white

WE drive to Capel Curig in his black Sierra and park behind Joe Brown’s.

I feel a pang of guilt whenever I see that car. He cracked the front bumper on a gatepost when we were turning round on a narrow pass last summer. We’d strayed in the wrong direction – my fault – and it was my idea to turn in that gateway. Smack.

Of course, he didn’t give a toss – the bang, when it came, hardly registered on his Richter scale.

We go east, walking into the Carneddau Range, and the trail out of the village swings to and fro, a childish squiggle on the landscape. In the thin wintry light our shadows are two exclamation marks searching for an end to the sentence; our boots press wayward commas onto the path. I follow in his footsteps, slowly but steadily: there’s no hurry to complete a story we’ve been creating – but not writing down – for nearly a hundred years between us. We both trashed our bodies some time ago and now we’re in the restaurant at the end of the universe, waiting for the final bill. Tweedledum and Tweedledee in anoraks. Noddy and Big Ears doing a hoodie thing.

Creeping licentiously along the hyena flank of Pen Llithrig y Wrach, on a stony path, we are no more than lice drumming a surface vein, seeing if we can tap it. Then we walk along the edge of Llyn Cowlyd, a cavity left over from a huge molar extraction, and the peaty water is thin brown blood, staining the lake’s gums.

He is the thinker, I am the notary: he plots the course and I carry the charts. Many years ago he taught me the art of map-reading, turning symbols and contour lines into a vision of the world. He is (and always has been) the hierophant, the explainer of mysteries. A fabulous draughtsman of the unseen. My own interpretations, in comparison, are crayon squiggles on a playground wall.

It becomes a day of reference points. At the eastern end of the reservoir I decide to tell him the secret inside me. It’s been there for a long time now and I want it out in the open. I want it exhumed and reburied. This is for my sake, not his. He would rather not know, I’m certain of that. I look around, and realise that this isn’t the right place. Right time, wrong scenario. Somehow, I’ll know where that is when I get there…

Around us there are abandoned, crumbling homesteads trying to keep their footing, drunkenly, on the edge of the seeping marshlands. Miraculously, they still have names – Siglen (bog) and Brwynog (rush-covered, sad). Never were two ruins more aptly named. They are senators representing hundreds more like them, leaning into puddles crookedly like aeroplane shadows, all along the length of Wales’ hinterland.

There is an old story that fairies called at one of these farms near Cowlyd late in the nineteenth century, asking if they could enter the house to wash and dress their baby. Having done so they left, leaving money as they’d promised. They also left the lotion used to clean the baby. It was found by a servant girl, who examined it. As she did so her eye itched, and in rubbing it she transferred some of the lotion from her finger to her face. Later, when she went to Llanrwst Fair, she saw the same fairies stealing cakes from a stand, and confronted them. They asked her which eye she saw them with, and when she told them, one of the little people touched it quickly. She never saw them again. But they still dance, frolic and sing on the flat meadows by the River Conwy every moonlit night. That’s what people say.

It’s hard going. We head for Moel Eilio, probably the least visited hilltop in the Carneddau Range. Visitors are rare, there’s no recognisable path, so we practise a pantomime waddle through the vegetation. We raise a woodcock, and then, euphorically, two black grouse cocks, samurai with twin vermilion wounds in their sable helmets. We struggle for words in the springy heather, in the way that middle-aged people do – standing in an ever-darkening hangar we survey the antique engines of our lives, dismantled and left lying around in bits on the ground. We clean each semantic nut and bolt with a rag, wondering where each meaning came from, glad we’ll never have to put it all back together again.

We search our corroded lexicon for words to describe the wattles on the blurred, escaping birds, and he conjures scarlet, alizarin, ruby, carmine and cerise. But there is no point to this naming of the parts: it’s no more than a walk to the garage every so often to start a vintage car. To let it idle for a while.

Carnedd Llewelyn’s clefts and ravines are veined with snow; the mountain’s ancient skin is blemished by burst capillaries running in cobweb filaments down the slopes. But the dominant theme is black: the mountain has used all its dark arts to win a secret, nocturnal battle. Below us, Cwm Eigiau trifles with our senses. We are two tiny krill lodged in the corner of the valley’s gaping whale-mouth, two miles wide.

We talk, fitfully, as we walk. It’s an old friendship; conversation comes in staccato bursts, then we are muted again by the vastness; each mountain is a crashed comet, reminding us to be small. We pick a path through the bog and I regurgitate a bolus of information about Dafydd ap Gwilym and one of his jocular poems. While riding to a love tryst one starless night, Dafydd and his horse stumble into a peat bog and he vents his spleen on all things peaty and boggy. He’s particularly upset because the tumble has fouled his best pair of courting socks.

Hopping from tussock to tussock, it’s more than likely that I too will get a bootful of cold bog-juice sooner or later. I feel like a kid trying to follow the timetable, wandering from lesson to lesson, trying to keep up. A raptor ripples above me and I pause to watch it. Time loses all meaning, retreats through a gap in the soundless clouds. This cwm also struck the ancient tribes as timeless – it was home to the Owl of Cwm Cowlyd, the oldest owl in Wales. When the owl was asked where Mabon was, it answered: If I knew, I would tell you. When I first arrived here this great valley was a wooded glen, but a great race of men came and the wood was laid waste. A second wood grew and was also laid waste, and a third also. And as for me, why, all that’s left of my wings is two little stumps. From the first day to this I have heard nothing of the man you seek.

I’ve fallen back again, the usual story: he says something just out of earshot, so I have to catch up with him and ask him, bronchially, to repeat himself. He plucks a name out of the air: Francois Villon.

The name means nothing to me, so he fills me in.

Dead six hundred years, he says. Murderer, thief, drunkard. In and out of prison, condemned to death more than once. Wrote witty, ironic, melancholic poems about his life in the medieval melting pot, where all human flesh was rendered:

Remember, imbeciles and wits,

Sots and purists, fair and foul,

You girls with tender little titties,

That death is written over all.

Famously, he wrote: Mais ou sont les neiges d’antan?

But where are the snows of yesteryear?

We cross the shallow valley between Moel Eilio and Cefn Cyfarwydd. Blocking our way is the pipeline taking water from the reservoir to Dolgarrog’s hydroelectric station, owned nowadays by Innogy (my, how they must have wet their knickers thinking up that name). The pipeline – a catheter plugged to Cowlyd’s bladder – is black and big enough to walk inside, crouching. I cup my ear against it, trying to hear the water rushing through. Nothing: no sound at all.

Ducking under the pipeline we meander along the valley floor, following the sheep paths through the morass, gambolling occasionally from tuft to tuft. We have all the paraphernalia of middle-aged walkers: rucksacks, phone, compass, hypothermia blanket, map. Our age is written in the rucksacks’ inventory. Gone are the days when we came here in t-shirts and pumps, still bleary, puffy from last night’s revelries...

There’s sunshine on our side of the Carneddau, but I can see a wagon-train of cumulus clouds approaching Carnedd Llewelyn on the other side of the range. I feel wistful and disconnected. Snow is the closest we get to walking in our dreams, or on another planet – the closest we ever get to fairy dust and magic.

This is a story of reference points, so I’ll take another bearing.

The first is this: many years ago my daughter fell ill with a minor illness. Tonsillitis I think – certainly, it was nothing serious. I stayed at home to look after her, and let her sleep on into the morning. Snow had been forecast, and as I sat by the window, looking out on the bleak landscape of winter, the sky became a bowl of cold porridge. Suddenly we were inside an old eiderdown of swirling, obliterating snow. I watched it, wondering if I should wake my daughter to see it, or let her sleep on. The snowstorm continued; I prevaricated. The snowfall stopped, and I still didn’t know what to do; languorously, I sat there looking at the blinding landscape as the sky cleared and a blue cupola replaced the porridge bowl. It was then that she woke up, arriving soundlessly by my side in her red winceyette pyjamas covered in teddy bears. I became conscious, as her eyes moved from the snow to my face, that I’d made a mistake. Only a small mistake. But I realised, the moment she looked at me, that I should have woken her when the first flakes were falling.

We come to a large outcrop of quartz on the brow of Cefn Cyfarwydd. Heather stalks lunge at my legs as I pass, conger eels darting hungrily from their hidden caves. We sit on an eruption of quartz, frozen toothpaste escaping frantically from a cracked tube, and as I lift my eyes to the mountains I observe the cloud-train over Carnedd Llewelyn, hiding it behind a white curtain, as if enacting a silent, courtly masque. Their magic is revealed after they’ve passed over the peak: they have spread a white cloth of snow over the top, and it gleams now, a linen shemagh on a sheik’s head, glinting in a Saudi sun. I goggle at it, as if I were a fish which has seen the silent, shimmering hull of a dredger pass over to deposit its ballast on the ocean floor.

We approach the dark cockscomb of Creigiau Gleision, the highest point of our walk. The lake lies far below us, a cat’s saucer of milk, frozen, and the drop is sheer enough to make me nervous. The wind sharpens and attacks my ears. Perhaps we should head for home, I suggest, fearing the snow will come to encase us too.

I focus on a second trig point in my mind, and a sharp pang of memory arrives like a contraction. I remember one of Kate Roberts’ stories in Te yn y Grug (Tea in the Heather). Four-year-old Begw is sobbing uncontrollably on a stool by the fire, her shawl trailing in pools of melting snow: she has woken up to a winter wonderland after an overnight fall of snow and she has opened the door excitedly – only to find her beloved cat dead on the doorstep. Her mother accidentally reveals the truth: it was her father who locked out – and killed – her little pet. To me, this tale of cruelty is a huge footprint in the snow: I want to know more about the yeti who was her father.

Along comes another contraction, and my memory finds a third trig point.

I look down on one of the ruined farmsteads, and I see a scene from the past.

Down there, in one of the roofless outhouses, with its bent walls and its broken slates, I see a boy of about ten, dressed in ragged clothes and Wellingtons, one of them leaky. His knees are red raw and scarred from countless falls. There are painful weals around his calves, which are chafed hourly by the Wellington rims (he hasn’t learnt to turn them down, yet). He’s dirty, and he clears a steady stream of snot with his sleeve. He wears no underpants. His clothes are cast-offs, and he has whitlows on his hands. There is a pad of hard skin on the thumb of his right hand, because he still sucks his thumb as he approaches his teens. He is tough, and already solitary.

He is small and lean, wiry and strong for his age. He masturbates almost constantly, and he is cruel to animals. He shoots sparrows with an air rifle and blasts pigeons and moles to pieces with a shotgun. When he’s allowed to he ranges far and wide, climbing trees, making hazel whistles, building dams.

He is almost wild, though he’s literate because he reads his father’s musty books by candlelight every night. There is no water in the farmhouse, no electricity, no toilet. He is already an expert ploughboy and he knows a great deal about sheep – about their oppressed lives and their frugal cunning. He is from another age.

He has just caught a young female goose in the farmyard; the chase has left him with a jagged beak-shaped scar across the fingers of one hand; bubbles of blood cluster around the weal in ruby droplets. He has been attacked by the gander. He carries the goose into the outhouse and tries to strangle it, but fails. He’s not quite strong enough. Carrying the goose by its legs, upside-down, he goes to another shed and returns with a hatchet. He rests the goose on a broken-down manger and arranges its head on a wooden truss, then slashes at it. He misses repeatedly, then loses his temper and lunges at the goose. Eventually he kills it and removes its head. Blood spurts on his trousers and his Wellingtons, coating his hands in warm crimson paint. He sits on a three-legged milking stool in the outhouse, which has virtually no roof remaining, and he plucks the goose, starting with the soft belly feathers, fine and still warm. The feathers stick to the blood on his fingers and to the mud on his Wellingtons. He is not impervious to beauty: a strong sense of futility and pain and melancholy wells up in him as he mangles the loveliness of the bird. He looks as though he has been tarred and feathered. It starts snowing. By now the goose is cooling. The feathers are harder to pluck. The boy’s fingers are weak and sore as he pulls desperately at the large wing-feathers. He almost disappears in a cloud of snowflakes and feathers. He is intensely miserable, not because of the death of the goose, but because he will have to kill and pluck many more before his tasks are finished. He will have to singe the birds and gut them and truss them for people who will complain about his ineptness – the torn gooseskin, the quill-stumps left inside the wings.

When nightfall comes he will gather a handful of wing feathers and take them into the house, where he will make quills and write spidery words in a scrapbook, his sentences scratching the paper with birds’ footmarks…

That little boy is me.

Tired now, exhausted almost, we descend into Capel Curig silently; I have told him the story of the geese in the snow. All the stories have been recited already, some of them many times. Night is almost with us and the white of the mountain peaks is fading into darkness.

We both become warmer, calmer and more reflective as we click our way through the church gate and enter the village. Our boots scrape on the tarmac, and we lift our feet a bit higher, suddenly conscious that we’re weary. We dump rubbish, collected on the walk, into bins: I think of all the debris gathered in my brain, unwanted but unbinable. We are silent now as we watch the light fade around us, the delicate shade-by-shade disappearance of the natural world. Other shapes emerge – man-made shapes, doors and windows, angular and harshly lit. We become two moth-men, our shadows flitting around in the orange glow of the sodium lights.

We buy chocolate in the shop and browse around Joe Brown’s, fingering the ropes and crampons. Then we sit quietly in the black Sierra, listening to the river pulsing through the mossy boulders below us. But my mind is much further away than we’ve been all day – at a lost and defunct trig point, far away in the ceded territory of my past.

He is my friend and companion, this man sitting in a black dented car. I want to tell him about the night I slept with his wife. About the day of the funeral, too.

I want to tell him that I wasn’t able to think the right thoughts that day – that instead of thinking about the tragedy and the pain of death, I had thought about the night we had spent together in my bed. I would never be able to tell him how wonderful it had been. In the crematorium, when I looked at the coffin on its rollers, I had thought little of the pain in my friend’s mind and body; I had imagined her shape as I had seen it that night in its nakedness and sexual greed. I had thought of her hands as she held me, the curve of her back and the sway of her hips as she left our bed. That is what I thought, not what I should have thought.

And when she died I felt nothing but guilt, and the absoluteness of death. I did not think of him at all.

I hoped perhaps that when I told him part of this story, when I took this story from the cold storage of my memory, he would understand, in that big, big way of his. My friend. But I couldn’t. Not here, in a car by a river. Not in Wales, perhaps. The time had felt right. But the place… I was beginning to realise that location was going to be more important than timing. And I couldn’t find the place. Was that because my guilt was associated with a place?

I would have to wait.

The moment was lost. That unfading memory of what happened must stay within me. Buried under the snows of yesteryear.