On the Edge

Prologue

Prologue

Along the road from my family home in Cornwall, the lighthouse at St Matthew’s Point dominates the landscape. As a child I used to lie in bed and watch its great beam sweep the night in unending, unhurried circles and feel safe. During the day, it seems asleep. In winter, it is a solitary brooding tower; even in summer, its peace appears untouched by the tourists who cluster round its windswept base or pay a pound to climb the 163 steps to the viewing platform and stare out over the sea. Most of the time, I remember it as the visitors see it, stately and still, gleaming white against blue skies and the grey-green of the wind-whipped grass.

Yet sometimes, even now, dreams of the lighthouse as it was on that Friday night, my first night back in Cornwall for months, disturb my sleep. The dream is always the same. A storm of wind and rain batters the coast. The tapering white form of the lighthouse appears in the distance, stark and motionless against the turbulent backdrop of dark clouds and darker seas tearing shreds out of each other. Its shaft of light shoots out into the night and circles, steady and constant, despite the blasts of the gale.

In my dream the lighthouse comes closer and closer as though a wave of rushing wind carries me towards it. A blotch appears, dark against the white walls. At first it’s a shadow that dances from side to side as the beam passes overhead; then it becomes a figure. A person, dangling off the viewing platform that encircles the top of the lighthouse beneath the lantern. Clad in dark clothes that gleam with wetness, a thin rope looped in a figure of eight under its arms and over one of the stone blocks that give the lighthouse the look of a medieval castle. The wind dashes the figure against the wall and shakes the stream of water that falls like a cord from its bare feet.

Closer still and a face with tight-shut eyes appears. A young woman. The skin of her eyelids and around her mouth twitches and trembles. She is lost in some fantasy sparked to life by the drugs crackling through her veins while all the time the rope thins and frays. And even in my dream, I know I must wake her before it’s too late, before the rope breaks and she falls to the ground.

Except I can’t. Because this is a dream and the young woman is Jenifry Shaw. She’s me. The figure hanging from the lighthouse is me.