Seven Sisters

I catch the train all the way from Manchester to London, and then another from London Bridge to Croydon, and then another from Croydon to Eastbourne. I want to throw myself off Beachy Head, but I get why people do it in front of trains now.

In Eastbourne, with discount stores, pubs, bookies and a weird water thing you can walk through. I step around, and nobody asks why I’m in a suit.

I take the wrong path, so I’m black-tie along a beachfront with its breakers and seals and dirty stones. Then the wind coming in hard fluttering my shirt collar. There’s a little route at the end of the coast that I take, and I stop for breath every thirty seconds. Nobody looks at me, and nobody stops me.

Nobody told me I needed to scramble up a hill, and I’ve already got mud on my shins, on this suit! I smell now, and I’m going to die and smell in a shitty, smelly suit. I’m gasping and fighting and dying before I can die.

There’s a few roads, and I take the lower one by accident. Down here, with ferns everywhere, green vistas and a gentle wind turning it all into television.

There’s this point where I need to scramble up a vertical hill, and every step I stop and take a breath, and I gasp and die again. When I get to the top, I wheeze, and ask the old couple if I’m almost there yet, and wheeze again. They laugh, as if I was joking.

At the RAF memorial, I see the pretty lighthouse, and the cliffs I want to jump from, maybe. The route towards them is flat and blowy and grassy. My hands sweat, seeing the white cliffs in the fog.

The way I’d do it with my arms in a cross over my chest, and my eyes on the sky. Or closed, I haven’t decided. I want to feel the wind.

Right at the top, I taste it on the tip of my tongue, as if I could be lost in this place as a new-born baby.

Mightier than the thunders of many waters.

Mightier than the waves of the sea.

God is always greater than all of our troubles.

I don’t believe in God, but I’m already crying.

By the time the charity picks me up with my suit, £400 by the way, rolled up in mud and smelling of manure, thinking of what I’d see when I fell. I’m worse than I arrived, but I’m not taking down train schedules.

They talk to me on the way back, but my head is on the window of the car and I love the way my country looks in the fog and the wind that’s always fucked me up.