going down

Going Down.

There was a footprint at the top of the track. It was recent, deep at the front, the rippled indentations were blurred, the crust of rain-blasted sand had caved in round the edge. Someone running. All the way down he searched for other prints, listened for footsteps, voices, breathing. When there were views of the beach and the rocks he stopped to look, but saw no-one.

The sun had been up for a while, it was already quite warm. He'd have to change his time soon, there'd be more people about at six thirty, more footprints, people to encounter, perhaps even someone he knew, expected conversation. He'd have to put the alarm back, half an hour would do, for a few weeks at least.

He reached the steps, old railway sleepers let into the hillside. The way was steep, the trees on either side - prickly wattles - were dense and tall and the path curved to the left. He stopped and listened carefully, this was the most difficult place to pass someone. On the fourth step down there was a dark pile of something he couldn't make out at first, although he should have, it wasn't unfamiliar, there were more and more dogs roaming these cliffs, with and without owners in tow. He shuddered at a quick thought of it squelching between his toes.

Last week, Tuesday, there'd been a car, at the top, tucked into the trees; a small station wagon, dung coloured and dusty, hard to see in the early light. Not the people though, they were easy to see, standing out in the early sun, so confident, in possession. He'd heard the laughter, moved into the bush to stay hidden, to check where it was coming from, who they were. They'd been swimming, down to the water and back before six thirty. The sea was still very cold. They must have run up, warmed up, chasing each other, shouting things. If he'd arrived early, or if they’d taken longer on the beach, or in the water, he'd have heard what they shouted, they would have run right past him, somewhere on the long tack down.

The shadows were long, he'd stood still in the thick tea-tree. They stood out, the low sun brown-red on their skin. They were naked, drying off with towels, turning their bodies round, turning different parts to the sun. One of them looked straight towards him into the sun. She stood firmly, arms at her side, legs slightly apart, the wet towel in one hand dragging on the ground. She was smiling, not at him, at the sun, her eyes were closed.

Her friend came up to her from behind, he was still naked, his penis barely moved as he walked. He was podgy, with the beginning of a beer gut, but uniformly brown all over. He pulled her backwards, off balance; her hand, the one with the towel, flung out wildly. He shammed a bite at her neck. "If I don't have breakfast soon...." he said, growling. She turned and laughed. He moulded one hand around her breast. They kissed. The water in her curly black hair glinted in the sun.

To kiss him, she had to rise up on her toes. The tension in her legs made her right buttock curve in at the side, forming a smooth hollow which gathered shadows from the sun.

That curving buttock with its little pool of shadows aroused in him the same excitement as his first view over the cliff each morning. He would rush to the edge to look down at the rocks lying in the folds of the beach, stretched out into the water. The sight was always familiar, comforting, the patterns solid, unchanging; yet, because of the action of the tides and the spray and the sun, the view was always different and enticing. Looking down, even from that height, he could feel the texture of the rock under his fingers. He would stare at the dark shiny areas and he could feel the rock surface on the tips of his fingers, wet, lubricated, mucus-soft. He could feel the palms of his hand pressing against cold rock, hard and unresponsive, in some places smooth as curved glass, offering no resistance to the movement of the sea, in others worn into deep groins pitted with encrustation, stirring with life at each pass of the tide.

He'd stayed in the bushes too tense to move. He watched them go back to the car, he could still see enough of them to tell they were dressing. He couldn't reach the track without them seeing him; he wouldn't be able to look at them, they would know what he'd been doing, what he had seen. It was time to return to the cabin, to get ready for work.

He had arrived at the cliff top quietly the next day, in case they were there, hoping they weren't, careful not to show himself, not to walk in on something, resentful that the track might be closed to him again. Even when he’d seen the empty car-park he still held back, stopping where he had hidden the day before, to stare at where they had been. The smell of the tea-tree was the same, though the sun wasn't as strong; it was misty out to sea. When he walked to look over the cliff-top it was very still, the ocean and the sky were one colour, without horizon. It was very empty. He’d been safely alone on the beach and all the way home.

The brown pile left by the dog had collected the flies and ants; he stepped over it with difficulty, it meant taking two steps in one stride and they were quite big steps. What about the runner? He looked for any sign of trodden shit, but could find none.

At the end of this first section of steps, the foliage opens out, you can see down into the long gully, its base thick with blackberries. At the end of the gully the cliffs are worn smooth and they curve open to expose a tall wedge-shaped slither of beach and sea, horizon and sky. This was always a place to pause, not only for the view, though he found that exciting. The gully was dark with foliage and shadow, and the sea, soft and bright, vastly changing in hue from one day to the next. More exciting than the view was the sound of the sea. From this point onwards along the gully he would close his eyes and just listen; all that expansive power of endless waves breaking over sand and rocks. From the middle of the track, and for a good way down, that sound formed a background against which all other sounds had to float if they were to be heard. But here, at his point, it was still largely blocked by the two smooth, solid cliffs. Only the sound from that visible wedge of sea flowed up the channel of the gully.

At the base of the steps he looked out and watched the white crest of a wave that left the body of water and spread out across the soft skin of the beach. As it ran towards him he could see less and less of its length, the tapering silhouette of the cliffs cut the long line of the wave into an ever decreasing fragment, a wavelet. And as he listened he thought he could hear the sound of just that one wave, he could follow it with his ears and eyes.

Often, when he finally reached the beach, if the tide was right, he would sit on the damp sand, just at the point where the last wave left its long white edge behind, waiting either to be nudged further by the next small push of the ocean, or to slowly fade away, sucked down into the pores of the beach. Here, the sound of the waves would rush towards him, so would the echo from the undulating face of the cliffs behind. The two would meet over his head, the noise of the ocean would cover him like the sky.

If, sitting there with the water soaking through his jeans, he focused on the next wave as it slid towards him, he could see the intricate structure of its white froth, its infinity of bubbles straddling bubbles. Those uppermost would burst open, exposing their filmy foundations which would rise up and burst open in turn. He supposed that the sound of each of those bursting bubbles, inaudible above the total roar that enveloped him, was nevertheless a constituent element of what we recognise as the noise of the ocean. Each bubble was spawned in a seething generation of new life below the surface; each would migrate quickly upwards, growing in diameter, striving to fulfil a destiny which would climax in that individual act of explosion. Taken singly, the life cycle of any one bubble would be of little significance. Yet, each little climax was part of a collective voice of such magnitude that it was surely audible, a distinctive element of the final roar of each wave as it mounts the body of the beach.

Sometimes, as he wound down the lower part of the track, deep in the gully, he would try crouching down or moving to the side (avoiding the blackberries) to pinch his view of a wave in the very bottom of the wedge formed by the cliffs, so that all that was left to see was the smallest fraction, a fraction so tiny that the number of bubbles of which it was composed was definitely small. Then, he thought, if he could just train his ears towards that point he might hear the final spurt of one lone bubble. From then on, no matter how loud the sound of even the wildest of seas, he would be able to discern each of those final bursting breaths, just as in a choir of voices it is possible to pick out an individual voice, provided you are familiar with its timbre and resonance.

He noticed again today how quickly the track was warming up. It was warm because it was still, neither the air nor the sea could manage much movement. Even as he moved on towards the bright horizon between the great thighs of the gully, the noise of the sea failed to dominate the sounds which belonged to the gully itself. Above the noise of insects and the small trickle of water which seeped below overgrown blackberries, there was a crackling, scraping, sound which he supposed was simply the noise of things heating up, foliage standing or opening out, rocks and earth expanding.

In front of him along the track were washed stones, large pebbles, probably carried up from the beach to stop erosion. Those in the sunlight looked as if they had just come out to bask. On the warming bellies of a number of these pebbles lizards lay sun-baking. He was now moving so slowly that he would come quite close to them before they took fright. He wondered what time would elapse after they had been frightened off into the grass, or under the rocks, before they would return to their exposed slumber. If it took some time for their confidence to return and for the sun to entice them back into the open, then he could be sure, by their numerous presence further on down the track, that the owner of the footprints wasn't just ahead.

He began to think of snakes. Above all the rustling of leaves and insects and lizards and expanding rocks, he was sure he could hear the longer, more continuous, scraping sound of snakes. In the thick bush around him he could envisage thousands of small white eggs lodged under rocks or wedged tightly under surface roots. The sound he could hear, which he had at first taken to be the expansion of things in the heat, obviously wasn't that at all. It was the crackle of snakes eggs being broken open from the inside; it was the first tentative hiss of nosy babies who tested the air with forked tongues to discover the delicious scent of insects; babies who uncurled their thin long bodies and set off for the sunlight. From every direction they moved, instinctively, towards the narrow path on which he was constrained to walk.

Today, thinking of snakes, he moved more quickly. This last few meters of the track, as it broke beyond the edge of the cliff, was usually a time to draw out the experience of opening, emerging. He loved to take those last few steps with eyes closed, for whilst the expanding panorama was exciting there was never as much in the visual surprise as in the change in the sensations that reached his ears. It was the only time he could believe that there might be beauty in being blind. The sudden experience of being enveloped by the horizon, dwarfed by the scale of the beach and the ocean. was a sense that fools your eyes, because it is received by your ears.

He found footprints again; now there were two sets going in different directions. At this point of the beach the sand was soft, dimpled by the overnight rain. It was difficult to determine which of the prints were fresh or similar in pattern to the one at the top. Those heading right, along the open expanse of beach, did look deeper, more like someone running. He decided to go left, to the protection of the rocks.

When the tide was fully out there were deep, narrow channels, with sand floors that wove through the seaward edge of the rocks like a maze. Today the tide was coming in and the channels were surging with water. He had to keep more towards the cliffs and clamber up and down. Between each of the large fingers of rocks stretched little webs of beach. Some formed perfect coves for swimming, others were too narrow, or the sea too broken by submerged rocks, to allow anything but paddling at full tide. He went over several of these recesses. Sometimes he followed a set of prints in the sand, sometimes there were none.

There was one set of these rocks he particularly liked, it had a high spine of a harder rust coloured stone which jutted up through a soft yellow crust, it seemed always to be shedding its sandy skin as it dried out in the sun. He stood on its highest point and looked out to sea.

If he'd looked along towards the next beach he would never have exposed his presence like that. When he finally turned and saw the girl lying out on the sand – and realised what it was he was seeing – he had to scramble back out of sight.

For a moment he'd thought she was a small rock exposed by some unusually severe tide. Then he registered the white towel and the small bundle of coloured clothes. Even before he carefully peered back over the ridge to test whether she had seen him, he knew it was the girl from the car park last week. She wasn't as naked this time; she wore the bottoms of some bikini. She was lying face down, propped up on her elbows, doing something to her face with her hands. She gave no sign of having seen him. He rested against the cold rocks and watched.

Her black bikini bottoms annoyed him. Without them she could more easily be some creature of the ocean, some native inhabitant of the beach, her smooth, curved, body attesting to the finesse of natural selection, to her adaptation for ease of movement in a fluid environment. Last year, only a week after he had arrived in the town, he had come down to these rocks for the first time on a cold morning and sat quietly, shivering, watching a sea lion clapping its flippers and barking, standing on an island rock just out to sea. Today, watching her lying on the beach, he felt almost the same as he had then; there was little sense of voyeurism. He felt that this place and this moment had been reserved for him. That implied no sense of privilege, only an acceptance that in such acts of silent observation there is communication more profound than anything that generally passes between people. After he had watched the sea lion for some time he had had the very clear feeling that the creature knew he was there, that some of that barking and bobbing of the head was especially for his benefit.

But, when the girl on the towel twisted to the side he ducked out of sight. When he peered back over the edge she was sitting up facing the beach and rubbing her temples with both thumbs, her hands resting on her head, her elbows akimbo. Her dark black hair was dry and her skin was without the lustre of oil or water. He managed a sequence of short glimpses, little snapshots, quickly raising his head up and then down like a periscope. He had to fill in the lapsed movement of her thumbs and arms, shoulders and breasts, in his imagination. This left the impression that she was working at something in her lap and he was almost game to take longer look when she gave a sharp cry. He thought of briefly of the bark of the sea-lion, then considered the echo of her cry, trying to interpret its meaning, deciding it was not of exultation but of pain and surprise. He was suddenly scared she may need help, concerned as to how he could come to her aid without exposing his own behaviour. There seemed no natural way to act in her presence. If she needed help he may have to touch her skin. All he could see was the hand of her companion as it had curled over her breast. He though of having to carry her along the beach, being so close to her face and her breasts. He wouldn’t have had the strength to climb the rocks. He had a startling vision of carrying her, like a fireman, over his shoulder; startling because she was naked, without the back bikini bottoms, his cheeks rubbing against the soft skin of her buttocks.

But there were no more cries, no sounds which could force him to respond. After staying still and listening for long enough he bobbed up to find she had gone, there was only the empty white rectangle of the towel on the sand. He was so surprised that he'd ducked back down before realising that, out of the corner of his vision, he had seen her disappear into the water. He came back up, bolder now, and watched as she swam out to sea. She would swim a little then dive under and disappear. Sometimes she would have made progress under water and reappear much further out, at other times she merely bobbed back up where she had dived.

Then she was out of sight, she must have rounded the next point. He waited for a while to see if she returned. When she failed to reappear he decided to run to the other side of the beach to the next rock outcrop.

He slowed as he passed her towel. Next to her bundle of clothes were two apple cores and a couple of peach or nectarine stones and the skin of a banana and an evil looking knife. Now he understood what she had been doing with her hands at her face. He bent to touch the handle of the knife, it was warm. Perhaps it was not the sun but the warmth of her hand he was sensing. As he twisted the blade it caught the sun glowing blood red. The white towel too had red spots. The cry he had heard was from a slip of the blade, piercing the skin, she had run bleeding into the water. He placed the knife gently back on the sullied towel.

He moved on to the shelter of new rocks and turned back. Across the beach his footprints were deep and clear; they were so fresh that they almost startled him. He considered ways of covering the dotted evidence of his passage; he thought of going back dragging a branch behind him. What would she make of the long continuous scrape it would leave? Where would he get a branch? It would be better to wipe each print away by hand whilst walking backwards.

Then, as he stood contemplating his unfortunate trail, he thought he heard a another cry from out at sea. He climbed the rocks and crouched down, peering cautiously over the next ridge. There was no sign of her. He presumed she was right off the tip of the rocks swimming back to her towel. Had she cried out because she had seen him? He turned to watch her towel, keeping out of sight.

After a few minutes she had still not appeared. When he stood up and moved towards the sea she was nowhere in view. He realised then the she must have swum even further, on past the next beach and beyond the next rocks.

For a short time he contemplated going further, thinking of ways of crossing the next stretch of sand without leaving more prints. But when he looked at his watch he was concerned about the time. It was so late that he cared little about the second set of prints. He returned past her towel almost at a run.

The gully closed the sound off the sea behind him, the lizards scurried; if any young snakes had reached the track they ran the risk of being squashed, possibly even before they had tasted their first insect. As he reached the narrow steps and the thick bush he thought only of hurrying and avoiding the dog shit. He didn't hear the approaching footsteps till he found his way blocked.

He couldn't avoid looking at the person coming down, they would have to negotiate a way of passing, but he determined to look determined, harried and in a hurry. Then he recognised the face and was afraid that all he managed to look was embarrassed. It was her friend from the car park, dressed only in a pair of jeans and thongs. He was hurrying. But he also had to slow down.

They were about to pass when the man stopped. "Sorry mate, but have you just been down on the beach? I'm looking for someone. I wonder if you might have seen her; a woman, black hair, probably not wearing bathers? She's brown, sun tanned, good tits”, he gestured with one hand cupped in front of his chest, the one he used to fold around the real thing, “about five four."

He considered ignoring the question and rushing on, but the other had stopped and was waiting. "No", he said softly, "I didn't see anyone". He hoped this would be enough, letting her friend move off down the track to continue his search. Instead he just looked puzzled and gave no sign of moving. "I was sure she would come down here." He hesitated for a moment. Perhaps he was deciding to turn around and go back up. But he spoke again: "You live around here? We just moved in to a house in Beach St. House-sitting for friends; just a couple of months till the holiday season. We had a bit of a party last night. Wild. Actually pretty hung-over this morning." He paused and looked down the track, squinting. "Not in a good state for these steps. Rocky, with the black hair, she's a bit of a health freak. Didn’t stop her knocking them back last night though. Thought she’d be in a worse state than me this morning. Surprised to find her gone when I finally got my eyes open. I assumed she would try and swim it off.”

There was another break, but he made no move to descend. His stomach looked larger when viewed from below. An even coating of sweat had flattened a fine spread of hairs below his navel which formed a crazy pattern like cracks in sun-baked clay. Then he said more slowly: "You must live round here, there was no car up there."

He wasn't just waiting for a reply. He shoved out his right hand. "Mike", he said, "Mike Stilton – as in cheese". The carves of his leg bulged towards the dry clay cliff on the upper side of the track. Social pressure took over. The proffered hand was met, a name was given in exchange: "John Stanley". It wasn't much of a gift.

"Well, I'd better go and look anyway. How far did you go along the beach? We like the rocks along to the left."

"I went to the right". John Stanley, feeling that the lie must have been obvious from his face, edged past, managing to roll “seyougoodluck” into one word, thrown over his shoulder. At the top of the track he peered cautiously back over the edge. He had a good view of the sea out from the beach and of the rocks where he had hidden. He looked carefully. She was not in the water. He moved forward so he could see the beach.

Her white towel was clearly visible, as were the tracks of his own progress over the sand, one set passed between the edge of the towel and her bundle of clothes. Mark was standing beside the towel; he seemed to be surveying the footprints. John watched as he turned his head to look up and down the beach and out to sea. He thought he could hear him calling: "Rocky". Then he turned and followed John’s footprints to the next set of rocks.

For as far has John could see, looking down along the beach and rocks in both directions, right to where each of the cliffs jutted out into the ocean, there was no one in sight except Mark. There was no sign of a swimming figure either. Far out on the horizon there was a string of dark shapes; the prawn boats had turned off their lights when the sun came up.

He tried to shout down to Mark, but he couldn't make him hear, and anyway he wasn't really sure what to say. He tried a half-hearted "I can't see her anywhere". He was ready to shout: "She's gone, completely gone"; but, as he bent forward, the soft still form of the supine rocks, wet from a lick of the tide, became a blinding gleam of light. His eyes shut faster than he could turn his head.

He almost lost his balance, feeling for one moment what it would be like to launch off the cliff. With his eyes still closed, the beach and rocks were brilliantly visible, like a photograph projected on to the back of his eyelids, but with all the colours strangely transposed. The outline of the rock formation was sharp and clear, shimmering; a translucent green against a blue-black beach. Above the rock and the beach, the rest was sea, a sparking and recognisable sea, but bright dappled red. Even with his eyes open, as he overcame his momentary dizziness and turned inland, this sharp and dancing outline remained fixed on his retina, like a thin transparency through which he regarded the empty car-park. Slowly, as he moved away from the cliff, its intensity weakened.

The power of that image surprised him and he was reluctant to let it dissolve. He wanted to walk on with eyes closed. Instead he tried to focus on the shape of the sea – a thin cellophane sea cut around the outline of the rocks and beach, still vividly red. Why red? If the sea had been green then this would have been just its complementary colour; some effect of saturation of optic nerves. But the sea was definitely blue. He couldn’t think of the complementary colour for blue. Blue and yellow formed green. Perhaps the complementary colour should be something close to red.

Soon only the edge, the boundary between the rocks and the sea, remained as a clear line across his vision. It was sharp and distinct and as he walked he tried to follow its outline from one side to the other. He wondered how much detail there was in this winding line, whether he could focus in on just one section and get a more detailed shape. It reminded him of that paradox of mapping; if you traced the edge of a continent, at a coarse scale, then its length could be calculated. But at a smaller scale, each time the view of the edge was magnified, the complexity of its shape increased – its apparent smoothness gave way to the more convoluted shapes of intricately worn rock and sand and soil. This added new twists and turns to be factored into the measurement of length. More magnification showed more detailed complexity, resulting in an even longer edge; and so on down, he suspected, to the molecular level. By then the ‘length’ of the continent appeared to be infinitely large; or at least it would take an infinite time to calculate. The distance he had covered from the cliff edge, and all that remained in front of him back to the caravan, could be considered in the same way. If he was as small as an ant then he would be embarking on a life-time journey.

Thinking about ants made him wonder how many were dying under his feet as he rushed home. He felt like he had created a trail of death behind him, all the way back to the beach.