Pulse

anything.’
    ‘You don’t need to.’
    Geoff sighed. ‘I forgot to point out the signpost as we got to Grindleford. It’s antique. Nearly a hundred years old. Not many left in the Peak District.’
    She blew smoke at him, rather deliberately, it seemed.
    ‘And, all right, I also read somewhere that low-tar cigarettes are in fact just as bad for you because they make you inhale more deeply to get the nicotine, so actually you’re taking more of the toxins into your lungs.’
    ‘Then I may as well switch back to Marlboro Lights.’
    They retraced their steps, picked up the path again, crossed a road and took a left by the sign for the Eastern Moors Estate.
    ‘Is this where the Bronze Age circle is?’
    ‘I think so.’
    ‘What does that mean?’
    Fair enough. But also, there’s no point in not being yourself, is there? He was thirty-one, he had his opinions, he knew stuff.
    ‘The circle is coming up on the left-hand side. But I don’t think we should look at it this time.’
    ‘This time?’
    ‘It’s in the bracken.’
    ‘You mean you can’t see it properly.’
    ‘No, I don’t mean that. Well, yes, you do see it better at other times of the year. What I mean is that between August and October it’s inadvisable to walk in bracken. Or downwind of it, for that matter.’
    ‘You’re going to tell me why, aren’t you?’
    ‘Since you ask. If you walk in bracken for ten minutes, you’re liable to ingest anything up to fifty thousand spores. They’re too large to go into your lungs, so they go into your stomach. Tests have found them to be carcinogenic to animals.’
    ‘Lucky cows don’t smoke as well.’
    ‘There are also ticks that transmit Lyme disease, which …’
    ‘So?’
    ‘So if you have to walk in bracken, you tuck your trousers into your socks, roll your sleeves down, and wear a face mask.’
    ‘A face mask?’
    ‘Respro make one.’ Well, she’d asked, and she was getting the bloody answer. ‘It’s called the Respro Bandit face scarf.’
    When she was sure he’d finished, she said, ‘Thank you. Now lend me your handkerchief.’
    She tucked her trousers in, rolled her sleeves down, tied his hankie bandit-style around her face, and tramped off into the bracken. He waited upwind. Another thing you could do was get some Bug Proof, and put it on your trousers and socks. It killed the ticks on contact. Not that he’d tried it. Yet.
    When she returned they set off in silence along the gritstone edge which was either called Froggatt Edge or Curbar Edge, or both, he didn’t care either way for the moment. The turf was springy up here, and reached right to the point where the ground dropped away sheer for what looked like several hundred feet. It was always a surprise: without any sense of having climbed much, you found yourself startlingly high, miles above the sunlit valley with its tiny villages. You didn’t need to be a bloody paraglider to get a view like this. There had been quarries around here, from which many of the country’s millstones came. But he didn’t tell her that.
    He loved this spot. The first time he came here, he was looking down at the valley, no one visible for miles, and all of a sudden a helmeted face popped up at his feet, and a bearded climber was hauling himself from nowhere up on to the turf. Life was full of surprises, wasn’t it? Edge climbers, potholers, paragliders. People thought that if you were up in the air, you were as free as a bloody bird. Well, you weren’t. There were rules there too, like everywhere. Lynn, in his opinion, was standing too close to the edge.
    Geoff didn’t say anything. He didn’t, for that matter, feel anything. Puzzled, of course, but that would pass. He set off again, unconcerned whether she was following or not. Another half-mile of this high upland, then a sharpish descent back to Calver. He had begun thinking about next week’s work when he heard her scream.
    He ran back, his pack thumping, the water in his bottle audibly sloshing.
    ‘Christ, are you OK? Is it your foot? I should have told you about the rabbit holes.’
    But she just looked at him, expressionlessly. In shock, probably.
    ‘Are you hurt?’
    ‘No.’
    ‘Did you twist your ankle?’
    ‘No.’
    He looked down at her Brasher Supalites: bracken caught in the eyelets, and the morning’s shine gone from them. ‘Sorry – don’t understand.’
    ‘What?’
    ‘Why you screamed.’
    ‘Because I felt like it.’
    Ah, missing waymarks again.