Circular

No matter where in the world you’ve been, which ever country or wonder of the world you’ve seen; there’s no doubt in my mind that the English landscape, in summer, or any time of the year, is the most beautiful thing you’ll ever see. I should know. I’ve walked most of it. Rolling downs, high vales and peaks, moors, meadows and river valleys. I’ve done the lot. In the last couple of years I reckon I’ve walked, must be, nearly a thousand miles. Serious, I am. Couldn’t think of anything better than that moment of anticipation, map in hand, when you look down that first stretch of footpath, contemplating how it meanders out of view, wondering how it will develop, what sights you will see. It’s an adventure, a challenge and a voyage of discovery. It makes you feel like an explorer, a frontiersman, a pathfinder seeking new routes of delight.

Of course, the best routes are always circular. It’s where your car’s parked, or the pub you’ve singled out is waiting for you. It’s home. I mean, you want to get back to where you started. You want to return - to show you did it, could do it. There’s nothing better than sitting there with the map, imagining which footpath is best, which route will afford the best views, the easiest passage. A to B is good, but to return to A, that’s the best thing.

That said, I haven’t always walked. I took it up a couple of years ago after a…bit of a personal trauma. My wife died – there, I’ve said it. Two years to come to terms with it, but it never gets any easier. We were close - as close as man and wife can get, anyway – and we’d been married for seventeen years. I still remember the day – well, I still remember everything – she died, the expression on her face, the slipping away…

The doctor said I should find a hobby, y’know, to help me get through it. Something that would take my mind off what happened. “Drinking? “ I said. “Not really,” said the doctor, “not a realistic solution under the circumstances.” So we talked about some pastimes I might be able to do. To be honest I never got out much anyway but he said that walking might be an option. He said it helped him to think about his patients and the suffering they were going through, and it might help me. I never looked back.

He also said I should get some pictures, because then I could look at the pictures and that would remind me of where I’d been and so I could cheer myself up when I wasn’t walking. So that’s what I did.

It’s the summer snaps that I like the best. It was in the summer that I met Karen, my wife. She was working on the perfume counter at Debenhams. I went in to get a scent for my mother, nothing fancy. She asked me what I wanted but I couldn’t think of a name, so she said something in French and I said, “oh, you’ve got a nice voice” or something like that. She blushed and said thank you, and then she asked what I did for a living, which I thought was a bit up front. I’d just started work in the Labour Exchange. “Ooh,” she said, “civil service, you must be posh. I bet you earn a lot.” And then she asked me what time I got off. I remember thinking how funny that was since I was supposed to ask her when she got off, or that’s how they did it in the pictures anyway. We met up later that night at a local pub. Her eyes sparkled with light, and I bought her a necklace. She turned around and I put it on for her. When she turned back to face me she said it was the best present she ever had. She said she had a good neck for necklaces. What a funny thing to say, I thought. We hit it off there and then. I think we were courting proper within a week of that. She already had a flat. In fact, she’d already lived with a man, too, but I never told mother. Of course she knows now, but at the time it was still a secret.

The first time I met her mum and dad was a bit of a disaster. I’d said we’d ride up to their place on my motorbike, but she’d said, no, it’s a car or nothing else; she didn’t want to be seen on a bike in her neighbourhood. So I had to sell the bike for a car. Not much of a car, a little Fiat 127 it was. On the way the engine started to pink a bit, then it conked out altogether. “Get out, Stuart, “she said, “you’d better fix this right now or you’ll never see me again.” So out I get, muttering under my breath, but, seeing as how it was a second hand car and it was a beautiful day, I didn’t mind too much. We were in a lay-by, in the country, and it was high summer, beautiful. We could see her parents’ house in the distance, but it must have been three miles away. In fact, I looked it up in the OS map last week, and it was actually three-and-a-half. So I tinker away for five minutes and it looks like the fuel pump. I hadn’t checked it, like a fool. It needed cleaning, and I didn’t have the right tools. So I go up to her side and told her we’d have to get out and walk, come back for the car in her old man’s car later on. Karen gets out the car and stands in front of me. And she punched me. Right underneath my left eye. I fell back onto the ground, with pain and shock, and she stands over me and says, “Don’t you ever, ever, so much as look at me again.” And then she starts walking.

I’m not ashamed to admit it but I started to cry, really sob. Here I am, with a clapped-out car, miles from anywhere and I’ve just been punched in the face by my girlfriend. She was almost out of sight by the time I picked myself up. I thought for a minute and decided I had to follow her. Maybe she’d forgive me. Maybe we’d make up. But I had nowhere to go and at least her old man would have some tools or a phone to ring the garage.

I looked at the road ahead, looked at where it went, how it meandered out of sight. And I started walking.

She said she’d never look at me again. But she did, for a long time after that, too. But she won’t anymore.


When you’re walking, there’s lots of things you need. Lots of equipment. The doctor said I should get pictures of the things I need to take with me. I’m quite the professional now. Quite the expert. I’m always being asked for advice about this and that. Sometimes I don’t think it’s right. But if I’ve got an answer, I’ll tell them. The doctor says is good that I can help others who’ve been through what I have.

Karen always had the right answers. Even though I’d been to grammar school and got into the civil service, she always had an answer for everything. I remember once we were moving – it was our first house. The car incident was a year or two down the line and there hadn’t been any repetition of the nastiness - well, not as bad as before, anyway. We’d got all our furniture in and we were putting everything in place. She knew the removal men – by name, if I remember – and got on with them famously. Of course, I ended up moving most of it myself. I’d bought some things from my parent’s house and she, of course, had all the stuff from her flat. I had a lamp, one of those art deco-looking things and I thought it would be nice on the side table in the lounge. “What’s that doing there, Stuart?” Karen said, pointing at the lamp. “It’s a table lamp dear, do you like it?” I replied. She said no – well, she said an obscenity that I don’t care to repeat actually. “I said, “it’s a table lamp, it looks stylish in here.” She looked at me quizzically and said, “Oh, ye of little brains” (that, I think, was the first time she ever called me that name) and picked up the lamp and took it upstairs. I followed her up and said, “what do you mean?” She’d put it at the side of our bed and said, “It’s a reading lamp, it should be next to the bed and it’s hideous anyway.” I searched for an answer but I couldn’t think of one. To tell you the truth, I was a bit angry. I followed her back downstairs and said, “I do have brains you know.” She replied, “Yes, and if they were dynamite you wouldn’t have enough to blow your hat off.” And then she went outside and started talking to the removal men. In fact, that was the last I saw of her that day.

She came back about 11 o’clock. By then, I’d moved almost everything into place. I must admit, I’d been a bit naughty and put the lamp back downstairs. It was switched on and lit up the room a treat. She’d been drinking, I could tell, and she walked in and the first thing she claps eyes on is this lamp. She starts shouting at me and I just took it. Then, all of sudden, she rushes over to the lamp still switched on and picks it up. She grabs the bulb which, as you might imagine, is very hot, and crushes it in her hand. The room goes black and the next thing I remember is a struggle, and then waking up in the dark with my mouth bleeding. I got up, went to the bathroom and looked at the mirror. There was a cut on the side of my temple. I’d either fallen and knocked myself out, or something else. But then I noticed that the blood in my mouth hadn’t come from the cut. It was from tiny shards of broken glass. She’d pushed the crushed bulb into my mouth.

People deal with things in different ways. And people deal with other people in different ways too. Most people would say that Karen wasn’t good at either. But there were moments of kindness. There had to be some really, didn’t there?

She would have quite liked the walking, I think. Trouble is, she never wanted to go back to where she came from. Never wanted to return. Always wanted to get to somewhere else, a straight line from A to B. But you’ve got to go back at some point. I’m a circular man, you see. She wanted to go somewhere else. I took her somewhere else.


I like the summer days best of all but summer has to turn to autumn then winter, just so you can have spring and summer again. I like that. I like the fact that, though the world dies away, it’s reborn again every March time. Walking in the autumn can be a sad time. There’s red and yellow leaves everywhere - they look pretty, but they’re nearly dead – and the water starts to flow slower and slower. It gets darker, too. The sun is getting lower but, ironically, the earth gets nearer the sun during the winter. Life’s full of funny things like that.

Karen had many affairs during our marriage. I turned a blind eye to all of them, just for an easy life. If I criticised her, she turned on me, and it was never really worth it. You’d think with all the abuse…no, I didn’t mean that word, let’s call it…sadness…with all the sadness, it’s a wonder I didn’t have lots of time off work. Most of the time, the bruises and burns didn’t show. If they did, I just put a plaster over them and said I’d cut myself shaving. They must have thought I was the worst shaver in the world! See, if I had stayed off, she’d be there, saying “Oi! Ye of Little Brains, get off my sofa!” or something like that. She hadn’t called me Stuart for years – every foul name under the sun, yes. Also, she’d have her men around, especially in the afternoon. She finished at two, so she’d get home as soon as possible and start…entertaining. Occasionally, I’d be there when the two of them came back. She’d introduce me as her disabled brother or something (I was in a wheelchair once). Then she’d be upstairs with them. I could hear everything. I think she was like she was with me with them. Perhaps they liked it that way. I didn’t. They’d always leave smiling. They smiled at me sometimes. If they only knew who I was. Or who I am now.

The doctor says that I was very brave being with her. I must have suffered a lot but that now that was over. I said, “Well yes, I am glad it’s over.” But the leaving of it was not how I would have wanted it to be. I did love her, I told the doctor. He thought I meant like the men who visited her. I said no, I wasn’t like those men, but I must have frightened the doctor when I said no because he didn’t see me for a while after that. Everything’s fine now, but there’s always someone else in the room when we talk. The doctor wanted it to be like that. Anyway, I’ve got my walking now so I don’t have to be with anyone else anymore.

Sometimes when you walk, you see things you shouldn’t. Sometimes there’s courting couples – nowadays they even have a word for watching it. When I was a boy they called it being a peeping tom, but I don’t mean it like that. No, I mean you see something that isn’t meant to be there. Nature is very cruel and I’ve seen plenty of dead things. Rabbits, foxes – birds are the worst. The way their feathers blow away and the bones stick out. Their eyes go out, a light has gone and they lay there. Sometimes I see things in the shapes of growing things. I see branches twisted out of shape, hedges buckled by the wind, twigs snapped, roots gouged out and wrenched apart…I see all these things when I walk. It’s how Karen died, after all.

You see she’d been with a man. I knew him; he was from my work. That’s why I’m here. I came home, I’d had a bad day. I’d sent a memo round to everyone and there was a spelling mistake in it and everyone was onto me and I was angry. I came home and, as I got through the door, I could hear them upstairs. What with the day at work and everything and a pint on the way home I’d had about enough. So I stood at the bottom of the stairs. I saw the steps going up and the way they bent out of sight and I could hear them at it and the noise and the shouting out and the way she walked - the taste of glass - and I ran up the stairs to the bedroom.

Their bodies did not make sense, doctor, the way they were all over the place, I couldn’t see where one started and the other one ended and I picked up one of his shoes and hit him on the back of the head – he called out “You…” then turned around and, maybe it was the look in my eyes or that he knew me we’ll never know but he ran out and I saw her there all covered in sweat and blood and the other and she started to speak. I heard “Oh, you of little…” and she picked up the green lamp from the side of the bed and went to hit me but not this time, doctor, and I pinned her down with all my weight and got her head up and I took the lamp flex and I wound it around her neck again again again until it was taut and I pulled the plug and the lamp apart and the flex dug in and there were the eyes and the colour of blue and the bird’s body buckling and wrenching and the eyes with the lights going out and the tongue and the sun getting lower and lower and me breathing and her breathing and then only me breathing and silence and silence and silence.

She was sat up straight when I let her go, her back against the head rest looking forward. As I uncurled the flex from her neck there were lines of red and purple, I counted five, and they were circles around her neck, like necklaces, all on top of each other. She always had a good neck for necklaces.

I sat with her for a while. Then I did the bit that I’m famous for, just to amuse myself. I said to her, “I want you to stop calling me ‘Ye of Little Brains’, Karen.” Of course, she couldn’t answer, so I moved her jaw for her, like a dummy. “No, Stuart,” she said, “I’ll never, ever say that again.” And she didn’t!


The doctor says that it was a good thing I told them all about what Karen was like. In fact, there were lots of things I didn’t mention, but even I thought they were a bit sick for public consumption. But the bit with the dummy, that was my downfall. So they found me guilty and put me away.

Since I’ve been in here, things have changed for men like me. People think you’re soft if you don’t do something about it, though, of course, not the way I dealt with it. Things like this get hidden away and concealed. Now there’s counsellors and help groups and all sorts. All I had was a lamp flex.

But now I’ve got my walking. Of course, when I get out, I can do some real walking, not the stuff that goes on in my head. This is my cell, you see. Not much walking in here! But the pictures I’ve got, the ones from the internet or the ones that people send me – they help me a lot.

You see, I like the circular walk, the one where you get to go back to the start, the one you return from, when things were new and you couldn’t see what was around the corner. That’s my kind of walk. And every walk I do in here, I get to go back to the start.

I’ve seen the end. I don’t want to go back there again.