Read Online Whatever You Love by Louise Doughty - Free Book Online Page A

I climbed higher, we reached the part of the walk where the cliff sloped up in crazed, jutting plates – the scrubby grass went right up to the edge, as if a hill had decided to stop mid-air. Further on, the walk levelled out and you could see over the edge but the early, irregular parts of the cliff were particularly hazardous because of the overhang. To our left was farmland. Sheep were grazing on the sloping field that led down to the river, the chill wind ruffling their dirty-white wool coats. To our right, the world swooped upwards and ended with improbable suddenness in sky.
    David was striding hard. He had such long legs our gaits were out of step. I stumbled on the uneven grass. I let his hand drop and moved away from him a little, not meaning anything in particular, just making myself more comfortable to walk. He stopped and looked at me. I stopped too. He appeared to be about to speak, then changed his mind and continued walking. I followed, a little behind.
    He said something to me, but the wind caught his words and I didn’t hear properly, something about my kitchen.
    ‘What?’ I said, raising my voice.
    He turned to me. The expression on his face was irritable. ‘I said, you know, girl, I think it’s just a bit peculiar that you’re so keen on washing up but you never wipe the surfaces.’
    ‘What?’ I laughed.
    He leaned forward and grabbed me by the arms, bending me backwards. ‘Think it’s funny, do you?’ he said, mock-menacing.
    Mock-menacing was his habitual manner before sex. It was foreplay, and a shared joke. When I wanted sex I behaved mock-defiantly, in a way I knew would provoke it.
    ‘You and whose army?’ I shouted above the wind, derisively.
    ‘That’s it!’ he yelled. ‘You’re the bane of my life, you’re going over!’ He slung one arm beneath me and wrenched me off-balance.
    This, too, was a joke he had pulled several times on our walks together, grabbing me and dragging me towards the cliff edge. David had inherited his Aunt Lorraine’s love of robust physical comedy. Pretending he was going to throw me off the cliff was a prank he never tired of. He was also fond of pointing at a button on my jacket, mid-conversation, then flicking my nose with his finger when I looked down. This always made me smile, no matter how often he did it. When I got wise to the pointing-at-the-button trick, he would invent new ways of getting me to look down; telling me I had a mark on my shirt, asking me about my brooch. It delighted him when I fell for it.
    Before, on the clifftop, I had always shrieked in alarm quickly enough to make him stop: but that day, something was different. Perhaps I had heard the joke once too often, or I was simply in a provocative mood after his neglect because instead of shrieking for mercy I yelled into the wind, ‘I’ll take you over with me!’ I wanted to push him, to see how far he would go, to unsettle him after his fortnight of silence.
    He pulled me right up to the cliff ’s edge, where it sloped sharply upwards and there was a dangerous overhang. Even then, I let him do it, thinking still that it was the old joke, that it meant nothing – but as we reached the edge and the first tickle of real alarm fluttered in my stomach, he did something he had never done before. With one swift movement of his arms and shoulders, he spun me round, so that instead of holding me face to face, he was grasping me from behind, both arms wrapped round me at chest height and holding my arms pinioned to my side. He bent forward, so that I had to bend forward too – and I could see right over the edge, to where the waves heaved and chopped against the rocky shore and the brown foam frothed beneath us. There were great, jagged lumps of concrete dumped among the rocks at this part of the coast, deposited years ago to protect the bottom of the cliffs from erosion. They were as big as cars, their corners and edges pointing menacingly upwards. If you went over at this point, you