CHAPTER 35
I had my session with my lady shrink before we went.

“So you’re rich, then, Stevie. Does that make you happy?”

“No. But it makes me less unhappy”

“What makes you happy, then?”

“Emily, for one. Nana. Iain. Brian and Karen”

“So your happiness is people?”

“Well, yes. Isn’t everybody’s?”

“Not at all, Steve, not at all. Some people need things”

“Well, I don’t. I never had them, so…”

“So, if you never saw a mountain again…”

“What do you mean?”

“Would you be happy indoors, with your people, forever?”

“No, of course not. What are you saying?”

“That you do yourself a disservice. If you focus on other people, as you are doing, you forget yourself, and you become a chameleon, forever changing to suit whomever you are with. Steve, those people love you, that is something so easy to see it could be painted on their faces. They love you, and not a weathercock. What I would like you to try and do is be yourself more, do things that you want to do rather than what you think they would like to do.”

She paused, looking at her notes. “When did you start fell-running?”

“When Nana took me out”

“When did you start rock climbing?”

“When Simon and Roger took me”

“Why?”

“Well, I’d seen this book…”

“Bingo. You made a decision totally off your own bat. You read voraciously, but so does Emily, am I right?”

“Yeah, but she reads romances”

“And you don’t?”

“No, of course not”

“And she hates you because of that?”

“Of course not!”

“Steve, that’s the point. What I have noticed is that you have clung to people tightly after your release, as if they might run away if you don’t tie them down. These people aren’t going anywhere, so take some risks, now, live a full life…and enjoy your holiday. Ada going with you?”

“Not this time, she says they talk funny”

“Then time to spread your wings, young man. Bring me back a bottle of Swn y Mor!”

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The drive down was quick, at the start, down the M6, but the A55 was a pain, through shitty industrial areas that reminded me of Workington and Whitehaven, until we hit the Conwy and started the run down to Llanrwst and then Betws y Coed, which was a real disappointment, so horribly tacky it could have been Windermere. Our car wound uphill through some woods past a tatty hotel and a run down sort of stone thing, and the hills were closing in. There was a glimpse of a waterfall or two, and then an old stagecoach outside a pub as we came into a small village called Capel something, which I later found out was Capel Curig. Tom told the four of us to look down at this point and he would tell us when to look out, and as he turned down a side road he murmured “now” and I saw the most wonderful view I had ever seen.

Val was right, I love mountains, and this one was just so perfect it hurt. Tom had pulled over by a lake and the four peaks of Snowdon hung in a frozen dance across the water down a textbook glaciated valley (bloody geography exams), complete with drumlins, under a cloudless blue sky, and I felt almost like an adulterer, lusting after something other than my own dear Cumbrian fells. Tom looked back.

“What do you think, people?”

Emily got her voice back first. “Amazing….is it all as good?”

“The valley over to the right is better, I think, but yeah, there’s an awful lot just as good. Steve?”

“I think I owe the boys a drink. This is almost as good as Wasdale Head or Fairfield”

Tom was laughing. “Oh, you parochial bugger! I’ll have another stop at Bwlch y Gwyddel, and you’ll get an even better look. Tell you what, let’s have a cuppa in the Climber’s Bar in the Gwryd, that’ll get you going.”

And it did. All those signatures….names I idolised, and then the view up into the huge great cirque that had expanded on our drive West along the valley, and the realisation that this beast was so much bigger than anything at home, and I wanted to be on it, running it, finding its bones.

Emily was talking to me, I realised. “Steve, love, there is an awful lot around here for me as well. If I don’t see you for a month, I think I’ll understand. Iain, has he always been like this?”

“Oh god, yes, he used to play mountaineers on Marina Hill on Kent Ridge, and that’s no worse that the walk to Windermere from the ferry”

Sally chipped in. “I checked. There are beaches. And ice cream shops. And I have my cossie. Stephen Jones, YOU may not see US for a month!”

Off we went down the twisty road past two lakes, until we arrived at a typical little North Welsh town of slate and slate, and following the instructions posted to us we were at the ‘cottage’ the boys had booked. As we started to haul out the bags, Simon and Roger appeared, in the most abbreviated running shorts I had ever seen, and then a bony girl came running past them and wrapped me in a hug. Tessa.

She squidged as we hugged, and I realised that it wasn’t just my own breasts, and she danced back grinning, showing off her incipient cleavage.

“We found a doctor who understood! And Roger found some money from somewhere, and there’s a place, and, and, oh shit, Steve, I can become me at last!”

“You’ve found a surgeon?”

“Yes! Casablanca, and I’m off there in a month, and, oh shit, I don’t know what to say, it’s just, I haven’t got the words!”

“Then we better get as much mountain stuff in as we can before you get laid up, lass. Simon, have we got somewhere near here where we can have an amble after the drive? Stretch our legs?”

“I think so…I know just the place. We shall walk past the Grave to the Dark Tunnel and see if Shelob is home. But first, tea!”

After tea, the boys took us across a field to a little mound, with a clump of trees and a couple of incised slabs, where we read the story of the great hound Gelert, after whom the village was named. Apparently, the prince Llywelyn left his baby son under the care of a nurse and his great war hound Gelert, while he went princing about somewhere, and when he came back he was met with the sight of the nursery in shambles, his son vanished, and the nurse with her throat torn out.

Gelert came running up to his master, full of puppylike joy and his muzzle caked with blood, and in a fit of rage and betrayed sorrow, Llywelyn drew his sword and slew his erstwhile friend. As the dog’s despairing howl resounded through the nursery, a baby’s cry was heard. Picking through the scattered bedding, the prince found his son alive and well, next to the body of a huge grey wolf, with the nurse’s blood drying on its muzzle and its own still red and wet from its torn throat.

In shame and sorrow Prince Llywelyn erected a mound over the body of his hound, faithful till death, and renamed the village Beddgelert, “Gelert’s Grave”

Both Sal and Em were sniffling at that point, but for some reason Tessa was smirking.

I looked at her. “What?”

She grinned broadly. “Good story, hey? Invented by a local pub landlord to boost tourism!”

Oh, you sods. Apparently Saint Gelert was the real occupant of the grave.

The rest of the walk was a delight. An old railway bed took us through long, dark tunnels where the boys did stupid Gollum voices, and pied flycatchers called out their promises to their trees above a gorge where a river tumbled over rocks, and Simon pointed out the hillside that featured as China in some film or other, and I started to realise that I didn’t need to go as far as the Alps to find new and beautiful mountains. The cramps and discomfort of the drive down evaporated, and Tessa continued to supply us with local stories, about white and red dragons, and river monsters, and oxen who pulled so hard their eyes flew from their heads, and she looked so happy I knew that the money I had sent Roger to pay for her operation was the best thing, in all senses, I had ever done.