Altered Life

by Keith Dixon

CHAPTER FIFTY-TWO

  I’D ALWAYS LIKED the drive north, pushing through and then leaving behind the messy conurbations of Manchester, Warrington, Bolton and Blackburn, the raw, grey mill towns that had provided the backbone for so much of the country’s wealth for so long, before progress and fashion had declared them expendable. In the dark you see nothing of the towns, hiding beyond stretches of greenery and fields and sunk in their own vision of themselves as vital hotspots of sophisticated nightlife.

  After Preston the traffic and urban sprawl thinned out, leaving just myself and a few hardy voyagers heading towards the rugged swoop of hill and dale that we couldn’t discern against the glare of vehicle headlights, but sensed as a looming companion on either side of the road. Occasionally, when the motorway lights dropped away and left us in comparative darkness, a segment of moon appeared briefly, only to be hidden again by the hulking peaks that smothered us and kept our eyes focused on the trail of red lights leading endlessly north.

  An hour and a half into the journey I pulled into Forton Services for petrol and a break from the car’s constant vibration. At the speed I was driving, the noise of the small-engined Corsa was setting up home in my head. I didn’t want to kick start another migraine. That would be asking for trouble.

  I rang Laura from the bizarre circular food hall at Forton that looks like an airport’s communication tower. A group of children in the crèche area sat hypnotised by cartoon TV as though they’d never seen it before.

  ‘It’s me,’ I said. ‘I’m on my way to the Lakes.’

  ‘You couldn’t wait,’ she said.

  ‘He called me. He knows I’ve been asking questions. He wants to find out what kind of tosspot I am.’

  ‘And what kind are you?’

  ‘The kind that doesn’t know how to listen to what other people say. The kind that’s too full of his own importance to consider other people’s feelings.’

  She was silent a moment, accepting the apology. ‘Where are you meeting him?’

  I told her.

  ‘It’s high up there. You don’t like heights.’

  ‘There’s lots of things I don’t like that I live with.’

  She said nothing for a while, then, ‘Is that music I can hear behind you?’

  ‘I’m taking a sensible break. A sign told me that tiredness could kill.’

  Her voice became soft. ‘What will you say when you see him?’

  ‘I’ll tell him I know everything. That he should give himself up and ask for clemency from the court.’

  ‘Will he listen?’

  ‘No. That’s what makes it exciting.’

  The radio stations began to crackle as I pushed further into the Lake District’s valleys. I put on Neil Young’s After the Goldrush and was carried on his thin high voice into the increasingly dark and empty countryside. Tales of spaceships and riverboats seemed alien but somehow fitting in a landscape devoid of features except the occasional lantern burning against a hillside cottage.

  At Junction 40 I turned off and took the road towards Kendal and Ambleside. At first it was fast, but eventually we came off the two-lane expressway and hit the dark country roads that twisted and wound towards the lakes. The Neil Young tape finished and I switched off the radio that suddenly squawked at me with some mindless DJ exhorting me to party hard. The silence echoed around the cabin.

  Eventually I entered the Langdale valley, moving silently on a pale road between high peaks that rose at either side. There was no other traffic. The clouds had vanished, and suddenly I saw that moonlight was bathing the fields and hills with an ivory-blue tint the colour of bruised skin. After a couple of miles the large red sign of the Unicorn Hotel appeared, at the foot of the ridge I knew to be Dungeon Ghyll. Beyond it rose Mill Gill and the track that kept pace with Dungeon Ghyll Force, the waterfall that tumbled downwards over rock and gully for a couple of hundred feet. I’d had friends in C & E who came up here to walk and climb. I’d seen their triumphant photos: on the peaks; by Stickle Tarn; in the Old Dungeon Ghyll Hotel; getting drunk.

  The peaks were high, had crumbled pathways that were unsafe even in daylight, and were shot through with screes, waterfalls and gullies that I didn’t know and wouldn’t be able to see. Apparently, according to my friends, both Wordsworth and Coleridge had written about this area.

  But however poetic the peaks were, whatever beauty they held for the walker who had struggled to scale them, they were no less dangerous at night, in the dark, with a cunning murderer patrolling them like an uncaged bear.