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One evening he was curled in the corner, overhearing a conversation his Grandhe was having with his two deputies. They were planning to slaughter a goat and have a feast. Tighe was astonished, repulsed. If the richest family in the village were celebrating an important wedding, they might – conceivably – slaughter an animal just for the eating. But for a man such as Grandhe, at a time such as the present (his daughter and his marriage-son probably dead, their souls lost over the edge of the world) it was incomprehensible. From what Tighe could hear most of the conversation was about finding a way of avoiding the opprobrium of the village. The Doge was mentioned several times.

Eventually, a little stupefied by the smoke from three pipes, Tighe drifted off to sleep. And in the morning he found he could not get up. It all seemed so pointless. His pas were dead. Gone for ever. Why should he bother? The inside of his head felt stricken, consumed with drought. He turned over and lay in a painful motionlessness.

Grandhe discovered him in this state at lunchtime and roused him with several sharp blows of his staff. Whimpering like a monkey, Tighe struggled up and ran zigzag, dodging the blows, out of the door. Grandhe’s voice followed him. ‘We’ll find some work for you soon.’

Tighe blinked in the sunlight, and wandered across main-street shelf. The crowd of itinerants was greater than ever, dull dead faces staring out at nothing, squatting on the ground or sitting with their backs to the wall. Tighe fought the urge to yell at them.
My pashe has gone. She is gone for ever
. There was an itch in the centre of his skull. His mouth was dry. His path wobbled and at one stage brought him towards the lip of the shelf. The thought was even in his head,
If I fall, I fall
. This was closely followed by
I hope I fall, I hope I die
. Maybe he would fall all the way to the God Grandhe denied lived at the base of the wall. But the actual proximity of the edge of the world was a different matter: his gut lurched and without conscious control his feet steered him back away from the great fall.

He was hungry. Lying on the floor all morning had meant skipping breakfast. His stomach felt like a clenched fist. But he had no money and he was not about to go back to Grandhe’s house to try and find some food. His back was still smarting from the blows. He maundered up and down the shelf, without the desire to go anywhere in particular. Then he sat himself down on the Leftward side of main-street shelf and shielded his eyes from the sun with his palm. Birds flocked, patterns of dots that zipped themselves together and then pulled apart.

A hand on his shoulder.

‘Well, boy, once again.’ It was Old Witterhe.

‘Hello,’ said Tighe, squinting.

Witterhe was carrying a small sack salt. ‘Apes need it as much as we do, salt, you know,’ he said. ‘There was a trader come up today with a backpack of the stuff. Prices are depressed, they are.’

‘I’m hungry,’ said Tighe.

‘Come down,’ said Witterhe. ‘There’ll be something to eat. My girl, she’s been asking after you.’

In a daze, and yet acutely aware of the transgression, Tighe followed Witterhe down the slant and then down the ladder to his ledge. Tighe stood at the bottom, sheepish. ‘I’ll get my girl out here,’ said Witterhe. He turned, stopped, turned back. ‘I was sorry to hear about your pas,’ he added, awkwardly.

Wittershe was out in moments, smiling to see him. She smiled at him. Tighe felt tears at the back of his eyes, but struggled to keep them back. ‘Hello,’ she said. ‘I’ve got to take this salt to the monkeys. Come with me?’

Tighe followed her.

They made their way along a narrow pathway, Tighe looking wallward to avoid the drop. Then they were amongst the crumbling rack of grassy crags that housed Witterhe’s monkeys. A few decaying pegs were driven into the wall, but no monkeys were actually attached to them. Witterhe had been keeping monkeys so long they were almost habituated to the place. The hairy, child-sized bodies clustered round Wittershe as she broke off pieces of salt and passed them out. Black, clutching fingers. Chattering and shrieking, with occasional sideswipes and bared teeth.

‘Sorry news about your pas,’ said Wittershe, raising her voice above the clamour.

Tighe didn’t say anything. He found a crag wider than the rest and pressed his back against the wall. When Wittershe had finished feeding the apes she came over and sat next to him.

‘Difficult time for you,’ she said.

‘I suppose.’

Her fingers touched his shoulder and even through the depression of his
spirits, even with the deadness in his heart, his wick responded, straightening a little in his pants.

‘There’s talk in the village,’ Wittershe said. ‘They say you should be the Prince now, with your pas’ wealth, that your Grandhe has no right.’

Tighe looked at her. There was an eager expression in her eyes. Through the fog of his mood, Tighe recognised the look. If he were Prince, then he would be an adult, a single man with five goats and his own house. That would be some catch for a monkeymonger’s daughter.

‘I suppose,’ he said.

Wittershe sat back, so that her eyes glittered in the sunlight. ‘I know your Grandhe is close with the Doge, but there ought to be a way. If you pushed it there might be a way. Claim the goats. Claim them – why not? Think, Tighe, six goats!’

‘Five,’ he said, in a small voice.

Then she was leaning on him, her breath on his neck. ‘It’s yours, you know. You need to
be
the Prince, to act as the Prince would. You need to
take
it.’

‘I suppose so,’ he said again. He felt an enormous weariness in his body, a terrible sense that there was nobody for him, nobody on any place of the wall. He was not a person, he was only the legal channel for an inheritance. And yet, despite this profound sadness, his wick was hard and upstanding. It was betraying his mood.

‘I’ve always liked you, you know,’ Wittershe was saying. Her voice sounded distant, despite the fact that the words were spoken directly into Tighe’s ear. He was staring straight ahead. The blue sky. Was there really another wall, a pure smooth wall, in the far blue distance? Was that what made the air blue?

‘You do know that, don’t you?’ she said.

Tighe turned his head a little and Wittershe pushed a kiss against his lips. Then she giggled. All around them monkeys were settling back into their crags, muttering to themselves, fumbling at one another’s pelts for fleas, plucking stems of grass, slapping the tops of their heads with the palms of their long, narrow hands. Tighe felt his heart pummelling inside his chest.

‘Better not let my pahe see me doing that,’ Wittershe said. She glanced at him, almost coy.

On an impulse, Tighe jerked his head forward and snatched a kiss from her. His wick was so stiff now it actually hurt. He reached up with his hand and grasped her shoulder, then let the hand slide down the clay-like softness of her right breast. She was still smiling, but she briskly removed Tighe’s hand. He tried to dart forward and kiss her again, but she pulled her head back.

‘Wait,’ she said.

She reached forward and pushed Tighe back, her two hands flat against his two shoulders, until his back touched the wall again. ‘Some of the boys like this trick,’ she said, in a low voice, and laughed again. Even as she was reaching for his belly, Tighe felt the words scrape awkwardly in his mind. Some boys? Which boys? A chasm of the possibilities of jealousy opened up. Which boys did Wittershe mean? Who did she spend her time with? Which boys did she practise this on?

But sensation drowned out contemplation. Wittershe had, with a slight edge of unpractised awkwardness, placed both hands on his stomach and then slid them under the band of his trousers. His wick was straining up towards them. She had to lean a little forward to get purchase, bringing her profile directly in front of Tighe’s face. There was a distracted smile on her lips. With her left hand she ringed the base of his wick, and with her right hand she grasped the head of it. Tighe shuddered. Then she began roughly rubbing it up and down. The suddenness of the gesture, and the friction of dry skin on skin, made him cry out. She stopped, looked at him, her smile cupping down a little.

‘What?’

‘Hurts,’ he said.

She paused, withdrew her hand, spat into the palm, and replaced it. Then she started rubbing again, a little more smoothly with the lubrication. The pressure was instantly there, just below his bladder; similar to the pressure felt when he needed to piss, but also different. It grew, building swiftly towards something hard and definite. Tighe dropped his gaze. The motion of the arm, back and forward in a small arc as her hand moved up and down, imparted a little jiggle to her torso. Underneath the rough weave of her shirt Tighe could see the wobble of her breasts. With a breathtaking jolt he came, his wick hurling up a glob of himself, then a second smaller one, and then nothing. Wittershe had stopped. There was a broad smile on her face.

‘There,’ she said, ‘what do you think?’

Tighe was staring at her, open-eyed.

‘Lost for words?’ she teased, extracting her hands and wiping them on the grass by her side. Monkeys chattered all around.

He started to say something, stopped as if blocked. Then with a heave, as if the words were leaving him by a similar mechanism to the way his seed had just exited, he said, ‘I love you.’

Wittershe’s smile shrank and then broadened. Tighe felt immediately stupid, as if he had over-extended himself.

‘I’d better get back inside,’ she said, ‘or my pahe is going to get angry with me.’ She leapt to her feet with monkeyish rapidity and scattered along the crag, jumping to make the ledge outside their house and ducking inside the door.

For a moment Tighe was in a kind of daze. He put his hand on his belly, felt the snotty stickiness of his own stuff where Wittershe had massaged it out. He brought out a glob between finger and thumb and examined it. It was the colour of nothing. The colour of sky.

Then the sunlight swelled; clouds parted and the glory of light squeezed Tighe’s eyes shut. His heart was beating. The image of his pashe came into his head. Why did he think of that? She always seemed angry when he remembered her; the skin of her face darkened with the anger. He seemed only able to think of his pashe angry. Then, suddenly, blocks of hollow misery burst up inside of him. His pas were dead. His pashe was dead. It was his fault, somehow; somehow he was to blame. His pashe had fallen off the earth. How had it happened? He saw a picture of her, features contorted with the rage that rendered her so close to fear. Fear and anger the same. Then the image was replaced with another and this was somehow much more terrible; his pashe simply stepping over the lip of things with a blank expression on her face, a nothingness. Going over as empty-minded as the goat they had lost. Anger and emptiness the same. A hollowness seeking out the enormous void of the air; to fall for ever, to fall into the fiery lap of God.

Away to the left, some monkey bickered shriekingly with another; and then, as swiftly as it started, the commotion died away.

Tighe was crying now and still he didn’t really understand what he was crying for. He balled his fists into his eye sockets, but the grief wouldn’t be contained. He could sense sobs trembling in his ribcage. Some distant apprehension of shame told him that he didn’t want Old Witterhe, or worse Wittershe herself, to see him in this state. His eyes bleary and his breathing shallow he struggled up and lumbered over to the Witterhe ladder. There was motion behind him; monkeys. Or Witterhe coming out of the house. Panicked, Tighe scrambled up the steps of the ladder.

He was making odd little
whoom
ing sounds by the time he got up to main-street shelf, a combination of distress and being out of breath. Careless of who saw him, he stumbled and wove over to the wall with tears tumbling from his eyes. Amongst the itinerants he collapsed, tucked his knees up and wept into his own lap, doubled over himself.

Tears eventually fall away and the eyes are left dry. Tighe reached a less hysterical state, a wider ledge of calm. For a while he simply sat, the comfort of the wall at his back, and stared out at the sky. The sun had climbed and shadows were concentrated on the ground. People came and went on the shelf. He saw his Grandhe come out of his house and scurry over the ground, punting himself onwards with his staff.

Tighe sat. He looked around at the itinerants. They were sitting, knees up, elbows perched on top of the bony kneecaps, simply staring into space. Many of them were now so thin that it looked as though their bones were struggling to burst through their skin, just as their bodies had burst through the sun-wearied rags of their clothes. Everything about them, Tighe saw, was slow. The man squatting next to him would turn his head like a figure in a dream, the face turning with the inexorable slowness of the sun rising through the sky. His eyes were milky with hunger, his skin was speckled with mauve dots. Even his breathing came with enormous effort, as if the air were scaling the ridged wall of his ribcage with difficulty. He would stare at Tighe as if he were as perfectly remote and as perfectly featureless as the sky itself, and then he would turn his head slowly back to face front again.

‘You’re dying,’ said Tighe. Saying the words added detachment to his perception of the man.

He breathed out; a sigh in answer.

‘How long since you last ate?’

He breathed in again. ‘Months,’ he said. His voice sounded strong, for all the stretched feebleness of his body. ‘I been eating grass,’ he said, the words coming slowly but distinctly, ‘but it don’t support your strength.’

‘So you’re waiting for work.’

Another exhalation, more like a laugh. ‘Nobody going to employ me now. Am too weak.’ Tighe looked at his arm; the elbow was like a seedpod in a slender black stem. ‘Once every few days somebody calls up,’ he said, and paused to get his breath. ‘Calls up one of the stronger ones. From the
group over there.’ The slightest inclination of his head. ‘They get a bit of food and join the group again.’

‘Why do you just wait around here to die?’ said Tighe, suddenly. ‘Why not just walk over the edge of the world and end it quickly? If I was like you I’d just walk over the edge of the world. That’s what I’d do. Why don’t you?’