7. The Edge of Reason

A QUESTION OF TIME Part 7

“When I was a little boy and probably still in nappies I crawled up the stairs at home when my mother wasn’t looking, and suddenly, like a shock, I fell back down,” Colin told himself, trying to remember. But it was a long time ago and the memory was far from clear. And anyway, he was sure it had only been a dream. Falling, he’d been falling and then, suddenly, he’d stopped falling and was only crying.

“Talking to yourself again?” asked Eleanor, mockingly, “two left hands and self-obsession! And you want me to marry you? What sort of loony do you think I am?”

“That time on no man’s land when we kissed,” stammered Colin, “that’s the sort of person I think you are. Do you remember? Warm soft lips, a tongue that tastes of nectar, and hands that wander where no hands wandered before…”

“It was your grey school shorts that tempted me,” she smiled, “you were a boy and I was a girl and don’t forget you were at the age when shorts would soon be put away for good and you’d get to wear your first pair of proper trousers.”

“I couldn’t wait,” he sighed, “I was growing up at last. I wanted to be a man! It was men who ruled the world, don’t forget. Men who declare wars, men who send boys to fight and even die for them, real men who lurk in safe dark places until the bombing’s done, men who know what’s what, men who woo their ladies!”

“Men who know what’s what? And what is what?”

“If I had a leg or two I’d show you,” he told her, “I’d walk the long mile with you, show you a nation blasted into nuclear sand, shining it would be, glowing with the heat of stars, and all because a man, and not a woman, pressed the button for Armageddon!”

Fear was like that back in those childhood days of mushroom clouds and east and west.

“Destruction. That’s men,” she sighed, “death, mutilation, broken bones and broken dreams...”

They were walking side by side along a road that started nowhere and led towards a signpost. At least, she was walking, long legs pretty as a picture, and he, invisibly, loped along on ill-matched legs.

“At least you’d got two legs, then,” she pointed out.

“It’s not easy walking when you’ve got two right legs,” he said, frowning. “But bit by bit I’m getting all of me.”

“It can’t really matter if you’re dead, and anyway none of it’s really you, is it?” she told him, “tell me, Colin, what is it like being dead? I don’t men pretend dead but really dead. Heart not beating kind of dead, flesh mangled by a speeding Land Rover, bones smashed… it must be horrible!”

“You remember that half hour on no man’s land?” he asked her, “was that horrible?”

“No. But you weren’t dead. We were in Heaven, and all the other kids were looking on, envying me.”

“Envying you?”

“Kissing a dead boy, though nobody knew it, not even me. You were dead back then, you know. Because, dear Colin, when you had that accident and your heart stopped pumping blood to your brain, you got trapped in an accident of the universe which according to you meant you were neither alive nor dead, which I can’t get my head around.”

“I told you that! What’s wrong with you, Eleanor? Can’t you listen to the boy who loves you? Can’t you understand?”

“Once dead, always dead. You were always dead, Colin, and that means you were never alive.”

“When I kissed you?”

“You were dead as a dodo. From the moment you tried to play hop-scotch on the main road in a one-way tussle with a Land Rover you were dead.”

“But I’m alive now!”

“What is alive, Colin? Is it breathing? Or is it thinking? Because you may well be doing the one but you certainly aren’t doing the other. You’ll never breathe again and you can rest assured that when I marry it’ll be to someone who knows how to breathe.”

“Then why don’t you die with me?”

“You what? Are you mad?”

He would have shaken his head but he didn’t have one. So instead he projected the negative of no at her and hoped she’d understand.

She didn’t. Instead, she skipped off and he could see her. Not with eyes, he didn’t have any of those left, not eyes that could see, but there’s something in the shape of a lass who skips with joy and jollity down the road that a lad doesn’t have to use eyes in order to see.

“Come on then,” she called when she was so far ahead he wouldn’t have seen her even had he not sacrificed his eyes on the road home from school. Nor did he hear her because, and it struck him as odd, everything she said and did was in the part of his head that refused to die because it was trapped in the worst kind of life there ever was.

And at that moment it happened. It wasn’t anything he did because, well, his interaction with the physical world was at best non-existent. But she fell off a cliff that hadn’t been there moments earlier.

Because, well, she wanted to.

“So you’re here with me?” he grinned, because it seemed to him that she was, “we’re dead together!”.

“There have been quite a lot of things for us to miss,” she declared, “and I’m not having it! I want to live! I want babies when I’m old enough! I want to be a grey haired old granny before I die!”

“Just help me,” he wept, “and you can have your heart’s desire!”

She shook her head, and the cliff morphed back into a level playing field, with boys and girls running on it and an ice cream van parked close enough to tempt them.

“This world?” asked Colin, and he slung his borrowed hands and legs into a river that flowed like a torrent towards the sea, and there was nothing left of him. Or almost nothing because, still lurking in a chasm in space and time was a bit of life, and he was living it.

“I won’t have the love or the sex or anything worth having,” he wept, “will I?”

“You can have anything you want,” she replied, “just close your eyes and dream…”

“I haven’t any eyes to close!” he whispered.

“Poor Colin,” she said, and she meant it as she joined in a game of five a-side with some girls she knew. “Go back to a second before you died if you can, and don’t cross the road!”

“If only I could…”

“If only you hadn’t…” she sighed, and she meant it.

THE END

© Peter Rogerson 08.06.21

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