Rubbernecker (34 page)

Halfway up there was a monument to a five-year-old boy who had died of exposure on the spot, having wandered away from a local farm and tragically walked up, instead of down.

After that it got steeper.

And narrower.

Until the footpath itself had to narrow to stay atop the new moon of a ridge that fell away steeply on the left-hand side, down
carved
swathes of dark green, as if giants had slithered down the face, digging their fingernails in all the way down.

It
felt
like a mountain now.

Patrick had been up Penyfan on several occasions, but never in T-shirt and trainers.

The setting sun was bright, yet up here it was a cruel mirage observed through the iced window of an igloo. Its warmth was dashed away by the wind that roared in his ears and pummelled his chest, then his back, then his sides – each time waiting until he had adjusted his weight into it, before dropping suddenly to make him lurch without its support, and running round behind him to try to push him over while he was still catching his balance.

As soon as he reached the crescent with the steep drop, Patrick walked with his head up, his watering eyes slitted into the wind, to look for his mother.

If she wanted to kill herself, it would be from this sheer ridge. Now and then he walked carefully close to the edge, or dropped to his hands and knees and crawled there, and looked over the side.

He couldn’t see a body, but it didn’t mean it wasn’t there.

The sun lost its brightness and turned orange as it sank towards the horizon. What little warmth it had lent to the wind was reduced still further, and Patrick’s teeth started to chatter.

He would have to turn back. It wasn’t logical to go on. It wasn’t safe. Even now he’d be cutting it fine if he wanted to get back down before dark. Penyfan by day was one thing; by night it was quite another. Even colder, even steeper – and the footpath seemed to shift just that little bit closer to the drop …

But he kept going, kept going.

‘Mum!’ he shouted twice, then stopped, because it was disconcerting how quickly the sound was torn from his lips and tossed aside by the wind.

He looked behind him and stopped while he watched the red
sun
squeeze itself down behind the Black Mountain. It disappeared, sucking the last of the thin warmth from the air, and left a leaden warning in Patrick’s belly. Night was coming. He had to go back. Not to was stupid – possibly fatally so.

Instead he went on.

In the dusk the curved drop had turned black. No longer grass-covered rock, but something dark and subterranean rising up through the Beacons. Something unnatural.

‘Mum!’ he shouted again, although he didn’t know whether it was for her, or for himself.

He found her close to the summit, in almost complete darkness. Another ten minutes and he could have walked right past her. She was sitting hunched at the edge of the drop, her legs dangling off it like a child on a swing, her head bowed over her lap, her arms crossed, her hair and her thin cardigan whipped around her by the wind like foam on a stormy sea.

She didn’t move.

‘Mum?’

She turned her head and looked at him. All he could see was the pale smudge of her face.

‘Patrick?’

He went towards her and she shrank away from him.

‘Don’t touch me!’ she screamed. ‘Don’t touch me!’

He stopped a few feet away. ‘I wasn’t going to.’

‘Of course you weren’t,’ she said.

He was close enough to hear her now, even though the wind did its best to rip up her words and scatter them across the hills like confetti.

‘We have to go down,’ he told her.

‘Go then,’ she said.

He was momentarily confused.

‘
We
have to go down,’ he repeated more clearly.

‘I’m staying.’

‘You’ll die if you stay here.’

‘So what? You read my letter.’

‘Yes,’ he said.

‘I didn’t have the guts to jump,’ she said with a nod at the drop below her sandals. ‘So I’ll just stay here until it’s too late to get back.’

Patrick didn’t know what else he could say, so he walked the last couple of yards to the edge of the ridge and sat down close to her. Lowering his feet off the side made him feel giddy, even though he could barely see the dark hole that might swallow him if the wind caught him off-balance.

He found she was right – that the only real way to sit here was to clasp his own forearms across his ribs and hunch down to protect his head from the worst of it.

Darkness fell fast and everything melted into blackness, and sitting at the edge of a three-thousand-foot drop became much more like sitting on the pier at Penarth, dangling his legs and watching the little yachts scud by on the white-tops.

Apart from the cold.

The cold was like falling into iced water. The cold would kill them both – or render them so stupid that they would tumble off the pier and into the black ocean below.

He wondered how long Weird Nick would wait for him, before panicking and taking his mother’s car home. He didn’t blame him, not even for the slippers.

‘I found the car,’ he told his mother through chattering teeth, and she nodded very slowly.

‘Then why did you come after me?’

He thought about that. Why
had
he?

He worked it out while he spoke. ‘Because I want to know the truth. And being dead makes that difficult.’

She said nothing and looked down at her feet, pale against the void.

‘Why did you kill him?’ he asked.

‘I didn’t mean to.’

‘But you hit him with the
car
.’

She nodded slowly again and for a long time said nothing.

‘I didn’t really mean
any
of it to happen. I just got in the car. I know I shouldn’t have – I’d had a drink. I was going to come and pick you up anyway … but then … but then I saw you crossing the road …’

She looked up at the darkening sky and wiped her nose on her sleeve.

‘It happened so fast. You stepped backwards, and he stepped forwards …’

She shrugged and shook her head.

Patrick remembered the moment and thought she must be remembering it too – but from a different angle. He tried to imagine how they had looked, crossing the road outside the bookies: him pulling away, stepping back.

His father turning towards him, into the path of the car.

Where
he
should have been.

‘You wanted to hit
me
.’

She said nothing. She stared out across the sinuous hills that stretched all the way to the dark northern horizon.

He took her silence as confirmation, and nodded.

‘That makes more sense,’ he said.

She looked at him, the wind thrashing her hair around her face. ‘Does it?’

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I understand.’

‘You understand why I wanted to
kill
you?’

‘Yes.’

He did. And he also understood that the accident had been just that – the unlucky culmination of a million tiny moments that had fallen into place – or out of it – on that bright spring afternoon. He understood that sometimes things happened
that
nobody could prepare for; that what was done was done and that there was no going back. Like Weird Nick’s slippers.

His mother looked away from him. Right away.

‘Well, now you know the truth,’ she said roughly. ‘Now you can go.’

‘OK,’ he said. He shuffled himself backwards and got up. ‘Come, then.’

‘I’m
staying
! For God’s sake, Patrick! Just
go
before we
both
freeze to death.’

Death.

Patrick thought suddenly of his leap over the car-park wall and into the bitter night air. Of how his heart had burst with a sudden hunger for life, even while his head knew it was almost certainly over. He had come close – he knew that. He could still feel its breath on the back of his neck.

It made him shiver with the pleasure of not being dead.

That was a good feeling. Good enough to share. He thought of the goldfish in the tank, and flexed his fingers.

‘It makes no sense
not
to come,’ he said carefully. ‘I know everything now. Things will be better.’

‘No, they won’t,’ said Sarah. ‘And how can I live with what I’ve done? To your father, and to you?’

‘But Dad’s dead,’ he said. ‘And I don’t care.’

Sarah turned and stared at him in surprise, and then she laughed. She actually
laughed
.

‘What?’ said Patrick. ‘What’s funny?’

But she couldn’t stop, even though they were on a wind-whipped ridge where they would both probably die quite soon.

‘You don’t care?’ she said, wiping her eyes.

He shrugged. ‘Not enough to die for.’

Sarah looked up at him, then back down into the void. As she did, one of her sandals tipped off her foot and was quickly gulped down by the hungry dark.

‘Shit!’ she said. ‘My shoe.’

She started to cry.

She couldn’t stop.

‘My shoe,’ she sobbed. ‘My shoe.’

Patrick watched her and thought of his father and of Persian Punch and of that feeling of
connection
.

‘I’m so sorry,’ she wept. ‘I’m so sorry.’

He had heard it a million times, but this time he believed it.

‘OK,’ he said. ‘Take my hand.’

His mother looked up in surprise.

She glanced back into the darkness one more time, then wearily pushed her hair away from her face, and put her hand in his.

They staggered and fell, and sometimes they crawled down Penyfan. Three times they lost the path, and held on to each other’s clothes while they tested the grass with tentative hands and feet until they felt the safety of stones again and went on their way. Twice Sarah begged Patrick to leave her, and he had to drag her over the sharp flint until she was hurt enough to get up and go on, every step making her weep with pain and cold and exhaustion.

Halfway down, Patrick saw lights coming up to meet them. It was a mountain-rescue team, armed with blankets, soup and heat pads for their armpits.

They put Sarah on a stretcher and Patrick walked beside it on legs he could barely feel.

In the deep valley they met Weird Nick, who had walked as far as his slippers had lasted to come to meet them.

He hadn’t taken his mother’s car home; he had called the police instead.

‘Thank you,’ said Patrick.

57

TWO DAYS AFTER
they got home from the hospital – while Sarah was still in bed – Patrick burned down the shed.

It took a little while to get going, but once it took hold it was unstoppable.

Weird Nick was woken by the sound of crackling, spitting flames on wood and rushed outside for the hosepipe, only to find that someone had stolen it.

Instead he went next door and stood beside Patrick while the shed consumed the car and the car consumed itself, helped by whatever fumes were left in its tank.

Sarah emerged in her nightdress and wellingtons and stood on the step with Ollie winding his way around her rubber legs.

‘How did
that
happen?’ she said.

‘It’s not difficult,’ said Patrick. ‘I’ll show you if you want.’

She raised her eyebrows at him and just for a second he met her gaze, before looking away with a little smile.

‘Hey,’ said Weird Nick, pointing towards the old greenhouse. ‘What’s our hosepipe doing over
there
?’

‘You’re on a meter,’ said Patrick.

Patrick got a job washing up in the Rorke’s Drift. He loved feeding the dirty glasses and dishes into one end of the big dishwasher and
retrieving
them at the other end, steaming with cleanliness and too hot to touch. He instituted a system that meant they never ran out of teaspoons, which had been a long-standing headache, and he worked so hard and fast that he quickly became a favourite with the staff, who got fewer complaints and gave quicker service, and who voted to share their tips with him – an exercise unheard of in the pub’s history. At the end of the first week the landlord told him he was putting his money up.

Patrick would have done it for nothing. He was allowed to have Coke in an hourglass bottle, and once a shift he got a free meal – the chef would cook him anything he wanted from the menu.
Anything
. Often Patrick chose a toasted tuna sandwich, because he’d come home from the hospital still wanting his half-sandwich, only to find the cat had licked off all the tuna and left only the soggy toast behind.