The motorway eventually turned to winding tree-lined roads, flanked on both sides by hills and mountains, and when we passed the Welcome to Wales sign I began to feel the nerves building.
I’d never met a boy’s family before and the idea of it made me feel sick.
Would he be as embarrassed when introducing me to them as he had with Jenny?
I knew he had a sister, Tessa, a sculptor who still lived at home. At least I would get on with her, I hoped.
I knew little of his parents, but they couldn’t be any worse than mine. I wanted them to like me, but people generally didn’t take to me easily.
We’d been driving for hours when we found ourselves on a winding road beside a huge lake and Theo surprised me by pulling into a car park.
‘Where are we going?’ I asked, stretching my aching legs and looking around.
He parked up and turned to me, the anger still simmering behind his eyes. ‘Come with me.’
I slid my feet back into my boots and climbed out of the car with the grace of an ageing wrestler.
He was at my door before I got the whole way out, his hands finding my shoulders and, before I knew what was happening, he pulled me into a hug that felt kind of urgent.
He pulled away but left his forehead resting against mine as he spoke. ‘I’m sorry about what happened back there. I didn’t mean to drop your hand, I just kinda freaked out. I know what that must have looked like to you but I don’t want her anymore, I swear. Forgive me?’
The breath caught in my throat at our proximity, at the smell of him that filled my nose, at the way his hands held my neck gently on both sides. I looked into the blur of blue that was his eyes and the air returned to me.
I thought back to when he’d had to pull me from that balcony and carry me to bed after my outburst and I made the decision that we were now even.
‘Maybe,’ I replied. ‘It’s a shame that I didn’t do something similar and lose my mind in front of someone I used to love … oh wait.’
He smiled and pulled away, opening the boot and sliding on his coat. He took out a small backpack and donned it.
‘What’s going on?’
‘You see that?’ He pointed to the left at the mountain that rose from the ground like a titan. I nodded and turned back to him. ‘That’s called Cadair Idris. It’s meant to be the seat of Idris.’
‘Elba?’
‘No, not Idris Elba. The mythological Giant Idris,’ he replied with a chuckle.
‘That still doesn’t explain why we’re here.’
He slammed the boot shut and walked over to me. ‘We’re climbing it.’
‘We are what now?’ I asked.
He reached into his pocket and pulled out the list. ‘Leave a mark. What better place to leave one than at the top of a mountain?’
‘I’m pretty sure I meant a metaphorical mark.’ I crossed my arms in protest. ‘I don’t know how to climb a mountain!’
‘Well, I do.’ He handed me a thermal coat that wasn’t mine. I wondered if this had been Jenny’s too. ‘I’ve climbed this mountain dozens of times. Come on, live a little.’
I pulled the coat on and turned to look at the mountain. ‘How high is it?’
‘Around nine hundred metres,’ he said casually, locking the car and taking my hand. ‘Come on, if we die, we die together.’
‘How comforting,’ I said as he pulled me along towards the incline.
I tightened my boots and sighed. I was not wearing the right pants for mountaineering.
Three hundred metres up and I was about ready to drop down and make wherever I fell my grave, but I was doing better than Theo who, after boasting about his mountaineering skills, was lagging pitifully far behind.
I sat down on a mound of turf and waited for him, my chest heaving with a satisfying kind of burn.
‘Just build me one of those cairns made of little stones and tell my parents where you left me,’ I said when he finally arrived.
‘I’ll be sure to do that. I’m pretty sure your mum won’t hold it against me. She likes me too much,’ he panted.
‘Yeah, and they’ll be glad to have the house to themselves.’ I lay back, my skin beaded with sweat. I dreaded to think what I looked like. I glanced over at Theo. The sweat glistened on his skin like he was a fictional sparkly vampire and there I was, frizzy-haired and red-cheeked and with a sweat-soaked bra that was making my boobs itch. He sat down beside me and opened the backpack, taking out some water and a blister pack of paracetamol.
‘Another headache?’ I asked as he popped two pills from the pack and swallowed them down.
He nodded. ‘Come on, there’s six hundred metres to go yet,’ he said, standing and setting off again.
‘You’ll be the death of me, Theodore Alwyn Morgan,’ I said as I slowly unlocked my knees and followed on.
I had never been the Bear Grylls adventurer type. My body, mind and temperament were much better suited to indoor activities, be that attempting to write or drinking a bottle of Shiraz in a darkened corner. Even the things I did do outside the comfort of my house were always done inside the treehouse, thus technically rendering them indoors.
But as I stood three hundred metres up the mountain, looking out to what I thought might be the ocean stretching out in the distance and blending seamlessly into the sky, I thought that I maybe needed to try and be a bit more Bear Grylls.
It seemed that I’d got the hang of mountaineering by late morning and I was now thoroughly enjoying it. I somehow instinctively knew where best to place my steps and which areas to avoid and I’d taken it steady to conserve my energy, but even so, Theo was still lagging quite far behind. About two hours ago I had asked him if he wanted to tap out and turn around, but he’d insisted that we carry on to the summit. I did worry what might happen if he collapsed. I’d never called an ambulance before, let alone an air ambulance, and I didn’t fancy my chances of carrying him back down. I was surprised at how much better I was at this than he was, seeing as I’d never done anything like this before and he was a muscular form of physical perfection.
I don’t know what he was trying to prove to himself, but whatever it was he was determined to prove it.
I sat down and waited for him, his figure slowly growing larger.
Life was completely different up here, completely separate from how it was down there. It was hard to believe that, miles away, life was still happening. Cars were still honking and people were still jabbering into their phones, yet here I was and it was like they didn’t exist at all.
The moon and the sun shared the sky, the sun blazing, although giving off very little in the way of heat, and the moon waiting patiently for its turn to take over and rule the sky alone.
A bird, red in colour and with a forked tail, swooped into the wind gracefully, riding the air like a leaf. It was not the fat pigeons with deformed feet that I was used to seeing; it was altogether less depressing, more beautiful.
I didn’t know Wales. I’d only been here twice when I was younger and never to this part. I’d only really seen two places in the world in great detail: where I lived and the static caravan in St Ives, and I suppose the journey between the two. I had never pondered the beauty of Cornwall; I’d stopped seeing it after those first few scarring years of living in such close confinement with my parents for two weeks every summer. My parents had gone on walks, but I had always stayed behind with a copy of The Hobbit or some such book, so that I could read about walking but not have to do any.
Theo was almost within hearing distance now. His heavy panting was just audible over the rush of the wind in my ears.
I had done rambling once before, but I hadn’t enjoyed it. It had been while I was in Brownies (a club that I had been forced to join because my mother had once been one – I had hated every millisecond) and we had been taken to some forest in the arse end of nowhere to earn our orienteering badges. I couldn’t have given less of a shit about orienteering until about three hours in when I found myself hopel
essly lost and crying and wishing I’d listened when they’d explained how to do it. Needless to say, I didn’t earn the badge.
I wasn’t in Brownies for long before I got kicked out. That’s right, I was defying authority even at the tender age of eight. What heinous crime did I commit, I hear you ask? I hit Lauren Gardner over the head with the flag during church parade because she called me a ‘Ginger Minger’, that’s what. I got a bollocking and was asked to leave, but Lauren got three stitches in her scalp and never spoke ill of me again, so I took that one as a win.
Theo arrived beside me and bent himself double, holding on to his knees for dear life. Sweat dripped from his brow into the grass beneath.
‘Are you sure you want to carry on?’ I asked, genuinely concerned by the way his breaths rasped in his throat.
‘We are climbing this mountain even if it kills me,’ he wheezed. ‘Come on, there’s something up here I want to show you.’
I don’t know how far up we were when we found the lake, but it took what little breath I did have away.
Nestled into the cresting peaks was a clear blue lake that looked otherworldly up here. Theo told me its name, Llyn Cau, but I let him do the honours of pronouncing it. I liked how his voice shifted when he said the Welsh names of things, his mouth remembering the accent like muscle memory.
We sat beside the water and ate the sandwiches that Theo had packed, the sun glinting on the water.
‘They say that if you fall asleep on this mountain, you’ll wake either a poet or a madman,’ he said, taking a segment of orange and bursting it between his teeth.
‘Why have you climbed this so many times? Wasn’t once enough?’ I said, my mouth full of bread and cheese.
‘I used to come up here with my mum. She liked hiking and I used it as training.’
‘Training for what?’ I asked.
He barely paused for breath before answering, but I saw something shift in him, subtle and almost unnoticeable. His muscles stiffened, his jaw set slightly, his pupils grew small.
‘I had hopes of becoming a professional light heavyweight boxer. I had a few junior belts and I’d just qualified for Team GB for Rio. I was on my way to becoming quite the big deal.’ He looked down at his orange, decided he didn’t feel like eating anymore and placed it back in the rustling plastic bag.
‘What happened?’ I asked, placing my sandwich down too, although I was still hungry. He stared over the water, his eyes misting with a memory that he didn’t feel like sharing. I looked down at his hand spread over the grass and placed mine on top of it.
He turned and looked at me like he’d forgotten I was there. ‘You don’t have to tell me if you don’t want to.’
‘I’ll tell you all about it, just not here.’ He picked the orange up again and pretended that everything was fine. I was beginning to worry about how good he was at doing that.
The final ascent to the summit was a climb through loose rocks and shingle that tumbled beneath our feet as we climbed. The wind whipped my hair in front of my face and rendered me occasionally blind. It was a struggle to push on through the final few metres, my legs aching, my heart pounding in my head. But when we got to the rectangular stone block that signalled the summit, I felt an overwhelming sense of achievement.
Theo held on to the stone as he panted and wiped the sweat from his forehead before it had chance to freeze in the bitter wind.
The view was like nothing I’d seen before, as if I was seeing the earth from heaven.
‘We did it,’ he said, a look of fulfilment on his face as he threw his arms up above his head and let out a whoop that ricocheted around us, echoing for an age before disappearing.
I pulled my phone from my pocket and snapped photographs of the view, just so that when I woke up the next day, I would have proof to show myself that I actually did this. ‘And you thought we would die up here,’ Theo said.
‘Let’s make it down before we celebrate too much,’ I replied.
I felt his gaze upon my face and when I turned, I saw that he was staring at me.
‘What?’ I asked, wondering if I still had half my cheese sandwich smeared over my cheek.
He took my phone from my hand, turned it to front-facing camera, leaned in and kissed me.
I barely heard the artificial click of the camera as he pulled me towards him. I barely felt the wind. I barely even remembered who I was until he pulled away and smiled down at me, pushing my phone back into my pocket and letting out another whoop!
In that moment, I think I was the happiest I’ve ever been.
Just below the summit was a crumbling building known as the summit shelter. We went inside. The roof was filled with holes and bugs that skittered above us. Theo took my hand and led me to a spot on the wall where he pointed out a stone that had been carved with angular graffiti. It read:
Theo and Megan Morgan were here 2011
Y dringo ydy popeth/The climb is everything
I ran my fingers over the letters, a layer of dust coming off onto my fingertips. Theo cleared his throat and I turned to see him holding out a Swiss Army knife.
‘Go on then, leave your mark.’ He placed the knife in my hand. ‘Just be careful, I know what you’re like and we don’t want to call out the air ambulance.’
I took the knife, carved my name on the stone beside Theo’s and took a photograph.
‘May I do the honours?’ I asked, holding out my hand. He placed the list into my palm, along with a little silver pen that he pulled from his Swiss and I crossed out the mission.
The encroaching feeling of anxiety grew like a balloon in my chest as we passed the threshold into Theo’s hometown. It had taken most of the day to travel up and down Cadair Idris and then it was an hour and a half drive to get to the town where Theo had been born.
‘How come you don’t have an accent?’ I asked, my mouth full of gummy Haribo rings. I’d always had a problem with accents, not because I didn’t like them, but because if someone had a particularly strong one, I found it almost impossible not to imitate them.
‘What do you mean I don’t have an accent?’ he asked, letting the strong sing-song Welsh accent form around his words.
I laughed.
He cleared his throat and continued in his usual voice. ‘I was born in Wales but then my dad’s business took him to England and we moved there when I was four. They kept the old house and as soon as they could move back home, they did. I stayed in England to finish school and because that’s where Jenny was. After that fell apart, I kind of bungeed between the two, doing Dad’s work in Birmingham so that they could continue to live here.’
‘Wouldn’t you rather live out here too?’ I asked.
‘Would you be here? Because if not, then no, I wouldn’t.’ He smiled to himself. He was the unbeaten champion of charm. I wished I was more immune to it.
‘Will they like me? Because, you know, people don’t generally tend to,’ I said, the worry seeping back in once the thrill of the charm had gone.
‘Hopefully, just don’t break a priceless antique or insult them and I’m sure you’ll be fine.’
See, I knew that he was joking, but still the possibility of me tripping and landing on a priceless Wedgwood urn and then offending them by telling them it was ugly anyway, was not that far-fetched.
Chapter Sixteen
My family had never been rich. Even the relatives going back hundreds of years had been either scraping by or in the poorhouse and, although we weren’t quite as near the breadline as they had been, we hadn’t moved very far up the financial ladder. I had lived in the same house since I’d been born; a run-of-the-mill semi-detached suburban with two bedrooms and a medium-sized garden. I’d always loved that house, modest and cramped as it was, but as we approached Theo’s childhood home, I saw that modest and cramped were words that had never been mentioned in the same sentence as the Morgan house, if you could even call it a house.
‘Your house has gates,’ I stated, eyebrows well and truly r
aised. ‘Are you, like, millionaires or something?’
‘Not quite, but we have enough to afford gates.’ He leaned over and popped the glove box, taking out a small black key fob. He opened the window and passed the fob over a reader before the gates opened in front of us like a very middle-class version of Jurassic Park.
‘You failed to mention that you live in a gated mansion.’
‘That’s probably because I don’t actually live here anymore and I’d have sounded like a dick if I’d mentioned it,’ he said as he slowly drove down the rhododendron-lined driveway, the few leaves that were left speckled with rain. I began to feel our mountain lunch repeat on me as we neared the end of the drive and the bushes fell away to reveal an immaculately kept lawn; it was one of those that had been mown into that fancy two-tone stripe pattern and it stretched out to a lake that lay just behind. The house itself was small for a manor house, but a manor house all the same, complete with sculpted creatures adorning the roof and a shiny old Land Rover sitting in the driveway.
Theo parked the car and turned to me abruptly.
I noticed then that a sheen of sweat clung to his brow and his usually warm complexion had turned slightly pallid. ‘So, a quick crash course in how this is gonna work. My dad, he will insist you call him Rhys, is going to mention Great-Uncle Alwyn almost immediately after meeting you. He’s then going to mention him a few more dozen times before we leave, so just a heads up on that. My sister, Tessa, tends to be a bit absentminded and will probably act like you are the Antichrist until you prove her wrong.’
‘What about your mum?’
‘Oh, don’t bring her up.’
‘Why?’
‘Because she’s dead.’
I recoiled.
Was I being an idiot or had he never mentioned this before?
I scanned back through all the conversations we’d ever had and tried to find the moment when he’d told me that his mother was dead, but he hadn’t.
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