Last Train to Gloryhole (53 page)

One of the more famous tales Jack was wont to tell his customers was how, as a boy of sixteen, who had mysteriously, and, most probably, mistakenly, got himself accepted into the town’s
‘County Grammar School,’
he had fared so atrociously in his only two ‘O’ level examinations - Physics and Latin - that when the the examination-board’s letter came back the following August, he discovered that they had awarded him CSE’s in Woodwork and Welsh! The gob-smacked Jack was naturally more than thrilled at this laudable, but highly unexpected outcome, and spent the rest of the day drinking celebratory rounds with his mates, in the public- bar of
The Quarryman’s Arms
in Pant, and yet he still asked his Auntie Jean to hide the certificate somewhere in her cellar, so that there was no chance it might pop up again unexpectedly, and compromise whatever career it might be that he chose to turn his hand to.

But Jack soon discovered.that he needn’t have overly concerned himself on that account, since he and Snowy Evans were appointed the town’s official rat-catchers, and went on to hold their esteemed positions for well over twenty years, before Jack finally summoned up sufficient courage to finally bid farewell to the council, and to his generous, blond-haired compatriot, and set off in his recently recovered, second-hand, twice written-off, VW
‘Camper-Van,’
to rent an isolated cottage, and its adjoining, former cattle-shed just north of
Caeracca
, and so try to live the airy, liberated life of the mythical, gipsy king, which Jack had for many years longed to be.

Goya’s ‘
Colossus’
had been hanging on the wall in the living-room of Tom’s house for some months now, having been brought there in the furniture-van along with everything else he had had the men pack for him on the bright, March morning when he had first arrived. Asking Carla to go downstairs and get it for him took the girl quite by surprise, but she nevertheless concurred with her father’s request, and was soon entering his bedroom once more, this time with the large, glass-covered print held securely up against her front. When she turned it round to show him, Tom at first gawped, open-mouthed, at the utter beauty of the strange, powerful subject it depicted, but then lay back down again and smiled serenely, almost as if its arrival within the scene of his imminent demise was, in some way at least, a partial justification for the same.

‘Yes - hang it up just there, would you, my love,’ said Tom, lifting a thin, veined, wavering arm and pointing to the section of the bare wall immediately across from his bed, and wishing that he still had the energy to climb out of it to assist her in the task his daughter was confronted with.

Carla stepped out of her slippers, stood up on the wobbly, three-legged stool, and, with a minimum of fuss, and just the one solitary readjustment for form’s sake, securely attached the great picture to a single hook, located centrally on the, otherwise bland, flock-papered surface.

‘How is that, Dada?’ she asked, hopping nimbly back to the floor, spinning round, and wiping her dusty fingers on the rear of her jeans. ‘Now are you sure he’s not going to scare you?’

‘The Colossus! Heavens no! Why should he?’ Tom asked, carefully sitting up against his pillows so as to experience the full aura of the cloud-covered, Iberian rural-scene now displayed before him, with its great, bearded colossus strangely turned away from it, his broad, muscle-bound back exposed and looming, and his powerful left arm poised, flexed and threatening.

‘Well, I can well empathise with all the Spanish folk running for their lives to escape him,’ Carla told her father. ‘They are understandably all panic-stricken if you ask me. I’m terrifued too just looking at it, if truth be told. That scary giant is one frightening sight, and no mistake, yeah?’

The two locked glances for a moment, while the elder probed deeply for the reply that would speak his mind and, at least partially, express the wit and weight of his experience. ‘And am
I
a frightening sight?’ the old man suddenly enquired, looking straight into Carla’s sparkling eyes.

‘What do you mean!’ she asked, confused, and somewhat flustered by his strange riposte. ‘Of course not, Dad. Why?’

‘Because - well, because,’ Tom replied, struggling to put his elusive thoughts into words that were comprehensible to her. ‘Look - you’re a clever, artistic soul, aren’t you, my sweet?’ he said. ‘Why don’t you come and sit down here next to me and tell me exactly what it is that Goya’s great painting says to you. Yes? Would you kindly do that for me?’

Carla smiled at him and nodded, then, slipping her purple foot-wear back onto her feet, she crossed over towards the bed, and gently sat herself down alongside her father’s thin, silk-covered knees. She stared down at the floor for a few seconds, nervously pinching her top lip between her teeth, then suddenly looked up and scanned the enthralling sight which now brightened up, indeed transformed, the rectangular wall before her. The questions the painting posed in Carla’s brain were many and varied, and one or two were deeply, deeply harrowing for her to contemplate. She decided to ask her father just the one she felt would insult him least.

‘Dad - why do you think you’re a frightening sight?’ Carla asked him, tenderly stroking the silky, arched projection that was his bony knee. ‘You’re not a frightening sight at all, you know, but
he
certainly is and no mistake.’ She pointed across the room so as to emphasise the point.

‘What! That pussycat?’ her father replied, his grey brows arched. ‘Look again, Carla, would you? The great Colossus is not at all what he at first seems, you know,’ he told her. At this she screwed up her eyes and studied the painting even more closely than before. ‘You know, dear, I guess you probably see him as a terrible giant scaring all the poor Spanish people away from him, very like the French general Napoleon, with his great armies, did in real life in Spain around that time.’

‘Well, yes, I do,’ Carla replied, turning towards him. ‘Something very like that, at any rate.’

‘Well, that’s understandable,’ said Tom. ‘You know, I felt much the same way the first time I saw it all those years ago in Madrid. The original, you know. But you see the painter is actually trying to show us something very profound here.’

‘Well, I realised he wasn’t showing us the burly prop-forward Adam Jones celebrating one of his tries at Twickenham,’ Carla retorted, giggling, both at her comment, and at the look of incredulity it had suddenly summoned to her father’s coarsely-lined face. ‘Though it could quite easily be a depiction of that, don’t you think?’

‘Well, now that you say so -’ said Tom, pondering the matter and smiling.

‘But to be serious, Dad, just tell me what the painting says to you, yes?’ Carla told him, turning and gazing into his ancient, veined, and woefully blood-shot grey eyes. ‘After all, you say you’ve owned it for years and years.’

The old man stroked his daughter’s side lovingly, and began his explanation. ‘Well, for a start, the great Colossus we can see towering above them doesn’t really seem to be threatening any of the fleeing people, does he, my love? I mean, after all, he’s not even looking at them, is he?’

‘Mm. Well, I suppose that’s true,’ said Carla. ‘But there’s no doubt they are all terrified of something.’

‘Oh, yes. The people are terrified, all right,’ Tom replied. ‘But just look at how the giant floats mysteriously above the landscape that they all inhabit, but yet is, in no way, rooted in it.’

‘In no way is he rooted in it,’ repeated Carla, straining her eyes now to comprehend it. ‘Yes, I see that, yes. O.K., Dad. I think I can concur with you on that one.’

‘You see, my love, he’s not
the source
of their fear at all,’ Tom went on. ‘No. The way I see it, he really seems to embody fear himself, do you see? He represents, to my mind at any rate, that awful dread that we all get to feel at least once in our long lives, sooner, or later. The naked man whom Goya has seen fit to set before us most surely is, I feel - and most surely represents - the generic fear that
we all
experience, and which goes hand-in-hand with being a mortal creature that will one day most assuredly grow old and die.’

Carla turned to look at him. ‘Do you mean - you surely don’t mean
like you
, Dad?’ she said.

‘Yes, that’s right, my love,’ Tom replied. ‘Like me. And like Francisco de Goya, himself, too.’

Carla pondered this. ‘Well, then very like me, as well, I guess,’ she added.

‘One day - yes, one day you’re almost certainly going to feel it too,’ he told her. ‘Hopefully, many moons from now, of course.’ Tom suddenly sensed his daughter’s body tense up as she plainly imagined it already happening. ‘You don’t have to be sad, you know, my love,’ he said. Because, you see, this is in no way a despairing picture that Goya has painted for us here. I believe that it is the deaf, world-weary, old painter’s own personal suffering - his own fear - that he has depicted up there, looming so powerfully and majestically above us all, and it is precisely this that he is telling us that he has, at last, managed to come to terms with.’

Carla rubbed an errant tear away from her cheek and looked into his eyes. ‘Just as you seem to have, do you mean, Dad?’ she asked.

‘Yes, my love. Just as I now have,’ replied Tom, smiling. He reached out and caught his daughter’s slender hand and gripped it firmly within his own. ‘You see, the giant - Goya’s Colossus - now accepts his fate - indeed has seized it firmly in his fist - and so, you see, my love, the painting, to me at least, is nothing more, nothing less, than a clear, unqualified statement of hope. The dreadful Colossus whom we see there embodies for all of us this hope.’

‘So you mean, he is triumphant,’ she told him, her voice now croaking with palpable emotion.

‘Yes, he is triumphant, Carla,’ Tom told her, ‘because, you see, he has conquered fear once and for all. But he is exquisitely beautiful too, don’t you think?’

‘Yes, he is - he truly is,’ she told him. ‘And I guess even Adam Jones in the after-game shower was never quite that rugged and handsome, even after winning the Grand-Slam.’ The girl laughed a frenetic, joyful laugh at last.

Carla’s father smiled his tender love back at her, and then, leaning back to rest his head deeply amongst the pillows that she had minutes before mounted behind him, and gazing at the masterpiece which she had generously carried upstairs and arrayed before him, spoke softly, as if to sum up how he felt about the death that was very soon to come his way. ‘And so the fear that is made beautiful,’ he whispered to her, ‘is now forever overcome.’

By the dull, orange tone of the lights outside the window on Cemetery Road, they could tell it was already evening. Still attired in school-uniform, Rhiannon and her closest friend Carmen were sat alongside each other, reading at the large, round table in the front-parlour of
Caerleon
.

‘Who is that in the photograph over the fire, Rhiannon?’ Carmen asked her friend, looking up.

‘Oh, that’s my Uncle Sam,’ Rhiannon told her. ‘My Dad’s brother, you know. I never got to meet him as he got killed a long time before I was born.

‘He was killed you say!’ exclaimed Carmen. ‘But how?’

‘On the railway,’ her friend responded.

‘Do you mean he worked on the trains?’

‘No, I don’t think so, Carmen,’ Rhiannon replied. ‘His body was found lying on the line that ran from Dowlais and Pant up to
Gloryhole
, where the tunnel emerges above the river-bend, apparently. There was some sort of controversy about his death back then, I gather.’

‘Controversy! How do you mean, Rhi?’ asked Carmen, clearly aroused by the mysterious aspect of the tale.

‘Well, I don’t really know,’ she replied. ‘My father still won’t tell me anything about it. I’m too young to be told, apparently. But the authorities demanded his body be dug up recently so that extra tests could be taken, to see if they could draw any new conclusions. But sadly to no effect.’

‘Oh, that’s too bad,’ Carmen replied, switching her attention back to the magazine she was reading, and that lay across her homework. ‘Hey, listen to this, Rhi! The shortest story ever written was by Ernest Hemmingway,’ Carmen told her. ‘Say - do you want to hear it?’ Rhiannon nodded. “
For sale: baby shoes never worn.”
Carmen paused for effect. Wow! Isn’t that cool?’

‘What a strange title,’ said Rhiannon, smiling at her across the table.

‘Oh, that wasn’t the title,’ Carmen told her friend. ‘That’s the whole thing! Truly. The entire story. That’s how it’s the shortest story ever, see. Get it? ‘
For sale: baby shoes never worn.
’ ’

‘Baloney!’ ejaculated Rhiannon. ‘Are you serious? Really? Well, I bet you I could write a shorter one than that if I tried,’ she went on. ‘If I had the time, I mean. As it is, this blasted homework is taking -’

‘But why would you need time, Rhiannon?’ said Carmen. ‘How long does anyone need to write five or six words? Eh? You call yourself a writer, yes? Well, I bet that story took Hemmingway a whole minute to conceive it, at most. So don’t you reckon you could match that?’

‘You betcha!’ retorted Rhiannon fiercely. ‘Check your watch, Carmen, and time me.’

‘O.K., then,’ said Carmen, folding the sleeve of her sweater back to reveal her pink wrist-watch. ‘I’ll give you exactly a minute, right? Ready? Three - two - one - go!’

Silence fell on Rhiannon’s home. Rhiannon looked blankly at her friend’s annoyingly wincing face, and desperately scanned her brain for inspiration. What could she write about? What were the issues that were on her mind at present, and which one of them bothered her most? And, even more to the point, how could she then abbreviate it?

‘Ten - nine - eight,’ said Carmen, mischievously

‘
Un-buttoned tree-feller caught short and killed
,’ Rhiannon suddenly announced triumphantly.

Carmen looked up at her, mouth wide open. ‘What the hell is that!’ she screamed. ‘
And
it sounds disgusting, too. Anyway, I make that seven words, Rhiannon, and you had six to beat, remember.’

‘Start again,’ Rhiannon commanded.

‘O.K. Go!’