Just Another Mountain Read online

  Heat from the sun beating through the thin fabric of the tent woke me. My whole head throbbed, my face was puffy, and yesterday’s tingling lips had erupted into the mother of all cold sores overnight. But, ropey as I felt, I was determined to make the most of every last minute on Kilimanjaro, a final day of mourning on the mountain, if you like.

  Once the breakfast things had been cleared away and before we made tracks down the mountain, the porters and guides put on a final performance for us; they danced and sang their hearts out, cranking up the volume as they belted out the medley of songs that had welcomed us into camp every night. It was a fitting farewell. And afterwards, as we trekked back down beneath the cloud line, I remembered what I could of my mother’s last goodbye.

  It was hard to recall much about the funeral; the day passed in sketchy scenes. When the hearse drew up outside my grandparents’ home my legs virtually gave way beneath me and the world blurred. I don’t remember the drive to Inverness, but when we got there I was aware that the crematorium was full to capacity of people who had come to pay their respects, and that was ‘nice’. And I vaguely remembered some former pupils of my mother who came to offer up those ritual expressions of consolation. My grandparents, uncles, aunt and Frank maintained composure throughout the service – I don’t know how they did it. I wanted to throw myself on top of the box that was taking my mother away. I don’t remember the hymns. But I remember the curtains being drawn, then the coffin – with my mum – was gone.

  At the wake I drank brandy, because it was what she would have had. I walked – actually, it felt more like I floated – around the tables and in between people. I thought I’d spend the rest of my life feeling permanently numb, so I was pleased to feel a fleeting surge of irritation towards a friend of my grandad’s who was filling his face with the sandwiches like he’d come along for the free feed. I wanted to grab his fork and stab his eyeballs, but instead I smiled. I sought out my grandad. Although I felt stone-cold sober, it seemed the alcohol had rubbed out enough brain cells for me to fuck up my attempt at quoting a verse from the Rubaiyat, but my grandfather raised his glass with me all the same.

  When we arrived back at Nakara Hotel I headed straight for the bar and ordered a brandy, making a toast to my mother and the mountain. As I sipped my drink, though, I felt strangely numb, not at all as I’d expected to feel having conquered the mountain. I had come to Kilimanjaro in hope that the journey to and from its summit would provide the time I needed to make sense of my grief – that by performing my own private memorial, sorrow would vanish as with the wave of a wand, and that by reliving painful memories my inner demons would be cast out. The boundaries of my own endurance had been pushed almost to the limit, so why did I now feel so underwhelmed?

  Like everyone else, I continued drinking after dinner, but unlike the others I drank not in celebration of summiting, but to blot out the unbearable fact that my anguish remained. Marty and I got blitzed – I even shared some of his ‘bad-boy’ grass, giggling uncontrollably for an hour before passing out on my bed.

  The undercurrent of disappointment remained as I left Africa behind. As our flight took us further away from Kilimanjaro I tried to work out why the challenge hadn’t provided the closure I was after. I’d certainly revelled in the physical and mental punishment the mountain had thrown at me, but once that euphoria had worn off I’d found no lasting change. What now? I remembered my mother’s words: Just keep busy.

  I needed a new focus, a new challenge.

  I decided right then that I’d climb all of Scotland’s highest mountains, the Munros. I started to feel excited as soon as I’d hit upon this resolve and a sense of renewed hope rose within me.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  Peaks and Troughs

  The North Glen Shiel Ridge, June 2011

  True to my obsessive nature, on my return from Africa I was keen to start ticking off the list of Munros, fixating on reaching the summits of all 284 mountains as quickly as possible. Having taken up a teaching post at a small school near Inverness, I went hillwalking whenever I could find the time.

  But despite my frequent excursions, by summer term the following year I felt the familiar tug of anxiety dragging me down again. Though my job was part-time, my evenings were taken up with marking or preparing activities. It seemed I was always rushing to get dinner and bedtimes over with so that I could get on with school stuff. I realised I’d fallen into the very same routine Mum had, and I resented being trapped in a cycle I’d sworn to avoid. Pressures increased when the roof started to leak again, and the uncooperative neighbours at our flat in Nairn continued to cause problems.

  In the last months of Mum’s life, while she’d still had the energy, she had done up the flat with a view to putting it on the market. We had lived in two homes since moving to the town, the first a tiny one-bedroomed property in the Fishertown area and then a larger flat above the busy High Street. It had more rooms than we really needed, all bright and spacious, but very cold in winter. And because it was an old building it had many problems other than just the freezer-like temperatures.

  ‘I think we should get rid of this place,’ she’d said. ‘It would be better for you not to have the worry of the leaking roof.’

  ‘No! I don’t want you to do that! This is home! It’s where we have lived together!’ I’d cried.

  At that time the idea of selling was inconceivable: my mum was going to die and I didn’t want the flat, with our shared memories, taken away from me too. We’d whiled away hours there playing Scrabble or cards. Sitting by the fire reading, or watching TV. Drinking brandy and playing the guitar. We’d fought and made up. She’d helped me with homework to get me through exams, and typed up the dissertation I’d written in my final year at art school. She’d given disastrous cooking lessons in the kitchen: I’d let pans of water burn dry, been heavy-handed with chillies in a curry that blew everyone’s heads off, and misunderstanding her instructions I’d drained all the juicy stock from a pan of mince down the plughole.

  Mum had been patient and forgiving of me as I struggled to grow up, even when I’d accidentally spilt the bright-red contents of my Indian takeaway all over her new living-room carpet (well, okay, that incurred a three-month silence – but I was easy to ignore since had I scurried off back to art school in Aberdeen feeling very bad and very guilty). I had rarely listened, but Mum had only ever done her best to guide and advise me, and help me become independent. We had been through a lot together in those four walls.

  But the flat had been a problem ever since. Recently a large family of Mancunians, minus a wife but plus one dog, had been installed. They were an odd lot and all heavy smokers. Fumes from their cigarettes migrated through the walls, permeating the air, making bedding and clothing in my sons’ room smell bad.

  Hearing the man’s dry cough as he laboured up the communal stairwell one day, I opened my door. He was tall and broad, dressed in baggy jeans and an oversized woolly jumper. I said a breezy, ‘Hello.’ His unshaven face smiled back and he politely returned the greeting. Maybe I’d stared a little too long, because he then put down his bags and went into a long explanation of why his teeth resembled a broken and rickety picket fence.

  ‘Me teef are needin’ fixed. Me wife an’ I were rowin’ an’ she pushed me – I fell into the side of the baffroom door an’ all me teef got smashed up,’ he said. I lamented their loss and asked what happened with his wife.

  ‘Did you divorce?’ I asked.

  ‘No. She’s dead. I killed her, but it were an accident. She fell down the stairs.’

  ‘Ooooh!’ I said. He began to tell me all the problems he was having with his twenty-year-old daughter and asked if I’d like to come in for a cup of tea sometime. ‘Sure,’ I answered, then made my excuses and retreated to the flat, deciding I’d complain about his smoke fumes another day.

  A few weeks later that strange family did a moonlight flit. Their replacements were just as unpleasant. The regular screaming matches, accompanie
d by objects being hurled against walls and smashed off floors, were frightening for my younger son to hear, while my older boy was receiving a different kind of education.

  ‘Mum! I can hear them having sex!’ Marcus exclaimed as he burst, wide-eyed, through our living-room door.

  ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘Yes, because the lady’s saying “Eff me harder!”’

  The police were becoming frequent visitors to the residents: they came when there was a fight between the father and son, they came when the man beat his woman and they came to arrest the son, a thief and drug dealer.

  Now, despairing of our situation and racked with anxiety, I sat at the kitchen window crying. All my problems were beginning to overwhelm me: the continuous stream of awful neighbours; a personality clash at work; readjusting to life as a single parent. I missed my family and the support they had provided. I felt like such a failure at everything as I sat there punishing myself. I was a shitty, introspective, self-absorbed fuck-up. I hated myself and wanted out of my own skin. I growled with self-loathing till my throat burned. Consumed by loneliness and the burden of my responsibilities, I moved closer to the window and opened it. Leaning forward, I peered down into the darkness, gripped suddenly by a terrible urge to leap. Be spontaneous! Don’t think about it, just do it. It’ll all be over quickly! It was a fleeting thought. I knew I could never do it, never deliberately choose to leave my little boys. I would put on a brave face for them and carry on going.

  I needed the breathing space that I only found on the hills to help me cope, but in my agitated state I began to hit them harder, becoming increasingly careless.

  At seven-thirty in the morning the alarm on my mobile went off. I’d arranged to meet Ollie in Inverness; we were heading north-west to do four Munros on the north Glen Shiel Ridge. After our first meeting on Meall a’ Bhuachaille in 2008, Ollie and I had been out walking together a number of times and were now pretty comfortable in each other’s company. Our association was uncomplicated; we met for hillwalks and kept conversation lighthearted. Ollie saw me as a joker, but humour, for a long time, had been a front. Underneath it, a sense of angry frustration had taken over. Like a midnight tide that washes in, depression seeped its inky darkness through me as I struggled on.

  Now, as Ollie drove us to our next challenge, I lowered my seat and closed my eyes, listening to the rain as it pattered off the windows.

  It had been a rainy day, four weeks after Mum’s funeral, when I was manhandled back into Woolworths by security. I was led up some stairs, their tan colouring worn down to a smooth grey in the centre of each step. What a truly unimportant thing for my stumbling mind to have focused on. A grubby white door was pushed open and I was taken into a small office. Dressed in a navy-blue pullover and skirt, the manageress, a dumpy woman with a terrible mousey-blonde perm and huge framed glasses, sat behind a desk that was covered in piles of paper in messy stacks. There were files and boxes everywhere, more like how I imagined the office of a journalist or private detective might be – except here there were random toys and Christmas decorations lying about. She’d phoned the police and officers were on their way. My belly churned, my head felt light and my brain raced at a rate of knots as the consequences of my actions finally sunk in. What in the fuck were you thinking? You have money. You could have paid. You even realised the security guy was watching you. Why didn’t you just dump the stuff? You’re such an idiot. I then recoiled as horror filled me. What were my grandparents going to think?

  The door opened and in walked a policeman. I looked up at his face, which was partially concealed under the shiny peak of his black cap, and cringed. I couldn’t believe it. I knew him. My embarrassment doubled as my mind flickered back to the night I’d shagged him down the putting green, long ago. I kept quiet but I knew he recognised me too. He opened up the large, white-plastic carrier bag that I’d stashed the stolen goods in and pulled the bizarre variety of items out one by one. He looked at me, and then at the manageress.

  ‘I think’, he said, ‘that in this case it would probably be better if you don’t press charges. I know Sarah’s circumstances and, if she is agreeable, I would instead refer her to the community psychiatric team for counselling.’

  There was a pause before the manageress nodded.

  ‘I don’t want to see you in my store again,’ she warned sternly.

  ‘Okay,’ I answered, and then asked if my name would appear in the paper.

  ‘No. We can keep you out of that,’ the policeman answered.

  ‘Thank you,’ I said, grateful that my grandparents would be spared the knowledge and shame of what I’d done. And with that I was free to leave.

  Yet I was not free.

  I hadn’t been able talk to my grandparents about how I really felt inside. How could I? I knew that their hearts were as broken as mine. I’d lost my mum, but they’d buried their child. I could only imagine their suffering. And yet they sheltered me from their own pain with a united show of composure. I witnessed only one outpouring of grief, from my grandfather. It was my fault, I’d said something, I can’t even remember what, that finally broke through his stoic self-control. He jumped up from his chair in the living room, banged his fists on the wall and cried, ‘I can’t seem to say anything right!’ His outburst was so unexpected, so out of character, I was completely taken aback. Guilt pinned me to my seat on the sofa, hating myself for being the cause of this dreadful moment, for hurting him.

  Other than that brief eruption, though, my grandparents ‘soldiered on’. Their strength and depth of character was humbling, so I hid my shoplifting shame and pretended that I was strong too – and, besides, it would only have caused them concern and even more upset if they’d known. So we three carried on with our usual routines, each suffering alone in silence. My brush with the law had given me a fright, but it didn’t change the blackness inside that I believed was going to drive me insane with grief, turn me into an alcoholic or, more likely, both. It was not a good place to be. And as the rain came down, I thought maybe it wasn’t a bad thing that I was going to have to see to a counsellor.

  It was a two-hour journey before Ollie and I, having driven through Glen Shiel, arrived at Morvich, a tiny settlement near the southern end of Loch Duich. The rain had stopped, though the sky remained heavy as we turned off the road and parked beyond a large metal gate. Feeling tired and sluggish, I put on my gaiters and waterproof jacket and set out on the six-kilometre route to Glen Licht House. Silver puddles filled the potholes on the stony dirt track that ran alongside the River Croe, its peat-coloured waters cutting a meandering path through the bottom of this wide, treeless valley. The lower slopes of the great mountain ridges that hemmed us in on both sides were cloaked in a deep and luscious green, fresh from the summer rains. Higher up, rocks glistened. Shreds of light found a way through rolling folds of gunmetal cloud and fell like ripples on the mountainside. The atmospheric trickery made it impossible to tell exactly how steep parts of these mountains were, but I had no doubt we were in for quite the slog upwards. It was only when we reached the isolated building at the end of the track that I realised I’d neglected to factor in the distance and time it had taken to walk those extra kilometres – adding another two and a half hours to what was already going to be a lengthy day. I felt cross with myself and worried that it would be near ten o’clock that night before I got home to the kids. Their grandparents hadn’t been able to help on this occasion, and so the boys were being looked after by Sam. Although our marriage had long since been over we had remained in touch and he sometimes helped me out with them – the boys were familiar with him, and Sam was still fond of them too.

  We followed a good path, in a southerly direction, alongside a tributary stream that we needed to cross. Heavy rains had made the river lively, and a suitable place to cross difficult to find. But it was after I had slipped off some rocks and got my feet wet that my temper escalated beyond the combined heights of the mountains we were scaling. Ollie, for reasons o
nly he knew, decided to do a gigantic zigzag up unforgivingly steep and craggy terrain in the opposite direction to the line I’d mapped out. And I followed him. A southerly wind, now blowing fiercely, brought low cloud and light rain, making it feel all the more like hard work to get anywhere.

  It now seemed I couldn’t even get to the top of a hill without messing up. Depression was not meant to follow me on the mountains. I yelled my frustration and rage into the wind till my throat hurt and tears burned. Ollie was too far ahead to have heard me wailing like a lunatic, and in any case the strong winds blowing against us carried the din away in the opposite direction.

  A day after the incident at Woolworths I took Poppy for a walk. I was desperate to reach the white sands of Nairn’s east beach, knowing that at this time of the year it was unlikely there would be anyone about. I’d chosen the place deliberately, so that I could scream out all the anger and misery and pain from the top of my lungs.

  A man appeared from between sand dunes, looking distinctly alarmed when he’d heard my cry.

  ‘Are you all right?’ the poor unsuspecting soul asked.

  No, not really. My mother is dead, I got done for shoplifting the other day and I want to fucking top myself.

  ‘Yes,’ I stammered, ‘I’m fine.’

  The man walked on uncertainly, and I felt idiotic. Nevertheless, as soon as I was alone on the wide, open space of the beach I started talking to myself again, pretending Mum was walking with me. ‘I dreamt about you last night. You told me that there is a heaven and everyone gets to go there. You said you’d done more there in two days than you could do in a lifetime on Earth . . . I wish I always got to see you in my dreams . . . I miss you so badly Mum.’

  I walked for empty miles along the sand till the chill December wind made my fingers, toes and lips as numb as I felt on the inside. And I remembered the promise I’d made not to give up. Sea air blustered across cold, grey waters carrying a gull’s cry. Looking to the sky, I said to Mum, ‘I’ll speak to the counsellor. I’ll do teacher training. I’ll go see your friend and ask if she’ll let me have work experience in her class. I won’t steal, I won’t drink and I won’t let you down again, Mum. I’ll be better.’