On the Edge

Two

Two

And then… something.

I woke.

Through the spiralling confusion in my brain, I knew I was awake. Everything was sharp and clear and real.

Not a dream.

But unbelievable. An undecipherable maelstrom of sound and motion and sensation. Brightness above me jerked my head back and turned the water falling over my eyes into glittering beads.

Rain.

I was outside.

And noise.

A confusion of wind, crashing waves and rain drumming a hard surface.

A storm.

Then pain, as a blast of wind hurled me against a white wall. The shock knocked the breath out of me and blew the mists of unconsciousness away.

Where am I?

A wall in front of me; white and smooth. But not in a climbing gym. There were no grips and no route markers.

The wind battered me again. Spun me round. Giddying my brain.

I need to get out of here.

I forced my thoughts to grip onto the here and now, and looked up. The wall ended against the dark sky. Then the blinding beam of light stabbed through the dark again and passed over my head. And disappeared.

I know what this is.

And I knew where I was. On the lighthouse along the coast from Tregonna. St Matthew’s lighthouse. Hanging from the viewing platform that jutted out below the lantern room, my knees against its bottom edge and my feet threshing the wild but empty air.

How…?

My brain screamed.

No time to panic.

I looked down. Through my feet, the concrete circle at the base of the lighthouse lay on the wind-lashed grass of the headland. I’d seen it so many times before from the safety of the viewing platform, leaning over its wall and staring down at the same grey circle, resting like a raft on waves of grass. A tiny raft far below, waiting to smash my body when I fell.

Not falling. You’re not falling.

Something held me up. Something under my arms dug pain into my flesh. I lifted my hand to touch it. A rope.

The beam circled overhead again and a glimmer echoed off the clouds onto the white wall. The rope was sash cord. Very old sash cord, hairy with loose strands that had broken or worn through.

The rope gave. A matter of millimetres. Even less. But I felt the drop in my bones.

My eyes scanned the wall above. The top of the parapet gleamed briefly as the beam passed overhead again. Not far to climb. But the surface was smooth. Super-smooth. No holds. No edges. No cracks. Nothing. I’ve climbed cliffs you’d think were impossible. Flat sheets of granite, smooth to the eye as butter sliced by a hot knife. Nature loves imperfection, though and there’s always a ridge or an edge in the rock your fingers and feet can use to swarm up the face. Even if you can’t see it, you can feel it. But the lighthouse was man-made, its surface grainy, gravelly, slippery in the wet.

The rope dropped again. A micro millimetre. A whisper of a movement but enough to tingle the sweat pores in my palms and sharpen my breathing, as if a hundred blades cut through my body and sliced through the confusion. Sliced through it and let it fall away. I felt alive, like I only ever do when I’m climbing. Even coke can’t compare to it. I laughed. f**k the rain. f**k the cold. It was just me and the wall.

I ran my hands over the surface: up, down, side to side, seeking a fault or a c***k I could widen.

Slow. Too slow.

As if my hands and brain were disconnected. I forced them to keep moving. All I needed was a hole big enough to jam a fingertip in. Inch by inch, my fingers searched, over and over again, but there was nothing.

Except the rope.

Use the rope.

It slipped again.

The moment when the rope would snap hurtled towards me and fear fired my sluggish neurones. I grabbed the rope and pulled myself up the lighthouse. Hand over hand, inch by inch, until my feet hit the bottom of the viewing platform and I flattened them against its side and pushed. Thrust out and up, forcing the grit into the flesh of my soles and toes. Dragged my body up the parapet, hauling on the rope’s fraying strands. Suddenly the rope came alive, twitching as its strands snapped and unravelled.

Shit.

I hurled an arm over the top of the parapet, gave a last kick, heaved myself up and over and tumbled onto the rough, wooden floor of the viewing balcony.

Adrenalin shook my limbs as I rolled onto my back. The sky was stormy black. There should be stars, I thought. There should be fireworks. There should be great, roaring bursts of rockets to celebrate this moment. Only the lighthouse beam travelled across the sky in its majestic orbit. I counted the length of its circuits as my breathing calmed. And then there was nothing but a slow fall into blackness as my consciousness drained away once more.

I woke again to cold and pain. My head and nose hurt along with the flesh under my arms and round my back where the cord had bitten. I made myself move to the doorway round the far side of the viewing platform, where the tower gave me some protection from the wind coming off the sea, wrapped myself in a tarpaulin that was lying there and tried to think as rivulets of rain gathered in its cracks and creases and ran in streams onto the wooden floor.

I huddled in the doorway for a while waiting for something to make sense. It could have been a few minutes. It could have been a lot longer. Time became elastic so some minutes stuck to me and held on for an age and when they let go the minutes waiting behind them shot past in a blur. And when I finally thought to try the door handle, it opened and I tumbled inside.

The quiet of the musty interior, out of reach of the storm, calmed my shaky brain. I brushed the worst of the water off my face, noticing my hand did what I wanted without hesitating. The strange disconnect between body and brain was passing.

Shit. Drugs. It must be. What have I taken? How the f**k did I get here?

The last thing I remembered clearly was the hotel room. How had I ended up two miles along the coast, hanging off the lighthouse? God knows I’d come to in some strange places before. Crept out of strangers’ houses as the first lightening of dawn dimmed the street lamps; been woken by cleaning ladies hammering on the door of the toilet cubicle in whichever bar we’d ended up in the night before. Come to, leaning against the closed grille of the tube station and, once, propped in someone’s doorway with a faint memory of an angry taxi driver. The memories were always vague. And lost in the glittering blur of bars and drinks and mirrors dusted with the last few grains no one had yet taken. Saving them for a last gum smear before heading out into the night. But I always had some memory of how I’d ended up where I was. Nothing like this utter blankness.

Pain in my hands dragged me back to the here and now, where I crouched in the dim and quiet of the lighthouse stairs. I’d dug my fingers into the crumbling wooden floor and driven splinters into the grazed and battered flesh. Cold seeped into my bones. I’d think about all this later. Now I needed to get back to the hotel.

I felt for my phone with some idea of calling a friend or a cab but I didn’t have it with me. Had I left it in the hotel, charging up on the bedside table? Not that it mattered. I was in Cornwall, not London. And in an area that was quieter than quiet. I looked at my watch. It was a few minutes before one o’clock. No chance. If you wanted a taxi here, you booked it the day before. As for friends, they’d all left Cornwall. At least the ones you could call at one in the morning when you needed help. Which left my family: Kit, Sofija and, I supposed, Ma – and even if I’d had a phone I wouldn’t call them. Two years ago, I’d have called Kit straightaway. A few months ago, I might still have called him. But not now. No way.

Tregonna was closer than the hotel but I couldn’t let Kit see me wrecked like this. He’d be furious and I couldn’t bear that. I just couldn’t bear any more of that. I’d get back to the hotel by myself. I stood up and started down the steps. The door at the bottom of the lighthouse was open, swinging and banging in the storm. I went out and onto the coast road.