by Raynor Winn
I followed the colours as they receded behind the land, back down into the village, to the darkness of the chapel where Moth was writing up an assignment, and to another sleepless night.
‘You know what you’re doing, don’t you?’
‘No, no, I don’t know at all, that’s why I’m trying to explain it to you. What am I doing?’
‘Can’t you see it? You’ve gone back to how you were as a child, how you were when we met. You’re hiding from the world; you’re back behind the sofa. When you were faced with something or someone new, you hid from it. Afraid to face the world. That’s what you’re doing now.’ Moth delivered his casual psychoanalysis while packing cheese sandwiches and a notebook in his uni bag. But he was right. I had been a shy, introverted child. Always running to hide when a visitor came to the door, happy and confident alone outdoors, but reluctant and afraid when faced with people. Until I met him. As I grew to know him, just the look on his face as I caught his eye across a crowded space was like a hand reaching into the darkness of my hiding place and guiding me out. One look from him and I could walk across a room full of strangers as if I belonged there. But here alone in the chapel I’d lost that sense of strength. He was right: I’d become that reticent child again.
‘I can’t get behind the sofa. It’s too small.’
‘Idiot. You’re hiding behind me, or round here at the back of the chapel. You’ve got to get a grip on this before it takes over. How did you overcome it before?’
‘I met you.’
‘But there was more to it than that. Where have you gone? Where’s the woman that finished walking the Coast Path, strong, determined, forcing me back into life, making me get up each day and keep going? Look for her – I know she’s still there.’ He put the bag down and hugged me and I didn’t want to let him go. Stay here and hold me, I feel safe when you’re here. I slid my arms under his and held him tight. There was less of him; he’d reduced, the strong muscles that had enveloped me in the past seemed to be shrinking. I held his arms and they felt much smaller. How had I not noticed this earlier? Too wrapped up in myself and losing Mum to pay attention. Or had winter and layers of clothes disguised it?
‘Are you losing weight?’
‘Yeah, must be, my jeans are looser. Don’t know how, considering the amount of pea risotto you feed me on. Anyway, I’ve got to go, I’m late already.’
I stood at the front of the chapel and watched him walk up the road. He made slow progress with an unsteady, lopsided gait, and his jeans really were baggy. He was vanishing like sea mist in the heat of the sun. Unnoticed, just quietly evaporating into the morning air. I shut the door on the back of the chapel and curled on the sofa. How had I been so blind? So absorbed in my own self-pity that I hadn’t seen how quickly he was declining?
I needed to know more about CBD, to understand it for myself, not simply accept the morsels of information given by the doctors. Did it really cause muscle wastage, or did Moth need to eat more? Or maybe his body wasn’t digesting his food properly. He’d refused to learn anything about the disease, preferring to accept each day as it came. But I couldn’t do that any more; I had to know everything. I’d spend a little time with Google now, maybe just an hour.
An hour became a morning, as a life-draining, body-twisting disease spread itself out before me in advice sites and chat rooms. The voices of the carers, recounting the lives of their loved ones changed beyond recognition, lives confined to chairs, hoists and straws. The sadness was total. Not once, among all the lines, all the lives, was there a glimmer of light, a word of hope. The day wore on. I switched on the lights and made more tea; late summer but the sun had already finished its short journey across the window of the chapel and disappeared from view. Stories of pain, loss of control, of dementia. I wanted to go back, to take away what I’d seen, to not have looked. But there was no way back. I could see the disease now in all its life-changing horror.
I closed the laptop and opened the door, watching the rain falling in heavy drops, bouncing off the leaves of the ivy wall. So much rain – you’d think the plant would drown in so much water. But I knew that couldn’t happen, the degree Moth was studying in sustainable horticulture had led him to read about the amazing power of plants to control their own responses to the environment, only taking up as much water as they need. Scientific research that showed it would take more than a few days of standing water before the plant’s internal regulatory system was overwhelmed and it did drown. Research. There must be scientific research into CBD.
Hours became a day, which led into days. I helped Moth stand in the early mornings, encouraged him through the difficult first movements, made cheese sandwiches and waved him off down the street. Opened the door when he returned, then made mash, then pasta, then baked potatoes, amazing dishes from a bag of frozen peas and an egg. Student food, paid for with a student loan. And I studied. Finding my way into a rare disease, about which so little seems to be known. As the days became a week, then a second, I followed research into CBD through efforts to find ways to diagnose and then to analyse the progress of the disease, through failed trials with drugs, to dead ends and down rabbit holes. Lost in a maze of research, and still it rained.
Paddy Dillon sat on the shelf, his book still tightly bound with its hair band. In there, somewhere in there, we’d found a way to hold the disease at bay, but how? There had to be a scientific reason for the improvements in his health when we walked; if we could understand why that had happened, then possibly, just maybe, we could replicate it in some way that would allow us to live a life under a roof and be well at the same time. I went back to the beginning, to understand the very start of the disease, to build a picture of it from the base up. So little information; so little knowledge. And I was back down the rabbit hole reading about connected diseases, other lives changed by tau proteins that have lost their form and function. And there, tucked away in research undertaken into a better-known, more widespread disease, I found something, a small nugget, but something. Small data sets, in one or two random pieces of work. They proved very little, but I was grasping for tiny, almost untouchable straws, so I seized the possibility the results represented and leapt around the chapel.
I opened the door to suck up some air. The ivy was dripping, but it had stopped raining. Out in the empty street, I could almost hear the theme tune to a spaghetti western and expected to see tumbleweed rolling by. After hours of staring at a screen, my head ragged from reading around in circles, the empty, soundless streets of autumn in a Cornish village were almost calming. On a normal day I wouldn’t have read the poster on the telegraph pole, even less considered answering the invitation it offered. I would have seen the headline of WI and thought, No, there’s absolutely no chance I’m going to the Women’s Institute, and walked straight by. I certainly wouldn’t have got as far as reading ‘flower-arranging session’ and definitely wouldn’t have thought of going. But this day was far from normal. Buoyed by the success of googling a tiny snippet of hope, I was through the door of the community centre before I had a chance to overthink what I was doing.
The square, clinical space, with its magnolia walls and small raised stage, bustled with old ladies scurrying. Piles of flowers, green oasis and shallow dishes covered the tables that spread out individually across the room.
‘Hello, you’re new.’
‘Yes, I, erm …’
‘Come and join us. We’re creating an arrangement for a side table – you can take it home afterwards. It costs a pound. Sit here.’
The efficient old lady was gone, busying herself with cutting oasis to fit a bowl, and I sat at a table in the middle of the room, watching the organized mayhem around me. What on earth had possessed me to do this? And a pound, what was I thinking of?
‘Well, I don’t know about all this – I can’t arrange flowers, but I guess I’ll just go along with it anyway! Hi, I haven’t seen you before – are you new?’ A small woman of a similar age to me, with curly red hair, sat dow
n at my table.
‘Well, yes, I was just passing and I thought –’
‘That’s how it starts! There’ll be no escape now; the ladies won’t let you go. I come and go from the village, two months here, two months in London, but when I’m here I love it. They just take me over. Every day they have a schedule for me: lunches, dinners, WI, card-playing, you name it. But they’re so easy, there’s no pressure, they just make me feel so included – I love it. I haven’t seen you before – have you just arrived.’
‘No, I’ve been here for quite a while now, but I don’t know anyone …’
‘Or have I seen you up on the Coast Path? Anyway I’m Gillian – call me Gill. Are you any good with flowers?’
‘No, not really.’
Later, walking back to the chapel, self-consciously carrying my scruffy flower arrangement down the street, I tried to work out why I had thought it reasonable to walk into a WI meeting. There was no answer to that, so I went back to googling research.
‘Moth, I have to tell you this – this is so important.’
‘What is that? Looks like you’ve thrown some weeds in a bowl. Why is that important?’
‘Not that, but they’re not weeds, they’re native British flora.’
‘What are you talking about?’
‘Forget the flowers. I’ve been researching CBD, looking for the answer to why you were so well when we were walking, and why you’re deteriorating so quickly now.’
‘I didn’t think you’d noticed. I tried to keep it from you.’
‘How can you hide from me? You’ve never hidden from me. I’m the one that hides.’
‘I know, but I know you’re struggling with being in the village and your mum and everything.’
‘Well, forget that now, this is more important.’ I made tea, sat at the table and explained about an obscure piece of research that had been undertaken with Alzheimer’s patients.
‘But that’s not CBD, so why is it relevant?’
‘Because Alzheimer’s is a tauopathy – different to CBD, yes, but it’s still about the tau protein, so there could just be a similarity.’ I showed him the research and made him read about patients with Alzheimer’s who had undergone endurance training and had miraculously regained some cognitive abilities which doctors had believed were lost forever.
‘Don’t you see, that’s what the path was for us: extreme endurance training. We were walking miles every day, carrying heavy weights on a really restricted diet. It’s the same thing.’
‘Well, maybe …’
‘Think about it, really think about it.’
‘But I’m already doing physio exercises every day, and I walk a couple of miles most days. What are you suggesting? I give up my degree, find another trail and keep walking? Just walk indefinitely? I don’t know if I can do that.’
‘I know, I know. But that’s not the end of it, there’s more.’
‘Oh …’
‘I’ve read pages and pages of science papers that show the importance of being in nature for our physical and mental health.’
‘Everyone knows that.’
‘Yes, but it made me think why. Why exactly is it good for us? It’s not just because it’s relaxing. There is that, but there’s more. Look at this – read this one research paper. It’s the only one I can find, but …’ I turned the screen of the laptop towards him; it showed the summary of an obscure piece of research. ‘Isn’t this what you’ve just been studying at uni? The chemicals that plants emit from their leaves – I can’t remember what you call them?’
‘Secondary metabolites. Plants emit them to protect themselves from the environment and pests and stuff.’
‘Oh, okay, but you can’t remember what you had for breakfast.’
‘Weetabix.’
‘That’s too easy. You always have Weetabix. Anyway, this paper shows humans interact with those chemicals from plants too. There’s an actual chemical reaction between our bodies and plant emissions. I mean just read it.’
‘I was going to eat, but okay.’
I put the kettle back on and watched Moth as he focused on the computer screen, a light of realization beginning to cross his face. I poured the water in the cups. Yes. Maybe this wasn’t just my wishful thinking.
‘It’s a small study. My science lecturer at uni would say there’d have to be a lot more research done to say this was conclusive proof, but you can’t doubt his findings. He did actually record a chemical change in the patients when they exercised in the natural environment.’
‘Exactly. Surely this proves it – proves what I’ve always believed. We need the plants, the land, the natural world; we actually physically need it. I’m convinced it’s part of the answer to why your health was so much better while we were walking. It has to be.’
‘Was I well, really? I almost don’t remember. There are bits of the walk that I can’t picture at all.’
‘You’re joking, surely. I remember it as if it was last month. How can you remember uni stuff but not remember our walk?’
‘No, I’m not joking, not at all, and I’ve no idea why I can remember one thing but not another.’
All those nights of wind and stars, the pain, the hunger, the life-changing beauty of it – how could he possibly forget? He was the centre point, the pin on which the compass hand of my life spun. Without him present, conscious, aware, my life would have no direction; I would be lost in a darkness I might never find my way out of. His fading memory was opening a bottomless box of loss into which all the memories of our long life together would slowly be drawn. I shut the lid on it quickly. Not today, not any day.
‘You have to do more exercise, you need to do so much more than you are, and you must spend more time outside. We need plants; we need green.’
‘So that’s why we have the weeds in a bowl on the table?’
‘No, that’s another story entirely; I’m almost too embarrassed to tell you about that. Shall we eat instead?’
The moon traced an arc across the bedroom wall, picking out the colours of the stained-glass window as it moved slowly through the night. I could almost feel the deep low tone of a ship moving away from the dock and making its way out to sea, the throb of its engines through the water vibrating the cliffs. It had to be high tide, the dark, invisible depths of the water floating a ship laden with thousands of tonnes of china clay out through the mouth of the river, releasing it to the wide ocean. The Fowey River is a deepwater harbour, allowing huge cargo ships to pass between the tiny picturesque villages of Fowey and Polruan, going a short way inland to the clay wharf at Bodinnick. As much as 750,000 tonnes of clay are brought by truck to the port each year from the china clay mines of central Cornwall, and then hauled out in huge iron containers that sink low in the water under the weight of their immense cargo, heading away to ports in Europe and beyond.
The blast of a single horn signalled the ship’s safe passage out of the river. But I barely heard it. The voice was loud in my ears, keeping sleep at the door and masking every other sound. Fleeting, untouchable, loud in its silence, a sparrowhawk passing grey on early-morning light, more a parting of air than a visible movement, a sensation of noise without volume. The voice of an answer felt, of an emotion that had no words for its expression.
10. Antimatter
‘Hey, here again, this is the only place I ever see you.’ Gill was right. Since the day we met at the flower-arranging table I had only seen her twice, each time when I was sitting on this bench at the cliff edge.
‘I know. It’s so open up here, so much space. I come here most days.’
‘This is your place, your thin place.’
‘Thin?’ I’d heard of this before at an abbey on the Scottish island of Iona, but I didn’t admit it; the conversation would be too long and my solitary time on the bench would be broken.
‘Yes, it’s a concept from Celtic spirituality, the idea of a place where the barrier between now and beyond is thinner, where you’re closer to God.’
‘No, sorry, I don’t believe in God, or hereafters. Just the carbon cycle: we live, we die, the molecules go on in some other form.’
‘Well, call it what you like, but I think this place is pretty thin for you.’
We were in our mid-twenties, our life together was still new and the possibilities endless, when we got off the ferry from the mainland of Scotland and set foot on the island of Mull for the first time. The old red rucksack that I’d abandoned in favour of a smaller lightweight one when we prepared to walk the South West Coast Path was almost new, its pockets still waterproof and its buckles still shiny. We’d been married for two years and had spent endless nights after work weighing dried rations into small portions and encasing everything else in plastic bags in preparation for a backpacking trip across the Isle of Mull to Iona in the west. In those two years together we’d backpacked across the Lake District, staying on campsites and climbing mountains as we went. We’d cycled from the Midlands to a wet and boggy mountain in mid-Wales, glad of the bed and breakfasts we’d found ourselves in each evening. Countless walking, cycling and camping trips in between had led us to believe that we should do something else, something a little edgier, something wild. We’d attempted a wild-camping trip once, into the remote, uninhabited expanse of Knoydart in the Western Highlands of Scotland, but unfortunately we’d chosen to go in August. Inevitably we’d beaten a retreat, pursued by a relentless army of midges and blood-sucking ticks and had relinquished our wild adventure, resorting to staying in hotels where the doors were closed against the biting swarms outside. But this trip would be different: we were totally prepared and it was later in the year, so darker nights but fewer insects.