After Brock (36 page)

He tiptoes out of the room fearful of breaking a peace (born of relief and release) that Nat may well not know again for a long time. Let the boy sleep for every bit as long as he can. Now he begins the descent of the staircase. Nat always says it's like a ladder. ‘Why it's worse than climbing down a fucking
ladder
!' he exclaimed, surprised by its steepness, on his very first visit to High Flyers, to be immediately embarrassed at having used such a word to his own father, an embarrassment that hasn't prevailed for many a year. And indeed Nat has a point. Even making his way carefully on his toes, Pete makes the narrow oaken rungs creak out. Maybe it's the tense stealth with which he is moving but all of a sudden it seems to Pete that he isn't in the eighteenth-century premises of his kite shop, in his early fifties and a tad overweight, but is a lithe youth creeping down a far broader-stepped staircase close-carpeted in turquoise, and trying not to rouse the Brats in their shared bedroom across the landing, engrossed in chequers. Yes, he is back at Woodgarth, and it is the evening of January 23, 1974.

Of course he will not resist Sam Price, either physically (that hand clapped over his mouth, that hard grip on his shoulders!) or psychologically – for how could any self-respecting young male pass up the chance to go haring off into the night after aliens – or even the attested possibility of them? Of course he will listen to Sam's Don-derived spiel as they drive north-west through the freezing dark, towards the Shropshire hills and the Welsh mountains beyond.

It is a while before the slopes of hills meet the road taken, but within forty minutes they do, bringing bursts of woodland, through which they see an owl making intent swooping movements. Pete's mind then travels back to that earlier Shropshire journey in Sam's VW, when Sam braked because a badger was crossing the road, and he was fearful of hitting him (or ‘her' as Pete deduced). Appreciating the co-existence of the two of them, young travellers and native fauna with priorities and habits utterly their own, brings about a change in Pete's head. An owl, a badger, their own two essentially affectionate if also genetically competitive human selves – that's the reality that matters, not the appearance of weird shapes of shifting colours brought about (if, by now, they can even be apprehended) by some Will beyond any earthly comprehension.

And then, almost on cue, another badger arrives on the quiet benighted scene. Once again Sam has to brake while the creature, his great white frontal stripe a-glow, or as good as, in the darkness of his context (which includes, from where the boys are, his own body), crosses the road – with rather more sense of haste than his kin of earlier in the month. Sam is too concerned with what Don Parry has witnessed in the heavens to be as interested in the animal as he was that earlier time, though he handles the car with the same care for its safety, but Pete…

The Pete Kempsey recalling all this has by now successfully got to the bottom of the ladder/stairs. The sign on the shop door is still reversed, keeping any customers away. Any minute now this will swing on its string as Luke Fleming makes his entrance, and Pete's world will, more likely than not, undergo yet another upheaval, or even transformation… I now know, he thinks against his fears of a future only movements of watch-hands away, how things could all have gone differently, how if we'd attended to him properly, there could have been, after Brock, the triumph of the sanity that comes from respecting the ordinary.

‘Sam,' this other Pete – both of and not of the past – goes, ‘stop the car, there's a mate! I must see that Brock really is making it to where he wants to go. Like we did last time.'

‘But tonight we've got an assignation. With History.'

‘Fuck History,' says Pete, ‘if Martians really have landed, we'll all of us find out in good time. They won't confine themselves to the Berwyns, I shouldn't think. Wouldn't do their cause a lot of good to stick around somewhere as cut off as that. Far better for you and me to see to this one particular animal.'

‘Okeydokey!' says Sam, if a mite reluctantly. So he slows down and then pulls up at the nearest gateway to a field, less than a hundred yards further on. The friends get out into the stinging night chill, and begin the walk back to where the badger had been traversing the road. Pete thinks he can descry lumbering movement in bracken and grasses ahead.

‘Before we go on any further, I must tell you something,' Pete says, ‘under your influence I chose UFOS for my High Flyers Special Subject, and then was too shy – or possibly too scared – to tell you. But I am not going ahead with it.'

After a long, for Pete, nerve-racking pause Sam says, ‘So what subject will you choose, Pete? You really don't have too much time left.'

Pete laughs, and puts a finger to his lips, for maybe their voices are too loud and their footsteps on the frost-bitten tarmac too hard. ‘Well, how about badgers?' he says, ‘I've a week to gen up on them, and anyway we might learn something new tonight?'

No panic-stricken Llanrhaeadr-ym-Mochant. No blurting out of the unpalatable truth on an unknown lane leading away from there to heaven-knew-what bizarre visitants. No fury from Sam, no assault, no abandonment, no possible visit to Annwn, and… after Brock, might it not have been Pete himself who made the phone call to Woodgarth, ending in a blast of righteous anger over the receiver but no alarmed journey out of Leominster by Jim Kempsey, with wife Marion, and sons Julian and Robin aboard? After Brock there would have been life.

Julian and Robin. In the tiny interval between now and Luke Fleming's return Pete knows what he wants to do. He goes to his computer, and, having already memorised the address, types on the keyboard: ‘[email protected]'

‘Dear Julian,' he now writes, ‘Hi! The journal Nat keeps – which I have read – has supplied your email address as well as a great many facts about your life – Ilona's worrying illness, for instance – that I am hugely ashamed I was ignorant of. Maybe you are in Hungary right now, as you intended. If you are, you may well not have heard of Nat's mission to bring us both money and himself fame by “disappearing” into the Berwyn mountains. It didn't result in either, I have to say, just in enough attention for me to resent the business heartily, and exposure to the ele-ments and an injury to the foot that are keeping him bed-bound for the time being. These may not be the only bad consequences of his ill-conceived venture. Just at the moment I can't ward off ideas of a prison sentence being handed the lad for the wild goose chase he's led everybody. That'll bring satisfaction to
The
Daily Mail
and further heartache to Izzie and me and everybody else who cares for him. Thank you for your own friendliness to Nat. It makes me bold enough to suggest we see a bit of each other. There's no reason why we shouldn't, is there? The terrible thing that divided our lives after I was “on the Heights” mustn't determine the rest of them. I remember…'

But he can't complete the sentence. Because what he is remembering is his own exclamation to Julian as he lay there on the hospital bed: ‘I was up there on those Heights – those Heights in Wales, and they took care of me after my accident. What had I done to merit those Heights?' And this makes him recall Julian's letter to Nat, ‘I prefer to let Peter stay up on his Heights, and not drag him down…' Heights, always that word Heights!! And suddenly a truth breaks on him which it amazes him it has taken decades to see.

With his regaining of consciousness Julian did recover memory; though he was declared to have amnesia, he knew perfectly well why the family had left Woodgarth at so unprecedentedly unusual an hour. But had chosen to keep quiet. He had wanted to spare Peter, to ensure that he did not suffer any more than he was already doing, that he was not troubled by further questions from authority or by more stabs from his already disordered conscience.

Kept quiet then, at a time when he must have wanted to cry out in protest at what had happened to him, kept quiet after that, for all the long years since.

Pete draws back from his computer, to place his head, eyes closed, in his cupped hands, consumed by an emotion so strong, so devouring that it defies naming – and maybe it will never quite let go of him. He is wondering how he can bear this new revelation – far more disturbing even than what he's heard about Sam from Don, asking, as it does, gratitude from him to someone he's rarely bothered himself about – when he hears a knock on the glass of the door. It is, of course, Luke Fleming returning from his lunchbreak.

   

Nat wakes up from his brief but deep sleep to hear this knock, realising who is responsible for it. But I'm ready, he tells himself, ready for absolutely anything, and I mean ready. And why? Because just now he's been reliving in his unconscious head those experiences in the Berwyns which he regards as far and away the biggest favour life has yet done him. Having received this – and treasured it, and stored it safely in his mind, to draw on for sustenance whenever he wishes – he is surely protected against whatever unkindness and suffering are to come his way. He doesn't feel disposed to telling anybody about it all yet, certainly no journo (even if this particular one, Luke Fleming does the kind thing and keep Nat's secret
secret
!), nor his mates, even Josh, nor Dad who certainly does respect animals, nor Mum who so loves, and seeks out, peace and harmony. The day may indeed come when he wants to share with others, but it will be for their sake, not his own.

He has already composed a poem – well, it's more of a psalm really – about all he witnessed up on the lower slopes of Pen-plaenau, but new verses for it keep on occurring to him, even now, in the interstices of stretching himself further awake and hearing Dad and Luke mount the precipitous ladder-like stairs to give him the news:

‘You, all of you up there, I could never say anything to you. One syllable aloud, and the whole wonderful atmosphere – with me hidden, spellbound, you venturesome and active – would have been destroyed. You have not great reason to think kindly of my species, but there are some of us – and not a few – who wish you well, who delight in you.'

   

It was by chance – in surely a double sense – that Nat had come across the badgers. It was the evening of his first full day in the Berwyn Mountains, his first, that is, to start with him waking up there, a bit stiff and slightly damp.

Twice in its course he'd glimpsed people in the distance, making their way along a path leading between two peaks: a walking party in the first instance, a tall young man with an Alpenstock (hopefully not a rival, some fellow recluse or hide-away) in the second. But he'd espied both these human intrusions from behind an outcrop of siltstone rock; there was no likelihood of having been seen, but anyway, to be thoroughly sure, he'd retreated, bent more or less double so that he covered ground like a deer or a less massive wild boar, further uphill. Though his twisted ankle was still hurting, he was filled with general satisfaction, not least at himself. By now he had arrived at the lower reaches of Pen-plaenau, not so far indeed from where, four days later, he was to be spotted and rescued.

He had slept pretty well the previous night. To his relief. Unlike Pete in 1974, he had a sleeping bag with him; he'd bought it in Shrewsbury on his way over. When eventually he was rescued, as a hardy, plucky, stoical casualty, nobody would hold this invaluable piece of equipment against him; rather it'd confirm opinions of him as a sensible, well-prepared, countrywise lad who'd been undeservedly unlucky and suffered a serious tumble. He'd fought against admitting to himself any worry about the night (inability to achieve restful sleep apart) which had occurred to him when hatching his plan: that he might be disturbed, even frightened by all the noises of predators and victims issuing from the dark into the dark. But he needn't have doubted himself so. Maybe his nocturnal escapades in South London seeking foxes had steeled him. Instead the problem he faced in this twilight hour was: however to pass the sizeable time before sleep, even if fitful, delivered him from his immediate surroundings and carried him on to the burgeoning light of the next calendar day, in his own unadulterated company?

The light was dimming, but surely more gradually, more subtly, than Nat had appreciated in his urban life. One kind of greyness would hold for a while, as though it intended to stay forever, and it came, even to the intent watcher such as himself, as something of a surprise when it yielded to another deeper shade. The colours, this second evening of this mountain country – light green (turf), dark green (clumps of woodland), light purple, deep purple (all the heathers), brown (bracken), grey (the shale) – were, he thought, maintaining themselves so well that this time maybe they might win against the descent of night, and remain intact… Impossible, of course – though
was
it? Up here his mind was surely changing its set, and shedding its former certainties.

Not enough light for him to continue with Henning Mankell's
Sidetracked
, though its ever more horrifying unfolding of violence in the Swedish coastal town of Ystad had left him on tenter-hooks, on which he would gladly impale himself next day. And his torch simply wasn't strong enough to illuminate page print; anyway stupidly he'd forgotten to buy new batteries, and mustn't let these ones run out. Just as he was despairing of hitting on any compensation for forgoing the Wallander mystery – and no speculations about UFOs! he commanded himself – he noticed an all but hidden little path which somehow appealed to him. It led up from the ledge on which he was now standing towards a rock crevice, its surface beaten hard and dry by constant use by some regular. He would follow it, but walk on the sheep-cropped grass to its right rather than in the wake of any discernible tracks, whose makers might notice and fret.

The path ended in a huge mound of slightly sandy soil, fresh and perfectly clean, thrust up by claws from the earth all around the crevice's base. Nat looked down. A large hole opened some inches from his calves, about ten inches across, and shaped ‘like a D lying on its side'. The comparison came to him from some book he'd read about British wild life and its habitat a few years ago. Therefore… yes, this was the entrance into, the exit out of a badgers' sett, and the Berwyns, it was a well-attested fact, firm in his own head, were home to many badgers. The fissured rock directly above him would give the creatures excellent protection, and shield just such a reliable look-out post for them as he himself had needed earlier in the day.