The Hundred and Ninety-Nine Steps by Michel Faber Page B

embraces for endings.
    On the third night, my family at last took to their beds and slept deep, and I carried my beloved Mary out into the night – being newly in the oil trade then, I had the strength of a whaler yet, & bore her in my arms as easy as a thief bears a sack of candlesticks. Under cover of darkness I ran down the ghaut to the riverside, and there I discharged her poor body into the restless waters.
    Next morning, she is found, and fetched up on Fish Pier. The cry of MURDER! spreads throughout the town, from mouth to mouth, until it reaches my door. Still I dissembled – You are mistaken, It cannot be, &c. But then they brought her carcase to me, and the streets of Whitby did echo with the clamour of my weeping.
    Siân staggered among the gravestones on the East Cliff at midnight, drunk as a skunk. An immense full moon worthy of Dracula’s demon lovers lit her way – that, and a dinky plastic torch with faltering batteries.
    â€˜Where are you, you sick bastard …’ she muttered, sweeping the feeble ray of torchlight over the headstones.
    Her mission, as far as she could have explained it if someone had collared her on her way out of the White Horse and Griffin, was revenge. Revenge on a man who would murder his own daughter for falling short of some hateful religious ideal. Revenge on Mack for being so sickeningly right about everything, for seeking out the soft underbelly of her own faith in human nature and injecting it with a lethal dose of cynicism. Revenge on Saint Hilda and all her kind for being so pathetically impotent to stop anything tragic happening to anyone ever. Revenge on the eternal, unfathomable badness of human beings. Revenge on the whole damn Godless universe for deciding she must die when, really, if it was all the same to whatever damn random cellular roulette decided these things, she would rather live.
    Revenge on THOMAS PEIRSON, WHALER AND OIL MERCHANT , whose headstone tilted before her now. Husband of Catherine, father of Anne and Illegible. Poor illegible Mary: given the cold shoulder by her lover, butchered by her father, erased from her pathetic few inches of memorial stone by two centuries of North Sea winds. Siân knelt on the ground and attacked the grave-plot with a trowel.
    VIOLATED! MYSTERY GHOULS STRIKE IN CHURCHYARD, that’s what the Whitby Gazette would say.
    Drunk as she was, it took her almost no time to realise that her grand plan of digging up Peirson and flinging his bones into the sea was a non-starter. The combination of her fury and one small trowel was not sufficient to send voluminous cascades of earth flying skyward; she was barely penetrating the grassy top-soil.
    With a cry of disgust, she abandoned the attempt; she even threw the incriminating trowel away – let the police trace her and arrest her if they had nothing better to do! Bumbling provincials! She lurched back onto the hundred and ninety-nine steps, and promptly fell over, grazing her palms and wrists.
    AMPUTEE BREAKS NECK ON CHURCH STEPS. No, not that; anything but that.
    She forced herself to sit down on a bench and breathe regularly. Ten breaths of sea air were probably equal in sobering power to one sip of coffee; she would inhale lungfuls of salty oxygen until she was capable of walking safely back to the hotel.
    For several minutes she sat on the bench, breathing in and out, trying to brush the sharp grains of grit from her bloodied hands. All the while, she stared down at the stone landing on which generations of coffin-bearers had rested their burden one last time before proceeding to Saint Mary’s churchyard. Her feet – foot – feet, shoes, whatever, damn it – were occupying the same space as hundreds, maybe thousands of Whitby’s long-vanished dead.
    â€˜I promised you,’ whispered a male voice at her shoulder. ‘I promised I would carry you up here, didn’t I? And here we are.’
    All the hairs on Siân’s body