Last Train to Gloryhole (77 page)

Stifling a laugh, Vic said, ‘You must know, Jack, there’s enough evidence, in this room alone, to put you away for quite a stretch. Only in jail I’m sure you wouldn’t get the preferential that your old mate Humphreys most probably gets.’

‘Well, I realise that,’ said Jack. ‘He’s one of your own, after all.’

‘But, you know, friend, if you were to - if you
were
to - to play fair with us, Jack, then -’

‘Oh, I see,’ said the Welshman. He rolled his bottom-lip outwards in deep contemplation. ‘But, you know, if I did, Sir, would I - I mean, would I get prosecuted?’

‘Prosecuted! Good heavens, no. For what?’ asked Vic, grinning. ‘Parking on the pavement?’

‘Unlike you, Rhiannon, I agree with Buddha that the essence of life is evil,’ said Chris, lying back on the short grass, and inhaling from his six-inch reefer.

Rhiannon knelt before him, watching his every action. ‘But that doesn’t mean you must seek to embrace it yourself, does it?’ she told him. ‘I mean, I believe I could accept your need to smoke a joint on occasions,’ she continued, ‘although I’m not sure how much that is just a pose of yours to be honest. But it would be a totally different matter if you ever began
selling
drugs.’ She suddenly had a thought. ‘Tell me, Chris, you’d never do that would you? Sell drugs. And go getting yourself a criminal record before you’ve even found a job?’

Chris exhaled a cloud of smoke into the summer air. ‘You know, I don’t know what I want,’ he replied, only half understanding what she was saying, or even trying to.

‘My dad says there are people round here who have started to retire before they’ve even started work,’ said Rhiannon. ‘They line up every signing-day and squander the lot in the pubs in double-quick time, with precious little left over to hand to their longsuffering partners, and so feed their children. I tell you straight, Chris, I’m never going to live like that.’

‘Nobody is asking you to,’ said Chris, suddenly feeling cross with her for appearing to be comparing him with his sister. ‘I know you, Rhiannon. You’ll probably go and find yourself some decent, hard-working, hard-saving, soft-bellied, soft-hearted sucker of a man, who’ll take out for you a mortgage on some three-bedroom semi in Brecon Rise, and fly you and your two-point-four kids off to Tenerife every August without fail, to see the sun and get himself a tan, and Orlando every five or six years so the kids can see Mickey Mouse and Spiderman, and get himself a burger.’

‘Chris!’ yelled Rhiannon.

‘Can’t you see just how meaningless and pointless all that is, Rhiannon?’ he asked her. ‘I’m telling you that guy I’m describing could never be me.’

‘So you think I could settle for someone soft-bellied and soft-hearted, then, do you, Mister Buddha? Because I assure you I find it every bit as repulsive as you do. Look - if you’d like to know, it’s - it’s you that I want Chris Cillick. Faults and all. Joints, even.’

‘Yeah, you say that,’ he told her, sitting up, and dabbing out his spliff to smoke it later. ‘But you don’t really want me, babe, I know that. I bet you you’d run a mile if you had any idea what I’d got up to in my, close on, eighteen short years on this planet.’

‘Oh, you think so, do you?’ she respondesd spunkily. ‘Try me, then. Go on. What
have
you done? What have you got up to that is so, so bad? Say. I bet you I don’t even blink an eye.’

‘You certainly will if I told you it all,’ he told her, nodding.

‘Try me - I said. Go on!’ she insisted.

The wind swept in on them for the first time that day, causing their open shirts to flap about madly. Rhiannon tried to tuck hers in, but failed.

‘O.K., then,’ said Chris, sitting up much closer to her, so that he could register even the slightest flickering of an eye-blink. ‘Steffan, Jake and I spiked cakes with cannabis in Food Tech. one time. Half the class had to be taken to Casualty.’

‘That was you!’ yelled Rhiannon. ‘Carmen nearly died that day!’ She contemplated this most shocking of revelations. ‘My God! I’m shocked! But you haven’t made me blink yet, have you?’

‘I probably have,’ Chris replied, smiling. ‘But let me tell you another that definitely will make you blink, shall I?’ Rhiannon nodded. ‘I grew cannabis plants in a clearing in Vaynor Woods.’

‘Well, I guessed that,’ said Rhiannon, smiling. ‘You practically lived there all last summer. My friends were convinced you had turned gay. Me, too, as it goes.’ She giggled.

‘
And
in my neighbour’s loft.’ He bit his top lip, knowing that this would surprise her.

‘Wow! Now that’s pretty awesome,’ she retorted, thinking furiously. ‘Though that explains a lot, I reckon. Your phone being off for hours on end. Your clothes stinking so bad.’

‘Oh, thanks,’ he replied.

‘Don’t mention it.’

‘And I thought you liked coffee.’

‘I do when it’s wet and steaming,’ said Rhiannon. She smiled serenely at him. ‘And I guess all that time you spent with Carla upstairs in her home, the two of you were - were running a farm. And you told me it was music practice. Dear, dear. O.K., next. Where else did you grow it?’

‘In a small patch in
Pant Cemetery
, just over the wall from yours.’ He tried to stifle a laugh.

‘You’re lying!’ Chris nodded that he wasn’t. ‘What!’ she screamed. ‘A young grave-digger called Evan got the sack for that, you monster!’

‘Colossal blink there, I see,’ Chris told her, grinning.

‘God! What is it about you and skunk cannabis, Chris Cillick?’ she asked him. ‘Sounds very much like you love weed more than anything, and a great deal more than you love me.’

‘Rhiannon, babe, your love
is
my drug,’ he announced. ‘You must know that.’

‘Ha! Gotcha!’ she yelled. ‘That just proves you’re fake.
Roxy Music
that is, yeah? My dad’s got that one on vinyl.’

‘But that doesn’t mean I don’t mean it,’ he told her, reaching out a hand to stroke her curls.

Rhiannon pulled away. ‘Gotcha again!’ she shrieked. ‘Two
means
in the same sentence that time. Dead give-away, right? You’re such a charlatan, do you know that, Chris?’

A loud gun-shot rang out.

Both young people ducked and rolled over in the grass, Chris soon pressing his body over Rhiannon’s to protect her. They listened to the silence that ensued, broken only by the sounds of the birds squawking madly in the trees down below them.

‘There’s just one more thing I must tell you, babe. You ready?’ he asked, then pausing for full effect. ‘And I was Carla’s dealer for the last four months,’

Trembling with fear now, and staring up into his big brown eyes, Rhiannon asked him, ‘Chris, why are you telling me this? You - you know you never had to.’

‘Because - well, because these could be the very last words I
ever
tell you,’ he replied, biting into his top-lip.

It occurred to Rhiannon that the gun-shot had quite possibly been meant to strike down her lover, and she suddenly became terrified. ‘Mine, too, then,’ she told him, shaking.

‘Yours, too,’ he concurred.

‘Chris - I love you so much,’ whispered Rhiannon, a tear filling up her left eye.

‘I know. And I love you, too, Rhi,’ he told her, hugging her slim, wondrous body tightly to him, warm hands exploring freely between the folds of her madly flapping shirt and his own.

‘Right now Venus is hurtling like a blue tennis-ball across the black Cosmos,’ announced Jake, looking up at the fast-darkening sky above them.

‘Venus Williams?’ asked Leone, staring through the same, open, window but at the yard below.

‘No - fluff-head. The planet Venus, I’m saying,’ said Jake. It might look still enough in that patch of sky over where the sun just went down, but, in fact, it is shooting along at break-neck speed, just as we are zooming along too. The major difference being that we - the Earth - are spinning round once a day, while that little planet barely rotates at all. Hence the enormous temperature contrasts on its surface.’

‘You’ve lost me eons back,’ said Leone, her mouth falling open in a yawn. ‘My brain can’t possibly take in all that space.’ She looked down and regarded her new, black hair in her mirror.

Carla however nodded, appreciating fully the information that the simple, but knowledgeable, kid was dispensing, which kind she was often wont to process swiftly within her own smart brain, the result being that it often emerged again, not many moons after, in a musical form.

Jake looked across at Carla and each one smiled, aware they were exchanging a common thought about their relative insignificance in the wondrous universe they were barely a part of.

A loud gun-shot suddenly rang out.

‘Not another one!’ shrieked Leone. ‘What the fuck does he think he’s doing now? I hope he’s not trying to impress me. Who the fuck loves pigeon-pie anyway? And I already told him I was vegetarian.’

‘Leone - do you love Volver?’ Carla asked her, looking up again at the twilight sky for fear the younger girl might sense her query had significance.

‘Of course I do,’ she answered, staring at the singer. ‘He’s one hell of a catch if you ask me. He could have any girl he wants he could, I bet. All my best mates for a start. And do you know, I heard that, in total, he’s got three different houses and four different cars?
And
a platinum card too. And he’s never been to prison neither. Christ, that’s a first for me, that is.’

Carla smiled. To her mind Leone seemed so wedded to the evil man she clearly knew better than her that there was little point in even trying to enlist the young girl on her side. Young Jake, on the other hand, was proving a completely different matter, she thought. He had wavered like a candle-flame in a windy corridor the previous night, then finally succumbed to her finest, almost effortless, endeavours. Yes, it appeared Pennant School musical-theatre had served her really well after all, thought Carla. And, having virtually won Jake over, she realised only too well that she couldn’t afford to lose him now otherwise she herself would be lost; lost completely.

A car’s engine could suddenly be heard approaching the farm along the track from the main road. When the vehicle finally got parked up outside the front-door Carla recognised it straightaway as belonging to Chris’s girlfriend Rhiannon. Wow! This was an interesting development, she mused, but one that she knew she was going to have to keep to herself. If the car was here, then where was Rhiannon? Carla asked herself. She now began to fear for the young girl’s safety; after all, like Chris she was only seventeen years old, and possibly alone.

Seconds before Leone and Jake had rushed downstairs, and both soon emerged onto the front-yard, illuminated in the little car’s headlights. ‘Where did you get the car?’ Leone asked Steffan, who soon leapt out of the driving-seat and thrust up the bonnet. ‘You didn’t get it for me, did you? I loves yellow, I do. Only nobody ever taught me how to drive, see. Unless
you
want to.’

‘And why would I want to do that?’ asked Steffan, slamming the bonnet down. ‘You have enough trouble walking, the shoes you wear.’

‘Fun-ny,’ said Leone. ‘Hey - did you buy it, or is it nicked?’ she asked him, as Volver walked across from the trees to join them, a rifle gripped under each arm.

‘It was left parked up on the hill path,’ the boy told Volver. ‘No keys in, of course. So I punched the ignition and brought it down here.’

‘What do you want to do that for?’ yelled Volver, throwing his weapons down. ‘Do you want to bring the cops here? Because that’s what’s going to happen now if we don’t get rid of it.’

‘Aw, can’t I even have one ride in it?’ pleaded Leone. ‘Please, babe.’

Completely ignoring her, Volver continued. ‘You need to take it somewhere where they can easily find it,’ he told the boy. ‘You and Jake go and dump it somewhere right now.’

‘Like where?’ asked Steffan.

‘Take it down as far as that bridge that separates the two reservoirs at that Dolygaer place
,
’ Volver told him. ‘Then walk back on this side of the lake, along the old railway-track that runs past here towards Talybont and Brecon. That way nobody will see you.’

The two boys jumped into the car straightaway and sped off, and, seconds later, Carla watched as the yellow Fiesta hurtled down the track towards civilization once again. The singer watched its red back-lights vanish amongst the trees, then rushed over to try the door, only to find it locked as usual. She then returned to the window and waited for a few minutes until she felt sure she had caught sight of its headlights travelling south again on the road in the distance.

Carla closed the window, lay back on the bed, and began to cry. Rhiannon was out there, with or without Chris, she thought, and the temperature in this upland terrain was now starting to drop fast. If the girl happened to wander into
Candice Farm
looking for sanctuary, then there was no doubt that she would seriously regret it. Why ever did I call it
Candice Farm
just then? Carla asked herself. After all, it was called
Cwm Scwt
these days, and that was what the wooden sign back at the junction on the main road declared to all the travellers who passed by. And passed by they clearly did, she thought, since not a single soul had turned off the main road and driven up the narrow trackway to the farm in the best part of forty-eight hours.

Candice Farm
had been very different about fifteen years ago, recalled Carla, around the time when she had first been invited along to sample the fun, and the music, and the accompanying excess that, on specific occasions, went on there. She couldn’t actually remember having ventured into the house itself more than perhaps once or twice, she thought, since the real action, including the musical gang-bang that she had participated in, had definitely taken place in a barn somewhere thereabouts, which she recalled had sat partially hidden amongst the conifers quite some distance to the rear of the farmhouse-building she now lay abed in. Carla then suddenly remembered that she had lost her virginity in the cool, shadowy woods nearby, although, with whom, she couldn’t actually say.

Carla began to think about Leila and Jackie Boyce, wondering whether the tragedy that had happened to the mother might not one day become erased in the mind of her poor daughter. She felt sure that Jackie’s killing had been purely a vile act of vengeance perpetrated on the woman on account of Carla’s love for her. And although she realised that it was Volver who had clearly been behind it, Carla herself felt a terrible responsibility for what had taken place