Last Train to Gloryhole (49 page)

Just then Volver remembered that the blond girl, whom he had taken to calling his ‘Welsh bitch’ on the last occasion he was up that way, was very likely going to be in the pub where he had arranged to meet up with the boys. After all, she did seem to sort of live there, he mused. Striding across the car-park, and removing his
Ray-Bans
and smoothing down his long hair and his short, black beard, he chuckled contentedly to himself. If his wife only knew what he had already done, or had any idea what his present plans were, he told himself, then she would most likely throttle him, then chop off his prunes, (as she had countless times before threatened to do,) and then, with an explanatory note attached, post them off to Jacob Zuma. ‘Oh, come on, now, Agnetha,’ he recalled telling her soon after they had first met in a street-bar in Amsterdam. ‘What you don’t know won’t hurt you, surely, sweetheart.’ But this lax comment had turned out to be very like a red rag to a bull, and so, ever since then he had kept his business dealings entirely to himself, and his testicles in an even tighter pair of jockey-pants.

Pushing open the translucent glass-door of the lounge-bar and sauntering inside, Volver smiled inwardly as he thought about the isolated, rural domain where he had spent the last three nights, and the deep, relieving sleep he had experienced while staying there. Who could guess that the latest supply of Class-A and -B drugs to the valleys of South Wales was presently being organised from such an innocuous location? he asked himself. And who could imagine that the drugs themselves were now stored deep in underground tunnels, not a million miles from where he was now standing, and were even being packaged there for distribution, then doled out by his two new young friends, and their own friends, and sold, both singly, as well as in bulk, from the small, two-up two-down, terraced houses that populated the nearby town?

But what only a very small, select group of people did know, however - of which, of course, he was now one - was that the second house this side of the road-bridge that ran across the
Taff Trail
, and almost backed on to its viaduct, and but a short way up the road from the very pub he was ordering himself a drink in, was the current domicile of the renowned, international singer-songwriter, and equally renowned drug-addict, Carla Steel.

Moving his filled glass to the much drier beer-mat nearer his elbow, and accepting his change with a forced grin, Volver asked the Irish landlord why his pub was called
The Railway
, when he had yet to see a single train, or even a yard of standard-width railway track, this side of Merthyr.

‘Well, a double-line track used to run right through here around thirty or forty years ago,’ the Kerry man told him. ‘And this pub, you see, happens to be much older than that.’

‘Oh, is that right?’ Volver asked him, slipping a tiny pill into his glass then drinking from it.

‘You must have seen the huge viaduct called
The Seven Arches
as you drove your car up here, surely?’ the Irishman added, studying the raw, acne patch bordering the Afrikaner’s beard.

‘Do you mean that huge bridge over the valley that only cyclists seem to use,’ said Volver, ‘and whose track then passes under the road that this pub is on?’

‘Aye, that’s right,’ the landlord told him. ‘Well, just this side of the little road-bridge that they all cycle under is the terraced house where the singer Carla Steel and her old, sick father now live.
‘Coral,’
I think they went and called the house soon after they moved in there,’ he went on, ‘though none of my customers seem to have the foggiest idea why they went and did that.’

‘I may seem like a useless, washed-up, toneless, old tin-can to you, my girl, but didn’t you know that God recycles trash?’

Seated just across the finished breakfast dishes from him, Carla shook her head at her father, more in pity than in desperation.

He pointed at the black rectangular object that had now taken up residence on the living-room table. ‘For heaven’s sake what good is that thing to an old man like me, eh?’ he asked her.

Tom was sounding especially angry that morning. Despite the thick reefers his daughter regularly force-fed him twice-daily, his pains now seemed to be getting worse once again. ‘When you called up from London and you told me you were getting me a new eye-pad,’ he said, ‘I certainly didn’t think you were going to bring me a blasted computer! I recently had cataract surgery, remember, so you surely must have known I’d look damn silly with that enormous thing cellotaped to my forehead?’ He lifted it up and flapped it against his temple to illustrate his point.

‘I know, Dad, I know,’ his giggling daughter replied. ‘But I couldn’t exactly see your face from my flat in London, could I? After all, you haven’t got
Skype
like I have.’

‘
Skype!
What the hell is that when it’s at home?’ asked Tom, rubbing his now aching chest. ‘Anyway, I told you I can’t stand that
Sky,
didn’t I? Their TV-News always seems to me to be wtitten by that Dai Cameroon himself.’

Despite having only recently arrived in
Gloryhole
, and with a few of his boxes still unpacked, Tom Davies was now very much on his way out. It was a tragic situation, of course, but one that he had trained himself to become accustomed to, more or less understood, and, in recent days, with the invaluable, spiritual support his brother Gary provided him, now partially embraced.

Tom let his mind drift back to the preceding winter when he was living in a flat on the outskirts of Cardiff. He had first known that he was in serious trouble when he wasn’t able to find his only pair of pyjamas for three days straight, and then one morning, on opening the cupboard at the top of the stairs to collect a fresh tea-towel, found them draped snugly, but, of course, far too warmly, over the immersion-heater that sat inside. And then one morning, and at least three days after he had ventured out for his shopping, he discovered that the red, plastic serving-spoon he had mysteriously mislaid was lying deeply submerged within its tin under more than half a pound of
Alpen
, which he quickly realised he must have stupidly poured right on top of it.

These two instances were just signs, it’s true, thought Tom, but he knew full well the enormity of what they meant for him. And what they meant was that, sooner, rather than later, he would need to ring up, and perhaps even summon to him, his only daughter Carla, whom he hadn’t seen for years, and who now lived up in London, where her musical career continued to flourish. And what he realised he would now be forced to tell her, he regretted far more than if he was once again having to report to her the sudden death of their much-loved, springer spaniel, Coral.

Tom’s mind then drifted forward to just a week ago. One afternoon he had told his daughter, ‘It’s only Spring, Carla, and the people on the television-news seem to be going on and on about ‘summer bed-linen.’ Turn it over so I can watch ‘
Countdown
,’ would you, there’s a good girl.’ Carla had slumped sideways on the sofa and laughed up at him. ‘It was a man known as Osama Bin Laden that that they were all referring to, Dada,’ she told him. ‘American soldiers found him and killed him in some mansion he was hiding away in in northern Pakistan,’ Carla had continued. ‘And then they promptly buried him at sea, if you care to believe what they claim.’

Tom screwed up his eyes in his quaint, enigmatic fashion, and tried hard to make sense of the rather improbable geography that seemed to be involved in the unlikely tale his daughter had just related to him. But, irrespective of the particular spatial limitations involved, Tom soon had to admit that he simply wasn’t capable of making head nor tail of it.

‘It’s called a ‘
Sidecar
,’ ’ Volver told him. ‘That’s brandy, cointreau and lemon-juice. Stick with me and you could be drinking them every night of the week, trust me. Hey, boys - are you listening?’

‘I won’t be a minute,’ said Steffan, turning away from the older man and approaching the one-armed bandit that stood against the pub-wall. ‘It’s just that this machine took money off me last night, and I swear I’m just not having that.’ He tossed a coin in the air, spun his body round once, and caught it. ‘It’s pay-back time!’ he announced to the strange metal object with a growl.

‘Shall I tell you what that’s called, Steffan?’ asked Volver, turning round to watch him.

‘Determination?’ the boy shot back.

‘Just listen to yourself, will you? No, it’s called addiction,’ Volver told him. ‘And if you happen to have got an addictive personality - and you clearly have, lad - then, I reckon you should save your addiction for the things that really matter in life. I mean, save it for fhe food you depend on.’

‘Food!’ exclaimed Steffan, dropping a coin into the machine and seeing how his luck was. ‘By that I take it you mean drugs?’ he enquired of the man in the shiny suit.

‘Of course,’ the South African replied, wishing his young, track-suited companion hadn’t moved so far away from him, so that he could have slapped him squarely on the back. ‘You and I should be grateful that drugs are so addictive, right, Steffan? If coke happens to be a man’s food, then a man has got to eat, right?’ Volver stepped away from the bar and moved closer to him. ‘Listen. That mate of yours.’ The Afrikaner paused for effect. ‘He’s a couple of sheets short of the full roll, if you ask me.’ He lowered his head and sipped his drink, and waited to see the stocky boy’s reaction. ‘Where’s he gone now, by the way? I just went and bought the twat a pint.’

‘Are you talking about Jake?’ Steffan asked distractedly. ‘Why, he’s gone to get the food,’ he told him, pulling once again on the obtuse-angled lever of the big, illuminated object, then flashing the older man a smile. The first coin he dropped plainly sank without trace, and the second quickly went the same way, but the third brought him three plums, and, as if so much fresh fruit had upset the very bowels of the machine, it suddenly belched like a mis-firing piston, and spewed out from its nether regions a gush of steaming silver.

‘Wow! I see slot-machines just buckle in your hands, lad,’ said Volver, grinning admiringly.

‘I don’t think it’s so much the machine, per se,’ Steffan told him, bending low, and gathering up all the money in two separate hands, then sifting it carefully, coin by grubby coin, through his fingers, and then down into the side-pockets of his jacket. ‘No, I believe it’s the fruit.’

‘The fruit!’ ejaculated the South African, looking down at him.

‘Yeah. For some reason, fruit always seem to - to melt in my hands.’

‘Melt!’ exclaimed Volver, not catching the boy’s drift, fearing it might be some new item of street-speak English he had missed out on, but still determined to press home the point. ‘Please tell me, if you can, Steffan, how the hell fruit can melt, would you?’

‘Crumble then,’ said Steffan. ‘Yeah, crumble I mean.’ He made a determined effort to smile back at Volver, but suddenly felt something deep within his guts that prevented him. Yes, the boy realised that he had probably made an error in insisting that his school-mate Jake join the rich man’s gang, but he didn’t take kindly to the smug way in which the suited man seemed always to want to drive home, at their expense, his sense of superiority. Steffan felt it might be the kind of drugs the tall, bearded man was hooked on that made him act like that, or maybe that’s just how he was by nature. Either way, Steffan knew that he didn’t like it. ‘They’re just fruit, aren’t they?’ he told Volver. ‘And didn’t we hear the man on the news just say that this was likely to be the year when
Blackberry
and
Apple
crumbled? Or one of the buggers at least.’

Tom was lying on his back in bed with an open bible propped up, and supported vertically, in his thin, frail fingers, against the first fold of the thick blanket that Carla had turned back lovingly for him across the top of his shiny, green eiderdown. With the aid of his reading-glasses, which sat, unbalanced and askew, just below the bridge of his long, hooked nose, he was endeavouring to read a passage from
The New Testament
which he found had recently begun to mean the world to him, and which seemed especially pertinent at this, the crucial, pivotal juncture in his long, but now plainly ending, life.

Tom’s reading was a silent, joyous task; these days, perhaps it was his only one. A blind person could not have heard the ailing man turn his pages, nor a deaf person have perceived the tiny tears that soon began to fill up the dark, inner corners of the old man’s weary eyes. The door of his room slowly opened and he looked up and saw his lovely daughter walk over and sit herself down close beside the gentle, shiny hillock that was his slender, covered frame. Tom read on. He realised that, by now, Carla was as accustomed to the idea of the inevitable happening as was he himself, and, now that his reverend brother was present in the house with him most evenings, and also during the daytime hours when his work didn’t call him away, Tom felt it far easier to accept, and even to corroborate without undue anguish, the undeniable fact that he had, by now, reached the final, wafer-thin pages of his very own
Book of Revelation
.

Though ever present, thoroughly devoted, and constant in her many, and varied, tasks of administering to him, at times Carla’s mind couldn’t help but be gripped with the sad, unfortunate image of the dying astronaut lying abed, and respiring over-loudly, in the film ‘
2001: A Space Odyssey
.’ The man even looked like my dad, she mused. There again, that fictional figure had aged and died utterly alone and abandoned, she told herself, while her father, now at least, had around him all of the living members that remained of his once-close, but still cherished, family.

Yes, Carla pondered, as she watched her dear father’s flickering pupils scan the brief lines of the numbered verses that he read without speaking, a once-loving family had sprung out of a small village embedded in the lush, green pastures of the Vale of Usk, and had travelled the wide world, seemingly making at least some difference to the lives of people of all ages, and of a variety of different creeds and cultures. And her dear father could feel rightly proud of his contribution in this respect, she told herself, nodding. While her own efforts had unquestionably entertained, and perhaps, to some degree, enriched, the lives of millions of music-lovers on six different continents - and many might claim that this was a very laudable achievement in itself - her father’s efforts, and not just his medical work, but the actions that followed from the application of his
‘gift,’
had actually
saved
lives. And so to Carla’s mind there was little doubt as to whose lifetime achievements she considered by far the more worthy and meritorious.