Fell , livre ebook

RedDoor Publishing - Robert Jenkins

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155 pages

English

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In an unspecified time and location,an unnamed boy is living what he feels to be an idyllic life in the faded and peeling Lido where his father is a lifeguard. He idolises his father–never more so than when he saves the life of a suicidal man –and he comes to believe that heroism is all.The arrest of his sister Lilly later that summer brings the halcyon days to an abrupt end, and his family is torn apart, with Lilly sent to jail and the boy set to a boarding house for dysfunctional boys, far away from his home–The Fell. He is young and afraid but the boys in the home become his family and they band together against their enemies, both real and imagined.The boy is an unreliable narrator, seeing the world and his place in it through a unique lens. He meets ghosts, hears voices and battles his fears but never questions his own version of reality. Anger spills over when he hears the girl he loves referred to as a twenty-dollar-whore and his actions lead him to run from The Fell.And run, And run...

Informations

Publié par	RedDoor Publishing
Date de parution	01 septembre 2019
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9781913062224
Langue	English

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,0540€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

Extrait

THE FELL
ROBERT JENKINS

Published by RedDoor
www .reddoorpublishing .com
© 2019 Robert Jenkins
The right of Robert Jenkins to be identified as author of this Work has been asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, copied in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise transmitted without written permission from the author
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Cover design: Rawshock Design
Typesetting: Westchester Publishing Services

For my parents,
For my children,
And for Donna. Heroes all …
Non illegitimus carborundum

One
I see a man hanged himself once, in the trees back of the lido late in that first burning summer after the little circus stopped coming to town with the tattooed Jewish trapeze girls, and after they stayed away it was like loneliness came in their place and later on people would say they had the sight and we should have known.
That summer was like living every day in the embers of a big and hungry fire that burned for ever and sucked all the air out of everything and every breath scorched your lungs so you breathed shallow and it was that same summer my friend Snotty Nosed Chaves went drowning in the canal after he jumped in for a swim and couldn’t climb back out because the sides were steep and sheer and too high and nobody knew. He was no great swimmer and the water was deeper and blacker than it looked and colder too. And that same summer a woman commits suicide down the road walking in front of a train and they raised the fences after that. They said the devil was on the whole neighbourhood that summer. It was airless and breathless and long and hot and perfect but for the flying ants and the dying. They said there were demons over us all like a cloud of flies and some Baptist preacher did the rounds preaching on street corners and even knocking on doors like they used to in the black and white days, but my dad said it was nonsense and he wasn’t scared and he forbade me to be scared too.
I was scared anyway. He said people die when it’s their time or if they go early it’s on account of they make mistakes or get bitten by plain bad luck, like the kid did in the canal, or had no job or good woman or man in their lives, or got betrayed or just lost in the fog of it all. He told me I could pray if I wanted but best not to any god in particular. Hedge your bets, he said, and don’t be scared. No god listens to chickens he said. Chickens don’t have a god. Chickens just get fried he said.
But people dying is an unpleasant thing and by all accounts from what I observed a very random thing and I was properly scared if I let my mind go there. Death was just too unpredictable and always very personal and as ugly as the flying ants that covered everything like tar and drowned in their millions in the cool water of the lido. Every morning we scooped them off in big nets on long poles before the customers came and everyone came there that summer because there was nowhere with cooler shade or sweeter water and it was everyone’s wish all day and all night just to submerge their super-heated bodies in those cool holy waters.
It was my dad cut the hanged man down. The shrill screaming whistle that broke up the air hurt my ears. One whistle blast, the first one, led to others as people joined in the panic. It was like a horde of cicadas from hell were let loose in the still and perfect summer afternoon. Blowing whistles was the alarm signal at the lido and my dad was foreman. It was grown-up professional lifesavers doing something when nobody knew what else to do. They all had shiny chrome whistles and that whistle was authority.
That noise made my spine almost hurt and lit me up with excitement. It was a pure shiver-making, knee trembling adrenaline kick. It meant the ordinary and peaceful was gone and something bad and exciting had come. There was a pause when the lifeguards and swimmers all looked across the water at each other like time and gravity and everything just stopped. I swear I could see their eyes clearly from halfway up the shallow end where I was, which was a long way. Fear and panic. When those things are in someone’s eyes you can see it a mile off. Then someone was running fast and I realised it was my dad.
That pool held one million and two hundred and fifty thousand gallons of water. That’s a lot. My dad said it was one of the biggest in the world but I don’t know if that was true or he was making his job out to be more important than it was, but he ran a full hundred and fifty yards and straight into the small copse before the fence just past the deep end. The deep end was fifteen feet deep, I don’t know what that is in metres or yards, but it’s deep. You won’t hit your head on the bottom even if you dive off the top board, which is pretty high. He ran straight past me and I was shocked at his speed and the power of his body in a fast sprint. I’d never seen him go like that before. I half turned away as he almost hit me. He sure wasn’t going to go round me at that pace. His bare brown feet struck the ground and lifted again like an Olympic sprinter with dust lifting from every footfall. He was wearing little swimming briefs in a spotted print like a leopard and a washed-out orange tee shirt with L IFEGUARD right across the chest. One day I wanted one of them shirts. People respected a man who wore one of them shirts and they were always sun warmed. You could pick one out of the drawer in mid-winter and hold it your face and feel the sun on it. They radiated summer and that’s a magical ability. They even smelled warm.
He went so fast he was almost in flight, his feet hardly touching the ground at all and his arms pumping and boy could he run, and he jumped clean over a lazy swimmer who climbed out of the water like a fat old seal in the sunshine and was stuck on his fat stomach trying to gain his feet, and he cleared him easy. Other men joined in the race and everyone still in the water and on the side stopped their playing to watch and slowly gather to see.
I went after him. I tried to make my feet strike the ground like his, lifting them the very instant they touched the ground and flicking them up behind me and raising my knees high like he did. I was trying to make dust fly. I was slow compared to him but there was a satisfying flick of dust behind me and I looked back and see it and heard it slide under me.
Other lifeguards ran too but not like him. Mostly they ran to be second at the event, to witness history, but he ran to change it. I could tell.
I saw him slow as he passed the first whistle-blower who was pointing and speaking with his voice loud and panicking and his face filled with fear and my dad kind of bounced and pivoted around him hearing all the story he needed, then went into the copse past the pool. I saw him climb a big old mossy oak tree. Just a glimpse through the heavy foliage.
I ran harder but I was so slow and I hated being slow. I wanted to see why my dad was climbing trees. He climbed easy and seemed to almost swarm it like he was rippling up over it and climbing it like a wind climbs a hill. I saw him in those glimpses through the trees and he was fast.
I got there late but soon enough to see a big man, fattest and palest I ever seen, fall to the ground and my dad jump down beside him. The fat man crashed but my dad landed light as a cat. The fat man was so pale he was like a fat and dimply human-shaped candle that had softened in the sun and lost its intended shape. His skin looked like it was made of candle wax too. Old candles starting to yellow. I saw candles that colour at my nana’s funeral. They didn’t look good on a human being and death close up is not like in the movies. Death close up is a cold and heartless hard bastard. Everyone should hate death. There ain’t no sweetness in death.
The man was in swimmers and now he was laying in the dry leaves and acorns that had been there since autumn and winter. Beside him was a rope and noose and I could see how he had tied its bitter end onto the lower limb of the tree and slung the noose end over a higher branch then climbed up and done the deed. His white foot had a cut where bark had opened the soft skin. There was moss under his finger nails where he’d scrambled up one last scramble and blood and skin under his nails too like coils of fine cotton, and deep scratch marks all round his throat where he had fought the choking and tried to take back the hanging and changed his mind or maybe the horror and pain of if made him fight or he saw Death and realised what a heartless cold fucker he is, and I heard my dad say that and he never swore before and I didn’t understand it at first but hearing it made the whole thing even worse. I could see where my dad had cut the rope to fell the man. I knew he had a knife, he always had a knife, even in his swimmers. An old liner lock knife, smooth handled and razor sharp. Older than me. It wasn’t a weapon, it was a tool. And it was a Live blade. A Live blade is like a razor.
The oak was an easy tree to climb even for me and I was no shaved monkey. It was one of the best trees in the whole wood for climbing and always made you feel good even when you was a bit tubby and not much of an athlete like me, but I wasn’t going to climb it ever again. Not after this day and there weren’t no smudge stick witch or bells and blessings could bring it back clean.
The man wasn’t looking too flash and people gathered and looked on with stillness and f