by Pete Lieunoir
It started like an ordinary Sunday. All their married life they’d done the same thing more or less, no matter the weather.
They climbed in the misty rain without speaking, he in front pushing the pace, she behind, her view filled by his backpack and flopping shorts and the hairless slabs of his calves pushing like overworked pistons to get his bulk up the hill. Even when the kids were small he’d done this: pressed on ahead, never looking back. To an observer he was the leader of the family: pack-horse and pathfinder. But to her it felt always as if he were trying to get away. She hated how he never looked back.
They sat against the summit cairn, each looking at different counties.
‘Down there,’ he said, ‘down there is the world that keeps us locked up. And up here, this is the window high in the prison wall where you can see a bit of blue sky every now and then.’
She reached into her cagoul and brought out a little jar of cream and rubbed her cracked hands, fingers slipping between fingers. She thought of all the times when at this point she would be unpacking sandwiches, pulling hats down on heads, checking for blisters on young feet. She looked over at him. His hair poked out under his bobble hat, longer than he’d ever worn it. She wished he’d stop saying these peculiar things.
‘It’s all nonsense,’ he said. ‘The whole system, the whole way we’re expected to live. It’s toxic.’
‘I suppose you’re right, Ben,’ she said. ‘But whatever it is, this system, it’s served us alright hasn’t it? We’re comfortable. We don’t starve.’
‘Are we comfortable? Exploiting others. Wrecking everything. Not me. And we are starved. I am. Starved of real things.’
She stood up and moved away. She couldn’t bear it.
The mist cleared as she came to her feet and she saw quite suddenly all around her sunlit countryside. Far below, a motorway loaded with traffic cut the landscape. She turned her face into the wind, delighting at its touch, neither warm nor cold.
‘Maybe you should go away for a while,’ she said.
‘Where?’
‘Somewhere wild maybe. Where this system of yours doesn’t operate.’
‘Ha! Where?’
‘I don’t know. There must be places. Just go. I’ll manage.’
‘Everybody manages. We close our eyes, shut our ears. We silence our heart. Well, not anymore. Not me.’
‘Then, what?’
‘Here. I’m staying up here.’
She told everyone afterwards that he’d slipped. Except the children. To them she told the truth. How their father had stood up and walked to the edge of the gully. How he had stood stuffing his hat into his old coat, allowing his hair to fly in the wind for a long time.
How he hadn’t looked back.
Pete Lieunoir works as a gardener in deepest Cornwall and is the father of two increasingly teenage girls.
Photo by fall maple: https://www.pexels.com/photo/grey-scale-photo-of-a-man-walking-towards-a-hill-3541831/
