Adrift

By Nick Paul

The air was cool and fresh. Clouds scuttled across the sky and parted now and again to give glimpses of the infinite blackness beyond. Jack embraced the night, swallowing lungfuls of air, his troubles already slipping away. 

At first he used the torch but he quickly discovered his eyes were already adjusting to the dark. Somewhere above him was half a moon, hidden by cloud, but giving the sky a little brightness and silhouetting the dark forms of the trees that lined the lane. 

His plan was to travel on foot rather than public transport so that he wouldn’t be spotted and  traced by his parents or the authorities. And besides, he enjoyed the therapeutic process of walking  – putting one foot in front of the other and seeing where it took you. His way out of Norfolk – his  ‘escape route’ – would be to avoid as many roads as he could by taking a long-distance footpath called the Icknield Way. He wasn’t too sure where it led to but he knew it ran south-west, roughly in  the direction of London, which is where he’d decided he would head for.  

The start of the path was four or five miles away. His quickest way there was to go cross country, up past the cricket pitch and on across the fields where he’d walked and picnicked with Alishba five weeks previously. 

He approached the cricket club. He’d been there less than nine hours before and he felt as  though he were returning to the scene of a crime. The ground had been full of players and spectators  but now there was hardly a sound – only the eerie clink, clink, clink of the flagpole rope tapping in the breeze. He clenched his teeth and hurried by. 

The adjacent field had been harvested for its bounty of wheat and was deeply rutted from ploughing, and he stumbled on its ridges and troughs. With the aid of the torch he veered to the edge of the field to avoid the furrows – but he kept his torch use to a minimum for he had no idea how old the batteries were and how long they might last.  

Somewhere behind him a tawny owl hooted for its mate but otherwise there was little sound. He passed through a belt of pine trees, his nose alert to the resinous, astringent smell. He’d sheltered here with Alishba from the blazing sun five weeks previously and he was near the spot  where they’d stopped to eat their picnic. Then the sky had been a crisp blue with a skylark singing  high above. Now there was only blackness and the screech of an owl. He thought of Ali lying by his  side – her arms around him, his face buried in the warm crook of her neck and his hand gliding across her bare breasts and belly. 

Half a mile ahead, a dark strip of trees marked the edge of Thetford forest. There was no howling of wolves – only the distant barking of one muntjac deer calling to another. In the distance, far-off beams of light played across the night sky. They marked the presence of a lone car making its way along the main road from Thetford to Diss.  

He veered off in their direction. The field he was crossing had been harvested, but was still to  be ploughed, and this made his going a lot easier, and he came out onto a track that led down to the road.  

He followed the main road for a mile or so, hurrying past a dark cottage, worried that he might wake sleeping dogs. Every now and then, distant headlights flickered across the sky and  warned him of approaching cars and he ducked behind a hedge or dived into the roadside ditch to avoid being spotted. At a junction, he took a narrow lane that ran down into a valley. The river at the bottom marked the Norfolk-Suffolk border.  

After another mile he arrived at a small, empty car park and a signpost announcing the start point for the Icknield Way. It was 4.30am. He’d been walking for over an hour and a half. He perched on a fallen tree, cracked open a can of coke and demolished a banana and cereal bar before pressing on. Behind him, a lighter band of sky hinted at where the sun would rise in an hour or so. It was the onset of twilight – that odd time of day between darkness and daylight, when the sun is still  below the horizon but throwing some of its light up into the atmosphere. The silence of the impending dawn was broken only by the occasional cooing of a pigeon or the distant rumble of a lorry.  

The path felt soft and sandy underfoot compared to the hard tarmac he’d left behind. This part  of north Suffolk and south Norfolk was known as The Brecks or Breckland. It was an odd open landscape with its own peculiar climate: cold in winter and baking hot in the summer. Two hundred years earlier it had been the nearest thing Britain had to a desert with shifting sand dunes and  sandstorms – but landowners and farmers had reclaimed the land with intensive agriculture and the planting of forests of conifers.  

Lines or belts of Scots pine trees, were silhouetted black and gnarled against the horizon. They’d been planted as windbreaks to prevent the topsoil from blowing away, but a century on, they’d become overgrown and twisted and contorted into odd shapes. 

As night slipped away and dawn seeped in, his spirits lifted and his pace quickened now he could see clearly all around. A doe deer and her fawn stood motionless on the track 50 metres ahead  and studied him before sprinting off across the field – and a bat, up late and feasting, flitted around in the early morning light, snaffling up small insects before it took itself off to bed. Bracken grew along the edges of the track and he caught the fresh smell of its tangy, wax-crayon-like scent in his  nostrils and it spurred him onwards. 

Just after 6.30am the footpath crossed the main road that ran from Thetford to Bury St Edmunds. It was already busy with traffic. He pulled up his collar and dashed across. The Icknield Way sign pointed across bare open fields and in the distance he could make out a thick and dark  band of trees marking the edge of another forest. For two hours he trudged along an avenue that cut its way between the trees, not meeting a  soul. His mind drifted. He checked his watch. By now, his mother would have discovered him  missing and he squirmed with guilt knowing the anguish he’d be putting her through. He pictured her swollen and bloodied lip and her wet, staring eyes from yesterday. 

Barking, angry dogs brought him back to the present. But it was only an early morning dog walker out with their charge, and he was relieved when the barking receded into the distance and was even happier to be clear of the forest and its air of menace.  

He passed through the village of Icklingham – grey, flinty houses and deserted streets. Where was everyone? And where had the footpath gone to? The rattle of a pushchair alerted him to the presence of a woman in an overcoat with, bizarrely, packs of beer in the pushchair. They looked at each other suspiciously but she pointed him in the right direction.  

The sky was heavy with unbroken, grey cloud and empty of bird life. More gnarled pine trees lined his route – twisted and battered by the wind – their broken limbs littering the field like piles of  white and splintered dinosaur bones in the aftermath of an apocalypse. From above came the growing hum of a helicopter rotor, and feeling like a fugitive on the run, he ducked into a small copse of trees and waited until it passed. 

A footbridge took him across a river and the path emerged onto a large area of open heathland where only heather and prickly gorse grew in the sour, sandy earth.  

He strode on. He’d been walking for seven hours and had covered 23 miles but he felt no pain  in his limbs, only a weariness. His walk had become a trudge. One foot followed the other, his head hung low, staring blankly at the wide sandy track beneath him. His approach disturbed a cluster of bluebottles who were gathered on a small tarry deposit of hedgehog excrement, and he swatted away the flies as they rose up towards his face. His mind was empty and for a long while he thought about very little and was conscious of only his own plodding footsteps and the murmur of the wind through the trees. The flat, open landscape was devoid of activity – fields of beet, maize, stubble or  bare earth, their boundaries and the horizon marked by the ever present lines of dark, twisted pine trees that he felt were watching his every move and whispering from one to the other like a huddle of cloaked, accusatory elders in a medieval court. 

‘Adrift’ is taken from Nick’s unpublished novel ‘When all I Wanted was to be Good’, about 16- year-old Norfolk lad Jack, who makes the decision to run away from home after a tragic incident.  The extract is the moment where he leaves his home in the middle of the night and sets foot on his  walk from South Norfolk to London following the route of the Icknield Way (and later the Grand  Union canal). It describes the strange landscape of Breckland which 200 years ago was the nearest thing that Britain had to a desert. 

Nick lives and works in Lewes, East Sussex and is also the author of ‘Pictures’, a multi-generational  family drama set in London. The novel features Aisha, a 20-year-old design student who takes up an  internship with a celebrated portrait photographer, but then stumbles across a set of unsettling  pictures that lead her on a frantic journey to uncover the truth about her lover, her family and  herself. Nick can be contacted at gilburtandpaul@gmail.com or via his instagram account nick_paul_gilburtandpaul