Eleven

I think that half turn before I fell saved my life. Without it, I’d have gone straight down – head first onto the rocks beneath. Would you die if you fell down seven or eight metres? Maybe I’d just have broken my neck and spent the rest of my life in a wheelchair, only being able to communicate by blinking.

Anyway, that half turn meant I was able to throw out my arm, and I just managed to catch the edge of the cliff. There was no way I was ever going to stop myself from falling, but my desperate grab at the cliff slowed my fall. It made sure that I slithered down feet fist, crashing and bashing into the rocky cliff face as I went. My head took one big smash on a jutting fist of rock, but I hit the bottom before I registered it, and then there was a different kind of pain.

It’s a funny thing, pain. When it happens, it’s the most important thing in the world – a stubbed toe, a burned finger, a bad tooth. You live inside the pain. The pain becomes you. If it’s bad enough, you’d do anything to make it stop. You’d even betray your friend (or your brother). And then it goes away and you forget it. It’s as if you never had the pain. It must be because it’s impossible to remember pain the way you remember other things. Like a times table at school, or the French for dog, or where you put your secret stash of sweets. That kind of remembering means bringing the things back into your head. But to remember a pain would mean having the pain again, same as before, and that’s not how it is. So all you can remember is how you felt about the pain, but not the pain itself. And even that comes back in a weak way, like orange squash with too much water in it. There isn’t the horror you had the first time round.

So now, when I talk about this, it’s just words – words that I’ve tried to make true. But they’ll never take me back – back to landing on the broken rocks by the side of the stream.

Instead of me feeling the hardness of the fall, I felt a weird softness. I expected an awful jolt as my legs hit, but it was as if I’d landed in sand. In fact, for a second I thought that’s just what had happened – that I’d been lucky and picked out some patch of sand or mud to land in.

Except that I slumped forwards and realised that there was only rock. And that the feeling in my legs was changing. The soft feeling was mixed now with something dark and terrible. It was the sort of feeling you get when you’re being chased in a dream by some faceless monster. But the feeling wasn’t fear in my head but fear in my legs. Yeah, that was it. The pain – a sick, grinding ache – began to grow like fear. A terror in my actual flesh and bones.

I heard a noise above the roar of the monster, the monster that was the stream.

Tina barking. And a voice. “Nicky! Nicky!”

And somehow I managed to shout back, “I’m all right, Kenny, I’m OK.”

But I wasn’t. I’d landed on a narrow section of flat rock and gravel in between the cliff and the rushing water of the stream. My hands were stinging – I’d come down feet first but then slapped down hard. I looked at my hands. It was only then that I realised the phone was gone. Dropped in the river or smashed on the rocks, I didn’t know. One of my fingers was bent at a weird angle. It hurt, but I knew that wasn’t the real problem.

I looked down at my legs, terrified about what I might see. I was on my side with my right leg on top of the left. I flexed my ankle and a jolt of white agony shot like a pinball up through my foot and my leg, right up into my head. I made a sound in between a groan and a scream.

“Nicky!” Kenny’s voice came again. “Nicky!”

I thought about my brother up there on his own, not knowing.

“Just wait, Kenny,” I gasped out, trying to make my voice carry to him. “Just give me a second.”

My right ankle was screwed – that much I knew. But something worse had happened to my left leg, the one underneath. I didn’t even try to move it. The sick feeling came from there. I had a picture in my mind. The kind of broken leg where the bones shatter and the ragged shards of it jab out from your skin.

I thought I was going to be sick.

But then I thought that there would be blood. Lots of blood. And my trousers didn’t look bloody.

So it wasn’t the sort of broken leg with bones poking out. I tried to reach down to touch it, but then another wave of pain came. Not the piercing white icy pain from my ankle but the slow surging fear that pulsed up from the other leg. And it wasn’t that it hurt to move it. I couldn’t. I didn’t know if it was because I was paralysed, or if it was just some deep knowledge I had. A knowledge hidden in the bones themselves, which said “DO NOT MOVE”.

More yapping from Tina. I tried to twist myself so I could look up, catch Kenny’s eye.

But it was darker now. The sky was the colour of the painting water you dip your brushes in at school, the colours all running together to make a swirl of purple‑black.

“Kenny, I’m all right,” I said. “I’m fine. I just need you to do something. I need you to carry on by the stream until you get to the road. And then you’ve got to stop a car and tell them what’s happened. Tell them I’ve fallen down and I need help. They’ll know what to do.”

Well, that’s sort of what I said. It might not have made as much sense, and there was a bit of gasping and groaning mixed in with it, but that was the gist.

It was wasted. There was more frantic barking from Tina, and then I saw something darker moving against the shadows of the cliff.

“Kenny!” I yelled. “Get back! Don’t be an idiot!”

He was trying to climb down. He was a good climber, Kenny. No tree he couldn’t get up. But this was wet rock. Two of us in a heap at the bottom would be seriously bad news.

But Kenny was doing OK. There were hand holds and foot holds in the rock. There were stubby shrubs and bushes growing out of it. Kenny was halfway down, then two thirds down, when one of the bushes sticking out betrayed him. I saw him pull away from the rock face and fall towards me. I thought he was going to land right on me. I thought about the agony that would be to my legs more than I thought about Kenny.

But the climb had taken him a little away from me. He landed with a grunt on his feet and then fell back on his arse.

“Jesus, Kenny, are you OK?” I said.

Kenny sat up and turned to me. He looked sort of funny in his Leeds United hat and scarf.

“Yeah,” Kenny said. “Sore bum. I thought you were … I thought you were badly …”

“I’m all right, Ken,” I said. And then, after a second, I added, “Except my leg. It’s broken, I think. Hurts like buggery.”

I mostly kept bad things from Kenny, but that was when I thought there was no point making him worried or sad. Now I had to let him know that we were in trouble.

And then I heard Tina barking again. She was still at the top of the cliff, going frantic. And then the barking stopped and I heard her small feet scrabbling at the cliff.

“Kenny,” I said. “I think Tina’s going to—”

But she already had. Somehow, she had found a way down, with no more fuss than if she’d just run down the stairs at home.

She came up to my face and sniffed, and then went to my legs and sniffed again. And then she came beside me, turned around and lay down, her body warm against me.