Last Train to Gloryhole (7 page)

A minute or two later, suddenly aware that there was no longer any cause to fret or make haste in this new home he had found for himself in the fresh, rural setting he had carefully selected in which he could live out his final days, Tom climbed painfully to his feet. He walked unsteadily over to the rocking-chair that he had just an hour or so earlier set up in the corner of the room, and which, in the days that followed, he knew would offer him a long-cherished view out over the upper Taff Valley, towards the great, limestone railway-viaduct which had for many years straddled his imagination, and had ofttimes haunted his nightly dreams and daytime reveries, ever since the sad, and sudden, death, years earlier, of his dearly loved wife, Carys.

Tom eased himself down into the chair, and, replacing his readers with his pair of regular, day-to-day spectacles, which sat where he had set them on the sparse dressing-table alongside him, he gazed out, through damp, squinting eyes, over the brow of the naked, cream-coloured, eyeless, sheep’s skull which he had just placed on the bare window-sill, into the fast dimming light of evening. Yes, the long-term tenants of the village cemetery near their family-home in Talybont had certainly gained a gem in my Carys, he told himself wistfully. And, closing his eyes, he prayed to his God that it wouldn’t be too long now before he himself would become boxed-up, lowered, and placed lovingly not more than an inch or so above her, and well within arms-reach, of his one true love’s fruitful, ever faithful, and once glorious body.

Yes - only then would he be truly happy, Tom told himself, nodding contentedly, and then smiling broadly at the sight before him of the bright, new row of gleaming grey fillings, caps and crowns that now adorned the sheep-skull’s gaping mouth, and which, to Tom, refuted, and indeed clearly belied, the slander and the libel and the hateful calumny of it all. Only then, in my death, would justice be truly served, the old man reflected; only then could the injustice, the patent abomination of the matter be finally erased and forgotten, and the wretched, cold case, which had tragically jolted, and then ultimately put paid to the hard-earned career that he had once adored, be signed and sealed, nailed down, and buried forever.

After almost an hour or so of dithering, Anne finally plucked up sufficient courage, opened the patio-door as wide as it would go, and strode out into the back-garden, quickly grasping, then clutching to her bosom, the assorted, slightly embarrassing, items of multi-coloured underwear which she had pegged up on the line there much earlier in the day. To her horror, Anne quickly saw that the old man, who was her strange, new neighbour, was still to be found out there, crouching low down, and pottering about on a quite different patch of ground very close to the house-wall, and collecting from it an assortment of small rocks and stones which he seemed to be dropping into a small cloth-bag that hung loosely from his neck and shoulders. Seeing him standing alone there, Anne began to feel a little sorry for him, but not quite as much as for herself, since the last of her shameful knickers hung very close to their adjoining fence, and so she was forced, very much against her will, to move within a few feet of his thin, bent, overcoated form in order to retrieve them. Yet her neighbour soon looked up, and so all was lost.

Anne emitted a broad, beaming smile which she normally reserved for the vicar of
Vaynor Church
, and, far more frequently, for the young people who called every Saturday morning without fail, to engage her on the topic of
The Book Of Revelation
, and, perhaps unsurprisingly, on the frequency of the bus service into town and the fact that it happened to stop right outside their Kingdom Hall. Anne waited until her neighbour had registered who she might be, and then commenced to address his kneeling form.

‘Hello there!’ she announced brightly. ‘I’m Anne.’

‘Yes, I can see’ Tom replied, a tad strangely, slowly rising to his feet. ‘I’m called Tom. Tom Davies, I am, you see.’

Anne watched the beads of sweat run off the man’s long, hooked nose, then winced a little, recalling suddenly how so many of the men at
The Willows
often told her the strangest things in a similar, eccentric fashion, and often responded to her questions and comments in a way that instantly betrayed to her their diminishing powers of memory and deliberation. For reasons that she could never really comprehend, this always made Anne feel terribly angry, and her present fury was becoming palpable. She could only think that this might be because it caused her to recall, and perhaps subconsciously relive, the experiences that she had to endure as a young woman when her own father fell sick, and was ultimately confined to bed for many months, before he finally succumbed to the debilitating and degenerative condition known to the Welsh as ‘
Dust’,
and which finally overpowered his skeletal frame, and caused his death shortly after his sixtieth birthday. There had been no question of a birthday-cake for Dad back then, she told herself, and for the second year running, they commemorated the event with just the same soup-and-complan, liquid diet, which, by that stage, was all that the ex-miner’s blocked gullet would allow passage to. Anne reflected on how the next day happened to be the anniversary of her father’s passing. Like everyone else, Joe had entered into life as a baby, she told herself, although, to her horror and dismay, it was very like a baby that he had been forced to leave it.

Sensing that she might be on the point of weeping, and, fearing that Tom would notice, and perhaps ask her about it, Anne turned aside, and gazed into the semi-distance, at the great, grey viaduct, now barely visible between the swaying branches of the trees. The customary early evening breeze now swept in from that easterly quarter, and its advent promptly chilled the warm, trickling runnels that had emerged from the corners of both of her eyes.

Whatever happened now, Anne told herself, she would simply take the basket and gather up the rest of her laundry items, and slip away silently with them to the safety of her steamy kitchen, where a lamb stew - Drew’s favourite supper - was already beginning to boil. But what Tom did next meant that, far from fleeing the scene, she would be forced to spin round and face him again, and once more seek out the sunken, blood-shot eyes which had previously caused her a degree of revulsion, reminding her, as they did, of her dead father’s own.

‘You were always my favourite girl, you know,’ Tom suddenly told Anne, standing now, and gripping tightly with his bony hands the wire-fence that split in two their almost identical back-gardens. ‘Always - always,’ he continued, his wayward, mysterious words now rising up and spinning through Anne’s brain like the circling clouds of condensed breath that emerged from his deep-lined, crooked mouth, and seemed to her now to swirl up high above them both, towards the brick-chimney that sat, perhaps a tad ungainly, above his terraced house.

Anne suddenly felt she was about to faint, and so, head down, rushed away to her open back-door, there to grasp firmly the wooden frame, trailing socks and pants all over the grass as she did so. Who on earth was this strange old man? Anne asked herself. And what on earth did he mean by his random, bizarre comment? Only when she was once again safe inside the house did she feel able to begin to contemplate the meaning of the words that he had uttered.

Anne drew closed behind her the kitchen-curtain, and then stared at the small, rectangular, black-and-white school photograph which now appeared in her eye-line on the wall alongside it. Anne slowly reached up, and, with a trembling forefinger, tenderly touched the tiny head of a young, dark-haired girl in a long, billowing skirt, who, holding tightly to a girlfriend’s shoulder, smiled up at the world before her with a beaming, but innocently toothless, grin. Anne moved in closer, and gently rubbed her own front tooth with the very same digit, and stood staring in wonder at how peculiar, and how gauche and unattractive she had looked back then.

Anne spun round and walked into her living-room, and then turned towards a wooden shelf in the corner of the room. From it she collected a large, black album titled
‘Anne’s Scrap-book,’
and quickly skimmed through it until she reached a page which she already knew as intimately in her mind’s eye as in her dreams, and which featured a cello-taped, paper photograph of a Sixties,’ uniformed, and helmeted policeman. The bobby was carrying securely in his sturdy arms a shy, delicate, tender bundle that was a young girl, who had been rescued by the patiently searching miners just minutes earlier, alone, covered in rubble, but miraculously still alive.

Anne blinked repeatedly in anticipation as, with trembling fingers, she very carefully unfolded the crisp, cracked, and somewhat discoloured, printed report from a daily newspaper of the time, which she still remembered having once glued onto the book’s broad, black page. Its smudged headline read - ‘
144 DEAD AT JUNIOR SCHOOL IN ABERFAN.
’

The road that ran uphill past Anne Cillick’s house and the two other, more modest, cottages that adjoined and preceded it, crossed over an old, stone bridge, beneath which lay, and at a perfect right-angle to it, the old station-halt, and from which point the course of the old double railway-line ran away westwards, into a swirl of green fields, and eastwards, across the great limestone viaduct, known locally as
The Seven Arches
. The north side-wall of the Cillick dwelling, therefore, stood perched high above the old line’s cycle-track that lay below it, while the views to the east from the windows of the family’s back-bedrooms, taking in as they did the whole, deep and forested valley, were not only beautiful but breathtaking.

In the evening’s gathering gloom a pair of young lovers sluggishly walked up the hill together across the road from the short, terraced row, moving in and out of the shadows thrown upon them by the tree-trunks that grew alongside the curve of the bend. The slim girl, who was walking on the inside of her taller companion, was in the process of telling the boy a story.

‘Honest, Chris. Well,
I
believe her, anyway,’ the girl told him. ‘She said she got grabbed by him as he was giving her something off his milk-float.’ She suddenly made a gruesome face. ‘The dirty old bugger!’

‘Semi, or full-fat, Rhi?’ asked Chris, turning towards her, a wicked grin sweeping right across his handsome face.

‘A belt is what he needs if you ask me. What? Oh, you’re disgusting, you are,’ replied Rhiannon, slapping him tenderly on the shoulder.

A vehicle suddenly pulled up on the road behind them, and the pair spun round as one to see who it might be. Two policemen in uniform soon emerged from their police-car and walked up the path of the adjoining house to the Cillick home, briefly knocked on the door, then entered. The young couple slipped from their hiding-place among the bushes, and, hand-in-hand, and still in partial school-uniform, began to cross over the road. But Chris suddenly pushed the girl back a few steps and up against a tree, and proceeded to kiss her roughly on the neck. Rhiannon squealed once, but then chose to accept his clumsy, but passionate, advances.

‘I can’t,’ Rhiannon told him. ‘You know that. Not here, anyway. And I’m not going with you down the line again, that’s for sure.’

Chris recoiled his head a little so that he could look deeply into her blue, copper-sulphate eyes, made his customary disgruntled face, and felt confident that that might be all that was required. He was right. Rhiannon grasped his ears and pulled his head down once more, until his face was as close as she could get it to her own. There the two lovers paused, hair entwined, buttocks mutually grasped, tongues protruding slightly over lips and chin.

The two policemen emerged again from the house opposite them, but this time with an ancient companion, whom they guided, with a firmly gripped arm, down the path and into their car. Hearing the car-lock open with a squeal, Chris and Rhiannon suddenly broke off their clinch, and watched intently as all three men drove away down the hill that the couple had just walked up, on towards the hair-pin bend, and thence left towards the waterfalls and the road to town.

‘Wow! That was quick,’ Chris announced, laughing. ‘The old fella only got here yesterday. I guess they must have been tracking him with that helicopter we saw. All the way up the valley, I wouldn’t wonder.’

‘Then he’s probably from Cardiff,’ said Rhiannon, glumly.

‘Maybe. Or from England,’ added Chris, his sparkling brown eyes now filled with mischief. ‘He probably never paid the right money at the bridge.’

‘The Severn Crossing?’ she asked him. ‘Yeah, perhaps he broke through the barrier like on
‘Gavin and
-’

‘But after first murdering the woman in the booth with a Molotov Cocktail,’ the wide-eyed boy added imaginatively.

‘Yeah. Or a W-K-D,’ suggested Rhiannon. ‘One bang on the bonce with one of them and -’

‘Splat!’ shouted Chris, mimicking an exploding cranium, and then wobbling about helplessly. ‘Aye, they should always keep their pull-up windows shut, if you ask me, girl. I know for sure that the guy who brings my weed across it is never unarmed, and always keeps a steak-knife in his glove-compartment.’

‘Eh? But I thought they used a grinder,’ Rhiannon retorted, scrunching up her nose with bewilderment.

‘Not for the drugs, babe,’ Chris responded. ‘Not for the weed. No, for the - in case they pass a stray cow on the carriageway, you know? And they fancy a quick sirloin-and-chips.’

‘Stop it, Chris!’ screamed Rhiannon, slapping him on the back. ‘You know very well how much I adore cows.’

‘I know, I know - you said your great-grandad was a farmer once,’ Chris replied, grasping her swinging hand to save himself from more pain. ‘I love them too, you know. Oh yes, I think they’re delicious.’ He ducked again, then raised his head aloft. ‘Rhiannon - can I ask you something?’ he asked her.

‘About cows? ‘Course you can,’ she said. ‘I know all about them - their colours, their lactation, their breeding, everything.’

‘Their breeding? Oh, good,’ replied Chris. ‘Tell me, babe - if your cow was Friesan, would you get her a Jersey?’