Last Train to Gloryhole Read Online Free Page B

Last Train to Gloryhole
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many years had already knocked out his respiratory centre and left his right side paralysed. Everyone in the street was aware that he was barely able to speak, or even open his eyes, although they knew he could still hear our tearful voices, and could yet still move the calloused fingers of his left hand, that once could strum a banjo of a Saturday night in The Mackintosh, The Labour Club and The Cardigan Arms in Dowlais with the very best of them.
    I recalled how, on what proved to be his final evening among us, I had detected a blackened hole in the thumb-nail of his rigid right hand that I strangely sensed would now lack the time necessary to work its way out, however many hours or days he might have remaining, and however much longer after death a dead man’s nails were said to continue to grow. And I fondly remembered too how, at the end of that long night, and barely minutes before the welcome sunrise, I felt moved to lean across the blood-stained and phlegm-encrusted pillow to caress his furrowed brow, only to find that his temple was already as cold as the corrie-d, mountain-ice on nearby Pen-y-Fan .
    My dearest Grandad, (whom we all lovingly addressed as Dad-cu, ) had breathed his last in those early hours before school began, and so had left me - his youngest grandson, and his ofttimes acolyte - to spit and cough and curse away the day on his behalf, and to poach and proffer, pilfer and plunder, and, as was his wont to do before me, walk the weary world of Wales alone.
    I stood up and walked across to the window of the room, and gazed out across the narrow road to the broad side-gate of the cemetery just as its janitor Ivor Coles locked it up for the night with his great, clinking bunch of keys that your average cat-burglar might have given up his fence for. The vast grave-yard’s narrow, dusky lane ran on up the hill to where Sam’s recently re-opened, and now, once again, refilled, and bouquet-strewn grave lay, just a few feet at most from the stony path, as well as to those other, more monumental mounds and memorials that housed, now and forever, the remains of many of my former family-members, among them my own dear mother.
    My mind drifted back just six or seven hours this time, to the moment when I had bent my back up there to scatter a handful of soil atop Sam’s coffin for the second time in almost forty years. A crowd of friends and relations had stood around in black attire, accompanied by the odd local journalist, who had more than likely been required to attend purely on account of the very unusual nature of the interment.
    I had watched a group of starlings swoop down on a colony of hapless insects, that were understandably oblivious to their lack of camouflage, as they ventured out of the grass-verge and across the grey, tarmacadam lane. And it was back down this same lane, towards the hill-top home in which I now stood, that we had all either driven or strolled, after paying our last respects to my dead brother, before taking time to acknowledge, and tearfully embrace, those distant relatives who had, by now, become almost strangers to us all. having travelled there from as far flung locations as West Wales and England, and so needed to leave early in order to get home again the same day.
    The scene from my window was now one of supreme stillness and peace, with just the rising, yellow moon to light up the vast, undulating field of death that for many years now I had, through my second marriage to my darling Gwen, elected to live alongside. The eerie creaking of the gate, as it was dragged to in Ivor Coles’ iron grip, and the horrible clunk of its ultimate closure, saw no one running towards it this evening, I mused, in their desperate efforts to escape the embarrassing predicament of another dreaded lock-in. And yet I felt sure I could still glimpse one solitary figure in the far distance, making her stooping way from the site of my brother’s grave, and gracelessly stumbling away in the

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