On the Edge

by Jane Jesmond

  So now, I let his rage break over me and pass. Even when he told me I didn’t deserve to call myself a Shaw. Although the irony of the accusation from Kit – the one who’d changed his name – stung.

  Sofija stopped him in the end, seizing his face in her hands and forcing him to listen to her.

  ‘Rosa,’ she said. ‘Not in front of Rosa. Please, Kit.’ She waved at Kit’s Land Rover, parked sideways under the hotel. Rosa, strapped into a booster seat, stared out at us through the back window. Her breath had clouded the glass and she’d wiped a hole so she could watch her father fall apart.

  Kit was falling apart. It was too much. I turned and ran away.

  Seven

  I raced through the village and up and along the coastal path until I reached a high point where the cliff beneath me fell straight in a stark line down to the sea, uncluttered by the shards and blocks of rock that normally impede its way. Although the wind had dropped to almost nothing, the sea still smacked great waves against the cliff base. I stopped and stared out to the blurred line of the horizon where grey sea met grey sky.

  And I thought about Grid. Not about the accident. Not here and now, with Kit’s bitter words echoing in my ears and the vestiges of last night’s drugs running through my blood. Instead I thought about how much I missed him. About how he was one of the few people who understood about me and Kit. One of the few people I could have talked to.

  One particular climb hammered at my thoughts. A summer night in London. The weather perfect. A light breeze to cool the sweat of our palms.

  And a crane.

  And Grid saying. A crane? Shall we?

  And the blood rushing faster through my body as I smiled.

  Breaking into a site is simpler than you’d think. There’s often a gap in the fencing or a loose upright left by the workmen to make coming and going easier. And then up the crane. Not climbing. No need to work out a route. No need to look for the next handhold. More like a pianist’s fingers rippling an arpeggio up the keyboard.

  At the top, we sat side-by-side, legs swinging free. The rungs of the crane were small beneath us and I felt as though I was sitting in the bowl of someone’s upturned hands raised high above them. Grid rolled a slip of a cigarette and we talked about work. Grid often talked about work. He was like Kit in that respect. He loved thinking aloud about ways to solve problems with projects we were working on. I didn’t, but I didn’t mind up here. He smiled and I thought how odd it looked. His face was bony and often expressionless as if the closeness of his skin and bone left little room for movement. He used his hands to colour and punctuate his words. It was only a small smile, made even smaller by the pointiness of his chin. I wondered if at some point during his adolescence he’d looked long and hard at his reflection and given up on his face. I smiled back. I liked him just the way he was. Faces weren’t everything.

  ‘You going to the end?’ he asked.

  ‘Yup.’

  ‘Get me a picture, then.’ He passed me his phone.

  I held the bar that ran along the top of the triangular arm and walked sideways until I reached its end. Away from the centre structure and its crosspieces, the space cleared around me. Then I sat astride, wedged my feet under the rungs and stretched my arms into the cool night air. I took my time. Like a child nibbling a piece of cake to make it last. I shut my eyes.

  No noise except the occasional buzz of a motorbike and the clang of Grid’s steelies against metal as he moved around behind me. The little sounds anchored me. I held onto them and let the rest of me drift. The feeling started as it always did with a prickling in my hands, as though the skin was dissolving, evaporating into the night and letting the coolness flow into my blood. It spread. I floated.

  I opened my eyes. The night and the lights robbed the city of its personality. Only the newest buildings with their distinctive shapes held their identity. The rest was squares and lines. A star cloth cityscape. I loved it. My eyes traced the lines of streetlights and followed the tower block windows up and down.

  Then I climbed inside the boom and lay face down surveying the ground below. I thought this must be how hawks felt, their wings wide and hovering on the updraft. And for a while I let myself be a hovering bird cradled in the air, scanning the earth for small movements that revealed where the little creatures hid. A flap of plastic caught my eye and I imagined plummeting down to snatch it before swooping back into the sky again. I imagined diving through the sharp, clean air, untethered from the ground. Soaking it in through my skin and rinsing all the staleness and stress away.

  I forced myself back to the now, sitting on a bit of rock amidst the dark green bumps of thrift, staring out at the sea. But the memory of feeling like a bird had awoken another. As faint and transparent as a shred of printed voile, it fluttered through my mind, so insubstantial that I was scared to breathe in case it blew away. It was a memory of air rushing through my hair, streaming it out behind me. I let it take on form and colour. I was sure it was a memory from last night.

  But even as I relived it I knew it couldn’t be real. Because I remembered flying. Flying through the night, buffeted by the wind and the rain but exulting in it. I knew it wasn’t a real memory. Of course it wasn’t. But my body didn’t. It thought it flew. It thought it soared through the storm clouds above the lighthouse. Diving through the light and chasing seagulls. It thought magic lashed through my blood and bones and hurled me into the sky. It remembered each banking turn and roller coaster drop and lift. It remembered the shockwaves of bliss as I surfed the wind.

  I knew what it was. Drugs make you dream. The chemicals search through your mind and find the things you want most of all and they bring them to life. Sometime in all the chaos of last night, that had happened to me. I’d dreamed I was flying high above the world. The drugs had prised open my head and let the ghosts out.

  I wanted to cry. I’d messed up so badly. I knew that. Knew I had a lot to sort out. But how could I do it if my brain was zapped? I wrapped my arms around myself and stared out to sea, counting my breathing, in and out, and fighting to calm the roiling inside me. It sort of worked. I got back to a kind of dreariness as dull as the cliffs and sky around me and the dark grey sea. No point trying to remember anything else while the dream of flying lurked on the edge of my consciousness, desperate to spring back into life.

  The little birds that live in the brambles and hawthorn bushes along the cliffs started to sing. I didn’t know why. Some change in the air that I couldn’t feel. Maybe it was a little warmer. I walked on until I reached a small path that split off the main track and curled down through the rocks and clumps of wild thyme to a tiny beach at low tide. I swam from it as a child and afterwards clambered over the granite to explore the pools where strange mixes of sealife lived in forced closeness, caught together for a few hours until the tide swept them free again. A few tiny shrimps clustered at one end of a narrow strip of water avoiding the wriggling tentacles of a sea anemone. Or a crab desperately burrowing into a thin layer of sand at the bottom of a shallow pool to hide from the heat of the sun.

  I loved that cove. I’d spent hours lost in its rock pool worlds. I was a rowdy child, always moving, and the cove was the only place I remembered being still and quiet. I went down the path to where it opened out into a ledge cut into the cliff a long time ago by the farmers of the fields above, looking for a safe place to hoist seaweed up from the rocks to fertilise their soil. They’d bolted an iron ring into the granite of the ledge and Kit and I used to tie a rope to it to lower ourselves down to the beach.

  The iron ring was still at the edge, fixed as solidly into ground as it always had been, and a rope hung from it. Beside it was a small plaque on a stand that displayed a picture of men and donkeys hauling great bags of seaweed up from below alongside an explanation of the importance of seaweed as a fertiliser which included a broad hint at the end that the system might also have been used for bringi
ng in contraband. Despite everything, I laughed. The tourist board loved Cornwall’s smuggling history. They never missed an opportunity to mention it.

  The tide was out and the rock pools were uncovered, although a host of seagulls hopped over the rocks and screeched at each other. I thought about going down but the path was slippery and narrow. Besides, I ought to go and find Kit and Sofija – it was what I had come down to do and I couldn’t leave things as they were between Kit and me.

  Except it was pleasant here. With the clean smell of the sea and the noise of the swell sucking and rattling against the sand, dragging the grains up and down and leaving fingers of foam. It drowned out the raucous cries of seagulls, gathered in a cluster at one side of the cove, pecking wildly at something caught in a shallow pool. I threw a stone and they half rose in the air, fluttering and squawking, long enough for me to see the blood specks staining their white plumage.

  Seagulls are scavengers. The sharks of the air. They peck out the eyes of baby seals so they can’t find their mothers and starve. An easy meal. I hated them. I collected several stones and threw them one after the other until the seagulls flew for the safety of the cliff.

  I looked at what they’d left behind. Dark and gleaming, like a seal, its body wedged against the rocks, the waves crashing and pulling against its lower half. But not shaped like a seal. Shaped like a cross with a thick upright and a spindly crosspiece. Just like the top half of a body. A human body. Lying face down and arms akimbo.

  I made for the path, screaming at the returning seagulls, then saw the rope still attached to the iron ring. I don’t remember climbing down. I remember standing on the beach, kicking sand and waving my arms at the birds, and knowing my fears hadn’t lied. It was a body. The skin of its hands and the back of its neck were greenish-black and blistered. I couldn’t touch it. I couldn’t move it. The skin looked ready to peel off and fall into my hands.

  ‘Jen.’ A voice called from above. ‘What is it?’

  Kit looked down at me from the ledge above.

  ‘It’s dead,’ I said.

  ‘A seal?’

  ‘A body. A person. I think. No, I’m sure.’

  He came down at speed and ran over to me, bent over the body and reached out a hand to touch the folds of its navy-blue jacket.

  ‘Don’t, Kit,’ I said. ‘I don’t think we should disturb it.’

  ‘Just wanted to see if it was anybody I recognised.’

  ‘No, Kit. Don’t turn it over. Please. Leave it be.’

  He straightened, put out an arm and drew me to him. The waxed cloth of his jacket was cold against my cheek but he smelled of my childhood. The sharp and musty scent of old coats dried too slowly. And mud. And bits of bark and moss.

  ‘It’s definitely dead, isn’t it?’ I asked.

  ‘Yes. Washed up last night in the storm and beached.’ He nodded towards the holes on the back of its neck. ‘Gulls have had a go already.’

  ‘I know. I caught them at it.’

  ‘I’ll call Talan. Tell him where it is.’

  ‘We can’t leave it. The seagulls will come back.’

  ‘OK, but turn around and stop staring at it.’

  He walked back and forward along the sand as he spoke to Talan and I watched him, waving my hands behind me from time to time to discourage any bolder gulls. He must have come looking for me, I thought. Followed me along the cliff path. I was glad.

  ‘Talan’s organising people to come and pick it up but they might be a while. He said for you to go to Freda Mullins’ cottage. You know which one that is? Just back along the path a way.’

  I nodded.

  ‘Get a tarp or something to cover the body and bring it back.’ He gave me a little shove. ‘Go on. I’ll wait here and keep the birds away.’

  ‘Were you coming to find me?’

  ‘Yes. Sofija told me to say sorry,’ he said. ‘She told me I was a fool.’

  ‘She’s right.’

  He smiled. ‘I’m sorry.’ And then his voice cracked and his smile collapsed. ‘Go on. We’ll talk later.’

  I left him and ran back to the cottage, one of the older stone-built ones whose garden stretched down to the coastal path. Washing hung on a line. Sheets, it looked like. White with large pink blotches, probably flowers but faded from years of use.

  A woman was sitting down on the low wall that marked the boundary between the cottage garden and the path. She lifted a hand and waved at me. So I waved back. Beside her I could just make out a bundle of blue. Probably a tarpaulin. Someone – Talan – must have rung to warn them.

  ‘Jen?’ she called as I came close enough to hear. ‘Talan called me.’

  I stared at her, willing my brain to come up with a name or an identity, raking through my childhood friends.

  ‘Jen?’ she said. She wiped her hands on the folds of her black dress and reached one out to me. The nails were bitten but the gesture was graceful. And then I recognised her.

  ‘Kelly. Oh, my God. Kelly! What the… What are you doing here?’

  It was her hair that threw me. I suppose you’d have called it blonde but it wasn’t. It was the colour of catkins. Pale yellow with a hint of green. And hanging as tumbled and streaky as they did after a storm.

  ‘Your hair – last time I saw you it was black,’ I said. ‘And long.’

  Kelly, the dancer. Talan’s sister. He’d said she was back in the village but I hadn’t registered it. Three years younger than me, she’d danced out of school when I was ten, talent-spotted by an outreach programme for the Royal Ballet School, and disappeared to Richmond. Kelly whom Kit and I had seen from time to time in London, but only at night. Kelly who danced every evening and then went clubbing and slept all day. Kelly of the city. Always indoors, lit up on a dark stage in a sculpted array of dancers or glittering in a heaving mass on the dancefloor of whatever club was the flavour of the moment. She didn’t belong in this cottage, sitting outside by the sea.

  She shrugged. ‘I’ve taken a break,’ she said. ‘From dancing. My hair was only black for dancing. Its real colour was never right.’

  Now that I looked closely I saw the darker tips straggling round her ears.

  ‘A forced break from dancing,’ she said and lifted the hem of her skirt and gestured towards a knee wrapped in an elastic bandage. ‘Some ligament thing. It happens to a lot of us.’

  ‘I’m sorry.’ And as the meaning of her words sank in, I truly was.

  Another shrug. But there was something about the precision of the placement of her shoulders that spoke of a lie. She cared more than she wanted me to know.

  ‘It doesn’t stop me from doing normal things. Just dancing,’ she said and handed me the tarpaulin. ‘Talan said to protect the body and then come back here to wait. He’ll get someone out as quick as he can.’

  My feet were hurting again so I walked back, clutching the tarpaulin. The tide had ebbed further and the body’s legs were now uncovered. Kit was scraping a trench in the sand around them and he’d collected a heap of stones. I threw the tarp down to him and gave him Talan’s message. He shrugged.

  ‘Hope he’s not going to be too long because the tide will turn soon,’ I said.

  ‘I think Talan, of all people, knows about the tides.’

  He threw the tarp over the body and buried its edges in the sand where he could, using the stones to weigh down the parts that lay on the rocks, then climbed up the cliff and joined me on the ledge. He untied the rope and looked at it thoughtfully.

  ‘You taking it away?’ I said.

  ‘It shouldn’t have been left there. It’s an encouragement to kids to use it.’

  ‘Like us, you mean? Kids like we were?’

  But he didn’t reply. We watched the gulls investigate the tarp. I didn’t think it would keep them off for long.

  Eight

  ‘You OK?’
Kelly asked.

  We sat on the low wall at the back of the cottage and watched Kit and the police head back to the cove. Kelly smoked a thin rollup; its bitter smell mingled with the saltiness in the air.

  ‘I think so. It didn’t seem very real.’

  She waited and I wondered if she was hoping for a description.

  ‘I didn’t look closely, though,’ I added.

  ‘Probably not from round here anyway. Talan says bodies can float for hundreds of miles in the sea.’

  I didn’t want to think about it any more.

  ‘What are you doing here?’ I said. ‘I mean, back in Craighston?’

  I remembered her saying time and time again that she would never come back. Her eyes flicked away from me and I knew she was remembering the same conversations.

  ‘I had no choice. No money. No work. Last of my pitiful savings finally ran out a couple of weeks ago. So I came back. Living with Talan was the only option. That and finding a job here. I thought looking after Freda would be easy.’ She mimicked the tones of someone older and patronising. ‘“It’s just spending the night with an elderly lady, Kelynen dear. She needs a bit of help getting in and out of bed, you know, if she’s caught short in the night. And sometimes she’s a bit confused when she wakes up. She’s gone wandering off in her nightie a few times. We just need someone to keep an eye on her. Poor old dear.”’ She pulled a stray piece of tobacco out of her mouth. ‘Poor old dear, indeed. She sits in her chair all day and dozes on and off, like she is now. Not even the police at the door woke her. So she isn’t a bit tired at night. I’m up and down like a fucking yoyo and mostly it’s because she fancies a chat and hasn’t a clue what time it is.’