Falling in Love

FALLING IN LOVE (1317 words)

He looked as forlorn as a greyhound’s tail. He didn’t care. Not caring had become like breathing, the oxygen of despair. His head was uncovered but for a tabard of wiry hair as short and as prickly as he was. Mortgaged by the past, his face was shadowed and crevassed, slouching towards the corduroy skin of his neck. Ruddy was his dominant colour infused deeper by the day’s salt breeze. His blue-sky eyes were clouded now as much by events as their constant flicker below to the grass that bearded the cliff edge. His shoulders drooped, pulled down by his hands as if they also bore a heavy burden.

He was withered within ill-fitting clothes to less than the man he was, before. He still could, but never wanted to, remember their life together and how it had become bitter, bitter-sweet, better, worse, and so on, so forth. It had been a rollercoaster of biopsy, diagnosis, investigations, reprieve, and grief. He shrivelled from these boomerang thoughts. He stopped, still within, as if impaled into the ground. From the tweedy jacket that she never did tolerate, he wristed his mobile into the light, an ancient model cosy in the woolly mini-sock she had knitted. He took it out and eased it a little way from him and then more, as far as his eyesight required and arms allowed. He pecked at the display with a gnarled forefinger as if a hesitant hen not entirely sure what to expect or what he was doing.

“Dad…,” boomed a crackly sound he recognised and shied from,” where are you, we’ve been out of our minds…”

He held it like a cracked egg towards his face, inclining his head a little sideways enabling his ear to creep up on the screen. But his hearing aids whistled and whined and the call cut out. Funny, he thought, up here on the cragg is where the reception should be uncluttered or whatever techno stuff it was his two sons discussed so much. Or was it the other way round, he mused, maybe this far from the City meant…

“Can I help you,” exuded a voice behind him. Mellifluous and feminine and purposeful.

His shoulders straightened, his breathing fast and shallow. Lies snared his throat.

“Ah…not from around here...just taking the air and lost my bearings,” he lied.

“Where’s home?” was her question. He told her.

“That’s a 300 mile round trip. Where are you staying?” He didn’t have a return ticket let alone an hotel. It had been twenty seconds and already he felt transparent, insubstantial, and discovered.

“I’m…” he sensed an attack of bluster coming on but she had, he thought, concern and goodness in her eyes. To mistrust this woman would be to betray his Joyce.

Her gaze held him in place, enough to lasso him back to the present where they stood, away from Joyce and his memories and hopes. A gripe in his chest coiled around his insides, constricting, and excavating its agony with the knowledge he would never be with Joyce again.

“It’s a funny place, this…” She talked the words in no way funny at all, waving her hand, its wrist flicking an accustomed gesture as though she was always here doing this. Doing what, he wondered.

She went on “People die here. They jump. By then in a sense they’re already over the edge, beyond the threshold of oblivion, gone from life and everything that was.”

He had come to recognize the truth of that in the hard, long hours bereft of sleep and peace. And he sensed she knew. Her compassion seemed to set her features a-trembling. Or was it the cold, bitter wind that winnowed her speech thin enough for him to strain?

She cared, he was sure he could see that. She’d edged herself between him and the extinction offered by the cliff verge. A spiritual bouncer, she stood poised in denial, her heels to the danger.

“And it’s a terrible, terrible thing to do. The currents are wild, a vortex that disappears the bodies and families suffer, never knowing for sure, never grieving, never ending.” As if overloaded by the tumble of her words, her voice ground down. Memories of the mobile call moments ago trespassed his mind and skittered from it faster than dogs off a leash. He couldn’t do it, she was right.

He looked at her anew. With her back to the sea below, she was silhouetted to shade by an azure horizon here and there stuccoed with whispery white. Way above, a contrail unzippered the sky. To either side and beneath, the distant trees were clenched like broccoli to hillsides that ebbed seaward and corralled the waters of the bay. It was majestic, she was majestic. Within him he felt attraction, then horror. What treachery that would be to his Joyce, even now, no doubt, as much out of her mind with worry as their sons. None of them could – nor in reality did he - understand how, after all his months of chemo, he had found the strength to disappear. He compressed his turmoil to zero and ventured a smile and made to speak but she was on with her mantra. That was, so he believed, how it must be for this guardian angel, up here whipped by the wind and her role.

She started again, “You see, they never know, there are no forms, no record, no one to remember and to tell the sad but necessary truth…” She not so much paused as wound down, seeming to summon some steel within to continue.

“Thank you… it’s been so hard,” he tried to say but she’d found her momentum and intent and kindly smile.

She cut across him, fast lips spitting faster words from memories that were no joy at all, “…I know, I know, I know…the loss; the love that goes on alone; the pain; the familiar words begun in a shout from bathroom to kitchen that shimmy to a silence no one hears; the pillow alongside your back as if a body next to yours; the radio left on so there’s a voice on your return; the house emptily full of things too soon to remove and too painful to keep; tears that come where you can’t show them and dammed when you need them most.”

Such grief…how many encounters up here, he wondered, had it taken for her to understand this misery so well.

Her recollections gouged beneath the brittle of his facade. He meant to tell her about how she misunderstood, how he was not the bereaved and the suicide he had intended but now abandoned. But it all got snared in his throat. He wept, a cocktail of relief and anguish.

It was a reprieve though not for long.

She cried too. Empathy, he guessed. She saw his torment and threw her arms out to the side, barring the way to him, denying him, annexing the cliff edge as hers, not his.

“It’s OK, I’m not…” his confession gravelled to a stop.

“Think how your family would have suffered if you’d gone through with it. They would never have found out,” her truth lanced through him.

“Yes, yes…you’re right.” He wanted to tell her more but she wasn’t about to hear.

“Do you have a good memory,” she asked, like their subject was now done and dusted, concluded.

“Yes, I guess…”

She smiled so sadly.

“My name’s Cindy McArthur.” She said it twice as if worried the errant wind might anonimise her and made to shake hands but that wasn’t it. Her hand was tilted with the palm outward and vertical facing him, as though she meant to say ‘stop’.

“It’s alright, Cindy.”

Before he could finish, she stepped back and was gone. She hadn’t been his saviour, it was he who was her messenger. (words 1,317 incl title)