if he listened carefully Jackson thought he could hear the sound of one hand clapping.
He picked himself up, dusted himself down and so on, and continued running, out of the wood, past his own cottage, along the bank of the stream, past the Seashell and up on to the cliff.
He’d switched to Maren Morris on his headphones. She was singing about how her car was her church. It was not a sentiment you often heard from women. If she hadn’t been young enough to be his daughter (not to mention laughing him out of court), Jackson would have tried to marry her. Hallelujah.
The remains of a handsome sunset was still staining the sky. He was running on the old railway line. It had been built to serve the alum quarries that had given wealth to this part of the coast. The line had never been used, his little local guidebook informed him, because it was realized that it was too close to the crumbling cliff. Jackson had had no idea what alum was when he first moved here. It was obtained from shale and had been used to fix dyes, apparently, and needed quantities of urine to process it. The urine used to be shipped here in barrels. Funny business to be in. Up on the cliff you could still see the piles of shale left behind when the quarrying had finished. The old railway line had been incorporated into the Cleveland Way now and during the day Jackson encountered hearty types with backpacks and hiking sticks, but now in the late evening he was the only person up here. Once or twice he had encountered a deer, but at the moment, at bay on the cliff, was a man.
The man was standing on the tip of the ness, staring out to sea as if he were waiting for his ship to come in and that ship was not only carrying his fortune but also the answer to the meaning of life. Or possibly he was contemplating flight, like a bird waiting for an updraught. He was very near the edge. Very near, considering all that crumbling. Jackson pulled his headphones off and veered off out along the ness, running on shale that shifted underfoot. He slowed down as he neared the man. ‘Nice evening,’ the running man said to the standing man. The standing man looked round in surprise.
A jumper? Jackson wondered. ‘You should be careful,’ he said, feigning casualness. ‘This cliff is crumbling.’
Ignoring the advice, the man took a step nearer the edge and the shale underfoot fell away in a little shower. Yeah, Jackson thought, this one had a death-wish. ‘You should maybe move back from the edge a bit,’ he coaxed. You had to approach would-be jumpers like you would a nervous dog. Don’t alarm them, let them get the measure of you before you reach out. Most importantly of all, don’t let them take you down with them.
‘Do you want to talk about it?’ Jackson asked.
‘Not really,’ the man said. He took another step nearer to flight. And then another. Jackson disobeyed his own rules and made a lunge for the man, grabbing him in a kind of clumsy bear hug so that the standing man and the running man became one as they went over the edge together. The falling man.
Stage Fright
‘And that’s just the tip of the iceberg, doctor!’
‘Drink, please, Harry, if you would be so good,’ Barclay Jack said with affected politeness as he came off-stage. He was in a good mood, full of the milk of human kindness. Trevor, his manager, had been in to see the show last night without telling him beforehand (‘Didn’t want to put you off your stride’) and he’d brought a TV guy in with him, from a backwater channel with a handful of viewers, but TV nonetheless, and the guy ‘liked what he saw’, according to Trevor.
The phone in Barclay Jack’s pocket vibrated as Harry handed him his tumbler of gin.
‘Oo, Barclay,’ Bunny Hopps said. ‘Is that your phone or are you just pleased to see me?’
‘Fuck off, Widow Twanky.’ His good mood had been abruptly terminated, the milk of human kindness curdled by the text on the phone screen. He stared at it uncomprehendingly for a moment before understanding what it meant. His blood dropped into his boots. His legs started to shake and then collapse like columns in an earthquake. He was going down. In the literal sense.