Ep.27: Ali
As I walk down the track there’s an adder basking in the sun near the gate. I pause, delighted by it, a kid again. I’d known there might be snakes on the croft but I’d not seen one in the wild before so to see this one up close is special. The colour is so dark and intense it looks like velvet, it’s all I can do not to reach out and stroke it, sensing my interest it slides away under the scrubby bushes and bracken then disappears. Once again I fill up with love for this place we live.
I’m waiting for Ali, one of my oldest and closest friends, to arrive. We met 25 years ago in my first week at the BBC and our lives have woven and wrapped around each other ever since with an intensity which is hard to put into words. There isn’t a page big enough to hold all the laughter we’ve shared over the years. Men, friends, marriages have come and gone for us both, but we remain constant, solid. She knows me like no one else. And now here she is, pulling up in her little red car. Ali, smiling and outspoken and so very funny. For the first time since this shitstorm hit she’s finally able to be here face to face, a shock absorber to my shell shock and in return I can wrap myself around the pain of her freshly broken second marriage. And it is magical.
The next day we head for Loch Farr so Ali can ‘pop her wild swimming cherry’ in among pond lilies below startling blue skies and heather scented hills. We swim and laugh and talk and everything about it is perfect. We emerge from the water blissed out with the need for this, exactly this and no more. ‘Come on’ says Ali, stripping off her wetsuit, ‘you’re not proper swimming til yer in skins’. And I pause. I think about the mess of my body under my own wetsuit and I take a breath. Can I? Can I peel away my wetsuit, exposing my scarred and sorry left breast to Ali and the elements. It’s a moment, one of those important ones and the two or three seconds I take to weigh it up, ripple across the air between us. She’s one of my closest friends, there’s nothing I wouldn’t share with her or do for her but this, this physical evidence of what the past few months have meant for me, makes me stall. ‘Quite a lot of people come here to swim’, I try and steer her away from it ‘we might get caught’. But there’s no steering Ali away from any madcap notion and she’s already stripping off and laughing. So I do. I fight my shoulders and breasts out of the wetsuit and there I am naked and scarred and fragile and Ali looks at me, square on, but instead of being horrified she’s intrigued, curious and just says ‘wow, it’s fucking amazing what they can do, isn’t it?’, then turns and plunges into the water. And I could kiss her! For those glorious few minutes while we swim naked in the loch, my body is transformed into something amazing, a marvel, I’m not just a mess but the genius result of life-saving cancer surgery. And like all the best, most self-less gifts, she doesn’t even know she’s given me it.
