When the Christmas holiday ends and students miserably return to the classroom, very few are in their mid-fifties and starting to forget as fast as they learn. We stood in the kitchen-living area of the chapel going through Moth’s daily checklist before he headed to university for the day. Phone, wallet, glasses, check; van keys, check; notepad with the list of what you’re doing today, check.
‘See you tonight then.’
‘Yep, see you later.’ And he was gone, but I could still hear his footsteps walking unevenly down the side of the chapel into the dull light of a winter morning. Closing the door I was back inside the long narrow corridor-like space of the flat. I sat at the table with a cup of tea and thought about the day ahead. Waiting for the bread to pop from the toaster, my eyes scanned the bookshelf, searching for something to delay the moment when I had to open the laptop to spend more hours in the soul-destroying hunt for an employer who was on the lookout for an unqualified fifty-something with no employment record. The small bookshelf held just a random selection of books that had come out of a packing box. A few scattered volumes picked up in the last hours before we left our house. Whenever I looked at those books they took me straight back to that last moment before we walked out for the final time. Evicted from the dream that had been our family home, where we ran our holiday rental for visitors to come and stay, where we kept sheep and grew vegetables, the home where our children grew up, our world for twenty years. Before a financial dispute with a lifelong friend ended in a court case that resulted in us being served with an eviction notice. Those few books collected before we closed the door and left our old lives behind, never to return, held the sound of bailiffs as they hammered at the door, the fear of not knowing if we would ever find shelter again, and an overwhelming sadness. But if I’d known this would be the only box of books we’d bring with us into our new life I might have packed a better selection. I ran my hand across them in search of something, anything to take me out beyond the walls, beyond the chapel. A Field Guide to Fungi, maybe, though probably not in January; Outsider II, definitely not; Five Hundred Mile Walkies, that book, the one that had led to the most unexpected adventure. No, there was only one that would do the trick. The South West Coast Path: From Minehead to South Haven Point, Paddy Dillon’s beautiful guidebook to the 630-mile path. The book that had guided us all the way to Polruan. The friend in our pocket as we decided not to give in to the chaos of homelessness, but to put our rucksacks on our backs and walk the whole length of the path Paddy describes, living wild, homeless and penniless on its cliffs and beaches.
The plastic cover on the little brown book was still intact, the pages bound together with a black elastic hair band. As I took it off the stiff pages bulged in ripples that had echoes of a hard sand beach on an outgoing tide. Between the pages, some stuck together in rain-damaged clumps, were postcards, feathers, grasses, scraps of paper and flowers. Memories of a path that falls from cliff top to sea level and back, until the rollercoaster of wilderness has followed the whole coastline of the south-west of England and the walker has climbed the equivalent of Everest nearly four times.
I buttered the toast and waited for the phone to ring. Moth’s call to say that he had arrived at university, and wasn’t sitting in a café in Truro or walking on the beach at Watergate Bay because he’d begun to drive to university, then forgotten where he was going and convinced himself that he had some other destination to go to. I thumbed the pages of the small book, almost reluctant to look inside. It held sunlit, windswept memories of months spent on cliff tops in all weathers. But there was something else in there: darker memories of the pain and sadness of the awful week that had driven us to make that walk. We were different people then, desperate, anxious, frightened people, trying to cram twenty years of life into packing boxes with only days left before we had to leave our house, thinking that losing our home was the worst thing that could possibly happen to us. But a routine hospital appointment during that week had changed those thoughts. As the lights of our life were going out, a doctor sat on the corner of his table and switched off the final lamp.
I closed the book. Did I really want to go back to that week, to feel the horror again? Too late: it was already with me. No escaping the memory of Moth’s body clenched tight as he was diagnosed with a neurodegenerative disease that had neither treatment or cure. No escaping the sense of fear that returned whenever I remembered being told that the pain in Moth’s shoulder, a numbness in his left side and dark fog of mental paralysis slowly taking his thoughts wasn’t just old age, but actually corticobasal degeneration, CBD, a creeping unstoppable disease with only a short time left to run its course to the end. And as the doctor painted a picture of Moth’s body forgetting how to swallow and pneumonia making him choke on his own saliva, we realized how wrong we’d been: far worse things were waiting for us than becoming homeless.
I put the kettle back on. He should be there by now – why hadn’t he called? I turned the pages, carefully peeling apart the clumps of dried paper, Paddy’s descriptions of the path leaping out in punctuations of memory. ‘Drifts a little inland and uphill’: I laughed at the thought of us standing at the start of the walk and reading that line as we looked at a steep path following a zigzag up a near-vertical cliff. But as the pages finally began to separate, Moth was there in the margins and I could see his face as he looked up at me in the torchlight of a dark evening, when the last of the light had faded over the horizon and the green dome of the tent enclosed us in the two sheets of our damp, nylon home. Still the same wild, unstoppable man I’d loved for all of my adult life, sitting on his sleeping bag as I lay in mine, heavy-eyed but watching him write. He was there, smiling as he wrote in tiny spidery words in the margins of the guidebook, capturing the days we had just spent on cliff tops and beaches, camping on headlands and rocky ledges. ‘Camped on Leskey’s Ledge, more in the sea than beside it.’ ‘I’m so hungry I ate Ray’s biscuit, don’t think she noticed.’ ‘Opened the tent to find we’re only a metre from the cliff edge.’ ‘Blackberries.’ ‘The sea is like syrup, I have become the sea.’ ‘Held Ray’s hand at the edge of all things.’ ‘Today I walked with a tortoise.’
Touching the faded pencilled words, I was with him in the wind and the rain, watching his feet as they followed the path ahead of me, blown forward into a new world. A world of university and the chapel, where the Coast Path ran past the front gate and I waited for him to return. He hadn’t called – where was he?
As the pages slowly separated, page 140 appeared: Portheras Cove. ‘Dolphins and high tide.’ ‘I ran with the tent above my head.’ ‘Is this real?’ That magical moment when we realized that he was defying the doctors who’d said CBD had no treatment or cure and his health couldn’t improve. The night when we ran up the beach in the moonlight. Running away from the incoming tide, holding the fully erected tent above our heads, and learnt how to hope again. After the walk, before he started university, we’d told the doctor about how Moth’s health had improved, how he had done something that every authority on the illness said was impossible. The doctor hadn’t been excited.
‘Start the degree if you want to, but be prepared to give it up.’ Implying Moth might not make it to the end.
We didn’t believe him, didn’t want to believe. And yet as the time passed and the pressures of his degree meant Moth was becoming more sedentary, the health and ease of movement he’d found on the cliff tops was leaving him. In the quiet coldness of the winter the stiffness had returned, his aching body slowing again. Each day now began with a struggle to stand upright and as he took each shaky early-morning step a creeping sense of inevitability had set in. A reluctant acceptance of what the doctor had said; he probably wouldn’t be able to finish the degree. He certainly wouldn’t finish the course if he kept disappearing; maybe I should start taking him to uni and picking him up later? No, it was a struggle for both of us to survive on his student loan; we certainly couldn’t afford the petrol needed to make the journey twice a day. What I needed was a tracking device. I closed the book, overwhelmed with the sadness of the thought that the day would come when Moth couldn’t remember what we did. The day when CBD had crept so far that the clear, magical, wild experience we’d shared was lost to him forever and I’d be left alone with the memory. The day when the guidebook would be the only record that our walk had ever happened.
Where the hell was he?
I switched the lights on. Mid-morning; the sun had already moved beyond the point where it shone into the flat and it was getting darker. I finished the tea and sat at the table gazing out of the tall chapel window that looked out on to the wall of the neighbour’s garden. At six feet high it half-filled the view, but above that was the upper terrace of garden shrubs and a magnolia tree. A large brown rat dropped out of the ivy and walked across the top of the wall; then he stopped, looking in at me, his round eyes staring until he turned around and went back the way he came. I opened the door to see where he’d gone. I could hear him, but I couldn’t see him, just the wall of ivy that clad the cliff face a metre and a half away from the door. From the dark damp corridor of greenness between the chapel wall and the cliff, my eyes followed his trail of rustling leaves upwards through the ivy. Up there, between the buddleia bushes and the roof of the chapel, was a thin blue strip of sky, a world where the sun shone and the wind blew and I knew I had to be there; a dark sense of enclosure had borne down on me and I had to get out.
Grabbing my coat and phone, I hurried out into the street, intending to follow it up to the open cliffs, as I had every day since we’d moved to the chapel. The narrow street, hardly wide enough for a car to pass through, seemed full of people. People walking, talking, loud gesticulating people. I walked a short way along the road, but was suddenly gripped by an overwhelming sense of panic and pressed myself against the garden wall of a terrace of houses until the people had passed. What was happening? I couldn’t understand the pulsing sensation in my head, and the reddening face. Not a hot flush, they were in the past, but what was happening? Was I ill? More people walked by, noisy, busy people.
‘Hi, lovely day.’
It was all I could do to mutter a muted ‘hi’ in response. I didn’t know what to do or which way to turn, but found myself running back to the chapel, slamming the iron gate behind me and disappearing down the concrete alleyway. I lay on the floor of the flat trying to calm my breathing, my thoughts racing. Gradually my head stopped pounding and I realized that in the year since we’d arrived at the chapel I’d barely said a word to anyone other than Moth or our two children when they phoned or occasionally visited. When out alone I didn’t speak if I could avoid it; if I was with Moth I let him do the talking.
Had I tried to talk to anyone since we’d moved there? There’d been opportunities in the shop when I could have had a conversation while the lady behind the counter filled my bag and asked me, ‘Are you living here now? I’ve seen you a few times. Where have you moved from – out of Cornwall, obviously?’ She had done so numerous times, but I’d avoided a conversation on each occasion, just muttering ‘thank you’, grabbing the bag and leaving. There had been moments when people in the street had stopped to look at the façade of the tall, imposing chapel and asked about its history, and I’d said I wasn’t sure but I’d get Moth because he knew all about it. Then I’d scuttled to the back of the chapel and stayed there. I was in a state of hyper-alert over-awareness whenever I left the flat. When we walked the path, our rucksacks stuffed with our possessions, I’d had no problems, so why now in the village did I feel this need to be invisible? Any hard-won grain of self-belief I’d found while we were walking had vanished, lost in the sea mist as it crept up the river. I sat up, angry with myself. So much time spent avoiding any interaction with people was ridiculous. I’d let this thing get out of control.
I found the laptop and put on the meditation channel I’d recently discovered. The cross-legged guru spoke to me in smooth tones.
‘Breathe in and follow the breath out, and focus on the breath. Let go of all thoughts and follow the breath.’
I followed the breath. I was good at this. I could empty my head and follow my breath as if I was born to it. But even as I breathed, the sound crept in and wouldn’t leave. A voice from some hidden, subdued, suppressed part of me that wouldn’t be quiet. That deep resonating sound which felt like a question.
The phone rang. Yes, at last.
‘Where are you? Don’t tell me you’re in St Ives?’ Last time he’d forgotten where he was going, he’d called me from a café on the north coast, an hour away from uni. Maybe this time he’d headed west.
‘Not today. I met one of the other students in the car park and she finally found the courage to ask me what I was doing in Cornwall and why I was on the course.’ Moth was finding sharing the course with a roomful of twenty-somethings quite difficult; they seemed to live in an entirely different world to him.
‘Can’t believe no one’s asked you before. What did you say?’
‘I stuck to the line we used on the path – that we’ve sold the house and I’m studying as part of a career move into teaching.’
‘Not really a lie, just a half-truth, but you’ve said it now so she’ll tell everyone else. Can you keep it up?’
‘Saves me having to explain how we lost the house and became homeless – it’s just easier – but now they probably think I’m an ultra-wealthy mid-lifer having some sort of existential crisis.’
‘Only a minor misconception then.’
I sagged into the chair with the relief of knowing he was where he should be. If only I could cope with this change in our lives the way he did. He just carried on being his full-on, outgoing, gregarious, story-telling self, despite occasionally not knowing where he was. The ragged, distorted threads of our lives were slowly beginning to re-form, but there was something eating into my peace of mind. Not just Moth’s health but something else, in the dark confusion of my own head in the early hours of the morning, when I opened the door and looked for the sky and saw nothing but a thin strip of grey between the chapel and the rock face, when I walked into the street and it was full of people and there was nowhere to be alone. On so many days like that, I followed the path to the cliffs to stand with my face in the wind and feel the force of the weather: something that felt real. And always the voice in my head growing louder, like an onshore wind bringing a storm from the sea. Or was it the voice of my mum saying ‘I told you so’? It was hard to say.
Making my bed in the tent in the early days of the new year, I thought I’d solved my sleep problem: I’d simply been missing the familiarity of the tent; things would be absolutely fine now. I’d get more sleep; then I’d be stronger, more in control and able to focus my thoughts on living our new life in the village and making sure Moth didn’t get lost. I huddled in the green dome in the corner of the bedroom, away from people and the world, unaware that only a few days later I’d find myself in the middle of the country, as far from the sea and the tent as I could possibly be.