The Jumper – Caroline Harbord

    When I left the car park in the small hours of the morning it was still dark.  I picked my way up the footpath using the faint light from the thin slice of moon.  I couldn’t hear the sea but I could smell it.  The stony path wound upwards and in several places was quite steep, but I managed the climb without stopping.  I could have got closer by car but had decided to take the longer walk in order to give myself time to think.  It was cool, but the last vestiges of the heat of yesterday prevented me from shivering; any feelings of chill were not caused by the air around me, they came from within. 

   By the time I reached the top I was aware of a slight breeze from the north, and as I walked along the springy turf I could just begin to make out the line of the sea to my left.  Somewhere ahead was the lighthouse.  Morning was approaching faster than I had expected.

            ‘It’s not a good time to jump’

            ‘What?’  I spun round to look at who had spoken.

            ‘I said it’s not a good time to jump.  Sea’s out.  Much better to wait till it’s in.  Not so messy.’

   He was about the same age as I was, late thirties, tall and thin, quite good-looking; the sort of person who, in another life, I would probably have considered a likely friend. 

   ‘I didn’t ask for your opinion.  Please go away.’  I’d heard they had do-gooders patrolling the cliffs now.  All part of the new inclusive “Big Society” we’re supposed to be living in.  Personally I think Margaret Thatcher had it right – there is no such thing as society.  Most people simply don’t give a damn about the next person, and certainly wouldn’t shift themselves to give a hand to someone who needed it.  Nobody had bothered to help me.  Nobody was even remotely interested – not my family, not my so-called friends, nobody.

   ‘It’s a long way down, you know; all of 530 feet, when the tide’s out.  Highest chalk sea cliff in the country; beautiful on a morning like this with the sun just rising.’  He was staring out to sea talking almost to himself.  So I said nothing.  I didn’t want to say anything to anyone, certainly not to some nosey-parker Good Samaritan.  The last thing I had expected, when I got here, was company.  I had presumed they kept office hours or at least went home when it got dark to their snug little houses and their snug little wives.  

   ‘Did you know you can see all the way to Dungeness if you look out to the east’ he said, ‘and over to the west you can just see Selsey Bill.  It must have been an amazing lookout for our ancestors, before the days of radar and satellites.  Think what it must have been like.  Every time England was in danger people would have come up here to watch for the enemy, ready to light fires to tell the population the invaders were coming.  Beacon after beacon would have lit up the headlands, flames shooting up into the sky, a warning of invasion being passed from village to village.  Imagine being up here four hundred and fifty years ago waiting for the Spanish fleet, peering out into the haze wondering if that smudge on the horizon was the first sign of the Armada; terrified that the enemy were coming and that England as you knew it might not survive.’ 

   The man was a bloody schoolteacher, or at least he behaved like one.  Who wanted a history lesson at a time like this?   ‘Excuse me,’ I said ‘I don’t want to be rude but could you please go away.  I don’t need your help; I don’t want to talk about love and religion; and the last thing I want to talk about is the sodding Spanish Armada!’  I had meant to speak reasonably but had ended up shouting.  I hunched my shoulders and walked a few yards further along the cliff path.

   ‘Mind the edge!  It’s got a tendency to crumble just round here.  Wave action you know.’  He was calling towards me.  What on earth did he mean?  Wave action – up here, the man was an imbecile.  He didn’t come any closer, he just kept talking in a carrying voice.  ‘We look at them as if they’re everlasting, don’t we?  They look so . . .  so permanent.  Yet a hundred million years ago they didn’t even exist, they were under the sea along with everything else round here.  All those little marine micro-organisms busy creating this.  Amazing isn’t it?  Then about fifty million years ago it all got lifted up out of the sea and we ended up with these huge chalk uplands.’   He waved his hand indicating the land behind.

   God, but the man was a bore with his incessant chatter.  I tried to shut my ears but the words kept seeping into my brain.  ‘Wasn’t until the last Ice Age ended, of course, that the sea rushed in and carved out the Channel creating these wonderful cliffs.  You see everything changes.  Nothing lasts forever.’

You could say that again, I thought.  I’d believed Magda and I would last forever, but we didn’t.  Magda with her dark green eyes, her slender body curved round mine, her seductive little smiles and her corrosive little lies.  No, nothing lasts.  Suddenly I could feel a rush of misery and tried to block the terror sweeping up over me.  Why did losing her mean everything?  Why couldn’t I cope?

            ‘Even now, you know, the waves are eating away at the bottom of the cliff.  The rain seeps into the cracks at the top and weakens the whole structure.  Chalk is very porous, you see; it absorbs the rainfall and that can cause problems. When the rain freezes within the chalk it fractures it.  Small bits crumble away.’

   I felt the compulsion to connect.  ‘Will it fall?’

   He smiled ‘Not in our lifetime.  We might lose a chunk or two here and there.  But the main bulk is solid.  That will endure for the time being.  What the future holds is anyone’s guess.  I’m not a geologist so I wouldn’t have a notion of what lies ahead.’

I considered the green expanse of cliff top at my feet.  ‘Seems stable enough to me.’

            ‘Yes, but then you and I look stable enough to each other.  How do we know what is going on inside the other person, underneath the face we are each presenting to the world.   You could be starting to crumble for all I know.’  He wasn’t looking at me, which was just as well, for I could feel tears rushing up to my eyes.  ‘Sometimes it’s only when huge chunks of cliff fall into the sea that anyone realises that something is wrong.  The weakness caused by the fracturing ice crystals doesn’t appear on the surface but it’s no less real for all that.’

   I thought that the fracturing inside myself was probably fatal.  When Magda had told me she was going, that she couldn’t bear to spend another minute with me, that I had only been a passing fancy; when she had tossed the little silver locket, my last gift to her, into the wastepaper basket and told me I was nothing but a middle-aged anorexic bore, then I had felt I was breaking in two.  I couldn’t believe she would leave me, I couldn’t bear for her to go, Afterwards I kept expecting to hear her key in the door, her voice from the bathroom.  I wanted to rush from room to room looking for her, convinced she would still be somewhere, hiding, telling me it was all a joke.  But she didn’t come back and I had no idea where she had gone.  I went out into the night and walked around looking for her, till eventually I found myself miles from home, from the flat we had shared, and a policeman stopped me.  “Lover’s tiff” he said, “Go home, she’s probably come back already”.  But when I opened the flat door, the silence overwhelmed me before I even registered the fact that she wasn’t there. That was when I realised she wasn’t ever coming back.  Once she had been mine but now she was gone.

   My unwanted companion was still there, a few paces behind me.  And he wouldn’t shut up.  ‘Have you lost someone who belonged to you?’ he asked.

Of course I had, what else would have driven me here to this godforsaken spot in the middle of the night.

            ‘I don’t know what I feel about this business of “belonging” to someone else.’ He carried on, ‘I’m not sure that I consider myself as anyone else’s property, do you?’

I thought for a moment.  Had I belonged to Magda?  If I had, she couldn’t have discarded me like a useless tissue, could she?  ‘No.’ I said, ‘I don’t belong to anyone.  Not now.’

   ‘Did you know that Saint Thomas Aquinas regarded taking one’s own life as the ultimate violation of God’s property; so presumably he thought we all belonged to God.  I don’t think I have ever thought of myself as property.’

   'Oh for goodness sake, I told you I didn’t want to talk about religion.  It doesn’t mean anything to me.’  I was getting really annoyed.

   ‘No, nor to me.  But it is interesting to consider how others view our dilemma.’

   ‘Look, will you please go away.  This is not our dilemma it is my dilemma.  I don’t want to talk about it and I certainly don’t want you dragging religion into the conversation every time you can.  If you want to do good, go and do it elsewhere.  Go and bother somebody else.’

   My childhood had been interspersed with bouts of religious fervour on the part of my mother.  Every time she and my father fell out, she went running back to the comfort of the Church.  I suffered the rigours of the happy clappy brigade as well as the formal Catholicism of her own family.  At the age of twelve I had endured baptism by full immersion to cleanse me of my sins, while the surrounding congregation cheered and sang and the Minister of my mother’s newfound Evangelical Church received me, dripping wet, into his arms.  I had felt deeply uncomfortable.  It’s no wonder I gave up on religion as soon as I left home.  I was quite convinced there was no God and I couldn’t abide people who tried to shove their religion down your throat.  Magda had been gloriously irreligious.  Despite her upbringing she never went to Church, protested her lack of belief and yet clung superstitiously to her gold cross and chain which she always wore round her beautiful white neck.  ‘Oh, sweetie’ she said the last time we had talked about it, ‘God is a convenience, a bit like the morning after pill, you use him in moments of crisis.’  Then she laughed.  I think that was when I first began to wonder about our relationship.

            ‘Gabriel Dante thought killing oneself was a greater evil than killing another, did you know that?   He consigned suicides below murderers in the Seventh Ring of his Inferno.’

   First history, then religion, now literature!  Would this infuriating man never stop trying to converse with me.  Couldn’t he see that I really wasn’t interested in anything he had to say. 

I turned away from the sea and faced my companion.  ‘Look, if you have something you particularly want to say, will you please say it now.  Otherwise go away.  I don’t wish to be unpleasant but I really just want to be alone.’

            ‘Yes, that’s what Garbo said – “I want to be alone”.  I wonder if she really meant it.?’

            ‘No, what she really meant was “I want to be left alone” and that is what I want.  Now.  If you don’t mind.’

But he was relentless.  ‘Did you know she never married?’

            ‘Who?’

            ‘Greta Garbo.  Apparently at the height of her fame she did agree to marry one of her co-stars, John Gilbert, but she failed to turn up to the wedding ceremony.’

‘That must have been a bit of a show-stopper.’

,           ‘Yes, I expect it was’.  He paused, as if he was picking his words carefully, ‘They say it wasn’t men that she liked.  She preferred women.  They say she had lovers – women lovers.’

His words fell into the silence like drops of thundery rain – plop, plop!  The rushing in my ears threatened to deafen me.  I sank to my knees and began to weep.

            ‘I loved her.  I really loved her but she didn’t love me’

            ‘Ah yes, the cry of the spurned lover down the ages – why don’t you love me?  We all want to be loved and so often the one we love loves elsewhere instead.  It is the ultimate irony of life.  Shakespeare made a career out of it -  all those A loves B, but B loves C who loves D and so on.’

I raised my head from my hands, ‘I don’t want to live without her’.   

            ‘No of course you don’t.  But you will, because you’re a stronger and better person than she is.  You are made of something firmer than chalk.  You won’t crumble away.’

            ‘How would you know?’

   He regarded me gently, ‘Oh I know.  A little bit of temporary fraying round the edges perhaps but nothing fatal.’

   I sat there, snuffling into my tissue, my face streaked with tears as the warmth of the morning sun began to creep over me.  My companion came a little closer.  He knelt down beside me.  ‘Are you alright if I leave you now?’ he enquired.

            ‘Yes, thank you, I shan’t do anything stupid.  Not now.’

            ‘Good.’  He got up.  ‘Don’t look to the past, look ahead.’

   He turned away and walked back the way we had come.  He was very close to the edge.

            ‘Good-bye then.  Good luck!’

   He stepped forward and went right over the edge.  No cry, no warning.  He just went.

   Later, I told the police what had happened.  ‘I didn’t even know his name,’ I wept.  ‘He saved my life and I never even thought to save his.’

            ‘Yeah’ said the policeman, ‘You never know do you, Miss?  Life’s a bugger like that.’

Picture: flickr.com