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The Road to Mynydd Troed

by RACHEL SYKES

I.

The road followed round to a gap in the skyline until, between that, we drove. A brief intersection in the hills above, the gap formed before us as a passage to the unknown, the gateway to a once-mentioned country. At a distance, it was a promise, or a whisper. For now it seemed like a point at which, if we could only reach it, all could see and which might let all, in turn, be seen.

Rising up out of the valley, the pressure around the car shifted, as our ears gently popped. We rose higher and higher. Though the air was ornate with jots of whisky, though under our fingers the whisky bottle felt like clay, the longer we moved, the more I could only think: that is the skyline meeting the earth at a gap in the horizon. And I could only focus on that point.

II.

Looking out over the hills and down through the valley, it became clearer that we had forgotten this land. These were the hills of our childhood, which we had climbed upon and hidden in, which we had drunk under and stared up at. And perhaps, more terrifying still, the lines of the ground we had once known, the valley, its hills, curves which we had all once traced with our fingertips, seemed already part of our history. Memories of them mingled in our minds, still tinged with familiarity, still touching on shared acquaintances. But now the hills were only subtle faces, like the friend of a friend who you ignored out of some mysterious guilt. It was a place that had meant so much, but which was now breaking from us.

Today the road was strange and wild, though we had driven it many times. For years we had visited a friend somewhere beyond the gap that now focussed our attention. These trips had started when we were sixteen years old, and continued until this day when, aged twenty-three, we were driving to Mynydd Troed without her. Without this girl, whom we loved so very much, the effortlessness of the road was forgotten. The undimpled highway we could see in our memory was now, on this particular day, a steady struggle along to the tiny church at the end of our friend’s lane. And with that, and without her, each motion of the car was ten times wished back.

III.

We travelled, witless with whisky and at a gradual incline, always aiming just above and ever inching upwards. Slowly, we crawled the sides of the valley, rolling around the landscape like a coin in a busker’s cup. With each sip we craved wildness, but with each mile we feared it more.

But then, skimming the valley for the last time, we left the deepest part of the dell and came out onto another plain. Soon there would be nothing but below. I began to wish. If we could only be lifted and placed higher, upon Mynydd Troed itself which still towered to our left, would we be able to brush hands with the sky. Something could lift us out of the air that at this second threatened to drown us, and provide us with new lungs.

I wrote in my diary, without comment or context, in the middle of a blank page: “We might close our eyes without fear, we might smell the wind, and we might know that the death of our friend was only the partnership of thorny hillsides and brackened dales.”

The gap in the skyline posed a promise that we might soon reach the hills’ horizon and there be newly restored.

IV.

The light of the early afternoon had been spread too finely. It freckled and sighed, finally moving behind a cloud and leaving us in an ocean of grey.

By now, we had surpassed the horizon at which we had stared. We weren’t talking to each other; the air could only pass out of our mouths and pop in worthless bubbles. The hills were no longer spires before us, their tops were not summits upon which we could climb. The light began to dance on the road in front of us, refracted by a million droplets of water. The sheep that we passed gazed blankly through us, like fish who knew nothing more of humans than the terror of hooks and the myth of shipwrecks.

The road smelt of whisky.

Snow had been promised since the first cough of ignition, and finally it came. Down fell a blanket so tightly wrapped that our vision whitened with the ground.

We sang along with the radio.

“Was it?” someone said.

“Yes, it was.”

“We thought it might’ve been.”

It occurred to us that when we had once seen this road from the top of Mynydd Troed. We remembered that now. Perhaps that day we had climbed it together, set out at 11 a.m., and come back when hungry. It had taken some time, stopping to roll back on ourselves, through the heather to the foot of the climb, but even then we had made good time.

We started to disremember. Perhaps there had been someone else, two of us, plus her, and that exchange student we had once known.

“No, that wasn’t with me.”

“Nor with me either.”

“Perhaps it didn’t happen at all.”

And yet, we agreed, we all remembered it very well.

Turning, again, looking down through the valley, it became clear that we had forgotten this land.

Rachel Sykes is the senior contributor to This Recording. She is a writer living in Nottingham. You can find an archive of her writing on This Recording here. She tumbls here.

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