CHAPTER 17
I rode back in a state of hyper-awareness, my mind locked on memories of a miserable ginger bastard high on the Slabs.

CHAPTER 15
That was when I nearly broke, but I had a long chat with myself. Stupid bloody thing to say, really, but while my thoughts were screaming and painful, there was a little voice underneath the agony whispering words of… What? Not solace; not comfort. Just words of sense and sentiment.

Carolyn had loved me, at least as much as I still loved her, and I had absolutely no doubts on that score. She was gone, and I took what solace, what comfort I could, in the fact that it had been so quick. To be honest, there was nothing better I could find to lift me from my bed, but in the end it was all I had, and it was enough.

CHAPTER 14
I managed to steady the bike enough to get it onto its sidestand, pain ripping into my chest as I did so. Something felt broken there, and I found my vision greying out as I struggled to get off. There was a lorry stopped just to my left, another pulled slightly away to my right, angled into traffic. I found myself falling, another agonising stab from my chest as I sat down hard on the tarmac. I really didn’t want to look behind me, but it had to be done. I had to know.

CHAPTER 12
That next morning will always be special to me. I woke to bright sunlight shining around the edges of the curtains and filtering through the material, Caro still burbling away in her sleep, the room ripe with the smell of our demonstration of parental intent the night before. I felt embarrassed as I imagined what the cleaners would make of the state of our bedding.

CHAPTER 10
It was a hell of a do. While there were a lot of folkies along, the atmosphere was predominantly focussed on climbing. I was a little surprised at how many of said folkies were ready to engage in outdoor stuff, but Caro had nudged me early on with a very heavy hint about tradition, land, culture and, overall, being a folky. When the instruments came out, a couple of the waiters in the Royal Vic said something about music licences, until their duty manager appeared, said something more pointed about taste, and then, clearly deliberately, sat down for a listen.

CHAPTER 8
There were very few people from work at the reception, which Penny and Keith held in the Red Lion, in the same stables bar the folk club usually occupied. As many of the guests were fellow folk club members, it was familiar territory for them; the climbers, being climbers, simply needed to know what direction the bar was in.

The wedding itself was held in the Registry Office on George Street, and our plan was to wander back that way later in the evening to hit the India Garden on Wellington Street for a final refuelling stop. As the soon-to-be-married couple would be flying to Palma the next day, I pitied anyone sharing the plane’s cabin and their curry-related effusions.

CHAPTER 7
That marked a new period in our lives, as that uncertainty I had picked up on steadily became more evident. Caro, it turned out, was a classic case of imposter syndrome, amazingly well concealed. While she was absolutely realistic about the allure of her rear view, she was far less confident about her worth as a person. She was never completely open about her history, but I worked out that she had stumbled out of a number of relationships, and assumed that each break-up had been down to her failings. She covered it up amazingly well, but in the end, she was always running to a timetable in her affairs of the heart: get what she could before the other person got fed up with her.

CHAPTER 5
We were back down the Cow that evening, as I vetoed a trip to Bangor to avoid dumping ‘designated driver’ on someone’s shoulders. It obviously wasn’t a club night, so I had much more opportunity to speak to the locals. We were joined at our table around nine o’clock by a couple that looked to be around the same age as myself, who were introduced as Vic and Nancy Edwards, although I found out later that the spelling was not what I assumed. Keith said Foreign-Not-really Things to them, before turning to the rest of us with a smile.

“Mike, one of our older friends, his mate Kul, and his son Dal. They are the ones who brought the rest of our stuff up from That Place We Don’t Name”

Nansi (I was learning) snorted out a laugh.

“Mike, does Keith always talk in Capital Letters?”

CHAPTER 4

CHAPTER 2
I felt my world wobble for a moment, before Keith simply tugged at my sleeve.

“Come in and sit down, Mike. I’ll talk you through it. Not what it sounds like”

I was lost. How could it not… Penny? Gone? They were joined at the bloody hip, for god’s sake. He towed me into the living room, pushing me down into one of the armchairs, then disappearing into the kitchen for a few seconds before returning with a couple of bottles of Shefford Old Strong and a pair of glasses. I found myself on autopilot as I used the bottle opener that lived on my key ring, poured and sipped.

CHAPTER 60
My feet knew their own way down to the Cow, as did my family’s, so the others simply followed. I had settled into a linked-arms walk with my lover, because after Mike’s revelations I simply didn’t feel like letting her go.

My stomach was still churning. I was so, so lucky in my family, as was Alys, and once again my mind was racing ahead, seeing us all simply as one family. Sod formality: Tref’s comment had set a very deep hook into my soul.

CHAPTER 58
The paramedic met us at the centre, seeming oddly satisfied with the state of my nose.

“It’s not broken, Enfys. That’s the good news. What it looks like is that the septum, the bit of gristle between your nostrils, has been bent”

“Hurts like it’s broken!”

She laughed.

“Aye, but it has to be there to hurt! What I am going to do is place a little bit of plastic over the top… Hold still… Got it. Try not to bang it again, and see your own GP when you get home. I know Cubby’s lot keep some basic painkillers here, but try not to overdo them, or those he’s about to give you in Aviemore”

“Eh?”

“At the pub. Don’t get plastered tonight just because I didn’t plaster you right now”

CHAPTER 56
Jordan didn’t actually move in to our shared house directly, but he became a very regular visitor. Our beds were all doubles, so there was presumably enough room, although lee did try being smug about it. We were sitting down to breakfast one November morning, the hints about milk purchases and porridge consumption having finally worked their way into the usual suspect’s understanding, when he stretched theatrically and grinned at the rest of us.

CHAPTER 54
Lee was the first to spot the bruising.

“What the hell, mate? Who did that, and don’t give me any shite about walking into a cupboard door!”

The bruise was clearly fading, yellowish around the edges, but still very evident. Tref was looking down at the top of our dining table, the wood grain clearly fascinating.

“Went to the wrong pub, didn’t I?”

CHAPTER 52
It was Dad who started the healing process, pulling out a whole collection of anecdotes and references.

“People do silly things, love. They do them everywhere; it’s just that when it’s in the hills, it can get serious. That’s the thing about it: something happens, no warning, and, well. I… Before your Mam and me got together, I used to spend a lot of time in Scotland, with your uncle Mike. We were called out…”

He shook his head.

CHAPTER 50
I didn’t know what to do. Steph’n’Geoff were such a part of my life, and Steph so utterly right in herself, in her femininity, that I found it hard to imagine, to recognise, that she had ever been any other way. I could remember Alys, of course, before she was ever visible; when my mind whispered “Before there was an Alys”, it immediately gave itself the answer “There always was an Alys, just hidden”, and I wondered what Steph had shown the world before she shook herself free of it.

CHAPTER 48
We were back to the grind of our studies after that, of course, and I found it a particular variety of ‘interesting’ the way my attitude to them was changing. In climbing guides, ‘interesting’ is often a euphemism for ‘terrifying’, but this was the more commonly understood meaning.

CHAPTER 46
University life was so very different from school. It looked, on the surface, as if we had much less work to do, lessons being fewer, free time seeming to be endless, but it wasn’t at all that way. There was so much background reading to do, for starters, and then we weren’t being handed the answers for later parroting. Our lecturers actually expected us to go out and bloody RESEARCH things, the sods.

CHAPTER 44
The rest of the week found its pattern, each day book-ended by a ride with Mam, and punctuated with a shared lunch. I am sure I was just as vocal as Alys was, about the way my course was going, but so much of what she described sailed right past me. At least with my stuff, it was rooted in daily life, at least the sort of daily life lived by someone who lived in the middle of mountains sprinkled with lakes.

CHAPTER 42
We moved on the next day, and had three days of progressing from castle to castle. Vic too his snaps, Nansi dispensed nuggets of history, and we ate all sorts of interesting meals. It should have been boring and repetitive, but it was far from that, and not just because of the company I was in.

Some of the historical stuff was amusing, much of it surprising, and every now and again, Nansi came out with something that deeply shocked me. There is a world of difference between hearing of Carcassonne’s flying pig and being told of how ‘Crusaders’, full of Christian charity, had herded 200 people out of Montségur castle and burned them all alive.

CHAPTER 40
We finally arrived in what was clearly the Deep South, at least of France, and I must have muttered something along those lines as Nansi Edwards immediately corrected me. She did it nicely, she did it with a smile, but it was clearly a very polite slap down.

“Politics, Enfys, and religion. You don’t need to know the details, but this was a different country back then. Paris-based France it wasn’t; different language, different culture. Once they had an excuse to come down from the North, well, lots of castle building, lots of land and property to be redistributed. Local language made illegal. Sound familiar?”

CHAPTER 38
I sat for a while, mulling over her revelation, and in the end decided to leave it for a private moment; there was clearly so much hiding behind her words that it would have been unfair to put her on the spot in public. We ate our rice and stuff, piling up prawn shells (is that the word?), and drank far too much, as was traditional for Brits in Tenerife.

It was more than that, I realised, as I looked around the group and saw how many were staring at their plates or glasses, or simply into space, and after a while, I recognised the mood.

Guilt.