Last Train to Gloryhole (66 page)

‘All right. But if you have to read one, read me a normal one,’ Rhiannon told her, ‘and not one that’s almost bound to offend me.’

‘O.K.,’ said Carmen. Then, after a short pause, she announced, ‘Mankind is a plague on the Earth says Wildlife legend David -’

‘Carmen!’ exclaimed Rhiannon. ‘You’re only offending everybody who’s alive this time. Look - there has to be something in today’s
Mail
that is uplifting. And I don’t mean like that either.’

Carmen grinned a wicked grin, then read on. “Sperm quality has declined by a third in a decade,” she announced. ‘Are diet and lifestyle to blame? ‘asks -”

Rhiannon grabbed hold of the newspaper and threw it onto the floor. ‘Carmen - I’d like you to do what that ad says on the TV. ‘Break the habit of a lunch-time.’ Now I’m sure you can do that.’

‘But I’ve given up chips,’ said Carmen. ‘And come September -’

Rhiannon wasn’t interested, and her mind drifted onto other things. ‘Carmen - does it make me a prude that I don’t like things like nipple-clamps, butt-plugs, whips or vagazzles?’ she asked.

‘I don’t see why,’ said Carmen. ‘I’m not a bit prudish, right? And I’ve never once been whipped, or plugged in the butt, that I remember, anyway.’ She took another toffee from the box sitting before them, unwrapped it, and popped it in her mouth. ‘Or clamped even. Except that time I parked my dad’s car under that awning down the market. Christ, it was pouring down! ‘So how else am I supposed to get those dresses in my boot?’ I asked the little parking-officer in the turban.’ She took a second toffee from the container and tossed it before her friend. ‘And the only thing’s ever been up
my
bum, Rhi, is a pessary, and that just an itsy-bitzy one.’

Rhiannon would normally have quizzed Carmen on the details of this queer, last statement, but just then she wasn’t listening. ‘Or that I only want to make love with just the one man?’ she went on. ‘Say - Carmen. Do you think that makes me a prude? Just Chris, I mean. And now I’m practically a virgin reincarnated, you see, since, for some reason, he simply won’t anymore.’

‘He’s a bastard, isn’t he?’ said Carmen, smiling. ‘Chris, I mean, not the traffic-warden. I mean
they’re
on a whole other level completely, don’t you think?’

‘Something has happened to make him act like that, I feel,’ said Rhiannon.

‘I reckon it might be how little we pay them,’ retorted Carmen. Her friend suddenly stared at her. ‘Hey - do you mean the warden, now, or Chris?’

‘No - Chris, I’m talking about,’ said Rhiannon. ‘Keep focused, will you?’

‘Well, I don’t know,’ said Carmen. ‘You know him so much better than I do, right?’

Rhiannon suddenly placed her finger across her lips, and then pointed to the table in the corner where her class-mate Jake Haines sat reading some newspapers. The two girls hadn’t even noticed that he was there, or perhaps, Rhiannon thought, the strange boy might have snuck in while they were engrossed in conversation. Why is he there? she was thinking.

‘Blimey, it’s Jake Haines. Why do you think he’s here?’ said Carmen, her mouth falling open.

‘Perhaps he’s come to see you,’ suggested Rhiannon. ‘He knows you fancy him, for sure.’

‘I did!’ her friend snapped back. ‘But you know he hangs round with some right nasty people these days. Total idiots, some of them.’

‘Most of them,’ added Rhiannon. ‘And they treat Chris like he’s their junior, when in fact -’

‘Look what he’s doing,’ said Carmen. ‘Now listen - nobody could read newspapers that fast. Not even Chris’s dad.’

‘I bet he could,’ said Rhiannon, picturing her favourite teacher skimming through the dailies at his classroom desk. ‘Mister Cillick does everything fast.’

‘And how would you know? I’m not sure I want to hear any more,’ said Carmen, giggling.

‘Stop it!’ exclaimed Rhiannon. ‘We don’t want him to hear us.’

‘But he’s probably in
Gloryhole
painting in his garden right now,’ Carmen suggested.

‘Not him - Jake,’ Rhiannon snapped back. ‘Say - let’s wait until he’s gone, then we’ll go over and see what it is he’s been up to, yeah? You know, I bet it’s something illegal.’

‘Oh, look how quick you are to judge, Rhiannon,’ said Carmen, frowning. ‘You should be ashamed of yourself, girl. I can tell he’s only cutting out little pictures with a scissors. Bless.’

‘Bloody tiny pictures, if you ask me,’ Rhiannon told her, screwing up her eyes so as to see better. ‘Look - he’s getting up to leave! Pretend you’re reading!’

Jake Haines got up and carried the pile of newspapers over to the waste-paper bin, folded them once, then stuffed them deep inside. Passing the two girls without even a glance, he then made his way out. After a few seconds Carmen and Rhiannon jumped up, the former heading for the bin, the latter for the vacant table. Carmen pulled out the folded pile of papers and carried them across to her friend. Meanwhile Rhiannon dived down onto her knees and began scooping up from the carpet every single scrap of litter that the boy had accidentally dropped there. They then sat on either side of the boy’s table and discussed what it was each of them had found.

Unbeknown to either girl, the librarian, Brenda Seccombe, head surreptitiously bowed, was observing their every move from her desk at the very front of the room. After a few minutes the woman smiled broadly and whispered, ‘Out of such mischief and downright nosiness real detectives are made.’ Strangely, on this occasion, she was actually referring to the two school-friends, busy burrowing about in the corner, and not to herself.

‘Letters! What do you mean - letters?’ a white-shirted, white-trousered Chris asked them, his uni-brow suddenly forming alarmingly, and frightening the pair of them.

‘You know,
the alphabet
,’ said Carmen.

‘Of course I do,’ he replied aggressively. ‘Are you trying to be funny, Carmen McGrath?’

‘She means cut-out letters,’ said Rhiannon. ‘Jake must have dropped at least a couple of dozen of them on the floor while he was at it.’ She smiled, an idea forming itself in her mind. ‘You know, I reckon that if we lay them all out together here on the bench -’

‘ - then we could see if they make words. Ingenious, right?’ added Carmen.

‘Stupid, you mean,’ snapped back Chris.

‘Why so?’ asked Carmen, making a face that seemed to impugn his sanity.

‘Well, isn’t it obvious?’ said Chris. ‘If he was actually writing something with them, then he wouldn’t have any use for the ones he threw on the floor, would he? It stands to reason, right?’

A stiff silence, broken only by the sharp thwack of willow on ball, filled the air around them.

‘Yeah, that’s what I thought,’ said Carmen, taking out a handkerchief and blowing her nose.

‘No, you didn’t, you little liar,’ said Rhiannon, slapping her friend on the arm. ‘You’re perfectly right, of course, Chris,’ she went on. ‘We two are just a bit thick, that’s all.’

Chris seemed to stare at a point in the air just above their heads. ‘But if only we could find the newspapers they came from, then we might be in business,’ said Chris. ‘Carmen - what’s that?’ he enquired.

‘The pile of newspapers they all came from,’ said Carmen, smiling. ‘I took them from out the bin. You know, I reckon that if we were to identify all the cut-outs that Jake made -’

‘ - then subtract all the ones that I found on the floor,’ added Rhiannon, ‘then we should discover every one of the letters that he must have chosen to take away with him. That makes sense, don’t you think, Chris?’ She beamed her most perfectly formed smile at him.

‘It certainly does,’ said Chris, hugging Rhiannon towards him in excitement, but then only pecking her gently on the cheek.

‘Hey - it was me that figured it out,’ said Carmen.

‘Yeah, but he’s not going to kiss you, is he Carmen?’ said Rhiannon, trying to make herself feel a little better about the partial snub she felt she had suffered at Chris’s hands.

‘Too right I’m not. I can see she’s got another scabby cold-sore coming,’ retorted Chris. He then ducked fast as Carmen swung a hefty left hook at him, which thankfully missed, swiftly followed by a slash with the thick roll of newspapers she held in the other hand, and which not only landed, but very nearly took the boy’s head off.

The afternoon sun beamed down on them as the three school-friends sat, three-in-a-row together, with the male of the group seated judiciously in between, on the green, wooden bench that looked out onto the cricket-field. Far out on the pitch, two cricket sides, dressed in all colours, including white, were attempting to knock six bells out of a cricket-ball that was yellow in colour, and no longer even close to round. The two girls suddenly glanced up at each other.

‘Have you written them all down, then, Rhiannon?’ asked Carmen. ‘Yeah? Right, let’s see.’

‘God - there’s got to be thirty-five or more, by the look of it,’ said Chris, moving the sheet the flame-haired girl had been writing on round and round on the grass below them until all three could see it clearly. ‘I reckon this is going to be a real nightmare trying to work out,’ he told them.

‘No it’s not,’ said Rhiannon. ‘I reckon it’s just a sort of cross between a normal crossword puzzle and that
Enigma-Code
thing in the magazine, and that’s quite a lot harder. But recently I’ve been getting much better at solving that one, and so I feel sure that we’ll be able to do it.’

The cricket-teams had racked up forty overs, trooped off, changed pads, and returned for their second innings minus Chris, before the three friends managed to solve it. But solve it they did.

‘As I said earlier, I think it’s definitely a ransom-note for a kidnapping,’ Chris told them, biting his thumb-nail nervously. ‘What else
could
it be?’

Rhiannon read out for them the strange sentence that the three teenagers had finally managed to uncover and piece together. “
Want her back live or in a box? Gonna cost you 500K in used or else too bad.”
Rhiannon looked up. ‘God, to think he’s in the same English set as me. Who the hell could Jake Haines have kidnapped for heaven’s sake? His baby sister? And, you know, I doubt if she’s worth five-hundred p.’

‘Ooh, that’s cruel, Rhi,’ said Carmen. ‘The girl’s only in Year Eight, remember. And it’s not her fault she dresses like her gran.’

Chris, of course, felt he knew exactly who the ransom-note related to, but he wasn’t about to tell even Rhiannon about it. He was just hoping that the kidnapping hadn’t happened yet. Chris looked across to the wicket and recalled vividly the night, just a couple of months earlier, when his timely arrival from Rhiannon’s had prevented certain harm from being done to his new neighbour, Carla Steel. She was the one whom he felt needed to be told about what the trio had just discovered, Chris told himself. But just then, he recalled how Carla had asked him not to bother her at all that day, or the next, on account of her having to rehearse for the benefit-gig at
The Railway
which was taking place that Sunday evening. And so, getting to his feet, folding up the sheet of paper and popping it inside his bag, which he swiftly shouldered, he made the decision to tell Carla about it as early as he possibly could the morning after next, and, leaving the two girls sitting on the grass, hurried home.

Perched high on a rickety, brown stool placed in front of the bar, her short, slim, denim-clad legs crossed, and with just her battered acoustic-guitar to accompany her, Carla bent her head slightly and tightened a couple of strings, then looked up and smiled just once at the three-score faces in the semi-darkness before her, as she waited until their opening applause fell away. She then proceeded to play, one after the other, each of the songs she had composed for her latest, and, as yet, unreleased, fourth album -
‘Two Birds - One Stone’
- which, of course, no one there knew, and so, perhaps unsurpringly, many of the more inebriated, especially in the blind corners, and in the adjoining back-lounge, whose door stood wide open, began to whistle at quite loudly.

‘Listen, everyone,’ announced Carla, around a half-a-dozen songs into her performace, ‘if you guys just stick with me a little while longer, then I promise you at the end I’ll play you only songs you’ve heard.’ At this welcome news the audience briefly cheered again, and, seemingly much comforted, once again settled down. Then, when she had finished performing all ten tracks, the singer began playing the very same songs from the first half all over again!

Beaten to the punch, what could the Welsh crowd do but admire the singer’s balls. After all, they hadn’t paid more than a small donation for the privilege of seeing and hearing her. And this was how Carla Steel was, after all, they concluded, and everyone right across the musical world knew it, and, yes, loved her for it. The feisty, little Welsh girl took no shit, but, if some ever got hurled in her direction, then she knew exactly how to fling it back.

Carla also seemed to know better than anyone how ‘a prophet has no honour in her own country,’ and she certainly expected nothing less than what she got from her humble, but fiercely proud, native audience. Yet, as the evening wore on, and unsurprisingly, given her awesome talent, the largely young crowd in
‘The Railway’
that night appeared to revel in it just the same, and soon screamed and whistled up the singer for a couple of encores. Carla, being Carla, did just the one - the song she had started the evening with - then, guitar in one hand, and a bottle of
Stella
in the other, nonchalantly disappeared into ‘The Ladies’ for a well-earned pee, a cold beer, and the trademark joint.

Around ten minutes later, a woman entered the stall next-door to Carla’s, and straightaway began a conversation with her. ‘Imagine that! Carla Steel playing ‘
The Railway!’
Whatever next,’ she said, in between a host of other sounds. ‘Lovely voice, that girl has, hasn’t she?’ Carla heard her say. ‘Though I wish she’d done my favourite song.’

‘Which one is that then?’ an intrigued Carla decided to ask her.

‘It’s the one my old man calls ‘the clinic song.’ the woman told her. Then she suddenly began singing it. ‘ ‘
Sometimes it dah-dee-dah-dee-dah, and sometimes it hurts instead.’
Oh, I love that one, I really do.’