by James Ellis
‘Got a cigarette?’ the girl said.
‘I wish.’
They took a short cut through the children’s park, where the swing hung motionless and a bird sat on a tree and looked down at the passing man and his dog. Otto walked ahead, pulling the lead as far forwards as he could. They came upon the car park and the market. Across the road, a man was working with a hoe along the edge of a patch of grass. Tom and Otto walked down a side road beside the car park and found a wide expanse of shimmering white concrete. Tom unhooked the lead and Otto ran free.
Otto was having fun. Tom lobbed the ball and Otto chased it, taking it farther and farther away, running along the top of a grassy verge alongside a cluster of industrial units. But then he stopped and looked intently at something. Tom couldn’t see what. He waited, calling and whistling, and then he walked along to see what was up. But Otto had forgotten his ball and now he was chasing something.
It was a fox. A skinny, red, urban fox and it ran fast. It ran around the corner and up the car park’s exit ramp pursued by Otto, who was ignoring Tom’s calls. He ran after them, dropping the lead and breathing heavily. Tom wasn’t built for that form of exercise. He was hot and discomforted in his heavy-knit cardigan and woollen overcoat.
They ran up the ramps, zig-zagging upwards until Tom noticed that they were dangerously high – at least, dangerously high for him. They were almost on the roof.
‘Otto,’ he shouted, but his dog was out of sight, barking madly somewhere above. With reluctant feet, Tom walked up the final ramp, came out onto the roof of the car park and walked into the Second Frame.
On the far side of the roof, the fox had somehow got up onto a low wall, a parapet that ran around the edge of the roof; a wall that was below chest-height for Tom; too close to his centre of gravity for comfort. Otto was barking and trying to scrabble up as well. The fox stayed on the edge, six floors up. It made Tom shudder. It made him want to crouch down and hold on to the floor. He wanted to go down.
A fear of heights is a very common thing. It ’ s easy to worry about what mig ht happen but who says it ’ s going to happen?
Up there, up anywhere he supposed, the sky was all around; the big sky, infinite and untouchable. There were no cars parked anywhere, only empty bays and the low wall that ran around the entire edge of the roof, topped with its white concrete cap. Otto was becoming insane trying to reach the fox. Tom could see it clearly: a ruined and threadbare waif; an urban fox living off rubbish. It was terrified, skittering on the edge. Tom couldn’t bear it. He had to do something. But he was scared.
He thought this is ridiculous. People walk around up here all the time. Old people, young people, children, all sorts of people. It was simply a car park. But it felt too high. Tom closed his eyes and walked forwards. One step, then another, and then another. Three steps, four steps, and then he had to open his eyes again.
He was halfway across the roof.
Away from the shelter of the ramp, the breeze blew harder and louder. It pushed and jostled him towards the edge. A bird flew past and dropped out of sight and seeing it do that, seeing it disappear downwards so easily and so naturally, struck a blade of panic through Tom’s heart.
He thought that if he narrowed his peripheral vision and blocked out the wall and the emptiness beyond, and didn’t listen to the sounds of traffic down below, he might be all right. If it was his imagination that was scaring him, then perhaps he could try to imagine himself out of his fear; imagine that he was walking over to Otto, grabbing his collar, dragging him back to the ramp and walking briskly down to safety. He would imagine himself walking outside and looking up at the car park. He would imagine himself joyous with relief.
‘If you imagine something happening, it might actually happen,’ he said. But the wind snatched his words away and his legs were trembling so much that he couldn’t move them. He called for Otto again in a voice that was thick and slurred, and that scared him even more, hearing his own voice sounding so strange. So he made a sudden decision and ran across the roof towards the edge.
Into the Final Frame. This was it.
The wind rippled through his hair and moustache like the parting of a corn field. Close up, the white cap of concrete was dazzling in the bright sunlight. The wall seemed very low and some wayward aspect of his brain questioned whether the safety of children had been adequately considered. He could see the cracks where seasons had expanded and contracted the cement, and layers of acidic bird-shit washed by the rain and dried by the sun.
Beyond the wall was a long drop to distant cars, pedestrians and tarmac, and the hard south London street. He could feel a vast cushion of air between him and the ground and he had an urge, a frightening urge, to lean out and fall into it to see if it would take his weight; to fall into it and get the fear over with; to drop like a stone and create a puff of dust far below as all the best cartoons do; to face his fear by dying.
He saw the market stall down below and a splash of black spots appeared and disappeared in front of his eyes like a firework display in negative. It felt as if bits of his brain were operating independently.
‘Come on, Otto. Come on. Come here.’
His head felt tight, sounds were muffled, and the black spots reappeared, joining up and spreading darkness across his mind. He was malfunctioning. He was fainting. He grabbed hold of Otto’s collar and tried to haul him away but the dog jumped, brutally bending Tom’s thumb. The fox ran along the wall and Otto tried to follow him, dragging Tom with him. He tripped and fell on his knees, shuffled along and then threw himself onto his dog.
I was dragged down and under, with Bullet ’ s massive presence above me; the smell, the sweat, the short-cropped fur devouring me.
Otto wriggled and slipped away, and bounded towards the fox. Tom managed to grab his back legs, shouting with pain as his thumb was bent further back. And then the fox ran back along the wall, past Tom, and he lost his grip as Otto changed direction.
Otto tried to run through Tom and his slab-like forehead smashed into Tom’s mouth and knocked him senseless. Tom staggered upwards, rising to his feet, blood in his mouth, put out his hands to steady himself and found he was leaning on nothing. He was looking at the street below, hanging over the edge of the low wall.
He tried to recover his balance but instead lurched further forwards. Tom’s heavy head looked outwards and down over the street-scene, like an ancient gargoyle, and for a second he saw that other ancient gargoyle his student housemates had once sculpted. But he was leaning too far outwards. More weight was over the wall than behind it. He hoped for a friendly hand to pull him back but of course there was none. He twisted and turned and tried to grab hold of something. Anything.
And then he fell.
His fingertips squeezed the wall and slipped off and he was gone, his legs following him over the side like eels slipping into water. It turned out that it was very easy to fall off a roof. There was no cushion of air to carry him safely to the ground and, if there had been, it would have been too thin to take his weight. Instead, he saw the concrete cap above him recede at speed and felt the warm wind push past him in an upward rush. There were no thoughts and no past life flashing before him; only a tumbling and a reaching out for what wasn’t there.
Epilogue
weekendingnews.com/news/Tooth_Fairy/101031/
Tooth Returned to its Rightful Owner
By Robert de Moor – Tuesday, 12 July 2016
SOUTH LONDON – In a touching scene yesterday, Parks & Open Spaces gardener Peter Hobbes, 28, presented a fragment of tooth to Tom Hannah, the former cartoonist. Readers may remember that, just over a year ago, Mister Hannah was involved in a fall from the roof of a multi-storey car park and sustained, amongst other injuries, a broken tooth. Hannah, the creator of Scraps, has since declared his retirement from cartooning, much to the dismay of his many Scraps fans. However, his new reality game, Happy Family Plus, developed by Borkmann Augmented Realities, is scheduled for launch this autumn and wi
ll feature a completely new set of characters.
Mister Hobbes presented the tooth in a re-sealable plastic bag at the scene of the tooth’s recovery. He said, ‘I was just turning over the soil and saw this little glistening thing. I thought at first it was a piece of chewing gum. But it turned out to be a tooth and I thought, I know exactly who that belongs to.’
Mister Hannah was unavailable for comment but his agent, Gerard Borkmann, said that earlier in the year the cartoonist had been reunited with his dog, Otto, who had run away and been found at a local dog rescue centre. Which meant that this was the second time in 12 months that his client had been reunited with a missing canine.
Acknowledgements
I owe a lot of people a lot of thanks for helping me get this story out of my head and into the real world. Those people include: all the wise, and discerning (hem) patrons who pledged their support and made it actually possible; Unbound, who took me on and took the risk; Whitefox, whose editing rigour and professionalism smoothed out the wrinkles; Mecob, who took the design brief and turned it into something special; the Unruly Writers, who listened without complaint to endless variations on a theme; tutors and lecturers who patiently explained why nested voices might prove tricky.
And, finally, thank you to all those great strip cartoonists whose art, humour and philosophies shaped my world.
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