Last Train to Gloryhole (48 page)

‘Tom’s gift! How do you mean?’ he replied. ‘Because I’m pretty sure he hasn’t sent me a solitary card, even on my birthday, since - since we were both teenagers.’

‘I don’t mean that kind of gift,’ she told him, grinning. ‘I mean his - you know, his power.’

‘Oh, that. But of course I am,’ he told her, smiling. Then gazing deeply into her eyes he added, ‘You see, Carla, we two both happen to possess it.’ His niece’s mouth dropped open. ‘Oh, yes, girl, it’s true all right. You know, I’ve been told it might be that it’s something that’s inherited, but I really don’t have an opinion on that, to be honest.’

‘You mean you’re actually telling me that you possess a gift too!’ said Carla.

‘For my sins, Carla, yes, I do,’ the man replied, sucking deeply on his pipe and creating the first sizeable cloud the sky above
Gloryhole
had witnessed that day. ‘And perhaps even more so than your father does.’

‘More so!’ she exclaimed. ‘Good God!’

‘Sure,’ announced Gary. ‘You sound shocked, my dear. But tell me, why is that so strange? We
are
brothers, after all,’ he told her. ‘Forgive me if I describe myself as such,’ he added, ‘but for a very long time now I have felt I was the Mycroft to my brother Tom’s Sherlock.’

Riccardo Pantheon, the self-styled ‘mind-reader, clairvoyant, hypnotist, conjuror, and ventiloquist’ (real name, Richard Ian Plant,) lived relatively unhappily ten miles north of Cardiff with his one-quarter-Welsh, second wife, (the mother of his three teenage, Bluebirds-fanatic sons,) who, like him, had marginally failed to achieve the A-level grades she required to secure a university-education. This deficiency, however, he frequently told himself, unquestionably went on to blight his own life and career far more than it appeared to have bothered her.

Ever since starting at secondary school, Dick’s ambition in life had been to one day go to university, Oxbridge or otherwise, major in British History, work hard day and night, and hopefully leave with a first-class honours degree. But now sadly he realised that in this respect he had underachieved drastically, since by 2011, although he could boast that he had actually been to Oxford, and worked hard well into the night on both occasions (at a social club on the
Blackbird Leyes
estate, as it happens) the only first-class thing he had left the place with was the trunk road he felt repeatedly tempted to speed along - the A.40, via Cheltenham and Gloucester, to be exact - and all he ever seemed to get awarded with each time he ventured there were three more penalty-points on his driving-licence.

Despite his marital connections, and, more likely, because of them, the stocky, dark-haired, but balding, man hated the Welsh with as great a passion as he hated the Taliban, black people, Asians, the Labour Party, and Fred and Rosie West, the latter pair quite understandably, for the indelible shame he believed their actions had brought upon his home town of Gloucester; so much so, that, in recent days, when asked where he came from, he invariably answered ‘The Forest of Dean,’ or ‘the West Country,’ or even, one time, ‘Swindon.’

The former bingo-caller’s one remaining ambition in life was to one day hypnotise the entire Welsh race into believing that they were ‘the spawn of the devil,’ whose traditional tongue was of the forked variety, slavered, as he believed it was, from before the Dark Ages, with a liberal coating of malice, aggression, bellicosity, self-love and self-delusion. He felt that if any race on Earth had conceived original sin then it had to have been the Welsh, and he would frequently tell people the same. One day soon he would get to punish them all, Dick had promised himself, but when he might actually get round to doing that - now that his latest wife was on the point of presenting him with their fourth child in just seventeen years - he wasn’t entirely sure.

Dick felt that, if he were a David Blaine, or a Derren Brown, perhaps, he might stand a serious chance of achieving his objective, but only if he were to be granted a booking to perform on television, (preferably by BBC Wales, or the Welsh equivalent of Channel 4 -
Sianel 4C
.) As for the time being, sadly, he had wreaked revenge on just the one - the woman he most despised above all others, and not just because she was quite a lot cleverer than him, especially in her knowledge and understanding of the subject that had brought them together, namely ancient British History, but that, contrary to his belief, and his repeated assertions, Gwen proved herself to be a woman who was courageous enough to walk away from the man. And this his former wife had deigned to do, he recalled, on a bitterly cold, winter’s night outside their house on Cemetery Road, a brown cardboard-box filled with his clothes at her slippered feet, and with a rolling-pin gripped in her strong right-arm, and their only child - Sarah Olwen - in the other.

By the seventh day of his inaugural visits to his elder brother’s new, rural home, the Reverend Gary Davies seemed to have developed sufficient confidence - one might even say, self-indulgence - to allow himself to begin waxing lyrical on matters which bore only a tangential relationship to Tom’s tragic, terminal condition, yet which clearly had a great deal to do with metaphysics, with philosophy, and, in a general sense, with the meaning of life.

‘And so, in much the same way that we tend to approach the dilemma of the wasp that gets trapped inside our window, God is not unlike us, in that He too wants to get us back out into the open air once again. And so, to make that happen, He opens up a window for us, you see. But crikey how we scream and we shout and complain, in utter frustration, as we repeatedly butt away with our heads and noses in all directions, and into all manner of solid objects round and about us, when what He is doing - all He is doing, in truth - is the very best for us. Yes, the
very
best. And, as people of God, what we need to realise, Carla, is that He won’t allow anything or anyone to effectively harm us. It’s that simple, you see,
really
it is. Whatever sorts of problems and tragedies beset us in our lives, and there isn’t anyone alive who won’t get to experience all these, we should be in no doubt that God will just keep on flipping that flipping door open for us.’

‘Window,’ said Carla.

‘Yes - window, I mean,’ Gary told her, smiling. ‘But it is true, nonetheless, don’t you think? The Man-upstairs just keeps flipping that window open for us day after day, week after week, winter, summer, rain or shine.’ He pouted. ‘But do we see it? Do we even look for it? Do we even sense that He might have already released us from our torment? Do we heck as like! No - we just keep telling ourselves that there is simply no way out for us. ‘I’m trapped!’ we scream. ‘Life is crap!’ we tell the world. ‘Ooh, wait - I’ve got a spare minute so I think I’ll just pop upstairs and kill myself.’ He watched as Carla smiled. Yes, I know it sounds crazy, dear, but it’s true nevertheless. Aren’t people amazing? We’re all seemingly content to believe that we’re locked up in - in Wormwood Scrubs, when, in reality, we’re running about freely, with a box-kite and a lollipop, in the warm airy gusts of Richmond Park. No, better still, The Brecon Beacons.’

The drone and hiccup of the washer-dryer broke into the silence which followed the reverend’s earnest speech concerning the infinite grace and mercy of his God. Carla was hoping that the spin-cycle might start right that moment, and drown out whatever similar diatribe her uncle planned to follow it up with. And, if the machine didn’t start spinning soon, she thought, she might be forced to adopt plan-B, which would most likely involve opening up a window - a la God and the wasp, she mused - and, with much waving and blowing, drive her uncle, and of course his infernal pipe-smoke, out through it, perhaps with the aid of a handkerchief, or a wet towel, or, better still, she thought, the giant frying-pan that her father kept sitting on the cooker.

But although these were Carla’s initial feelings, her uncle eventually began, little by little, and day by day, to wear the poor girl down. For some reason, which she couldn’t fully comprehend, he did at least seem to revive, or, perhaps, re-instill in her, some of the spiritual feelings that she remembered having felt during her youth; the comforting view, for example, of the existence of ‘a loving God,’ who was both above you and all around you at the same time; who cared about you and about the things you got up to, and the warm, tender, fatherly aspects of the same. It also fascinated her almost as much that her aged uncle - himself a father, and a grandfather, even - still welcomed and embraced this paternal slant of his God just as much as she did. The image Carla often got in her mind’s eye of an old man in a wheel-chair being stroked and cuddled by an even more ancient man with a long, white beard, who stood benevolently, ‘on guard’ almost, just behind him, was one that frequently made her smile, and, on occasions, even giggle over.

‘Suffer all the oldies to come unto Me,’ Carla whispered to herself, smiling broadly, as she climbed the stairs once more to check on her ailing, but presently slumbering, father. No, it didn’t seem right to her, somehow, except that God was, of course, old enough to regard everyone who walked the Earth as children, however ancient and decrepit they might happen to be.

How old
was
God? Carla wondered, as she closed her father’s bedroom-door, having tucked him in again. Well, I suppose he had to be time-less, she thought, since He’d obviously been there since long before people were created, and therefore even before age itself was invented. Indeed God must have invented age, much as He had invented everything else. Therefore I guess, since God can’t have an age, He must never have enjoyed having a birthday, or a birthday-party even, she mused, or once been in receipt of anything resembling a genuine present, or any kind of heart-felt, celebratory gift. Carla winced at this, rather sad, discovery.

‘Yes, how strange and how difficult it must be to be a deity,’ Carla pondered aloud. ‘I mean, as an artist, I have a pretty enormous fan-club, and occasionally I even get to enjoy fabulous celebrations in town. But a deity Who, after all, is probably the only true Deity, can’t possibly have experienced any of these terrifically fun aspects of a life at the top. And this just doesn’t seem fair somehow,’ she told herself, creeping downstairs and walking back into the kitchen, ‘but I’m sure He must get His thrills in countless other ways. In fact, unlike most of His creation, He might get a high from just seeing people hug, and cuddle, and love each other and what-not, much as my father claims he does from seeing me stroke and play with Emily, next-door’s cat.’

The past winter’s extreme weather had rendered the valley’s roads so riddled by the cruel effects of frost that many of their tarmacadam surfaces lay pitted and pock-marked, as if by the night-time actions of a tribe of clandestine, pneumatic moles. Indeed certain routes in the so-called ‘local road-network’ were now little more than sinuous mole-carpets, their fine, ground-up fragments of tarmac either dispersed laterally onto the grass verges (or the narrow stone-pavements, where the latter did exist,) or gradually, silently, becoming embedded in the tyre-grooves of the wide variety of vehicles that daily traversed the area, and so being distributed liberally to countless other towns and cities nationwide; in a way very like Welsh water, which, although a major export, is one that earns the uncomplaining Welsh not a single penny.

Volver himself had exported a vast amount of the crushed tarmacadan that Spring, but his favourite freight by far was cocaine, and in a variety of commercial forms, which catered to the specific needs of consumers throughout south and west Wales, as well as a vast network of retailing outlets he had painstakingly developed for himself right across the West Midlands and the South West of England. The exports which Volver specialised in had their origin, rather like himself, in Holland, and earned him enough untaxed income to maintain expensive, fashionable homes in London and two other international cities, as well as his temporary bolt-hole in Bristol.

On occasions Volver reminded himself that he might easily have made a first-class youth-worker, or teacher, even. After all, in recent years he was sure he had developed the sort of relationship with young people everywhere which enabled him to exercise significant persuasion over them, and, when the occasion demanded, to compel them even, as to their future conduct. And, quite naturally, he had found that the outcome of his efforts was rarely anything but beneficial to his bank-balance. Volver’s father - also named Abram - who had been a very popular rabbi in his native Durban, and himself had a knack for collaborating with young people, might perhaps have been proud of him after all, he thought. The Afrikaner winced a thin smile as he changed up and slowed to a crawl in order to make his way across the narrow, limestone bridge near
The Blue Pool,
and soon after climb the steep, winding hill to
Gloryhole
that skirted it on the river’s northern side. Yes, in a way I suppose I’m basically a role-model for Britain’s youth, Volver told himself, nodding at his smiling brown eyes in the rear-view mirror before him.

Abram Kronfield was a wealthy, self-made man, and was clearly admired by a number of very beautiful women, largely on account of that fact. But there was still one woman who had long been on the man’s radar when he was living in London, but who had now mysteriously gone to ground, sadly, he had once thought, never to be seen again. Volver recalled how he had first met Carla Steel in a drug-den in Fulham, and, for some reason, that he could never seem to fathom, had let the attractive, talented woman slip right through his fingers. But nowasays, and ever since his two new compatriots, Steffan and Jake, had discovered that she had at last turned up in her, and their, home-town of Merthyr, of all places, he had been determined to try to kill two birds with one stone, on what was to be his latest visit to the land of their fathers. But unfortunately it hadn’t quite turned out as planned, he reminded himself, as he reversed his gleaming, bright-blue Audi into the last remaining parking-space across from the rear-door of the large, rambling roadside-tavern, on the road from
Gloryhole
to Cefn, known as
The Railway Inn
.