He could see the scorched wood at the corner of the shed as he crossed the gravel – a dark scar that must tell a story, just as surely as a blocked artery, swollen meninges, a bitten finger.
He touched the burnt wood, feeling how it crumbled and flaked under his fingers, leaving them black as coal.
Behind him he heard someone coming across the gravel and assumed it was Weird Nick.
The fire had taken a good bite out of the bottom of the shed before being extinguished with Weird Nick’s mother’s very expensive water. Patrick knelt in the weed-cushioned gravel and looked through the hole it had made. In the warm spring afternoon, his eyes took a while to adjust to the dark cavern that was the inside of the shed.
There wasn’t much to see. The weeds continued from the outside to the inside, across the cracked concrete floor of the shed, as if there had never been a barrier there. Against the far wall he could see cobwebs draped like curtains.
He lay down to get a better view. Between the burnt wood and the cobwebs, Patrick could just make out a wheel of a car.
He stood up. ‘There’s a car in there.’
‘Fuck,’ said Weird Nick softly. ‘Is it her?’
‘I don’t know,’ said Patrick. His voice sounded the same, but the urgency inside him was growing with every breath he took.
He jogged to the ruined greenhouse. Among the debris were things he remembered from his childhood; things that had always been there, between the glass and the grass and the cement gone hard in its bags.
One of them was an old, rusted hatchet.
He grabbed it and ran back across the gravel, and didn’t even slow down before driving the hatchet into the wooden door.
‘Shit, Patrick!’ said Weird Nick, shielding his head from the splinters, but Patrick ignored him, using the hatchet like a hammer, and when he’d made a hole that was big enough, tearing at the planks with his bare hands. The wood was old and rotten and soon he tore off the latch itself, and one door creaked crookedly open just a few inches on a rusted hinge.
‘Patrick, wait!’
Patrick did, panting and suddenly frightened, while Weird Nick stepped gingerly forward and opened the door.
‘It’s OK, Patrick,’ he said. ‘It’s not her.’
‘What is it then?’ Patrick stepped forward to look into the shed – and stared in disbelief. ‘It’s our old car.’
It was.
Under a thick layer of dust was the old blue Volkswagen. In an instant, Patrick remembered how deep the back seat was – so deep that he’d have to kneel if he wanted to see out of the windows, and covered with a comforting velour. A back seat for sleeping, as he loved to do. He remembered how his mother had seemed so small in the plush driver’s seat, and how his father would laugh at her and pat her on the head and make her laugh too. He remembered his father opening the bonnet and showing him the plugs and the air filter and where to top up the radiator. He could do it right now; it was so fresh in his head.
But he didn’t remember the damage.
The front edge of the bonnet was crumpled, the radiator grille smashed, the VW badge popped out, leaving only a black circle in its place. And in the middle of the bonnet was another dent – a shallow pan impressed in the metal, as if someone had taken a medicine ball and dropped it there.
Patrick stared at it.
For no reason at all, he thought of his mother’s stinging hand on his backside when she’d caught him testing the lock on the shed door.
No means no, Patrick!
Was the car in here then?
Why would she hide it?
People hide things because they don’t want anyone to know about them.
His mother’s words. Telling him something as surely as the dead man had. In a slow fog, Patrick reached out and touched the distorted metal – ran his thumb along the steel creases, with their seams of rust.
‘It’s been in a crash,’ said Weird Nick.
And that was all it took – to hear the truth spoken aloud.
With a lurch of his insides that actually made him sway, Patrick saw his father’s hips crush the front edge, his legs smash the radiator grille, his head bounce off the place that looked as though it had been punched by a monster fist.
A strangled shout escaped him and he clapped his hand over his mouth in surprise.
His mother had killed his father.
But why?
Because Weird Nick’s mother was out, they took her car, even though they weren’t allowed, and even though neither of them had ever driven on the roads.
Patrick drove because Weird Nick said that it was his emergency and that his mother would therefore be more likely to forgive Patrick if anything happened to her car.
Patrick didn’t follow the logic but assumed his neighbour must be right. He was more concerned that the word ‘emergency’ had made him realize he’d left Meg’s phone on the kitchen table next to his tuna sandwich. He wished he had them both.
Driving Weird Nick’s mother’s car was nothing like Grand Theft Auto. Patrick steered and braked and pressed the clutch whenever Weird Nick said so, and Weird Nick changed gears, looked both ways at junctions, and kept an eye out for small children running into the road in the villages, and sheep thereafter.
At times they reached speeds of thirty miles an hour.
‘I hope we’re not too late,’ said Weird Nick.
Patrick remembered, ‘The kettle was still a bit warm. She can’t have been gone for long.’
They lurched to a halt beside the Fiesta, which was parked opposite the Storey Arms at the base of Penyfan. It was only then that Weird Nick realized he was still wearing slippers, and was therefore ill equipped to climb the highest peak in South Wales.
‘I’m such an idiot!’ he wailed.
Patrick didn’t answer pointless statements. Instead he just got out of the car, jogged across the road and started up the slope alone.
56
AT A SHADE under three thousand feet, Penyfan was little more than a very steep hill, really, but it still took some climbing. It was also deceptive. It started broad and shallow, with an inviting footpath passing through gentle fields, bathed in sunshine. A family might ascend, with small children; maybe Nana in a wheelchair!
But soon there was a stile, and then a mean descent into a cheating valley, before the real rise began again from below the original starting point.
By halfway up, the slope was a proper incline that required the bowing of the head, the lifting of the knees and the sending back of children and the elderly, while the drop on either side of the stony footpath grew closer and closer, until it seemed that to stray too far from the path might be a rash thing to do.
Here the winds gusted hard, cooling any sun and blowing one briefly raised leg across the other in an effort to trip the unwary walker.
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.