The Black Joke

by David Bramhall

  Chapter 32

  For I am ready to halt and my sorrow is continually before me (Psalm 38)

  Pert stood for a long time. Just as he had known immediately that the second figure was Grubb, he had also known the first faller, the one that had tumbled and gone straight down. He knew that slight, pale figure, recognised the flash of yellow dress. His mouth fell open and he realised that the high keening noise he could hear came from his own throat. Slowly he sat down on the stones. Rosella was dead.

  Later when he thought back to that moment and tried to remember what he had felt, the only word he could come up with was “empty”. Grief would strike him later, but at that moment he just felt ... empty. He was empty. His life was empty. The world was empty.

  He had known Rosella since he was six, and she five, when she had first appeared at infant school, a self-contained, confident little tot with almost-blonde hair and dazzling brown eyes. Ever since, she had always been there. True, she had never acknowledged his existence, but there he had been and there she had been, year after year. And he had watched her, and laughed when she laughed, and cried for her on the rare occasions she cried, and been proud when she was clever which was most of the time, and made excuses for her on the rare occasions when she was not.

  And now she was not there any more. She was gone, and his life was over. There would be no return for him now. His family would mourn but would manage without him, his sister would certainly weep but would then go on with her life, the town would hardly remember who he was in a week or two. His purpose in being had vanished, and he felt that he would prefer to fade and vanish as well. There was nothing else to do.

  He stood and wandered round the little beach vacantly. Overhead the wind still blew but there were stars in the sky now. The rags of cloud were flying away, and the storm would blow itself out. The glow in the sky was dimming too, as the flames died down. There would be smoke for days, but it was blowing inland and he could not see that from where he stood.

  He looked at the wreck. It held little interest for him, but he wandered over to it anyway. He climbed up to its deck, which gave under his feet. Some planks still held, though, and he was able to make his way to the little deckhouse. On the side was a piece of wood, nicely carved round the edges with a mermaid at one end and a foul anchor at the other. Incised into the wood were the words Bight of Benin.

  He smiled wryly at himself. Of course it was. The idea had occurred to him when Walter told him about the wreck. It was obvious, really. This was all that was left of his grandfather's boat, the Bight of Benin. Mascaridus Potts, the arch-villain, the ex-pirate who sailed with and was beloved by the infamous Benito de Soto, the upstanding fisherman, the leader of the Free Fishers, hadn't made off with the treasure to sunnier climes at all. He might have stolen the treasure, true enough, but he'd ended here, in the dark and damp at the foot of the Old Man. It seemed rather fitting that his grandson should do the same.

  He went back to the Better Times and curled up under the sail and looked up at the stars, but could not sleep. He thought of his mother. And Fenestra, what was she doing? Sleeping, probably, and tomorrow she'd give Billy another reading lesson, and tell him a story and be happy.

  And Rosella?

  He thought about Rosella. Where was she, and what was she doing? She was lying broken on the rocks somewhere, all alone. All alone, and cold, and nobody would come and be with her. She would be so lonely and sad. And at last the tears came and he cried. He cried for Rosella, and he cried for himself, and he cried for the afternoon on the moor and for the demoiselles in her hair, and he made a decision. He would lie there till it was light, and then he would go and find Rosella, and be with her.

  He woke at dawn, and realised that he had slept after all though he did not feel refreshed, just empty and pointless. But his resolve was the same, so he set off across the rocks. He looked up and tried to judge just where he had seen her fall. It was not directly above him, but a little way along to the south, in the direction of the town. He looked out to sea, where the lumpen swell was still heaving on the rocks though without yesterday's savagery. He thought he could see the rock where Grubb had fallen, but of course Grubb had flown somewhat first so it wasn't a very good indication.

  The clambering was very hard, for the rock was jumbled and young, with sharp edges and many crevices to trap your feet. He lost count of the number of times he came to a dead end, a rock too tall to climb, or a gully too wide to jump, and had to retrace his steps and try another way. The sun came up and presently he was too hot, so he took his jacket off and tied it round his waist. He had nothing to drink, and there was no fresh water here.

  By the middle of the day the sun was overhead and burning. He wet his handkerchief in a gully of salt water and draped it over his head, which helped a little. In front of him was a glacis of loose rock and spoil, where a piece of the cliff had not fallen but simply slid down. The going was a little easier here and he made good progress. By constantly looking above him he thought he was approaching the place where she had fallen.

  At the top of the glacis was a raw scar of rock with some earth, where the great mass had slipped down, and above it some hundred or hundred and fifty feet above him was a shelf of green, where grass still grew and a few bushes still clung. The cliff rose above them, but there was a cleft in it, making a ravine that ran back into the body of the cliff and here there were more trees sheltering from the blast.

  He headed up hill towards them across the glacis. Sometimes his feet slipped, and sometimes the ground gave under him and he slid down the slope with loose stones round his feet, and had to cling to the ground with both hands while the stuff settled again. Then he would have to make good the height he had lost. Other times he would come to a more vertical section he could not climb for fear that more would break off and carry him with it, so he would have to go left or right until he found a way up.

  The wind was dying, and the sun had gone over the top of the cliff, so he was cooler though the effort of climbing was a trial to him, and he had still eaten and drunk nothing. He kept climbing though, relying on the numbness of his grief to shut his mind up and keep him from worrying about his own discomfort. He thought about Rosella, sometimes without meaning to, and the tears would flood his eyes and he would have to stop and weep for a while, crying loudly with his mouth open and not bothering to hide it because there was no one to hear.

  Other times he thought about her on purpose, reminding himself of her pale body lying somewhere above him all alone, to force himself to keep going. He wasn't sure what he would do when he found her. A grave was an impossibility on these slopes, and he had nothing with which to dig. The idea of dropping her into a hole or over an edge was unthinkable. He only thought about finding her and being with her. Perhaps the best he could do was to lie beside her and hold her poor hands until he died as well, for he was sure he was not going to get off this cliff alive, and wouldn't have wanted to if he could. He knew he might get back to the Better Times and sail her home so Walter would still have his good boat, but then he thought of Rosella and knew it was impossible. She needed him more.

  As it grew dark he searched for a place to rest, and eventually his strength gave out where a small fall of rock had left a scoop of gravel and a little vertical face above it so that he could lie with his back towards the rock. He laid his head on the gravel and closed his eyes, but the tears came again and forced them open. Through them he saw the watery void in front. It would be so easy to just roll down and let himself go, and allow the comfortable air to cushion him and let him down and down and it would all be over. He could die so easily and quietly, without effort. It was an alluring prospect, but Rosella kept coming into his mind, lying broken on the hillside somewhere, and he couldn't do it. She was so lonely, and no one else knew where she was. Even the dead need some company, surely? There was nothing else he could do for her, so surely he must do this much, hold her and be with her as she started her journey into oblivion?
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  He woke at dawn, bitterly cold. His limbs screamed with the cold, and his heart quailed, but even before he made the effort to open his eyes Rosella was there. If he was cold, how bitter must she feel? He was alive at least, but she didn't even have the comfort of a beating heart and flowing blood. He could hear a chattering, clacking sound near at hand, and thought it must be seabirds rattling their beaks on their ledges.

  When he finally opened his eyes he saw a small pink flower, shaking in the wind. He saw it hazily, his eyes not yet focused. It had a small spray of leaves around it. As his sight cleared he could see that its roots were half exposed by the wind that whipped the soil from it. Small pebbles lay between it and him, and behind it was a grey sky. Lifting his head a little he could see the brown shale above him, which had fractured and allowed the rock in front to fall away, creating this bed for him.

  His limbs ached, and there was an excruciating pain in his hip where he had been lying on a stone. He shifted to avoid it, and the pain got worse. He began to sit up, but had to grab hold of the earth to stop himself from sliding down. He had slept on a ledge that in daylight was barely nine inches wide, and below him was nothing but empty air. That he had not turned in his sleep and fallen to his death was a small and quite pointless miracle.

  With infinite care he inched his way along the shelf by wriggling first a shoulder, then his hip, then his feet. Little stones cascaded down at every movement, but soon the shelf grew wider and he was able to haul himself onto a little pocket of grassy slope where several gulls glared at the intruder. One pecked at him, and others hopped to get nearer, thinking perhaps they might mob him. He spoke to them softly, speaking gibberish, and after a while they relaxed and went back to grooming their feathers and making clicking noises to each other. He lay between the rudimentary nests they had made for themselves, mere scrapes in the earth, and gave rein to the grief that filled him. It was like a blanket at the back of his head, smothering his reason and his throat so that his thoughts ran loose and his throat opened and the tears sprang forth. He wept, and wept, crying and keening, and the gulls cried too, sharing his desolation.

  When the spasm had passed he looked around and chose the route of his next attempt at the climb. He would climb for fifteen minutes, and then pause and weep again, then go on. That would be the routine, a routine of loss and hopelessness. He crawled to the top of the slope and took to the hard stone. At first it was not so bad, but then it grew steeper. He had to find a handhold, reach out and grasp it, then look for a foothold not too far below it and transfer one foot to that. Then another handhold, and then the last foothold. Then a small heave, maybe only six inches, and start again.

  Some handholds were hard won, scraped out of crevices with his broken fingernails, rooting out small plants that had taken two or three years to win themselves this tiny home, only to be dispossessed rudely by his desperate fingers. Others were easier, a natural ledge or fault that offered enough room for a hand. Footholds were the same, but sometimes just a small protuberance of rock had to make do, a place where the face was not quite vertical and he had to rely on the grip of his leather shoe. When he found a place that offered four reasonable holds and would not let him down, he was able to relax and let the grief well up again, and weep for a few minutes, then gasp and take a deep breath and start again.

  Looking down he could see that he had won less than forty feet of height since he had slept, and was clinging like a fly to what from a distance would seem a vertical sheet of rock. From his viewpoint it was a landscape of gaps and faults and crevices, each to be explored or ravaged as he climbed. His mouth hung open, and his breath came in gulps, and his limbs shook with fatigue and, when he looked down at the ridiculous feat he was attempting, sheer terror. Though the gale had passed, the wind had not died completely away, but tugged at him first from one side and then from the other, trying to get underneath and prise his body from the cliff. Once it got under his jacket and wrapped it round his face and he could not see where to put his hands or his feet and had to cling there and wait until the wind turned and blew the jacket back the way it had come. That was a very bad time, and he was very frightened.

  As the day warmed the flies found him, and began to buzz round his head, and try to settle on his eyes and mouth. At first he tried to twitch his head and frighten them off, but they were persistent. It seemed so unfair, that with everything else that had happened they should be picking on him now, when he could not spare a hand to brush them away. He even chuckled wryly to himself. It was a bit funny, that however low you fell, there was always something to make you lower. After an hour or two he got used to them and just let them land and crawl on him.

  In a sense it was the spasms of grief that saved him, as they prevented him from dwelling on the abyss below his feet. While he hung back his head and bawled in desolation, still his unconscious mind was working away, charting the face of the rock above him and plotting his next moves, so that when he reached a shuddering quietus he could begin to climb again.

  He did not know, and could afterwards not remember, just how long he climbed with his muscles shrieking for relief and his bloody fingertips leaving a trail on the rock. He knew that in time the pauses when he wept were welcome, moments when he could turn his mind from physical pain. He summoned them deliberately every few steps, forcing himself to think of the girl, his girl, his poor girl lying on the rocks with no one to hold her or be with her.

  He could not remember how long it was, but it must have been the entire day because when the ground he reached up for began to slope away from him and become less vertical, it was evening and the sun had already left him. He did not think to wonder what he would have done if nightfall had caught him out on the bare rock. He certainly could not have clung by his fingertips through the night, but waking or sleeping must have let go sooner or later and just gently leaned back and fallen. What a relief that would have been.

  But here he was, now, on a steep grassy slope again. The light was getting bad, and the air was dropping cool. There were even a few bats flitting along the rock faces, hunting and squeaking. He wondered what they did when the wind blew. There must still be calm places here where they could hunt in shelter. He began looking around for a place to spend his second night.

  Above him there was the beginning of the cleft he had seen from far below, and there he could make out bushes and even a couple of straggly trees. He thought this was underneath the falling place but as he had moved along, the shape of the cliff above him looked different and he was no longer sure whether he had come too far or not far enough. In a last scramble he reached the place where there was more grass, and proper undergrowth, and a few last insects buzzed.

  He lay on the grass facing the sea, the ground falling sharply away before him where he had climbed up. Above him, craning back, still rose six or seven hundred feet of rock, deep in shadow now but he could see the edge because that was where the stars stopped. He turned on his front, and ran his eye down and down towards the place where he now was, and as he did so he caught a glimpse of something light. In the dusk he could not see its colour, but it showed up pale in the twilight, and did not belong. He got up and forced his weary limbs to climb again, soon having to hand himself from one branch to the next gnarled branch because he had plunged into the bushes and trees that lined the gully. He kept the pale patch in sight as he climbed. Perhaps it was just some paper that had blown there, or a dead animal that had fallen and become desiccated, or a scrap of canvas from some ship in the storm or in the storm before that. Canvas would be useful, because he could sleep under it.

  When he got to it, it was caught in the branches of a tree only three or four feet from the ground. In the dim light he had to go very close to it to see, but he wasn't frightened because he had been through all the emotions there were, and couldn't be scared of anything any more.

  It was her. Rosella lay on her back on a litter of broken branches, sprawled just as she had fallen and landed. The branche
s had come down with her when she crashed through them. Her yellow dress was in tatters, and the flesh that showed through was red and lacerated. There was blood on her face, and her eyes were closed. One leg was bent at an unnatural angle. She was almost unrecognisable, but her hair, her lovely hair was still bright.

  He touched her. She was cold, but he had expected that. In fact he had expected her to feel colder. He put his face to hers and kissed her, only their third ever kiss and, he supposed, their last. Her lips were cold, bruised and swollen, but not icy and still soft. He tried to stop himself believing, in case it was not true, but he couldn't. She was nearly dead, broken and smashed and hurt, and she was probably dying, but she was not quite dead yet. At least he could make her a little comfortable. At least now he could say goodbye, and she would not die alone.

  He held her, cradling her in his arms and putting his face beside hers, and cried wet tears that ran down his face and onto hers, and he felt her stir beside him, and her head turned a little towards him and her eyes opened.

  She spoke in a whisper so faint it might have been just the fluttering of a breath, “I knew you'd come. Took your time, though.” Her eyes closed again. The merest ghost of a smile played on her lips.