The Old Rope

Stuart had buried his son four times before they reached the lifeboat shed.

Once over the wall, where the path dropped to the stones and the brown suck of the tide. Once under a Transit crossing the road. Once, vividly, headfirst over the bars onto the slipway, the particular wet sound of it. And once into the Tay itself, fully under, Stuart going in after him in his good coat, the pair of them hauled out grey and shaking by a window cleaner who'd downed his squeegee and run straight in. He had attended his own son's funeral, briefly, somewhere between the putting green and the ice cream van, and selected, in passing, a reading.

Thomas, meanwhile, was having the best morning of his life.

He was four days off the stabilisers and he had the thing now, the balance, the wee wobble that turns at the last second into forward motion, and he rode the flat front of The Ferry with his wee back straight and his face set in fierce delight, shouting the score back to his father at intervals. "Daddy! Doing it!"

"You are, mate. Brakes coming up, mind. Brakes!"

There were no brakes coming up. Stuart just needed it said. The way ahead was a minefield, and he jogged it three seconds before Thomas, defusing: the dug ahead off the lead, the old boy with the stick, the gap in the railings where a wee lad could fit, and the dog poo, God, the dog poo, a whole campaign of it, and Stuart plotting his son's racing line around each curl of it like a man landing a plane. "Left a bit, bud. Left. Good lad." Thomas missed it by a mile he never knew was there.

A cyclist came the other way, far too fast, and Stuart saw the whole thing, the wobble into his path, the clip of handlebars, the spin, the boy down, and stepped half in front, and the cyclist went by with a foot to spare and a nod, and nothing happened, the way nothing kept magnificently happening, all down The Ferry front, in the thin good sun.

They passed a man at the wall, lost in his phone, thumb going. A gull dropped like a chucked brick for a chip by his feet, close enough to give him a new center parting, and the man didn't so much as flinch. And Stuart saw it go for Thomas instead, saw the boy swerve, saw the wheel catch the lip of the kerb and go one way while the boy went the other, onto his hands, the flat wet skite of it...

Thomas rode past the gull, who ignored him entirely. Past the lifeboat station. He did not swerve, did not catch the lip, did not go down. He pedalled on, fierce and upright and absolutely fine, the way he had been fine the entire length of the front, the way he was apparently just going to keep on being, fall after fall after fall that arrived only in his father and nowhere on earth.

And something in Stuart, somewhere along the front, simply ran out.

It wasn't a fall that did it, because there was no fall. It was the opposite. It was the sheer accumulated weight of nothing, every catastrophe storyboarded in full and then quietly declining to occur, until the dread itself began to look daft, a man standing in the sun holding his breath against a tide that wasn't coming in. The cinema in his head ran one last reel, the boy in the river, the boy under the van, and then switched itself off, like a telly at the end of the night.

He let the breath go. He'd been holding it, he realised, more or less since the maternity ward.

The sun was out properly now, laid gold and generous on the water, on the low Fife shore across the firth, on the back of his son who was getting, he noticed, a wee bit far ahead, twenty feet, thirty, a small fierce engine of a boy going where the path went, and Stuart felt the old hand reach for the old rope, not too far, mate, and did not pull it. Let him go. Let him have the distance and the wind and the whole shining boring dangerous front of it. The falling would come, one day, some day, and heal, and be forgotten, and the boy would keep the bike. That was the whole of it. That was the deal you signed.

"Not too far, bud" he said anyway, quietly, to nobody, because a dad has to say it.

Thomas didn't hear. Thomas rode on into his morning, upright, delighted, fine.