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He wasn’t there when I began. I wouldn’t have stayed if he was. The whole point of what I do is the loneliness and solitude, the escape from my troubled existence. I hike out to these places to be alone, and sketch and paint them so that I can take them home with me. They are my escape. From the first pencil line or brush stroke, the canvas becomes a reality where I can live alone for a few hours or days, free from the real world.
The real world isn’t very nice.
“Kes! Here!” My little collie scampers across the heathers and weaves through a stand of ferns, back to where I have set myself up for the day. He’s a good dog. Dogs are undemanding and kind, their love a simple thing. That’s why I like to bring him out here with me, because his simpleness, his dogness, doesn’t taint this place.
The figure in my painting does.
Kes nuzzles against my hand. I tickle him behind the ear, and he grumbles and tilts his head in satisfaction. There’s a warm breeze flowing across the hillside today, carrying scents of heather and wet mud, and the fresh, wild smells of the mysterious mountains. If it shifts ninety degrees and breathes at me across the town, I’ll pick up aromas from the bakery close to the river, or the building site where they’re constructing another two hundred homes. I hope that doesn’t happen. This is my fourth day coming to the same spot, and I’ve been lucky so far—the weather has been consistent, the sky cloudy but witholding its rain, the breeze wafting in from the same direction.
The painting is progressing well. Apart from him. But right now, I’m avoiding thinking about him.
Kes growls and lopes off again, and this time I let him. I watch as he springs through the high ferns like a lamb, leaping to find his bearings, running again, leaping again. He reminds me of myself, ploughing blindly through life and coming up here, or places like this, to raise my head above water.
“Go get ’em, boy,” I say under my breath. Kes barks as if he’s heard me, and several startled birds take wing.
I look at my painting and consider adding the birds in, specks in the sky that might remind me of this place and time, but my attention is drawn to the figure once again.
He’s little more than a few brush strokes right now. He appeared on my version of the hillside just an hour ago, and I surprised myself by painting him in. However much I stare at him, and then sit back and look across the hill, he’s only there in my painting.
Maybe I saw a shape in the air? A shimmer in heat haze, or a waft of mist from the damp grass? The shadow of a red kite circling high above?
I can’t fool myself. I saw nothing, yet still I felt the need to paint him into my picture.
It should not matter, and yet it does. My paintings are rarely literal representations of the world. The general lie of the land is as I view it, but the skies are inevitably more stormy and violent in shades of red shadow, the hillsides more desolate and windswept. I paint my mood and my soul onto the canvases, and sometimes I frighten myself with how I see the world.
It should not matter. But it does.
In my painting he is a long way away, but he is walking straight towards me.
––––––––
Later that afternoon I come down off the mountain. The Blorenge is my favourite of the three hills surrounding Abergavenny. Although it is perhaps not the most dramatic to draw or paint—that might be the Sugarloaf, with its distinctive volcano-shaped peak, or the harsh knife-edge of the Skirrid—it is the quietest of the three. I can sometimes follow a familiar seven-mile walk across and around the mountain without encountering another soul, and sometimes when I’m up there I imagine that I am the last person on Earth, wandering with my rucksack full of art stuff and my dog, and recording the end of time for the no one who will come after me. For someone so lonely, the fantasy is strangely calming.
Kes runs ahead of me down the steep slope through the woods. There are old stone railway sleepers here, the track long since gone, the chains that hauled carts up and down the mountainside now rusted away to nothing. Perhaps their remains are close, fragile remnants buried deep.
I pass the old tunnel mouth. It’s a strange structure, an arch of brickwork protruding from a steep bank with only darkness beneath its mouldy embrace. I’ve stopped a few times and looked inside, but Kes has always been uncertain, sometimes standing with hackles up as if sensing something in there, perhaps sensing nothing. Maybe it leads to other worlds. Maybe it leads to different versions of this one. I wish I was brave enough to venture in.
Further down the hill I start to hear distant traffic, and experience the familiar sadness that my time alone is over. I consider turning around and going back up. It’s summer, warm and bright, and I know I could probably sleep on the mountainside. But it’s late afternoon now, and I have no food or water left.
Kes whines softly. He’s hungry, and probably eager to get home. He’s not as young as he used to be.
“Okay, boy,” I say, and then another voice pipes up and surprises me.
“Nice dog.”
I jump.
“Sorry. Sorry.” The old man is beneath the trees to my left. I’ve seen him before out in the hills, usually from a distance. I recognise his long grey hair and red bandana. I sometimes think he’s as lonely as me, but who am I to judge? I have no right to project my problems or faults onto him. Just because he walks the same paths as me doesn’t mean he’s heading in the same direction.
“It’s okay,” I say. “I was miles away.”
“Look like you’ve seen a ghost.” He’s looking at the kit I’m carrying. If I’ve seen him he must have seen me, but maybe he was too far away to make out what I was doing.
“Just tired,” I say. “All this fresh air.”
“Lovely up there,” he says. “My favourite mountain.”
“Mine too.” Kes has trotted up to the man, confident and unconcerned, and that puts me more at ease. The dog’s a good judge of character, and he can usually smell the crazy on people. The old man kneels and ruffles the back of his neck.
“You seen the Walker.” Even in that simple remark I can hear the capital letter for Walker. He gives the word a peculiar weight.
“What do you mean?”
He doesn’t answer at first. He looks down at the dog, and something about his manner makes me think he’s sorry that he spoke.
“What Walker?”
“Oh, nothing. Silly old story. The hills are full of them.”
I think about asking more, but don’t. He seems like a nice old man, but I’m tired from the day’s work, and I’m eager to get the painting home and set it up to dry. It’s almost finished, and the more I carry it around, the longer I hold onto it, the more chance there is of causing damage.
“Nice to meet you,” I say. “I think Kes has a new friend.”
The old man nods and smiles, then waves as he heads past me up the hill.
“It’ll be dark soon,” I say.
“I like it up here in the dark,” he says. “See you around, I’m sure.”
I head down to the road, and cross to the small car park. Kes walks beside me, obedient as ever. I open my little car and place the painting carefully on the front seat, propped so that it will not slip or tumble on the short ride home. Kes jumps into the back and snuggles down on the seat. By the time I start the car the dog is already asleep.
I sit for a while, thinking about the old man walking up onto the mountain to meet the dusk. I wonder what else he might meet up there.
He seemed unafraid.
––––––––
I do not talk to anyone else that day.
Back at home, Kes trots into the house and waits patiently in the kitchen for his tea. After feeding him I feed myself, some salad and cured meats from the fridge, followed by a whole packet of biscuits and a big mug of coffee. I stare at the painting as I eat. It’s propped on a stand in the large kitchen. I’ve been working on it for four days and I’m starting to consider it complete, but the more I stare at it, the less it seems like a painting I would have done. The landscape is familiar, and the stormy sky giving voice and scope to my constant inner turmoil and loneliness. But there’s something about the shape—cast onto canvas with a few brush strokes, shadowy and yet obvious—that speaks of familiarity.
I cover the painting before going to bed.
––––––––
I wake up before the dawn, as always. Kes has crept upstairs during the night and made his home on the foot of my bed. I don’t mind, and he knows that, stretching out as I stretch, crawling closer to me so I can pet him as I lie awake and watch shadows retreating across the ceiling.
Something plays at my mind as I use the bathroom and dress. A certainty that is left over from my dreams, a vaguely haunting idea that I sense plagued my sleep, but which I can no longer recall. Something to do with the Walker.
As I enter the kitchen, I know what I’m going to see. He’ll be closer. He’ll be a greater part of my picture, a larger part of my life.
The shape of the figure in my painting is as I left him the night before, and I breathe a sigh of relief. The idea of painting him out of the picture never even occurs to me until much later.
––––––––
By the time I see the Walker again I have almost forgotten about him.
He remained with me and visible, of course. I hung the picture in the little studio I rent in town, but it never sold. No one ever commented on why they didn’t like it, but I started to think perhaps they were put off by the strange smudge, the errant brush strokes that they saw as a fault or a mistake. Only I seemed to recognise him for who he was.
The next time I go up onto the Blorenge to paint, it has passed from summer into autumn. I’m wrapped up warm, and although the forecast is for a dry day, I have a rucksack containing waterproofs and wear walking boots. I’ve been caught out in bad weather on the hillsides before.
Kes lopes ahead of me. I decide to let him find a place for me to paint, and for an hour or so he leads the way up and across the mountain, smelling his way towards the old surface mine workings that make for such an interesting landscape. After a while I call a stop and Kes comes back to me. I give him a treat from my pocket, then look around and select somewhere to set up my kit.
The easel is steel, with spiked feet to hold it fast. The canvas I’ve brought today is smaller than usual. I paint standing, enjoying being able to pace back and forth to gather different angles and aspects.
I open my flask and pour a steaming coffee, then begin.
For me, painting slows things down. My life is not lived fast anyway, but I always feel that it is out of my control. Both of my parents died when I was a teen, I grew into my twenties living with an aunt, and then when I started living on my own the tides of life washed over me, always threatening to drown. I’m not self-pitying. That’s just the way I am, and I sometimes welcome my loneliness rather than regret it. Without being alone, I would not be able to create the art I do, and it’s the art that defines me. It pins me to the world, and when I slow the world down I start to believe I might be able to grab on and go alone for the ride.
The morning passes. I drink more coffee. The painting grows. I fill out the lie of the land, impatient to move onto the part of any painting that always excites me most—the sky.
As I start to address the sky above the slope of the land, it is marred by a silhouette I have not seen.
I pause and take a step back. I hold my breath. A bird calls somewhere, a buzzard circling high above. A rabbit rustles through undergrowth nearby, Kes chasing it, flushing it out, and I wonder if the buzzard will swoop and clasp it in its claws. I think what the world would be like if birds of prey were ten times larger, and we were their prey.
Perhaps we are all prey to something, I think, and the shape on the painting manifests as the walking man once again. He’s more defined than he was before, on the painting that still hangs in my studio. There he was merely a hint, a few brush strokes. Here he is more angular, more solid. More formed.
I gasp and look past the painting towards the spread of mountainside where I have painted him, and of course there is nothing there. If there was I would no longer be alone.
“Kes!” I say. The dog perks up, head raised. “Who’s that?” He looks around, darting here and there, sniffing and whining softly. Kes always likes meeting people—perhaps because he knows I’m not so keen, and he wants to guide me away from being so alone—but he sees and senses no one.
I’m not sure I do either.
I return to the painting and hover my brush over the shape in the distance. A few strokes of green and blue and the Walker will become hillside and sky once again, swept from memory with a few casual drifts of my hand, like a conductor orchestrating a sudden silence. I am a god with the power of being in my hands. It’s not a feeling I like.
I leave the shape alone, but my painting is done for the day. Finding the man on my canvas has made me feel more alone than ever before. I crave the company of people, and that’s a feeling I am not used to.
I pack and rush down the mountain, not afraid, but needy. Kes comes with me, and an hour later we’re at the coffee shop in town. We sit outside, even though autumn’s breath keeps most people behind door and glass, and after an hour watching people passing by, I see the old man walking towards us. He has his head down but is dressed as he was the last time I saw him, the bandana no longer looking out of place in the cool, breezy day. It seems that he hasn’t noticed us, and I wait until he’s passed us by and is walking away until I say something.
“Tell me about the Walker.”
The old man pauses, and for a moment I wonder if he is the Walker, and if in some strange way he’s down here with me, as well as up there on the mountainside. But he’s shorter and squatter than the figure in my painting, more present. When he turns around I see a strange look in his eyes. Maybe it’s confusion. Perhaps I’ve stirred him from a deep reverie, and I’m instantly sorry for calling out to him. I know what it’s like not wishing to be disturbed.
“Oh, it’s you,” he says, and he sits across the picnic table from me as if we’ve sat and spoken many times before, not just bumped into each other for a brief time on a hillside months ago. He pulls his coat around him and takes some time to get comfortable, finally looking up at the sky, and at the clouds drifting by. “Coffee’d be nice,” he says.
I half-stand, then pause, thinking of Kes.
“I’ll look after your dog,” he says. He clicks his fingers and Kes trots around to him, and the old man strokes and pets him. Kes is instantly at ease, and that puts me at ease as well.
I go inside and buy two coffees and a couple of cakes. Returning outside, I’m not surprised to see Kes lying on the bench with his head on the man’s leg.
“You’ve seen him again,” the old man says.
“Yes. Today. Or rather, no, I didn’t see him. Not with my eyes.” He glances at me, one eyebrow raised. “And they call me mad.”
I laugh, placing the coffees and plate on the table. He grunts his thanks.
“I painted him,” I say. “Don’t remember seeing him, but he’s in the landscape I’m working on. It’s strange. I’ll show you, if you like.” I reach for the folder I use to carry my canvas, and the man shakes his head and holds out one hand.
“No need,” he says, a little too quickly. I get the feeling he really doesn’t want to see my painting. He softens, though, and smiles. “I know what he looks like well enough. I see him too.”
“You do?”
The old man nods, drinks coffee, eats cake. Kes looks up and he drops a corner of Welsh cake into the dog’s mouth. “He’s always up there, if you know where to look.”
“Do you go looking for him?”
“God, no. I just see him now and then.”
“You’re talking like he’s a ghost,” I say, thinking, What the hell else could he be?
“Not sure what he is,” the old man says. “I only know the story. Four decades ago, he appeared in town. Came from somewhere else, and it’s said he carried trouble with him like a stain. Rumours are he was a murderer, or something worse. Sometimes a stranger attracts such stories, I suppose. Anyway, he started going up the mountain on his own. He went there more and more, loved the place, spent longer and longer walking up there. Couple of people in town still remember him, and if you buy them a drink they’ll even talk to you about him. They say he wasn’t happy with the way the world was going, but he was happy with things up there. That’s the only place he felt alive.”
I look down at my cappuccino. It’s difficult meeting the old man’s eye when what he says sounds so much like me.
“Anyway, one day he went up there for a walk and never came back.”
“He vanished?”
“As good as. Left his clothes and belongings in the room he was renting in town. Never seen again. By most people, at least.”
“So you think he died up there? You think I’m seeing his ghost?”
“Like I said, I don’t know what he is. Could be that he died and he’s a ghost. Or maybe he’s still walking around up there.”
“How could that be possible?”
The old man shrugs and smiles, as if what he’s about to say is preposterous and embarrassing. He sips the rest of his coffee. “Maybe he lives somewhere up there now,” he says. “There are...places. Old mine workings. Brick tunnels that don’t seem to lead anywhere. Drainage culverts. If you get to know the mountain well enough, you soon realise you don’t know it at all.”
“You think he’s living in a hole in the ground.”
“I don’t think at all. Best not to. None of my business, and he’s never done me any harm. Live and let live, that’s what I say.”
“I say that too,” I mutter, and the old man stands ready to leave. Kes lets out a little whine.
“He’s just part of the mountain,” he says. “Sounds to me like that’s what he always wanted.”
As the old man walks away I think, Maybe that’s what I want too.
––––––––
It is a mountain of many seasons, and I have painted them all but winter.
Kes likes the snow. By the time we reach the trig point on top of the mountain there is four inches, and the forecast says we might have more tomorrow. But for this afternoon the skies are clear, the sun shines, and the world is a shimmering blanket of glorious white.
This mountain has become a familiar place to me. I am known in the town for painting it, and I’ve sold more than twenty canvases of various sizes over the past nine months. Three still hang in my studio, unsold. Each of them has a shape, a figure, and to me the Walker is very clear. I’m starting to believe that to other people the Walker is simply a smudge on the paintings, and that most believe it to be an error on my part but are too polite to say.
I am certain he is not an error. My autumn conversation with the old man convinced me of that. I’ve seen the old man several times since our chat, but always at a distance across the rolling terrain of the mountainside. Once, Kes saw him and ran all the way over to him, further away from me than he has ever gone before. Another time he raised his hand and waved, and I waved back. There is something profoundly comforting about our familiarity, as if we share a wonderful secret that no one else knows.
I settle down to paint, and set against the virgin snow my skies are darker and more tumultuous than ever before. Whenever I paint angry skies, I feel myself becoming more at ease with who I am. I’m still young, still finding my hand with painting and my way in life.
It’s cold, and although the sun is out the breeze drifting across the mountainside makes it feel colder. My paints are thick and sticky, and I hold the brush over my mug of coffee to soften the bristles. I don’t mind my work being a tough process. I think it benefits the final product, and if anyone asks—which they often do when browsing in my studio and commenting on the wildness of my locations—I can give them a wide, deep history of how art often grows out of discomfort and difficulty.
By mid-afternoon I have the shape of the painting set, and I’m spending some time examining the skyline, seeing boiling clouds in my mind’s eye, when I see the shadow on the left side of the canvas.
I gasp, almost winded with surprise. I didn’t see anything, didn’t do anything, and the shape has come from nowhere. It’s like a shade against the snow and sky, and I step left and right to ensure I am not throwing a silhouette.
It’s not me.
“It’s him,” I say, and my voice is captured by the breeze and taken across the mountainside. Kes’s ears prick up and he turns to look up at me. “It’s him,” I say again, and this time I look at Kes. He trots off ahead of me, past the canvas, and he strays into the spread of mountainside where the shape has found itself. He sees and senses nothing.
This feels like an intrusion. The Walker is too close. Before, in the distance, he was like the old man, a presence I do not mind and which I actually enjoy. But this is personal space.
I pass my brush across a smear of white paint and spread it on the canvas. It’s a crass, damaging application, and I can see that it has lessened the painting even though it is only just begun. The shape vanishes. What once was the outline of a human figure is now less than a shade.
My heart beats, my stomach sinks, as if I have done something bad. A flush of loss surges through me, a feeling deeper and more profound than the loneliness I grow used to. I have been painting the Walker all year, allowing him to inhabit my paintings as he comes closer, closer, and now I have shunned him.
But what if he really came that close? What if—?
Across the hillside, Kes turns back towards me and growls. I feel a heavy presence behind me.
Brush poised, breath held, I wonder whether I should paint this moment away.