The Fish Ladder (22 page)

‘Try to get your mum to leave the room,’ she said. ‘His love for her binds him to the earth. Even a few moments would do it.’ Astonished by the folk wisdom of the nurse, we persuaded Mum to leave Dad’s side, on the pretext of having something to eat. John and Rupert took their places on either side of him, and held Dad’s two hands. But no sooner had Mum sat down at the table in a room across the hallway, declaring that she had no appetite, than John and Rupert called us back.

As we stood in the doorway a sigh left Dad’s body. Mum walked to Dad and took his hand in both of hers. She bent to kiss him, and then sat next to him. There was a terrible sound as my uncle Dennis beat his chest with the backs of his fists, and roared, his head back, mouth open, like a Picasso bull. The room filled with people, they revolved like planets around Dad’s awful stillness. Looking down I noticed my own yellow hair, like summer cobwebs, on the floor around the bed. It had been falling out for days. Someone had brought a box of iced buns from the bakery in the village,
for the mourners
. Flipping open the cardboard lid I sat down next to Dad and ate them all. There was a lot of movement in the house, a lot of drinking, tea, whisky, wine. Someone phoned the doctor, the undertaker. Asked if we could keep Dad’s body overnight. Yes, we could. I wondered where Evie had got to. Someone had taken her off for the day, but as the hours stretched she had been passed from one friend’s house to the next. It was then that I noticed that the orange glow had gone. I wondered if the electric lights rendered it invisible. And then I saw it. No longer emanating from his body, the orange light was now a man-shaped cloud, and it hovered just below the ceiling. I climbed onto the windowsill, and opened the highest window, and then watched as the shape slipped like smoke from a cigarette, into the September sky. That night John slept on the sofa alongside Dad’s body. The next day the undertaker came.

The priest looked at me, his fingertips pressed together, making a church of his hands. I wasn’t mad, or mentally ill, so far as he could see. He said that if we were Mediterranean it would probably be said that I had
gone mad with grief
.
What I had described was not unknown to him. The phenomenon, of a visible aura, wasn’t a symptom of psychosis. It had been well documented by the Church over many centuries. The followers of St Francis of Assisi reported just such an orange glow emanating from beneath the door of the saint’s cell while he was at prayer. The priest arranged for me to talk to another priest, a Jesuit, and also to a nun, who had trained as both a spiritual director and a counsellor. I don’t remember much about this, only that Sister Josephine showed me photographs – of rioting crowds, of deserts, of children, of war, of a river, a fighting bull, and a matador. I began to perceive that there was a world beyond my heartbreak.

I began to cycle, every morning, at dawn, while Rupert looked after Evie. I rode for miles through country lanes. One morning I saw a chubby grey badger slip into a ditch at the sound of my approach. Another day I passed beneath an oak tree heavy with buzzards, and a flock of collared doves, the doves fanned a branch’s length from the nine solemn raptors, a temporary truce between them. I saw a family of mute swans at the reed-encircled disc of Hatchmere Lake, the immaculate parents at the side of the road, their muddy-looking cygnets behind them. Often I cycled along the ridged switchback road bisecting the ancient forest of Delamere. I grew back into the world that held me. I learned to reconnect. Gradually I learned to fit.

I stepped back down into the riverbed. It was filled with new grass, brilliant and green, no higher than my foot. I was happy for the companionship of the water. The river was now little wider than a stream, but it was my clue through the labyrinth.

I seemed to have been wandering for hours. I wondered if I had missed the track, which according to the map was about two-thirds of the way along the river’s length. Maybe it was a ford, rather than a bridge – and I had passed it, without noticing. The stream was barely more than the span of my arm, and the deer-tracks wandered from one side to the other as the animals sought a straighter path than that of the wriggling stream. I climbed back up onto the heather. A short-eared owl lifted up in front of me with a
he-awe
cry, its black-rimmed eyes as fierce as suns, burning through pale rings, delicate as pansies. The Welsh word for owl means flower-face, after an enchanted woman made from flowers, who was condemned – for her adultery, and for plotting to murder her husband – never to show her face in daylight again. There was no sun now, but neither was it dark, and I tried to dismiss the superstitions linked with the appearance of daytime owls, and to concentrate instead on the fact that short-eared owls are diurnal. After I had passed the spot, the owl returned to its place, and was immediately lost beneath the heather. I walked on. In part I had been unnerved because the owl was sitting on the ground; but there was nowhere else for it – for either of us – to be.

At last I could see the track. It crossed the stream at a bridge made of wooden railway sleepers. There was a square shack with a metal roof and picture windows. As I got closer I saw a kitchen table and some chairs. The stream and the track – two tyre lines across the moor – formed a perfect crossroads. I was still uncomfortable at the thought of being seen. I was too nervous even to put my face to the window of the hut, or to try the door. And yet as soon as I had gone past it, and the stream had curved out of sight of the hut, and out of sight of anyone who might come to it, I felt safe. The transition took moments, not even a minute, because the dwindling stream was now constantly turning, sometimes leaving crescent moons of still water through the gentle cut. There were no more traps. The cleft prints of the deer were for the most part hard and cracked, the black peat baked by the sun. The grass was longer now, and every so often I came across the pressed, indented shapes that marked the place where deer had rested. A golden frog, with a shiny Murano eye, hopped quickly away into the damp grass by the stream.

A hind came down from the moor to drink, her pale face and large ears tuned inquisitively towards me. Uncertain, she changed her mind, and picked her way back onto the peat hag, head pulled back, one eye swivelled in an attempt to keep me in view. And then she turned, and remained there, her ghostly face suspended, waiting for me to pass. She was the first solitary deer that I had come across although I had seen several herds throughout the day.

An eagle. Like the owl, she too must have been resting on the heather, and I heard her before I saw her. When she gained sufficient height to catch the breeze she curled away, black against the still-white sky, which muffled her
pee-oow
call, a white band under her tail attesting to her youth.

It was the time of the evening when the creatures move.

I was relaxed as I walked towards the waterhead, although it seemed extraordinary to me that I still hadn’t reached it – the stream was so very narrow. I wondered about settling, soon, for the night, because the boggy water table might not be the most sens­ible place to sleep. In any case I was hungry. I had apples, chocolate, pumpkin seeds and raisins. And, like
Treasure Island’s
Dr Livesey, I carried a block of cheese. I also had the remains of Liz’s Rioja in my hip flask. While I was pondering the meal I might make with these things, I heard something.

At first I thought it was an effect of my being alone, a trick my ears were playing caused by the silence of the moor – I wondered if it was tinnitus. But it didn’t seem to be coming from inside my head, so I stopped a moment to listen. And as soon as I stopped moving they descended.

Midges!

They filled my eyes, my ears, my nose and mouth with their pointy needle kisses. I breathed them, swallowed them, spat them out, batted at them, and then began to run.

Without ever stopping moving I scanned the ground for somewhere to sleep. A heather-covered ledge had collapsed at the edge of the cut. It was about a yard below the level of the open moor, and yet still a little elevated above the stream. I scrutinised the place as best I could through the stinging cloud. I could see no tracks across it, and found a spot in the middle where I was least likely to be stepped on should a deer descend from the moor in the night. The deer-track along the edge of the stream was around three yards away: I had no desire to find out if
sure-footed as a deer
was a truism.

Having identified my spot, I broke into a furious dance. I pulled off my Wellingtons, pushing them into my bag. I opened out my sleeping bag and wriggled into both it and the bivouac bag before pulling the hoods of both of them over me. I was, mercifully, wearing a muslin T-shirt, and I pulled this over my face like a fencing mask, before killing every one of the horrid little flies that had so comprehensively invaded my bed.

At last it was over. I drank a sip of water from within the safety of the sleeping bag. It was the only one of my supplies that had made it into the sanctuary. I then rearranged the fencing mask. I could feel a space about the size of a fist under my ribs, but hunger was a small price to pay for being safe from the midges. The whole of my body, face and hands stung with their bites. Earlier, as I walked, I had nursed an image of myself sitting by the stream in the long northern night and reading Neil Gunn’s book while eating an apple. The electronic-sounding whine was still at full strength, though; I could not even hear the water. And I couldn’t see through the muslin fencing mask. In spite of the early hour – it couldn’t have been more than nine o’clock – I pushed my body into the heather, which was soft and springy, and didn’t even mark the passage into sleep.

A joyful sound awoke me: rain. A light summer rain, but I was warm and dry and the midges were being washed away. When the rain gave way to silence, I peeped out from beneath my mask, then took it off. The darkness was imperfect, and the gentle bubble of the stream replaced the high-pitched hum. A white mist hugged the water, visible as a light area below me. I drifted off.

I felt him before I saw him. It was as though there was a dial in my stomach and an arrow had spun me back to consciousness, accur­ate and sensitive as a compass. The needle stalled, quivering, in his direction. He coughed and then shifted his footing, and my nose burned with pungent musk. Lying very still, I lifted my face. The stag was standing just behind the crown of my head, his own head held high. His antlers filled the darkness over me; it was like looking at the sky through leaded panes. I could make out the deeper darkness of his body but he was too close, and it was too dark, to see his legs. He seemed unsure about what to do and then, sliding back his head in that tight, reined-in gesture that the hind had exhibited earlier, he delicately stepped down onto the track, and whether he stayed to drink or left immediately I will never know, because sleep once again stopped my senses.

I woke soon after dawn. Thick mist filled the streambed. On either side, in the long grass, cobwebs cast about in all directions, weighted with an early catch of rain. I glanced down at my sleeping bag. I too was covered in a pearly veil. I touched my cheek and my hand came away wet. Even my eyelashes were beaded. I was about to turn over and go back to sleep, wait for the sun to burn it off, when I caught myself. How many times would I ever again wake up alone, at dawn, on a Highland moor? And yet I would sleep the day away!

I took off my clothes and wandered around barefoot, feeling the soft moss and cold peat between my toes. I found a flower which looked like edelweiss, but was really a sprig of sphagnum moss that had dried, rehydrated and then dried again so many times that it had petrified. Stalks of drenched bog-cotton formed an army of white-haired witches, partially transformed into their broomsticks. I got dressed and packed away my bed. I was thrilled to see the place where I had been, the crushed heather dark against the dewy whiteness. I looked up and down the streambed, as though for someone or something with whom to share my excitement at this concrete mark of my existence. But I was alone with the impassive moor. And yet the fact that it was clearly so very much alive reassured me. Made me glad.

I picked up my bag and broke through the cobwebs, feeling certain that the source was close. I smiled at my lack of faith in bringing such a quantity of bottled water to the source of a river.

The stream disappeared into a muddy hole in the ground. Or, rather, it emerged. It hadn’t got any narrower. There was no bubbling spring, no crystal well. Just a navel oozing primordial soup: viscous and green. The water seeped, rather than flowed. One half of the damp oval was covered in grass, the height of a finger, preternaturally bright.

There was absolutely nothing there.

I suppose that made sense. That there
was
nothing there. It was the source. Embryonic. The beginning. Although my spirits had sunk when I saw it. I knew that I was fighting to make something out of the discovery, because this was nowhere near the Well at the World’s End I’d come to look for. I sat down. I had a flask of hot water, and some sachets of coffee, sugar and milk that I’d taken from the hotel the night before. I made myself a cup and drank it, broke off a piece of chocolate, and all the while gazed at the hole.

The mist blew past in gauzy fragments, sometimes closing, sometimes lifting, and I couldn’t really see what lay beyond. I didn’t want to move away from the navel. Since reaching the water table the ground had levelled off. I was afraid of getting lost if I left the indentation of the streambed. I was in no hurry to move on.