Welcome to the Real World (17 page)

T
here was a roaring sound like a jet plane flying too low overhead. Evan heard his dad shout, 'Get out of here!' and there was a mad scramble to obey.

Evan thought it was a plane coming to land on their heads and huddled into a tight ball, forehead on his knees. The roaring increased, and Evan watched open-mouthed as before his very eyes a huge spinning boulder smashed through the window, flattening two of the choir membersMr Vaughn and Mr Boycewho were in its path. Then all the world went black as they were hit with a wall of shale, slurry and mud as the six-hundred-foot mountain of waste coal that had stood silently behind the village for years slid, with devastating speed, down the valley and engulfed the tiny hall.

All the people here knew that there were risks that came from living in the shadow of a slag heap and being perilously near to the pit head, but it was the landscape they lived with every day. The slippery components of the towering black masses shifted regularly, resettling their immense weight, but it was the price you had to pay for keeping jobs in the community. And no one could have imagined quite how catastrophic the consequences of a major slippage would be or how easy it would be to trigger.

When the roaring stopped, Evan remembered, there was the most unearthly silence. You could hear no noise from the road outside and no birds singing. Idris Edwards had somehow ended up next to him, though his head was at a funny angle and there was dark blood running from his nose. They were both half-buried by a horrible, foul-smelling slurry. Evan shook his friend, but he didn't move even though icy, black water was running round their legs and it was really frightening.

'Come on. Come on,' a voice said by his ear. It was Dylan Hughes, standing looking shell-shocked with his shirt all ripped down the front. His mam would kill him when she saw the state of him. Evan scrambled from under his chair, urging Idris to come with him, but still he wouldn't move. Across the hall he could see the dirtied arm of his red jumper stuck out from the mud. Evan struggled to wade towards it and he pulled it out. It was ruined. Shredded beyond recognition. His mother would tan his backside for that later. He picked it up and clutched it to him. Megan David could work wonders with her knitting needlesmaybe she could mend it.

He couldn't see his Da or Glenys anywhere. Tangled music stands stuck out of the muck, and Arwel Ham Arms, face filthy and bleeding, tore at the black mass with his bare hands like a man possessed. All the men who had stood side-by-side with his Da on the stage had disappeared.

'Da!' Evan shouted. 'Da. Where are you?'

'Get out!' Arwel Ham Arms yelled at Evan.

'What about Da?' Evan heard his voice shake. 'What about Glenys?' They were there just a moment ago, where had they gone? Had they left without telling him? Had he been so naughty that Da had left him behind? Evan felt himself wanting to cry. Then he spotted a ruined Molly Dolly abandoned on the slurry and knew that it was a bad thing. Glenys would never be parted from her favourite toy if she could help it.

'Get out!' Arwel sounded frantic. 'Get out, quickly. Go for help.'

Dylan Hughes tugged at his arm and then scrambled ahead of Evan, scaling the pile of waste coal and mud which had smashed through most of the windows, blocking their exit. Evan couldn't even see the door. He couldn't see any of their friends, eithernot even Rhys Williams, who was his best friendthey always went everywhere together.

'I can't leave Rhys,' Evan gasped, coughing as the dust choked his throat.

'He's gone,' Dylan told him and, at the time, he'd assumed that Dylan meant his friend had already left.

Rhys would have been cross if he'd found out that Evan was going off with Dylan without himhe could be funny like that. There was one window right at the top of the hall which was still intact. Dylan climbed higher, and when he reached the window he started to kick.

'What are you doing?' Evan asked in shock.

'I'm going home to Mam,' Dylan told him flatly. 'She'll know what to do.' His hands and knees were black and bleeding from scaling the coal. 'I'm not staying in here.'

It seemed like a sensible plan. Though Da would be furious that Dylan had broken one of the few windows that seemed to have survived the impact from the tip. Evan hoped that he didn't get blamed for that, too.

T
he limousine swung into Stackpole Street, and Evan instructed Frank to slow down. The place where the village hall used to be was now a children's playground. There was still a gap in a row of terraced houses where the cataclysmic slippage of waste coal had taken out the homes, smashing the solid bricks and mortar to the ground like matchsticks. The street now looked like a rictus mouth with all of its front teeth knocked out. A small, immaculately maintained memorial garden marked the tragic event with a neat brass plaque declaring that the disaster had claimed the lives of fifty miners, including twenty men from the Llangolleth Male Voice Choir and five of their children. Evan ran his fingers over the cool metal. Among them his father, Geraint David, and Glenys, his beloved sister.

Bright yellow daffodils swayed bravely in the cold breeze, the weight of the rain bowing their heads. The Prince of Wales had attended the memorial service and had planted a tree. Evan David, to his lasting shame, had stayed away. He was too angry, too hurt, too outraged, to have been able to mumble platitudes to visiting dignitaries who had no idea how this community had suffered. The noisy laughter of the children now playing on the gaily painted swings and the slide seemed alien to him. For so long after the disaster a pall of hush had fallen over the village.

Evan leaned forward and spoke to Frank. 'Let's go up to the cemetery.'

On that fateful day, Dylan had helped Evan to struggle through the window and the first shock was breathing fresh air again after the dust-laden atmosphere of the village hall. He remembered gulping it greedily into his lungs.

The second shock had been that the village hall was gone, smothered under the shale, completely obliterated by the shifting mass. The towering tip looked as if it had exploded like a volcano, leaving a crater the like of which Evan would have only expected to see on the moon, not in this sleepy village. They found out later that over half a million tons of coal waste had been loosened by three days of continual rain and set on its tragic route by an underground explosion from the pit. A tiny spark from a coal-cutter had ignited a build-up of gas caused by a fault in the colliery's ventilation system. A fault that Geraint David had complained about for years to his foreman at work and had continued to complain about every night when he returned home from the depths of hell.

A group of miners straight from the pit, still blackened from work and reeling from the impact of the explosion, were already on the scene when Evan and Dylan kicked their way out of the village hall. They dug frantically at the heap that had brought down trees, bricks, cars and anything else that had been in its voracious path, knowing that their colleagues were trapped inside. Evan folded the tattered remains of his jumper and left it on a wall while he too ran to claw at the coal with his hands, trying to reach his sister, until a policeman came and lifted him gently away while he struggled ineffectually at the air.

'My da's in there,' Evan said to him stricken. 'And my sister.'

'Come away, son,' the policeman said softly. 'There's nothing you can do for them now.'

Some of the miners, blackened with filth, were crying. Of his father and Glenys, there was no sign.

Moments later though, his mother, in her carpet slippers and still tying her headscarf over her hair, ran towards the hall. She'd brought all the towels from the house with her and Evan didn't know why. When she saw him, she ran to him and hugged him briskly while Evan tried to hide the remains of his jumper.

'Where's Glenys?' she'd demanded of him, shaking his shoulders. 'Where's your sister?'

'I don't know,' he'd answered, but feared the worst.

'Where's your da?' His mother had left him before he could answer to run to the coal heap, pushing aside anyone who tried to stop her. Other mothers joined herIdris Edwards's mam among them and Evan didn't like to tell her what he knewand they'd scrabbled at the muck and silt with their fingers until they bled while he stood on the sidelines, forgotten, along with his rescuer, Dylan, not knowing what to do.

After an hour or more, his father was lifted out of a window by policemen. His limbs were floppy like Molly Dolly's. He was cut and bleeding, his hair was matted with mud, his clothes torn and dirty. His da was laid on the ground, and a policeman covered him with a sheet. Which Evan thought was strangehow would his da be able to see with that all over his eyes?

Megan David couldn't stand unaided after that. She leaned against Mrs Edwards, her knees buckling with the weight of her limp body. As darkness fell, Evan's mother was persuaded to leave the scene, and one of the ambulance men washed and bandaged her hands, which were nothing more than bloody strips of raw skin. She took Evan home, but forgot to give him anything to eat. He bathed himself, getting dried with a rough flannel as all the towels were gone, while Megan David cried in front of the fire, making a terrible keening noise the like of which Evan had never heard before and never wanted to again. Then he sat with her in his pyjamas in silence, not knowing what to say. Later that night, leaving Evan alone and scared, his mother went with a policeman to the little Baptist chapel, waiting in line for hours to perform the grisly task of searching through the bodies wrapped in blankets until they found Glenys.

Today, Frank swung the limousine round the tight bends as they climbed towards the village cemetery, a place that seemed disproportionately large for the size of the community. The church stone was blackened with age, and Frank pulled into the car park outside the wooden, studded front door.

'I won't be long,' he said to his driver.

The older man's face was creased with concern. 'I could come with you, governor.'

Evan shook his head. 'I prefer to be alone.'

'There's an umbrella in the boot of the car.' The rain was heavier now, weighing down the grey sky. 'Let me get it for you.'

'Thanks,' Evan said, 'but I'll be fine.'

He wanted to feel the discomfort of the rain on his head. He wanted to feel it soaking through this ridiculously extravagant cashmere coat. This shouldn't ever be a visit undertaken in the glare of the summer sun.

Evan left the car and walked up the steep path through the cemetery. The ancient gravestones were higgledy-piggledy and fallen, the grass overgrown. Stones that needed repairing were tied up with yellow and black tape like the stuff they use to mark the scenes of crime in American cop movies. It was a mess, and someone should do something about it. The memorial garden at the top of the hill looked too new and too immaculately kept by comparison. No one had forgotten these graves. The stark white stones stood out against the gloomy landscapethe last of the treacherous slag heaps flattened many years ago due to public pressure. After the disaster, there had been a mass burial service and the sounds of crying had carried along the valley to the next village.

Megan David, having just rescued her husband and her only daughter from being buried in the earth, was forced to return them to it once more. It was a torture that she never recovered from. Her hair had turned white almost overnight. She learned that Glenys had been found wrapped in her father's arms, but the fact gave her no comfort. Illogically, his mother blamed herself for the tragedyshe should never have allowed her children to go to the rehearsal, she should have found an excuse to keep her husband at home. But Evan knew that it wasn't really his mother's faultit was his. The fault was all his.

To say that nothing had ever been the same again was an understatement of magnificent proportions. The village, when the residents should have been mourning together in peace, went into battle against the coal boardwho they blamed for the disaster by ignoring the miners' worries about the problems with ventilation in the mineshaft. Evan's mother no longer knitted in the evenings; his ruined red jumper was the last she ever made for him and she never did mend it. There were no more luscious cakes. Dust lay unnoticed on the furniture. The wonderful opera recordings lay unplayed. The only sound was the clock ticking.

Back then, there was no counselling, no talking about it, crying was not 'the done thing'. You simply had to sit on your feelings, button them down, zip them up tight. No one talked to him in the street. No cheery greetings were called after him. People turned away from him as if he were too awful to look at. He never played with Dylan Hughes after that day. Whenever they met at school, they just looked at each other sheepishly, and Evan wondered if Dylan too felt guilty about surviving when so many others had died. He went to the chapel with his mother and they said the prayers and listened to the hymns and, though no one ever mentioned it, everyone knew that the strongest, purest voices in the village were missing. Only five members of the Llangolleth Male Voice Choir survived and, after the disaster, they never sang again. Evan couldn't sing the hymns, either, even though he wanted to, as they made a big lump come to his throat and the words wouldn't come out.

Nothing seemed to matter to his mother anymore. When his high standards of academic achievement started to slip, she didn't chide him as Da would have. Failing to complete homework went unpunished. He could leave his neck unwashed for weeks and his mother wouldn't notice. Dai Jenkins stopped bullying him even though Glenys was no longer around to protect him. And Evan didn't sing Beatles songs on the way to school anymore.

He went along the lines of gravestonesthe names so familiar and so many of themRhys Williams, his best friend. Idris Edwards. Merfyn Davis, who'd been so good at running that he won all the medals every sports day. Hywel Owen, who could make all the class laugh with his bad jokes and clowninga born actor if ever there was one. Short lives snuffed out too soon. The rows and rows of miners' graves stood to attention behind themmen who had lived their lives underground. Evan wondered if the confines of the earth held some peace from them now. He truly hoped so.

Evan reached the grave of his father and his much-loved sister, Glenys. He laid his hand on the marble stone. In his eyes she had never aged. To him she was always ten years old. It was hard to accept that his father had been younger than Evan was now when he'd died. They'd now been joined by his mother. 'Reunited,' Evan had put on the headstone, and he prayed that it was the case. It was the last time he'd come back to the village; to attend Megan's funeral. His mother had never regained the will to live after the loss of her husband and her daughter and had simply taken her time to fade away. Who could survive after that? From that day she was as lifeless, as dead as the loved ones she'd buried.

He looked out over the magnificent valleyshrouded in mist today as thenthe tiny, proud houses hugging its contours and his soul filled with sadness. At the age of eleven, after enduring three years of hearing his mother cry at night, even though she had boxes and boxes of unopened antidepressants in the bathroom cabinet, and too many nights lying in his bed alone wishing instead that he was lying in the earth with his da and with Glenys, he'd tried in his own way to cheer her up after she'd taken to her bed with a headache, to try in some small way to bring some happiness back to the house. He could bear the oppressive quiet no longer, so he'd stood in the sitting room and sang 'Oh Pure Heart'his mother's favourite song. In the months of enforced silence something strange had happened to his voice, and it was his father's rich tone that leaped forth from his throat. Megan David had careened down the stairs, swinging him round by his arm as she lashed out at his head in a frenzy. 'Never ever do that again, Evan. Never,' she said, and then collapsed sobbing on the floor.

A month later, without her ever looking him in the eye again, he'd been sent away without consultation to a school that had specialised in music at Oxford. Which was far enough away for him not to be able to go home regularly. After not being allowed to sing a note at home for all that time, Evan still wondered how he'd managed to gain one of the coveted scholarship places. Perhaps his da or Glenys were still protecting him and knew that he had to be taken away from that terrible place. This time he knew that the fault didn't lie with him.

He could understand his mother's agony, but he'd never been able to address it with her. Why hadn't she been able to find succour in her one surviving son? Megan had never rejoiced in his success; never watched him on television; never listened to his recordings. She'd been embarrassed by his stardom, so he'd stopped returning home to face her torment. To his mother he would always sound too much like his father, and nothing he could do would ever help her to bear that pain. Evan had never been reconciled with her, and she died with too many unspoken issues lying unresolved between them. Too many other mothers had also joined their husbands and their children in their graves prematurely. It was heartbreaking to see. There were always fresh flowers on the Davids' family gravesEvan paid the mother of Rhys Williams, monthly by direct debit, to maintain it perfectly as she did her own husband and son's memorial. And it very nearly helped to assuage Evan's conscience.

Every single person from the village had been marked by the legacy of the disaster. Many of his friends took jobs at the colliery that had blighted their lives, that had robbed them of fathers, uncles and brothers. They went down into the darkness of the pit every day even though their hands shook. They married local girls and settled down to build the next generation of villagers, the next generation of miners, the next generation of sacrifice. Evan had done it differently; he'd been one of the few boys to escape and, if money and fame were a measure of success, he'd gone on to achieve greatness. He'd gone from the school on to music college to study opera and then to Brighton Conservatoire, where he'd excelled in his chosen field, graduating as best student in his year. Within months he'd made a sensational public debut by winning the Cardiff Singer of the World competition in front of millions of television viewers. He was immediately signed by top agent Rupert Dawson, and his career sky-rocketed with a host of international appearances. His New York debut at the Met had warranted a front-page review in the
New York Times
an unprecedented honour. Evan had embraced his success readily and had never looked back at this small village that had almost swallowed him. Now he was respected, courted and cosseted around the world. Yet he hadn't escaped unscathed. Evan hadn't wanted to marry a village girl. Or any of the other girls he'd been involved with over the yearsif you could count casual dating as being 'involved'. Any form of emotional involvement was the one thing he'd steadfastly avoided. Since then, he wanted to be alone, untouched by the pain of love.