The Leaping

by Tom Fletcher

  ‘Best moment of my life,’ he says, ‘was seeing a UFO over Scafell Pike.’

  ‘What?’ I say. ‘Really?’

  ‘Well,’ he says. ‘Apart from marrying your mother, of course. And her giving birth to you.’ He glances at me sideways. Kind of smiling.

  ‘Well, I don’t know. I didn’t mean that. I meant – what, seriously? Seeing a UFO?’

  ‘Yep.’

  ‘Why was that so good?’

  ‘Because I couldn’t explain it,’ he says. ‘When was the last time that you saw something that you couldn’t explain?’

  ‘I saw an aeroplane yesterday,’ I say. ‘And I can’t explain that. How it was working, I mean.’

  He shakes his head.

  ‘You know, though, that the aeroplane was built by men and women,’ he says. ‘People. People who understood how the thing was going to fly. What I saw that night, that was different. Just seeing it evoked a feeling, I don’t know how to describe it, it was so strange. I feel like I can’t really describe it using human words, Francis. It was completely other.’

  ‘I bet I could describe it,’ I say. ‘I bet I could describe it now. ‘It looked kind of like a helicopter in the fog.’ Would that be accurate?’

  ‘You know,’ Dad says, ‘I’ve seen a helicopter in the fog. And that thing over Scafell Pike looked nothing like it. I’m telling you now. The sight of it, just the way it looked, placed it well outside our understanding.’

  ‘No,’ I say. ‘You can’t ever know that. All you can ever know is that it’s outside of your understanding. That’s all you can definitely say! That’s what I meant about the aeroplane, see. You don’t know that the thing you saw wasn’t built by people.’

  ‘One day,’ Dad says, ‘you’ll see something. Or hear something. Or feel something. And you’ll know exactly what I’m talking about.’

  Well. That would be nice, I guess.

  ‘You want to stop somewhere to do some watching?’ he asks.

  ‘No,’ I say. ‘No thanks.’

  My parents live in a small terrace on a small road that sticks out from a small village in the Lake District. It’s a pretty nice house, actually. All nice grey stone and flowers. They bought it years ago. When they were younger than I am now. Dad turns off the engine.

  ‘Here we are,’ he says. But doesn’t move.

  ‘OK then,’ I say. ‘Thanks, Dad.’

  I reach back for my backpack and open the car door. He still doesn’t move. He’s staring into space. Literally. His eyes pointing upwards through the windscreen. He gazes absently at the actually pretty amazing starscape.

  ‘Dad,’ I say. ‘You getting out?’

  ‘Yeah.’ He seems to come back. Shakes his head slightly. ‘Yep. Come on then.’

  Visiting my parents isn’t all bad. The house is warm inside. All old wood. Soft rugs. Pictures of farm animals. The wooden floorboards and banisters and skirting-boards and everything else wooden seem to glow orange.

  ‘Hi, Mum!’ I shout through. I take my shoes off.

  ‘Francis!’ she says, coming through from the kitchen. She gives me a hug. ‘You’ve lost weight. Dinner’s ready. Come through. How are you? Are you OK? Is Manchester treating you well?’

  ‘Yes thank you,’ I say. She lets go and turns away immediately. ‘Are you OK?’

  ‘We’re OK,’ she says. She heads back into the kitchen. ‘Of course we are.’

  My mum is called Joan. She is less of an old hippy than Dad. She is quite tall and has long brown hair, usually tied up. In old photos she’s wearing make-up but she doesn’t wear it any more. But then she looks quite young for her age, I guess. Her and Dad should both be fat, the stuff they eat, but they’re both quite thin. Mum loves books by Ian Rankin and Stephen King. She loves music by Seal and Joni Mitchell. She loves Forrest Gump and Robin Hood, Prince of Thieves. I don’t think she’s afraid of much. Apart from maybe something bad happening to Dad or me.

  ‘Throat cancer,’ Mum says, later.

  ‘All the rollies, son,’ Dad says, managing a feeble laugh.

  ‘Cancer,’ I say. ‘Cancer.’

  ‘Should be operable,’ he says.

  ‘Then why the fuck don’t you stop smoking, Dad?’

  ‘Language,’ Mum says.

  ‘Fuck off,’ I say, and she starts to cry.

  I go to the room that used to be my room.

  I have to get home.

  The next day, over a cooked breakfast, I apologise.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I say. ‘I was just shocked.’

  ‘I know, Francis,’ Mum says. Dad is outside. He sits in a deckchair on the tiny patch of grass that is their back garden. Looking up at the sky.

  ‘What’s happening next?’ I ask.

  ‘He’s waiting for the date of his operation. Should be getting a letter any day now. Then he’ll go in, and you know. Get the thing cut out.’

  ‘And that’s the end of it?’

  ‘All being well.’ She smiles at me. A washed-out smile. All being well. ‘Francis,’ she says, sitting down. ‘Your father and I know how you are about all this kind of thing, and—’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘You think about it a lot. You know what I mean.’

  ‘I don’t know if I can help it, Mum,’ I say. ‘It’s everywhere. You know, I circled the word cancer every time it appeared in the paper last week. Just to see how many times. Too many. It’s not me thinking about it a lot, Mum, it’s not me. I can’t help worrying. The whole country is obsessed. It’s natural, though. I just want to prevent it.’

  ‘No, I know,’ she says. ‘But we don’t want it to get in the way of your life. We don’t want you to worry so much you can’t, you know. Get on with your life. That’s all I meant.’

  ‘What? You want me to just forget about dad dying? Is—’

  ‘He is not dying!’

  ‘No, I’m sorry. I know.’

  ‘This is what I mean, though. Always thinking the worst. Fear, Francis. It would be very easy now to be afraid forever. Every little pain or illness. But you can’t. Do you understand me? You can’t.’

  ‘OK, Mum,’ I say, and smile at her. Another washed-out smile. As if it’s not already too easy to be too afraid. I blink. ‘Mum,’ I say, ‘I think I want to go back to see my friends.’

  ‘What? Already?’

  ‘I think so. I think it would help.’

  ‘Oh, Francis. I don’t know.’ She starts shaking her head. ‘I don’t know about that.’ She starts stacking the empty plates.

  ‘As long as I stay here, Mum, I’m just going to be watching him. Waiting for him to start coughing again.’

  ‘I know,’ she says. ‘That’s what I do.’

  ‘I’m sorry, Mum.’

  ‘Don’t say sorry. I guess I understand, Francis. I’ll take you back to the train station this afternoon. Promise me, though. Promise me you’ll be back soon. Come back for Christmas, hey?’

  ‘Yeah, of course. Of course. Thank you, Mum.’

  So I’m back on the small, rural train. Crawling through countryside, towns, villages. Watching the sky get deeper in colour. It’s not that late: it’s just the time of year. Late August. Warm, soft air rises up from the grimy heater running along the bottom of the side of the carriage. It smells dusty. The seats are grey with a pattern of small, green squares. Each is slightly obscured by a smaller, darker-green square. How anybody could be satisfied with the pattern is a mystery. It’s horrible. As I look at it, I start to see cells; I start to see the cells that make up human bodies. I start to imagine them splitting, subdividing, mutating. I look away.

  The plastic casing that covers the inside of the carriage sides – that is, the wall of the carriage – is beige. Sick beige. The train only has two carriages. They vibrate, rattle and shake. Outside it is dark now. Two girls – one with dark-brown hair and a square jaw and the other with light-brown hair and a big, sharp nose – share jellybeans. They laugh. On the opposite side of the aisle, over the textured, turq
uoise, plastic floor, a boy in his early teens sits in a seat facing backwards, so that he’s looking in the opposite direction to the one we’re travelling in. He has very dark – nearly black – hair, and pale skin. He wears a dark green hoodie and black wires snake from his ears. His backpack rests beside him. Portable music players generate an electromagnetic field. Electromagnetic fields, they think, may cause cancer. Behind the boy sits a tall man with a round, tanned, shiny head. He is wearing a suit and forces a mobile phone to his ear with a claw-like hand.

  ‘Yeah,’ he says, ‘in Wakefield.’

  It is quite dark inside the train now. Not dark, but dingy, dim. A woman in a pale blue parka-style coat coughs into her hands and blows her nose. We approach a stop and the boy in the green hoodie stands up to get off. Squares of orange light float across the interior of the train as we pull into the small station. Light that’s made it through the windows. As we pull away, the squares of light are a strange whitish-yellow. Like the inside of a grapefruit. On either side of us now, industrial estates and car parks. Outside. But also, the reflections of the inside of the train are visible in the windows. They travel with us. Like ghosts, in that they disappear when the train passes a light source. But are at their most vivid in the deepest dark.

  Suddenly, a large, brightly lit object appears in the windows on the left-hand side. Descending as if from the sky and approaching our train at incredible speed. My mouth drops open and a warmth spreads up from my stomach and I laugh. I start to laugh. Dad always says that space is so big that it’s stupid not to believe in intelligent extraterrestrial life. I always thought he was just being a fantasist, but now. I press my face to the glass to get a better view of its approach. It’s incredible. Beautiful.

  ‘What’s tha’?’ asks a young boy with a Liverpudlian accent. ‘It’s gonna hit us!’

  ‘A UFO!’ I am about to say. To exclaim. To shout. But his father answers.

  ‘It’s another train, son. Another train on a higher line.’

  The train runs alongside ours. I stare at all the people on it. I wonder what they think of me. A strange boy crying at them from the window across the space.

  JACK

  The local papers were full of the news of the remains found up that back alley, except they were all quite vague about it – they didn’t say what, exactly, the remains were comprised of, or who had been killed, or who the suspects were, or even when they thought the person might have been killed. Which suggested to me that they couldn’t, because obviously they would include all the gory details if they could.

  Kenny, I thought, as I put the paper down, what were you doing down there? What was on your mouth? Could you be connected? I mean, that would have been ridiculous. But I couldn’t let it go. I couldn’t forget the bloody-looking stuff on his face. But what could I have told the police? I saw a man sicking up some tomato sauce? No. No, I didn’t think so.

  ‘I suppose I should go to work,’ I said.

  ‘I’m afraid so,’ said Taylor, sitting across the dinner table. ‘It’s that time again.’

  ‘Taylor,’ I said. ‘You have to tell Erin how you feel. You have to. She told me so in Ice Bar on Friday. She said if you don’t tell her how you feel then she’s going to run off with Graham.’

  ‘I know,’ he said, ‘I know.’

  ‘That bit about Graham, I made that bit up. What’s the hold-up, though? You know she likes you too. She’s hardly going to say no.’

  ‘I guess. I don’t know, Jack; I don’t know. I’m nervous. I’ve never asked a girl out before. She’s just – I just want it all to go right and for it all to be alright and just – right, you know?’

  ‘You sound stoned,’ I said, standing up.

  ‘I’m not.’

  Our kitchen took up the whole basement of our house, and so was pretty big, and it was lit by one of those windows that looked out on to a kind of pit that let light down from the surface. The fridge was covered in magnetic words from the erotic-poetry fridge kit that had been arranged into sentences like TONGUE MY HOT, WET HEART and COME ON YOURSELF, DOG. Taylor would have been responsible for those, probably. There was a row of wall-mounted cupboards, along the top of which we proudly displayed empty bottles that had once contained unusual or unusually strong alcoholic drinks, and there were potted plants behind the sink.

  ‘See you later,’ Taylor said. ‘Might see you in the canteen. I’ll be in at three.’

  ‘Maybe see you there, then,’ I said.

  From the road outside the house, I looked up at Francis’ bedroom window and saw that his curtains were closed. They had been closed since he had returned the day before.

  The sky was a milky-yellow wash, laced with poisonous-looking streaks of brown vapour. Despite the fact that I was walking, I found myself overtaking cars and buses, the traffic so slow it was more or less stationary. The city was clogging up. All the cities were, as far as I could see, with too many vehicles, too many shoppers, too many plastic bags, and the earth, too; I had read that there were only seven years of landfill left. We were filling it up. The closer I got to work, the thicker the crowds got, the denser the mass, the slower the circulation, the wider the mouths. What day was it? Monday. With working shifts, I lost track.

  Looking around the city at everybody with their massive mouths and tiny mobiles and bags of early Christmas shopping, it was as if people traded part of themselves for the money with which to consume and then used that money to fill the vacuum. Especially then, at that time of year, just a couple of months before the desperate frenzy of November and December. Already people seemed laden and haggard, heavy bags stretching their arms. Those people would probably ring me up later, angry about something, no doubt. People liked being angry. They got frustrated, looking for something they’d lost.

  Disillusionment was the primary shaping force of my mental landscape, I realised as I walked through the central business district towards the call centre which lurked like a demon totem somewhere in the middle. My feet carried me surely and inexorably towards the pestilential plug-in point of the desk. Disillusionment was the ice that formed the glaciers that carved out my world. Manchester – the city, any city – was grim, and adult life was rubbish. I missed the forests and rivers I grew up with. I wanted them back.

  The building was one of those that looked quite clean and shiny and impressive until you got close up and saw the grime and graffiti and large, flat planes of dull colour. I swiped my employee card through the little black reader and the LED turned from red to green to indicate that the door was open.

  That switch in the colour of the LED was the point at which the real numbness kicked in, and oh God, I thought, I’m in now, it’s beginning. I pushed open the door and stepped through. I worked five storeys up, and so headed for the stairs.

  There was something organic in the electronic buzz and hum and the complex interactions of the call centre, partly because the carpets and walls were green. It might have been a fresh green once upon a time, but now it was just kind of rotten. And I don’t mean ‘organic’ in a positive sense, like the forests that I used to wander through when I was a child. I mean like we were a half-dead riot of maggots, blind and buried inside a rancid avocado.

  I was sitting at my desk with my head resting on my hand, my fingers holding the bridge of my nose and my eyes closed, trying not to see the CASH FOR CHRISTMAS posters pushing overtime, when I heard somebody running. I looked up and saw a girl dashing past the bank of desks, and my stomach suddenly seemed to be trying to crawl up through my chest cavity.

  She was beautiful, but not the tawdry modern beautiful that was used to describe pop stars or actors or actresses, she was beautiful like I imagined Morgana le Fay to have been: delicate yet severe, wild yet self-possessed. She had long, flowing black hair that streamed out behind her, glossy and gorgeous, held back from her face by a deep red headscarf, and her pale skin was smooth across her even, well-defined features, and the light glinted from three adjacent lip-rings grouped toget
her at the right-hand end of her full lower lip. Her ears were small and sharp and she had red eye make-up on that swept backwards to fill the spaces between her thin eyebrows and her big, green eyes. She wore a black shirt and a lacy, layered calf-length black skirt. She looked at me as I stood up, and then looked away. Was she upset about something? I watched as she disappeared into the girls’ toilets.

  ‘Jack,’ said somebody from immediately behind me, and I turned around to see Artemis Black, the manager of this floor, a big, bald, well-dressed man, with a little black goatee. ‘What the hell are you doing, you awkward dreamy bastard? Sit your arse right back down right now, get your headset on, and wrap your ears around some of our lovely customers. Any more funny business and I’ll have to start thinking about you, and that would be bad news.’ He stopped to draw breath. ‘This here is a job for life, and you’d be a fool not to realise that, Jack. My boy.’

  ‘Yes sir,’ I said, and sat back down, and he smiled, nodded and wandered off, evidently satisfied. I put my headset back on and looked back over at the toilet door, and then I looked back at Artemis and waited until Artemis had disappeared into the maze of desks and whiteboards and raised management platforms. Then I looked back at the toilet door to see the girl re-emerging, red-eyed and pale. She started making her way back through the room. I stood up and threw my headset down on the desk. It was not like me to ignore my boss so decisively, but I could sense that something important was happening. I hurried over to her, through the thick air and in between the overflowing desks, and the closer I got the more nervous I became, until, by the time I reached her, I couldn’t think of anything to say. Not just because of my nerves; close up, her eyes paralysed me.

  ‘Hello?’ she said, after a moment or two of us just looking at each other, and her voice was smoky, dark. I had Artemis’ words running through my head – awkward, dreamy bastard.

  ‘Hi,’ I said. ‘Um. Are you OK? Do you want a cup of tea?’