Image: © Courtesy of Manchester City Galleries
[Content trigger warning: suicide]
There was an incident at the castle. Someone fell from the walls. Or jumped or was pushed. Jason says we must have a look. It will be so much fun. When we get there, there’s already a cordon of blue ticker tape and a crowd of onlookers three deep. Jason grabs my hand and pushes his way to the front. “This will be so cool,” he says. A big guy in a yellow jacket blocks his way. “How about a quick look?” Jason asks. The big guy in the yellow jacket says, “How about a bit of fucking respect?”
We walk into the village. Jason keeps looking back, at the thickening crowd. An ambulance, lights flashing but siren off, flies by. “That fucking guy,” Jason says, meaning the big guy in the yellow jacket. “I’m telling you, he’ll never know how close he came there.”
We queue for coffee from a kiosk on the village green. We inch forward, under the shade of an oak tree. The woman in front of us is wearing a bikini that is two sizes too small. Jason doesn’t even pretend not to notice. “An old man,” the woman says to another woman, also in a too-small bikini. They look like sisters. “Apparently he jumped.” The other woman makes a face. “It’s disgusting,” she says. “How could someone do that? Jump from a height like that? Knowing some poor sod will have to clean up all the mess later on? All the blood and guts. It’s really disgusting. And, if you ask me, selfish.”
We visit the crow museum to get out of the heat. Jason says crows are a big deal in the village. He read something about it but can’t remember what. He tries to explain it but stops. He tries again and stops again. “It doesn’t matter,” he says. I buy a lined notebook with a crow on the front, a box of fudge with a crow on the front and a tote bag with a crow on the front. Jason doesn’t buy anything. “I guess I’m just not that into crows,” he says.
He pitches his tent behind the church, next to a No Camping sign. “Don’t sweat it,” he says, double checking the guy ropes. There’s a campsite a mile out of the village, and I suggest we try it, just for the night, till we get our bearings. I look around, at the crooked headstones and freshly laid flowers. “This is all a bit, you know.” Jason won’t have any of it, and says he doesn’t do campsites. “Tourists,” he explains.
The waitress in the pub next to the museum says the old man was pushed. She says her boyfriend’s cousin knows someone who works with the wife of one of the first responders, so it’s straight from the horse’s mouth. Jason asks if she knows the guy with the yellow jacket. “Big guy,” he says. “Ugly face.” The waitress says, “That’ll be Wayne. You don’t want to mess with Wayne.”
It’s after midnight and we’re on the beach doing handstands in the soft sand. I don’t remember the hows and whys of it but we’re naked and it doesn’t feel wrong at all. There’s an island about a mile out to sea and when Jason stops and looks at it he goes quiet for a while and says he used to come here with his parents when he was little and his dad used to swim to the island and back, even in the winter, even when there were jellyfish everywhere. On the way back to the church he says his dad died last year. “I’d like to say he drowned, but he didn’t.”
We meet the waitress coming out of the pub. She recognises Jason first, then me, and recounts exactly what we had ordered. Steak and kidney pie, haddock and chips, mushy peas, gravy, new potatoes, bramble crumble and custard, a banana split with extra squirty cream, two flat whites and a pint of cider. It’s her party trick, she says. “I never forget an order.”
She says we can come back to her place but there’ll be no funny business. She rents a cottage near the golf course and says she can only afford it because it belongs to the guy who owns the pub and he gives her a twenty-five percent discount. She opens a bottle of red wine and says she can make some eggs if anyone is hungry because eggs is all she’s got. Her boyfriend, who is clinically if not morbidly obese, eats four boiled eggs and falls asleep on the sofa. Jason tries to wake him up. Says he wants to wake him up and fight him because he’s never had a fight with someone as fat as that.
The waitress walks us back to the church. It’s three in the morning and the castle is silhouetted high above us, towering over the village. “It must be weird,” I say, “having the castle there, right there, watching you.” The waitress shrugs. “You get used to it. Sometimes you forget it’s even there.”
She says she’s never been in a tent before, so we all squeeze in and lie back and look up at the castle through the gap in the door. “They usually fly a flag,” she says. “A Union Jack. But they took it down as a mark of respect.” She says someone in the pub, a tourist, said the old man jumped of his own accord and that he left a suicide note. Someone else said it was an old woman, not an old man, and that they’d slipped. An accident. Someone else said it was a little boy and it was a miracle because he survived. Lots of broken bones, but he survived. “I’ll drink to that,” Jason says, getting up. He rummages through his rucksack. “If I had any drink.”
Sometime in the early hours, the waitress rolls over and whispers, “How long have you guys been together?” Jason is sleeping, half in and half outside the tent. “About twenty-four hours,” I say, and laugh. I tell her we met in Wetherby service station, cadged a lift off a shoe salesman en route to Scotland, planned to go all the way to Edinburgh with him but decided at the last minute to get out in Belford when Jason saw the sea and remembered the island and said he really missed his dad.
There’s no sign of the waitress in the morning. Jason says he wants to leave, says he should have just gone to Edinburgh as planned. “This fucking place,” he says, looking back towards the castle. I tell him I’m going to stay for a few more days. “I like it,” I say. “I really like it here.” He doesn’t ask where I’m going to stay or what I’m going to do, and when he leaves, his tent on his back, he doesn’t say goodbye.
Gary Duncan’s stories have appeared in Unbroken Journal, X-R-A-Y Literary Magazine and Flash: The International Short-Short Story Magazine, among others. His short story collection, You’re Not Supposed to Cry, is available from Vagabond Voices.