by R. D Rhodes
He shook his head regretfully. “I don’t know.”
I took a drink and placed my cup between two jumpers. “Do you ever still think about suicide?” I asked.
Harry sat up fully, seeming taken aback by the question, and he turned his body towards me from a yard away. He looked at me and his eyebrows raised, “Do you?”
“I never told you I did.” I said. “But yeah, sometimes. Not often. I feel like I want to try and make some positive contribution though. To change things, though I’m not really sure how. That keeps me going.”
The bright lamplight shone fully on his face, pronouncing the sharpness of his nose. With no hood and no beany hat, his short hair looked weird. He looked away, “I think about it pretty much every day. I want to give it another ten years though. Maybe fifteen. Thirty years old, or thirty-five. Even forty. That’s enough for me,” his voice was controlled and measured, like he’d given this speech to himself a bunch of times already. “Life is for the young, that’s the way it should be, I think. Remember what we were talking about in hospital on that first night, about Jesus, and living like a child? Well, that’s just so sacred, I think. The naivety, creativity, the innocence even, it gets lost with age and the world suffers for it. People become cynical and crush out all the hope. Governments should be full of young people, even kids, who think more about the next generation and about making the world a better place. People over forty are more selfish, or else just focused on their own families. And I don’t want my body breaking down either. I can’t imagine that. The indignity of it. I want to go while I’m still strong.”
“I get you. I think.” I said. “It kinda helps with overpopulation too. That’s a big thing for me. But I never thought, so young.”
“Maybe I won’t. I don’t know. But there’s something really beautiful about death that really draws me. Pulls me in. Attracts me. It always has. I like what those old Indians in Canada and Alaska used to do, with their groups. When they got to a certain age, and couldn’t keep up, or weren’t strong enough anymore, they held back on the trail, and were left for the animals. But they saw no badness in that. No negativity. Human sacrifices too. And all their resources, the resources they would have used, were left for someone else. Or for the next generation. It’s unselfish. And just to be relieved of the suffering. To not have to think anymore. Wow, I crave that sometimes.”
“You like it here, don’t you?” I said. “You were awe-struck earlier. We had such a laugh. You were so happy.”
“Yeah, I know,” His voice picked up defensively and he looked at me instead of at the wall, “I mean, it’s not for sure. But could I have the same joy at forty? You just asked me, and yeah, it is on my mind a lot.”
I topped up my cup with more tea.
“But you’re right! I was so happy today. I am happy. I won’t do it for a long time.” He announced cheerily.
I indicated towards his cup, but he didn’t want any more. “I think next time we’re in Inverness,” I said, “we should phone the care commission, anonymously. Tell them what the inspector did, about Sanders and Kev. And the state of things there. But you’re right, no police.”
He nodded in agreement, “Okay. Next time. We’ll do it.”
-----------------
Only the stream gurgled away. We switched off the lamp and the world plunged into blackness. We tucked ourselves into our sleeping bags.
“Aisha?”
“What?”
“Do you mind, if I ask what your dad did, in politics?”
“He worked for labour.” I said.
“Oh.”
“…What was he like?”
His face before I’d killed him floated into my mind. “As a politician? As a person?”
“Both.”
“Well, like I said, he was okay when I was younger, then he just kind of, flipped. When my mum left him. He had been spending more and more time away from home before that. I found out he was taking bribes from companies. I think he just got greedy, it went to his head. He turned into some kind of monster. They kicked him out the first time-.”
“-because of the money?”
“Yeah. He was hoarding different donations as well, and stowing some in an overseas bank account. They caught him and suspended him, but they let him back in.”
“Like Chris Hun. But he got rich instead.” Harry grumbled.
I softened the back of my head deeper into the pillow. “How long were you homeless for?” I asked.
“Only about two or three months. It was in the summer too, so it wasn’t that bad. I just crashed in abandoned buildings, or under bridges.”
“This will be s-
We leapt up at the same time.
“What the fuck was that?!”
It sounded like a scream, and from not far away. I turned on the light and we stared at each other, frozen.
My ears pricked the silence, but we didn’t hear it again.
I crawled softly across to the door, slowly pulled down the zip, and peered out into the blackness.
Harry’s head came up beside me.
“What could it have been?” I said in a hushed voice.
“I don’t know. An animal? A bird maybe?”
“Fuckin hell. A bird.”
Harry remained by the door as I got back in my bag. He picked up his book and tried to concentrate. I could feel his tenseness, though.
He put the book back down, “Do you think it’s safe here?” He looked perturbed.
He’d read my thoughts exactly, but I said “Yeah. It’ll be fine.” as confidently as I could.
The wind softly rustled the branches again. The sound was a relief. Some of the leaves skittered the ground as they dropped. Every noise was amplified, and we were totally at the mercy of our fears. I realised then, at long last, what had taken me so long to understand- why so many people preferred the chaos of the cities to areas like this. The silence and remoteness was deeply unnerving, at eight in the evening it could seep into your brain and drive you crazy. The cities and towns provided light, lengthened out the day and decreased boredom. Life became more sheltered and comfortable. Maybe the sacrifice was worth it? But for so long I’d thought this was what I wanted- to get away from the iron grip of society. To be free, and left alone. No, it’s still what you want, it’s only humans that are dangerous, I told myself. Ghosts, and the very few animals that are out here, won’t hurt me.
But I was sure I had seen a ghost only last week. I remembered it perfectly. Oh, I wished I hadn’t watched so many daft Hollywood movies. All those demons and aliens were coming back to me now. I remembered what Sandy had said in the hospital, about being scared to sleep at night. I tried to calm myself and be rational.
Then something snapped right next to the tent. I thought I heard movement. My senses rose to their peak. Harry was sitting up like a deer caught in the headlights. The trees hushed. The stream gurgled. An owl hooted somewhere. It was nothing. This is ridiculous, I thought. I switched on my CD player and played Time out of Mind.
I’d only got through one song when Harry’s fearful eyes turned on me, his lips mouthing something. I pulled out the earphones. “What?”
“I just said, what are you listening to?”
“Oh. Bob Dylan. Time out of Mind.”
His eyes darted to the door then back to me. I hadn’t seen him this anxious since the first night in the hospital. “That’s a great album,” he said. His eyes shot to the door again.
“It’s fine. It was probably just a rabbit.” I forced a chuckle. “There’s two of us anyway. Whatever it is, I’ll kick their ass.”
His face relaxed a little. He smiled. “I know. Just a rabbit. Did you know the last song on that album is based on a Burns song?”
“No. My heart is in the highlands?”
“Yeah. That’s Burns.”
I turned off the CD player.
“You don’t like Burns?”
“Just not read him much.” I said.
“Fair en
ough. You should though. He’s awesome,” he said distractedly as he remained sitting up, his wide eyes fixed on the door. “I thought this was what I wanted,” he said, “But now I’m here and…”
“We both want this. It’ll be fine.” I replied, realising I had taken on the role of counselor. For some reason I felt a sense of déjà vu. “We’ll adapt.” I continued, “Here, you want to listen?” I held up an earphone.
“Nah, I’m okay, thanks.” He showed me his book.
I edged across to the door and peeked out. “The stars are out! Want to sit outside? At least we’ll see a bit more of what’s around us.”
“Okay.”
We took our headtorches down to a gap in the trees. The sky was absolutely packed. Harry lay down his jacket and we sat on it, our sleeping bags wrapped around our shoulders. It felt safer, and more open out there.
“We should try and get a fire going tomorrow.” Harry said. “Nothing beats a roaring fire.”
“Yeah, we’ll be more prepared tomorrow.”
“Doesn’t feel as cold as it did the last two nights?”
The moon shone brightly amongst those hundreds of stars. The wind slowly pushed clouds across.
Harry pulled his sleeping bag closer to himself. “This is nice. You see any star signs?”
“No. You?”
He shook his head. His black eyes sparkled as he looked up. “The Greeks used to sit and make up stories about them. That’s where most of the star signs came from. They were such good storytellers.”
“Cool. I didn’t know that.” I said. “That one’s pretty cool, the seven sisters. You know the Japanese car Subaru is named after that.”
“Really?”
“Uh-huh.”
“Look at that!”
I followed his pointing finger to the cloud-face that flashed in the sky- a sinister face with eyes, nose, ears, an open mouth. It seemed to be staring at us. It took me aback too.
“Fuckin hell!” Harry said. We kept watching as it broke apart and fell in with other clouds. “That’s eerie, man. That was a perfect shape of a face. We’re always being watched, man. We’re always being watched.”
PART 3
Chapter 45-
I woke to the songbirds, and Harry snoring. The watch on his thin wrist said 10.30am. I got changed as quietly as I could under my covers then opened the door. A thick grey fog floated through the landscape and I watched it, mesmerized, as I stepped through the hardened snow. The stream was gushing with numerous little waterfalls, and I filled the pot from one of them and washed my face.
I sat outside the tent with my cup of tea. The birds hopped along the dripping branches and the mist continued to sift between them all. Soon Harry woke up and came out to join me.
We went down to the loch and stacked up piles of rocks as targets, then threw stones at them, having competitions to knock them down. Then we wandered on up through the woods. Harry stopped before a rosehip bush and said we should pick some, that they had thirty times more vitamin C than oranges. We took an armful each and headed back.
Later we gathered some firewood, but everything was soaking through. We took some rocks from the stream and made a fire-circle. My frozen hands could barely hold the lighter. We both tried for about an hour, but neither of us could get the spark to catch. We put some of the sticks inside a corner of the tent to dry.
After that, we spent ages de-seeding all the rosehips, which we put in a pot with boiling water and some sugar. Harry said he’d made it once before, when he was twelve. The syrup didn’t taste too bad. Would be nice with the porridge, I said.
I stayed out while Harry went inside, absorbed in his new book. The fog thickened, enclosing the world until I couldn’t see beyond twenty yards. It gave me a strange, warm feeling and I felt hidden and safe inside it. I remembered reading John Lennon saying this kind of weather made him creative. There is something mystical about it, it’s true, I thought.
Hours later Harry came out for lunch, then went back inside. I’m liking it here, I thought. Those birds singing. The sound of that dripping water. And it’s so beautiful. I looked to the rowan tree five yards to my left, its leaves gone but blazing with its multitude of red berries. On my right, my favorite tree, an old oak, towered way up into the canopy and beyond, its orange leafed branches sprawled out everywhere, its trunk five times my width. I stared up and down its scaly bark. Something made me think it was aware of me looking at it, and I stared at it in wonder for ages. And all around me, amongst those trees and the birches and pines and the fog and the grass, amongst everything, there was some sort of presence that I thought I could feel myself absorbing, and being absolved by, the longer I sat out there. Any negativity I had, felt like it was being sucked out from me. The hospital, Glasgow, the journey up here, all felt a million million miles away, like it was in some past life.
Immersed in the trees and the birds and the fog, I felt an urge to write down what I was seeing, so I borrowed a notebook and pen from Harry and I came back out. In the late afternoon, the fog began to dissipate. The sun slowly broke through to light up the mountaintops first, and then everything else. The landscape changed right before my eyes, in atmosphere as well as appearance. And being there to see it, I felt connected to it.
Harry came out to join me again.
“Still happy to rest?” I asked him.
“Yeah. I’m enjoying this book. You?”
“I love it out here. How can you ever get over that.”
The loch looked like a postcard picture. “It’s even more beautiful than yesterday.” he agreed.
“I saw a buzzard earlier.”
“Did you? Was that what we saw yesterday?”
“No. I think that was some other bird of prey…What you reading now?”
He showed me the cover, Candide, by Voltaire.
“Any good?”
“It’s alright. It’s pretty funny actually. You know him?”
I shook my head.
“He was a French philosopher. He wrote during the enlightenment. He’s pretty famous. He actually said everyone should look to Scotland, to guys like Hume and Adam Smith, for ideas. Edinburgh was like the new Athens, at the time.”
I laughed. “Not a fan of Alan Smith?”
“Adam. Och, he- never mind. Wealth of Nations.” he muttered, staring at the loch.
The last of the fog lifted. The jagged summits looked like an optical illusion. I scanned my eyes down the azure blue to the silvery rocks, down the verdant green canopy mixed with yellow and orange, and to the pale blue water. I didn’t want to read. I only wanted to take in what I was seeing.
A warm ray landed on my face and I shut my eyes. Soon, the sun was sinking behind the mountains. Pink and purple splashed the canvas sky.
Before it got dark, we had another go at the fire, but the sticks were still too wet.
It didn’t matter though. We slept like babies.
Chapter 46
S oft thuds rapped on the roof and walls. I watched the drops run down the outside. I felt proud of myself, and of our shelter. I lay in my sleeping bag listening for a while, then Harry and I went out.
The ground outside was like an ice-rink. Heather and bracken poked through the slush and the red bark of the pines glistened in the early sunlight. We walked about two or three miles, actually on the road this time, till we came to a bridge. A river crashed under it on its way to the loch and we decided to follow it upstream. It had no path so we made our way up as best and as safe as we could. We reached a gorge and carried on up one of the cliff walls, soon reaching a spectacular sixty-foot drop. Beyond that, the gorge narrowed, and white rapids screamed down huge waterfalls. On the opposite cliff, three gravity-defying trees were bent ninety degrees over the angry water as it thrashed beneath, as if the water was a shark and the trees were goading it.
We found a safe passage down through a gulley and came to the water’s edge, clambering along it towards another ferocious waterfall. At its side, the current had
gotten stuck between the curve of two rocks, and a black whirlpool churned away. We stopped and dangled in our bare legs, the jacuzzi-like current massaging my calves while we watched the stunning fall tumbling down and sending its own thin mist up into the air. We held onto the rocky sides and lowered in for a bath. I laughed at Harry’s increased cautiousness. I just did the same thing as before- controlling my breathing, telling myself it wasn’t cold. It was a lot easier this time. The warming sun above the trees helped. I washed myself all over and dipped my head and we got out and threw on our clothes.
“Aw, it feels amazing!” Harry shrieked, “I can’t remember ever feeling so free. Look at those vines!”
I raised my eyes to the green, rope-like ivy dangling thirty feet above us. Harry yanked on a piece and it snapped off. He tossed it into the river and it writhed like a snake. We climbed back up the cliff and slow-jogged down the hill. “Aw, man, everyone should do that!” I shouted. “It’s free. It’s fun. They should recommend that on the NHS!”
“Ah, but the economy would suffer! Unless the pharmaceutical industry could buy all the water supplies.” Harry morphed into a Southern English news announcer, “Disaster as GlaxoSmithKleine see their hundreds of millions pill income lost overnight, as people realise, What the fuck are we doing? We can make ourselves happy!”
I laughed. “Is that how much it is, in only a year?!” I said.
“Yeah. In America it’s worse. It’s billions a year there. They wiped out the highlanders and lowlanders here, the Indians in America. All for PROGRESS! and a BETTER WAY OF LIFE!” he raised his voice again in that posh, clipped English accent. He sounded a bit like Sanders, “JOIN PROGRESSION! JOIN CIVILIZATION! NEVER MIND THAT HALF OF THE POPULATION ARE ON HAPPY PILLS TO KEEP THEMSELVES SANE!”
We jogged, embraced by our happiness, slipping in the snow and rolling and landing on our asses as we went down the slope. Back at the bridge, I looked both ways on the road and there were still no other footprints but ours. The other side of the loch was empty too. As we treaded the road, I thought how we looked at the start of our journey, compared to now, - Harry’s long brown curls gone, my red hair dyed. I thought back on having to steal those clothes from that washing line, then sleeping in the stick shelter we made, and being woken up by the fat landowner. The night at the park with the drunk kids, sleeping amongst the gorse bushes. Then Gary’s in Glasgow, and the stone cottage, and now, here. We had done bloody well. And now we were free. It was highly unlikely we would get caught. A couple more weeks and we’d maybe even be forgotten.