Far, Far the Mountain Peak

by Arthur Clifford

  ‘In future, Roderick,’ declared Dorothy, ‘I think we’d better leave these big, official youth expeditions well alone. I really couldn’t go through all that again.’

  ‘Quite agree,’ replied Meakin, ‘there’re just too many interested parties and big egos involved. Next time we’d better do something ourselves. We’ll lay this one to rest.’

  Monster or Angel?

  So, laid to rest it was. John’s Morocco display was quietly removed from the Geography Room. ‘That’s all in the past, now,’ said Dorothy when he protested. ‘You must look to the future.’

  ‘Look to the future and forget about the past’: that became the standard response whenever he tried to talk about it to any of the teachers. The Morocco Expedition just didn’t seem to be something you mentioned in polite society. Not unless you wanted to be labelled as a boastful, self-obsessed, ego-manic.

  Why? Things were all so topsy-turvy. Two years ago when he’d alerted the fire brigade about the fire in the Bishop’s house he’d been acclaimed as a hero, even though he’d messed himself with fright and hadn’t done a quarter of the things Isobel said he’d done. Yet now, when he really had done great things, he was pushed aside. Odd, irrational, perplexing.

  And Steadman? His hero who’d rescued him from disaster two years ago, who’d stood by him, who’d taken him to Morocco, paid for him when all his money had been stolen, praised him to the skies? Why had he run away like a thief in the night? Why, after all those honeyed words, had he discarded him? Later that term he had an answer of sorts.

  As part of its, Ongoing Sex Education Initiative, the Boldonbridge Education Committee sent teams of trained counsellors round the schools – and even to the private schools! – to ‘raise Paedophile Awareness among young people’. All the old chestnuts of the ‘Paedophile Awareness’ pamphlets were brought out, polished and exhibited: warnings about those paedophile strategies that he knew so well.

  Once again, it all seemed to fit Steadman like a glove. Textbook case. Forget all the guff about being ‘the disciple Jesus loved’. Face facts, Jonny boy, it wasn’t you he loved, it was just your bum! Yet, one part of him insisted that he hadn’t been abused. He’d been given something he’d wanted; indeed, he’d experienced a wild and seemingly holy joy!

  Strange. Perplexing. What was he? Depraved monster or specially blessed angel? How could he possibly know?

  Authorised Version

  As time passed an ‘authorised version’ of the Morocco Expedition took shape both in the Youth Outreach Committee and in the Education Department of the University. ‘That Morocco thing… Great idea… Pity it had to be hijacked by self-interested petty bourgeois elements… Pity the lawyers were too chicken to go ahead with the court case. They could have exposed the whole racket.’

  But secretly, Brian Dobson knew better. By not going to court, certain embarrassing skeletons had remained firmly locked in their cupboards. More importantly, however, he had a grievance, to be preserved and lovingly polished up over the years. John Denby wasn’t to hear the last of the Morocco Expedition.

  6

  Lost Childhood

  A Friend Departs

  The months passed. Vital exams loomed. All John’s group were involved. Even bumbling old Sam Hawthorne was down for a few exams: R.S.A. exams in basic English and maths, a CSE in art. Dorothy declared herself satisfied by the ‘mature and positive attitude’ of the group; so different from Billy Nolan and his mates of evil memory!

  The only blemish was Danny Fleetwood. Over the year a downward spiral had gathered momentum. He’d become increasingly obsessed with street culture: ‘hards’, motorbikes, fights, knives, screwing birds. To him, this was an alluring world, much more real than school. He set his heart on becoming a punk.

  One day he turned up at morning assembly with his head shaved and sporting a quiver of red, blue and green Mohican plumage. Dorothy sent him home with orders to come back with his hair properly cut, and in his school uniform. Whereupon his father angrily protested and threatened her with the European Court of Human Rights. But she stood firm: school rules were school rules..

  The net result was that Danny dropped out of school. Rumours abounded. He’d become a Hell’s Angel. He was ‘on drugs’. He’d been involved in a recent spectacular burglary in Moorside. Somebody said they’d seen him cavorting round with Kevin Bartlett and his ‘hards’ in the nether regions of Greenwood.

  What Am I?

  John was saddened by the spectacle. He remembered his one-time friend, so full of life and interests, with whom he’d made model aeroplanes, played with trains and formulated plans for recovering the Falkland Islands from the Argies back in ’82. It was a loss. Like a bereavement: his best friend dead. Worse than dead; changed into something else, something he found repellent.

  At the same time he found himself increasingly isolated. It became less and less easy to relate to his schoolmates. They inhabited different worlds. Not for them, explorers struggling through steamy jungles, the three hundred Spartans at Thermopylae or the undiscovered ruins of long-lost civilisations. Not derring-do on far-off mountains, and certainly not the sheer wonder of seeing the crags of the High Atlas emerge from the darkness into the brilliant light of dawn. Their world was football, pop music, motorbikes, who amongst them was ‘hard’ and, above all, sex. Bonking. Having it off with this or that bird on Saturday night. Their latest ‘bang’.

  It was all so boring! Of course, he had to take part in it, just to keep his macho image intact. That meant inventing ‘conquests’ that had never happened and, indeed, never could happen. Like that ‘horny bird down in London’ that he’d finally managed to ‘have’. As always, it was a matter of getting yourself to actually believe your fictions.

  But he feared discovery, especially when a resentful Army-Barmy Martin started up. ‘Yeah! Great! But how come we never gets to see yer birds? Is they too good for the likes o’ us? Or mebbe you ain’t got no birds!’

  Then it would have to be, ‘Belt up Martin! Want a fight, do you?’

  ‘No! Just kiddin’ like.’

  The threat of violence always worked with a self-indulgent fantasist like Martin. For the time being, at any rate. The trouble was that Martin almost certainly knew the truth about him, but was too chicken to say so openly. But one day the time would come.

  And always at the back of his mind was the dread of another ‘accident’ like that one with Danny Fleetwood in the shower three years ago. This time, he knew only too well that he would not get off so lightly. Rejection, ridicule and, almost certainly, gross humiliations worthy of Greenhill were there waiting for him should he drop his guard for even a moment.

  But if only the Demon would stop tormenting him with those unmentionable, but intoxicating visions! If only it would let him have desires that he could actually talk about instead of forcing him to tell lies all the time; let him do something that was acceptable and not shameful and disgusting. Every night he prayed for it. But it made no difference. God just didn’t seem to be listening. Either that, or more likely, there was no God at all. Indeed, with the departure of Bob Steadman God was slowly dying within him, to be replaced by… what? A seeming emptiness, where nothing made sense and where, he, John Denby, was only a statistical quirk.

  Very Different People

  Among his classmates, of course, there was Fred. Fred was a big cut above the others. He could talk about more than just sex or ‘being hard’. But they moved in different worlds. He didn’t want to penetrate remote and exotic jungles to test himself to the limit on high mountains. When John had suggested a hiking and camping trip in the Lake District, Fred had hummed and hawed, and when his parents had firmly squashed the idea as ‘too dangerous’, he’d meekly complied with their decision.

  Fred was a decent and kindly lad and John wondered if he could possibly confide in him. Like his parents, Fred was a devout Christian, and John saw p
ossibilities here. So one day he tentatively probed his beliefs. He read the Bible every night, but did he really believe that every single word in it was true?

  ‘Of course,’ replied Fred, ‘it’s the word of God, isn’t it?’

  ‘But what about that bit about Samuel hewing Agag to pieces before the Lord?’ said John. ‘That wasn’t very Christian, was it?’

  ‘But Agag was an unbeliever who had offended God, so of course it was right.’

  Further probing showed that he’d hit a brick wall, so he backed off. He had thought of asking what he thought of that bit in Leviticus about homosexuality being an abomination. But he quickly thought better of it. It could well lead to awkward questions that were best left unasked. He and Fred, they were very different people.

  Arrested Development?

  The only people he could relate to were the juniors. Their world was still bright and exciting. They loved the model railway in the attic and were always willing to help him enlarge it. Together they made a great big papier-mâché Matterhorn with a spiral tunnel through it. They helped him create a big forest and a new village.

  As Head Boy he was deputed to help out on the adventure weekends. While many of the seniors professed themselves ‘dead bored’ by these, the juniors wallowed in them. They were wildly excited when he took them on midnight walks through dark and creepy woods, conjuring up all sorts of grotesque monsters lurking in their Stygian depths. To them, Helvellyn was a grand and awesome mountain, a sort of Everest and Striding Edge, a dramatic challenge.

  He came to relish these weekends. Here he was the king, the leader of the pack, his worth recognised. They weren’t bored by him. They thrilled to his tales of Morocco and midnight operations with the Army Cadets. Among them he seemed to physically expand. Adolescence hadn’t snuffed out their sense of wonder, nor sex yet thrown its drab monochrome blanket over their natural ebullience. They hadn’t grown up; and, maybe, he hadn’t grown up either and that was why he seemed to get on so well with them. They were all kids together. But wasn’t it better to be a kid, if ‘growing up’ meant abandoning all that was fresh and exciting in the world? No, he thought to himself, I don’t want to follow Danny Fleetwood, not yet, just let me feast a little longer in this Aladdin’s Cave of wonders! Maybe he was a case of arrested development.

  A Squalid Evolutionary Accident?

  But that wasn’t all. He did like supervising the juniors while they were showering after games – and in ways that he knew he shouldn’t. The Wednesday afternoon rugby session became the highlight of the week: the chance to feast his eyes upon… hidden treasures! Briggs had been right; spot on, in fact, and didn’t he bloody well know it!

  Of course, he had to keep the Demon in check; more than just ‘in check’, locked up in an iron-bound cage. Let it out, even for the briefest moment, and it would ruin you. But was it really a demon? On that strange and, by now almost mythical, night in the depth of the Atlas Mountains, Steadman had talked of a visitation from the Holy Ghost. But where was Steadman now? Why had he deserted him?

  Different, he certainly was. For a start, he now knew that he was a lot brighter than any of his schoolmates. And if Martin was average and Fred well above average, then he, John Denby, must be, at the very least, brilliant – if not almost a genius. Indeed, he’d read in a book he secretly got out of the library that many of history’s most creative geniuses had been homosexuals: Leonardo de Vinci, Alexander the Great, Lawrence of Arabia, Richard Burton the great Orientalist and African explorer. So, maybe, John Denby was to be numbered among them?

  Then came a more sober voice. At the Army Cadet summer camps he had to conceal the fact that he was at Beaconsfield because the other cadets said it was just a dustbin for thicks. So perhaps he was just average after all; or, more probably, below average. In the Kingdom of the Blind, after all, the one-eyed man was king.

  Maybe the exams he was going to take would sort this one out. Do well and he would be vindicated. But would he do well? Maybe Dolly and Meakin were puffing him up when they had entered him for all those O Levels? The test would come. He might just succeed, and how wonderful it would be if he did! But it was much more likely that he wouldn’t. Face reality, young man, you’re nothing but a squalid evolutionary accident. Little more than a turd dropped by a dinosaur.

  ‘I Know What I Am’

  So what was he? Good or bad? Probably, very bad. One Saturday evening he saw a late-night horror film on television. It was about a youth who had discovered that he was a werewolf who killed people when the moon was full. ‘I know what I am!’ the youth exclaimed in despair. ‘I know what I am!’

  The climax of the film came when he’d met his girlfriend in a moonlit wood and had begun to rip out her jugular vein. In the nick of time, a silver bullet fired by a kindly policeman put him out of his misery and saved the situation. The distraught girlfriend duly wept over his corpse. It was a thoroughly bad film, creakily banal and embarrassingly awful. Yet, it made a deep impression on him. That’s me! I, also, ‘know what I am’.

  Just Have to Soldier on

  But what to do? Find a sympathetic listener and spill the beans? Fine! But who? Go to the vicar? Old Vicar Ainsley? He, the sixty-year-old who hated kids and couldn’t abide teenagers? Forget it! Go to the doctor? Yes, and be classified as a dangerous loony who ought to be given drugs and locked up in an institution for his own and society’s safety. No way! Ring up the Samaritans? But you only rang them up when you were about to commit suicide. They’d ring up the ambulance and you’d be carted off to a secure loony bin, certified and filled up with dope. Not on, either.

  No, he would just have to soldier on, as if he had some dreadful, lingering disease. In a way it could almost be heroic, like the doomed Dr Livingstone struggling through the wilds of Africa.

  Get Real!

  All of a sudden the exams were upon him. Oddly enough, they were not the ordeal he’d been dreading. Instead it was an orderly and precise process, like executing a well-planned night exercise with the Army Cadets. It was matter of keeping calm and doing the right things at the right time. Nothing unexpected, the ground well reconnoitred, enemy position located, well-rehearsed plans calmly executed.

  When it was all over he felt a shaft of seemingly irrational hope. That was easy! God, I could have done really well! That would be just great! But, get real! Dream on, deluded young man! In this life miracles don’t happen; not to people like you, at any rate!

  End of the Road

  So, to the end of the summer term. Final Assembly. Praise. Glory. Special prizes. Given a special tie. A eulogy from Dolly: ‘our most outstanding pupil’ … ‘a tremendous asset to the school’… ‘You must come back and see us!’ Thunderous applause from the assembled juniors. Glory such as he had never known before.

  Then emptiness. Long after the boys had gone home he went out of the front door. It was a glorious afternoon, the climax of high summer. A warm, friendly sun smiled down from a clear blue sky, seeming to caress the mellow red brick of the old Edwardian houses and the rustling leaves of the luxuriant trees. A rich and comforting world. ‘Don’t worry, you’re safe here!’ He hadn’t realised just how much of it was a part of him, like his very hair and fingernails. It had taken him up when he had been at his very lowest ebb, restored him and given him everything. But it was all over now. It was his no more.

  ‘Still a Liddell Kid Ain’t Yer!’

  And what next? Fear of the unknown waters that lay ahead. If only time would stand still and stop driving him relentlessly onwards.

  Suddenly Martin breezed up to him, ostentatiously smoking a cigarette.

  ‘Well that’s me rid o’ that dump!’ he chortled, exhaling a cloud of blue smoke from his nostrils. ‘I’m havin’ me fag and there’s fuck all Dolly can do aboorit, neither! Want a drag, Jonny?’

  He pulled out a packet of Silk Cut and offered him one.

  ‘No
thanks, I don’t smoke.’

  ‘Still Dolly’s liddell pet is yer?’ sneered Martin. ‘Scared Mekon’ll catch yers and smack yer bum, eh?’

  ‘Shut up, Army Barmy!’

  Ever since that memorable ascent of Scafell Pike, four years ago, Martin had nursed a resentment against both him and the school. They just hadn’t given him the credit he felt was due as a ‘hard’ and a ‘military type’. Now, after John’s apotheosis in the Final Assembly, his hatred was boiling over.

  ‘Know what I’m gannin’ ter dee tonight?’ he said aggressively.

  Without waiting for John to answer, he plunged ahead. ‘First, I’ll be shaggin’ Meg.’ John winced as the lengthy pornographic description poured out. It was all so childish – a small boy rehearsing all the four letter words he’d just learnt from his mates! And as if, he, John, had never heard them before! ‘Then I’ll be off with the lads on me motorbike. We’ll gan roond ter Jake’s place and get proppa ratted on the vodka like. Worraboot you, eh?’

  John walked away. He was too keyed-up to listen to this fantasising drivel. ‘Shagging Meg?’ That’d be the day! Martin was a notorious loser who’d never yet managed to score. That he did know!

  Martin followed him. ‘But you won’t be doing nothing, will yers? Still a liddell kid, ain’t yer!’

  ‘No, I’m not!’

  ‘Yes you is! You is goin’ off ter Greece with Dolly an’ all the liddell kids, ain’t yers? Dolly’s great expedition! Know what yer’ll be doin’? Makin’ liddell sand castles on the beach with all the liddell kids. And all the time Dolly’ll be seein’ that yoora a good liddell boy an’ that. Else Mekon’ll be pullin’ yer pants doon an’ smackin’ yer bum. You’ll like that, won’t yer, yer poofter?’

  ‘Piss off, will you!’

  John hurried away and left him burbling away into the void. He really couldn’t be arsed to get into a fight with a great lump of self-indulgent lard like Martin.

  Trapped