Chapter One

All I could say to myself at that moment, all I can say now in recollection . . . A surface. Hard and cool. It obeyed all the physical laws. I found myself there – not awakening to it as in a dream, but there after a long, real day on buses and trains. I still had change weighty in my pocket, could still taste repetitious pickles and mayo from lunched on burger. This surface - I ‘clung’ to it with the balls of my palms, for there were no fissures in which to insert stiffened, locked up digits. It being completely smooth and flat – platonic perfection – soaring away presumably infinitely in all directions, and set, to boot, at a most unforgiving gradient. Only a little clamminess easing through my pores, once evolved in man so that hunting spears could be more efficiently grasped. Grateful for this alone sticking splayed fingers down. An unweildly body still exerting those instinctive mechanisms it retained from simian or marsupial ancestry. Muscle memory keeping me perfectly still, allowing myself a smile, impressed at such immobility against the odds. For above and behind, torrents, that you could feel lashing against the neck and back, yet silent (there was no sound here). So. . . to try to climb? Or slide? That was the bind - I’d been trying to decide for several minutes, but I’m so . . . indecisive. In truth, of course, sliding the only way. Inevitable. The surface wasn’t wet and slippy - the rain didn’t technically exist. At any rate, only registering on your body, and so most likely psycho-somatic in origin, or else full-body pins and needles, from crouching so long like a petrified cat. In all other respects, feeling completely normal. But where I was - so very steep - I knew, even had I bespoke, sucker cup-soled trainers, that there’d be no purchase and the first flexing of calf or tricep, the most timorous twist of the minutest sinew, and I’d be off, heel over head, downwards, in a spin. Very likely to concuss, or break or worse. When I think of it, the angle (if you want to know) was seventy degrees, so . . . you get the idea. Anybody worth their salt knows if you’re going to be sliding indefinitely, through black and purple skies, and gathering speed always, then you’d best be on your behind. Ankles slightly raised, arms by the side, Olympian luge position. Keep eyes beady and fixed on the vanishing point (though, I might add, that there were no such things here, no topographical markers nor horizons . . . just a sense of gravity, a split-screen tilt between space and surface). And the surface was olive coloured. Even as I cautiously turned the head to better squint below, nothing looming in view. No distant farmhouse, no ‘A’ road leading to more level grounds. But that didn’t mean that five or ten or a thousand miles down, a rusty man-sized spike or tiger wasn’t poised right there on your trajectory, patiently awaiting you to slide down the longitude into open jaws. Fuck it. Anything to get out of this rain, I thought, and on counted three flipped with all four limbs to rotate in the air for a fraction of a moment, then landing on my arse and . . . away! From nought to a hundred and more, aqua-planing down the plane, except no aqua, no water slide ride. Just pristine, olive surface all the way. But as nothing changed, I might as well have still been static, just lying there on my back with wind resistance (phony?) telling me I’m moving so fast. And how could I trust that? The rain had stopped, if it ever had begun. I could be here some time – would miss The Bill for sure, unless somebody taped it. I settled down to hurtling, raised my eyes to the night and began to think about work . . .