by Raynor Winn
‘Undoubtedly this DaTscan shows what we feared. If you look at this, here and here, you can see the problems we’re facing.’ The doctor had moved to a new consulting room. No longer overlooking the car park, we now looked into a willow tree, its leaves moving slightly, disturbing the light that fell across the table. We still travelled north to see the same consultant, a journey every six months that led us back to Wales, a tie not quite severed. ‘See this here, these two tadpole shapes in the centre of the brain?’ He pointed with a pencil at two dark forms in the middle of the picture on the screen, the putamen and caudate, areas of the brain that control all manner of movement and cognitive functions. ‘The radioactive material you were injected with should show up as lights in the scan in the areas of the tadpoles that are functioning. Like flying over a city at night, a mass of tiny lights.’
I stared at the screen, waiting for the lights to come on. They didn’t. All I could see was a faint line of fairy lights strung around the head of one of the tadpoles like fancy dress. Moth moved backwards, away from the picture.
‘But there are barely any lights.’
‘That’s the problem.’
‘Surely the scan isn’t working properly? That looks as if I’m hardly able to control my movements at all.’
‘The human brain is an amazing thing and we don’t know everything about it. Yours clearly seems to be finding a way around the shutting down of this section. It’s taking other pathways.’
Sitting again in the hospital car park we were numb. It wasn’t the shock we’d experienced with the original diagnosis of CBD, but a sense of disorientation that came from of knowing that however hard we fought CBD it still held a future that couldn’t be avoided. We leant against each other and stared at the pebble-dashed wall of the hospital. Behind us men pulled golf caddies across the green of the golf course, hitting balls with varying degrees of success. With the windows open we could hear the whistle of balls through the air. Balls flying with hope rather than aim.
‘I can’t do this any more.’
No, no, please don’t give up. I held his hand, the same hand that had held mine for the first time as we walked in the park during a college lunch break. The hand that held our children safe and protected, and plastered the walls of our home. The hand that had reached for mine in the darkness of the tent on a windswept headland. The hand that now had a tremor which shook his pen as it tried to write notes for his degree and rolled the peas off his fork on the way from his plate. I held it tight and still. We have hope. We found hope on the path and saved it. Kept it safe in an inside pocket for days like this, for a life like this.
‘You can’t give in, you just can’t.’
‘No, I meant I can’t sit in this car park and stare at the wall any more. Let’s go into town and buy that copy of the Big Issue. It’s out this week, isn’t it?’
‘Can you be bothered? It’ll just be a small piece at the back. They said they’d send me a copy anyway.’
‘What? Not go and buy the magazine with the very first article you’ve ever written, your very first piece? Of course we’re going to town.’
The Big Issue seller was just packing his bag away, about to leave his pitch.
‘Have you got a copy left? We really need to get one this week.’
‘Sorry, they’ve all gone. Why do you need one?’
‘My wife’s written an article – it’s in this week’s issue – about a time when we were homeless and went for a walk.’
‘That’s not this week; it was last week. What, you wrote that? I kept a copy cos I keep rereading it. That was a bloody long walk, but good on ya both, what a thing to do. Here, take it.’ He fished in his bag and produced a curled-up copy with a cover picture of green trees.
Sitting beneath the clock tower in the centre of a Welsh town, we flicked through the front and back of the magazine where the smaller articles normally appeared. There was nothing. I couldn’t let go of my manuscript, couldn’t trust anyone to read it and not diminish it with derision. But Moth, Rowan and our son, Tom, had persuaded me that I did have something to say about homelessness. I’d offered the Big Issue an article about the hidden rural homeless without the slightest expectation of a reply. But within days the editor had said, ‘Send us something and we’ll see.’
‘You look. I can’t see it; it must be a really small piece somewhere. I thought it was all too good to be true.’
Moth took the magazine from me and started methodically turning pages from the beginning.
‘There’s no point you doing that. It’ll be at the back.’
‘Just wait.’
I watched a busker setting up his pitch – a camping chair and a hat – then taking a small tin whistle out of a tube.
‘Oh wow.’
‘What?’
‘Just look. Look, Ray. Your words. You’ve done it.’
Not a small column at the back, but four pages in the centre of the magazine, with photographs of us that I’d sent with the piece of writing. A selfie taken on a headland near Godrevy Lighthouse. Pictures of the tent on Chesil Beach. And words, my words. We had left Wales, heading south to walk an unknown path and now the record of that walk and the homeless people we had met were in print in our hands and we were back in Wales. A strange and unexpected circle. But, looking at the pages, I could only feel disbelief. I couldn’t laugh or cry; instead I sat beneath the clock and listened to the busker play Irish folk music. It was a horrid irony. My words were in print, the thing I’d dreamt of as a child had come true, on the day when we watched Moth’s lights fading across the computer screen.
‘We should go somewhere to celebrate.’
‘I don’t feel like celebrating.’ I still felt numb, flattened by the coming darkness, and it was hard to acknowledge what was there on the pages.
‘What? Just get up and look at what you’ve done. Something you thought was beyond reach. And this man, this editor, he took your work and believed in it enough to get it into print. He told you he would and he did. This is what I’ve been telling you: not everyone’s bad, not everyone’s to be mistrusted. We’ve had a shit time, but this is the start of something, a new path – I can feel it. So get the fuck up and come on. We’re celebrating.’
‘But where …’
‘Cnicht, I think. It feels right for today.’
A small mountain in Snowdonia, from the south Cnicht looks classically conical, a cartoon mountain, but on the top it becomes a ridge running in a boggy line towards Snowdon. The first time we stood on the summit our children were small, carrying sandwiches and Pokémon cards in their own tiny daysacks. They’d struggled up the stony scramble to the summit, exhausted, unable to take another step, until we reached the flat ridge summit and they ran away to play in the heather. Now, we parked the van in Croesor, a small village at the foot of the mountain. It had been decades since our children had run ahead of us down the track beyond the car park, through a wood and out on to the open hillside. We walked that same path now, the air thick with memories and, in the warm windless July afternoon, midges, rising in their millions from the boggy ground in a biting irritation. But as the path headed upward a breeze grew and had carried them away by the time we reached the rocky, scrambling path to the top. In my head I could still hear the children’s voices complaining and I finally had to agree, it was quite steep. On the top it was just as I’d remembered, the land falling away south in a patchwork of fields and wooded valleys, out towards the blue expanse of Cardigan Bay. And away to the north, somewhere behind a band of lazy white clouds, the summit of Snowdon. We stretched the magazine across a rock and reread the article as if it had been written by someone else, about someone else. Moth pulled his feet up on to the rock and hugged his knees.
‘I’m not really seeing this; all I can see is that picture on the computer screen. Those lights going out.’
‘Stop pretending it’s just me then, that I’m just feeling sorry for myself.’
‘All that research you r
ead: there has to be an answer in there somewhere. Maybe you’re right, and it’s out here in the environment, in our natural wild state. As we were on the Coast Path. Perhaps we just need some land, some space where we can be outside all the time but still sleep under a roof.’
‘Of course we do, but how’s that going to happen? Oh, I know, a miracle.’
I lay on my back on the flat dried grass among the heather as broken cloud hung in the sky obscuring the blue, leaving only fleeting patches of bright possibility between the white. A warm wind blew through dry hard stems of heather and scrubby gorse. Purple buds were about to break open to spill honey-scented air across the mountainside and its sparse grass torn by sheep and razor winds. I spread my hands wide on the grass and felt the earth warm and present. A breathing entity beneath my palms. And the voice I hadn’t heard for a while was back, clear in my ears, sharp in the air through the rocks, soft in the clouded sky. A smooth ribbon of sound like a heartbeat slowing to the murmur of birds returning at dusk.
‘We should go – it’s getting late. Shall we go down the way we came, or take the horseshoe past the old mine then cut down the path on the other side of the valley?’
‘The horseshoe.’
We headed across the dry bogs of the ridge and then down towards the ruins of Rhosydd quarry. Little over a century ago, this had been a thriving slate mine, the barracks and mine workings heaving with men and machinery. The roofs of the barracks are long gone, and the walls are crumbling, but the sense of lives lived and lost is strong. And a magnet for cavers who come to brave the tunnels that are still open underground. A powerful, eerie sound emanated from the broken walls, almost like music.
‘What is that? Is it the wind in the walls?’
‘No … I’m not sure, but it sounds like Linkin Park.’
Sheltered behind a higher wall a small fire burnt, sending sparks up into the fading sky. A group of people gathered round, sitting talking, strains of the metal rock band echoing out from a small speaker and around the empty walls.
‘All right, lads, good spot for a party.’
‘Yeah, it’s not bad.’
I could see Moth trying to work out how to take the conversation further.
‘Is this the Friday night spot? Perfect for a gathering.’
‘We’re here for Chester.’
‘Right, a birthday?’ Moth glanced at me, shrugging his shoulders.
The men looked at each other, then at the ground as someone changed the track to one I’d heard playing in the kids’ bedrooms when they were teenagers. Of course. Moth clearly remembered too.
‘Not Chester Bennington?’
‘Yeah, he died yesterday. He was a legend. Nothing’s going to be the same now.’ The troubled, tattooed, immense talent of a lead singer from the metal band Linkin Park, who’d been a big part of our kids’ lives, so inevitably ours too. ‘We’re here to send him on his way, lift him up in the smoke and his words, the way he should go.’
We sat on the rocks with them, a group of young people in black T-shirts and piercings, tattooed as their idol had been, holding vigil in a ruined mine on a Welsh hillside.
The sky turned to night as the group moved around, talking, singing, drinking, their faces lit by the firelight from wood they’d carried up the mountain. Our lives, life, death, the movement of molecules from wood to air, it had all become one. Moth’s lights were slowly going out, there was no denying that, but the electrical charges in his brain were finding their own route, making new pathways. For now there was still enough power in his cells for them to keep searching and all we could do was to help them on their way. All we are is an electrical charge, no more than a mass of particles, matter, antimatter, mass and energy. No different to a blade of grass or a spark from the flames, just energy moving in a never-ending flux. While Moth’s lights were still shining we would celebrate every one of them and keep each burning in his night sky for as long as we could.
We got up to leave, the final track playing from the speaker, the last of the flames flickering in the dark air as the fire died away.
13. Mass
Late August and the village was heaving with visitors, the silent winter streets an almost forgotten memory. But sitting on the bench in the gorse there was hardly a passer-by. In the late-afternoon sunshine the only human sounds came from the beach far below at Lantic Bay. People were dotted over the sand and jet-skis cut figures of eight through the bay and between the boats moored in the bright water. I couldn’t stay – I needed to get back to the chapel where I’d left Moth sleeping. For days he’d been overwhelmed by a strange dizziness, as if he was slightly drunk on a swaying boat. A sensation that only seemed to be relieved by lying down with his eyes closed.
I left the bench and cut across the fields. The National Trust rent the land in this strip of cliff-top margin and control the way it’s grazed. The grass looked like the fields of my childhood: not smooth-grazed and low, but varying in height where the sheep had eaten but not mown the grass. This lighter grazing regimen allows a scattering of wild flowers to remain, and provides the type of cover that the skylarks love. When I’d walked through here in the spring and early summer, the small brown birds would lift high into the air, singing their bright celebration of the sky, attracting mates and my attention away from their nests. But in late summer the fields were quiet, the birds away feeding. Inland from here the land changed and became what spreads throughout much of the south-west: arable fields of wheat and barley. Monocultures where little wildlife can exist in fields sprayed with pesticides and weedkiller, where the wildlife and the plants it thrives on are driven out of the fields and into the hedgerows and woods. Not the habitat for many of our grass-living birds, who are retreating to the margins, their numbers dwindling.
Following the coastal path down from the skylark fields, through the gorse, to the steep dip in the land where winter storms funnel high winds into a jet-powered blast of air, making it hard to stay on your feet. Past the windblown hawthorn whose roots hold tight while its branches are stretched inland by the force of the wind. Ahead a backpacker appeared from the steep steps that led to the village, rising through the cleft in the rock and vegetation and pausing to catch his breath and look out to sea. A small wooden gate stood between us and as we approached it I could see he wasn’t the average backpacker, with the latest equipment and a determined expression. He’d stood and gazed out over the Channel before slowly turning and walking on, unhurried. A bright yellow reflective jacket shone out against the dark gorse, and, on top, an old rucksack with an external frame. Strange to see on a man who at the oldest could only have been in his mid-twenties. I reached the gate before him and held it open for him to pass and as he looked up his face was a showcase of piercings: an open expression adorned in silver.
‘Hi, you’re backpacking. Where are you heading?’ The inevitable question that had been asked of us so many times as we walked the path, but now I was the one asking.
‘Not sure tonight. I’ll just do a couple more headlands then stop, I think. But I’m heading to Plymouth.’ He seemed almost nervous as he replied.
‘Oh, right, a few more days then. Where have you come from?’
‘I started in Penzance. I’ve been walking for two weeks or so now.’ He seemed to relax a little as he walked through the gate, but wasn’t in a hurry to leave. He didn’t look like a person who walked often, although two weeks on the coast had given him the tan lines of someone who had been squinting into the sun and wind.
‘That’s a great section. I bet the Lizard was amazing in this heat. What brought you to the South West Coast Path then? Have you walked much before?’
‘No, though I walked to the shop a lot when I was a kid! No, haven’t been living the sort of life where you walk much. I’ve been sleeping rough in Exeter for the last year, you know, on the streets. But then I read this article about a couple who’d been homeless and walked the Coast Path and I thought, I can do that. So I borrowed all the stuff I needed fr
om the charity people and they helped me get a train ticket to Penzance. It’s been really hard though; I’d never put a tent up before, and these boots …’
‘That’s incredible. Have you eaten? Come back with me and have some food, or a cup of tea at least.’
‘No, I can’t. I have to keep going. This walk. This, all of this.’ He gestured his arm across the sea. ‘It’s changed everything. I have to keep going. I’ve got a routine now; I know my days. Can’t remember when I last felt this way, if I ever felt it. I’ve got to find somewhere to put the tent, then make some soup. This is my day.’
I knew this boy: not his life, but the feeling he was expressing.
‘Have you any idea what happens when you get to Plymouth?’
‘I’m not sure, but I won’t be going back to the way I was. That part of my life’s over now. Everything’s changed. I’ve changed.’
I watched him go through the dip and over the brow. I couldn’t tell him it was my article. This was his moment, his life, his discovery; I couldn’t interfere with that.
I pictured the young man walking away beyond the brow, tunnels of blackthorn engulfing him in a green transformative cloak. As it had us. Another life saved by the immense power of the elements on this wild strip of land. I spread my arms and let the rising ozone wind fill my clothes. I’d stopped and spoken to him without thought or hesitation. Had I felt at ease with him, felt a connection? Or was it something else? During all those dark months in the chapel I’d written myself back on to the path, back on to this foot-wide piece of dusty track. Back into the sun, the wind and the green, never-ending horizons. Unknowingly, unexpectedly, I’d written myself back to the place where I felt safe, secure and whole: our wild home. I closed my arms on the salted strength and carried it down the familiar path to the village. But the path had changed; it was no longer the windswept haunt of thrift and kestrels, but a new way, lit by a hesitant light from an unexplored source.
It’s hard to spot a fork in the road of life, harder still to make a deliberate choice which way to go. But sometimes you can catch a fleeting glimpse of one as it disappears in the rear-view mirror. The outcome doesn’t change, but many miles down the road, with the map unfolded in front of you, it’s possible to point to the fork and say: Yes, that’s where we took a different route.