Charlie slept, but I didn’t. I stayed awake the whole night next to him. I listened to his breathing, and when he rolled closer to me the warmth from his body made me shiver.
By the time dawn came a full ornithological choir was practising, the songs of each and every bird flying round my head. How Charlie managed to sleep through such din, I’ll never know.
I got out of bed, dressed myself, and departed from the house with my bicycle. I left a note saying I’d gone for a ride, and that I was going to make a flying visit to The Suspension Bridge, over Clifton Gorge. Dark humour has its place sometimes.
My route there was by no means the shortest, but I didn’t care. It allowed me to see some of the places I loved most in the city.
In the dawn light I spied The Shakespeare pub in the periphery of my vision as I pushed off from the house. Many, many nights and notes had been wasted there with Charlie and Jeremy and Marie. In some ways it was probably a bad thing, for my health and my wallet, that we lived right by a pub, but looking back at those good times with my loved ones I decided that I didn’t regret it for a minute.
Around roads and past the local park, and then over train tracks that led either to the station or south, through and out of Bristol. I soon came to the River Avon, the divisionary landmark between the north and south of the city.
Turning left and then right to cross the river I passed Coronation Road, where I had once bought a hand-carved Indian wooden box as a present for my mother. She had been pleased, but had never put it to use. Just over the river was the sixth-form I’d attended as a teenager, and a little beyond that I passed the church from which it had taken its name – St Mary Redcliffe. I’d made a lot of friends in my time at the sixth-form, but I can barely remember any of them now. I really should have put more effort in to keeping in touch with them all. Too late now, though.
Through Queen Square I rode, recalling numerous times I’d staggered past the statue in its centre while drunk, and noticing my favourite tree to piss against at night. It was also here that I met Charlie for the first time, though during the day, at the annual Harbour Festival. He walked into me and knocked the drink from my hand, though never realised the full outcome of our physical contact and merely gave me a quick apology over his shoulder. I’m pretty sure he doesn’t remember it at all, and I’ve never brought it up. So far as he’s concerned, we met at a music festival in Cheddar.
After exiting the square, I continued on past the fountains of the city centre, the Hippodrome theatre, Bristol Cathedral, and College Green, noting them all as places I’d never really spent any time, until I came to Park Street.
Park Street was iconic in this city. Near the city centre and littered up and down with shops, clubs, cafes, and restaurants, its name was virtually synonymous with that of Bristol.
Near the bottom there used to be a famous Banksy piece of a naked man hanging out of a window while his lover’s husband leans out to look for him. And once, one summer when I was younger, an artist set up a functional water slide that was three hundred feet long down the street. Huge crowds of people amassed to watch the slide being used by the lucky few hundred selected. I forgot to go look that day.
A quality of Park Street to consider when cycling is that it is both quite steep and quite long. I had always tried to avoid riding my bike up it, usually opting to get off and push it on the pavement. Today I decided to give it a go, seeing this hill as the last test. If I couldn’t make it up, I wouldn’t follow through on my plan. Panting all the while as I practically crawled my way up, I was grateful for how few people were out and about so early in the morning. I would have been pretty embarrassed otherwise. Still, I made it to the top, glancing at the museum to my right as I slowly continued on towards the Clifton Triangle. Although I’d not visited it in years, I had a variety of hazy memories of going round that museum as a child with my family. Like most kids, I’d adored the Egyptian exhibit the most. The reasons why elude me now. A lot of reasons for a lot of things have eluded me for a long time.
Around the Triangle I went, turning left, and shortly thereafter right at the roundabout to go past the Victoria Rooms, where in my first year at sixth form I’d attended a talk by the founder of Wikipedia. The best advice he could give on students using Wikipedia as a source of essay information was “don’t”. I seem to remember him being quite charismatic, though my memory of the talk is hazy, like most of my memories.
I continued along the road, stopping at the traffic lights by the old location of the BBC broadcasting house, only to suddenly realise how dumb I was being. Why was I obeying traffic laws and looking around for cars to avoid? Safety shouldn’t matter to me anymore. As the light changed and I pushed off, I thought about if a car or a huge truck were to smash into me right then. How mangled my body would be. How I might bounce across the tarmac to stop as a mess of pulp and blood, barely recognisable as human. That inhuman appearance appealed to me – it would match my feelings of never having really been a person. But I didn’t want to put my death on someone else. I didn’t want other people to have those images of gore burned into their minds every time they closed their eyes. I didn’t want someone to feel too terrified to get behind the wheel because of damage they’d inadvertently wreaked. It wouldn’t be fair for me to wish for that. It definitely wouldn’t be fair for me to try and organise such an incident. I rode on, still taking care to be as safe as possible.
I had thought of Park Street as my ultimate physical challenge, but that was because I hadn’t considered Whiteladies Road and Blackboy Hill. Most people assert that the names relate to the slave trade, but both actually are derived from old pubs in the area. Nobody ever believes me when I tell them, though.
Whiteladies was a long stretch of incline that taxed my already burning lungs and weary legs. I wasn’t a bad cyclist, or particularly unfit, but I was never good at pacing myself over distance and often ended up with a steep oxygen debt screaming for repayment, as was happening now. I pushed on and on, wheezing and sweating like a pug in the sun, until I felt like I was about to pass out. This is killing me, I thought, to which I then laughed. Well, wheezed with slightly more intensity. The irony of my temporary self-preservation pulling my lips into a smile, I steered over to the edge of the road and dismounted. Still gripping the handlebars of my bike, I bent slightly as I gasped for breath and waited for my head to cease swimming. When collapsing seemed like less of a possibility, I decided to walk the rest of the way up the hill. It wasn’t far now, I’d made it most of the way up by pedalling. The rest of the way should be easy once I reach the Downs.
The Downs brought up many good memories for me, mostly with Jack Winstead. A friend of mine some thirty-nine years my senior, in the time I knew him he was always in an electronic wheelchair due to cerebral palsy. We would meet on the Downs to fly his kites, which he expressed more adoration for than anything else. I saw them as an expression of the freedom he wished for, away from his chair, but perhaps that’s not a fair analysis of how he felt about his condition. I could easily be putting words in a dead man’s mouth.
While flying kites we would talk about all manner of things from personal to trivial. His two daughters would sometimes come up, but the more common topic was my family – my mother, my sisters, and their children, all of whom he loved as much as if they were his own blood relatives.
I learned much about life from talking with Jack. Nothing that can be put down on paper, but after every encounter I came away feeling a little more knowledgeable about something, whether it be myself, other people, or the way of the world. His wisdom was won from the many battles he had faced in his time alive, supplemented by more than a little natural genius.
There was a moment where I paused at the top of Blackboy Hill to look over the stretch of grass that was Clifton Down, but quickly mounted my bike and headed left down Upper Belgrave Road, away from the memories of my beloved educator.
I was nearly at the end of my journey. Aside from the Bristol Zoo Gardens that I sped past, there was nothing more for me to see until I made it to the bridge. I was never sure on how I felt about zoos. For some animals they are a necessity for surviving and breeding. For others, it is merely a life of captivity. Plus you always hear horror stories about the disgustingly poor treatment of animals. I suppose that probably depends on the zoo and the keepers, but still. I can only hope that the zoo in the city I spent my entire life in takes care of its animals appropriately and humanely. That would be yet another taint in my already marred childhood, otherwise.
Just after the Zoo I turned left and then immediately right, passing under a brief canopy of trees before coming out again into the cool morning light.
After turning right down Observatory Road and then right again, the bridge was in sight immediately ahead of me.
It was still early in the morning. I’d seen few motorists or pedestrians in my journey, even though it had taken me over half an hour. The air was very still.
I dismounted, and pushed my bike forwards and locked it to a metal railing before heading to the pedestrian path on the south side of the bridge.
Part way along the bridge, I paused. I looked around at the cliffy sides of the gorge. The shallow, muddy waters of the river below. The trees, and the city, and the cold blue sky that surrounded everything. I looked down at the ring Charlie had given me, fit snugly on my finger. Solemnly, I tugged it off, rested it in my palm, and stared some more. Finally, drawing strength from the steel resolve I had felt two days before in making my decision, I knelt and placed the ring on the ground at my feet. With it I placed my wallet, already emptied of everything except my driver’s licence facing up through a clear plastic window.
Standing, I pulled out my phone and selected Charlie’s name from my contact list. The call went straight to voicemail, as I knew it would – before leaving the house, I had turned his phone off. I left him a message, almost something of an explanation for what I was about to do. I didn’t know if he would understand, though. I barely understood it myself. What I told him was one explanation of many possibles, each as plausible as the next. But this one involved him, my lover, so it seemed the right one to share.
When I was done, tears were welling in my eyes. My voice had cracked a few times as I’d spoken, as it often did when I was upset, but I had managed to say what I had wanted to say clearly enough. The phone went on the ground with the ring and the wallet.
It was time.
There were suicide barriers on the edge of the bridge – wire fences to make the task of jumping more difficult and so discourage those acting on impulse. Apparently they had proven themselves successful since their introduction near the end of the previous millennium, reducing the amount of jumpers by about half. I was concerned, but not dissuaded.
I looked around, checking if there were any cars on or approaching the bridge. Two were just driving off in the direction from which I’d come, but none seemed to be coming on. I grabbed part of the barrier, pulled myself up, and slowly, carefully, swung one leg over and then the other.
My jaw was clenched so tightly I didn’t think I’d be able to open my mouth again. Adrenaline coursed through me, feeling like a flood consuming my being beneath the skin. My thoughts were chaotic, a battle of fear and determination that almost made me forget where I was. My hands were getting sweaty. I wondered if they’d slip.
Suddenly, there was the sound of a car horn, and someone shouted. I don’t know what they said, but instantly I knew what I should do. I was already heading out the door, my back turned to the world left behind. There was no returning now, and I shouldn’t give this witness a chance to try to force it. Silently, I let go.
Terror assaulted me like the wind that violently rushed past my body. Everything I’d felt the second before vanished. I didn’t want to do this. Of course I could have returned; the only thing stopping me was my own shame for what I was doing. I regretted jumping, instantly and completely. I didn’t want this to happen. I did not want to die, not anymore, not like this. I thought of Charlie, my lovely, loving, lover. I didn’t want to leave him. I wanted to be with him, to be his, forever, and tell him every day that I loved him and that he was all I ever needed in the world. Inside, I begged for him to stop me falling. I begged for him to catch me. The thought took over my mind: Charlie will catch me. Charlie will catch me. Charlie will catch me.
Charlie will catch me.
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