‘They says I’ve lost my nerve,’ Mal told me that evening when I met him coming up the path from Treen. ‘“Gone soft he has,” I heard your old man tellin’ Jess Jewill, the one they’re callin’ gaffer now. 

‘Wouldn’t think to say a bad word about your Da but sneerin’, he were. And him as I thought were my partner in anythin’ after that time two year ago, you remember? When we brought them boats in after the big October storm.’ Mal paused, then added: ‘But how could you forget?’

Weren’t a cold day, wind had dropped briefly, but Mal was shrugged up in his jacket set for heading into a squall when I stopped to greet him. He didn’t look over keen to see me, though I was never sorry for the times we met. But he talked, and once he’d begun, I could see there was something in him winched up that tight he could scarcely hold it.

‘Soft, am I?’ He pushed his big face forward, almost into mine. I didn’t flinch. ‘Well, an’ maybe they’re right,’ he added, withdrawing again, dropping his voice like he’d had second thoughts about me.

So I asked Mal how come he’d heard them say that, was he sure? Knowing it weren’t like my Da to call no man a coward that’d ride a trawler in the big swells, nor one that ever had.

‘Was comin’ down-along the harbour front at Newlyn this mornin’ after checkin’ the gear on the boats. That’s when I came across ’em. Your father haulin’ the hawsers up off the trawl beam onto the walkway, talkin’ all the while to Jess stackin’ the creels beside him.

‘Reckon they didn’t hear me comin’. The wind took their words like scraps of bait chewed off a line an’ spat ’em out at me in gobbets. “Weren’t none of his what got injured, that night, were it?” they says.’

Mal turned and looked out to the headland where the big slabs of granite are shuffled up right on the edge of balance, then on out over the swollen Atlantic, dull as a pewter pot in the fading light. It was like he found it hard to keep his gaze on me while he was talking.

I tried to stop him. I started to say it couldn’t be like that, it was Mal pulled me out of the water. Da know’d it weren’t about having no bottle; must be some other feller, or something else. No-one’d hold it against him for what happened, or for not going back in the sea. 

Don’t know if he heard me proper, with the wind against me. He was well ahead on the path when he looked back, standing above the cliff where the steps go down to the beach. Mal cut them steps himself, must be ten, twelve year back when I was a child. 

‘I still knows my way down Pedn back’ards an’ in the dark,’ he called out. ‘Even in the mud an’ the weather.’ The wind brought his words to me as if he was still by my side. His eyes were narrowed in the breeze, his face set broad. I thought he was smiling, then, before he walked off where I couldn’t follow.

***

I know my way down that cliff, too – the way Mal climbed down the vounder that evening to the beach. Know every footstep between the sharp boulders and the hebe scrub, on that path so narrow at places that one trip on a root could send you pitching over the cliff edge to the rocks below. And I know how at night, after a fair day, you can feel the heat of the earth coming up like the cliff’s a living body breathing quietly under you in the dark. 

We used to go down there before dawn at low tide to look for jetsam – anything really – that might have got stranded on the shore between the headlands, or in the lagoon between the sandbar and the beach.

Don’t know what Mal was heading down there for that evening, though. Maybe nothing in particular. Maybe same as we used to. Or maybe because it’s a good place to walk off your trouble if you can. Wind whips it out of you with salty slaps if you set your face to the ocean. Even just to see the sea glitter under the smallest sliver of moon – the way it burnishes the water in a streak like a polished blade –will turn your spirits. That’s how I try to remember it.

I like to think that’d be how it was for Mal, too. On the way down the cliff he’d have stopped to look out over the bay to the taut curve of the horizon: a thin, bright line where the sun left its dying trail. He’d have picked his way down through the furze and the glossy leaves of the hebe, with the green and cobalt colours bleaching out to greys in the half-light. And the sound of the sea would have washed out his sour spirits, filling him with its energy. 

And I can’t help thinking about what must’ve happened next, even though I don’t want to. Don’t know when he’d have seen the dark shape in the water, cliff’s too high to see it from the top, that’s for sure. Maybe twenty yards from the sand, and him knowing it’d be too late to go back for help by then. He’d have gone the last scramble down the rocks, feet slipping out of the footholds in his speed, in the spray and the oncoming dark, and jumped down onto the small patch of sand. 

Tide was rising so it would’ve been coming up the beach fast, swallowing the sandbar in the bay, out where the boat was. Currents are wicked right then, spinning off the edges of the bar in all directions; boat could have been pulled out any ways, or sent smashing into the rocks. But still shallow enough for a grown man to wade out there, if you were wise to stay clear of the fast water.

And Mal would’ve known every minute counted. He knew the currents and the risk – must’ve known – and still he waded out there. Found the boy and the girl bundled up together, both nigh on drownded and washed up on the spit of sand, waves tugging at their legs like they was only a bit o’ weed. I can just hear the way the lad might have been saying, hoarse-like from the water: ‘Take the child, take her first, Mister, go on.’ 

Can’t think too much about what must’ve gone through Mal’s mind that minute he walked into the sea, and him not set foot in water this two-and-a-half year gone. Da said that time, back then, he saw Mal tip up his head as he went through the waves and his mouth was wide open like he was roaring at the sea. But no sound came out that Da could hear, and if there was any it was slammed back down Mal’s throat, stifled by the wind on the water. 

So I can just hear the boy calling out to him as he hesitated, ‘Mister, what you doin’? Take hold of the child and I can help myself then.’ And the girl close to finished, cold and clammy in his hands. Their boat was smashed up on the rocks, splintered at the bow when it hit the cliff where land spits out stone into the water, roughing it up into foam. Little skiff it were, blue-painted. Kids like that, they should never have been out in such weather.

Mal would’ve shipped the girl over his shoulder, just a bundle of clothes in his big hands. Taken her up to the rocks out of the surge, leaving the boy marooned on the sandbar as the tide came in. Waves would’ve been cutting off the path back up the rocks, then sucking out again in a deep gurgle, churning the tiny shells and stones that shred your skin like a grater when the sea drags the sand over you. And the currents were crashing the waves across the cove so they boiled round the base of the rock.

He came back in the water for a second time, did Mal, his fists clenched, his eyes like a ranting preacher all hellfire and damnation, near sparks flying from him, cutting his big body through the waves. He got to the boy, and he took him by the collar and began to drag and drag, all the time staring into his eyes like a savage beast, dragging him through the plunging water – just like he did with me. Losing his footing, going under in the boil and surge of the breakers and coming up again spitting like a whale. 

They were both near done for, as I see it, dragging each other. Each of them trying to get a handhold on a steady bit o’ rock to pull on where the waves would boost them upward and out. And Mal got his hand in a crevice and began to haul himself up, still grasping the boy’s jacket, and pulling him after. The boy had his body against the rock, waves washing over his head by now, but his feet on solid granite under water, buffeted against the cliff so he could scarce breathe. Mal was there beside him, gripping the same jut of stone. The boy let go of Mal and Mal let go of the boy so they could pull themselves up with both hands safely. 

Faced into the cliff, the boy would’ve just heard the crash of waves ringing in his ears. Deafening it would’ve been – I know, I’ve been there – the booming sound echoing from rock wall to rock wall and into the caves and crevasses like the deep groan of a ruined god. Wouldn’t have heard Mal’s cry in the wind and water. Wouldn’t have seen him slipping back behind him, swept off his feet by the rip. Wouldn’t have felt the empty space in the air beside him. Would’ve had his eyes on the girl, on the cliff, on the gulls wheeling above, on the path to safety. Would’ve thought they’d made it just in time.

But when he did look back – before he reached the child sprawled on the couch-grass whipped from side to side, leaves like tiny daggers, and the sea pinks swept flat and dancing up in every blast of the storm – when he did look back, Mal wasn’t there. 

***

They found the girl stiff and cold on the hillside next morning, her fingernails dug deep into the sandy soil and the grasses, she’d tried so hard to cling on to her life. They found the boy on a ledge halfway down the cliff, his head smashed, where he must have lost his footing trying to climb the rocks in the dark to get help. They found the boat, or leastways, parts of the splintered hull and the snapped oars, snagged on rocks in the lee of the cliff. They didn’t find Mal for days, not there neither, not till his body had floated out and back on the tides that washed him up down Newlyn way. He was bloated and blackened with his eyes wide open – though the fishes had one of them – and a triumphant terrible grin on his face. 

I pause, often, on the brow of the cliff. I stop, and look down at that path – the one Mal took, where I couldn’t follow to give him a hand. I remember how, two years before, it was Mal who pulled me out of the water, all broken, and carried me home. I gaze out to sea where his body had floated, the spring clouds reflected as grave green patches on calm grey water. Then I turn my chair and wheel myself away.