‘I want to show you something.’

She limped on and when she reached the lighthouse, which wasn’t much taller than her, she stopped. The sea was just about visible as a dark streak at the lower edge of the fog enshrouding the mountain.

The man stared at her until she walked on. Below the lighthouse was a concrete platform that may have supported a cannon in a different time and she thought to herself that there might be other relics further out. Maybe it was something along those lines he wanted to show her?

They came out onto a terrace where limestone cliffs had eroded into discs like the ruins of some ancient megalithic monument. There was no path; that made her uncertain. She turned around and the man motioned for her to walk on, toward the edge.

Her urine-soaked jeans were stiff and cold and she moved with short, faltering steps. As though her shoelaces were tied together, or she was disabled by some neurological walking impediment. Lichen-flecked polygons, pink like salmon-flesh, spread out around her. A small flight of concrete steps unexpectedly appeared among the rocks and beyond it was a primitive fortification with a wall made of stone shards. She was hoping there would be something behind that wall, but there wasn’t, just scrap metal, inscrutable, rusty formations.

From time to time, the mist parted to reveal a stretch of coastline in the distance. A promontory like the black back of a whale. Leaden, wave-streaked water disappearing under a curtain of clouds.

The mountain sloped into the sea with geological unambiguousness. After dropping down from a small ledge, she ran a few steps to regain her balance and then carried on running. Her legs moved of their own accord. The cliffs on her right jutted out over a steep drop; below lay a belt of fallen rocks. She stumbled among piles of rocks the size of human heads and ran into hollows deep as cauldrons and up again. She had no plan, she just ran.

The fog lifted and the sea spread out before her, but that was as far as she got because sitting in her path on a hunk of siltstone was that animal. It glared at her with its cold lizard eyes and the will to escape drained out of her in the blink of an eye. Suddenly, she wasn’t afraid any more and she didn’t know why she had run. Her mind couldn’t move so much as an inch, forward or backward.

A hand grabbed her arm and she was led back and she smiled, embarrassed by her inability to remember what she had done wrong.

The man put one of his boots up on a crag like a jaunty explorer and gazed down at the precipice.

‘What do you reckon,’ he said, ‘would falling off the edge kill you?’

‘Am I supposed to fall off the edge?’

‘Do you reckon it would kill you?’