A short story by Irvine Welsh published in The Dubliner for the first time
I was in a terrible state after I’d pushed her over the cliff. It was only when I took a few steps back from the edge I realised that I was shaking with fear and nausea. I looked out to the sea: it was a grey smudge, then the sky: a blue blur. Before my action they had seemed so alive and vivid. Like her, I considered fretfully. Where was she?
Gone.
One minute right here; looking out towards the horizon and pointing at a red buoy that bobbed in the waves, the next just gone. It was even so hard to envision her now in my mind’s eye. I could see the yellow oilskin jacket, her blue jeans, boots, her hair whipping out from under the ski hat in the wind. But her features, that face I’d lived with all these years, it wouldn’t appear; it was as if they’d been wiped from my consciousness. It seemed so final, so absolute!
A 200-foot drop to certain death. I moved slowly towards the edge of the cliff and looked over. I couldn’t see any sign of her body. They say that the undercurrent takes them right out to sea. Yes, she was gone; one hale and hearty shove in her back and her just making a strange noise of mild disapproval, urgent yet surprisingly soft, a sort of gihhhh...gihhhhhh...as if she’d stepped on dog’s dirt.
My head spun as I looked down at the crashing waves and jagged rocks, and for a second or two, I was of a mind to join her. Then, without being conscious of stepping back or falling onto my haunches, I found myself squatting, breathing heavily, trying to regain some sort of control of my senses. Through some subconscious mechanism my fingers dug into the spongy scrub-covered soil of the cliff top, some internal force trying to anchor me to life as sure as a competing one was attempting to slowly inch me to the precipice of the cliff and my demise.
I tried to concentrate on my breathing, to find a rhythm. When I did, I was a prisoner to the beat of tunes I associated with her. Or, I should say: with us. I was murmuring, through tearful gasps, a ballad of breathless, soul-shattering pathos. Then I bellowed my anguish against the indifferent sea below as it smashed against the rocks as if it, and not I, was her fatal assailant.
After a while the violent rushes of terror and that shattering sense of loss abated somewhat, as a certain numbness set in. I managed to get to my feet. I walked away from the cliff top, unable to look below. Anxious now to escape the sea’s reprimanding roar, I made haste down the grassy slope and onto the track, the wind and my tears stinging my face.
A jolt of panic stopped me abruptly as I noted, through the mist and the drizzle, the lights of the old village at the bottom of the hill. It signalled the impending presence of people, and all those potentially troublesome dealings, negotiations, explanations. A gloomy realisation forced itself upon me: I had already decided that I would do everything in my power to survive this. It therefore wasn’t the hot-blooded, spur-of-the-moment action of a desperate man like I’d conceitedly deluded myself into believing. It was an icy, calculating execution, and one I’d been journeying towards for some time.
I bit down hard on my bottom lip, steeling myself: I had to endeavour to act as if nothing untoward had happened. Only then would my own survival be possible. A tremor coursed up and down my spine; I was terrified that somebody had seen me, but the screeching gulls were the only witnesses to both the act and my subsequent retreat. At first I thought of heading straight back to the cottage, the place we’d bought almost six years ago as a holiday home, but I needed a drink to calm me. I backtracked onto the coastal path and moved towards the lights.
Darkness was starting to fall, and the murky twilight had visibly reduced further by the time I got into the village. A sudden shattering crash in my ears made my blood run cold. I stopped and looked around, only to see the man from the grocer’s shop pulling down his steel shutters with a hooked pole. He’d had them installed after the place had been burgled. When he told me about it he’d reckoned that the culprits were youths from the city. I recalled him pointing up the A1 in accusation, in order to make his point.
I prayed my fright hadn’t been noticed. I gave him what I hoped passed for an absent-minded wave and he nodded back.
The village pub was empty except but for the young female bartender and two middle-aged men who sat at the bar. I acknowledged them with a nod and the observation that it was getting colder, and ordered a pint of lager. I remember that I asked for Carlsberg but the barmaid picked me up wrong and gave me Carling instead. Strange how stuff sticks in the mind. I didn’t bother about that, I just looked at the pint.
I worried that if I tried to lift it up my hands might visibly shake. I just wanted to throw back as many large whiskies as I could, but there was little to be gained and everything to be lost in drawing attention to myself or having my judgement impaired through intoxication. I let my hand grip the rail under the bar, testing its strength and my control, before getting into my pockets for a five-pound note which flickered as I handed it over to the barmaid. When she attempted to give me change, I urged her to stick it in the collection box on the bar, for the Royal Naval Lifeboat Institute.
I took a deep breath, picked up my pint and moved over to the corner of the pub and a seat beside the roaring coal and log fire. After trying to drink the pint discreetly, I felt comfortable enough to order a small Scotch with my second one. I pretended to read a newspaper discarded on the table next to mine, the Telegraph, for about an hour and a half. My mind kept on jumping back to the cliff top, so powerfully that at one stage I actually felt myself back there, teetering drunkenly along its edge.
I wandered back up to the cottage, one minute full of elation, the next crippled with a crushing remorse. It was now dark and the road was poorly lit. When I turned off and started to climb the hill, some bramble overhanging from the stone wall of the garden of a neighbouring farmhouse tore at my face, causing me to curse in frustration. I cried softly to myself, heading up the stone path, as I remembered the good times, and thought about where it had all gone wrong.
My hands were numb with cold as I put my key into the lock. To my surprise I found that the door was open. I was positive that I had locked it before we left. There was a strip of yellow light between the door and the frame. Ripples of anxiety moved through me as I cagily entered, creeping through the hallway towards the front room, trying to control the sharp breaths that threatened to explode in my chest.
The intensity grew as my heart thudded and the blood swirled to my head, making me giddy. At first I thought, hoped, that it might have been burglars. Then I expected to see the police, perhaps asking me if I knew of my wife’s whereabouts. Depending on my response, they would then either place me under arrest or solemnly ask me to accompany them to the police station or hospital morgue in the city, in order to identify her body. I couldn’t think of which scenario would be the least savoury.
When I opened the door, I had a severe shock, feeling a violent spasm, sharp as a blade, rising up through me from my bowels. I thought that I was going to pass out. I was unable to believe the evidence of my own eyes, which I was compelled at first to rub, and then repeatedly blink. But what confronted me would not be so easily dispelled.
She was sitting in the chair in front of the fire, in her dressing gown. Her yellow oilskin and her wet clothes lay discarded on the floor at her feet. She had a few cuts and bruises. One was visible on the side of her face, the other on her leg, but otherwise she looked alright.
I couldn’t speak. I just gaped at her. As she turned to me with her large, sad eyes, she looked beautiful, ethereal, and I really wondered whether or not she was a ghost.
“I...I...I...” I eventually stammered, like a jammed machine gun.
She raised a hand to silence me. Her hair was wild and tangled. One side of her face looked bruised, puffy and swollen.
“I’m very, very disappointed, Philip,” she shook her head. “I thought that after 22 years we owed each other
at least some sort of explanation. I never thought that you’d take matters into your own hands in such a thoroughly despicable manner.”
“I…I…”
“But I blame myself,” she continued. “You’re a good man, Philip. This was completely out of character for you,” she said grimly, then looked sharply at me. “Why? Is there someone else?”
“No…of course not,” I protested in genuine horror. “I just felt…so…trapped…” I bleated, feeling my face crumbling at her bemused response to the inadequacy of my explanation, “…by life,” I was moved to add in weak urgency. While shame had now replaced shock as the causal root of my behaviour, the effect, paralysis, was the very same. I now believed myself to be utterly vile and worthless. “I behaved abominably,” I lisped, shaking my head in sheer incomprehension.
She just sat in solemn contemplation, her hands in her lap. When she spoke there was a strange, maternal pleading in her voice. “I’ve obviously disappointed you in some way. What you did was terrible,” her head shook again, tightly, violently, for a second or two, “but you must have been driven to it, otherwise you, well, you just wouldn’t have acted in that way,” she said, looking into my eyes and seeming to acknowledge something. I wondered, with a spectral chill, exactly what it was she saw in them. “I want us to say no more about it, except that I’ll try and be a better wife to you.”
I attempted to talk again, but I couldn’t. Something was fused inside of me and all I could do was retreat back into this holding pattern of the idiotic stammer. “I...I...I…”
She put me out of my misery, raising her hand again. “Please don’t say any more, Philip.” She turned towards the open fire. “There’s some pizza in the oven if you’re hungry, and there’s coffee in the machine. It’s still quite fresh.”
I wanted to go to her and hold her, to beg forgiveness and tell her how much I loved her. But that’s not how I was, how we were. So I gratefully went through to the kitchen, tears still welling in my eyes, and poured some coffee into a mug. Cupping it in my hands, feeling the heat biting into my pink, cold fingers, I looked out from the window above the kitchen sink, across to the cliffs.
I fancied that I could still hear the sea lapping against them in the still night. I thought about how lucky I was to have her. How she always made an attempt to understand my moods. A wife like her really was worth her weight in gold.
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