After Brock Read online

  for

  Steve and Ljuba Morris

  Seren is the book imprint of

  Poetry Wales Press Ltd.

  57 Nolton Street, Bridgend, Wales, CF31 3AE

  www.serenbooks.com

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  © Paul Binding 2012

  ISBN: 978-1-85411-650-5

  The right of Paul Binding to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.

  A CIP record for this title is available from the British Library.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted at any time or by any means electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise without the prior permission of the copyright holder.

  This book is a work of fiction. The characters and incidents portrayed are the work of the author’s imagination. Any other resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Front cover by © John Lavrin, ‘The Boy from the Mill’ – oil on canvas

  Typesetting by Elaine Sharples

  Ebook conversion by Flo Reynolds

  Printed by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon

  The publisher works with the financial assistance of The Welsh Books Council

  Part One

  Nat’s Adventure

  One

  Beginnings

  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 went, 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, that 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, sometimes scary endeavour, and there he was. At the very top.

  * * *

  This waterfall is Pistyll Rhaeadr, at 240 feet the longest single drop waterfall in England and Wales. It lies in the Berwyn Mountains, north of Welshpool, east of Bala, south of Llangollen and west of Oswestry, on the Welsh side of the Wales-England border. Twenty-four of the Berwyn peaks are more than 2,000 feet high, Cadair Berwyn itself rising to 2,700. They contain Wales’ largest stretch of moorland, many hectares of heather, cotton grass, bracken and peat bog, home to the famously elusive polecat, to foxes, squirrels, pine martens, otters and badgers. For birds, there are curlews, merlins, red kites, hen harriers, dippers, peregrine falcons and both red and black grouse; by streams you can see kingfishers.

  It is in the Berwyns that tradition sites Annwn, that Celtic Otherworld with geographically traceable entrances in this one. The ruler of Annwn is Gwyn ap Nudd, head of the Tylwyth Teg, the ‘good’ or ‘fairy’ folk, elusive as any polecat, and his is a peaceful yet merry land. In the early seventh century Gwyn ap Nudd invited Collen onto his stretch of Berwyn moor. Collen was a devout local ascetic, later commemorated in the name of the nearest town, Llangollen (St Collen). The meeting of the two – as set down in Buchedd Collen (Book of Collen 1536) – ended ambiguously. For if Collen was never bothered again by Gwyn or the Tylwyth Teg and went on to sainthood, Gwyn himself continued his sway over his happy realm.

  In September 2009, an eighteen-year-old boy disappeared into the Berwyn Mountains for more than five days. Then on the sixth day the headlines brought relief:

  Missing Berwyn Boy Alive

  Helicopter Rescue Drama

  We Didn’t Dare Hope – Dad

  But by the Tuesday of the next week, the story was changing:

  Berwyn Boy Mystery

  Was Nat Kempsey Really Lost?

  Doubts Grow Over Berwyn Story

  And again:

  Nat’s Dad’s Secret Past

  And, still more attention-grabbing:

  What is the truth of Dad’s UFO Encounter?

  Pete Kempsey was eighteen when he climbed to the top of Pistyll Rhaeadr at night, hoping to find a new beginning for himself. His son, Nat, was the same age when he vanished into the Berwyn terrain.

  * * *

  For a moment Nat’s back there, bouncy, fragrant heather for pillow and mattress, and near his head a spring bubbling out of the ground. And far above him a lark singing to start the day. Then he hears his dad clumping up the stairs two at a time, breathing heavily – he’s become so out of condition these last two years – and Nat knows exactly where he is. In his room above High Flyers, his dad’s kite shop in the little Shropshire town of Lydcastle. And in bed, under doctor’s orders. And with a hard-on. Up there waking with one would be something to celebrate in a poem or song. But this wouldn’t do for down here. Down here nature is something to disguise by rearranging the duvet. He has, he must remember, to be a paragon of virtue; that’s how the kinder papers and programmes are presenting him, and he must live up to this image. Dad has now arrived in the bedroom doorway, with his most serious face on.

  Pete Kempsey is thinking: ‘I know even less how to talk to Nat now than before he disappeared, and I wasn’t much good at it then.’ And somehow things aren’t helped by the boy looking so unlike Pete at that age: thin like a character in some cartoon, grey eyes and greyish hair that single him out from any known relative, and irregular teeth not really righted by that hospital operation. And every sentence he speaks bringing South London closer.

  ‘Nat,’ he says, ‘another reporter’s turned up. This one’s from The Marches Now. Came here last week. Before we knew where you were.’

  On perhaps the blackest of all those mornings, he nearly adds, when I was pretty much certain I’d never see you again.

  ‘His piece came out on Saturday; I read it before joining the rescue operation.’ How long ago that feels! ‘He did a fair-enough job, all things considered, even though…’ It’d be egocentric to quote that smart-arse phrase which so got to him, ‘High Flyers is one of those New Age enterprises which still flourish in rural Britain, even though the Age has largely turned its back on what it once pronounced New.’ Shameful enough to have even remembered this with so much else to think about.

  ‘Even though?’ persists Nat.

  ‘Even though he did go off at a tangent,’ says Pete, ‘after all yesterday’s hoo-ha, I was beginning to think the press would draw a line under your case today.’

  I wasn’t beginning to think any such thing, he admits silently, so why say it? It’ll only give the lad a f
alse picture of what to expect.

  ‘But this bloke downstairs,’ he continues, ‘is sure there’s more media mileage in you, and he says it’d be better for you to talk to him than to the rest of them. But then he would say that, wouldn’t he?’

  Nat thinks: But I don’t want a line drawn under my case. Has Dad really not worked that out? Maybe it’s not only physically he’s out-of-condition, what with living and working so much by himself. Aloud: ‘Bad publicity’s better than no publicity, Dad. All they print about me – about us,’ for his father hasn’t been spared, ‘does High Flyers no harm. Quite the opposite.’

  Pete Kempsey suppresses a wish to snap back at this crass observation. After an ordeal as gruelling as his you couldn’t expect the lad to be himself, whatever that might be. Pete’s all too aware that in the six years since he left London and Izzie, Nat’s mum, for the Welsh Marches, he’s failed to keep up con-scientiously with the successive stages of his son’s development. And by now… well, he’s developed! Pete doesn’t know what to make of how Nat’s turned out, let alone of this big vanishing act gaining him so much attention.

  ‘Nat, I can’t keep this guy waiting much longer. I could tell him it’s far too early for you to see him, if you like. Serve him right for barging in before I’ve opened the shop. I could even tell him that you’re just not up to talking to anybody at the moment.’

  Too early; not talking… shit, thinks Nat, what a strange life I’m living. Far stranger than life ‘up there’. He mustn’t, of course, downplay the health side of things; Dr Warne has told pretty well the whole reading, listening and watching world how Nathaniel Kempsey must rest and take a course of strong medication. In truth, Nat suspects, these later, slower starts to the morning quite suit his dad, for all his grumbing about the journo downstairs. But then, he thinks, I’ve fallen back to sleep twice since Dad brought me that mug of tea, and that’s not normal.

  ‘I’ve always said I’m available to the media, haven’t I?’ he doesn’t mind sounding pompous, ‘it won’t look good if you say I won’t see people after what they put yesterday.’

  What he also wants to say is, ‘And, you never know, this guy might actually talk money. At last!’ Then a bitter little résumé flashes in his head, like an ad on the computer screen. ‘Cash tally so far. BBC Midlands Today who have had two whole, two whole, interviews with me: zero. BBC Mid Wales, same: Shropshire Star, Oswestry and Border Counties Advertiser, likewise. Western Mail – well, they’ve gone so far as to say they’re thinking of a feature; “We’ll be coming back to you,” But they’ve made it clear they won’t be giving me a thing. And they haven’t come back either. Daily Mail – mega-huge circulation! But all it managed was two miserable paragraphs talking about “the Herne Hill boy lost in Welsh desert” when everyone knows the Desert of Wales lies between Rhayader and Tregaron. You’d think they could get people to check that sort of thing, wouldn’t you? Anyway, money from that quarter – once again, zilch!’

  Pete Kempsey scratches the nape of his neck with his right hand. ‘Nat, this man – this Luke Fleming – says he’s got questions for you others haven’t asked. He’s coming from a different place from everybody else, to use his own words.’

  At these last two sentences Nat’s hard-on subsides and activity starts up in another part of his anatomy, his heart seems to double its beat. ‘Well, let him ask,’ he hits back. ‘I’m good and ready, no matter what place he’s coming from. After all – remember that sentence in Shropshire Star? “Nat Kempsey, in his own words, is a news-freak who’s decided to turn newshound, and is to study journalism at the University of Lincoln.” And anyway, The Marches Now is only a twice-weekly regional paper, and I’m someone who’s been handling national dailies. ’

  That’s just the kind of stupid thing I could have said at his age, thinks Pete Kempsey dolefully. ‘If you call it handling to have ended up with that two-bit thing in the Mail that even got your location confused with some place else,’ he retorts.

  This Fleming guy’s rattled Dad, thinks Nat. He hasn’t got as much nerve as I have; I’m not sure he’s got much nerve at all…

  Nat has no idea of the battle I’ve been through while he vanished, his father thinks: the effort it cost to bother to wash and shave: the near-overwhelming temptation to knock myself out with a heavy concoction of whisky and Diazepam until at least some concrete information came through.

  ‘Okay,’ he says, ‘I’ll go and bring him up. But, Nat, you can stop talking any time you want. You’d be within your rights. He’s not a policeman after all.’

  ‘I’ve already been put through it by the police, and I’m still smiling, Dad.’

  ‘Give me a cop any time over a journo. I never thought the day would come when I’d say that, but now I do. I’d shout it from the rooftops, in fact.’

  Despite the bravado, his father’s undisguised unease infects Nat. The rapid heartbeats are not slowing. A health course at school had told them that a good way of dealing with these is to gulp cold water. Which gives you a slight shock, makes you gasp. Well, he has a carafe full of water on his bedside table to help him swallow Dr Warne’s tablets. So he pours himself a glass now, but his hand is trembling and, shit, he spills water onto the table, his own left arm and the duvet. The old Nat Kempsey’s hands never shook when holding or pouring any thing. It’s not, he thinks, his trials in the Berwyns that have changed him for the worse. It’s all the grilling by press hacks, intent on catching him out, on presenting him as one more British youth whose good A Levels only illustrate declining national standards, and who won’t be able to find any kind of job in the highly competitive global market.

  And of course Dad’s been well and truly grilled also. That’s why (thinks Nat) he’s let himself go appearance-wise today and yesterday; he’s exhausted, knackered. Just as well he isn’t showing this Luke Fleming bloke into his own room, bed most likely unmade, crumpled clothes all over the floor, a lingering smell of the dope he still smokes virtually every other day. Nat himself has a passion for cleanliness and order, which he now knows himself to share with most animals in the wild – though not with either of his parents or with a fair number of his friends, even Josh. But, give credit where it’s due, Dad is amazing in the way he keeps his kite shop, scrupulous and appealing, changing the principal kites round at least twice weekly, so a customer’s eye always meets interesting new potential purchases. And, in the public eye as it now is, High Flyers must be winning many a new visitor.

  Nat takes another gulp of water, and back into his mind and body come the many times last week he bent down to streams or sudden little freshets on Berwyn mountainsides, his hands cupped. He can hear the two men coming up the staircase, which is steep as a ladder, for it’s extremely old and made for earlier people and lifestyles. Nat can tell just from the upward drift of his voice and the impact of his tread on the uncarpeted wooden steps that this guy with the questions for him that haven’t been asked before is still quite young, a deal younger than his dad anyway, who once, though you’d never know it now, was a fast sprinter and played rugby.

  ‘Here’s the invalid, Luke!’ Dad says in that falsely hearty voice that he himself despises and which embarrasses his son. And he ushers in a guy of twenty-eight, no, more like thirty, reckons Nat.

  Fair, slim, bright blue eyes, not as tall as himself, at a glance the type who does daily work-outs at the gym. He wears a grey, two-button jacket, white shirt with black T-shirt beneath, blue chinos, and white Nike trainers and blue laces that match the trousers. All very different from Pete Kempsey’s sloppy shaggy sweater, sagging jeans and dirty old trainers, and hair, though still dark and reasonably profuse, as unkempt as if he’s the one who’s been sleeping on mountainsides.

  ‘Hi, Nat, pleased to meet you! Apologies for disturbing you at this godforsaken hour,’ goes this unwelcome latest arrival. ‘But then a man has to do what a man has to do.’

  ‘A man has to…’ fucking what does he have to do? Nat inwardly inquires. Men beli
eve they have to do a great many horrible, revolting, contemptible things it’d be better they didn’t.

  This is more or less his dad’s reaction too, though something makes him add to himself, ‘You never know when someone who seems like an enemy will turn out to be a friend.’

  ‘Quite a little snug you have here!’ Luke Fleming is remarking breezily.

  ‘Glad you like it!’ There’s a touch of cheek in Nat’s manner.

  The word ‘snug’ has connotations for Pete, from his youth (and not unconnected with his own Berwyn adventure), and he rather regrets having heard it. He is also discomfited by the way the journalist has spoken the compliment. It sounds hellishly like a softening-up before he attempts the hard, not to say knock-out punches. Nat seems to be taking it straight, though; in fact he’s smiling.

  And Nat is pleased; he likes this room of his far better than his other one back in Herne Hill. It’s nice too, now he’s – temporarily – an invalid who mustn’t budge from bed, that this room’s window looks out over Lydcastle Market Square, lined by houses all with shops on their ground floors, and with façades painted cheerful greens, blues, light yellow, magenta. The façade of High Flyers is duck-egg blue but, needless to say, it badly needs a fresh coat of paint. (Another thing Dad should have seen to, his land-lord having by law to pay the cost.) On Saturdays there are stalls in the Square, selling fruit, flowers, potted plants, cheeses, pies and pastries, and Nat is looking forward to seeing them. It’s only Wednesday today, but a fair number of people are about, ramblers or other visitors, peering interestedly into shop windows, even though it’s the last day of September, and the tourist season is coming to its end.

  Inside, the room contains Nat’s bed, a bookcase and a desk bearing his Dell laptop, and, pinned on the wall above that, some of his best photos: two ravens on The Stiperstones mating in mid-air; a collie confronting a hedgehog who’s rolled himself into a ball. Then on the bulgy old cream-washed wall opposite the window Dad and he, only two months back, hung two favourite kites of his from the downstairs stock: a Balinese bird kite, made of bamboo and silk, complete with beaked head, and a Rokkaku, the famous Japanese fighting kite, painted with a picture of a carp. Perhaps, Nat thinks with a sudden irrational inclination to giggle, that’s how it’ll end up, this meeting between the guy from The Marches Now and himself – with a ritual kite-fight. But even with his prized Rokkaku he might, of course, lose to this fitness freak. Besides, how could he forget? He’s not his usual energetic self, not at all, he’s under the doctor.