Anne Hewling

Viewed from up here on the cliff side the horizon stretches unbroken from farthest left to farthest right. A ship-high ribbon of glowing pinky-orange light separates the grey blue of the sea from the peachy blue of the sky as the dawn spreads. The pier immediately below me is a dark silhouette, stiff and crisp-edged as a cardboard cut-out. The only thing vying for my attention is the gentle shimmer of the first rays of sun off the mast of a yacht anchored in the middle of the bay.

Sitting on the bench reserved for those hearty enough to complete the trek this high I have the world to myself. Few are the hearty at this time of day. There is a chill in the air and finding footholds to reach this height is still risky in the half-dark. Dawn brightens the sea and the sky as I watch. A light breeze chills the sweat on my forehead, the only sign of the steepness of my climb up here.

The clock on the church by the pier strikes seven. Although I can’t see him, I know that Father Walter is opening the huge wooden doors preparing for a service of remembrance later this morning. A minute or two passes and a bright blue and orange fishing boat appears in the bay. The Blue Boy is Cor Bradley’s boat. Or, rather, he was the Skipper until four am two days ago when he was found in the alley between The Ship Inn and the fish quay with a blow to the side of his head and no memory of anything. Jim Fairbord, who found him, called 999 at once, but Cor had been there a while and felt very cold to the touch. The tutting about town is that he was drinking in The Ferryboat Inn on the other side of the bay from unloading his catch around five in the evening, declaring himself on holiday on account of the storm coming in. Around midnight, having taken a phone call that sobered him up dramatically, he told the assembled company that he was off to ‘…sort out some business with that silly bitch at home…’ Not for the first time in recent years he is in the intensive care ward. For the foreseeable future it will be his nephew Harry, his assistant skipper, who lands any catches.

Cor met his wife up here. A long time ago, and a lot of water has flowed under a lot of bridges since. Eighteen and owning only the clothes she stood up in and the contents of the soft canvas bag at her feet, she looked to him like a lost flower girl, the kind pictured on the front of a birthday card his sister Hester might choose. This girl was willowy, pale and interesting with an air of somewhere other than this place. Looking down at her feet he noticed her battered sandals and dusty toes and, glancing at the cliff path and then back at her feet again, his first words were full of admiration.

‘You climbed up here in those?’

‘Only ones I managed to grab. Used to them now.’

When he hadn’t known what else to say, but had not moved away either, she told him he was welcome to share the bench, but she didn’t want to talk about it. Thanking her, he took the weight off his feet and they sat in silence for quite some time before he spoke again.

‘Not being funny or anything but you don’t come from round here, I’d know if you did, I’m Cory, who are you?’

‘Diane’

‘Pleased to meet you Diane…’

‘And you,’ she said, taking his offered hand before lapsing back into silence.

And again, the silence, this time broken vaguely by the breeze getting up. Cory waited. Then,

‘I came up just to get a walk, now I’m away for my lunch at the Sidewinder Café–will you come with me? My treat.’

Their eyes met and, by and large, that, and a wedding with pageboys and flower girls in sailor suits at Father Walter’s church, sealed the deal for the next twenty years. Then the Blue Boy capsized.

The clock is striking nine. The wind is up still. I’m really feeling the chill now. So much to work through and I’m remembering that February day, five years ago now. I was leaning on the railing on the promenade–as I often did–watching the Blue Boy bringing the boys home. There was always a moving coronet of seagulls above the boat, rising and falling above its fishy mass. That grim winter’s day there were just two brave birds, battling the wind, rising and falling with the swell then, suddenly, rising and falling and not rising. They mirrored the trawler that had dipped and risen but was now listing precariously and fast - as the hull wedged on to the sandbar. The next rush of the rising tide crashed through and round and over the boat and I could not see how they would get out. This scene played regularly inside my head in the half-awake consciousness that will often strike the wife of any man who goes to sea. Time and my breathing stopped until, above the spume and spray, rose a cracking sound and a golden flare lit the sky.

At first, days were punctured by the beeps and whistles of the machines around him and I heard nothing beyond a few feet of the bed. The background drone was low and rhythmic but persistent, the kind you only really notice when it stops, and the way in which the room let us know it was there, waiting patiently as we must. There was no lasting peace though. Turn by turn a drip and then a monitor or pump or a fan would stutter, a shriek or beep would sound. Each time, a lurch of suspended breath restored, the kind of lurch I had experienced first as I watched from the promenade, would again bump my chest until someone appeared to reinstate calm and my breathing shuddered on. Mostly not a word was spoken. But, once a day at least, a white coat would stop awhile with an update. Mostly that there was nothing to report. Cory would wake up in his own time. He was strong, but it was not just the blow to his head as he fell when the boat went over. He had had a heart attack too. They just weren’t sure what was affecting him most. A week in and Harry, who had had a luckier escape than Cory, felt strong again and he would join my vigil periodically. We might try a little light conversation, but he was still suffering the effects of the near drowning as he had pulled Cory from the hold and up to the lifeboat. Right now, even being in the room was a struggle for him.

‘What if he doesn’t make it?’

‘He will!’ I had to believe it. ‘He won’t give up, he won’t…’ An alarm sounded beside me. Harry rushed out as a nurse hurried in and shooed me out.

We colonised the three plastic chairs, yes, three, outside the ward and waited. Harry was shivering beside me to the left, despite a battalion of Victorian radiators lining the corridor walls. On the other side of me, Hester. But I can’t think about Hester now.

Eventually, they came and ushered us into a side room. Blood pounding a relentless fuzziness through my ears, I barely registered the doctor explaining that Cory had added a stroke to his list of injuries.

‘I must warn you that we just don’t know what the outcome will be. He might be perfectly fine,’ the voice did not sound convinced, ‘he is resilient, he’s a fighter… well, it’s all a matter of time and we will see...’

Somewhere, six months disappeared. In tiny chunks mainly, punctuated with travel to and from the house, eating and sleeping and, very occasionally, going to the office or paying bills and doing housework. Cory woke up 37 days and 14 hours after being admitted, shortly after I had finished counting all the ridges on all the tiles of the suspended ceiling in his side room. I wasn’t sure who had endured the most successfully. Cory had limited movement, as if his body had forgotten that it was made of moving parts; mine needed its joints oiled after all the hours spent in the one hunched position permitted by hospital furniture. It had seemed to me that keeping still and being vigilant was the only thing that would save him, or perhaps that was what I needed to save me. Either way, I figured, the worst was now over and we just needed to get rolling again. Time to go home and get on with life.

It took two more months and a lot of hard work before Cory actually came home. There was not a mark on him to record what had happened. To the world he was the same Cory. It was simply a matter that they had not seen him about for a while. Midsummer’s day, Harry took him to see the Blue Boy in the dockyard where it had gone for refit, having been salvaged off the back of a higher tide two days after the accident.

‘It was crazy,’ Harry reported, ‘he demanded to know why I sold his boat and when I reminded him it was just in the yard for repairs not sold he screamed at me that there was nothing wrong with it!’

‘He’s bound to be a bit confused. He doesn’t really remember the accident at all…’ It was a feeble response. I felt cold all over. I had had too many such conversations with him myself. That same night, with 3am half consciousness came the spectacle of Cory kneeling over me with a pillow held high above his head.

‘Get back, get out of my way, you’re suffocating me,’ he hissed.

This man was awake but was not Cory as I knew him. When I made no attempt to move, he lunged toward me with the pillow and as I rolled sideways and out of his reach he tumbled forward on to the bed and fell back to sleep. It took me much longer to find rest.

Five days ago a similar thing happened again. In fact, I have lost count how often this has been repeated. I know he doesn’t mean it, I’m not even sure he realises half the times it happens. But my body is no longer so confident, just taut and wary.

Now I’m cold. Really cold. What time is it? The pealing church bells tell me I have been here for several hours. I want to lie down and sleep, but my body won’t do it anymore. I think about going home, but memories of how I came to be on this hillside the first time all those years ago assail me. I fled my father’s house because of fear and found safety with Cory. ‘I am safe with Cory, I am safe with Cory, I am safe with Cory.’ That was what I knew then. I mutter the words over and over to convince myself that I do not want to hear the other words, the ones I’m trying to unhear but which echo ever louder,

‘Come and live with me before he kills you.’

I am no longer sure where I am going. Nor who I should be going with. Just where do you go when you really don’t know where to go because you can’t trust your own instincts anymore, let alone take your own advice to quit while you can? I’m not safe with Cory, but he needs me, even more so after this latest escapade. How can I let him need me though if I am not actually safe with him? If he only needs me to harm me, then why can’t I just go where I am safe?

I came up here to think it through, but it’s not working. The wind is getting worse. There are white tufts on the ripples on the sea. The blue grey sea is colonising the peachy blue sky, and yet another storm looks to be blowing in. Wrapping my jacket close around me, I stand, tentatively testing my tingling legs bent stiff for hours now. How ironic would it be to fall going down the cliff? Who would have what to say, particularly what would the town have to say then about Cory’s ‘silly bitch’? That she got what she deserved probably, the girl who came from nowhere and fancied herself one of them! Twenty or so years is not long enough to be one of them around here. Step by careful step, I descend the cliff. I will collect Hester’s dog, always keen for a walk, and head for the promenade. I’ll watch the sea awhile and then I’ll decide.

***

Harry Birdlip, usually assistant skipper to Cory Bradley on The Blue Boy but currently acting skipper, is on his way home from The Ferryboat Inn. It’s only nine pm, early to his fellow seamen at The FerryBoat. They, as always, especially when the sea is too rough for there to be fishing tomorrow, will be there for an hour or two longer yet. To Harry it’s late. Harry, as he’s keen to point out to his colleagues, ‘has a life’, by which he means Agnes, his finance and the love of his life since they were both ten years old and in Mrs Mablethorpe’s class at Scarsbury Middle School and she let him share her packed lunch. She’s been feeding him ever since. If not at home, then at the Sidewinder Café on the seafront where she spends, possibly, way too many hours, but about which he can hardly complain given how often he is at sea.

The café is closed as Harry passes on the Promenade. Just a few steps further, and to the background roaring of the still angry sea, the phone is ringing in the old call box on the seafront, a hangover from the days when, according to Nanny Perkins, one of Scarsbury’s very oldest and sprightliest residents, ‘simply no one had their own ‘phone, not like these days when even babies seem to need them’. Harry stops and looks around as if expecting someone to come rushing forward to answer the call. No-one. He carries on, so does the ringing. Feet faltering, he turns towards the box. The phone rings on. He enters the box and stares hard at the phone. It persists in ringing on. He picks the receiver. ‘Hello?’

A muffled, accented voice he can barely hear above the roar outside, ‘Is that you? Are you OK?’

‘Who do you want to speak to? This is a call box…on the seafront…’

‘Not gym, no?’ is the only response before an audible hiss of breath, a pause, and the line goes dead.

Putting the phone down, Harry sighs. ‘Idiot!’ he mutters to no-one in particular, clearly someone wanting the new open-all-hours leisure centre on the other side of town. Stomach rumbling in anticipation of his late supper, home-cooked by Agnes, he shakes his head, dismissing the call, then bends forward against the wind and continues on his way.

***

Thank goodness Hester’s not home! Diane mentally notes that the rear gate still isn’t fixed. She heads for the back stairs up to Hester’s first floor flat over Birdlip and Associates rather than going through the office on the ground floor. There’s almost certainly someone in the office and she’s anxious to avoid needing to explain, yet again, how Cory is doing, or hearing how awful it is. Like I don’t know that already! Leaving a quick note for her sister-in-law she heads out, an excited black dog at her heels.

A legacy of the past storm, and possibly a herald of more bad weather, for it is still winter after all, the wind is gusting along the promenade between the beach huts and around the ice-cream stall as Diane, with Humph in tow, braces herself and pushes forward through the gloom towards the first bench she sees. The waves crash in front of her, hitting the sea wall then rolling back with renewed force to crash against those behind them sending spray shooting skywards.

‘A nasty night to be out in!’

Diane’s already shattered nerves cause her to start so hard she feels it as a thump in her gut.