The Beautiful Fall

by Hugh Breakey

  ‘Now we just make that your home screen.’ With a few deft swipes, the photograph appeared on the screen again. My tumble of feelings in that instant were now frozen forever. She handed it back to me. ‘Done. Vanilla no more.’

  With the phone came the charger. Julie gave me a quick demonstration but again, the whole thing felt intuitive.

  Then we got down to the business of the day, Julie kicking off her shoes and strapping on her tool belt as she surveyed the long ramps I’d attached to the two opposing walls, remarking on the single-file line of dominoes standing one to each little step. The two platforms in the far corners were bound to present the toughest challenge: we’d leave them until later and tackle the easier ones first.

  It didn’t take long before we fell into a routine. Within an hour we had two more platforms up. Then, before embarking on the fiddly job of setting up the connecting ramps, Julie proposed a break for afternoon tea.

  ‘I’m dying for a smoke,’ she said. ‘Why don’t we sit outside?’

  Declining my offer to bring out the chairs from the kitchen, she parked herself on the floor by the balcony railing. The summer sun sat low in the sky, but it had lost little of its force. A breeze tried vainly to stir some life into the stifling heat. Julie lit up, and blew a stream of smoke out at the view. Summer clearly didn’t bother her. I shrank back in the shade.

  She smiled up at me. ‘What?’

  I’d been caught staring. ‘Nothing.’ I shook my head, embarrassed, and busied myself unwrapping the muffin she’d brought over.

  She lowered the cigarette to the saucer she was using as an ashtray. ‘Sorry. The smoke bothers you.’

  ‘No, it’s not that.’

  Julie held me fixed in her gaze, hard eyes under arched brows.

  ‘I just wondered about the smoking. Given you’re so strict about not drinking, I mean.’ I almost bit off my words at the sound of them. Spoken out loud, they sounded judgmental. ‘Sorry. Silly thought.’

  ‘No. Quite sensible really.’ She brought the cigarette to her lips. ‘One vice at a time. That’s all.’

  I nodded, but it struck me as a weird set of priorities. If she was a regular smoker, that had to be more damaging than the occasional drink.

  Unless.

  Unless it wasn’t the occasional drink. Unless for her the drinking had been a real problem. But that seemed unlikely. Julie was only a little younger than me—too young, surely, to be an alcoholic?

  ‘Knock off the worst vice first?’ I ventured.

  ‘Three hundred and fifty-one days.’ She flashed a crooked smile. ‘But who’s counting, right?’

  She fished through her bag and produced a thick metal medallion attached to a jangling set of keys. A puff of pride in the way she held it out for me. My hand dipped with the unexpected weight of the thing. Six months, it proclaimed, with the date engraved into the matt-grey metal. Six months dry.

  ‘I’m almost up to the twelve-month trophy. Exciting stuff.’ Again the mix of pride and irony, as if she was mocking her own sense of achievement.

  ‘That’s great.’

  Julie shrugged. She reached to take the medal back from me and stuffed it unceremoniously in her handbag. Despite her lightness with the subject, as if she could blow it away on a puff of cigarette smoke, I still felt a little honoured. Like she’d let me in on a secret.

  Truth be told, it fitted somehow. Since the minute she’d appeared on my doorstep, I’d struggled with seeing someone so vivid, so charismatic, in such a mundane job. Perhaps I was just naive, but the picture made more sense to me if she was a recovering alcoholic and this delivery job was her way of getting back on her feet. A new occupation. A new apartment in a new city. Rebuilding her life, piece by piece. A surge of warmth flared in my chest.

  ‘Again: what?’ Her eyes narrowed.

  Dammit. Caught staring. Again. I needed to improve my poker face. But then, improvement was the whole point here. To make these mistakes and get better around people. ‘Sorry. I just thought that you seem a bit young to be overcoming serious vices.’

  Her eyes narrowed further. ‘I’m not sure whether that’s a compliment.’

  ‘Oh, definitely a compliment. I just meant that I haven’t lived as much. You have a real history.’

  ‘Alcoholism isn’t really an achievement.’

  ‘No, I see that. But facing up to it, overcoming it, that’s something.’

  ‘Hmm.’ Her mouth tilted upwards in the hint of a smile. ‘Well, by that logic, I’m highly accomplished. I must have given up drinking about a dozen times already.’

  I smiled, taking her point: eleven failed attempts. Still, I envied her that history. Her smoking, not-drinking, myriad piercings, hard boots and fluttering dress: all of those layers announced a life lived, for better or worse. So much more than mine.

  I’d fallen into staring again, but this time Julie didn’t call me out. She turned towards the view and took another drag on her cigarette. For a time, I could just look at her, the bright sun beaming down on her black hair and bringing a touch of red to her cheeks. A web of thin smile lines radiated out from the corner of her eyes, and a narrow white scar ran from her temple into her hairline: traces, perhaps, of the drinking she had given up. None of it detracted from her beauty. The sinews and scars of history—a survivor’s beauty, hard won.

  She stubbed out her cigarette and tossed the butt in my kitchen garbage as the apartment’s cool air welcomed us back inside.

  I explained the new task confronting us. Putting up the next platform, nestled in a high corner, was going to be difficult, and it soon became apparent that it required a certain amount of contortion. Julie’s right foot and my left one had to share a single stepping stone—the outside edges of my sneaker lined up alongside her bare skin like ill-fitting jigsaw pieces.

  Ignoring such distractions, I set about getting the platform positioned, using one hand to hold it in place. With my free hand I held whichever drill Julie wasn’t using, while she busied herself with the actual work. This left my face a few inches from hers, side-on. Her eyes fixed in concentration on aligning the fastenings on the platform. I could see the faint dusting of freckles across the bridge of her nose and the top of her cheeks, lending a blush of colour to her pale skin.

  The quiet of the room and our closeness seemed like the humming before an explosion. An urge to speak seized me; anything to break the quiet.

  ‘I read about their history this morning,’ Julie said, mercifully. ‘I came across it this morning, googling for videos of how other people had done dominoes.’

  ‘The history of dominoes? I didn’t know they had a history.’

  ‘Everything has a history.’ She dropped her weight a little as she drilled the holes under the platform. As her knee tipped forward, it bumped into my lower calf and stayed there, using me as a handy bulwark. ‘I don’t remember all the details. It started in a Middle Eastern town somewhere. Apparently, the place went crazy for the game, and used to play all day long.’

  I tried to focus on her voice. But the closeness of her skin and the soft whisper of the breaths between her words seemed to saturate my attention. It was only willpower that kept my attention fixed on her words.

  ‘Then they wound up getting invaded and pillaged by some warlord. In the wake of the invasion, the town elders blamed the game…’ She paused as the drill surged to life in her hands, once, twice. ‘And fair enough. If the townsfolk had all been watching their borders instead of playing dominoes, and probably gambling on them, they mightn’t have been invaded at all.’

  Up this close, I could make out the individual muscles in her forearms, tensing in rhythm with the drill’s intermittent whine, driving the bit forward into the wood. I dragged my attention back to the dominoes and their blood-soaked history.

  ‘So the elders decreed that no one ever mention the game again. And it would have disappeared forever. But the story goes that one of the young villagers went travelling, and told a stranger about the game.�
�� She took the screwdriver drill from my free hand and replaced it with the one she’d been using. ‘This is where it gets weird.’

  She glanced back at me. ‘For no obvious reason, this stranger got it into his head to write down all the game’s rules on stone tablets. Then he put them in clay pots and buried them. All in different places. A field here, beside a pathway there. Then it all disappears from history. There’s no more record of him, or the town or dominoes. But the pots remained there, hidden away. Can you imagine?’

  ‘No. I mean, yes, I can imagine.’ Of course I could. The pots lying deep within the earth, lost from memory and history, but with all the information still there on the tablets. Not dead. Just lost.

  ‘You fixed in this side, didn’t you?’ Julie started manipulating the platform into place.

  I nodded, turning to pick up our next lot of screws from the pile. ‘The one on the right, yes.’ I stopped. The mental picture in my head didn’t quite gel with what I’d said. Julie was facing the opposite way, meaning that her right would actually be—

  ‘That’s funny. It feels a bit…Oh!’ She lurched forward, her arm scooping underneath the platform as it tilted and dipped away from her. But its weight pulled her forward and down.

  The platform blocked Julie’s view of the floor: she couldn’t see where the stepping stones were. Her feet stayed glued in position, unable to step forward into the unknown and halt her fall. There was nowhere to go but down. Nothing to break her fall except the thousands of dominoes below.

  For a split second, her body’s crazy tilt forward stayed fixed, as if by sheer willpower she could resist gravity. A vision of the jogger incident flashed through my mind. The feel of my hand on her slick, muscled body felt as real as true memory.

  ‘Shit! Little help!’ Julie tumbled forward.

  Her voice sparked me into action. I went in fast and low, one hand catching the platform, the other pushing forward, trying to meet Julie’s torso with a soft palm. Tight muscle met my hand, and her momentum pushed me back and down. My knees and arms flexed, stiffened, held. Julie, the platform and I rocked to a halt.

  Silence. No sound of streams of dominoes cascading out from under us. Nothing but Julie’s shuddering breath.

  ‘Fuck,’ she said. ‘Nice catch.’

  ‘I’m going to push you back up.’ My voice sounded surprisingly authoritative. Like someone was actually in control.

  At first, I could hardly move, the taut muscle behind the soft cotton pressing down on my hand with all her weight. Slowly, I pushed my shoulder forward and Julie backwards, until her weight returned over her centre of gravity to balance on her own two feet. Limb by limb we disentangled, each keeping our precious hold on the platform until we had it fixed firmly in place.

  ‘It’s good now,’ I said, and we each let go. The platform held fast, but heat burned my cheeks. The whole thing was my fault. ‘My bad.’ I turned a little sheepishly to face her. ‘I meant left. My right but your left. That can happen. When you’re facing the other way. I mean, everyone knows that. Obviously.’

  When you’re in a hole, stop digging. I clamped my mouth shut.

  ‘No worries.’ Julie shrugged. ‘Pretty good catch, in the end.’ Her hand smoothed over her top where I’d caught her, pressing out the crumples. She looked around the room, resetting her feet on the stepping stones, and turned to face me. ‘I’m going to explode if I don’t ask the obvious question.’

  I bit back my apprehension. What obvious question? Had I made some sort of blunder that gave away something about my condition? Or—maybe worse still—was it something about how I’d put my hands on her?

  She raised an eyebrow. ‘You didn’t think to do all the platforms first?’

  I blinked.

  ‘If you’d done all the elevated stuff first,’ she said, ‘we wouldn’t have to balance as we rigged the platforms and almost topple over and ruin everything.’ She grinned. ‘I mean, I like the challenge of three-dimensional Twister as much as the next person, but wouldn’t it have been ten times easier to do the platforms first and the floor second?’

  ‘Oh, I see what you’re saying.’ I nodded. ‘No, I had to do it this way. Until all the dominoes are in place on the floor, it’s hard to get any idea of the overall timing.’

  ‘Timing?’

  ‘It’s all about the timing. The spirals you liked, the—’ I fumbled for the words she had used. ‘The whirling patterns. They’re not there to look nice. The way the domino flow spirals outwards alters the timing of their fall.’ I pointed to one of the larger patterns. ‘Longer arms take more time to fall, so the lines flow differently, moving in tides, and then in waves, chasing and overtaking each other. But the platforms are too small to contain large patterns. It’s the dominoes on the floor that shape how it happens. So I had to do the floor first, so that I’d know how the platforms would feed into and out of it.’

  I took a deep breath. That had to be the longest speech I’d ever given to another person. As far as I knew.

  ‘Hmph,’ Julie said. ‘That hadn’t even crossed my mind.’

  ‘Well, it took a lot of practice to get a feel for the timing. I spent weeks setting them up on the kitchen table and then watching how the different shapes and curves and set-ups accelerate as they tumble down.’

  ‘How did you get the idea to look for that? Did you see it online or something?’

  ‘No. That’s just what it was always all about.’ Sometimes the simplest things seemed hardest to explain. ‘It’s not just that one moment you’ve got eighty-three thousand dominoes all standing and the next you’ve got the same number lying flat. It’s about how it happens. The flow and waves.’ I’d never had to put it into words, not even in my own thoughts. It just seemed self-evident. ‘The beautiful fall.’

  ‘Oh.’ She looked away. Down and to the side. ‘Okay.’

  I bit my lip. Having heard it out loud, the idea did sound a bit weird. The letter that set me the task hadn’t mentioned a word about the beauty of what I was meant to create. But the more I toyed with the dominoes in my first weeks, the more I’d begun to play with the possibilities. Now it felt like the most natural thing in the world.

  ‘I should be going.’ Julie shook herself a little. ‘We’ve got that platform fixed properly now, so you should be right with it.’

  ‘Sure, of course. You’ve been such a wonderful help.’ It felt like I’d said too much.

  Julie busied herself collecting her handbag from the kitchen. I tried to tell myself this was the reason I’d wanted her to visit—for me to make mistakes and learn some lessons. But all I felt was stupid and embarrassed.

  She turned back at the door. ‘Thanks for letting me come over.’

  ‘You didn’t finish your story,’ I said. ‘The history of dominoes.’

  ‘Oh, right.’ She smiled and leaned back against the doorframe. ‘Where were we?’

  ‘The dominoes buried in the ground.’

  ‘Right.’ She nodded. ‘Centuries passed. Empires rose and fell. Until a traveller heard a rumour of a buried treasure in the local fields. He set about digging them up, searching for weeks. It upset the locals who were trying to work the fields, but lo and behold, he found one of the pots.’ She spread her arms. ‘And here we are.’

  ‘That’s amazing.’

  She grinned. ‘Think of all the things that had to go right for that to happen. The guy from the town blabbing about it. This random stranger who decides to conserve it all for posterity. The treasure hunter who hears the ancient rumour.’

  I smiled. Half in agreement, and half because things had returned to normal.

  ‘I’m delivering to Mrs Davis tomorrow,’ she said. ‘How about I pop up and see how you’re going with it?’

  ‘Sure.’ I nodded. ‘Definitely.’

  She opened the door, but just before she stepped across the threshold, turned back towards me.

  ‘I liked what you said before.’ With that, she gave a nod, and was gone.

  She
liked what I said about what? The more I ran over our conversation, the surer I became that she was referring to my little speech about the timing of the dominoes. No other answer made sense. She didn’t find it weird; she liked it.

  Julie, with all her complicated history, with all her other-worldly beauty, had seen me, and heard me. And, just for the merest moment, she had understood and responded. A warm glow seized my chest, clamping its hold around me as fast as the rush from any drug.

  The rest of the afternoon passed in a haze. Enough time remained in the day for me to fill one of the new platforms. The work went slowly. My left hand still tingled where it had caught the flat of Julie’s stomach. The nerves in my fingers and palm seemed to have their own memory. Replaying the interaction, revelling in the feeling of Julie’s top as it shifted beneath my hand, and the hard press of muscle under it.

  At last, despite all the distractions, the day’s work was finished. Like yesterday, I switched off the main light and took a moment to look around at the growing edifice before me. I breathed it in, wishing I could capture this feeling for all time.

  The camera.

  For once, this image could be fixed: given a concrete form that could be passed on to my future.

  I took several snaps and then a panorama, taking in the entire structure. I had no trouble using the camera—clearly I had previously owned such a device. The shots couldn’t capture all the details in the failing light, but I didn’t mind. In the deep shadows, mystery seemed to swirl about the strange sculpture.

  The day’s work recorded, I eased my way through the evening chores. Dinner finished without me tasting a bite. Instead, my fingers kept straying to the phone next to my plate, and the photo on its home screen. Julie’s cotton top touching my shoulder as she leaned in towards me. History captured. Memory of that moment nailed down; ready to pass on.

  I tidied away the dishes on autopilot, my mind elsewhere, my attention flagging. But writing the journal could not be done on autopilot. This type of memory took effort.

  I opened the notebook to a fresh blank page and scrawled the first words. Concentration slipped through my fingers like warm honey. The phone beside me kept pulling me back, the picture fading to black after about thirty seconds so that I needed to keep reaching out and touching it. I didn’t mind.