Last Train to Gloryhole (31 page)

‘Ask him anything about outer space, and he’ll be sure to know it,’ Steffan said, smiling.

‘O.K., then.’ replied Volver, straightening up. ‘I bet you can’t tell us which two astronauts - apart from Tom Hanks, I mean - were on the calamitous
Apollo Thirteen
mission, which was the only one that never managed to land on the Moon.’

‘Easy,’ retorted Jake proudly. ‘But Tom Hanks wasn’t actually one of them, remember.’

‘Do you think I didn’t know that, dip-stick?’ Volver retorted angrily, and turning to Steffan to share with him his sense of superiority. ‘Mind you, he probably would have been, had he been born back then, don’t you think?’

But Jake was busy thinking, and proceeded to answer the question posed. ‘They were Jim Lovell -’

‘Tom Hanks,’ Volver explained, grinning.

‘Jack Swigert.’

‘Kevin Bacon - my personal favourite, as it goes.’

‘And Fred Haise.’

‘Er - some other actor I’d never heard of before.’

‘Bill Paxton,’ Jake told him, beaming. ‘You must remember the sleazy car-salesman in
‘True Lies,
’ surely?’

‘But I thought you said there were only three of them,’ Steffan reminded him.

‘There were!’ the other two announced in unison.

‘Oh, O.K., then,’ responded Steffan, little the wiser. ‘Say - how many large bags are you leaving us with, then, Volver?’ Twelve, is it? And what’s this one here with silver paper inside? Eh?’ He looked up into the tall, bearded man’s face. ‘Do you figure - are you thinking - that we - we should be movng up a level all of a sudden then? Is that what you think?’

‘Don’t get so stressed, Steffan,’ the foreigner told him, laying the palm of his long hand on the boy’s cheek. ‘It’s on a sale-or-return basis, O.K.? Look - I realise you boys have only ever met me once before, but I’m going to be back here again in a fortnight, and hopefully once a week after that. And if you intend trying to save up in advance for those gigantic tuition-fees they have up in England now then you need to put the hard graft in right now, don’t you? Because you’ll soon find you’ve accrued a debt bigger than the average family mortgage before you even find someone you want to share a flat with. Life out there’s not easy, you know, boys. Just look at me. I know I may look forty-five, but I’m only in my thirties.’

‘But how on earth are we supposed to find buyers for all this lot you’ve left us?’ asked Jake, suddenly acquiring a fresh insight, and marking how the tall, hirsute Afrikaner’s own distinction seemed to wrap him round like a chill breath. ‘Quite apart from the coke.’

Volver stood up to his full height and looked off into the distance. He shaded his eyes from the morning sun and pointed down into the green-edged, valley cleft below, at the long, parallel rows of terraced homes that made up the two contiguous communities of Merthyr and Dowlais, and the housing-estates that covered the hills, and told them, ‘There’s your market, boys. Go, be fruitful and multiply, subdue the Earth, and fill it with all your blessings.. He turned about. ‘And in a fortnight I’ll be back here with your money. It’ll be in euros, by the way. And I’ll also have a second consignment in the back of the car for you, all packed up and ready for sale, O.K.? Any questions? I thought not. Right, then I’m off back to civilisation. Well, Bristol, anyway. See ya!’

Donning his shades, the denim-jacketed South African got into his Audi coupe and sped off back down the narrow, winding mountain-road to the
Asda
-roundabout, and the Heads-of-the-Valleys road beyond it, which would eventually lead him, at break-neck speed he hoped, along the route that ran back east towards the English border.

With two large sacks hanging from their shoulders, the two boys soon climbed aboard their blue scrambler-bike, and began following after the drifting cloud of smoke and dust that the Afrikaner had left trailing in his wake in the cool, mountain air behind his fleeing motor.

‘Who does that Volver guy think he is?’ Jake shouted in Steffan’s ear from behind. ‘The Devil himself?’

His friend half-turned his head and screamed back at him, ‘You’d better believe it!’

The drone of the banal, seemingly endless, chatter that seemed to pervade the whole room, chock-full of tele-typists, forced Rhiannon to get up again from the black, leather stool, (which they had chosen specially for her, but which she felt her bottom almost permanently stuck to,) and walk over to the huge window that looked out onto the bottom end of Merthyr. She was beginning ro wish she had accepted the opportunity she had been offered of working at the large leisure-centre she could just make out round to her left, except that that was where she heard all the jocks went, and where, inevitably, work-experience week would inevitably prove to be more exhaustive, if a lot less soul-destroying, than the call-centre in which she was presently based.

Gazing out into the afternoon sunlight, Rhiannon watched every motor-vehicle as it rounded the wide bend off the roundabout, then changed up and accelerated briefly past the front of her building, then drifted gently down to the smaller, much older ‘
Locomotive roundabout,’
from where the slow, inevitably tortuous, trek through the town-traffic would now begin.

It was the fourth car that approached from the main road which immediately caught Rhiannon’s eye. For a start it looked familiar, and second, it pulled in suddenly, and halted on the double-yellow line just across from where she stood, face against the glass, looking down. Yes, it was her father’s car, she told herself, but, oddly, it didn’t seem to be her father who was driving it today, but some strange, unknown female in sun-glasses and a head-scarf. Rhiannon strained her eyes to try to make out the unknown woman’s identity, but it wasn’t until the diminutive little lady got out of the car, and began transporting a pot of paint and a large paint-brush across in her direction, that Rhiannon realised that it was none other than her mother.

Through the glass-pane the gob-smacked young girl soon saw Gwen pause outside the
‘Silver Excalibur’
building, which stood right next-door to her own, stare upwards at its broad facia, and, after setting her pot down on the grass, and carefully removing it’s round lid, dip in her brush, and begin the task of daubing in red something that Rhiannon was unable to make out onto the plain, black wall before her.

Rhiannon was shocked beyond belief, and was reluctant even to turn round, in case someome else in the vast room had also seen what she had seen. Thankfully nobody had. She knew full well that she had to do something, but, not wanting to attract any attention, she calmly took her coffee-cup back to the kitchen, then walked slowly towards the door, taking care to smile at every person who looked in her direction, and even a few of those who didn’t.

When she had passed out into the silent, carpeted corridor that overlooked the mezzanine and the spacious vestibule that sat beneath it, Rhiannon elected to wait for the lift rather than gallop off down the spiral staircase, and run the risk of toppling over disastrously in her strappy, five-inch heels. But, as luck would have it, this turned out to be the wrong choice completely, the lift, presently stationary at the top floor, clearly needing at least two minutes more to reach her.

On exiting the building, the tumult of the traffic at the busy junction hit Rhiannon like a speeding freight-train. She looked around her and quickly saw that the car and its driver - her mother, Gwen - had already departed, and all that was left behind was a wet brush and, alongside it, an empty pot, dripping splashes of blood-red paint down its side. Embarrassed, and more than a little flustered, Rhiannon picked up both items, and, holding them well away from her pretty dress at arm’s length, walked around more or less in a circle, searching for a waste-bin that she might safely deposit them in. But the poor girl soon found that there was none.

A man in a passing car suddenly screamed out abusively to her. ‘You Welsh-Language protestors just make me sick!’ then threw down on the seat beside him the mobile-phone he had been busy texting on, and raised his two fingers at her instead. What on earth did he mean? Rhiannon asked herself, reddening fast, and, tossing the two large, messy items she was carrying down onto the grass. Rubbing her soiled hands together, Rhiannon soon turned and looked up at the wall behind her, where, in large, scarlet characters she saw written the freshly-dripping word ‘
CALEDFWLCH
.’ But my mother doesn’t even speak Welsh, Rhiannon told herself, so why on earth would she want to write up such a silly thing? And what the hell does that strange, almost unpronounceable, Welsh word actually mean, anyway? The girl turned and ran as fast as her stillettos would allow her back along the lawn to the neighbouring building she worked in, and then dashed headlong up its great, circular stairs. Reaching her work-station, she quickly clicked on the internet, and carefully typed into the
Google-
box the weird, Brythonic word her memory was unlikely to ever let her forget.

‘In Welsh and British legend
Caledfwlch
is the name of Arthur’s legendary sword, later called Excalibur,’ she read out aloud. ‘Christ alive! I know she’s not been herself for a while, but why in hell’s name would my mother -’

‘Hey - I knew that!’ her manager, Idris, announced from where he was standing, a few yards to her left, plastic coffee-cup in hand. ‘
Caled Fwlch’
he alliterated, splitting the term neatly in two. You see ‘
caled’
means ‘hard,’ he told her, approaching closer, and banging on his chest with his free hand, ‘and
fwlch
, or
bwlch
means ‘a pass.’

‘Hard Pass!’ exclaimed Rhiannon. ‘That sounds like something in rugby, don’t you think?’

‘It certainly does,’ the stout, bald-headed man replied, smiling. ‘But I guess Arthur called it
Caledfwich
because -’

‘Let me! Let me!’ Rhiannon implored him. ‘If Arthur was wielding it, then I imagine his enemies would find it well nigh impossible to pass him - to get past. Right?’

‘Exactly. You got it, babe,’ Idris told her, smiling again. ‘Say - where on earth did you come across that word, then, Rhiannon? That’s real, ancient Welsh, that is.’

Just then two young girls, carrying carrier-bags filled to the brim with sandwiches, sticky buns, and sundry snacks of various kinds, dashed into the room from the corridor. One of the pair suddenly walked over and addressed Idris.

‘God, you’ll never guess what some daft old bat went and scrawled on the front of the
Excalibur
building next-door, Mr. Evans!’ she stammered, before bursting out laughing.

‘My uniform is but a rolled-up cloth I stash inside my bag,

My tie, a triangle of well-stained stripes of blue and green.

The only jewellery, my name-sake chain I catch upon my chest,

My indolent mind, a tangled web of thoughts obsessed and images obscene.

Who am I, dearest lady? Pray, do tell. To you, once loved, who might this traveller seem?

Life’s treasure is the latched-up box of memories I stow

‘Neath bed wherein we once did writhe and write our love.

My breasts, two forest-fruits your tender lips did tight enclose.

My hips, that sunken freight your lissom body pressed, and thrice did rock above.

Who might I be, kind gentleman, who bathes her deepest thoughts in wishful streams?

Young lovers two, that’s who these words describe, though parted now,

While time ensoaks the fabric that enfolds our loins

To test its denier-strength, its promise, and its surety,

Perchance to leave it stouter, whole, and free from joins.

Who could e’er gainsay young hope so, cannot love itself esteem.

Who would prise true love apart, may hell itself choke in between.’

Rhiannon smiled at the whispered words she had just read out, she now having managed to put all three verses together in less than half-an-hour of her first private-study session back in the school-library since returning from work-experience. She knew full well that Chris had somehow strained his damaged leg again and so was absent, indisposed at home, but accepted that she dare not attempt to contact him, since he had told her plainly, both by phone and text, that what they had had together was finally, and irrefutably, over.

But Rhiannon was of another opinion entirely. Oh, yes World, and you’d better believe it! she silently announced, by way of confirmation. Newly emboldened by her recent experience of work and real life in
Celtic Aquarium Solutions,
especially in the crazed, stiletto-ed swamp that passed for its typing-pool, she believed that, while she could still eat and breathe - oh, and wear a short skirt, a push-up bra, and apply daily her favourite Chanel mascara - there was still hope.

The bell for lesson-five sounded, so the girl folded the paper in her freshly manicured hands, stood up, and walked out of the room and along the radiant, sun-beamed corridor towards the Art Room, where her teacher, Mr. Cillick - Chris’s father - would very soon be holding court.

The teacher wasn’t in the room when Rhiannon walked in, but she noticed that, as was his custom, he had hung his frayed and patched-up brown sports-jacket over the back of the black swivel-chair which stood, as always, squarely behind his desk. Rhiannon smiled at her good fortune, and hovered above it nervously, deliberating furiously whether or not she should follow through with her plan, while her fellow-students wandered round and sought out their work from amongst the myriad of shelves, drawers, cupboards and chests that filled the lower parts of the peeling, pastel walls on two of the opposing sides of the vast classroom.

Nervously pinching a fold of her top-lip between her sharp front-teeth, Rhiannon looked down and quickly committed the three-verse missive to memory, and then, after silently whispering some words of a prayer her mother had often recited at times of doubt or stress, she carefully slipped into the father’s jacket-pocket her literal expression of urgent, undying love for his darling, handsome son, which her tender, longing heart had just minutes before composed.