Adam Farrer - Cold Fish Soup

My phone rang, cutting out the music on my headphones. It was my mother.

Are you okay? she asked. Youve been gone for hours.

She sounded concerned, as if she was preparing to grab her coat and perform an intervention. This would have been an overreaction had it not been Christmas. If someone disappears at Christmas time its never for a good reason. At best, theyve left the house in a panic to source a last minute, terrible gift. At worst, or close to it, they are standing on the edge of a cliff and contemplating their next move, like I was.

The coastline in my hometown of Withernsea is fragile and perilous, built of soft, vulnerable clay. Each day the waves collide with the cliff face and drag a little more of it into the sea. Several feet of these cliffs are lost in this way each year, making them the perfect suicide spot for the idle. I knew that if I stood there for long enough, I wouldnt have even needed to summon the energy to throw myself off them. Just give it enough time and the ground would have made the decision for me, disappearing beneath my feet like a supervillains trapdoor.

Im fine, I told her. Im heading back now. Millie just wanted a long walk.

Millie is my aged dog, who strained at her lead while I spoke, desperate to peer over the edge and sniff at the unknown below. When Id adopted her a few months earlier, it had been predicted that she wouldnt make it to Christmas. Yet here she still was, wobbling onward. The image of me with Millie seemed to calm my mother down. Because really, who kills themselves with their dog? Especially a tragic one. But I found myself picturing it all the same. Toying with the image of me hopping off the cliff, my body descending, my hand raised above my head as I gripped Millies lead. A Victorian aeronaut attempting to take flight by holding on to a dog-shaped balloon. I shuddered. From the thought, the cold weather and the tiny compulsion in me that was telling me to do it. Jump!

Are you still there? my mother asked. I realised then that Id stopped talking and all shed have been able to hear was the fierce coastal wind and the absence of her son.

Sorry, yes, I said. Im here. Sorry. Ill be back soon.

Okay, she said. See you in a bit. Love you.

Love you.

This was big-guns talk. Were a loving family but we dont show it in obvious ways. We dont dole out love you unless were really worried about each other. You get a love you on your deathbed and a few more during bereavements and heartache then, like fine china, theyre packed away and kept for best. In this instance my mothers love you meant Dont you fucking dare.

And I wouldnt. Not anymore, at least. Id been here several times over the years, in this place, or places like it. Places, edges, that had long ago fallen into the sea. I could have easily fallen in along with them but decided against it, and now, it seems, I didnt have a choice anymore. I considered my teenage daughter Effie, safe at home in Manchester with my ex-wife, preparing for Christmas morning and rightly oblivious to the thoughts in my head. Of my precarious position on the cracked rim of the world. She was enough reason for me to stick around. But there was something else too, an obligation I couldnt quite grasp, pulling me inland. The unfinished business of living, I guessed. So, while I couldnt give in to the urge to jump, it didnt mean I couldnt think about it, and although it was freezing and getting darker, I waited on the cliffs a little longer. Mulling things over, listening to the insistent throb of that tiny compulsion, while Millie circled me, wrapping her lead around my legs. Whether by instinct or accident, holding me fast.

*

When Id arrived at my parents house on Christmas Eve, my mother was concerned, worrying about my inability to smile or eat because as a child these were two of the things Id always done best. You used to wake up each morning with a smile on your face, shed say, happy that shed given birth to a being of such relentless sunshine. And because she has always shown love through feeding, it was pleasing to her that I was also a boy who ate everything on his plate then immediately pined for seconds. There was clearly never a time back then when she thought shed have to consider me glumly wasting away.

I dont want to talk about it, Id said, pre-empting her questions as I made my way into her house, sad and gaunt and making a circus of carrying large gift bags through the door. Lumpy paper ones filled with awkwardly shaped presents and clinking wine bottles. I huffed and I puffed and I fussed and I kissed her on the cheek. Her dogs rushed towards me excitedly and I crouched to welcome them, embracing the giddy, fluffy distraction of their enthusiasm.

It helps that my mother knows that I can sometimes be dramatic. That ever since my teens Ive tended to feel things intensely, my default setting during times of trouble being to announce ruin and proclaim that the sky is falling on my head in particular. My elder sister, Becky, can be the same way, making it a well-worn family trait and therefore nothing for our mother to worry about. So, she could comfort herself with the idea that this was just one of my displays of high emotion, and that Id clearly decided to exhibit that emotion in the manner of a drama student fumbling their way through a scene that required interaction with multiple props. I was all about the bags and where to put them. Chattering about whose was whose. About lost gift tags and the trials of Christmas shopping. Familiar with this sort of behaviour, it could appear to my mother that this was all sound and fury signifying, if not nothing exactly, then at least very little. She didnt know that the death compulsion I was feeling that night was strong and real, and I was having to navigate it just as I have ever since I first began to feel it as a teenager, crushed under the vice-like pressures of my own dedicated portion of collapsing sky.

Everyone has a worst Christmas of their life, my mother said, unable to stop herself from acknowledging my sorry state. Yours is just happening right now.