Thicker Than Water

"

"I closed it up again, put it back in the shoebox and the shoebox back where it belonged. I was piling up the porn barricade again when out of the corner of my eye I caught a movement from outside the window. Too late now to turn the light off, or to duck down out of sight: I’d just be advertising the fact that I didn’t have any right to be here. Instead I finished what I was doing, closed the wardrobe as slowly and casually as I could, and then turned to look out into the night.

I couldn’t see what had moved at first, because everything seemed still now.

Then, as my gaze panned from left to right across the scene, I finally saw the small figure standing on the concrete balustrade of the walkway on the side furthest away from me. It looked like a boy, far from fully grown, with his shoulders hunched and his head down, staring at the ground sixty feet or so below. He was standing absolutely motionless, which was why he’d been so hard to spot: the movement that had alerted me at first must have been when he climbed up onto the balustrade.

Nothing in his posture suggested that he was about to jump: he might have been waiting for a friend, or for a bus, except for the insane place he’d chosen to do it. But somehow I could see in my mind’s eye how this was going to end: the shapeless, half-exploded blood-and-bone sack that had once been a human being, on the pavement below. I was seeing it as though I was remembering it, looking straight down from the spot where the kid was now standing.

Maybe that flash of false memory galvanised me. I don’t remember thinking it through or reaching any kind of rational decision. I was suddenly caroming out of the bedroom, across the lounge and up the stairs, taking them three at a time. I hauled Kenny’s front door open and let it slam against the wall, heedless of the noise: then I was out through the spavined swing doors and onto the walkway, in all maybe twenty seconds after I’d first sighted the kid standing there.

But once there I came to a sudden halt, uncertain what to do. The boy was still standing in exactly the same place, about fifteen feet away from me, and in exactly the same posture. There was something unnatural about his stillness: anyone in that position, standing over a drop like that, would sway slightly as they unconsciously adjusted their balance. This kid was as rigid and immobile as a statue.