by Rachel Joyce
So expansive was the land, and so small was he, that when he glanced back, trying to gauge the distance he had travelled, it seemed as if he had not advanced at all. His feet fell on exactly the same place where he had lifted them. He looked at the peaks on the horizon, the waves of turf, the boulders of rock; the grey houses tucked among them were so small, so temporary, it was a wonder they stayed up. We hang on by so little, he thought, and felt the full despair of knowing that.
Harold walked under the heat of the sun, the pelting of the rain, and the blue cold of the moon, but he no longer knew how far he had come. He sat beneath a hard night sky, alive with stars, and watched as his hands turned purple. He knew he should lift his hands, guide them to his mouth and blow on the knuckles, but the idea of flexing one set of muscles and then another was too much. He couldn’t remember which muscles served which limbs. He couldn’t remember how it would help. It was easier simply to sit, absorbed in the night and the nothing that was all around him. It was easier to give up than keep moving.
Late one night, Harold rang Maureen from a phone box. He reversed the charges as normal, and when he heard her voice, he said, ‘I can’t do it. I can’t finish.’
She said nothing. He wondered if she had thought better of missing him. Or maybe she had been asleep.
‘I can’t do it, Maureen,’ he repeated.
She gave a gulp down the telephone. ‘Harold, where are you?’
He looked at the outside world. Traffic shot past. There were lights, and people hurrying home. A billboard advertised a television programme, coming this autumn, and showed a giant-sized policewoman smiling. Beyond stood all the darkness that lay between himself and wherever he was going. ‘I don’t know where I am.’
‘Do you know where you’ve come from?’
‘No.’
‘The name of a village?’
‘I don’t know. I think I stopped seeing things quite a while ago.’
‘I see,’ she said, in a way that sounded as if she saw other things too.
He swallowed hard. ‘Wherever I am now might be the Gateway to the Cheviot Hills. Something like that. I maybe noticed a sign. But maybe that was a few days ago. There have been hills. And gorse too. A lot of bracken.’ He heard a sharp intake of breath, and then another. He could picture her face; the way her mouth worked open and shut when she was thinking. He said again, ‘I want to come home, Maureen. You were right. I can’t do it. I don’t want to.’
At last her voice came. It sounded slow and careful, as if she were reining in words. ‘Harold, I’m going to try and work out where you are and what to do. I want you to give me half an hour. Can you do that?’ He pressed his forehead on the glass, savouring the sound of her. ‘Can you phone me back?’
He nodded. He forgot she couldn’t see.
‘Harold?’ she called as if he needed reminding who he was. ‘Harold, are you there?’
‘I’m listening.’
‘Give me half an hour. That’s all.’
He tried to walk the streets of the town, so that time would pass more quickly. There were people queuing outside a fish and chip shop, and a man being sick in the gutter. The further he strayed from the phone box, the more afraid he became, as if the safe part of himself still remained there, waiting for Maureen. The hills were terrible deep giants impinging on the night sky. A gang of young men were striding into the road, shouting at cars and throwing beer cans. Harold cowered in the shadows, afraid of being seen. He was going home, and he didn’t know how he would tell people that he didn’t make it, but it didn’t matter. It was an insane idea, and he needed to stop. If he wrote another letter, Queenie would understand.
He phoned Maureen and reversed the charges. ‘It’s me again.’
She didn’t reply. She gave a gulping noise. He had to say, ‘It’s Harold.’
‘Yes.’ She gulped again.
‘Shall I phone later?’
‘No.’ She paused and then she said slowly, ‘Rex is here. We’ve looked at the map. We made a few calls. He has been on his computer. We even got out your Motorist’s Guide to Great Britain.’ She still sounded not right. Her words came light against his ear, as if she had run a long way and was struggling to settle her breath. Harold had to press the phone against his ear to hear her properly.
‘Will you say hello to Rex?’
At this she gave a laugh, a short fluttery one. ‘He says hello too.’ There followed more strange swallowing noises; like hiccups but smaller. Then: ‘Rex thinks you must be in Wooler.’
‘Wooler?’
‘Does that sound right?’
‘I don’t know. It’s all beginning to sound the same.’
‘We think you must have taken a wrong turn.’ He was about to say he had taken many but it was too much effort. ‘There’s a hotel called the Black Swan. I think it sounds nice, and so does Rex. I have booked you a room, Harold. They know to expect you.’
‘But you’re forgetting I have no money. And I must look terrible.’
‘I paid over the phone by card. And it doesn’t matter how you look.’
‘When will you be here? Will Rex come too?’ He paused at the end of both questions, but Maureen’s voice gave nothing. He even wondered if she had put the phone down. ‘You are coming?’ he said, his blood warming with panic.
She hadn’t gone. He heard her sucking in a long breath, as if she had burnt her hand. Suddenly her voice shot out so loud and fast it hurt his ear. He had to hold the handset slightly away. ‘Queenie is still alive, Harold. You asked for her to wait and you see, she is waiting. Rex and I checked the weather forecast and they have slapped happy sun shapes all over the United Kingdom. You’ll feel better in the morning.’
‘Maureen?’ She was his last chance. ‘I can’t do it. I was wrong.’
She didn’t hear, or if she heard she wouldn’t allow the gravity of what he was saying. Her voice kept coming at him, rising in pitch: ‘Keep walking. It’s only sixteen more miles to Berwick. You can do it, Harold. Remember to stay on the B6525.’
He didn’t know how to say what he was feeling after that, so he hung up.
As Maureen had told him to, Harold checked into the hotel. He couldn’t look at the receptionist or the young porter who insisted on leading him to his room and opening the door on his behalf. The chap drew the curtains over the windows, and showed him how to change the air conditioning, and where he would find the en-suite bathroom, as well as the minibar and Corby trouser press. Harold nodded but he didn’t see. The air felt chilled and hard.
‘Can I fetch you a drink, sir?’ asked the porter.
Harold could not explain about himself and alcohol. He merely turned away. With the porter gone, he lay fully clothed on the bed, and all he could think was that he did not want to keep going. He slept briefly, and woke with a start. Martina’s partner’s compass. He groped his hand in his trouser pocket, and pulled it out and tried the other. The compass wasn’t there. It wasn’t in the bed, or on the floor. It wasn’t even in the lift. He must have left it in the phone box.
The porter unbolted the main doors, and promised to wait. Harold ran so hard that his breath cut into the cavities of his chest like blows. He swung open the door of the kiosk, but the compass had gone.
Maybe it was the shock of being once more inside a room, and lying on a bed with clean sheets and soft pillows, but that night Harold started to cry. He couldn’t believe he had been so foolish as to lose Martina’s compass. He tried to tell himself it was only a thing. She would understand. But all he could feel was the loss of its weight from his pocket, so vast its absence amounted to a presence. He feared that in mislaying the compass, he had also lost an essential, steadying part of himself. Even when he briefly slipped into something that was like unconsciousness, his head swarmed with images. He saw the man from Bath in the dress, with his punched eye. He saw the oncologist staring at Queenie’s letter, and the woman who loved Jane Austen talking into mid-air. There was the cycling mother with her scarred a
rms; he asked himself again why a person would do that. He curled into the pillow and dreamed of the silver-haired gentleman, who travelled by train to see the boy with trainers. He saw Martina waiting for the man who was never going to return. And what about the waitress who would never leave South Brent? And Wilf? And Kate too? All those people, searching for happiness. He woke crying, and continued to cry all day as he walked.
Maureen received a postcard with a picture of the Cheviots, bearing no stamp. The message read, Weather good. H. x. There was another postcard the following day, showing Hadrian’s Wall, but this had no message.
The cards came every day; sometimes there were several. He wrote the briefest messages: Rain. Not good. Walking. I miss you. Once he drew a hill shape. Another time a squiggly w that was possibly a bird. Often the cards were blank. She asked the postman to look out for them at the sorting office; she would pay the extra charges. The messages were more precious than love letters, she said.
Harold did not ring again. She waited in every night, but to no avail. It tortured her that she had let him go, when he needed her help. She had booked the hotel and spoken to Harold through tears. But she and Rex had talked it over and over; if he gave up when he was so close to arriving, he would regret it for the rest of his life.
Early July had brought winds and heavy rain. Her bamboo stakes tilted at a drunken angle towards the ground, and the tips of her bean plants groped their blind passage into air. Harold’s postcards continued to arrive, but they no longer mapped a steady northward path. There was one from Kelso, but by her reckoning that was twenty-three miles west of where he should be. Another came from Eccles, and also Coldstream; again too far west of Berwick. Almost every hour, she resolved to ring the police, only to realize as she lifted the phone that it was not her place to stop Harold when he must surely arrive any day.
She rarely slept a full night. She feared that by giving in to unconsciousness, she surrendered her one contact with her husband, and might lose him altogether. She sat outside on a patio chair beneath the stars, keeping vigil for the man who somewhere very far away was sheltering under that same sky. Now and again, Rex brought her tea in the early morning, and a travel blanket from his car. They watched the night lose its darkness, and the pearl light of dawn, without speaking or moving.
More than anything, Maureen wanted Harold home.
26
Harold and the Café
THE LAST STRETCH was the worst. All Harold could see was road. He had no thoughts. The earlier damage to his right leg had flared up again, and caused him to limp. There was no pleasure to be had; he was in a place where it did not exist. Flies swarmed in a cloud round his head. Sometimes there were bites. Maybe stings. The fields were immense and empty, and the cars were drawn along the roads like toys. Another peak. Another sky. Another mile. It was all the same. It both bored and overwhelmed him to the point of surrender. He often forgot where he was heading.
Without love, nothing had – what? What was the word for it? He couldn’t remember. He thought it began with a v, and he wanted to say vulva, but that surely wasn’t right. Nothing could be made to matter very much. The blackness crept from the sky. The rain slashed his skin. The winds blew so hard he struggled to keep his balance. He fell asleep wet, and woke wet. He would never know again what it was to be warm.
The nightmare pictures Harold thought he had left behind were back, and there was no escaping them. Awake or asleep, he relived the past, and felt the fresh horror of it. He saw himself flailing with an axe at the wooden planks of his garden shed, his hands ripped and full of splinters, his head swinging with whisky. He saw his fists sprouting blood over thousands of coloured glass pins. He heard himself praying, eyes screwed up, hands clenched, and the words meaning nothing. Other times, he saw Maureen turn her back on him and disappear into a dazzling ball of light. The twenty years that had passed were shorn away. There was no hiding behind the ordinary or even the cliché. Like the detail in the land, these things no longer existed.
No one could imagine such loneliness. He shouted once but no sound came back. He felt the cold deep inside him, as if even his bones were freezing over. He closed his eyes to sleep, convinced he would not survive, and having no will to fight that. When he woke, and felt the stiffness of his clothes cutting his skin, and his face burnt with the sun, or maybe the cold, he got up and plodded on.
A bulging in his shoes made a rip at the seam and the soles were thin as fabric. His toes would be through the leather at any moment. He bound them with the roll of blue duct tape, round and round and round, crossing underneath the foot and up over towards the ankle, so that the shoe was a part of himself. Or was it the other way round? He was beginning to believe they had a will of their own.
On, on, on. These were the only words. He didn’t know whether they were ones he cried out, or words in his mind; or whether someone else was calling them. He thought he might be the only person left in the world. There was no more than the road. He was no more than a body that housed a walk. He was blue-duct-tape feet and Berwick-upon-Tweed.
At three thirty on a Tuesday afternoon Harold smelt salt in the wind. An hour later he reached the brow of a hill and saw a town lying before him, fringed by the endless gap that was the sea. He approached the pinkish-grey town walls but no one stopped, or looked twice, or offered him food.
Eighty-seven days after setting out to post a letter, Harold Fry arrived at the gates of St Bernadine’s Hospice. Including mistakes and diversions, his journey had amounted to six hundred and twenty-seven miles. The building before him was modern and unassuming, flanked by trembling trees. There was an old-fashioned street lamp close to the main entrance, and a sign pointing to a car park. Several bodies sat in deck chairs on the lawn, like clothes set out to dry. A seagull wheeled and barked overhead.
Harold walked the soft curve of the tarmac drive and lifted his finger to the buzzer. He wished the moment would hold itself, like an image cut out of time, his dark finger against the white button, the sun on his shoulders, the seagull laughing. His journey was over.
Harold’s mind fled back over the miles that had brought him to this place. He saw roads, hills, houses, fences, shopping centres, streetlights and post boxes, and there was nothing extraordinary about any of them. They were simply things he had passed; that anyone might have passed. The thought filled him with sudden anguish, and he was afraid at the point where he had least expected to feel anything other than triumph. How did he ever believe that those very commonplace things would add up to something more? His finger remained, suspended over the buzzer but not pressing it. What had it all been about?
He thought of the people who had helped him. He thought of the unwanted, the unloved; he numbered himself among them. And then he considered what must follow from here. He would give his presents to Queenie, and thank her; but then what? He would return to the old life he had almost forgotten, where people staked trinkets between themselves and the outside world. Where he lay in one bedroom, not sleeping, and Maureen lay in another.
Harold replaced his rucksack on his shoulder and turned from the hospice. As he left the gates the figures lying in deck chairs did not look up. No one was expecting him and so no one appeared to notice his arrival or his departure. The most extraordinary moment of Harold’s life had come and gone without trace.
In a small café, Harold asked a waitress for a glass of water, and use of the bathroom. He apologized that he had no money. He waited patiently as the waitress’s eye took in his tangled hair, his ripped jacket and tie, and travelled down the length of his mud-soaked trousers, to land on his feet that were more blue duct tape than yachting shoe. Her mouth frowned and she glanced over her shoulder towards an older woman in a grey jacket who was talking to customers. This second woman was clearly the more senior. The waitress said, ‘You’d better be quick then.’ She ushered him towards a door, without touching any part of him.
In the mirror, Harold met a face he only dimly knew. The skin hung i
n dark folds, as if there was too much of it for the bone behind. He appeared to have several cuts to the forehead and cheekbone. His hair and beard were wilder than he expected, and from his eyebrows and nostrils shot stray long hairs like wires. He was a joke old man. A misfit. He looked nothing like the man who had set off with a letter. He looked nothing like the man who had posed for photographs and worn a pilgrim T-shirt.
The waitress provided water in a disposable cup but did not invite him to sit. He asked if anyone might lend him a razor or a comb, but the manageress in the grey jacket came swiftly over and pointed to the sign at the window: NO BEGGING. She asked him to leave, or she would have to call the police. No one looked up as he moved to the door. He wondered if he smelt bad. He had been outside so long he had for gotten which smells were good and which were not. He knew people were embarrassed on his behalf, and wished to spare them that.
At a table beside the window, a young man and his wife crooned over their baby. There rose such pain inside Harold, he didn’t know how he would keep upright.
He turned to the manageress and the teashop people and he met them face on. He said, ‘I want my son.’
Speaking the words sent his body shaking; not with a gentle shiver but a spasmic shudder that came from deep inside. His face twisted as grief tore through his chest muscles and swelled its passage up his throat.
‘Where is he?’ said the manageress.
Harold squeezed his hands to keep himself from falling.
The manageress said, ‘Do you see your son here? Is he in Berwick?’
A customer put his hand on Harold’s arm. He said more gently, ‘Excuse me, sir. Are you the man who was walking?’
Harold gasped. It was the kindness of the man that unpicked him.
‘My wife and I read about what you did. We had a friend we had lost touch with. Last weekend we went to visit. We spoke of you.’