by Sarah Moss
* * *
Round the little headland, the track rougher, stones larger, footwork. She’d be able to see up the valley into the mountains, here, if it weren’t for the cloud. There’s the old stone barn in the clearing, by the remains of the house; the family must have built the barn better than the house, hundreds of years ago, whenever it was. People used to live all along here, there are the ruins of cottages and byres scattered the length of the path. Farming, she supposes, probably some fishing, but also haphazard little quarries. Whatever it took to get by, just like home, but harder; colder, dirtier, less comfortable. She licks water from the hair dripping onto her face and the vest’s dark with wet, maybe she’ll just take it off and after all women do run in crop tops, don’t they, and she’s in as good a shape as any, visible abs in her forties after two kids, but still, a woman of her age, though maybe she should take everything off, the whole lot bar the shoes and the expensive socks, that’d see off any baddies in the trees, a middle-aged woman with an old-fashioned bush maintaining 12k an hour. Well, nearly that, anyway, sometimes. Not that she measures, not that she cares. If Steve doesn’t like it, if he’s been watching porn and seen the alternatives, he’s more sense than to say so. They should again soon, really, never mind the thinness of the bathroom walls, must have been two weeks, three – four? – and even when she doesn’t feel like it, it seems to be good for them, like oiling your bike chain, doesn’t have to be fun but it stops things falling apart.
* * *
The cloud eddies across the trail in front of her. Uphill, careful, loose gravel. Faster, not far to the top now, get some cardio done. Pain flickers in her knee, one of those things, and the mist is thinning, she can see it lying under her running feet, filling the loch and the valley. It’s not clear up here, still raining, no blue sky or anything like that, she can’t even see the other side of the water but who’d want that view, it’s just a stream of cars and lorries and coaches heading for the Highlands, every pair of wellies, every tin of shortbread, every English family who’ve convinced themselves that the south coast is crowded and expensive and the glory of Scotland’s landscape makes up for the weather, squeezing down this one road to be pushed out into the mountains and coasts at the other end, who wants to look at that? That’s why she chose the holiday park on this side. You should get a different kind of person here, Justine’s kind of person, those who don’t need fried food and warm sweet milky drinks always on demand, gift shops and public toilets, people who want to get out of their cars, who aren’t scared of weather, whose idea of fun involves using their own two feet to get away from all that. Or at least that’s what you’d think; as far as she can see quite a few of the other people don’t leave their cabins at all except in their cars, must be spending hours going up and down the road every day, no wonder it’s not safe to let the kids ride their bikes.
* * *
Flat between the trees, roots veining the path, straight through the puddles now, can’t get any wetter. There’ll be hikers out soon, the ones walking the whole trail under huge rucksacks and their calves bared to the ticks which isn’t clever, not around here, doomed by hostel bookings to finish the day’s distance whatever the weather. She could run the whole trail, she thinks, she’d like to do that, but not with one of those bags. She’d like to run from Penzance to John o’ Groats, from Paris to Vienna. Well, maybe not over the mountains but you can go round, can’t you, up the Danube or something? She could probably handle a few passes, anyway, anything people can cycle Justine can run. She’d like to run from San Francisco to Vancouver, not that she wouldn’t miss the kids.
* * *
Behind the music, the sounds around her change. A wind strokes the hillside, disturbs the trees, lifts the rain sideways into her face. Go on then, rain on me.
* * *
She thinks of the blood pulsing on one side of her skin and rain on the other, the thin membrane so easily opened, of the threads of blood in water. She had a waterbirth with Eddie, felt the baby’s waters go into her own pool, Russian dolls of membrane and fluid. Leaves flutter in the wind and rain, the valves of her heart flicker, currents of water move in the loch below her running feet and rain filters through earth where the roots of oak and beech reach deeper, spread wider, than the trees’ height. There are waterways through the soil, aren’t there, trickles and seeping, and the branching streams within her body, the aortic river and the tributaries flowing from fingers and toes, keeping her going. Faster, then. Faster. The wind is lifting the mist, making a space for her between the rocky trail and the low sky. Breathing room, steady now. She can feel her core muscles responding, her belly and her backside holding her, letting thighs and calves and the unthought muscles and tendons of ankles and feet stretch and hold, lift off and land. She could go on for ever, easier than turning back, but she must turn, must make breakfast and see that the kids brush their teeth and create the day for them, not yet, a few more minutes, just up there to where the path levels, broadens, where if you could see today she’d be able to see miles, down the loch towards the town and the station and up the Ben with the whole Highlands peering over its shoulder, leaning south. Breathing room, damp and oak and pine and her feet finding their way, rain and sweat in her eyes, she’ll remember this later in the year when she’s running by orange street light under a brown sky, keeping an eye out for dog poo, she’ll remember how she could have kept going.
* * *
The track turns and runs back under the trees, rivulets carrying soil and sand towards the loch, patterns of sediment like ripples on a beach. Not much point going down just to turn round and come up again, she could turn here. It’s not that she minds hills, not when they happen to be where she’s going, but she doesn’t go looking for them, doesn’t do training, intervals and hill reps, doesn’t join the running club, doesn’t race against anyone but herself. But you could probably run a marathon, Vicky tells her, Vicky who starts Couch to 5K every six months and gives up because she’s too busy or there’s weather or she doesn’t like being out in the dark. Of course Justine could run a marathon, she does the odd 25-miler just to show that she can and it’s not hard, you run and keep running until the end, but she doesn’t see why she should, just because some bloke in Ancient Greece was too excited to find a horse or a chariot or whatever people normally used when they wanted to go faster than they could walk. Women run marathons for sure and good luck to them, but it seems to her such a blokey thing, 26 point whatever miles and all that chatter about minutes and seconds and splits and Personal Bests, are we not measured and recorded and found wanting often enough already these days? Why not just run?
* * *
Oh well, she’s down the hill now, may as well keep going a bit, just a few more minutes, they’ll probably all still be asleep when she gets back anyway, though maybe Steve in his dressing gown, picking at his feet and doing the crossword from last weekend’s paper which is pointless but harmless – the crossword, not the picking, the picking makes Steve much more likely to have his scratching fingers bashed with some handy domestic implement, with the iron or the big orange pan, than he seems to understand. It doesn’t change anything, does it, doing a puzzle, you don’t learn anything or make anything. It’s exercise for the brain, Steve says, stops you getting dementia, running doesn’t change anything either, you have your hobby and I’ll have mine. Anyway it’s a bit weird, he says, the amount you run, it’s not normal, you do know that, you’re addicted. Fuck off, she says, yes I do know it’s not normal, normal is sitting on the sofa pushing cake into your face and complaining about your weight until you get type-two diabetes and they have to cut your feet off and then you die, no thanks. And she’s out and back before the kids are up, isn’t she, and if it keeps her fit and well into old age he should be grateful, she knows who’ll be looking after whom.
* * *
She must turn back. She can hear her children turning in their beds, scent their morning breath, feel on her fingers the roughness of their uncomb
ed hair. There’ll be small bare feet on that carpet, small morning erections in dinosaur pyjamas. She’ll just go to that bay ahead, where the loch laps boulders and tree-roots under the fog, a tenderness between water and land that’s almost a beach, and she’ll pause there, a moment’s triumph before she turns back.
* * *
And she does pause and she does rest, inhales the morning through the rain, is still, lets water drip from her hair and her top. Here she is, under this mountain, beside this loch. Here, now.
* * *
She sets off again before her muscles cool, before the body’s equations change again, back up the hill, under the trees, along the shore. There is a hiker, and another two, mummified in waterproof coats and trousers and gaiters, their rucksacks wrapped in tarpaulin. Just run, she thinks, take it all off and run, and she’s at the top of the hill above the car park when it happens again. Does it feel like a fish in your chest, the doctor said, patients often say it’s like a fish flopping. A bit, she’d said, watching him hold the probe on the bones above her breast the way they’d held it on her belly for the babies, thinking more like a bird, really, a flutter, a brush, nothing to worry about, nothing worth bothering the doctor for if she hadn’t collapsed at the top of the stairs at work. Turned out to be nothing, she said later, to Steve and to HR and to her mum, after the ambulance and the oxygen and the ECG. Nothing at all, I’d run that morning and not got round to breakfast, I’ve always been a fainter, remember when I was carrying Noah? No reason to stop running, one funny turn.
* * *
It’s more than a wingbeat this time, as she splashes through the brown puddle that now covers the whole width of the path. More, she thinks, grinning at the menagerie now imagined in her ribcage, at the entire damn food chain gathered in the chambers of her heart, more like a small mammal, something with hurrying feet. Smaller than a hare. A vole, doctor there’s a vole in my upper ventricle. One of these days, she thinks, one of these days, girl, and she pulls off her wet vest, balls it in her hand, picks up the pace, races bare-bellied in the rain past the tent and through the trees and around the barriers at the top of the holiday park, past the bicycles and the blue gas cylinders and the limp laundry and the old man sitting again at his open French windows with a cup of tea. Safety first, the consultant said, there in an overheated pink room with the machines resting between patients, we must think of your kids, they need their mum, don’t they, I’m afraid I must say there’s to be no more running. And if you really won’t take my advice at the very least don’t go far, don’t push yourself, don’t ever run alone.
* * *
But what’s another person supposed to do, if her heart stops? How would it help, to have a witness?
the days of the first plants
Here is the Highland Boundary Fault, 420 million years ago the dividing line between mountains and plains, when the rocks that are now Scotland lay south of the equator. The sandstone to the south was made by seasonal rivers carrying sand and pebbles down from the mountains in the days of the first plants.
* * *
Was that water brown with the sediment, did it foam?
* * *
Have the sounds of rivers changed in all those millennia?
* * *
What was the riverbed, before the bedrock?
* * *
The land under our feet, far under our feet, beneath our buildings, roads, pipes, subway systems, mines and even our fracking; under the valleys, the deepest lakes and the abysses of the ocean floor, is always shifting, forming, changing state. We write on the surface but the surface moves.
* * *
Here: to the north, the Dalradian Supergroup, ancient Precambrian metamorphic rock.
* * *
To the south, Devonian sedimentary rock, early and late, imprinted by the bodies of primitive plants.
* * *
In the beginning was earth and fire. Was there here, then? Was Scotland?
* * *
Should the history of bedrock comfort us, in geological time?
the opposite of dancing
ALL THOSE YEARS of getting up and leaving the house before anyone else was awake, David knows how to leave so no one hears. He’d leave his best self haunting its rightful place beside her while his sneaking self, his doctor self, slithered down the stairs and into the kitchen, eased the door shut and didn’t turn the radio on – though he’d have liked the news – while he made coffee and toast, read the day’s allotted portion of the weekend paper. Earl Grey in the tea-strainer with the dodgy clasp, dash of milk in the china mug with the violets on it he gave her years ago, not too full because the last thing he did before putting on his shoes and jacket, picking up his briefcase and leaving, was to go back upstairs with the tea and say, Mary, Mary love, I’m off, have a good day. It had to do a fair bit of work, that cup of tea: when the kids were small he’d go days without seeing them awake and there weren’t always weekends either. Now he makes the tea when she wakes and not before.
* * *
It’s harder in the lodge than at home, to leave her in peace, but he’s had enough practice, and if he sometimes suspects she’s faking her sleep, just doesn’t want to deal with him and the day quite yet, is hoping to pick up her book for a few minutes once he’s out of the way, he doesn’t say so. Isn’t that what he’s after too, a stolen hour’s solitude? There are moments in his retirement that seem to be the opposite of dancing, a daily game of hide and seek in which the unspeakable objective is to avoid the beloved. He pushes down the plunger on the cafetière – it’s not worth having a proper coffee machine here – and carries it and an inelegantly large earthenware mug to the table by his chair. He wrestles with the lock, slides back the French window, lets in the day. It’s cold, she’ll say, can we shut that door, meaning why did you open it, you know I don’t like a draught, but for now he can sit here and feel that he is both indoors and out, breathing wind and weather from a nice velvet armchair with his coffee. He pours, from higher than necessary, admires the shape of the falling liquid and the steam curling from it, an indoor imitation of the mist between the trees. The scent rises, a blend he chose as his favourite after working his way along the shelf in the new deli by the station at home – good sign, that shop opening, property prices holding up – and now buys in small bags, freshly roasted.
You have to expect rain here but not usually like this. Raining stair rods, his dad would have said. There’ll be flooding down the road at this rate. It’s not Scottish rain, more tropical, not that he’s been or ever wanted to go anywhere tropical, insects and parasites, gastroenteritis, Melissa back from that trip exactly as he predicted, sunburnt and underweight and running a mysterious fever. It’ll surely ease off later, the weather. It was always the saving grace of being here when the children were young, the one thing you knew about the weather was that it wouldn’t last. There’d be a dry patch most days, and if there wasn’t, that was what the rain-suits and wellies were for, and in later years the wetsuits and kayaks. His kayak is still under the veranda, resting in the long grass. Might have squirrels nesting in it, but he could get it out if he wanted to, that plastic stuff doesn’t rot or corrode, though he hasn’t seen the life jackets for years. They probably don’t deteriorate either, don’t they wash up on beaches years and years later, along with trainers and plastic bottles? He takes another sip, and there’s that lass renting what was the Pollocks’ place running as if from a bear. Taken her top off, surely she must be cold and really, at her age – he used to have to have a chaperone, sometimes, to examine women wearing more than that, once the Indians started moving out to the suburbs. You’d be surprised, what’s often under those burqas and veils and what-have-you, no wonder they get self-conscious. He leans forward to check there really isn’t anyone after the lass though he knows she goes jogging most days. He’d not have liked Mary doing that, out on her own at all hours in that Lycra, especially with the things in her ears, wouldn’t even know if someone was coming up behind
her, and what about her children, who looks after them while she’s wearing out her joints, pounding down that hill in her underwear? She looks to be laughing as she runs, not even paying attention to where she is, as if the loch and the hills are no more than a giant gym. The park’s not what it used to be when they bought the cabin, doesn’t attract the same kind of person. They bought it off-plan, while there were still trees tall in the airspace now occupied by the lodges. You do realise, Mary said, we just spent half your dad’s legacy on a drawing of something that doesn’t even exist yet? But the old man would have liked it, his son the doctor with a house in Bearsden and a lodge in the Trossachs, kids at the good schools. Still, they should probably have seen what was coming, sold up when Duncan and Maggie left, it wasn’t the same after that even while the Pollocks hung on. They did have parties, back in the day, he’ll admit that, of course they did. Summer nights, bonfire on the beach, sausages on sticks, a swirl of children up too late and the grown-ups sitting on the shore until dusk became dawn. Hogmanay, even, when there wasn’t too much snow to get cars up the road and sometimes when there was, one winter he remembers Mary and the kids getting out and standing under the trees while he gunned that old red Ford up the hill and made it too. But that was different, everyone got together, it wasn’t just one lot keeping everyone else up all night and in the early days the music was real, Duncan on his fiddle and there was a piper, wasn’t there, could there have been? He’s sure he remembers a piper, at least once or twice, hearing it the way it should be, over the water. Even five or ten years ago, you’d never had anything like those Romanians these last two nights, the odd French or German plates on a car in summer but the folk renting knew how to behave. And there weren’t all the cyclists and horrible jet skis like amplified mosquitoes and the fell-runners in the skin-tight neon. Not that they didn’t use to climb the hills themselves, even must be two years ago now, three maybe, up the Ben when Marcus came for the weekend and there was blazing sun and brave folk swimming all along the shore, but hill-walking’s not running, there’s time to look and listen. Wild flowers, birdsong, Mary usually knew the names. He could still make it up there, for sure. Well, probably. Who’d want to try, in this weather? More coffee.