After Brock

by Binding, Paul

‘Seemingly it’s you not me that should be talking about strokes of genius,’ says Nat, at once sorrowfully and admiringly. (Maybe he will follow in this guy’s footsteps after all?) ‘I must say I’ve been surprised that nobody yet has asked about that entry in my Journal after my trip to Cornwall. “Hasn’t riding the waves taught me that mastery of self is the key to life? And if an idea comes to you, but seems (at times) too hard to execute, then use that mastery to ride on the crest of it, as you would on an Atlantic roller… Never forget the hero of Sixty Minutes,’ I wrote! Though I guess I should have added “the hero, Jamie Neale, as I see him,” for in my view there’s really no good reason whatsoever to doubt the truth of what he told the world, like so many fuckers tried to. And the medicos backed him up a hundred per cent. You seem clued up already about the Jamie Neale/Richard Cass case, Luke, but you can’t be as clued up as me; I could get a fucking PhD in the topic, I reckon. (Probably the only one I’m capable of getting!) So I’m going to run it all past you, even if it does mean telling you things you already know. Because unless you’re familiar with what I read up and looked up on the web, then you won’t fully grasp what I did – and why. I don’t know how many times I watched the YouTube of that ABC programme on him. It became a true obsession.

  ‘Jamie Neale’s position seemed uncannily like my own; I thought that even before I decided to take him as a model. Like me he’s a Londoner who got his A Levels, like me he comes from what’s called a dysfunctional family (his mum and dad weren’t together, and he lived with his mum), like me he’s keen on those activities like exploring and orienteering, like me he’d time to fill before starting Uni, Bristol in his case. Yes, I know, he went out to Australia during his summer, while me, I only went to Shropshire, plus a few days trying to surf in Cornwall, but… shit, I’m well used to having a less exciting time than most of my contemporaries. It always works out that way. Anyhow Jamie – I think of him like that, like he’s a friend – decided, once over in Australia to explore the Blue Mountains. And I must say from the pictures they look fantastic, awesome, I’d give a lot to go there. (Well, maybe after all this to-do, I wouldn’t!) But obviously all those peaks and ravines and forest and wildlife appealed to him hugely as they would to me…

  ‘Jamie checked into a youth hostel at Katoomba on July (see how every single detail’s stuck in my head, Luke!). He was meant to go on a tour of the Jenolan Caves on July 4, but he didn’t turn up, and the folk connected with the National Park hikes were worried. Especially when they found he’d left his mobile phone and personal papers behind in the hostel. A little later a couple came forward who’d definitely seen Jamie on July 3, on a lonely outcrop of rock, about to take a track even further into the wild. So now everyone knew the last date he’d been seen alive, and that it had been in inhospitable country. They searched and searched, and his dad came out from England, the dad he’d never lived with! Bush-parties went out on foot, four hundred volunteers in all, and police helicopters, which took his dad on board, flew over enormous swathes of the National Park. But they didn’t find him! He must have perished, they thought.

  ‘Even his father – name of Richard Cass – came to believe he was dead, and that there’d be no point in any more costly investigations. He got a memorial-stone designed for the boy, and then prepared to fly back to the UK from Sydney. But on the very day of his departure – July 15 – in stumbles Jamie on some Blue Mountains campers, actually only four kilometres from the hostel where he’d been last seen. The campers made him welcome and took him to the police and safety – and to all sorts of official and medical inspec-tions. He’d been missing twelve whole days. Without a compass he’d lost his bearings completely, and had not known which direction to take in such vast, totally unfamiliar territory.

  ‘And then all the questions started in earnest. Did Jamie really got lost? Or was he pulling some kind of stunt? How could a boy, and a stranger to Australia into the bargain – it was mid-winter there, remember, with tough conditions in the Blue Mountains – possibly survive so long in that wilderness? What did he eat? Where did he sleep? The doctors who examined him all agreed he was suffering from dehydration and exposure, as well, naturally, from fatigue, and none of them has expressed any disbelief. Loads of other folk have, though. His father was furious with his accusers and sort of drove them away from bothering his son in his hospital bed. But before long things got bad between the two of them. Quite nasty, in fact. I hope they’ve made it up since though…’

  ‘Money,’ says Luke again, and this time it isn’t an interrogative nor does he give any kind of smile.

  ‘Dead right,’ says Nat, wondering if staring this man with the vivid blue eyes hard in the face might be a good tactic, showing his own fearlessness. For he has now reached the crucial part, that which could get him into truly serious trouble. ‘Money. Sixty Minutes, a major Australian TV show did a feature on Jamie, for which he was paid £98,000. Agents started making a beeline for him, and even from his convalescent bed Jamie chose the best for himself. A celebrity agency reckoned his story could be worth some £500,000. His dad thought part of any money made should go to the search-and-rescue teams and also to himself, as someone intimately involved. Jamie had a different opinion here.

  Perhaps he’s changed his mind since.

  ‘But in the case of me and my dad, it’s the father who never thinks realistically and creatively about money, and his inexperienced son who does – on his behalf. Always preferring to stock art-kites instead of the power-jobs, the sporting kind, where the money is! Often turning down – or as good as – or as bad as – guys with proper disposable money because he prefers to have another sort of customer, who share his Green Wave ideas. Who doesn’t check the invoices with thorough regularity, or service his website, keeping it always up-to-date and interesting the way a business man these days should.’

  His pulse has accelerated, and he can feel himself sweating anew. Luke Fleming sees this, and with an irrepressible rush of fellow-feeling with the boy, says: ‘I get the picture! Got it a while ago! But let me say before you go on – I’ve done a little research of my own, and my own dad runs a shop too, as it happens, selling plants and flowers. Pete may be guilty of all the deficien-cies you say, and this is no fun time for any of us. But I doubt there’s need for quite all your worries about High Flyers. He’s done okay up to now, hasn’t he? Held his head way above water, and all that… But I can see how and why you wanted to help him; you’ve got a different approach to what a business should do from his… You wanted to be the Jamie Neale who actually gave the money to your dad. Who’d insist on larger sums than the media first offered, but for his sake, not out of any greed of your own. And you’d launch High Flyers into its greatest days of security and prosperity yet.’

  ‘Right! That’s right!’ Nat respects the man for his ability to have grasped his ambition and to express it now without disapproval or mockery. Almost, it seems to him, with moral regard, if not admiration. And Luke is in fact comparing the boy before him with himself. While he never minded giving his father a hand with the plants, with the bags of compost, and the gardening equipment, he also got heartily fed up with helping him. And he has always, and conveniently, taken it perfectly for granted that his dad, under his mum’s supervisory eye, knows what he’s doing business-wise. Doesn’t need any help from his son Luke.

  ‘Yes, I said to myself, I will disappear like Jamie Neale. Like him, in somewhere wild and possibly dangerous. Not contactable by mobile. Nobody will know where I am. There will be search-parties, people will give me up for dead, just like they did poor Jamie. Papers will be speculating like fury. Wherever can he be? Has he been murdered? Has he taken his own life? Was he in trouble? Did he have enemies? Did he have love trouble?’

  ‘I get the picture,’ Luke feels like saying again here, a little taken aback by the cascade of bad predicaments tumbling from Nat Kempsey’s mouth.

  ‘And I have to say in this respect I succeeded. Most of those questions were asked
in the tabloids – and in some of the broad-sheets too. You even asked some of ’em yourself.

  ‘The first decision I had to make was where to disappear. I wanted to be found, I had to be found to achieve my goal – though only after a lot of effort. So no good just leaving home and vanishing into the whole of Britain, as Dad apparently thought I might have done. Equally no good choosing somewhere very near Lydcastle either. Jamie Neale had caused me to set my heart on mountains, and – like the police – I first thought of Snowdonia, though I thought that might be too obvious and too well-patrolled. I also thought about Cumbria and the Cairngorms. Then I found that newspaper cutting about the 1974 UFOs and that suggested the Berwyns to me. The idea that it was somewhere Dad had been interested or possibly involved in gave it great appeal. When my dad takes an interest in something or somewhere, it’s always worthy of attention. Think of this kite shop, think of South Shropshire in general and Lydcastle in particular. I even thought the Heights that my uncle Julian had spoken of in connection with my dad could refer to the Berwyns. And I was proved right, wasn’t I?

  ‘But though I was wanting to be thought lost like Jamie, I didn’t want actually to get lost like he did. Besides how could I? Not only did I have an extremely clear idea of the whole area through conning the map repeatedly, the Berwyns are not the Blue Mountains. That hardly needs saying, does it? By British standards they’re an impressive but compact range, and wild and enticing; by international ones they’re pocket-sized, miniatures. Think what a comparatively short time it took the Eurocopter that picked me up to make her complete overhead tour of the Berwyns – even though it must have seemed eternity to those involved. The only thing for me to do, I thought, to earn myself a Jamie Neale-like story that would galvanise the press with its vast coffers, was to get injured. And in due course I would see to this myself. I didn’t need to worry about that business until enough time had passed for the packet I’d given Joel to have arrived in Lydcastle. You were right, Luke, I put that arrival at Wednesday or Thursday not the Friday of reality.

  ‘I really didn’t think – maybe chose not to think – of the fear and worry I’d cause. I’d told Dad I was heading for the Heights. That could have been a clue for him as to where I was bound, though he didn’t see it – but, with the xxxx that followed the message, I thought it was like a guarantee that I was in good spirits and not intending to do away with myself.

  ‘Everything I did was after careful consideration. I even went to Shrewsbury a roundabout route in case I bumped into any people who knew me, wearing a baseball cap with its peak pulled far down over my forehead. Then I caught a bus to the Tanat Valley, and walked through Llanrhaeadr-ym-Mochnant all the way to Pistyll Rhaeadr. My good fortune in meeting Joel Easton there you know about – but maybe it wasn’t such good fortune after all.

  ‘I’d disposed of my mobile and my journal, and that gave me a marvellous free new identity. And I didn’t plunge into some wild hermit’s life either. I kept away from people, obviously, and sought out all the remotest stretches of the mountains. But I had lugged loads of good food with me, fruit and veg and bread and some ready-cooked meals, to keep me going for most of the time I was up there. I buried all the packaging. As I eventually did the Wallander thriller I’d brought with me, and read most of Tuesday and Wednesday… Towards the end, when I was getting distinctly worried about rescue, the provisions ran out; I could have saved more of ’em if I hadn’t eaten so well at the beginning.’

  ‘And the injuries?’

  ‘Well, as it happened, I did twist my ankle – or something of that sort – you know, the way you can on hill paths. It swelled up a bit, and hurt quite a lot. I wrapped a handkerchief round it, and in due course it improved. But that little mishap was very useful to me when I was brought back to normal life. As I believe you guessed – and I take my hat off to you, Luke – I didn’t give myself the serious injury, the broken ankle, till I saw the helicopter literally overhead. But doctors who examined me saw that I’d hurt myself in the same place earlier, and even if they were perplexed, they appreciated that I couldn’t have moved all that far from the Pen-plaenau where I was discovered. End of, really.’

  ‘And were you ever afraid up there? Alone and disabled!’ Luke’s tone isn’t as mocking as the words might suggest.

  ‘No, I wasn’t. Towards the very end I was longing for discovery, I’ll admit. But afraid, no.’

  ‘Bored? Uncomfortable? Your ankles apart.’

  ‘Not after the two days.’

  ‘Not oppressed by your own company?’

  ‘Own company? No!’

  ‘Has it all been worth it?’

  ‘Worth it? I haven’t received a fucking fifty-pence piece, Luke!’

  ‘In other ways apart from cash?’

  Nat bats his eyelids as if trying to blink away pictures insistent on coming between him and the room he’s now in. ‘I dunno!’ For there are some things he won’t tell anybody.

  ‘Perhaps we should ask your dad that question?’ says Luke, who’s been aware that Pete has heard the entire conversation he has just been conducting with Nat.

  But – unlike the previous occasion – Pete doesn’t burst in. He’s busy with his own discomfiting reflections:

  ‘Nat may believe he concocted his bizarre plan to help me, to redeem the fortunes of High Flyers, but that can’t be the real explanation for his coming up with it. I know now that, deep down and desperately, he wanted and needed to find out that he was a unique person in others’ eyes, and loved for himself. Terrible that he felt such love could be articulated only when he was feared dead.

  ‘But by travelling those paths into that country I myself visited at his age, believing it to be Annwn, the Otherworld of peace, Nat has surely established not only his own right to be loved, he may well have won it for me also.

  ‘And for his sake I’ll get hold of a Spirit of the Air Power-Kite, and maybe for mine, he will join me in flying that rare, sacred, colourful Barroletta.

  ‘But that’s not an end to it all, is it?’

  Two

  Confrontations

  The Town Hall clock strikes the quarter. 1.45. With Luke Fleming still out at lunch, and Nat deservedly, understandably and thankfully asleep, Pete feels he can remain within this early-afternoon hour just a bit longer, inside a quiet cell of time, more like what you’d find in a monastery than a police station, even if, after what he’s overheard, he’s only too aware of the latter. He can use this confined but calming space to gather fractured thoughts and feelings together, if that’s at all possible. For the heavy blankness of exhaustion has taken him over… And now comes a knock-knock-knock on his shop door. Pete moves into the main part of High Flyers to answer it.

  ‘Can’t you bloody see I’ve turned the sign to CLOSED?’ he silently demands of the unknown man of about sixty on the other side of the glass. In general appearance he’s not so unlike himself: medium height, dark, grey-streaked, wavy hair, broad shoulders, and more stomach than desirable, though not as ample as many a male’s in this age of obesity. I’ll play the Man of Constant Sorrow, Pete thinks. And truly with Luke right now deliberating his professional duty, whether or not to publish the truth he has finally elicited from Nat, his sorrow does appear about constant. He could make his visitor feel he was acting selfishly to come bothering a man still in the public eye with his leisure-time requirements?

  But as he undoes the door-catch, Pete knows for sure that here is no buyer-to-be. There’s something too pleading about his smile.

  ‘I’m shut,’ Pete tells him redundantly, and in a huffier tone than intended, ‘and I’m staying shut today. Far too much else on!’

  ‘I believe you,’ says the caller, ‘and that’s why I’m here. On an errand of sympathy.’ His voice was warm, low, notably and incongruously intimate.

  And who the fuck do you think you are, banging on a man’s front-door despite the notice on it, just to show off your compassion, goes Pete to himself. However sympathetic he may fee
l, this bloke can’t conceivably know about the heaving, stinking shit Nat has landed them both in. Nor the agony of having to wait till Luke has ransacked his journalist’s conscience and come up with an answer. Something in the intentness of the newcomer’s gaze, half softly sensual, half probingly puritan, compounded with his husky voice, reminds Pete of another occasion in his life, in precisely the terrible period he recreated for Nat and Luke upstairs. But it refuses to come to his bidding; Bob Thurlow wouldn’t have tolerated such slowness, even at an audition.

  ‘I haven’t had the pleasure, have I?’

  ‘I think you did once, without knowing it. I’m Don Parry!’

  ‘Don Parry?’ It has the sound of a name from a history book; it might have sprung out of G.R. Elton’s Reform and Renewal: Thomas Cromwell and the Common Weal, for instance, which he’d been reading in his warm Woodgarth bedroom the night he was summoned to the Berwyns. Summoned because of the phone call to Sam Price this very man standing before him now, these thirty-five years later, had made.

  ‘Well,’ astounded, flummoxed, ‘you’d best come in, hadn’t you? I’ve been visited by God-knows-how-many different odds-and-sods these last days. But you’re the very last person I’ve been expecting to see!’

  Neither manner nor matter make this last remark complimen-tary. But this visitor in black cashmere jersey and cream chinos doesn’t look put down. He steps confidently, even blithely into High Flyers, where he gives a swift look about him with evident admiration, which he also means Pete to see. ‘A beautiful shop!’ he exclaims, ‘and I’ll be honest with you, Pete. I’ve passed here a score of times, and looked through your window, and very impressed I’ve always been. But I’ve never had the nerve actually to come inside.’ Pete thinks, if this guy’s stupid enough to believe his chat-up line will disarm me, he has another thing coming!

  ‘I didn’t think I’d be welcome here, you see!’ Don Parry adds.