The Cliff House: A beautiful and addictive story of loss and longing

CHAPTER FIVE

Edie

July 1986

Edie reached out of her window and struck a red-tipped match against the wall. The head burst into flame with a sputter and she held it to the end of her cigarette, the tobacco crackling as it caught. She inhaled then hung her hand out of the window to allow the smoke to curl upwards into the sky rather than into her room. Not that she cared if her parents smelt it. What were they going to do? Send her back to London? Hardly a punishment.

She could still see Tamsyn on the cliffs in the distance. She leant against the window frame as she smoked, her eyes fixed on the girl’s retreating figure, knotted red hair trailing behind her like a knight’s pennant.

The blazing sun had disappeared behind light grey clouds and it had started to rain. The relief from the heat was welcome. The rain wasn’t normal rain but that particular drizzly nothingness Edie only ever saw in Cornwall. More mist than rain. Cornwall had its own weather system as far as she could tell. There was nothing predictable about it at all. She watched the fine spots of water marking the cigarette, tiny dots turning its whiteness a translucent grey, the same grey, in fact, as Tamsyn’s childish cotton bra.

Edie had never met anybody that innocent before. That sheltered. It was so striking she wondered if perhaps it was put on. A well-rehearsed act designed to elicit sympathy and ward off punishment for breaking into houses. Clever if it was. Unnecessary though. Edie didn’t give a shit about her being in the house. When she’d heard noises downstairs her first thought was she was going to be kidnapped by someone who’d then send her father a ransom note made from newspaper cuttings demanding thousands of pounds, so it was quite a relief to discover a girl her own age as terrified as a rabbit in a snare. Plus she’d literally been about to kill herself with boredom and Tamsyn was a perfect distraction.

When Tamsyn finally disappeared out of view, Edie took a last drag then roughly stubbed her cigarette out on the wall below the window, which stained the paintwork with another charcoal smudge and sent out a shower of tiny sparks. She flicked it and it skimmed through the air and landed on the terrace below. She watched the cigarette end smoulder until it burnt out, a thin trail of smoke wending its way upwards and dissolving to nothing. She lifted her head and looked out over the sea. A handful of boats dotted the blue, and the horizon lay in the distance with exciting lands beyond, each of them offering a different adventure, like chocolates in a box.

She closed the window and shut out the sounds of the waves and gulls, then cast her eyes around the bedroom with disdain. Stuck here for the whole damn summer. Jesus. It was no better than a prison cell. Nothing more than essential furniture – a bed, a wardrobe, a bedside table – and grim cream and grey striped curtains at the window. There were no pictures. No plants in pots. The only thing of mild interest were the four white walls, which changed shade as the sun moved through the day. Edie thought of Tamsyn in the house, her wild hair and regional accent contaminating the designer emptiness which Edie’s parents believed to be the height of sophistication. Minimalism they called it – all the rage in New York, darling – which as far as Edie could tell meant echoing rooms with too much white and expensive pieces of statement furniture chosen to be coveted not used. But in this room, her room, the minimalism wasn’t a design feature. This was just a room that didn’t matter.

Edie lay back on the bed. She’d had a dismal end of term. Everything had spiralled from bad to worse and now she’d had enough of every single person she knew. If life were a poker game, she’d swap her whole hand of cards. Her father barely knew she existed. Her mother was forever gummed up with pills – pills to wake up, pills to calm down, pills for energy, pills for sleep – all liberally washed down with whatever booze was closest to hand. Edie had been in Cornwall for four days and was already climbing the walls. Most of her time was spent daydreaming about escape. Shoving a few things into a bag and leaving in the dead of night, walking down the moonlit lane to the main road and hitching a lift to anywhere. But of course she wouldn’t do it. Everybody knew girls like her who hitchhiked alone got raped or strangled.

Maybe Tamsyn would be enough to get her through the summer. She was certainly interesting. Unusual. Different to the people Edie usually met. She was the daughter of a cleaner for starters. The people Edie knew were all the offspring of doctors or barristers or duller-than-dull bores who ran boring companies doing boring things with numbers. Her own father was something of an anomaly, a well-known restaurant critic turned New York Times bestseller. Whilst her mother was a tragic cliché. A failed model turned socialite wife with a penchant for getting off her face. Between them they didn’t have one friend who was a cleaner or a shopkeeper or anything remotely normal. They’d sealed themselves in a bubble and floated about in a manufactured world of braying voices, nauseating opinions, and a universal lack of morals. It made Edie’s stomach heave. Having no friends was better than having fake ones.

She reached for her Walkman and slipped the headphones on. Yes. Hanging out with Tamsyn, the trespassing daughter of a cleaner, with unkempt red hair and a look of adoration, would hopefully make the purgatory more bearable.

At the very least it would seriously piss Eleanor off.

CHAPTER SIX

Present Day

‘Are you still scared of ravens?’

My hands instinctively ball tightly. Where did that question come from?

I check my rear-view mirror, indicate, turn the wheel. The back seat of the car is piled up with shopping bags. She sits in the passenger seat. Her hands rest on her lap, motionless, ankles crossed, skirt risen above her knees. Her legs are blemish-free; nothing, not even a freckle marks them. It’s as if she’s been airbrushed.

We skirt Hayle. Drive past the mudflats revealed by the tide. Sea birds pick over the exposed silt in search of razor clams and worms and the remains of dead fish.

‘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.