Three days walking

"Well, you can walk with us," J. concedes: "But we're going to be walking for three days."

He says: "We're going to be walking for three days." He doesn't say: "We've three days walk ahead of us." For there is nothing ahead but the present, the present drawn out languidly and exhaustingly, the words we are speaking now, as we walk together -- the prospect of these and nothing else, -- except, of course, the same fields, in which young cabbages seem to have been spaced very far apart, and whose isometric lines pull to one side, like a declivity of water, far down in the valley; while the valley itself is three days of speaking; the smoke above it just the cough from an unseasoned apple, and the cars in the road little more than stutters, doors that failed to sit fast when they were closed.

"Well, you can walk with us," J. said. But I was wearing cycling shoes, imagining three days of chalk in the cleats, and the way they would slip to one side as we climbed the empty temple in the abandoned barn, thrown together from hunks of water pipe, with a small cross half spun about, as if it had taken a blow to the cheek. And I knew that J. would outstrip me among the gullies and outstrip me across the fields, and it would be more than myself, and, indeed, everything else that I was dragging onward with me for three days.

Which was why, in a subtle, diffuse way, I contrived to lose myself; and it was finally a relief when, however hard I bounded, I could not find any of them again along the roadside, or at the foot of the field, or their tightly corsetted packs bobbing above the hedgerows, or any sign in the empty temple, with its old genuflections now curled and stiff upon the door; and the room beyond it, when you forced yourself through, seemed to have been balanced on edge, looking down precariously without a lintel into the overrun garden, as though it were only safe for it to stand here with those it trusted completely.