My childhood dream was that I would grow up to be an adventurer. I knew it might be hard, so I practised. I learned to climb rock faces, to abseil into caves, to swim long distances in cold water, to sail small boats. I was a strange child, wandering through fields trailed by my dog, talking to myself, but I was perfectly content.
Eventually, I grew up and got married. I stopped climbing. I still biked, but mostly out of necessity: to get to work across town. I still swam in cold water, but in an urban park.
I had fallen for a penniless artist. I don’t think he’d mind me calling him that. H introduced me to artists, writers, musicians and movements, whole new ways of looking at the world. With my master’s degree in science, society and the environment, I had taken on the nature/culture dichotomy. I wrote for a horticulture magazine – about parks, bedding plants and, I seem to remember, waterproof jackets. Then I came home and consumed art, all the time longing to be outside, somewhere wild and vast and full of life.
We lived in a top-floor flat in London. I kept pot plants perched precariously outside the window, and spent my after-work hours maintaining other people’s gardens, always dreaming of my own. We were living with another layer of the nature/culture divide: H has cystic fibrosis, a long-term, life-threatening weakening of the lungs caused by a faulty gene. In the eyes of the world, I was his carer. Of course, since we were young and in love, it didn’t feel like that; we were brave and brilliant, because we understood fragility.
On my writer’s wage, I worked around the clock to make ends meet and never quite managed it. Then I applied for a job in Birmingham and, for the first time, had an inkling that I’d done well in the interview. As I wandered back to the station through bland shopping centres, I cried because I knew I would be leaving the capital I had grown to love. But Birmingham was cheap and I was tired.
Nine years later, it is home. I own soil: my glorious, sunny back garden, with a magnolia to welcome spring and two apple trees that are heavy with fruit by autumn. Birmingham gave us a spare room to turn into a studio, a kiln down the road, and an allotment in the park.
Although I have tried, I cannot pinpoint the moment when I knew I needed to be alone. Or, at least, that was what I thought. Now I see that it was more that I needed to be somewhere unfamiliar: a landscape I didn’t know by heart. I dreamed up plans to explore the far reaches of Bolivia and the mountains of central Asia. I subscribed to adventure travel magazines and dreamed of owning a tiny house somewhere wild. (I’d say daydreaming is my strongest skill.)
Then a friend suggested I tackle the city as I might the wilderness. “Climb the tallest building and spend the night under the stars, canoe the canals,” he said. The latter stuck. I did a little research. You needed a canoeing licence and that was it. Anyone, it turned out, could float about on the canals.
Outside a bar one evening, I asked a friend if he thought paddling Birmingham’s canal network was achievable. Over 100 miles of canal run through the city, with aqueducts, roundabouts and tunnels. Where most cities have one or two branches, Birmingham’s canals wind round each other like spaghetti. I figured I had until early autumn before the water grew too cold and all the green things disappeared. He sent me a map that makes the canals look rather small, until you realise that the network reaches to Wolverhampton, Dudley and beyond. But I was not taking time off to paddle. It had to fit around my life – an afternoon, a couple of hours over lunch, an early evening, weekends. I wasn’t prepared to admit it then, but paddling was going to compete with gardening – and, just as hard to admit, I was excited by the thought. I drew a line around a map of Birmingham. Any canal that fell inside this, I would paddle.
I wrote to a nice man called Rob and asked him not to laugh at my idea of an adventure. He didn’t laugh, and instead sent me a video of an earnest young Swedish skateboarder taking a pack raft for “some urban action”. A pack raft is a sort of blow-up dinghy, a miniature kayak that can pack down into a rucksack. The ingenuity lies in the fact that you blow it up with a silk bag the size of a pillow. In this, you trap air, twist, then squeeze the air into the boat. The silk pillow packs down to the size of a satsuma. The idea was that I could strap the boat to my back, get on my folding bike and cycle to the canal, blow up the boat, strap the bike on the front and paddle as far as I could – then pedal home again. I liked everything about it.
The boat arrived at the weekend, neatly packed in a brown cardboard box. After a few failed attempts, I got the knack and blew it up in my sitting room. I sat in my boat, and the dog tiptoed warily around it. H came downstairs and was mildly unimpressed, telling me I would “probably drown”. I packed the whole thing up and ran out of the house, shouting that if he hadn’t heard from me in several hours to call a lifeguard.
In the coming weeks, I learned that Birmingham still upholds the tradition of the “gongoozler”, slang for a curious onlooker idly observing canal life going by. Gongoozlers love flights of locks; it’s hard not to be thrilled by the opening of the paddles and the slow pushing of the heavy balance beams. They love hanging over bridges to peer below. Sometimes they comment on the strange sight of a woman in a bright red dinghy going nowhere particularly fast. Nearly everyone stops to say hello when you’re paddling. My boat afforded me great safety. Out in the middle, no one could touch me, a freedom that’s hard to find in the darker corners of any city, particularly for a woman. The water was too dirty and the bottom too unknown.
My friends Sarah and Ming met on the Birmingham queer scene and had navigated onwards to an old, settled friendship. Charlotte was up visiting from London. I sat at the edge of their world and listened to them catch up on a wide circle of friends. Charlotte and I knew each other through work: she is a landscape designer, and we had worked together on a park in London. We had discovered a shared love of hill-walking and agreed to tackle an Irish mountain. In retrospect, I’m not sure I was invited to that lunch, but nobody seemed to mind.
Afterwards, Charlotte suggested we paddle the boat. As we negotiated our route to the water, I listened to them talk about their version of Birmingham: here was the street where they’d lost a car, there a night in jail; their roads were full of dancing.
The best maps are not published, but are the maps we make ourselves, about our cities, towns, villages and landscapes. We all make these maps: here I was happy, there I lost my bike, over there I had to sit down and cry. Kew Bridge still makes my heart leap – it’s where I realised I was in love with my husband.
My maps are mostly made up of plants: here is my favourite city oak; outside the dole office, an almond always gives nuts to those prepared to hunt; that is where my favourite urban dandelion once poked its head. I can forage in that corner for garlic or damsons or the seed of opium poppies.
I forced Ming, Sarah and Charlotte to the middle of the canal, to whistle loudly and hear the echo that’s audible only to someone floating away from the edge. We messed around, we explored, we were aimless. We met a man who had scuba-dived to the bottom to help fix a lock in the 60s. We met another who decided his wife would love our boat. We met cyclists and more curious gongoozlers, until it was time to put Charlotte on a train home to London.
Within a week, Ming and Sarah had bought their own inflatable canoe. I had the beginning of a boat gang.
Often I think that living with cystic fibrosis, or any long-term illness, is like climbing a mountain. Anything and everything can change with the whips of the weather. If you’re lucky, you get to the top and have a view of this world that alters everything. You get to stand and see where you’ve come from and where you will go.
Faced with that mountain, I’d do the only thing I knew to try to steady my world. I’d sink into nature. But I had started to want to bolt. Out in the middle of the canal, no one could intrude, and I had found a wild place with an unknown horizon. In idle moments, in meetings or at home, I dreamed of my new boat. I started to count down my weeks until the moment I’d next get down to that dark water.
One day, H turned to me as I rolled up the boat, in a frenzy to get out there, and mocked gently, “You’re finding yourself, aren’t you?” I looked preposterous in a beaten-up old felt trilby, with my rucksack spilling paddle parts, clutching my bus money and my crumpled, still-damp map.
“I’ll be back in three hours,” I called. I wouldn’t, though, not back as we knew it.
Over time, I had suppressed a part of myself, so deep that there weren’t enough words to make a rope and send it down to find her. But one day, standing on a bridge looking over a dock, she shouted so loudly that I had to cling to the edge to steady myself. Sitting in a meeting later, I had to shout back silently to her that it was not in any way acceptable to turn my chair sideways and stare so hard at the woman beside me. But she forced me to stare at Charlotte anyhow, and I spent a whole meeting pretending I was fascinated by a light fixture behind her.
One day, I sat at the edge of the bed, turned to H and said, “I’m gay.” Or maybe bisexual: somewhere in that grey middle. That shattered him, and me. I moved out of our bedroom and slept in my study. Those first nights alone were washed in heartache and pain, saturated in loss.
I wrote to Charlotte and told her that I had come out. I felt out of my depth; I was quite sure that a woman like her wouldn’t want a woman like me. I was married. But I thought I could wait: because H has an illness that would rob us of our future, I had never been able to think, “We’ll grow old together.” I had always had to imagine a future where I’d be alone. And in that future I thought, naively, that perhaps, oh, please, gods everywhere, when that happened, it might just be that Charlotte would be there, single, and, oh, please, dear gods, I might just be someone she’d notice. In that way.
And she had noticed, in that way. We wrote to each other. She made it very clear that she was not going anywhere near me, not yet. I agreed with that: I didn’t want her to come second to anyone. She had as much right to be loved wholly as H did.
I told my family. I told friends. I told a stranger just to see how it felt. Most people were kind, a few unsurprised. My brother told me he’d been waiting 20 years for that conversation. A few people were shocked, a few made unkind remarks, but most were positive. I began to understand that there is no such thing as coming out: it is a daily negotiation. You are forever having to challenge the dominant heterosexual view. Ask anyone who is gay, even the most out-there, you’d-hardly-have-to-explain-it types, but they do. Ours is an increasingly open, fluid society, but it is still a very straight world.
As a gay woman who passes as straight, as in, I haven’t cut off my hair – “Are you going to?” my mother asked, shortly after I told her I’d fallen in love with a woman – I will spend the rest of my life gently correcting pronouns and firmly saying, “My girlfriend and I…” That you don’t have to anticipate any of this is one of the many invisible privileges of being straight. From now on, I’d have to talk about myself to assert my identity. I found it tiring and too consuming; once again, I found myself wanting to run somewhere I could get lost.
I cannot say how H coped, but he did so stoically, humorously at times, with generosity at others. And people were generous about him, too: they said kind, thoughtful things, which says a lot about the sort of man he is.
We agreed that I would buy him out of the house. My home shrank to a bike and a rucksack that homed either my boat or my belongings, as I travelled between Birmingham and London to stay with Charlotte.
I loved being in London with Charlotte, but I also felt out of place. I was exploring a city that was familiar but very different. We cycled along Regent’s Canal, up through Bethnal Green and on to the Hertford Union Canal. It seemed wider than much of the Birmingham network, but perhaps this was a trick of the eye: I was looking down at it, rather than paddling in the water.
London’s canals have a clear monetary value that Birmingham’s have yet to acquire. Homeowners like to have a balcony overlooking water or a garden backing on to it. The towpath was busy, too: parents with pushchairs, dog-walkers, cyclists, skateboarders all jostled for space. We sat on a scrappy bit of concrete embankment and I dangled my feet just above the water. We discussed life, slowly layering our understanding of each other, peeling back bits and covering areas we weren’t allowing each other to look into yet. Some hipster kids had pizza delivered to their blow-up dinghy, and someone threw pebbles at them from a bridge above. I know that all these people are good for the canal: their footfall means that the towpath is bike-friendly and smooth, that the wildlife and water quality are monitored, but it was a little too populated for me. I realised I wasn’t yet ready to share my canals with too many others.
The thing you hear over and over again when you come out is how brave you are. It doesn’t feel brave. You confuse people: they feel they don’t know you any more. You feel the same thing about yourself. You spend hours wondering whether there might have been a better moment. But ultimately it becomes: if not now, when?
There were those who thought I should and could have waited, those who thought it had been a choice. I hesitated and stumbled over how to refer to my husband (until someone kindly offered up “former partner”), telling my boss, and meeting my first disgusted stare as a stranger realised I was kissing a woman in public. These things – the etiquette, the language, the pronouns, the glances and glares, the thrills and disappointments, and oh, the opinions – don’t add up to happiness, but they don’t detract from it, either. What coming out brought me, in the end, was a peace I hadn’t known you could possess.
By late August, I had settled into a routine of sorts. I spent my weekends in London and my weekdays working and writing in Birmingham. H had his own life, and I had mine. It was strange to be observing this in each other, when we had been so familiar. There were few arguments. Mostly we passed like indifferent housemates. Occasionally, he’d bring home new people, and I felt as if my private space had been violated, but didn’t feel I could claim that. The canal remained my escape, and when I was centred enough to find calm there, it was glorious. Seared into my memory are hot afternoons, the sun bouncing off the water, nature just being nature.
A glorious, warm autumn ended in a wet thud, and the winds whipped the garden into chaos. Charlotte and I watched fireworks in drizzle in a country park, then walked back along the beaches of Margate. I had been avoiding home. I carried on my back what I needed to get by.
When I did go home, I marvelled that I had ever accumulated so much stuff. I ran my finger along shelves where books were missing. H had not yet found somewhere to live and the house was littered with two lives in limbo. There were boxes of stuff for his new life, a new tea caddy, spoons, a bread bin. I kept offering him our old stuff, but he continued to buy identical replacements.
I looked at mantelpieces and knew that none of the things that sat on them would stay with me – so, too, with the paintings, the knick-knacks, the carpets, the TV, the stereo. I’d be left with books, houseplants and the sofa neither of us liked. I didn’t feel bereft; I didn’t even know if I cared for any of it any more. I felt a pang, though, when I looked at the garden, which was still unravelling. The path had disappeared – the garden was lush and overgrown. The wildlife loved it: undisturbed, they were throwing its contents around.
I sent our beloved dog to live with my parents while the house was dismantled. H was sad and angry that I would do this. She wore her heart on her sleeve and was tortured by our separation, running from one to the other, pawing at us, slowly growing thinner. Her absence meant our marriage was coming to an end. H and I would never be together again. I felt relieved – and terrified by my relief. It all came back to the same fear: if I had done this for so long, for 14 years, how could I trust myself again?
I traced back over my maps. The canals I had fallen in love with, the stretches I had returned to, had by now become familiar: I knew them as you do shortcuts. I found out that a section, the Icknield Port Loop, was to have 6,000 houses built around it. My city was changing, and so would my canals. The deep boom of the factories, the hideaways, the old rotting hulls that acted as ponds, the forest of birch and alder seen through misty mornings, the mushrooms, the berries, the litter, the broken glass, the pathways made by foxes, the pigeons’ nests and the rats’ burrows: within the next five years, they would all be gone.
I think you can recover from leaving a marriage, but I’m not sure you can recover from leaving the responsibility of caring. Perhaps in years to come I will learn that you can recover, but that it is a long journey. I had always imagined that I would be there until the very end. Now, I might be, but more likely I might not. Living with cystic fibrosis had been difficult – heartbreaking, tormenting, but also all the other diametrically opposite things: joyous, loving and fulfilling. Now my road led elsewhere. I was grieving an ending, a marriage and a house, and I was also celebrating a beginning, and a love that was unlike anything before it.
I have a map pinned to my wall that traces that strange summer, a turbulent autumn and, at times, a desolate winter. My map is peopled. That is how I got here, dragged along, sometimes physically, by friends like Ming and Sarah, pushed along by those I love.
H had moved out to start a new life in a new house. I did the same thing in an old house. I moved furniture, repainted, filled the rooms with houseplants, added an armchair and ordered my library so I could read in the afternoon sun, dappled by the tropical foliage of my plants. I gardened inside. Then I went outside and did the same. After a bit, Charlotte came and gardened with me, and I went home with her and did the same. We’re very good at gardening together. It may be what we do best.
I don’t need the watery world of the canals to represent anything now, other than a wonderful bit of nature, a ribbon of green space like no other. The boat and I, we’re sticking together. I love a woman and I love my boat, and I hope that both these things continue far into my future, to the point that I can trace on the map and off it.
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