[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]
.That’s something to keep in mind though the urge to kill myself is likely to come over me so quickly, much too quickly for the rigmarole of joining a team, buying a rifle, learning to load it, cock it (if rifles are cocked)—Fire.Too long a procedure.Of course, there are trains and cars and trucks to jump in front of, but that would be unfair to the driver, that would make an innocent man a killer.Hanging myself with a rope is an option.Rope is cheap—my bedhead money would be more than enough to pay for it.There are hardware stores everywhere for the buying of rope.The bathroom curtain rod would break under the strain of me hanging from it.The balcony rail? It’s a possibility.The school’s rugby goalposts on the main oval, or the trees behind the scoreboard, would provide the perfect purchase as well as witnesses, plebs, seniors, the whole tribe of us, to make me more famous than any honour board.What about poison! Poison would allow me to die in my own bed.But where would I get poison? The school science laboratory.Heels’ pill drawer.Yes, it’s comforting, it cheers me, my dying.But there is no need to die today, a Sunday morning, a day of do-nothing.The sun lies in silver flakes over the sea.The air on the balcony where I eat breakfast toast is cool and blowing soft on my skin.The boy who throws a tennis ball for his midget dog to fetch is out on the green at Rosa Gully.He tosses the ball straight up, high, high until it loops back down.Up goes the ball again and with it the dog, its stumpy legs dangling in mid-air like a circus trick.Three times the dog catches the ball on its way back down.Four times it fails, the ball bouncing off its snout and across the grass.Now it fails once more, the yellow ball arcs towards the edge of the cliff and the dog barks after it.The ball bounces to the cliff face.To the very edge.Over the edge.The dog scampers and yaps after it, over the edge.“Pee Wee!” the boy screeches and sprints to edge.“Pee Wee,” he pleads, and runs over the edge.His echoing voice rebounds once around the rock walls then the gully resumes its flops and gushes of ocean below.A thin mist swirls.I grip the balcony rail, eyes shut, thinking, thinking: have I conjured this in some imagination place inside the eyes? Somewhere in the neighbouring apartment block a woman is shouting “a boy, a boy”.A man, tea-towel and plate in hand, his shirt off, his belly round as pregnancy, steps out onto his balcony.He points down to the cliff and beseeches someone inside his apartment to believe him, believe there really was a boy there and he ran over the cliff.I hurry into the lounge room to the phone, pick up the receiver, but put it down straightaway.I go back onto the balcony to blink and be certain.The tea-towel man calls across to me, “Did you see him?”“Yes.I saw.I saw,” I reply.“Has anyone called someone?”“I don’t know.”“My wife’s doing it now.He just ran off the edge.Ran right off.The damndest thing.”Ask this lad (me) here, the tea-towel man says to the policeman who is taking details, his notebook open on the roof of his car.“A boy just ran over the cliff.The damndest thing.” I nod that the tea-towel man is telling the truth.Abseilers crab-walk backwards over the cliff and swing out and down to the rocks below.A stretcher with straps and pullies is lowered.The wind has come up.Spray drifts out to sea like steam.People from the gully’s homes stand cross-armed.They curve their hands through the air to describe what happened: one hand for the dog, one for the boy.Then they stand cross- armed again.On balconies, binoculars flash sunlight as if taking a photograph.A woman in a nightie sits on the grass beside an ambulance, her head buried in a man’s embrace.Her back shudders with weeping.A prancing dalmatian barks and lunges at a labrador and is told to get out, go home.The tea-towel man throws a pebble at it.Two children in pyjamas play tag then climb onto the fire engine to which the abseiler ropes are tied.They are told to get out, go home.They jump from the fire engine and run playing their tag.It’s an hour before the winching begins.The men of the gully haul in time after the count of three.I haul on the end of the line.The stretcher ropes squeak on their anchor somewhere in the deck of the fire engine.Here he comes now, up he comes.He is tucked into his puppet-bed in a black sheet of polythene.We step forward to glimpse.His mother is helped forward
[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]