fuck’s sake, Jackson had thought, lying on his back staring at the darkening sky. His heart was racing as if he’d just run a sprint and his ‘old’ knees hadn’t been done any favours again when they had hit the unforgiving rock. He struggled to a sitting position and said to the standing man, now a lying-down man, ‘That’s a sheer drop and I’m not going to try and stop your acrobatics a second time. Okay?’ The guy had the decency to look shame-faced.
Jackson thought it was probably a good idea to get a guy with a death-wish off a cliff. ‘Come on,’ he said, clambering carefully to his feet and offering Vince a hand up – warily, in case he suffered another moment of madness and decided to yank him over the edge with him.
Vince was his name, ‘Vince Ives,’ he said, holding his hand out to shake as if they were at a party or a conference rather than teetering in a death-defying manner on the edge of a cliff. He was very sorry, he said. ‘A moment of madness. I just sort of reached a tipping point.’
‘How about a drink?’ Jackson offered when they had come down from the cliff and hit what passed for civilization again. ‘That place looks like it’s still open for business,’ he said, indicating the Seashell to Vince Ives. Vince didn’t seem impressed, in fact he seemed positively averse, saying, ‘The Seashell? No, thanks,’ with what looked like a little shudder, so Jackson took him back to his cottage, like you would a stray dog. He lit the fire and offered him a whisky, which he refused. It seemed that Vince hadn’t eaten all day, so Jackson made them both tea and toast.
It was a good day when you saved someone’s life, Jackson thought as he put the kettle on the Aga. Even better when you didn’t die saving them. He really hoped this wasn’t going to become the regular thought of the day because sooner or later he was bound to fail at one or both parts of the equation.
Eventually Vince started to pull himself together and it turned out they had something in common. They were both from the same neck of the woods and were both alumni of the band of brothers. ‘We happy few,’ Vince said, looking as far from happy as you could. He didn’t strike Jackson as much of a soldier.
‘Royal Signals,’ he explained. ‘In another lifetime.’
‘Yeah, well,’ Jackson said, ‘I used to be a policeman.’
It was a familiar story. Mid-life crisis, sense of meaninglessness, depression, etcetera. He was a failure, Vince reported. ‘We’ve all been there,’ Jackson said, although in truth he’d never allowed himself more than a glimpse over the edge of the abyss. Jackson had never really seen the point of existential angst. If you didn’t like something you changed it and if you couldn’t change it you sucked it up and soldiered on, one foot after the other. (‘Remind me not to come to you for therapy,’ Julia said.)
‘Trudged through my life,’ Vince went on. ‘Never did anything interesting, anything important. I’ve led a very little life. Never been top dog, you know?’
‘Well, I don’t think being the alpha male is all it’s cut out to be,’ Jackson said. ‘There’s nothing wrong with remaining in the ranks. They also serve, and all that.’
Vince sighed gloomily. ‘It’s not just that. I’ve lost everything – my job, my wife, my home, my dog. Pretty much lost my daughter too,’ he added.
It was a long list, but a familiar one to Jackson. ‘My first wife divorced me,’ he said in solidarity.
‘You married again then?’
‘Well, yeah,’ Jackson said, immediately regretting having mentioned Tessa, or whatever her real name was. A she-wolf. A certain manly pride stopped him from admitting to a stranger that his second wife had been a scheming, hustling conwoman who had removed him from his money with surgical precision before disappearing into the night. Instead he said, ‘No, well, that one didn’t work out either.’
‘Life just seems to be against me,’ Vince said. ‘Like I’m cursed.’
‘Sometimes you’re the windshield, Vince,’ Jackson said, ‘sometimes you’re the bug.’ That was what Mary Chapin Carpenter sang anyway, pace Dire Straits.
‘I suppose,’ Vince agreed, nodding slowly as he chewed on the last bit of toast. A good sign in Jackson’s book. People who were eating weren’t usually about to top themselves.
‘And there’s no point in clinging on to things if they’re over,’ Jackson continued. (Julia was right,