Boy on the Wire (15 page)

He sees them in front of him. For a second he is stopped. Mid-air. Floating in the sky. Things come to him then, memories of times before this moment: the slights, the pushes, the dead dog in the road, the scorecard fluttering out of the window. Moments of nothing. He feels a hardening in his chest when he sees them, when these things come back, and he goes inside and he wants to know what it is, wants to know what he was thinking then as he hurtles towards his brothers, whether he can remember what he was thinking, remember what it is he wanted to do, what he thought he wanted to do. Was he trying to stop? Did he think it would be funny, would get him back in their good books if he pushed one of them off, did he want both of them gone because that would teach them, was he thinking only of trying to stop, trying to stop his own flight over the edge of a cliff? Was it one of these or all of them? He tries to feel in the remembering of this moment whether he could stop, could have stopped.

He is running again, flying again, his feet have still not touched the ground, and he is so close to them, so close he can feel the warmth from their skin.

At the moment they touch, time stops again, or slows. He feels his hand placed on Peter’s back, his other on Paul’s shoulder, his head somewhere between them. He feels a brush on his cheek, the skin of one of them. He tries to remember the next moment, what happened in his own arms, hands, torso. He wills his body to repeat the moment, wills his muscles to remember what it is they were trying to do – stop one fall or start another – in that very second that Peter and Paul went over.

But it is gone.

Peter and Paul are flying. Children launched into the blue.

John, the boy, his hands and knees cut, is sprawled on the ledge, legs sticking out into space, clinging to the rock by his fingernails. For a second he thought he too was going over.

He is alone, on his back. He looks up into the sky. Bright sunshine. He looks up and he stares at the sun. He opens his eyes and he stares at the sun and does not close his eyes, does not close them until he can bear it no longer. When he does close them, there, burnt on the inside of him, burnt there forever, the flight of his brothers, whom he loves more than anything, though he has not known it until then, and never allowed himself to remember it until then.

He is singing. Not out loud – under his breath. Breathless. It is a nursery rhyme. He is singing to himself as if it could make everything go away, as if concentrating on the words, bringing them to life could make everything else go away. Come back, Peter. Come back, Paul.

The man is flying too. He has left his child self behind on the ledge.

As he falls, he jumps out at the same time. He knows what will happen if he does not; if, instead, he falls straight down.

He hangs, suspended in the thick air. It is silent.

And then – it feels like a lifetime – the cold, the shock of the cold, as he plunges into the river. He drinks it in. He kicks, not sure which way is up. He opens his eyes and he can see nothing except brown water and the white flecks created by his fall.

He breathes in water.

He feels himself sinking. Though his lungs are full of air, he feels heavy. It is a slow process. He sinks like a dead fish. He feels the weight of the water on him, pressing against his ears. He floats, face pointing at the surface, arms to the side.

He opens his eyes slowly as if waking from a deep sleep. The boy in front of him floats into vision. His hair floats around his face. The boy’s eyes, like his own a moment ago, are closed. Light dances on his cheeks. An air bubble escapes from his nose. The man follows it until it disappears against the surface of the water.

He looks back at the boy and he does not shy away from what he sees. He looks at it, looks it in the face. The water is darker around his face, like a cloth, a blanket holding him. The darkness spreads from the side of his head. A flap of skin moves in the current. The head itself at an angle it never took in life.

He comes to him. Paul comes towards him, walking through the water. John stares at him. It is as if he has seen him just yesterday – the face, the eyes. They stare back and almost three decades vanish. They are boys once again, running across a sun-bleached garden, their laughter whipped away by the wind.

Hyde is struck by the beauty of him. Though the lips and skin are blue, he is struck by the beauty of the vanished boy.

The boy takes another step forward. Hyde can smell him. A dead boy carries a particular smell, is the thought that comes to him. One thought in a darkened space. Spring water, rotting leaves, young blue skin.

Hyde waits, closes his eyes, waits to be taken. Instead, a hand reaches out to him. It reaches out and touches the top of his head. He can feel the coldness, the dampness of it, even through the water. The hand reaches out to him and is laid on top of his head and as it lies there, Hyde feels a warmth begin and feels it spread in that touch, a warmth he could never have imagined.

John Hyde pulls himself out of the pool. His foot slips on a weed-covered rock and he gulps more water, but manages on the second attempt. He lies on his back on the rock, his head turned towards the pool. He watches as the surface calms.

He stares into the grey above him, the mist thicker now. There, on the ledge, barely visible in the mist, he sees himself as a boy again. It is just an outline, the figure disappearing. But even as it disappears into the mist, John remembers standing there, getting up after the fall. He remembers standing there, looking down at what he had done, knowing, somehow, what he had done already, not needing to see the evidence. He remembers the warmth of the urine running down his legs and how, when he moved his foot, there was a wet footprint, and how he focused on this until it dried in the sun, and he remembers the feeling in his chest, what he can now describe only as fear, though it is something more than that, the fear that no eight-year-old should have, that comes with knowing that what he has done, whatever the reason, has broken the world and can never be spoken of.

He is alone again. The boy has gone into the mist. A single bird calls.

He will go back up there, back to the woman in the car waiting for him. He will go back because it is what he must do now, what is given to him to do. It is all he can ever do.

He hears the rushing of the river. He can almost hear it cleansing the mountainside. The rocks, silt, plants, bodies of animals, the memory of what these things used to be, hurtling down the mountain. They slow down, the river widens, until, after some distance, it empties into the sea and the water there is turned brown near the shoreline before the river and everything in it is lost, swallowed by an immensity that pays it no heed.

Acknowledgements

Thank you to Geoff Mulligan for his insightful and sensitive editing and to all at Clerkenwell Press. Thanks also to Fourie Botha and Random House Struik. Dr Natalie Clarke and David and Melanie Bruce helped with aspects of the research. Any mistakes are, of course, mine. Throughout the writing of the novel I benefitted from the close reading, critique and suggestions of Andrew McIntosh. Finally, thank you, as ever, to Tabatha, Sophia and Elliot.

ALSO AVAILABLE FROM CLERKENWELL PRESS