John Marsden - Incurable

And suddenly, much faster than I would have expected, we were at the top. I broke into a huge smile and bopped him on the head. I felt like the mountains were mine again. I forgot about mangled cats and farm mortgages and war and put my head up and threw back my arms and drank in the sky instead. I ran in zigzags among the rocks and moss and tufty grass, then ran straight until I had almost lost sight of Gavin. Perhaps if Gavin had not been there I would never have come back. The sight of his sad little figure, watching me from the top of the track, didn’t change my mood completely but it reminded me that I was still connected to the world. I couldn’t fly. My wings were working well again but the anchors were holding fast.

I ran back and tackled him and we rolled down the hill a few metres, wrestling and laughing. I really had to fight to get the better of him these days. Just when I thought I’d pinned him he wriggled out and somehow got on top of me and sat on my head. I scrabbled my legs up under me and used my neck muscles to throw him off, then went after him again. I was on my hands and knees. He jumped up and ran straight backwards, with his arms out, like he was fending me off, still laughing, and he went straight over the edge like that, still laughing, still with his arms towards me.

Sickness ran through me. Every spot on my skin prickled, every hair on my head and neck and arms stood, and all the saliva in my mouth and throat dried. I tried to call as I ran forwards, and couldn’t, then realised it was a waste of time anyway with Gavin being deaf. I saw the crumble of fresh dirt, the smear of it, where his shoes had scraped the edge, and only just stopped myself from following him over.

Instead I got down on my stomach and slid forwards and looked down. Jesus! What a place to pick. There weren’t many sheer cliffs along here but this was as sheer as they got. I saw him straight away. He’d fallen, I don’t know, twelve or fifteen metres. Somehow he’d been caught on a bump of earth and somehow he’d stuck there; somehow it had held. I didn’t know what damage he’d done himself but he was still alive. He was lying face down over this bump sticking out from the face of the cliff but it wasn’t big enough to reach even halfway under his body, so he was tipping over it quite a bit. Like someone not lying properly on a sofa and about to roll onto the floor.

In Gavin’s case the floor was a long way below. I don’t know how far, whether it was sixty metres or eighty or a hundred. It didn’t matter. It was enough.

His arms were moving as he tried to find some way to hang on to this bump of earth without disturbing it. Little showers of soil were falling from it, so it wasn’t handling the weight very well. He had a bit of a grip with one hand on a root or something that was growing out on his left, but the other hand wasn’t having much luck.

I stared down at him. I know my eyes must have been the size of DVDs. I could feel how big they were. He looked up at me suddenly. He stopped groping with his hand and gazed into my face. I saw the same determination he had always shown. He always wore it so proudly. Now I saw also his utter terror, the expression of someone who is about to die and knows it. I had one of those little insights you get sometimes, when you look at your friends and for a moment see them age fifty years. I saw Gavin age fifty years, then a hundred.

I tried to make my face mirror only the proud determination in his. My panic would do him no good. I tried to make my mind work. We had no rope, no mobile phone, no walkie-talkie, no helicopter. He was about to die and I would try to reach him and I would probably die in doing so. But at such a moment you have no doubt and almost no fear. Everything becomes completely and utterly focused on the moment. The weather, the view, the picnic, and beyond that, the farm, your friends, your school, your life, none of those have any priority any more. They have no existence.

I slid back a little, trying to think of tools, props, miracles. Nothing, nothing. My eye contact with Gavin, that extraordinary moment of contact and clarity, was over and my mind was starting to race again. I knew I had to start down that cliff in a millisecond and I wanted to do something before I went that would give me, us, some little chance, some tiny hope. I looked at our pack. Roast lamb sandwiches? Not much there. I had to be better prepared next time, except there wasn’t going to be a next time. There weren’t going to be any next times.

I looked around. Already I was backing towards the cliff, thinking I had to get going, I couldn’t leave it any longer. Nothing but roast lamb sandwiches and a bit of salad in the packs, nothing but trees and rocks along Tailor’s Stitch. We had brought nothing with us that I could use and the bush offered nothing either. That’s the way of the bush.

I was at the edge of the cliff, not far from where Gavin had gone over. In a state of complete terror I eased myself over too. What did I know about rock climbing? I knew one thing about this climb. I had no real thought of saving him, of either of us coming out alive. I had some vague half formed idea that I would try to get to him to comfort him, to be with him, and that would be the end of the story. I glanced down. He was still there, thank God. Now he was starting to show his terror. He gazed at me. He’d realised, I think, that he couldn’t move, couldn’t cry out, couldn’t beg, because it would take only a slight movement to collapse the clump of dirt that was holding him. In fact, as he stared at me he did shift a little, and I gasped as a cascade of dirt showered down from his feet. Soon the whole thing would give way. Even so he shifted again. I wondered if he was starting to cramp up.

I did know one thing about rock climbing, and one thing only. I couldn’t remember who’d told me. A teacher at school, I thought. ‘Use the toes and fingertips.’ That was the whole thing. My entire knowledge summed up in five words. Oh yeah, and face into the cliff. More knowledge, more memory was coming back. Something about, ‘No matter what your instincts tell you, you’ve got to face into the cliff.’

My instincts were telling me not to face into the cliff. They were telling me to go down with my back to it. My brain battled with my instincts. My brain said, ‘Someone somewhere has given you good advice. You must follow it.’ My instincts said, ‘You need to see where you are going. If you face out you’ll be in charge of the situation. You’ll control what happens. That’s what you want, isn’t it?’

It’s all about control. It’s always about control.

It took a lot of courage to turn my back on the world so I was facing into the rock. I don’t think of myself as brave very often, but I suppose when you force your instincts to obey your brain it takes something, and you might as well call that courage.

I started down. One part of me was already out of control and that was my breathing. I hadn’t noticed it but suddenly I heard myself, heard frantic squeaking gasps. I tried to stop them. Breathe in, breathe out. I did that three times then forgot about it. There was too much else going on.

I found to my surprise that the toes and fingertips thing worked better than I’d expected. I pressed into the face of the rock with all the force I could, then decided I was overdoing it and eased off. The first part wasn’t too bad, as it was still sloping, but I soon realised to my horror that it was getting sheer. I glanced across at Gavin again. He was watching every move I made. He never made a sound. They used to call deaf people deaf and dumb. I don’t know about other deaf people but Gavin was as noisy as a lost cockatoo. He chattered away all day to himself, and when he was with me and people he trusted he tried really hard to talk properly. The only time he was quiet was when he was with strangers, and then he’d try to let me know with subtle gestures what he wanted.