A Walk Along the Promenade - 8. Scene Two, A Cliff Railway on a Summer’s Evening

He sat down on the wooden bench, outside the closed gates onto the cliff railway. The gloss painted bench was hard and uncomfortable against his buttocks but that wasn’t his concern. His left leg was throbbing with a sharp and hot pain. The pain had begun again before he’d got halfway back to the cliff railway but he hadn’t stopped to rest, he kept telling himself that he had to get back to the cliff railway, he couldn’t rest until at least he was back at the cliff railway. The determination had kept him going, pushing him forward with each step. But the moment he’d reached the cliff railway all that resolve had evaporated and he’d almost dropped down onto that bright green wooden bench there, just outside the entry gates.

As he’d been walking up to the cliff railway station, down there on the promenade, the passenger gates had been closing, the next moment the passenger car was slowly moving up the rails, up the cliff side. Shaun hadn’t been able to rush to catch it, even if his leg hadn’t been throbbing with pain, his walking speed was now so pitifully slow at the best of times. But the throbbing pain now meant that he needed to sit down and rest, the pain was too great to even allow him to stand for the short trip the cliff railway took to reach the top of the cliff and for the equally short walk from there to his hotel. He had to rest now.

He’d been attacked two and a half years ago, in a little over three months he would thirty-eight years old, nearly forty, and his life already felt as if it was over. He was a cripple, living back with his mother. He’d never had a boyfriend, and beyond casual sexual encounters that had only left him hungry for more, he’d done virtually nothing about his sexuality. He felt such a failure and such a cliché, the sad old homosexual still living with his mother, even if it was out of necessity.

When he’d returned to work, he’d found a desk full of tasks waiting for him, his mother had pushed so many different things onto his desk for him to sort out, things that she certainly did not want to do. The problem was he found his concentration and energy levels being dictated by his pain levels. If his pain levels were high then his concentration and energy levels were drained. Marni certainly tried to help. If she saw he was struggling she would try and siphon off some of his work or, if his mother was out of the office, send him home. But even with Marni’s support, he was struggling at work. Sitting at a desk, all day long, took its toll on his leg. At the end of day, his ankle and foot would be swollen and pushing against his shoe and sock, while his leg would be throbbing with its sharp pain. Even walking the short distance to his mother’s car would be deeply painful.

All that physiotherapy he’d endured had only seemed to move him off using crutches and onto walking with a metal walking stick. His walking was still painfully slow and he still needed to stop and rest, just to manage the pain in his leg, when he tried to walk anything but a short distance. Running, cycling, merely rushing up a flight of stairs, all seemed things lost to him now. He even walked like a crippled now, like a seventy-year-old man, and he was only thirty-seven. He felt so pathetic. He knew his mother was now frustrated at his slow progress. She didn’t say so, well not often but even her sharp tongue would slip, but mainly he saw it in the frustrated looks she would give him. When he’d be slowly walking to her car at the end of a working day, when he was slowly walking through the house for a meal, whenever she would have to stop and wait for him to catch up with her; it was that same look of frustration that would flash across her face.

Since he was attacked he’d lived like a monk, his life completely celibate. He’d not put any of those gay dating apps back on his phone since he’d deleted them, and if he was tempted to do so again he’d remember how ugly and deformed his leg looked and that would stop him. Who would want to have sex with him when he now looked so ugly, so pathetic? He couldn’t forget how ugly he now looked. Each day, in the shower or in the bath, he was reminded of the ugliness of his leg. As he washed it, he’d stare at its scars, twisted and wasted muscles, and the outlines of the metalwork he could still feel under the skin. It was so disgusting.

He heard the clank and grinding noise of the cliff railway’s car moving down the tracks towards him. For a moment he watched the green, metal car approaching him. In that moment he considered just sitting there and letting the car stop at the station and then return back up the cliff without him, to give his leg more time to let the pain ease, but he quickly rejected that idea. The pain had now hit the point were rest alone would not ease it, he now needed pain killers, and they were back in his hotel room.

He slowly pulled himself back up to standing, again using his walking stick, and slowly hobbled to the cliff railway’s closed gates.

There was no one in that empty car, so when its door and the gates opened, Shaun hobbled onto it alone. Taking hold of the hand rail to steady himself for the short ride, there wasn’t any benches inside the car. It was barely a minute’s ride up to the top of the cliff but he needed that hand rail to stop him falling over, he’d lost so much of his ability to balance when his leg had been shattered.

He didn’t know who his father was, the man had left his mother when Shaun was three years old, and his mother had never mentioned him. As a child his mind had fantasied about who his father really was, a spy, a famous actor, a member of the nobility, as many reasons as his little imagination could find for why his father was no longer there in his life. He imagination didn’t venture into the simple answer that his parents no longer loved each other, maybe even hated each other, but even that explanation asked far more questions than he knew any of the answers to.

He’s only asked his mother once about his father. He’d been eleven and again he was being bullied at school about not having a father. An absentee father was seen as a large mark of weakness at his school, even just seeing your father every Saturday afternoon was considered far more “normal” than having no father at all. Nathan had been out that evening, at seventeen Nathan had barely been home, and it had just been him and his mother for dinner. As they ate, he’d asked her:

“What happened to my father? Why don’t we see him?”

“Your father is a useless bastard and we’re all better off without him,” his mother shot back at him. “He has not contributed one penny to this family. He made it clear he didn’t want anything to do with us when he left, and he hasn’t made contact with me once since then. I had to force him to sign those divorce papers, and I’m a bloody sight better off without him, the useless excuse that he was.”

Her tone was so harsh and hard that Shaun instinctively knew not to ask any further questions. He wasn’t close to Nathan so there was no point in asking his brother, who’d been eight when their father left. Nathan would just have ignored him or reported him to their mother, depending on the mood he was in that day.

Over the following years, as he grew older, Shaun began to wonder if their father’s leaving was due to another factor. Shaun and Nathan barely looked like brothers. Nathan was solidly built, with a square and open face, and his head covered in thick, black hair. Shaun had always been thin, his lean body had been hard to develop thick muscles on, while his face was thinner than Nathan’s, dominated by his dark brown eyes, and his hair was brown and curly, growing unruly when not cut. Neither did he much resemble his mother in looks. Though her hair had been bleached a pale blonde for as long as he could remember, her figure was always curvingly round and female, breasts and hips dominating her outline, and her face was round and open looking.

Did he and Nathan even share the same father? The thought had repeatedly haunted his mind over the years. Was that the reason why Nathan had always been the apple of his mother’s eye, the perfect son who could do nothing wrong; whereas Shaun was the son who was always a constant disappointment to his mother. Did she even love him or was he just a continual burden from some previous mistake?

With a gentle movement the cliff railway car came to a stop at the top of the cliff. The doors on the far end of car opened, the station’s gates already open, and Shaun found four middle-aged women filling the doorway, all dressed up for a night out on the town, wearing bright colours and sparkling sequins, and all showing their ample cleavages.

As he hobbled towards the doorway, leaning heavily on his walking stick, the women had rushed into the car, until one of them called out:

“Stand back girls! Let the disabled lad off first.”

And with that call the women had all stood to one side to let him pass.

It was only a short walk from the station back to his hotel, but with the pain in his leg he could just walk at a slow, hobbling pace now. He was so feed-up of this now, his crippled nature that was holding back his whole life. He’d aged, doubled his years with this crippled leg, he now moved liked an old man, and he deeply hated it.

He’d come to Scarborough because he did not know anyone who lived there, that was very true, because he feared meeting someone he knew and their mere presence breaking his resolve.

Before he came on holiday, he’d collected a month’s supply of his three different pain killers from his pharmacy, and he’d brought all that stock of tablets him with, not just a week’s supply. He’d read many years ago of people booking into hotels just to kill themselves, and at the time he’d not seen the point of that, now it made complete sense to him. As much as his relationship with his mother was failing, he couldn’t force his own dead body on to her, he couldn’t cause her to be the one to find his dead body, his death in her own home.

Committing suicide in a hotel seemed almost clinical and detached. The people who would find his body would be strangers and his death would not have any emotionally impact upon them. He was just a stranger to them, would just be a dead body, just an inconvenience to them. His mother would have a warning of his death before she was faced with the physical reality, she wouldn’t be faced with the sudden shock of his death and the physical reality of dealing with that all in her own home. He could spare her that.

The more he thought about it the more it all made sense to him. Book himself into a hotel, in a town where no one knows him and he can finally end his miserable life, easing the emotional stress it would cause others.

It was the pain he could no longer live with. The physical pain radiating out of his leg and physically eating away at his body, and the emotional pain eating away at his very personality. His life was such an empty failure, and with his crippled leg, he saw no way out of it, no way to change the emptiness inside of himself, he was trapped and he hated it. Taking all those pills, even though it would probably take a long time to actually swallow them all, was his only chance at any sort of peace, it was all he could see to do.

Slowly he hobbled back to his hotel.

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