After Brock

by Binding, Paul

  And there he would lie, he told himself, and banish all thoughts of any kind, all feelings physical or emotional as thoroughly as he could. Sam had deliberately abandoned him to the night…

  Before long Pete appreciated that where he lay was more or less at the head of the Afon Rhaeadr valley: the waterfall Pistyll Rhaeadr could not be very far off. Another car – maybe Don Parry’s was – might be making its way down from there, and its driver would for certain see Pete, lying there in his blood and shit, with his feet splayed out, and come to his rescue.

  But no car appeared.

  Infinitely venerable these shanks of the Berwyns looked tonight, in their desolate wintry coat, with patches of snow on the higher moorland. If Pete shifted round he could see to his left those stark black cliffs in the direction of the fall which suggested wilder terrain beyond. The night sky was still overcast. Pete realised that though spiritually he couldn’t recollect any comparable desolation and misery, bodily he had suffered many similar injuries, and probably worse ones – playground fights years back, and that time when three thugs had jumped on him from the Priory walls back home and beaten him up for the sake of his wallet. At the time awful, but not amounting to anything so very serious!

  Taking courage then from these occasions, when he’d overcome what had been inflicted, he now, slowly, gingerly, hauled himself onto his feet. Arrows of agony shot up the length of both legs, but… He would find a stream, and, after wiping his behind and legs with ferns, he would wash his whole body thoroughly. He told himself: ‘You’re not gonna die. There’s nothing for you to do but walk up to the waterfall. Unaided.’

  The great waterfall gleamed white through the darkness, and he felt himself compelled to climb, to see where it began.

  He craned his neck. The edge of the plateau from which the water tumbled down so fast, long and loud was hidden from him at least two hundred feet above.

  What, right up there? It’d be like scaling a fucking wall.

  He had no torch, it was past midnight, cloud covered the sky, and there was a night dew underfoot which would later turn to frost. He was alone, a stranger, without any mountaineering experience. As well as this he was a mass of cuts and bruises after the attack in which he’d lost the one friend he cared about. He knew his mistakes now for what they were, and those faults of his that were responsible.

  He was dead tired and so very cold.

  Come unto me all ye that labour and are heavy laden,

  and I will give you rest.

  Where had he heard that before? It was a command that was also a promise. And he wouldn’t disobey. Up, up he proceeded, in his jersey, jeans and sneakers, hardly appropriate for this place. Scaling a wall was about right, too. In front of him was a long vertical face of moss-covered stones and boulders with narrow slithers of soil between them. Bare, bent birch trees had their roots in some of these. Higher up, stark rock face confronted him. But he would surely find enough footholds to edge his way to where pine trees reared sombre forms against the night sky.

  During his slow ascent, this sky often got blocked by birch or boulder or by flashes of the torrent itself, always audible, and always calling him on. Often he was on the point of slipping; the soil between stones was principally mud.

  But his limbs had determination of their own. An hour’s stren-uous, patient, and sometimes scary endeavour, and there he was. At the very top.

  As it rushed over the edge to form the celebrated fall, the silver-shot dark water of the little river, Afon Disgynfa, instantly turned white. It was incredible to think he had been standing down there in that gulf of blackness a mere hour ago. Only venture a few inches closer in, and he’d be part of this 240-feet tumble, and arrive in the whirlpool beside which he had had the urge to climb. But ‘I wouldn’t do any arriving, would I?’ Pete told himself caustically, ‘I’d have leaped myself out of life, as Sam wanted to at Darnton, with a knife for the purpose which those guys grabbed from him.’ That kind of exit was never to be his course, he suddenly understood, however miserable he was. Anyway, hadn’t he, thought he would begin afresh up here? He swung himself away from the great drop into the abyss, and instead looked towards the land from which the river was issuing.

  Quite featureless it seemed too, the Afon Disgynfa itself the principal giver of light on this clouded night. The marshland on either side was a bumpy spread of obscurity above which tall reeds or grasses protruded in colourless clusters, and in which big stones and bigger rocks were anchored. Eventually, on both sides, this marsh – Pete could tell – gave way to firmer ground (though doubtless many a patch of bog punctuated it, to pull any foolish night-time walkers down, or suck them in). This ground rose to meet hillsides hung with mist, especially to the west, in the direction of Llandrillo and the alleged celestial intrusion. But Pete felt the only direction for him to take was that of the source of the river. He was surely right to feel he had reached some objective, the heights above Tan-y-pistyll; it was here that he would find whatever it was that was right for him. So, from now on, Afon Disgynfa would guide him, with its calming sheen of surface, its fleetness of motion, its quiet campanology of notes. Deliberately he didn’t check the time by looking at his watch. Exactitude of hour wasn’t important now.

  But with saying goodbye to watch-time, he said goodbye to progress. On and on upstream he walked, but the same stretch of moor and marsh continued to lie ahead of him, the same bends of the mercury-streaked Afon Disgynfa, and the same hill-slopes on either side of it, clad in the same, never-unveiling mists. Could it be that he had now attained a curious stasis of both time and space? That ought to be frightening, but somehow this was not. Could it be that he was inside Annwn? The Land above the Falling Water.

  Part Three

  Pete and Nat

  One

  Confessions

  ‘So you made it into the Berwyn Heights same way I did,’ says Nat, ‘up the side of the great waterfall.’

  ‘T’other way about, I’d say, wouldn’t you, Pete?’ observes Luke Fleming, ‘Nat went where you did!’

  By now he’s so reconciled to Pete’s presence in this room that he’s turned his chair round to face him. He finds the father easier to relate to, and deal with, than the son. Pete could be a mate, but there’s something strange, deliberately elusive – or is it evasive? about Nat that’s disconcerting. But if he’s proved correct about what the lad did – and he’s sure that, sooner or later, he will be – then he has guts in quite alarming supply. Pete Kempsey’s cut from rather more ordinary cloth than Nat, and as for his ‘wrong-doing’, well… who was he to cast the stone here? He himself, after all, swore to his mate, Justin, on the Shropshire Star that he’d keep those rumours about the new development area in Newport to himself. And didn’t. Made one of his own most successful stories out of them.

  Nat thinks: Any consideration Luke shows me will be because he’s taken quite a liking to my dad, has thought better of him for springing to my defence. For all his moodiness there’s a matiness in Dad which gets to people. I don’t have it. ‘That’s shit, that is!’ he hears himself saying, ‘How could I fucking know Dad went into the mountains via Pistyll Rhaeadr years ago? Dad’s never told me about this part of his life before this very morning. It’s all been news to me! Isn’t that right, Dad? You tell him!’

  Pete doesn’t answer. He’s read Nat’s Journal after all, and knows that his dreadful escapade of January 1974 wasn’t completely unknown to his son. Luke has sussed this out too.

  Nat closes his eyes as if to keep what he alone has knowledge of safe behind his closed, if sun-filtered, lids…

  After he discovered that newspaper cutting from The Wrexham Leader, secreted inside Wilfred Owen’s poems, he carried out the most tirelessly thorough Google search about the Berwyn UFOs. He found himself more fascinated by the territory of the sightings than by the alleged events – surely a mid-twentieth century not a twenty-first century preoccupation, and interesting because people had once believed, or half-believe
d, in them. Llandrillo and Llanderfel were the Berwyn places most reports concentrated on, but Llanrhaeadr-ym-Mochnant featured regularly as well. He wanted to visit the region, and maybe strange emana-tions would arise from rock and heather and tracts of marsh…

  The very next day Nat went to the local newsagent’s, and bought that Ordnance Survey map he was later to post back to the Co-operative, Lydcastle, in that tell-tale jiffy-bag. By the time he did this, he had the territory pretty well fixed in his mind, so that, when up there day after day, he had the clearest mental picture of the relationship between Berwyn streams, expanses of moor or forestation, high peaks, and so on. But from his very first inspection of the map Llanrhaeadr had struck him as the place to aim for first. He liked the physical shape of the valley leading north-west from the town up to the waterfall. This last, lettered in blue, in both Welsh and English, and honoured with a star, seemed to beg for full attention. That’s where I’ll begin, he told himself.

  He’d never heard anybody speak so much as once of Pistyll Rhaeadr.

  ‘I’ve never heard anybody speak so much as once of Pistyll Rhaeadr!’ he says aloud, principally to Luke but with a near-accusatory side-glance at his father. And could the moods in which the two of them confronted the great fall before climbing up to where it began contrast more radically?

  ‘Well, Nat, I think we should both thank your dad for being so free and forthcoming with us,’ says Luke, as if reprimanding the younger for implicit criticism of the older, ‘and it so happens I can vouchsafe the accuracy of everything you’ve said, Pete, about the 1974 UFO sightings. They crop up, you see, pretty regularly at the paper as part of our regional history. So in my time I’ve watched quite a few YouTube clips – showing various local guys swearing blind that lights they saw flashing above their heads were from another world. And how there was a huge government cover-up afterwards. How Whitehall arranged, at about two minutes’ notice, for a whole horde of coppers and squaddies to come belting on up to Clwyd, nab all the extra-terrestrials on the hillsides, handcuff ’em and haul them off to some deep underground prison somewhere in the south, where (apparently) they still are. Well, if you can believe that, you can believe anything!’ Then, as if recognizing the possibility that he may be doing himself out of a juicy tit-bit for his publication, he adds, ‘I take it you didn’t see anything out-of-this-world that night, Pete?’

  ‘Not see, no! Or hear either, come to that!’ And yet it was not a night like any other. Annwn clearly means nothing to either Luke or Nat. Luke, thinks Pete, is one of the increasing number who would come to High Flyers for a power kite but not an art or ethnic one. He’d fork out good money for a little buggy to draw him and some traction job along the sands of West Kirby at a fair old speed, but he wouldn’t give a Barroletta, with all its centuries-long tradition behind it, the time of day… Funny thing is, I don’t dislike him! Even though I caught him giving Nat the third degree. Even though I suspect he’s here in this room as the enemy.

  Yet he wonders how much more he can take from him, or any other prying journalist, given he has any choice in the matter. Which he surely hasn’t. This last week anxiety has loosened his tongue far more than was wise (shades of the bad old days of that quiz show!), and he’s already made himself, as well as Nat, a target for investigation. When he joined the police expedition to the Berwyns almost one hundred per cent certain that this was where Nat would be, he foolishly told other members he’d been here before – ‘in the UFO time’! A clever cop had already, of course, noted the cryptic reference in Nat’s notebook now in police possession) and an equally clever press hack was listening to their conversation! And so what he said had become:

  Dad’s Long Ago Brush with the Bizarre

  But should this have surprised him? Already, by Wednesday last week Pete (and a few million others) could read this sort of des-picable crap about himself:

  ‘A picture is emerging of an unstable family background for the missing bright young boy who, says his Headmaster in South London, “never failed to hand in assigned work exactly on time, and with the confidence of someone who knew he’d done the best he was capable of.”’ (Oh, really! It was certainly news to Pete who, over the years had built up a picture of Nat as a pretty indifferent pupil. But then he was that bogeyman of the righteous press, an absentee father.) ‘Nat’s dad, who grew up in Leominster, Herefordshire, is remembered in that town somewhat differently. “Oh, yes,” says a prominent senior citizen who knew him well back then, “he was a bit of a lout. Of course he had his moments of glory, on that old Radio 4 quiz show, High Flyers, and didn’t he let the world know! Went clean to his head, we all thought. In reality, he was much the same as any lad in those days when so many of them were living on benefits beyond the country’s means, and leading the life of Riley. Of course tragedy came his way later, and we all hoped it would make him re-think his ways. It certainly made him decide to leave our town for good. But there you are!” finishes this anonymous member of the Leominster community, “we’re all a mixture of good and bad, aren’t we? I don’t suppose he’s much worse than most of us, and he must have suffered terribly what with the worry and guilt.”’

  ‘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-show
s, 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.