The Fall (7 page)

“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.