Page 30 of Jenny James Is Not a Disaster
We tell him we do, and he traipses away with a towel and his wash bag. I watch him disappear and decide that he seems to have grown even taller in the last week. Or maybe he’s just standing up straighter. Who knows? Something about him seems different anyway. Maybe it’s the outdoor lifestyle, I think, thenremind myself that we’re not exactly living off the grid. Could it be only yesterday that we left our old life behind? We have traveled for hundreds of miles, crossed from one part of the country to another, and spent two nights in a motorhome. It is surreal how quickly everything has changed.
Even thinking about my old home unsettles me slightly, and I suspect that I haven’t quite finished processing it all. I have jumped from “my house has fallen off a cliff, my life is ruined” to “I am the new Jack Kerouac” with alarming speed, and I would not be surprised if, at some point, I trip myself up.
I’m not even sure how much of this newfound sense of contentment is real and how much of it is simply a coping mechanism. Am I doing all of this just to distract myself, or am I genuinely looking for a change in the way I live my life? Big questions that need to be answered—but not today, I decide, switching off. Not today.
“So, how are you this morning?” I ask Luke, who is finishing his coffee and watching two birds flitter in and out of a nearby tree. They are quite plain apart from brilliant orange patches on their heads.
“Goldcrests,” he says, following my gaze. “And I’m fine, thank you. I... well, I’m sorry I went all silent last night. It’s just a hard thing to talk about, and I haven’t done it for so long and, being truthful, I didn’t want to start crying in front of you. Didn’t want to blow my tough-guy image.”
He is trying to make light of a dark situation. It is an instinct I recognize, one that Charlie called me out for quite recently.
“Tough-guy images are overrated,” I say quickly, “and I’d still want you next to me in a zombie apocalypse. I reckon you’re the kind of guy who could swing an axe while sobbing and pull it all off.”
“Like Brad Pitt?”
“Exactly like that. Luke... please don’t apologize, for anything. Just know that if you want to talk about it—about Katie—then I would love to listen. But if you don’t, if it’s just too hard, then I understand that as well.” He nods and stares at the goldcrests, and then looks back at me. Our eyes meet and he says: “This is going to be quite a journey, isn’t it? And I don’t just mean to the Lake District.”
I know exactly what he does mean, and I share the sensation. I feel a strange combination of liberation and fear right now—the knowledge that things are changing, and not just my work or homelife, but my internal life. It’s as though I am a closed-off flower spreading its petals to the rainfall, to the sun, to the sky, desperate for the nourishment I didn’t even know I’d been missing.
I am starting to have the niggling feeling that I have been hiding from things that could potentially scare or hurt me for a long time now. Things like trust, and close friendships, and even thinking about deep emotions, never mind confronting them. In my defense, I have been busy, but I have also made choices—to focus on the things I could control, and to ignore the ones that made me feel unsteady. Making another choice—to come on this crazy road trip—is having all kinds of unexpected consequences.
“Well,” I say as calmly as I can, “I suppose we can still adapt the same general principles—don’t go too fast, always clearly indicate when you’re going to change lanes, and don’t crash. Especially the last one.”
“Don’t crash,” he says, grinning. “I like it. Maybe I’ll adopt that one as my life motto?”
“It’s possibly a slight improvement on ‘everything’s better with biscuits,’ I’d say. So, is there anything else we need to do before we get on the road?”
“I think we’re pretty solid. You want to start looking at a route while I put the tables and chairs away?”
I nod and we both go about our business—mine being slightly less labor-intensive than his.
Charlie comes back before long, sending Betty into spasms of joy. He falls onto the couch as though he is trying to prove the theory of gravity, and she jumps onto his lap. He kisses her face and scratches her ears and calls her his little princess, and she licks his face in return.
“Dad said he has that book, the one about the stone circles,” Charlie says as Betty rotates three times and thuds into a curled-up ball on his knees.
“Oh, right, brilliant—well, it must be good then, if it’s got your dad’s seal of approval!” I reply, adopting the fake-enthusiastic voice I always hate hearing when I talk to Charlie about his father. He, of course, doesn’t know it’s fake, so that’s all right. I don’t hate Rob, or even really resent him—he wasn’t much older than me when I fell pregnant, only twenty-one. I can’t hold it against him that he freaked out, that he ran—but I do kind of hold it against him that he’s been such a piss-poor parent ever since. He’s almost forty now and he’s never even sent Charlie a Christmas present, never mind contributed to the cost of raising him.
The money side of things isn’t even the part that upsets me, truth be told—we have coped, and there are more important things in the world. It’s the emotional aspect I’ve struggled with—the dipping in and out of Charlie’s life when it suits him, being this fun peripheral figure, always full of stories of adventure and mystery. Truffle-hunting in Croatia, working on a yacht charter in the Bahamas, a season at a bear-spotting resort on Vancouver Island, leading student expeditions in New Zealand—you name it, he’s done it.
He’s traveled far and wide, lived loud and large, and experienced so much of the world—all while I managed to move from one side of England to the other and raise our son. I have no regrets about that, no bitterness—I still think I got the best end of the deal. But I’d be lying if I said it didn’t sometimes hurt listening to Charlie talk about his dad with near hero worship, relaying his stories secondhand, telling me about his exciting adventures at remote mountain camps as I shopped for budget-brand breakfast cereal. I don’t want Rob’s life—but maybe I want Charlie to think about me with the same admiration, the same respect.
All of which, of course, is extremely childish and silly—and because I know that and need to cover it up, I always go over the top in my responses. Please, I tend to say, tell me more—Ilovehearing about your dad’s adventures!
“Apparently he’s famous, the bloke who wrote it. He’s called Julian Cope and he was in a band in the eighties and then he wrote this, and it’s like the bible on British prehistoric sites.”
“Wow. Excellent. I’ll look him up—maybe I’ll know the band...”
“Don’t think so, Mum. Apparently they were a cool post-punk group.”
And there, in that one sentence, is exactly what makes me feel childish and silly about the situation—the assumption that while his dad will, of course, know the cool band in question, I for sure will not. What makes it even worse is the fact that he’s probably right. I’m more Spice Girls than post-punk.
“Okay, right. Anyway. We’re going to set off soon—look up Ennerdale Water and see if there’s anywhere you’d like to go on the way, all right?”
We are soon on the road again, and now even more enthused byThe Modern Antiquarian, Charlie picks out a stone circle that is, roughly speaking, on the way to our zombie-connected beautyspot (words I never anticipated being used together before now). Before that, he announces that he wants to call in at a place called Malham Cove in the Yorkshire Dales National Park.
Some of the winding roads we have to travel down on the way are so narrow they make me wish the motorhome could hold its breath, but eventually we make it without getting stuck, or knocking down any of the pretty drystone walls. A few sheep look at us suspiciously, but I can live with that. I reckon I could take them in a fight.
We park near a small information center and follow the signs to Malham Cove. We walk through a village that is spread along the side of a burbling stream that tumbles over rocks and tree roots, ancient-looking stone bridges crossing from one side to another. We are surrounded by green hills and wide blue sky, and the place feels tiny in comparison—the pubs and shops and the smithy and other signs of human achievement dwarfed by the grandeur of nature.
