Pilgrims of nowhere

‘The Pilgrimage is going through the city centre tomorrow.’ 

It’s evening and I’m leaning back in my chair, denim-clad legs stretched out, heels resting on the kitchen table. I like sitting like this, thinking and not really thinking, smoking and staring at the mould creeping out from the corner of the ceiling. You get what you pay for I suppose. The flat is dense with the warm stench of cigarettes and turmeric. Victor stands over the hob in that stupid apron he insists on wearing while making dinner and I realise he’s speaking. 

‘Oh yeah?’ Everyone’s heard of the Pilgrimage. I don’t remember when I first heard about it, though, but I don’t remember when I learned about respiration or earthquakes or the inevitable heat death of the universe.

‘I don’t get it,’ I say, ‘pilgrimage to where?’ 

Victor shrugs and keeps stirring. 

Googling it, information about the Pilgrimage is strangely scarce. What information there is seems resigned to message boards claiming it’s a myth or a mass delusion. The Wikipedia page simply states it’s existed as long as recorded history. No citations. 

‘This is crazy,’ I say. ‘How come no one's talking about this? Shouldn’t there be documentaries about it? Books?’  

‘Perhaps the pilgrims don’t care to explain themselves.’ 

‘Who told you they were coming through town?’ 

‘I can’t remember. Someone at work I think.’ Victor turns to face me. ‘Wanna check it out?’ 

‘Sure.’

‘It’s a date then.’ 

‘It’s certainly not.’ 

He smiles at me like I’m being absurd and in a way, I am. 

It’s a meek Saturday which greets us as we walk into town. The city centre is colourless, dissected by roads and pockmarked by souvenir shops. Skyscrapers, like cathedrals of capitalism, loom over us, puncturing the bland, blue firmament. 

The Pilgrimage finds us before we find it. We reach a main road which instead of being choked with cars, is filled with a great tapestry of people. Victor and I watch from the pavement as they file past. I catch snippets of Spanish, Mandarin, a Slavic language, another I don’t recognise. I try to grasp faces as they pass: a boy, thirteen or fourteen years old, an old woman with bubblegum pink hair. A group of five with shaved heads and orange robes. Women wearing flower crowns, in petticoats, sporting leather jackets. I see worn-out military fatigues and bright purple trousers, though many wear t-shirts, jeans, hoodies, indistinguishable from the usual milieu of the city centre. Some people sing. Some dance. A few beat on drums slung around their necks. Backpacks of varying bulks are attached to most pilgrims, though they seem untroubled by their burdens. 

We watch for five, ten minutes and the crowd doesn’t thin out. People walking on the pavement stop and stare, or carry on after a few quick glances. From where we're standing, it’s a step onto the road and into the crowd. I glance at Victor.

‘Why not?’ he says.

We join the throng. I overhear a middle-aged woman speaking with an Australian accent. 

‘Hey,’ I interrupt her before I can stop myself. ‘What’s going on?’ The general chatter isn’t too loud and I don't have to shout. 

She turns from her companion and smiles. ‘What does it look like? We’re walking.’ 

‘Where are you going?’

‘Nowhere and everywhere, friend,’ she says and laughs. ‘We’ve been in the UK for about a week now, but we go wherever the road takes us.’ 

‘But I mean, ultimately, where are you going? Why are you walking? You’ll have to stop at some point.’

She shakes her head. ‘Stick around. You’ll understand.’

I thank her for her time, then turn to Victor. ‘Come on. Let's try to see whoever’s leading this thing.’ 

We weave forward through the Pilgrimage as it follows the road out the city. An hour or two passes but we don’t reach an end to this column. We near the city limits, merging onto the motorway without cars. The Pilgrimage still stretches ahead. 

I pause. ‘We are going quicker than them, right?’ 

‘Yeah.’ Victor frowns. ‘This doesn’t make sense.’

‘You two lost?’ A man stops by us, his leathered face sheltered by a broad-brimmed hat. He speaks with a Welsh accent and could be any age between fifty and seventy. 

‘Who’s leading this?’ I ask.

‘No one, lad.’

‘But who decides where to go? Where’s the start of the column?’

‘There is no start.’

‘That’s impossible,’ Victor says. ‘What are you saying, that if we kept walking, we’d never reach an end to all these people?’ 

The man chortles. ‘Try if you wish, son. But I'll save you the bother: there is no such place. And if you walked in the opposite direction, you wouldn't find an end either.’ Unsure whether he’s joking, I don’t know how to respond. ‘I’m Lee,’ he says. ‘You’ll get used to all this after a while.’

‘It’s good to meet you,’ I say, ‘but we’re not staying. Not permanently, I mean.’

‘That’s no different to any of us, son. Either you leave the Pilgrimage or the Pilgrimage leaves you, but in the end, all will leave. And once you’re gone, you can’t return.’ He looks up, the sun low in the sky. ‘We’d best carry on. We’ll be making camp soon.’ 

The Pilgrimage moves down country lanes, then diffuses into surrounding fields. Tents are pitched, mats rolled out, campfires lit. Victor and I help, with Lee’s direction. It’s better than standing around and gawking. Most tents are yurts, housing perhaps a dozen people. An endless tide of people collapsing into a patchwork city. No one arrives and objects to this, despite this presence on what is, presumably, private property. 

‘You can sleep in here, tonight.’ Someone tells us after the tent is up. 

Victor peers into it. ‘Guess we don’t have to sign anything.’ 

Groups of pilgrims have gathered around fires and after spotting Lee, I try to quiz him more. 

‘How long has the Pilgrimage gone on?’

‘Oh, a long time.’ His face blooms in the fire’s glow. ‘A long time, yes. We were marching when all the past civilisations fell and we’ll be marching when this one falls. We’ve marched through battlefields and the palaces where peace treaties were signed and we’ll keep on marching.’ 

‘We’re bound for Wales,’ Lee says before we leave to sleep. ‘Unless we wake up in another continent.’ He laughs and I assume this is a joke until Victor shakes me awake the following morning, half-terrified, half-amazed, and says we’ve been transported to another place. 

The others in the tent are asleep. We slip out into the pale dawn. A city sprawls in between us and a vast, white-encrusted mountain. Vivid greenery encircles the camp. Lee is sitting on a stool, whittling a piece of wood. 

I call out to him. ‘Where the hell are we?’

‘Japan,’ Lee says, lips pursed in amusement. ‘Sometimes it happens. We sleep, then wake up in another country.’ 

Victor blinks at him, then at our surroundings, then at me. I shrug. 

The Pilgrimage moves as one, through the Japanese countryside. When I notice someone slowing their pace or dragging their heels, I offer to carry their rucksack and after a day or so, someone else takes it off me. This system, if it can be called that, is how we carry our supplies. 

A fortnight passes and we wake to mountains again. The Andes. 

‘So do you want to stay with the Pilgrimage?’ Victor asks like I wouldn't have stayed no matter what, so long as he was staying. 

‘Isn’t it a bit late for that?’ 

‘But do you want to?’ 

‘I could do with a holiday.’

I stop smoking. I could probably get some cigarettes if I wanted, but somehow it doesn't feel appropriate. 

Faces within the crowd become familiar. Lee is an old-timer, a pilgrim for over thirty years. Jabu, an aerospace engineer, joined the Pilgrimage around the same time as Victor and me. A professor from Toronto tries her best to explain the uncertainty principle and Bayesian statistics to me and I try my best to understand her. Sahil, who says he’s trying to improve his English, though it sounds near flawless to me. Mako, a young violinist from the Kansai region of Japan. 

‘It was nice to be back,’ she tells me, ‘though I don’t feel homesick.’ 

It shouldn’t work. I wait for us to wake up in the Sahara or Antarctica. I wait for us to be Pied-Pipered off a cliff or into a minefield. I wait for food to run out, for water to become scarce, for this impossible cohesion to break down. But at some point, I give up waiting. 

We cross countries and wander over borders. No one stops us. There are no blockades or raised rifles. The roads we travel are clear of cars. We pass like the wind through towns and cities. People notice us and join, or they notice us and don't. We traverse boreal forest, alpine valleys, savannahs and prairies. We wake up in landscapes so different to ones we bedded in, they could be another realm, be the biome of some distant planet.

To me, the trees are nameless. To me, a beetle is just a beetle, a butterfly is just a butterfly. I can’t recognise the intricacies which separate one species from another. Birdsong I can't identify. Poisonous plants which display no hazard, edible ones which suggest no flavour. What can I say? I’m a city boy, born and bred. But there’s always someone among our number who is returning home, someone who knows the land and all living within it. I try to learn all I can, to see the layer beneath what meets my eyes, but sometimes I give up and just walk through a world both intensely familiar and utterly alien. 

The depth of days. The thousand minutiae of one day lost under the weight of the next, flattened into a single indescribable feeling, folded into one lingering memory.

The moon. Its aureole under translucent clouds. Slowly carved to a sliver, then gone, leaving the night so deep you could step forward and fall into it. Filling out again to a swollen, jaundice whole. This is our calendar. The passing of days sculpted by so many festivals and holy days, always some part of our massing drawn together in shared ceremony. 

Midnight rain on tent skin, tightening the space within. The morning after, the air is fresh, vaporous. I stand in it and realise I am alive.  

Music against the silence of the night. High, clear voices and low chants. A dozen oddly-shaped instruments I’ve never heard played before. 

One day, in a snow-studded Finnish forest, a man plays Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata on a grand piano. Where it came from, I don’t know. 

Counting Victor’s ribs, digging my fingernail into the flesh between them. You're such a child sometimes, he says, and swats my hand. We’re in a field, alone, the chirping of crickets swarming the air. And I think: I will remember this moment, the absolute, perfect feel of it. 

The desert sky at night. Unsmothered by city lights, bristling with constellations. 

The hardship of the road. Cold which leaves my fingers numb and my hands lame. Heat like nausea. As blisters on my left foot heal, more are rubbed into my right. This is the price of admission, I tell myself. This is the cost of motion. 

One day, as we walk, Victor tries to hold my hand and I pull away. 

‘Why do you care?’ he asks later, lying next to each other in a two-person tent. ‘No one cares here. No one even blinks.’ 

He’s right. But shame has grown from a tumour into a vital organ. I don’t know how to be without it. I don’t know if I want to. 

‘Give me time,’ I tell him. 

In time, I learn the rhythm of this march. And I think, I could walk for a million years and there would still be places to go, still people on this road to know, still be sounds to hear and there will be a million different shades of sunset to see which I will never see. 

A year goes by and it's like this was all there ever was. What came before, the cramped, grey flat, fades to something two-dimensional, unreal. 

We return to Britain, setting off across the Scottish Highlands. As we rest by a stream, Victor and I trade greetings with a woman, roughly our age.

‘Where are you heading?’ she asks. ‘Where are you going?’

‘Nowhere and everywhere.’ I grin and flail my arms above my head and jig around. ‘Nowhere and everywhere! Nowhere and everywhere!’ The woman looks at me like I'm as mad as a march hare. 

Victor laughs and apologises for my antics. ‘You should join us though,’ he tells her. ‘See what it’s all about.’ And somehow, she does.  

From the Cairngorms, we’re transported to Poland. It doesn’t worry me when I wake up and Victor isn’t there. Sometimes he goes off, keeping in step but keeping to himself. Sometimes I do the same. But by nightfall, I start to panic. I still can’t find him. No one I ask has seen him either. 

I’m about to ask Lee when he interrupts me. ‘Looking for Victor?’ he says. ‘It looks like he’s left.’ There’s a sadness in his eyes which almost makes me flinch. 

‘Left?’

‘More like we left him. It happens sometimes…when we cross over. Sometimes a person gets left behind. I’m sorry, son.’

Two days pass, we cross into Germany and I keep searching for Victor, swearing he must be lost within the crowd. As we near Berlin, I stop looking. Camping a few miles from the capital, some of us head into it, raiding nightclubs and surveying neon-lit streets. I find a yellow phone booth, grimy, graffiti-ridden. 

‘Hello?’ 

‘Victor?’ 

‘I’m surprised you remember this number.’ He lets out a weak chuckle. 

‘Where are you? Why did you go?’ 

‘Do you think I wanted to?’ His voice sounds tight, like it's sticking in his throat. ‘I woke up… and no one was there. I tried to find you. I tried to find everyone but the Pilgrimage had gone. There was nothing I could do.’

‘Are you in the UK? We’re in Berlin. You could come over here. You could—’ 

‘You know I can’t. Once you leave, you can’t return.’ 

I’m clutching the phone so hard, if I grip it any harder it will shatter like glass and the splinters will bury into my hand and encase it with blood. 

‘But I’m staying,’ I whisper. ‘I’m still here.’

‘Good, stay. Stay as long as possible. I don’t want you to leave.’ A pause. I can’t speak. ‘I’m sorry.’ 

I place the receiver down, stare at it, pick it back up and hold it to my ear. Silence. 

I speak to no one as the Pilgrimage cuts south-west through Germany. I help make camp, then sit by myself. Sometimes Lee sits beside me, wordless. This silent presence, I appreciate. 

Every night, constructing camp, only to dismantle it all in the morning. Day upon day upon day. Going nowhere. I grow sick of this ceaseless slog. This constant weight on my back. How do they do it and not get tired? How did I do it before? My pace slows. I sink backward. I imagine that Lee was wrong, that there is a back of this column, where a group of stragglers linger, their head down, their clothes disintegrating, slouching off them and whipping in the wind. 

All revelry and ritual is mockery. They are the mortician’s domain. Sealing the eyes, cottoning the mouth, washing the body, styling the hair, perfuming the decay. The dolling up of a corpse, a bride for its own burial. Not for the first time, I think about leaving. I won’t be able to return, but so what? What would there be to return to?

I barely register our bucolic surroundings, the French town signs we pass. After we construct camp, scattering across vacant fields, I walk away, up a hill and sit under a tree. This one I can name: a sycamore tree. Not that it matters. The Pilgrimage is out of sight. Looking over this patch of French countryside, I wonder if I should stay here until dawn, stay and let the Pilgrimage move on without me. 

It should be an unremarkable view. It’s just trees and fields dotted with sheep. But as the dusk casts a burning purple, I feel like I’m on fire. I want to jump up and run into that horizon. I want to swallow the sun, leaving the earth cold and black. I want to push into the soil, let it muddy my mouth and spoil my skin. I want to do it all and I don’t want to leave. I don’t want to leave. I’d follow him anywhere but I can't follow him there.    

I hold my head in my hands and cry. Then I pick myself up and make my way back to the Pilgrimage. It’s still there when I return. 

Three months pass and we move from France to the US to Ghana to Cambodia. I don’t think of Victor everyday, but I do think of him a lot. I love him and I miss him. 

One day, I’ll wake up and everyone will be gone. No depressions from pitched tents, no singed grass; it will be like the Pilgrimage never existed at all. Perhaps I’ll try to chase after them. Run down the road ahead, shouting for everyone to come back, catching no sight of them. Perhaps I'll just sit and stare into empty air and know that for me, the Pilgrimage is over, though some small part of me will be carried in the memory of those still marching, until they too stop.