Body

A lone hiker on a remote mountain is drawn out of his shell after a rather unusual meeting . . . 

It is early morning. A young man hikes up an empty mountain alone. By the time he reaches the plateau top, a cloud of mist has gathered and begun to suffuse the air with a tedious drizzle. The weather forecast was good, he remembers; this can only be a temporary setback. There is a building nearby – a relic of the long-dead slate quarrying industry. It is in a ruinous state, but some of the roof has survived. He decides to hold up there until conditions clear.

As he enters, he sees something he has never seen before, yet instantly he knows it is the face of a corpse. It is peering at him through the narrow gap between two wooden planks. The young man stands rigid, bewitched by this nightmarish intruder into the comfort and familiarity of a day which had begun all his own. Eventually, he shakes his body out of its cold stupor, turns and steps outside.

The moor is silent. But inside the young man’s head is the sound and sensation of a thousand strip lights buzzing. He makes a brief effort to make his way back down the mountain. But in his daze, he cannot find his bearings. The path he had risen by was steep and poorly marked. Much of the plateau edge in that direction consisted of precipitous cliff faces, looming high over fan-shaped masses of scree. He has little option but to wait until the mist clears.

He sits on a boulder near the entrance to the building, and watches as the mist alternately thickens and dissipates, as rock outcrops appear as dark silhouettes, then fade into the white. But he cannot put the corpse out of his mind: he does not want to look at it, but neither does he want to let it out of his sight.

Eventually, he forces himself to return inside to confront the thing. He even removes a piece of slate to get a better view of its face. There is no visible decay on its ashen-grey skin. Its lips are invisible, its jaw fallen to reveal yellow teeth. Its eyelids are open, its black eyes staring at him - or rather slightly beyond him. Its head bears some staining, its hair and features suggest it is (or was) male. Its trunk, legs and arms are hidden, covered by stones, rotted wooden slats and scraps of canvas. However, he notices one of the creature’s boots protruding beneath the debris: he gives it a gentle kick. It feels hard, like wood.

The young man steps back and, under the direction of some self-protecting instinct, starts to talk to the corpse. “I’m sorry to see you here.  . . . I have to say, you don’t look good.  . . . Still, I’m sure you lived a good life. That’s the point, isn’t it? It doesn’t really matter what you look like now. If you had a good life . . .  You have my word, I’ll tell the police, so you get properly buried and everything.”

Already the young man feels better, more in control. “I know you can’t talk back to me. But you may as well enjoy our conversation; it’ll probably be your last. I don’t think the police will talk to you, or the pathologists. And your family, or whoever identifies you, they won’t want to look at you a moment longer than they have to.  . . . This is it, mate: your last chance to be somebody.”

The young man almost chokes with disgust as a small black form appears from nowhere and flies into the mouth of his companion. “Ugh!  . . . Did you feel that? Dust to dust. You’re going back to nature. We’ll all be joining you soon enough.  . . . This is all there is, right? On second thoughts, don’t tell me.  . . . I call myself an atheist, but when I think of God, my blood boils. Can you hate someone that doesn’t exist? Can you hate someone for not existing? Oh yes, I have a relationship with God - and it’s personal.”

The young man’s body freezes as he hears a scampering sound to his left. But when he looks round, he sees nothing. “Fuck! I thought I’d calmed down, us chatting like this. God, I hate fear, fucking hate it.  . . . It’s my insides, they always feel so twisted up and tense. No, it's not death, it's fear of living. Scared of what might happen and what might not happen. Scared of pain, scared of being crippled. Scared of being an office nobody the rest of my life, but too scared to jack it all in and start again. Scared of routine, and scared of anything different. Scared of being ignored and forgotten. Scared of standing out or being watched. Too scared to take risks and live with rejection. And Hazel, yes I'm scared of Hazel! Of losing her, of keeping her. Scared of her changing, scared of me changing.  . . . She was supposed to be coming up with me this weekend . . . oh Hazel, God how I wish you were here with me now . . .”

The young man notices a shaft of brightness enter behind him. He steps outside to see the mist dissolving, the craggy landscape emerging into a washed pin-sharp clarity. He feels the dry breeze telling him he is now free to go. But he returns inside to finish what he is saying. “Yes, I wonder if fear is the only thing people see in me sometimes. So you have that going for you at least: no more fear.  . . . People are always saying: ‘Go on, live a little.’ As if . . . well, was that what you were thinking, right at the end? All the things you should have done? Or was it just fear?”

The corpse does not answer. "Well, I'll remember you for the rest of my life, if that's any consolation," says the young man as he turns to leave. He feels lonely as he retraces his steps back down the path. Whether it was the corpse's silence or his confessions to it, who can say, but he needs to sit down and hear some kind words. He cheers himself up by imagining the evening to come. He's arranged to call Hazel from the phone box in the village of course, and the woman who runs his B & B will want to know all about his adventures too. He will have to spend time with the police before then. He is looking forward to it.

And now there comes into his vision another hiker, walking toward him having probably taken the same route up. Dark green waterproofs, large backpack. The young man goes back to meet the stranger. At last, someone to talk to - really talk to.

The tradition on these mountains is to greet everyone you come across. But the dark green man shows no inclination even to raise his eyebrows. As he gets nearer, his face reveals itself to be unusual for a hiker: an ingrained scowl indifferent to the landscape around him. The young man sees all this, but the other’s life draws him in. “Excuse me, do you have a mobile?” He explains the situation and offers to show the man the corpse.

The dark green man slides the pack off his back and drops it to the ground. Its unseen contents jangle loudly. He unzips the top and thrusts his hand inside: “You want a mobile?” he says. His voice is cold. Our young man is very disappointed. “Where did you say the body was, again?”

The young man turns to point out the ruin which had sheltered him. As he does so, he has a momentary revelation that leads him to half-expect the blow to his head which terminates his consciousness forever. More blows follow, but he doesn’t feel them. In the end, what does he feel? Only he knows that for sure, in the little time he has to know anything. But that time is so short, I think we can say he feels no regret, is spared even fear, and that what is with him instead is a sort of knowledge, a sort of indifference, a sort of abandonment.