‘Wait!’ she called.
The boy waited until she was just behind him, then walked on. It was still fairly easy, you couldn’t call it a steep climb. In the far distance, a good bit higher, probably at the top, there was some kind of structure. The summit was completely white.
‘See that bump a bit to the right?’ the boy asked.
She looked along his outstretched arm. ‘Yes.’
‘We’re going to walk around that now. And see that ridge to the left of it that looks like it’s lower than the bump?’
‘Yes.’
‘That’s the crest we take to the summit.’
‘How far is that from here?’
‘It looks further than it is.’
‘Oh.’
‘Yr Wyddfa is the name of the mountain. Burial place.’
She looked at her feet. The path, the small stones, the short flattened grass. She wasn’t dizzy but her field of vision seemed unsteady, pivoting around the fixed point of her shoes and the end of her stick. Today, after taking two tablets, the pain was distant. She had actually had surprisingly little pain, it was more a vague but persistent sense of deterioration, a shrinking of her body, her mouth spouting words that weren’t in her head. Maybe she hadn’t had any pain because she had been on painkillers almost constantly. The boy had just said something incomprehensible, she only understood what he was talking about because she could see the cover of the Ordnance Survey map before her: Snowdon / Yr Wyddfa. She didn’t care what the name meant. As far as she was concerned the boy was already gone, he could say what he liked, he wouldn’t get much more out of her than ‘Oh’, ‘Yes’ or ‘No’. Maybe he’d fall off the mountain. She took a deep breath, the bite was gone from the air. The path, his heels, the grass. Walk. Keep walking. The path curved to the right and went through a brand-new gate and suddenly they were at the top of a cliff. An enormous void on her left, a couple of small lakes far below. Maybe I’ll fall off the mountain, she thought. Her head was itchy under the hat, the tassels swung back and forth annoyingly. She was trying with all her might to make it a day like any other and the swishing purple tassels helped, as did the clear path. The sun that cast a red and blue glow over the lakes. Red and blue. They looked minuscule from up here. Not much bigger than, say, a hotel pond. They were probably deeper. She thought of the bananas in her rucksack or were they in Bradwen’s? He had the water, she was sure of that. Maybe tomorrow would be a day like any other too, she hadn’t decided yet.
‘I’m thirsty,’ she said.
The boy stopped and took off his rucksack. He got out a bottle of water and handed it to her. She drank, water ran down her chin. Quickly she handed the bottle back. He drank too, but only after sticking a thumb in the neck and rotating it, his index finger squeezed against the thread. No, in the train just now he hadn’t been acting as if nothing had happened. ‘Onwards,’ she said.
*
Did the Evanses ever climb this mountain? They must have. Or was a mountain here like the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam for her? So close you took it for granted and never went. She imagined the boy as Farmer Evans on a sunny Sunday in his younger years and herself as his new bride, a girl with no interest at all in the cliff, the lakes or black birds, who can’t take her eyes off her husband’s back, longing for children. ‘Hey,’ she called. ‘Did Mrs Evans have children?’
‘No,’ said the boy, who was already a good ten metres ahead. He turned back, then walked on. ‘Otherwise they’d be living in your house now. Or sold it, at least.’
All at once she was exhausted and widowed, with the old-woman smell forcing its way into her nostrils. The boy was leaving her farther and farther behind. Her bones creaked, her corns were playing up, the wind tugged a lock of thin grey hair out of her bun. But I already knew that, she thought. Rhys Jones told me. Rhys Jones, his father. Why is the boy so keen to get away from me? She looked slightly to the left, following the ridge to the top. It seemed very far away. It was terribly white up there. The structure could just be an enormous pile of snow. I’ll never make it, she thought. Suddenly one of her legs was dragging.
*
Her aunt cheering her uncle on like a fanatical football supporter. She has something in her hand, an object. Her uncle working faster and faster: sawing, varnishing, hammering. Cats fleeing under the sofa. ‘Not a wall unit,’ she says. ‘Not a wall unit.’ Her aunt laughs, still cheering him on, urging him forward. Her mother’s there too. That’s how you do it! You just do things! One of the cats, the oldest, a tortoiseshell, slinks out of the house.
‘Wall unit?’
She opened her eyes. The boy was very close to her.
‘What?’
‘You said something about a wall unit.’
‘Not at all.’ Slowly she raised herself. Bright sunlight. Her shoulder touched something, a remnant of a wall. She used her arms to push herself farther up and leant on the sharp stones, the rucksack an awkward hunch between her back and the wall. They’d been climbing constantly and now she saw the depths for the first time: a model train station, an enormous lake beside the tracks, other mountains, hills, hazy sunlight — the picture on a box for a homeopathic cure. She panted. The boy squatted before her and pulled her a little closer by the shoulders. Then he wormed the rucksack off her back and got out the bunch of bananas. He gave her one and ate two himself, putting the skins in his own bag.
‘I’m going on,’ he said. ‘I’ll be back before you know it.’
‘Cat,’ she said.
‘What?’
‘Cat.’ I can, she thought, that’s what I want to say. Not cat, but can, with something else. I can walk to the top, if we don’t go too fast. Something like that.
‘Just wait here,’ he said. ‘Really. I’ll be back soon.’ He turned and walked off.
She watched him go. He strode up the slope like a mountain sheep, reaching the line where the grass gave way to snow. She turned back to the view and peeled the banana, stuffing it into her mouth and throwing the skin over her shoulder. ‘I’m fine,’ she said to a couple of concerned hikers. ‘Just enjoying the view.’ That last bit was a mistake because the man and woman turned and began to provide a commentary on all they could see. They were in her way, they were mosquitoes, annoying blowflies.
‘What a lovely knitted cap you have,’ the woman said before they finally walked on. She pulled the strip of tablets out of the front pocket of the rucksack and took one with a couple of mouthfuls of icy water. She breathed in and out deeply and rubbed her legs, then rummaged through the front pocket again for the packet of cigarettes and a box of matches. She sat with her hands on her lap, then lit a match. It kept burning, there was virtually no wind. She braced herself. The tar and nicotine that assaulted her throat were almost liquid. She had just enough time to hurl the cigarette as far away as possible before bending over to one side and vomiting up the banana. She sat up straight, breathed in and out again deeply and looked at the thin plume of smoke. She drank a few mouthfuls of the sweet-tasting water, spitting out the last one, then stood up and started to walk downhill. She didn’t look at the drop or the model train station, but at the path, her shoes, the alder branch and the purple tassels waltzing around her head.