Both Ways

Never waste a good sky. I am here, on my back, on the grass in the common. I am conscious of the sounds around me: the rush of wind-blown leaves, children shouting in the distance, what sounds like a small dog barking. Roll your eyes from one end of the sky to the other. To the West, the sun is beginning to set. In the East, the clouds are becoming dark charcoal sweeps upon the blue. Under the blue there is a blackness. The sky sweeps as far as my eyes will go, and further until I can feel it rolling on, thousands of miles beneath me, on the other side of the world. As I revolve here on earth I can feel myself slowly aligning with something. I’m not sure what, but my closest guess is that I am aligning with the way I am supposed to appreciate things, like the sky.
Two kids walk by in red school jumpers. One has long hair and the other is bouncing a football. I know they think I am drunk. On drugs, maybe. Their parents would want them to avoid me. So would I. But they don’t. They come up to me, very close, and I see them from my low angle, I smile as wide as I can.
‘Hey, are you ok?’ says the long haired one, who genuinely looks concerned. The other one is smirking a bit.
‘I’m ok, thank you. Are you both ok? You’re both ok, right boys?’
‘Err, yeah’ the long haired one says with a quizzical and somewhat damning expression in his brow. They both turn and walk swiftly away, and I hear them laugh. They are so lively, I hope that they’re both alright.
I have done this, every time there is a good sky, for six months now. I’m surprised they haven’t moved me. I know it seems strange. I take my problems to the sky, I suppose. Sometimes I speak them aloud, and send it all the way up there, send them floating like helium balloons until they slowly shrink, darken and disappear. It makes me feel better for a little while.
A dark bird, I don’t know which type, cuts a clean crescent in the sky above me. The moon is beginning to appear, and soon my sky will be gone.

-

Freddie was fourteen years old, had two sisters and lived in a small house on a backroad by the river. His two sisters were older than him. They were loud, garrulous and they doted on him. This gave Freddie a quiet and humble demeanour. At school he was perspicacious and funny but lacked any of the sense of competition, duty, or drive to get the grades. He lacked athleticism, so important to boys at that age, and their perception of themselves. He hated sport, and in particular he hated tennis. He couldn’t return a ball, or if he did, he scuffed it bouncing into the net or sent it looping out of the court. He had no control, and no desire to control that ball. He had been made to do tennis because of the Duke of Edinburgh award. You had to do a skill, a hike, an activity, and a sport to get your Bronze. Freddie didn’t care about The Award, either. It was just something his school recommended to enhance your CV and to put in your university application. His mother made him do tennis for his sport because she had a friend who could get him free lessons.
The only upside of the lessons were that they meant he could walk to the tennis courts on Summer mornings, with his ipod on, music in his ears. It was time to himself, which he loved. It was on one of these walks that I killed him. That summer really was a beautiful one, I remember. I remember the breeze, it would arrange itself around you, so lightly. It would hang perfectly off you like silk.
I don’t remember hitting him, just one minute driving and the next him lying there, on the road. He was unconscious. I wasn’t the first to him, a young man ran as soon as he saw, and held his head on top his hands, as if they were some sort of hammock. He was shouting to others, who came towards him from across the road. An attendant was dialing a phone in the Shell Station just ahead of me, three men, smoking, stood up from the bench outside The Crown and darted over, rolling up their sleeves. The traffic had stopped. The sunlight made it hard to see their faces, but they were all sat staring, hands over their mouths. Hands over the eyes of their children.
I took none of this in at the time of course. I only know this through constant revisions of the scene, revisions in court, revisions in prison, revisions at home, when I eat, when I sleep, when I wake.
I remember especially well a woman, who had come to console me in the front of my car. I must have looked sick, I must have looked pale.
‘Hey, are you ok?’ She said, she was tearful.
I couldn’t believe she was coming to my aid. It shocked me out of my numbness, and I burst into heavy, slow tears.
‘He didn’t look both ways’ was all I could say. She held me and I could see past her shoulder. I didn’t see any blood, he looked simply as if he was lying down. Spreading his arms across the road. Freddie had regained consciousness, apparently. People were talking to him, trying to seem calm, comforting.
‘So you play tennis, then? We’re going to see you at Wimbledon then aren’t we!’
‘I bet you’re good...’
‘Please don’t move your head, or your neck, don’t move it. Please. Please.’
‘What’s your name? Freddie, Freddie Wilson? I’ll look out for it at the US Open then!’
‘Do you live nearby, Freddie?’
‘Are you hurting anywhere, no? You don’t feel any pain?’
‘We’re just waiting for the ambulance now, don’t worry.’
I could see his face, he didn’t look in pain, his eyes rolled back to meet mine. He didn’t look upset, or angry with me. Breathlessly, I mouthed that I was sorry, I kept mouthing it, but no sound could come out, I tried to get up, to go talk to him, but the woman held me down in the driving seat.
The traffic behind me starting building up.
This makes me think about every time I’ve been in traffic.
Nowadays, whenever traffic stops, I hope its for no good reason.
I saw the woman who helped me, and some of the people who helped him again in court. They all wore serious expressions but, crucially, none of them were hateful towards me. The woman who had comforted me had her hair cut since that day. She looked the most sympathetic. I saw his mother and his sisters, they were all petite, with long hair and almond eyes. The sisters cried, but the mother simply looked vacant. Her eyes were dark and she had crows feet. I said as little as I could for the whole proceedings, I was in a stupor. I just fixed my eyes on the shine of the wooden panelling. I had never been to court before. Eventually, I pleaded guilty to involuntary manslaughter.
A contrail in the sky just behind me is slowly fattening, bending and breaking.
When I was released from prison four years later, I saw the sky for what it was again. It was so broad, so heartbreakingly immense and inescapable that I immediately went to the common next to my flat and lay under it, staring up into it, as if it might suck me into its cloud formations. They looked and felt like waves breaking over me. It was a perfect sky. In the summer day’s golden light i saw dust motes play chaotically, dust from pieces of earth, pieces of people, pieces of everything smashed together. It warmed me to think that there Freddie was, in a million pieces, flying around me, picked out by beams of sunlight.
I went to see Freddie’s mother some time after I was released. I had walked past her house and considered it often, but only committed to the action after much deliberation with the sun and the clouds. When she answered the door I could tell that she had been smiling about something, there was the ghost of it in her wrinkles, an undying resonance as if it were a note struck from piano in an empty room. When she saw me, though, her face fell. She looked older than she had in court. Hers was a friendly face.
She didn’t say a word, but turned away, leaving the door open. I took this as an invitation to go inside.
I had meant to express my sorrow, give her some idea of how much the regret and shame was tormenting me every day - though I think, now, that this wouldn’t have helped her in at all. She knew this wouldn’t bring Freddie back, and she was too kind to take pleasure in the suffering of even the killer of her son.
‘I’m... truly sorry’
She still faced away from me, walking towards the kitchen, its windows two luminous squares of sunlight. I saw her head drop slightly. She called out: ‘Tea?’
‘No, no thank you.’
I followed her at a distance into the kitchen.
‘Well’ she said, ‘I’m going to have one, because I don’t know what to say to you. So I’ll drink instead.’
The boiling of the kettle, the bright clinking of china, were all amplified to me as I stood looking at the floor. I did, now and again, try to meet her gaze, but it was too strong for me.
She drank the tea slowly and in silence. When she was finished, she put her teacup in the sink and looked at me for a while. She looked sad, but not for herself. She was sad for me.
‘I know you’re sorry’ she said.
I wanted to tell her all that I felt, but I couldn’t. Who can you tell?

-

So here I am then. Lying on the grass. The grass is crushed under my body, it is damp, it is probably going to stain my shirt. Fuck my shirt. I’m telling this to the sky. Out loud, too. I know that I look insane, dangerous. Look to the West, the sun is gone and just a faint luminescence remains, fading a its ventures towards the East. Look to the East, the stars have come out and if you look at them hard enough you can see the shimmering of their impossibly intense heat. Do it- test your eyes because you can. You know, whenever I see kids like those, with the long hair and the football, it hurts me. It hurts me because I see their life, their capacities to think and to move and feel, and I also see them with these capacities removed. It pains me beyond words to look at it both ways. Why didn’t you look both ways?

A train passes with its steady industrial rhythm.

The orange streetlights around the common are switching on one by one.

You never go too long around here without here a siren on the main road.

The breeze fetches me the smell of the river: it smells of sodden wood and rust.

A plastic bag bounces around the legs of a bench, teased by the wind.

Here is that siren now.

A plane blinks its red light across the sky. I follow it with my whole conscience as it makes its course. A straight line across his beautiful face.