Amanda Jennings - The Cliff House

‘I remember how you were back then. Terrified, weren’t you?’

I don’t answer. I can’t. The familiar dread gathers in my stomach like a sponge soaking up tar. I glance at her. She’s staring at me, eyes fixed, challenging me. She won’t let this go. She’ll push and push. I have no choice but to answer .

‘Yes,’ I say .

‘Because of the one you saw the day he died?’

I don’t reply .

‘Tell me.’

‘You know.’

‘Tell me again.’ Her voice has dropped to a low angry rumble and my stomach tightens .

‘It was on the path,’ I whisper. Tears prick the backs of my eyes. I don’t want to think about it. ‘Black all over. Calm. It had eyes like tiny lacquered marbles. The sky was getting darker and darker, pressing down on us. In its beak…’ My voice is choked by a knot of emotion. ‘Long thin strands. Like spaghetti. I grabbed his hand . “ It’s just a raven ,” he said. Granfer says ravens make bad things happen, I whispered. He saw one at the mine once and the next day the tunnel collapsed and two men were crushed.’

I see my father’s face then. He’s laughing at me. Telling me not to believe such superstitious nonsense. I try hard to recall the sound of his laughter but it’s elusive. If only I’d known it would be the last time I’d hear that noise I’d have listened harder, sucked the sound of it right into myself, etched it on to my brain forever .

‘Don’t be daft, Tam, he said. Granfer’s an old fool. Ravens are just birds. Species genus Corvus. He’s trying to scare you. Too much of the Hitchcock in that one. Don’t you worry.’

‘But you were right to worry.’

‘Yes.’

We round the bend and I slow to a halt to let a farmer cross with his cows. Their underbellies swing as they walk, hip bones pushing against black-and-white hides, tails chasing away the flies. The farmer raises his hand in thanks. Then he does a double take. Stares. Brow furrowed in vague – or perhaps judgemental – recognition .

I put the car into gear and drive onwards. The farmer lifts the iron gate into place, stick resting against the dry-stone wall, his fleeting interest in me gone .

‘What was in the raven’s beak?’

I recall how I pressed myself tight into my father, wary eyes bolted on to the bird, my body flooding with building horror .

‘A chick,’ I say softly. My hands grip the steering wheel. Knuckles white. ‘The entrails of a dead chick.’

Flashes of that small pink body batter me. Flecked with newly emerging feathers. Sodden and bloodied. Its stomach ripped open. Entrails, tiny and thin, spewing from the ragged hole. Its baby head twisted unnaturally, spindly legs broken, wings spread-eagled. One eye bulging beneath a translucent membrane. The other pecked out .

‘A kittiwake. A day or two old, Dad said.’

Then without warning the raven had taken flight. Startled me so I squeezed my father tighter. The bird beat the air with powerful wings, dark feathers outstretched, body rising like a phoenix into the bruising sky .

I take a breath and shift my weight as I change gear. I glance out of the window to my right. The sea is silver today. Touched white in places where the wind annoys it. Foreboding wraps around me like a cloak. I pull in to a lay-by. A caravan passes, its driver red-faced, stressed as he negotiates the narrow Cornish lanes and unforgiving locals who speed around corners primed and ready to shake their fists at the tourists .

‘You saw a raven the day I left, didn’t you?’

I look across at her. She is staring straight ahead. My breathing grows tight as if my lungs are silting up. A gull cries and the shadow of a cloud passes over us .

‘Yes,’ I say. ‘I saw a raven that day too.’

CHAPTER SEVEN

Tamsyn

July 1986

I knocked on Granfer’s door as I pushed it open and walked in. My whole body was buzzing from my morning. The raven on the roof was forgotten, blanked out so I was free to relish every moment I’d spent at the house.

‘Hi,’ I said. ‘I made you a sandwich.’

Granfer hadn’t moved and was still sitting in the worn leather chair he’d had forever. I never understood how he could spend so long staring at the same muddle of jigsaw pieces. It would have driven me mad. But Granfer could sit at the table for hours on end, happy in his own world, poring over the spread of shapes on the table Mum got for him a few years earlier. She’d found the table in the Salvation Army shop in Penzance and brought it back on the bus as proud as could be. It looked like junk to me, with its sun-bleached flimsy laminate top and legs riddled with woodworm, and sure enough, as she set it down in the kitchen, she’d beamed and announced it only cost a pound.

It took her three evenings, a yard of green felt from the haberdashers in Hayle, and a staple gun she borrowed from school to transform it into what she grandly called a card table , perfect, she’d said with a wide smile, for holding a jigsaw.

It wasn’t perfect, but Granfer loved it. Told her it reminded him of one they’d had when Robbie was small, which they’d use for games of Gin Rummy and Snap.

Granfer’s attention switched from the jigsaw to me as I neared him. I put the sandwich on the table, and kissed him on his hair, which was thick and white with a yellow tinge and in need of a wash.

‘Fish paste on white sliced.’

‘Lovely,’ he said. ‘I was feeling a… bit peckish.’

‘How’s it going?’ I gestured at the puzzle.

‘Got the corners... and that far... edge. But… blimey… it’s a bugger.’

‘I’ll give you a hand.’

I sat on the small stool beside him and leant over the table, resting my chin on one hand to stare at the pieces. His breathing was loud in my ears. Each inhalation a fight to draw air into his lungs which had been ruined by dust from the mines. I tuned out his painful rasping by reliving my encounter with Edie Davenport. I savoured every detail, from the warmth of the paving stones beneath my feet, to the look of admiration she gave my dress, to each delicious elongated vowel which dripped from her lips. It was all so unreal, too unreal perhaps. If it wasn’t for the syrupy taste of Coca-Cola lingering in my mouth, I’d worry the whole episode was a figment of my imagination.

A triumphant holler from Granfer intruded on my thoughts. He patted my knee with excitement and launched forward to slot the piece of puzzle he’d found into the space that matched it in the jigsaw. It was a section of sky, half-cloud, half-blue, and he jabbed it vigorously into place.

‘Well… that’s one step… closer to finishing. Only another two… hundred and fifty-seven… to go.’ He beamed at me, revealing his crooked stained teeth, and a glint of gold from an ancient filling. ‘I’ll have… it done in a… jiffy.’

‘Would you like a cup of tea?’

‘Ta, love.’ His eyes drifted back to the pieces again. ‘With two and a half… please.’

‘Mum says no more than one.’

He made a face.

‘So don’t tell her, okay?’

He winked and tapped the side of his nose. As he did he erupted into a fit of coughing. Though I’d seen this a hundred times – coughing, spluttering, fingers bent into claws as they dug into the arms of his chair – it still shocked me. You’d have thought I’d got used to it, but each time, with each attack, I was terrified it wasn’t going to stop until his oxygen-starved body collapsed dead on the floor.

I reached for his hand and rubbed it helplessly. His eyes widened and the whites turned bloodshot as the effort of pulling air into his ravaged lungs popped capillaries in tiny scarlet explosions. He struggled to get his handkerchief from his sleeve and to his mouth.