After Brock (35 page)

And, for all my conceit about my brain, I didn't have enough trust in my own knowledge to resist Sam that evening, Pete now reprimands himself. But then resisting him was the last thing I wanted to do then. Quite the contrary. I thought yielding to his will was a proof of my own testosterone. ‘Sam, of course, had already seen, a UFO,' he reminds himself – and Don, ‘at Darnton.'

Don at last removes his gaze from Pete's face, and casts it down to the well-swept wooden-boarded floor. ‘Pete, I don't think so; I don't believe he did. He was an unhappy, mixed-up lad, and that day, on the long run, and feeling alone with his problems, he probably saw something a bit out-of-the-ordinary in the air, and it became something else in his imagination. Maybe it was a solitary bird, a crow or a magpie, which can give you a turn sometimes. Or maybe it was a child's kite like one of the fancier ones you sell here, adrift from its flyer. Who knows? But then when he read Jung's
Memories, Dreams and Reflections
, well…'

‘“Well”, indeed!' says Pete.

‘Oh, come on, Pete Kempsey, youth's the time for fantasy, especially about oneself. And if you can't invent your own, then why not take somebody else's? Specially if he's a world-famous sage like Carl-Gustav Jung. What about you and those psychia-trists' tests?'

Touché, thinks Pete, even though the parallel surely is not exact. Besides, hasn't he held this interpretation of Sam's schoolboy experience far too long to be shocked by Don Parry himself cutting it down to size? ‘And the event that got Sam chucked out of Darnton?' he finds himself asking. Its revelation to him was something he will never forget.

‘That was a piece of schoolboy theatre. Got worse and worse in the telling. I reckon.'

‘For Darnton it was no big deal?' Pete surmises, ‘an almost routine piece of adolescent histrionics? That's why they took him back into the fold so easily.'

‘Bang on, Pete! It was the right decision too; Sam was good at his studies, and actually the teaching at his old school, whatever he thought about the institution, was much better than at that crammer's in Hereford…'

What doesn't he know about Sam, Pete asks himself. Almost nothing. He knows so much, and in such detail, because… because he loves him. Probably has loved him since their first meeting, when Don was doing jobbing bit-work for Trevor. Sam had (has) Don Parry, and I had Oliver Merchant. Egotistic upstarts that we two boys were, sick of self-love as Shakespeare says, we didn't deserve all that steady service of the heart. Yet we expected it nonetheless. And therefore received it…

‘Did I understand just now, Don, that you and Sam never met up that night?'

‘We never did. I was with a bunch of mates, chewing the rag about what had been happening to us in the Berwyns. My old mum, who'd talked to Sam and thought him ever such a nice, well-spoken lad, was under the impression that he was coming back to ours to sleep. So we waited up and waited up… but nary a sign of him.'

‘He drove all the way back to Leominster?'

‘He did. Unwise of him to set out for so long a trip, I suppose, 'cause by then he'd had a few good deep smokes – you know the kind I'm meaning.' Pete hardly cannot do, seeing he is still enjoying these himself. So he merely nods.

‘Would have probably got back to his house in Bargates – three o'clock, wouldn't you say?' Pete's heart is starting to pound fiercely fast. For in a sense these fast-approaching moments are ones he has waited these thirty-five long years for, and he cannot meet their arrival without fear – the fear of having hindsight imposed on him.

He makes himself continue: ‘Sam'd have been home in The Tall House, sleeping off his night's misadventures, at the time you picked me up at the caff in Llanfyllin?'

Once again Don transfers his weight from one foot to the other, but this time it's a patent sign of awkwardness, even unease. The man has anticipated precisely this exchange but, now it's at last and irrevocably come, likes it every bit as little as Pete himself. ‘I reckon so, yes.'

‘This was all long before the time of mobile phones. But you know he was asleep at that hour because, Don, because he told you about everything?'

Don's eyes rather than his lips plead again. ‘He did, yes, Pete. I was the big brother, you could say, in whom he – well, he was an only child – in whom he could confide. Confide what he was unable to tell Trevor or Susan. Or anybody else for that matter.'

‘Me included, eh, Don? He was ungetatable ever afterwards. Mr and Mrs Price sent a wreath to my parents' funeral, but they never came to it; Sam himself sent me a condolence card – from London – and, later, another post-card of good wishes – from Darnton. But nothing more… But you know something, Don, I've got the strongest feeling, that even now we haven't got to the end of the whole dreadful business? There's a still grimmer truth you haven't yet told me. And that Sam has charged you to do so now. To make good the decades-long delay. So we can meet and be friends again…'

‘And he'll do anything to be of help to you now, Pete.' Don steps nearer to him, you might say advances to him, as if to lay some assuring hand on him. Pete edges along the counter away from any demonstrativeness. ‘He's a really wealthy man, Sam is, and deserves to be. Has a shrewd business-head nobody can rival, and works his arse off.'

I suppose this shrewdness has made him see the kind of difficulties Nat has plunged us in, thinks Pete. And he's offering to help. Guilt-money?

Or something handsomer, if you're prepared to forgive.

‘Spit it out, Don Parry. I can't be waiting for you all bloody day!'

Don looks not at Pete but – oddly – at the debit-card machine on the counter, as if reminding himself of what his admired protégé could do for its owner – if only he could cleanse his heart. ‘Before Sam left Llanrhaeadr – about half-past midnight he swears it was; he looked at his watch – he went into the phone box in the main street and rang…'

‘My parents.' It's not a question now, but a statement of fact.

And had he somehow, somewhere, always known this?

‘He rang up your home, Pete. He was sorry for what he'd done to you. And wanted to make amends.'

‘Not sorry enough to turn his fucking VW back round, and pick me up himself?'

‘Sam had a young man's pride, Pete, just as you had yourself. Proud young men don't do things like going back over their tracks and saying sorry. Would you not agree? You were like that yourself.'

The scene becomes – and is to remain – almost hallucinatorily clear to Pete. For years to come (with assistance from the one person who can know all its intimacies) he will regularly revisit it.

  

…Sam steps into the red telephone box, though it smells over-poweringly of vomit. Soon he'd be adding to this mess, for the cans of beer he's drunk with a few (already pretty sozzled) lads encountered near the British Legion have mixed unpleasantly with the dope he's himself smoked. He's in no state to re-present himself at Don Parry's house, and exhibit himself to Don's nice, hospitable mother. (And Don himself? Where is that fucker?) He dials the number he wants with an energy that surprises but pleases him, though several times his fingers slip out of the appropriate holes. And, at half past twelve am, he might well have to wait a goddam age for a reply. But wait he would. Wait he must. Eventually a voice comes on the other end of the line, and though drink and sheer exhaustion very nearly obstruct the tiresome business of inserting the coins (has he even the right ones to hand?) and the pressing of bloody fucking Button A, he accomplishes all this. ‘Is that the Kempsey residence?' he shouts, and when Mr Kempsey (for him it must be) affirms in a slow, heavy, bemused but anxious voice that indeed it is, he bawls even louder: ‘Mr Kempsey? Sorry to have woken you up in the middle of the night, and spoiled your sleep. But I thought you ought to know. I've just seen your son, Peter, lying on the side of the little hill road between Llanrhaeadr-ym-Mochnant and the waterfall known as Pistyll Rhaeadr. Looks as if he's been seriously in the wars. Hope he's alive still. I wouldn't like to say for sure, though.'

Then he hangs up – and to his profound shame and physical disgust – spews all down his bomber jacket and jeans, and then onto the floor… Gasping as he steps back into the keen January night air, the tears rolling profusely down his cheeks, he's tempted to turn round, re-enter the kiosk, ring the Kempseys' again, and inform them: ‘Forget what you just heard. Just a drunken joke, by a stupid jerk who's going to feel even sorrier in the morning.' But he does not. For one thing, as he tells himself (and Don Parry) later, there's the reality of poor beaten-up Peter who, for aught he knew, might easily be lying there in exactly the same forlorn spot he's left him in.

‘So that's where my dad was driving them all to,' says Pete, and how right he was a few minutes back: life brings you things that quite simply cannot be borne, ‘he was going to fetch me from Pistyll Rhaeadr. When the lorry jack-knifed into their Rover only a few miles out of Leominster, I was up on the Heights. And during the course of the night – according to those old legends you filled Sam's head with, Don – my family must have arrived there too. Isn't Annwn the Otherworld, the land of the Afterlife?'

He can't cry. He can't even be angry with this well-meaning soul who's been authorised to disclose things far better hidden.

‘Those legends are metaphors, Pete,' Don's tone is so low Pete can barely catch the words, ‘to help us in just such terrible situ-ations as yours has been. They are things of beauty, to aid us and guide us and comfort us… Pete, think please that Sam was sorry that night. Think that he still felt himself your friend. Think that he wants to be your friend again. To assist you. To introduce you to his lovely, lovely family.'

Pete says: ‘And my own lovely, lovely family? Dad, Mum, dead before they were fifty, Robin dead at age ten. Julian left with a tragedy that will stay with him for ever… So much silence, Don, so much conspiracy. You helped Sam to keep the truth of his absence in the Berwyns from his parents, from everybody. Just a lad, like every other red-blooded one, who'd been out on the tiles in his own town all night… But then Oliver Merchant performed the same service for me, so who am I to take the moral high ground? The moral fucking Heights.' He feels he might well break out now into a fit of insane laughter, like a character in some Jacobean drama, who would roll on the floor in a frenzy, gnashing his teeth and beating the floor with his fists. And whatever good would that do? It wouldn't even relieve the unnameable, indescrib-able emotions now threatening to take him over.

The only words he can find are, ‘I know that in my own way I'm as guilty as Sam. At least I think so. If he can accept his wrong-doing, then I can accept mine, I guess. And if he's wanting to help me, then maybe somewhere inside me I'm wanting to be helped. Even by Sam Price… As for you, Don, I can't express, as well as I'd like to, my regard for you, for someone who actually came to confront me – ill-mannered bastard bound up in self even more than normal. As you well knew… Shouldn't we have that brew.' That's not really enough, but it's the best he can manage.

   

About half-an-hour later, Pete goes up to Nat's bedroom to take a look at his son. Who, though the afternoon sun is streaming strongly through the fabric of the drawn curtains, lies deep in sleep, on his right side but with three-quarters of himself above the duvet. His eyes being shut, no grey light shines disconcertingly from them; his mouth is half-open, but, from this angle, his row of ill-assorted front teeth is less conspicuous than usual. In the shadows that the curtains have caused to fall over the bed his tousled hair has lost its odd grey colour, seems the usual English mouse-brown. Why, he looks like practically every other youth, thinks Pete, like a couple of million others, at a conservative estimate. Ordinary enough. Still, he did a mad thing, did it deliberately and sustainedly.

Yet don't very ordinary people do very mad things? Think of me, Pete advises himself. I wasn't the High Flyer I thought, just a good average probably. But I carried out a surely extra-ordinary action – following someone through irrational devotion on a wild chase after UFOs which probably, it now seems, from as good an authority as I could have, weren't UFOs at all, just a geographical disturbance not so very remarkable in other parts of the world and scientifically explicable even in this one. But what I got at the end of my adventure, that surely was extra-ordinary? Enough so anyway to merit police inquiry and media attention.

Yet was it? Spontaneous heated action on the part of a father and mother who loved their child, and are therefore anxious about him, the deaths of several members of one family in a single accident – these don't really defy sensible canons for human experience. Watch BBC
Midlands Today
for just one week! Only to the bereaved individual who, because of his youth and narcissism, took for granted what should never be taken for granted, the continuance of life in all and any circumstances, could what befell the Kempseys those cold small hours of a January morning seem a defiance of probability, a violation of human rights, a breach of some contract you signed at birth.

A callow, inadequate notion, to put it mildly. Hasn't the Pete Kempsey of 2009 jettisoned it long ago? He now approaches life with unflagging, if not always obvious or even self-acknowledged, suspicion. Yet when Nat went missing, such a feeling of injustice came flooding back through him. It would return again if Nat were to have a serious relapse of health; it almost certainly will return, he admits, if, as a result of what he has just told Luke Fleming, he has to pay a severe penalty for his ill-begotten escapade, for activity in truth far ‘madder' because more deliberate.