Page 36 of The Chemistry Test

Penny

When we get to the car park at the foot of the mountain, CJ gets my wheelchair out of the car and we make our way over to the railway station.

Several yellow buildings with green-trimmed roofs are dotted all around, looking deceivingly small against the mountainous backdrop behind them.

We make our way into one of them to collect our tickets.

Our slot isn’t for another half hour, so CJ buys us hot chocolates to warm our hands while we wait.

The boxy-looking carriage arrives just as CJ tosses our cups in the bin. ‘The front looks a bit like the black rectangular Thomas the Tank Engine,’ he says as he helps me onboard.

Growing up with Parker (and Delilah, come to think of it), I know exactly who he means. ‘Do you know what’s a good synonym for “the black rectangular Thomas the Tank Engine”?’

‘No, but that’s a good word,’ he teases. ‘Engine.’

I roll my eyes. He’s almost as bad as Ro.

‘It’s Diesel,’ I say, picturing the character, but he’s already too distracted to listen.

Once in our seats, I put on my motion-sickness wristbands and we both take in the views around us as we begin our ascent.

I knew the top of the mountain would be spectacular, but the green alpine scenery that unfolds as soon as we leave the station makes my breath catch in my throat.

We pass plunging waterfalls and rivers nestled among the peaks, before catching sight of the summit itself, poking out above a ridge to the right of the train.

The little girl sitting opposite us complains that the tracks aren’t ‘sloped enough’ and the journey’s taking too long. I smile at her as she looks over at me, eyes transfixed on my chair.

‘Did you expect it to be more “sloped” than this, Penny?’ CJ asks, turning to face me as we come to a stop at the halfway station. Another steam engine passes us on its way down and we all wave to the other passengers.

‘Yeah, I did actually,’ I say, laughing.

The views are stunning, but I can see why the child is surprised by it.

She was probably expecting it to be a bit like going uphill on a rollercoaster.

Instead, she looks bored and is now stomping her feet in a simple rhythm on the floor.

I take the packet of sweets from the plane out of my backpack and offer them to the girl’s parents after taking one myself.

She soon perks up when they give one to her.

With lollipops in our mouths, our whole row sits in silence for a moment as we continue onwards, taking it all in.

After a while, the faces of the people around us start to match how I’ve been feeling the whole time.

Completely in awe of the views. We all peer over the sheer edge of the mountain, overlooking vast valleys and grassy peaks and I wish I could tell my younger self that I’d still get to see views like this.

When I first started getting unwell a few years ago, I didn’t think I’d still be able to see stuff like this in person anymore. And yet here I am.

My neck hurts and I’m already starting to feel a bit sick, but mostly I’m just filled with wonder.

‘Nearly there,’ CJ says, grinning at me, pointing to the summit which is finally back in view. I grin in disbelief as I gaze up at the top of the mountain with my very own eyes. Not bad for a girl who can’t even walk up a flight of stairs.

When we finally reach the top, CJ insists we switch the SmartDrive off (‘one wrong tap and you’re sipping rosé with the saints’) and pushes me as far as he can out of the station.

But I didn’t come this far to only come this far, so he helps me up and together we walk across the rocky terrain for as long as I can manage.

I don’t quite know how it happens, but wherever we walk, we seem to be in the way of people taking photos.

Even when CJ helps me on to a rock I thought would be out of the way, we still end up gatecrashing the background of someone or other’s shots.

CJ, on the other hand, is blissfully unaware of our accidental photobombing, fully engrossed in guiding me.

I pull my coat down enough to sit on as he lowers me on to the coarse surface, beaming at me.

It’s not uncommon for sheer, infectious joy to light up every inch of his beautiful face like this, and yet I always feel like I can’t get enough of it when he looks at me like that.

Like I want to bottle it or inject it into my veins, just to revel in it all over again.

‘I wanted to see you up here so badly,’ he says, still looking at me like I’m the next Mona Lisa.

‘This is what life’s all about Penny! I’m so happy I got to share this with you.

Wait here for a sec, I’ll get some photos so you can see it from every angle.

’ He prances off, already absorbed in his self-set mission.

Although, from where I’m sitting, overlooking the precipitous valleys and jagged peaks, I don’t feel like I’m missing out on a single thing. I’m on top of the freaking world. You made it, Penelope, I tell myself, hugging my arms to my chest against the harsh wind.

‘This is where we should send people who think the world is flat.’ I would have known who’d just sat next to me on the edge of the mountain even if I hadn’t come up here with them. There’s only one person I know who would say a thing like that.

‘Why’s that, CJ?’

‘You can literally see the curvature of the earth from here. Look at the way the horizon bends.’ He leans back on his hands and exhales deeply. Contently.

I’ve been taking in the bigger picture too much to notice the roundness of the horizon. It looks like it’s frowning ever so slightly.

‘I don’t know if that is actually the curvature of the Earth or if it just looks like it is,’ I say, rubbing my hands together. ‘And it’s too nice up here, anyway. How’s it fair that they get rewarded with these beautiful views?’

He chews on his cheek, tugging his mouth to one side. His mouth always bunches to the left when he’s thinking. I let him stay like that for a while before continuing. ‘That’s what it was like at my school. Kind of.’

‘What? How?’ he says, cupping his hands around mine. They feel pretty warm, at least compared to mine, but I don’t think they actually are. We got one of the last trains of the season, but judging by my grey-tinged palms, you’d think we were in the depths of winter already.

‘Behind my school, beyond a willow tree, there were beautiful gardens with wildflowers and stone arch ruins. There were even tree stumps to sit on and hollowed-out logs where the students would bring lanterns,’ I say, trying not to think about how CJ’s hands feel wrapped around mine.

It’s not like I could really object to it with my fingers looking like the living dead like that, so I just try my best to ignore it.

‘I always wanted to go in, but since the students in their final years obviously couldn’t smoke at school, they secretly – at least to the staff – took over the nearby gardens, which left the rest of us with either an old bench in the playground or a jumper on the field.

’ I leave out the fact that my friends and I actually spent the majority of the year eating in the hall with the twelve-year-olds as my old wheelchair couldn’t make it through the muddy field.

‘It felt like the smokers were being rewarded for smoking and I hated that.’

And actually, even though that’s how I felt when I was seventeen, that was nearly two years ago now.

I don’t feel that way anymore and I haven’t for quite some time, so I don’t even know what possessed me to say it in the first place.

We all have our reasons for doing the things we do, even if it’s hard for others to understand them.

‘Not that smokers should be punished or anything,’ I say quickly.

‘I just think what’s the incentive to quit if it earns you the right to a beautiful garden, you know?

’ I finally stop myself, aware that all I’m doing is digging a hole – at this rate I might not even need to get the train back.

I can just jump straight down my hole and drive myself home.

‘I think you just had a mild case of verbal diarrhoea, Penny,’ he smirks, stretching his legs out in front of him. ‘How did all of that pour out of you because of a bendy horizon?’

‘I have no idea,’ I say. ‘Tiredness, maybe? Is jet lag still a thing if the time zone doesn’t change? Can I blame it on that?’

He winks. ‘We can go with that.’ He smiles up at me then, his eyes the brightest thing on our corner of the mountain. ‘But I actually don’t even think it’s the smoking that bothered you in the first place. I think smoking is, like, a scapegoat or something.’

‘Go on,’ I say, feeling like we’re playing the strangers game all over again, ready for him to tell me more about myself.

‘I think you just wanted to fit in. And it wouldn’t have mattered what was keeping you out of that garden. Because the thing that was really keeping you out, was you.’

I baulk at him. ‘You don’t know that.’

‘I can guess.’ He shrugs. ‘You and your mates could’ve gone in, taken up some space and reserved an area too.

Part of the reason I wanted to bring you here was to show you that you belong anywhere, Penny.

We all do. And not just in one place either – we all belong wherever we want to, in as many spaces or capacities as it happens to be.

’ He weighs it up with his hands. ‘Within reason, obviously. But right now, you’re a wheelchair user at the summit of a mountain. There’s no better metaphor than that.’

‘Well, when you put it like that,’ I say, laughing.

‘Look at me go.’ Despite being in view of a few strangers behind us, I strike an exaggerated pose to break the heaviness of it all.

We’re not the first to have profound conversations up here, and we won’t be the last. ‘I could be the poster girl for it.’

‘Damn right you could,’ he says, pointing to my wheelchair by the ridge where we left it. ‘Just you, your wheelchair, and all the flat-earthers you’re trying to convince otherwise.’

‘What a vision. What an icon,’ I say, tipping my hand up like the sassy girl emoji.

Of all the conversations we could’ve had up here, I wouldn’t have come anywhere close to guessing something like this.

‘You know, the reason most of them believe in it, is actually because they started out trying to disprove the theory and couldn’t. ’

‘Well,’ he says, checking the time in case we have to head back already.

‘Maybe you really do need to bring them here then.’ He reaches out a hand to me, so I guess our time really is up.

I’m too busy taking in every square inch of it all to dispute his bendy horizon theory again.

‘And in case you were wondering,’ he says, once we’re almost eye to eye again, ‘no, I don’t smoke. ’