After Brock (2 page)

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 believe 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.

Luke Fleming looks at Nat: thinking ‘Even after all the photos I've seen – and his appearance on BBC
Midlands Today
– he doesn't really look like what I've been expecting. Nobody's mentioned how odd his smile is, as if somebody collected individual teeth from some dentist's and then stuck 'em all anyhow onto his gums. And then those grey eyes. Very bright too. Perhaps a touch of fever, I wouldn't be surprised. His eyes shine just as my Jared's did (though he's twelve years younger) when he was so poorly last March.'

Time to assert himself as the professional he very much is. No offence meant etc, he says to Pete Kempsey, and he thought he'd already made it clear downstairs (he knows he hasn't!), but he must speak with Nat alone. It's an axiom of journalists that, if it can possibly be avoided, an interview isn't conducted with a third party present.

Nat regrets this axiom on account of what Luke has already said to his dad. About coming from a different place. But his father – as his mother from time to time sadly observes – can prove pretty spineless in the face of opposition, and today he caves in without a show of resistance. ‘Well, if that's how you work, Luke…!' he assents, though finishes this sentence with, ‘Only don't tire the lad, please. He's had quite a time of it these last ten days.'

‘I know that, Pete,' says Luke Fleming, matily, ‘it's
because
of the awful time he's had that I've belted along over here to find out more.'

A race for my story? That's good to hear, Nat thinks, and if there's a race, mustn't there be… but he doesn't say the all-important word, even to himself.

‘That's okay,' he says, and signals to his dad that this is perfectly true; he can be left alone with this man from
The Marches
Now.

I'm not a bully, I loathe bullies, Luke Fleming thinks to himself, but I must not let any fears of being one get in the way.

Luke has, from the first, been convinced something's gravely amiss with Nat's story. And he's not the only one. He's compared notes with newspaper colleagues. But he can be surer than they, because now
he
has a trump card he knows for sure nobody else holds. And for a few seconds he feels almost sorry for the curious-looking boy sitting up in bed, ignorant of this last fact, vulnerable on so many counts, and already palpably on the defensive. Poor lad, the day might well come when both Pete and his son thank Luke Fleming for his insights and persistence, even for his very ruthlessness, but it could be a long time arriving. There'll be resentment before gratitude, and very possibly real anger.

Nat is saying, ‘Won't you take a chair, Luke?' He feels that starting the first name business, instead of letting the older guy do so, is a good ploy. It's as if he's calling the shots. ‘There's one over by my desk. See?'

‘Best to be comfortable,' agrees Luke (ominously?) ‘how
are
you feeling by the way?'

‘
By the way
', thinks Nat, ‘well, I like that!' Dr Warne certainly doesn't think his health's an incidental matter. And it was the police themselves who absolutely insisted he spend the two first nights after his rescue secure in hospital, being thoroughly gone over. Only after those was he allowed to come back to Lydcastle, and then with certain conditions.

‘That twisted ankle of yours still giving you grief?' Luke Fleming's now seated himself on Nat's right-hand side, and is grinning away at him as though there's something humorous in his question. Humour!! If Luke was struck by the greyness of Nat's eyes, Nat is struck by the vivid blueness of Luke's, which doesn't make him feel a bit comfortable. Luke Fleming's eyes are like the lights of an interrogation cell.

‘I haven't
got
a twisted ankle.' He sounds annoyed.

‘Sorry,' keeping up the grin, ‘
sprained
ankle.'

‘I haven't got
that
either!' What the hell homework into his case can this bloke have done if he's ignorant of so elementary a fact? It's been given out to the public a thousand times – by Nat himself, by his dad, by Shrewsbury Hospital, by the police. In truth any watcher of BBC
Midlands Today
could give a more accurate account of Nat's injury than this employed writer for an allegedly serious paper. Hasn't Nick Owen, that programme's chief presenter, spoken the correct words to well over a million viewers? ‘I've got a
broken
ankle. That's hugely different!'

The expression on Luke's immaculately clean-shaven face is a question mark in itself. So Nat goes on. ‘A
broken
ankle isn't at all the same thing as a
sprained
one. Ask any doctor. Ask Dr Warne here in Lydcastle. He'll be happy to put you in the picture. You have three bones at the ankle joint – tibia, fibula and talus – and I happen to have broken all fucking three of 'em.'

He hadn't intended the f-word but doesn't regret it.

‘Just remind me how you got that injury, will you, Nat?' goes Luke Fleming.

Considers himself crafty, this hack, well, he considers wrong, is Nat's immediate response. But he's gone over this part of his history so often to so many different people from so many organisations that he's getting bored with his narrative. And that doesn't do the story itself many favours. But he can't get out of answering Luke's question, whatever he feels. ‘Well I was out on the mountainside, wasn't I? and I heard this horrible little bang – sort of sudden loud pop, like someone shooting a rabbit. And then when I looked – well, the talus, the ankle bone, had broken through the skin. That's pretty serious, you know. But it only started to hurt a while after I saw it. Shock, I suppose. I still can't stand up or put any weight on my right foot. That's why they're keeping me in bed. That, and the after-effects of all the exposure.'

‘Tough!' says Luke. His eyes don't exactly seem moist with sympathy. And he's pulled out of his jacket a neat little pocket recording device. At least, Nat thinks, he has the honesty to show it. ‘Nat, I didn't ask
what
happened to your ankle, I asked you
how
it happened. So I'll put the question to you again: just how
did
you manage to
break
…'