She reached for the newspaper she had dropped on the table with trembling hands and forced herself to look again at the front page and its terrible, awful information.

‘That’s him,’ she said, and her voice felt like such a fragile thing, she wasn’t sure anyone else could hear it until there was a too-loud reply right next to her.

‘Your son? Are you saying that’s your son, love?’

The woman’s excessive perfume seemed like an odd thing to register at this time, but Irene’s nose puckered with the sweet musky smell enveloping her. Three people stood over her: the man from behind the counter, this blowsy woman who seemed to have come from who knew where, and the old man who had said he thought he recognized Michael in the first place.

He had a tatty copy of the local paper on the seat next to him and, when he held it up to show Irene, she had let out a strangled sort of cry and felt the room tip.

Then she was being ushered onto a seat and people were fussing all around her. She accepted the cup of hot sweet tea that had magically appeared from nowhere in front of her and took a couple of quick sips. Have to get myself together, for Michael, she thought, bracing herself to read the words in the story.

‘Critical condition’ and ‘head injury’ swam in front of her eyes but there was another word that seemed to be blotting them out.

‘Suicide’.

It was a known suicide spot.

Was that what he had come here to do? Irene felt a wave of grief thump into her chest and her eyes filled with hot tears. She fumbled in her handbag for a clean tissue and, when she located one, blew her nose twice into it, then dabbed under her eyes.

But it made no sense. Michael had always hated heights. If, heaven forbid, he had been meaning to do that, she was sure he would have found a gentler, more benign way. Pills, perhaps. Irene still recalled the way Liam would tease his older brother for not wanting to climb high on the monkey bars. So for him to deliberately throw himself off a cliff? This series of thoughts, so logical, tore a gasp from her lips.

‘You sit there and have a moment, love, alright?’ said the man who worked there as a couple of mothers with prams came into the café, laughing and talking noisily. The sound of their bright conversation was offensive to Irene’s ears. She wanted to say, ‘How can you laugh, when my son is lying in a hospital?’

‘Can I do anything to help you?’ said the old man in a quiet voice and Irene looked at him. He had a nice way of speaking: well-modulated. Now she saw that he was perhaps her own age.