After Brock (26 page)

‘Glad to hear it, friend,' said Sam, who was now slamming-to the passenger door, ‘so let me wish you a very good night. Sleep well, won't you?'

He ran over to the driver's door, then banged it shut, firmly, and started up the engine. No doubt what he was going to do…Pete could barely raise his head to watch the VW move on out of sight. And then back in sight again. Sam had obviously found a little gateway into a field in which to turn the car round. He drove on, down past him.

Amazed, distressed, incredulous and guilty, Pete stretched out his body, bloody, mucus-ridden and sore in the face, all ache and bruise at the back of the head, and jabbing with pain at the shoulders, thanks to Sam having shaken him so furiously. And filthy at the bum too. With maximum caution he edged his way so that, still recumbent, he had a small moss-covered stone for a pillow.

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.

   

‘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-believed, 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.”'