She hopes the Airbnb hosts don’t think she’s rude. She left very quietly at 7am, easing the front door closed as she left the foreignness of another family’s framed affirmations and tide-marked wellingtons. At 6 she had decided to make an early-start on the day’s hike, lying sweaty and wakeful in a cream-coloured guest bedroom. There were no villages along the route today, just the high ridge of the South Downs to power along until she reached sleepy Amberley and the train back to London.
Now it’s almost 9am and hot enough to stuff her plastic-smelling waterproof back into the rucksack. This is her second and final day of walking. A trip that on Thursday night she had vowed would be a sabbatical, a pilgrimage, her road to Damascus had turned by Friday morning into a sheepish long weekend. On Thursday her boss, in a roiling mood, snapped at her and she had to shuffle humiliatingly out of the meeting and sit sobbing, breathing like a wounded animal in the park for 45 minutes. She had imagined her co-workers raising their eyebrows at each other. They always managed to stay cool when his temper was aimed at them, so they must have thought she was being a dramatic. Or maybe they wondered why she had such a hair-trigger fearfulness, ascribed it to an abusive boyfriend or the witnessing of a terrible accident.
As the panic-attack ebbed in the strange island of a London park, she thought about escaping. She could hand in her notice tomorrow and go on long-term sick for the next month. Visit the GP for a note over the weekend. She would get away, she decided, and booked a couple of Airbnbs on her phone while the adrenaline was still flowing. The next day she guiltily bought a return ticket and started agonising over her excuse for missing a day of work.
Now she’s here, she tries and fails to steady her mind on the lichen air and the rolling Battenberg of fields. The gentle bump of up and down over little hills. She had a CD of Arthurian legends when she was small and used to listen to it every night until her player got thrown against the wall. When she sees these cushiony hillocks she can’t help thinking of the King under the Mountain; ‘It’s said they sleep there to this day, ready to rise when England is in deadly peril…’ The prophecy had always scared her. Even now, with the chalky path shooting ahead and bobbing up over a barrow, the thought of what’s underneath makes her heart feel chilly. Not a row of slumbering knights, but maybe the remains of a Bronze-Age man, bones curled desperately around precious pottery and flint arrowheads.
Yesterday she had stopped for lunch (pasta and sweetcorn matted in a Ziploc bag) in a copse of trees. Wandering and stretching afterwards she noticed one was hollow, a maw round and dark as a black eye yawned at the height of her hip and widened into a tunnel straight down. She wondered about squeezing through, letting herself plummet, flume-like, into wherever it led. Instead she dropped down a tiny stuffed toy she kept on a keyring, a velvety thing which was too soft to make a sound if it hit the bottom. There, she thought irrationally, now I’m bound to here.
Her feet chaw up the next hill, pressing through the mud into globs of chalk that look like white cheese sprinkled onto ragu. She could be anywhere and still only feel the dread of work tomorrow. She goes for her phone in the waterproof pouch wrapped around her waist, stops herself, goes for it again. A flitting wall of notifications. There’s a string of messages from her mother, who doesn’t even know she’s on holiday. She rarely talks to either of them now, trying to live out a piece of wisdom her therapist gave her in the hope it was profound.
Mila, please call me as soon as you can
As she reads her mind races theatrically to find an appropriate reaction. She stretches her eyebrows upwards, her chin down.
Mila?
M
Daddy is in St James. (St James was the fat, glassy block of a hospital that crouched on the outskirts of the town where she grew up) We had to call an ambulance this morning, he had pains and couldn’t breathe. He sint awake. Get here please
Mila
Tears come. Tears and snot start bubbling and she hasn’t got enough tissues and she wants to press one nostril with her finger and force out air until her snot shoots onto the ground, but she knows there are other walkers behind her and she doesn’t want them to see.
The signal on her phone is sporadic up here and it’s a good enough excuse not to call back. She gets anxious on the phone, and talking to her mother only makes it worse. She taps out a brief message: I’ll be there as soon as I can.
But she cannot be there soon. She has no cash for a taxi and no idea of where she could even meet one. As far as she knows, no roads intersect with this part of the way. The only option is to carry on walking, feeling every knock of the hollowed hills under her feet. Relying only on herself, like a bird that’s been thrown up into the air.
Her mother will expect her to be in frantic, movie-climax flight, but she’s chosen a journey too old for that. No phone call can whisk her to the bedside just in time for his final absolution. But no last words can take away two decades of trauma, a fear of men like a whipped dog, the mind-back nag that she is wrong just by being around.
And so she dawdles.
Rich Giptar is a new writer from the UK who enjoys writing about fear, spirituality and going on massive walks. They have recent/upcoming work in Spelk, Crack the Spine, X-RAY Lit and others. Find Rich at @richgiptar and richgiptar.wordpress.com.
