picnic on a razor blade
You know I’m carrying a shedton of food and you could lighten my load but you don’t, out of a sense of mischief. We could be climbing this fell together and you could be eating snacks and pastries and cheeses and sweets and by the time we reach the top I’d have a light load and you’d be carrying the weight in your stomach. But no. I see the way you smirk at my oversized backpack containing its oversized picnic. I’m not going to give you the satisfaction of complaining about it, either, even if I am sweating.
We pause by a tarn, a mountain lake high above sea level. Ringed on three sides by precipitous accents, there’s a sense of quiet seclusion, for all that twenty or other hikers are also here in scattered groups. The rock faces make it feel cosy but it’s huge.
“Coooould I haaave…” you begin, and I get my hopes up that you’re going to take the family-sized pork pie or a few rounds of sandwiches or even ask me to bust out the pocket rocket mobile burner and fry off those sausages, but: “a Babybell?”
I drop the backpack, leaving behind a crater, and dig through its contents. A tiny red coin is handed to you wordlessly. You smile sweetly in response to my flat glare.
You know I get a kick out of you fucking with me like this. I can’t help but grin as you make a show out of enjoying the tiny cheese, smacking your lips and thanking me for feeding you.
“You froot loop,” I say. The emptied wax goes into a bag and then I follow your searching gaze. You’re scanning the walls for a path of ascent.
“What’s our path?”
“Well, we can either take a perilous route over Striding Edge, with its deadly drop to the right followed by what’s surely more intense than a Grade 1 Scramble up a vertical chimney… Or there’s a gentle incline over there, to reach the same place. Which would you like?”
Your gaze settles on the Edge. Broken slabs of rock rise like a row of subsided graves, exposed on both sides; and at their far end, a dark cleft in the almost vertical cliff face, alleviated by snaggleteeth ledges and blocks. Then you look at my heavy, overweighting backpack.
“Mmmh… The first one?”
I love how much faith you have in me.
The drop to your right is fifty yards if it’s a foot. The chimney looms ahead, like the gates of fucking Mordor.
I’m singing a joyous folk song. What more could I want than this: to be in nature, with you?
The vertical ascent is difficult. Do you have a head for heights? You seem focused but perfectly at home, scaling from ledge to ledge while above you I do the same.
“Careful!” you call out. “If you fall on me, you know how I’ll catch you, right?”
Yes. What more could I want?
The summit is flat. We actually have to walk a little way across it to get to the vista. But we do. It’s worth it.
Late afternoon, the sunlight is turning to gold. It pours over a toy box landscape before us. Beneath our feet a blind valley falls away 200 yards, merging into a verdant plain where we see tiny cars driving past, hyperlucid through the clear air. Then the ground bucks and swells in a series of shapely fells that catch or reject the light, making of themselves jagged and captivating jigsaws of a landscape in turmoil.
I hold up a chicken and sweetcorn sandwich. With your eyes on the spectacle before us you take a bite and chew thoughtfully.
We’ve been there half an hour, seldom speaking, just sharing food. Well, you know what I mean. You’ve devoured with every sign of enjoyment the four sausage rolls, the rest of the Babybell twelve-pack, and I one and a half Cornish pasties. One of those was for me—I certainly need to eat, waking like this, but you leaned over and bit into it with such audacity that I couldn’t help but watch you chew, swallow, and take another bite.
Your drive, your hunger, your ability to please yourself. These are all so beautiful to me.
In the relative public of the summit you are more demure when your tummy sends up a report of air. I tease you about it and you blush.
“You’d happily eat an onlooker and you wouldn’t blush. How is burping in front of them worse?”
“Witnesses left behind,” you say, thumping my arm.
I laugh and source another sandwich for you. You sigh and rub your tummy idly.. Seated like this you develop that beautiful crease just north of your belly button, and it drives me crazy that it’s hidden beneath a windbreaker.
Beside me, the sausages sizzle away. They’re done, which means I’ll cook them for another ten minutes for you.
“I always…” I cut off suddenly, like I realised I wasn’t sure how to say what I wanted to say. “I always really love when you make the time to go somewhere with me. Do something I like.”
“If you feed me I’ll be there,” you retort with your crooked smile.
“Well, there’s that. I just feel so grateful, for it all. That you’d share so much with me. I try to do the same for you. But just wanted to say… you’ve made me very happy. Just by being yourself around me. You let me be myself, too.”
You don’t reply in words, just boop my shoulder with an affectionate headbutt, then leave it there, leaning against me for a moment in the late-afternoon sun.
A scent on the breeze. The sausages are hopelessly cremated. “Sausages are done. Sausage-inna-bun?”
Something hot in the fresh is a treat. Your mouth waters at the scent, driven by the pleasurably warm exhaustion of your body.
You polish off the rolls and lick my fingers clean. I kiss your cheek. “Perfect.”
We’ve been there for forty-five minutes but your repast is not yet through. The main challenge: a family sized pork pie, the kind with no jelly. I carve generous slices and frankly can’t hold back from watching you any longer. I turn my back on the landscape and instead kneel by you as I feed you slice after slice. What does nature have that can compare against the finality of your severing bite? The thoughtful roll of your jaws as you chew? The pulse of tension at your throat as you swallow.
There’s other courses. Fruit, desserts. Chocolate hob nobs. A pack of eclairs, one of which squirts a dab of cream on your nose. You laugh, mortified, and I lean over and kiss it away. You eat your fill and then some, growing podged, heavy and digestion-warm on the way back down the fell. I loop my arm in yours and we keep one another stable.
But for me, the enduring memory of that day is when I turned to feed you the pork pie. Though you knew I was watching you, your eyes roamed the glorious landscape for ages. I felt like I was not quite there; a servant force guiding food between your lips.
And then you looked at me. Enough force to make my hand shake, though I didn’t stop bringing the next piece to your mouth. The next bite you took you never broke eye contact. It was like it was me you were devouring: that intimate. I felt every smooth cut or irresistible crush of your teeth.
I hope when you take me, you leave me the memory of your eyes as long as you can.