Forty-one

The 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 her—Idris Edwards’s mam among them and Evan didn’t like to tell her what he knew—and 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 strange—how 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 landscape—the 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 tragedy—she 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 fault—it 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 board—who 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 gravestones—the names so familiar and so many of them—Rhys 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 clowning—a born actor if ever there was one. Short lives snuffed out too soon. The rows and rows of miners’ graves stood to attention behind them—men 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 valley—shrouded in mist today as then—the 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 graves—Evan 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 years—if 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.

He took a pristine white flower from the grave that entombed his devastated mother, his strong, capable father from whom he’d inherited all his God-given talent and his beautiful sister, and he crushed the fragile petals in his hands. What if he’d found someone who made him want to sing Beatles songs with her again—someone like Fern, perhaps—would she, too, be cruelly snatched away from him? How could he ever hold a child of his own in his arms and not shake with terror at what the future might bring? The very thought of it made him go cold. But what was the point of his life, his success, if all of it was to be endured alone? It caused him great anguish to admit it, but he was tired of being isolated in his own life, of being by himself. Wasn’t it time he summoned up the courage to open up and share his life with someone else? He knew only too well that loving and losing someone could ruin your life, forcing you into a dark place that left you unable to function at anything more than a primary level. Could he ever risk loving so much again? Was he prepared to put everything else that he’d worked so hard for in his life on the line for that chance? He’d built an impenetrable bubble round himself, and now he longed for someone to come along and pop it, to liberate him. With help, surely he would be able to break free and step back into the real world once more?

He looked at the sky and cried. This village, this tragedy, this loss, was still in his blood, coursing through his veins. To keep the darkness away was a constant effort. That was why he always needed to be in bright, airy apartments with big rooms. Why he needed windows that didn’t have curtains to obscure them. Why the noise of jet engines sent a chill arrow of fear into his heart. Why he kept himself healthy with handfuls of vitamins, punished himself with a stringent fitness regime. And it was why, when he was alone at night, he still slept with the light on.