by Raynor Winn
I couldn’t accept it. At the first crack of light through the window I picked the phone up.
‘I don’t care how tired you are – get up. You have to walk; you have to move. Just get outside and move.’
‘But I can’t. I feel like shit.’
‘I don’t care. Get up.’ I put the phone down and went into the corridor for another tiny tea from the machine, then picked the phone up again.
‘You’re still in bed; I know you are. Get up – you have to. Please just get up.’ There had to be a connection, a physical, chemical, biological reason why he’d improved when we walked. Whatever it was, we had to look for a way to replicate that effect. If we couldn’t find a way, we’d have to put on our rucksacks and walk again, indefinitely. He was on the slide to the bottom of CBD, with no twists or turns to slow his descent; we had to find a way. ‘Moth, put your boots on. I don’t care how you feel; you have to keep fighting. Just get up and try. Please try …’
We were walking the first time we’d realized that Moth had some kind of problem. Our twenty-fifth wedding anniversary. No big celebration, no noise or commotion, we hadn’t even told the kids which anniversary it was. It was a day just for us to be together, but we still felt we should do something to mark the moment.
‘Do you fancy walking up Tryfan? We’ve always wanted to but never given ourselves the time. Let’s do it today.’
Tryfan is a sharp ridge of a mountain in Snowdonia, tricky to get to from any side, and more of a scramble than a walk to get to the top. But it pointed out from the Glyderau hills, in a definitive, memorable way that somehow seemed to fit the day.
‘Okay, today then.’
Leaving the van by the YHA building at the foot of the mountain, we began our walk, climbing easily up the rocky steps from the tea hut. The air was clear and early-summer warm, skylarks hanging over the heather bogs with their clear, unmistakable song of the sky. The towering arc of the Cwm Idwal cliffs lay ahead with the lake at their base reflecting bright sparks of sunlight. We weren’t drawn in to follow the path that runs a pinball route beneath the rock walls, but branched away left, following a line across the rocky flank of the hillside, past the fast-falling stream to its source at Llyn Bochlwyd. We stopped to eat, drinking the tea from the flask and feeling the ache of legs that had been away from the hills for too long. Moth put the flask back into the daysack and handed it to me.
‘Can you carry this now? Don’t know what I’ve done to my shoulder, but it’s really aching today, I can’t seem to lift my arm properly.’
‘Isn’t it any better? Do you think it could have come from that fall through the barn roof in April?’
‘Could have, I don’t know – it didn’t seem to hurt at the time though.’
‘Give me the pack then.’
We continued up, rising sharply. Avoiding the eye-watering, knuckle-whitening Bristly Ridge that has rock-scrambling enthusiasts dribbling with excitement, we opted instead to find our own way to the top and began to scramble through a scree of large rocks and boulders towards the summit.
‘I’ve got to stop.’
I thought I’d misheard him – he never said stop; I’m always the one who needs to put the pack down and admire the view. We sat on a rock, the Ogwen Valley stretching away west, a deep groove of dark rock, oozing peat bog and high peaks where only the sheep belong. Multitudes of orange and blue specks were leaving the cars that were beginning to cluster on the roadside.
‘We should carry on. It’s going to get busy up here soon.’
‘Don’t know if I can. I feel dizzy. I can’t look down – I think I’m going to be sick.’
‘What’s wrong? Have you eaten something that hasn’t settled? It was only a cheese sandwich …’
‘No, it’s not that, it’s something else.’
‘What? What is it?’
‘I don’t know. I’ll try; maybe it’ll pass.’
At the top of Tryfan are the Adam and Eve stones. Two column-like boulders that stand vertically on the exposed ridge. To truly say you’ve done Tryfan you have to have leapt over the one-and-a-half-metre gap between the two boulders, and having done so wins you the ‘freedom of Tryfan’, however that presents itself. Our climbing days had faded away when the children were born, when being around for them meant life was too precious to risk on the fickle hold of a climbing aid. We weren’t there to prove anything to anyone, or to have a tale to tell in the pub. That leap represented far more to us: we were there on that day to say yes, yes we’d make that leap of life again together as we had twenty-five years earlier. It was to be our wild, exposed retaking of vows: to each other, to nature, to life. But as Moth retched up his cheese sandwich and sat with his head in his hands at the foot of Adam, it wasn’t to be. Looking at the precipitous fall down the other side of the boulder, I wasn’t sorry.
‘Stupid idea anyway. It’s not as if we’ve anything to prove to each other after all these years.’ I tried to make light of what was one of the rare occasions in his life that his body had failed to do what he asked. ‘Maybe you’ve got vertigo. It’s just middle age creeping up on you.’
‘Don’t joke – I think you’re right. I don’t actually know if I can go back down.’
We sat on the exposed mountain ridge as the light faded and the brightly coloured specks returned to their cars and drove away. The moon rose above the arching eastern skyline, washing the mountain tops in pale waves of light, obscuring the valley below in darkness, highlighted only by the lights of passing cars.
‘I’ll be with you forever, Ray, because it’s where I want to be. Will you do the same?’
‘Of course. Where else would I be? Forever.’
‘But that might not be too long. We’ve got to get off Tryfan in the dark, without a head torch.’
‘Forever it is then, even if that’s just half an hour.’
8. Painless
‘As we don’t know if she’s in pain we have to choose whether or not to give her painkillers.’ The consultant stood outside the dying room tapping the clipboard with his pen. ‘I would err on the side of the likelihood that she is in discomfort, which we have a duty to alleviate, and begin a morphine drip.’
It had been two weeks since the consultant had said Mum would live for two to three days and finally the morphine was here. This was it. Dad had reached this point on his bed in the sitting room of the farmhouse, while Mum made scones for visitors in the kitchen. I knew what it meant: another choice to make, another box to tick to ease her along the path to death. I chose for her; I chose to bring death on a floating cloud of opiate. No more struggling for air, no fighting to cling to a life that was over; these days, hours, moments had to be gentle. An easy goodbye on the warm summer breeze of morphine.
The Macmillan nurse leant across the bed to explain to Mum about the drug; there was no response, other than for a long moment she stared again at the end of the bed. I glanced in the direction of her vision and for the faintest second I thought I saw him there, flat cap pushed back on his head at a strange angle, that funny lopsided grin. Her eyes closed and as I looked again Dad was gone, a hopeful figment of my imagination wishing he’d come for her as I’d asked him to so she wasn’t alone.
Together in that long, quiet night, as the morphine driver filled her veins with stillness and her breathing dropped to a calm and shallow movement of air, my thoughts were full of doubt and fear. The choice I’d made to let her die rather than try for life by inserting the feeding tube was beginning to torment me with a worm of recrimination that couldn’t be buried. And fear. A growing, burning sense of panic, forming itself like a white-hot ball in my stomach. On the Coast Path I thought I’d found a way to come to terms with knowing that Moth would die, to accept it as the hardest part of life. Death had become the ever-present shadow in the corner of our lives, but now I was living through the same death that was predicted for him and I realized that, as much as I thought I’d come to terms with that, there could never be a peaceful acceptanc
e for me; I would be forcing him to fight long after he chose to lie down and let it be. My mind was running in panic through a room of fire with no exit doors.
I dozed fitfully through the night, my face on her cool, dry, unmoving hand, until woken by the faint grey light of morning. I sat back in the chair, straightening my stiff joints, putting my feet up on the bed. The blue covers, silvery in the early light, moved almost imperceptibly with her breath. Her waxy face had taken up the same translucent colour, outlined by light from the window behind. Then a mist. A mist like steam leaving a hot, wet athlete at the end of a long run. Lifting from her body in a gentle rising haze. I didn’t want to drag my eyes away, but glancing around the room I couldn’t see it anywhere else. It was just there, in the outline of her quiet stillness: a slow movement of molecules through time and air, energy from her cooling body passing into the morning, into the flat dull atmosphere of the room. I took a deep, deep breath and held it tight.
Over now, all over now.
I walked slowly back across the estate in the late afternoon as the light began to fade, making my way, as I knew I would, to the darkness of the trees. And now at last, with my fingers pushed into the composted pine needles, I knew why. I finally knew what had driven me to suggest that we should walk across cliffs and beaches, through woods and valleys, sleeping wild, living wild. I could feel it now, cold, gritty, dark. I could feel it pushed beneath my fingernails and dusty in my hair. It was the thing I’d fooled myself into thinking I could live without, the one part of me that my family had understood better than I did. I’d always known what the voice in my head was saying. It was the land, the earth, the deep humming background to my very being. I ran to it when all else fell apart. I needed the safety of being one with the land; the core of me needed that sense of complete belonging as fundamentally as the air I breathed. Without it I would never be whole. It was always the land.
I rearranged the wreaths on the grave as a cold wind blew up from the farm in the hollow below. Walking out of the churchyard, crunching the smooth, round pea gravel beneath my feet, I left them there: my family, my history, all the connections to my past. I got into the van and closed the door on the estate and my childhood, cutting the final tie. Heading south, back to Moth, to our new empty life and the strip of concrete that led to the back of the chapel.
Part Two
* * *
PUSHES THE SEA
Read again my friend, watch how the words bend.
‘come, will you join me in my precision?’,
Anno Birkin
I can hear it,
hear it but not hold it,
feel it but not touch it.
It wraps around me like a breath,
soothing,
cooling
and the voice falls
and becomes a tone
and I’m closer to its source.
And in the breath, a smell,
rich, deep, acidic, wind-blown over dense heath,
through tall seed heads of ripe grass.
And the tone rising, rising, until it’s clear, clean,
sky-lark sharp on racing cirrus clouds
and I can touch the voice,
feel its words
and they’re full and total
and carry the truth
in a stinging cold rain
dried by hot sun.
9. Matter
Quantum physicists would explain the possibility of something coming from nothing by the theory that when matter and antimatter particles come together in a vacuum they cancel each other out; they’re annihilated. But if you change the energy in the vacuum to an electromagnetic field then that annihilation event produces energy, a whole set of new particles which have a mass. I’m no physicist, most of my physics classes at school were spent reading a book under the lab bench or staring out of the window. But having lost just about everything we owned and entered a life that felt like a hollow space in which I was merely existing, then perhaps I was in that vacuum. And yet even in a vacuum it’s possible for the energy to change, almost without warning.
Death wasn’t new to me – I’d known it before – but now the tyranny of its finality returned as if I’d met a complete stranger. I was once again astride the void between life and death where days lost their meaning, overshadowed by the darkness of infinity. Doubt about choices I’d made and fear of those I still had to make, playing on an endless loop of regret and fear. Day on week on month, alone in a bubble of silence as Moth studied and the world went on around me. The only sound was the resonance of the voice in my head, never quiet, hollowing my thoughts into echo chambers of its insistence.
On the cobbled streets of the tiny city of Truro, Cornwall’s county town, a group of homeless people were gathered outside the bank. Sleeping bags on cardboard, clothes worn and dirty, faces showing the harshness of a life spent outdoors in every weather. Never hesitant, Moth stopped to speak to them.
‘All right there? Anything you need?’
I watched him stand and chat casually with the group as if he’d always known them. His strangely lopsided stance was more exaggerated than it had been when we were walking, but otherwise he was the same person who had dropped his rucksack on the floor of the chapel for the first time, his homeless life behind him. Confident in himself, sure of who he was, no reluctance to re-engage with life. When he avoided mentioning having been homeless to his peers at uni, it wasn’t out of fear of their reaction, but because he was so engrossed in the coursework that he couldn’t be bothered with the distraction of having to discuss anything else. Not like me, hiding in the shadows.
‘Just the usual, food and a roof. TV might be good, bored sick of talking to this lot.’
‘Could help you with some food later, not a lot I can do about the rest. Ray?’
I thought about the contents of the fridge, and the small amount of student loan we had left. Pea risotto again.
‘Yeah, no problem, we’ll pop and get you something from the Co-op.’
We headed back to the group with a bag of the food we would have wanted when all we’d eaten for a week was twenty-pence packs of noodles: bread, fruit, cheese and a couple of pasties. An offering to share around. I folded the empty bag and had to ask a question that had been scratching in my head as I sat in the chapel, out of sight of the world.
‘If any of you found a home and you moved in and started living a normal life again, how do you think you’d be? I mean, do you think it would be hard? Not paying the bills and finding a job, not all that practical stuff. But do you think it would be hard to go inside after living outside for so long? And what about other people – do you think you’d find it easy to slip back into normality, that you’d just be able to interact with people in the same way you did before you were homeless?’
Moth looked over at me, half sympathetic, half annoyed.
‘I’ve been in and out of homelessness for a while.’ An older man in a trilby hat, with a brown dog that licked my ankles, seemed to have no hesitation in talking about his feelings. ‘Not in my own place, but I sofa-surf when I get the chance. I like the comfort of inside; I have no problem at all getting out of the rain. But there’s a freedom outside and when I sleep in the woods it feels right. Feels like I belong. Other people though – fuck me, that’s another matter.’
The younger men were laughing at him, mock crying, dabbing their eyes.
‘Shut up, the lot of you. You’re just afraid to say it – you’re the first ones out to the woods and on to the coast, because it’s where you feel right. Feel human. But other people …’
One of the younger ones stopped laughing and looked up.
‘Just taking the rip, mate, we all know it. But people, well, you can’t trust ’em, can you? Even if they seem to be helping, you can’t trust their motives. Feels like someone always wants to know a bit more so they can find an easier way to do you over, move you on. And here, with all the tourists, well, we’re just a fucking eyesore, aren’t we? Everybo
dy wants us gone. How would you get rid of that feeling? Be bloody hard, wouldn’t it? That’s why we all stay hidden. It’s not like in the big towns; in the countryside you can’t sleep on the street, you’ve got to keep out of sight.’
We walked away, Moth’s hand a little tighter around mine. He knew why I felt as I did, he just felt powerless to help me beyond it. Trust. Such a slippery, elusive concept. Like an eel in your hands at the side of the river: release your grip for a second and it’s downstream and out of sight. You may never catch it again.
We bought a copy of the Big Issue from the seller on the corner and headed back to the van with a bag of frozen peas and a pack of rice in our bag.
Winter passed, spring came then warmed into summer as I hid on the exposed cliff tops. Hiding from other people, hiding from myself, where the sea was always in motion and the cry of the herring gulls on the wind unending. Midsummer: the sunset had moved beyond the west and was heading north as I crouched among the rocks near the cliff, watching the badgers scuffle out of their hole and head off into the undergrowth. The nights were so short now the badgers needed to be out before darkness really came, or the sun would return before they’d had enough time to find food. It was too early in the year for ripe fruit, too late for birds’ eggs; they needed all the time the short nights would allow to suck up the hundreds of worms and grubs they needed to eat each day. The sun had finally dipped below the horizon behind me, leaving the sky to the south holding a mirror to the dying light. Pale turquoise blue growing darker by the second, stretched from Bolt Head in the east to Lizard Point in the west, scattered with thin clouds that moments before had been low and white, but now were brightly lit in reflections of pink. Torn ribbons of colour fluttering across the evening sky, a maypole dance of light.