After Brock (34 page)

So Sam and Don Parry never met up that night. In the absence of any knowledge of Sam's activities after his assault on himself, Pete had always assumed they had. Despite all that he has been revealing of his past to Luke and Nat, he sees in a flash that there are very important things about that crucial occasion he doesn't, even after so many years, know. And this causes another ripple of giddiness to pass through his head. Pete realises that he must sit down. He doesn't do so immediately, still coy about showing weakness, so just props his back firmly against his counter. Some days of life, he thinks, are quite simply too much to bear. Indeed they can't be borne, and in all honesty never are; surviving them is just a question of disguise, pretence, self-suppression. This is the truth that people in every culture, every country, have gone out of their way to deny – as they feel they must, sometimes simply and sternly, sometimes with intellectual and emotional display – whenever they pronounce, as they do all the time, on life and God, and time and space, and the soul and the psyche, and morality and natural laws. And never properly acknowledge the outbreaks of the truly dreadful – which makes nonsense of everything that's helped till then to keep them going…

Just such a day which could not be properly borne was that on which Don (Don!) drove him back to Leominster, to learn that his whole family bar one had been wiped out. Just such a day, or as near a one as damn-it, was Tuesday last week – and Wednesday – and Thursday and Friday morning, all days when he woke up to see no logical reason why Nat shouldn't have joined those others he was kin to in extinction.

Today, however, is not one of this terrible sort, or not so far, Pete hastily checks himself: uncertainty is of existence's very essence. Nat may be both troubled and in trouble, but he's incon-testably alive. And Pete's relationships with his fellow-townsfolk here in south Shropshire, with those customers who know him personally, and, even after all that has happened between them, with Izzie, his ex, are better, more beautiful, than ever they have been. And isn't that something! Not forgetting what's opening up, at long last, between Nat and himself.

‘My son's sound asleep,' Pete says, ‘in fact I gave him a tablet. We've had as gruelling a morning as you could ever not hope to have. We're not out of the woods yet, you see.' He despises himself for this last, overworked cliché, but then sometimes clichés are both useful and comforting as other more first-hand phrases aren't. They remind you how many countless others have been in your predicament, and have found it so hard to cope with that they couldn't come up with adequate original words to convey its quality. Anyway, isn't the present predicament really rather like being dumped in the middle of some dense, lightless, coniferous forestation, with no natural path out? ‘So I think we'd better stay down here in the shop, Don,' he doesn't find the man's first name easy to deliver, ‘where we can't disturb him. I can put the kettle on for us in the little kitchen back there, if you like… Tea? Coffee?'

‘Tea'd be fine, Pete, but in your own time, man, in your own time. I'm in no hurry, though I wouldn't want to outstay any welcome you're good enough to give me.' He seems to Pete to be speaking without a hint of irony, let alone reproof. ‘I'm really here as a messenger, Pete. As you've probably already guessed.'

I've hardly had the time to fucking guess anything, thinks Pete. But even as he articulates this to himself, he appreciates that there's no way Don Parry could have come over from Leominster on his own account.

‘Sam Price?'

‘Sam, yes!' assents Don Parry, clearly glad the name has been first uttered by Pete rather than himself. There's a look of strong resolve and optimistic good will on the man's somewhat florid face.

‘Sam's followed the case of your missing lad, followed every bit of it,' says Don slowly, and his eyes give Pete's own now blanching face an unswerving attention that he finds both discomfiting and curiously tranquillising, ‘and naturally when he heard where Nat was found… well, he was delighted on your behalf, of course. But he has his memories, you know.'

‘I'll bet!' says Pete, ‘and so he should.' Though – at least on that occasion – Sam himself never made it to Pistyll Rhaeadr and the mountains at its back.

Is it prevarication, or a stab of his former burning interest in that person, impossible for all its sorry associations now to resist, but ‘Hadn't you better tell me a bit about Sam, Don? How he is now. What he's doing.'

‘You don't know anything?'

‘I'm hardly in the fucking mood today for asking idle questions to which I already know answers, am I? As I've told you, my son and I are not out of the bloody woods yet.'

‘Well,' Don takes a deep breath – of personal pride, thinks Pete, ‘Sam owns and generally looks after Price's Menswear with all its subsidiaries. And me, I'm the Leominster manager (though I may retire year after next), and on the Board too. We have branches now in Abergavenny, Monmouth, Newport (Gwent), Ross-on-Wye, Gloucester, Stroud. Not too bad, huh?' Mouth stretches and pupils expand in satisfaction, and Pete realizes that Don too is glad of this interval in his narrative. ‘Only all those shops have a different name. They're called Sartor (Latin for tailor). Sam thought Price's Menswear, though okay for when it started, was just a tad dull.' He laughs with something like irrepressible affection at Sam's – well, call them ‘high-flying' – notions. ‘So I expect you've seen a branch or two of us on your travels, without knowing you were looking at a business owned by your old friend.'

‘Have I?' wonders Pete to himself. ‘Clothes shops bore the balls off me. A long time since I felt good because of the trendy clothes old Ol had bought me! I go round more like an old tramp now, and that's how I like it!' Aloud he said, ‘Old friend?' he expostu-lates, ‘some old friend, him! You saw with your own eyes how he'd beaten me up that evening. In fact you remarked on it as we drove along. Thought it was two boys fighting over a lass. As if, incidentally, that'd have made him lamming into me any the better. I'm no friend to violence of any kind whatever.'

A pause, as well there might be. There's an animation in Don's face and voice that suggests he hasn't himself been a total stranger to violence – of feeling if not of deed, and of the past rather than of the present. ‘Sam had treatment for those bad tendencies, soon after that episode,' he says in a soft, slightly injured voice, ‘got them from his dad, we reckon. Not his fault. Anyway it worked. The treatment, I mean.'

‘I'm pleased to hear it,' says Pete, ‘makes me feel a bloody heap better about everything.'

Don puts out a hand, so it rests lightly on the dangling blue wing of a dependant paper-and-bamboo butterfly. Another pause. Then, somewhat to Pete's surprise says, with a definite contraction of that pleading smile (though it'll return in full very shortly), ‘Sarcasm gets us all nowhere, Pete. And bitterness even less far… Sam wants so much to communicate with you. Needs to, you might say. He has the kite shop's email address – you're a famous establishment, after all – so he could have got in touch with you any time. But he thought it best not to, it might upset you too much. Make things worse by bringing back too much that was painful. Sam is not under any illusions. But he's been thinking and worrying about you, empathising with you, one might say… Until he begged me to go to Lydcastle on this mission. “See if you can effect a peace, Don,” says he, “if
you
can't, nobody can”.'

Well, that may well be true, Pete agrees. He's as good an inter-mediary as any – and has knowledge that others wouldn't have. But it doesn't mean he is going to succeed. Effect a peace, indeed! Makes it all sound like a relationship between retailers and suppliers. Perhaps Sam always was a businessman's son above everything else.

‘Well, here you are, Don! You've carried out your mission!' Pete can't but entertain respect for the strong-willed yet plainly soft-hearted man in front of him, ‘And I know that you did try to make peace once before. Sending me that cutting from
The
Wrexham Leader
about the UFO sightings anniversary.

Suggesting Sam and I met, and… buried the hatchet, I suppose. But it wouldn't have been possible. We were both so different. Sam had his course in medicine…'

‘His heart was never in his medical studies, Pete. After Trevor Price's first stroke, giving them up and going into Price's seemed the obvious course. I'd already become Manager in Leominster.

Sam's never regretted his decision, I know it.'

‘…and I was just starting my delayed entry into the London School of Printing. And you never sent me any other – let's call them, olive branches, did you? So I don't know a thing about Sam's life, a subject I closed down in my mind long ago. But I can't object to opening it up now, at any rate for just a tiny while… Is Sam married? Does he have kids? Does he still live in Leominster?'

The smile (pleading no longer) comes back fulsomely: almost ear to ear. ‘The answer's Yes to all those questions,' says Don with a look of personal happiness, as if he can take some responsibility for Sam's good life. ‘Sam's been married to Giulia thirty years. Met her when travelling to Italy – to Milan – on Menswear business. She comes from Bergamo, a marvelous old city – do you know it, Pete?'

‘Never travel anywhere,' mutters Pete in reply to this paren-thesis.

‘And the two of them go out there and see family for part of every year. They have such a lovely apartment in the high part of the town, its old quarter; I sometimes stay in it myself, and I'm quite sure – if we have the reunion Sam's now set his heart on – that you could be his guest there yourself, Pete. Probably just what you need after all you've been through.' And he gives a persuasive little nod of the head, a salesman's gesture, thinks Pete, who has used it himself. ‘And they've three beautiful children, Grazia, Lucía and lastly Ned, who's the image of Sam.'

Pete hardly knows whether, in this surge of reminders of past pains, he should be pleased at this last observation. ‘Image', however, generally applies to externals. Outwardly Sam, as Pete knew better than anybody, was alluringly handsome as a youth. And for a few disturbing seconds his former friend's physical charm seems to advance towards him from across chasms of time and space – from a deserted car park, from the crest of The Stiperstones after speeding downwards from The Devil's Chair.

‘And living in Leominster?'

‘Where do you think in that town he lives, Pete?' Don's is a rhetorical question, for he's impatient to give Pete the joyful fact of the matter, ‘why, The Tall House, of course. Poor Susan's been dead fifteen years – cirrhosis, sadly but unsurprisingly – and Trevor stayed on alone for a while, but then had to move to Sheltered Accommodation. Where he's doing pretty well! But The Tall House suits Sam and his family to a T.'

Why, the guy's talking about Sam as though he's in love with him, Pete comments to himself. And then – the guy
is
in love with him, of course! Sam was able to make people that way; I do believe, viewing it all from this remote perspective, now that I was in love with him too. In as much as I was able to be in that condition with anybody but my own self, the Wellerman-Kreutz wonder. But I was then a greenhorn of eighteen, and was always to go for women. In Don's case, am I not dealing with something more literally true? And more all-pervading? ‘And how about yourself, Don? You married? You a family man?'

‘No! I played the field as a young man,' I know, thinks Pete, Sam used that selfsame, idiotic, politically incorrect phrase about you, ‘in fact I had quite a reputation – as you no doubt heard. But after – after that terrible day of the sightings, as I tried to tell you when we rode along together and you thought my name was Joe, I gave all that up. Took it for a warning that life's meant for more serious things.'

‘What can be more serious than women?' asks Pete, a touch indignantly, even though he has behind him a marriage failed beyond any mending despite present mutual warmth. He couldn't ever be doing with misogynistic sentiment.

‘More serious than the flesh, Pete, was what I meant,' says Don. And the sincerity of his tone enables Pete – to his astonishment, and for the first time during this, their one true encounter – to envisage him, without much strain, as a man who once believed (who maybe still believes) in Annwn, in otherworldly beauties and virtues, ‘more serious than just fucking around. Which was what, God forgive me, I was doing. Life's been given us for hard work and for love.'

Both of which, I guess, he's found, thinks Pete. But he doesn't want now to hear any confession of devotion, which, enlightened though he is, would hugely embarrass him. Nor any corresponding recital of Sam's merits which would only make him suspicious. Anyway, since they have already alighted on that dark, significant point in the past, there's something he now greatly wants to hear. From as near the horse's mouth as makes no matter.

‘Don,' he asks, ‘what do you think about the night of January 23, 1974? You must have given it a hell of a lot of thought. Yours isn't the only life it changed.'

Don shifts the weight from one foot to another. Here they've been talking of momentous things, and yet both have remained standing (half-propped-up in Pete's case). ‘All I can say, Pete, so many years later, is, “I heard what I heard, and I saw what I saw.” And I was so overwhelmed that I wanted my new friend, whom I'd taken such a shine to, as you might say, to share the aftermath with me. If you go onto YouTube now…'

And Pete shows by ‘Mmms!' and a nod of the head that he has indeed done this, a fair number of times, ‘You can still find people I personally know vouchsafing for the authenticity of their experience. But me – maybe I've turned dull in my old age; maybe years of managing men's clothes sales first for Trevor, then for Sam, has corrupted me – but me, I've come to think it was an earthquake, not so strange in this zone we live in, the Bala Fault and all that.' Exactly what I said to Sam when he first broke to me the occurrences in the Berwyns, thinks Pete, but it's carrion satisfaction. ‘That accounts for all the tremors and great bangs, you see,' continues Don, ‘and also for the many weird lights in the sky which seemed so awesome at the time. They frequently accompany upheavals below ground, but, us in Llandrillo and Llanderfel, we didn't know that. We were an ignorant lot, mostly, our heads fuller of science fiction and sensational stories in
The Mirror
or
The News of the World
than of geology.'