For the first time since those halcyon days of university, I wrote a story. And it doesn’t rhyme. Not one bit.
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He walked. He walked miles, and not just miles but miles in their hundreds. It was hard to tell how long or how far he had walked, and if you asked him he couldn’t remember himself, either. He just walked. With no destination or purpose except the placement of one foot in front of the other, one foot in front of the other.
Why are you walking, they called. What are you raising money for? What are you teaching us? Do you have a website? He did not have a website, or a lesson to teach, or a cause. He was just a man who walked. Not fast – it wasn’t a race, and he wasn’t walking to any particular schedule – just at a steady, walking pace; stopping to look at things along the way and resting each night.
He wasn’t happy and he wasn’t sad. He posed for photographs with people who thought he was interesting but preferred to take the photographs himself. Of waterfalls and funny place names and different-looking trees. He spoke like a man with no past; no accent or stories or addresses to send postcards to. He was just a man who walked.
The weather was the one thing which could change his mood either way. The sun made him walk slower, take more photographs, rest more often. The sun made him answer questions with more words than usual. The rain, however, made him run. Made him sleep late in the beds of B&Bs and in rooms above pubs; made him ignore shouts from cars and shops as though he was unable to hear.
And so people gave him things. Because this man who walked needed taking care of it seemed, and so he found himself presented with dry socks, and a new raincoat, and after a while a new pair of trainers. Small things, small, second-hand things which people were planning to throw away; clothes people had already worn to decorate in or jackets handed down from brother to brother. He said thank you and went on his way; dryer, and warmer than before.
He continued this way for months, years. Nobody was counting the time, not least him. Absence only has a number when there is someone waiting for your return. Nobody was waiting for his return. Not least him. He continued this way until one day, unexpectedly, under a grey sky on an otherwise empty road, he saw ahead of him a man. Just a man who was walking.
Eventually they met. On this high road over the brow of a hill, and it seemed right that they should stop. His tongue was thick in his mouth after so long of speaking to himself alone, and he asked the man what he suddenly, urgently wanted to know.
Why are you walking, he asked.
The other man smiled quietly. He looked out across the landscape; green and empty and vast. The man followed his gaze out over the fields. They saw nothing.
No reason, the other man said.
They walked on. And a short while later the man stopped. Abruptly. He stopped and he laughed aloud to himself; laughed at the absurdity of a man walking for no reason. And as he laughed until tears began to form a haze across the sky, he remembered her face, the morning she left. The morning she walked out with nothing but the clothes on her back and his heart in her hands. And he realised that there was no distance a man could walk to find her; no room above a country pub in which she waited, asleep like the princess in the fairy tale.
Quietly, in the next town, he called a taxi to take him home. The man who walked; driven home to his empty house in his borrowed clothes.
The Writing Hour 