CHAPTER 55
In the end, it was Charlie who made the bridge that brought Tiff to us. The latest girl had done her best, holding her hand out to Gemma, but it was Charlie she clicked with. I suspected it was mostly to do with their shared experience of the man that the latter, with an increasing prickliness, started calling ‘That wonky-eyed cunt’.

Whatever the reason, they seemed to work well together, and the only time that I really saw the damage that had been done was in the simple fact that neither of them would ever leave the House. Not for any form of schooling, not to go shopping, not for a night out at the Smugglers. Just not, ever.

Kim’s offer was a godsend, because I found myself fretting, needing my own support network, my own freedom, and so Kim and Gemma, plus the other girls, in a show of solidarity and maturity that had me weeping, allowed me to hit both the Fumble, with Maisie on the pillion, and the Welsh Coast rally, where Maisie rode with me and Rachel and Emma went with Rockrose and Elf. I had missed that scene so, so much. I felt a little guilty, as so many of the young people had exams to get through, but the guilt flew rapidly away on the wings of my first down-and-dirty dance to a bloody good rock band.

High Summer in itself meant a minibus again, and once more my two champions agreed to hold the home fort, with a watching eye from Paul (plus Nita and Heidi) while the rest of us joined Pat in the North, her contacts in the Scouts saving us a whole shitload of tent issues, but delivering another load in the form of all-night giggle fests from my flock. I was up partway through the first night, explaining forcefully, but as quietly as I could, that canvas walls weren’t soundproof, and that there were other people on the site who might value a decent night’s sleep.

My own sleep suffered a little that night, as I drifted through memories of Pennine Way walkers and a shared breakfast as the sun lit the gold of the long grass to the North, and Mam and Dad slumped happily under blankets with mugs of tea, soaking in the stillness and beauty.

I had booked our pitches by phone, and while the scenery was the same, Mr Williams had retired, and it was someone else, much younger, on site. He was there by the van almost as soon as I turned the engine off and started the game of loosening my back and thighs.

“Hi, you Debbie Wells?”

“Yeah…”

“Nothing to worry about, ah? Emlyn said about you, so we saved you some pitches over by that lump of rock. Couple of your party here already”

He pointed to the little boulder I had sat on so many times, over the years, and to my delight, there was a proper gas range there, a grinning Pat just emerging from the little stone hut that held the water point, two kettles in hand, and Nell and Cathy waving from their own tents. I looked again. Oh. Separate, two-person tents.

I hugged Pat, then waved vaguely at the ground to the North of Pat’s tent and car, where there were various canvas bags on the ground.

“Not got it set up for us, then?”

“Oh, do bugger off! Part of the learning process, Debbie. They can pitch their own bloody tent! Now, how many of this lot have I not met yet?”

I couldn’t help laughing, so I turned to the vanload with my arms spread wide.

“Girls, this is my old friend Pat, who has sorted your accommodation for you. Your accommodation, to be clear, is in those bags on the grass. Guess what your first job is?”

Yes, we did all muck in, but only after I had spent some time catching up with my two students, which was something that really hit me in the guts. My girls, my successes; I could almost forget Andrea. Almost.

“Debbie…”

“Cathy. Why do I feel that you have something messy to tell me?”

“Um, well. You know we joined some clubs at Uni? Dancing and climbing?”

“Of course”

“Well, we’ve brought ropes and stuff to go climbing while we’re here”

“And?”

“Well, neither of us is really that experienced, are we? And it’s not safe, doing it by ourselves, is it?”

I could just see into Cathy’s inner tent, her sleeping bag, her… Her double bag. Nell had her own tent, so it wasn’t a double bag for them, even though I had wondered, now and again.

Oh, once more.

Nell came over to join us, her face rather pink.

“Sort of double whammy, Debbie. Went to the climbing club, sort of got followed to the folk dance club, sort of…”

She cleared her throat, sitting up straighter.

“Sort of courting. Both of us. Just so you know”

My stomach did a little flip.

“And…?”

“Leo and Scott are on the Perving Slab at the moment. We wanted a chance to warn you before you met them”

“Perving Slab?”

Nell laughed, happily.

“Remember how Kim described it? She not here, then?”

“Um, no. We have, there are a couple of new girls, been, well, they don’t feel safe outdoors at the moment”

Cathy nodded, understanding clear in her eyes. I pushed it a little further.

“This Leo and, er”

“Scott”

“Leo and Scott. I assume they are, that they know?”

Nell nodded.

“They do. Not always easy, not completely, you know, but they’re here, and they were smiling on the way up, and we get cuddles and climbing. Whatever else…”

She stopped talking, and I had a surge of memory, of holding a sobbing Kim, of Cathy’s painful question about being hated. Leave them to it, Debbie Petrie Wells. Let them make the best of things, in their own way.

Of course, I had to placate Pat, who missed Kim, so I promised I would do my best to drag her up again, and then our stay went the way they usually did. We had three days of solid rain, but the rest of the fortnight was a delight.

Leo and Scott proved to be more than decent lads, and rather than my girls forming a cheerleading-cum-ogling rank at the foot of the ‘perving slab’, they were attached to ropes and taken up a number of what must have been really easy climbs, and I say that because I was one of those pulled up on the end of a rope, and if I could do it, then it must have been phenomenally easy.

Leo turned out to be from somewhere near Milan, studying English (in Wales? The logic flew straight past me), and was a lanky, dark-haired individual with a hint of a stammer, although that may have been due to the fact that both he and Scott had looked absolutely terrified on meeting me the first time; I did wonder what the girls had told them. Scott, on the other hand, was a chubby lad, from Cannock, of all places, and if anything served to break the ice, it was my reminiscences of Hollies ‘mixed grill’ and his smiling promise to show me the equally infamous ‘Big Jim’ served by a climber’s café in Llanberis.

The hills were still there, though, despite the burst of rain, and with Pat we repeated that route I had done with Kim so many years before, as well as the circuit from Pen yr Ole Wen to Carnedd Llewelyn, and of course we visited the summit of Yr Wyddfa, but not by way of Crib Goch.

Most of us avoided that bit, but not Cathy, Nell and their boys. What on Earth had happened to Miss Beige of the classical music? I realised the answer when we made our obligatory visits to both ‘The Mole Pub’ and the one in Bethesda with the folk club, and I watched her lad settle an arm comfortably around her waist, his smile so obviously genuine, as well as being for her, that my heart nearly broke.

We ticked so many of my boxes on that trip, and it felt almost exactly like that, a tick list, up until the point I realised that while Pat’s old friend the woolly-hatted shepherd was in his usual place, a certain ginger misery wasn’t.

We were down the Bethesda pub when it sank in, and I was behind Pat at the bar. The barman was in a cheerful mood.

“Hiya, Pat! How many you brought down this time, ah?”

“Dunno, Owen. Lost count of them on Llech Ddu. You’ll probably find a couple still up there next Spring”

He laughed, and she gathered her drinks as I read out the long list of soft drinks for my brood. Owen was chuckling.

“Good to see her smile, isn’t it? Anyway, you not been up so often recently. All okay?”

“Ah, just work. So many to look after, so much in the way of exams and that”

“Aye. Running a home, aren’t you?”

“Sort of. Girls come, they go, but this place is always the same”

He chuckled, pointing at Nell as Scott settled into a rather relaxed cuddle with a clear lack of ‘interpersonal space’.

“Aye, but wasn’t that one shy when you first brought her up?”

I stood up a little, looking more closely at him.

“I didn’t realise you paid so much attention to my lot”

“Ah, good customers, aye? In both senses. Good custom, decent customers. If Pat is happy with you, then so am I. I remember how you looked after her, love, when, you know. That time of year, ah?”

“Ah indeed. She’s always been there for me, so what else could I do?”

“There’s loads wouldn’t, so take it as I mean it”

“Thanks. Could I ask a question? Might be a bit rude?”

“I’ll tell you when you ask”

“Somebody I expected to see here. Ginger hair, pony tail, plays fiddle. He not here?”

“That’ll be Steve Jones. You gave him a lift once, didn’t you?”

“Yes. Bit of a misery, to tell the truth”

“Aye. Piss head as well. No, not seen him for a while. Gets like that, up here. People come over and over again, almost their second home, and then whoosh, they vanish. Find something else to do with their lives, I suppose. Never know; he might even have got married!”

I had a rush of certainty to the brain that if anything had happened to him, it wouldn’t have been good. So close to the edge of breaking down, never a smile, and the only times I had ever seem him any distance from a glass was when we drove him back up to the camp site or rolling down to Betws on his bike.

Forget him, woman. Other things to worry about. Young ones, to be precise.

I said goodbye to three old friends and two newer ones as the rest of the girls did their best to put away their large tent before we left, Pat grinning and pointing out that it would only end up spread out over clothes horses to dry when she got home, and then I began the long drive back through England, my soul feeling so much lighter even as we left the mountains behind. The girls found some nonsense song or other to sing, which then mutated into mickey-taking of the nice kind, each member of our group, including those not with us, getting a verse for themselves of ‘Coming round the Mountain’. Pat’s involved the repeated phrase ‘Just get over this bit and we’re there’, and then a reference to flasks of tea.

An almost perfect holiday.

We parked up at the House to offload, where I found Rockrose waiting with a grin.

“Hiya, Deb! Been freeloading on tea with your girl Kim. We thought you might like a lift back from the van hire place, so get them in, grab your lid, and we’re offski. Got my dogs to feed, isn’t it?”

I left the girls to sort themselves out, already arguing about who got the baths first, gave a quick wave to Charlie and Tiff, and shot off to get rid of the van, which was far more painless as they had come to know me and value my custom.

“Rockrose?”

“Yup?”

“How long were you waiting at Ruth’s?”

“Only about three hours, no biggy”

“Three hours? But…”

“Oh, shut up, woman. Family, aren’t you? Anyway, we’ve been doing some sniffing, haven’t we?”

“Oh?”

“Yeah. Upstairs flat you might have heard of. Had a flooding accident, so it can’t be used at the moment”

“Flooding? Upstairs? Explain”

“Well, someone pulled all the radiators off the walls. Real mess, by all accounts. Lid on, sis! Dogs to feed, aye?”

I fretted about that one all the way home, but her riding was so utterly without consideration of taking any prisoners that I lost my thread several times. Never dangerous, just not open to any form of intimidation by other road users. I was reminded of how Horse would walk across a rally site; he was going from Point A to Point B, and that was how he walked. Other people moved. That was Rockrose; never dangerous, just very, very clear in her intended course down the road.

She was off almost as soon as I had stepped off the bike again, with just a little grin and the words “No problems while you were away”. I stepped into the kitchen and was met with hugs of real affection from Charlie and Tiff, who were in night clothes and a dress, respectively.

Charlie was stirring a very large pot of what smelled like one of Kim’s or Ruth’s stews (they were, after all, the same thing, in essence), while Tiff was slicing carrots and shredding cabbage. She grinned up at me as she dropped the hug and returned to her work.

“Not the same, cabbage, not like at school, is it? Not all boiled to squishy stuff, is it?”

Charlie let out a monumental sniff of disdain.

“Yeah, Debbie, you got two real cooks here now! Not dinner ladies, us, we’re chefs de cuisine or whatever!”

She couldn’t hold the pose, and collapsed into a fit of giggles, along with her co-conspirator.

“Talking rubbish, we are! All Kim’s work, this. We’re just doing the veg. She’ll be over in a bit, once Max is home, she said. Anyway, doesn’t matter. Debbie?”

I stepped across to hug them both once more, and both squeezed hard. Tiff’s voice was muffled against my breasts.

“Thanks, Debbie. It’s light, yeah? Dawn coming? Next year, us two on holiday with you? Maybe?”

New dawn, indeed. They were healing.