October
Chris’s calf muscles were on fire, but he kept pushing down on the pedals and then pulled up as hard as he could without his lungs exploding out of his chest. He was standing up on the pedals for the first time in months and it hurt everything, even his teeth from clenching his jaw as he went up the sharp twisty road out of Buttermere village.
Sweat ran into his eyes, but the pain it caused made him push and pull with an emotion he didn’t fully understand: it burnt like anger, but hurt like his heart was splitting down the middle.
As he approached the top of the hill, his stomach was right at the back of his throat and his whole body was starting to shake. Sitting back onto the blade-like saddle when he passed over the summit, he sank his shoulders forwards and allowed his legs to relax a little. As he moved back up through the gears, his heart rate went back down to somewhere closer to normal. The ugly emotion that had kept him going had sizzled out for now. He felt drained, but better than he had for months. Moving everything to the extreme had been physically painful, but cathartic. Pure muscle memory and grim determination had got him up the hill.
The morning light was soft; he noticed it now and breathed the fresh air deep into his lungs, his eyes half closing in long forgotten pleasure. He glanced at his outstretched arms, coated lightly with sweat, and noticed the hairs were standing up in an effort to escape the dampness and cool down. He wore fingerless cycling gloves, the backs of which were criss-cross cream cotton like old-fashioned driving gloves and had soft suede pads. Only his thumbs and index fingers were visible as he gripped the hoods of the handlebars, ready to tweak the brakes as he descended the long sweep of road out of the village and towards the end of Crummock Water. He had always kept his nails closely clipped, but over the last few months, he had taken to nibbling them without even realising it was becoming a habit.
After the shady and sometimes slippery with leaves and sheep poo bends by the posh B&B that never had vacancies, the road dropped down more sharply and he had to pull hard on the brakes. His left foot twisted slightly, ready to unclip if he wobbled. But he caught himself just in time and glided down to the large lay-by under the stand of Scots pines by the lake end. He often stopped here on his way back from Honister; it reconnected him to his life before everything had gone wrong. This morning was no exception.
As he stood astride his bike, quenching his thirst from his water bottle, he allowed his eyes to feast on everything that was laid out in front of him. The tall, dignified trees that provided a natural windbreak in the winter and cool shade in the summer; the blue of the deep water, so calm that it reflected the greens, russets and coppers of early autumn fells; a tiny island, where oystercatchers made their nests in spring and which noisy teenagers invaded by paddleboard and rubber canoes during the first hot spell of summer; and right down in the distance, the giant lump of shattered rock, airy ledges and sheep-nibbled grass that was Melbreak.
Something pale caught his eye down on the beach below the road. It was a person – a solitary figure of a woman. She was naked. He was so deeply lost in memories that he hardly reacted; she just seemed to be part of the landscape that he knew so well. But as she lifted up her long, dark hair and held it on top of her head, he found himself examining the shape of her body. He wanted to be closer, even though it felt slightly voyeuristic. He felt guilty for intruding on her obvious pleasure in soaking up the early morning beauty, believing herself to be alone and unwatched.
But he was mesmerised. From the road, he couldn’t tell who she was, how old she was, or whether she’d just been or was about to go for a swim. It was her nakedness that caught him by surprise – or rather, his body’s reaction to watching her bare body, even though he knew it was not an invitation for anyone or anything. Feeling uncomfortable in many ways, Chris hurried to get back on his bike and cycle on down the road before she turned round and saw him watching. He put his reaction down to having raised his blood pressure cycling up the hill, but for the first time in months, possibly years, he felt a vague connection to his body and another, more intriguing, part of his being: desire.