Extract from “Fearless Flying Apartment People”

 

When I was a young kid I knew I’d never grow up to be an apartment person. Such dizzy heights were beyond my comprehension. On Sundays, when mum and dad—usually after a heavy night of drinking—used to take me into the city, I’d stare up at the apartment people’s abodes, soaring way up into the sky, with their neat little balconies thrusting precariously into space. Imagine, I would think, with a mixture of envy and awe, to be sitting up there in the air like that, perched on one of those thin concrete ledges.

I asked mum: “How could they do it?” She thought I’d meant afford it and replied: “They have lots of money.” But dad picked up on what I meant—I think he’d always had a fear of heights; you should have seen him on the suspended escalators in the hyperdome. He always stood in the middle and stared dead ahead. He never once let his eyes wander to the sides and that awful drop below. “They’re fearless,” dad said and then, as if not to contradict mum, added, “wealthy and fearless.”

Sometimes you hear things funny and when you hear things funny you understand things funny too. So I didn’t think that ‘fearless’ sounded like it had anything to do with ‘fear’. It sounded like a completely different word to me and I imagined it had something to do with flying, which explained to my fresh young mind why apartment people could live up so high. It didn’t matter to them if their balconies cracked and fell apart one evening while they were eating their dinner; they’d just fly away as the concrete rubble came tumbling down into the street and all of us below ran and ducked for cover. It all seemed to make perfect sense at the time, and that became the fact of the matter for me for quite a while.

Later on I grew up like all the other kids. I’d been hoping I wouldn’t, thinking I might somehow have got lucky and become the first kid ever who lacked the growing-up gene. Yeah, well, maybe one day there might be some kid who does get lucky and finds he doesn’t have to grow up, but sadly that kid wasn’t me. So, despite the hoping, I grew up and eventually got myself a job in an office on the thirteenth floor of a city skyscraper. I guess I must have inherited dad’s fear-of-height gene because the idea of working on the thirteenth floor filled me with some trepidation. Apart from riding on the escalators in the hyperdome with mum and dad when we went shopping on Sundays, the highest up I’d ever been was climbing the old Poinciana tree in our backyard. I only did it the once, and it was an experience I’d never care to repeat. Going up was easy. It didn’t worry me none; I made sure I never looked down as I was climbing, but once I was up there on the tallest branch, I was clutching it for dear life, totally unable to think of how I was going to get down again. Other kids—the sort that couldn’t wait to grow up—would have been hollering out their triumph for all the neighbours to come look see, but not me. I still don’t know how I got down from the top of that tree and, to this day, I can’t understand why I’m not still up there.

 

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