Two Years in Paradise

## Chapter 1: The Trail ##

The rain stops around noon, which in Peter's experience means it will start again within the hour. He pushes back his hood anyway and lets the wind dry his face. The path runs along the side of the valley, a thin brown line through the heather, and below him the river is loud and brown with three days of water.

Day four. His knees have stopped complaining and started to cooperate. His shoulders have not. He hitches the rucksack higher and keeps going, one boot after the other, the way he does every year in the one week he keeps for himself. No email, no meetings, no flat with half of his ex-girlfriend's things still in boxes in the spare room. Just the hills, the weather, and the quiet in his head that comes on the third day and stays as long as he keeps walking.

He's watching the clouds stack up over the far ridge, guessing how long the dry spell will last, when a speck of red snags at the edge of his vision. He slows and squints.

Someone is down there, well off the trail: a figure on a flat rock beside a stream, with a stretch of hillside between them too steep to walk upright. Peter hasn't seen another walker all day, and nobody ends up down there on purpose.

Red jacket, hood up, a small pack that looks too new. Whoever it is keeps turning on the spot with a phone held up at arm's length, as if a signal might drop out of the sky, then lowers it, stares at it, shakes it, and holds it up again. A strand of dark wavy hair has worked loose. A woman, probably.

Not my business, Peter thinks, and stops anyway.

"You all right down there?"

She turns. Even from the path he can see the relief land on her face, and then embarrassment right behind it.

"I'm not sure," she calls. "Is this the path?"

"No. The path's up here."

"Ah." She looks at the slope between them, wet grass and loose stones, and then at her phone again, as if it might settle the argument. "My phone died. It had the map."

"Hang on."

He picks his way down to her sideways, digging in his heels. Up close she's younger than he guessed, mid-twenties, with a round, wide-cheeked face, tanned the deep even way you only get from living somewhere with real sun, cheeks pink from the wind. Her eyes are so dark he can't see where the pupil ends. A tiny gold flower sits in the side of her nose and catches what little light there is. Her jacket is soaked through at the shoulders. Rain gear that was sold as rain gear and isn't.

"Where were you headed?"

She names the lodge at the head of the valley, the one he's aiming for himself, and points confidently in exactly the wrong direction.

"That way's back where you came from," he says. "The lodge is on. Eight miles, give or take."

"Eight." She repeats it like a diagnosis. "I came down when the cloud came in. I thought I was following the path. Then I was following sheep."

"Easy done. Sheep make better paths than the council." He swings the rucksack off, unzips the top pocket, and digs out the power bank, a heavy brick with a cable wrapped around it. "Here. It'll take a while, but you'll get something."

She looks at it, then at him. "You don't need it?"

"I've got a paper map." He shows it, the corner already soft and torn from four days of folding. "Old-fashioned. Never runs out."

She plugs in, and the phone shows a little red sliver of a battery and nothing else. She holds both in her hands like a bird she's been told not to drop.

"I'm Jessica."

"Peter."

"Thank you, Peter." She has an accent he can't place at all. Not American, not Australian, not anything European he knows. Soft vowels, careful consonants, like English is a room she lives in but didn't build. "I would have walked until dark, I think. Following sheep."

"You'd have ended up in a field with a very confused farmer." He nods up the slope. "I'm going that way anyway. Walk with me till your phone's back, if you like. Then you can be rid of me."

She smiles for the first time. It changes her whole face, like a light coming on in a house.

"Okay," she says.

---

The path climbs out of the valley floor in long loops, and they walk it single file at first, Peter in front, listening to her breathing behind him. She's fit, he notices. Doesn't stop, doesn't complain. Just walks, and every so often says something to his back.

"Is it always like this? The weather?"

"This is a good day."

"No."

"Honestly. Yesterday it rained sideways. I watched it go past me horizontally for four hours."

She laughs, a short surprised sound. "At home rain falls down. Straight down, warm, and then it stops and the sun comes out and everything steams."

"Where's home?"

A pause, long enough that he glances back. She's looking at her boots.

"An island," she says. "You won't have heard of it."

"Try me."

"Paradise Island."

He laughs. He can't help it. Then he sees her face and stops.

"Sorry. That's really what it's called?"

"In English, yes. Everyone laughs." She doesn't seem hurt. More tired of it, the way he gets tired of explaining that Manchester has nice bits. "The old name means something like the garden. Someone translated it badly a long time ago and it stuck."

"And is it? Paradise?"

She thinks about it longer than the question deserves.

"It's very warm," she says. "And very orderly."

He waits for more, but that's all he gets. Fair enough. He doesn't feel like explaining the spare room either.

By two the path levels out on a shoulder of the hill, and the sun actually breaks through, a thin pale light that turns the wet grass silver and puts a shine on every rock. There's a stream crossing ahead, flat stones set into the water, and beside it a boulder the size of a car with a dry side out of the wind.

"Lunch," Peter says. "Non-negotiable."

They sit with their backs to the rock. It holds a little warmth, or he imagines it does. He unpacks what's left: a block of cheddar sweating in its paper, a packet of oatcakes mostly whole, half a bar of chocolate, two apples bruised from four days in the bag. He breaks the cheese with his hands and holds out half.

She takes it, and then unzips her own pack and brings out a paper bag, folded over and over at the top. Inside are dark, wrinkled pieces of something, curled at the edges like old leather.

"Fruit," she says. "From home. My mother made me take it. She thinks Scotland has no food."

"Your mother's not wrong." He takes a piece. It's sticky and chewy, sweet at first, then sour enough to make his jaw ache. "That's good. What is it?"

"There's no word in English. It grows behind every house. Children steal it from the neighbors." She chews and looks out over the valley. "I wanted to see mountains. We don't have any. The highest point on the island is a hill with a water tower on it."

"So you came here. On your own."

"My friend was supposed to come. She got pregnant." Jessica says it lightly, as if her friend had broken an ankle. "So, on my own."

"Brave."

"Stupid. You found me following sheep."

"Brave and a bit stupid. Best kind."

She looks at him sideways and doesn't answer, but the corner of her mouth moves.

They eat. The water talks over the stones in front of them. A bird he doesn't know calls somewhere up the slope, a thin rising whistle, over and over. Her shoulder is a few inches from his. He's aware of it the way you're aware of a stove that's on.

"How old are you, Peter?"

"Thirty-five. Why, do I look old?"

"No." She studies him openly, without any embarrassment at all, like she has every right to. His face, his hands, the wedding-ring-less fingers around the oatcake. "And how many children?"

It's such an odd way to put it. Not do you have kids. How many.

"None."

Surprise crosses her face, and then something he can't read, something careful. She looks away at the water.

"None," she repeats.

"Is that bad?"

"No. Not bad." She picks at the cheese paper. "At home it would be unusual. That's all."

He waits again. Again, nothing more comes. Very orderly, he thinks.

She checks the phone. It's at fourteen percent. She leaves it plugged in, and he doesn't ask for the power bank back.

---

Jessica walks behind him in the afternoon because the path is narrow, and because it lets her look at him without being caught.

He walks like he knows where every stone is. Broad back under a green jacket blotched with old rain, a stride that doesn't change uphill or down. He hums sometimes, she's sure he doesn't know he does it. He's tall, lean in a way the jacket doesn't hide. When he turns to point something out, a waterfall, a deer far off on the opposite slope standing like a cut-out against the grey, she gets his eyes, a pale clear blue like nothing at home, with lines at the corners. His hair is the color of dry straw and sticks up wherever the hood let go of it. A few days of stubble on his jaw. She wants, absurdly, to touch it.

Thirty-five, and none.

At home a man his age would have his two by now, and be done. She thinks of the men at the market with their certificates in their wallets. Of her friends' husbands with one child already, how carefully they live after that, every night in bed with their wives a little game of Russian roulette. Of her cousin's husband, who got twins on the first try and was at the clinic before the babies came home from the hospital. Her cousin still hasn't forgiven him.

Peter has none. Nothing spent, no red days to watch. He walks like a man who has never been told to be careful.

Her phone buzzes in her pocket, then again, the signal back up here on the ridge. She takes it out. Her mother: What's the weather like? Then: Is it cold? Forty-one percent. Enough for the map. Enough to find the lodge on her own, and to thank him, and to walk a little faster, and to let him become a nice story she tells her friend.

The sky over the next ridge has gone purple-grey, like a bruise. The wind turns cold and smells of water.

"That'll be on us in twenty minutes," Peter says, stopping and squinting at it. He unfolds the map against his knee, and the wind tries to take it. "We won't make the lodge before it hits. There's a shelter about a mile on. Stone hut, four walls and a roof, nothing fancy. We can sit it out there."

"We?"

He looks up, and she watches him realize what he's said.

"If you want. You've got your phone now. You could push on."

The first drops hit her hood, fat and cold. Up ahead, through the rain, she can just see it: a low grey shape against the hillside, a black doorway, a thread of path leading to it.

She puts the phone back in her pocket without looking at the screen.

"No signal," she says. "The map won't load."