On the Edge

by Jane Jesmond

  A text from Rachel Mullins pinged onto my phone. It was Nick Crawford’s previous address. Near Plymouth. I was going to Plymouth tomorrow to sell the car and see Grid.

  Grid.

  How many times had I seen him rig a pulley when we worked together? Watched his hands deftly secure it to a beam and run the rope through it? Countless times.

  They call them white nights. The ones where you don’t sleep. Is it something to do with summer nights in the Arctic Circle where the sun never sets? Perhaps. But there was nothing white about the October night before my meeting with Grid. It was black, with no stars or moon penetrating the low clouds.

  As soon as I started drifting into sleep, the barriers in my brain dissolved and I saw hands on the spanner unscrewing the eyebolt. Then hands undoing the chain. Over and over again and each time the hands were different. Some were familiar although I couldn’t remember whose they were. Others were strange to me. I told myself to look up at the faces but, each time I tried, my mind dragged me out of sleep and I came to, sweating and shivery. Anyone could have done it. I repeated it like a mantra. The back door was unlocked. It wouldn’t have taken long. It could have been anyone. It didn’t have to be someone who knew about climbing and rigging. It didn’t have to be someone like Grid. It could be Nick Crawford. Of course it could. I’d have been visible for miles when I shimmied down the rope into Ma’s room. Anybody watching for an opportunity would have seen me.

  Eighteen

  In the morning, I set off early for Plymouth. Couldn’t bear another hour in Tregonna with Ma and Sofija trying to avoid each other. Couldn’t bear seeing the desperate expression on Kit’s face. It was a large house – a massive house – but we all used the same scruffy kitchen and the same back door.

  Besides, it was my last drive in the Aston and I planned to take the long way round, through all the twisty country lanes with their high hedges that broke every now and again to give a tantalising glimpse of the countryside, then over the moors where you could see for miles. But when I drove past the lighthouse, quiet and withdrawn in the morning light, another idea came to me and I stopped the car where the road met the cliff path, and walked down to the ledge where I might have been attacked to see if there was any sign of a struggle – although the storm and the police raising the body from the cove below would have covered over most things…

  It was quiet on the ledge and thin clouds let through a soft glimmer of sun that dappled the rocks and grass. Winter mornings in Cornwall were often like this, teasing you with the promise of sunshine, then abruptly piling on heavy layers of cloud.

  Nothing seemed out of place. No signs of a fight. I walked back and forth checking the ground from left to right like the police do in TV crime series, feeling ridiculously excited when I found the stub of a rolled cigarette. There were quite a few, in fact: rain-sodden and ground into the grass. I peered over the ledge. It was low tide and the sea had pulled back to reveal nothing. No more bodies, just unmarked sand and rocks, empty of everything except pools and seaweed. It was all as blank as my memory.

  I sat on a stone with my back against the cliff and shut my eyes. I tried to remember. Instantly, I became aware of the smells: wet grass overlaid with the rotting tang of seaweed. Nothing else. But nothing ever came when I forced it. Memories only burst upon me when I was thinking of other things. No matter. I opened my eyes. While I’d been sitting, the clouds had thickened, draining the colour from the grass and darkening the stone. I shivered. The ledge felt exposed and I wondered if I’d been sensible coming down here, of all places, on my own. A trickle of fear slid down my neck. I hurried back to the car. A flutter of cloth at the first bend stopped me. Someone was standing there. I looked around for a stick. A stone. Anything. But there was nothing I could use to defend myself. I pressed myself into the cliff, and Kelly walked onto the ledge.

  ‘Kelly!’ I wiped my sweaty hands on my jeans. ‘I mean, hi. What are you doing here?’

  She jumped when I appeared out of the rock and dropped her cigarette.

  ‘Oh Jen.’ She bent over and hunted through the grass until she found it. Her hands shook as she lifted it to her mouth and inhaled. ‘Shit. You gave me a shock.’ Her lips were white and tight round the cigarette and I thought she’d been crying. Her free hand clenched and unclenched the material of the dress she was wearing. She was all in black. Dress, jumper, thick tights and boots. But she always was. Most of the dancers I knew were. As though the grace of their posture and the line of their bodies needed no adornment. Except Kelly was crumbled and shapeless and pissed off that I was there. In fact, more than pissed off. Like a shabby cat whose fur was still ruffled from the thought of danger, her back was arched and her eyes spat. I’d interrupted her, I thought, in a moment when she’d let all the barriers holding her together go. A private time not meant to be witnessed. I watched her pull the barriers back up and give a sour laugh.

  ‘Tough night,’ she said. ‘I come down here for a few minutes most mornings after I’ve finished. It’s quiet. Puts a bit of space between me and the night.’

  Her hand still gripped her dress. When she saw me looking at it she relaxed and let the crumpled material fall.

  ‘I know,’ I said. ‘I do that myself. Have a few minutes away from everything. I’ll leave you to it.’

  ‘No, no. Stay here. I don’t want to drive you away.’

  She sat herself down on a rock. As graceful as ever until her knee bent beyond a certain point and she winced and put her hand down to take the weight. I suspected she’d never dance again. Not like she had before, anyway. Whatever she’d done to her knee, it had been catastrophic. I wished she’d tell me because I, of all people, understood what it was like to have the thing you loved most snatched from your life. I understood the jagged hole it left behind.

  ‘You OK? I thought you looked a bit stressed yesterday,’ she said.

  ‘I was. A bit.’

  ‘Anything I can do?’

  I shook my head. ‘Things are tricky at home. But thanks. And you?’

  ‘Not great either. But easier since I started working for Freda. Gives Talan a bit of space to himself in the evenings. The cottage is small.’

  ‘He’s very proud of you. He used to talk about you all the time when we were going out.’

  ‘When the two of you were going out,’ she said. ‘All those years ago. When you were going out and I was still a dancer.’

  ‘Is it –?’

  ‘All over? Dancing? Oh yes. Everything is gone. My life might as well be over.’

  Her cigarette was nothing but a stub now. She spat on her fingers, extinguished the last few strands of burning tobacco and threw it into the grass.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I said. She stiffened and I thought how little I would like people being sorry for me but I ploughed on. ‘I do get it, Kelly. What it’s like, I mean. I don’t climb any more. Not since –’

  But she cut me off with a slice of her hand and pushed herself up off the rock.

  ‘No, Jen. You don’t understand at all. It was your decision to stop. You can climb again. One day, you probably will. I have no choice. Everything has been ripped from me and –’ She stopped and gathered all the pain back into herself. ‘I’m sorry, but I can’t talk about it,’ she said and left.

  I sold the car. The garage checked it over swiftly and offered me seventy-five thousand for it. They’d probably sell it on for over ninety but Kit needed the money fast, so I only haggled them up to eighty and got them to throw in an ancient Golf, very down-at-heel, but with an engine that still had some life. In fact, after I’d chucked everything from the boot of the Aston into the Golf and driven off, I thought I might have done well. Not that it mattered. I felt too low after my meeting with Kelly to enjoy speeding around the countryside.

  I headed off to Little Gidleigh, a village further round the estuary, where Nick had come from according to the address R
achel had texted me. It was a pretty village, high up with views over the estuary. The centre was small, just a pub, a church and a shop that sold a bit of this and a bit of that. It was posh, though, with houses set back from the road behind high hedges and walls and, of course, no street numbers.

  I asked at the little shop in the end and bought a chocolate flake, for old times’ sake.

  ‘Forty-three, Lower Court Road?’ The woman behind the counter asked.

  ‘Yes. It’s the only address I’ve been given and I’m supposed to be picking something up for a friend. I wondered if you knew which house it was.’ I was getting good at this investigative stuff.

  She put down the pencil she’d been using to write addresses on a pile of copies of the Plymouth Herald and thought.

  ‘Can’t say I do. Don’t you have a name?’

  ‘Aunty Joyce,’ I said with a rueful smile. ‘That’s all she told me. She did say they hadn’t lived here long.’

  ‘I don’t think anyone’s moved into that road recently. You could ask at the Reynolds’, though. Mrs Reynolds runs the residents’ association. It’s the white house at the end, called River View.’

  Mrs Reynolds, ‘call me Lily’, was very friendly. None of the houses had numbers, she told me. They never had. The Parish Council had tried once but the residents put a stop to it. Oh yes. Much nicer with names, didn’t I think? The postman knew everybody anyway. Mind you, the courier companies didn’t like it much. And as to what would happen to a letter addressed to number forty-three, she didn’t know. She supposed it would be returned to sender. Not that anyone wrote these days. It was all virtual, wasn’t it? A real pity. And on and on.

  When I could get a word in edgeways, I found out what I needed to know. Nick Crawford had lied to Rachel. The address didn’t exist. And he’d never lived in Little Gidleigh. Mrs Reynolds knew every family in the street and everything about them. No one who resembled Nick Crawford had ever stayed there. I felt relieved. The case against him was growing.

  I got away in the end and pushed the Golf to its limits to get back to Plymouth in time to meet Grid.

  The café was not what I’d expected. Stripped wooden floors, round marble-topped tables and bentwood chairs. Very Fifties Paris, with large prints of Leslie Caron and Louis Jourdan and other French film stars of the era. Not a Grid sort of place at all.

  I ordered a coffee and watched the clock tick the seconds away. When Grid arrived I understood why he’d chosen this café. There was plenty of space between the tables, and the chairs were easily moved out of the way. I should have sat by the door and saved him having to negotiate a path to the back. Not that you could tell there was a problem. There was a slight hesitation sometimes before he moved his left leg. A sense that something about it had surprised him. That was all.

  Of course, I knew straightaway he’d had nothing to do with what had happened to me. He could walk unaided but he couldn’t have dragged me up the lighthouse stairs. He’d have needed both hands and all his strength to get himself up. On every level, I’d been stupid to worry he’d been on the lighthouse on Friday night.

  He must have seen me looking because, once he’d sat down, he lifted the bottom of his jeans and showed me the sleek, black curves of his prosthetic foot.

  ‘Carbon fibre,’ he said. ‘With integrated spring technology. Much more dynamic and hardwearing than your puny bone and soft-tissue feet. I’m thinking of having the other one done, too.’

  I felt tears prickling the insides of my eyes.

  ‘Don’t, Jen,’ he said. ‘Another coffee?’

  I nodded and he went over to the counter and ordered.

  If I looked closely, I could see the traces of the last few months. His skin had always been tight over his skull but now there was a thinness to it. A transparency. The rest of him was different, too. His shoulders used to curve, hollowing his chest and they didn’t any more. From the waist up he was broader and softer. Maybe it was the result of learning to walk again: using his upper body to drag his legs up and down the parallel bars. Beneath the thick, cable-knitted jumper, the body I remembered wasn’t there any longer.

  ‘So what are you up to then?’ I said after he’d finished placing the tray of coffee on the table and the look of fierce concentration had left his face.

  ‘This and that. Moved. As you know. Lots of rehab. The clinic here is good. Alan has been talking to me about working at Skyhooks. Plans and prep stuff, for the moment.’

  And talking about me, I thought.

  ‘And about me?’ I said.

  ‘Some.’

  ‘He sacked me.’

  ‘He told me,’ Grid said.

  ‘I don’t blame him.’

  ‘It sounded bad, Jen. You OK?’

  ‘I’m not doing stuff any more.’

  ‘You look OK.’ He was a liar. I knew how I looked. Thin. Flabby. No muscle tone. ‘I mean, you don’t look like…’

  He meant I wasn’t covered in scabs and acne and my nose didn’t dribble all the time.

  I thought of everything that had happened to me since I’d last seen Grid in March, and wondered how to tell him. Then I realised I wasn’t going to. Just as he wasn’t going to tell me about the months in hospital, the struggle to learn to walk again and come to terms with his disability. We’d stopped being able to talk to each other that day in the hospital when he told me they were transferring him to the rehabilitation centre and he’d asked me not to come to see him there, saying he needed time to himself.

  ‘I’m fine, Grid. I’ve been a bit stupid but, like I said, it’s over.’

  He started rubbing his fingers and thumbs together.

  ‘Have you stopped smoking?’ I asked.

  ‘Uh-huh. You can’t smoke here anyway.’

  ‘No, but you used to prepare them for later. Whenever we sat down.’

  His fingers stopped.

  We sat in silence. His fingers twitched every now and again. Old habits die hard, I thought. I looked at my hands and saw they were doing the same, forming and reforming the classic climbing handholds. Pinching, crimping, gripping. I clenched them between my knees.

  There was one last thing I needed to know before I could rule out Grid’s accident as the cause of the attacks on me.

  ‘How are Vince and Ricky? You said you were in their flat.’ I tried to sound casual.

  ‘Good. They’re in the States now. Yosemite.’

  Yosemite. The rock climber’s Mecca. Solid granite carved over aeons by rivers and glaciers into vast cliffs. We’d planned to go together, Grid and I.

  Something must have showed in my face. He smiled. Some things hadn’t changed. Still the same crack of a smile. Fleeting across his face.

  ‘You should go there, Jen. It’s like nowhere else in the world. If you’ve got nothing to do, go there now. Climb with Vince and Ricky.’

  ‘I’m not fit.’ I said.

  ‘It’d come back quickly.’

  Oh, God. I wanted to so badly. Pack a bag. Get a flight. Go. Start on the easy stuff. Grid was right, I’d get fit fast. Once again, I’d feel the cool touch of the granite beneath my fingers and smell its sour, gritty scent. My hands caught the edge of my vision. They were moving through my practice holds again. I shook my head.

  ‘Too much to do. And, anyway, Vince and Ricky. You know. Would they want to climb with me? After…’

  ‘Jen. I told you then and I’ll tell you now: you did what you had to do. They know that. No one blames you. It was all of our faults for climbing the stupid tower in the first place.’

  ‘I haven’t climbed since.’

  ‘No?’

  ‘No.’

  He spread his hand out over the cold marble table-top. His fingers looked as muscled and tight as ever and I wondered if his dreams too were haunted by the feel of the rock on the skin of his hands.

 
‘You must go back to climbing, Jen. You can’t stop. It’s all wrong.’

  He picked up a spoon and tapped it in the space between each of his fingers in turn. Slowly at first then speeding up. It was a game we used to play. See who could be the fastest. The metal against the marble made a noise and the other customers looked over at us. I reached out and put my hand over his, smothering the movement.

  ‘Kit made me promise to stop.’

  ‘What?’ He paused while the sense of what I’d said sank in. ‘Completely, you mean?’

  ‘I guess he thought… No, I know he thinks I can’t be trusted. That I won’t be able to resist going too far.’

  Kit was probably right not to trust me. I wasn’t sure I trusted myself.

  ‘I haven’t wanted to climb anyway,’ I lied.

  ‘Haven’t you?’ He paused. ‘I have. And I will. Somehow.’

  Shit. My eyes were prickling. I wouldn’t cry. Not now, for fuck’s sake.

  ‘Ricky and Vince are definitely in Yosemite?’ I asked.

  ‘What?’

  ‘I mean, they told you they were going, but did they?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Maybe they lied.’

  ‘Like, why would they do that?’

  I shrugged.

  His eyes raked my face and then he shrugged, too. ‘They’re blogging about it,’ he said. ‘Every day. With pictures. Unless you think they’re faking it. Difficult, though.’

  ‘What’s the blog address?’

  His mouth opened on a light gasp of breath. He took my phone and typed in an address and then handed it back to me, his face unmoving as I scrolled through the pictures. There was no doubt. Vince and Ricky were in Yosemite. You couldn’t fake the shots of the two of them inching up those vast granite faces towering over the spikes of pine forests. They’d been in the States last Friday, not on top of a lighthouse avenging the reckless stupidity that had cost Grid his foot, his ankle and his climbing dreams. The relief was huge.