Walk With Me: When Grief Passes Love Remains

By Peter Nathaniel Lee

We meet Peter standing on the edge of a cliff contemplating the question, 'How far would you fall before changing your mind?'
Adrift in Spain, having left all he owns and knows, he faces the hard truth – life catches up to you no matter how far you run.
Three months before, whilst sitting in a former police cell and handling delivery requests, he received a phone call from a stranger who asked him to write her suicide note.
So begins a series of synchronicities that lead him to set out on the ancient pilgrimage through France and Spain, the Camino De Santiago.
As he walks, his father's story unfolds beside his own, chronicling the causes of addiction that run through his paternal line and which led to his father's premature death the year before.
Peter is haunted by what seems like an inevitable path laid before him. Homeless and without money, he must let go of control, place his trust in the kindness of strangers, and embrace the mysteries of the Camino.
Before he can finish his pilgrimage and reach the ocean, a reckoning awaits him in the desert. If he can face his family's past, he may walk into a new world.
Inspired by true events, this story is about grief and healing and how we can send the love back.
Will you walk with me?

• Language: English
• Publisher: Tablo Publishing
• Release date: Sep 1, 2022
• ISBN: 9781685835026

Book preview

1

PROLOGUE

SPAIN, CAMINO DE SANTIAGO | AUGUST 2010

My father once told me you should never judge a man until you have worn his shoes and walked a mile. I remembered it well when my boots were worn down and dusty, the toes hanging over the edge of a cliff.

I stood on the edge, of myself, and of the earth, or so it seemed. The sun-scorched plains of northern Spain, a patchwork of brown and yellow, stretched away, dappled with the passing shadows of clouds. The vista eventually faded into a blue line where the horizon, that divorce of earth and sky, seemed to mock me as I heard his last words.

‘Don’t…’

Below, a thousand feet or more, was the accumulation of all that had been tired of holding on; rock, dirt, perhaps bones. Out of that collapsed mess at the faraway bottom, I hoped new life was growing.

All I had to do was take one more step and I would fall gracefully, maybe not, into the blue. When you’ve travelled so far on a journey it can be as hard to stop as it is to carry on. That’s why falling appealed.

Different words and a different voice, cruel for its absence of care, whispered, ‘How far would you fall before you changed your mind?’

As though to test me, the wind tugged my trousers, pulling me back before pressing them flat against my legs, pushing me closer to the edge.

To either side, the cliffs fell away to the east and west before curving back to encroach on the view. I had climbed the steep switchback track to this place where the path continued westwards along a narrow ledge. But my Way had run out. All I had before me was the drop and its view. I looked east, recalling the many steps that had brought me here.

I had been walking the Camino De Santiago for three weeks without a map or guidebook, determined to choose a different path from the men who came before me. I had followed the yellow arrows which marked the 900km pilgrimage route, hoping to lose their shadow. Instead, I stood here, in the same place as them, more or less, at the edge.

I looked west to face the setting sun. Three hundred kilometres in that direction lay the fabled city of Santiago. For many, the end of their pilgrimage was to stand beneath the statue of St. James in the cathedral and kiss its cold stone cheek. But I had heard of another place called Finisterre. Three days walk beyond the city walls, where the gulls cry in salt-tinged air, the storied path becomes sand, and the Way disappears beneath the waves of the Atlantic Ocean. Tradition holds that pilgrims who burn their clothes and run naked into the waves will rise born anew at the place once known as the end of the world.

I didn’t want to stop here. Not yet. I wanted to feel the sand between my toes, taste the salt- air kiss on my skin. I wanted to strip naked and, free of care, run into the cold waters. I wanted to be born anew. But the hourglass of my wallet had run out, calling me home a failure and a fool. They would tell me so, back home, with their eyes and shared glances over half empty pint glasses, that I should have known; there were no more adventures to be had.

I closed my eyes and surrendered to the void, to the feel of the wind tousling my hair across my face. It pushed and tugged at my back and then front, as though undecided if it wanted to take me over the edge or not. I opened my eyes again — what a height. There were tears on my face now, chill ghost fingers on my cheeks.

I bent down and picked up a rock; it was heart-shaped and had a confusing weight, heavy or light? I threw it up and out. The rock rose like the curve of a full moon; began to fall as soon as it reached its highest point. I watched it go down, that rock, just like my heart, until my eyes nearly took the rest of me over too.

‘How far would you fall before you changed your mind?’

As though to replace the rock, ahead of me, an eagle flew into view. It seemed to hang in the sky, suspended and surrounded by the clear cold blue.

‘How far would you fall before changing your mind?’

The eagle flew higher, circled in the thermals. It called out in a high screech, eliciting something primal from deep within me.

A memory stirred. A room, blue wallpaper, an eagle emblem fastened to a corkboard. A desk. A chair. Me. That blue, blue room with the snake in the desk drawer and a white pill on the pad of my finger. The sound of someone crying through the walls…

The eagle called again, a high shuddering screech. The sound woke me to the danger of where I stood, between hard rock and soft sky with only the wind for company. I took a shuddering breath, so deep it came out as a wild sound.

Sucking in, the wind pulling my hair. Blowing out, leaning me closer to the edge, as though it were the world and not my lungs that were breathing for me. Like a single blade of grass tethered in a field of dust, I shook. I inched a quarter step closer to the edge and held my arms out wide.

‘How far would you fall before changing your mind?’

I thought of my mum, angry words and slamming doors. I saw my ex, Sarah’s face, tear strewn, innocent. I saw my dad on the day I let him go. Let him fall.

The wind teased around my legs; a sudden gust yanked and pulled at my clothes and back, pushing me this way and that. Only a fraction each, but this close to the edge, it made my legs shake.

A memory. Walking on a tree branch as a child, arms out wide. My brother, older by four years, tiny below me, yelling.

‘Get down. Stop it.’

He was afraid of high places, daring me to climb until the height outgrew his fear. Another voice, firmer and used to the obedience of children. ‘Peter, get down from there. You’ll break your neck.’

Father’s teacher’s voice — prophetic, ironic words but not meant for that moment and not meant for me.

‘How far would you fall before changing your mind?’

The words of the question seemed to drum in time to my heartbeat.

Would it all stop? All this chatter. All these thoughts. All this feeling. Would it go out like a light?

I decided to find out. My legs shook — a classic knee knock. This was no longer a game my body wished to play, but we all need to find the edge inside ourselves as well as out. So, I stayed, then I inched closer.

You see, I brought you here, to the rock at the mountain top beneath the first star where the eagle soared because here is where I stand at my most brave, my most honest, and my most afraid. I will not say I wanted to die. Did the rock want to fall, want to be thrown?

Behind me, the light of the setting sun cast my shadow over the ledge, which called back to me reassuringly, ‘It’s only space, and there are many more shadows waiting below.’

Ahead of me, the sky changed rapidly from pale to deep blue, and the first star pierced the veil. It blurred as I closed my eyes and breathed all that space outside of me, inside, and got ready to fall.

Silent expectation. Shuddering breath. Just let go, I told myself. One more step. And that’s when I heard Dad’s last words.

Sometimes I wake at night, thrust myself back against the pillows and headboard, as though dragging myself from that precipice. I touch my legs and chest, just to make sure I’m still inside my body, and the cliff is but a memory. As the room grows out of the surrounding gloom, I remember that life has a way of rewarding you if you take a chance and follow your heart, even when the odds seem against you.

Perhaps you stand near to your own edge or hear it calling to you in the dark hours.

Maybe you are finding it hard to see the light inside your life.

Walk with me a while on the Camino de Santiago and let us see where the strange road leads. We will go onwards together, you and I, but first we must go back. To appreciate the light, we must first face the dark. We go to the prison cell the day the snow fell.

PART I

THE BIRTH OF THE PILGRIM

Shell

1

THE PRISONER

NOTTINGHAM | DECEMBER 2009

We are all prisoners.

The words had been scratched through peeling paint deep into old brick.

There was a slew of graffiti in the cell, profanities, song lyrics, and genitalia which the inmates had used to mark their presence, but it was those words which stood out stark as scars, the colour of rust.

It was December and so cold that my breath fogged before me as I sat waiting. The window was beyond reach in the high walls. Snow partially covered the bars, casting the room in a soft grey shade. Against the opposite wall, shadows of the snows falling gave motion to an otherwise lifeless room. In the corridor beyond, phones rang. The voices of the operators echoed eerily to where I sat.

It was 2009, eight years after I’d left the Royal Navy and returned to civilian life. Soon after, the Twin Towers had been brought down, making me feel like a deserter. Now, as though the tremors of their fall had only just reached us in England, the financial crash shook the world. War abroad and terrorism at home dominated the news cycle, and fear hung over the country like a cloud of ashes.

I was twenty-seven, and the gardening business I had built to pay my way through university was ruined by fear of recession. My customers, pensioners mostly, who could no longer tend their lawns, hoarded their cash. Friendly faces became scowls, doors were closed to me, and the gardens they loved grew wild. So that winter, between lectures, I took a job with a national flower delivery company, and that’s why I was in the police cell.

There was a nice call centre to work in, heated and carpeted, but the snow had fallen heavily on the roof in my section, and as a sign of the collective times, its rotten core had given in under the weight of that which had fallen from above. Those of us willing to brave the icy roads to work were moved into a dilapidated former prison, which hunkered under the shadow of Nottingham’s Castle Rock.

I sat in one cell huddled in an overcoat and layers of jumpers, with a laptop, desk phone and headset. My job was to resolve complaints, take new orders, and type out or help write messages of love on Christmas cards.

As I waited for the next call to come through, my phone vibrated in my pocket. I pulled it out to see yet another message from my friend Amy on the green screen.

‘You can hide from the world, but it won’t hide from you!’

My fingers hovered over the buttons, unsure how to reply. We had lost touch after school, but her recent breakup, and my current ‘situation,’ meant we were clinging to old friendships. It was easier to be around someone who knew you before your world fell apart.

Across the city, beyond the snow and traffic, Sarah, my girlfriend of seven years would be wondering where I was and which version of me would return home after my shift. Would it be the version she’d fallen in love with or the one who stared into space, sitting in the chair in the backroom when she left for work, and who she often found sitting there when she got home. Not washed, not dressed, vacant.

In truth, I couldn’t bear to be around her. Sarah had done nothing wrong. She wasn’t the one who had changed. But she was the one who took the first call on the day of my dad’s fall. Caught between her love and my grief, I punished her with vacancy.

So that winter, I spent my free time with Amy. She was from the time before, had her own pain that I could understand. We were comfortable leaning on each other without falling over.

‘Please come.’ The text continued. ‘I’m booking mine now. She has an open slot for you…’

She had been pestering me to see a psychic with her. I wasn’t keen. Amy wanted to know if, and when, she would meet Mr Right. She wanted children, and life was behind her schedule. For me, I guess she thought I’d get answers. You know, closure.

An encounter with a psychic was enticing. Yet I had little time for religion or new age spiritualism since I’d suffered years of proselytising by an older brother before losing him to a Christian cult. What could this psychic tell me I didn’t already know? We were born, we messed each other up, we died. Wasn’t that the sum of it?

I shivered, pushed my hands into the folds of my overcoat and swung around in the swivel chair.

The room hadn’t changed a great deal since it had been used by the prisoners. The door had been removed, the toilet too, leaving a bare pipe in an otherwise formidable wall. I wondered if I could crawl through that pipe and escape to a new world. Perhaps I’d follow a white rabbit?

Instead, I imagined the cell door returned and closed. The lights turned off, and the warden’s fading footsteps walking the corridors. The chains which had held the bed to the wall still dangled from rusted hooks. The room smelled of cold iron and brick dust with an undercurrent of disinfectant. And beneath that, a greasy scent.

I heard footsteps outside and with a sinking feeling realised the manager was coming to tell me I could go home, again.

My shift had finished an hour before, but I’d stayed for the extra hours. Killing time. That’s what prisoners did, wasn’t it? I was oddly reluctant to leave. It seemed like the right place to be, that cell. Besides, I didn’t want to go out into the snow. I didn’t want to go to the car.

That morning when I’d reached work, I’d sat behind the steering wheel and stared at the wall of the parking lot fifty yards ahead and imagined doing it.

I’d wondered what speed the car would reach before it smashed into the wall. A crash of metal and glass, the thwack of my head. The hiss of engine gas and hum of distant traffic. The sound of my last breaths, ragged, perhaps torn out of the frigid air with regret. Running footsteps. Shouts for help and sirens in the distance. Thoughts of loved ones. Perhaps shame.

‘You still here? Shift’s over, you can go.’

I spun in the chair to see the manager standing at the doorway. She was wrapped in layers of wool and a boiler jacket, with a thick red scarf and hat nearly obscuring her face. She clutched a note-board to her chest as though it would add warmth to her body. I nodded, smiled, said,

‘Thanks. I’ll take one more call, then I’ll go.’

She made a mark on the board, nodded, and stepped out into the corridor, but then she turned and asked, ‘I’ve booked the dates you’ve requested to have off in June. Long weekend, wasn’t it?’

‘Yeah, thank you,’ I said, pleased despite myself.

‘Holiday, is it?’ she asked, taking a step across the empty doorway. The movement seemed to make the room shrink. I pulled at my scarf where it rubbed my neck.

‘Festival,’ I told her. ‘A friend got me a ticket. Secret Garden Party or something.’

She frowned, then shook her head as though to say she’d not heard of it. ‘Fancy dress?’

‘Yeah, fairy tales. Magical creatures.’ I shrugged. 

She nodded, raised her eyebrows, ‘One more call then.’

I nodded, then she stepped away, leaving the cell doorway empty and my way to the car unblocked.

I’d cried in the car as I’d faced the wall. Gripped the steering wheel until my knuckles were white. No, not cried, sobbed, like a child. Yet even that had felt detached.

Soon I’d drive through the rush hour traffic. I would pull up outside our house. Sarah’s car would be on the driveway. The lights would be on inside. She’d have a fire going in the lounge. It would be unbearably warm in there. I’d sit in the car after turning the engine off until my breath became visible.

Eventually, Sarah would open the curtain to see why I hadn’t come inside. Later, as we lay in the darkness of our bedroom, she’d ask me, ‘Why do you sit in the car when you get home?’

And I’d say to the ceiling, ‘I don’t know.’

Then she’d ask me the question I was really terrified of being asked.

‘How was your day?’

The dull click of the headset made me sit up as I prepared to take the last call. I waited a moment before cheerfully speaking the greeting, ‘Welcome to Flowers4u. Merry Christmas!

How can I help you?’

A woman’s voice answered, perhaps in her late sixties or seventies. I began to form a picture of her in my mind. Thin, dark grey hair with white roots. She sat straight-backed, perhaps perched on a mahogany chair. The room she was in was gloomy, full of antique furniture. The walls papered dark green, covered in silver-rimmed frames and bookshelves replete with more photos of formal family events. A museum to her love. Perhaps there was a Christmas tree with no presents beneath it.

‘I want two bouquets of flowers,’ she said. ‘For my daughters. I’d like to leave a note if I may.’

I helped her choose a suitable selection from our promotions and then got ready to type out the message. There was a lengthy pause.

She cleared her throat once, then again. After the third time, she said, ‘I am sorry.’ The keyboard thunked as I typed. ‘I wish we could have parted in this life under different circumstances. Please know that you are not to blame for what I have done.’

As I listened, I felt a numbness settle over my being. I felt like I’d slipped into a bath that was neither hot nor cold. Devoid of sensation, I held my breath.

She continued, and my fingers typed the letters that formed the words. I watched with a growing sense of panic as the allocated 250 characters rapidly disappeared. I knew there must surely be more to write. There was.

‘Never forget that I always loved you, was so proud of you both...’

‘I’m sorry,’ I interrupted softly. ‘We’ve run out of space.’

There was another pause. I could hear her take a deep breath and pictured her holding her lips together in frustration. 

After a few moments of back and forth, I helped her edit the essence of the message down until it was acceptable. She asked me if I thought it would suffice? I ran my tongue across the rough skin of my lips, then said that it would.

I read through the order, confirmed the message we had composed. Now, I had only to take her payment, and then the call would end. I would thank her for her order and inform her a receipt would be emailed to her.

I cleared my throat, then told her when her daughters could expect the delivery.

‘No,’ she said. ‘Send them a day after Christmas. It will be better that way.’

I amended the date. This was it. Nothing left but the goodbye, the dull click, and then our voices, having briefly touched, would be disconnected forever.

She waited patiently as I finished processing the order, then in a voice, made soft so that I knew she spoke to me, and not for her daughters to read, she said.

‘You mustn’t judge me.’

My fingers paused over the keyboard. In the silence between our breaths, all I could think was, what can I do?

Later, a different question would haunt me. Why had she come through to me? There were hundreds of operators on the phone that day, sitting in the warmth of the call centres, yet she came through to me, sitting there, in the cold cell.

‘I don’t,’ I said, and hoped that she would hear the sincerity in my voice.

I wondered if she would hear the pain of my own recent grief, and through it, hear the future echoes of her daughters when they discovered her body. Perhaps, dangling from the ceiling, or laying lukewarm in a red water bathtub. I didn’t want her to feel judged. She was suffering enough.

I swallowed. I had to do something, say something, didn’t I? Didn’t I have to say something? Didn’t I have to stop her from doing whatever she had decided she would do with herself?

I could call the police. I had her address. They would send the white coats, who might, if deemed necessary, inoculate her with powerful drugs for her own good. Perhaps her daughters would visit her in the hospital ward on Christmas eve. I could almost smell the disinfectant, hear the squeak of trolly wheels. Eventually, they might release her back into the wild. That is what we do to people who no longer wish to live, isn’t it? We stop them, then comfort them until we change their mind. And if we can’t, we take their body away from their restless spirit to prevent it from leaving.

‘Would you mind holding the line?’ I asked her. ‘There’s a glitch on the system.’

She said yes. I placed the call on hold and took the headset off, then looked around my cell. My eyes found the scratched words on the wall.

We are all prisoners.

Who had carved those words, and who had they carved them for? Perhaps they were right.

I put the headset back on, cleared my throat, and thanked her for the transaction. Curt, quick, professional. I said goodbye, wished her a merry Christmas, and let her go to her fate.

My boots echoed on the tiled floor as I strode past the open cell doors. I ignored the calls of goodbyes from colleagues and warnings to drive safely on the roads; my mind was elsewhere.

Outside, the cold hit my face like a slap. Snow was falling softly out of the grey cotton sky. The traffic was a dull roar. I took out my phone and read Amy’s message from earlier that day.

‘You can hide from the world, but it won’t hide from you.’

I blew on my already red fingers and typed back.

‘Book me in. I’ll come.’

I pressed send. Her reply came back almost immediately.

‘Changed your mind, have you? Don’t worry, I booked you in last week.’ It was signed with a smiley face.

I smiled back and walked carefully to the car, skidding on ice, but stayed upright a little longer.

2

A DEAD TOWN FOR WITCHES AND GHOSTS

LOWTON, NOTTINGHAM | JANUARY 2010

The church was broad and old, grey stone stacked high. I could barely see it through the fogged-out windows of Amy’s mini. I leaned forward over my knees, which were pressed against the dashboard, and wiped at the window screen. It squeaked like a creature in pain as the church came into focus, where it towered over the surrounding houses like a giant tombstone, stark against the snow clouds.

‘What is a witch doing living in a church?’ I asked.

‘She’s not a witch, Peter. She’s a medium or a psychic,’ Amy said this without looking at me. She had her head buried in her bag. ‘Besides, she doesn’t live in the church. She’s in one of the buildings attached to it.’

‘Do you need help?’ I asked.

She had been digging around for the last few minutes in an oversized D&G handbag, trying to find the note on which she’d written the address. She gave me a withering look.

‘What’s the difference then?’ I asked.

‘I dunno. One speaks to the dead...’ Amy looked at the church and shrugged, ‘The other enjoys the company of black cats?’

I gave her bag a disapproving look, and she returned mine with a narrow-eyed glare of her own, warning me not to start again.

The bag had cost her $5000. Which was the bonus she had earned working a sixty-hour week as a manager in a retail store, leaving her exhausted and ill over Christmas. This was one of the many ways we teased each other—me about her rampant materialism, her about my lackadaisical attitude to all things fashion.

‘So… she lives in the church so she can keep the graveyard company?’ I said through the side of my mouth, with eyes wide… ‘Great!’

‘She doesn’t live in the church. She lives next door to it!’ she snapped and then held up the address triumphantly, bright red nail varnish stark against the paper.

‘Nice one. I thought we were going to need a ladder to get you out.’

‘Haha!’ she mimed. I could see she was about to return fire, but then her face grew serious, and she grabbed my arm. ‘Do you think we’re doing the right thing?’

‘Hey, this was your idea,’ I said, holding up my hands, but then I noticed the fear in her eyes. ‘What’s wrong?’

‘What if she tells me I’ll never meet him. You know, and I end up alone, childless, like an old spinster. My sister will never let me live it down.’

‘Amy, that’s not going to happen, regardless of what this psychic says.’

‘Promise?’

‘Promise. Besides,’ I told her, ‘We’ll get a refund if she does.’

She smiled and said with a grin, ‘Okay, but you still have to marry me if no one else does.’

We spoke over each other at the same time. I said, by the age of fifty, she said by thirty, and we both laughed.

She slapped my arm in mock protest at my cheekiness.

‘I best give her a big tip then,’ I said.

‘Damn right!’ she said, brightening. ‘Come on then!’

Filled with excitement once again, she opened the door and hopped out. The car shook as she slammed the door behind her. I watched her walk a few paces in front of the car, staring into the mobile in her hand. She was tiny, about five foot five, wearing heels and tight jeans, a leather jacket, and a thick scarf. Her hair had been straightened, whilst her face was hidden beneath layers of makeup, which couldn’t hide her natural beauty. She looked like the kind of girl footballers hoist on their arms at glitzy events. She’d had the run of three bad partners, two of whom had been violent with her, and all had cheated on her, leaving her confidence and trust damaged. Yet even that couldn’t dampen Amy’s, hopeful heart.

She turned and mouthed, ‘Come on.’

I sighed and reluctantly opened the car door.

Unlike Amy, I wasn’t afraid of what the psychic might tell me about my future. I didn’t really believe that she could.

But I couldn’t help feeling a lingering superstitious dread. I had been raised on spooky stories, and the entire family was convinced our childhood home had been haunted. During the frequent power shortages in the ‘80s, we’d gather around the fireplace, and my mum would scare us with tales that sent us running up the stairs and leaping into our cold beds. Later, when my brother was going through his conversion, he would keep me awake half the night telling me about hell and what waited for me if I didn’t come to Jesus.

One night, after our parents had fallen asleep, he’d whispered to me from his bottom bunk about a man who had converted after a near-death experience. ‘He fell into a coma,’ he said, ‘but whilst his family watched him sleep by his bedside, he was lucid. The room became dark, and he found himself in a cavern as cold as ice. Out of the darkness, he heard a voice, and it said, ‘You’re in hell now, and it’s all your fault.’ I remembered the cruel twist his voice took on and how the shadows seemed to lengthen in my room. I didn’t come to Jesus, but that story had kept me awake long after he had fallen asleep.

As I climbed out of the car, I remembered my mum telling me the dead were best left alone. ‘What if you disturb someone, or worse, something?’

But I was an adult now, I told myself, and shouldn’t worry about such things. I’d travelled the world in the Royal Navy and backpacked across countries that weren’t on the prescribed tourist lists. What did I need to fear? Yet as I made my way towards that church, I felt the unease rise from the corners of my childhood bedroom.

My boots crunched on the snow as I got out and hurried to catch her. We linked arms and skidded, then, laughing like a pair of drunks, we crossed the road. As we passed under the shadow of the church, we saw an alleyway that ran alongside its length between the neighbouring houses where a woman stood smoking.

‘I think that’s her,’ Amy whispered, giving me a nudge.

‘She’s forgotten her cape,’ I said.

‘And her cat,’ Amy said. We giggled like kids and made our way toward her.

‘Do you think she has the vicar over for tea?’ I whispered under my breath.

Amy elbowed me in the ribs.

The snow in the alleyway had turned to brown and yellow slush, yet a patch of reflected light from the church’s stained-glass windows coloured the last few steps of snow in purple, blue and green.

A small woman in her mid-fifties waited for us just outside the doorway. She had short purple hair and was wearing a grey woolly jumper that hung to her knees. She smoked the last of her cigarette and watched us approach through a cloud of smoke. Amy made the introductions.

‘I’m not a psychic. I’m a witch,’ she corrected Amy matter-of-factly. Her voice was deep and rough, as though her throat was scarred from years of smoking.

My eyebrows went up, and I felt my face redden. At first, I thought she must have overheard and was teasing us, but then I saw she was serious.

‘You can call me Sue,’ she said, holding out her hand.

I reached out to shake her hand and felt an intense heat radiating from her fingers, which seemed strange since she was standing in the frigid air. Before the skin of our hands made contact, she pulled away, whip quick, as though she’d been electrocuted. She took a step back and eyed me with open curiosity. I gave Amy a side-on-glance to see if she’d seen what had just happened. Her raised eyebrows told me she had.

‘You’re a spiritual one, aren’t you?’ Sue said, giving me a long look.

I frowned, not sure what to say. The word was unfamiliar to me. My town didn’t do ‘spiritual.’ It did football. It did beer drinking and fights in the kebab shop after last orders. It occasionally did drugs and dance festivals, but it didn’t do funny spirit stuff.

Sue turned and beckoned us inside, then led us into the building where her office was. I followed behind Amy, who was giving me a look as though to say, ‘Behave yourself.’

We entered a gloomy hallway that felt like an annex to the church—an extension of old stone and dark wood, high ceilings and the smell of forgotten books.

Sue turned and asked which of us wanted to go first, and everyone laughed when I pointed at Amy, and she pointed at herself.

Sue told me to wait in the kitchen. I turned to go, then gave Amy a good luck nod as she followed Sue into a darkened room at the front of the building. She waved back at me in excitement.

I entered the kitchen and pulled up a hard plastic chair and sat down. The room was small, with white tiles and walls and a glazed window. On the opposite wall were four paintings. The style was unusual, and the images unclear. At first, there seemed to be nothing more than blotches of browns, and dark greens, but the longer I looked at them, the more I saw that there were images hidden inside the patterns. Pathways through woodlands maybe, or steppingstones in a river.

I sighed, feeling out of place. What am I doing here? I wondered, making meaning out of nothing, waiting to see a witch about my dad, all because of a stranger’s words.

‘You mustn’t judge me,’ the voice whispered to me.

I thought about sneaking out. I could wait for Amy by the car or just text her and walk home.

I stood up a couple of times as though to walk out but found myself sitting again.

Eventually, I gave up and continued to look at the paintings.

And then Amy was there, standing in the doorway, hands on her hips.

‘What?’ I asked.

‘She wants to bloody see you!’

‘Why?’ I looked at my watch. ‘You’ve only been in there fifteen minutes.’

‘I know,’ Amy said, her face red with exasperation. ‘She said there’s someone here for you.’

Afterwards, I told Amy I would walk home. She protested, half running in her heels behind me up the path, trying to catch up with my stride. ‘Wait,’ she cried, ‘you can’t just go. I want to know what she said! Who was in the room?’ But I just walked away. I needed time to hear my own footsteps.

I walked down one of the many mile-long streets that defined the town. Rows of red brick terraced houses squashed so tight that they shut out the grey lid sky. I kept my head down and watched as the cracked paving disappeared beneath my tread.

‘There is a presence here for you,’ Sue had said. I’d peered over my shoulder, but no one was there. Her room was large, ill-lit and dusty, with piles of heavy looking books stacked in the corners. Sue had leaned across her desk where her deck of tarot cards was laid out. ‘You are supposed to be here today.’

‘Who is it?’ I asked, wondering if it was my dad.

She shook her head. ‘It’s not your father. You’re not here for him. You just think that’s what brought you here.’

I tried to hide my disappointment and anger at Amy giving away my personal details. Something she would later deny.

‘What do you mean?’ I asked.

‘You’re here because you are waking up.’

I passed closed factories and empty lace mills with cobwebs clouding the windows. The path led along the canal choked with chickweed. Beer cans bobbed, watched by lonesome fishermen whose lines caught on abandoned shopping trolleys. Graffiti was sprayed under the bridge and across the cinema, which had half burned down three years ago and was still boarded up.

We are all prisoners.

This town is like a prison, I thought, walking on.

‘What does that even mean?’ I’d asked her, ‘Waking up?’

Sue had leaned back, taken out a cigarette from the packet on the desk, offered one to me, and then lit it. I watched as the light flicked across the hollows of her face until smoke trailed in a stream up to the ceiling.

‘That’s what you’re going to discover,’ she said before coughing into her jumper.

When I didn’t answer, she said. ‘You’re an empath.’

I shrugged at the unfamiliar word.

‘You feel other people’s pain, as though it’s your own, don’t you?’

I swallowed, shook my head, I had no idea what she meant.

‘Don’t people come to you for answers?’ I asked, looking at the pile of cash I’d placed on her desk.

‘Some do, yes,’ she said. Then she’d leaned forward, resting her elbows on the desk and took another long drag. The cigarette crackled and smouldered, and then smoke billowed out of her mouth. She said, ‘But the wise ones come for the questions.’

I passed a pub that backed onto the canal where fruit-machine lights spilled across the footpath in mockery of the stained-glass windows I’d seen earlier. A pungent stink of soaked beer mats and sticky carpets reached me. I heard the sound of laughter and a man’s voice bellowing what could have been abuse or a joke.

There were more pubs in the town than banks and churches put together, rivalled only by charity shops in numbers. As a kid, I’d sometimes sit in pubs with my parents after days out with their pipe band. I enjoyed the heady mixture of chatter and laughter. My mum had always disliked them. ‘Fools pretending to be wise, propping up the bar and spending money that should be saved for their kids,’ she’d often say in the car on the way home. ‘How can they drink so much when they’re not thirsty? That’s what I don’t understand.’

Dad would fiddle with the air intake of the car and drum his fingers on the wheel. Occasionally he would murmur as though reciting something for me to hear in years to come, ‘First the man has a drink, then the drink has a drink, then the drink has the man.’

The car would fall silent. I’d see my mum look at him from side-on. The sound of window wipers squeaking on the glass. The entire family learned to hate visits to the pub and what followed after them. Eventually, Dad’s years of abstinence began.

I stopped walking when I reached the cemetery. It was huge, creepy, and backed onto the park in the centre of the town. The sun was going down, bleeding red and raw behind skeletal trees. My breath misted across the tombstone view.

What did my hometown say about me? It said nothing. I couldn’t be who I was here. ‘I’ve got to leave,’ I said, ‘before it chokes me.’ Is that what the psychic meant about waking up?

‘So, who is it who’s here for me?’ I asked, not sure I wanted to hear the answer.

Sue stubbed her cigarette out and said, ‘There’s an old lady. She said you don’t have to worry about your dad. And you have guides who are here. But you also have a guardian around you who will help you.’

An old lady? I wondered, frowning.

‘What do you mean? Like a ghost?’

I had looked around me, feeling goosebumps run up my spine.

‘She says you’ll remember her when the time is right.’ She cocked her head as though listening. ‘Your spirit guides help you see the path your soul desires. They speak to you through synchronicities and signs that only you will recognise.’ She had leaned forward again, ‘And your spirit guardian protects you,’ she paused, then continued, ‘and helps you face your shadow.’

‘My shadow. What does that do?’

She took a deep breath and paused before breathing out as though unsure whether to answer.

‘Let’s just say shadow tries to guide you on a different path.’

‘How do I…what does my guardian look like?’

‘You’ll know when you are ready to see.’

‘See?’

‘I can help you.’ Then perhaps sensing my reflex suspicion she was trying to get more money from me, she shrugged and said, ‘Regardless. When you are ready, it will happen. You will awaken.’

In the fading light, I sat down on the graveyard wall and looked over the park. In the distance a whistle blew time on a football match. I could barely see the pitch in the twilight, just dark figures running to catch the ball before the dying light took it.

In the sky, a flock of birds scattered across the orange traces of sunset. My mind wasn’t on ‘waking up’ to anything. I had a mortgage to pay and a house to take care of. Sarah was struggling with her new job. We had rats between the walls. We heard them at night scratching at the boards behind our bed but had no way of getting to them nor getting them out. They gnawed in the dark, the sound competing with my thoughts as I lay staring at the ceiling. They’d stop when the first bird sang. Sarah would turn over in her sleep.

I knew I didn’t want to be here. But what did I want? I looked around and realised I was alone with only the gravestones for company. The world became a blur.

Get through to summer, I told myself. It’s nearly spring. Just two months to go.

My phone vibrated in my pocket. I knew it was Amy, wanting to know what the psychic had said, or Sarah, wondering if I was okay, but when I took out my phone, I didn’t read the new messages. Instead, I found the text from an old school friend who lived in London. Another escapee.

‘Tickets booked! We’re going to the Secret Garden Party. Pack the glitter!’ I smiled. I’d never heard of the festival, but it sounded pretty colourful to me in that grey place.

I remembered the stained-glass shadow on the snow outside the church, the witch’s knowing look and her words to me. I pulled out the invitation she had given me after the session and wondered about all we had discussed.

I didn’t know about awakening. But as I stood in the cemetery, the world disappearing around me, I understood I had become a ghost inside my own life. A translucent person, not entirely there, yet still haunting the steps of other people’s lives, ever drawn to cold places, lurking about gravestones.

Beyond the park, I called into a shop to get some milk. A man with a short, sharp haircut was having one-way banter with the shopkeeper. He turned and walked past me, glared to see if I would match his stare. His shoulder forcefully brushed mine, knocking me back.

‘Get your stupid hair cut,’ he said as he pulled the door open.

My hair was curly and fell just below my ears, barely touching the shoulder, but too long, too foreign to the status quo of this town.

I felt my anger stir but smiled as though he was a friend making a joke. Because the alternative is to say, ‘You grow yours.’ And then he would come back and push me, and I’d push him back, and then there would be a brawl in the paper shop.

That’s just life in Lowton, middle of the country, middle of the middle, and if you stray even a little bit outside of that, you need to be pulled down and put in your place. It was fitting that the town had a cemetery at its centre. Stay positive, I told myself. That’s what they say.

I stopped walking when I reached the top of my street. The traffic hummed behind me. Fumes rose like spirits to merge with the rising fog. At the opposite end of the street was the river. I took a step and began to walk. Our house was only nineteen doors away.

I could appear positive. I had been doing such a great job of that, I had convinced people that I was okay. Even on the day of my father’s funeral, I had made the family laugh. Ran around the garden with my nephew and niece. I had worn mirrored sunglasses during the service so that it had been easy to hold myself together and make others feel good. I’d held my cousin and aunts as they’d sobbed on my shoulders. Not one person at the funeral had said they were sorry for my loss. They had stood side on and said things like, ‘terrible shame.’ As though discussing the weather or some distant national misfortune. As though the grief belonged to someone else, and I was just a distant relative or spectator, looking through glass.

As I passed number seventeen, my phone rang. I answered it without thought. A mate’s voice said, ‘We’re going out tonight. I’ll pick you up at eight.’

I didn’t answer. My mind swirled, trying to think of excuses because the truth wouldn’t do.

I was sinking, and the last thing I needed was to drink myself deeper.

I reached our house. The lights were on, and smoke poured from the chimney pot. I could hear the TV on inside and the sound of an audience laughing. Sarah appeared at the window. She smiled, her face lighting up as she saw me. She waved.

I smiled and waved back. For a moment, I forgot the past year. Forgot who I was. It was just Sarah and me, and we were smiling. As our eyes met, I remembered.

‘Sure, mate,’ I said into the phone pressed against my ear. ‘See you then.’

I had not taken those mirrored glasses off. They were welded to my face. Like a mask, useful at first, but it was making it harder to see and breathe.

No one asked me how I was now. I was angry about that. But perhaps they didn’t need to ask. Perhaps it was clear that I wasn’t doing well. I was living a lie. I was becoming a ghost.

3

PILLS FOR THE DARK PLACES

ENGLAND | JANUARY 2010

The pub was packed. The noise and cheer spilled onto the street with the flashing lights from the window. I stood with my friend near the doorway. He held a lighter to my face. The flame caught and warmed my chin as I pulled on the cigarette. I took the smoke deep and blew out shallow.

‘What do you mean?’ he said.

‘I’m scared.’ It was hard to speak it out loud, but I could no longer keep it in. Besides, we’d had a few drinks. ‘I don’t…want to feel like this anymore. I’m getting worse.’

‘What did the doctor say?’

‘He’s put me on anti-depressants.’ I felt weak saying it. Ashamed. 

He swore.

‘Are you going to take them?’

‘I don’t know.’ I took another drag and looked down the dark street. Parked cars lined the road, pools of light from street-lamps guarded the distance.

‘They’re the same ones he gave my dad,’ I said quietly.

‘The same doctor?’

‘Yeah.’

He swore again and looked away, then back to me with anger on his face. ‘Did you tell him about your old man?’

The music from the nightclub further down the street was a dull throb. Crowds of partygoers were making their way towards the sound, drawn like moths to bright light. I followed them with my eyes, avoiding his.

I shook my head.

A year before my dad had sat with the same doctor, heard the same words. ‘Sorry, but our counsellor is on long-term sick leave. What I can do is prescribe a course of anti-depressants.’

It had felt odd to sit in the same chair that he had. I had rubbed the cushion with the tips of my fingers. Here I was, as he had been, asking for help, and receiving the same answer. All I could think was, he was here, but now he’s not.

‘How long will I be on them?’ I’d asked the doctor. My voice sounded like it came from inside a deep hole. Some part of my mind wanted to tell the doctor that those same pills hadn’t saved my dad. To tell him they wouldn’t save me. But that part was buried deep in the place I kept my anger, where it was safe and couldn’t hurt anyone.

‘I don’t think I should take this, mate,’ I said to him, holding out my hand. The pill was yellow, a different kind of tablet, a small sun in the palm of my hand. ‘I want it, but I don’t think I’ll make it back up on Monday.’

I raised my eyebrows and forced a smile. ‘After all, doesn’t everyone struggle with the Monday after?’

He shrugged. ‘It’s all the same, isn’t it, that shit the doctor’s giving you? At least we have good music to go with ours.’

He held out his hand to take it back, but before he could an impulse took hold me of me. 

‘True,’ I said, shrugging, and just like that, the pill went into my mouth, and I swallowed.

We laughed nervously, a sound filled with all the words we didn’t know how to say.

‘Come on, let’s go inside,’ he said. He put his arm around my shoulders, hugging me roughly.

I flicked the cigarette away and followed him into the pub.

The nightclub thumped with a deep base that shook my bones. I was surrounded by silhouettes of friends, arms waving, fists pumping to the beat, our fingers expressing the harmonic intricacies we felt in every nerve. I was smiling so broad my face ached. Strobe lights flashed for half a minute. A moment of eternity where bodies vanished and reappeared in flashing crescendos. Horns blared, and we cheered. Someone threw their arm around my shoulders.

‘I love you, man!’ Mannnnnnnnnnnnnnnn. The sound reverberated through my skull.

Lights flashed, people passed, squeezing through the crowd, sharing moments of beats and smiles.

I see a striped form overlaying dresses and partygoers. Between the length of shadow and stripes, I see primordial eyes. I frown, and then it’s gone. I look around me. I am surrounded by friends dancing to the euphoric beats. I feel happy here, free. Hours pass by.

There are moments where the beat seems to drop away. Slows until it fades into breath. The spinning lights converge into one blinding sun circle of brightness. My arms cease waving, and my legs and feet just step in place, walking towards that sun. I’m walking free of my body, marching on