Stephen Kelman - Man on Fire

A great scream like a wrecking ball split the darkness in half, and I fell forwards into empty space.

There was a moment of nothing when I could have been anyone and anywhere. It was beautiful and it made up for every lie I ever told.

‘Lovely hit!’ Jolly Boy shouted, and I opened my eyes. The bat had been ripped in two, the grip end splintered in my hand. Jolly Boy was grinning at me in demented wonder. Bibhuti rubbed the spot where I got him, the bruises spreading over his skin like a wild virus. He looked at himself in grim adoration and slowly shook his head, taking in some obvious and binding truth about his new place in the universal order of things. Then came the smile, and he grabbed me in a bear-hug and lifted me up, summoned Jolly Boy in between us. I was squeezed against Bibhuti’s hard unbreakable body, his son’s adolescent softness. I was weightless. The three of us danced and spun in the rain, laughing at each other, warped survivors of an unreported war.

‘Kudos! What did I tell you, I knew you could do it!’ Bibhuti broke free, took the broken bat from my hand and snapped off the last splinters. Dripping wet and buzzing, he wore the look of some crazy apparition, an elephant-headed eight-armed angel wriggled free of earthly shame, and wherever he went I wanted to go after him. I wanted to see the place where pain runs away in rivers.

‘What did I tell you?’ he repeated. ‘If you can break one bat you can break fifty bats. The method is the same, only the number is different. But you must go faster, thirty seconds to break one bat is too much. You must relax.’

‘I don’t want to hurt you though.’

‘You cannot hurt me, it is impossible. Clear your head of this clutter and think clean. There is no need to worry, we will have a great success. This is God’s choice and we cannot argue against it.’

Jolly Boy wiped the stopwatch dry on the thigh of his jeans. Another laugh dribbled out of me and it tasted like my own religion. The rain was lashing down now. The noise filled me up from the inside. It scoured the colour from the buildings and sent the shutters rattling down on Suresh’s dosa kiosk and the Ayurvedic health centre across the road. Streetdogs settled in under parked Marutis and Hyundais, lumbered to the shelter of quaking palms. The world felt furious and free and we stood there watching it, me and Jolly Boy daring each other to stick our heads out, to stamp our feet and wash our faces. The boy made a run for the open sky. I crossed my fingers and followed him out into the downpour.

I felt the falling rain, let it soak into me. I remembered how far away I was from home. But I wasn’t scared, not like I thought I’d be. I felt nothing but relief.

‘Come. We will rest and hydrate, then we will practise some more.’ Bibhuti dumped the two halves of the dead bat in my arms and stumbled to the stairwell. He flinched when he took the handrail, his moustache drooping at the edges. Jolly Boy looked anxiously to him.

‘Baba, your leg is broken.’

‘Nothing is broken. Your Baba cannot be broken, remember?’

The boy took his father at his word. They left me to stand there in the rain, alone with my thoughts. The neighbours had taken to the streets. They danced around me in circles, faces lifted to the sky in joyful communion. It had been a long dry season and the coming of the rain had triggered something in them. Spirits left the earth and flew.

I still couldn’t believe how I’d ended up here, whether I’d made it happen or let it happen. I mouthed thanks to India for giving me my breath back. This must have been the first time I’d been happy since I died.

Ellen wouldn’t have known what hit her. At the time I thought there was a mercy in that. I thought I was doing her a favour. In the weeks between deciding and going I did my best to keep my excitement from her. We slept on our own sides of the bed. She still made my lunch and I still took it with me when I left the house in the morning for a job I’d already walked out on. Instead of working through the day I’d drive one junction up the motorway and sit in the services putting my escape plan together. I grew my shell there watching the rain trickle down the windows, talking myself into the stubbornness I’d need to get on a plane without her.

I made my pilgrimage to the visa office and emptied my bank account. I bought chewable vitamins and practised going hungry.

When it was time to come home I put my tie back on and turned the key slowly as if I was walking into a stranger’s house.

At night when Ellen went up I’d go out into the garden and X-ray specs the bones of all the animals buried there. The pets of the children who’d lived in the house before us, the orphaned hedgehog we’d rescued from the cats. My pheasant. I hoped the animals I’d known had liked me. Listening to the star music while Ellen dreamed herself a musician above me I’d mentally rebuild the tiny skeletons and clad them with new flesh. I’d blow into their nostrils and bring them back to life, and they’d thank me and go scurrying back into the forest to tell their families who’d given up on their returning that magic still lived in the hearts of selfish men. I’d tell myself I was sparing Ellen a sharper pain to come by getting away while I still could.

With me gone she could be light again. I’d take my weight and my plans with me and in their place she’d put a dance floor where she could swirl unseen and not have to fret about being in anyone’s way.

I made all the bookings and got my travel things together in secret. The house grew cold under the deception I’d laid and every movement of mine through it became fraudulent, head up and shoulders straight for the cameras. I moved the heart-shaped pebble I’d picked her from Brighton beach, to give her something to find unexpectedly and cry over when I was gone. I stole her favourite nail polish, the plum colour she always wore, to have something of hers with me that felt random and meaningful.

The night before I left I asked to put the conditioner in her hair, and feeling it turn from wire to silk I fell in love with her again. I dug the stray foam out of the folds in her ears and kissed her as softly as I could. She looked at me intently, her eyes bluer than I remembered them. I saw myself in them as I’d once been and I saw how much she missed that earlier me. The man who was leaving wasn’t the same man she’d once pinned her hopes on and he didn’t deserve her pity.

In the morning I left her sleeping and drove to a Travelodge on the edge of the known world. I listened to a consumer affairs phone-in on the radio while I ate up the lonely miles. Someone was having a problem with a leaking conservatory door. Someone else couldn’t get the manufacturer to honour the guarantee on their faulty microwave. The host of the show gave his sympathy and promised results. He spoke to them like a parent talking their child down from a nightmare.

I stopped to pick some motorway blackberries, parked up on the hard shoulder with the hazards on. The blackberries were shrivelled and they tasted bitter. I had to spit them out. Nothing much else had changed. The sleeping robots woke up and bent down to see what I was doing. I waited to be picked up by their talons and thrown skyward. The anticipation of it prickled my neck. I was very scared. I’d always been very scared. They let me be. I waved goodbye to them before I drove off again.

The birds were singing backwards when I woke up and I could feel the weight of Mum watching me from somewhere above and the panic of having left something behind. It crossed my mind to turn around, drive back up the motorway and sneak back through the door before Ellen had a chance to find me gone. But it was too late.