“Isn’t this fantastic?” he calls.
She certainly finds it exhilarating — the sound is loud, her position is high and the woodland around her is dense and green and beautiful — but she also finds it unsettling. The balcony on which she is standing seems to be dangerously fragile. Below her, the water moves from rain-specked flow to turbulent chaos as it passes through and under the wheel.
“Is it safe?” She has to raise her voice because of the white noise from below.
“I think so. Take it carefully, though.”
“You are joking...”
“You’ll be fine.”
She moves forward gingerly, feels some give but is reassured that it seems to hold. Just to be safe she clings to the wooden railing that runs along the length of the walkway.
“It’s incredible. Who’d have thought it?”
The wheel is about fifteen feet in diameter and reaches to about the level of their knees. It is in need of much repair and does not move despite the water rushing past it.
“I wonder what it’s for,” she says.
Greg leans over the balcony, scares Gilly. “The axle goes into the side of the house beneath us. There must be some milling equipment down in the basement.”
“Be careful.”
He straightens up, looks across at her and smiles. “It’s perfectly safe,” he says. To demonstrate this he wobbles the railing, making her gasp slightly, eyes widening. This is typical of him, playing the macho man, trying to scare her.
“Don’t,” she pleads, making him laugh.
Turning back to the wheel he says, “I can’t work out why it isn’t turning. It must be stuck. Probably silted up or something.”
This is amazing!
Gilly is for the moment transported. The idea that she does not want to live here is suddenly absurd; this place is a paradise. Greg is right; of course, they must live here, deep in nowhere, surrounded by memories of things that perhaps never happened, enchanted and entranced.
Greg’s phone rings. Although the noise is almost swamped by the water’s rush, Gilly hears it.
She watches him reach into the breast pocket of his shirt, hardly look at the phone as he presses with his thumb, raise it to his ear.
She walks towards him, feeling the balcony giving slightly beneath her feet despite the fact that she is petite and light-footed.
Who’s ringing?
Greg answers the call.
“Hello?”
A brief pause.
“Oh, hi...”
He glances up at her as he turns slightly away, takes a step back...
But then there is a crack for he has not noticed that the wood where he stands has rotted because when the wheel worked the water splashed for decades against the underside of the balcony. He falls through with a scream of shock. His knee is struck as he falls and he is aware of a shaft of pain that skewers into his leg...
His head strikes the side of the house.
Gilly screams.
Gilly’s head has made perfection of her life, yet her life is far from perfect and the foundations of what she has made are already cracking. She watches Greg disappear through the wooden flooring, sees the phone flip upwards out of his grasp and fall in front of her.
Please, no. Please, God, don’t do this to me.
She rushes forward, now even more aware of the fragility of the balcony on which she treads, made fearful by the knowledge of how precarious her own position might be.
The phone is lying between two planks of the balcony, saved from falling into the water by an underlying strut but this is barely registered.
“Greg? Greg?” She half asks this, half screams it as she approaches as close to the splintered hole as she dares, leaning forward to look down through it. What she sees makes her almost hysterical.
He is half submerged in rushing water and she can clearly see that his legs are being pulled away by the strength of the current; but the upper half of his body is caught. He has fallen on to the wheel — fallen partly through it — and is now wedged, splintered beams sticking into his abdomen just below his ribs, between the wheel and the house. The water falls and splashes around him and past him, only just missing his face.
“Greg?” she calls again.
She sees that he is dazed. He has hit his head and there is blood over the left of his face. When he looks up, she can see that he is having trouble focusing on her.
And then the wheel moves.
I remember a curious incident.
It was the good time, the time when I was pregnant and full of joy and expectation — and I mean, “full”, as in replete, filled to bursting, completely consumed by them. This time things had gone without a hitch and we were just awaiting the result of the chromosome analysis...
I had lost my keys to the house and had looked everywhere. Greg’s car was a last resort — I had driven it briefly the day before to pick him up from the station when my car was at the garage — and I came across a savings statement from a foreign bank, one I’d never heard of. It was in the glove box, under some travel sweets.
It said that Greg had saved twenty-six thousand pounds.
I asked him, of course. What wife (or husband) wouldn’t?
He said that it was a tax avoidance scheme, a bolt-hole for money from the business. Not strictly legal, he said, but everyone did it.
He was perfectly natural, perfectly convincing.
I believed him.
“Gilly?” She hears the terror in his voice as he comes to full realization of where he is.
“Greg! Are you all right?”
It is a stupid question.
“It hurts, Gilly.”
He is only two metres from her, but they are metres that stretch to infinity. His voice echoes and the noise of the water is loud and insistent and menacing. Above all this, she can still hear his panic, his pain, his terror.
Gilly can see that he has fallen on to the wheel, partly broken it and then come to rest in the narrow gap beside the sheer drop of the house wall. She sees also that his fall has loosened the wheel, that it is creaking faintly against the rush of the water, that it will soon start to turn and drag him under the water.
The creaking is getting louder.
Turning away from the wheel she looks around, searching for something to stop the wheel beginning to turn, without any ideas as to how she might achieve this. She sees a splintered plank, grabs it, but it is caught by nails at one end.
The wheel moves and she hears Greg scream.
Spurred by terror she finally wrenches it free, then thrusts it down into the hole that Greg has fallen through. It is just long enough — but only just — to reach down between the spokes of the wheel and stop it turning.
The day that they were given the results of the chromosome analysis has not faded into the past but lives with Gilly and always will. The events of the day — the emotions, the things seen and glimpses, the sounds heard and the places visited — revolve around a single discovery like dancers around a maypole, are tied to it for all of her eternity.
The obstetrician was very kind and very calm, the nurse with him even more so, but that counted as nothing when the implications of what he said burst into molten pain within her.
The baby had Down’s Syndrome, probably severely so.
Greg had been with her, had held her hand, but all human contact was detached from her existence at that moment.
The clock on the wall behind the obstetrician’s wiry grey hair had said that it was seventeen minutes past eleven; the calendar on his desk had said that it was the 6th of June.