Dick Francis - In the Frame

‘That picture of a pony and two boys, that you thought was nice,’ I said to Sarah.

‘Well, it was,’ she repeated defensively. ‘I liked it.’

‘It was a Munnings.’

She sat up abruptly on her towel.

‘Why ever didn’t you say so?’

‘I was waiting for our friend Renbo to tell us, but he didn’t.’

‘A real one?’ Sarah asked. ‘Or a copy?’

‘Real,’ Jik said, with his eyes shut against the sun dappling through palm leaves.

I nodded lazily. ‘I thought so, too,’ I said. ‘An old painting. Munnings had that grey pony for years when he was young, and painted it dozens of times. It’s the same one you saw in Sydney in “The Coming Storm’.”

‘You two do know a lot,’ Sarah said, sighing and lying down again.

‘Engineers know all about nuts and bolts,’ Jik said. ‘Do we get lunch in this place?’

I looked at my watch. Nearly two o’ clock. ‘I’ ll go and ask,’ I said.

I put shirt and trousers on over my sun-dried trunks and ambled from the outdoor heat into the refrigerated air of the lobby. No lunch, said the reception desk. We could buy lunch nearby at a takeaway and eat in the garden. Drink? Same thing. Buy your own at a bottle shop. There was an ice-making machine and plastic glasses just outside the door to the pool.

‘Thanks,’ I said.

‘You’re welcome.’

I looked at the ice-making machine on the way out. Beside it swung a neat notice: ‘We don’t swim in your toilet. Please don’t pee in our pool.’ I laughed across to Jik and Sarah and told them the food situation.

‘I’ ll go and get it,’ I said. ‘What do you want?’

Anything, they said.

‘And drink?’

‘Cinzano,’ Sarah said, and Jik nodded. ‘Dry white.’

‘O.K.’

I picked up my room key from the grass and set off to collect some cash for shopping. Walked along to the tree-shaded outside staircase, went up two storeys, and turned on to the blazing hot balcony.

There was a man walking along it towards me, about my own height, build and age; and I heard someone else coming up the stairs at my back.

Thought nothing of it. Motel guests like me. What else?

I was totally unprepared both for the attack itself, and for its ferocity.

They simply walked up to me, one from in front, one from behind.

They reached me together. They sprang into action like cats. They snatched the dangling room key out of my hand.

The struggle, if you could call it that, lasted less than five seconds. Between them, with Jik’s type of strength, they simply picked me up by my legs and armpits and threw me over the balcony.

It probably takes a very short time to fall two storeys. I found it long enough for thinking that my body, which was still whole, was going to be smashed. That disaster, not yet reached, was inevitable. Very odd, and very nasty.

What I actually hit first was one of the young trees growing round the staircase. Its boughs bent and broke and I crashed on through them to the hard driveway beneath.

The monstrous impact was like being wiped out. Like fusing electrical circuits. A flash into chaos. I lay in a semi-conscious daze, not knowing if I were alive or dead.

I felt warm. Simply a feeling, not a thought.

I wasn’t aware of anything else at all. I couldn’t move any muscle. Couldn’t remember I had muscles to move. I felt like pulp.

It was ten minutes, Jik told me later, before he came looking for me: and he came only because he wanted to ask me to buy a lemon to go with the Cinzano, if I had not gone already.

‘Jesus Christ Almighty,’ Jik’s voice, low and horrified, near my ear.

I heard him clearly. The words made sense.

I’m alive, I thought. I think, therefore I exist.

Eventually, I opened my eyes. The light was brilliant. Blinding. There was no one where Jik’s voice had been. Perhaps I’d imagined it. No I hadn’t. The world began coming back fast, very sharp and clear.

I knew also that I hadn’t imagined the fall. I knew, with increasing insistence, that I hadn’t broken my neck and hadn’t broken my back. Sensation, which had been crushed out, came flooding back with vigour from every insulted tissue. It wasn’t so much a matter of which bits of me hurt, as of finding out which didn’t. I remembered hitting the tree. Remembered the ripping of its branches. I felt both torn to shreds and pulverised. Frightfully jolly.

After a while I heard Jik’s voice returning. ‘He’s alive,’ he said, ‘and that’s about all.’

‘It’s impossible for anyone to fall off our balcony. It’s more than waist high.’ The voice of the reception desk, sharp with anger and anxiety. A bad business for motels, people falling off their balconies.

‘Don’t... panic,’ I said. It sounded a bit croaky.

‘Todd!’ Sarah appeared, kneeling on the ground and looking pale.

‘If you give me time...’ I said. ‘... I’ll fetch... the Cinzano.’ How much time? A million years should be enough.

‘You sod,’ Jik said, standing at my feet and staring down. ‘You gave us a shocking fright.’ He was holding a broken-off branch of tree.

‘Sorry.’

‘Get up, then.’

‘Yeah... in a minute.’

‘Shall I cancel the ambulance?’ said the reception desk hopefully.

‘No,’ I said. ‘I think I’m bleeding.’

Alice Springs hospital, even on a Sunday, was as efficient as one would expect from a Flying Doctor base. They investigated and X-rayed and stitched, and presented me with a list.

One broken shoulder blade . ( Left ).

Two broken ribs . ( Left side. No lung puncture ).

Large contusion, left side of head . ( No skull fracture ).

Four jagged tears in skin of trunk, thigh, and left leg . ( Stitched ).

Several other small cuts .

Grazes and contusions on practically all of left side of body .

‘Thanks,’ I said, sighing.

‘Thank the tree. You’d’ve been in a right mess if you’d missed it.’

They suggested I stop there for the rest of the day and also all night. Better, they said, a little too meaningfully.

‘O.K.’ I said resignedly. ‘Are my friends still here?’

They were. In the waiting room. Arguing over my near-dead body about the favourite for the Melbourne Cup.

‘Newshound stays ...’

‘Stays in the same place...’

‘Jesus,’ Jik said, as I shuffled stiffly in. ‘He’s on his feet.’

‘Yeah.’ I perched gingerly on the arm of a chair, feeling a bit like a mummy, wrapped in bandages from neck to waist with my left arm totally immersed, as it were, and anchored firmly inside.

‘Don’t damn well laugh,’ I said.

‘No one but a raving lunatic would fall off that balcony,’ Jik said.

‘Mm,’ I agreed. ‘I was pushed.’

Their mouths opened like landed fish. I told them exactly what had happened.

‘Who were they?’ Jik said.

‘I don’t know. Never seen them before. They didn’t introduce themselves.’

Sarah said, definitely, ‘You must tell the police.’

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘But... I don’t know your procedures here, or what the police are like. I wondered... if you would explain to the hospital, and start things rolling in an orderly and unsensational manner.’

‘Sure,’ she said, ‘if anything about being pushed off a balcony could be considered orderly and unsensational.’

‘They took my room key first,’ I said. ‘Would you see if they’ve pinched my wallet?’

They stared at me in awakening unwelcome awareness.

I nodded. ‘Or that picture,’ I said.

Two policemen came, listened, took notes, and departed. Very non-committal. Nothing like that had happened in The Alice before. The locals wouldn’t have done it. The town had a constant stream of visitors so, by the law of averages, some would be muggers. I gathered that there would have been much more fuss if I’d been dead. Their downbeat attitude suited me fine.