Breathless, not too fast now. There’s a feeling like a change of gears that comes after the first ten minutes, as if the engine was labouring and now it’s smooth, any minute now it’s coming, and meanwhile look at the oaks, the blue depth of them, and the raindrops hanging from pine needles like Christmas decorations, and her top darkening, starting to cling. There’s the smell of cold green things, there are fallen needles and pine cones bouncy under her feet. Leap a puddle, easier now, wet feet won’t matter later, once they’re warm, and here it is, the shift, the running element, like getting into a lake and at first your body says what are you doing, this water is icy, these are boobs, they’re meant to be warm, but you keep going, you swim, you push and glide, belly and lungs floating the way they did before you were born and it’s not cold, not once you get used to it. It’s like that, running, after the first mile. Your body knows how.
*
Round the little headland, the track rougher, stones larger, footwork. She’d be able to see up the valley into the mountains, here, if it weren’t for the cloud. There’s the old stone barn in the clearing, by the remains of the house; the family must have built the barn better than the house, hundreds of years ago, whenever it was. People used to live all along here, there are the ruins of cottages and byres scattered the length of the path. Farming, she supposes, probably some fishing, but also haphazard little quarries. Whatever it took to get by, just like home, but harder; colder, dirtier, less comfortable. She licks water from the hair dripping onto her face and the vest’s dark with wet, maybe she’ll just take it off and after all women do run in crop tops, don’t they, and she’s in as good a shape as any, visible abs in her forties after two kids, but still, a woman of her age, though maybe she should take everything off, the whole lot bar the shoes and the expensive socks, that’d see off any baddies in the trees, a middle-aged woman with an old-fashioned bush maintaining 12k an hour. Well, nearly that, anyway, sometimes. Not that she measures, not that she cares. If Steve doesn’t like it, if he’s been watching porn and seen the alternatives, he’s more sense than to say so. They should again soon, really, never mind the thinness of the bathroom walls, must have been two weeks, three – four? – and even when she doesn’t feel like it, it seems to be good for them, like oiling your bike chain, doesn’t have to be fun but it stops things falling apart.
The cloud eddies across the trail in front of her. Uphill, careful, loose gravel. Faster, not far to the top now, get some cardio done. Pain flickers in her knee, one of those things, and the mist is thinning, she can see it lying under her running feet, filling the loch and the valley. It’s not clear up here, still raining, no blue sky or anything like that, she can’t even see the other side of the water but who’d want that view, it’s just a stream of cars and lorries and coaches heading for the Highlands, every pair of wellies, every tin of shortbread, every English family who’ve convinced themselves that the south coast is crowded and expensive and the glory of Scotland’s landscape makes up for the weather, squeezing down this one road to be pushed out into the mountains and coasts at the other end, who wants to look at that? That’s why she chose the holiday park on this side. You should get a different kind of person here, Justine’s kind of person, those who don’t need fried food and warm sweet milky drinks always on demand, gift shops and public toilets, people who want to get out of their cars, who aren’t scared of weather, whose idea of fun involves using their own two feet to get away from all that. Or at least that’s what you’d think; as far as she can see quite a few of the other people don’t leave their cabins at all except in their cars, must be spending
