‘What the fuck does Tom want,’ I said, through the panic, thinking, where is he going, and why can’t I catch up to him? We’ve lost him, I thought. I shuddered. Then Daniel picked him out with the light from his phone only a few metres away from us, across a gap. His eyes had a backshine to them. I turned to Daniel: ‘Did you see that?’ I said, ‘humans don’t reflect like that,’ but he must not have heard me.
We stood at the break and I called out ‘Are you all right?’ and the part of Tom I could see in the light – a sliver of his face, showed a smile: recognition.
If we approached too close there was a risk he would take flight again, perhaps over one of the cliff edges that lay in every direction. After a time Daniel sat on the ground, while I kept yelling into the weather. Pleasantries, suggestions, as Tom stalked about and turned on himself answering for a while, then apparently talking to himself. I tried to engage with full sentences, until it seemed pointless. Half my words thrown back at me by the wind. Then I just tried, ‘Hey Tom. Hey.’ He turned his back and faced away.
I listened to only the wind. Tears started going down my cheeks. I wiped my face and then my hand on my clothes. My throat burned. So I stopped calling, so I stood, looking on, as Daniel had. I let my phone drop, its light finding out my shoes and jeans – I have a body, I thought, how strange I am not just a voice in the dark. The sky above us had come down hard, so it really seemed like existence was unlikely at all. I began plucking at a clump of salt-cropped spiky grass by my knees. It’s oddly dull, I thought. And I’m cold now, as well as tired. But the chill at least was keeping the unwilling flesh of me alert.
Tom was also sitting down. He was only about five metres away, but the sea cut between us, down those cliffs. I thought, who is keeping him over there? And I blinked; it seemed to me that I saw in faint outline the impression of another person sitting down beside him, facing him. It moved oddly, as if parts of it were slipping away as it moved into non-existence.
As much as I wanted to believe in what I saw I’m no fool. I’d been driving for about eight hours, fractious and on little sleep, and it was so dark that I could barely make out much beyond the light I held up. Tom’s head was low as if he was listening.
‘Daniel?’ I said, uncertain. ‘Can you see something there?’
Daniel didn’t answer. I turned the light at him and all he did was raise a hand against it. He was lying down, looking at nothing, scarf up to his nose and the hood of his jacket pulled up. He was exhausted too. ‘Tom,’ I called, and found myself asking: ‘Who – who’s your friend?’
‘It’s James,’ Tom said, ‘James.’
‘James, Tom, why are you so far away?’ I said, ‘We’re over here, if you want to come round?’
‘I’m waiting – he wants – ’ Tom said, almost inaudible.
‘For what?’
‘I don’t like this,’ he said, his voice with a crack in it.
‘I’m coming over,’ I told him. ‘Wait for me. Just so I can hear you better, all right?’
Daniel and I looked at each other a moment and he nodded.
I hesitated. I was stuck between the sharpness of my thinking and the tactile mutability of what was going on. We should call someone; but who was there to call in all this world, who could help any of us? I thought, wiping my cold hand on my face again: I have no future. The terrible thoughts rushed over me. There’s no one beside him. He’s talking to no one. How awful – awful to go so mad. My cheeks burn from the wind and Tom’s gone mad. So he has no future, no stability, even if we get him back. Anyway there is no future. It was like a flood of sadness, then. For all my careful study, I thought, all my enthusiasm for my subject, I’ll die in poverty on this fucking coffin archipelago, there will never be a job in codicology waiting like a prize for someone like me. There will never be a secure old age from which I might tell stories of this time. In spite of this I was getting up, pushing myself, heavy in body and heart, sore arms and legs and frozen fingers – and so it was, otherwise how would I have written this? If we’d all just stayed. Or tipped one after another off the ledge for a lack of other options on how to live.
I went skirting round the gap, holding out my arms for balance. There was nothing below, no water visible, only the sound of it crashing and withdrawing and crashing. I got down next to Tom, and felt primeval there, hunched against the rages off the sea, like any ageless nameless number of people might have held down against the weather, waiting for the sea to give them an answer to some terrible equation.
‘Are you going to come inside with us or what?’ I asked. He twitched his hand, turned away still, and muttering, murmuring, though for the wind I could not make out one word. On the other side of him I glanced for the thing I had seen. And I sickened. There was something; a shape that moved when he did, that felt almost like a shadow he was casting, but on the dark air where it could not
