Her breathing was heavier, catching on unseen obstacles, causing her mouth to dry and block with unswallowable saliva. It had to be removed with swabs to let the air past. At two in the morning, there was no time for sleep. Just time to listen to the breaths, saving them, storing them for when there would be no more. I opened the curtain, letting the car-park lighting turn the room into a burnt-yellow crypt.
I put my feet up on the bed and tried to let sleep come, but there was no hope of that, so I propped Copsford on my legs, letting it catch the light from the window. Why couldn’t I remember this book? But as I opened it and thumbed the worn, discoloured pages, a faint memory began to stir. I did remember it. It was one of the books that had come from Glin, Mum’s artistic, book-loving friend. I’d tried to read it, but, too young and disappointed by the lack of animals, I’d discarded it on the bookshelf. Too young to understand what had driven the young Walter J. C. Murray to leave the city and live for a year in the ruined house depicted on the cover. A year without running water, or electricity, in a house where rain leaked through the roof and wind howled through the doors. Maybe now it would make sense. As the night wore on and nurses came and stood by Mum, watching, listening, I read my way out of the room and into a hidden place in rural post-war England. But in the quiet stillness of the room I became increasingly irritated by Walter Murray and his inability to stick to anything. He grew up in Sussex, playing in the fields and lanes of the village where he lived. Too young to be affected by the early years of the First World War, when he was finally old enough to join the war effort he entered the Merchant Navy, only to find he hated the nauseating endlessness of the sea, so left and joined the RAF. But he was never to become a pilot; the war ended before he learnt how to fly. Returning to the village of Horam, he was listless, an irritated youth who felt he’d missed out on the big show, so he packed his bag and left for the city and a job in journalism. But he was bored by reporting on trivial incidents and again began to grow dissatisfied.
I became quickly bored with Walter and put the book down to go out into the corridor for a cardboard cup of tea from the drinks machine. The man – his name was Harry – came shuffling towards the women’s wards in new blue checked pyjamas, taking up his seat by the sleeping old lady. ‘Mum, Mum, let’s go home.’ I waited for the nurses to usher him out, but they didn’t come. He held her hand, stroking it carefully, almost tenderly, as she started to rouse. I expected her to shout, but she didn’t, she just reached out and patted his arm. ‘We’ll go home tomorrow. Go back to bed now and get some rest.’ Harry stood up without resisting and left the ward the way he came, a hunched old man, but inside the shell a lost, frightened little boy who just knew he had to get back to some vague memory of an earlier time. I went back to the room, shutting the door quietly behind me. Mum’s eyes were open, staring again at the end of the bed. I tried to stand in her gaze, but she wasn’t seeing me; something else held her transfixed.
‘Try to sleep, Mum. I’ve got this book …’ I began to read to her and within seconds her eyes were closed and her breathing heavier and harsh. I knew how she felt; there aren’t many things as sleep-inducing as a teenager who can’t just get on with something. But I stuck with it as Walter became disillusioned by his dull job and his dismal accommodation, even finding he no longer had inspiration to write: the one thing he’d hoped to do. He was suffocated by the city and started to dream of returning home where he could ‘live close to nature’. The pages turned and I stopped needing him to explain himself; I knew him already, I knew what he was searching for – it was the same force that drove me to walk the cliffs or run to the woods. The same inexplicable, magnetic pull. Hooked now, connected, unable to stop reading, I followed Walter’s year of living alone in the countryside, immersed in the wild exuberant nature of the English landscape in the mid-twentieth century.
As night turned into morning and the hospital day began, I started to understand what it was that didn’t feel quite the same about the fields and woods of the estate. What it was that had changed in such a silent way that its passing was hardly noticeable. There was a lack of something, but that lack had been almost invisible until I held up the mirror of Copsford and what was reflected wasn’t the estate of my childhood. I looked up from the book at the leafless branches of the birch tree outside. Of course the hedges weren’t full of wild flowers, or the grass buzzing with bees: it was the end of January. But it was something less obvious, something more than the converted sawmill and the commuters living in the farmworkers’ cottages. It was a stillness, a wild silence beyond the emptiness of the pine trees. A silence on the wind, the deadness of something having gone. The farm had become a different, neater, more barren place, the wild things had gone, the skies were quieter and the earth was empty and dark. An invisible change, almost imperceptible until it shone out in Copsford’s blinding light.
Then everything changed.
‘I can’t stand to think of you there. Don’t you need me with you? Let me come.’ It was hard for Moth not to be with me; it made no sense to him. ‘I know she hates me but it’s too late for that.’
‘I know, but please don’t come.’ I could already feel the difficulty of what was happening that day and I couldn’t have him there. It was almost too awful to cope with myself, but if he was in the room he would know what it was to die this way and I couldn’t let him see it – I could barely hold Mum’s death separate to his as it was. For him to be in the same room would have meshed the two inextricably in my head and I was already close to drowning in my own maelstrom of thought. ‘Please don’t.’
The harsh, snatched breath had become a deep wheeze. Every intake a growing battle, and with each hour it became worse. I called the nurses in.
‘She’s choking. Can’t you do something?’
‘She’s on nil-intervention. We’d have to get approval from the consultant. He told you she would aspirate.’
‘What the hell? How could I know that aspirate meant this? You can’t let her suffer.’
The wheezing became a hauling suction of air, her body taking over in a primal, instinctive fight for oxygen, her face and throat distorting with the force of each deep, desperate attempt to breathe. Her lungs were producing vast amounts of mucus, but her throat couldn’t swallow.
Hours passed in the agony of watching her suffer. Hours of doubting the decision and hating myself for making it. Hours of mind-shattering, nauseating despair as I fought for each breath with her, thinking each one must be the last and she couldn’t possibly survive this. Exhausted, harrowed, I held her hand and watched in useless horror. As the afternoon wore on, when I thought neither of us could take any more, the matron appeared.
‘We’re going to give her hyoscine. It’s a drug that will stop the mucus production and ease the choking.’
Slowly the miracle relief left the syringe and her throat began to relax, the breathing became quieter, and the stillness returned. I crawled on to my chair, curled in a ball and shuddered with sobbing. I just wanted blackness, where no thought or sound or fear could enter.
‘I’ll get you a cup of tea, duck. That’s the hard bit over now.’
Over now, it was nearly over now. But it wasn’t. I was sobbing through one death, with the weight of another bearing down on me. I had to call him.
‘It’s been an awful day, but just tell me about yours.’
‘Why won’t you let me come?’
‘Just tell me about your day.’
‘Another weird one – definitely not the best. I had a really blank moment like I’d just switched off without knowing it, then I was so stiff I could hardly move. The lecturer was shaking me, saying I’d been staring out of the window for ages; then I couldn’t get up, nothing seemed to work, so someone drove me back to the chapel. Today I’m doubting if I’ll make the end of this degree, let alone teach afterwards. I’m just going to go and lie down. Can I call you later?’
I curled back into the chair, pulling the cotton blanket over my head and dragged Copsford into my cave with me. Take me away from this, Walter. Take me to green spaces and country lanes filled with herbs and wild flowers. Let me pick agrimony and comfrey with you. Take me away; give me the green safety of my childhood. I began to reread the book in the filtered light from the fluorescent strip. The world, Mum, Moth, all of it shut outside, just alone with Walter, wading through a stream on our way to pick blackberries.
In the twilight of a hospital night I couldn’t hide any more. Moth had begun university in hope. Not the sort of hope a normal student would have, that their degree would give them a long and prosperous future. His hope was that he would survive to the end of the degree and in doing so maybe his brain would stay alert enough to take him on to the next stage of his life. But he didn’t have to tell me; I knew he was slipping backwards from the high point at the end of the path. That euphoric point when he’d taken his rucksack off and his body had lost the stiffness and restraint of CBD and moved to his command. Or was he actually slipping forwards, slipping into the future that had been predicted?
We began our epic walk of the Coast Path with no sense of hope or possibility. Moth had been told he couldn’t survive, that the tau protein in his brain had stopped functioning in its normal way and was now clustering together in what the consultant called aggregates. A creeping process of tau phosphorylation, which would slowly close down the parts of his brain that instructed his body what to do. I imagined the tau forming like plaque on teeth, but in a place where the brush wouldn’t reach. So it could spread and grow until it suffocated all those beautiful brain cells that told Moth how to move, to feel, to remember, to swallow, to breathe. And yet as we walked along that incredible strip of wilderness, forgetting the existence of the normal world that lay to one side of the path, with our eyes always drawn to the endless horizon of the sea on the other, exhausted and starving, something had changed. He had changed. He’d grown stronger, the fog in his brain had cleared, his movements had become surer, easier to control. Why, why, why had that happened? There had to be a reason, but maybe it was time to accept that the doctors were right, that there was nothing that could be done other than face the inevitability of the end.
I couldn’t accept it. At the first crack of light through the window I picked the phone up.
‘I don’t care how tired you are – get up. You have to walk; you have to move. Just get outside and move.’
‘But I can’t. I feel like shit.’
‘I don’t care. Get up.’ I put the phone down and went into the corridor for another tiny tea from the machine, then picked the phone up again.
‘You’re still in bed; I know you are. Get up – you have to. Please just get up.’ There had to be a connection, a physical, chemical, biological reason why he’d improved when we walked. Whatever it was, we had to look for a way to replicate that effect. If we couldn’t find a way, we’d have to put on our rucksacks and walk again, indefinitely. He was on the slide to the bottom of CBD, with no twists or turns to slow his descent; we had to find a way. ‘Moth, put your boots on. I don’t care how you feel; you have to keep fighting. Just get up and try. Please try …’
We were walking the first time we’d realized that Moth had some kind of problem. Our twenty-fifth wedding anniversary. No big celebration, no noise or commotion, we hadn’t even told the kids which anniversary it was. It was a day just for us to be together, but we still felt we should do something to mark the moment.
‘Do you fancy walking up Tryfan? We’ve always wanted to but never given ourselves the time. Let’s do it today.’
Tryfan is a sharp ridge of a mountain in Snowdonia, tricky to get to from any side, and more of a scramble than a walk to get to the top. But it pointed out from the Glyderau hills, in a definitive, memorable way that somehow seemed to fit the day.
‘Okay, today then.’
Leaving the van by the YHA building at the foot of the mountain, we began our walk, climbing easily up the rocky steps from the tea hut. The air was clear and early-summer warm, skylarks hanging over the heather bogs with their clear, unmistakable song of the sky. The towering arc of the Cwm Idwal cliffs lay ahead with the lake at their base reflecting bright sparks of sunlight. We weren’t drawn in to follow the path that runs a pinball route beneath the rock walls, but branched away left, following a line across the rocky flank of the hillside, past the fast-falling stream to its source at Llyn Bochlwyd. We stopped to eat, drinking the tea from the flask and feeling the ache of legs that had been away from the hills for too long. Moth put the flask back into the daysack and handed it to me.
‘Can you carry this now? Don’t know what I’ve done to my shoulder, but it’s really aching today, I can’t seem to lift my arm properly.’
‘Isn’t it any better? Do you think it could have come from that fall through the barn roof in April?’
‘Could have, I don’t know – it didn’t seem to hurt at the time though.’
‘Give me the pack then.’
We continued up, rising sharply. Avoiding the eye-watering, knuckle-whitening Bristly Ridge that has rock-scrambling enthusiasts dribbling with excitement, we opted instead to find our own way to the top and began to scramble through a scree of large rocks and boulders towards the summit.
‘I’ve got to stop.’
I thought I’d misheard him – he never said stop; I’m always the one who needs to put the pack down and admire the view. We sat on a rock, the Ogwen Valley stretching away west, a deep groove of dark rock, oozing peat bog and high peaks where only the sheep belong. Multitudes of orange and blue specks were leaving the cars that were beginning to cluster on the roadside.
‘We should carry on. It’s going to get busy up here soon.’
‘Don’t know if I can. I feel dizzy. I can’t look down – I think I’m going to be sick.’
‘What’s wrong? Have you eaten something that hasn’t settled? It was only a cheese sandwich …’
‘No, it’s not that, it’s something else.’
‘What? What is it?’
‘I don’t know. I’ll try; maybe it’ll pass.’
At the top of Tryfan are the Adam and Eve stones. Two column-like boulders that stand vertically on the exposed ridge. To truly say you’ve done Tryfan you have to have leapt over the one-and-a-half-metre gap between the two boulders, and having done so wins you the ‘freedom of Tryfan’, however that presents itself. Our climbing days had faded away when the children were born, when being around for them meant life was too precious to risk on the fickle hold of a climbing aid. We weren’t there to prove anything to anyone, or to have a tale to tell in the pub. That leap represented far more to us: we were there on that day to say yes, yes we’d make that leap of life again together as we had twenty-five years earlier. It was to be our wild, exposed retaking of vows: to each other, to nature, to life. But as Moth retched up his cheese sandwich and sat with his head in his hands at the foot of Adam, it wasn’t to be. Looking at the precipitous fall down the other side of the boulder, I wasn’t sorry.
‘Stupid idea anyway. It’s not as if we’ve anything to prove to each other after all these years.’ I tried to make light of what was one of the rare occasions in his life that his body had failed to do what he asked. ‘Maybe you’ve got vertigo. It’s just middle age creeping up on you.’
‘Don’t joke – I think you’re right. I don’t actually know if I can go back down.’
We sat on the exposed mountain ridge as the light faded and the brightly coloured specks returned to their cars and drove away. The moon rose above the arching eastern skyline, washing the mountain tops in pale waves of light, obscuring the valley below in darkness, highlighted only by the lights of passing cars.
‘I’ll be with you forever, Ray, because it’s where I want to be. Will you do the same?’
‘Of course. Where else would I be? Forever.’
‘But that might not be too long. We’ve got to get off Tryfan in the dark, without a head torch.’
‘Forever it is then, even if that’s just half an hour.’