Coming down from the summit we sat for a while at the base of the rock, eating our lunch, making sure we were refuelled for the slippery descent. There were other climbers around but not many – I’d say about fifty people climbed the mountain that day, far fewer than the many hundreds who summit each day throughout the summer. Everyone was quiet and peaceful, admiring the view; nobody seemed compelled to make noise or draw attention to themselves. It seemed that the only people there that day were experienced mountaineers. I felt really moved, tried to express it to Diane but couldn’t do it without sounding odd. To her it was unnecessary, she’d just brought me up the mountain. I couldn’t express without crying how important it was that I’d made it up here, that I’d done what I set out to do and not shirked it – that I couldn’t have done it without her help.
After a couple of hours of careful descent, I suggested she walk ahead. I could feel my feet cramping in the unfamiliar boots, their inflexibility was designed so that feet didn’t bend and slip against the smoosh of the snow and ice. It meant that my tender feet met the tough boots and yielded. I felt them curling underneath, the familiar pain coming sharply. It made me irritable; I could feel myself wanting to snap and snarl, curse out loud. Diane wanted to get back to the van to see to the dogs and I was holding her back. Letting her walk on meant I could relax for the final two miles, allow my feet to step, step, step, at their own pace, a measured tread that was slower than most walkers but that would keep a speed that got me there, kept getting me there. It was a flat path by this point, coming around the two lakes, first Glaslyn then Llyn Llydaw, the rippled lower peaks mirrored completely in the still water, blue skies and sun shining bright on the snow and rock.
Penny, jolly and generous schoolfriend of my mother’s friend, plus husband David and Jack Russell dog, hosted me all the way around the Llŷn Peninsula, generously picking me up and dropping me off every morning and evening. They lived in the centre of the tip of the stretch of land, a web of single-tracked, high-hedged roads stretching out in all directions, the canals by which to navigate this backwater: Wales’ Land’s End.
Penny’s diligent ferrying back and forth meant I could walk further than usual, despite having trouble with oedema along my calves. Diane, also a sports masseuse, had looked very concerned as she treated me, telling me to sleep with my feet raised wherever I could. I pushed a pillow down to the foot of my bed, massaging my legs from toe to ankle to knee over and over again, trying to reduce the sharp tenderness that ran along the inside of my tibia, worrying it might be a walk-ending injury if it got any worse.
The weather stayed bright and brilliant all week, with a wind to freeze the drip from the end of your nose. I was glad of my bobble-hat and neckwarmer, pulled right up to cover my cheeks and ears. I walked into the wind until I turned the corner of Pen Llŷn into the cover of land, away from the side of the peninsula that was slapped by the wind coming straight from the Irish Sea and curling under into the cover of Cardigan Bay. Here was gentler-washing water, rocky coves giving way to wide flat beaches. I took some time at the sloping peak of Mynydd Mawr to stare longingly at Bardsey Island – it was another important island I’d missed out on; the boat transport didn’t run at this time of year and I’d struggle to afford it anyway. A £30 return ticket for a four-hour trip was the same as my weekly food allowance.
From Aberdaron, past Abersoch and Pwllheli towards Criccieth, I walked on so many beaches, always accompanied by the wind, made visible by the grains of sand taken along by it. Hard gusts progressed in diamond ruffles, zigzagging white above the deep yellow hard-packed surface, hitting my legs, stinging and abrading.
The Llŷn peninsula passed quickly, thanks to Penny and David, enabling me to walk without a bag. I managed eighteen-mile days without problems, so different to my usual pained hobbling.
OWEN’S ACCIDENT
As I walked around the tip of the poking finger of the Llŷn Peninsula, I felt as if I’d turned a big psychological corner too: it was all downhill from here, just the coast and another six rivers to go. I woke up in Porthmadog on the 1st of February after a wonderful rest weekend, stumbling naked through another unused holiday home, blinds drawn, thinking of the day to come, more food to eat, more terrible television, another bath, more sleep, more writing. Bliss. I was almost there, just another few months of walking…
I settled on the sofa and found a missed call on my phone, an unknown number, a voicemail from a policeman with a broad Derbyshire accent, asking me to call him. The words were so simple that they didn’t register at first.
“Your brother’s car has been involved in an accident. There’s a man in hospital in a serious condition: he was found in the car and we need someone to come and identify him. He’s unresponsive and can’t identify himself.”
No further details, just “a serious condition”. The policeman couldn’t tell me anything unless the man was indeed identified as my brother. I called my mum, arranged that she would go directly to the hospital and then looked at train times. It was Sunday and there was only one train that day; I had to wait eight hours to catch it. Could I go on walking? Serious condition. What did it mean? What was happening over there? Would I want my family to come to me if I was in hospital in a serious condition? Of course I would. I didn’t want to stop walking but there was nothing else for it, I had to go to Derbyshire.
After a day of tension and waiting, I finally left Porthmadog at 4pm. The train wound its way around the coast and estuary into farmland, then towns, then Birmingham, the Midlands, where there were buildings as far as the eye could see, no distance to the horizon. Finally, late that night, I had a lift into the heart of Nottingham where, waiting for me, lay my prone brother, the wise nurse at the end of the bed guiding him through his coma, machines beeping a jagged lullaby.
Owen had been put into an induced coma, to allow his body to cope with a head injury, brain swelling, broken bones. We gathered at his bedside.
“Can we talk to him?”
“Yes,” they said. “It’s his hearing that will come back first.”
This talking was for us, not him. I was hesitant at first, stumbling over words that suddenly felt alien when spoken to a sleeping man. We had to continue to talk knowing that he wouldn’t respond, knowing that our imprecations were unlikely to make an impression on his stern unconsciousness.
A car accident, they said. Slipped off the road in the dead of night. A mystery. No speeding, no alcohol, no other cars, no marks on the road. Only saved by a woman who drove past after midnight, saw a car in a ditch and had a strange feeling, called her daughter who told her to call the police who went to the spot and found a bleeding man behind the wheel, his brain battered and bones broken. His life hung there, death suspended by the safety belt, time ticking through the minutes between successful treatment and brain-death.
I whisper, croaked and awkward, that I love him and believe he will be fine. I don’t know where the words are going, how they’ll interact with his darkened mind. I imagined his eardrum vibrating, flashing the Morse code of binary nerve responses towards the silenced machine that is his brain and the message falling, jagged and jumbled, at the foot of a closed door. I didn’t know if Owen was inside his body or if he’d gone away forever. He might have melted away into shadow at the foot of a tree on a rural back-road, leaving blue lights flashing on crumpled metal, turning blood to black.
We called his friends together, rallied the troops. He had a group of friends from school, from years of computer games and football, of spliffs in the attic and nights out drinking. Mountain bike weekends, grunts and piss-takings, long-held easy friendships. Now these men came to be with him as he mended, along with many others. There was nothing to do but wait, spending time at the small plastic-topped table outside the ward, different friends turning up every day, taking it in turns to go in and see him. It turned out that many people loved and cared about Owen – he’d made friends wherever he went. In the first few nights, when he was in intensive care
, twenty people arrived to see him, gathering in different groups along the corridor, making jokes and hiding their feelings.
They took away the drugs keeping him sedated but Owen didn’t move, didn’t respond. Nothing held him there, no chemical cosh; he was just a man lying silently in a bed and not waking up when you pressed him.
“If he continues in this state for another two or three days, there’s a very strong possibility that he’ll die…”
We held each other, sometimes in tears and sometimes silent, my other brother walking into this meeting straight off the plane from Barcelona, his eyes wide in shock.
I saw men everywhere that looked like my brother – the shape of the shoulders, a flash of bristly beard, a thin upright back, a blazer, spectacles on a round, shaved head. I wanted to run after them each time, catch an arm and have them turn and be him, alive and warm and moving but the illusion always revealed the truth. He’s not walking around in the fresh air, he’s upstairs inside, prone in bed and not responding. He’s lying as if sleeping but you can’t wake him no matter how hard you try. Don’t shake his broken body, you’ll only grind the pieces of his shattered bones. Only place your hands gently on his skin and pour your love out towards him, hoping that it will catch his spirit.
Then Owen’s eyes opened overnight, flickered into life. At first they were just moon-eyes, indiscriminate, wandering blankly over any surface. Then they contained recognition. He would see people, try to speak.
I learned, through regular consultants’ meetings, to understand the reliance of every single thing that makes us human on an arrangement of neurons, nothing more. Everything that made Owen into the person he is was down to the interactions of his neural network, the strength of the connections between areas of his brain. His brain was only a series of nerves, their constant firings creating his entire reality, creating him, his bodily functions, his personality, his movement and sensory processing. Everything was up for grabs, nothing could be taken for granted. He might have woken up but could he see us? Could he walk? Could he swallow or shit? Could he remember who we were? Remember our shared history? Keep events in his head for longer than the time they took to fall out of short-term memory? Would he be angrier now? Sadder? Disinhibited? Would he speak in a foreign accent? Believe he was a spy?
We only knew that life had irrevocably changed for him, my lovely brother, but it wasn’t clear just yet how seriously. While his world had changed again, so had mine. This time it wasn’t a calamitous event changing my health and outlook, it was his. Now he was the one with a date that marked a before and after.
There have been times when life paused, when I lay at a field edge watching a wren hop gently between the twigs of an intricate hedgerow, safe from swooping predators, just a short head turn from a face-to-face encounter. I’d keep my body still as I focused on the bird, subduing my movements so as to pay attention to it, to drink it in, everything else blanked out. There in Nottingham, the walk disappeared. I could do nothing except be with my brother as he struggled to bring his brain back to normality, back to a world that had suddenly become confusing and impossible to understand.
First he saw us, then he mouthed words, started to speak, rambling burbles, slurred murmurs, then he made sentences, became able to move more, was helped into a chair, helped to his feet, helped to walk. We watched as his feet crossed over and did not obey, a physiotherapist under each arm, keeping him from tangling on the floor. There was always a change the next day; improvements kept coming, steps grew straighter; he put clothes on, he played cards, chess, remembered names, laughed at jokes, his eyes bulging to absorb all the newness. We paced with him and tried to help him rest, tried to keep his concentration on a single object, tried to encourage him to eat and drink through his broken mouth, tried to keep him informed about his condition when facts were falling out of his head as fast as we put them in there.
All the other things I thought I wanted to do – walk another thousand miles, write a book, take a boat to the Black Sea, meet a man, have a baby – all seemed very far away. They didn’t seem like anything it was possible for me to do at all. I could only wake up, have breakfast, go to the hospital, try and talk to my brother, answer his questions, hope he could eat something that day, hope he could hold on to the facts I gave him, hope that if we started a card game he’d remember the rules, hope that eventually he’d be able to leave hospital, to live by himself, hope that things would get better.
He had a shaking injury, small spots of bleeding which were scattered throughout the brain. No specific part was damaged, we just had to wait and see what would be affected, how his brain would cope with rerouting around the damage. It would depend on the strength of his neural network, on his ability to think around the problem. He’d always been a person who was pretty out there, who would come up with a joke, an invention, out of left field. I tried to imagine the type of brain he had, the neurons veering off into unexpected places.
This is what would save him, his ability to find new pathways where others had been destroyed. A brain isn’t just a single track of impetus to action, it’s a complex network of connections, each one conveying an individual piece of information: the seeds of strawberries, their taste, their texture, the fact they grow into plants, their appearance, their pattern on the fruit. Each piece of information could link to millions of others, memories of strawberries on cakes, in jelly, on days out, in gardens, picked with a grandparent, picked while listening to Wimbledon, a handful of miniature ones, warming sun on strawberry skin, the explosion of juice in the first bite, redness of ripening, lusciousness of swelling fruit, deep smell of strawberries in the sun.
Each of these points of information could have disappeared in a minute explosion of blood, never to be retrieved, and we had no idea which facts would come back and which would stay missing.
Owen was reborn, a Buddha brother. The layers of learned behaviour, of human culture were stripped away; he had no artifice, every thought came to his face and then his mouth. He was an innocent, trying to put out chairs and shake hands with the doctors when they only wanted to stay standing, chant their information and leave, trying to invite friends for a sleepover when they’d come for a few hours’ visit. He was funny and ridiculous and we laughed at him, as we had always done; he was a man who made people laugh, was charming and funny, and somehow he still was, even as he paced up and down the ward corridor in bright green compression stockings, drooling uncontrollably, eyes bright and hair crazy, saying hello to everyone who passed him, my arm linked in his to help him balance, legs high-stepping in jerked movements, like an awkward robot, imitating walking from a set of written instructions.
He changed daily and we tried to keep up, went to hospital and sat with him, or sat outside while others took their turn. Days became a rota of visitations, a packing of lunches. We seized upon the gift of an adult colouring-book, my sister and I, colouring flowers as a way to hold still in the whirlwind, to live in the uncertainty without going mad. In the hours between leaving the hospital and going back the next day there were meals, showers and the passing of time until we could return again. I took up smoking again, as a way to escape the waiting area outside the ward, a way to add regular breaks into my day, a way to take back control. Some kind of subversion of enforced events, even if it was self-defeating.
After the first couple of weeks of daily car-journeys, once the emergency part was over and it started to be about recovery, I began to take some time out to walk to hospital. It was an escape from the life I found myself in, the stifling effect of being with my family all the time, the intense pressure of familial relationships. It was six miles, the quickest way. First a gentle canal-side pace, then cutting away to ploughed field-edges, approaching the roar of the M1, a muddy tunnel underneath it and then a mile of fume-crusted suburbia until, finally, a surprise stately home and deer park, nestled in the city’s encroachment, frilled with tarmac, and on the other side of it, the huge hospital complex.
I tr
ied walking further, taking the canalside detour, twelve miles all the way around to the River Trent and up into central Nottingham, admiring the narrowboats and their private community, the beauty of riverside life, their tidiness, their choice of rooftop adornments. The twelve-mile walk was more beautiful, but it brought the pain back. My feet hurt, the plantar tendons felt cramped and curled, sharp shooting-pains spread into my heels and I feared for the future of my body, feared that I’d permanently damaged myself. I realised that my body had nothing left; I was bone-hurtingly, crumplingly tired.
As days became weeks it began to dawn on me that it was going to be OK; Owen was getting better; this was positive. He moved into a room of his own on the Major Trauma Unit and it felt good. He was walking, talking, he appeared to have full control of his body. His mind was still all over the place, unable to settle, unable to concentrate, unable to make rational self-care decisions, but he was progressing. I felt my mind churn as I turned away from the idea of constant worry and negativity. I’d been stuck there for four incredibly intense weeks.
Before this, before the 1st of February, my life had been fixed and focused on one thing: completing the 3300 mile walking target I’d set myself. I’d walked through pain and bad weather, up and over hundreds of hills, down into tree-lined valleys, scattered hundreds of sheep. My heart flew free above me and, despite all the pain and privation that walking in this way involved, I was happier than I could ever have been in a job, in a house, entangled in the snares of a so-called civilised life.
One Woman Walks Wales Page 28