Two Steps Forward

by Graeme Simsion

  Marianne left from her own home, as the pilgrims did in the ninth century, and carries a picture of her three friends with her. She holds the photo in every shot that is taken of her and posts it on Facebook for them. She can manage only five to eight miles each day. Along the way, she meets Moses, a Kenyan man of sixty, who grew up in a Catholic orphanage and, after caring for other orphans his whole life, is on a pilgrimage to thank God for his fortunes. He started in Rome and walks ten to sixteen miles a day, but stays two nights at each place, because he wishes to spend a full day seeing and making sense of everywhere he goes, visiting each church and religious monument. Every second night, he waits for Marianne. When Marianne calls her daughter, he has Google ready to help with the answers.

  Neither had anyone to share their experiences and thoughts with, because other pilgrims move on. Until they found each other.

  I was working harder than I had in years. I had a deal with the Chronicle and my contact there, Stephanie, wrote chatty emails with critiques. She didn’t care much about specific routes. It was all about the people. She loved the Martin cartoon—and Martin—but I managed to convince her that an entire series about him would not do justice to the diversity of the Camino. I told her that he had his own story and was blogging it; she could mention that at the end of the article if people were interested in following him.

  All right, but can we have some Americans? Not counting the group I’d met at St Jean Pied de Port, that would be Ed Walker and me.

  I was keeping up the pace to ensure that I got into Santiago in time for my flight. And Oviedo. Martin’s argument for taking the Camino Primitivo made sense. The coastal route might have been pretty in the ninth century, but the highway now covered the original trail, and a lot of the beach had fallen victim to property developers.

  At a push, I could make Oviedo on April 28, and the thought of seeing the Brazilians filled me with warmth. Truth was, I wanted to see Martin too—a lot. I just wanted to be sure, before I did, that I was ready. I had woken one night thinking of something he had said to me: I wished you’d stayed in St Jean Pied de Port and let me listen. The time hadn’t been right then, but now I felt as much in need of a friend as a lover.

  Thanks to Martin’s loan, I had solved my immediate financial issues, including paying for the ticket change. I hadn’t wanted to take his money, but I figured that someone who could afford to stay at hotels and eat at three-star restaurants wouldn’t miss it—and I would repay the debt as soon as the Chronicle came through.

  I had something to do—a kind of job—and I was looking forward to meeting with the San Francisco team to see if they had further opportunities. I wondered if I should move there. I’d always preferred the Bay Area to LA, but somehow it seemed too big a decision. My friends were in LA, even if neither of my daughters were now. Maybe I should move closer to them? I felt more adrift at the prospect of moving home to the States than I did on the Camino, spending each night at a different hostel.

  I was eating better. Vegetarian was not too hard once I learned to avoid the traps: salada mixta contained tuna; menestra—an otherwise wonderful vegetable stew—had jamon, and so did the bocadillo vegetal. Ham is apparently not meat in Spain. My one indulgence was a glass of rosé after my work was done for the day.

  Camille emailed me to say I couldn’t be happy without love: a Spanish man, perhaps? They were reputedly good lovers, though she could not offer personal experience. She seemed to have forgiven me for sending her halfway from Cluny to St Jean Pied de Port.

  Walking around Castro Urdiales in the evening, I was blown away by the silhouette of the church on the harbour edge, the Madonna and Child illuminated through a large square window. I had an urge to tell Martin about it, how I saw the work of the artist without the filter of negativity toward the church. His words about Keith and his power to choose stayed in my mind, and I felt that with each step my grief diminished, or at least the self-blaming part did. And I acknowledged that the anger the crucifixes along the path had stirred had been as much about Keith as my mother.

  I would never know for sure what was in Keith’s head on that last ride, but I no longer felt I had been at the wheel. Though I missed Keith, when I woke up at night it was Martin I thought of. I wasn’t ready for a relationship yet—but I was ready to think about one.

  The stage to Laredo was harder than it should have been. The night before, there were only three others in the dormitory: all of them apparently had several zippered items of clothing that needed to be stored, retrieved and repacked in zip-lock bags at crazy hours.

  Walking on the highway was always exhausting, with the fumes and noise and need to stay alert. There was a hole in the sole of one of my sneakers and the stitching was coming apart in both. It rained all day; even regular boots would have gotten soaked.

  After roaming Laredo in the rain, I found a pensione. My routine was to start early enough to get the walking done before 1.30 p.m., when everything except the restaurants closed. After lunch and a siesta, I would work on cartoon ideas until 11 p.m. The drawings came easily; it was the stories that took time. But today, I fell asleep as soon as I arrived.

  I missed lunch—even the crazy-late Spanish lunch—but the kitchen was happy to make me a tortilla and salad at 6 p.m. Trouble was, with the change to my routine I forgot to check my socks, drying on the radiator. The room was warm but the heat was coming from somewhere else. I ended up having to wear wet socks the next day.

  The route from Laredo ran beside the sea all the way, and much of it was actually on the beach. I had enjoyed the coastal aspects of the walk, but I’d lived a long time in California. It wasn’t as breathtaking as it might have been if I’d come from Arizona. And sand is difficult to walk on. My sneakers let it in, and my socks slipped. Five miles in I pulled off my shoes and socks and, sure enough, I had blisters. Not just one, but at least two on each little toe, and one developing on the sole of my left foot.

  Monsieur Chevalier had said I would have blisters and perhaps I had become overconfident after escaping them for nine weeks. It wasn’t like I’d never gotten blisters before. It happened every time I bought a new pair of sandals at home.

  The cure for new sandals is to walk in them for small periods of time, days apart—not an option right now. Then there were my experiences of other people’s blisters on the Camino. Tough young men hobbling at night, changing to sandals and strapping their huge leather boots to their packs, sometimes abandoning them or even the walk altogether. I had quietly felt superior, taking some pleasure in my age not being a disadvantage in this contest. Now the laugh was on me. I stopped at Nojo after only ten miles.

  It was worse than I thought. There was a huge blister on my big toe too, a result of changing gait to protect the little toe. By the time I had burst them all and left threads hanging to drain them, my feet were like pincushions.

  One thing I knew was that I could easily walk to Santiago in time for my plane. God must be laughing. With Martin’s money, I could of course catch a bus or train to Santiago and sit it out there, working on my cartoons, waiting for the 13th.

  No. Damn. Way.

  The next day my feet were no better. One blister looked like it could be infected. I needed to get myself somewhere with a pharmacy and maybe a doctor. The next large town was Santander, twenty-two kilometres away. Plus a boat ride, something my fellow peregrinos assured me was an accepted tradition. Like it mattered. Of course it did.

  My progress was slow. Painfully slow. I longed for the blister pack Nicole had given me on the second day of my Camino. I had thought I was strong—I only had to look at the new contours of my calves to remind me of the mountains I had traversed—yet here I was about to be crippled, my walk brought to an end by a few bits of red weeping skin. Anywhere else on the body wouldn’t have been an issue. But my feet were critical. If they couldn’t heal while I walked, I would have to catch a bus. I didn’t have the time to sit and wait.

  Why did that feel like a cop-out? It wasn
’t as if I had promised myself: Santiago or die. I wasn’t doing it for anyone else. And I hadn’t made a deal with the universe: walk to Santiago and I will have given back all I took from Keith.

  ‘The Camino walks you,’ Richard had said in Tramayes. ‘Walking the Camino will help you find what you’ve lost,’ Monsieur Chevalier had assured me. Would taking a bus instead of arriving on foot detract from the thousand miles I had already walked? For reasons I did not understand, the answer remained an unequivocal yes. Not walking, for me, would be cheating—peace of mind was within my grasp, and I would never get it, never feel I deserved it, if I didn’t walk.

  When I arrived at the port for the ferry across to Santander, it was late—too late for even a Spanish doctor, unless I went to the hospital. But I hit the pharmacy and bought enough antiseptic and blister Band-Aids to start my own store.

  On the boat, sitting and watching the town stretched out across from me, hilltop churches and piers giving way to working docks, I started tending to the worst of the wounds. My fellow passengers were probably horrified, or more likely disgusted, but I was too beat to care. One patted my shoulder and muttered Buen Camino.

  After settling into a hostel and finishing with my feet, I washed my clothes and went out for a glass of rosé. I’d gotten used to the trash on the floors of Spanish bars—wrappers and stuff—a contrast to the bathrooms, which were always clean. Someone had told me the mess was to make work for the cleaners who might otherwise add to the country’s unemployment problem.

  ‘Why am I walking?’ I asked myself, but no answer came. I got another glass of rosé.

  ‘There is nothing to prove,’ the devil said. It wasn’t as if it would make any difference to anyone back home whether I walked one thousand miles or twelve hundred. Either amount was too hard to imagine unless you’d done it, and they’d be in awe—or think I was crazy—either way. The bartender waved the bottle in front of me and I nodded.

  Santiago was no big deal. The head of St James? More like a gullible shepherd boy and a smart operator in the ninth century seeing a business opportunity—though even he couldn’t have imagined it would still be paying dividends a thousand years later. And if it was the head of Christ’s disciple, transported by stone boat to Spain—so what? Cute bit of history, but I could get a bus and see it too. Why did I feel so compelled? Magic or stubbornness? Or something else?

  ‘What had I learned?’ Monsieur Chevalier had asked. I had said I could walk. Now I couldn’t, so maybe this was the lesson—not to be proud; not to take anything for granted, as I had with Keith. But was it also a lesson to still have faith enough in myself to be independent? It was a confused message, which may have had something to do with the third glass of rosé.

  I slept badly, though the dorm was quiet. My dreams were full of my pèlerin cartoon characters, Monsieur Chevalier assuring me I would find what I was looking for, the Brazilians laughing and Martin waiting for me to show up in Oviedo. In the morning, I still didn’t have an answer. But my feet were not as red and my socks were dry. I got up, used some of Martin’s money to buy proper shoes and painted my feet with iodine. Then I did what I did every day. One day at a time.

  I walked.

  56

  MARTIN

  I kept walking, appreciating the mix of urban and rural. Between Portugalete and Castro Urdiales, there was a spectacular walking and cycling track, about twenty kilometres over motorways and through countryside. The best of both worlds and perfect for the cart.

  That evening, I had an email from the American photographer we’d met in the Estaing church: Thanks again for the history lesson and hope you like the photo. I did: the surprise was that at our feet, directly in front of us, the colours of the stones formed a distinct heart—clearly a deliberate design. I hadn’t noticed it at the time; Zoe the artist surely must have.

  I crossed the railway bridge between Boo de Piélagos and Mogro illegally on foot, rather than taking the train as recommended by the guidebook—or the long deviation prescribed by the purists. I was a bit down, concerned that Sarah had gone quiet again, and pessimistic about whether Zoe would be in Oviedo.

  I had also begun to think about what I would do after the trade fair, now just a fortnight away. In all the time I had been walking, this basic question had not been on my mental agenda. Questions of accommodation, food and finding the next signpost had kept me occupied. I had literally been living a day-to-day existence. I wondered if Maarten the Dutchman was making any progress with the same question.

  There was something else I had to face. Even after ten weeks of walking with the cart, learning how to place my feet, sticks and body weight to best effect, I would rather have been carrying a backpack. The cart was remarkably manoeuvrable for a wheeled vehicle, but it could not compete with two feet. Lifting it over stiles, which tended to present themselves one after another, was an absolute pain in the neck and all parts below.

  The Chinese manufacturer had sent a list of detailed questions that could only mean they were serious, but no sum was mentioned. Nothing more from the Germans or the French. Somewhere in a British Army facility, my cart’s twin was being put through tests that were doubtless more strenuous than anything I had inflicted on mine.

  Jonathan, the Chinese and the Germans would deliver the verdict, but there was a danger that my market would be limited to people like Maarten who could not carry a backpack at all, rather than those who had a choice.

  In Mogro, I had booked a room in a family hotel a few minutes’ walk from a bar. The chef would have not been out of place in San Sebastián. I was regaled with a menu degustation featuring foie gras, wild mushrooms, octopus and veal, which I washed down first with a glass of rosé and then, after seeing the array of wine in the rack on the wall, most of a fifteen-year-old Rioja, leaving just a glass for my host.

  Remembering the night with Dead Walker, I refused a digestif of Spanish brandy, but it came anyway, gratis. I went back to my hotel room and composed a reflective blog entry about the people you meet on the Camino. Such as Zoe.

  Reading it the next morning with a double espresso in my hand and a couple of aspirin in my stomach, I was only mildly embarrassed. It could have been worse.

  It turned out to have been bad enough. As I packed my phone, I saw there was a message from 3 a.m., an hour earlier in the UK. From Julia: Call me. Urgent.

  I went to my room and rang her. It was the first conversation we had had for nine months, if you could call it a conversation. Sarah had taken an overdose: Julia’s sleeping pills washed down with vodka. Yes, my sleeping pills—what’s that supposed to imply? Sarah was okay, physically. She had had her stomach pumped and spent the night in hospital. There was a suggestion that the unpleasant remedy was more about delivering a lesson than about life and death.

  Of course it was a cry for help, you fucking self-absorbed prick. Does she need you? Does she fucking need you? What do you fucking think? No, she doesn’t want to talk to you. No, don’t ever come back. Go and live in fucking America.

  I texted Sarah: I’m coming home.

  After a fortnight without communication, the response was instant: Please don’t.

  I want to see you.

  I’m OK now. Won’t be if I have to deal with u and Mum. And then, knowing me all too well, that I’d trust a professional over the judgment of a seventeen-year-old: I talked to the psych this morning. She was good. I want to talk to you but not till I’ve worked out what I want to say. OK?

  Are you going to keep seeing her?

  For a while. OK?

  OK. I love you, Sarah.

  xxx

  I walked the twenty-one kilometres to Santillana del Mar on autopilot. Rain drizzled all day, and the path followed agricultural pipes painted with the ugly yellow arrows. All I was thinking about was how to get back to England, where I could take the Germans’ offer and use the money to rent a flat in London, and get Sarah away from the woman who had left potentially lethal sleeping tablets for a troubled teenag
er to find.

  I dumped my gear at a painfully quaint hotel and found a sidrería—a cider house. Despite having drunk too much the previous night, I ordered a drink. Where was Dead Walker when I needed him? What would he have said? What would Zoe say? That I should look within? Christ.

  But as I watched the bartenders doing irritating tricks with the cider for the tourists, I became conscious of how much my anger was clouding everything. Zoe was right. There were things I hadn’t dealt with.

  57

  ZOE

  My blisters were getting better and there were no new ones. The Camino gave me more seascapes and paths of every kind, including some coast-hugging freeways, with startling blue water on one side and huge trucks bearing down on the other—which was too often the side I had to walk on. At home, I would have sent angry letters to city hall. But here I was in the hands of St James. Or in my own unsteady and uncertain ones. I watched the roads carefully. Fate may have been occasionally causing a casualty, but I was not going to be one of them.

  In Santillana del Mar, the cobblestone streets were as old as the Inquisition torture machines in the museum, but the town was in other ways modern, bustling with tourists, and I was grateful that I did not feel the presence of past souls whose blood had soaked the earth I was now walking on. I sketched a laughing waiter as he splashed still cider into my glass from a great height to make bubbles.

  Loving the cartoons, Stephanie wrote. The old lady made me cry; you captured something saintly in her. Hope her daughter doesn’t read it! Did you find religion on the Camino?

  I didn’t answer her query: too complicated. I let my cartoons say it for me. ‘Marianne’, who I’d met at a hostel in Moissac, had radiated something quite magical.

  There was also an email from the American photographer—with the photo he’d taken on the steps of the church in Estaing the day of the rainstorm. I sat in the cybercafé staring at it, not wanting to leave it behind. It wasn’t just that Martin and I looked totally like a couple. It was my expression. I couldn’t remember the last time I had seen myself looking so happy.