It’s early morning. No one else is up. Simon slips out of the house, walks purposefully down the road, turns left along the lane, past the last house with its wooden verandah and its view of the sea, climbs the overgrown stile into the tunnel of trees. He cuts himself a long straight hazel stick with the knife he inherited from his dad, peels the bark off as he walks slowly to the next stile.
He walks the Coffin Path across the fields, parallel with the sea for a while, climbing each stile without stopping to rest. Each stile is broad enough to rest a coffin: it takes at least six men to bear the weight of a dead man in a wooden coffin, and it’s a long way across the fields to the churchyard. He imagines them, the six men, heaving the weight on to their shoulders for the next stretch of the path, sweating with the strain of it. But it’s something to do for the dead man, isn’t it? A last act of friendship, to carry him to his resting place.
He keeps walking until he’s almost at Matt Davies’s studio, and then he cuts across to the cliff edge and stands there.
The sea is slate grey today, whipped up with white horses. Waves crash and boom on the rocks below, sending fine spume and spray up the cliff, over the grass, over him.
He thinks about Edward Morvah.
He tries to imagine what he was thinking that night.
Somehow he must have seen Simon, with the air rifle strapped to his bike, cycling up the main road towards Mr Davies’s house. Followed him, just because that’s what he always did. For his own muddled reasons.
And then he’d watched Simon get out the air rifle, rest it on the wall, aim it into the garden. Hovered, watching, waiting, not knowing what to do, and then he’d heard Matt and Leah come out, but too late to stop Simon shooting… and so he’d taken the blame on himself to protect Simon, whom he’d muddled in his head with his own brother. Or maybe even with himself, the boy he’d once been, before things had gone so wrong for him. Or perhaps it was for some other reason, some strange, twisted logic that even Simon can’t imagine…
And then…
Hard to imagine the next bit.
Maybe he knew what the police would do, the way the story would sound, the other stories people round here would tell about a crazy man with a gun, living half wild on the edge of things, watching other people’s lives: ‘Stalker… pervert…’ Mad, or bad, or dangerous. All three, perhaps. And so he’d made his decision…
Or maybe it wasn’t like that at all. Perhaps it was just another accident. A step too far in the wrong direction. Easy enough to make a mistake in that kind of thick sea mist in the dark.
It isn’t my fault, Simon tells himself over and over. Is it? People do their own crazy things. There are things you can’t know, can’t understand.
A darkness at the heart of it all.
He picks out five stones, catapult-size. He hurls them out over the cliff edge, waits to hear the splash, but it never comes. The air has swallowed them up.
You could let something like this cast its shadow over your whole life. Or you could choose to see it another way: that it had been a simple act of kindness; one lonely man trying to stop a boy from suffering the consequences of a stupid mistake. You could accept it as meant, be grateful and move on.
There is always that choice, the dark or the light. Simon knows that.
He keeps on walking the Coffin Path, all the way to the cluster of stone buildings that make up the next village. A small church nestles in a dip in the land, surrounded by trees which have been blown almost horizontal by the wind off the Atlantic. They look like arms reaching out. Within the stone boundary wall there are gravestones and stone crosses, urns and angels, and the small mounds of earth which are unmarked graves. Simon picks his way between them, reading the inscriptions. Lost at sea; Reunited at last; At rest; Sleeping; Dearly missed; Never forgotten. He wishes they’d had a grave like this for his dad, a real place where he could go and talk to him sometimes. Tell him things. He can’t remember the day they scattered his ashes all those years ago, even though Nina speaks about it sometimes. What he does remember is that he couldn’t believe that was all there was left. Dust and ashes.
He thinks about that other burial place a few miles back: the stone burial mound made more than five thousand years ago by people living out here, on this far-flung fist of land surrounded on three sides by sea. Five thousand years of people being born, and growing up, and dying; the messy business of being alive. He thinks about his gun hidden deep in the deepest chamber, like all the other secrets swallowed up in its darkness.
He thinks about the things that can be buried, and the things that can’t.
Simon goes home the coast-path way. The sea sends clouds of spume over the cliff edge. The rollers are magnificent. The wind tosses the gulls and kittiwakes and storm petrels like froth and their cries are lost in the thunder of waves on the rocks below. It’s the first big storm since they moved. He’ll go surfing this afternoon.