Short fiction

Fragments/Anabasis

A man, observed by a security camera mounted high on a tower, appears on the Clifton bridge. The man wears flat-soled trainers, dark trousers and a grey coat, rucksack slung over his left shoulder. His gait is steady, and in the camera’s black and white screen his body diminishes as it moves out along the thin walkway.

  The man in the grey coat climbs on the railings of the bridge. Three lads run up to him. He takes a metal clip from out of his bag and attaches it to the fence. Don’t worry pal, he says to the tallest of the three lads, I’m working rope access. He zips open his coat to reveal a body harness inside. One of the lads twitches, eyes the harness, notices a rope is tied to a clip at the man’s solar-plexus. The rope disappears into the rucksack. The man moves off, and with a few swift movements positions himself on the lowest point of the chains. From this point the chains rise gradually in both directions, becoming steeper and steeper, then soaring into the distance. The three lads drift off as the man busies himself with the ropes.

  The man in the grey coat, ascend the chains. He moves some twenty metres back in the direction of Clifton. He works the rope, which traverses in a large downward arc from its anchor point in the middle of the bridge straight up to his chest. The man stands up straight, facing downstream.

  The three lads are by the Clifton tower of the bridge, silently standing in a row along the fence at the edge of the view-point. They see the man in the grey coat lift his hands out in front of him, palms outward, middle and third finger of each hand tucked behind the thumb, index and little fingers outstretched parallel, pointing to the sky.  The man in the grey coats jumps.

  The rope whistles and whips, catching the falling body just before it bottoms out, catapulting the man across the gorge. The swing stabilises into a smooth pendulum covering forty metres. Fluid falls from the swinging man, making oily pools on the muddy water.

* * *

  A man walking a dog is struck by a vision: a figure is hovering just above the River Avon. The figure spontaneously combusts. The dog-walker stops, and stands, removes his sunglasses, rubs his eyes, looks again at the apparition. His dog sniffs around his feet in the winter grass. He can see the dark span of Clifton Bridge, the murky brown water and the steep craggy sides of the gorge. The burning figure is dead central.

  Hey! Hey! the dog walker calls out to a young woman. She glances up, and on seeing him in a trance, turns her head in the direction of his gaze. Her hand, in a rainbow-striped glove, raises to her mouth. She sees what he sees, a burning figure floating in the air just above the slack water of high-tide Avon.

  The flames intensify. A chain reaction is occurring in the general public walking on The Downs; a crowd is beginning to gather by the fence above the gorge. They are watching the man on fire. All chatter has died down to nothing in the bright winter sun.

 Burning fiercely now, he hangs mid-air, his features diminished to an outline. His body is black as the clouds of purged smoke; he is seen in flickers and glances through the dancing flames wrapping round him like a living blanket. His scream de-forms and re-forms itself into fragmented echoes among a crowd still momentarily distracted from their stroll on this sunny Sunday. The entire A4 comes to a standstill. Car doors open, people are getting out. A red-faced child in a stationary pushchair looks up for his mother. Sunlight and firelight shimmer on the water’s dirty surface.

  The sound of sobbing is heard on the air. The odd shout here and there. All eyes are fixed on the burning man who swings gently across the Avon, then swings gently back. The surge of flame can be heard above the idling car engines. Up on the Downs the dog-walker sees a man in a green coat at the bottom of the gorge, running up the A4 through the onlookers, leaping the fence and moving to the side of the river, where he stops and stands motionless, watching.

  The man on fire plummets suddenly into the river, and the flames extinguish. He swims to the shore, where the man in the green coat gives him a helping hand climbing up the wall. The man in the green coat sees skin, peeling off the hand of the other man. They both run to a white Rascal van, idling on the grass verge. They climb inside.

 Are you alright, I thought you were gonna die, did you cut the rope? says the green-coated man to the grey. Grey, breathing heavily yet sitting relaxed and alert in the passenger seat, with the fingers of each hand interlocked in the other and resting on his belly, nods. The knife snapped, I had to pull the reserve. Just get outta here, to the hospital, he says.

  The white van pulls into the now moving traffic. A Police siren pierces the air, fades away, and peace returns to the Avon Gorge.

Mark Doyle