The Salt Path Read online

  He took Moth’s hand and shook it.

  ‘It’s the judge’s decision, not mine.’

  I still didn’t cry, but a silent internal howl took hold and screwed me tight, making it hard to breathe.

  I stood in the field behind the house, under the twisted ash tree, where the children built an igloo in the big snow of ’ninety-six. I broke a slice of white bread into six pieces, a ritual that had marked the start of the day for the last nineteen years. The old ewe snuffled at my hand and her soft lips took the bread: nineteen years old, no teeth, but still a great appetite. The children called her Smotyn, Welsh for spotty. Now she was a grumpy old ewe, with a scruffy black and white fleece and two wonky horns. Well, one now, she’d knocked the other off in her desperation to get into a feed bucket a few years before. Tom had kept the horn; it was in the treasure box he took with him when he left for university, along with his fossils and Pokémon cards. When Rowan was three I’d taken her on a forty-mile road trip in our tiny van. We bought three scatty, spotty little lambs from a farm on the side of a hill overlooking the sea. She howled with annoyance when I wouldn’t let her sit with them, so I relented and drove home with all four of them together on the straw in the back of the van. They’d been part of our lives ever since, part of our family. They’d had many lambs over the years, but now Smotyn was the only one left, her sisters had died and I’d sold all the rest to another breeder the year before, when the court case had reached a point where we thought it couldn’t go any further and we were about to lose. I hadn’t been able to let Smotyn go: at her age no one else would keep her; the average lifespan for a sheep is six to seven years before they’re sent to make dog food or meatballs. The day after the court hearing I’d taken the hens to a friend, but there was no room for Smotyn. She wandered away down the field, clouds of dandelion seeds engulfing her, to below the beech trees where the grass was always dry. We both knew that field as if it was an extension of ourselves. How would either of us live without it?

  We’d both be homeless in five days; then we’d know.

  What I didn’t know, what I couldn’t know, was that it wouldn’t take five days for my life to change forever, for everything that kept me stable to turn to quicksand beneath me. It would happen the next day.

  We were in a consultant’s room in a hospital in Liverpool. Finally, we would have the results of years of medical procrastination and we’d know the cause of Moth’s shoulder pain. After a life of physical work he’d been told by one doctor: ‘Pain is normal, you should expect to suffer when you raise your arms and stumble a bit when you walk.’ Others had raised questions about a slight tremor in his hand and numbness in his face. But this doctor was the top dog, head of his field, the real deal. He was going to tell us that it was ligament damage or something similar and how it could be fixed; that it had happened when Moth fell through the barn roof years ago – maybe there’d been a hairline fracture. He was certainly going to tell us how it could be put right. He would sit authoritatively behind his desk and tell us this. Without a doubt.

  We’d barely spoken during the long drive to Liverpool, each of us in our own mire of shock and exhaustion. The days since the court case were a blur of packing boxes and bonfires, endless fraught phone calls and despair. The realization had dawned that we had nowhere to go. The worst thing that could possibly happen had happened. This seven-hour round trip was something we didn’t need. Every hour was precious, every hour to finish packing, every hour to still be held safe within those walls.

  The endless trips to doctors’ waiting rooms had begun six years previously. A debilitating pain in his shoulder and arm, and then a tremor beginning in his hand, had led to doctors believing he had Parkinson’s disease, but when that was proved not to be the case, they felt maybe it was nerve damage. This consultant’s room was like every other: a square, white, emotionless box overlooking the car park. But this doctor wasn’t behind his desk; he came and sat on the corner of it next to Moth, put his hand on his arm and asked him how he was. It was wrong. Doctors don’t do that. No doctor we’d seen, and we’d seen a fair few, had ever done that.

  ‘The best thing I can do for you, Moth, is give you a diagnosis.’

  No, no, no, no, no. Don’t say any more, don’t speak, something awful is going to fall out of your smug, tight lips, don’t open them, don’t speak.

  ‘I believe you have corticobasal degeneration, CBD. We can’t be absolutely certain about the diagnosis. There is no test, so we’ll only know at post-mortem.’

  ‘Post-mortem? When do you think that will be?’ Moth’s hands spread wide over his thighs, holding as much of himself as he could between his broad fingers.

  ‘Well, I would normally say six to eight years from onset. But yours seems to be very slow progressing as it’s already been six years since you first presented with a problem.’

  ‘That must mean you’ve got it wrong then. It’s something else.’ I could feel my stomach rising into my throat and the room slipping out of focus.

  The doctor looked at me as if I was a child; then he carried on trying to explain a rare degenerative brain disease that would take the beautiful man I’d loved since I was a teenager and destroy his body and then his mind as he fell into confusion and dementia, and end with him unable to swallow and probably choking to death on his own saliva. And there was nothing, absolutely nothing they could do about it. I could hardly breathe; the room was swimming. No, not Moth, don’t take him, you can’t take him, he’s everything, he’s all of it, all of me. No. I tried to keep a calm face, but inside I was screaming, panicking, like a bee against a glass pane. The real world was there, but suddenly out of reach.

  ‘But you could have got it wrong.’

  What was he talking about? This wasn’t how we would die. It wasn’t Moth’s life; it was our life. We were one, fused, enmeshed, molecular. Not his life, not my life: our life. We had a plan for how we would die. When we were ninety-five, on top of a mountain having watched the sun come up, we would simply go to sleep. Not choking to death in a hospital bed. Not separate, separated, alone.

  ‘You’ve got it wrong.’

  We clung together in the van in the hospital car park, as if the simple act of pressing our bodies together would make this stop. If there was no light between us, then nothing could separate us, this wouldn’t be real and we wouldn’t have to face it. Silent tears rolled down Moth’s face, but I didn’t cry, couldn’t cry. If I did, I’d give in to a river of pain that would wash me away. Our whole adult life had been lived together. Every dream, or plan, every success or failure, had been two halves of one whole life. Never separate, never alone, one.

  There were no drugs to halt the progress, no therapies to keep the disease at bay. The only help that could be offered was a drug called Pregabalin to ease the pain, but Moth was already taking that. There was nothing else. I longed to be able to go to the chemist and collect a box of magic, anything that would stop the march of destruction burning through our life.

  ‘Physiotherapy will help with the stiffness,’ the doctor had said. But Moth already had a physio routine that he did every day. Maybe he could do more; maybe if he did more we could stop it progressing. I clutched at every straw, any flimsy thread to drag me from this suffocating fog of shock. There were no threads, no hand reaching down to pull me to safety, no soothing voice to say it’s all right, it’s just a bad dream. Just the two of us holding on to reality, to each other, in a hospital car park.

  ‘You can’t be ill, I still love you.’

  As if just loving him was enough. It had always been enough, it had always been all I needed, but it wouldn’t save us now. The first time Moth told me he loved me was the first time I’d ever heard those words said. No one had ever said they loved me before, not my parents or friends, no one ever before, and those words had lifted me up, shining, glowing, into the next thirty-two years of my life. But words had no strength against Moth’s brain shifting into self-destruct, against a protein called tau
sludging up the cells, blocking the connections.

  ‘He’s got it wrong. I just know it, he’s wrong.’ He had to be wrong. The judge had got it wrong, so why not the doctor?

  ‘I can’t think, can’t feel …’

  ‘Then let’s think he’s wrong. If we refuse to believe him we can carry on and live like this isn’t real.’ I couldn’t let it in. Nothing made sense, nothing was real.

  ‘Maybe he is wrong. But what if he’s right? What if we get to the end stage he talked about? I can’t think of that, don’t want to think …’

  ‘We won’t get there; we’ll fight this thing somehow.’

  I don’t believe in God, in any higher force. We live, we die; the carbon cycle keeps running. But please, God, please don’t let us get there. If He exists He had just grabbed the roots of my life and ripped them from the ground, turning my very existence upside down. We drove home with the CD player at full volume, hiding in the noise. The mountains falling away below and the sea crashing over my head, my world was upside down. By the time the van stopped I was walking on my hands.

  Thoughts of choking plagued me. Night after night, for weeks after the diagnosis I woke in a cold sweat, head throbbing, panicking from nightmares of drowning in mucus. Visions of Moth’s neck swelling, his jaw distorted, fighting to suck in air until he reached a suffocating end, while the children and I stood by and watched, helpless.

  The swallows had arrived late, in ones and twos, finally finding their way home after an epic journey, to swoop through the beech trees and gorge on insects. If only I could be a swallow, free to fly, free to come home if I chose. I broke the bread for Smotyn and went out into the fresh June morning. The air was soft and light, brushing my face with the promise of a beautiful day ahead. I squeezed over the stile between the branches of the wild pear hedge. I’d bought the hedging in a sale at a tree nursery; it was supposed to be beech, but had grown into a small-leaved, spiky hedge with no pears and a bad attitude whenever I went over the stile. I rubbed at the scratches on my arm, new ones amongst the healed scars. It wasn’t worth cutting it back now. The field was warm and honey-filled with the smell of clover coming into flower. The moles had been active again overnight, and mounds of finely tilled soil spread across the centre of the field. I kicked them flat, instinctively, still concerned about the wellbeing of the land, our land. Moth had reclaimed this field from an overgrown patch of weeds. Refusing to use pesticides and without any machinery at that stage, he had hand-scythed the two-acre patch. Raked away the debris and dug out nettles. He’d restored the boundary that surrounded it, carefully replacing hundreds of stones into walls that had been derelict for decades. It was the field where the children of visitors collected eggs, warm from the hens, and fed pet lambs in the spring. We’d played endless family cricket matches here and lain in long grass before it was cut for hay and watched shooting stars in dark summer skies. Our land.

  Smotyn didn’t come. She always came to the stile for her slice of bread. Always. As I looked around the fields for her, I already knew what I was going to find. In her favourite spot under the beech trees, her head laid out on the grass as if she was sleeping. She knew. She knew she couldn’t leave her field, her place, and had simply died. Put her head on the grass, closed her eyes, and died. As I stroked her hairy face, passing my hand one last time over the bent horn, it came like a contraction. All-consuming and uncontrollable. I curled on the grass next to her and sobbed. Crying until my body stopped, spent, drained of tears, dried out by loss. The grass wrapped around my face and I lay under the beech trees and tried to die, to let go and be free with Smotyn, free to fly with the swallows and not have to face leaving this place, or the desiccation of Moth. Let me die now, let me be the one to go, don’t let me be left alone, let me die.

  I got the spade and started to dig, to bury Smotyn next to her sisters, in their field. Moth came out and we silently dug the hole together, refusing to speak, refusing to acknowledge the hole as it grew. The blackness that we had looked into the day before was still too shocking, too new for us to admit its existence, even as an idea. I covered her head with a tea towel; we couldn’t look at her as the soil fell on her face. She was gone. It was all over. The dream that had been the farm was buried with her.

  3. Seismic Shift

  After closing the door for the last time we had two weeks to put our few belongings into a friend’s barn and try to work out what to do next. The children couldn’t help: they were both students, living in shared accommodation, with barely enough money to keep themselves afloat. Moth’s brother was on holiday so we could use his house, but we had just two weeks before he came back with his family, then there wouldn’t be room for us all and we would have to leave. Only twenty miles away from home, just down the road, but we couldn’t go back. It was agonizing. Reeling from the shock of leaving our house and trying to acknowledge what the doctor had told us, the first few days passed in a near catatonic haze.

  Logic said we should work hard and find somewhere to rent. It wasn’t just the house that had been taken from us, but our holiday-rental business too. Our income was gone. We’d need to find a job to enable us to reconstruct a life. But we were faced with the possibility that our life together was to be limited to a short time of moderately good health, followed by a decline into paralysis and death. I couldn’t leave him and go to work – I needed to spend every minute of this precious semi-health with him. I had to save every memory to carry with me into a lonely future.

  I hated the doctor, sitting on the edge of his desk delivering his diagnosis as if he was presenting a gift. The best thing I can do for you, Moth, is give you a diagnosis. It was the very worst thing he could do. I wished he could take it away, and let me live without knowing. I didn’t want to see the black void of my future every time I looked at Moth. We stumbled through those days as if we had just come from a battlefield, scarred, shocked and lost.

  Long-term camping was an option until we could find something better, but the best offer we had from a campsite was eighty pounds a week, far more than we could afford, and there was no housing benefit for campsite fees. No one we knew had a room to spare, or a garden they were willing to sacrifice for more than a few weeks. And we needed somewhere to settle our thoughts and come to terms with what had happened. No caravans were available in a holiday hot spot, where in midsummer every caravan is booked out for visitors who pay a lot more than housing benefit.

  In an ideal world we’d have found a place to rent, but it was quickly apparent that when you’ve had your house repossessed it’s close to impossible to get a rental property. Our credit rating was on the floor. The council could put us on their waiting list if we chose that, but we were low priority and the only accommodation they could offer at that moment was a room in a bed and breakfast that housed mainly those with drug and alcohol problems. A girl with dark hair pulled back into a tight ponytail sat behind a desk in the council offices, speaking to us in a strong Welsh accent: ‘Well, if you’re not going to die soon, like in the next year, then you’re not that ill, are you, so I can’t call you a priority, can I?’ That was the moment when we knew it for certain: we’d rather be in the tent.

  Back in Moth’s brother’s house I gazed through the window, dazed, unable to think of a way forward.

  ‘I’m glad really. I can’t imagine living in a council house down the road from the farm. That would be just soul-destroying.’ Not only that, but in such a tight-knit rural community we would be the source of gossip for months.

  ‘I know. At the farm we could shut ourselves away from everyone, couldn’t we? On our island.’

  That’s what the farm had been to us, in every way: an island. As soon as we left the road and drove into the forest, we left the rest of the world behind. Beyond the trees the views opened up as if we had entered another world. Old field systems on all sides, separated by hedge-topped banks. Mountains rising high in the west and stretching away to the east, a delicate, smooth cloud snaking between. A hug
e buzzard lifting its wings, circling into the sky and hanging in the blue air, somewhere between the tree tops and the mountains. The world of the road, the villages and all human noise left behind as the forest closed the door behind us. But now we were cast adrift, with no safe haven to return to, floating through fog on a raft of despair with no notion of where we would come ashore, or if there would be a shore at all.

  Moth stood by the window, looking across the hillside of gorse and heather. Home but not home.

  ‘I don’t think I can bear to stay around here. I need to put some space between Wales and us; it’s too painful to stay. I don’t know about the longer term, don’t know if I’ve got a longer term, but for now I need to be somewhere else. Need to look for somewhere else to call home.’

  I took a deep breath.

  ‘Let’s pack the rucksacks then, and make it up as we go along.’

  ‘The South West Coast Path it is then.’

  Packing a rucksack when you’re fifty just isn’t the same as when you’re twenty. The last time our packs had been ready for a trail was before the children were born, Moth still had long hair and I was a stone lighter. Then we’d shoved in anything we thought we would need and carried it regardless, our young bodies springing back from strain and injuries. We’d backpacked in the Lake District and Scotland, walking miles every day but nearly always staying on a campsite, very rarely wild camping. Thirty years on and I had the aches of twenty years of manual labour, damage that never quite heals but stays malevolently in the background. Stiff from three years spent fighting a court case, hunched over the laptop trying to construct our defence and prone to muscle damage at every twist or turn. And Moth? How could he possibly carry the weight he had before? We packed the rucksack as we would have in the past and gingerly lifted it on to his back. A sixty-litre pack, stuffed with our old orange canvas tent and two slightly rusty billy cans. Twice around the room and he was on his knees in agony.