After Brock (27 page)

‘Knew him well, huh?' Whatever old fart had the paper managed to corral on the street and make talk? Pointless to ponder; he'd never find out. He probably did have many a hater as a schoolboy, and deservedly too. Beside this guff the paper printed a picture of ‘Peter Kempsey at 18,' then of Woodgarth, Etnam Road etc, his hair long-flowing Renaissance-style, like boys wore it in the seventies, in those far-distant days (regretted by many of his generation) of glam rock and a state actually proud of itself for looking after the needs of those who made it up.

‘Which reminds me,' says Pete slowly, but he can he face it? ‘I haven't come to the end of my story. I've got the worst part still to tell you, I'm afraid. But I guess, Luke, if you and Joe Public are to make sense of the whole Peter-and-Nathaniel-Kempsey saga, I've no alternative but to press ahead. Without any further ado!'

‘Well, of course you must, Pete,' says Luke, with a breezy kindness. ‘Take it easy, man. We've got plenty of time to spare for you, haven't we, Nat?'

That, thinks the boy he's addressed, is the first time this guy's used my first name in a light, natural way. Are things looking up then? Well, the sun is higher in the sky, the sky itself is a brighter blue than before. It'll be a fine afternoon. Up there he'd have stretched his limbs out on the heather and surrendered to the warmth, and later gone picking cloudberries.

But Pete who's about to take him back in words to those mountains Nat now thinks of as his own, is casting his gaze downwards, as one dreading what he yet has to relate. There's no going back for him now. He's turned his shop-sign round to ‘Closed', believing Luke Fleming's his best bet, as far as both accurate and reasonably friendly unravelling of Nat's tale's concerned, and of the history behind it too.

When it's my turn to come clean about everything (assuming – a big assumption – that I allow myself to agree to this), I shan't be anything like as submissive as my dad, thinks Nat. Mum's right about him; for all his awkwardness and independence, he's only too apt to choose the line of least resistance. Unlike me, who, when still at Junior School wrote a poem about myself beginning:

    

‘My secret is my own person,

Because my own person is my secret…'

    

But he listens to his dad now as if his whole life depends on it.

   

Pete's upstream nocturnal walk beside Afon Disgynfa might not have yielded the usual signs of progression through a landscape, and his sense of stasis might have been reinforced by the measureless calm all round him on those uplands. But there came a point when sheer bodily exhaustion informed him ‘Enough is enough!' And when, combating a surprising reluctance, he eventually did stop in his tracks, to his heartfelt relief time and place established themselves again.

However many ready facts about natural history he had at his disposal for quiz-shows, Pete was not one of those boys who identifies birds or plants as he looks about him, was, in truth, ignorant of the appearance or habits of, say a peregrine or a merlin, a buzzard or a hen-harrier, all birds for which the Berwyn Mountains are famous. He wasn't even sure in what seasons these were to be seen. But most walks in every part of the Marches bring you into contact with sheep. And bleak and remote and hallowed by Celtic mythology though this plateau might be, it is also very much sheep country, and many of those humans who do bring themselves up here do so on sheep business. Strips of barbed-wire fencing as well as stone walls run across this bare moorland. And, as he halted, overpowered by his most intense weariness yet, by the ache of his every limb and the smarting of his every sore, Pete could see, hanging over an uneven strip of fence a huge black, layered shape. As he peered through the night at this, a word came into his head, almost as if Bob Thurlow had asked him for it. Tarpaulin.

‘Tarpaulin', he said aloud. And – in the interests of finally lying down for sleep after the most extraordinary nocturnal activity he'd ever indulged in – he forced himself to inch his way to it, stepping carefully from larger stone to larger stone, so as not to sink feet into soggy and chilling marsh… With the temperature having been so low for such a long period, these great folds of material were frozen weightily stiff. But realising the use and, beyond the use, the unspeakable comfort, the material could be to him, Pete tugged and tugged at it, till he had hauled it off the wire completely, and onto a suitably hard strip of ground. Then he set to and began patiently, systematically to stamp the stuff into some sort of manageable flexibility… How long did these endeavours take? He never knew. He still refused to look at his watch. And his determination to succeed was so powerful, so consuming of the whole of his bruised, battered self, that he surely could have endured all of them, and worse, for twice, if not thrice, as long – if it were to end with achieving his life-saving purpose.

The tarpaulin, he had seen at first glance, was both big enough and long enough for him to wrap himself up in it several times over. Even one folding would blissfully do the trick, let alone the four or five that, he soon appreciated, he could in fact manage. Beyond the fence Pete had already spotted a little stone cairn, protected by two incomplete, roughly constructed walls, part of some sheepfold long since abandoned.

His brand of energy, originating in desperation, in a grasp of the seriousness of his situation, did not forsake him for so much as a second. He dragged the now pliable canvas sheeting over to the cairn, again having to tread carefully because of the wet treacherous slipperiness beneath his feet. He chose the side of the shepherds' rude construction least vulnerable to the wind, protected to some degree by the unfinished walling. Turf here was comparatively dry and therefore free from the night frost now setting in by the minute. So, after lowering himself down with anxious caution, Pete wound the tarpaulin round him even more times than he'd reckoned possible. Then he let himself slump inch by inch down to the ground, and wriggle into a now-yearned-for horizontal position.

A little saying of Mum's came into his head, one she'd used when he was younger (and employed to the Brats even now): ‘Snug as a bug in a rug'. Well, somewhat improbably, this was his condition now.

As he felt himself borne into unconsciousness, he involuntarily envisaged Sam Price beside him, also safe from the winter cold inside the black, rank-smelling canvas, his feet touching his own, and his eyes fixing their beams on his face, not with the fury and loathing of their last moments together, no, nothing like that, but with forgiveness, understanding, satisfaction in comradeship…

He was never to forget what he dreamed of in those tarpaulin hours. He was making his way back to Leominster, not by the slow slog of road in whatever vehicle, but through the air. He simply put his hands on the string of a huge kite, the plain old diamond-shaped sort like his brother Robin had wanted him to make, and floated effortlessly off this shank of the Berwyn Mountains to home and safety, a high flyer with the best imaginable goal for his high flight. Possibly this was the first time that particular play on words occurred to him – asleep on a stretch of Welsh wilderness.

   

When he was sufficiently awake to poke his head out of his tarpaulin cocoon, it was still dark and cold on the Disgynfa plateau. A dark which was nowhere relieved by any luminous flying object in the sky. Had there ever been such a visitant to these mountains? Perhaps only those saw who deep down wanted to see. Sam Price did want to see, fervidly, so maybe he'd met up at last with Don Parry (clearly another bloke who wanted) and had been rewarded with a brief, bright glimpse of some balloon-like form hovering overhead, little twinkles of light playing on its underbelly. But Pete himself, he did
not
‘want'. Somehow the great peace on these Heights, which had enabled him to sleep so deeply these past hours had taken from him any desire for extra-terrestrial encounter. In truth this had been Sam's desire, not his own, and he had borrowed, not to say appropriated or stolen, it. Surely, after all their joint quest had brought him – Sam's obscene, hostile words and his vicious blows, which still hurt, to say nothing of his feelings of guilt and loss – it would be best for him to abandon UFOs once and for all. When he got back home to Leominster, he would write to Bob Thurlow and tell him, sorry, but he'd had a change of mind, and would instead go for…

No. That wasn't enough. He must inform Bob Thurlow that he was, regretfully, unable to take part in the show. He still felt, of course, ‘honoured and appreciative' etc etc. But the programme – under this waterproof canvas he suddenly understood – had brought him nothing but woe. What success it had bestowed on him had, even at its best, its most dizzying, been hollow – and it had always met resistance from those closest to him. Better by far to let the whole thing recede.

His parents would rejoice at his decision, would think it showed moral maturity; he could scarcely bear the wait before informing them. It'd be a while before this would be practicable. He looked at his watch for the first time since he'd lain down: almost half-past five; he had slept, he reckoned, for at least four hours, and probably longer. High time to be off and away, and sadly there was no likelihood of any kite coming to bear him back to Herefordshire. He had a horrible cramp in his right arm and right leg, indeed the whole of his right side was uncomfortably stiff, the consequence of the foetus-like attitude in which he'd slept. With every minute of fuller consciousness, he was more horribly aware of his profusion of bruises and cuts. As well as of the hideous truth that Sam had left him with injuries beside a quiet roadside to – well, to bleed to death for all he knew! Or, apparently, cared!

Bringing this improbable, almost impossible fact to mind enabled him to find the strength to crawl out of the canvas, lurch his shaky body upright, balance and support it on feet very wobbly at first, and then take forward steps. He must look like some flesh-and-blood scarecrow placed by some crude joker by this broken-down, dry-stone sheep-fold. Well, a fixture in this gaunt, frozen landscape he was not going to be. How he was going to explain himself – even on his homeward journey, let alone on arrival at Woodgarth – was a thorny matter to be postponed until he'd got properly started… His mouth tasted unspeakably foul, and even spitting out disgusting globules of yellow phlegm into the nearest clump of bracken didn't relieve it. There was an emptiness around him beyond any past experience of night or countryside. For the first time since his arrival above the waterfall, he felt fear at the sheer scale of where he was. If this really were Annwn, then he was perfectly happy to quit it (though grateful for having stayed unscathed in it). He did not belong here; the Overworld was what he'd settle for.

Few other ramblers in the Berwyn Mountains scale the side of Pistyll Rhaeadr as he had done. Official notices oppose their doing so; there are other, far kinder and safer ways of getting up to the plateau from the base of the fall, and of coming down too, to end up where they began, in the hostel and café of Tan-y-pistyll. From here the tarmac road leads down the Afon Rhaeadr valley to Llanrhaeadr-ym-Mochnant, which Pete now felt he'd visited in another life. Pete took far less time to reach the normal path to Tan-y-pistyll than he'd anticipated. Could it be that, however remote and arcane his sleeping-place had appeared to him, in geographical reality he'd never been all that far from where other people could, if they wished, walk without any feeling of entering wilderness? That his psychological state had created the sense of great space? Anyway soon he was back in the world of recognisable sounds. Among the trees and bushes he was now passing there was, at this pre-dawn winter hour, enough rustling, scurrying, wing-flapping, to have given him at least a few frissons, had he been suddenly placed down here among them. But, in his fervent resolve to make for Llanrhaeadr and means-of-transport home as quickly as he could, he was scarcely bothered by these noises, not all of which he was able, first off, to identify. Tan-y-pistyll, like the farm houses beyond it, appeared still rapt in sleep. Pete however strode forward defiantly in the direction of his goal, with something of the spirit in which, against common-sense, he had scaled the side of the waterfall.

But he still felt he had to sing to keep up his spirits, particularly as he would soon pass the place where Sam had stopped the Beetle and assaulted him viciously. When he did actually pass it, he deliberately swivelled his head to the opposite side of the road, lest rage rise too strongly in him.

He made himself remember happier things, and went through the successive verses of many songs until – really not so far now to the little town of last night! – he'd reached the junction of the road down from the waterfall and the road down from the village of Llanarmon Dyffryn Ceiriog; clustered houses were imminent, thank heavens!

But now from the direction of Llanarmon DC (as most signposts call the place) a car was coming, to Pete at this moment a more unnerving sound than any late-hunting owl's hoot. Though what else do you expect to hear on a road? It was, in point of fact not some little Beetle like Sam's, nor anything remotely rustic, but a black Volvo, obviously bound, like himself, for Llanrhaeadr. Pete judged it best to take no notice of this intruder – perhaps, he told himself only half-facetiously, it's driven by an alien? And he walked on, purposefully looking straight ahead of him.

The ploy didn't work. The car was drawing up alongside him.

   

It seemed to Pete now a truly immense while since he had seen another human being. The night had thoroughly removed him from his kind, with all its capacity for hostility and treachery, and he'd been glad. But now he felt a stab of pleasure at seeing an indisputable
man
. Especially one so utterly normal-looking as the bloke now leaning across the empty passenger seat, and winding the window down. Expressly to address him, no doubt of it. He was about his own dad's age, with dark, curly hair, and, would you credit it, wearing a formal suit. Talk about swallowing pride, Pete would accept the lift the chap was surely about to offer him.