Something to Declare by Cyclist

Chapter 24

It’s a long walk back along the cliffs to Bosherston, The wind was at my back and my hair was streaming out, showing me the way home. I could get a lot of my bits and pieces onto the bike, and it was only a short ride back to Pembroke railway station.

Who had I been kidding, really? Obviously not Sally; her advice was clearly based on a sounder judgement than I possessed, and I was glad she had held back my wilder ideas. What was I, exactly? A man in women’s clothing, to all intents and purposes, legally and otherwise. So I had a new name; so what? I had closed the door to Steve; perhaps it was time to start pulling to the other doors, none of them led to Summer.

I was sobbing, in those jerking, limping gasps where you can neither talk nor breathe properly, and my eyes filled with salt and pain. I stumbled over a rock on the path, and a hand grabbed my elbow.

“No”, he said, “If we are walking away from each other we will make damned sure we know what we are walking away from”

There was a ramp of rock sloping down parallel to the grass, and he led me down there, out of the wind and the noise of all but the surf and the birds, and the occasional odd moan from a blowhole.

“We are among ghosts here” he said, “and you have raised some more. What were you trying to do?”

I could hardly talk. All my hopes had dropped off the edge like the jackdaws, and I wondered who this haggard, haunted-looking man really was. I had lost all subtlety, all guile. My split screen appeared again, and I watched a ragged and torn woman try and string something, anything coherent together.

“I just wanted to help!” she wailed

“You were, you idiot!” he shouted, throwing a chunk of limestone off the cliff. He watched it sail out into the void and curve down to the sea. I remembered a poem by Ed Drummond, and shuddered. I was no Syrett, but what about Geoff? My sobs were dying down and I looked at him, really looked at him. My beautiful man looked emptied out, the life gone from those eyes. I wondered what they were seeing, and he looked down, closed me off from his soul, and started to talk.

“I was his little brother, I was the one he cared for and looked after. Bill was always there for us but just a little too old, a little too beyond our grasp; Tony and I were the biz, the real thing. If I had problems at school, he was the one who would turn up for me, have a word with the bully, help with the home work. He always brought light to my world, and when we were both old enough to realise that there were people outside the family who could become at least as important he was the one to wipe my tears when the girl with the red hair told me I was too short for her”

He looked at me, then, and I shuddered at how bleak his attempt at a smile was.

“Yes, even then I had a thing about redheads. It took me a little while to pick up on how different Tony was…”

He trailed off again, staring out towards Lundy and hurled another stone into space.

“You know when you see a friend, and realise they fancy someone? And you don’t know, or know only slightly, this other? You don’t know what they are like, but you know your friend…your brother, he fancies them to bits, so you push them along, you boost their ego, you urge them to go for it because you love the thought of them being in love, no matter who with, it’s exciting and wonderful and it can’t go wrong, can it, because he is your big brother and how could anyone say no to someone as wondrous as him?”

Geoff was crying now. I sat on the hard ground, too frightened by his mood swing to change position at all. My backside was going to sleep, and I was worried that if he did decide to leap I would be unable to move fast enough to stop him.

“He said about this boy on his course, how the light caught his hair, the line of his mouth when he smiled, the curve of his throat when he laughed, and I knew that Tony was irresistible because he was my big brother and that was how it worked, and I PUSHED and PUSHED for him to ask him out and he said, all right, he would when term started, and that was what he did, and this boy said ‘I never realised you were such a fucking shirtlifting twat’, that was what Tony said, and then ‘Fuck off and die you fucking queer, you make me want to puke’, and Tony got into his Corsa and drove out of Brighton till he got to the Seven Sisters. He rang home, and I know he just wanted someone to say they loved him and come home, but nobody was there, so he put it all on the answering machine and then he jumped and fell over 500 feet till the rocks and the water tore my beautiful brother into shit and if I had been home he would still be here”

I slowly reached out a hand for his, and he looked at me with his head cocked.

“And then there’s you….I saw you that first day, so frightened I thought you were going to die when we spoke to you, but you stayed, and then you played and I saw the life that was behind the terror, and you reminded me so much of him then.”

He took my hand and I said “I’m not him, cariad”

“I know, but I thought if I could make you happy I might feel I had done something for Tony, but then it all went wrong”

“How?”

“I fell in love, and that means I’ll fail you……”

“Geoff Woodruff, you have never failed me. You even stood by when I puked on you!”

That raised a wan smile. “It was the first warm meal you gave me…”

A joke. A shit one, but it was better than what had preceded it.

“Geoff, you gave me more than that. You gave me more than I could ever thank you for, you gave me my life. Even if this is the end for us, I still have that. Remember that card from work, ‘Happy Re-Birthday’? That’s your doing. Tony went because of fate, or bad timing, or homophobia, or all sorts of things, but not because of you, or Bill, or Jan, or any other innocent bystander. The fact that you are so torn up inside shows that you cared, proves your love was real, just like mine is for you”

We were both crying again. I moved over and held him as tightly as I could without snuffing what life was left in my hurting man.

“We are both damaged goods, my darling, but will you try for a while and see if we can’t put some of those ghosts to rest?”

“I do love you so very much…” he murmured as I helped him up. We stumbled off down the coast path towards the tent, my hair whipping round our heads in the wind, too scared of falling apart to let go of each other, and left the clifftop turf to the rabbits and the ravens.

Next time, we must bring sleeping bags that zip together.

John Syrett was a talented rock climber, born in 1950, and the subject of a heartbreaking poem by Ed Drummond. He suffered great fits of depression, and in 1985, possibly while drunk, he climbed to the top of the great Yorkshire limestone cliff of Malham Cove and, it would appear, jumped to his death.
Ed Drummond’s poem talks of Earth as the mother, the nurturer, and finishes with the lines
“He jumped;
She snatched him back”