The Salt Path Read online

  We spent Christmas with Moth’s brother, sleeping on his floor, comfort, warmth and happy families, trying to pretend nothing had happened and life was the same as it had always been. Late December saw us back in Polly’s woods, cutting fallen trees into sections to be chopped into logs. Days were spent clearing brush and undergrowth, creating vast mounds of timber, then, when darkness came, going back to the shed, Moth lying on the floor crippled in pain. I restored a range cooker to go into the shed, knocked down a partition wall, timber-lined the entrance room, cleaned holiday lets, and worked in the laundry. We paid no rent, just electric, but we had no money. I needed to find work, but I needed to be with Moth too; he was exhausted, getting weaker. However glad we were for the roof that Polly had provided, the physical price Moth was paying for that luxury was high.

  ‘You can’t go on like this, it’s killing you.’

  ‘But we’ve got a roof and I’m grateful for that.’

  Spring came and the woodland floor burst into life, carpets of previously hidden bluebells lit the top of the hill like a blue crown. A fallow deer walked across the fallen larch, her delicate legs carrying her strongly over the trunk, out of the wood to graze in the field at dusk. We watched her covertly, for fear she would end her days in the freezer. She was alone, beautiful, free and our secret.

  With spring came the lambing. We watched the hundreds of ewes in vast corrugated barns for signs of the start of labour: unsettled ewes trying to find a space alone, pawing the ground, lying on their side, necks straining, their heads to the sky. Then wet, wriggling, instant life. A time of excitement, hope and fresh starts. But I felt outside of it all, an empty shell, going through the motions. Spraying lambs’ navels with iodine to prevent infection. Cleaning out the mothering pens, bedding them down with clean straw. Familiar actions from a familiar life, but one I no longer lived. I wasn’t living my life; I was just existing in someone else’s.

  Everything we’d ever worked for or towards in our long years together was gone. Our first home, a tiny Victorian terraced house that looked across a road on to a wood, where we’d returned after work every night to start work again on its restoration. Rolling in stripped wallpaper on Sunday afternoons, pointing chimney stacks at two in the morning, dreaming of buying a place with a bit of land where we could be free of the nine to five. Selling that house and piling all the money into our dream. Even that was lost, the memories drained, worthless, because it was all gone. I was grateful we’d had the life we had, a place some people aspire to all their lives and never achieve. But we’d worked so hard to get it, to make it happen; all our time, energy and ambition had been sucked into it. It was everything. When our friends were on foreign holidays, we were reroofing the barn. The kids went to the beach with other families because we were digging ditches to lay drainage pipes. It had taken everything and now the whole thirty years had gone. What now? What the fuck now?

  I missed my home for the memories of family life, the closed, safe sense of security, for knowing where I would sleep next week, next year, for the decades it represented. But now I missed something else just as much. I woke in the nights to the hot dust smell of the baked path, or the citrus tang of a salt-laden rainstorm on molten earth. Alive with the anticipation of following a buzzard as it swept through silent, dappled woodland to bright, open headlands, filled with the hope of a future just beyond the next combe. Waking to a night filled with the call of gulls on the wind through racing skies and the view to an infinite horizon, lifting me up and beckoning me on to endless possibility. But then the room would come into focus in the darkness, and with it a realization of the hollow truth. I was living someone else’s life while Moth slowly died. Time ran backwards, the past became the future, things that had been became anticipated events, memories ran in fluid streams, transforming into rivers yet to come. In the darkness, I began to believe the doctors and accept that I had been in denial, to realize that their words could be true. No matter how much I fought it, he would die, and I would somehow have to live without him. I was spiralling down. It was no comfort that books suggested I was in a normal state of pre-bereavement grieving. I was haunted by ghosts of Moth that stalked his living days. Spiralling down.

  We searched the area, trying to find somewhere to rent, but nothing had changed; we dragged our credit history wherever we went. I looked for work, but in such a rural area there was nothing that paid more than enough to cover the petrol costs to get to the job. And who wants a fifty-year-old woman whose work history for the last twenty years has been self-employment? It didn’t count that I’d been a farmer, plumber, builder, electrician, gardener, decorator, designer, accountant, tree surgeon, and run a holiday let. I had neither a piece of paper or an ex-employer to prove it. I would have to retrain. But even then, who would want to employ a fifty-year-old newly qualified woman when they could have the equivalent twenty-three-year-old? Without a job and an income, we would never be able to find a home independently. Spiralling, spiralling down.

  Moth was a trained master plasterer; the action of skimming over plasterboard wasn’t something new to his body, rather a skill he’d returned to often throughout his life, a muscle memory. But his body screamed as if he’d never lifted a trowel before. I couldn’t help him; the ability to create a perfect glass finish isn’t something you can pick up in a few lessons. The mornings became harder; I was lifting him from the bed, helping him to move reluctant limbs until slowly, by lunchtime, he was ready to start. He crawled through the work, turning the meat-packing room into a comfortable, habitable space. It just needed the plumbing to be altered for the restored Rayburn range cooker, and decorating, and then it would be complete. We craved the security that staying in the shed would provide, yet at the same time we needed something more: we needed a future over which we had some control.

  ‘Sometimes, Ray, I wake up and I can’t remember what I’m supposed to do. It’s as if my body’s forgetting how to function. I have to tell myself I should eat or drink or go to the bathroom, because I should, not because I want to. Is this it, am I dying now?’

  It was late April, the swallows were returning, the lambs were growing strong on the hillside. In the dense wood, behind the fallen larch, I glimpsed the fallow deer, no longer alone, but with four tiny frail legs next to hers. Reluctant to leave the safety of the trees she slipped back into the darkness. Seagulls massed raucous over a late-ploughed field, clustering more tightly than they did on the coast. My thoughts drifted south, as they always did when I had a moment alone. The gulls would be busy now. Rearing their young on cliffs and rooftops, hanging out in the harbours waiting for pasties.

  Early on a May morning, Polly rushed into the shed.

  ‘Found you some work if you want it.’ Of course I wanted it. ‘The shearing team need a wrapper; do you think you can do it?’

  ‘Of course.’ I had no idea if I could do it. Wrapping our few fleeces after they had been shorn was one thing. Wrapping for a team of three competition-standard shearers, who could each shear a ewe in under four minutes, was quite another.

  The pick-up truck pulled up outside the shed at six in the morning, towing a rattling trailer made up of confusing strips of boarding and metal. I sat in the rear seat amid a tangle of tools, grease-covered clothing, sandwich boxes and a black dog, hot and panting. We collected other shearers on the way to the farm where they had been contracted to remove the fleeces from over eight hundred ewes.

  ‘Take us about two days if it goes well.’

  The ramshackle farmhouse held an old couple in ripped clothes, cotton aprons and trousers held up with baler twine. The old man, stooped and arthritic, led us out of the farmyard to a dip scooped from the hillside. Within the dip was a vast expanse of corrugated metal, a state-of-the-art barn, racked with quad bikes, tractors and farm equipment. I’d never looked at eight hundred sheep in an enclosed space before. They went on and on, filling over half of the barn, the collecting yard behind and out into the field. Gordon, the team leader, revers
ed the trailer into the barn and began unfolding the boarding/metal contraption. It consisted of a ramp, which would usher the sheep to the top of the trailer and then into a half-metre-wide trailer-length dead end, called the race. Three doors opened from the race on to a platform where the shearers stood, each hanging their own set of shearing equipment above their door. The electricity was connected to the small motors that powered the shearing heads. They all removed their boots and put on thick leather moccasins, soaked with dark lanolin. I stood below the waist-high platform, behind me a metal frame, from which a two-metre-long woven plastic sack was hung, to be filled with fleeces. By eight o’clock we were set and ready to go.

  Each shearer opened his door, grabbed a ewe by the fleece and rolled her on to the platform, shutting the door behind her. The pull cord fed power to the shearing head and they began. The ewe on her haunches as the wool separated down the belly first, and then around the head and neck. On to her side, held between legs, and smooth, long strokes down the flank and back; then the other side. Pull the power cord and release the ewe, who would turn and leap from the trailer to a pen created to hold the clipped sheep: thin, white, fleeceless, heads huge on their naked bodies.

  As the first fleece dropped on to the platform my day began. My aim was to roll the fleece, bind it into a tight bundle and put it into the sack. Flip the fleece on to its clean side, head end facing me, fold the leg sides into the back, roll it tight keeping it about a foot wide, take the last piece from the rump end and tuck it into the previous bind to create a tight ball. Stuff it into the sack. Clear the platform of debris with the flat edge of a stick. The moment the fleece had dropped, the shearer had already turned to take the next ewe from the race, so the wrapping had to take place on a small space to the side of the next ewe. Too close and the platform was a mass of tangled wool, wrapped around the feet of the kicking ewe. Times three.

  The first few of the day were difficult, everyone shearing at roughly the same speed, and I ran from one to the next. But as the morning progressed so the time per ewe began to vary and I fell into a rhythm. When the sack was stuffed full, I took an eight-inch-long wooden peg from a bucket, driving it through both sides of the top of the sack twice to form a closure. Four of those and the sack was closed tight and one of the shearers jumped down and helped me drag it to the side of the barn.

  Having left the shed at six, the morning was long, with a break at ten thirty and then lunch at one. The afternoon felt longer, with a break at four before carrying on until seven. At the end of the day the farmer brought out the last pen of sheep. The rams. Muscular Texel beasts. When sitting on their haunches, they were nearly the size of the smaller shearer. Once that was done, we finished the turn-out of the sheep: the clipped ones to one field, those yet to be shorn to another. Then the drive back. I crawled into the plastic shed just after eight.

  ‘How was it?’

  ‘Yeah, it was fine. More than I’ve ever done before, but I’m okay.’

  I stood in the shower as green lanolin slime washed down the drain. I ate a bowl of soup and was asleep by nine. I woke in the night, my arms pulsing in pain, got up and took a handful of ibuprofen and went back to sleep lying on my back with my arms propped on pillows, until the alarm blasted out at five thirty.

  Repeat.

  Some holdings we visited were small, family-run farms, three generations on a couple of hundred acres, deep in the rolling moorlands. Others were vastly intimidating industrial units with thousands of ewes. The tight-knit group of shearers rarely spoke to me, confining themselves to discussions about equipment and sheep breeds. But I watched; I didn’t really need to talk. Days ran into weeks, with only wet days off, during a warm, dry early summer. The Rayburn was plumbed in, the decorating done, blinds hung. I talked with Polly, rebuilding some of the friendship we had shared when we were young. Days when our relationship wasn’t stained by time and events. It could never be the same. I was now an unpaid employee, a tenant, a recipient of her brand of philanthropy, grateful, obedient, and always aware of my position. She was a landlady with a tenant who paid no rent, an employer of a worker who earned no wages, possessor of a life that represented everything her friend had lost. She was in control. On rare occasions, she invited me round to the farmhouse and we sat in the garden on the hillside and watched the stars. The plough held its place in the north, while everything around it changed.

  ‘The shed’s looking great, better than I hoped. Stay as long as you like, stay forever if you want.’

  A home, a place to be, a platform to rebuild from. Was this real? Could it work?

  There was a rapid scramble as everyone tried to capture the ewe before she left the platform. This happened at least five times a day; the ewes in the race would become so pressed together in their attempts to escape that when one was pulled through the door others would force their way out behind her, leap across the platform and away into the already shorn sheep. This would mean precious time lost in trying to separate her out again.

  The huge Leicester/Suffolk cross ewes were producing massive, deep, loosely connected fleeces, taking half as many as usual to fill the sacks. As Gordon pulled the ewe through the door, two more burst out, swirling the vast fleeces into a half-woven soup of wool and green sludge. No! One turned and leapt into the air next to my head; instinctively I grabbed her wool and hung on. The barn floor, which began the start of each day dry and clean, was wet with lanolin and dung, and she began to run, towing me behind her until my foot wedged into a patch of broken concrete and we both rolled into a puddle of slime, two heads and six feet encased in green.

  ‘You’re shearing that one, Gordon, I ain’t touching that.’

  ‘Fuck, time for a break, I think.’

  I washed my hands and hair under a standpipe before opening my flask of tea.

  ‘You hung on, I’ll give you that.’ Did my greenness make me one of the gang? Was Gordon actually talking to me? ‘Done a good job of the old meat shed; I like it, like the floor.’

  ‘Have you looked at it?’

  ‘Yeah, Polly showed me round – you were out. No, it’ll do me fine.’

  ‘Do you fine?’

  ‘It’s all I need really, since the wife left. Back to a bachelor pad. The rent’s steep for what it is, but it’s handy, where I need to be.’

  I drank the tea, while he told me about moving into the shed, stay forever if you want echoing in my ears.

  ‘It’s got no planning permission, you know.’

  ‘All the better – no Council Tax.’

  When I got back, Moth was finishing some plastering around the Rayburn flue pipe; installed now, shining chrome and cream enamel. ‘Why am I not surprised? They’ve got to make money where they can, I suppose. I wonder when she was going to tell us? After the shearing, I expect. We need to make a plan.’

  ‘I know, but what?’ I looked at Moth, stiff and hunched, hardly able to raise his hands above his shoulders, plastering with a small trowel, as close to the wall as he could be. What plan could we possibly make?

  ‘I’ve been thinking a lot these last two months while you’ve been away. I obviously can’t go back to physical work, but most of my life’s been spent in the environment; I’ve got so many skills that I could pass on. So, maybe I could teach. Perhaps I could go to uni and get a degree, then train to be a teacher. Start again. We could get cheap student digs.’

  ‘But do you think you could manage it? What if you get worse? You’re already much worse than when we came here. I thought I was the one in denial.’

  ‘And what if I don’t? I’ve been on the internet. I could do a degree in Cornwall – there’s a campus that’s part of Plymouth University; then teacher training somewhere else. It’s not too late to apply; they’ve still got vacancies. Maybe my brain needs a jolt. What if I force myself? Look how much better I was physically when I forced myself to walk; it could work for my brain. I need to try.’

  ‘Why didn’t you say?’

  ‘Because you we
re back with your friends; I thought you were happy.’

  ‘Really? Well, yes, it’s been comforting in some ways to be with people we know so well. But even if it had gone on indefinitely it would’ve been hard to find a way to create a new life here.’

  Moth made an application, had a Skype interview, and was accepted. We applied for student finance – fortunately our credit history didn’t prevent us receiving the reliable fixed income it would provide. Two of us could live on one student loan until I found work; we’d lived on less. We’d wait and see what happened about the packing shed before we made a firm decision. To give up the security of a roof and voluntarily step back out into the abyss of homelessness seemed like an unnatural move.

  The summer warmed into early July. Ewes that hadn’t had their fleeces removed earlier were starting to suffer from maggots. Flies lay their eggs on the dirty wool of sheep, usually around the back end; the eggs hatch into maggots that wriggle through the wool to the skin, burrowing in, causing the wool to lift off and creating raw, infected sores. If left too long they get under the skin and into the spinal area, eventually killing the sheep. Picking patches of maggots out of the last fleece of the season, I dropped the last green handful of wool, skin and fish bait on to the floor. Two and a half months of work were over. We went to the pub and Gordon handed out the season’s earnings. The one and only payment, but I had fifteen hundred pounds in my hands. A fortune compared to the day in Bude when we had only eleven pounds to last a week.

  We locked it into a metal tin under the bed and I carried on working in the laundry and cleaning holiday lets. Moth was in so much pain that he was considering returning to the Pregabalin. Was going to uni a stupid idea? He seemed to be deteriorating so quickly. Maybe if we held on, Gordon might not move into the shed, maybe he’d got it wrong. We said nothing to Polly about the uni application, unsure if Moth would be able to do it anyway. Until one hot afternoon in Polly’s kitchen, as she leant against the work-top, arms folded, worried, explaining that she desperately needed to find extra income for the farm, as finances were tight.