10. Jack
Chapter 10
Jack
“P ass me that, will you?”
Chloe reached into the Defender for the bug hotel I’d made for Mum out of some scrap lumber, foraged twigs and paper straws. She heaved it over the low hedge bordering the front garden, and I was surprised yet again at how heavy it was, despite the fact that I’d made it. It was massive for a bug house, nearly a metre tall, but she’d insisted she needed one that size for the back garden, and arguing with Mum was almost always futile.
“I hate these things,” Chloe said, dramatically shivering as she handed it to me. “They just get covered in spiderwebs, so they trigger my arachnophobia and my trypophobia all at once.”
“Well, helpfully you don’t have to look at it anymore,” I said, placing it on Mum’s front step facing away from Chloe. I walked the long way round through the gate back to the car where Chloe was waiting in the passenger seat, then drove it back up to drive it over the hill to mine.
“I need to say hi to your mum,” she said. “I haven’t seen her in ages.”
“Yeah, well, gird your loins, because she wants to set you up with?—”
“Let me guess,” Chloe said, “her friend’s daughter recently came out as gay?”
I shrugged. “I don’t know about the recency, but I’m afraid it’s a colleague, not a friend.”
“Damn,” Chloe said, smacking her thigh. “So close. It’s fine, I’m emotionally unavailable either way.”
I rolled my eyes. “Are we talking about that girl from the R escue?”
“I can’t stop insta-stalking her,” Chloe said from the passenger seat, turning her phone to show me a picture of her current crush.
“Don’t shit where you eat,” I said, not even looking. I’d seen half a dozen pictures already since I’d picked Chloe up.
“She works at the actual rescue, not the headquarters,” she explained for the third time.
“Doesn’t matter,” I said. “Seems complicated.”
I could practically hear Chloe roll her eyes as I put the car in park. “Every form of romance is too complicated for you. You’re hardly the barometer I’d use for normal dating habits.”
She had a point; romance generally was too complicated. It was like I’d been trying to tell Morgan on our weekend away; there were too many opportunities to hurt one another, and you never got enough back for the trouble.
But even if I was all the way at one end of the dating normalcy spectrum, Chloe was way at the other end. She was so chaotic in who and how she dated. She’d never been with anyone for longer than a few months, but she would go through an entire long-term relationship cycle in that time. She would swipe through profiles on the app like she was trying to win some kind of competition, and she’d flirt with men at every opportunity despite being wholly uninterested. But she’d never approach a woman she didn’t already know, just obsess over them from a distance, imagining an entire fictional life together without ever having spoken. And heaven forbid they actually speak to her ; she’d find the tiniest thing to get hung up on and throw the whole idea of that person out the window.
Come to think of it, I wasn’t sure how she’d ever managed to actually find a relationship at all.
What she was very good at, on the other hand, was packing Tetris.
Over the years, she’d earned the honour of packing my rucksack for my solo trips; not that I couldn’t do it myself, but she loved to help, and she was a bit of a prodigy at it. Each time I’d think I’d found ways to trim weight, making it lighter and easier to carry. But she was next-level ruthless. Last autumn she’d even snapped the end off my toothbrush.
But now, as she looked at the supplies I’d laid out on the floor of my lounge, she seemed stumped.
“Honestly, Jack, I think we might have achieved perfection.”
“Not a chance,” I said, spurring her on, but I was, of course, stumped too. Over the years I’d collected lighter-weight clothing and state-of-the-art gear, and I couldn’t spot a single inefficiency among the bunch. Except the pad of paper and pencils, but Chloe knew by now not to question that.
“What’s the chance of rain?” Chloe asked, and I knew what she was thinking: could we lose the rain gear?
“I thought of that,” I said, “but it’s fifty–fifty. And it is Wales after all…”
Whilst the cost/benefit analysis of dating didn’t work out, the cost/benefit of being prepared for rain certainly did. I’d been caught out once without the proper equipment, and it was the only time I’d understood why some people didn’t like the outdoors. It had been miserable.
“It’ll all have to stay then,” she said, then turned to me. “Well done, grasshopper.”
She knelt down and started folding and stuffing, adjusting and analysing as she went. Within five minutes, my rucksack was meticulously packed; I put it on to find the weight perfectly distributed. We really did have this down to a science.
“I still don’t understand why you love doing that so much,” I said, adjusting the straps so my hips took all the weight rather than my back.
“It’s the ultimate sense of achievement,” she said, standing up. I decided not to ask her for the umpteenth time why, then, her flat was such a tip all the time.
“You sure you don’t want to come? Surely the achievement is better when you get to experience the impact of it?”
Chloe placed a hand on the strap running over my right shoulder. “See, that’s where you’re wrong,” she said softly. “The satisfaction comes especially from not having to exert myself after. All the fun, none of the fitness.”
* * *
Several hours later, I was walking along a low ridge in the Black Mountains north of Abergavenny. It was an area I’d visited several times, and sometimes I’d get questions about why I didn’t go further afield, but I loved this route, just over the Welsh border. The Wye Valley and the Brecon Beacons were, in my fully biased opinion, the best place in the world to live. And given that I’d seen a lot of the world, I felt pretty entitled to that opinion.
Plus, I knew enough about the local flora and fauna to get more out of the experience than the average outdoor enthusiast. I’d learned a lot of it from Mum growing up, when she’d taken Amy and me walking or camping, but I’d learned a lot on my travels, too, always a bit homesick for the birdsong and foliage I’d grown up with.
I tried to walk a slightly different route each time I came to these hills, but I was somewhat limited by my camping spots, which I had to clear with the land owners ahead of time. I would have preferred to wild camp like I had before in Scotland and Dartmoor, but it wasn’t allowed, and Dad knew one of the landowners here. Still, for the past few years, I’d been able to escape to a place where I knew I’d have to interact with nothing and no one but the weather and terrain.
Except apparently my brain was determined to make me interact with Morgan, whether or not she was actually here. We were going on a hike in just a few days – admittedly a much tamer hike than the one I was on now – and I hadn’t been able to stop thinking about it since she’d texted me. On the one hand, I’d been the one to suggest we could do things together this summer as a way to help her level up. (God, I still cringed at how cheesy that analogy was, but it had seemed to resonate with her.) But honestly, I hadn’t expected her to take me up on it; certainly not so quickly. There was a part of me that had done a happy jig – internal, of course – when she’d texted. But most of me went directly into overthinking it. Was she just that desperate to try something new? Or had the heat I’d felt between us in the river, despite the cold water we’d been swimming in, not just been in my head? Was she interested in me that way, even after everything I’d said about Aria and about dating in general?
A cynical part of me wondered if maybe she was into me, but only because of Aria. That would be typical; everything coming back to her. She’d been a black hole for attention our entire relationship, and maybe now was no different.
But no, Morgan had been a bit flirty with me before she’d found out about Aria, hadn’t she? Or had it just been my brain short-circuiting? Inferring interest where there wasn’t any? Assuming that the tiniest bit of physical affection from a tipsy woman meant more than it did, just because I had felt something when she’d stepped between my legs and pressed herself against me?
Suddenly a familiar weight began to pool in my gut, and I felt sick to my stomach. I had to stop walking and catch my breath, which was unlike me. I didn’t like the way it made me feel, thinking about Morgan that way. Thinking about anyone that way, actually. It was why none of the dates I had been on – the ones I hadn’t mentioned to Morgan – had worked out. Any time I felt a spark, it was doused in this anxiety.
But I was determined to get Morgan out of my head, so I popped in my earbuds – always a last resort, but I was desperate – and focused on moving forward as quickly as I could. The further I walked, the more I felt myself unravel inside, even as my calves cramped and my glutes burned from the incline. My head cleared enough for me to take out my earbuds and enjoy the sounds of nature, like the coo of a wood pigeon and the wind blowing through the ferns in the gullies. I spotted several sets of dog tracks in the mud on one path, and even some for a fallow deer near a small grove, which was a nice surprise. And just as I began to fatigue, I came around the corner of a large rock formation and saw my campsite.
The reservoir was nestled in a little valley similar to my pond at home, but on a much larger scale. A dam at one end held back what seemed like an immense amount of water from flooding through the valley beyond. It was owned by a friend of Dad’s, and since it had been decommissioned as a drinking water source, it had become the destination for several popular walking routes. It was quiet now though, with not a soul in sight.
I made my way to the far end where the hillside folded around it; it was the most sheltered and secluded spot, with hills on both sides and a few oak and ash trees for cover. The longer grass was pointing the same north-eastern direction as the shorter grasses, so I knew, as raindrops began to fall, that I’d need shielding, both from the south-westerly winds that would sweep down over the hills and the driving rain that would come with them.
My tent and fly were at the very top of my pack – thanks to Chloe, of course – so I was able to get them up and put some water on to boil for my dinner before the rain started in earnest. I rehydrated the curry I’d packed, for which Phil had loaned me his fancy dehydrator, and sat in my tent looking out over the water, where the rain was coming down so hard now that it was hard to find the line between it and the surface of the reservoir.
As I looked around, it struck me for the millionth time how interesting the mountains here were. There were so few trees and bushes; it looked almost barren. The small oak grove I was sitting in was the only part that actually looked lush, despite the fact that I knew the grasses contained an immense amount of biodiversity. Because of the sparse look, any bothys and buildings that had been constructed, most made out of stone to combat the wind blowing against the side of my tent, stood out like sore thumbs on the landscape. What would it look like to build something that actually looked at home out here?
I pulled out the one inefficiency I always allowed myself on these trips: a pad of paper and pencil. It wasn’t a fancy sketch pad or artist’s pencil, but I began to draw anyway, reflecting the image that formed in my mind. A house built into the hill opposite me, just below the road out, with a live roof and a dark blue timber facing to match the colour of the water. The drawing didn’t have colour, of course, but it helped it come to life more in my mind.
Before long I had a mostly accurate sketch of the hill opposite me, but with a new structure in perfect harmony with its surroundings.
It wasn’t the first time I’d done this; in fact, my weekends away were some of my most inspired times. I’d started doing it when I was with Aria, taking in the different architectural styles we saw when we were travelling. I’d expected the inspiration to wane when I’d moved home, and especially when I’d started working for Dad, but if anything, it had deepened. Knowing how buildings came together had added a new level of consideration to the sketches, and I found the British landscape super inspiring.
But it was just a creative outlet, nothing serious. So I shoved the pad back in my pack and continued to watch the rain until it was time for bed, hoping it would clear up in time for my hike with Morgan.