I - ???
Night
rolls on in Devara. The streets, once
filled with Christmas shoppers, then drunken partygoers, now fill with
litter. Stray newspapers still stained
with chip oil drift along the high street, whilst in the back alleys seagulls
pecked at the remains of someone’s kebab.
The huge white birds circle in the sky and hop along the roads. Bars begin to close up and the homeless
huddle deeper into their blankets, but the city is still far from deserted.
Here and
there pockets of people still move. A
group of drunk students with nowhere to go for Christmas stagger down one alley,
whilst the ragged remains of a hen party try to hail a taxi, all in shocking
pink. Policemen and women patrol,
breaking up fights and taking away repeat offenders. An ambulance siren can be heard somewhere in the distance.
On the
bridge on the high street a young man stares down at the railway tracks beneath
him. He is drunk, but that’s the least
of his problems. His girlfriend left
him weeks ago. He’s stuck in a dead-end
job with no prospects. He hates his
family. He hates the grey city with its
almost endless winter nights. He hates
his life.
The tracks
below look cold. They glitter with
frost so that they almost match the granite walls which separate them from the
park and the underpass. The young man shivers,
but supposes that he won’t feel the cold once he hits them.
He
glances up and down the street, checking to see that no one is watching and
then, taking a deep breath, he vaults the railing and leaps in one, final
confident motion.
For a
moment all is still, the chill air almost seems to cocoon him, but the ground
is rushing up fast. It will be over
soon, he thinks with a mixture of fear and relief, expecting it to be his
last thought. He closes his eyes.
And he
keeps on falling.
When the
expected crash doesn’t come he opens his eyes again and wishes he hadn’t. The city had gone. Where once the railway had laid itself bare before him, there was
now an endless dark pit. He could just
make out the edges if he looked hard enough, but he quickly realised that he
didn’t want to.
Bodies,
bodies lined the walls of the pit, living bodies, dead bodies, naked and
bloody, arms outstretched or dangling.
He felt that the living were trying to reach him, the dead mocking him
and still the fall continued.
This
is hell, he thought, I hit the ground and now I’m in hell. But he couldn’t remember a crash, only
endless, endless falling.
No comments:
Post a Comment