by Simon Mawer
“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.
“Bloody sheep,” Jamie’s mother said. “However will we live here?”
But we two boys looked out across the valley, beyond the woods on the far side, over the nearer hills to where the mountains stood darkly against the horizon. It seemed a splendid place to be.
The Matthewsons moved out of the hotel a week later. They loaded their suitcases into the trunk of their car, and then they were gone, with a promise to have me to stay, with a promise to keep in touch, with a distant smile from Mrs. Matthewson and an approximate wave from Jamie out of the rear window of the diminishing car; and quite suddenly and unexpectedly, I felt alone.
“You’ll soon be at the new school,” my mother told me. “You’ll soon be making lots of new friends.” But friends were a random and unpredictable entity. Jamie was a friend and a mentor and a stepping-stone into the adult world: yet Jamie had vanished.
When was the train journey? How does it fit into those distant, fragmentary days? A single-track line ran up the valley, from the estuary at one end up into the hills and on to one of the slate towns. It was the kind of line that would soon be threatened with closure, would soon have a local pressure group to preserve it from cold economic winds. At passing places where the track was double, one train would stop and wait for the other, and there would be the ceremonial handing over of a kind of engraved mace, a key, a scepter that allowed the one train to go forward onto the single track newly liberated by the other. This method was, so local lore had it, fail-safe: as long as there was only one key and as long as the driver obeyed the immemorial rule that, bereft of the key, he should not trespass on the section of the track governed by that key, there was no chance of collision. The ritual seemed occult and faintly mystical, quintessentially Welsh, hedged about with the trappings of monarchy. The baton might have been Arthur’s magical sword, Excalibur.
I traveled in a compartment in which I was the only occupant, in a carriage in which I appeared to be the only traveler. There was no corridor. I sat there feeling grand and important, and looking, I suppose, small: still dressed in shorts and dull and functional gym shoes, and wearing a close, clumsy haircut that owed much to the army. The train trundled along the valley floor, past a town that had been destroyed in a landslide (you could see the boulders, fenced off as a memorial alongside the new, resurrected settlement), through another town where there was a woolen mill and a quarry, as far as the station of Llanbedr, Peterschurch — where Jamie was waiting. Memory gives all this, but not the preparation — no telephone call to make the arrangement, no discussion with Mother, nothing that surrounds the event or gives it context — just this journey on the train through the Welsh countryside and Jamie waiting on the platform at the Llanbedr station, dressed too in the uniform of the boarding-school child of the period. He still wore shorts, I remember.
I opened the door of my compartment and he climbed in, and we were together again. His mother waved from the platform, a vague blond figure shifting away from memory just as she shifted away from our view as the train moved off.
“How’s the house?” I asked, thinking that you must ask questions of that kind, the sort of questions that adults ask: How’s the weather? How’s the house? How’s the job?
“It’s okay. There’s some kind of old room called the games room and then there’s the stable block with rooms upstairs, but the floors are weak and I’m not meant to go up there in case they collapse…”
“But you do, of course?”
“Of course I do.”
The train trundled on — woods, cliffs, the glimpse of a mountain torrent. Green and gray were the dominant colors. It always rained, but not today. I remember waterfalls of sunlight among the trees and strange names in that strange, wild language that neither of us knew: Pont-y-pant, Dolwyddelan, Pentrebont. Names that hovered on the edge of absurdity, that someone might have made up in a comedy film. “Pont-y-pant,” Jamie said as we pulled out of that station. He smiled. There was a reserved, adult quality to his smile. I looked out of the grimy window as the train passed beneath the bare slopes of a mountain, past sterile farms where sheep picked over the land like soldiers picking over a battlefield after the guns had fallen silent, past the ruins of a castle, gray beneath the open sky. Then the train vanished into a tunnel and careered on in the dark, while our twin reflections looked back at us from the black window, distant images speeding through the bowels of the earth to vanish abruptly as the train emerged into the open light and the small and squalid slate town. There were signal gantries and a deserted platform and a dirty station building. We climbed down from our compartment and watched the guard blow his whistle and wave his green flag. The train drew out and left us alone.
Why were we there? Blaenau was the name of the town. Bline-eye, that’s how it was pronounced. It sounds like a physical condition, something you might correct with pebble-lens spectacles or perhaps delicate surgery. The myopia of memory. We were there because we had taken the train and it was the end of the line.
“Let’s go,” said Jamie. He spoke with his faint American intonation, as though we were cowboys or something, as though there were anywhere actually to go. But the town was no more than a ragged line of buildings along the contours of the hillside, half deserted, silent. Slate was the whole world, slate the landscape, slate the sky, slate the rows of terraced houses, slate the road. But the slate mines had been closed down now that there was no demand, now that they no longer roofed buildings like that. What did they use instead? Tar paper? Tiles? Not Welsh slate, anyway. The mines had closed and the young men were missing, and Blaenau might have been a town in wartime, populated only by the women and the children and the old.
We wandered the empty streets, went into a sweetshop and bought tubes of sherbet with a licorice straw, went into a newsstand and bought a magazine called Weekend that showed girls in bathing suits. At the edge of the town
we pushed open the rusted gate in a high fence and found ourselves one step beyond PERYGL, CADWCH ALLAN — DANGER, KEEP OUT.
A quarry. Without saying anything, without agreeing or disagreeing, we walked up the road through a narrow, black valley whose sides were slopes of shattered slate. “What if someone sees us?” I asked as we advanced.
“What if?” Jamie was careless, brave, capable of dealing with the adult world. I marched along beside him — behind him, just half a pace behind him. The road opened out into a great arena carved out of the hillside, with steep walls and a level floor. The floor was littered with shards of slate, like pieces of shrapnel from a long-finished battle. Our feet crunched the fragments. Rusting machinery — a conveyor belt, a hopper, some kind of chute — drew large alphabet letters over us: an N, an A, a Y; semaphore from a dead industrial age. The quarry walls were steel gray, as gray and steep and sheer as the side of any battleship, stepped and polished deliberately into edges and planes. How high were they? Two hundred feet, three hundred? I had no means of judging. Above you could see traces of what had been before man had come here with dynamite and pickax: the curve of a rising hill, a slope of bracken, the ghost of a hillside. But all this had been cut away, as though torn by giant claws, as though some ancient dragon, the Draig Goch, the red dragon of Wales, had woken up and clawed away a whole mountainside.
“Cor,” Jamie whispered.
The wind buffeted us. PERYGL MARWOLAETH, DANGER OF DEATH, it said. We crunched nearer, the walls drawing us under their shadow until we stood directly beneath them, looking up the clear vertical sweep. Hundreds of feet. The rock glistened; not wet but whetted: sharpened, honed, dangerous.
“Bet you couldn’t,” I said thoughtfully. I knew exactly what I was saying.
Jamie was sucking the sherbet. He looked up, squinting against the light. He could see things, ripples in the rock, a slanting fracture line, a ledge from which a tuft of grass grew. He could see things. “Bet I could.”
“How much?”
He finished the sherbet and wiped powder from his lips. “My X-15 to your FD2.” These were plastic model aircraft: precious.
“Done.” We shook sticky hands on the wager. Then he reached up, found some kind of flake, and pulled himself up until his chin was at the level of his hand. For a while his feet pedaled on the slate, walking up the rock at exactly the same speed as they were sliding down. He reached overhead again, and his feet skipped up and found a foothold and he stood upright. I couldn’t see what he was standing on. A mere wrinkle. Another reach and a series of darting moves up left, his fingers in a crack, his black-soled gym shoes slithering on the boilerplate rock to find friction, the space beneath his feet now more than a mere jump down if he couldn’t make it.
Suddenly nervous, I edged away from the wall to see better. “Jamie, be careful,” I called.
He had reached the mustache of grass. His hands were on it. He made another move, pulling down, pedaling his feet upward until his weight was over his hands and he was leaning down on them straight-armed. Then he brought his right foot up to just beside his right hand and stepped straight up onto the ledge. What he would later know as a mantelshelf, executed (the word execute, with its sensation of sharp cutting, seems exactly right) with speed and grace.
He glanced over his shoulder down to where I stood directly below. “Come on then.”
“I can’t.”
“I can.”
“What you going to do now?”
“You come up.”
“I just said I can’t.”
“I won the bet.”
“Yes, but you’re up there now.”
“And you owe me your Fairey Delta 2.”
“But you’ve got to get down.” I walked farther backward to get the whole thing in perspective, to see Jamie standing in the middle of the wall, on a narrow ledge that wandered away from him on either side and vanished into the smooth slate. How high? How high was a house? Sixty feet? He was as high as a house. Not as high as Kangchenjunga, but high enough to make a dent in the ground if he fell. Not this ground, though. I kicked my toe speculatively into the brittle litter of slate and felt a tiny flutter of unease somewhere around the level of my diaphragm. I knew that was my diaphragm. I’d seen it in the plastic model of the visible man that I’d got for my last birthday. I knew a lot about the body and the innards and all that. If Jamie fell, then his innards would be spread all over.
“I’ll go on up then,” he called.
“What if you fall?”
“I won’t.”
“I’ll get someone.”
“Don’t be a silly bugger.”
That was the moment when the man appeared. I suppose he’d come from one of the buildings. Maybe he’d been having a nap, I don’t know. He wore some kind of uniform. At least he wore dark-blue overalls that looked as though they might be a uniform, and he was striding toward us across the quarry floor with the importance of someone who sees his whole world about to come crashing down with the fall of one stupid unknown youth. “You come down from there, you little bugger!” he shouted. He had a narrow face and a mustache and an adult frown. Seeing a uniform brought mixed emotions, an uneasy mixture of fear and hope. “What the devil you boys doin’, goin’ where you’ve no right to be goin’? Eh? Can’t you read the signs? You come down here this instant!”
I could see the problem with that. If Jamie were to come down this instant, he would be dead. I looked up and wondered what he would do.
“This instant!” the man yelled.
And then, high up on the wall, the figure moved. A couple of shuffled steps along the ledge and upward again — two, three, four moves, like an animal, not a human, a monkey perhaps, or a cat, darting quietly up the wall, pausing to look, then climbing up and traversing leftward toward a sharp corner.
“You come down here at once!” the man shouted, but he fell silent as the true import of what he saw came through to him, this boy moving up across the face of slate as though he was attached to it, as though it was his element. For a second Jamie looked down. You could see his face like a white piece of rag against the gray of the quarry wall; then he slipped around the corner and out of sight.
The guard turned on me. His face was red and shiny, sweat standing out in beads across his forehead. “You come along with me, young man,” he said, and reached out to grab me.
I ducked away and then apologized for it: “I’m sorry, sir.”
“Don’t you sir me!” he shouted. He made another lunge and I ran. I had never run so fast in my life, not when I played rugby at school, not when I ran the hundred yards on sports day. With the guard sweating along behind me, I ran along the quarry wall and skidded around the bottom of the same corner around which Jamie, sixty, seventy feet up, had vanished. Slate clattered under my feet like fragments of brittle pottery. Around the corner, ahead of me now, there was a slope of rubble leaning against the back wall of the quarry, a tip where fragments of the rock had been cast down from the upper levels. Running up the slope was a beaten pathway. I went upward, slipping and slithering, the fragments rattling beneath my feet. The slope reached a gangway that split the face in two, where the shot holes were bored, where the slabs of steel-gray slate had been blown out of the belly of the earth, where Jamie waited high up, beckoning. “Come on, Rob,” he yelled. “Come on. We can get out up here!”
The guard scrambled up the slope after me. I slid on the slate debris, three steps upward, two steps back, as in a nightmare — the thing you dared not look at but was there at your heels, the running that got you nowhere.
“Come on, Rob.”
“Stop, you little bugger!”
Perhaps because he had larger feet, perhaps because he was able to compact the slate fragments better beneath his weight, the guard was gaining on me. I slipped and fell onto my hands. Before I could get up I felt the grab of his hand on my shoulder. He pulled me to my feet and turned me around so that I was looking straight up at him, at the angles of his f
ace and the half-opened mouth and the glaring eyes. “You little bugger,” he said. He was breathing hard, and his breath had the smell of gas, the gas that came from the stove and the gas fires in the bedrooms at home.
“Rob!” Jamie called.
The man looked upward, over my shoulder. “I got ’im,” he called up. “You’d best come down too.”
“Stay there, Jamie,” I yelled. I yelled it at no one, at the blue overalls of the man who held me. “Stay there!”
But Jamie was clambering down the narrow gangway he had found, down over some steep steps that had once been used by quarrymen to reach the upper tiers. I twisted to see. He was coming down and his face was set, and he was watching me and the guard there on the slope below him. “You let him go,” he called. “He’s not done anything. You let him go.” I thought of the adventures of the times, of the Boy’s Own Paper and brave kids who did things right, fought for their friends, didn’t abandon them in times of distress. I loved him. I recall the emotion exactly. Love.
There was a cascade of slate, and Jamie joined us, standing there defiantly as the guard grabbed him too. “You come along with me, young fellows,” the man said. I thought that maybe he wasn’t so bad after all. Fellows seemed a term of reconciliation. But still he held us as we slithered and stumbled down the slope of slate and onto the brittle floor of the quarry.
“What are you going to do?” Jamie asked.
“We’ll see about that.”
“I want to ring my mother.”
“We’ll see about that too.”
He led us toward a shed that was sheltered in the shadows of the rusting machinery. It had a sign on the door that talked of the mining company and the need to keep out. And the man came up against his problem. “Open it,” he said, holding us.
“You’re hurting me.”
“Open it.”
Jamie and I glanced at each other. There was a smile of complicity.
“Open it.”
