by Raynor Winn
Squatting in the back of a van on the approach to the M6 motorway, holding a reluctant toddler on a potty, in a traffic jam that had already lasted for two hours, wouldn’t be one of the moments when you would expect your life to change forever.
‘If this is what it’s like on the A road, what the hell is happening on the motorway?’
‘You’ve said it, some kind of hell.’ Moth was driving, hoping to get the four of us to Scotland for a two-week holiday that we’d planned for months. Maybe this would be the trip when we found our dream home, the ruin in the mountains that we’d thought about for ten years. We didn’t know where we’d find it, but we were totally convinced it would be in the north. Tom sat in his car seat, a chocolate biscuit smeared across his face, hair, clothes and now me. Rowan, squirming and annoyed on the potty. The camping equipment mounded menacingly in the space behind me.
‘I don’t think I can take much more of this – it could go on all day. What happens if we just turn off the road now, just turn left, where does it go?’
‘West, if we keep going, west into Wales.’
‘Shall we?’
‘Yes, anything to get off this road.’
The sun set over Cardigan Bay as we stood on the side of a hill in a chill wind rising from the valley below. The sea was streaked in every tone of dying light, washing Moth’s face in a pink and orange hue. Tom was quiet in the backpack, his face a chocolate smudge on Moth’s shoulder, his plump lips relaxing in a gentle pucker, toddler hands fat and sticky, hanging limply from his sides, a deep and peaceful sleep. Rowan, not awake but not asleep, wrapped tightly in a blanket hugged on to my hip, her tangled blond hair catching the last tones of day.
‘I didn’t realize Wales was so beautiful.’ Moth had always been drawn north, to the high mountains and the open spaces, but something in the sunset held him entranced.
We held hands and looked out to sea, while the traffic on the motorway inched its way forwards. Unaware then that the next twenty years of our lives beckoned in a place we would never have discovered if we hadn’t taken an unplanned detour.
As I turned the corner to head back to the chapel Sarah stepped out of her doorway. Fighting the instinct to run, I took a deep breath and stopped.
‘Well, hi, how are you, haven’t seen you for a long time. How’s the writing?’
‘It’s going well.’ I could do this. I pulled my ozone-filled clothes just a little tighter, unaware that the chill I was feeling came from the fork in the road that I couldn’t see, from a direction I didn’t realize existed, from a choice I didn’t know I was making. ‘I’ve just had an article published in the Big Issue.’
‘Oh wow, well done. What’s it about?’
I took a deep breath. A breath filled with the doubt of choices made, of losses endured or yet to come. A breath filled with nights on wild headlands and pebbles from the beach.
‘It’s about losing our home in Wales and becoming homeless. About choosing to walk the South West Coast Path rather than wait for a council house and the many rural homeless people we met along the way, the hidden rural homeless.’
‘You lost your house, your home, everything?’
‘Yes. I couldn’t say before because I know it can make people feel quite uncomfortable. I’ve encountered that reaction so many times I felt I had to keep it to myself. But today I realized there’s no point.’
‘You don’t need to hide that here. There are some people who would react that way, but there are lots of others with a history of life falling apart, people who’ve come back to live with parents, or just to start again.’
‘Really?’
‘Yes. I think it seems to be a bit of a mid-life theme. Lots of us find we have to go back to the beginning of our life in order to start again. Back to where we grew up, or where we were happiest. To a time before things went wrong. I see it like pressing the reset button.’
I watched her walk away, then leant over the wall that protected the narrow street from the drop down to the river. The water was full of boats moored for the summer: yachts, motorboats, the little blue boat that took visitors on river cruises, the black wooden hull of a tall ship, its sails tied down, the crew heading to shore. Children jumped off the harbour wall beneath the no swimming sign; old people in shorts tied their dinghy to the pontoon. Life. Life going on. Lives being lived.
It was all so simple and so clear. Sometimes you just need someone else to switch the light on in your dark place. The strong, fearless person who had finished the path had got lost somewhere in the hospital corridors, lost in a choice that had haunted me. Moth was right; I’d gone back to the start. Afraid of people, hiding, the child behind the sofa. But Sarah was right too; this was my moment to start afresh. The months of being that child again hadn’t been wasted time. She was afraid and isolated, yet she had a connection to the wilderness that hadn’t left her. She’d had something else, too, a dream that had been broken and lost along the way. I’d stood with her in her room as she stroked the books on her shelves, her small fingers running over the pictures of penguins on the spines, and imagining. The children shouted and splashed as they jumped off the wall, swimming away from the ferry as it weaved between the moored boats and came into the quay. I took one more breath of ozone air and went inside.
Google can find just about anything you need, if you ask the right question. After two hours of searching it gave me exactly what I was looking for. A non-fiction literary agent, not so big that they would ignore me, not so small that they would be ineffective. I uploaded my submission package and sat back as Rat stood up and stretched from an afternoon on the wall. I could see the sun beginning to set on the very last day of our walk along the South West Coast Path. I felt Moth’s hand in mine, the scent of blackberries in the air and the overwhelming sense that this moment is the only one we have, the only one we need.
I pressed the reset button.
14. Water
Late afternoon, late August, late summer. The air was still and silent, only broken by the hum of insects and an occasional shriek from the few children who still ran across Lantic Bay. Tail-enders, hanging on to the last few days before being taken home for new school uniforms, exercise books and confinement. Fewer people passed the bench near the rocks on the headland, so I lay on it, knees up, listening to the sounds of nothing, soaking up the last of the light and warmth on my skin before heading back into the village. Back stiff from lying for too long on the narrow wooden seat, I sat up and squinted against the bright sway of light on the sea. Two figures walked across the fields behind me, heads close, deep in conversation. I stood to leave as my mobile sounded the receipt of an email. The literary agent. The likelihood of an agent responding so quickly was very slim; undoubtedly this would be an automated rejection.
My fingers found themselves on the brass plaque on the bench as I sat back down. The last jet-ski of the summer headed for harbour, a spray of water and noise in its wake. The plaque said this had been Peter’s favourite spot and his loved ones had sited a bench here for every tired walker to sit and remember him. The couple were cutting across the field waving, but I couldn’t focus on them. I glanced at the screen again, expecting the message to have changed, but it was still there.
Gill and Simon climbed over the fence.
‘I’m back. How are you? I’ve been talking to Sarah: she told me how you lost your home, that’s so sad.’
She knew and yet she was still talking to me.
‘How long have you been back?’
‘Only yesterday.’
Only a day and yet she knew already. The narrow streets: obviously the sound carried. But she was still here talking to me. It was almost impossible to process her words; my hand was still gripping my phone tightly, the email still alight in the darkness of my pocket.
‘It doesn’t matter here. Lots of us have a history, don’t we, Simon?’ Simon just smiled and nodded. ‘Do you ever get on to the river? Someone offered me a canoe to use while I’m here. Do you
want to borrow it?’
‘Er … yes, thanks.’ They walked away and my head was spinning. I took deep, salt-laden breaths and tried to grasp for something real. A two-pound coin in my pocket. All I had until tomorrow, when we would allow ourselves to take our weekly allowance of money from the student loan. That was real, just enough for two large potatoes and a tin of beans from the village shop. Baked potatoes, that was real. Not people talking, sharing, accepting, no reality there. I looked again at the screen. ‘I’ve read the first three chapters. Could you send the rest of the manuscript?’ An agent showing interest in the manuscript, that couldn’t be real either, that had to be an illusion.
The Fowey River begins on Bodmin Moor, trickling out of the peaty ground in a hopeful stream of water rising from deep in the earth. Falling slowly south, the stream becomes a river fed by tributaries until it gathers enough power to head towards the sea. Before it makes it that far it’s sidetracked and syphoned into pipes and taps to provide drinking water for much of Cornwall. But enough water keeps flowing to dilute the salty incoming tide where the river widens and in its lower stretches becomes a tidal estuary. As the tide goes out, deep wide mudflats are exposed between steep-sided woodland, a last remnant of the ancient forests that would have existed here before they were cleared for farming. Crossing the river on the car ferry from Bodinnick to Fowey it’s hard to picture the depth of the river, dredged by the harbour commission to keep the mud from blocking the shipping channel. But floating on a piece of foam in the wake of a motorboat we seemed to be crossing a watery chasm.
‘So when Gill said canoe, I imagined something like the Canadian canoes we hired when the kids were small, do you remember those? In the Lake District? This feels as if I’m just sitting on the water without sinking.’ The holes in the base of the two-man foam kayak were supposed to maintain its balance and buoyancy, but two minutes in and I was already soaked to my waist. The foam hovered in the wake of the passing boat as water pushed in through the holes and washed over the top. Unsinkable, in a half-submerged sort of way.
‘Yes, I remember those canoes. They were green, weren’t they?’
‘No, red and orange.’
We paddled in weaving, uncoordinated strokes, slowly making our way upstream away from the pleasure boats and commotion. Dodging the car ferry, we passed the looming metal hulk of the clay-loading dock, towering above us half in, half out of the water as we paddled by. Beyond the oil and diesel fumes being washed out to sea and the creek full of moored yachts. Past the old man standing on his ancient wooden-hulled boat, sea-whipped hair and beard, old woollen jumper and boots, dog at the helm, a living snapshot of another era. On to where the river quietens, the mudflats rise closer to the surface and boats are restricted to a central channel. Staying close to the riverbank we skimmed above the mud on the incoming tide, away from the occasional passing boat but beyond the reach of low-hanging trees, in our own channel of water, floating almost silently along the rocky, mud-crusted shoreline beneath the darkness of the woodland. Small groups of white birds perched on the rocks, a stark brilliance against the dark background, their black legs and beaks barely visible as a faint drizzle lowered the light in the woods, deepening our sense that the first few visible trunks shielded a secret just out of sight.
‘What are they? White herons? Kind of exotic and out of place.’
‘They’re little egrets, yeah, that’s what they are, a type of heron. They’re beautiful, but I’m not sure they’re a good sign.’
Near motionless on the rocks, their whiteness formed a perfect, monotone still life. These elegant birds have traditionally been rare migrant visitors, flying north from the Mediterranean and Africa. But towards the end of the twentieth century permanent colonies began to form along the south coast of England. The Wildlife Trust feel their expansion could be due to the changing climate, the birds being driven north and west as temperatures rise, causing their food sources to dwindle. Not everyone agrees. Possibly by the time the little egret moves to the Outer Hebrides the doubters will be convinced, but by then it could be too late to say ‘I told you so’. The drizzle thickened to steady soft rain as we picked up the paddles and found our rhythm again, the birds dwindling to specks of white on the rocky outcrop behind.
The soft rain became vertical rods of connection between land and sky, drops bouncing from the river with the force of a pebble, leaving ripples expanding and reflecting.
‘Shall we stay under the trees, or head back?’ I didn’t want to give in, but the wetness was making me shiver.
‘We’re wet to our armpits anyway so it doesn’t make any difference. We could explore this little creek while we’re here, then head back. This might be the only day we can use the canoe and we certainly can’t afford to hire one, can we?’ He had a point, but why wasn’t he cold?
Paddling back out into the rain we turned into a creek. It was heavily wooded on one side, old oaks, beech and birch cloaking the steep hill. On the opposite bank a scattered line of trees bounded a steep slope of grass and thistles, where cattle climbed like goats to graze. Huge bird’s nests clustered among the branches of willow and oak, where a heron sat swaying in the leaves, its head lowered as the rain rolled from its back. Two others stood motionless by a broken jetty hung with lichen.
‘This rain’s getting worse. Shall we just pull it under the trees until it eases off? And I need a minute – my shoulder’s killing me. Maybe I shouldn’t be doing this.’
‘Or maybe you need to do it more.’
We dragged the canoe under the dense trees of the opposite bank, crouched among the roots and waited.
‘Jeez, I’m cold now.’ Finally.
We shivered under the canopy of the trees until the rain slowed with the tide. As we stretched our stiff knees to leave, an apple landed at Moth’s feet.
‘Where did that come from?’
‘Strange, can’t see any apple trees.’
Deep, slimy mudflats were reappearing from beneath the water, barely covered even at high tide. Within moments of the mud becoming visible, a small flock of curlews landed and immediately began to feed, burying their long curved beaks into the mud, hoovering up whatever morsels of protein were hidden under the surface. These tall brown birds used to be common in much of Britain. In our home in Wales, the burbling call of the curlews had been the sound of spring, as they returned from their winter feeding grounds to nest in the wet meadow and feast on elvers as they ran upstream. But in the last few years before we left the curlews didn’t come, their calls silenced. Their numbers have declined by 80 per cent in Wales and 30 per cent in England in the last twenty years. Vast drops in numbers that have put their survival on our shores in jeopardy.
‘Look at that, there must be twenty or more. That’s brilliant to see.’
‘This must be a really undisturbed spot. Curlews, herons, little egrets, who’d have thought there could be somewhere so special, so close to all the mayhem in the river mouth? What the fuck …?’ Moth ducked as a half-pecked apple landed on the canoe.
‘Are there kids in the woods?’
‘Can’t see any. I think you’d hear them, wouldn’t you? Birds maybe.’
‘What were you saying about undisturbed?’
We followed the retreating tide to a narrow channel between the mudflats and paddled quietly away. No sounds of humans, or boats, just the push of paddle against water and the knocking of half-pecked apples against the side of the canoe as they floated downstream on the tide.
We left our wet clothes at the door of the chapel as the rain stopped and the sun appeared. Wrapped in towels as the kettle boiled, I checked my mobile: a voicemail from a London number.
‘Hi, I’ve read the whole manuscript now and I’d love to have a conversation. When would be a good time to call?’
15. Air
I stood at the door of the chapel and signed for the parcel, a heavy box that I took inside and put on the table. I sat and looked at it, running my hands over the square cardboa
rd, over the address label with its place of origin printed on the top and the logo in the corner. The kettle boiled and I made tea, then I sat with my knees pulled up on the wooden chair. I could open it now, get the contents out, feel each one, hold it, smell it. Or I could just sit and wait until Moth came back and share the moment with him. Through the window the snowdrops had returned to the neighbour’s garden and the magnolia buds were full and ready to open. He’d taken his shed down at the weekend and if I sat on the worktop by the window I could now see between the roofs, to a glimpse of trees in the far distance. I ate a Rich Tea biscuit and waited, the box seeming to grow in size as I watched it. I moved to the worktop, resting my feet on the chair. The box and the trees in one view, the tea steaming between.
Months had passed since I’d walked out of the underground station at Covent Garden in London. Taken the short walk to the Strand, so nervous that I’d struggled to put one foot in front of another or think in a straight line. I’d stood outside a stone archway that led to a gleaming building of glass and steel. So many people, so little sky, I could barely breathe. Our path had led us through the pain and despair of loss to wet nights on foggy headlands – and now to me standing suffocating in front of this glass door. The literary agent pushed it open and waited for me to go through towards the huge picture of a penguin above the reception desk.
‘Don’t worry, it’s just going to be an informal chat with the commissioning editor.’ The small, elegant woman in a smart blouse and heels made me feel huge, frumpy and inadequate. ‘You scrub up well’ wouldn’t be something anyone would ever say to me. I put my hand to my hair, expecting to find twigs and blades of grass – no, just the normal frizzy uncontrollable bird’s nest that had never really recovered from our months in the wild. I took a deep breath of stale office air, a deep breath of life, of death and all the complex emotions that brought with it. As we sat on the couch and waited for the editor to come downstairs to meet us, I picked quietly at the blue cloth of the bench seating, startled by a memory of Moth pushing a piece of white fluff around the table as the judge had delivered his verdict and served us with the eviction notice. There was nothing to lose, so nothing to fear. Why then was I so nervous? We’d lost just about every material thing we’d owned and still survived. If I blew the meeting, as I expected to, and Penguin decided they didn’t want to publish my book, then what would I have lost? Nothing. Life would be the same, death would still be waiting in the wings and nothing would have changed. Books by famous authors lined the bookshelves, authors who had sat on my own bookshelves, in the days when I had bookshelves. A sharp flash of memory of a life before I had to give away boxes of books and leave the shelves behind. Loss sets you free. In the empty void it leaves, anything can happen. Something from nothing.