The Ribbons Are for Fearlessness
Copyright © 2014 by Catrina Davies
Originally published by Summersdale Publishers Ltd.
First Skyhorse Publishing Edition, 2015.
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available on file.
Cover provided by Summersdale Publishing, Ltd.
Interior illustrations by Kirstan Gorvin
Print ISBN: 978-1-63450-238-2
Ebook ISBN: 978-1-5107-0078-9
Printed in the United States of America
For Naomi and Rosie, and all my other sisters
We have simply cheated ourselves the whole way down the line. We thought of life by analogy—as a journey or a pilgrimage—which had a serious purpose at the end. The thing was to get to that end, success, or whatever it is, or maybe Heaven after you are dead, but we missed the point along the whole way. It was a musical thing, and you were supposed to sing or dance while the music was being played.
—Alan Watts, The Tao of Philosophy
CONTENTS
Journey Maps
Author’s Note
Intro
Part One: Love and Death
Part Two: The Midnight Sun
Part Three: Paths of Freedom
Part Four: The Ribbons Are for Fearlessness
Outro
Acknowledgments
About the Author
AUTHOR’S NOTE
Before we start our journey I’d like to say a few words about truth. It is true that in the summer of 2005 I drove an old yellow van on to a ferry bound for Norway, with a one-way ticket and a cello, intending to busk my way to Nordkapp and see the midnight sun. It is true that someone I had known for most of my life had died the previous year and that is what inspired me to undertake this crazy mission. It is true that I had a broken heart, that I had been in love and had lost. It is true that I survived for a year and traveled alone in my yellow van, through playing my cello on hundreds of streets, from Norway to Portugal. It is true that I met a girl who wrapped me up in light and gave me two ribbons, for fearlessness. I still have them. These are facts. When I first tried to write this book I didn’t understand the relationship between facts and stories. I came up with something as long as Ulysses and not half as readable, where the truth was lost down endless cul-de-sacs of confusion and boredom, just as it is in life. So I tried again. I realized that the relationship between facts and truth in a story is not always clear-cut. Stories have their own internal logic, by means of which the truth emerges, and to find this truth the facts have to be sculpted and whittled down like a sculptor whittles a piece of stone, in order to expose the form hidden within. So I got very clear about the truth of my journey, the truth that I had experienced out there on the road, and then I allowed the needs of the story to take over. I fashioned single characters out of a cast of half a dozen. Important encounters were transplanted from one place to another. Names were changed. The conclusion was imported from the future. In my opinion this poetic use of the facts is not only justifiable but necessary, as it serves to make the truth shine more brightly.
INTRO
Since I got back and told the story of what happened, everyone keeps asking the same question; if I had known in advance how hard it was going to be, how many mountains I would have to climb, how many lonely roads I would have to drive, how many hours of music I would have to summon up from a part of myself I didn’t even know existed, would I still have gone?
And perhaps I wouldn’t.
It seemed daunting enough as it was. Busking my way to the midnight sun and back. With a cello. Which I had never played on the street. Or anywhere else, for that matter, apart from my bedroom. But I thought the whole thing would be over in a couple of months. I’d do it because I had to, for Andrew’s sake, and then I’d carry on with my old life again. And nothing much would have changed, apart from Andrew, of course, and the fact that Jack would see I wasn’t as pathetic as he thought I was and come back.
But that’s not what happened. Everything changed. Because I met Hanna.
I tried to tell them about Hanna the day I returned, when we were finally all back at Broadsands, the backpackers’ hostel near Land’s End, in Cornwall, where I had lived and worked for several years before my great adventure. It was just like the old days. They took the piss.
“She sounds like a Bond girl.”
“I’d give her one.”
“Maybe if you gave her one you’d get ribbons, too.”
I’ve thought about it often. How easy it would have been not to have met her. If I had been an hour later, or an hour earlier. If the fog hadn’t lifted. If I hadn’t called Ben from that phone box in Tromsø. If I hadn’t met Henrik. If I hadn’t ever left in the first place.
I don’t believe in destiny, but nowadays I do believe in fearlessness.
I believe that there are well-trodden paths through life, paths made familiar by habit, or ancestors, or television, that bring us into contact with the things and the people we already know.
Paths that lead to the pub, the sofa, the supermarket, the job we’re sick of but don’t have the guts to leave, the houses we hate, the politics that don’t serve us.
But I know now that there are other paths, too. Insane, impractical, ridiculous paths. Paths that are not familiar and do not feel safe, that have not been walked by celebrities, or friends, or anyone. And it’s all too easy to ignore these paths, because to follow them requires a huge leap of faith, a fingers-in-your-ears, eyes-shut-to-the-consequences kind of fearlessness.
But if you do follow them, no matter how crazy they look to those on the outside, if you muster your courage and go, that’s when you meet the people that change you. Like Hanna.
I never used to understand what fearlessness was. I thought that some lucky people, like Jack, were just born unafraid, and that was why they could surf huge waves and climb massive overhanging cliffs with no ropes. But real fearlessness has got nothing to do with being unafraid. It’s about doing things anyway, getting on with it, living, whether you’re afraid or not. And courage isn’t about climbing huge cliffs with no ropes. Courage is about telling the story of who you are with your whole heart. Courage is about being who you are with your whole heart.
So I gave up trying to talk to them and instead I went to my van and got the ancient guitar that Francis Philippe had given me at Salagou, and I went back into the bar and I sat down and I started to play the chords from “Bruca Maniguá,” the song that will always remind me of Hanna and that night we drove through the wilderness together. And then I started to sing the words I had finally finished writing on the long journey home. And it certainly shut them up. They stared at me like I was a freak of nature, and I could hardly blame them. I used to die of shame if one of them accidentally heard me playing my cello through the thick walls of the bunkhouse, and now here I was singing in p
ublic.
You said you wrapped me up in light that day,
You said you’d show me how to find my way,
You said these moments are all precious,
And the ribbons are for fearlessness …
It wasn’t easy. I had to stop and take a big swig of Rattler, which is when I noticed they weren’t taking the piss any more.
“What is that?” asked Ben. “It’s really familiar.”
“It’s an old Cuban song. Ibrahim Ferrer did a cover. I used it loads busking. That girl I was trying to tell you about got me into it. In fact, this song is about her.”
“How can an old Cuban song be about some girl you met in Norway?”
“They’re my words.”
Jack and Ben looked at each other.
“Start again from the beginning,” said Jack.
Part One:
Love and Death
1
Beginnings are hard to pin down, because they’re always overlapping with endings, but I suppose you could say that this particular story started where it finished, at Broadsands. Dawn was just breaking one midsummer morning. I said good-bye to Ben, who was running the place while the owner was traveling the world on a vast inheritance, and drove my bright yellow van 500 miles up the coast to Newcastle. At least, the bits that weren’t brown from rust were bright yellow. Not the kind of yellow you’d find in a van factory, either. More the kind of yellow you might end up with if you were trying to disguise a stolen vehicle in a hurry and one of your mates had a spare can of spray paint.
Which is probably why the policeman pulled me over. He sucked air through his teeth and kicked one tire then another. I stuck the heels of my hands in my eyes and tried to focus on looking normal. If only I was someone else: the kind of person with the kind of happy-go-lucky approach to life that I would have cut off my own arm for. And sold my left leg. But I am not that kind of person. I am a worrier. And I had not taken my rattling, ancient van on this fourteen-hour journey from Land’s End to the Tyneside tunnel in order to spend twenty-four hours crossing the North Sea on a ferry bound for Norway because I was brave and fiercely independent, or because this was the type of thing I was in the habit of doing. I had done it for the same two reasons people have been doing everything for thousands of years: love and death.
I had only had the van for a couple of weeks. I had chosen it because it was all I could afford and because it was so old it had a tape player, so I would finally be able to listen to the six dusty tapes that were all the proof I had that Jack ever existed. It was a three-and-a-half-ton Iveco Daily with a medium wheel base, six tires, and loads of horsepower. Frankly, it felt like driving a forty-ton truck. Ben had got it cheap from his motorcross mates. It reeked of grease and old motorbikes.
Most people hadn’t thought it would even manage this far, let alone what lay ahead. They raised their eyebrows and shook their heads and tried, not very successfully, to pretend they didn’t think I was insane. It’s true that it really didn’t look like much. Apart from the rust and the spray paint it had a clutch that sounded like the noisy creaking of a coffin being opened by a vampire in the dead of night, a murderous sliding door that kept falling off and had already put nine stitches in my head, and two bald tires. Which I would have been more concerned about if they weren’t on the back, where there were two each side. Ben called it a twin axle. I called it safety in numbers. Until the policeman pulled me over.
I attempted to muster a smile and waved my ferry ticket in his face to let him know I was leaving the country.
“Routine safety check.”
My heart sank.
If only Jack were there. Golden-haired, broad-shouldered, rock-climbing, seductive, selfish Jack, who owned his selfishness with the pride of a religious convert. Jack didn’t freak out every time he saw a police car. He didn’t grip the steering wheel with sweating palms convinced he was about to be locked up for a crime he didn’t even know he’d done. He gave policemen the finger and told them to their face they were pigs. But Jack was not there. Jack was about as far away as it was possible to be without actually being in space.
The policeman asked me to open up the back.
I was sitting in the driver’s seat. The back doors didn’t open from the outside, because they were broken. The side door was held on with cable ties. One thing to knock myself out, quite another to knock out a policeman doing a routine safety check. The only option was to squeeze myself through a small hole in the bulkhead, a sheet of metal that separated the cab from the back. Things went from bad to worse. For a few horrible seconds I thought the policeman was going to have to call the fire brigade. Then there was a loud bang as I landed headfirst on the floor.
The policeman peered inside. He looked at me and peered inside again. It was an unusual sight. The bare metal sides and rusty floor had been hastily cladded with splintered tongue and groove from the dump, until my new home resembled nothing so much as a disused sauna. Apart from the fact that there was no insulation and no heating. The fiberglass ceiling, which had not been cladded, was black with mold. Two pairs of jeans, four T-shirts, two warm sweaters, and some embarrassing pairs of underwear were stuffed into a piece of old fishing net Ben had found on the beach. An asymmetrical plywood offcut, with a washing-up-bowl-size hole cut into it and a secondhand gas cooker perched on top, was my kitchen. Apart from that there was a cupboard, which doubled as a bed. The policeman told me to open it. He scratched his head. Inside the cupboard, in an old beaten-up case, was my cello.
It may be eccentric but it is not actually illegal to drive around in a disused sauna with a cello under the bed. After warning me about my tires, the policeman let me go. I made it to the ferry just in time for a man in fluorescent overalls to measure the van with a ruler and wave me on board. Cars and trucks and shiny white campervans lined up behind me and switched off their engines. I sat motionless in the driver’s seat, wishing I was a million miles away. Preferably on another planet, where life is like an old tape recorder and you can just record over the bits you don’t like. Erase the mistakes, go back to the beginning, say the things you never said, do the things you never did. The massive metal doors, like a monstrous pair of jaws, clanged noisily shut behind me. My body felt heavy. Tears pricked my eyes. Because life is not like an old tape recorder. There is no pause button, no rewind button. No going back.
2
I had met Jack on the beach one winter’s day.
I was tucked into the dunes watching the waves, which is something I did a lot. I liked watching them crash on the rocks and make patterns in the sand. I liked thinking about how far they must have traveled and where they might have come from. The Caribbean, or Alaska, or somewhere out in the middle of the ocean that had no name. It was raining slightly. I wore an old anorak. Jack didn’t. Jack didn’t care about things like rain. Jack came looming out of the mist with nothing but a backpack full of climbing ropes and a surfboard under each arm.
Broadsands had rooms with bunk beds, which Ben occasionally rented out to traveling surfers. It was in these rooms that Andrew and I lived. In exchange we would do a few hours of work behind the bar when it was busy, which it never was. Broadsands was a mile inland from the beach, just outside the tiny village where Andrew and I grew up. Most people who grew up in that village left as soon as they were old enough to buy a train ticket. Andrew and I had tried to leave, but we both came back. Andrew because he was addicted to surfing and me because I had no idea what I wanted to do, and because the sea is a hard thing to live without once it’s in your blood.
Ben offered Jack a room, but Jack insisted on clearing out the shed at the bottom of the garden, which was six feet square and infested with mice and spiders. He covered the ancient rotting floor with beach mats, laid his Therm-a-Rest on top of them, and made a shelf out of driftwood for his novels by Aldous Huxley and Jack Kerouac, books of Japanese death poems and half a dozen old tapes nobody could listen to because who the hell has a tape player any more?
Every morning Jack brewed fresh coffee in a Bialetti espresso maker, which he balanced on an ancient Trangia, an alcohol-burning stove designed for high altitudes that made the whole place stink of petrol. He wore flowered shirts he bought in charity shops and his surfboards were stenciled with Japanese characters that meant things to him he couldn’t explain. He called himself a wanderer and was full of stories of all these crazy adventures he’d been having since he was two years old, trailing round the world after his dad, who was something high up in the Marines.
My dad was not something high up in the Marines. My dad was funny, charming, lovable, saddened, and broken by a life that had been much harder than he’d expected. He built a business from nothing in the eighties and lost it all in the nineties. He drank subtly and relentlessly, and it didn’t make him happy. With our house went my parents’ marriage and, for a time, my mother’s sanity. She had taught us all there was to know about love and we loved her fiercely in return. My sisters and I clung together and tried as hard as we could to pull her back from the cliff edge she teetered on, but there were days when she barely knew our names. Homeward journeys on the school bus were clouded with fear. The specter of suicide gnawed at us constantly. I grew up quickly and moved out early. My parents couldn’t be burdened with my survival when they were fighting for their lives. Moreover, since we lost our house, my bedroom was a tent in the garden of my mother’s tiny flat. I saw her often, but Broadsands became my home, and the people I knew there, like Ben and Andrew, became my family.
The school bus fear lingered into adulthood. Maybe that was why I fell so hard for Jack. Jack had no fear. He hurled himself at cliffs—like those sticky men you throw at windows when you’re a child—and climbed them with no ropes. He paddled out to razor-sharp reefs nobody had ever dared to surf and grew hallucinogenic cacti that could kill you. While most men viewed Jack with a certain suspicion, all the girls I knew were in love with him. Which is why I was so utterly and completely stunned when he chose me. Plain old, fuzzy-haired, neurotic little me. I couldn’t believe my luck. I was safe at last.