Last Train to Gloryhole (65 page)

Carla recalled how a man across from them - who looked for all the world like a twin-brother of the chancellor, George Osborne, - had suddenly bellowed to his equally posh friends how he believed that the only thing wrong with the death-penalty was that it hadn’t been used often enough. When they all laughed in unison with him, Carla remembered how Amy had turned her chair to face them, and, in her distinctive, deep, urban drawl had asked the man if he didn’t think it might be a great idea if he took himself out the back and tried it for himself. She’d gladly let him borrow her belt, since he didn’t appear to be wearing one of his own, she told him, suddenly ripping the thin, white one from the ringlets in her own waist-band, and presenting it to him.

The group at the man’s table had all wanted to laugh at Amy’s comment, but, out of loyalty to their male companion, had bitten their tongues, and gazed long and hard into their drinks instead, clearly waiting for their friend to reassert himself, and be the first to break the eerie silence that, by now, had ensued. It goes without saying that the chap never did. The group all knew, as the two singers themselves knew, and as the rich boy himself plainly did, that he simply wasn’t up to it. The beads of perspiration on his temple betrayed the fact that he had plainly floundered out of his depth in an ocean of confusion and dread; he was lost; sunk. After all Amy - this diminutive, dusky-headed girl before him - was
The Queen of Camden
, and possessed both the wisdom of Solomon and the balls of Heracles; and those Berkshire buffoons were on
her
manor. With just a quiet word, and an arch of her long black brows, she had swiftly turned them all to stone.

During her initial period in London, Carla faithfully believed that the road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom. And unsurprisingly, in the aftermath of leaving Oxford she had convinced herself that she wanted to open up her mind and experience much more of life than she had managed hitherto, and to do this she felt tempted to sample practically every substance that she encountered, including almost every type of religious belief, life-style, body-art, food, drink, vitamin, and, of course, drug.

It was during this critical, ‘blue period’ of her life that Carla had first met Abram Kronfield, and at the time she was quite naturally elated to do so, since she found he was a man with access to a great many of the things that she patently desired. It is fair to say that the Afrikaner’s arrival on the scene was critical to her, to an extent at least, in that he was to prove instrumental in helping Carla achieve so many of her early ambitions. The man had, for example, sundry contacts in club-world, amongst other things, and being certain in his mind of her continuing, indeed burgeoning, success, he was no longer shy about using them.

And it wasn’t very long before Carla was to sign the record-deal that catapulted her to musical prominence; and, for much of the time, there beside her in many of the publicity snaps, CD signings, and magazine-interviews, if not as yet in her bed, was that same Abram Kronfield.

When Rhiannon arrived at the café ahead of her ambling mother she could sense that something strange was going on. The coven of gross, middle-aged women staring in her direction, for a start, seated, as they were, round two adjoining tables, and smoking cigarettes they all seemed to be holding up before them, less than three feet beneath a sign she was currently unable to read for the clouds of smoke, and which she knew plainly forbade them.

‘Is she with you?’ asked Zeta Jones, leaping to her feet, and approaching Rhiannon to relieve her of her dribbling brolly.

‘My mother? Yes. She’s just coming. She sent me on ahead to tell you ‘two teas, both with milk and one sugar.’ Why? What’s happening? Tell me, please!’

‘Martin - did you get that?’ exclaimed Zeta to her nodding husband, taking Rhiannon gently, but firmly, by the arm, and escorting her past her group of female friends and all the other customers towards the Ladies’ loos, that stood at the far end of the long room. ‘There’s just something I need to tell you, love, that’s all,’ Zeta told her, closing the door tightly behind them. ‘Before your mother gets here, I mean.’

If truth be told, the music being pumped out from the quadraphonic sound-system around me was a little too loud for my liking, although I admit there must be times when a smattering of
Bonnie Tyler, Tom Jones
and
The Manic Street Preachers
was exactly what was needed on a Friday night in the
Merthyr Labour Club,
so as to raise the general level of excitement and fan the flames of mass anticipation. But, though being admiring of all three musical acts, it is just that I wasn’t at all sure that they were what was required on that particular night.

I took my pint of bitter off the tide-washed counter and turned and sought out my seat at the very back of the hall. The excited buzz in the audience was, I felt, understandable, most of the crowd there I’m sure, like myself, having never before attended, or perhaps never had the courage to attend, a live show of this type. Sitting myself down next to a couple in matching blue blazers and mullets, I took a large sip of my ale, and then, ever so carefully, placed the pint-glass under my chair, and equidistant between my two, carefully planted, feet.

I looked about me. The group of women I had met in the café had insisted I accompanied my English companion to the club, which I had done, and also helpfully informed me of a man in the bar who would be able to furnish me with a ticket. But where were those women now? I wondered. After telling me that something would be taking place tonight that would both shock me and gratify me, my mind was understandably filled with a whole pauperie of notions, of sorcery, of self-embarrassment, and possible sexual malpractice. And, in a strange way, with regard to all three, I soon discovered that on that particular night I wasn’t about to be disappointed.

The soprano was dreadfully flat, both in bust and pitch, the sparkly dancer less than exotic, and the comic nothing to laugh about, but, in all fairness, the animated crowd that filled
The Labour Club
that night definitely hadn’t bought tickets to see any of them. Their
piece de resistance
was still to come. The lights were dimmed again, and then onto the stage came my new friend, Dick - the ‘Riccardo Pantheon’ who was headlining the show.

The porn-star shades, the anthracite-black dinner-jacket, and the pearly-white dicky-bow were a complete shock to my eyes, and even more so the song -
‘Hit The Road Jack’
- with which the performer began his set, and which, for all I could tell, seemed to bear no link whatsoever to what the man had prepared for our entertainment. But, after that harmless, toneless distraction, it was soon straight down to business.

‘I am looking for six volunteers from the audience tonight,’ Dick announced. ‘Brave, or stupid, it doesn’t really matter.’ The audience erupted. The first four individuals who rose from their seats appeared largely to be either pushed or bullied into coming forward, but came forward nevertheless. The fifth - a young man, probably no older than sixteen, and very unsteady on his feet, and whom Dick straightaway rejected - was replaced by an attractive young woman with bleach-blond hair, a shoe-shine tan, frighteningly white teeth, and a massive tattoo of a constricting snake all the way down one leg. The sixth and last volunteer I saw was a middle-aged woman in a long, black dress, who, to my eyes, looked remarkably like Zeta Jones from the café where Dick and I had eaten no more than two short hours before. I gazed at the row she had emerged from. The sight of Maggie Scratch and Bobbie Hole - the latter woman’s real name - both of whom had gone to junior-school with my Gwen, leaping to their feet, and cheering her on, told me instantly that it was indeed Martin’s better half who had presented herself as the willing focus for our evening’s amusement, and, just as likely, I thought, our abuse.

In less than ten seconds - or at least the time it took me to sip my beer and store it away safely again - it appeared that Riccardo Pantheon had hypnotized the whole lot of them, and very soon had them sit down on a row of six chairs that faced the audience and himself. Thereafter he had each of them perform - unknowingly, of course - sundry acts of humiliation, self-degradation, even self-flagellation, the like of which I had never before witnessed, and, quite frankly, never wished to witness again. First there was ‘a public caning in school’ - on the bottom, naturally - where schoolboys screamed out from imaginary pain, and their tearful lovers chased the teacher in and out of the club’s loos before administering on the caner a dose of the same medicine. And then there was a take on the television show
‘The Voice,’
where two women turned their revolving chairs round to discover Michael Jackson and Elvis just yards away, singing for a shot at fame, and thereafter rushing on-stage to rip imaginary tight clothing off the two equally imaginary, and wholly dead, stars. Watching the poor girls take off their own blouses and slacks to don the same perhaps went a little too far for my palette, I felt, but clearly not so for the bulk of the inebriated audience, who, quite literally, seemed to lap it up, and even cried out for more.

After forty-five minutes or so, the show appeared to be nearing its conclusion. But before galloping off to the lounge-bar to hand out imaginary Christmas presents to unsuspecting regular customers, the two-legged, but tightly manacled, male reindeer had had same-gender sex with a yielding, smiling Father Christmas. Yet not long after that, unmoved and unscathed, his pretend antlers throbbing, he emerged once again from out of the imaginary chimney-piece into the bedroom of a family-home, soon to roger the euthymolised, tanned wife, who shocked us all by causing her fine, long legs - snake and all - to securely pin her supine partner to the ground in the sort of rutting position I could never imagine a reindeer ever managing to achieve, with, or indeed without, the aid of his bearded master. But then again the unlikely pair seemed more than overjoyed when Santa himself, this time without any encouragement from the crowd that whooped and screamed, did in fact elect to assist in the human rut, and, after pushing and squeezing them into genuine, eye-popping ecstacy, he finally wrapped up the beast-with-two-backs in yards and yards of imaginary cellotape and acres of human-sized wrapping-paper, and left them, struggling hopelessly on the floor, for their imaginary kids to discover, and no doubt prise apart, very early the following morning.

Yes, the show that Riccardo Pantheon put on at
Merthyr Labour Club
that night was nothing less than scandalous mayhem, and, though clearly of the kind the audience, who paid good money to see it, had craved, it certainly wasn’t at all to my taste. I did, however, screw up my own eyes and whoop loudly when I spied my wife Gwen sitting on one of three empty chairs that I quickly assumed her friends must have vacated. I was naturally very shocked by this; after all, there was I, thinking that I was the dirty stop-out, and that Gwen was at home, patiently awaiting my return, when all the time she was out for the night partying, and doing precisely what I was doing. Whether this was fair or unfair I was largely undecided, but, either way, I simply couldn’t believe it.

When the crucial moment came for the six dazed volunteers to be snapped out of the spell Riccardo had put them under, I noticed that it was Zeta whom he chose to de-hypnotize first. Looking all about her as she started coming to, and recognizing where it was she was standing, (if not what ignominies she had been performing for us,) she suddenly ran back to where my Gwen was seated, and, taking her by the hand, led her out swiftly to join the five others who were all standing in a line. Presently Riccardo came to Gwen, and, no doubt assuming she too had taken part in the crazy actions along with her friends, waved his hand across her face too, and uttered the same words he had used on them.

As the lights went up, and the audience stood, applauded, and bellowed out their appreciation, all four women quickly returned to their seats, gathered up their bags and coats, and made their way out to the bar. For myself, I found I was too gob-smacked to follow after them, and so, instead, made my way outside to my car. and drove back home to Pant.

What my Rhiannon told me as I made my way upstairs - about the unexpected phone-call she had received from Zeta, and about her and her mother’s trip to the
Café Giotto
(not long after Dick and I had left) - still didn’t furnish me with the whole story, and sadly that had to wait until quite early the following morning, when Zeta’s husband Martin and his meddling, but ingenious, Italian wife delivered my stop-out wife back home to me. And what Rhiannon chose not to tell me was that she and her friend Carmen had themselves turned up to watch the show that night as well, having been informed by Zeta that it was quite likely to be life-changing.

To say that my Gwen was, from that night on, a changed woman was, I would say, certainly no gross overstatement, but it was undeniably the last that either Rhiannon or I heard from her about any great Welsh chieftain called Arthur, or about his family. his horses, or indeed the weapons he was said to have possessed and intermittently wielded. And, thankfully, Gwen returned to addressing me by the name with which she had hitherto always called me - Dyl.

It was August, and the school-library was open for the very last time before finally closing for the last fortnight of the school holidays, and the two best friends decided it would be a great place for a natter about their plans for the rest of the summer, about boys, and about life in general. Rhiannon was in the process of combing her long hair and pinning it back in place, while across the table from her Carmen was reading a newspaper. She suddenly looked up at her red-haured friend, and said, “Teenagers are like insects, in that they can’t stop grooming so as to get near the opposite sex.”

‘Speak for yourself,’ retorted Rhiannon, clearly offended.

‘But Rhi, it’s just a story in the paper, that’s all,’ said Carmen. ‘There’s no need to get arsey, you know. It’s nothing personal.’