The Fall (6 page)

After that first encounter, the Matthewsons, mother and son, came to stay in the hotel. It was only for a couple of weeks
during the summer holidays while they were doing up their house. They took three rooms on the first floor —
“Three
rooms, can you imagine?” my mother exclaimed — and for almost the first time, I had a companion. Despite the difference in
age, we were united in much: an alien Englishness among the Welsh, a shared lack of a father, the shared fact of being an
only child, a shared curiosity in what went on around us. Powerful similarities, centripetal forces that pulled us together
across the barrier set up by the years.

I worshiped Jamie, I suppose, with that dogged admiration that the young can have for the immediately older — far greater than
if he had been an adult. In the next few weeks, I followed him around like an acolyte. We kicked cans around on wasteland
nearby. We had a tense encounter — an uneasy blend of familiarity and suspicion — with some other kids at the recreation ground,
an encounter in which Jamie’s greater age and belligerence won the day. We made casual friends with a solitary girl called
Bethan, who lived in the council houses. We watched contrails high in a rare blue sky and debated whether they were Russian
spy planes preparing to take the capitalist world for their own. Perhaps we could see satellites up there among the night
stars, Russian sputniks looking down on our own fragment of Earth. Together Jamie and I went into town. I followed him along
the seafront, past benches with glum vacationers, amid the alien accents of Liverpool and Manchester. He walked quicker than
me; I seemed to spend the whole time struggling to catch up. We found an arcade with slot machines. One of them was a what-the-butler-saw
machine. Jamie fed it with pennies and then stood aside for me to peer into the viewer. I could make out vague and ill-focused
tits and a froth of lace. It was education of a kind.

One day we spied on people in case they might be spies, stalked random strangers around the streets, watched a Bryl-creemed
man going from door to door trying to sell brushes to housewives. “Clear off, you little buggers!” he shouted when he noticed
us following him. “I’ll tell your parents of you.”

I went in fear for the rest of the day in case he had that power, to know names and addresses and parentage from a mere glimpse
of someone’s face. But Jamie merely laughed. “I think he fucks the ones that want it,” he said. And added thoughtfully, “Maybe
they get a free brush.”

The word
fuck
was possessed of a strange potency, a password into the unknown adult world. Jamie had got hold of a copy of
Lady Chatterley’s Lover,
published by Penguin at 3/6d, phoenix-covered and newly risen from the ashes of censorship, and we leafed through the pages
for
fuck
and its derivatives. They occurred twenty-six times. We counted. He told me the book was his mother’s. My mother would surely
never have read it, certainly would never have owned it; never in a million years would she have uttered such words. The fact
that Jamie’s mother possessed it, had read it, and had played those words over to herself in her mind, made her seem dangerous
and subversive. I watched her with the careful eyes of a spy, saw the curve of her calves, the arabesques of chin and ear,
the subtle hollow at the base of her throat, and the gravitational funnel between her half-hidden breasts.

“I’ve seen my mother,” he told me. “In the nude.”

“You never.”

“Bloody have. She doesn’t mind. As long as you’re family.”

I wondered what it might be like, the sight of his mother stark naked. My own mother was tightly prudish. I could not imagine
her exposing herself for me to feed at her breasts, never mind opening her legs to let me out in the first place. And yet
Jamie’s mother had allowed herself to be seen naked.

“What’s she
like?”

He shrugged. “Like any woman. Tits. Hair.”

“Hair?”

“Down there.”

“You’ve
seen
it?”

“Sure.”

Hair seemed counterintuitive. All other evidence in my possession (but there was little enough) was to the contrary — statues,
paintings, anything like that, even the pictures in the slot machine. Men were hairy. Paintings showed that, and I’d seen
it in the changing rooms of the municipal swimming pool. Men were big and dark and hairy. But not women. I discovered a book
of art reproductions in the guests’ lounge and showed it to Jamie as evidence. Sir Peter Paul Rubens, whoever he might be.
Women who didn’t seemed concerned about their figures. Flesh piled up like uncooked dough, but no hair.

“That’s art,” Jamie said dismissively It was Bethan who put the matter beyond doubt, around the back of her father’s garden
shed, hitching up her skirt for us to look. “You can’t touch,” she warned as she pulled her knickers down. “Touching’s rude.”

There wasn’t much to see: sparse brush strokes of dark hair and a small crease like pursed and smiling lips. “Just that?”
I asked.

“There’s inside too,” she said.

“Not
hair
inside?” Hair inside seemed remarkable, like nostrils.

“Not hair, you silly. Things.” She pulled herself open for us to see, and there were indeed
things,
things coralline and glistening. Folds, membranes, a little bud. We were silent, watching. “That’s my pinkie,” she explained.
“One day it’ll grow into a willy. Maybe.”

“Don’t be daft,” Jamie said.

“It will so.” Bethan hitched up her knickers. “Now it’s your turn.”

“Who said anything about
turns?”

“It’s only fair.”

We stood there between the shed and the nettles, and debated the justice of the matter. “Not both,” I insisted. “Both’s not
fair.”

“One of you then.”

So Jamie agreed. He was the kind who would agree. It was he who had suggested trailing the brush salesman, he who had discovered
the penny-in-the-slot machine with the ancient photographs of naked women, he who had found the copy of
Lady C.
He unbuttoned and dropped his trousers and underpants, and stood there exposed. His penis was small and smooth, with a domed
head like a mushroom. There were blond hairs around its base.

“Roundhead,” I said, eager to break the silence. “That’s a roundhead.” At school we divided ourselves into Roundheads and
Cavaliers. Sometimes there were games of football, or tag, or even fights between the two groups. The Cavaliers seemed to
be courageous and carefree like their historical namesakes; the Roundheads were determined and efficient with their helmeted
heads.

“I’ve not seen one like that,” Bethan said thoughtfully. “Can I touch?” Remarkably the thing had begun to stir, like an animal
roused from sleep.

“I thought touching’s rude,” I protested.

But Jamie said nothing. Everything about him was very still except the slow rise of his penis. “Okay,” he agreed finally,
and she did touch, her small, grimy fingers going around it and moving the outer skin so that the head of the penis tasted,
with its small mouth, the unfamiliar outside air.

“I’ve done this to boys till it spits sometimes,” Bethan said.

After we had left Bethan we walked home in silence, contemplating matters of sexuality. “Does your mother miss your father?”
I asked eventually.

He shook his head. “She’s got boyfriends.”

Boyfriends sounded dangerous. “My mother still loves my father,” I assured him, although I wasn’t sure. “That’s what she told
me.”

We climbed the hill at the back of the hotel. From there you could look down over the estuary and the suspension bridge and
the castle. The tide was out, and the mudflats glistened like steel. We sat on the grass and looked at the mountains. When
seen through rain-streaked clouds, the mountains seemed like storm clouds themselves; beneath blue skies, as we saw them that
day, they looked like the abode of the gods, the Celtic gods who had once ruled this place of gray chapels and gray headstones
and luminous green fields.

“What are you?” Jamie asked.

“What d’you mean?”

He picked up a stone and threw it at nothing in particular. “Roundhead or Cavalier?”

“Cavalier.”

“Show me.”

“No.”

“You saw mine.”

So I unbuttoned my trousers and showed him. It was a joke, a laugh, kid’s stuff. I didn’t stop him when he touched me. “You’re
getting a stiff,” he said. Suddenly there was a great unease in my guts, a weakness in my knees, a sensation like falling.
He laughed at my discomfiture. “You like that, don’t you?”

“Did you like it with Bethan?”

“It was all right.”

I swallowed. “Well then.”

Later we lay in the grass and contemplated the mountains in the distance. “They’re nothing,” Jamie said. “Kangchenjunga is
over five miles high. Can you imagine five miles high? Like an aeroplane.” I was silent for a moment, trying to imagine five
vertical miles, which seemed so much more than five miles horizontally. “My father told me that it’s where the gods live,”
Jamie said. “That’s what the people there believe. My mother says even he believed it, sort of. No one has ever stepped on
the top, out of respect for the gods.” After a while he added, “He’s up there now, you know.”

“Up where?” I thought of heaven, somewhere up above the clouds. Had Jamie’s father perhaps been watching us?

“On the mountain. They never found him. They never brought him down. He’s up there on Kangchenjunga somewhere. My father.
One day I’m going to climb mountains like him. One day.”

“So am I,” I said, because I was going to do what Jamie did. Whatever that was.

J
AMIE SAYS
his father was a mountaineer.”

“He was,” my mother agreed.

How do you read an adult’s face? Children have little practice in the art. The eleven-year-old that was me read her expression
as sour and disapproving. “Was he a hero, like Jamie says?”

“He was to some people. To others he was just a man. A friend, perhaps. A special friend.”

“Was he a friend of yours?”

Was she smiling? A curious look that I didn’t understand; as close to a smile as pain is to pleasure. “He was a wonderful
man. Very brave and a little foolish.”

“Is that why he died?”

“I’m not sure why anyone dies,” she said.

“And were you sad?”

“I
was. But Meg really didn’t seem to be. As soon as it happened she went off with some American fellow. And now she’s back
here calling herself Mrs. Matthewson again and wanting to move into Gilead House — which she never liked, never was happy with,
never really
lived
in.”

Gilead House. The name held strange echoes of gilded lilies, of guilt and loyalty. Jamie described the place in terms that
gave it the status of a mansion or a castle.

“You can come and see it if you like,” Jamie said.

“I’d like that.”

He shrugged. “No problem.” I liked the way he said that:
no problem.
I practiced the phrase in front of the mirror, with my thumbs hooked into my pockets and my chest puffed out.

To my surprise my mother didn’t want to come. She had too much to do. She was too busy. She turned to a pile of papers on
her desk just to prove it. “Go if you want,” she said. “Go.” So the next afternoon it was just the three of us who drove there.
The inside of the car was heavy with Mrs. Matthewson’s perfume, and the journey was long and stuffy — so stuffy that I felt
sick and they had to stop to let me get out. We were on a hillside somewhere near our destination. The air had a breathless,
exhilarating texture to it, and the smell of animals. I stood there looking at the view across the valley, over the market
town of Llanbedr and toward the mountains in the distance, while the bitter vomit sank back down. Jamie’s mother came and
put her arm around my shoulders. “Not far to go now,” she assured me as we climbed back in the car.

A mile or two later she brought the car to a halt. There was a wooden gate and a sign, the paint blistered and faded, saying
GILEAD HOUSE.
The building was set back from the road, couched in a small cwm with trees behind it. It still preserved the faint air of
a chapel: a steeply pitched roof of gray slate, a turret on one corner, which might have been a bell tower, an imposing front
entrance that might have led into the nave. There was a builder’s van parked in the drive, and men in overalls were coming
and going. The lawn was unmown, and the field at the front was full of sheep. They bleated a thin, petulant protest.