Last Train to Gloryhole (62 page)

‘You think I’m Spanish, right?’

‘Are you Spanish?’ asked the constable, turning the standing man round, and slamming, and locking the door.

‘I am, I am,’ the man responded. ‘And what’s more, I demand that you take me to the embassy.’

‘In Madrid, Sir?’ the constable asked, forcing the driver ahead of him along the footpath..

‘Yeah. Or in London,’ the man replied, lurching from side to side. ‘Whichever is closer.’

As the pair approached nearer to the police-car Constable Llewellyn lifted his radio to let control know that the Maestro he had stopped needed recovering to the pound, and that he had carried out an arrest, but then realised he still didn’t know who the man was. ‘Say - what did you say your name was, Sir?’ he asked.

‘I never did,’ the man replied.

‘Because I bet it isn’t really Spanish, is it?’

‘’Course not, silly. Dick,’ the man told him.

Llewellyn tugged at the man’s cuffs, halting him in his tracks. Then he stood before him and pressed his huge forehead right up against the man’s face. ‘What did you just call me!’ he bellowed.

‘Wait! I’m telling you the truth, officer!’ the terrified man responded. ‘I said ‘Dick’ because, you see, that’s my name. In full it’s Richard, you see. That is my name, honestly - Richard.’

‘Really? Richard what?’ asked Llewellyn.

There followed a pause, during which the man dropped his head, clearly thinking fast. ‘Plant,’ the man announced. I am called ‘Richard Plant,’ though people generally call me ‘Dick Plant.’

‘ ‘Dick Plant!’ repeated the police officer, clearly not happy with this response. ‘Really, Sir? And are you sure it’s not ‘Dick Transplant?’ Because I’d be much more likely to believe you if you said that. Say - have you got ID on you?’

‘My card is in my back-pocket,’ the man told him, bending slightly. ‘That’ll show you I’m precisely who I say I am.’

Constable Llewellyn reached into the man’s back-pocket and took out a whole bunch of business-cards. He read one. ‘ ‘Riccardo Pantheon!’ ’ he exclaimed. ‘ ‘Riccardo!’ So you are a bloody Spaniard after all, then.’

‘No, that’s just my stage-name,’ the man told him. ‘I’ve just come from doing a show, you see. In The Merthyr Labour Club.’

‘Really? And what do you do? Impersonations?’ quipped Llewellyn, grinning.

‘Very funny,’ the man replied. ‘Look - if you care to read the card, then you’ll see my job-title.’

‘Christ! You do all this?’ asked Llewellyn.

‘I do,’ the man replied. ‘Though I can’t throw my voice like I once could, so I’ve knocked the ventriloquism on the head.’

‘Really?’ said the constable, seating the man in the back seat of his patrol-car. ‘Well, perhaps you shouldn’t have done that.’

‘Why’s that?’ asked the man, looking up.

‘Well, that’s assault with a deadly weapon, that is, you see,’ Llewellyn told him, grinning. ‘And you’re in enough trouble as it is tonight with the - with the D.U.I., as they say on
‘Cops.
’ ’

‘Now stop crying this instant,’ Tom commanded, looking up at her from his pillow. ‘You don’t need to feel anything but joy for me, Carla,’ her dad told her, perspiring freely now, and, to her eyes, looking more gaunt than ever he had before.

‘If that’s what you want, Dada,’ Carla told him, clasping his thin, veined hand in hers, and, though biting into her top lip, attempting to smile back at him,

‘You know sweetheart, during the last few weeks your Uncle Gary has helped me to understand and appreciate a great many things.’

‘Really?’ asked a not wholly convinced Carla. ‘Such as what, exactly?’

‘Well, amongst other things, he showed me how you can’t hope to learn anything from the process of dying unless you first accept the fact that you are, in fact, ‘on the way out.’ Denial, after all, is senseless, as it simply arrests the learning process.’

‘Is that right?’ Carla replied, seeing that her father seemed determined that what could be their final serious conversation together was going to be on his terms, and his terms alone. ‘Yes, I think I can see what you’re saying now. And what else have you learned? Because I’ve noticed he has been reading to you an awful lot these past weeks.’

‘Well, for example, did you know that, almost two thousand years ago, the Roman sage Seneca said that ‘throughout the whole of our lives we need to keep on continuing to learn how to live, while at the same time continuing to learn how to die.’ ’

Carla’s tears now began to roll freely down her cheeks. ‘And what else did Uncle Gary tell you, Dad?’ she asked him, turning to look towards the door.

‘Well, he not so much told me, sweetheart, as showed me. For example, he showed me how major learning is a lot like dying.’

‘And how is that?’

Tom coughed phlegm into the basin that his daughter patiently held out before him, then, in a hoarser, lower tone, slowly answered her. ‘Well, you see, in order to learn something significant we must first unlearn the old, wonderfully familiar, but ultimately useless, things that we do know. And this self-emptying process is - is what Gary has now, thank God, helped me to achieve.’

‘This self-emptying,’ said a trembling Carla. ‘Tell me - what has that been like to go through?’

‘Well, it feels an awful lot like annihilation,’ replied Tom, ‘And it can scare the shit out of you too, if you’ll pardon my language. The ancients had a word for it. They - they called it
kenosis
.’

‘Did you say
kenosis
?’ asked Carla, gazing into his eyes. ‘You know, I think I might have heard of that.’

‘And the purpose of this
kenosis
, this self-emptying process, is not simply to have an empty mind, or empty soul if you prefer, but to make room there for the new and the more vital. No, the more vibrant, is probably what I mean, darling.’ Tom looked up to see that she was still listening. ‘What I now understand, since, you see, I believe I have managed to achieve it, sweetness, is that we can empty ourselves sufficiently of ego, so that we might then become truly spirit-filled.’

‘Spirit-filled! How wonderful. Then I am so happy for you that you’ve achieved it, Dad,’ Carla told him, through sobs that now broke from her like loud rollers on the Cambrian coast, and which echoed through the house very like a banshee’s wailing. ‘Yes I am - I truly am, Dada.’

‘The goal we seek is not the obliteration of the soul, after all, Carla, but its expansion, do you see?’

‘Yes, I think I see it now,’ she told him, noting how dreadfully weary his words seemed to be making him. ‘But just lie back now, and rest for a little while, there’s a love.’

In the silent moments that followed Carla wiped all the tears from her eyes and tried to pull herself together. She stared down at her father’s thin, drawn face, and his perspiring forehead, that remained unmoving, and the pulse on his neck that rocked apace quite independently of it. She felt completely taken aback, and humbled, by her father’s earnest efforts to seek to self-improve himself, so late in life, indeed, so very near to the time of his fast-approacing death.

Tom’s lips suddenly quivered, and Carla could tell that he had something important he wanted to tell her. ‘Carla dear,’ his hushed, hoarse voice whispered. ‘I realise now that my goal is beyond.’

Carla considered this, then, while patiently and lovingly drying the gleaming drops that lay on his brow, told him, ‘Then I’m pretty sure that mine is too.’

The bleach-blond police-officer looked across the top of the bulky, cream-coloured machine at his big, burly, uniformed colleague, who, to his eyes, in some strange way resembled it, and who was again distracted from his work by the gleaming pool-table that they had had to store in the little room from lack of space. There again, Llew is far more like a filing-cabinet, in my opinion, Ben told himself, grinning. Solid and square, and every bit as sturdy, but open a drawer and. there’s virtually nothing on the inside. He chuckled lightly. He decided to induce his colleague back on task, so nudged his elbow just as he was lining up a shot to the corner-pocket

‘Sorry Llew! ‘I didn’t see you there,’ said Ben, holding in a laugh.’

‘Shit! I think I’ve gone and ripped the cloth,’ Llew told him. ‘Bugger! There’s only the table-tennis left now, and we haven’t got the balls for that.’

‘Say - do you think this chap was behaving illegally tonight, then?’ he asked him.

‘Of course he was. I could have brought him in for his singing alone, you know,’ the sturdy constable replied, ‘but it was clipping that bollard near
‘Hoovers’
that clinched it for me.’

‘Say - did I tell you how last week I caught an under-taker doing forty in a bus-lane,’ said Ben.

‘What the hell was he doing in a bus-lane?’ Constable Llewellyn asked him.

‘What was he doing?’ said Constable Thomas, raising his brows. ‘Why - he was under-taking, like I said.’

‘In a hearse?’ asked Llewellyn.

‘A hearse! Who the hell mentioned a hearse?’ Thomas cut back. ‘No - a white-van, as it goes. It seems the driver reckoned a lorry had dropped its load in the middle-lane, but when I checked up there wasn’t any mess to clear up, and no lorry either. Some people will make up any old shit just to get out of trouble, don’t you think?’

‘Oh, he was under-taking?’ said Constable Llewellyn, chuckling. ‘I get what you’re saying now.’

A young female P.C. walked into the room and handed a plastic cup containing hot, steaming tea to the driver the officers had earlier arrested, and who she thought seemed to have a terribly confused look on his lined face. ‘I thought you might like a change after all that coffee,’ she said.

‘The higher of the two readings was a-hundred-and-one, but the lower I gather is considerably better,’ Constable Llewellyn told the bald man. And, of course, that’s the one we always take account of.’

‘Thank God for that,’ said Dick Plant, smiling thinly. ‘What figure was it?’

‘Ninety-nine,’ said the blond-haired constable standing beside him, and who was leaning over the table to make it out.

‘Bloody hell!’ exclaimed Dick, grasping what little hair he still possessed in his two fat hands, and shaking his head from side to side.

‘Yep - you failed on ‘
the roadside
,’ and you’ve failed again on ‘
the intoxicator
’ too, I’m afraid, Riccardo, mate,’ said Constable Llewellyn, waving in his hand the tiny slip of paper he had just torn off the machine, ‘And that reading is nearly three times the limit, you know, despite the two hours or more that have passed since you had your last drink.’

‘So, naturally, you’re going to be charged with
‘Drink-Driving,
’ and you’ll be staying in a cell for the rest of the night to sleep it off,’ added Constable Thomas.

‘Well, bang goes my job then, boys,’ said Dick, wincing sharply at the thought.

‘Well, we’re very sorry about that, Sir,’ said Thomas. ‘But that’s how it goes, you see. He rolled his bottom-lip over, and gurned his face into his sympathy-look. ‘Yes, you’re going to lose your licence, I’m afraid, Riccardo,’ he continued. ‘But your car will naturally be released any time you want, and will be available to be driven away by any licence-holder that you nominate.’

‘Your wife perhaps?’ suggested Llewellyn.

‘Great,’ said Dick, shaking his head. ‘Then you boys will need to park it on the roadside with the door open and the engine started or Vera won’t even bother to get in it. She drives a smart-car normally, you see. She’d never manage to get my big one out of the car-park.’

‘My wife’s just the same,’ chimed in Thomas, chuckling. ‘Drives a rusty, green Micra. Nothing remotely smart about that that I can see.’

‘But Riccardo mate, at least there’s some good news for you,’ Llewellyn told the man, creating a broad, beaming smile out of virtually nothing.

‘There is?’ Dick asked in reply, looking up at him. ‘And what’s that then?’

‘Well, you’ll still get to walk round to
The Labour Club
for you final show there tomorrow night, won’t you?’ the burly copper told him. ‘And so there’ll be no need to worry your head about the state of the traffic coming up from Cardiff, or the road conditions - it’s going to piss down tomorrow, see - or the cost of the petrol to get there, or finding somewhere to park, even.’

‘Yeah, well we’ve at least got that last one covered for you,’ added Thomas.

‘And we can recommend a nice little restaurant where you can have a pleasant meal before your show starts, too,’ said Llewellyn. ‘Tell me - do you like Italian?’

A giggling sound suddenly filled the night air, and small puffs of smoke could be seen emerging from a black saloon-car parked some distance behind the pub. The group of young men who were slowly walking in that direction quickly caught on that there were two people lying on the back-seat of the Vauxhall Vectra, (that was parked tightly up against the fence,) with their faces pressed close together. The back-window of the car was slightly open, so that the couple’s conversation could easily be heard by them. The men stayed quiet and crept up to the vehicle to witness what was happening inside.

‘Damn buttons and metal-clips,’ the boy could be heard telling the woman. ‘I’m - I’m a bit new to all this, you know.
And
I’m only a poor farmer’s boy, so maybe I should -’

‘Plough me!’ the much older woman told him, laughing aloud in a deep voice, then leaning her head so far back that it banged loudly against the car-door. ‘Shit!’ she yelled.

‘Are you O.K.?’ the young man asked.

‘Sure. But don’t stop. It’s only my head,’ she told him. ‘But thanks for asking, anyway. You’re really sweet, you are, aren’t you, bach?. Come here.’ She kissed him passionately on the lips. ‘O.K. Now, like I said - plough me good - cow-boy!’

To the pair of lovers inside it, the car seemed to be rocking a heck of a lot more than they had anticipated, but they weren’t overly interested in that. However the rocking-motion soon became so extreme that two of the doors soon flew open and the back-bumper dropped off.

‘Christ! What have you been drinking, love?’ the woman was heard to enquire.

‘Just the usual,’ the boy told her. ‘Why?’

‘Well, I must try some of that, whatever it is,’ she told him. ‘You know you’ll be sure to make the London Olympics next year if you keep this up.’