The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry

by Rachel Joyce

  More than anything, Maureen wanted Harold home.

  Harold and the Café

  THE LAST STRETCH was the worst. All Harold could see was road. He had no thoughts. The earlier damage to his right leg had flared up again, and caused him to limp. There was no pleasure to be had; he was in a place where it did not exist. Flies swarmed in a cloud round his head. Sometimes there were bites. Maybe stings. The fields were immense and empty, and the cars were drawn along the roads like toys. Another peak. Another sky. Another mile. It was all the same. It both bored and overwhelmed him to the point of surrender. He often forgot where he was heading.

  Without love, nothing had—what? What was the word for it? He couldn’t remember. He thought it began with a V, and he wanted to say vulva, but that surely wasn’t right. Nothing could be made to matter very much. The blackness crept from the sky. The rain slashed his skin. The winds blew so hard he struggled to keep his balance. He fell asleep wet, and woke wet. He would never know again what it was to be warm.

  The nightmare pictures Harold thought he had left behind were back, and there was no escaping them. Awake or asleep, he relived the past, and felt the fresh horror of it. He saw himself flailing with an axe at the wooden planks of his garden shed, his hands ripped and splintered, his head swinging with whiskey. He saw his fists sprouting blood over thousands of colored glass pins. He heard himself praying, eyes screwed up, hands clenched, and the words meaning nothing. Other times, he saw Maureen turn her back on him and disappear into a dazzling ball of light. The twenty years that had passed were shorn away. There was no hiding behind the ordinary or even the cliché. Like the detail in the land, these things no longer existed.

  No one could imagine such loneliness. He shouted once but no sound came back. He felt the cold deep inside him, as if even his bones were freezing over. He closed his eyes to sleep, convinced he would not survive, and having no will to fight that. When he woke, and felt the stiffness of his clothes cutting his skin, and his face burnt with the sun, or maybe the cold, he got up and plodded on.

  A bulging in his shoes made a rip at the seam, and the soles were thin as fabric. His toes would be through the leather at any moment. He bound them with the roll of blue duct tape, round and round and round, crossing underneath the foot and up over toward the ankle, so that the shoe was a part of himself. Or was it the other way round? He was beginning to believe they had a will of their own.

  On, on, on. These were the only words. He didn’t know whether they were ones he cried out, or words in his mind; or whether someone else was calling them. He thought he might be the only person left in the world. There was no more than the road. He was no more than a body that housed a walk. He was blue-duct-tape feet and Berwick-upon-Tweed.

  At three-thirty on a Tuesday afternoon Harold smelled salt in the wind. An hour later he reached the brow of a hill and saw a town lying before him, fringed by the endless gap that was the sea. He approached the pinkish-gray town walls, but no one stopped, or looked twice, or offered him food.

  Eighty-seven days after setting out to post a letter, Harold Fry arrived at the gates of St. Bernadine’s Hospice. Including mistakes and diversions, his journey had amounted to six hundred and twenty-seven miles. The building before him was modern and unassuming, flanked by trembling trees. There was an old-fashioned street lamp close to the main entrance, and a sign pointing to a car park. Several bodies sat in deck chairs on the lawn, like clothes set out to dry. A seagull wheeled and barked overhead.

  Harold walked the soft curve of the tarmac drive and lifted his finger to the buzzer. He wished the moment would hold itself, like an image cut out of time, his dark finger against the white button, the sun on his shoulders, the seagull laughing. His journey was over.

  Harold’s mind fled back over the miles that had brought him to this place. He saw roads, hills, houses, fences, shopping centers, streetlights and postboxes, and there was nothing extraordinary about any of them. They were simply things he had passed, that anyone might have passed. The thought filled him with sudden anguish, and he was afraid at the point where he had least expected to feel anything other than triumph. How did he ever believe that those very commonplace things would add up to something more? His finger remained, suspended over the buzzer but not pressing it. What had it all been about?

  He thought of the people who had helped him. He thought of the unwanted, the unloved; he numbered himself among them. And then he considered what must follow from here. He would give his presents to Queenie, and thank her; but then what? He would return to the old life he had almost forgotten, where people staked trinkets between themselves and the outside world. Where he lay in one bedroom, not sleeping, and Maureen lay in another.

  Harold replaced his rucksack on his shoulder and turned from the hospice. As he left the gates, the figures lying in deck chairs did not look up. No one was expecting him and so no one appeared to notice his arrival or his departure. The most extraordinary moment of Harold’s life had come and gone without trace.

  In a small café, Harold asked a waitress for a glass of water, and use of the bathroom. He apologized that he had no money. He waited patiently as the waitress’s eye took in his tangled hair, his ripped jacket and tie, and traveled down the length of his mud-soaked trousers, to land on his feet that were more blue duct tape than yachting shoe. Her mouth frowned and she glanced over her shoulder toward an older woman in a gray jacket who was talking to customers. This second woman was clearly the more senior. The waitress said, “You’d better be quick then.” She ushered him toward a door, without touching any part of him.

  In the mirror, Harold met a face he only dimly knew. The skin hung in dark folds, as if there was too much of it for the bone behind. He appeared to have several cuts to the forehead and cheekbone. His hair and beard were wilder than he realized, and from his eyebrows and nostrils shot stray long hairs like wires. He was a joke old man. A misfit. He looked nothing like the man who had set off with a letter. He looked nothing like the man who had posed for photographs and worn a PILGRIM T-shirt.

  The waitress provided water in a disposable cup but did not invite him to sit. He asked if anyone might lend him a razor or a comb, but the manageress in the gray jacket came swiftly over and pointed to the sign at the window. NO BEGGING. She asked him to leave, or she would have to call the police. No one looked up as he moved to the door. He wondered if he smelled bad. He had been outside so long he had forgotten which smells were good and which were not. He knew people were embarrassed on his behalf, and wished to spare them that.

  At a table beside the window, a young man and his wife crooned over their baby. There rose such pain inside Harold, he didn’t know how he would keep upright.

  He turned to the manageress and the teashop people and he met them face-on. He said, “I want my son.”

  Speaking the words sent his body shaking; not with a gentle shiver but a spasmic shudder that came from deep inside. His face twisted as grief tore through his chest muscles and swelled its passage up his throat.

  “Where is he?” said the manageress.

  Harold squeezed his hands to keep himself from falling.

  The manageress said, “Do you see your son here? Is he in Berwick?”

  A customer put his hand on Harold’s arm. He said more gently: “Excuse me, sir. Are you the man who was walking?”

  Harold gasped. It was the kindness of the man that unpicked him.

  “My wife and I read about what you did. We had a friend we had lost touch with. Last weekend we went to visit. We spoke of you.”

  Harold let the man talk, and hold his arm, but he couldn’t reply or move his face.

  “Who is your son? What is his name?” said the man. “Maybe I could help?”

  “His name is—”

  Suddenly Harold’s heart plummeted, as if he had stepped over a wall and was tumbling through emptiness. “He’s my son. His name is—”

  The manageress looked coolly back at him, waiting, waiting, with
the customers behind her, and the kind man with his hand on Harold’s sleeve. They had no idea. No idea of the horror, the confusion, the remorse raging inside him. He couldn’t remember his son’s name.

  Out on the street, a young woman tried to give him a piece of paper.

  “It’s salsa dancing classes for the over-sixties,” she said. “You should come. It’s never too late.”

  But it was. It was far too late. Harold shook his head wildly, and took a few more staggering steps. His legs felt boned.

  “Please take the leaflet,” said the girl. “Take the lot. You can throw them in the bin if you like. I just want to go home.”

  Harold stumbled the streets of Berwick with the wodge of leaflets, not knowing where he was going. People swerved to avoid him, but he didn’t stop. He could forgive his parents for not wanting him. For not showing him how to love, or even giving him the vocabulary. He could forgive their parents, and their parents before that.

  All Harold wanted was his child.

  Harold and Another Letter

  Dear Girl in the Garage,

  I owe you the full story. Twenty years ago I buried my son. It is not something a father should have to do. I wanted to know the man he would become. I still do.

  To this day, I don’t understand why he did it. He was depressed, and addicted to mixing alcohol with pills. He couldn’t get a job. But I wish with all my heart he had spoken to me.

  He hanged himself in my garden shed. He did it with some rope, tied to one of the hooks I used for garden tools. He was so full of the alcohol and pills, the coroner said it must have taken a long time to tie the noose. The verdict was suicide.

  It was me who discovered him. I can barely write this. At the time I prayed, although as I told you at the garage I am not a religious man. I said, Dear God, please let him be OK. I will do anything. I lifted him down, but there was no life. I was too late.

  I wish they hadn’t told me about him taking all that time to tie the noose.

  My wife took it terribly. She wouldn’t leave the house. She put up net curtains because she didn’t want the neighbors visiting. Gradually those people moved away and no one knew about us, or what had happened. But every time Maureen looked at me, I knew she saw David dead.

  She began talking to him. He was with her, she said. She was always waiting for him. Maureen keeps his room exactly as it was the day he died. And sometimes it makes me sad all over again, but it is what my wife wants. She can’t let him be dead, and I understand that. It is too much for a mother to bear.

  Queenie knew all about David, but she didn’t say anything. She looked out for me. She fetched tea with sugar and talked about the weather. Only once she said, Maybe you’ve had enough now, Mr. Fry. Because that was the other thing. I was drinking.

  It started off as just one to keep me steady before the coroner’s report. But I was keeping the bottles in paper bags under my desk. God knows how I drove home. I just wanted to stop feeling.

  When I was really out of it one night, I dismantled the garden shed. But even that wasn’t enough. So I broke into the brewery and I did something terrible. Queenie knew it had to be me and she took the blame.

  She was fired on the spot and then she disappeared. I heard she had been warned to get out of the South West, if she knew what was good for her. I also overheard a secretary who was friendly with Queenie’s landlady saying that she had not left a forwarding address. I let her go. I let her take the blame. But I gave up drinking.

  Maureen and I fought for a long time, and then gradually we stopped talking. She moved out of our bedroom. She stopped loving me. There were many times I thought she would leave, but she didn’t. I slept badly every night.

  People think I am walking because there was a romance between myself and Queenie all those years ago, but it isn’t true. I walked because she saved me, and I never said thank you. And this is why I am writing to you. I want you to know how much you helped me all those weeks ago, when you told me about your faith and your aunt, although I fear my courage has never matched yours.

  With best wishes and my humble thanks,

  Harold (Fry)

  PS. I apologize for not knowing your name.

  Maureen and the Visitor

  FOR DAYS MAUREEN had been preparing the house for Harold’s return. She had taken the two photographs he kept in his bedside drawer and measured them up for frames. She had repainted the best room a soft shade of yellow, and hung a pair of pale blue velvet curtains at the window, which she had picked up at the charity shop, good as new, and shortened. She baked cakes to store in the freezer, as well as a selection of pies, moussaka, lasagna, and boeuf bourguignon—all those dishes she had cooked in the days when David was alive. There were jars of her runner bean chutney in the cupboard, along with pickled onions and beetroot. She kept lists in the kitchen and bedroom. There was so much to do. And yet sometimes, when she looked out of the window, or lay awake listening to the gulls crying like children, she felt that despite her activity there was something about it that was inactive, as if she were missing the point.

  Supposing Harold returned home, and told her he needed to walk again? Supposing he had outgrown her, after all?

  A ring at the doorbell in the early morning brought her downstairs. She found a sallow-faced young girl waiting on the threshold, with lank hair, and wearing a black duffle coat although it was already warm.

  “Please could I come in, Mrs. Fry?”

  Over tea and several apricot flapjacks, the girl told her she was the one who had given Harold the burger all those weeks ago. He had sent her many lovely postcards; although due to his sudden rise to fame there had been an inconvenient number of fans and journalists hanging about the garage. In the end her boss had been obliged to ask her to leave for health and safety reasons.

  “You lost your job? That’s terrible,” said Maureen. “Harold will be very sorry to hear this.”

  “It’s all right, Mrs. Fry. I didn’t like the job anyway. Customers were always shouting, and in too much of a hurry. But what I said to your husband about the power of faith has been bothering me ever since.” She looked fidgety and anxious; she kept tucking the same strand of her hair behind her ear, although it wasn’t out of place. “I think I gave him the wrong impression.”

  “But Harold was inspired by what you said. It was your faith that gave him the idea to walk.”

  The girl sat bunched up in her coat and gnawed at her lip so hard Maureen was afraid she would draw blood. Then she tugged an envelope out of her pocket, and removed several sheets of paper. She held them out, but her hand was trembling. “Here,” she said.

  Maureen’s mouth bent into a frown. “ ‘Salsa for the over-sixties’?”

  The girl reached for the papers and flipped them over. “The writing’s on the other side. It’s a letter from your husband. It came to the garage. My friend warned me to fetch it before the boss saw.”

  Maureen read in silence, weeping over each sentence. The loss that had wrenched them apart twenty years ago was as lacerating and incomprehensible as if it was happening afresh. When she finished, she thanked the girl and folded the letter, running her nail along the crease.

  Then she posted the letter back inside its envelope. She sat, very still.

  “Mrs. Fry?”

  “There’s something I need to explain.”

  Maureen wet her lips and let the words come. It was a relief. Moved as she was by Harold’s confession, it felt right to share the facts at last about David’s suicide, and the grief that had split his parents apart. “We shouted for a while. I blamed Harold terribly. I said awful things. That he should have been a better father. That the drinking was in Harold’s family. And then we seemed to run out of words. It was about that time I began talking to David.”

  “You mean he was a ghost?” said the girl. She had clearly seen too many films.

  Maureen shook her head. “Not a ghost, no. More like a presence. A feeling of David. It was my only comfort. I said
little things at first. ‘Where are you?’ ‘I miss you.’ Things like that. But as time went by, I said more. I said everything that I didn’t say to Harold. There were times when I almost wished I hadn’t started; but then I worried that if I stopped talking, I would somehow betray David. Supposing he really was there? Supposing he needed me? I told myself that if I waited long enough I might see him. You read about things like that in those magazines at the doctor’s, while you’re waiting. I wanted to see him so much.” She wiped her eyes. “But it never happened. I looked and looked but he never came.”

  The girl stuffed her face into a handkerchief, and bawled. “Oh God, that’s too sad.” When she emerged her eyes were so small and her cheeks so red her face looked peeled. Strings of saliva looped from her nose and mouth. “I’m such a fraud, Mrs. Fry.”

  Maureen reached out her hand for the girl’s. It was small as a child’s, but surprisingly warm. She gave it a squeeze.

  “You’re not a fraud. It was you who began his journey. You inspired him when you talked about your aunt. You mustn’t cry.”

  The girl let out another sob and plunged her face back into the handkerchief. Raising her head again, she blinked her poor eyes and took a shuddering deep breath. “That’s just it,” she said at last. “My aunt’s dead. She went years ago.”

  Maureen felt something falling away. The room seemed to give a tremendous jolt, as if she’d just missed her step on the stairs. “She’s what?” Words stuck in her mouth. She opened it and swallowed and swallowed again. Then in a rush: “But what about your faith? I thought it saved her? I thought that was the whole point?”

  The girl dug her teeth into the corner of her upper lip, so that her jaw shot out sideways. “If cancer’s got hold of you, there’s nothing that’s going to stop it.”