Chapter 10
“Zombies?” I say, confused. “Our next stop is zombies?” We are all sitting outside the van, eating croissants and drinking coffee. Luke was up early, and bought treats and a spare fold-up chair from the site shop. The baseball hat is on the table amid the plates and mugs, and Charlie is cringing as he stares at the tiny scrap of paper in his hand.
“I know!” he says, despairing. “It’s really stupid, isn’t it? But... well, I’d had a drink, and I was just thinking about things I like, and about all the zombie films I’d watched and the video games I play, and... look, all I can say is it made sense at the time!”
Luke starts laughing, and it is a fine laugh—deep and genuine and utterly infectious. He seems more like his normal self today, although his early solo start implies that he perhaps didn’t have the best night’s rest. I’d been vaguely aware of him tiptoeing around somewhere near five o’ clock but had fallen straight back asleep.
“Well, zombies it is then,” he says, once we have all calmed down. “We made a pledge, and now we must honor it. Let’s see what we can find out about zombies in the locale...”
He starts googling on his phone, while I clear away and wash our dishes. At first, I am confused as to why no water comes out of the taps but remind myself to switch on the pump. Duh. Luke has already filled the tank and emptied the waste, and our leisure battery is fully charged. This, I am sure, is as ready as it gets for a motorhome. I dry the crockery and wrap it, as I have been shown by the master. I also do a quick scan of windows and skylights to make sure we’re good to go.
By the time I go back outside, Charlie is looking excited, gazing at Luke’s phone screen and nodding.
“Mum, you wouldn’t believe how many zombie films have been made in the UK! You know in World War Z , when they’re driving through Philadelphia trying to escape?”
“I do indeed. Brad Pitt being all macho and pretty at the same time.”
“Well, that wasn’t Philadelphia; it was bloody Glasgow! And at the end, when he goes to Nova Scotia, it wasn’t even Nova Scotia—it was someplace called Lulworth Cove in Dorset!”
His voice is slightly higher than normal as the words tumble out; he is so thrilled he can barely contain himself. “Wow,” I say, smiling, “the magic of Hollywood, eh? But... Glasgow isn’t in England, and Lulworth Cove is a long, long way away. Anywhere closer to home?”
“On it,” says Luke, continuing his quest.
Charlie pipes up: “We looked at Shaun of the Dead , but it was all London, and, you know, that doesn’t really fit with the vibe, does it?”
“What about 28 Days Later ?” Luke asks, frowning at his screen.
“A classic,” Charlie replies firmly. “Fast zombies, though. Really scary. You need your zombies to be slow if you want to escape.”
“Well, I don’t suppose we need to worry about that, love—because, you know, zombies aren’t real?” I say, patting him on the shoulder.
“Ha! You’ve clearly not spent much time in the amusement arcade on a Sunday night. So where are we going, Luke?”
He sounds so thrilled, like a little kid sitting in the back of the car playing the ever-popular “are we nearly there?” game.
“Okay,” Luke replies, after some championship-level scrolling, “this could work. One of my picks was the Lake District—it’ll be in the hat somewhere, and now seems insanely mundane.”
“It does,” adds Charlie. “The way we’re going, we’ll be pulling out bits of paper that say ‘the far side of Jupiter.’”
“Nah,” I say, shaking my head. “Never Jupiter. I hate Jupiter. It’s so full of gas. Totally up itself.”
“Yeah, I know,” replies Charlie, grinning. “It’s such a show-off—I mean, who cares if it’s the biggest? If Jupiter was a person, they’d be an absolute cock, like one of those giant meathead men who goes to the gym and eats seven turkeys a day and has steroids for breakfast and parks their jeep in the disabled spots.”
“Or one of those people who go on talent shows and say they’re the world’s best singer in the video clip and when they audition, they’re terrible, and you find yourself wondering why they didn’t have any friends who told them that before they humiliated themselves on national television,” I add.
“Yeah. Total loser of a planet!”
Charlie holds up his palm, and I slap it with a high five.
Luke is leaning back in his chair. “I love your double act,” he says. “You should start a YouTube channel.”
I examine his tone for any sign of sadness, but all I find is genuine amusement. After last night, after learning that he lost his own child, his little Katie, there is part of me that worries about this kind of thing—the easy knockabout chatter I share with Charlie, the bond that isn’t perfect but always strong. I have had eighteen years with him, already far longer than Luke had with Katie, and Charlie and I can talk like this for hours. Now more than ever, I appreciate just how lucky I am.
“Well, maybe not a YouTube channel,” I say, “but I did do some writing last night. Did a review of our day on one of those touring websites. I thought it only fair that I share that picture of Charlie asleep in the pub in Haworth with drool on his chin.”
“You didn’t, did you?” he says, looking aghast.
“No. But I do have the photo on my phone, so watch your step, sunshine. Anyway... I enjoyed it, writing it all up. Might start doing it for myself, keeping a diary.”
“Will there be any rough caresses or thrusting against the walls of the school gym?” Charlie asks, winking. He has clearly been reading those damned notebooks again, and I blush slightly.
“Moving on...,” I say, keen to do exactly that. “Where to then, Luke?”
“A place called Ennerdale Water,” he says, “in the western side of the Lake District. Apparently the closing scenes of 28 Days Later were filmed there.”
I don’t remember the movie too vividly—I think I watched it once with Charlie when I was half asleep after work—but he clearly does.
“I know the bit you mean,” he says. “The survivors are holed up in a farmhouse and they spell out HELLO with curtains and stuff on the hillside until the rescue plane spots them. It looked like it was in the middle of nowhere. That’d be really cool. Have we got time for me to go and use the showers?”
We tell him we do, and he traipses away with a towel and his wash bag. I watch him disappear and decide that he seems to have grown even taller in the last week. Or maybe he’s just standing up straighter. Who knows? Something about him seems different anyway. Maybe it’s the outdoor lifestyle, I think, then remind myself that we’re not exactly living off the grid. Could it be only yesterday that we left our old life behind? We have traveled for hundreds of miles, crossed from one part of the country to another, and spent two nights in a motorhome. It is surreal how quickly everything has changed.
Even thinking about my old home unsettles me slightly, and I suspect that I haven’t quite finished processing it all. I have jumped from “my house has fallen off a cliff, my life is ruined” to “I am the new Jack Kerouac” with alarming speed, and I would not be surprised if, at some point, I trip myself up.
I’m not even sure how much of this newfound sense of contentment is real and how much of it is simply a coping mechanism. Am I doing all of this just to distract myself, or am I genuinely looking for a change in the way I live my life? Big questions that need to be answered—but not today, I decide, switching off. Not today.
“So, how are you this morning?” I ask Luke, who is finishing his coffee and watching two birds flitter in and out of a nearby tree. They are quite plain apart from brilliant orange patches on their heads.
“Goldcrests,” he says, following my gaze. “And I’m fine, thank you. I... well, I’m sorry I went all silent last night. It’s just a hard thing to talk about, and I haven’t done it for so long and, being truthful, I didn’t want to start crying in front of you. Didn’t want to blow my tough-guy image.”
He is trying to make light of a dark situation. It is an instinct I recognize, one that Charlie called me out for quite recently.
“Tough-guy images are overrated,” I say quickly, “and I’d still want you next to me in a zombie apocalypse. I reckon you’re the kind of guy who could swing an axe while sobbing and pull it all off.”
“Like Brad Pitt?”
“Exactly like that. Luke... please don’t apologize, for anything. Just know that if you want to talk about it—about Katie—then I would love to listen. But if you don’t, if it’s just too hard, then I understand that as well.” He nods and stares at the goldcrests, and then looks back at me. Our eyes meet and he says: “This is going to be quite a journey, isn’t it? And I don’t just mean to the Lake District.”
I know exactly what he does mean, and I share the sensation. I feel a strange combination of liberation and fear right now—the knowledge that things are changing, and not just my work or homelife, but my internal life. It’s as though I am a closed-off flower spreading its petals to the rainfall, to the sun, to the sky, desperate for the nourishment I didn’t even know I’d been missing.
I am starting to have the niggling feeling that I have been hiding from things that could potentially scare or hurt me for a long time now. Things like trust, and close friendships, and even thinking about deep emotions, never mind confronting them. In my defense, I have been busy, but I have also made choices—to focus on the things I could control, and to ignore the ones that made me feel unsteady. Making another choice—to come on this crazy road trip—is having all kinds of unexpected consequences.
“Well,” I say as calmly as I can, “I suppose we can still adapt the same general principles—don’t go too fast, always clearly indicate when you’re going to change lanes, and don’t crash. Especially the last one.”
“Don’t crash,” he says, grinning. “I like it. Maybe I’ll adopt that one as my life motto?”
“It’s possibly a slight improvement on ‘everything’s better with biscuits,’ I’d say. So, is there anything else we need to do before we get on the road?”
“I think we’re pretty solid. You want to start looking at a route while I put the tables and chairs away?”
I nod and we both go about our business—mine being slightly less labor-intensive than his.
Charlie comes back before long, sending Betty into spasms of joy. He falls onto the couch as though he is trying to prove the theory of gravity, and she jumps onto his lap. He kisses her face and scratches her ears and calls her his little princess, and she licks his face in return.
“Dad said he has that book, the one about the stone circles,” Charlie says as Betty rotates three times and thuds into a curled-up ball on his knees.
“Oh, right, brilliant—well, it must be good then, if it’s got your dad’s seal of approval!” I reply, adopting the fake-enthusiastic voice I always hate hearing when I talk to Charlie about his father. He, of course, doesn’t know it’s fake, so that’s all right. I don’t hate Rob, or even really resent him—he wasn’t much older than me when I fell pregnant, only twenty-one. I can’t hold it against him that he freaked out, that he ran—but I do kind of hold it against him that he’s been such a piss-poor parent ever since. He’s almost forty now and he’s never even sent Charlie a Christmas present, never mind contributed to the cost of raising him.
The money side of things isn’t even the part that upsets me, truth be told—we have coped, and there are more important things in the world. It’s the emotional aspect I’ve struggled with—the dipping in and out of Charlie’s life when it suits him, being this fun peripheral figure, always full of stories of adventure and mystery. Truffle-hunting in Croatia, working on a yacht charter in the Bahamas, a season at a bear-spotting resort on Vancouver Island, leading student expeditions in New Zealand—you name it, he’s done it.
He’s traveled far and wide, lived loud and large, and experienced so much of the world—all while I managed to move from one side of England to the other and raise our son. I have no regrets about that, no bitterness—I still think I got the best end of the deal. But I’d be lying if I said it didn’t sometimes hurt listening to Charlie talk about his dad with near hero worship, relaying his stories secondhand, telling me about his exciting adventures at remote mountain camps as I shopped for budget-brand breakfast cereal. I don’t want Rob’s life—but maybe I want Charlie to think about me with the same admiration, the same respect.
All of which, of course, is extremely childish and silly—and because I know that and need to cover it up, I always go over the top in my responses. Please, I tend to say, tell me more—I love hearing about your dad’s adventures!
“Apparently he’s famous, the bloke who wrote it. He’s called Julian Cope and he was in a band in the eighties and then he wrote this, and it’s like the bible on British prehistoric sites.”
“Wow. Excellent. I’ll look him up—maybe I’ll know the band...”
“Don’t think so, Mum. Apparently they were a cool post-punk group.”
And there, in that one sentence, is exactly what makes me feel childish and silly about the situation—the assumption that while his dad will, of course, know the cool band in question, I for sure will not. What makes it even worse is the fact that he’s probably right. I’m more Spice Girls than post-punk.
“Okay, right. Anyway. We’re going to set off soon—look up Ennerdale Water and see if there’s anywhere you’d like to go on the way, all right?”
We are soon on the road again, and now even more enthused by The Modern Antiquarian , Charlie picks out a stone circle that is, roughly speaking, on the way to our zombie-connected beauty spot (words I never anticipated being used together before now). Before that, he announces that he wants to call in at a place called Malham Cove in the Yorkshire Dales National Park.
Some of the winding roads we have to travel down on the way are so narrow they make me wish the motorhome could hold its breath, but eventually we make it without getting stuck, or knocking down any of the pretty drystone walls. A few sheep look at us suspiciously, but I can live with that. I reckon I could take them in a fight.
We park near a small information center and follow the signs to Malham Cove. We walk through a village that is spread along the side of a burbling stream that tumbles over rocks and tree roots, ancient-looking stone bridges crossing from one side to another. We are surrounded by green hills and wide blue sky, and the place feels tiny in comparison—the pubs and shops and the smithy and other signs of human achievement dwarfed by the grandeur of nature.
Charlie has downloaded some information leaflets and walking routes and guides us through the village and up to a gate, where we obey the sign and put Betty on the leash. I swear she looks at us with disapproval.
We walk down a steep hill, covered with rocks and grass, scattered with grazing sheep. It is still early, and we are alone apart from one man and a Labrador going in the opposite direction. As we near the bottom of the hill, we all stop and stare, not quite believing what we are seeing.
The stream gurgles along and expands at the bottom, bouncing over large boulders toward a kind of basin. Surrounding it is a huge cliff of white limestone, curving and enormous, its sheer face veering hundreds of feet into the pale blue sky. It is breathtaking, and alien, and like nothing I have ever seen before.
“Wow,” says Luke, standing and staring, hands on his hips, “now that is impressive. Do you think it was a waterfall?”
“It was,” says Charlie, after looking at his phone, “but not now, unless there’s been huge rainfall. It was formed at the end of the last Ice Age, whenever that was... It’s amazing, isn’t it? It’s like the cliffs at Dover but mashed up a bit and plonked down in the middle of the country. Can we walk down?”
We go through a small gate and find ourselves surrounded by rocks and water. It’s been dry for days now, but we still need to pick our way across the floor of uneven pebbles and slippery plants, edging closer to the cliff itself. I peer up and see a climber dangling from the side of it, yellow helmet bright in the sun.
It is an incredible place, silent apart from the cries of circling birds and the sound of the water. It feels ancient, somehow holy, and completely magical.
“This is the best thing I’ve ever seen,” announces Charlie, taking some pictures with his phone. “I can’t believe we’re still in England.”
He is a teenager, and prone to exaggeration, but he is right—it’s so strange and eerie and beautiful, it is hard to describe.
We eventually tear ourselves away and make the climb up a steep range of steps at the side, which leads us to the top of the cliff. The ground is made up entirely of irregular white blocks, and Charlie tells us it is called a limestone pavement and gets momentarily excited when he finds out that one of the Harry Potter films was shot here. I’m not surprised—it feels otherworldly, and we are all silent as we sit and gaze out at the views of the village, the lush green dales around us.
“Where next, Captain?” says Luke after a while, and Charlie informs us we can do a circular walk to a place called Gordale Scar and on to a waterfall called Janet’s Foss before we loop back to the car park.
It takes a while, but it is so worth it. The Scar is strange and stunning, reached after a short hike through a field and another lively stream, which I am told is called a beck. We let Betty cool her feet in the water and, as we turn a corner, are yet again faced with another unbelievable sight—a huge gorge that has been cut into the limestone, waterfalls tumbling dramatically down over the rocks.
“This place actually looks a bit familiar,” says Charlie, gazing around. He looks at his phone, and after a few minutes a huge smile appears on his face. “ The Witcher !” he says triumphantly. “They filmed some of The Witcher here!”
“What’s The Witcher ?” asks Luke, shrugging when Charlie stares at him in horror. “What can I say? I don’t watch a lot of TV!”
“It’s a fantasy show on Netflix,” I explain, “and it’s pretty good for all kinds of reasons. I can’t believe I’m actually walking in the footsteps of Henry Cavill...”
“Who’s Henry Cavill?” Luke says, frowning.
“Actor,” replies Charlie, grinning. “She thinks he’s hot and has an embarrassing mum crush on him.”
“This is true,” I answer, “and I refuse to apologize for it. Henry Cavill is a god among men. I might be a mother, but I’m not actually dead.”
“A god among men...,” says Luke as we make our way back along the path. “I feel quite emasculated.”
“You shouldn’t,” replies Charlie. “You’re pretty hot too, you know, for an old man!”
He bounds ahead with Betty, and Luke laughs.
“I don’t know whether that was a compliment or an insult,” he says as we follow on, heading to the footpath to Janet’s Foss.
“Possibly both,” I explain, avoiding his face. I have been noticing Luke’s hotness a little too much for comfort, and it unsettles me. I find myself thinking about him in ways I don’t want to think about him, ways that I haven’t thought about a man for a long time. This new arrangement we have is working just fine without me developing another “embarrassing mum crush.” He is fast becoming a friend, and that is enough. That is a win. We reach the foss after an adventurous downhill walk, clambering over rocks to reach yet another magical spot. It is tucked away in what feels like a fairy glen, secluded and shady despite the warmth of the day. There is a central pool, a pretty waterfall flowing into it, surrounded by rocks so big you can sit or lie on them.
“Can we go in?” asks Charlie, as Betty takes the plunge. “I think this might be my new thing, wild swimming.”
“Better than heroin addiction, I suppose—but we don’t have swimmers or towels with us. I can offer you bottled water, half a croissant, and a small first-aid kit, but no trunks.”
He stares at the clear water longingly, and Luke adds: “It’s a hot day. We could take a dip in our undies and dry off in the sun.”
I opt out of that, as, for some reason, a woman in bra and knickers seems a lot weirder than a man in boxers. Maybe just to me, I don’t know. I am happy to get my feet wet, wading into the chilly water up to my knees to cool myself off. I deliberately avert my gaze as they strip down, and wait until they are submerged before I look back up.
Sometimes in life, you have those rare moments of perfection—moments that you know you will remember forever, frozen like a photograph in your mind, stored to revisit in more challenging times. This is one of them: sitting in the sun-dappled morning light, my toes wet, watching them enjoy themselves. They splash and dive and swim; they stand beneath the white froth of the waterfall; they laugh and they clamber out and jump back in.
Not so long ago, I thought my life was damaged beyond repair—now I can’t keep the smile off my face. I say a small and silent prayer of thanks to whoever might be listening, because in this place, in this unearthly beauty, it feels entirely possible that someone is.
When they finally emerge, shaking themselves free of water, droplets golden in the sun, Charlie says: “You look blissed out, Mum. What are you thinking about?”
You , I think, and how much I love you. How privileged I am to have such a wonderful human in my life. Luke, and how lucky I was to meet him at the time I most needed help. The beauty of the world, its endless potential, the scary but scintillating prospect of a whole different future opening up in front of me. Of loneliness and loss and how easy it is to find yourself thinking that you need to carry it all on your own shoulders; of the joy at realizing that maybe you don’t. That if we dare to take a risk, to step outside our own isolation and our own worries, there is a kaleidoscope of wonders just around the corner. Of the mysteries of what is yet to come.
“Oh, you know,” I say, smiling up at him, “just Henry Cavill.”