The moor was an enemy this morning. It was watching me whether I stood in the yard or hid inside my room and closed the door. It was a great presence which held me down and I would not be held down anymore. I had been in this small world for so long circling the table circling the yard drinking sitting walking up and down. Everything was white and split apart and nothing was known. For me to be here. I could not stay here a moment longer. I had to go. Broken in this broken place I had to walk into the whiteness. I needed to see beyond. I needed answers I wanted words put to shapes I wanted a history. I wanted to name this place and all the things in it. It was enough now. There could be no more.
I decided I would walk away. I would walk to the town. I was sure there was a town somewhere and that it was not so far I felt I remembered this and I thought that maybe I knew how to reach it. I felt that if I left and headed down the track and just kept walking then my body would remember where to go. When I got to the town I felt that something would happen. There would be answers there. Things would become clear in the town there would be other people and questions could be asked. I would see familiar things for I had been to the town before I was sure of that. There were images there were notions of it. This place now it was caging me it was tightening around me there was no breathing here. Something would happen in the town. And even if there were no town even if I got lost on the moor then at least I would be away from here. At least things would open up and begin to happen again.
I went back inside and made tea and drank it slowly. I ate the last of the very stale bread. The chocolate had run out weeks ago but I hadn’t been hungry recently I just wanted to drink. My body craved water. I drank some and took the last of the painkillers. My headache ebbed and flowed but it never went away. Then I packed a jacket and a bottle of water into a rucksack that had been hanging above the bed and I strapped my boots on slowly and painfully. I couldn’t tie my left boot tightly. I picked up the stick that I’d used as a splint and I walked out of the door into the whiteness.
Everything was white. It wasn’t just the sky everything was white and new and washed clean. A new energy flooded through me new life came into me as I moved as I headed for the beyond. I went out through the farm gate and closed it and made my way slowly down the track outside. The muggy white heat pressed in on me as I walked. I stopped within a few hundred yards and took my shirt off and walked in my T-shirt. I continued downhill along the track. This was a test for me. I felt it was a long way to the town but a sense of direction was coming to me now a sense of where I was what this place was. Yes. I would have to climb the crest of the moor and trudge through rough heather. Up and over and down. I didn’t know if my body could carry me but I would try this because the only other thing was to return to the stone room and I would not return there.
As I walked I felt the strange and awkward rhythm of my crippled frame. I was lurching down onto my left leg and supporting it with the stick then loping ahead with my right. I felt like a beggar on a slow pilgrimage but the result was an intense awareness of what I was. I could feel my body working or trying to work I could feel the muscles straining and how the bones knitted together and moved with the tendons. When I got to the stream I turned right and followed it up towards the shoulder of the moor. The climb was hard work. I had to stop and drink regularly. The heat didn’t help. Halfway up the climb I stumbled over a rock by the stream and sat down heavily on it. I decided to rest. The sound of the stream was the only sound I heard. I had already got through half of my water and I was only a mile or so from the farm.
I continued slowly up to the tops and then I followed a peaty track through the heather. I was on a huge expanse of open heather moor now wide and brown and green under the close sky. On the horizon to my right I could see the moor climbing upwards and peaking in a high rocky tor. To the left of the tor the land sloped down and slid into a deep stone gully. I walked now in the rhythm and I didn’t stop. I didn’t want to break the spell. I could feel my head emptying but I didn’t will it. I just walked and breathed and felt my legs jerking over the black track as I headed slowly towards where the other people were.
It must have taken a couple of hours for me to walk across the top of the moor following the black track and keeping to my rhythm. When I reached the point where the track began to descend I knew that I would make it to the town. I didn’t know how I felt about that now. All of my questions seemed to have been swallowed by the heather and the sky but I kept walking because there was nothing else. Soon I arrived at a wooden gate where the rough footpath became a lane that headed down into the valley where the town was. I remembered it all now. I went through the gate and began to walk down the lane. Hedges of elder and ash and thorn grew up on either side of me and beyond them the heather and broom of the moor began to give way to fields of grass dotted with patches of bracken and bent, gnarled trees.
It was then that the silence really hit me. It had been quiet in the house and in the farmyard and up on the moor but this lane was stiller surely than a lane should be. There were no rustlings in the undergrowth there was no noise in the hedges or the trees. No cows no dogs no sheep no cars no voices close or distant. No animals at all and no birds either. I realised then that I had not seen or heard any birds since the accident. There was no life here at all. Nothing moved except me.
I kept walking. I felt it was perhaps a couple of miles now to the edge of the town. I passed an old church which I knew I had seen before. It was a squat medieval church with a square tower and a giant yew tree in its graveyard. I felt it was early afternoon though I couldn’t see the sun to make any judgement. I wondered what would happen when I got to the town. I didn’t know what I wanted. Suddenly I felt the need to explain myself. Perhaps I wanted to go shopping. I probably needed food though I wasn’t hungry. Or perhaps I wanted to go to a doctor. There would be a doctor there. Perhaps I should show somebody my knee and my ribs and the scratches on my chest perhaps I should talk to somebody about everything that had happened. I kept walking. When I got there I would know what to do.
And then I found myself outside the church again. I found myself coming down the lane to the church again. I found myself coming down the lane from the moor to the exact same point where I had been perhaps twenty minutes before. I stopped and looked around me. I didn’t understand what had happened. As far as I could remember you just followed this lane down and it went to the edge of the town. But here I was outside the church again and I was sure I had passed this way already. I sat down and drank some water. It was still hot. I didn’t know how I had managed to get lost. Perhaps I had remembered wrong. Everything was still so unclear. I had probably got it wrong taken a wrong turning. I set off again down the lane towards the town paying attention this time to where I was.
It happened again. After another twenty minutes or so I found myself coming back down the lane towards the church. I was puzzled now and angry too. What the hell was happening? I was angry with myself. I had thought I would manage this trip. Now it looked like my legs could do it but my mind could not. What was going wrong? Where was the wrong turning I was taking? I couldn’t remember taking any turning at all. Up the lane was the moor and down the lane was the town. It seemed straightforward. Surely it was straightforward.