing chairs, alongside them the shadowy light of late-afternoon lying captive in the window-wells. Things appeared to be looking up, each one was thinking independently. However, unbeknown to them,
Discordia
, the goddess of marital strife, was seemingly pulling strings in some other tender scenario, in another world completely.

‘Listen we’re talking about Pippa Jenkins here, for God’s sake,’ Chris told Rhiannon, opening up another wrapper and refilling his drying mouth.

‘And?’

‘Well, she isn’t exactly - you know -’ He paused for effect.

‘Me?’ said Rhiannon, following her pert comment with a beaming smile.

‘Well, that too, of course.’ said Chris, leaning across and making as if to kiss her, but instead dribbling his glob of chewing-gum onto her shiny nose. Despite herself, Rhiannon tried hard not to flinch. ‘But she’s not really my type, is she?’ he told her, gobbling the sticky ball up again.

‘Isn’t she?’ asked Rhiannon, making light of his childish action, and dipping, and rubbing her nose clean with a paper tissue she always kept in her sleeve.

‘No, and she never was, if I’m honest,’ he snapped back.

‘I see. Well, Chris, I can understand why you say that.’

‘Can you?’ he asked. ‘How?’

‘My form-tutor - Mr. Hardiman - told us last week that if you sleep with dogs then you’re sure to catch fleas. That’s pretty apt under the circumstances, don’t you think?’

‘I’m not sure. I bet he doesn’t even have a dog,’ he teased her. ‘That guy is seriously weird. if you ask me. In Maths earlier today he told us that there are ten sorts of people in the world. Those who understand Binary, and those who don’t!’ Chris smiled a wry smile, but Rhiannon’s brows narrowed as she tried, unsuccessfully, to fathom its meaning. ‘And you tell me the guy’s your form-tutor!’ said Chris. ‘Do you know I feel sorry for you, I really do. Harry Hard-on takes teaching even less seriously than old Mrs. Tibbs and my dad do, and I know for a fact that
he
thinks school is a complete joke.’

‘O.K., I hear you. Anyway, I’ve been told she’s riddled,’ Rhiannon told him.

‘Who? Mrs. Tibbs!’ ejaculated.Chris.

‘No, silly. Pippa Jenkins,’ retorted Rhiannon. ‘
And
her sister. And their - their long-haired brother Sam. If you ask me, the whole family are a bleedin’ -’

‘Flea Circus?’ Chris suggested.

‘Menagerie, I was going to say,’ she told him, giggling.

‘A what?’

‘Well, isn’t that what you call it?’

‘It’s called a menage-a-trois, stupid,’ Chris teased her, looking down straightaway to hide his grinning face.

‘Is it?’ she asked. ‘O.K., well, unlike you, I was never any good at Spanish, was I?’

Pippa Jenkins suddenly walked past the window, arm-in-arm with a tall boy in a duffel-coat.

‘Slut!’ they both called out simultaneously, and then collapsed laughing and squealing into each other’s arms across the table-top.

The kiss that followed caused the watching librarian, Ms.Seccombe, to switch off every light, and call time on all the sundry coupling that was taking place in virtually every available nook and cranny, except, of course, the very area that she herself supervised - the crowded computer-suite, where
‘Homework-Club’
had been proceeding apace for well over an hour now.

Brenda Seccombe logged off her own computer and gathered up the six or seven text-books that the club-kids had been using. Gone were the days, the woman told herself, when homework was something that all children undertook at home. And gone also were the days when canoodling was something carried out well away from the school, either in the woods, the park, or very occasionally behind the bike-sheds. There again, Brenda thought, the Deputy Head-Teacher was always banging on about how her library should become ‘a centre for all aspects of learning,’ wasn’t he? So, she told herself, I figure if the old fool chose to walk in here right now, and witnessed all the clandestine fondlling and smooching that was going on, she could always tell him that she was simply fulfilling one of the key-objectives that, after all, the man had insisted she put in her departmental action-plan.

And even sex had to be learned somewhere, didn’t it? Brenda contended, as if arguing the toss with her alter ego. Otherwise all schools would soon run short of pupils, and teachers, technicians and librarians alike would be thrown out onto the scrap-heap as a result. Yes, you had to learn about love and sex somewhere, she mused, smiling benignly, as she held open the swing-door so that a dozen students, including Chris and Rhiannon, could make their exit. And, with all these new-fangled, parental controls they’ve come up with in recent years, she pondered, as she took her car-keys from her drawer and twirled them round her finger, no longer did everyone around have access to as wide a selection of adult-porn at home as she did.

In the northern sky over Morlais Hill, and above the much closer burial-ground, the clouds were clearly breaking up, but the harsh, eye-shadow shades of robin’s egg blue and lavender marked out the cutting-edge of the latest cold front that was fast arriving. I drew the curtains closed and walked over to the sofa, picked up the weekly TV-magazine that we took, and scanned it. ‘There’s a programme on the box I want to see called
‘If Wales Could Talk.’
Fancy it, Gwen?’ I asked. ‘I imagine it’s a new political show.’

Gwen looked up at me with a disconcerting look. ‘Surely that must be
whales
,’ she said. ‘You know, the swimming, squirting kind. And if it is, well, you know I can’t stand nature programmes.’

I held the page close up to my eyes, and squinted manfully so as to check out the spelling. ‘Oh, no, sorry, love’ I said. ‘It’s actually entitled
‘If Walls Could Talk,’
and it’s apparently a property show about home-renovations. You know, I guess I’ll need that second cataract operation sooner than I thought,’ I told her, feeling a complete fool.

‘Well, I’ve been telling you for ages, haven’t I?’ she continued. ‘Last month you went and sent the council-tax cheque off to British Gas, and we still don’t know yet if they’re going to cut us off or evict us. Get a new pair of reading-glasses, why don’t you.’

‘But we just don’t have the money, love,’ I told her. ‘The pay-check from my part-time job barely gets us through the week, as it is. And then there’s our utility bills, which have got completely out of control.’ I waved my arms above my head to express my frustration, then gazed back at Gwen. ‘How ironic is it, love, that, in an energy-rich country like ours, so many people last winter were too terrified to even turn on their heating. I feel what we need to be told is why the government can’t just stop the energy companies ripping us all off as they’re currently doing? Who is in charge in this country, for heaven;s sake? I reckon Mister Brylcreem and his pal living next-door are even oilier than we all feared. My God! I reckon that with the Con-Dems in charge up in London, the light at the end of the tunnel has effectively been turned off.’

‘Ever the optimist, aren’t you love?’ said Gwen sarcastically, crossing her legs and plumping a couple of cushions with her tight little fist, so making room for me to join her on the sofa. ‘I have only ever voted once in recent years, you know, and that was in the Referendum, and I wasn’t really bothered who won then, either. Listen, my love,’ she said, ‘when I am tucked up in bed and fixing to die, I can assure you that the last sound you will hear from me will be that of Lady Conscience cracking her hollow whip.’

‘Yet if you go first, Gwen, and I’m left here a widower, you’ll already be a householder in heaven by the time I get there,’ I told her, putting my arm round her shoulders, and kissing her cheek. A nose, the elaborate, bony edge of which forever called for a lover’s finger to be drawn down along it, received its just desserts. ‘And I feel He’ll look after you,’ I said. ‘I’ve always told you how God is just.’

‘Yeah, just not available when you need Him,’ was her cute reply. ‘Arthur, for all the trouble I am sometimes, I can say that you’ve never once been a burden to me, do you know that?’

I glared at her. I had finally endured enough. ‘Gwen - why do you call me that?’ I asked.

‘Call you what, love?’ she retorted, her eyes narrowing.

‘Arthur. You called me Arthur again. You see, for all but the last two or three years you’ve been calling me Dyl, like everyone else does. Then one day, quite out of the blue -’

‘God - you went on about this nonsense last week,’ she told me. ‘You know, I do believe that I’ve always called you Arthur, have I not? It
is
your first name, after all, right? And, when I asked Rhiannon, she told me she can’t remember me calling you anything else.’

‘Rhiannon said that!’ I bawled back at her, instantly regretting my statement of doubt. I wondered about this for a few moments and came to the conclusion that it could only have been that my daughter wished to prolong familial harmony in the household by getting her mother to believe she was right, even though we had many times discussed this queer Arthur-business, and Rhiannon had told me how she had been struck by the eccentricity of it every bit as much as I had. Indeed, coupled with the horse-box graffiti, and the business down in town at the call-centre I heard about from someone in the pub, as well as her violent outburst with a crusty French-loaf in
Prince Charles
that time, Gwen’s apparent fixation on King Arthur, (or the never-crowned, Welsh chief known as Arthur, as she had once insisted) was a fairly recent development, and one which I had to admit had come to blight our most recent days together.

‘Arthur - pass me my catalogue, please,’ Gwen asked, reaching for a felt-tip pen with which she liked to circle items she wanted to order, and which she felt we could just about afford.