Black Chalk

Jolyon looked out past the rooftops of Pitt and rested his hand on the merlon beside him. He could see all of the towers and domes of the city glowing yellow beneath the soothing black of the sky. And his head didn’t hurt. No, his head didn’t hurt him at all. He flicked his cigarette out into the night and it whirled away like a dying Catherine wheel before diving into the light. Then Jolyon lifted his arms above him and placed his palms together, a high prayer, a tall steeple. Slowly he lifted his foot and shifted it forward, held it out over the void. ‘Velocity equals gravity multiplied by time. So what’s my speed when I hit the ground, Mark? Let’s do it in miles per hour, just for fun.’

Mark was quiet a while. And then, uneasily, he said, ‘Just a fraction shy of fifty miles per hour.’

‘A fraction shy? Let’s round it up, friends shouldn’t argue over trifling amounts, don’t you agree, Mark?’ He took a loud, sharp breath. ‘Fifty should be fast enough,’ said Jolyon.

And then he stepped down into the night.

They were laughing hard on the lawn below and they didn’t hear Mark’s panicked cry as Jolyon’s weight began to pull him down, as his foot dropped beneath the edge of the tower. And his head didn’t hurt him at all.

LXV

LXV(i) No, it can’t be done. I can’t go on telling you what took place that night as if it were only a story, the climax to some distant thriller. My confession must come from the heart, there is no literary distance I can put between me and what happened back then. Because I live with it in the here and now. Not on the page. I live with it every second of every day.

First person. Singular. Me.

LXV(ii) Here is the worst of my guilt. He tried to save me. Mark tried to stop me from falling to my death.

Perhaps he believed I would shout his name. But this doesn’t matter. No, he called out to me – Jolyon, no! All I had wanted was for him to believe I would go through with it, for Mark to surrender.

From where he was standing, he couldn’t have seen the flagpole beneath my hovering foot – Jolyon, no! – daring him, trying to convince him I was mad enough to go through with it. And who knows, perhaps I was. But at that moment, I was only trying to plant my foot on a flagpole. So Mark ran at me, he leapt, he tried to save me. And then two things happened at once. My foot landed on its target, and Mark, with a lunging dive, caught hold of my trailing leg. And as he grabbed hold of me, Mark knocked me off balance.

My foot came away from the pole, there was nothing beneath me but death. The whole world seemed to lurch in my chest as time began to stretch, constant becoming variable. Suddenly there were no thoughts in my mind – gravity was claiming me and my thoughts were all feelings. Panic, regret, life, fear, death. And then the weight of me, gravity’s scream, pulled Mark quickly over the low parapet wall. Somewhere in this jumble of feelings and instincts, my arms had started to move, had somehow found a way to wrap themselves around the flagpole. With a sharp jerk I stopped falling. I felt the slick surface of the pole and quickly became aware of a great burden attached to my leg. And as my fingers started to slip, I didn’t think. There was no motive, no thought but survival. Life not death.

I kicked, electric, instinctive. I bucked like a killer at the end of a noose. Something was taking me down and I fought for life, I shook death off.

And that’s when Mark pleaded with me to stop, or at least that’s what I think those three quick words were supposed to mean, just before I managed to kick him away.

Jolyon, you win.

LXV(iii) As Mark’s body fell slowly into the light I saw that he was trying to twist through the air, instinctively steering his body to keep his skull from shattering against the earth. And he didn’t call out my name, Mark didn’t cry out at all as he dropped from the tower. He simply fell, down and down for two and a quarter seconds. At the end he managed to turn his body enough that I could see his face before he hit the ground. And in that moment of impact, Mark’s wide eyes seemed to call out to me that he was very scared of dying but also that this was a terrible injustice. And it was true, he was absolutely right.

And now I see his face every morning, every day. First Mark’s wide and afraid and accusing eyes. And then I hear the horrible crumpling sound, I feel his spirit fly up like a cold wind biting through me. And then I see the blood pooling around Mark’s body in the pale light. The blood was very black and the eyes very suddenly shut.

LXV(iv) It was quiet below as if the people down there couldn’t comprehend this sudden appearance of death on the gravel. A silent pause. No one saw me as I scrambled up onto the roof.

And then the screaming started.