A fly buzzed around Toby’s ear as he sat in the long, sun-burned brown grass on the cliff tops looking out over Cardigan Bay. He flicked it away without seeming to really notice the action. Sea birds were calling; somewhere in one of the fields behind, a lark was singing as it rose into the crystal clear blue sky. Around him the early morning summer sunshine was waking the insects and everywhere it seemed everything was springing into life. The field behind him had a few sheep with scraggy fleeces that needed shearing badly, the wool had started to fall off in clumps as it did when they were left alone. Dirty brown wool could be seen here and there in the field. They looked in poor condition.
The fields looked a bit more overgrown than usual and the farm house he had passed on his way to the cliff tops was a tad more run down that it had been this time last year, but it had stood empty now for fifteen years and another year was not going to make much difference. Had this been a day a year ago, it would have been idyllic and perfectly normal. Now it just hammered home how alone he was. Toby guessed he was the only person around for miles in all directions. In an area that had once been populated by thousands of people, bustling little market towns, villages and hamlets, farms and small centres of industry, there was just him and his dog.
He tried not to dwell on the last year, but it was nigh on impossible not to do so, so much had happened, so much had changed. This was an area of the cliffs his mother had loved and he had resisted coming here over the last year as he knew it would bring back painful memories, and it did. He felt his eyes stinging as tears started to well. He had cried a lot over the last year. Not for the first time he wondered where she was. Where any of them were.
****
Toby had always been a keen reader and a bit of a loner, he lived with his dog in the small village of Taliesin in Mid Wales. The view from the back of his small terraced house looked down over the hill bordered valley down towards the sea by Ynyslas and Borth. The front of the house was on the busy main road that connected the university town of Aberystwyth and North Wales. It was only a thirty mile an hour zone through the small village, but it did not stop the big tankers thundering down the road. It was noisy and he longed to get away from it, but he had bought the cottage when the house prices were cheap and the mortgage was cheap and he just could not afford to move now. Work was slow and although he had enough work to keep him and his black Labrador Ben fed and watered and the mortgage paid and enough diesel in his battered old ex army Land Rover 110, that was basically it. He had never been brilliant with money and after a prolonged period of being constantly short and a bit reckless with his money he was only now in a period where he was sorting himself out.
“Enough is enough!” He had told himself one morning after another call from his bank. He had sat down and budgeted for the first time ever and was strict with it, no longer spending his money frivolously. Books he found in charity shops, as did the clothes he brought as and when they needed replacing. He had enough bits and bobs to last him a lifetime, his small house was cluttered enough as it was, books were piled high on shelves and floors, a collection of air rifles and knives were in cupboards and boxes. Fishing gear spilled out of the cupboard under the stairs jumbled in with all the camping gear he had amassed over the years. He had always found reasons and excuses to get more gear, now he reasoned he finally had enough and would just have to make do. Sometimes you just had to calm down.
Perhaps at the age of 33 he was starting to grow up a bit, his mother despaired of him he knew, but she was always there for him. Cooking him a meal once a week when he went over to see her and her husband, his step-dad who he adored. She sometimes still brought him clothes and food from time to time, she just could not help herself, and he was not about to tell her to stop. He was the only child and he knew she did spoil him from time to time, she always had.
“Any girlfriends on the horizon?” His mom would ask him.
“Nope, sorry, not interested.” Toby replied. “Who would want me any way, when I am not working I am usually out walking, camping, fishing or shooting. And when I am at home I am either in the shed or reading. I am not much of a catch mum, no money and no interest.”
He had had a couple of girlfriends in the past, but nothing lasted for the reasons he had given many times before. It wasn’t that he wasn’t interested in women; it’s just that he wasn’t interested enough. He would rather be outside and more importantly, he would rather be on his own. He had always been like that. At school he had just bumbled through, not getting bad grades, but not getting good ones either. When he should have been reading his books to revise, he was reading fantasy and science fiction books instead. He had had friends, but nothing like the classical best friends he saw everyone else have. And when he left school and more importantly, when his mom moved to Mid Wales, he left them all behind and that was how he liked it. It was quite a selfish outlook on life he knew, his mother was desperate for grandchildren and all the trappings that went with it, but it was just not going to happen, not just yet anyway.
Rich 2021
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