Page 59 of The Friend Request

Chapter Twenty-Six

The silence is the first thing I have to learn to live with.

I’m used to the quiet. I work from home. I spend hours on my own in my office with my laptop and a cup of tea going cold on the desk, and I’ve always liked the stillness of an empty house. But this isn’t stillness. This is the total, pressing absence of sound that happens when you’re the only living person for miles. It sits against the walls of the cottage like something physical, like water filling a room from the floor up.

On the first morning, I wake at six and lie in bed listening for traffic, voices, a plane, anything that connects me to the world I came from. All I get is wind. Wind, the occasional bleat of a sheep somewhere on the hill behind the house, and a rhythmic creak from the gate in the yard that I keep meaning to wedge shut with a stone but haven’t yet. The bedroom ceiling is low and white and cracked along one corner, and the curtains are too thin to block the dawn, so the light comes in grey and early, and there’s nothing to do but get up.

I eat toast standing at the kitchen window, looking out at the fields, which slope away towards a line of hills that are half hidden by cloud. The grass is wet. Everything is wet – the yard, the gate, the stone wall that borders the track. It’s beautiful, in a way that I can see objectively but can’t feel, like looking at a painting through glass.

So I walk.

It’s the only thing that helps. I pull on my coat and my boots, lock the cottage door, and I walk, up the hill behind the house and along the ridge and down into the next valley and back again, and I do it every day, sometimes twice, because as long as my legs are moving, my lungs are working, and there’s ground under my feet, I can keep the thoughts at a manageable volume. They’re still there – Ross, Alex, the messages, Olivia, the look on Alex’s face when he said I can’t be near you right now – but out here they’re competing with the wind, the sheep, and the ache in my calves, and most of the time the wind wins.

The landscape is enormous. I’m not used to it. In Keynsham you can see from one end of a street to the other and that’s your horizon – houses, hedges, the school gate, the top of the church. Here, the land just keeps going, rolling away in green and brown and grey until it meets the sky. On a clear day, I can see hills I can’t even name stacked up on the horizon like a row of sleeping animals. It should be calming. Sometimes it is. But there’s too much space, and my eyes don’t know where to settle. And every now and then, I catch myself scanning the landscape the way I used to scan the street from behind my curtains – looking for a figure, a shape, something that shouldn’t be there.

I check my phone constantly. It’s pathetic, and I know it’s pathetic, and I do it anyway. Every ten minutes, I pull it from my coat pocket and hold it up like some kind of offering to the sky, watching the signal bar flicker between one and nothing. Sometimes, on the highest point of the ridge, I get a single bar that lasts long enough to load a message. Mostly, I don’t. Alex said he’d call, and he hasn’t. I don’t know whether that means he’s still thinking, or he’s done thinking, and has already been to see a solicitor about something I can’t bring myself to name.

I take photos instead. The views, mostly – the valley from the ridge at different times of day, the way the light changes on the hills when the cloud breaks, the sheep standing in a line along the wall as if they’re posing for a portrait. I photograph the wildflowers along the path, the crumbling stone stile I climb over every morning, and the robin that sits on the gatepost when I come back in the afternoons. I take a picture of the cottage from the hill above, small, white, and neat against the green.

They’re for Olivia, and every time I frame a shot, I hear her voice in my head – That’s actually quite nice, Mum or Why have you taken fourteen pictures of the same hill or Is that a sheep or a rock? – and the missing hits so hard it takes the breath out of me. Tears burn my eyes every time I think about her sitting at the table in Alex’s parents’ kitchen, eating the biscuits his mum always keeps in the blue tin, doing her homework with the telly on in the background. I wonder if she’s asking why I’m not there, and what Alex has told her, and whether she believed it.

Three days in, and my daughter feels further away than the hills on the horizon.

On the fourth afternoon, I take a different route. I follow the ridge further than usual, past the stone stile and through a gate I haven’t used before. The path drops down the other side of the hill into a shallow valley with a stream running through it. The grass is longer here, thick and tussocky, and I have to watch my footing on the slope, which is steeper than it looked from the top. I’m concentrating on where I’m putting my boots when someone calls out from somewhere below me.

‘Afternoon!’

I glance up. A man is coming up the path from the stream, leaning on a walking stick, with a flat cap pulled low over white hair and a waxed jacket that’s seen better decades. He’s older – late sixties, maybe seventy – and he’s moving slowly but comfortably, as if the hill is something he does every day without thinking about it.

‘Hello,’ I say, and my voice sounds rusty. I haven’t spoken to another person since Alex left.

‘Bit damp for a walk,’ he says, stopping a few feet below me on the path. His face is weathered and brown and deeply lined, and his eyes are sharp and pale blue. He’s smiling the unhurried smile of someone who has nowhere particular to be. ‘You’re at Ty Gwyn, are you?’

I blink. ‘Sorry?’

‘The cottage. White walls, blue door, up past the ridge.’ He points back the way I came with his stick. ‘Only place to be walking from in this direction, unless you’ve come a very long way.’

‘Yes,’ I say. ‘That’s where I’m staying.’

‘Thought so. Jeff,’ he says and holds out his hand. His grip is dry and firm and rough, a hand that’s spent fifty years opening gates and shifting bales and doing whatever it is that hands do on a Welsh hill farm. ‘I’m just over there.’ He turns and points down the valley with his stick, and I follow the line of it to a farmhouse I hadn’t noticed – grey stone, tucked into the fold of the hill, with a chimney trailing a thin line of smoke that the wind snatches sideways.

‘It looks lovely,’ I say, because I can’t think of anything else and because it does – solid and warm and rooted in the landscape as if it grew there.

‘It does the job,’ Jeff says. ‘Been there forty years, give or take. My wife and I moved in when we were your age, more or less. She passed three years ago, so it’s just me and the dog now. And the sheep, though they’re not much for conversation.’

He says it simply, without fishing for sympathy, and I like him for it. There’s something grounding about the way he talks – practical, warm without being sentimental. He reminds me of my dad’s older brother, my Uncle Pete, who used to fix things around the house and talk about the weather as if it were the most important subject in the world. He could make you feel calmer just by being in the same room.

‘I’m Kim,’ I say. ‘I’m just here for a few days. On my own, getting some fresh air.’

He nods as if this is entirely normal, as if women turn up alone at remote Welsh cottages all the time and it doesn’t require further comment. ‘Well, it’s the right place for it. Nowhere quieter, I can promise you that.’

We stand there, gazing out over the valley. The wind pushes at us, and the cloud breaks long enough to let a shaft of pale sunlight slide across the hillside. The farmhouse glows briefly gold before the cloud closes again.

‘Not far if you ever get turned around,’ Jeff says, nodding towards his place. ‘It’s easily done up here – all the valleys look the same once the mist comes in, especially if you’re not used to the ground. But if you can find the stream, follow it down and you’ll hit my yard. I’m usually in the kitchen or the top field. Kettle’s always on.’

‘Thank you,’ I say. ‘That’s kind.’

‘One thing, though.’ He adjusts his cap and assesses me with those pale eyes. There’s nothing ominous in it – no edge, no warning – just the plain concern of a man who’s lived in this landscape long enough to know what it can do. ‘Get yourself back before the light goes. The paths are fine in the day, but after dark it’s a different business. No street lights out here, no markers. The ground dips where you don’t expect it, and if it’s cloudy, you can’t see your hand in front of your face. I’ve found more than one lost walker standing in a field at midnight, completely bewildered.’