The Falling
A MEMOIR
Book Sample


PART ONE
the falling

Every text has a shadow.
Michael Harlow, 1999

♦♦♦♦ My name is Robert Hale, or, if you’d prefer, my name is Alan Loney. Or, my name could be any that any of us could choose. If all of us die, and if kings and paupers are the same in death, as the wisdom goes, then what’s in a name?

For the moment, however, my name is Robert Hale. I am 14 years old, and the train on which I am travelling is falling through the bridge that has opened up beneath us. It is Christmas Eve, at 10.21 pm, December 1953. The river below us is in flood, the water turbulent beyond local memory. The falling seems to take forever, and I am unable to distinguish the screams of others from my own. It is as if the world has suddenly reconstituted itself as a scream. Just that. A scream that has been there forever, is everywhere present, and will go on forever, even though ours will be cut short in the next few minutes. Lines from a very old poem, ‘How should I love, and I so young’, come to me, unbidden, like an affront that will not be denied, yet totally beside the point, alongside it rather than instead of it— why? But here my mother is beside me, and like me she is beside herself also, as others are beside themselves. The ancient Greeks had words for it. Ecstasy, ek-stasis, outside the stillness of what is. Or ek-thesis, when a paragraph begins in what we now call a hanging indent, outside the body of the text. And that is exactly how it seems, how it feels, outside the body, a body no longer one’s own, yet there has been nothing in my short life so bodily intense as this. Every fibre of my being—how astonishingly does a cliché like this make itself known at a time like this—is screaming. Each cell in the body, each muscle, each bone, each limb, is a mouth open to the infinity of life and death in the affirmation of the scream. In a few seconds, my mother and I will die our separate and our communal deaths.

The bridge that has broken the thread of our journey is Tangiwai, River of Tears, and the river that rages below to receive us is Whangaehu, Turbid Waters. All at once, the clear water and the dark water have joined in this one, deadly, life-affirming, open-mouthed and utterly inarticulate moment of death.

♦♦♦♦ What I hate most about this falling is its slowness. Not that I want to speed it up. But the slowness has a kind of vertigo in it. A kind of slow sickness that does not quite erupt into anything. It doesn’t happen, yet it threatens to happen in or throughout each aching, stretched-out second of the descent. It seems I have all the time in the world in which to see and think on everything around me. I am out of the seat, yet without any prospect of landing anywhere else for an eternity. Glass has shattered beside us, and just hangs there in the air, a thousand little knives that will end up embedded in everything, but now in nothing. It all moves and does not move, and my mouth gapes in my poor attempt to take it in. I can see everything with total clarity and I cannot comprehend a single item of its information. All the things in the carriage have become redistributed somehow, as if one would not be able to recognise that this was indeed the carriage one was travelling in. If I had gone to the toilet and returned, I would be bound to think that I had entered the wrong carriage, turned left instead of right coming through the toilet door, it was that unfamiliar. It will end soon enough I am sure of that. I am sure also that there is something about it that will go on forever. What it is I do not know. It simply feels that way. Forever, at this lightning speed from the familiar and the safe to the alien and the treacherous.

The unknown is both what happens next and what happened to get us here. I’d not thought of that before. We assume a sort of absolute dividing line between death as an ‘unknown’ and life as a sort of ‘known’. And here I am, about to die, and I have no idea whatsoever how I got to this position. If I had been ill for a period of time, or had seen a car coming down the road toward me, or knew that I was getting very old, I’d have something to go on. But there’s nothing. My clear and unerring reality right now is that I have nothing to go on. And never will have again.

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