The Distant Temple

The road to the mountain temple had not been climbed in thirty years, not since the flood took the lower village and the old people scattered to the winds. But Arthur Penhaligon remembered every stone, every root that had worked itself through the cracks, every handbreadth of moss that clung to the north face of the staircase where his father had sat, smoking, the day the telegram arrived.

He climbed now with a rope in his hand and a photograph in his breast pocket, the photograph creased and faded, showing a man he barely recognised — his brother Thomas, younger by four years, standing beside the temple wall with his arm around someone whose face the rain had blurred beyond recovery. Arthur had never seen that face. Thomas had never spoken of it.

The monastery of Saint Brigid's stood on a ridge three thousand feet above the valley floor, its granite walls blackened by centuries of rain and wind. Arthur could see it now, small and stubborn against the grey sky, the way it had always been — not grand, not beautiful in the way the picture postcards of Ireland and Scotland describe, but necessary, like a stone held in a clenched fist. His father had built a life around its absence, around the silence that had grown between them like ivy, thick and suffocating.

The telegram had come in November, twelve years ago, the kind of official envelope that carries news no one ever prepares to receive. Thomas was missing, the police said. Had been for eleven days. Last seen hiking the old pilgrim's path toward the highlands, the path that ran past the temple and continued into the unmapped bogs beyond. They had searched for three weeks. They had found nothing but a single boot, left on a rock in the middle of a stream as though its wearer had simply stepped out of it and walked into the water and never stopped walking.

Arthur had not spoken to his father for nine of those years. Not out of anger, not exactly, but out of the peculiar and mutual refusal that grows between two people who love the same lost person and blame each other, silently and without words, for not having held on tighter.

Now he climbed alone because alone was what he had become, and because something in him — something he would not name, would not examine — was convinced that the temple still held answers, or at least still held Thomas, in the way that stone holds memory, in the way that water holds the reflection of a sky long after the clouds have moved on.

The rope helped where the steps had washed away. The rain made everything slippery, everything treacherous. Arthur moved slowly, carefully, the way his father used to move — methodically, with the patience of a man who had learned from watching the sea that haste only drowns you faster. He thought of his father's hands, cracked and salted, mending nets that no one wore anymore, because the fish had moved deeper, because the ocean had become something else, something that did not recognise the old paths.

By mid-afternoon he reached the terrace where the temple stood, and the first thing he noticed was that nothing had changed. Not really. The roof had collapsed in the centre, leaving a ring of wall like a broken tooth, and the door was gone, blown inward by some winter gale decades ago, but the walls still held. They stood four metres high, rough-cast stone with lime wash fading to the colour of old bone. There were no stained glass windows, no frescoes, no relics. Saint Brigid's had never been a place for adornment. It was a place for endings.

Arthur sat on the threshold where the door had been and took out the photograph. The man beside Thomas — the blurred face — he could not make out, but the coat was recognisable. A woman's coat, dark wool with a fur collar, the style of the late 1970s. Thomas had been twenty-three then. He had worn that winter himself, before giving it to his brother for Christmas, before Thomas had worn it once, twice, and then not returned it.

He put the photograph away and stood, and that was when he saw the carving.

It was on the inside of the eastern wall, half-hidden by lichen, a line of text in a hand that was either careful or careless enough to be indistinguishable from negligence. Arthur rubbed the moss away with his thumb and read:

T. and A. — 1983. We came here to remember how to be lost.

Thomas's handwriting. Arthur would have known it anywhere — the same slight upward slant on the ascenders, the same way the T was crossed not with a straight bar but with a curve, as though his brother were signing something secret, something that belonged only to him and the stone.

Arthur sat down hard. The rock was cold and damp through his trousers. He sat with his back against the wall and his eyes on the carving and he felt something in his chest loosen, the way a rope loosens when the weight it has been holding for years finally lets go.

They had been twelve and fifteen the first time they came here, his brother and he, before the split, before the long silences, before their father's grief had become a country neither of them could enter. Their mother was dead — fever, quick and merciless — and their father worked from dawn until his hands gave out, and the boys were left to their own geography. They had found the temple by accident, following a goat track that ran above the tree line, and when they found it they had understood, without being able to explain how, that this was a place where boys could become something other than what their father had made them.

They had carved their names in pencil first, on a piece of driftwood, and then, when the pencil ran out, Thomas had taken a stone and scratched the letters into the wall, and Arthur had helped, pressing his thumb hard against each letter as though he could leave a fingerprint in the rock itself.

We came here to remember how to be lost.

He read it again. Read it until the letters blurred. Read it until he understood, at last and without wanting to, that Thomas had left a message not for the police or for the search parties or for the newspaper that had printed a photograph and a sympathetic article, but for Arthur. For the brother who would one day climb this mountain alone and find this wall and understand that Thomas had not disappeared. He had come here, deliberately, to be lost, because being lost was the only thing left that felt true.

Arthur stayed until darkness gathered in the corners of the temple, until the rain stopped and the sky turned the colour of pewter and the first stars appeared, thin and indifferent. He sat with his back against Thomas's carving and he thought about the woman in the coat and he thought about the boot in the stream and he thought about his father, who would be seventy-eight now, still mending nets that no one wore, still waiting for a son who had chosen to become a mystery rather than return to be a man.

When he finally stood, his knees cracked like dry branches. He picked up the photograph and held it in his palm for a long time, feeling the paper soften beneath his thumb, and then he put it back in his breast pocket and climbed down into the dark.

The descent was faster, careless, reckless. Arthur did not use the rope. He ran his hands along the wet stone and leapt the gaps and slipped and caught himself and went on, driven by a hunger that was not for food but for the valley below, for the lights of the village, for the small and ordinary comfort of a room with a door and a bed and a lamp that could be turned off.

He reached the bottom at midnight. The village slept. The church clock had stopped at eleven, as it had since the war, because no one had remembered to wind it and then no one had remembered to wind it again. Arthur walked past the pub, past the post office, past the house where he and Thomas had shared a room until Thomas had packed his bag one Tuesday and left for Edinburgh and never came back to stay.

At the foot of the mountain he stopped and looked up. The ridge was black against the sky, featureless and immense. Somewhere up there, the temple stood in the dark, and on its eastern wall, two boys' names would slowly fade, lichen by lichen, rain by rain, until someday they were gone and the wall was plain and no one would know that Thomas and Arthur had been there, had carved their belonging into stone, had tried, however clumsily, to leave a trace that would outlast them both.

Arthur smiled, faintly, without warmth, and walked on.