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possibility this might turn out to be his last birthday. That he’d never go beyond the statement: ‘Rydw i’n un deg wyth.’
    And the final item? The journal. Pete had seen Nat writing in a handsomely bound book during his summer stay in Lydcastle, and wondered if he was keeping some record of his days and thoughts. The book was an unlined production of excellent quality, and Pete knew a lot about stationery because before the kite shop he’d first worked for, and later run, Sunbeam Press. Thanks to his godfather, Oliver Merchant.
    If he had kept a Journal when Nat’s age, and could read its pages now, might he not be better able to come to terms with his eighteen-year-old self, who – for obvious reasons – was haunting him now night and day. That eighteen-year-old Pete who’d left his native Herefordshire town of Leominster one bitter January night, with his friend Sam Price at the wheel, his mind, like his driver’s, possessed by news of strange sights, and who’d ended up climbing a Berwyn mountainside beside the very waterfall shown on the postcard Nat enclosed.
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    The great waterfall gleamed white through the darkness…
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    He wouldn’t go down that road yet. Would not remember his own adolescent eagerness to disappear and what had brought it about. Would postpone for a while the recognition of the invin-cibility of death, and the appalling, obfuscating greyness that made up its wake.
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    That notebook. It was by reading it that Izzie and he understood (as they were intended to) that the Berwyns were where they must search for their missing son. Like too many diaries, Nat’s journal was very detailed for the first days of writing, and then trickled out into little more than a series of jottings, not all of them coherent. Still, Pete learned a lot from it, as much as he needed and far more than he cared to. And the police (to whom it had to be passed, though naturally Nat’s parents made a photocopy for themselves) found it invaluable too.

Two
Secrets
    Journal of Nathaniel Robin Kempsey
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    Yes, there is life after A Levels 
    Doings and reflections June-September 2009
    Weather: assume temperature this afternoon is 80º Fahrenheit 
    To convert to Celsius:
    Subtract 32 from your figure – that’s to say, subtract 32 from 80 and you get 48
    Multiply new figure by 5
    5 x 48=240
    Divide this last number by 9
    Result 26.7
    Temperature in Celsius!
    Excellent for my first day of freedom.
    But is that what it is?
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    This morning when I clambered off my bed, every section of me knew that in an hour’s time I had to forget about my body and the whole being it housed, and just become a moving physical item that must tap out on a keyboard x number of words on y and z as they issued from the brain. Tomorrow I shall get up quite differently, restored to myself. And I’ll let the sun pour through my closed eyelids, and imagine that when I open them, I do so as another sentient creature: a baby, for instance (was I really one once?) or an old man in care who can’t stand up straight or see properly (which I may become one day, and that’s impossible to accept too) or a cat, particularly the long-haired ginger tom who comes onto our balcony, or one of the many foxes in our neighbourhood (though, of course, early morning is when, after a night’s adventuring, they slink back homewards to sleep).
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    Dad said, ring me when the whole thing’s over, won’t you, Nat? That’s the nearest he’s come to expressing any interest whatever in my exams. I’ve worked out that he must have taken his A Levels in 1974. Considering the heavy weather he makes of doing the accounts for the shop, I can’t see him sweating away at revision – or even sitting in an exam room. But that’s a failure on my part, I suppose. His amazing general knowledge