Last Train to Gloryhole (6 page)

‘I didn’t mean it like that, Babs. Fair play, now,’ Mervyn told the old woman apologetically, turning slowly to face her. ‘Anyway, you know full well you’ll always be the only bird for me, girl.’

‘Oh, that’s all right, then,’ Babs responded, forcing a strange, coiled smile out between her hair-lined top lip and her grizzled chin. ‘Though you won’t get watered by me, that’s for sure, Mervyn John, even though your hands are covered in psoriasis, and that English baggage Joycie on the night-shift might have slipped another one of them vee-ag-a-ra biscuits in your tea. Common, that was of her, if you ask me. Though I dare say it’s a pity her old man ran off back to Worcester when he did.’ She suddenly took out of her mouth her dentures, placed them on the table beside her, and picked up a piece of the cherry-cake herself, and bit into it with the most infinite care, and yet clearly, from the anguished expression she very soon made, more than a little painfully.

The back-door of the terraced-house slowly opened, and the old man called Tom emerged tentatively into the daylight, the back of his right hand suddenly shooting up so as to shade his keen, but weary, blue eyes from the sudden glare of the sun, which by this time was at its height, and already bathing the small, still largely leafless, trees that edged the steep slopes of the surrounding river-valley in a rich, vibrant fusion of dappled sunlight.

Tom took out a handkerchief from the side-pocket of his long, tweed overcoat and used it to wipe the drops of gleaming perspiration from his tanned, freckled forehead, and then plodded erratically across his new, tangled, grassy lawn towards the wire back-fence, at which point a clear vista of the enormous, grey railway-viaduct lay opened up majestically before him. Still shading his eyes, Tom gazed down towards the base of one of the viaduct’s six great plinths in the valley below, hugely impressed, as he recalled he always was, by the bridge’s solid, stone structure, and especially by the broad, Romanesque curves of its seven splendid arches.

The old man allowed his gaze to rise up the limestone columns to the wide, walled path that ran away from him along the top of the bridge, and where once had run a double-railway track that he remembered well. Close to the right-hand wall a man’s head could now be clearly seen moving rapidly just above the parapet of the vast structure - too fast, he thought, for a rambler, and clearly a tad slow for a sprinter. Tom rubbed his dim eyes with his knuckles in a muddle of bemused wonder and deliberation, until it finally dawned on him what it was that he was actually beholding.

Many years after the steam-engines had ceased running along this route, and the two railway tracks and their points had been taken up, miles of tarmac had been laid down where the line had once been, and a new cycle-way was opened up for the use of the general public, and which is still known locally as ‘
The Taff Trail
.’ Tom understood now: the travelling head his eyes followed was clearly that of a solitary cyclist, who was peddling leisurely westwards towards him, having just skirted, on this level, but winding route that ran parallel to the Upper Taff River, a towering escarpment of sheer, grey cliffs. Tom saw that these cliffs majestically rose up to, and, around the time of its construction in medieval times, had offered protection to, the elevated, Norman ruins of
The Morlais Castle
, which these days still sat peering down from its lofty hill that seemed almost to caress the creamy, cotton-bud, cumulus clouds that gently floated past it across the Spring sky.

With a trembling hand Tom lifted up a loose, waist-high length of wire, and eased his tired body gently through the back-fence of his kitchen-garden, and then more or less staggered his way out onto the steep, grassy bank which lay just beyond it. He was now able to see down to the river itself, and he smiled at its simple beauty. Picking up a weathered sheep’s skull, Tom then took a quick look behind to ensure he wasn’t being watched, and sat himself down carefully, though a tad painfully, beside the trunk of a tall oak-tree, and placed the strange grey object alongside him. Once comfortable, he then reached into his coat-pocket and took out a small tin-box, and, adeptly fixing the lid beneath its base, began rolling for himself a cigarette.

Within minutes the seated old man felt himself to be in another world completely - a realm of calm serenity and bliss. He closed his eyes and thanked his Maker for the same. Then, as the trilling sounds of the nesting birds in the trees above and around him amplified to the point of ecstasy, Tom stubbed out his stogie on a large stone, leaned his back against the thick, gnarled tree-trunk, and, even more quickly than he expected, fell fast asleep.

In the spare, but cosy, lounge of the Cillick household jazz music was playing quietly as Drew sat back in his favourite armchair, scanning an art-book, and sketching on a plain sheet of paper that he had secured with a paper-clip inside it. He paused and looked across at his wife who was seated peacefully on the sofa, repairing a button on her uniform, and then at Chris who was sitting at the dining-table, seemingly working on his homework. Drew suddenly reached down, and, clasping in his hand the remote-control for the stereo sound-system, raised the volume on it quite considerably, then swiftly dropped the hand-set back to its original position beneath the cushion where he always kept it.

‘Darling, do you think that’s wise?’ Anne asked him, without looking up.

‘Sorry?’ Drew retorted with a smile. ‘I can’t hear you above the music.’

‘Yes, I’m not surprised you can’t,’ she told him. ‘There again, perhaps he’s deaf.’

‘Or maybe he’s gone out,’ her husband added helpfully.

‘Oh, so you
can
hear me then?’ Anne announced, looking directly into her husband’s eyes, and clearly exposing for all to see yet another of his childish capers.

Chris slammed shut the textbook he was reading, and addressed his parents in the calm, deliberate manner that he always used to stifle any glowing embers of family discord that his fast maturing mind detected. ‘He was out digging in the garden earlier. Did I tell you?’ he said.

‘Really?’ replied his mother. ‘So you got to see him then, Chris? Tell us - what does our latest next-door neighbour look like?

‘Oh, I don’t know,’ he told her. ‘Normal size for an old man, I’d say. He was wearing a waist-coat.’

‘In the garden!’ his mother asked him.

‘Poor form, poor form,’ said Drew, shaking his head a little. ‘The chap is clearly a blackguard. I dare say you probably caught him trying to dispose of the bones.’

‘Bones! What bones?’ his wife enquired, staring at him, and making a face.

‘You know, the body,’ Drew told her, with a serious look that belied his black humour.

Her son stood up to join the fray. ‘Oh, Mam, you must know how murderers almost always make use of their own gardens,’ Chris informed her helpfully.

‘I make use of my own garden,’ Anne told him sternly. ‘So does that make
me
a murderer?’ She was feeling out-gunned again by the pincer-movement of the two men in the household, and suddenly wished that her daughter Bethan hadn’t recently gone off to live with that awful man in town with the ice-cream van, that sat on bricks month after month in the street of prefabricated homes round the corner from her husband’s school, and that had been erected just after the war, and with a projected life-span of twenty years, but had already celebrated its diamond anniversary. And how embarrassing that had to be for her son, too, she thought: having to walk past it as often as he did, even if Drew - Bethan’s step-father - didn’t appear to care a rat’s behind about the shame of it.

‘Look,’ Anne told her husband, ‘I can’t seem to concentrate while you’re playing your Miles, dear. Can’t you just take him upstairs or something?’

‘But he’s been dead for nigh on twenty years, love,’ Drew told her, barely able to contain his laughter.

‘And it’s world-turning music, Mam,’ Chris added, smiling at his step-father, who by now was grimacing with the pain of it all. ‘Didn’t Dad mention that?’

‘Really?’ Anne retorted, smirking. ‘Well, it’s turning me, all right, I can tell you. Can’t we hear something different for a change? A - a voice, maybe? Or another instrument, even?’

‘O.K., if you like,’ Drew told her. ‘How about Dinah Washington? Or Benny Carter, maybe? Ben Webster? Coleman Hawkins? I know - Coltrane?’

‘Say, isn’t that what Grandad used to work on, Mam?’ put in Chris mischievously.

‘The coal train?’ said Anne. ‘He certainly did, Chris - when the line was still running over
The Seven Arches
back in the Sixties,’ his mother told him with feeling. ‘And your Uncle Ern was a coal-man too, remember. He used to deliver with a horse-and-cart back then, of course, and in those days they’d just drop a ton of it right outside your front-door first thing in the morning, and you and your whole family would spend the next few hours, rain or shine, just filling up bucket after bucket, and scurrying back and forth, until you had finally managed to cart it all inside.’

‘Wow! How
Third World!
’ Chris ejaculated, mouth agape, and clearly visualising the quaint, misty, historical scene his mother had so sharply portrayed for him.

‘How do you mean
Third World
!’ Anne bellowed back at him. ‘It wasn’t at all. No. It was lovely back then, actually - it really was.’ By now she was positively beaming with the poignant recollection of it all. ‘I tell you, those were the days, Chris. We even got our fresh milk off the horses,’ she added.

Her son fell silent, trying to picture this most unusual - to him, thoroughly unfeasible - method of milk-production.

By now Drew was sitting with his head in his hands. ‘What a family I’ve gone and shackled myself up with, eh!’ he cried out in desperation. ‘God help me! That’s all I can say,’

‘Hey - what was that!’ Anne suddenly called out, leaping to her feet.

‘What?’ asked Drew, reducing the volume of the music. ‘I didn’t hear anything.’

‘That,’ replied his wife. ‘Hey! You must have heard it that time, Drew, surely? Chris?’

‘I heard something,’ her son retorted. ‘I thought it sounded a bit like a - like a -’

‘Drill!’ Anne replied sharply.

‘Yes, that’s what I thought,’ Chris informed her. ‘A drill of sorts.’

‘God! There it is again,’ Anne announced. ‘Hear it? Hear it?’

‘Oh yes, I can hear it now,’ Drew told her. ‘A bloody funny drill that, though, don’t you think? It’s very -’

‘High-pitched,’ replied Chris. ‘Like - almost like somebody screaming.’

‘Eugh!’ Anne cried. ‘It’s fair making my flesh creep, I can tell you. You know, it sounds very much as if - as if -’

‘You know, perhaps he’s got the dentist round,’ said Chris, poking his index-finger into his open mouth in simulation.

Both his parents suddenly stared straight at him. Their response told him that, yes, that is precisely what the Cillick family were all now collectively surmising.

Drew turned round to face his wife, and reached out, and tenderly clasped her round her shoulders. ‘Anne, what was the title of that - of that very first film I took you to see, soon after we met?’ he asked. ‘You know - that horrible, scary one. Laurence Olivier, wasn’t it?’

‘ ‘
Rebecca’
- yes?’ she asked, watching him shake his sweet, curly head in reply.

‘Or do you mean
‘Spartacus?’
enquired Chris. ‘I believe I’ve watched both of them on-line.’

‘No dear,’ his mother replied in hushed tomes, suddenly placing her free hand across her face. ‘Gosh! I think your Dad means - I think you mean…. ‘
Marathon Man,’
don’t you darling?’

‘Yes, of course.
Marathon Man,’
Drew announced, smiling
.
‘
That’s
the film I was thinking of. Well, God help us if we end up discovering we’ve got some crazy Neo-Nazi living next-door to us, that’s all I can say.’

‘But that would be fantastic,’ Chris told them firmly, his face beaming. ‘Then we’d simply
have
to move house this time, and no two ways about it.’

Through the living-room wall the screeching, manic wail of the drill unexpectedly started up once more, and the family Cillick felt compelled to cover all six of their ears in a swift, synchronised movement. Their anxious looks and shared frowns confirmed that the noise was unquestionably a lot louder this time round.

Throwing down her sewing in despair, Anne suddenly rushed over to the television-set in the corner of the room, and turned it on at full-volume. ‘A neo-Nazi, did you say!’ she shrieked out in horror. ‘As a neighbour! God alive! No. I tell you, I won’t let it happen.’

‘No, that would make life in
Gloryhole
almost unbearable for us again, wouldn’t it?’ her husband told her. ‘And, you know, it’s possible it could even turn out to be worse than when the paedo was holed up in there.’

Dressed in grey waistcoat and patched jeans, and with a pair of National-Health reading-glasses perched crookedly on the bridge of his hawk-shaped nose, Tom knelt on the floor of his new bedroom, taking out various items from their cardboard boxes, and putting them inside two small cupboards which sat against the wall that separated his home from that of his new neighbours. Reaching down into the empty box he took out a large brown envelope which was all that remained inside, and then tossed the empty box up and behind him onto the bed. Removing the shiny sheet of paper from the inside of the envelope, Tom read aloud the words typed boldly at its heading in proud, blue italics, and which made up the title of the, still pristine, document.

‘Degree Certificate for Dentistry - University of Wales, University College Cardiff - Thomas Davies,’
he read out proudly, stopping for a moment or two to dab his right eye gently with a wavering fore-finger, overcome, as he suddenly was, with the sheer, unanticipated emotion of the moment.

Opening up the second box, Tom reached down and dug his hands deep into its packed interior, in search of something that he was just as determined to find. Pausing briefly on its discovery, he then removed from within it a similar envelope, of a similar colour to the last one, but this time of a much smaller size, and gazed at it for ten seconds or more, and with obvious trepidation, before finally electing to remove the solitary, folded sheet of white paper which was contained inside. Tom then read silently to himself the opening two paragraphs that were written there without moving a single muscle, and then, in a voice which seemed to express his sense of personal shame, spoke aloud the single statement which sat written emboldened at the very end of it, and which announced, in official language, ‘
the same Thomas Davies is therefore barred from practising Dentistry forthwith
.’