Clackmannan tower

Corinne Fowler

They were watching and waiting for me back home. Later they told me that Zoe had sat at the attic window twisting long strands of hair and trying to work out what time I'd left. That my mother had sipped black tea without tasting it. And that Jeff insisted I was only taking a walk. But he hid the baby clothes at the back of the airing cupboard and lifted the cot into the attic.

I just wandered. Long strands of hair clung to my neck. I didn't scan the wood for startled deer. Not on that day. I reached the stone bridge and paused to stare into the Black Devon. Then I set out towards Clackmannan tower. I went lurching up the hill towards the barbed wire fence. As I walked, the fingernails of my right hand scraped tufts of wool from the pockets of my sweater. My left hand rasped against the trees' red bark. I saw the tower piercing the ridge ahead.

When I looked back, the trees were steaming like a herd of animals in the open fields. The ground was oozing mud. I stood flicking the bark and dirt from my fingers. The rain was pelting against my scalp, sliding down my cheeks. I put my hands back into the woollen pockets. They were soggy. I took them out again, breathing across the numb skin, stretching out my fingers. At least I'd had the presence of mind to wear my walking boots. I strode uphill towards the tower.

But there was a cold, dead weight curled up inside me. The mud lapped at my boots as I jabbed them into the flabby belly of the hill. The entire slope was liquefying. Marooning me. As I climbed, the view peeped beyond the horizon. When I reached Clackmannan tower, I clung onto the sandstone blocks while the snow-crested hills heaved and fell about me. I craned my neck upwards. There were clouds spilling over the turrets. My hands dropped to my sides, but I knew I had to keep moving. I started walking. Slowly at first, but soon I was running along the bony spine of the ridge, laughing and laughing. Before I knew it, I was chasing myself round and round the tower, my feet skating over the mud.

Coming to an unsteady halt, I blinked at my mud-spattered clothes and flopped onto my back. The whole tower was spinning out of control, the gargoyles leaning and leering, the giant blocks of stone looking as though they were about to tumble. At first I wanted them to crush me. I rolled onto my belly. The rain drummed onto my head. I tasted grit in my mouth but didn't spit it out, just laid my head against the shuddering ground. The landscape was all smeared, the rain-flattened grass seeping into the curve of the hill, the blades of grass plastered against the horizon the way hair clings to the head of a newborn baby. And while I buried my face in the black soil, the rain slowed and the down-turned mouth of a rainbow appeared above the wood.

I picked myself up and stumbled over to the engraved plaque beneath a snarling pair of gargoyles. 'Clackmannan tower', I read, 'passed onto the son of Robert the Bruce.' Everyone in history has had a child, I thought. I watched my breath warming the gathering chill. Soon, surely, there would be space for something else. When I was healthy again. Time for thinking about something else.

I knew I wouldn't get lost on the way back. But I had to hurry. My family would be really worried when they found my unmade bed and the empty house. I was bound to look a sight too; pallid, mud-splattered, hunted. I could clean up in the river or, better still, sneak past them into the bathroom and shout cheerfully from the shower. I turned towards the fading bars of colour arching above the trees. The woods were darkening like a bruise.

The barbed wire caught my thigh as I swung over the fence. When I stooped under some low branches, droplets of rain came rolling down the back of my neck. I pulled the heavy wool sweater around me and groped my way through mud and branches. I leaned against a tree for a moment. The hospital had told me to rest. I felt a little dizzy. And the cut from the barbed wire was stinging. I retraced my steps to the river. Then there was a quick crash and snap of twigs and some muffled thuds against fallen branches. I whipped round. Four red deer flashed through the wood. I stared after them until they faded to specks of blackness.

Ahead the stones of the bridge were glistening in the dark. Half way across the bridge I heard the soft hoot of an owl. I paused to wait for the answering call before leaving the wood. I pulled my wet hair back into a pony tail and headed back to the unworn baby clothes, the hidden cradle. I thought, so this is what it's like to walk in the dark. I'd feared and dreaded it for so long. Nearly everyone dreads it. Once night falls, every tree stump becomes a crouching figure. But now I'd left the wood, the estuary came into view. I could see right across the water's rain-puckered surface to the oil refinery at Grangemouth on the far shore. And its lights were flickering like fireflies in the dark.