Just Another Mountain Page 5

  ‘Well,’ he said, ‘that’s the end of phase three. Don’t you know where you are?’

  I had a think but shook my head.

  ‘The last time we tried to come here you were four months pregnant. The time before that was with Mum.’

  It all came flooding back. This was the loch at Coire Mhic Fhearchair, a place Mum had wanted to visit ever since Frank had shown her photos of one of his trips here. As she became sicker it seemed increasingly important to her that she do it, and so the three of us attempted it just a couple of months before her death. She had convinced herself, and us, that she was fit enough for the walk, but when we were a little over halfway to the loch she’d had to call it a day. Mum really wasn’t well and, although disappointed she hadn’t made it to the loch he especially wanted to share with her, Frank knew we absolutely had to turn back and get Mum home – and he was with her every step of the way.

  We had tried to return, Frank and I, on Valentine’s Day 1998, six months after Mum died. But I was carrying an already large pregnant bump and it had been my turn to struggle. The winding trail felt interminable as I trailed far behind Frank, and as the wind battered around the side of Sail Mhor it took my breath away. It was madness to try to carry on – and I too had had to give up. I yelled, hoping Frank would hear my voice over the wind. He did. I felt bad for him as we walked back. I understood that he’d wanted to come here to remember Mum. To relive the walk we’d done just months earlier with her at our side; we both needed to feel that connection to her. Twice we’d been on Beinn Eighe, and twice we’d turned back before reaching the loch. Now we’d finally made it, and it felt like Mum was here with me.

  Inhaling deeply, I stood still for a few moments absorbing views of the wild, ragged landscape. Standing in that space of irresolution I felt entirely at the mercy of the mountain: and there was something strangely reassuring about that.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Cheating Myself

  Ben Wyvis — The Hill of Terror, July 2008

  On Ben Wyvis the cloud can settle on the top and clear up again many times in one day. I knew that well from all the years I had spent staring out of our second-floor kitchen window. With the naked eye, on a clear day I could see over the outer Moray Firth, all the way along the coastline from nearby Black Isle and Cromarty to as far up as Caithness – probably about forty miles away as the crow flies. It was a far less hilly view than the one I’d enjoyed from the old family home in Ardersier, but while Ben Wyvis was the only proper mountain I had a glimpse of from here, I loved being able to see for miles around me.

  So I knew that what happened at the top on any given day was always hit or miss, but as I looked over blue-slate rooftops, the church spire and the water, the weather seemed fair and the mountain cloud-free. I decided it was a fine day to go up the Ben. And I’d been itching to take my boys up their first Munro, as any mountain in Scotland over 914 metres is known.

  Marcus and Leon were like chalk and cheese, both in looks and personality; aged nine, Marcus was dark-haired with hazel eyes, while seven-year-old Leon was my fair-haired, blue-eyed boy. Where Marcus would be content to play quietly, Leon was a rascal. They even expressed affection differently, especially when they were tots: where Marcus would offer a gentle cuddle Leon would come running at me, deliver a swift blow to whichever of my body parts he came into contact with first, then growl, ‘I LOVE YOU MUMMY!’

  I’d already taken them out with me on many long walks and I’d recently started to introduce them to the hills as well, tackling Meall a’ Bhuachaille with them. Now I felt they were ready for their first big climb, hoping that the mountains would bring us closer together, just as walking had with me and my mother. But it turned out that none of us was quite prepared for what was waiting for us on their first Munro.

  Ben Wyvis was about an hour’s drive from home, and the circuitous route I’d picked from my book had suggested the walk would only take around six to eight hours. I was feeling confident and well prepared when we set out walking along the well-constructed path, glad to be with the two little humans who meant most in the world to me. As we walked up through trees and enjoyed views of the river racing and frothing over rocks on our right, the sun’s warmth was delicious as it beat down. The straps of my overstuffed daysack rubbed against the exposed flesh of my shoulders, but I felt too content to care as I enjoyed watching my boys happily exploring, Marcus staying close by while Leon made straight for a small burn that dissected the path to poke at some water spiders. But as we continued into more open land, the weather changed all too quickly.

  Patches of cloud blotted out the sun, and the wind suddenly blew harder, making it feel considerably colder. I was glad I’d had the foresight to pack extra clothing for us all, which we threw on, halfway up, by the shelter of a camper-van-sized rock. Our cheerful mood soon evaporated, replaced by a steady stream of moans and groans, mostly falling from Leon’s lips. At the height of his disenchantment he declared crossly this was ‘a wasted day’ and ‘a meaningless walk to the top of a lump of earth’, which despite everything made me laugh, and he soon saw the funny side too.

  It really was a hard slog for untrained calf muscles, though, as we continued upwards. The path edged the mountainside and it was a long drop down. In a reversal of roles, Marcus appeared to be in his element, much more confident and adventurous, whereas Leon seemed to have lost his usual fearless approach to life and was demonstratively ill at ease when he saw his brother investigating a large, flat slab of rock, like a shelf, jutting out over the valley below.

  ‘Tell him to come back, Mummy! He’ll get blown off the mountain!’ Leon wailed.

  I reassured my younger son as he clutched my hand tightly, though in truth I’d been watching his brother with nervous pride myself. I called Marcus to rejoin us, and he immediately scrabbled back before forging off ahead once more.

  ‘Auch, man, you have got to be kidding me!’ he called back.

  Laughing, I realised he must have reached a false summit. After battling up heathery slopes we were fully exposed as we topped out onto a dirtied-amber flat-summit skyline, and the wind buffeted around us mercilessly. We gazed down upon views of the Cromarty and Moray Firths, steely grey waters spilling from their triangular inlets into the expanse of the North Sea, which filled the horizon. It was tremendous to be so high up. To see so far out into watery nothingness in one direction, and in the other to behold an inanimate world of seemingly endless peaks fading into the distance. I hoped the boys shared my sense of awe.

  The going was now easier as we tramped across woolly hair moss over the broad ridge, but we were still just over a kilometre and a half away from the summit. We watched as cloud drifted onto, over the top of, and away again from Ben Wyvis’s highest point. The boys were delighted by large pockets of snow still clinging to the deep, craggy corrie on our right, but I began to worry about the deteriorating weather closing in around us. It was one thing to watch weather fold and unfold from my kitchen window, but to be right here experiencing it in the fabric of the landscape, on the peak of this big, rolling, fuck-off mountain, was something completely different.

  At the shelter cairn we huddled together, seeking extra protection from the wind behind the concrete trig point. Dense mists surrounded us and, as my shivering boys ate their sandwiches, a sense of irresponsibility rolled about my stomach in sickening waves.

  I stared at the drawing of the route I’d printed from the Munro book realising, with growing fright, how redundant it was without a proper OS map. It was wildly less than adequate for the zero-visibility conditions we were now in. We were only at the halfway point. I’d thought we’d be much further along by now and would easily beat any change in the weather. Of course, I’d anticipated it would take longer with two small kids in tow than if I’d been on my own, but now I realised I’d vastly underestimated just how much longer. Now I was up here in bad weather with my children, frightened and out of my depth. But panicking in front of the boys was not an opt
ion. I just needed to think.

  I figured there were three choices: stay put and hope the weather cleared up again before we all froze to death; try to continue following our planned route despite no longer having a clear idea of where that was; or return the way we’d come, hoping we’d be able to retrace our steps and keep to the path. It wasn’t a happy situation – two options carried a high risk of getting lost, and in all three there was a chance we could end up with hypothermia. As I sat shivering next to my boys, my terrified mind began to play out the tragic scene of our deaths, and then of my own death in which my children were left without their mother. I didn’t want them to have to grow up without me: it had been bad enough losing my own mum at twenty-four; they were far too young to go through that sort of pain and suffering. Who would look after them if I was gone? Those thoughts made me pull myself together with a firm resolve. They were not going to die today, and neither was I.

  I was twenty-one years old when I’d arrived back in the country on 18 December 1993 after spending two weeks in Thessaloniki, Greece. It was quite late, after I’d caught various buses from Aberdeen airport, when I opened the door to my wee student bedsit on Hardgate. Despite the hour, I phoned home to wish my grandad a happy eightieth birthday.

  ‘I think you’d better give your mum a call, Sarah, pet,’ he said.

  My mum had been diagnosed with breast cancer.

  ‘I’ve had lumps before, but they were just cysts. I went into the doctor’s once with one and came out with five,’ she said.

  It felt like I was falling in spirals from a great height as my stomach dropped and churned. She was only forty. A stabbing pain clawed across my chest.

  ‘I’m gonna get the first bus home,’ I told her.

  Mum’s next appointment was on the Monday and I went with her to the hospital.

  ‘And you’ve had this lump for about a year?’ the doctor enquired.

  ‘Yes . . . I didn’t get checked for so long because the lump is the antithesis of what my local GP advised me to look out for,’ she answered defensively. ‘It’s wiggly and mobile. I assumed it was another cyst.’

  Mum was admitted for a lumpectomy and discharged from hospital on Christmas Eve.

  ‘I feel exhausted,’ she said, and then she cried.

  Days passed in a numb blur until the college holidays were coming to a close.

  ‘My radiotherapy sessions start on 7 January. Least I’ll get a whole term off school,’ Mum told me.

  ‘Do you want me to stay home. I can help you?’ I offered. I didn’t want to leave her to deal with this on her own, I wanted to be there for her – and I wanted her to want me to be there for her.

  ‘Thank you, Sarah, but no. There’s nothing you can do. The treatment only lasts six weeks and then that’s it. I just want everything to carry on as normal, so you get back to art school,’ she answered affectionately.

  She still looked and sounded like my mum, yet cancer, this hateful disease, seemed to have lodged itself between us. Now she felt more distant than ever. She was probably trying to protect me by sending me away, but at the time I only saw it as rejection. I couldn’t help my mum. I was utterly powerless, still cartwheeling from the sky. It felt like it didn’t matter what I did; the sick in my guts and fog in my head were there to stay.

  Maybe it was that feeling of rejection, combined with the fear that I might lose her, that caused me to suddenly rebel. In the following weeks and months my life slid out of control quite quickly. Shopping sprees became opportunities to thieve out of devilment rather than need, and I was drinking more than was good for me. I loved painting in my studio, sometimes staying late till only the cleaners were around, but when my day at college was through I found myself getting either stoned, pissed or both. Weekends extended, beginning on a Thursday and ending on a Monday, and if Kate, my only friend at college, was preoccupied with her boyfriend then I’d go out alone, latching on to anybody in the various bars and clubs I frequented.

  Bad dreams disturbed my sleep, ones in which I had only days to live because it was me who had cancer, not Mum. And then there were night terrors – the paradox of knowing I was asleep, but believing I was awake. In these episodes I could see my soul extricating itself, taking flight from my lifeless corpse. In others the Devil himself was coming for me. He’d be outside my window ready to get in and I, by some supernatural force, found myself crawling, as though through treacle, on hands and knees across the ceiling, desperately making a bid for freedom. There was no respite from Mum’s cancer. No escape.

  I was drinking so much that blackouts were becoming a common occurrence, but I started passing out too. I was swinging on a chair at the Students’ Union one minute and the next everything went black. It wasn’t until the very end of the night that the people I was with got me to my feet and helped me to leave. If I was still conscious at closing time I’d try to find a party, just to keep pouring down the alcohol. Sometimes I’d make it back to my bedsit and not remember how, but more often home was a distance too far so I’d crash out wherever I ended up.

  The boys next door weren’t exactly a stabilising influence. They’d already shown me how to identify which mushrooms were the magic ones, but tripping out, I discovered, was definitely not for me.

  ‘Why don’t you just stick to blow?’ my neighbour’s muffled voice said before he inhaled deeply, while his flatmate, having drawn on a loaded joint, blew its smoke up through the black pipe attached to the mask on my friend’s face. Pale features, framed by his ginger locks and black rubber, disappeared in a fog behind the clear plastic visor and I laughed when he reemerged looking an even more ghostly white, his eyes glazed, totally stoned. It was my turn to pull on the gas mask and take a blow back through the concertinaed hose. But it wasn’t enough for me; I was going out to the pub in case I missed out – on what, I don’t know – and so I left them with their mask and blow in their squalid rented room. I passed out that night too. I didn’t register what was at the root of my behaviour so I did nothing to break the pattern, not even when the events of a night out turned a shade darker.

  I’d switched on the TV, browsing through channels to figure out if it was afternoon or early morning. It wasn’t great that I’d lost a day at college, but on the bright side I didn’t have to wait long to go to the pubs. I thought alcohol made me happy and gave me confidence. But there I was, alone again, in a booth at the Students’ Union, all maudlin and introspective. I phoned my neighbour to tell him I felt suicidal. He had come more than once to get me, but on this occasion it was a mutual friend who turned up – someone I fancied – and took me home. One minute we were kissing on the sofa, the next he’d pushed me to the floor and was forcing himself on me. It was over within minutes. He readjusted himself and left. I sat staring at the blurry vision of my jeans around my knees. I remained there for a moment in a state of total confusion before cleaning myself up and crawling into bed. What I should have done was call the police, but I didn’t – because I’d invited him in and had enjoyed him pressing his lips to mine, and because my efforts to fend him off when he pushed me down consisted of two alcohol-weakened hands pressed flat against his chest until I gave up and let him get on with it, and because I was so drunk. He’d physically hurt me, but I blamed myself entirely. I felt shame, too much to be able to tell anyone. And I felt worse than ever before.

  While I was busy screwing myself up, Mum’s treatment had been hard going for her.

  ‘How are you feeling?’ I asked when I called home.

  ‘Glad the radiotherapy is over. I felt so sick and lethargic all the time. I’ve had enough of hospital and doctor appointments. I just want to get on with things now.’

  ‘So the cancer is all gone?’

  ‘Yes. The doctor said I’ll have to go for check-ups, but after five years I should get the all-clear.’

  It was a relief to hear her airy optimism, and so I buried my fears.

  Summer term had come round and I threw myself into the routine of art sc
hool. I was relieved that the doctors had dug out and zapped Mum’s cancer, but I remained unsettled. I began a secret affair with one of the visiting tutors. He was married. It was clandestine, and I enjoyed it. I grew fond of him because he seemed to genuinely care, and he was gentle with me. But the affair was almost as though I was substituting one bad habit for another. Like alcohol and shoplifting, he was the initial high of those first few drinks, and the buzz I felt at getting away with thieving. My satiation was only ever temporary. It was like I was addicted to danger and unpredictability. Eventually our involvement, just like my worst hangovers, made me feel regret and shame. He wasn’t mine to have and so we came to an end. As usual, I promised myself that I’d change, that I’d be better.

  With the degree show only weeks away, I needed to make new plans and decided the best thing would be to get as far away as possible from Aberdeen – even from Scotland. I applied for a postgraduate place at a quaint and ramshackle art college in a small village called Lemba, several miles from Paphos on the Greek side of Cyprus. I wanted Mum to think that I was taking responsibility for my future; I didn’t want her to worry about me.

  Six months later I was living in Cyprus, I had a boyfriend and was feeling good. I thought I had things under control. But I was kidding myself. A couple of months later my boyfriend dumped me. What he had first been attracted to in my crazy, drunken behaviour had become a worry and burden.

  ‘You can’t just enjoy one or two drinks, you always have to get fucking trashed,’ he said. ‘I’m fed up of all your moaning and feeling sorry for yourself. I’ve had enough.’