Last Orders

Char paid the taxi driver and turned towards the pub. The sign, marked ‘LINES END’ on a painting of the facing cliffs of Arrowick Cliffs, creaked in the cool breeze of the night air.

She listened as the car crawled over gravel, sped up. She watched as it disappeared into the evening.

The last journey.

The pub door then slammed open, a mixed and messed up group in their twenties crashing out, comparing who was drunkest, where they ought to move onto next.

The glow from the crackling fire of LINES END pulled Char in. She stopped pondering whether the sign was owed an apostrophe.

Onto the next.

~

“Do you take sugar?” the policeman asked.

The journalist batted the question away with his notepad.

“No thanks, not at this time in the evening.”

The reply garnered good-natured laughter from Colin.

“Start of the day for me, ain’t it,” Colin reminded him. He thrust two heaped spoonfuls into his mug, thinking about but not speaking of all the victims he’d encountered over the years. Pale faces. Twisted limbs. Maybe they wouldn’t have ended up how they did if they’d have said “yes please” to a few more of the sugars life had had to offer them.

Colin indicated for Hugh to sit on one of the kitchen’s breakfast bar stools. The journalist was there to research an article on Arrowick Cliffs. Specifically, its infamy as the country’s busiest suicide spot.

Sure, one could wax lyrical about the local winged wildlife it attracted – the butterflies and the birds. The views – drawing many an amateur painter to commit to canvas the swirling sunsets, or the sun kissing the sea good morning, the gracefully rotating windfarms, surfers and dog walkers and children trying their best to build sandcastle from shingle with brightly coloured yet futile buckets. But below all of this thrummed the current of drama. The permanence of death. The scythe that scuppered all of these lively pursuits.

A silence fell between the two men while the kettle grumbled in preparation for its screech. Hugh pulled out his phone – he’d remembered a ‘fact’ he had found online that he wanted to verify with Colin. At the very same moment, almost as though it were envious about being left out, Colin’s mobile began to ring.

“Wouldn’t be surprised if that’s one of them now!” Colin boomed, Hugh unsuccessfully stifling a flinch at the force.

“Hello?” Colin greeted the caller while he tapped the countertop rhythmically with a teaspoon. Shaz was always telling him off for that, reminding him she had neither married a drummer, nor did she wish for her kitchen to be redecorated a speckled muddy brown.

“Oh really? Right,” Colin sighed, perhaps a touch overdramatically; Hugh couldn’t tell yet. Nonetheless his ears had pricked up and he placed his phone expectantly back in his jacket pocket.

“Yep, yep. Okay. See you down there. In about 10.” Colin hung up, turned back to his visitor.

“Trouble?” asked Hugh.

“Called it, didn’t I?” claimed Colin, with a waggle of his eyebrows for good measure. He poured water into the mugs, one of which indicated it had once come with an Easter egg, the other proclaiming it was ‘# 1 DAD’. He took a seat next to his guest, figuring an extra few moments to finish his drink wouldn’t change the outcome.

~

Char ordered her last drink, a Fireball. It burned her throat and warmed her belly. When she was a child she had read about spontaneous combustion and had been convinced it was her fate. Her namesake. She demanded to be called Charlotte after that but it had proved hard for her parents to get into the habit, after they’d already been shortening her to Char for eight years.

She hadn’t expected so many of her final thoughts to dwell on grammar and punctuation. Yet another of life’s procrastinations. Syntax. Social media. Sausages. Sausage dogs. Sex. Sales. Self-care. All constructs. Distractions. Fencing us off from the abyss.

Char chuckled softly to herself, causing the bartender to glance at her. Char wiped her mouth with a napkin, slithered off her stool at roughly the same moment Hugh was about to be invited to take a perch on his.

She left the building – the last building, the last artificial warmth – and walked the three minutes it took to get to the cliff’s edge. Glancing back at the pub, thinking how long before that too fell prey to erosion. Coasts and climate change. They were coming for us all. Nothing’s gonna stop us now.

The wind had picked up, was now at her back, urging her on. Char didn’t look down. She stepped off, with her eyes fixed firmly on the horizon.

~

“What, really?” Hugh prided himself on remaining ambivalent; he thought it drew out people’s trust. Say little. Ask only pertinent questions. Show no emotion, except for occasional sympathy. His girlfriend Becca often remarked he would do well as a therapist if he ever thought of changing career. But this had caught him off guard. An article coming to life.

“Yeah!” said Colin, taking a big gulp of his coffee and smacking his lips with relish.

Hugh decided Colin wasn’t being gleeful – merely excited to be in the heart of the action. Right? Right.

“Bartender called it in. They know the signs, see. People coming in on their own, acting funny, got that look in their eyes…” Colin paused while Hugh reopened his notepad. “That stare. They know.”

~

Her jacket had caught on a branch about a quarter of a way down the cliffside.  

A gull flew by, vaguely interested in Char’s dilemma, but mostly wondering if something with that many layers around it would be edible.

She heard a soft rasp as the freshly punctured hole in her jacket began to tear.

Don’t look down.

Moonbeams turned the gull’s wings into ghostly fans. Stars were reflected in pinpoints in its black eyes.

That stare, she naively thought, as the tear ripped through the night and the sea rushed up to embrace her, it knows.