Inside the Cloud
For their honeymoon, they’d flown to New York, Marnie’s first time, Neil generously allowing her the window seat in the premium economy cabin, though technically it was his on the boarding pass and you should always sit in your allocated seat. At twenty-five, long-haul air travel was a novelty and Marnie had pressed her forehead against the thick glass and marvelled at the clouds’ solidity, the firmness of their lines against the blue. If you fell, would the clouds catch you? What was it like inside a cloud?
The answer, it transpired, was fucking shit and, no, a cloud wouldn’t catch you because clouds were treacherous bastards and so were rocks and so was rain, and the mountain streams weren’t babbling: they were taking the piss and so was everything outside, all of nature.
‘Why am I doing this!’ she bellowed into the rain. ‘I’m not even sponsored!’
‘Ha!’ he barked. ‘We’re there! We made it!’ Then, standing upright, ‘Almost!’ Even the mountain was a liar because there was a further crawl before she could finally stand upright, at which point a whole new bastard element introduced itself, a sharp and vicious wind, which slapped her wet clothes against her body and scoured her face with the scrapings of the freezer compartment.
‘Is this wuthering, Mr Bradshaw? Are we wuthering now?’
‘Yes, this is wuthering.’
‘I’m getting consumption, I can feel it. Consumption in my lungs.’
‘But look where we are!’
Nothing. She could see nothing and he was pointing into nothingness. ‘There’s Haystacks!’ The grey of a sickbed sheet. ‘Behind us, Great Gable and Green Gable’ – the grey of old snow and dirty bathwater – ‘and down there, in theory, is beautiful Buttermere!’ The grey of a dirty shirt collar. ‘And over there, you can see when the mist clears, that’s Innominate Tarn where they scattered the ashes of Alfred Wainwright, the man who devised this walk.’
‘Good!’ she shouted. ‘Good! I’m gladhe’s dead!’
‘Marnie!’ he said, a little shocked. ‘Bit harsh.’
‘Light grey, dark grey, black, grey and brown. It could be the Golden Gate Bridge out there, it could be the Bay of fucking Naples, we wouldn’t know!’
‘I didn’t make it rain, Marnie!’
‘Oh, no, it’s never anyone’s fault, is it?’
‘Shall we head down? See how you feel at the hotel.’
‘Oh, I know how I’ll feel. Fucking … furious. Don’t laugh at me!’ she said, though she could feel herself on the verge of laughter too. ‘Just get me down.’
He wiped the rain from the strange device in his hand, some kind of GPS, a prop from Star Trek, radiation levels rising, silicon storm approaching. ‘This way!’ he announced, pointing into the featureless grey, and now here was some whole new natural-world fuckery to deal with. The fell top was a plateau and the rain had soaked and submerged the path so that they were obliged to hop between small islands of spiked red weeds, Martian and treacherous and often turning out not to be islands at all, so that her new boots were plunged again and again into mud, the liquid quickly breaching the top, and this brought on a new storm of abuse.
‘Fuck you, Countryfile!’
‘What?’
‘I don’t like it here. People shouldn’t even be up here.’ She was squelching now, audibly squelching, her teeth rattling like joke-shop dentures as they hop-scotched along, her eyes boring into his back, resolving to be silent now. She’d seen this film before, the one where the neurotic city slicker is initiated into the ways of the wild by the taciturn, hard-handed adventurer, initially appalled then charmed by his simple ways. Well, screw that. She’d resist the cliché and show that she was just as steely, competent and capable as he was, which was exactly what happened in the movie too.