The Salt Path Read online

  ‘So, what’s wrong with you, man, why’re you dying?’

  Moth was dancing, smooth, relaxed, his body moving with a rhythmic flow, a glass of Jack in his hand. I didn’t know he drank whiskey, but you can’t know everything.

  ‘My legs are going to stop working, then all the other bits that matter, then I’ll choke.’

  ‘Fuck.’

  ‘Yeah, fuck.’

  ‘You know, Kurt’s a herbalist. He might have something for that.’

  ‘Kurt. Is that really his name? What do you really do with him, why do you really hang out here?’

  ‘We feed the pigs, cut the grass – you know, help each other out; works for all of us. Then he comes surfing with us to Costa Rica, we carry his boards, drive the van – like I say, help each other out. We get to stay in the sheds for free. It’s all good.’

  Kurt emerged from behind the bar.

  ‘That’s really my name. Take this and breathe deep: all the pain will just disappear.’

  ‘But I don’t smoke.’

  ‘You will, you will.’

  A beautiful haze of happiness filled the barn and I curled on the sofa in bliss. Moth was still dancing and the world was good.

  It was the following morning when I raised an eyelid to wave to two of the lifeguards as they left with their surfboards strapped to their bikes, but it was close to midday when we packed our things and unsteadily headed away.

  ‘Take this with you, my friend, it’s medicinal. Anytime you need a place to crash, we’re here.’

  ‘Thanks, Kurt.’

  The skies were clearing, the remaining clouds scudding fast across the blue as Watergate Bay stretched endlessly ahead. We followed the beach, too fragile to face the up and down of the cliff top. The wide expanse of sand lay pristine and empty beyond the restaurants and cafés. The only person ahead came into focus as an old man with two spaniels. He stopped to speak as we passed.

  ‘Are you walking the coastal path?’

  ‘Some of it. To Land’s End at least.’

  ‘I’ve always wanted to do that … just walk for days and days.’

  ‘Then do it. Just pack a rucksack and do it now. You never know how long your fetch will be, depends on the wind.’

  The man and dogs grew small behind us, passing between the land-slipped cliffs and the foam. The waves high and crashing on the incoming tide seemed to stretch the vertical horizon, folding us in between the land and the sea. Confined and set free, on the edge but part of it all. Blown up and still building our strength through the fetch.

  Towards Zacry’s Island the rocks were blue with thousands of mussels. We filled our pan and boiled them, picking the fat bodies out with the penknife. Occasional people passed, but we were becoming observers, not participants. Crows crawked in the damp air, their calls eerily clear against the cliff face. Our world was changing, the edges fading as our journey drew us on between sea, sky and rock. Becoming one with the wild edge we inhabited, our fetch redefined by the salt path we trod.

  Camped on the fort at Trevelgue, the lights of Newquay ahead, the darkness of Watergate behind, we were openly exposed to the Atlantic. The wind picked up, bringing torrential rain. We put on all our clothes, laid our waterproofs over the sleeping bags and slept for twelve hours without waking.

  13. Skins

  The sprawl of Newquay was a shock after the wilderness, but strangely welcome at the same time. The urban blanket begins in Porth and stretches all the way to the Gannel: a collection of headlands, intersected by sandy beaches, catching some of the best surfing waves in the country. The town built its reputation on the newly growing surf culture of the sixties, but that heyday has passed, leaving a town becoming down at heel. Home now to the ever-growing tribes of stag and hen parties, shrieking through the streets in fancy dress, filling shop doorways with empty bottles and pools of puke. It’s off-putting to the locals, families and surfers alike: all the trade that the shopkeepers would like to attract. But the pubs and restaurants need the party revenue to keep them open during the winter. This contradiction has left the town pivoting on an awkward catch-22. Only a handful of surf shops now remind us of its past, and its best hope for the future.

  Being separate from people for large chunks of time had reduced our tolerance levels, but for a moment it was comforting to feel part of humanity. For a moment. And it was a good place to shelter from the rain ripping in on a horizontal westerly. I zipped the waterproof hood tightly round my face and viewed Newquay through a tunnel.

  It was quickly evident that beyond the holidaymakers, still there in numbers in September, there was another side to the town, a side the vacationers ignored. The invisible ones. The homeless street dwellers lining the shopping areas in greater numbers than we had seen since Glastonbury. Wet bodies curled in doorways. But these weren’t well-honed professional beggars, these were tough, hardened rough sleepers. A tall, broad ex-soldier asked us for money, and when we told him we had none and were homeless ourselves he didn’t question it, but gave us directions to a soup kitchen. Moth gave him some coins and his last chocolate bar. We had very little left, so wandered up to dodge the rain and claim our free bowl of soup.

  The soldier’s directions had sent us to St Petroc’s, a charity aimed at helping the single homeless who fall through the net of social care provision. I didn’t ask what happened to couples that fell through the net, but they redirected us to the soup kitchen anyway. Depending on which statistics you read, Cornwall has the second or the fifth highest rate of rough sleepers in the country, outside of London. It was claimed to be just forty or sixty-five people, or thereabouts. If that was true, every homeless person in Cornwall was currently dipping bread in tomato soup in a disused church in Newquay. The anomaly in figures was explained by a volunteer; apparently, only those people on the street in the given area between the set hours of the count could be included in the figures. And that was if the person confirmed that he was homeless and sleeping rough. And if he was asleep, or appeared to be, you couldn’t wake him to ask.

  ‘So, does every homeless person sleep on the street in the given area at the right time?’

  ‘Of course not, they’re everywhere. There’s a group that sleep in the woods, but the council want to get them out so they can create some sort of public access space. What they really need are shelters for overnight stays, not pretty paths in a woodland, taking away what little safety they have. They’re opening some new shelters this winter, ten beds here, ten there – it’s better than nothing, but it’s nowhere near enough.’

  ‘Trouble is, people think we’re all addicts of some sort; puts them off helping. They think it’s a waste of time.’

  ‘Of course there’s a high proportion of addicts on the streets, but whatever makes you homeless, you still deserve help.’

  The rain had cleared and the sun flickered through the clouds with a thin, watery light. We sat on a bench on the steaming pavement and watched people go by. Shoppers, holidaymakers, mums with kids fresh out of school in shiny new uniforms, skaters on longboards, dog walkers, a homeless boy with a duvet over his shoulder. We were all of those people, and none of them. The bakery by the post office was selling the last of its pasties for twenty-five pence each. Moth bought as many as he could, handing one to each of the people sitting on rags in doorways, keeping the rest for ourselves.

  Fistral Beach was loud with booming waves and neoprene dancers heading out to sea. The street behind was lined with blond, tanned boys in VW vans, anxiously watching the waves for a good set coming through. But we carried on, crossing the Gannel estuary by the wooden footbridge, just ahead of the tide. Then on, out on to open headlands and our room for the night.

  The sky held only the faintest haze of light as Moth got out of the tent alone and made tea. I was still in the sleeping bag, under a thermal blanket that we’d traded for Robinson Crusoe in a charity shop in Newquay. A flock of sheep were surrounding us when he opened the flaps, but dashed away with the sound of the zip. A ro
ck just off the headland, oddly named the Chick, was swarming with sea birds. The cacophony of noise drowned out the sound of the swelling sea rushing through the gap. Herring gulls, black-backed gulls, oystercatchers, cormorants and terns, all bickering over the same lump of inhospitable, jagged rock. It seemed every living thing in the area wanted to occupy Kelsey Head, and none of us were happy to share the space. We left the birds to it, passed the empty army camp at Penhale, with its abandoned Nissen huts, and headed down on to Perranporth Beach. I could live in one of these corrugated iron huts. With a little imagination, the whole site could provide housing for the people of Newquay who desperately need shelter, but undoubtedly it’ll be converted for leisure use.

  The beach is flat, straight and as long as a landing strip. Moth’s shoulders were stiff, and I was more tired than normal, so we sat in the sand beneath two sculptures made from beach debris. Human rubbish fashioned into human forms. We made some more tea and shared the last of the ibuprofen. An old man carefully laid out a towel close by, then methodically took off every stitch of clothing and lay very precisely on the towel. There was something close to tortoise-like about the naked old man, wrinkling, drooping as if his old skin was sliding away, soon to reveal a pink, exposed, smooth new body. I had to stare. We hide ourselves so well, exposing our skin in youth when it has nothing to say, but the other skin, with the record of time and event, the truth of life, we rarely show.

  One naked man was interesting, but two became a little awkward. When a third shouted ‘good morning’ as he strode past in only walking boots and blue socks, I felt I had to put the stove away and carry on. The alternative was to make them tea and discuss anti-wrinkle cream. We left, feeling overdressed and half tempted to go for a full body tan.

  The beach didn’t end but became a desert, stretching on remorselessly. The scorching sand scalded our bare feet and we put our boots back on. Cutting up into the dunes to find some shade we lost all sense of direction. Rather than showing the way out, every peak just revealed more never-ending dunes reflecting the heat. Dried out, turning to dust, we slid through the sand back down to the beach and fixed our eyes on the cliffs beyond Perranporth, a shimmering distant oasis that we might never reach. Eventually, a swarm of people and windbreaks emerged from the haze near a car park. The end. We begged iced water from a café and slugged it down, listening to our bodies hiss with pleasure.

  I peeled more skin to find yet another nose.

  The cliffs of St Agnes Head are desolate, scraped and scarred by its mining history. Littered now with open shafts and ruined buildings, left open and weeping with sulphur fumes and dust, the land stained with a rainbow of ore.

  The days had fallen into a routine. Between morning and early evening, camping spots abound. After six, they’re nowhere to be seen. The nights were getting longer and colder; as soon as the sun sank, the air temperature dropped quickly behind. That morning had been our earliest start and without realizing we’d walked through a day which had become our longest. But now we were exhausted, desperate to find somewhere for the night. The Nancekuke Common RAF airbase rose to our left, with its high steel fence trapping us into a strip of gorse and bramble. The land was dead and still and the fence endless. Dropping down into a shallow valley, a patch of grass seemed promising. But the valley had been barricaded on the landward side with a man-made dam of rubble, grown over with gorse, brambles and thistles. The land around the dam oozed water, running with ore-stained mud. We carried on, the light falling, darkness coming, until eventually the fence turned inland and the airfield turned to farmland and fields of brassicas. In the final moments of light we pitched the tent in the corner of a grass field. No longer a twenty-minute battle with hooks and pegs, the tent was up in five minutes in semi-darkness. I heated a tin of soup; our legs were throbbing, our strength drained to zero by sand and fences.

  The sky lit into colours we hadn’t seen since the Rumps, fading to blackness, then a silver light that moved with the sea.

  ‘Am I seeing things, or are those cabbages glowing?’ Moth was wandering around the grass field, trying to stretch the aches from his body before sleeping. ‘Do you think it’s a trick of the moonlight?’ The field had a light green aura, a supernatural hue.

  ‘No, they really are. Could be just the angle of the moon.’

  ‘What on earth do you think goes on inside that fence?’

  Now a radar base, the site was originally built during the Second World War as RAF Portreath. By 1950 it was no longer needed and was given back to the government. Using equipment brought back from Nazi Germany, the government turned the airfield into a chemical-weapon production plant as an offshoot to Porton Down and began manufacturing the deadly nerve agent Sarin B. Production continued for two or three years alongside other chemical weapons. An investigation by the Independent newspaper reported that forty-one deaths and a high incidence of serious illness occurred amongst the workers involved in the production of Sarin B. In the study ‘Sickness Experience at Nancekuke’ in 1970, it was found that workers at the plant who had been involved in Sarin B production were 33 per cent more likely to suffer serious illness than the average and 50 per cent more likely to suffer respiratory disease, the classic outcome of nerve-gas exposure. The government denied any errors on their behalf, suppressing the report and altering its conclusions, declaring that during this period there had merely been a ‘higher than expected level of absenteeism’. However, in 1971, they admitted negligence, and made ‘generous’ payouts to sufferers, in the region of £120 each. In 2000, the government finally admitted that they had dumped the machinery used to produce Sarin B in the mineshafts on the common and began to clean the site in 2003.

  The next morning the cabbages were just plain green and the holidaymakers were already arriving in the valley of Portreath, not far away.

  The path skipped around the rims of deep hidden coves and in and out of car parks as it ran parallel with the road, the nearness to the road making it perfect dog-walking country. We had grown to appreciate the challenges dog walkers face every time they encountered a stile. A lot of wooden stiles on the path have an open section at the side, with a piece of wood that slides away to allow the dog through. Which seems to work fine for small dogs, but anything bigger and it needs to be circus trained, or collected up as a huge, hairy, muddy bundle and manhandled over to the other side. Some stiles are made of stone slabs trapped horizontally into the wall, which necessitate the walker going up the stairs on one side, traversing the top of the wall, then down the staircase on the other side. Some are huge, sturdy constructions that would befit a castle: perfect for big dogs, but small ones need to be carried.

  We were at a gate. Gates are great for dogs, even if, like this one, it’s a kissing gate. These are ingenious constructions: a C shape of fence has a gate inserted into it that’s hinged on the opposite side, allowing the walker to enter the C from one side, then open the gate and pass out the other side. Great for everyone: walkers and dogs can get through easily; great for farmers, unless they have really intelligent sheep. But not great for backpackers, or fat people. I’m convinced that the usability of the kissing gate depends on the size of the person constructing it. If they’re large they leave plenty of space between the edge of the gate and the back of the C, enough room to pass behind the gate and out the other side. If they’re small their concept of space is completely different. After being trapped repeatedly in these gates, the backpacks wedging us in, we had developed a way of getting through that prevented us getting stuck. Enter the C with the gate fully open, climb up the back of the C until the backpack is higher than the gate, kick the gate to fully closed, then climb down and exit the C.

  After spending a morning at stiles waiting for dogs, lifting dogs over, catching dogs that had been thrown over, we came to a tiny kissing gate. I climbed the C, just as a chubby man in early retirement, who had been following us, rushed up to the gate, obviously in a desperate hurry to get home to read the newspaper. He completely ig
nored me hanging precariously from the top of the fence and let his three dogs through one at a time. Then stood angrily getting redder.

  ‘Well, are you going through or what?’

  I climbed out of the C, followed by Moth, and let the chubby man go rushing past. There was loud clapping from the other side of the hedge.

  ‘Wow, that was so good, what a perfect way to get through the gate.’ A smart elderly couple were clapping excitedly. ‘Could you possibly do it again so I could film it?’

  Moth obligingly climbed in and out of the gate while the couple cooed over the camera, shaking him vigorously by the hand when their masterpiece was finished.

  ‘The book club are going to love that; do you mind if I put it on the blog?’

  ‘No, feel free, mate.’

  ‘We’re coming to see you in St Ives. We can’t wait.’

  ‘Are you really?’ Moth pulled his hat lower and stepped back. ‘Well, who exactly do you think you’re going to see?’

  ‘You, of course! Oh, is that a clue? Is that the theme, our different personalities? Perfect, who are you today?’

  ‘I’m just a homeless bum going for a walk.’

  ‘Oh, that’s perfect, perfect. Oh, we’re so excited now, can’t wait to see you perform, Simon. Bye for now.’ They carried on in the opposite direction. ‘Split personalities, contradictions, opposites. Thrilling to have a heads-up, let’s blog this as soon as we get back.’

  We watched them go, deep in conversation.

  ‘Why didn’t you deny it?’

  ‘It’s just funny now. Imagine the stick he’s going to get when his book club read his blog. He’ll never live it down.’

  ‘Cruel.’

  ‘But we still don’t know who Simon Armitage is.’

  ‘No, but we have a clue: he’s interesting to book clubs, so he must be a writer.’