by Anne Frost
Mia windmilled her arms in an effort to stay upright, having slipped kicking out at a clump of annoying nettles. At nineteen she already knew her personality type. Flighty. Unreliable. Someone who easily lost things. The bracelet that was a present from her mother. The phone her father insisted she should carry for safety. Her virginity. All casually left behind somewhere, never to be recovered. Now it appeared that she had even lost the path.
It had seemed so straightforward when she began the walk. A large wooden noticeboard in the carpark displayed three routes in bold colours. Green for the easy option, yellow for medium and red for the difficult hilly one. The wording below assured nervous hikers that there were extraordinary views and clear waymarks to be found. She’d chosen the Red Route because how else could she have fuck you-ed Matt, her now presumably ex-boyfriend. Matt, who’d wanted to show her the countryside of his childhood, then thrown a hissy fit because she’d forgotten to pack their walking boots in her car. You had one job, Mia. She had dropped him at his parents’ house, wearing perfectly good trainers, already knowing what she would do, driving away before he had time even to open the front gate. She was healthy, she could read signs. She would show him.
Later she would learn about the Dunning-Kruger Effect, the tendency of those with little competence to over-estimate their ability. Also Decision Points where a walker reaches a split in the path. But all Mia knew then was that the noticeboard had been some sort of practical joke. The red signs soon disappeared, the path fading into a thin crease between the trees and now she risked falling into the mud. As her limbs flailed, one hand latched onto a low branch and she steadied herself despite the sensation of skin shredding against the rough surface.
‘Shit!’
Mia licked the blood from her aching palm and briefly considered her options. She could retrace her steps or press ahead along the thin trail, which was no choice at all. She’d already come so far in that direction, it would be a waste to turn back. A reasoning which nicely demonstrates the Sunk Cost Fallacy, another theory unavailable to Mia that day.
* * *
Forty-four-year-old Mia surveys the not so eager faces in the lecture room. In a world that whizzes past at a dazzling speed these faces represent a reassuring continuity, their ages and expressions fixed year on year. Intellectually she knows that individual students change but not, she is happy to acknowledge, their type. She tells herself that she should probably learn their names but it is much easier that she does not.
‘We all like to think we are unique,’ she begins as she always does, ‘but your study of Psychology will show you that we are not. Humans can be divided into clear types and within those types our behaviour is predictable, particularly in stressful situations.’
At home she has a, quite suddenly, thirteen-year-old daughter who plays the bloody clarinet and shows no interest in boys. Or girls. Ruth (Mia’s husband chose the name) is regarded as something of a paragon amongst their social circle. A teenage girl completely free of angst and moodiness. Steady, dependable, a child who has never lost anything. The prevailing opinion is that Ruth is so like her father. Which is undoubtably the case, Mia and her husband are very different personality types. This is, she observes, the case with most successful couples.
When Mia first met her now husband, her then best friend had thought it amusing. ‘Jesus, Mia, do you have to pray before every shag?’ and then, ‘Does he actually shag?’
‘It’s complicated.’
Which was a lie. Andrew is anything but complicated. She recalls their first tentative fumblings, her breath turning to gasps as much from surprise as arousal. She had not expected him to reciprocate, had been intending to tease. It was going to be a good story, you should have seen his face, but as her hands spidered towards the zip of his trousers she heard his voice above her, shaking but calm.
‘It can’t just be casual sex, Mia, it has to mean something. Something important.’
She had responded quickly, unthinkingly, ‘of course it’s important.’
Which was her first Decision Point.
* * *
The track she was now following was clearly intended for something much smaller. All the ducking beneath low branches and inching sideways between spined shrubs had slowed her progress. A glance at her watch told her she’d been walking for more than four hours and still she was wedged amongst dense trees. It was, however, a route. She was certain that in due course it would intersect with a larger, proper path. She would spot a colourful sign and all would be well. No-one need know about her little excursion, except perhaps her best friend who had been the joyful recipient of so many of Mia’s hair-raising tales. ‘This will be a good one,’ she thought.
Later, when she was much older, Mia would learn about Optimisation Bias, the tendency to overestimate the likelihood of a good outcome, particularly prevalent amongst people who are lost. Had she heard the term at nineteen she would probably have called it being positive which was surely a good thing. Mia herself was a positive person, which is why there, on the hillside, she maintained her conviction that the trail she was following would lead her to somewhere helpful. Until it didn’t.
Slithering beneath a particularly dense set of branches, no longer worried about the mud that striped her jacket and trousers, Mia reached out blindly ahead and touched – nothing. Crawling cautiously forward she found herself looking over the top of a cliff, peering into a deep valley. At the bottom of the valley she could make out the speckled khaki of more trees, the glint of water, but, immediately below her, a sheer wall of red-grey rock. It was a shock to find nothingness and for a while she wondered if the view was merely a mirage, a hallucination. When she finally accepted what her eyes were reporting she briefly imagined curling herself into a tight ball, launching over the edge and rolling down to the valley, but Optimisation Bias has its limitations and even someone as positive as Mia could see that this choice of action would not end well.
Instead she lay there, her body sensing the gnarls and bumps of vegetation beneath her legs and chest, her face resting in the narrow gap between trees and ridge looking down to the valley bottom that would surely have represented her escape route could she only have reached it. Anger careered through her head. At Matt for bringing her to this God forsaken place and then abandoning her. At herself for setting out at all, for losing her phone. She was particularly cross about the phone. If she had it she could have done something, called someone. She wasn’t sure who, or even what she would have said, but they would surely have dispatched a helicopter. She’d never flown in a helicopter. There would be a clip on the Evening News of Mia, prettily bedraggled, being gratefully winched to salvation then offering a humble speech of thanks to her rescuers.
Logic tells us that lost people could resolve their situation by retracing their steps, backtracking to their first incorrectly handled Decision Point and return safely to the start of their walk. Most, however, do not behave in this way. Instead they put their faith into features of the landscape that they might follow, in the false confidence that these will somehow take them to where they want to be. Which is why Mia, scrambling carefully to her feet, made the decision to continue along the edge of the valley.
* * *
‘Today,’ explains Mia, ‘we will examine a particular aspect of psychology under stress. How walkers behave when they become lost. This is important for academic study but also has a practical application, it allows rescuers to know where to look, it saves lives.’
She pauses for dramatic effect but the expressions on the bland faces are set. Usually she accepts their distance, the sense that they are listening to her words but not their meaning, but today it is a rejection, a reminder of her own irrelevance. She sees in them a reflection of Ruth. She tells herself that her daughter is merely shallow, which she suspects is partly true, but she also knows that Ruth is closed to her, has inherited no part of Mia. She sometimes hears her husband and daughter talking softly behind closed doors, their voices identical monotones. In the past she would worry that they were discussing her but has now realised that she plays no part in their conversations.
She catches the train of thought before it heads to darker places. It is wonderful that the two of them get on, so many fathers have no relationship with their children. Mia is just tired. She has been planning a garden party to celebrate a milestone, their fifteenth wedding anniversary, but Andrew has been expanding the guest list. The Bishop and his wife have apparently accepted. So now Mia will be on show for the event instead of contentedly tipsy. But impressing the Bishop is her job as much as her husband’s. She will wear the pink floral dress that Andrew chose for her last year.
She always understood that Andrew saw them as being on the path to marriage. She was flattered by it, and, when he finally proposed, at once made the decision to accept. It would have been too cruel to refuse.
Her then best friend had not appreciated this inevitability. ‘Are you sure about this, Mia because it’s not just about Andrew is it? Will you have watch him at work every Sunday?’
Mia had assured her that it would be fine, she knew what she was doing. She was, after all, an optimist, and understood relationships having had so many. By the time of the wedding, though, her friend had faded away and she was obliged to accept Andrew’s cousin as a bridesmaid.
Sometimes Mia thinks back to that conversation and wonders how things might have been if she had allowed herself to be persuaded to change her mind. She thinks she might still be the person she was then. Flighty. Purposeless. Turning one way, then another, without logic or reason as she behaved when she was once lost amongst hills. Her every decision psychologically predictable.
* * *
The narrow cliff edge was scattered with loose stones that skidded beneath her feet and reminded her of the chasm below. Now she could imagine it. The fall, her ragged body. Turning to face the trees, she concentrated on moving one limb at a time. Her stomach was sickly empty, she hadn’t thought to bring food, and, as the sky grew darker, she had sense of the most bitter loneliness, of being the only person alive, anywhere.
‘You total idiot, Mia.’
Her voice was unsubstantial in the vastness of her surroundings, her words evaporating to leave a deeper silence behind. She wanted to rest but doing so would use up precious time. Also she worried about sleep. Falling, the ragged body. Cold air hung about her face like an aura, seeped through her clothing, wrapped itself around her bones. Mia resisted the desire to shiver, focused instead on her limbs. Left hand, right hand, left leg, right leg.
Thoughts drifted in and out of her head like static. Hiss. What she would do when she got out of this predicament: have a shower, down a Jagerbomb, join a nunnery in gratitude. Hiss. An image of Matt drinking hot chocolate with his overprotective mum. Hiss. Her best friend’s birthday party in two days time. The party that Mia could not on any account miss, even if she had to drive straight there. Hiss. Her little Clio tucked into the corner of the carpark, like Mia, alone in the dark. Which, she now reasoned, would be spotted by someone. A search party would surely be assembled. She imagined huskies sniffing out her scent, guiding her down.
All whilst displaying a classic case of Confirmation Bias, the tendency to only take note of information that reinforces our existing beliefs. For Mia this meant that the clarity of her route suggested to her that she was heading towards the valley, despite a very obvious sensation that she was moving uphill.
* * *
Mia hears her own voice intoning the words she has offered year after year. Once she was excited by her subject, the study of people, but now she is overwhelmed by the dullness of mankind. She is explaining that walkers take time to realise they are lost, reassure themselves that all is well, think they know what they are doing before they finally accept their situation. At which point they must make a choice. Wait to be rescued or come up with a strategy to save themselves. A boy in the front row yawns.
It is unfair of Mia to be bored. She knows her social circle are envious of her. They have husbands who drink too much, who have affairs they believe to be secret. Andrew is such a good man. They are right, he is so bloody good. And she has been with him for so long, why would she even think about choosing another path after all those years? Sometimes, though, she imagines bumping into her once best friend in the street. A joyful reunion. Catching up over Jägerbombs. Laughter. But do they even sell Jägerbombs nowadays?
* * *
As daylight returned, the direction she’d been travelling became clearer. During the night Mia had passed the jutting point of the cliff and the ridge she was following now turned back on itself. Worse, she was much further above the valley than when she first emerged from the wood. She was, she finally accepted, undeniably lost. Mia listened to the silence. There were no rescuers about to save her, it was down to her to save herself. There was a calmness in this realisation a sense of drawing on a deep, hidden wisdom. From the depths of her mind came a suggestion that this was what it meant to be an adult. Mia looked up at the fledgling sun, rises in the east, sets in the west, considering the direction she must now take. Which was to cut back through the wooded area, path or no path. She took a deep breath, scanned the vegetation for a suitable gap that could form the start of this new challenge.
For two hours she inched forward, reminding herself to maintain a straight line, to look for a point ahead, a broken branch, a patch of colour that would help her navigate. Dipping, crawling, forcing her way through too small spaces, her face adjacent to an earth that spluttered scents. Some she recognised, pine, moss. Others were new, only, she decided, to be found in that place. Finally she broke through the vegetation to find herself above a deep, muddy bank. Below her she could easily see a path, a broad and well used path, and a flash of a yellow sign. Mia paused, looked to her left then right. There was no obvious way down. She clenched her fists, here was her way out but she was at least the height of a two-storey building above it. There was nothing she could do. Unless…
She removed her backpack, lowered it over the edge, and watched it slide gracefully down before skidding to a halt on the footpath. She inhaled. Fuck it.
Mia sat, shuffled forward, let gravity and mud take over as she skidded down the slope remembering the exhilaration of toddler slides, waterparks, leaping into the sea. Slamming into the ground, her momentum rolled her across the trail, her stomach meeting a wooden post that expelled every bit of air from her tired body. She lay very still, gasping for breath, as she mentally assessed herself for serious damage. Because she was nineteen and not forty-four, there was none. She was winded, definitely bruised, but nothing felt broken. She looked up at the wooden post, attached to it was a yellow arrowed sign announcing, 2km to carpark. Despite the pain in her abdomen, Mia laughed as if this was the most hilarious of jokes.
She was still laughing when something wet and cold touched her ear, closely followed by the head of a concerned labrador and the face of its even more concerned owner.
‘I’m fine,’ she explained to them both, scrambling to her feet, recovering her pack, tousling the dog’s head. ‘I’m fine. Just heading back to my car.’
* * *
The class is over, the students gone. Mia remains in the empty room, unsure of what she should do. A memory replays. The sooty sky, stars illuminating brushstroked clouds, somewhere, incomprehensibly far away, a fuzzy lined horizon. Beside her, always just beside her, a death drop. Daring her to fall. And the smallness of her, the inconsequentiality of her existence amongst this vastness and yet the insistence on survival. The only sound her sobbed breathing, each inhale an icy trail, a reminder of life. Freezing hands stretching for the next solid branch, left arm, right arm, the nerve ends attuned to their task, this bough will hold you safe, this one is loose, left foot, right foot. Each step completed a celebration. And an unconscious, undeclared knowledge.
This is how it is to be alive.
Beyond the lecture room walls, a thrum of voices announces the arrival of more students, another lecture is about to start. Mia gathers her notes into a crisp rectangle. She knows it, she is lost. And now, like all lost people, she must choose her course of action. It is down to her to save herself.
Anne is a fiction writer living in Central England. Her work has been shortlisted for the Scottish Arts Trust’s Flash Fiction Award, longlisted for the Aurora Prize for Fiction and published in Wensum Literary Magazine. Her flash fiction story, The Woman Who Danced With Her Father, featured in Issue 3 of Thin Skin Magazine.
Photo by Feodor Chistyakov on Unsplash
