Don't Take the Cliff Path Tonight

We had walked the cliff path a hundred times: shortcut home from the harbour pub, twenty minutes along the headland with the sea doing its enormous thing below. That night the rain was more mist than weather, nothing serious.

He was standing exactly at the trailhead where the tarmac gives out. Long coat, hands folded in front like an usher. And dry. I registered it without processing: mist beading on our jackets, and this man matte and dry as a church.

'Not tonight,' he said, before we had said anything. Pleasant, final. 'The path isn't taking guests tonight.'

Drunk enough to be sociable, my brother asked if he was a warden. 'Something like a warden,' he said, and smiled with a lot of calm and no teeth, and gestured — an usher's gesture, palm open — back toward the road. And here is the embarrassing truth: we went. Two grown men, redirected like schoolboys by a stranger's open palm. The whole road-way home we workshopped jokes about it, and none of the jokes were funny, and we walked quite fast.