JOHN M. HARRISON

SUICIDE COAST

FOUR-THIRTY IN THE afternoon in a converted warehouse near Mile End underground
station. Heavy, persistent summer rain was falling on the roof. Inside, the air
was still and humid, dark despite the fluorescent lights. It smelled of sweat,
dust, gymnasts' chalk. Twenty-five feet above the thick blue crash-mats, a boy
with dreadlocks and baggy knee-length shorts was supporting his entire weight on
two fingers of his right hand. The muscles of his upper back, black and shiny
with sweat, fanned out exotically with the effort, like the hood of a cobra or
the shell of a crab. One leg trailed behind him for balance. He had raised the
other so that the knee was almost touching his chin. For two or three minutes he
had been trying to get the ball of his foot in the same place as his fingers.
Each time he moved, his center of gravity shifted and he had to go back to a
resting position. Eventually he said quietly:

"I'm coming off."

We all looked up. It was a slow afternoon in Mile End. Nobody bothers much with
training in the middle of summer. Some teenagers were in from the local schools
and colleges. A couple of men in their late thirties had sneaked out of a civil
engineering contract near Cannon Street. Everyone was tired. Humidity had made
the handholds slippery. Despite that, a serious atmosphere prevailed.

"Go on," we encouraged him. "You can do it."

We didn't know him, or one another, from Adam.

"Go on!"

The boy on the wall laughed. He was good but not that good. He didn't want to
fall off in front of everyone. An intention tremor moved through his bent leg.
Losing patience with himself, he scraped at the foothold with the toe of his
boot. He lunged upward. His body pivoted away from the wall and dropped onto the
mats, which, absorbing the energy of the fall, made a sound like a badly winded
heavyweight boxer. Chalk and dust billowed up. He got to his feet, laughing and
shaking his dreadlocks.

"I can never do that."

"You'll get it in the end," I told him. "Me, I'm going to fall off this roof
once more then fuck off home. It's too hot in here."

"See you, man."

I had spent most of that winter in London, assembling copy for MAX, a Web site
that fronted the adventure sports software industry. They were always interested
in stuff about cave diving, BASE jumping, snowboarding, hang-gliding, ATB and so
on: but they didn't want to know about rock climbing.

"Not enough to buy," my editor said succinctly. "And too obviously skill-based."
He leafed through my samples. "The punter needs equipment to invest in. It
strengthens his self-image. With the machine parked in his hall, he believes he
could disconnect from the software and still do the sport." He tapped a shot of
Isobelle Patissier seven hundred feet up some knife-edge arete in Colorado.
"Where's the hardware? These are just bodies."

"The boots are pretty high tech."

"Yeah? And how much a pair? Fifty, a hundred and fifty? Mick, we can get them to
lay out three grand for the frame of an ATB."

He thought for a moment. Then he said: "We might do something with the women."

"The good ones are French."

"Even better."

I gathered the stuff together and put it away.

"I'm off then," I said.

"You still got the 190?"

I nodded.

"Take care in that thing," he said.

"I will."

"Focke Wolf 190," he said. "Hey."

"It's a Mercedes," I said.

He laughed. He shook his head.

"Focke Wolf, Mercedes, no one drives themselves anymore," he said.

"You mad fucker."

He looked round his office -- a dusty metal desk, a couple of posters with the
MAX logo, a couple of PCs. He said: "No one comes in here in person anymore. You
ever hear of the modem?"

"Once or twice," I said.

"Well they've invented it now."

I looked around too.

"One day," I said, "the poor wankers are going to want back what you stole from
them."

"Come on. They pissed it all away long before we arrived."

As I left the office he advised:

"Keep walking the walk, Mick."

I looked at my watch. It was late and the MAX premises were in EC 1. But I
thought that if I got a move on and cut up through Tottenham, I could go and see
a friend of mine. His name was Ed and I had known him since the 1980s.

Back then, I was trying to write a book about people like him. Ed Johnson
sounded interesting. He had done everything from roped-access engineering in
Telford to harvesting birds' nests for soup in Southeast Asia. But he was hard
to pin down. If I was in Birmingham, he was in Exeter. If we were both in
London, he had something else to do. In the end it was Moscow Davis who made the
introduction.

Moscow was a short, hard, cheerful girl with big feet and bedraggled hair. She
was barely out of her teens. She had come from Oldham, I think, originally, and
she had an indescribable snuffling accent. She and Ed had worked as steeplejacks
together before they both moved down from the north in search of work. They had
once been around a lot together. She thought Johnson would enjoy talking to me
if I was still interested. I was. The arrangement we made was to be on the
lookout for him in one of the Suicide Coast pubs, the Harbour Lights, that
Sunday afternoon.

"Sunday afternoons are quiet, so we can have a chat," said Moscow.

"Everyone's eating their dinner then."

We had been in the pub for half an hour when Johnson arrived, wearing patched
501s and a dirty T-shirt with a picture of a mole on the front of it. He came
over to our table and began kicking morosely at the legs of Moscow's chair. The
little finger of his left hand was splinted and wrapped in a wad of bandage.

"This is Ed," Moscow told me, not looking at him.

"Fuck off, Moscow," Ed told her, not looking at me. He scratched his armpit and
stared vaguely into the air above Moscow's head. "I want my money back," he
said. Neither of them could think of anything to add to this, and after a pause
he wandered off.

"He's always like that," Moscow said. "You don't want to pay any attention."
Later in the afternoon she said: "You'll get on well with Ed, though. You'll
like him. He's a mad bastard."

"You say that about all the boys," I said.

In this case Moscow was right, because I had heard it not just from her, and
later I would get proof of it anyway -- ii you can ever get proof of anything.
Everyone said that Ed should be in a straightjacket. In the end, nothing could
be arranged. Johnson was in a bad mood, and Moscow had to be up the Coast that
week, on Canvey Island, to do some work on one of the cracking-plants there.
There was always a lot of that kind of work, oil work, chemical work, on Canvey
Island. "I haven't time for him," Moscow explained as she got up to go. "I'll
see you later, anyway," she promised.

As soon as she was gone, Ed Johnson came back and sat down in front of me. He
grinned. "Ever done anything worth doing in your whole life?" he asked me.
"Anything real?"

The MAX editor was right: since coring got popular, the roads had been deserted.
I left EC 1 and whacked the 190 up through Hackney until I got the Lea Valley
reservoirs on my right like a splatter of moonlit verglas. On empty roads the
only mistakes that need concern you are your own; every bend becomes a dreamy
interrogation of your own technique. Life should be more like that. I made good
time. Ed lived just back from Montagu Road, in a quiet street behind the Jewish
Cemetery. He shared his flat with a woman in her early thirties whose name was
Caitlin. Caitlin had black hair and soft, honest brown eyes. She and I were old
friends. We hugged briefly on the doorstep. She looked up and down the street
and shivered.

"Come in," she said. "It's cold."

"You should wear a jumper."

"I'll tell him you're here," she said. "Do you want some coffee?"

Caitlin had softened the edges of Ed's life, but less perhaps than either of
them had hoped. His taste was still very minimal -- white paint, ash floors, one
or two items of furniture from Heals. And there was still a competition Klein
mounted on the living room wall, its polished aerospace alloys glittering in the
halogen lights.

"Espresso," I said.

"I'm not giving you espresso at this time of night. You'll explode."

"It was worth a try."

"Ed!" she called. "Ed! Mick's here!"

He didn't answer.

She shrugged at me, as if to say, "What can I do?" and went into the back room.
I heard their voices but not what they were saying. After that she went
upstairs. "Go in and see him," she suggested when she came down again three or
four minutes later. "I told him you were here." She had pulled a Jigsaw sweater
on over her Racing Green shirt and Levi's and fastened her hair back hastily
with a dark brown velvet scrunchy.

"That looks nice," I said. "Do you want me to fetch him out?"

"I doubt he'll come."

The back room was down a narrow corridor. Ed had turned it into a bleak
combination of office and storage. The walls were done with one coat of what
builders call "obliterating emulsion" and covered with metal shelves. Chipped
diving tanks hollow with the ghosts of exotic gases were stacked by the filing
cabinet. His BASE chute spilled half out of its pack, yards of cold nylon a vile
but exciting rose color -- a color which made you want to be hurtling downward
face-first screaming with fear until you heard the canopy bang out behind you
and you knew you weren't going to die that day (although you might still break
both legs). The cheap beige carpet was strewn with high-access mess -- hanks of
graying static rope; a yellow bucket stuffed with tools; Ed's Petzl stop,
harness and knocked-about CPTs. Everything was layered with dust. The radiators
were turned off. There was a bed made up in one comer. Deep in the clutter on
the cheap white desk stood a 5-gig Mac with a screen to design-industry specs.
It was spraying Ed's face with icy blue light.

"Hi Ed."

"Hi Mick."

There was a long silence after that. Ed stared at the screen. I stared at his
back. Just when I thought he had forgotten I was there, he said:

"Fuck off and talk to Caitlin a moment."

"I brought us some beer."

"That's great."

"What are you running here?

"It's a game. I'm running a game, Mick."

Ed had lost weight since I last saw him. Though they retained their distinctive
cabled structure, his forearms were a lot thinner. Without releasing him from
anything it represented, the yoke of muscle had lifted from his shoulders. I had
expected that. But I was surprised by how much flesh had melted off his face,
leaving long vertical lines of sinew, fins of bone above the cheeks and at the
comers of the jaw. His eyes were a long way back in his head. In a way it suited
him. He would have seemed okay -- a little tired perhaps; a little burned down,
like someone who was working too hard -- if it hadn't been for the light from
the display. Hunched in his chair with that splashing off him, he looked like a
vampire. He looked like a junkie.

I peered over his shoulder.

"You were never into this shit," I said.

He grinned.

"Everyone's into it now. Why not me? Wanking away and pretending it's sex."

"Oh, come on."

He looked down at himself.

"It's better than living," he said.

There was no answer to that.

I went and asked Caitlin, "Has he been doing this long?"

"Not long," she said. "Have some coffee."

We sat in the L-shaped living area drinking decaffeinated Java. The sofa was big
enough for Caitlin to curl up in a corner of it like a cat. She had turned the
overhead lights off, tucked her bare feet up under her. She was smoking a
cigarette. "It's been a bloody awful day," she warned me. "So don't say a word."
She grinned wryly, then we both looked up at the Klein for a minute or two. Some
kind of ambient music was issuing faintly from the stereo speakers, full of
South American bird calls and bouts of muted drumming. "Is he winning?" she
asked.

"He didn't tell me."

"You're lucky. It's all he ever tells me."

"Aren't you worried?" I said.

She smiled.

"He's still using a screen," she said. "He's not plugging in."

"Yet," I said.

"Yet," she agreed equably. "Want more coffee? Or will you do me a favor?"

I put my empty cup on the floor.

"Do you a favor," I said.

"Cut my hair."

I got up and went to her end of the sofa. She turned away from me so

I could release her hair from the scrunchy. "Shake it," I said. She shook it.
She ran her hands through it. Perfume came up; something I didn't recognize. "It
doesn't need much," I said. I switched the overhead light back on and fetched a
kitchen chair. "Sit here. No, right in the light. You'll have to take your
jumper off."

"The good scissors are in the bathroom," she said.

Gut my hair. She had asked me that before, two or three days after she decided
we should split up. I remembered the calm that came over me at the gentle,
careful sound of the scissors, the way her hair felt as I lifted it away from
the nape of her neck, the tenderness and fear because everything was changing
around the two of us forever and somehow this quiet action signalized and
blessed that. The shock of these memories made me ask:

"How are you two getting on?"

She lowered her head to help me cut. I felt her smile.

"You and Ed always liked the same kind of girls," she said.

"Yes," I said.

I finished the cut, then lightly kissed the nape of her neck. "There," I said.
Beneath the perfume she smelled faintly of hypoallergenic soap and unscented
deodorants. "No, Mick," she said softly. "Please." I adjusted the collar of her
shirt, let her hair fall back round it. My hand was still on her shoulder. She
had to turn her head at an awkward angle to look up at me. Her eyes were wide
and full of pain. "Mick." I kissed her mouth and brushed the side of her face
with my fingertips. Her arms went round my neck, I felt her settle in the chair.
I touched her breasts. They were warm, the cotton shirt was clean and cool. She
made a small noise and pulled me closer. Just then, in the back room among the
dusty air tanks and disused parachutes, Ed Johnson fell out of his chair and
began to thrash about, the back of his head thudding rhythmically on the floor.

Caitlin pushed me away.

"Ed?" she called, from the passage door.

"Help!" cried Ed.

"I'll go," I said.

Caitlin put her arm across the doorway and stared up at me calmly.

"No," she said.

"How can you lift him on your own?"

"This is me and Ed," she said.

"For God's sake!"

"It's late, Mick. I'll let you out, then I'll go and help him."

At the front door I said:

"I think you're mad. Is this happening a lot? You're a fool to let him do this."

"It's his life."

I looked at her. She shrugged.

"Will you be all right?" I said.

When I offered to kiss her goodbye, she turned her face away.

"Fuck off then, both of you," I said.

I knew which game Ed was playing, because I had seen the software wrapper
discarded on the desk near his Mac. Its visuals were cheap and schematic, its
values self-consciously retro. It was nothing like the stuff we sold off the MAX
site, which was quite literally the experience itself, stripped of its
consequences. You had to plug in for that: you had to be cored. This was just a
game; less a game, even, than a trip. You flew a silvery V-shaped graphic down
an endless V-shaped corridor, a notional perspective sometimes bounded by lines
of objects, sometimes just by lines, sometimes bounded only by your memory of
boundaries. Sometimes the graphic floated and mushed like a moth. Sometimes it
traveled in flat vicious arcs at an apparent Mach 5. There were no guns, no
opponent. There was no competition. You flew. Sometimes the horizon tilted one
way, sometimes the other. You could choose your own music. It was a bleakly
minimal experience. But after a minute or two, five at the most, you felt as if
you could fly your icon down the perspective forever, to the soundtrack of your
own life.

It was quite popular.

It was called Out There.

"Rock climbing is theater," I once wrote. It had all the qualities of theater, I
went on, but a theater-in-reverse: "In obedience to some devious vanished
script, the actors abandon the stage and begin to scale the seating
arrangements, the balconies and hanging boxes now occupied only by
cleaning-women."

"Oh, very deep," said Ed Johnson when he read this. "Shall I tell you what's
wrong here? Eh? Shall I tell you?"

"Piss off, Ed."

"If you fall on your face from a hundred feet up, it comes off the front of your
head and you don't get a second go. Next to that, theater is wank. Theater is
flat. Theater is Suicide Coast."

Ed hated anywhere flat. "Welcome to the Suicide Coast," he used to say when I
first knew him. To start with, that had been because he lived in Canterbury. But
it had quickly become his way of describing most places, most experiences. You
didn't actually have to be near the sea. Suicide Coast syndrome had caused Ed to
do some stupid things in his time. One day, when he and Moscow still worked in
roped-access engineering together, they were going up in the lift to the top of
some shitty council highrise in Birmingham or Bristol, when suddenly Ed said:

"Do you bet me I can keep the doors open with my head?"

"What?"

"Next floor! When the doors start to close, do you bet me I can stop them with
my head?"

It was Monday morning. The lift smelled of piss. They had been hand-ripping
mastic out of expansion joints for two weeks, using Stanley knives. Moscow was
tired, hung over, weighed down by a collection of CPTs, mastic guns and
hundred-foot coils of rope. Her right arm was numb from repeating the same
action hour after hour, day after day.

"Fuck off, Ed," she said.

But she knew Ed would do it whether she took the bet or not.

TWO OR THREE days after she first introduced me to Ed, Moscow telephoned me. She
had got herself a couple of weeks cutting out on Thamesmead Estate. "They don't
half work hard, these fuckers," she said. We talked about that for a minute or
two then she asked:

"Well?"

"Well what, Moscow?"

"Ed. Was he what you were looking for, then? Or what?"

I said that though I was impressed I didn't think I would be able to write
anything about Ed.

"He's a mad fucker, though, isn't he?"

"Oh he is," I said. "He certainly is."

The way Moscow said "isn't he" made it sound like "innie."

Another thing I once wrote:

"Climbing takes place in a special kind of space, the rules of which are simple.
You must he able to see immediately what you have to lose; and you must choose
the risk you take." What do I know?

I know that a life without consequences isn't a life at all. Also, if you

want to do something difficult, something real, you can't shirk the pain.

What I learned in the old days, from Ed and Moscow, from Gabe King, Justine
Townsend and all the others who taught me to climb rock or jump off buildings or
stay the right way up in a tube of pitch-dark water two degrees off freezing and
two hundred feet under the ground, was that you can't just plug in and be a
star: you have to practice. You have to keep loading your fingers until the
tendons swell.

So it's back to the Mile End wall, with its few thousand square feet of board
and bolt-on holds, its few thousand cubic meters of emphysemic air through which
one very bright ray of sun sometimes falls in the middle of the afternoon,
illuminating nothing much at all. Back to the sound of the fan heater, the
dust-filled Akai radio playing some mournful aggressive thing, and every so
often a boy's voice saying softly, "Oh shit," as some sequence or other fails to
work out. You go back there, and if you have to fall off the same ceiling move
thirty times in an afternoon, that's what you do. The mats give their gusty
wheeze, chalk dust flies up, the fan heater above the Monkey House door rattles
and chokes and flatlines briefly before puttering on.

"Jesus Christ. I don't know why I do this."

Caitlin telephoned me.

"Come to supper," she said.

"No," I said.

"Mick, why?"

"Because I'm sick of it."

"Sick of what?"

"You. Me. Him. Everything."

"Look," she said, "he's sorry about what happened last time."

"Oh, he's sorry."

"We're both sorry, Mick."

"All right, then: I'm sorry, too."

There was a gentle laugh at the other end.

"So you should be."

I went along all the deserted roads and got there at about eight, to find a
brand-new motorcycle parked on the pavement outside the house. It was a Kawasaki
Ninia. Its fairing had been removed, to give it the look of a '60s cafe racer,
but no one was fooled. Even at a glance it appeared too hunched, too
short-coupled: too knowing. The remaining plastics shone with their own harsh
inner light.

Caitlin met me on the doorstep. She put her hands on my shoulders and kissed me.
"Mm," she said. She was wearing white tennis shorts and a soft dark blue
sweatshirt.

"We've got to stop meeting like this," I said.

She smiled and pushed me away.

"My hands smell of garlic," she said.

Just as we were going inside, she turned back and nodded at the Kawa.

"That thing," she said.

"It's a motorcycle, Caitlin."

"It's his."

I stared at her.

"Be enthusiastic," she said. "Please."

"But --"

"Please?"

THE MAIN COURSE was penne with mushrooms in an olive and tomato sauce. Ed had
cooked it, Caitlin said, but she served. Ed pushed his chair over to the table
and rubbed his hands. He picked his plate up and passed it under his nose.
"Wow!" he said. As we ate, we talked about this and that. The Kawa was behind
everything we said, but Ed wouldn't mention it until I did. Caitlin smiled at us
both. She shook her head as if to say: "Children! You children!" It was like
Christmas, and she was the parent. The three of us could feel Ed's excitement
and impatience. He grinned secretively. He glanced up from his food at one or
both of us; quickly back down again. Finally, he couldn't hold back any longer.

"What do you think, then?" he said. "What do you think, Mick?"

"I think this is good pasta," I said. "For a cripple."

He grinned and wiped his mouth.

"It's not bad," he said, "is it?"

"I think what I like best is the way you've let the mushrooms take up a touch of
sesame oil."

"Have some more. There's plenty."

"That's new to me in Italian food," I said. "Sesame oil."

Ed drank some more beer.

"It was just an idea," he said.

"You children," said Caitlin. She shook her head. She got up and took the plates
away. "There's ice cream for pudding," she said over her shoulder just before
she disappeared. When I was sure she was occupied in the kitchen I said:

"Nice idea, Ed: a motorcycle. What are you going to do with it? Hang it on the
wall with the Klein?"

He drank the rest of his beer, opened a new one and poured it thoughtfully into
his glass. He watched the bubbles rising through it, then grinned at me as if he
had made a decision. He had. In that moment I saw that he was lost, but not what
I could do about it.

"Isn't it brilliant? Isn't it just a fucker, that bike? I haven't had a bike
since I was seventeen. There's a story attached to that."

"Ed --"

"Do you want to hear it or not?"

Caitlin came back in with the ice cream and served it out to us and sat down.

"Tell us, Ed," she said tiredly. "Tell us the story about that."

Ed held onto his glass hard with both hands and stared into it for a long time
as if he was trying to see the past there. "I had some ace times on bikes when I
was a kid," he said finally: "but they were always someone else's. My old dear
-- She really hated bikes, my old dear. You know: they were dirty, they were
dangerous, she wasn't going to have one in the house. Did that stop me? It did
not. I bought one of the first good Ducatti 125s in Britain, but I had to keep
it in a coal cellar down the road."

"That's really funny, Ed."

"Fuck off, Mick. I'm seventeen, I'm still at school, and I've got this fucking
projectile stashed in someone's coal cellar. The whole time I had it, the old
dear never knew. I'm walking three miles in the piss wet rain every night,
dressed to go to the library, then unlocking this thing and stuffing it round
the back lanes with my best white shortie raincoat ballooning up like a fucking
tent."

He looked puzzledly down at his plate.

"What's this? Oh. Ice cream. Ever ridden a bike in a raincoat?" he asked
Caitlin.

Caitlin shook her head. She was staring at him with a hypnotized expression; she
was breaking wafers into her ice cream.

"Well they were all the rage then," he said.

He added: "The drag's enormous."

"Eat your pudding, Ed," I said. "And stop boasting. How fast would a 125 go in
those days! Eighty miles an hour? Eighty-five?"

"They went faster if you ground your teeth, Mick," Ed said. "Do you want to hear
the rest!"

"Of course I want to hear it, Ed."

"Walk three miles in the piss-wet rain," said Ed, "to go for a ride on a
motorbike, what a joke. But the real joke is this: the fucker had an alloy
crank-case. That was a big deal in those days, an alloy crank-case. The first
time I dropped it on a bend, it cracked. Oil everywhere. I pushed it back to the
coal-house and left it there. You couldn't weld an alloy crank-case worth shit
in those days. I had three years' payments left to make on a bunch of scrap."

He grinned at us triumphantly.

"Ask me how long I'd had it," he ordered.

"How long, Mick?"

"Three weeks. I'd had the fucker three weeks."

He began to laugh. Suddenly, his face went so white it looked green. He looked
rapidly from side to side, like someone who can't understand where he is. At the
same time, he pushed himself up out of the wheelchair until his arms wouldn't
straighten any further and he was almost standing up. He tilted his head back
until the tendons in his neck stood out. He shouted, "I want to get out of here!
Caitlin, I want to get out!" Then his arms buckled and he let his weight go onto
his feet and his legs folded up like putty and he fell forward with a gasp, his
face in the ice cream and his hands smashing and clutching and scraping at
anything they touched on the dinner table until he had bunched the cloth up
under him and everything was a sodden mess of food and broken dishes, and he had
slipped out of the chair and on to the floor. Then he let himself slump and go
quite still.

"Help me," said Caitlin.

We couldn't get him back into the chair. As we tried, his head flopped forward,
and I could see quite clearly the bruises and deep, half-healed scabs at the
base of his skull, where they had cored his cervical spine for the computer
connection. When he initialized Out There now, the graphics came up live in his
head. No more screen. Only the endless V of the perspective. The endless,
effortless dip-and-bank of the viewpoint. What did he see out there? Did he see
himself, hunched up on the Kawasaki Ninja? Did he see highways, bridges,
tunnels, weird motorcycle flights through endless space?

Halfway along the passage, he woke up.

"Caitlin!" he shouted.

"I'm here."

"Caitlin!"

"I'm here, Ed."

"Caitlin, I never did any of that."

"Hush, Ed. Let's get you to bed."

"Listen!" he shouted. "Listen."

He started to thrash about and we had to lay him down where he was. The passage
was so narrow his head hit one wall, then the other, with a solid noise. He
stared desperately at Caitlin, his face smeared with Ben & Jerry's. "I never
could ride a bike," he admitted. "I made all that up."

She bent down and put her arms round his neck.

"I know," she said.

"I made all that up!" he shouted.

"It's all right. It's all right."

We got him into bed in the back room. She wiped the ice-cream off his face with
a Kleenex. He stared over her shoulder at the wall, rigid with fear and
self-loathing. "Hush," she said. "You're all right." That made him cry; him
crying made her cry. I didn't know whether to cry or laugh. I sat down and
watched them for a moment, then got to my feet. I felt tired.

"It's late," I said. "I think I'll go."

Caitlin followed me out onto the doorstep. It was another cold night.
Condensation had beaded on the fuel tank of the Kawasaki, so that it looked like
some sort of frosted confection in the streetlight.

"Look," she said, "can you do anything with that?"

I shrugged.

"It's still brand new," I said. I drew a line in the condensation, along the
curve of the tank; then another, at an angle to it.

"I could see if the dealer would take it back."

"Thanks."

I laughed.

"Go in now," I advised her. "It's cold."

"Thanks, Mick. Really."

"That's what you always say."

THE WAY ED GOT his paraplegia was this. It was a miserable January about four
months after Caitlin left me to go and live with him. He was working over in
mid-Wales with Moscow Davis. They had landed the inspection contract for three
point-blocks owned by the local council; penalty clauses meant they had to
complete that month. They lived in a bed-and-breakfast place a mile from the
job, coming back so tired in the evening that they just about had time to eat
fish and chips and watch Coronation Street before they fell asleep with their
mouths open. "We were too fucked even to take drugs," Ed admitted afterward, in
a kind of wonder. "Can you imagine that?" Their hands were bashed and bleeding
from hitting themselves with sample hammers in the freezing rain. At the end of
every afternoon the sunset light caught a thin, delicate layer of water-ice that
had welded Moscow's hair to her cheek. Ed wasn't just tired, he was missing
Caitlin. One Friday he said, "I'm fucked off with this, let's have a weekend at
home."

"We agreed we'd have to work weekends," Moscow reminded him. She watched a long
string of snot leave her nose, stretch out like spidersilk, then snap and vanish
on the wind. "To finish in time," she said.

"Come on, you wanker," Ed said. "Do something real in your life."

"I never wank," said Moscow. "I can't fancy myself."

They got in her 1984 320i with the M-Technic pack, Garrett turbo and extra wide
wheels, and while the light died out of a bad afternoon she pushed it eastward
through the Cambrians, letting the rear end hang out on comers. She had Lou Reed
Retro on the CD and her plan was to draw a line straight across the map and
connect with the M4 at the Severn Bridge. It was ghostly and fog all the way out
of Wales that night, lost sheep coming at you from groups of wet trees and folds
in the hills. "Tregaron to Abergwesyn. One of the great back roads!" Moscow
shouted over the music, as they passed a single lonely house in the rain, miles
away from anywhere, facing south into the rolling moors of mid-Wales.

Ed shouted back: "They can go faster than this, these 320s." So on the next bend
she let the rear end hang out an inch too far and they surfed five hundred feet
into a ravine below Cefn Coch, with the BMW crumpled up round them like a
chocolate wrapper. Just before they went over, the tape had got to "Sweet lane"
-- the live version with the applause welling up across the opening chords as if
God himself was stepping out on stage. In the bottom of the ravine a shallow
stream ran through pressure-metamorphosed Ordovician shale. Ed sat until
daylight the next morning, conscious but unable to move, watching the water
hurry toward him and listening to Moscow die of a punctured lung in the heavy
smell of fuel. It was a long wait. Once or twice she regained consciousness and
said: "I'm sorry, Ed."

Once or twice he heard himself reassure her, "No, it was my fault."

At Southwestern Orthopaedic a consultant told him that key motor nerves had been
tipped out of his spine.

"Stuff the fuckers back in again then!" he said, in an attempt to impress her.

She smiled.

"That's exactly what we're going to try," she replied. "We'll do a tuck-and-glue
and encourage the spinal cord to send new filaments into the old cable channel."

She thought for a moment.

"We'll be working very close to the cord itself," she warned him.

Ed stared at her.

"It was a joke," he said.

For a while it seemed to work. Two months later he could flex the muscles in his
upper legs. But nothing more happened; and, worried that a second try would only
make the damage worse, they had to leave it.

Mile End Monkey House. Hanging upside down from a painful foothook, you chalk
your hands meditatively, staring at the sweaty triangular mark your back left on
the blue plastic cover of the mat last time you fell on it. Then, reluctantly,
feeling your stomach muscles grind as they curl you uptight again, you clutch
the starting holds and go for the move: reach up: lock out on two fingers: let
your left leg swing out to rebalance: strain upward with your fight fingertips,
and just as you brush the crucial hold, fall off again.

"Jesus Christ. I don't know why I come here."

You come so that next weekend you can get into a Cosworth-engined Merc 190E and
drive very fast down the M4 ("No one drives themselves anymore!") to a limestone
outcrop high above the Wye Valley. Let go here and you will not land on a blue
safety mat in a puff of chalk dust. Instead you will plummet eighty feet
straight down until you hit a small ledge, catapult out into the trees, and land
a little later face-first among moss-grown boulders flecked with sunshine. Now
all the practice is over. Now you are on the route. Your friends look up,
shading their eyes against the white glare of the rock. They are wondering if
you can make the move. So are you. The only exit from shit creek is to put two
fingers of your left hand into a razor-sharp solution pocket, lean away from it
to the full extent of your arm, run your feet up in front of you, and, just as
you are about to fall off, lunge with your right hand for the good hold above.

At the top of the cliff grows a large yew tree. You can see it very clearly. It
has a short horizontal trunk, and contorted limbs perhaps eighteen inches thick
curving out over the drop as if they had just that moment stopped moving. When
you reach it you will be safe. But at this stage on a climb, the top of anything
is an empty hypothesis. You look up: it might as well be the other side of the
Atlantic. All that air is burning away below you like a fuse. Suddenly you're
moving anyway. Excitement has short-circuited the normal connections between
intention and action. Where you look, you go. No effort seems to be involved.
It's like falling upward. It's like that moment when you first understood how to
swim, or ride a bike. Height and fear have returned you to your childhood. Just
as it was then, your duty is only to yourself. Until you get safely down again,
contracts, business meetings, household bills, emotional problems will mean
nothing.

When you finally reach that yew tree at the top of the climb, you find it full
of grown men and women wearing faded shorts and T-shirts. They are all in their
forties and fifties. They have all escaped. With their bare brown arms, their
hair bleached out by weeks of sunshine, they sit at every fork or junction, legs
dangling in the dusty air, like child-pirates out of some storybook of the
1920s: an investment banker from Greenwich, an AIDS counselor from Bow; a
designer of French Connection clothes; a publishers' editor. There is a
comfortable silence broken by the odd friendly murmur as you arrive, but their
eyes are inturned and they would prefer to be alone, staring dreamily out over
the valley, the curve of the river, the woods which seem to stretch away to
Tintern Abbey and then Wales. This is the other side of excitement, the other
pleasure of height: the space without anxiety. The space without anxiety. The
space without anxiety. The space without anxiety. The space without anxiety. The
space without anxiety. The space without anxiety. The space with

You are left with this familiar glitch or loop in the MAXware. Suicide Coast
won't play any farther. Reluctantly, you abandon Mick to his world of sad acts,
his faith that reality can be relied upon to scaffold his perceptions. To run
him again from the beginning would only make the frailty of that faith more
obvious. So you wait until everything has gone black, unplug yourself from the
machine, and walk away, unconsciously rolling your shoulders to ease the
stiffness, massaging the sore place at the back of your neck. What will you do
next? Everything is flat out here. No one drives themselves anymore.