Looking Down Read Online Free PDF

doubt. They moved a few paces together, Edwin well aware that John did not like to walk all that close to the cliff edge and contemptuous of him for being so careful. He could not have known that John had liked the artist, the man Edwin referred to as ‘bloke’ or ‘dirty bastard’, because in their brief conversation he had admitted he felt the same fear. In a short time they had managed to discuss their vulnerability to vertigo and a number of other, surprising things. Yes, John had liked the artist a lot, thought abouthim and the girl ever since, to his own irritation. They were preoccupations that took him by surprise. He had become, to his own mind, a dry, dispassionate, emotionless man.
    Edwin was suspicious of all authority in the manner of a loner who was always waiting for someone to take away what little he had. John remembered details of his background from those long-ago but plentiful medical notes. There had been a history of non-accidental broken bones. He had been taken into care as a teenager, abandoned by violent and abusive parents but only after the abuse occurred, and become apparently incapable of forming relationships, redeemed by his love of the birds and the cliffs. Maybe Edwin was not so impoverished after all, John thought. At least he had his passions and principles and lived with a kind of dignity, which was more than John felt he had achieved himself.
    For all his irritating and cunning qualities, there was a harsh gentility about Edwin. He always extended his hand on parting and then wrung John’s so hard that he felt his bones would break and the tender skin erupt in grazes. It was the only occasion of which John was aware that Edwin ever touched anyone, and it was as if he did not know how it was done. He had never felt skin like that, a series of knobs and calluses, like rusted iron roughly fashioned into the semblance of a hand and always cool on the warmest day. Edwin extended the hand, then withdrew it, remembering something.
    ‘John, if you ever hear of any walkers wanting to go down to Cable Bay, tell them no, won’t you? We’ve . . . we’ve rare visitors there. Oh, don’t tell them that. Tell them it’s dangerous.’
    Rare visitors must mean blasted birds. Again.
    ‘Surely no one but a fool would go there. The earth’s still moving, isn’t it, and the path’s been diverted. What kind of birds?’
    ‘The sort that nest early. Forget I said that.’
    Bugger the birds, John thought, and waited.
    ‘It’s the pathways do it, you know. Always them.’
    ‘Pardon?’
    ‘Pathways. The thoroughfares that take people from one place to the next and open up the land. But what they also do is close it down. They give vantage points, all that, but what happens is that the land either side of them is never used, becomes less and less used, so that it becomes the wilderness, never used at all. Rank, unkempt, overgrown, full of hiding places, the new hidden zones that the pathway was supposed to open up, while really it closed them down. Created a new habitat. Don’t go off the path, John. Like she did. Like dogs do.’
    Such a long speech. John was amused by it, and did not want to let the man go.
    ‘Do all pathways go somewhere?’
    ‘Yes and no. They make a matrix, like a cardiovascular system, going round and round on themselves but with connecting paths leading off. There’s probably an interconnecting point on this path that leads straight to that man’ s door, that so-called artist, all the way to London town. I could walk it in three days, I reckon. Without going on a path.’
    Then he smiled and extended the hand again. The sun came out.
    ‘You’re a good enough man, John. Don’t try so hard.’
    John felt flattered that so many of the usually few words had been placed at his disposal, even if he did not understand them. No one knew more about Edwin’s background than he did, and yet it was so little. He was a man with a certain insight, and that was all John