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.