After Brock

by Binding, Paul

  * * *

  Reading through the Paperchase notebook now, It’s clear that, already exhausted by exams, Nat had used up any energies left by writing so full an account of my life immediately after them. So he abandoned journal-writing proper in favour of largely random-seeming jottings, in deteriorating handwriting (laptops are so much easier) not always dated and probably making no sense to anyone else.

  A great many entries concern the shop, its customers, its visitors who might, or should, or in some cases should not, become customers, its calling reps, its new stock, its actual sales. He also put these on a special computer file of his own, although he had Dad’s password and inspected his files rather more often than he realised – though Nat did tell him! The names of supplier firms – T.K.C. Sales of Steeple Aston, Wind Designs of Ely, Cambridgeshire, Spirit of Air of Newport, Gwent – occur many times. But his private thoughts still went in the journal.

  ‘Dad handled the rep this morning in a laid-back but pretty lazy way, I thought. Must have struck the guy as a pushover for anything he had to flog, and he didn’t complain as strongly as we agreed he should do about those two Sky Lanterns that never arrived (‘Romantic Chinese Flying Lanterns’, which are ace to let float off at the tail-end of a barbecue party – and it’s the barbecue season right now.) Why can’t Dad see all this for himself? Why does he need me to tell him? And then sulk when I do?’

  The same querulous mood prevails in the following regularly repeated, and heavily underlined, sentences. (Handwriting becomes neat again for these):

  Kids’ kites: single line. Average price £15-£30

  Power-kites (adults and teenagers) Average price £150-£300

  Wouldn’t the obvious deduction from this be to concentrate on the latter?

  Pete Kempsey needs a really good shake up!

  On the other hand…

  ‘Dad said he was really chuffed by my hard sell today of the swept-wing sports-kite in general and the Sandpiper model in particular. So I said to Dad, “I’ll take over the kitchen tonight, and I’ll make a Quorn shepherd’s pie.” I burned the Brussels sprouts I served with it, and I apologised, but Dad said he hadn’t really noticed, and anyway what did burnt veg matter. “It’s a real treat for me you cooking dinner, and I appreciate it.”

  ‘July 18. Managed to Google a fantastically interesting programme – Sixty Minutes – from Australia (ABC) shown yesterday (July 17). Watched it four times! Its subject’s becoming a hero, and I’m rather in need of one stuck up here a lot on my own, and worrying about cash flow. What an ordeal this new hero had, but what a reward! There’s a dad round a son’s neck there too…

  ‘July 23: ‘Dad surprised me today by suddenly asking me, as I was helping him clear out the yard, “Do you think Izzie is serious about this Doug guy?” “Yeah, too serious!” I said, “and the guy bores the pants off me!” Dad put down the white sack the county has given us for garden rubbish, and said quietly, “That’s not fair, Nat, and I do wish you wouldn’t say things like that! I didn’t meet the man for very long, but he struck me as a thoroughly – as a thoroughly decent bloke.” Isn’t that what’s called damning with faint praise, I thought, but I had the wit not to say this aloud. What I did say was, “Would you mind, Dad, if you heard he and she had started living together?” ( I certainly would!) Dad said, “I haven’t the right to mind anything in that department, have I?” Which sounded unusually hopeful as far as my own wishes went, I thought, though he immediately spoiled it by saying, “And anyway I wouldn’t mind! Not that I’d say if I did. Haven’t you taken it in by now, Nat, that I do my damnedest never to pronounce on what anybody should or shouldn’t be doing?”

  ‘“Well, I suppose that has sort of struck me!” I replied.’

  * * *

  As Luke Fleming’s investigations later uncovered, Nat made two long stays in Lydcastle between June and September 2009. The first ended on August 10 when he returned to London, to his mother’s flat. Then on Thursday August 20 he got his A Level results. His journal would have you believe that on the morning of that great day he didn’t feel nervous but weirdly calm, as if, whatever the results, good or disappointing, he had moved far beyond responding to them as an individual with a future dependant on them, but had, over the summer, turned into a different kind of person, with just enough curiosity about his own past to want to know how he’d fared.

  He’d fared well, he found out, two As and a B. His place at Uni, the University of Lincoln, to study journalism, was now assured.

  Both Dad and Doug were full of congratulations. No words from the first about the iniquity of exams and the ranking of people (‘often for life!’), though it was unlikely his views had undergone any change, no words from the second about ‘soft’ subjects. Instead Doug told him that he’d heard nothing but excellent reports about the university of Nat’s choice. Mum was moved to tears, but (according to Nat’s journal) disconcerted him by saying, with eyes still moist, ‘It’s a tremendous relief for me, Nat, how you’ve done so well, and I really think some of the calming exercises we’ve done together helped you. I must be honest, and say I didn’t think you’d make those grades.’ She put a hand on top of his head – she was not a very demonstrative mother – and smoothed his straight, grey-brown hair making the feathered fringe in front tidier. ‘You’ve been so difficult to know, Nat. Do you realise that? Perhaps if Pete hadn’t left us, you’d have been a bit more forthcoming.’

  ‘August 2. Decided I should let Dr Julian Pringle know my good news. But that strange letter he sent me hasn’t exactly encouraged calling round again, even though it’s full of good wishes and suggests we have a friendly future to look forward to. So I decided to ring. Dr Pringle sounded surprised to hear from me, as if I wasn’t at all in his thoughts. But when he heard what I had to tell him, he was genuinely pleased (that was clear enough!). He really needed to hear things were going well for somebody, he said, as his wife Ilona had been extremely ill again. What was wrong with her? I asked; felt I had to. A pause. Then – “Leukaemia!” Impossible to know how best to reply, especially as I’m pretty ignorant about such things. But say something I surely should, so I managed: “That’s when white blood cells take over, isn’t it?” Stupid really telling the man something he knows only too well but far more fully. He didn’t answer directly but said that the two of them still hoped to be going to Hungary in ten days’ time, but obviously it was far from certain. But on their return… well, things might have improved a little, and of course it’d be good for us to meet up. I really don’t know why, after this, I asked my next question: “What did you mean by saying in your letter that you preferred my dad – Peter – to stay up on his Heights?” It was a mistake, saying that. There was an even longer pause than before, then, in a cold, firm, low voice: “I thought I made it clear I didn’t want to go over all that past history. Let bygones be bygones.” But I’m wondering if they are bygones either for him or for my dad.’

  Using some of the money he’d earned, Nat joined three friends of his, including Josh (who’d only managed one A in his exams, though in the ‘hard’ subject of Economics) down in a rented cottage in Cornwall, near St Ives. They swam, they climbed the cliffs, they tried surfing. Nat wrote in his cloth-bound book: ‘Hasn’t riding the waves taught me that mastery of self is the key to life? And if an idea comes to you, but seems (at times) too hard to execute, then use that mastery to ride on the crest of it, as you would on an Atlantic roller… Never forget the hero of Sixty Minutes!’

  Back to South Shropshire on Monday September 7. Jottings are far more numerous than during the London and Cornwall weeks, but, as before, they deal overwhelmingly with High Flyers matters. Still the same complaints that Pete Kempsey wasn’t pro-active or efficient enough, but the tone, after the interval away, was more accepting, mellower. Not that Nat’s mind had left its earlier preoccupations altogether. One page towards the end of those containing writing is, with hindsight, of particular importance to the Missing Berwyn Boy Case.


  ‘At last my constant snooping has been rewarded. Dad has kept no papers or letters from before his marriage, and precious few from after it. I won’t go down in history as a son whose smallest doings were of such vital interest to his proud parents that they hoarded away every memento of him they could. But I had hopes, remembering that yellowed little receipt from Gregory Pringle, of coming across something from my dad’s past secreted (or just kept, preserved) in a book, and so went through every single old one in the house. And, just as I was thinking this far worse than the needle in the old haystack I found a volume of Wilfred Owen’s poems, with a photograph, a newspaper cutting, and a letter inside, all between the two pages of the poem “The Show”. The first four lines of this had been highlighted in yellow:

  ‘My soul looked down from a vague height, with Death….’

  ‘The photo showed a youth on a summer’s day, longish dark hair parted in the middle, bare arms, bare feet, and a shirt unbuttoned all the way down and worn over trousers turned up as if to aid paddling in a stream. He was sitting on a tree stump, and looking ahead of him, but what held the attention – as it obviously did his – was the white fox terrier between his splayed legs. This dog’s pointed, bright-eyed face wore an expression of true content, as one who could envisage no happier, safer place to be than where he actually was. His back legs were on the ground, but his front ones rested and dangled over the youth’s right thigh. This youth was my dad – no doubt about that. He had his left hand on his dog’s rump while his other hand stroked his back. I’d never known the Pete Kempsey I was seeing here, and I don’t say this just because I was born so many years after the picture. But I’ve glimpsed him, I believe, every so often, especially when he thought you weren’t looking his way.

  ‘There was something written at the foot of the photo, and I could tell it was in Dad’s writing even though it was from way back. “Your former friend as he is now”. Strange words!

  ‘The cutting was from the Wrexham Leader, just a photograph headed :

  UFOs in the Berwyn Mountains – Anniversary Rally

  Time and poor quality reproduction made people and bleak mountain almost impossible to make out. Attached to this by paperclip was a sheet of notepaper with, again, Dad’s writing on it. No address or date, just “Sam, Got this picture through college where we can get copies of practically every goddam paper there is. Don’t you think it’s time we got together too? Whatcher think? And here’s what I look like, with my closest mate, Pete.” Then, after this the unnecessary words: NEVER SENT.’

  ‘And what do I think ?

  ‘I think there’s a very great deal about my dad’s past I know nothing about. ’

  Trade was excellent throughout Lydcastle in the golden weather days leading up to and including the Michaelmas Fair of 2009; High Flyers did really good business. ‘We’re both rushed off our feet!’ scribbled Nat, ‘and Dad actually has sold (at a good price) one of his two beloved Barrolettas from Guatemala. He’ll be sorry to see it leave, but he’s happy too, and feels vindicated. He truly deserves to do well and yet – everything isn’t as it should be with the shop, and he should understand this. How terrible if he went under!’ These are the very last two sentences in Nat’s Journal. As doubtless he intended them to be.

  The Fair itself was a real cornucopia of entertainments throughout Lydcastle’s cheerful old centre: Morris dancers (West Midlands style), Street dancers (New York subway style), toffee-apple vendors, three brass bands competing and an accor-dionist for the duration, jugglers, ‘The Tiger’s Last Chance’ performing in the evenings on a platform underneath the early eighteenth-century Town Hall, and young, middle aged and old dancing to their rhythm in the streets while the moon climbed higher in the sky… Nat thoroughly enjoyed every moment of it all, and many is the person who saw and heard him doing so.

  Yet the Monday morning after so much community fun, Nat disappeared. And did not re-appear until police operations found him stranded on a lonely mountain.

  Part Two

  Pete Kempsey’s Adventure

  One

  High Flyers

  ‘Our Midlands edition of High Flyers comes to you this evening from the old market-town of Leominster in the county of Hereford-and-Worcester. With me here, facing an audience of local folk, are six of the district’s brightest and best, three boys and three girls to prove it as fertile in talent as in apples, hops and good pastureland. My name is Bob Thurlow, and it will shortly be my pleasure to introduce our contestants. But before I do that, a brief reminder of how our programme works.

  ‘It’s all a matter of sixes. So one accusation you can’t make against High Flyers is that we are at sixes and sevens.’

  Laughter, as anticipated.

  ‘For our purposes the United Kingdom is divided into six regions: London-and-the-South; Wales-and-the-West-Country; The Midlands; The North; Scotland; Northern Ireland. We visit six different places in every region and, in each, six young people compete, first in general knowledge and then in a special subject of their own choice. Each region then has its own heat, in which its six strongest do battle. The winners of these regional contests then go up to London for the final, when we find the Highest Flyer of all. After which we makers of the programme have a well-earned summer break.

  ‘And now on this golden evening in the county which boasts, not far from here, a Golden Valley, let me give you our latest High Flyers, selected after the most intense auditioning process man can devise.

  ‘So – Miss Melanie Clarkson.’

  ‘Good evening!’

  ‘Mr Andrew Wheeler.’

  ‘Hullo!’

  ‘Miss Linda Rhys-Jones.’

  ‘Hullo!’

  ‘Mr Peter Kempsey!’

  ‘Hi!’

  ‘Miss Fiona Chambers.’

  ‘Oh… hi!’

  ‘And last but not least, Mr Robert Fitzwilliam.’

  ‘A very good evening to all listeners!’

  What a way of announcing yourself, thought Pete. He felt the agreeable prickling of the urge to win.

  ‘It’s a cherished custom of ours to begin with the six contestants introducing themselves. We like our listeners to know our participants; this programme celebrates comradeship as much as competition. Therefore I call on Miss Melanie Clarkson to give the opening self-presentation of the evening.’

  The assembly hall of one of Leominster’s chief junior schools, close to its Priory, was filled to capacity with people looking terribly proud that BBC Radio 4 had elected to honour their town on so popular a programme. Only Jim and Marion Kempsey appeared to be attending the show with visible reluctance; their claps, Pete could see from the platform, were mere token ones, palms barely impacting. When the ‘recruiting poster’ first appeared in public places, Jim Kempsey had said to his eldest son, ‘You’ll be just like those gullible young Britons in 1914, you know, Peter. They saw the picture of old Kitchener’s face, and the words “WANTS YOU”, and off they went, won over by flattery, to horror and death.’

  ‘But some came back heroes,’ said Pete. Neither parent denied the likelihood of his being chosen for the show, nor that he’d excel on it. They knew only too well that he was an extraordinary storehouse of facts. The explanation for this was something they repeatedly begged him never to disclose, but always Pete grinned and replied: ‘I’m making no promises. Isn’t there a saying, the truth must out?’

  All other contestants in the show would have left home to volleys of good wishes. But not Pete with his younger brothers’ words ringing in his ears: ‘Mum and Dad are worried you’re going to make an idiot of yourself this evening, Peter. They nearly stopped us coming along to see you perform. Thought you’d be a bad example for the two of us.’ (It was Julian who spoke, of course!) But as Pete walked across the smooth stretch of lawn below the sandstone Priory in the early evening, he could not only sense September’s tang of ripened apples but also an invitation to trust in his special gift, surely given to him for some great purpos
e. ‘Tonight will be the turning point of my life,’ he told himself, as he approached the red-brick, mock-ecclesiastical, late Victorian buildings of the junior school.

  ‘…It’s always good to remember,’ Linda Rhys-Jones was saying in a curiously reverberant voice (sitting too close to the mic), ‘that the poet, Robert Herrick praised our local wool, actually speaking of a “bank of moss more soft than Lemster Ore” (spelling the name LEMSTER).’ This information, nothing to what Peter Kempsey was going to give ’em shortly, so charmed the audience that they spontaneously broke into a silly little burst of clapping.

  ‘And now for Mr Peter Kempsey,’ said Bob Thurlow. ‘Sixteen years of age, and in his first term in the Lower Sixth at the boys’ grammar school, Hereford. Peter’s already told us his principal activities are day-dreaming and skiving off set work.’ The laughter here was mild and muted, and his parents, Pete noticed, did not join in; indeed his mother lowered her head. Dad, in his best crested blazer tonight, was, after all, a highly respected accountant with an office in Leominster High Street and an open ambition to become a Liberal town councillor; Mum taught home economics at the comp. But someone more sympathetic to Pete’s wit was sitting by his mother’s side: his parents’ closest friend, Oliver Merchant, founder of The Sunbeam Press, a bachelor who called the Kempseys’ house, Woodgarth, his ‘second home’, and the only man in Leominster to accord Pete the dignity he deserved.

  ‘So, over to Peter Kempsey who can tell us whether that is really an accurate self portrait.’

  An icy cold wave of fear broke over and drenched him. Irrelevantly he noted that Bob Thurlow wore a toupee. What if he said this aloud? But, to his relief, he heard himself saying: ‘It’s as accurate as any, I guess.’ He preferred the American ‘guess’ to the English ‘suppose’. ‘It’s odd, I know, that a guy who doesn’t particularly shine academically should want to take part in a brains challenge like this, and has already cleared the auditions with outstanding ease.’ He tried not to take in the malign smirk of Mr Robert Fitzwilliam. ‘But you see I have a secret, which I am going to make public for the first time ever.’