by Tim Robinson
I gathered up his three coats and shook the dew off them. Keeping his face turned from me he held out his arm stiffly for me to hang the coats over it. When he made an uncertain step in the direction of the road I spun him round and send him shuffling off along the side of the house. The bell was clamouring at the gate.
On the Edge
I am too near the edge, they tell me; I look too deep. Even here, lying down close to the shopfronts, the wind is tearing at me. The pavement trembles as the lorries pass, and then comes the shock of a wave against the base of the cliff It amazes me that the passers-by register neither of these disturbances. So I keep my head down and they hardly notice me.
There is a crack here between two paving slabs, a fissure in the rock with a bramble deep down in it. It runs between my hands, a groove full of blackish grains and a glint of broken glass, and disappears under my chest. The bramble stem, dull purple, with pale hooks, leafless, is tensed against the sides of the ragged gap. The wind makes my raincoat flap against my legs. The joint of the paving runs straight to the kerbstone. I taste salt on my lips; spray is drifting up over the rim of the land. Just ahead of me is the base of a lamppost; I worm myself forward, get one arm round it, clasp my hands together, and peer over the edge.
The traffic is stopping. A big wheel moves slowly across in front of me. There is a cigarette packet stuck to it. When it stops, the corner of the packet, green and white, shows under the bulge of the tyre. People stepping over my legs angled wide across the pavement look down at me anxiously. Can they not see that years of footsteps have rotted the stone? The rock is fissured, rain has worked deep into the faults. I do not tell them the clifftop could break up under us into heavy box-shapes at any moment. If it happens – when it happens! – they would surely see me clutch at the sliding masses, my feet dragging across the pavement; they would hear the wind screaming in my ears as I turn, legs astride in the air, twisting myself free of the cloud of sand and stones falling with me, curving my back like a salmon as the wave leaps up towards me, foam biting at my face, arms twisted around my head …
But my arm is around the base of the lamppost, my hands grasp each other firmly even though they are aching with cold. I am steady, my interwoven worlds separating out into two clarities. The joint of the pavement is actually a few inches to the right of the rock-fissure, the edge of the cliff is just beyond the line of kerbstones. I dig my toe in where the corner of a manhole cover is broken off, get my foot secure where a loose stone has been kicked out of the turf. Smoke spurts by my head, the lights have changed, the big tyre hunches slightly and moves off. A motorbike follows, red mudguards and a leather foot. For a few moments, for as long as I can hold my worlds apart, I can see far ahead, to reflections in plateglass opposite, naked gesturing figurines, and beyond all that a band of ivory sky between the heavy cloud-base and the dark sea horizon. Distant rainshowers hang across the long rim of light.
Look, that pale bird sliding through the air on knifeblade wings! Watch it glide away across the wind roaring up the cliff. But you don’t want to see it. There are people stepping off the pavement onto the black and white rectangles without a glance at the leaping shapeless blacks and whites far below.
Now a wave is gathering itself out of the confusion, raising itself up in a long dark fold. As it moves in towards the bottom of the cliff another sea-bird, a heavy black thing, takes off from the upcurving face of water, lifts itself over the dancing white teeth of the blade, glides along the wave’s smooth back with its long neck stretched out, leaves the wave as it runs in under the cliff, and rolls its flight along the hollowed front of the next wave, turns, checks, rides the water for a moment, and plunges into the throat of the wave. You could see all this if you wanted to, if you would stop for a moment. The bird is swimming in the transparent wave; it is a pale green shadow of itself.
The traffic is stationary again, murmuring, waiting for the lights. Choking fumes roll along the gutter. The wind drives blinding dots of foam into my face. Look down, look down, all of you! Directly below us the belly of the cliff hides the cavern at sea-level, but it is there, I can tell you. I have seen it from the bus: a long slit between the strata where the water crouches to go in under the smooth dark lip of stone. You must have heard it sometimes: the shriek of air forced out, the satiating plunge of liquid into solid. When a wave is torn open by the rocks and thrown back against the next one that comes surging into the shore, the white blood of the sea streams out, coiling and foaming. The two waves drive together and send up writhing towers of shattered water. The new wave mounts the first, rushes over it, arches its smooth-muscled back and empties itself into the cave. Watch what happens! Stand and watch! The waters spread themselves, folds of froth are smeared out, the linked arcs of bubbles widen, sleek black patches well up; a space is prepared, a field, a bed, that is what it is, for the coming-together of the wave now being flung back from below the weight of stone and the next already forming from the chaos of peaks and troughs further out. And this is a huge one, bulging up out of the dazzling crinkled surface-film, stretching it smooth. This is the one I warned you of, the one that will surely bring down the cliff, shaking out thousands of tons of rock poised over crumbling foundations, leaving the department stores behind us hanging over the surf with seagulls riding up through their floors on the rounded back of the wind. It leans and piles itself against the cliff, it heaves and bursts into the cavern, it forces itself along clefts running deep into the rock below us, behind us, prising apart the stone. Inertia, the immovable clenched darkness, resists, repels. No, this isn’t the one. This wave is lost, beating against its own echo. I feel the shock throughout my body, people pause as they reach out towards the swinging shopdoors, the piles of metal baskets rattle by the tills, but the force is spent in unfulfillable labyrinths, the earth holds, the sea falls back once more.
No, not this time, not today, and maybe not this year. But another winter is coming. Storms hundreds of miles away in the ocean will prepare the great rollers that travel for days one behind another, moaning in banks of fog, whispering through nights of full moon and icy stars, gathering strength from deep after deep. Not this winter perhaps, and not the next, and perhaps not in winter but on some unsuspecting day of spring, a Sunday afternoon with the shops closed and a few children running to a park through the drowsy scent of sea-pink blossoms nodding on the clifftop. At some such moment the ultimate touch will be given, the undermining of the base completed. Suddenly, a whipcrack, a whisper that becomes a roar, a crevasse rips open along the pavement, the level turf sinks into hollows and comes apart, we see through it to the glistening calm sea below. And then the gigantic foundering, the utter disappearance into roaring muddy foam of a place we knew, a place where families picnicked only days ago.
So, even though you notice nothing, the double geography will have changed. The line of the cliffs will run further back, behind the big stores, along little streets that are quiet in the sunshine, with locked-up workshops, shuttered restaurants, empty stalls whose loose canvas tops flap in the breeze, where trodden cabbage leaves and the blue wrappers of oranges lie in the gutter and a cat sleeps among broken wooden crates.
I know all this; I have seen such changes several times in the course of my life.
Visits to the Black Cliff
The ground ends a foot before me; I fling myself back from the drop, fall, slip forward, stop myself on the very edge.
I lie absolutely motionless, eyes shut, body flattened on a slope to a brink, fingers stretched over smooth ground, till my heart quietens.
A cave, a cliff below. A shallow hollow in a cliff-face, curved. Night; a vast pale disc hanging in the sky.
Very carefully I raise myself a little, look about. The back of the cave curves down under me, falls away rimlessly at my heels into the cliff-face. Hemispherical, almost perfect. The opening several times higher than myself, circular, slightly elongated at one side like the corner of an eye. The ground, the surface of the hollow,
the substance of the cliff, black. The orb bigger than the sun, paler than the moon, on my level, in black sky, exactly opposite me. Its dim light floods the hollow and seeps into the black material, diluting its outer layers. The ground does not feel like glass or crystal, though, but neutral in warmth, like ebony, with faint swellings and concavities more palpable than visible.
It is clear at a glance that there is no way out of the recess except by the cliff-face. It seems possible that the elongated side of the opening gives onto a ledge, but at the thought of moving closer to explore it a qualm of distress runs through my body and mind. I lie staring out at the dark and its central pool of light until I feel enough stillness in me to face the view of the depth. But when at last I inch my head out over the edge it takes my mind some time to interpret the shimmering recessions my eyes plunge into. The cliff stretches downwards as far as I can see, densely black, filmed with dewy light. The sky differs from it in being the black of emptiness, negativity. The two are separated by a delicate, precise line at an incalculable distance. On either side of me is the same unbroken endlessness. As I turn myself cautiously to look upwards I realize that I want to find this vertical horizon a complete circle, that its absolute simplicity of form is more important to me at this moment than the possibility of an escape-route. And indeed there is no visible limit to the cliff above; it meets the sky in a perfect circle all about me. The beauty of this limitless world silences my mind, forbidding hope and despair.
I lie still until time begins to be measured again, but only by a slow increase of loneliness. My mind roves wider and wider over the cliff in search of life. Might there be other crannies in which anything similar to myself hides from the force of gravity that hunts across the face of this world? When the sense of isolation overcomes my paralysis I crawl forward to the side of the opening. It does appear that it would be possible to hold myself in the narrow channel leading from it, which slants slightly downwards across the face of the cliff and ends a few yards away in what could be the lip of another hollow. A vision of a tunnel, an escape inwards, away from the terrible motionless wind of gravity that threatens to suck me into emptiness, makes my mind yearn forwards. I ease myself into the groove, a half-cylinder just deeply curved enough to hold my body, with my head turned inwards so as not to hear the seductive silence of the abyss an inch to one side. But just ahead the channel narrows a little before funnelling into the recess beyond. Even as I make the first slight move to round the obstruction I know I am about to slip off. My hands go over the edge first. For a moment I lie upside down on the cliff-face, and then turn right over as my body clenches itself against the impact my mind knows will never come.
I am in a slanting oval niche, half crouched, half leaning against the black slope. The vast luminary almost fills the sky; I have to lean outwards to see the narrow rim of soot-black between it and the more solid black of the cliff, which has lost its sheen of light. I cannot decide if the orb is a sun or a moon, whether it dominates or is dominated by this vertical world. It is so huge, all-illuminating, all-embracing, and yet looks so tenuous my breath could disperse it. There is an almost imperceptible wavering in its luminosity, a drifting and mingling of smoky perturbations like shadows of multitudes of subtle thoughts playing across a composed face. Nothing in its appearance gives any clue as to its distance. Does it ever touch the cliff? I imagine it would not annihilate it, merely rest on it like a moth for an instant before withdrawing softly. The nature of the cliff has changed too; it is now impenetrable by the light, and its irregularities are even less marked. My hands are already wearied of maintaining a hold on its featureless surface. I am almost glad when I begin to slide inexorably into emptiness, knowing that I will quickly lose consciousness of this world in the fall. For a moment I see my own reflection turning with me, between the hazy sphere and its faintly rippling image in the cliff.
It is so dark it takes me some time to work out that I am standing spreadeagled with my back to the cliff, my feet on a slight projection so smooth I know I will not be able to balance myself on it for long. The light in the sky is a tiny round spot opposite me, visibly waning. I am determined not to fall before it has entirely disappeared, before this day or year in the cliff’s existence has ended. My back and limbs are aching by the time it dwindles to a point and flickers out, leaving utter darkness, and is instantly reborn. As it grows I find I can see far across the cliff’s surface from this vantage-point. There are no other footholds, no hiding-places. Nothing stirs within the immeasurable distant circle of the horizon. But the depths all around do not frighten me now. I wish though that I could remain conscious for longer when I eventually fall. I am certain that I would never reach a ground, that this world is an infinity turned on edge. I exult over the chance that has casually crucified me here to glimpse the cliff’s slow progress towards purity. The face of the light is brighter now, untroubled, almost inert, its edge determinate against the black of the void. I imagine the future of this harmonious world given over to the play of light and gravity, the cliff making itself a mirror for the passing of time, time purging itself of incident, shaped only by the pulse of matter’s blind meditation on its own nature as a coast of the sea of time, enduring, against which time culminates, from which time ebbs, to which time is drawn back out of nothingness, its flow unchecked by incidents, histories, irregularities, unimpeded even by the infinitesimal pressure of my vision, which I can now withdraw, by letting myself go, fall, float, fade.
My hands slip from their hold even as I wake; I twist in space, see the star an ultimate of white, the cliff a flawless black, myself drowning between them.
Since then, rare moments of falling, each instantly extinguished, and the last some time ago. Regret for a world that in perfecting itself has excluded me.
The Absence
They, every living person in the whole world, all of them, were stolen – or stole – away from me while I dozed after love. I had felt her head lift from my shoulder, and after a pause, to which thinking back on it later I could assign no length, her lips had rested on my forehead for a moment. Then she had unclothed my body’s warmer side of hers, let the sheet fall in her place, slipped my restraining murmur. All that some time before I woke.
I woke, not hearing the expected kettle settled on the stove downstairs, the bright twinned cries of saucers on the tray, cups and teaspoons on the saucers. The morning was summer, yet it was not quite usual that her gown still hung with mine behind the door.
I would have called had not the silence closed itself against my call.
Naked too, I stood at the stair-head; all the doors of the upper rooms were open, all the upper rooms were empty. I stood on chill tiles in the hall below; all the doors were open, rooms empty. The front door open, the garden empty.
A loose horse-step. At the garden gate the piebald pony from the riding-school next door lifted its hoof to free it from the loop of reins trailing from its mouth, and moved away as I came down the path.
Leaning over the gate I saw the other ponies cropping the verges here and there in the lane, reins lying loosely across saddles.
Every room of the house empty, once again. At the head of the stairs I picked up the telephone and carried it to the bed, dialled a number at random, let it ring and ring and ring.