It was ten miles from the Executive Home to the turn off. Patrick did not take it. It had been wordlessly established by then that neither of us wanted to stop, only drive and keep going until there was so much distance behind us. I looked out my window at the smattering of houses built with their backs to the road. They thickened into the village, thinned again. Fields to the right. We kept to the A road. It narrowed, became woods on both sides. It slowed through other villages, doglegged, widened and sped up, bypassed a town. Its industrial outskirts became a long section of countryside. Services. Signs for the M6. It said Birmingham, next exit. It stopped being beautiful. On the other side, it was beautiful again. Patrick said how are you going? Good. I’m not hungry, are you? Not really. Do you want music? Do you? Not really.
We passed a sign that said Manchester 40 and we looked at each other and smiled, silently, bulging eyes, like two people in a crowd acknowledging a secret between themselves. Six lanes, a density of cars, drivers on either side became familiar from the slowing and stopping and starting again. They smoked, tapped the wheel. Their passengers looked at their phone, ate and drank and put their feet on the dashboard.
Then, we were past Manchester. Countryside but plain, dotted with factories. Silos. At intervals along the road, a suburban house without a suburb.
I said, ‘How long have we been going for?’
Patrick looked at the time. ‘We left at nine so, six hours. Five and a half?’
Nothing for a long time except the vague sense of the road curving, and starting to climb. He put the window down, maybe salt in the air but no sight of the ocean. Then winding sharply upwards, until You Are Now Entering an Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty.
It was late in the afternoon. Patrick said I might need to stop for a bit soon. In a mile, there was a sign that said Access with a symbol of a bridge and after the next curve in the road, an unpaved layby.
The air was clear and sharp. We stretched and twisted our backs, the same way, in unison. Patrick said one sec, got our jackets, then locked the car. I took his hand and we walked the path that cut through dense wood to a river. It was swift moving but where it curved, in front of us, a pool had formed. It was deep and still and dark green and from the bank we were standing on, a sheer drop of – Patrick said – ‘nine feet, maybe ten’。 We looked down into it.
He said okay but I’ll go first.
We took our clothes off and hung them over a branch. Patrick said, ‘I don’t see why you get the added warmth of a bra.’ I took it off and both of us lingered for another minute on the edge, already shivering.
He said, ‘Aim for the middle’ and leapt out. The noise of him hitting the water was like a crack. I followed while he was still below the surface. The water was so cold that, at the instant of entry, it could not be deciphered beyond shock and pressure, then a sharp pain in the heart muscle, lungs like heavy stones, then burning skin. I opened my eyes, a blur of green and swirling silt. I thought, move your arms but they were rigid, above my head. I felt suspended. Then everything was Patrick’s grip on my forearm, and the rush of being tugged upwards and the great pull of air. And then we were face to face, speechless, breathing too hard. He still had my arm and swept me forwards to the bank.
I was below the surface for only a second but I thought I was already drowning. I did not think I could swim back but I was only ever feet away from the edge. It was just the pain of the water. And then Patrick was helping me back up the bank, and I was standing, wrapped in my jacket, water running down my bare legs, and it had only been a minute.
We ran back to the car, holding our clothes and shoes. It took a long time to get dressed in the front, hot air roaring out of the vents, talking so fast about what we’d just done.
I said, we are the best.
Patrick said, do you feel like chips, so badly?
We drove out and found a pub. It was empty apart from an old couple sitting at a table on the other side of the room and a woman behind the bar polishing glasses. We ate chips and drank beer on a sofa in front of a fire, and I was so warm and so clean.
‘Do you ever think we’re the best, Patrick?’
He said no. ‘But we probably are. No one else would have done that.’
I said I know. ‘Anyone else would have been too scared. We’re the only ones.’
Patrick said, ‘Are you super, super conscious of having no underwear on?’
‘There’s no one here,’ I said. ‘We are the only people in the world.’
28
I READ AN article in a Sunday magazine about a newly classified disorder. The journalist, a sufferer himself, described Boarding School Syndrome as a sort of PTSD/attachment disorder hybrid being silently endured by a mass of British men who had been incarcerated since the age of six, at the will of their own parents. Symptoms, he said, included excessive self-reliance, the inability to ask for help, ‘pride in endurance’， an overactive moral compass and repression of emotions, chiefly negative ones.