Frozen

by Richard Burke

  The town ended where the road met rising ground. We looped upwards through a series of switchbacks, in the shade of the dense woodland that covered the hillside; then, suddenly, we broke out onto the high rolling grassland of the Sussex Downs.

  Everywhere was bright and bleak. The low hills and shallow valleys were rounded smooth and grassy, unrelieved by trees or hedges. The grass rippled ceaselessly, and when I glimpsed a solitary man walking a dog, I could see that a savage wind was ripping at him. Inside the car's safe shell, I felt nothing.

  Half a mile later, there was a pub by the road—“Beachy Head” was written over the door in large gold lettering, with a pebble-dash exterior, and a huge car park was packed to overflowing. As we ghosted past, my eyes caught a phone kiosk by the roadside, with a green sign next to it —

  THE SAMARITANS

  Always there, day or night

  —and a number to ring.

  I wondered if Adam was right, that I should have waited before coming here. Verity had been here. Had she seen that sign? Verity, you should have called them. Or me.

  Further on there was a lay-by, and a path rising to a lighthouse on a hilltop. Metal letters on a gate near the road declared it as the Belle Toute Lighthouse. It had vanished from sight round a curve before I made the connection: the police had told me that her car had been found there; this was where she had fallen.

  Another mile, and the land sank again towards the sea. At the road's lowest point, a row of grey cottages hunched against the wind along one side of a large gravel car park. Three cars were parked in it; it could have held three hundred. Opposite the cottages, a low building sprawled along the car park's edge. Beyond, there was an assortment of wooden shacks and barns. A discreet sign announced this as the Birling Gap Hotel. We parked between the cottages and the hotel, at the edge of a low cliff: beyond was the sea, a wide expanse, foamed and heaving, flanked by rising headlands in both directions.

  Tucked away round a corner from the hotel's main entrance was a doorway signed “the Thatched Bar, and Oak Room Family Restaurant.” I truly did not want to go in there, so I stared out to sea instead.

  Although he wisely said nothing, I was aware of Adam studying me. I ignored him. But I knew what he wanted to say—and I couldn't stand there forever, in any case—so eventually I answered his implied question.

  “Yes, Ads, I'm still sure,” I muttered. “Come on, then.” He gestured for me to go first. I pulled open the door.

  The Thatched Bar was so called because the bar had a straw awning above it. The room was low-ceilinged, with dark beams and rough-rendered walls. It had been decorated throughout with an assortment of nineteenth-century farm implements—ploughs, harrows, and, obscurely, some disturbing-looking tongs. There was a hearth with a wood-burning stove—mercifully not lit—and near the door the inevitable fruit machine flickered incessantly in the corner of my eye. Only two of the fifteen or so tables were occupied: at one, a family of four, looking sunburnt and disillusioned, and in a far corner a couple sitting opposite each other, uncomfortably examining their drinks, glancing up and then back down, as though summoning the courage to talk to each other—divorce, I thought, or the first day of an affair. I assumed the pub was aimed at the holiday trade, but it was two o'clock, in high season, and there were just six people in there, eight if you included Adam and me, and two were underage.

  “Sorry, love, no food.” The girl behind the bar peered at us through the gloom. She pointed unhelpfully to a sign—Food Served Until Two-Thirty—and then to a clock behind the bar. It was nearly three. She seemed pleased by her announcement.

  I didn't want food. I wanted answers, but Adam had other plans. “So, how do we persuade you?” He grinned at her.

  “What did you have in mind, darling?” She dimpled back at him, and swept her hair behind her ear. She was young, probably not yet twenty, and plump. Her green gingham pinafore was stained.

  “Ah...” Adam frowned seriously. “Well, I'm married, so I'm afraid our options are a bit limited. I could offer you the price of a sandwich?”

  She giggled and twirled her hair again.

  “Any old thing'll do,” he urged, sounding earnest and cheerful at the same time. “We're starving. Been on the go for hours.”

  “Oh, go on, then.” She twinkled at him. “Cheese sandwich, do you? Chef's gone.”

  Adam grinned. Her cheeks dimpled again, and she headed for the kitchen, hips swaying.

  I don't know how Adam does it. I know I can't, though; if I had tried to persuade her, she would have dug her heels in. Then I'd have got ratty with her, she would have insisted that rules were rules... Adam had no such trouble.

  “And some drinks, please, love,” he called after her. “One bitter, one lager.” She came back, pulled the pints, and then bustled off. Adam chuckled.

  We sat with our pints, comfortably silent. I thought about the promised cheese sandwich, and realised that I was very hungry indeed. It must have been lunchtime the day before that I'd last eaten, waiting outside the Carlisles' house. The trouble was, every time I thought of Verity a cold nausea swept through me, and my appetite vanished. I tried to picture Verity walking in, but couldn't. This dingy pub seemed such an inappropriate place for her. It had been only hours before the fall. What had she been thinking? Feeling?

  “Cheer up, love, it might never happen.” The girl dumped our sandwiches on to the table. “Here you go.”

  I bolted down a mouthful. Grated cheese and raw onion on pre-sliced white bread; I was so hungry it tasted almost good. I shook my head vigorously. “Already has happened.”

  “Ooh, love, I am sorry,” she said, as though she knew exactly what I meant and fully understood. She widened her eyes into a cliché of attentive sympathy. Then, without pause: “Hey, you're not going to jump, are you?”

  Adam sniggered, and then looked solemn. I stared at her. She looked surprised.

  “No,” I said carefully. “Thanks, but no. I'm not jumping.”

  “Good, 'cause I hate that. They all come here, you know—well, some of them. It's only five minutes' drive, did you know that?” I frowned. She gave an impatient grimace. “Beachy Head,” she explained. “The drop. People jump off it. Top themselves.” She scooped up my empty glass with a neat, satisfied movement. She looked expectantly at Adam. He knocked down the rest of his beer and asked for two more. “Had one in the other day, as it goes,” she said cheerfully, and flounced off. I glanced at Adam, who raised an eyebrow speculatively. We grabbed our sandwiches and shuffled after her.

  “Um, excuse me?” I called. “Did you say you had one in? It wasn't on Wednesday, by any chance?”

  She set down our empty glasses, and leaned on the bar conspiratorially. “A woman,” she said. “Not your usual type. Mostly it's men of a certain age, know what I mean?” She laughed merrily—at Adam, I noticed. She wasn't really talking to me at all.

  “This woman,” I pressed. “Was she in her thirties? Big brown eyes, about this tall, dark hair?”

  “Could be.” The girl shrugged. “Did you know her, then?”

  “She's a friend. Was. Is. We're... we were close.”

  But not close enough for her to call.

  She winced. “Well, it has already happened, then, hasn't it? Sorry I asked.” She turned to go—embarrassed, perhaps.

  “No. Wait,” I called hastily. “She was here, wasn't she? I mean, you saw her?”

  She picked up a glass and started to polish it, looking at me appraisingly. Adam came to the rescue. “Same again, please, love,” he reminded her. He gave her his best smile. “And how about something for you?” He grinned warmly, and waved a twenty-pound note.

  She looked at it like a bird eyeing a scrap of bread. “Ooh, ta, love, I'll have a Bacardi.”

  Courtship ritual completed, she talked as she prepared the drinks. “She came in about three. Dressed all scruffy with a big black bag. Had a vodka on the rocks, a double. I thought, Aye-aye, we've got one here—'cause that's a big drink for
a Wednesday afternoon and she was on her own. They do that, you know.”

  She enjoyed this, I realised. It made her interesting, in her own eyes at least. I hated her for it. She made the poor people who came here sound more like commodities than individuals with shattered lives and an intolerable burden of pain.

  The people on the other side of the pub left. The father called out a cheery “Thank you,” which the barmaid ignored. The other family members looked grim.

  “Anyway,” the girl continued. “She just sits there listening to one of them Walkman thingies. Winding and rewinding. She's staring straight ahead and playing this tape. So I goes over and strikes up a bit of chat. Got to get them talking, see?” She tucked her chin against her neck, as though the story was a little too rich even for her. “And she's really sniffy. Says to mind my own business. Straight out. Says she's fine.” She sounded indignant. “She wasn't, though, was she?”

  “A tape-player?” Adam said, puzzled.

  “Mine,” I said. Verity had given it to me for my thirtieth. She had asked to borrow it a couple of months ago. Apparently she wanted to make some recordings of “real life” for her next show; she needed a tape-recorder small enough to go unnoticed. I hadn't had the heart to ask her to return it. Too late now.

  Adam frowned. “What was she playing?”

  “Well, I don't know, do I?” She gaped at Adam as though he was an idiot. “She'd got those earplugs, hadn't she?”

  “Of course. But was it music? Classical, pop?”

  Adam knew more about human nature than I did—I'd have taken her denial at face value—but she answered him. “I told you, I don't know, do I?” She rolled her eyes impatiently. “Not music, though. Speaking. Someone talking.”

  I was baffled. Verity had said she wanted to record the sounds of the city—traffic and sirens and pigeons and tube trains; I couldn't imagine why she'd need the sound of someone talking for her show, particularly given the theme. “Damaged Goods.” Verity, here, waiting out her last hours, alone in this abandoned place, listening to... what?

  “So, when did she come in?” Adam's question jolted me back to the girl.

  “Must've been after three, 'cause I'd just closed the bar. Had to open up again.” She shrugged unhelpfully.

  “Did she stay long?”

  “Only three bloody hours, and just the one drink all that time. Cheap, if you ask me.”

  Neither of us had asked her, and I was getting irritated. This girl might be glad of the attention, but Verity deserved better than gossip. We had learned everything we could. Verity had come into the pub. She'd sat with a single drink for three hours. She had listened to a tape. She had left. I looked at Adam. He was clearly thinking the same thing.

  “Thanks, love, you're a star.” He racked his grin a notch wider.

  We wolfed down the remains of our sandwiches, and headed back to the car.

  “Where the hell is it, then?”

  “Hmm? Where's what?” Adam seemed absorbed in thoughts of his own.

  “My Walkman. It wasn't in her car.”

  “Maybe she had it with her when she fell.”

  “It wasn't with her things at the hospital, though.”

  “I didn't look.” Adam spread his arms in exasperation. “It's on the beach somewhere. Or at the top of the cliff. Or someone nicked it from her car. Or it's there and you missed it. How would I know? After a fall like that”—he gestured towards the sharp cliffs rising in both directions—“it's amazing they found anything at all.”

  I looked back at the Birling Gap Hotel. Under other circumstances it would have been a pleasant enough place, inoffensive, if uninspired, but to me the building squatted on the landscape like a lumpen spider, its windows blank and beady, a row of unforgiving eyes. I could feel its gaze on my back as I crossed the huge empty car park, my footsteps inaudible against the endless moan of the sea.

  We reached the car. Adam leaned on the roof. “Where to?” I took a last look round. Verity had been here, she had moved through this space. But there was nothing of her left.

  “The Head,” I said. “I want to see where she fell.”

  *

  We parked in the lay-by below the Belle Toute Lighthouse. The land rose gently away from us for a hundred feet, and then ended abruptly. Adam perched on the bonnet of his BMW. “Go on, then. I'll wait here.”

  I headed for the edge. You could smell the sea below; you could smell how the sun had warmed the grass. The air was strong and cool, the wind bruising and refreshing by turns. I breathed deeply. The headlands rolled along the coast like a vast smooth swell, a vivid green sliced through by chalk cliffs, which fell sheer to a gravel beach and the sea. The drop had to be at least two or three hundred feet. To my right, the land rose towards the lighthouse; to the left the rise was steeper, and the cliffs fell five hundred feet or more, sheer to the tumbled boulders at their feet. There was another lighthouse at the base of the cliffs, neatly striped in red and white, dwarfed by the huge promontory above. Beachy Head. Had Verity walked any further that way, she certainly would not have survived.

  The cliffs were brilliant white in the sharp sunlight. The sea was soft green. The wind brought a warm salt tang, more a taste than a smell. The coastline had a monumental beauty that was breathtaking. It was tranquil, impassive. It swept me up.

  She had walked here too. My body was passing through the same volume of space as hers had; my head was where hers had been. Perhaps our feet were in step, separated only by time. Of course it was a silly notion. I was a good four inches taller than her; there was no way our stride lengths would ever have been the same, or our heads level, but the illusion helped me. I wanted to get inside her head, see what she had seen, think her thoughts. I wanted to be close to her. I didn't want her gone.

  There was no way I could tell precisely where she had jumped, but somewhere along this stretch she had chosen her spot. Possibly I walked past it, or did not go far enough; there was no way to tell. The cliffs were featureless. I sat and watched the sea, its roughness flattened by my high perspective. Its surface glittered with warm yellow light. A supertanker stood in the middle distance, its colours bleached to grey by the sea's haze, its oily wake smearing the sea flat. Perhaps this was where she had sat in the two hours after she left the pub, just taking it in, emptying her thoughts, reflecting. The sea dazed me. It became a meaningless tangle of sparkles, crossed by gulls, warm blurs sliding across the sky. It wasn't a bad spot to die. Despite the battering of the wind, it was peaceful here.

  Did you even think of me, Verity? You could have called. You could have. You know that, don't you?

  Miss you, Verity.

  Beachy Head was beautiful. The clichés didn't do it justice. I had imagined it would be rather tacky. I mean, it was such a hackneyed idea, such a popular conception of Where To Do It. I'd half expected a souvenir hut selling candyfloss and badges saying something tasteless—Beachy Head, Worth a Look Before You Leap, that kind of thing. Let's face it, the Sussex coast—Brighton, Eastbourne, Hastings—has an image problem, and I confess that I'd bought the stereotype. But, being there, it was dramatically obvious that my preconceptions were wrong. Beachy Head was stunning. It's a place that, normally, I'd have been glad to see—and I'd never have bothered to come if it weren't for Verity. I wished I could have shared it with her.

  And that's when I realised...

  The fact that Beachy Head was beautiful changed everything.

  *

  Adam was pacing, mobile clamped to his ear, his other hand chopping at the air. “I don't care if it's difficult, just fucking do it.” He swivelled to start back in the other direction and caught sight of me. He stopped walking and scowled blankly at me, listening to whatever was being said at the other end. He waved me over.

  “Okay, I'm going to interrupt you there”' he said briskly, into his phone. “Yes, I know it's difficult. Yes, there are problems. You're paid to solve them. Do so. Now. Understood?” He didn't wait for the other person to respon
d, he just carried straight on. “Ring me when you've got a result.” He folded his phone and rolled his eyes. “Lord save us... sorry, Harry. Feeling better?”

  “Much.”

  I meant it. For the first time since Verity's fall, there was something I was sure of. Something I absolutely knew. She had not come here to kill herself. She would never have chosen this spot—and the reason was that she had the same prejudice about this stretch of coast as I had. She'd thought she knew what it was like here. She'd thought it was all sticks of rock, sunburnt children weeing in the sand, knotted handkerchiefs for sunhats. It didn't matter that she was wrong, that Beachy Head was beautiful, because her preconceptions would have prevented her coming here and finding out.

  Adam squinted at me, perhaps puzzled by my expression. I grinned back.

  And if Verity had not come here to kill herself, then perhaps after all I knew her as well as I'd thought. Because if she hadn't come to kill herself, then she wasn't suicidal—so why bother calling me? She was going to see me later that evening anyway.

  A new vision of Verity took hold in my mind. She was waiting for someone at the pub—not desperate, not suicidal, just waiting. The place had been chosen by whomever she was waiting for, because she would never have thought of it, or even have known it existed. She waited, her friend failed to arrive, and she left. Before driving back to London (for her hot date with me that evening), she decided to enjoy the scenery for a while—scenery she'd never imagined might exist among the weeing kids and the fish-and-chip stalls. She parked the car, walked along the cliff-edge, as I had...

  ... and then what? She slipped. Or the wind took her. Or she looked down and got vertigo and —

  Whatever. She didn't mean to kill herself.