CHAPTER 45
I had no answer to that, none that seemed adequate, so I simply reached across and squeezed the back of her hand, just as her mobile chirped from the glove box. I opened the cover and passed the phone across to her. A quick glance, then a shy smile, rather than the beam I was used to, or the brittle near-grimace I feared.

“Kul, Mike. They have all plumped for fish and chips, and he says not to bother with the bottle shop. His words: ‘Me real man, haz gotz booze’, and yes, all zeds, no esses”

She checked her face in the rear view mirror.

“Ah, I’ll do, and so will you. Let’s get rolling”

She went to start the car, then paused.

“Thank you, Mike. Really”

“I didn’t do anything, Maz”

“Not true. You shared, both ways. I had hoped, with your background, you would understand. I’m a very lucky woman right now. Let us indeed get rolling, and you tell me about that seafood place near the boys’ climbing shed”

So I did, as she drove, and a couple of times I actually heard her laugh, and then we were parking up at Chez Butt, paper parcels warm in our hands. They were seized on by Dal and Geeta, while Kul led us to the dining room rather than the lounge.

“Easier to chat round the table, mates. I want to know what Rod’s work was like. That suit? Beer is coming out of the fridge, if my offspring has his best interests in mind. Oi! Serf! Opened and poured!”

“Er, no, Dad. Still plating the food”

Kul shrugged.

“Can’t get the staff or the offspring these days. I’ll have to sell his body parts for transplants, I suppose”

He lowered his voice.

“Going to keep the lights dimmed, cause I can tell you two have been, well, talking. I’ll drive the table chat, okay? Keep it on safe ground, if I can. Ta, Dal! More to come?”

“One more plate, Dad, and it’s yours. Mum says the puds in the fridge”

“Beers?”

“Only got two hands, Dad”

“I knew I should have married that octopus. Give me a hand, Mike?”

As soon as the two of us were in the kitchen, he put an arm around my shoulder.

“You okay, mate?”

I shook my head.

“Not sure yet. She’s just about broken, but I can sort of see that in myself. Lots in common. She’s a very deep woman, Kul”

“She is that. Not for tonight, though. Geeta’s made her up a bed, so she can have a few, but two of us are driving tomorrow, so no piss up. Have that at the weekend, with Chad and Ronnie. Trip to the Vault, deep fried crispy sea locust at the place we visited, and then most of us back here for the night. Ripper, et cetera. Now, if you are steady, let’s get in there. Beers are in the cool bag, and pud is simply a load of ice creams and sorbets”

I handled the clinking bag, and the next few minutes were spent in near silence after our initial “Cheers!” as beer and chips were dealt with. Once our hunger and thirst had eased, Kul quizzed me about the boarding place.

“Ah, Kul, that Rod is a seriously good engineer. He was telling me about a bike he built. I don’t think Maz got the whole deal there”

She raised her bottle for a sip.

“Me and motorbikes? Not a clue”

“Well, what he has done is take a decent little 250cc bike, a bit old school in design, but really good for its day. Lightweight, decent handling. Anyway, he’s tweaked it to fit an engine nearly three times the original size, but done it in a way that makes the bike look just about as it was. Thing is, the engine’s a single cylinder in both cases, but a lot taller in the bigger one, so he will have needed to remodel the petrol tank, so he’s either very good at panel-beating, or in cutting and welding something that might explode, or both, and then keep the fuel from being stuck in one part. Clever stuff that looks simple”

Maz offered her take.

“More than that, Mike. I was watching the dynamics, his face as he was describing the work. He’s got a real passion in him, just like that Rhona, or Des at Soapy Joe’s. Found their place in the world, all of them. Kul, by the time we got there, he’d already taken the trailer for a drag up Welshpool Road, the hilly bit, and casually says he can always switch the engine for a bigger one. Just like that!”

Kul was grinning.

“Well, shows what sending the A-Team in for the initial contact does. Makes the second string’s job an easy one”

Maz arched an eyebrow.

“Well, Mike was there for both visits, so it was A-Team each time”

Geeta was laughing.

“Game, set, match and new balls to them, love! Mike: had any more news from Wales? And, well, I think Maz might appreciate a bit more info on who was who on that call”

I caught the little pat Kul gave to Geeta’s knee, but it seemed that Maz had missed it.

“Well… I gave Maz some of the---oh, hell, of course! I promised to tell you about how he left That Place”

I ran through a slightly cleaned-up version of the tale, finishing up with that second-hand account of him walking out on Dr D/Mr S.

“And that was the thing--- I was the only one in the loop till he was gone. Now they’re in a very, VERY insular community, but they seem to have made a space for themselves”

Dal chipped in.

“They all speak the local language, and it’s so weird. Different sounds from ours, like that double-L thing, and I don’t think Enfys and Dafi, I mean Alys, know when they’re in Welsh and when they’re in English”

I gave him a little glare I hoped was sufficiently surreptitious, and waved at Maz.

“Our B-team non-member here was saying something like that about, what was it? Singlish?”

She nodded.

“Yes. Codeswitching, where people jump from language to language, as they find the best expressions. Not so much where I’m from, though. Stick to one tongue, my father would say. Oh, yes: there’s a place I really want to see some day”

Geeta laughed at that comment, and I wondered, for the first time, how much she had put away before we had arrived.

“You said that about Hadrian’s Wall, duck!”

“Duck?”

“Sorry, love. Local term where I’m from. Anyway, yes, you said about that tree place, the Robin Hood film. Where’s this other one? Or is it part of a list?”

Maryam opened another bottle, and I saw Kul glance my way and give a little shake of his head. Maz was in full flow, now, so different to the bleakness in the car.

“I have such a list, Kul! My own 100 places before I die thing. Paris, of course, and the Little Mermaid in Denmark, and Iceland, and, well, loads, but this one’s Malta. The whole place… she digresses, yet again. The language. It’s Arabic, but written in Latin script, and it’s stuffed full of loanwords--- words from other languages--- so ‘good night’ is French, and ‘thank you’ is Italian, but they codeswitch all the time, from Maltese to English and back. Love to hear that”

Another swig of beer.

“Anyway, who are, were, the other three on that call. You gave me a few pointers about the couple, but the other man? What was his name again?”

“Neil. He’s another friend of the two families. He’s a photographer”

“Does he climb as well?”

“Er, no. He’s a cave diver”

“Sorry?”

“He goes into flooded caves. In scuba gear”

Her face said it all, so I did my spread-armed shrug.

“Nope. No way on Earth would I ever do that. As I keep saying, if I have a ‘fail’, it will be outdoors and accessible, not bloody well underground and underwater”

“Who’s Davvy, Mike?”

Oh, shit. Thank you, Dal.

“That’s Alys. She decided she didn’t like her name, and where they live, it’s a sort of hippy colony. I mean, Enfys’ actually means ‘rainbow’, so you get my point”

She nodded, and seemed to drop the matter. I asked what the pudding was, to break the subject, and for a while we immersed ourselves in the taste and cold. Maryam was working her way through the bottles, right up to the very last, when Geeta made a comment about beds and bedding, and she was gone. I gave Dal the cold stare.

“Nice one, son”

He was clearly finding it hard to look me in the eye, so I muttered something about sorting it later and let them all head off for bed.

Arse.

Maz and I rode with Kul to the office, as he claimed she might still be too lubricated (his word) for safe driving, and returned us both at the end of the day,, when she simply drove away after a very abbreviated farewell, which left me asking myself two questions in sequence, the first being whether I had said or done anything to upset her.

The second was to ask myself why I cared so much on less than a fortnight’s acquaintance.

I stayed with Kul for the next two days of burger restaurants and kebab shops, along with a travel agent and a shop that rather surprisingly declared that it sold ‘Manchester’. That turned out to mean various types of cloth and fabric articles. I spent the whole visit praying that Kul wouldn’t say ‘Ripper’ until we were clear of the place. It was one of those moments when I realised that despite the shared language and history, Australia remained a foreign country. That was reinforced when, once again, Saturday arrived as a warm and dry day, getting warmer. We packed our kit, four of us squeezing into the Butt car (got to get some wheels of my own) and rattled off to upstream Perth.

“Mike? Did you hear me?”

“Sorry, Dal. Miles away. Thinking I need to sort some personal transportation out. What were you saying?”

“I was wondering what your old climbing wall was like”

“Ah. In That Place?”

“Indeed”

“Well, pretty rubbish, really. There was a vertical jamming crack made from kerbstones set into the wall, which was all brick. Chimney and ledges made by setting paving slabs into the brickwork, with some wooden blocks bolted in as holds. Lengths of scaffolding pole along the top to lay the rope over for belaying, abseiling or toproping. Pretty crap, as I said, but miles better than nothing”

“You’ll love this place, then. Really modern stuff, and you don’t get a face full of gritty wind like at the top of Stanage”

“Air con?”

“Oh yes. If by that you mean big doors they can open. That’s it over there”

We were in a pretty nondescript industrial estate, and the building in question was a little low-rise, so it was likely to be all bouldering rather than leading. What struck me when we entered, though, were the colours. That and the plethora of impending angles: everything seemed to lean inward. Once my eyesight had recovered from the blast to my retinas, I spotted a sector with dangling ropes, along with a large number of fixed ‘quick draws’. It wasn’t all jumping off onto crashmats, then. Geeta was amused.

“There is somewhere to sit, there are cold drinks, and if I am bored, I can always have a go. And there are the other two, just arrived”

Indoors, away from the sun, both were dressed very differently from their rig on our quarry trip. Chad was in cycle shorts and a loose vest, while Maz was in looser jogging shorts, with a ‘muscle shirt’ style vest that showed half of her back between her shoulders. To my delight, both were wearing proper rock shoes.

“Chad, mate!”

The shout was from the other side of a rather large roof. Our boy jerked, then grinned.

“Hiya, Vern! Been shopping, I have”

Vern was also grinning.

“I can see! Make a real difference, they will, and with no Aussie bolts here, we can push the grade boat out a bit. What you looking to do, Mike?”

“Get a feel for the place first, and ideally do some leading”

“Right…”

He rattled through some site rules, and then insisted I do a demo of my belay technique.

“I know bloody well that you can, mate, but the insurance rules, ey? Right…”

He pointed out some of the more important features, and then left me and the others to explore while he checked over Chad’s choice of shoe, or something. I left them to it, and started warming up with a few simple traverses. Dad and lad were straight onto the toproped section, while Maz followed me as I swayed and hopped across the base of the wall. Our social outing seemed to have fragmented very quickly, but I wasn’t complaining, but rather listening to Maz.

She was alternating between mild swearing each time she slipped off, and detailed questions about what I was doing when I didn’t, and how to manage it herself. I spotted her a few times, standing below but a little to one side, just to ensure she didn’t end up with the comedy landing where the faller ends up running backwards rather than fall onto the crash mat, that can turn into a tragedy when they run right off the padding before the fall backwards onto a hard floor.

That was a lie. I was watching her climb, but it was her I was watching, rather than her moves. This time, I definitely knew where to look.