To Hell With It

Chapter 50

Chapter Fifty

M aybe it was the mountains – maybe they worked their magic on me too – but I got up early the next morning and felt a little lighter after my chance encounter with Bunty.

I had my breakfast outside on the swing chair and promised myself I would do the same when I got home, facing towards Slievenamon so that I could remind myself of what I’d seen and where I’d been.

I didn’t have a shower because I’d figured I’d be getting hot and sweaty walking up Roy’s Peak (which was where I was heading by the way). I planned on getting there as early as I could because Lynne had told me there’d be less mosquitos in the morning. She lent me some thick socks and a blister pack for my bag and I set off excited. When the shuttle bus picked me up just down the road from Irish Eyes Lodge there was only one other person on board. Guess who it was?

It was Tim.

He didn’t look up at me when I got on, but I made a point of sitting relatively near him so that I could get his attention without getting too close.

‘Hi,’ I said and there was a pause before he looked up (like when somebody already knows who it is but they are trying to avoid acknowledging them for as long as possible).

‘Oh, hi,’ he said with a half smile that still looked sad.

‘Are you going up Roy’s Peak too?’

‘Yes,’ he said flatly.

‘Are you climbing to the top?’

‘That’s the plan.’

‘Great, I’m meant to be doing it too, but we’ll see how things go, it’s a long way up.’

He nodded.

I should have probably taken the hint and left Tim alone. After all, I knew what it was like to want to be left alone. But I didn’t, did I. Because something about Tim just screamed out at me that he might need some kind of help.

‘Is it your first time?’

‘No,’ Tim said.

‘Oh cool, it must be good if you’re doing it again.’ I beamed but Tim’s expression stayed flat. ‘I’m doing it for a challenge,’ I continued. ‘Actually, it reminds me a lot of a mountain where I’m from – Slievenamon – that’s about seven hours too, so really I didn’t need to come all this way for this one.’

‘Mmm,’ Tim said and I had nowhere to go with that.

‘I never thought that I would be on the other side of the world climbing a mountain,’ I persisted.

‘There are lots of things that we don’t think will happen, but they do,’ Tim said and it was the most I’d heard him speak since I’d met him in the airport taxi.

‘That’s true,’ I mused.

The shuttle bus stopped and I realised I had been talking at Tim the entire time, like Rob and Ruth had (and like them, Tim hadn’t asked me anything about me). I didn’t mind though. I liked Tim. I could tell that he wasn’t really as rude as he appeared to be. I could tell there was something underneath it all. And although it wasn’t my job to find out what that was, I felt compelled to.

‘Are you over here with anyone?’ I asked as we got off. God, did I sound like I was chatting him up?

‘My wife,’ Tim said, and I felt my cheeks burn, which made it look like I was.

‘She didn’t fancy the hike then?’

‘She’s doing it with me,’ he said.

‘Oh right,’ I said, as I looked around for a wife I couldn’t see.

‘I’m actually over here on my own but it’s a long story.’ I laughed awkwardly. ‘It all went wrong so here I am, trying something new.’

Tim put his rucksack on his back and started to make his way down the aisle of the bus. I pulled my sanitiser out of my pocket and poured a dollop into my hands and then set off behind him like a puppy trying to keep up with its owner who had stomped ahead.

Tim didn’t slow down. He didn’t stop to say goodbye, good luck, or turn around at all. He just marched on as if he didn’t know me, which of course he didn’t but still, he could have at least said goodbye.

‘You know if we’d done this in October it would have been closed – they shut it for lambing right through to December.’ I sped up behind him. I’d read it in the brochure Lynne had given me.

Tim stopped and turned to face me, his face taut and stern.

‘We’re not doing it together,’ he snapped, and it took me by surprise.

‘Sorry, I just meant me and you as in we’re both doing it on the same day, at the same time?—’

‘We’re not doing it at the same time,’ he cut me off. ‘I planned on doing this on my own.’ He carried on walking.

‘I thought you said your wife was doing it with you?’ I said behind him, suddenly aware that it was just me and Tim up there alone, because the bus had already pulled away. He could have been lying to me about his wife – where was she anyway?

Tim didn’t say anything. He didn’t even look back. He just kind of swished his hand as if he was flicking me away like one of the mosquitos, and then off he went along the path that led to Roy’s Peak.

I watched as Tim became smaller and smaller until he was a dot in the distance, and I lagged behind. There was no sign of his wife, perhaps she would stomp past me at any moment to catch him up or maybe she had started before him? Maybe that was why he was in such a rush.

I wouldn’t have been able to keep up with Tim anyway, the track was steep from the moment I started walking on it, so I paced myself and took in the views because that was why I was there wasn’t it – to take it all in.

It was breathtaking. I could see little islands dotted around a huge turquoise lake, and mountains and glaziers beneath me that somehow made me feel bigger than I was. I felt like I was on top of the world, and I suppose I was.

* * *

I don’t know whether it was half an hour later or twenty minutes or maybe even less, but just as things started to flatten out a bit, just as I thought that maybe I might be able to get to the top without passing out (there was no shade and my T-shirt was already soaked through), I tripped. I tripped and I landed on my ankle so hard that I howled out in pain and the small dot that was Tim got bigger until he appeared next to me.

‘Are you OK?’ he asked out of breath as he bent down beside me.

‘I don’t know.’ I winced. ‘It’s my ankle, it really hurts.’

‘Hold on,’ he said and he got something from his bag and that was when I saw it. It had padding around it and was supported by some clothes but there was no mistaking what it was. It was an urn.

Tim wrapped something cool around my ankle and held it there while I tried not to stare into his bag, but I couldn’t help it. I mean who wouldn’t?

‘You need to keep this on,’ he said. ‘Can you stand up?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘We need to see if you can put weight on it, otherwise how are you going to get back down?’

‘I’m not going back down, I need to get to the top,’ I said defiantly.

‘You can’t go to the top now.’

‘I’ll go slow.’

‘It’ll take you all day.’

‘I’ve got all day.’ I shrugged.

‘You need to go back down,’ Tim said firmly. ‘I’ll help you.’

‘But what about your wife?’ I asked and I don’t know why I asked that because I knew where his wife was. She was in his bag.

Tim followed my gaze to his open bag and the silence made my ears hurt.

‘Sorry. I shouldn’t have…’

‘I proposed to her up here two years ago,’ Tim said. ‘She got cancer after our wedding and died six months later.’

‘I’m so sorry,’ I said and I suddenly felt like an idiot for badgering him before.

‘We always said we’d come back,’ he continued. ‘We never got to do it. We should have just done it.’ He looked out towards the view. ‘It was our place, you know?’

I nodded but I didn’t know. I’d never had a place with anyone, apart from the graveyard with Una and that didn’t count.

‘You just never know what’s going to happen in life,’ he said. ‘Nicola was here, she was happy, healthy, she loved life. Then she got ill and everything changed, just like that.’ He clicked his fingers. ‘She was gone.’

‘She’ll never really be gone,’ I said because I thought it was the right thing to say.

‘She’s gone,’ he repeated.

‘She’s in your bag.’

I died inside. Why did I say that?

‘I mean her spirit will always be with you.’ I tried to rescue myself.

‘I don’t believe in all that crap.’

‘It might be true though.’

‘If Nicola was here, she’d have given me a sign.’

‘Maybe this is it? Maybe her sign is to meet someone who tells you this is her sign?’ I was making it worse but for some reason I couldn’t shut up.

‘That doesn’t make sense.’

‘I know, sorry. I’m still waiting for a sign from my grandmother. She died a few years ago and promised to leave me one.’

‘How’s that going for you?’

‘She hasn’t sent one yet.’

‘Exactly,’ Tim said. ‘Because she can’t, she doesn’t exist anymore.’

‘Well, I like to think that people still do.’

‘That’s because you can’t deal with the fact that they don’t. Let me help you back down.’ He changed the subject. ‘If no one else comes up you’ll be stuck here.’

‘I can wait for you to come back down.’

‘I’ll be hours.’

‘I can do some sunbathing.’

‘You’ll burn.’

‘I need a tan.’

‘Let me help you,’ he said bluntly and reached out his hand for me to take. And I had no choice, did I, because how else would I have got to my feet? I could feel the sweat on his palms; it soaked into mine like a sponge. I reached around for my sanitiser once I was standing up. I didn’t care in that moment.

‘I don’t have a disease you know,’ Tim said.

‘It’s not that,’ I said as I rubbed it in. ‘I have OCD.’

Tim looked pensive.

‘Nicola had OCD.’

He nodded to my bottle of sanitiser. And I went from feeling sorry for Tim to feeling annoyed with him because using sanitiser doesn’t make someone have OCD.

‘She used it a lot,’ he continued. ‘Do you know that humans have a natural antibacterial property in their hands that helps kill bacteria and viruses?’

‘No.’

‘It’s true. There’s a lot of research on it. It really helped Nicola to know that and she stopped doing it in the end.’

‘Using sanitiser doesn’t make it OCD,’ I repeated my thought matter-of-factly.

I hate when people say they have OCD just because they check their car doors are locked or used hand sanitiser. It is far more complicated than that. The thing with my OCD is that it is based on facts (facts that I make up in my head) and urges and compulsions and desires, and if what Tim told me was a fact, that my own hands could clean themselves, then it should have potentially ended a lot of my self-inflicted trauma. But the only problem there was that it doesn’t work like that. OCD is irrational, and irrational behaviour can’t be overcome by rational thinking.

‘What else did she do?’ I asked, even though I still felt irritated. I wanted to prove my point once it was established that was all she did – used a bit of hand sanitiser now and again.

‘What do you mean?’ Tim asked.

‘What other OCD things did she do?’ I said impatiently.

‘That was it, I think.’

‘She didn’t have OCD then,’ I said smugly, like it was a badge of honour someone had to earn the right to wear.

Tim fell silent, so I continued.

‘OCD is so much more than just using hand sanitiser. It’s a compulsion. You can’t control it by just rationalising it – you can’t just stop because someone tells you your hands can clean themselves.’

‘It was because of the chemo,’ Tim snapped, and my body shrank. ‘Nicola was more susceptible to getting ill because the chemo killed her immune system. She became obsessed with using it, so that, you know, she didn’t get an infection and die.’

I felt like a twat.

‘Sorry,’ I said shamefully.

‘You shouldn’t jump to conclusions.’

‘I don’t usually, it’s just a touchy subject.’

‘So is my dead wife,’ Tim said, and I felt like I had died too.

‘Do you have any children?’ I asked, as if I couldn’t have made the situation any worse – why did I ask that?

‘That wasn’t an option to us while Nicola was dying.’

‘Shit, I’m sorry.’ I cringed. ‘I say stupid stuff when I don’t know what to say. Of course she couldn’t, I mean I’m sure she wanted to, but of course, how could she?’

Tim kept silent. I could hear the crunch of our feet against the path as we made our way slowly (I was hobbling, remember) back down the track, and just when I thought he must have hated me, he sighed.

‘She wanted me to have a family, to meet someone else, in fact she made me promise her that I would.’

‘She wanted you to be happy.’ I beamed, grateful to Nicola for giving me a lifeline. ‘It probably made her feel good to know you could still have and do the things you both wanted.

‘But I don’t want that if it’s not with her,’ Tim said.

‘Of course you don’t,’ I sympathised. ‘But it’s nice she has given you her blessing, that must have been hard for her, and for you.’

‘It was,’ Tim said, and then as if the mountains had opened up his heart, Tim poured his out to me.

* * *

I found out that Tim had moved from the UK to New Zealand when he was ten and had gone to school with his wife. They dated from the age of twelve to fifteen and then again from seventeen to nineteen, and then they went their separate ways until their paths crossed again at the age of twenty-nine and he proposed a year later.

Nicola sounded like a lovely person and by the time I was back at the shuttle bus, I felt as though I’d known her all my life. For example, I knew she liked to go for a run every morning on the beach and then jump into the sea afterwards, where she’d swim with dolphins. She did it with a bald head, from the chemotherapy, but she didn’t care – she wanted to feel alive. The dolphins would actually come to the same spot every morning at the same time as if they knew she’d be there.

She also made a bucket list of all her fears so that she could face them before she died. Most dying people make a bucket list of things they want to do, not what they don’t, so I admired Nicola all the more for it.

She did a talk in her town hall about dying because she had a fear of public speaking. She danced around her supermarket because she had a fear of people looking at her bald head. She would sing every day, no matter what mood she was in because it would lift her. She even sang the day she died, but I didn’t ask Tim what song and I don’t think he wanted to tell me anyway.

She held a snake around her neck because she hated snakes and sat in the passenger seat of a racing car because she’d had a car accident when she was younger. And she camped outside on her own, with no tent, because she had always been scared of the dark. By the time Tim had told me everything I felt like I was grieving for Nicola too.

Tim told me he’d toyed with the idea of scattering her ashes in the sea but the thought of them being eaten by fish had put him off, and I could understand that, because who would want their other half turned into fish food?

‘Will you be OK from here?’ Tim asked once I’d hobbled onto the bus that was empty, thank God.

‘Yes, thank you.’

‘Make sure you keep the ice pack on it and put a fresh one on in the morning, but it should be all right in a day or two.’

‘Thanks, Tim.’

‘Safe travels.’

‘You too,’ I said. ‘I hope it all goes OK up there.’ I nodded to his bag and we both knew what I meant.

He smiled back and then the bus doors closed like in the films, and I watched as he became a small dot again and then completely disappeared.

And I hoped that Tim’s wife, wherever she was, would leave him a sign once he’d got to the top.