The motorway bridge goes over the road to Hinton, and that road runs through fields, with a ditch on either side. It’s a lonely road, with no houses or lights. But when we reached it, the sun hadn’t set, not quite.
Approaching the bridge itself, there’s a wide grass strip on the roadside, as well as the ditch. At a certain point, this was scattered with bikes, thrown down any old how, since there weren’t any trees or hedges to lean them against. And not far beyond the bikes, their owners were gathered: kids from our homeroom. Alan Tydman was there, with Rob at his side and Jack close by.
And a little apart from the kids, all except one, was an adult: a real live policeman! The one kid standing with him was Peter Horn.
Had Peter Horn called the police? Had he gotten them to take him seriously? And then the policeman turned round, at the sound of our brakes. There was still enough light to make out his face, and I saw it was Peter’s dad. Peter Horn’s dad was in the police! That was lucky.
We laid down our bikes with the others, and joined the thin little crowd from behind. We stood at the back. If we’d reached out our hands, we could have touched Lydia and Candy, who were in front of us, arms linked. They turned in sync and noted our presence, but that was all. They didn’t make a fuss about Bogsy; they didn’t react to his terrible face; they showed no surprise that he’d come, so soon after the fight.
Everyone’s interest was fixed on the bridge. Only Alan Tydman was making a point of looking away. Nobody gave a stuff about us. It was funny how unimportant they thought we were.
And up on the bridge, where the motorway rumbled, up there, there was nothing to see. This was the southbound expressway side, but the show had not begun. It couldn’t, with Bogsy and me down here. That’s how unimportant we were!
I shivered, and not just with cold. The excitement was catching. I almost believed he was going to fly. I almost forgot boys can’t (any more than pigs). I almost forgot what he was going to do.
Then I remembered and shivered again. I had to stop him, that’s why I’d come. But how was I going to?
How could I possibly, all on my own?
In the pub beyond Burstead, a phone starts to ring. Phones go off all the time, of course, but this one is in a coat pocket and the coat has been hung on a hook by the door. Nobody hears it above the talking and laughter in the bar, so no one picks up. The man by the fire is on his third pint.
A parapet ran the length of the bridge, and was topped by three lines of rails, which now stood out hard and stark against the glowing sky. If he climbed up there and spread his wings, he’d look great. I almost wanted him to.
It was freezing now, on Hinton Road, and a wind was getting up. It came at us through the bridge, which funneled it, giving it extra strength. People were getting restless. Was he enjoying making them wait? I looked at his face, but it was so bruised, I couldn’t tell what he was thinking. (Maybe I wouldn’t have been able to anyway: I never had before.)
Somebody cracked a joke (not a good one) and someone else laughed, but the laughter trailed off.
Bogsy was making fools of them all, but he shouldn’t push it too far. They could easily get fed up and go home.
In the pub someone gets up to go to the bathroom and brushes past the coats by the door. A ringtone is coming from one of them, this person notices. Somebody’s cell, left in a pocket. Could be anyone’s. Pointless to try and identify whose.
But no, it’s this pocket, here, in a coat much bigger than all the rest. It needs a peg to itself, this coat, whereas all the rest have to share. Looks like it was made for a giant.
There aren’t many giants around these days. There’s certainly only one in the pub.
“Titch! Hey, Titch! Phone! C’mere!”
On either side of the bridge, a steep embankment led up to the motorway itself, thickly grown with fir trees. The sun was so low, it was under the bridge, but the sky was so bright under there, you could hardly bear to look away. When you did, the rest of the landscape seemed drab. The fir trees were a solid, dull black. You wished the sun wouldn’t go.
I was so intent on that, I almost missed it.
Bogsy was slipping away! I only just noticed in time. (No one else did at all.) He’d gone from my side.
He’d detached himself from the crowd and was moving back, the way we’d come: leaving me behind.
“Oh no you don’t!” I said to myself, and hurried after him. And when he jumped down in the ditch, I was right behind him, jumping too. He wouldn’t shake me off that easily. Not on his bike at the top of Lark Lane; not now. When he dropped down onto hands and knees, so did I. Because there, in the ditch, with its mouth toward us, was something that looked like a massive toilet paper tube!
A drainage pipe, it was really, stretching away toward the bridge. And it was big enough for a person.
Two.
If they went down on hands and knees.
Him and his tubes.
“What?” says the man in the pub, pressing his phone to his ear and beginning to shout. “What did you say? I can’t hear!”
Now he is standing, he towers over everyone else, even those who are standing as well. He’s huge. He knocks his head on the door frame as he steps outside.
“Now—say again!” Although he’s drunk nearly three pints, his eyes are focused, his mind alert. If he sways a bit, it’s only because of that clonk as he came through the door.
He rubs his head. “Where?”
He can hear much better out here, but he still asks for things to be repeated because he can hardly take them in.
“No! Stay where you are! I’ll go!” he says fiercely. “It has to be me.”
Then he just says, “Jesus Christ!”
He says that a couple more times before the conversation ends.
One of his mates comes out to see if everything’s okay. It may or may not be. On the small patch of tarmac under the sign (which announces the pub as The Bricklayer’s Arms) there is nobody there.
It was totally black in the pipe. No encouraging light at the end of the tunnel this time. No Wonderland. I opened and closed my eyes, to see if that changed anything. It didn’t. The pipe was concrete and cold (though not damp) and gritty. I hoped there weren’t rats. But my main thought was not to let Bogsy give me the slip. He was moving forward, I knew from the sounds, and I knew he wasn’t going to wait if I fell behind. It was scary, not being able to pause or be cautious in that dark. But at least there wasn’t any danger of going the wrong way or missing a turn. There was only one way and no turn to take.
And so we crawled on. The grit and the concrete were hurting my knees. But Bogsy didn’t stop. And after a while my eyes began working. I could dimly see his shape, like a bung blocking out the light ahead.
The light! A soft gray circle (mostly obscured by Bogsy) had appeared.
And I saw something else, as well: He’d got the wings. He must have brought them earlier—perhaps when he’d come out of school before everyone else—and hidden them at this end of the pipe. Now he was trying to get them (and himself) out again, but there was almost no room to move.
The man who’s come out of the pub to check on his friend shakes his head in surprise and looks up the road, then back toward town. Back toward town, a tall figure is running.
“Titch! What’s up? Where you going?”
“Get my car!”
“You can’t, Titch! You’ve had too many!”
The tall figure raises an arm as it runs, waving away the objection—or waving good-bye. His friend, standing watching him go, under the sign of The Bricklayer’s Arms, can’t tell which.
The end of the pipe, when it came, was unexpected. The light couldn’t have been as distant as I’d thought. When we emerged, the sun had nearly gone and the sky was somber. We crawled out into a garbage dump, or perhaps just some stuff thrown out by passing cars. There were takeout boxes with gunk in, and bottles and, weirdly, a pair of trousers. A fox must have been here, too: I put my hand on something slim
y, with bones and feathers.
“Eurghh!” It was half a dead pigeon. The stink brought my stomach up into my throat.
Bogsy paid no attention. He was squatting on his haunches, inspecting the wings. With his knees sticking out on either side, he looked more like a frog than a bird! But no one could see us, down there in the ditch.
Anyway, all the spectators, I guessed, must be well behind us now. The drain had led us past them, to the foot of the embankment.
I saw it all. From here, we would climb the embankment and get to the bridge. He’d planned it well: One of the trees growing up the embankment was rooted in the ditch itself, which meant we’d be able to move from ditch to slope without being seen. And we’d climb the slope, concealed by the trees, and be on the bridge itself before anyone knew anything about it.
Police Constable Horn would be wondering why he’d listened to Peter’s story. It was a hoax and a waste of time. A fairy tale. He’d start telling everyone to go home.
And then we’d appear.
Too late to be stopped.
Too late to get backup.
Poor PC Horn.
And poor me. What chance did either of us have?
I watched Bogsy going over the wings with his fingers, smoothing the feathers, feeling the structure underneath.
Could I be the feather that wouldn’t lie straight? I’d have to act fast.
When he was satisfied there was no damage, he grunted and said (though without looking up), “Give us a hand with these.” It was the first time he’d spoken since leaving Lark Lane.
He gave me one of the wings to hold. I gripped it by its top edge. My heart was pounding. This was my moment.
“Careful!” said Bogsy because I was crushing the feathers.
He got to his feet, but crouching. I got to mine, but stood up straight.
“Get down!”
I opened my mouth to shout, Over here! They’d all come running and PC Horn would apprehend Bogsy.
I closed my mouth again and dropped down beside him obediently. It wouldn’t solve anything, calling for help. He’d only do it again later on, or do something else.
Something big had to happen. Here. Tonight.
And I had to let it. But also stop it. It didn’t make sense.
Don’t think too hard.
The car is trying to maneuver away from where it has parked, on the side of Burstead Road. It touches the car in front, then reverses and bumps the one behind. How is it going to get anywhere, if it can’t get out of its space?
Backward and forward it goes, getting more and more frantic, hitting the cars in front and behind. But slowly, slowly, its angle is changing.
Getting up the slope was worse than crawling through the drain. Far worse. It was dark in among the fir trees because they’d been planted so close together. (That would be to stop people doing exactly what we were doing.) There certainly weren’t any paths, and the trees’ lower branches were so near the ground, there wasn’t even space to stand up. Not that standing up would have helped: The slope was so steep we were scrambling at best, bracing our feet against roots so we didn’t slip back. I screwed up my eyes to protect them, and tried not to yell when a branch whipped my face or cut into my hand.
And somehow we pulled the wings behind us. They’d surely be damaged by this. Bogsy would have to accept that the feathers were going to look a mess now.
It seemed he did. What he minded about was the harness. Whenever it caught on a branch he said, “Stop!” and we had to wait, while he freed it, with painstaking care.
But at last we reached the top of the slope and came out from the horrible trees. They were still a screen between us and the people we’d left behind, down below. But ahead, the motorway roared and the sky opened out. Most of the daylight had gone from it now, but after the gloomy dark of the wood, it was still a relief.
The wings didn’t look too bad, after all, and Bogsy was too excited to inspect them anyway this time. At least, I think that’s what it was. He was constantly flexing his fingers and working the muscles in his jaw. It was weird. It was like he was back in his shed, right back at the start, chewing gum and positioning feathers. But he’d come too far to go back. In the narrow strip of grass between the trees and the rushing cars, I helped him on with his wings at last.
What else could I do? Maisie had said, Trust your instincts. Well, I was ready and waiting to trust them, but they were keeping themselves to themselves.
We had to climb over a barrier and haul ourselves up to a concrete ledge before we could set foot on the parapet of the bridge. And at this point, the bridge rested on the embankment, which meant two things. One: We were still concealed from spectators. Two: If we’d fallen, we’d only have fallen back into the trees. But, perhaps in preparation for what was to come, we flattened our chests and faces against the steel mesh bolted onto the railings. The parapet was so thin, our heels would have hung out over the edge if we hadn’t turned our feet to the side like figures painted on Ancient Egyptian tombs. Bogsy could have been that bird god, if he hadn’t thrown his mask away.
Like that, we edged along, gripping the railings and the mesh. What if a car going over the bridge was to spot us? But no, they all had their lights on; they wouldn’t see anything but the road. If somebody glimpsed a boy with wings, they would think they were dreaming, and stop for a nap.
The wings hampered Bogsy. They didn’t behave as they had in the shed, or even as they had when he’d worn them outside on Halloween night. The wind blew them every which way. And, now and then, it whipped them about so wildly they seemed to have a life of their own. He tried to control them by catching them in his fingers, but he couldn’t do much.
And now the embankment was dropping away beneath us. The bridge reached out into empty air.
“Get to the middle!” yelled Bogsy. He had to raise his voice above the motorway noise.
The people below would see us now, too. Perhaps they would shout. If they did, there was no way we’d hear them. Only a giant’s voice could reach us now. But we couldn’t afford to look down, so we had no idea if they were trying. We couldn’t afford to look down because now there’d be nothing beneath, except the drop, and we couldn’t risk letting ourselves see that.
I never knew fear could feel like it did up there on the bridge. If you think you’re going to die, people say, your whole life flashes before you. Well, that’s not true. Or perhaps I wasn’t at that stage. Because mine did the opposite. My past and my future cut out. What we were doing; why we were here; all that went. The only thing that mattered to me was the present. The present moment. My fingers, clutching the mesh; my Egyptian-style feet.
And I couldn’t think what I should do, beyond carrying on. Hand over hand, shuffle shuffle. Don’t stop. Don’t stumble. Keep going. At least you’re alive. I would have kept going forever, I think, if something hadn’t changed.
My feet felt it first. They no longer had to press in so tight to avoid jutting over the edge. Then my hands felt the railings begin to curve.
The parapet was widening! I looked, and saw we had entered a kind of small concrete bay.
It was there, perhaps, for maintenance workers: a place of safety where they could unpack their tools. Whatever, it seemed we had actually reached the middle of the bridge. The bay wasn’t spacious, but compared to the ledge that had brought us there, it was Wembley Arena! The railings curved inward, around it. We pressed ourselves into the curve and dared to face out and look down. On the crowd. If they were still there.
Far below us, they were. They stood still, looking up. Their faces were lit now and then by the lights of cars on Hinton Road. I couldn’t make out individuals, only Peter Horn’s dad, because he was taller. He seemed to have raised his hands. He was probably shouting.
I wanted to laugh. We were safe! We’d survived! It was like the time in the shed when we’d managed to leave Alan Tydman behind. We’d shaken him off, left him not knowing which way to turn. Only this was better.
It was more than better. In all the relief, I didn’t look beyond it. So when Bogsy yelled, “Ready?” I couldn’t think what he meant.
“For what?” I joked. “Tea?” I could say what I liked, there was no way he’d hear.
But Bogsy was yelling again. “Come on, stupid! Put your hand on my back!”
I couldn’t think why he wanted me to. But then …
Don’t think.
The sun had set.
He was going too fast.
Stepping forward toward the edge.
“Push when I say!” he screamed—and almost immediately after: “NOW!”
And he jumped.
SMACK!
That’s the sound of a car being driven into the ditch. Normally, people will stare at a crash, but the people standing on Hinton Road carry on looking up. The sun is about to set. No one can tear their eyes away from the bridge. Not even the big bully boy, who tried for a while to appear unconcerned. Not even the policeman.
The man called Titch (whose real name is Colin) climbs out of his car and staggers toward them. He looks where they’re looking.
The sun is about to set and, against the darkening sky, two figures are silhouetted. He recognizes one, even at this distance, straightaway. It seems to have wings.
His wife didn’t mention wings. He’s definitely had a few too many. Then again, his wife didn’t go into that much detail. “Get to the bridge!” she screamed down the phone. “For God’s sake! Be quick! If you won’t, I will … ”
But he is too late.
The sun has set.
Up on the bridge, against the sky, the figure with wings has stepped forward and spread them.
The man on the ground holds his head in his hands and groans. He falls to his knees.
And the winged figure jumps.
What did he think, as he fell? As he tumbled out of the sky, trailing feathers?
The Icarus Show Page 13