Jonathan Lee - High Dive

Patrick asks what happened with your father. What happened, what are the facts? The fact your father worked eighteen hours a day in the tobacco factory. The fact he made the move into odd-jobbing around town in pursuit of greater freedom. Plumbing, wiring, checking timber for defects. Shakes, knots, resins. The hole in a brick is called a frog. Preparing the installation of lighting systems; testing equipment; balancing on scaffolding; pushing wheelbarrows along planks; swearing like he was supposed to swear, a manufactured vulgarity that cost him a little of who he was. He was doing whatever he could to get by and to purchase that shabby family home. Someone decided to toss a brick at his head. His eyes became mere things, marbles. A son sees that and what does he do? Tidies his talents into a different channel. There’s more to say but what’s the point in saying it, in going on and on when life itself can be so brutally abbreviated? A random act. Can’t even pick a culprit. System itself is bad. Take apart the system. Dan imagined the tourists outside the hotel coming into this bathroom and gathering around, cameras suspended from treated strings around their necks, special shapeless walking shoes in creative shades of beige, watching him make the timer for this bomb. He imagined them saying, Ah, he wouldn’t have done it if his daddy hadn’t died like he did. Might as well say he wouldn’t have done it if he hadn’t been born. All of us love a single motivation. Saves us from thinking too hard.

Moving pieces around. Keeping the gloves pulled high around the wrists. Fingertips feeling no slackness.

You had to attach your input leads to the left flank of the board. The intention wasn’t to connect them, just to keep the lead wires in place. You had to thread the lead wires into a chosen hole near the input. You needed to connect the wire lead from the RST of your 555 to the board, nice and slow, and then you had to use your jumper leads to connect up the two holes that you’d used to attach the RST and input. You were creating a circuit path with these basic tools, something that connected the pieces, the world shrinking around you to the size of a smoke ring, forgetting that this floor was a bathroom floor, a bathroom floor in an expensive hotel on the south coast of England, a hotel where the Tories would stay for their party conference in three and a half weeks’ time. Form a bridge. Form a link. Get the body of the resistor aiming upward, a needle on a compass pointing north.

PEOPLE SAY DRUGS cause dreams, but during his first twenty-four hours in hospital it was mostly memories that came. People and scenes washed in and washed out, a structure stolen from the sea, and a doctor playing with a twenty-pence piece began offering high-speed advice. Monitoring, lifestyle, myocardial. Nurse, perhaps a cappuccino please? A myocardial infarction, the doctor said, using his two fists to demonstrate the difference between myocardial and some other cardial, saying ‘pop’, saying a heart really looks like a fist covered in blood, saying smoking and fatty foods, saying any recent uncommon exertion, saying physical or mental stresses or family problems, saying in forty-five minutes we’re going to clear that artery of yours, don’t try and say too much in the meantime.

There would be a little screen.

Like a TV screen?

Yes, Mr Finch, black-and-white screen in the theatre.

Call me Moose.

Mousse? As in the dessert?

As in the animal. Animal.

Are you amenable to students being present to observe? Three, four. Picture of a little bonsai tree, really. One little twig shape lengthening, that’s all. But they’ll learn so much from you, they will. Young. Doing their degrees. Going to be fine. Futures ahead of them. Simple procedure. Done it a hundred times. Futures. That and a few days in bed and you’ll be out of here. The rest is really up to you.

His mother telling him at the wedding, and before the wedding, that he was making a mistake. Didn’t listen. Didn’t worry. There was something reassuring about marrying a woman your mother wasn’t convinced by. It underlined to you the fact that you weren’t marrying your mother.

Mr Waldman’s father-of-the-bride speech had contained only one joke — good to get Viv off my hands! — but Moose in his groom speech had the audience roaring, joke after joke about things Viv did and didn’t do, and when he sat down Viv put her hand on his wrist. He thought, She’s proud of me, that was a good speech, I worked so hard on that speech to make her proud. In the corridor five minutes later she slapped his face. ‘Performance!’ she said.

‘What?’

‘Performance!’

He didn’t understand the accusation. She refused to elaborate. If he was performing he was performing for her, for her friends, for a family from whom he’d always wanted more love than he got. It was the first of many times he’d see her pretty neck go blotchy with rage. Not the best of starts. She cried when they drunkenly fucked that night, a bed covered with itchy red petals. He lay awake thinking of words that rhymed with wedding. He thought of shredding. Maybe dreading. Spreading. At times he lamented the fact he’d been born with a somewhat unsubtle mind.

Where was the paramedic with the big blurry nose? Where was Potato the Dog? People so easily swam in and out of your life.

The theatre. Mr Marshall pulling his mask to one side. Mr Marshall saying, ‘You’re about to feel much better.’

His tongue feeling clean. A huge weight lifted from his chest. But weak, still weak, the white lights of the theatre. Bluish smocks and masks. The dreamy creamy space emptying out. Performance. Two students who’d observed the whole thing standing in the corner, solemn, waiting to be told what to do. A distant nurse saying, ‘The boy said he fell on it in the bathroom!’ Distant people laughing. Water. A plastic cup. Performance. Most delicious water he’d ever tasted. Light dimming and his daughter, sleep.

Growing up in Brighton, not yet known as Moose, he’d been told on many hundreds of occasions that he was destined for great things. This seemed like good news. He chose to believe it. He was good-looking, bright, popular, sporty. The idea that his heart would one day falter? That he would keel over before achieving what he wanted to achieve? Ridiculous. Absurd. As crazy as thinking life itself would one day stop shaping itself, however crudely, around his needs and wants. As unimaginable as the idea that he’d one day have such a precocious ear for failure that he’d mishear almost everything else. His heart was healthy, its welfare was secure, its beat was steady and vital and it was — like him — carefully contained, unbothered by the world, a private preciously effective thing that functioned without thought or doubt. Picturing his knowledgeless boyhood self now, he couldn’t help but laugh. The laughing hurt him even more than sighing did. The pain brought him briefly out of a thick half-sleep and made him ask, ‘Is my daughter still here?’ A nurse wheeling him along a corridor told him to try closing his eyes.

His supposed destiny as one of life’s trailblazers took strength from all the occasions when kids his own age, and a healthy few dozen from the years above, chanted his name from the sidelines at football games. It took strength from the huddle of parents who often invited him round for tea after he’d hit a hundred runs or taken five quick wickets. It took strength from the local newspapermen — doughy, tired, deprived of light — who vied to steal from him some quick remark or meaningful reflection on the nature of Talent every time he won (aged 14, 15, 16 and 17) the 200 metres and 400 and 800 metres in the South-East of England Regional Schools’ Junior Athletics Championships. And it took strength (how could it not?) from seeing his own face in the Argus under the unforgettable headline ‘BEST YOUNG SPORTSMAN BRIGHTON’S EVER SEEN’.