CHAPTER 62
We had the next week before the new term started, and as the other four had cleared off back to the shared house that meant a week shared with a friend I hadn’t seen in what felt like a lifetime. Mike had always been there, and after Mam’s rather fuller explanation of the role he had played in my family’s move, I realised that it was indeed that, my own lifetime. That week was filled with familiarity, as Mike revisited places we both knew so, so well, and I got to watch Ish as he found new joys in wild places. He really seemed to click with Alys, and to no surprise on my part, it was all about birds.

I got lost very quickly when he started on about honeyeaters and fairy wrens, but he did have time for the rest of us, especially when we dropped the other two couples back at the shared house and it was just four or five of us left to play on the easier rock in the Valley or drive out as a foursome to show the lad some castle or other more conventional tourist attraction. We were sitting in a café in Caernarfon one lunchtime, the local castle ticked, Biwmaris already done with Harlech next on the list, and Alys was probing Mike about the rest of his plans.

“Well, no surprises, love, but I don’t have plans to spend a lot of time in one particular town”

I had to laugh at that.

“Where god would put the tube if he was giving the Earth an enema?”

Ish spilled some of his tea as his father chuckled.

“Keith and Pen told you about that one, then? Nope. Be a flying visit only. I have someone to visit…”

His voice trailed off, and then he turned to his son.

“Got a bit of history there, Ish. Bit of… before your Mum, that is. Do you mind?”

“Ah. I remember Mum, well; it’s your first wife, isn’t it? Carolyn?”

“Aye, son. You okay with that?”

Ish reached out to take his Dad’s hand.

“Been thinking about it for a while, Dad. Trying to get it straight in my head, our relationship, me and her. I mean, we don’t have one, really, do we, but…”

He paused for a few seconds, then gave a hint of a smile.

“Dad, I’ve got you now. Mum had you, till, well, and part of you… I’m not doing well with words. Never do”

Alys took his other hand.

“I think you’re doing wonderfully, Ish. Go on, please”

He took a couple of deep breaths, a touch of Kitzy in him as he studied his cup, before he started speaking again.

“Been watching you with your family, Dad, and this lot, that’s what they are. That’s how I see them, now. And what you are, what I know, that’s these people. They helped make you. I think it’s the same with Carolyn. Without her, Mum would have met someone else. Er, I don’t mean another man, I just mean you’d have been someone else. I think… I think step-mum, second Mum, something like that. What I am, it’s come from you, and what you are, she shaped. So, sort of, she’s related. That work for you?”

Dad and lad spent a little while in the ‘accessible’ toilet to clean their faces, and then we walked back out to the seafront car park, as a much quieter Mike described his plans.

“Down the A5 and M1 to That Place, and then straight off to Sheffield by way of Suffolk”

Alys muttered something rude, and Mike grinned, almost back to his normal self.

“Did a couple of days in That London to get over the flight and tick the obligatory tourist boxes, but this is as much a trip for Ish as it is for me. He wants to see Minsmere and the Lost City of Dunwich. Wants to check for non-Euclidean angles”

Alys squeezed my hand.

“I’ll explain later, love”

Mike hadn’t finished, of course.

“Assuming no tentacles, stay with some other old friends in Sheffield and show the lad the Dark Peak and a couple of the caves, then York, Durham, Newcastle, Edinburgh, but we dump the car in Sheffield. Train from there to York and the rest, from Edinburgh to Fort Bill and then out to Mallaig. Wrong time of year to drive around the Highlands; you can end up with a bent nose”

Definitely coming back, that old Mike.

We ticked off Harlech, swing back via Cricieth for another, and it was almost like being back with Alys’ father, as Mike explained that, for some odd reason, Australia had a paucity of castles, and Ish needed some culture beyond his silly books. That reminded me of the earlier odd comment, and I nudged my woman for an explanation.

“Non-Euclidean whatsits?”

“Oh! Man called H.P. Lovecraft. Sort of a horror story writer, sort of an SF author”

Mike called back to us, “Sort of absolute racist bastard!”, and Alys nodded.

“Yeah, he was. One of his best stories, ‘Rats in the Walls’, name of the narrator’s cat, oh dear. Anyway, he had this sort of joined-up background to his stories, Cthulhu Mythos it’s called--- no, don’t even try to say it, love! Anyway, there are things outside this reality, and they can get in if the geometry is right, if walls meet at odd angles, that sort of thing. And lots of well, the things that come through, they have tentacles. Some of his stuff, he writes, wrote, about places where the physical laws are different. That’s why I think Ish wants to go to Dunwich. Am I right?”

He called back in his turn, “Yup. Couldn’t find an Arkham or Innsmouth”

Alys patted my arm.

“Don’t worry. They’re all places in the stories, just not the same. Pity, really: spotting whippoorwills in England would be a real find”

I was well out of my depth, as their mutual interests in SF and birdwatching collided in some really, or perhaps unreally, ways, so I just stuck with random comments on the rocks until we were cutting back through Beddgelert for the famous view of Cwm Dyli, Mike drawing the line at going even further and taking in Conwy.

‘Tentacles’, for god’s sake.

The weather did clear enough in the week for some climbing, but there was still far too much seepage for the slate. Alys took charge of Ish, using her Mam’s car for some birding trips, while Mike and I hit some old favourites of his at Tremadog and a really obscure slab in Cwm Dyli that I had never explored. Nothing above Hard Severe, given the time of year and seepage from many of the cracks, but it was still a chance to get some air beneath my heels, as well as an opportunity to poke fun at Mike’s technique. He was very, very competent, but everything he did was measured and controlled. I had been watching lots of the newer videos, or at least newer than the ones Dad had shown us, with climbers in the shortest of microshorts, and that newer stuff was all about dynos, where you coiled your body before springing for a hold.

‘Dyno’: dynamic move, or, as Dad called it, ‘jumping’. Mike, on the other hand, was an exponent of ‘extending’ and what he called an ‘udge’. The former involved relying entirely on balance to move from one hold to another a long way away, where the first hold ceased to provide any security as soon as the move was partway through. The other word, however, was a puzzle.

“Ah, Enfys, it’s a Peak thing. You went to Froggatt, yeah?”

“We did”

“Well, the next edge, after the walk down round the end of Froggatt, that’s Curbar, and the routes there are generally harder. One of them, the old guide book, it just says for one move, ‘levitate to the such and such hold’, and that’s an ‘udge’. You just ‘udge up’, and half the time you can’t work out how. Sometimes the best climbing is like the morning after a heavy night on the ale”

“Sorry?”

“When you wake up, look around you and ask yourself how the buggery bollocks you got wherever you are!”

Mike could never stay serious long, and when we came to the end of our week, and all four of us were packed to go our two separate ways, I was hit by a surge of loss. Always there for my parents, he had simply resumed his part in my life as if he had never been away, and now he was once more leaving, along with a young man that both Alys and I had become very fond of. It was a wrench, but there was still the promise of their return after the ‘grand tentacular tour’.

He used the excuse of heading for the faster coast road to drop us off in Bangor, followed immediately by the other excuse of needing to vet our pubs to blag floor space for the night for him and Ish, but in the morning, after a solid breakfast, they were off, and my horizons closed in once again.

Six of us were slumped around the living room that afternoon, Kitzy looking a little out of sorts, and once again it was Alys who picked up the undercurrents.

“Nerves, Kitz?”

The smaller girl nodded.

“Dad’s due down with a load of my stuff, and I don’t know what… I still haven’t told him about Lee and me”

That man slipped an arm over her shoulders for a squeeze.

“I’ve got an idea, Enfys, but it’s a big ask, like”

Alys put a finger to my lips.

“Then ask, Lee”

“Um… I don’t know… Boys, it’s you two as well. Plan is, sort of, I bugger off till her Dad’s gone, so I was hoping to use your family’s place, Enfys that is, her family. The bunkhouse. There’s a bus from Bethesda here. Four of you sharing, her Dad can assume, you know, two couples but not the way it really is…”

Alys started laughing first, followed by Tref, and the two of them had some of those moments where the laughter stops, the laughers stare at each other for a couple of seconds, then start hooting again.

I stared at Lee till he blushed, and then asked the obvious question.

“You want me to pretend to be straight?”

Tref stopped snorting long enough to point out that he had done that all his life, which brought a sharp retort from his own lover.

“Yes, but you were utterly shit at it!”

Once we had got the jokes out of the way, I rang Mam. We had a Plan. I still pointed out to the lads that it didn’t matter which one I pretended to be ‘with’, there was no chance whatsoever of me wearing a dress for it.