Last Train to Gloryhole (64 page)

‘Aye, I must admit I wasn’t prepared for this downpour today,’ he said, drying his knees.

‘How come?’ I asked.

‘Well, it’s a long story, but I spent the night at Her Majesty’s pleasure, I’m afraid,’ he told me, wincing, and running a hand down his back. ‘And they made me leave the car in the police-pound, etcetera, etcetera.’

‘Oh, I get it,’ I said. ‘You were on the sauce last night, yeah?’ Dick nodded. ‘And you failed a breath-test on your way home to Ponty.’

‘In a nut-shell,’ he told me, dropping his head onto his chest. ‘I sucked on a two-pence coin, for all the good it did me, and I drank all the coffee I could scrounge, but it had no effect at all.’

‘No, it doesn’t, because I tried all that stuff one time,’ I told him. ‘As well as sucking on the tube instead of blowing, and pretending to be knocked-out, in the hope they’d take me off to
Prince Charles
in an ambulance, and I could get up unnoticed and dash off home again. I got myself a three-year ban a long time ago, so I know just what you’re feeling, Dick. What beer were you drinking? A strong one?’ I enquired.

‘Yeah, the strongest you can get,’ Dick replied, chuckling. ‘Cognac.’

‘Oh, dear,’ I responded, shaking my head. ‘God! You don’t want to be doing that, man. Not if you need your car for your job, I mean. And do you? What do you do these days, Dick? Still on the bingo, are you?’

‘No, that all went tits up donkeys years ago, that did, Dyl,’ he explained. ‘I just do the performing these days,’ Dick told me. ‘On stage, you understand?’ I didn’t. ‘Which reminds me, Dyl, I’m working at
The Labour Club
again in a few hours time. That’s if I’ve dried out enough by then, I mean.’

‘Say, I’ll tell you what you need, butty boy,’ I said. ‘A nice hot cappuccino, eh?’

‘Well, I wouldn’t turn one down right now,’ he replied, smiling thinly at me.

‘Be my guest, then, Dick,’ I said, standing. ‘Say - you ever been to the
Café Giotto
?’

‘No, I don’t believe so,’ Dick replied, rising too, and running his hands through what little hair he still possessed. ‘Although I believe one of the coppers recommended I try that place.’

‘Aye, they do a stunning cappuccino in there, they do,’ I told him. ‘And it’s only just across the road too. Come on. And I bet you must be starving too.’

As usual, the meat-balls were epic. The balding, former marital partner of Gwen Plant, as was, and I wiped our stained mouths simultaneously with the white, cotton napkins provided, then exchanged eye-watering glances that spoke volumes about the quality of the food and the tastiness of the meat-ball sauce we had just consumed. I burped loudly, as was my custom at such times, and, though a little taken aback by this at first, my English-born guest smiled, then sat back snugly in his booth-seat and, though a little less discreetly than myself I felt, unashamedly followed my lead.

‘My Vera can cook, don’t get me wrong,’ Dick Plant told me. ‘But she’s never once made me a meal like that.’

‘But you love her all the same, yeah?’ I proffered. ‘It’s just that some women weren’t born to cook meals, right?’

‘No, I guess,’ he said.

‘And I imagine your Vera’s talents run in other directions,’ I said hesitantly, but with a smile. Dick looked at me almost as if I were conversing with him in a separate language. ‘I mean, on days when I’m not working - I’m presently working part-time, see - I do most of the cooking in our house. Whereas Monday to Wednesday, when I’m at work, Gwen does it all. I’m not saying she enjoys doing it, of course, unlike my daughter Rhiannon, who, like me, loves to experiment with new recipes, but Gwen manages to carry out her side of the marital contract, so to speak.’

‘Let there be spaces in your togetherness, and let the winds of the heavens dance between you,’ Dick suddenly exclaimed, beaming a smile across at me. ‘Sorry, but I don’t think I remember the rest.’

‘And stand together, yet not too near together, for the pilllars of the temple stand apart, and the oak tree and the cypress grow not in each other’s shadow,’ I said completing it for him. ‘Gibran,’ I told him, quoting from memory a portion of the book I endeavoured to read at least once every year..

‘It is indeed,’ said Dick. ‘My. Who’d have thought that the two husbands of Gwen Havard would have read the very same book. Then turning, Dick called out over his shoulder, ‘Waiter!’

‘Waitress, you mean,’ I told him. ‘She’s called Zeta, you see, and she’s really nice.’

‘Well, she cerainly wasn’t around when we came in, was she?’ Dick announced with a pout. ‘Didn’t we have to find our own table? I believe we did.’

Dick was right. Zeta hadn’t moved from her seat at the far end of the room - where she sat with her back directly to us - in all the time we had been there, and I felt that that was a very odd thing, she normally being the supreme hostess during all my previous visits.

Martin arrived at the table, a little, pink tea-towel draped over his muscular forearm, looking for all the world like a professional boxer carrying a copy of
‘Little Women.’
‘Did you enjoy your meal, then, Dyl?’ he asked, with a pinched grin, lifting, then adeptly balancing our two dinner-plates in one hand, while shifting the sugar-bowl, the flower-glass and the condiments back into place with the other.

‘Yes, very tasty it was,’ I told him, glancing across and seeing my table-guest nodding in agreement with me. ‘Say, Martin - where’s the missus today then?’ I enquired, already knowing the answer before I even asked.

‘Oh, she’s over there on the phone, she is,’ he replied. ‘I try my best not to disturb her when she sits facing the clock like that. Do you know what I mean, Dyl?’

I didn’t, but still nodded at him my full understanding of the matter.

‘I dare say she’s busy calling her friends,’ he continued, dabbing with his towel, then straightening the crumpled, dreadfully gore-stained table-cloth. ‘But I’ll be sure to tell her you asked after her.’

‘Aye, do that, would you,’ I told him. ‘I’m sure my Gwen’ll pop in to see her some time during the week, if ever this horrendous weather lets up and she decides to come in to town.’

Gwen had just taken a refreshing shower, and now, clothed only in a belted, white robe and the obligatory towel twisted round her head, was lying flat on her back on top of her eiderdown, taking a nap. Her little pink nose was twitching, not just from the contralto snore she was not infrequently given to emitting, but almost as if somewhere in the wide world about her someone very close to her was trying to make contact, but was finding it impossible to do so.

Odd though it might seem to some, Gwen and her husband Dyl had never once owned a mobile-phone between the pair of them. Each one, of course, had known of this fact from the start, and had happily approved of it; indeed it was one of the things that had brought the pair together, and which had probably helped keep them together, during good times and bad, through sickness and health, and right up to the present moment, when her warm, dignified, and splendid isolation meant that her friend Zeta couldn’t reach her with news that would no doubt force her to rise up straightaway and address it.

But the actual cause of the problem in
Caerleon
which prevented her friend Zeta from being able to establish contact was a simple one, but one that neither woman knew the slightest thing about. Gwen had accidentally dislodged the receiver on the house-phone in the lounge downstairs, and it wasn’t until long after she had gone upstairs that the strange whining noise, that signified a problem with the telephone’s connectivity, began to sound off.

Inside the little bathroom a naked Gwen had drawn the plastic curtain closed soon after having climbed inside. Under the hot, gushing stream she was in heaven, despite the fact that her bath-tub shower was of the old-fashioned, dripping kind, which understandably annoyed Rhiannon far more than it ever did herself, the mother, unlike the daughter, having never once experienced the holistic wonders of the power-shower. What you’ve never had, you never miss, Gwen might have remarked, by way of explanation, had anyone ever bothered to ask her for her explanation for this life-style omission, which, of course, was just one of many.

It was past seven p.m., that is when her daughter Rhiannon finally arrived home, that contact with civilisation was finally restored.

‘Mam! Why is the phone off the hook?’ the red-haired girl bellowed up the stairs, rushing to the side-door to open it, so as to let some fresh air inside. ‘You must have banged into it again, you know.’ Then silently, to herself, I bet it’s been screaming like that for hours.’ She bent down and replaced the receiver again. ‘Mam! Where’s Dad? Hasn’t he come back yet? I’m starving.’

Just then the telephone rang, and Rhiannon sat herself down on the sofa and answered it. It was Zeta Jones from Café Giotto in town, a woman she barely knew, and so Rhiannon galloped up the staircase to wake her mother, and to get her to come down to talk with her.

Barely a half-an-hour later, and Dyl not having returned home to make the Friday evening dinner, mother and daughter got dressed in long and short raincoats, and polythene and cotton hats respectively, and, dashing from the garden-gate to Rhiannon’s yellow Fiesta, very like a pair of contestants in the
Le Mans
road-race, took off in the driving rain for Merthyr town-centre.

Without doubt it had been an unseasonably hot Spring, ‘almost as if
The Maker
had left his great oven-door open as He was cooking us all breakfast,’ her Uncle Gary had recently told her. But now that Spring was past, Summer was being much more its usual self again, Carla pondered, almost as if He had shut the oven again, but this time left the fridge-door a little ajar as He was fetching everyone afternoon drinks. If there indeed
was
a God, then He was undoubtedly male, she thought.

And here was two-thousand-and-eleven gradually uncoiling itself before our very eyes, Carla mused, her head deeply buried beneath the duvet, just as predictably, and every bit as disappointingly, as any year already passed. She mentally flicked up the four numeric flash-cards in the red-black, swirling pool behind her lightly-clenched eye-lids.
2-0-1-1
it flashed. Just another prime number amidst a whole millennium of them, she told herself. But, as her father and uncle had recently told her, in the very year when the world’s most renowned scientists undertook a frantic, but effectively abject, search for a God-particle, the actual Living God gazed down with open hands extended, and pleaded for us to quite simply look to Him in this most seductive, shameful, and ultimately satanic of times.

In the last few days the Libyan capital Tripoli had been liberated and the tyrant Gaddafi effectively overthrown, and yet, unbeknown to Carla, he was, not very long after, to be pulled from a rat infested sewage-pipe and summarily shot, as adults and children across the world witnessed the Muslim country’s despotic head-of-state starring in his very own snuff-movie.

And within weeks, and totally unrelated to these events, a thick, pyroclastic cloud of over a thousand hooded, urban looters and wreckers would have had their state-of-the-art i-pads and x-boxes, and brand new track-suits and trainers, ripped off them, and returned and re-packaged for sale, by the police constabulary, and been fast-tracked through the English court system, and ultimately locked away in jail for many months, for partaking in, what soon became known as,
‘The English Riots.’

2011 was a year when the stock-exchange was almost permanently in free-fall, and the UK economy - already in a total mess since the worldwide banking crisis - found itself in the pale, feeble hands of the aptly named Con-Demns - a Coalition Government that even the Tories’ own Boris Johnson was soon to claim was ‘doomed to succeed.’ Yes, this oily-tongued, shower of posh boys, whom even their most ardent supporters freely admit couldn’t tell you the price of a pint of milk, (or the cost of a litre of unleaded petrol, for that matter, since it seemed to rise almost daily,) gripped and squeezed ever more tightly, with thin, manicured hands that were greedy for power and wealth, and soon bore even more up-to-date, gleaming Cartier watches on their puny, pen-pushing wrists as evidence that they had achieved it. Knowing who the nation’s real wreckers were in 2011 had now become a far simpler matter, Carla mused.

But it was the recent, sudden death - the (for too long a time) unexplained, and initially, misreported, death - of twenty-seven year old Amy Winehouse, which easily disquieted Carla the most about 2011; yes, the Camden singer-songwriting legend, whom she had had the good fortine to meet on a handful of occasions, but alas never got to sing with, except one wet, windy, otherwise largely uneventful Tuesday night, when the slight, dark pair, jointly intoxicated, and seated facing each other, at a small, round, table in a corner of
‘The Jazz Café’
in Parkway, wiled away a couple of hours together. Like myself, Amy may have had her problems of the addictive kind, thought Carla, but psychologically, she certainly hadn’t seemed to have displayed any manifestations of the kind of issues Carla believed she herself had been confronted with.

A tall, willowy, black woman on the stage nearby had sung to them that night, Carla recalled, and to less than a dozen other customers scattered about the dark, tinkling room. But, if truth be told, Amy just hadn’t seemed overly interested, and instead shared some of her personal feelings with her. ‘Do you know, Carla, I quite often feel like a black boy in a white girl’s body,’ she had declared between sips of vodka-and-tonic.

‘You know, I believe I know what you mean,’ Carla had replied, nodding, and biting her top lip in her unique, but unattractive fashion, and shuddering somewhat from the stark honesty, and the effortless poetry, of the plainly tipsy, but deeply sensitive, Cockney girl’s admission. That year
‘Back To Black’
had taken the album-charts by storm right across the world, she recalled, and, quite literally, had altered the musical landscape for ever, and Carla simply ached within to create for herself a similarly spectacular album, that would be just as blessed with its own unique, enigmatic, life-changing sound.