Page 6 of Jenny James Is Not a Disaster
Chapter 3
I freeze, and Charlie walks straight into the back of me. He tugs out his earbuds and looks as though he’s about to make a snarky comment until he sees my face.
He follows my gaze, and his mouth drops open.
We are about a minute’s walk away from our house—or at least the place where our house used to be.
Now there are crumbling walls and a roof tilted sideways and sliding away down the side of the cliff, which has encroached all the way inland. It’s a skewed, slanted fun-house version of our house, as though time has fast-forwarded a hundred years to when it is falling apart. I can’t quite believe what I am seeing. It is like something from a disaster movie, and I blink rapidly in case I am having some kind of stress-induced hallucination. It doesn’t help. My home is still a wreckage of bricks, pipes, and shattered tiles. The cliff face has moved.
The wind is screaming and the rain seems even more intense than before, my feet getting sucked into the mud of the field because I’ve been still for so long.
A wild gust lifts the roof momentarily, and it seems to float in the air like a kite before crashing down again. The tiles shatterand break, slipping away and down, into what would once have been my garden but is now just the new edge of the cliff.
The whole cottage has sunk low, parts of the walls completely gone, the rest reduced to crazy paving leaning and shaking to one side.
“Mum...,” murmurs Charlie, grabbing my hand. “What the fuck has happened?”
I grip his fingers and shake my head.
“I don’t know. The cliffs... they’ve eaten our house!”
“But the cliffs weren’t that close! There was the garden, and the vegetable patch, and the coastal pathway that everyone waves to us from when they’re walking past...”
I nod. There were all those things, once. But now they are gone. No more garden, or vegetable patch, or pathway. Just the sludgy brown edge of the cliff, and our home slipping away—down, down, down, onto the beach, into the sea, out of existence.
I drop my shopping bags and run toward the house. I have no idea why—I don’t think I’ll be able to stop it, but some instinct just makes me run anyway. I cover the field in about thirty seconds, water splashing around my legs with every step, hair plastered to my head, wind whooshing like thunder in my ears.
As I get closer, I see the entire front of the cottage is gone. The rest has collapsed and is inching down in the same direction. The chimney has sunk in the middle of it all, and only one doorway is left standing. It’s the door into the back kitchen, the one we use when we come home this way, and it is so odd, freakishly upright in the middle of the carnage, bright red and wavering in the wind. A door we’d have been walking through minutes from now, sighing with relief at being out of the rain.Now it is a door that leads nowhere, nothing behind it but smashed glass and twisted metal and ruined plasterwork.
I see flashes of color against the deep poison-gray of the sky, bright pops of vibrancy that catch my eye. The cushions of our burgundy sofa, now covered in rubble. The remnants of our pale blue curtains, the ones I made myself. Smashed plates and mugs, yellow and cream. Flapping gingham material that used to be a tablecloth. It’s a rainbow of destruction.
There is a trail of the weirdest items scattered around: paperbacks from my bookshelf, open, pages fluttering in the wind; the toaster I was battling with this morning lying on its side; clothes flying and flapping; a torn box of cornflakes, its contents dancing in the air. CDs and DVDs I’d picked up cheap at charity shops are lodged in the mud. My bed, along with its pretty floral duvet cover, is hanging half on land, half over the cliff, and the toilet has somehow landed on top of it.
I see Charlie’s Xbox rolling away toward the edge, his old school textbooks and his desk, legs snapped, the only things remaining from his room.
I am paralyzed by all of it until I notice the photographs. Loose, flying, whisking through the air—precious pictures that I can never replace. Pages torn from albums, the stray ones I’d tucked inside the covers, spiraling in a chaotic dance, caught in swirling wind currents. I can buy a new sofa. I can make new curtains. I can sleep anywhere—but I can’t ever get those pictures back. I run toward them, trying to snatch them from the air, grabbing at random and trying to collect them. I am jumping and stretching and crying, desperate to save as many as I can.
I hear Charlie’s voice somewhere nearby but a million miles away, shouting: “Mum! Stop! Leave them... you’re getting too close to the edge!”
He doesn’t understand. These pictures are pre-digital. These pictures are priceless. These pictures are all I have to remind me of Charlie’s childhood—there is no dad around, no family, nobody to reminisce with. Nobody else with a camera. It has always just been me and him, and if I lose those photos, I lose those memories. I lose that part of us. I have to get them.
I’m aware of one of my shoes coming off, getting stuck in the squelching mud, a strange sucking sensation as I leave it behind. I see a picture of Charlie on his fourth birthday, wearing a badge that is almost as big as his chest, and I try to snatch it. I miss and it flutters away, flying out of my reach.
I feel my balance deserting me, and have that dizzying moment when you know you’re going to fall, the adrenaline surging up into my brain. I stagger, throw my hands out in front of me to break my descent, barely aware now of Charlie’s voice and the relentless drive of the rain.
I am grabbed from behind, held, lifted, pulled back to collide with someone’s body. “It’s okay! I’ve got you...”
I glance over my shoulder. It isn’t Charlie. Charlie is yards back, a look of horror on his face, dark curls squashed flat to his head.
I look up into the face of a stranger... or maybe not.
He looks familiar, but I can’t place him.
“My photos!” I protest, struggling to try to get free.
His arms are firm around me, and he physically lifts me up into the air and starts to walk backward. I am half carried, half stumbling, watching forlornly as I see Charlie’s birthday badge picture blown away into the bleak distance.
“We’ll get them,” the man says, having to shout to make himself heard over the wind. “I promise. But for now you need to besafe. You need to stay away from the edge, and you need to talk to your son.”
