The Hike

by Lucy Clarke

Blafjell mountain towers above her, an impassive, brute witness. It saw everything but tells nothing.

The mountains give away none of their secrets. Yet out there, hidden within their granite folds, someone knows exactly how this woman died. And why.

She loved maps. It was the combination of precise organisation married to the promise of adventure.

‘Some locals think that there is … an energy about the place. A sense of something larger than us.’ He spoke only to Maggie. ‘A vibration, if you will.

Homo sapiens had always walked – even before there was language, they’d walked. It was a simple, fundamental need of their species: walk. So why did everyone outsource it: cars, electric bikes, escalators, lifts? She liked reminding her patients of the incredible mechanics of the human foot: twenty-six bones, thirty-three joints, and over a hundred muscles, tendons and ligaments – all working in structural harmony to enable us to walk.

There was something about Joni that always made Maggie feel excited by life.

Joni didn’t play music. She was the music.

She’d forgotten the feeling of a small audience an arm’s length away. No dazzling stage lights or costumes or big screens. Just a girl with a guitar and something to say.

You don’t know how much you love someone until you realise you’re never going to see them again. That you must live in a world where they no longer are. The finality of it, the utter endlessness of grief – it was overwhelming. She couldn’t fix it. Or change it. Or bargain with it. Or control it. It just happened and she was powerless. Grief was so brutal that she didn’t know if she’d survive.

She kept on walking because that was the deal. Put one foot in front of the other and walk. It was that easy. It was that hard.

‘Do you ever look at your life and think: This isn’t the one I’m supposed to be leading?’

‘The things that frustrate you about Joni – her impulsiveness, how she doesn’t give a shit about plans, that she’ll throw herself into any situation – those are also the reasons why you love her.’

You start choosing the parts of someone that you’d change or alter, and you realise those very parts are what also makes you love them.

She could feel the warmth of her body beneath her palms. Somewhere in there was a … foetus. Yes. Foetus. That was the word. Baby was far too emotive. Babies were real, with feelings and needs. A foetus was … scientific. Abstract.

If there had been a road to this beach, if they’d stepped out of a car, their pleasure at reaching this place would have been diminished. Joy was the reward that followed a struggle.

Wasn’t it that joy and struggle were so deeply emmeshed that you couldn’t experience one without the other?

The mountains are brutal. Impervious. They don’t care who is left broken and bloodied. They don’t care for weeping or joy. It is why people lose themselves out here. There’s no judgement. You can be anyone in the wilderness.

‘I could have called you, messaged, sent something for Phoebe. But I didn’t,’ Joni said. ‘There’s something wrong with me. I think about doing something nice – and then I never follow through!’

The wind strengthened the higher they climbed. It moulded jackets to bodies, stole words from mouths, whipped hair across faces.

Loneliness wasn’t the absence of people, she realised. It was the absence of people who understood you.

‘Joni died for us. And I don’t know how I’m meant to feel.’ After a time, Maggie said quietly, ‘There