Handrails and Parachutes
Three hundred feet below them a
single car speeds its way northwards. Lining the strip between road and river,
traffic lights change from red to green and back to red again. The tide is low.
Even in this, the darkest hour of the night, the lights from the city
illuminate the sloping mud flats oozing their way down to the water.
When she squeezes his hand, he
looks down into a face radiant with possibility.
“Are you ready, Leo? Shall we do
it?”
It has all converged to this point.
Every toss of the coin and roll of the dice has led to this edge, this dizzying
view into the gorge. Perhaps he should’ve known it would. Perhaps the signs had
been there the first night he met her. In the pulsing, sweating club he
should’ve felt the pull of fate, dragging him closer and closer until this
moment where his toes brush the void beyond the crumbling cliff edge.
But he hadn’t known. When she’d
struck up conversation at the bar he’d had no idea.
“What star sign are you?”
It wasn’t a question he’d been
asked in Acid Attic before. Even in this bar at the back where it was possible
to talk without screaming, he’d never got much further than first names.
“My star sign?”
“Yeah. When’s your birthday?”
“August 8th.”
“Makes sense.”
She was tiny – barely five foot to
his six and a half. Pale skin, green eyes, purple hair. No black mini-dress and
sky-high heels, she was wearing shorts and a t-shirt, polka dots and stripes.
Not his type at all.
“Why does it make sense?”
“You’re a Leo.” She paused, as if
expecting him to understand. “You know – the lion: big, sort of handsome.” She
tilted her head on one side. “Generous too, probably.”
Despite his snort of laughter and
his, “You don’t believe all that rubbish do you?” he’d found himself pulling
out his wallet and paying for her drink.
“Why shouldn’t I believe it?”
“Because it’s superstitious crap.”
“Probably.” She took a sip from her
glass. “I’m nothing like my star sign.”
“Why? What is it?”
As she disappeared into the crowds
he just caught her answer.
“Virgo. The virgin.”
It’d taken him an hour to find her
again. She was sitting on the curb outside, smoking something that didn’t smell
like a cigarette. He’d sat down next to her and she’d offered him a puff
without speaking.
“Why did you ask me all that stuff
about star signs in there?”
She took a long drag and blew the
smoke upwards. Loops and spirals hung above them.
“I liked the look of you. Wanted to
know if we were compatible.”
“And are we?”
“Probably not. You’d do better with
a Sagittarius, I need a Taurus or a Capricorn.”
He shrugged. “I could try and be a
Taurus if you want.”
She laughed and took another puff
before stubbing the roll-up on the pavement.
“I don’t think that’s how it
works.”
“Then how does it work?”
“Not sure it does.” She sighed and
lay back, staring up at the haze of light pollution above them. “Virgos are
meant to be control-freaks – order and details kind of people. That’s not me at
all; I don’t believe in order.”
“What do you believe in then?” He
leant closer. “Chaos?”
“I believe in destiny and living in
the moment.” She propped herself up on her elbows so their faces were only
inches apart. “I believe in Fate.”
She’d said it with a capital F.
Fate. Six months later as he stands looking down at the river, hand-in-hand
with her, he remembers noticing that. Even half-drunk the word had sounded
important, the name of a god.
“So if Fate says you should come
back to my flat with me, you’ll overlook that I’m a Leo?”
“I never argue with Fate.”
It is cold. The breeze rifles
through his pockets and tugs at his t-shirt. She is shivering too. Her thin
dress clings to her, showing off every curve and angle of her breakable body.
He looks down at the road below again.
“The ultimate test of Fate.” Her
eyes are wide, as if they can’t bear to miss one photon of life. “The ultimate
freedom, Leo.”
“I don’t know, V.” He grips her
hand tighter. “Is this really the right moment?”
“If it wasn’t, we wouldn’t be here.
But we are, so it must be.”
Her logic – that flawed, beautiful
logic – had been his undoing. From that first morning of bacon sandwiches and
coffee made with milk past its best, he’d been captivated. For the first two
days he’d been unable to even leave the flat; they’d talked, slept, had sex and
philosophised until his head ached and he wanted her to leave and he felt like
he would go crazy and he wanted her to stay more than ever.
“If we always lived in the moment,
we would never worry,” she had told him, and it’d sounded like a promise. “We’d
never worry about tomorrow because it’s so many moments away it might as well
be a different life altogether.”
“But then we’d never make any
decisions at all.”
“Course we would!” She’d bounced up
from under the duvet, his old Bon Jovi t-shirt hanging off one shoulder. “No
decision would ever be hard again, because the only thing that would matter is
what we wanted in that moment.”
“So if I wanted a bacon sandwich, I
would have one and not worry about whether there was enough bacon left for
tomorrow?”
He’d laughed, but she had only
nodded.
“Exactly. Living any other way is a
compromise.”
“But what if I do want a bacon
sandwich tomorrow?”
“Then you buy more bacon.”
She allowed herself to be pulled
back down under the covers.
“That’s a crazy way to live.”
“It’s the only sane way. What if
you spent years sacrificing everything to get your dream job and then got there
to find you hated it, or were crap at it, or you had terminal cancer? It would
be such a waste.
“We never let life just happen,
Leo. We give it handrails and parachutes and emergency exits. We’re too afraid
to take off our seatbelts. I don’t want that.”
Laughing and arguing into the
night, she had worn him down. She never mentioned leaving. He never asked her
to go.
On Monday he’d tried to go to work.
He really had.
“Heads or tails, Leo?” She grinned
at him over her mug. “One to go to work, the other to stay here with me.”
“You can’t be serious?”
“Why not? I thought you agreed with
me about Fate. Or was that just a line to get me into bed?”
“I do agree.” He found his car keys
and began hunting for his wallet. “And as I recall, you didn’t take much
persuading.”
“Prove it.” She raised an eyebrow.
“Heads you go, tails you stay.”
How he found himself agreeing, he
would never quite know. And why, when the coin flipped on to tails, he didn’t
laugh it off and go anyway, he couldn’t later recall. Perhaps it was because he
knew that if he went to work, she would not be there when he came home.
Every day the coin came down tails
he told himself that it didn’t matter, he would go to work anyway. And every
time, he didn’t. Sometimes Fate was on the side of common sense and would flip
to heads three days in a row, and he’d leave her watching television as he
disappeared to battle the rush hour. But
not often. Not often enough.
It was simpler once he had no job
to go to; easier to give Fate free-reign. As soon as she’d convinced him that
the rent would either pay itself or it wouldn’t, he relaxed. She was right, of
course. She was right about everything.
The roll of the dice became their
consultant, the draw of a card from the pack their financial advisor. The
colour of the first car they saw when they opened the curtains, or the number
of people that passed the café window dictated where they went, what they did,
whether they ate like kings or beggars. And they were lost. Virgo and Leo:
incompatible, inseparable, hostages to nothing but chance and each other. Every
moment was there to be lived: sucked-in, spat-out and discarded for the next.
Fate was their god.
“What if Fate’s wrong?”
A gust of wind catches him
off-guard and he clutches at the rusty railings behind them with his free hand.
“Fate can’t be wrong.”
“Then maybe we are.” He is
beginning to feel giddy. “What if we’re meant to be getting married in Vegas
right now, or trekking in Peru? We could’ve taken the wrong turning, V.”
She is looking disappointed. He has
disappointed her.
“So what? If we made the wrong
decision yesterday, or last week, or even that first time we met, it doesn’t
matter. Those moments are past, aren’t they?” She pulls her hand from his and
folds her arms. “There is only this moment, Leo. You can only live in this
one.”
“Or die in it.”
Somewhere in the city an ambulance
is wailing. Two lorries, driving too close together, thunder by below.
She turns to face him and he feels
the tug of her convictions.
“You can’t die in the moment you’re
in,” she says. “Maybe in the next moment you’ll be dead, or the moment after
that perhaps, but that’s not your problem. You can only choose what to do now.
No handrails. No parachutes.”
Nausea rises in his stomach. He
needs to step back from the edge, climb back over the railing. But he is
trapped by his addiction; by her.
“How can we do anything, unless we
do this?” She reaches for him again, wrapping her arms around his waist. “We
aren’t really trusting in Fate unless we know that She wants us to be alive.
Once we know that, imagine how free we’ll be. We’ll know that Fate has picked
us out to live. She’s chosen us.”
He is nodding before he has even
processed her words. Isn’t this what he wants? Isn’t it what their religion
demands?
She holds up one clenched fist in
front of them, palm up. Slowly, as if performing some rite of worship she
uncurls her fingers. The two-pence coin has left marks where the edges dug into
her flesh.
“Heads or tails?”
The coin loops upwards, flipping
over and over in slow-motion. And as each rotation catches the light, it seems
to reflect another step, another stopping point on the inevitable journey that
brought them to this edge.
Flip.
At first they had been content with
the smallness of life. Diamonds, we watch
a movie.
Flip.
Spades,
we go to the pub. But it hadn’t been enough. Fate was not a game fuelled by
minutiae.
Flip.
It was an extreme sport which could
not contain them. They always needed more; life in fast forward. Clubs, we jump the train tracks.
Flip.
Hearts,
we go 100 on the bypass. Odds we leave without paying. Evens we catch the first
flight we see.
Flip.
Heads
or tails, Leo? Heads or tails? Heads? Tails?
Flip.
This was the only place it could’ve
ended. Yes, he should have known.
She snatches the coin from mid-air.
Right hand slaps down on to the back of left.
“Heads, we jump. Tails, we go home.
Right?”
She removes her right hand and
lifts the oracle for him to see.
Tails.
He vomits. Chicken tikka, cheap
beer. Sour and acidic. Without waiting for her, he climbs back over the
railing, huddles down against it, hands and jeans stained with rust.
She is laughing. She turns her back
to the edge, looking down on him from the wrong side of the barrier; life
pouring out of her.
“See?” She raises her hands in the
air, throws back her head to the night. “Fate wants us to live. Don’t you feel
free, Leo? Don’t you feel alive?”
And in that moment, he knows that
she really believes it. Before she slips – before the rocks crumble away under
her feet and her hands just fail to grab the railing in time – she believes
completely in her god. And she is completely free.
ENDS
