Victories

I counted ten inactive streetlights on the roads between the Bainbridge house and the pharmacy. I didn't have a good reason for counting them, there was fog and rain flying over the windscreen so the patches of darkness stood out more when my headlights probed the denseness of the air. I suppose the temporal inconsistency of the night had brought on these odd observations. I felt like I'd been waiting an hour when I parked up in front of Lyle's house and texted him that I'd arrived, but from there to the edge of his neighbourhood I felt time shoot by, only to have it fall back to a creep again once I pulled out onto the main road.

All of which is to say that I remember having some odd feelings on this particular night. With Lyle poking around in my head and nature clouding all my other senses, I didn't expect to have such a vivid moment of clarity. There's an analogy there, I feel.

"I've told Janet that you're my girlfriend now," he said as we drove down Richardson Road. It always made me cringe when I heard people call their parents by their first names. Lyle explained that calling a person by anything else would be submitting to their power, giving them a title that they'd done nothing to earn. But it still made no sense to me.

"Why?" I asked.

"I doubt she'd have let me out for any other reason. She thinks I'm depressed."

"You are depressed."

He seemed to scoff at my comment. A kind of titter that I knew had initiated a sort of discussion in his mind. He was thinking about how ignorant I must be, and was probably firing off a chain of clever quips at his imaginary driver in her imaginary car.

"Janet lives between bottles of whisky and painkillers. There's no view of the real world from hers, so she can't say shit about me or anybody else."

He was definitely depressed.

"My Mum thinks I'm okay," I said. "At least I think she does."

"Maybe she just doesn't care."

"Yeah, you might like to think so."

"She doesn't think you're a failure?"

It was my turn to sneer. "My mother keeps my trophies and paintings up on the living room mantle, I hear her stop in the hall when she walks past my room when I'm practicing violin. She doesn't think I'm a failure." I paused for a minute as we passed the park where Jenny had cut me. I felt the steering wheel necking under my grip.

"So she's not a problem, then."

"The only problem is the forced character of our world. She tells me that every day is an accomplishment. Every song I learn is an event, every test score, every volleyball game I play, every act is an achievement. It's all wrong. It's all forced. I want some truth."

"I hear that." He grinned at me, his swollen eye somehow allowed his brow to arc up and let him smile. The pleasure was authentic and it made me think my mind was in the right place.

I didn't notice the Band-Aid on his left ring finger until we got to the first pharmacy in New Windsor. He reached into his back jean pocket for his wallet and I saw it right there on his dark digit. It looked like it had been there a while so I should've already noticed the gash, it wouldn't have helped anything to ask him about it now. I started to notice the rest of him after that. I saw his unironed button-up shirt under his hoodie, the black covered the brown which was sort of how his eyes appeared under his round brow and fading bruise. He'd seen better days. We both had. When I looked at myself in the visor mirror I hated what I saw.

Japanese girls looked nice with short hair, but they also looked good in short shorts and tight tops. No cleavage, but plenty of bust. Those girls had parts to show off, tight thighs, sweet smiles, perfect test scripts. I was tall, lean, and clever, but I hadn't smiled in weeks. I didn't know I had a hoodie, but I found a pink one in my closet last week and it had quickly become my favourite jacket. It was just what I needed. It allowed me a sense of hiddenness, a way to just disappear. At any moment I could hide myself away, but the feelings of hollowness came in force whenever I saw myself in the mirror. I would have to wonder how I came to be here. To be in this place. To look like this person.

I parked and switched the car off so the only sounds to be heard were our breathing and the rain. Another moment that seemed to hold for longer than the dashboard clock dictated.

"I've got this one," he said, reaching for the door handle.

I nodded and turned to track the water on my window.

"We're still doing this, right?"

"Yeah," I answered. I didn't want to focus on him at the time. I suppose it was silly of me to call this a personal journey when I had this boy with me.

"Isla!" his voice was lower than a shout but it still shook me.

"What?"

I was totally aware of how aloof I looked but I figured I was allowed to be. I reasoned that I had copped enough shit to be allowed to draw jail-bars in the clouds of my window. I had earned the right to decide whether or not we drove in silence or to a soundtrack of my choosing. Then again I only had my mum's Dolly Parton CDs in the glove compartment so I think we were both happy with silence.

"We chose this," he said. "And you know why."

I didn't know how to describe him when he got like that. What to call his manner. Sententious, maybe.

"Yeah, I know. Just go. Hurry up."

He exhaled slowly and sucked his teeth a couple times. It was a habit that only his dedicated incursion had made natural. Like an actor whose character slowly bleeds into them, filling the gaps in their persona when the world shoots their resolve full of holes.

#

He shoved his door open and rushed to the shelter of the shops, pulling off his hood when he entered the pharmacy. I looked through the clear bars I had drawn in my window at a dark, smoky world that seemed so peaceful. A surrounding silence fell on my ears like the infinitely sweet voice of some God. No judgements, no filtering through the throat of some holy man, just the awareness of my own existence and my own loneliness. It was such a lovely moment, being so close to the universe, a palpable nothing beyond my own plane.

But I could only enjoy the silence for so long. I guess the universe doesn't like having people peeking over its fence. I inevitably slid back to the things I hated. The things that had filled my mind for the past few weeks. Malignant memories.

I thought myself a resolute young woman when I caught Jenny up about that shit she had written online. She pushed me, I pushed back, her friends held me down and let her lay into me. I came back at her the next day and cracked her face on a water fountain. Then her crew found me, took my plat, and left me a giant scar across my collar bone and a cut at the top of my right cheek. When I puffed up my cheeks and looked down I could see it. I did not need a mirror to remind me it was there, it just hung at the edge of my sight. I stopped myself from making too big a metaphor out of that fact. All the artsy bullshit I left to Lyle. It seemed to be his thing.

Lyle's return was celebrated by the car's interior lights and the rush of rain that came as he set himself down. The suddenness of it made it dramatic, which in turn made it apt. He showed me the two bottles of cough medicine he had bought and tucked them away into the brown paper bag. I stowed them away with the pill bottles in the duffle bag behind my seat and heard the rattle of the spray cans. We'd bought these last week when all of this had been just an idea. The thought was that we would paint truths on Robert and Jenny's property. Show who they really were on the walls of their houses and the doors of their cars.

But our plan had gone way beyond juvenile vandalism at this point.

With a deep breath I shifted the car into reverse, pulled away from the pharmacy, and drove down and around the corner. I had just shifted to third when Lyle demanded that I stop.

"Pull over! Now!" his tone was tired yet strong. He spoke like he had expected me to know what he was thinking, like the ideas he pulled out of his arse were vivid in my mind too.

I did as he said, switched the car off, and looked to him to see what he wanted. We had a plan, a script, and it was quite unalterable.

"What?" Our plan required focus. It was already difficult to keep myself from straying with all these observations throwing themselves at me. I noticed the temperamental orange lamp above us was jumping between a lively blaze and lethargy, giving definition to the island droplets on the dashboard before wiping them out like a pacific tsunami.

"Pass me the bag," he said. His face looked eager when I passed the bag to him. "The threads of our lives should grow more vivid toward the end."

I sighed with a tired rolling of my eyes. "Overdramatic."

"There's no such thing as too much drama," he stated.

I pulled down my hood and followed him as he took off into the rain.

"Yes there is," I mumbled.

For all its needless theatricality Lyle's new idea was quite interesting. We each took a can and traced a long dark line on a wall behind the shops, drawing a sort of knot with whatever shape was in our mind, before ending with a long streak and leaving.

This was an idea I had expressed to him when we had both started high school. I scoffed at the concept of fates, but was quite taken with the prospect of the threads of life. I imagined an infinity of wires, shaped by the push and pull of the world, overlapping and tangling with each other, and then fraying at the end. The thread was historical but without meaning. Undefined. Beautiful.

The light tapping of rain hid the tune of our work. The fog obscured everything across the road outside the alley. For a moment I forgot that there were other people in the world. Were it not for the sucking noise he made and the clatter inside his can I would've thought I was alone.

We left long dark threads at all the sites we went to. Chemists, dairies, liquor stores. It felt so liberating. There was freedom in every pattern I drew, the long hiss of black particles and the rattle that built the pressure was like the song I had always wanted to write. Sometimes I thought the shapes were random waves of my arms marking a wall. But I was confident that one wire had Jenny hanging from my lifeline, and another read: 'Fuck Gina'. I was so sure this was the path for me. So completely sure.

#

It was at a basketball court beside a primary school in Mount Roskill that I first considered abandoning this endeavour. Time had resumed its usual rhythm when I parked up and the night time showers had hopped off for a smoko.

The street split up at the court, one path went to a main road where a bridge rolled over the motorway, and the other led to a dead-end at the base of Mount Roskill. This was a street of simple living. The kind where the kids knew each other and actually played outside. Where the vans parked out on lawns were half swallowed by weeds. Come New Year's these places would either be totally empty or a parking lot for families. I'd never really been to these places at this hour.

Lyle found a basketball in the boot of my car so we played a little game. We joked and tossed shots from all over the court, jiving and dribbling to the songs that came from somewhere down the cul-de-sac. He mocked my odd leap as I went to throw but I rarely missed so he couldn't tease me too much. Whether or not this was a distraction for us or a final act to be performed, I didn't know. I guess it could've been both, but I didn't say anything. I was content to play this game with my friend.

We were maybe fifteen minutes into playing when I pulled off my hood because I was getting hot. It felt strange being so open. There was still the lingering veil of fog, a natural hood that hid me from the empty street. But I became more sensitive to the elements than I had been before. I was suddenly introduced to the night chills. The wind blew past my neck and hair, whispering something behind my ears and tickling my face so that my cheeks raised and my scar came into view.

I put my hood back on.

Another ten minutes and the game was ended, and we resigned ourselves to the swing set on the playground beside the court.

"Hey Isla," he began.

"Hmm?"

"Have you got your violin in your car?"

I shook my head and stared at the lines my feet drew in the bark. "Why?" I asked.

"Ah, it's nothing. Just thought that I'd like to hear you jam. Strings always sound so beautiful. Calming and all. Perfect thing to tie off our lives with."

"Songs to go out too." I smiled. "I remember talking to my mum about this a few years ago."

"Oh?"

It was a lovely night. My mother had been drinking and I'd been practicing for a performance I had coming up. She is such a pleasant drunk.

"I chose Undertango by Astor Piazzolla. Figured I'd go with something cool."

"What'd Anne say?"

I grinned at the memory of her telling me her favourite song was one of mine.

"She asked me to record myself playing this piece I wrote in Year 11."

"Cul-de-sac Fire."

"Yep, that's the one."

"That's cool. I wouldn't mind drifting away to that."

I felt my face drop and lose colour. "That was two years ago. Back then... back then she said that you wouldn't get to pick which song you faded out to." I felt a tear leaking out from the edge of my eye. I turned away from Lyle and wiped it away, scowling at the feel of my finger on the scar. "She said you should just be happy that you get to hear a song as you pass. Even if it's a stupid rap song."

"Yeah," Lyle laughed. "She would say that."

"But now." My lip was wobbling, almost as much as my voice was. Lyle put his hand on my shoulder. I breathed deep and swallowed hard. "Twelve months." It came out as a whisper. "She's got a year."

Lyle offered some consoling words but I didn't hear them. People don't hear you when you're saying what they know you're going to say. I think that's why Lyle didn't hear much of what anyone said. It's not easy talking to a depressed person.

My mother would get to hear me play as she faded out, she would choose her last song. And I wasn't ready for that.

We set about our work and drowned the court in black scribbles. We could barely tell where our lines were without any light, and no one else could see us with the fog, but they would know in the morning. Everyone would know.

"Thanks for this." Lyle gave me the widest smile I'd seen from him in a long time. I wondered if it hurt his eye to do that. "I appreciate you being here... with me."

"Moments like this make me think about staying alive," I half joked.

#

Having bought all our pills and cold remedies we found ourselves on another quiet street beside the same motorway at a row of shops. Lyle was inside the liquor store while I posed with my backside on the car and a cigarette between my lips, sucking in the fumes that I had absolutely no taste for. This wasn't rebellious nor dream-fulfilling, I didn't even like smoking. It felt like another forced habit that people partook of. Something that you heard had some meditative quality. That tamed your appetite.

But every drag I took was like a middle finger to the future. My eyes would not end up like the ones in the picture on the pack, I would simply drift off into darkness. No feelings about the things I would miss. No conscious realizations of my body degrading, no coughing or wheezing, no carcinomas or lung x-rays flecked with white. I had the ultimate choice.

I looked off down the street to a couple of blocks of flats behind a bus stop near the motorway. Despite the mist, I could make out some of the features of the place. It had a low wall to separate it from the footpath and a dirt driveway between both blocks of flats. They looked cosy. Quiet. Somewhat remote. The shadows of a family of ducks crossed the street and passed behind the brick wall. Heading home.

Two small silhouettes appeared from the flats and made to cross the road. Their movements were innocently erratic; the leader was quite stout and rotund while his companion followed behind with a syncopated gait and a step that seemed to be led by its hips and shoulders. They were children, a boy and a girl. Both with darkish brown skin and clothes that looked like their parent's old hand-me downs. They wore the creased and stretched shirts of already grown children, discoloured to a degree that only time could affect. Danger Mouse faced me on the boy's shirt with his trademark eye patch and one faded eye. I don't think they still make those shirts.

The girl was much bubblier. She would lose his pace every few steps and then rush up to meet him, chewing on a quartered apple and swinging her shoulders so that her sleeves flung about her tiny arms. They couldn't have been older than seven.

The boy nearly bumped into Lyle but my friend stepped out of the way with a box of Steinlager.

"Sorry, G." The boy took a moment to eye up my black-eyed friend.

"Sorry," said the girl. Her smile was wide eyed and toothy and her fingers were shiny with her own saliva.

I smiled as they passed us and headed into the dairy on a night time chore.

Lyle set the beer down in the passenger's seat and opened me a bottle with his key chain accessory. We sat for a moment in silent reflection of the night. Our threads had wound around many neighbourhoods. Lyle had lifted me up onto the roof of the Three Kings Plaza and I had drawn a pulse of my lifeline on the Countdown sign. He had dashed out of the car as we passed Jenny's house in Royal Oak and sprayed the back window of her Acura Sport Wagon black. And now we had arrived at this pleasant little street to cool off. I figured that we would find ourselves behind these shops with our cans later.

"For whom the bell tolls," said Lyle. His tone was droll, carrying a pack of dramatic words that begged for a reply but offered no right way of doing so.

"The song, the book, or the meditations?" I asked. We had hardly gotten into our bottles but I was trying to make some leeway.

"The ideas." His face peeled back from the bitter taste. "Fate. Camaraderie. No one is completely remote. We are all of one body no matter how sequestered we feel."

"Oh. Right. What about that?"

"Just... I can hear the chimes in my head, now. A resounding clang of some metal that's thick with eighteen years of rust and neglect. And it's me. Me and you."

"Okay..."

"And I've been... you know... you know when you're doing something, and you don't recognise that it's the right thing until you're a ways into it? Like, you haven't fully understood the thoughts that drove you here. You didn't think your ideas would fit so well."

"Confirmation."

"Yeah. That."

"What about it?"

"Well... I- We are on our way out. And you're the only other person... who.... who's gonna care that I'm gone. The only other continent that'll see me drift. And I'm... I'm flattered." His throat seemed to convulse as he downed a good half of his bottle. He cringed like he was trying to keep more than his beer down. "Thank you, Isla. No man will diminish at my death, and the one person whom it will wound is coming with me. A clean break."

"A clean break."

An image of my mother flew into my head. The way she looked at me when I'd left for the evening. Her bandana only made me look at her head and the hair I knew wasn't there. I'd been so miserable when Jenny took my plat, but I was shattered when my mother came out of the bathroom with her head so bare. And she just forced a smile. She said this was just a part of her life now and she was proud that she had the will to go through with the treatments. Another achievement. And I didn't know what to say. Just like when I left her this evening. She smiled at me and I pulled the door shut.

It was going to take a lot to get her off my mind.

As the murky world was about to engulf me I heard a ruckus break out and crash into the front of my car. In my daze I hadn't noticed Robert approach from behind. I didn't feel Lyle leave my side or hear their confrontation. But I heard the bang of Robert's back on the bonnet of and the curses Lyle spat from his clenched jaw as he collared his opponent. Robert was taller, his back left a long imprint in the steel at the car's fore, and his arms stretched far beyond my friend's. His huge hands sculpted around Lyle's engorged eye and tried to peel him away .

Their bout went on for a long while, but that might've just been my internal clock rebelling against reality. Lyle took a good few punches to the face when he was pushed up against the parking sign post, but he did manage to throw his weight around enough to knock Robert off balance. My friend had his arms swinging in every direction, catching skin with his knuckles and drawing blood at Robert's lips and nose. But he looked to have lost himself for a moment when Robert shoved him back and knocked his temple into my driver's side window. His head dangled from his shoulders as he knelt to gather his mind.

"Get up!" Robert growled. Streaks of his own blood on his sleeve and my friend's on his hands.

I decided now was the time to move. I dashed around the car and yanked hard on the collar of his Spanish brown, bomber jacket. Blood rubs right off those. Robert went stumbling backward and I rushed to pull Lyle to his feet. His already injured eye was leaking blood.

"Move!" Robert was headed our way with speed.

I wrenched the front door open and winded him. The mirror rattled, obviously off its hinge. I reached in to my bag and found a can of paint. I'd never used mace before and it seemed bizarre that in self-defence I should be using toxic paint particles. But I pressed down on the tip and let loose the pressurised coloured vapour. Robert caught it right in his eyes. His face spawned a black mask as he spat, flailing his arms in front of his face and falling hard on to the footpath. Rolling and writhing at the pain of the tiny intruders I'd let into his eyes. I imagined the stinging for a moment and winced as a phantom itch festered above my scar.

There was little time to think after that. Lyle regained some strength and stole the can away from me. He stood over the boy he hated so much and painted his face a frostbitten black, laying down an overlapping thread on that concrete, desperate to make Robert's eye as black as the boy had made his. I had to pull him away at the end. The sound of his curses and Robert's wailing was drawing the attention of the shopkeepers. We got into my car and pulled out of the parking space. I had to pull my eyes away from the boy and girl who stared at me from the dairy's entrance. The little girl's apple pieces were browning on the ground.

#

Lyle seethed all the way to the school while I navigated the streets in silent reflection. I counted every street lamp on Carr Road because they shot out of the fog with so much intensity.

The forever-lingering mist. Stalking me like my own vaporised perspiration.

I parked up at the Primary School and we both got out. I'd refrained from looking at my friend for the entire journey here. I had heard him sucking his teeth in between sculls of lager, along with the incessant whining about what a bastard Robert was, and the sharp scowls that came as he put a hand to his many cuts. But just then, in the last minutes that I would ever see him conscious, I saw that he was too far gone. The state of his face was worse than it had ever been. His eye was beginning to re-blacken, his lips were cut and bleeding, his nose was open at the bridge, and his whole body felt tense. An ebbing fury had suddenly rolled further than it was ever meant to and there was no way of it flowing back.

"This is where it ends," he grunted. His teeth flashed red and he spat.

My friend was a ruin. In that moment I saw a broken boy and a dying woman with a bandana in the mist. This world was too much. So much forcing. So much pain. It was unnatural.

"I know the plan," I told him. We spilt the medicine and the beer, I took the bag while he filled his pockets with as much as he could carry.

"Meet at the stream by the turf," he said.

We embraced each other. His arms crushed me with residual indignation and I clutched back just as hard, mostly in fear. He stalked one way and I went the other, but I took a moment to watch him go and saw him downing pills by the handful, washing it all down with lager. I took a swig from my own bottle to calm my shakes.

I seemed to float across the Primary school grounds in a tired reverie. My old classrooms, the playground, the newly painted-on asphalt that marked the places where I used to play with Jenny. Sweet memories. So strange that they would come to me at such a time. I downed the rest of my bottle and tossed it across the field but it didn't shatter like I wanted it to. Nothing happened like I'd planned.

I told myself all those things I had been saying for the past few weeks. They came through tragic whimpers that had no chance of boosting my resolve. My faith in this journey was fading quickly. I jammed pills down my gullet and tried to put down a stroke of black but my can was dead. I shook it with all the strength I could muster, like this needed to happen. Like I needed to do this despite myself.

Several more pills fell down my throat.

In frustration I tossed the paint can to meet my beer bottle on the field and tried another. Not even my most vigorous shaking could make this can speak.

I took another lot of pills and collapsed at the basketball court of the intermediate school.

I wasn't even crying. I was snivelling and everything else but I couldn't bring myself to cry, I was too out of touch to even try and force a tear. My prayer had done nothing. Having grabbed a beer bottle from my bag to try and numb myself I realised I had no means of opening it. I tried banging the lid on the wooden beams that held up shelter at the edge of the court but it wouldn't work. The corrugated iron above me boomed low with every strike of my palm on the lid, but all that noise didn't help me get to the drink. In desperation I tried prying it open with my fingers, but the jagged metal started to dig into my callouses and I knew it was useless.

Then I saw myself in the reflection of the school hall window.

I froze and stared at my form.

My jeans and hoodie were smudged with residue of the paint I had spread around town, and my hands were affected in a similar way. Chemical patterns that told the story of my night. It played like a film on the cloud around me. All the driving, all the streetlights, the little girl, the fat boy, Robert, Jenny, the basketball court. It all wound back to that moment in the car at New Windsor. The loneliness. I hadn't seen myself all night, but now I realised I hadn't seen myself in a long time.

My bottle slipped from my grasp, halving on the concrete and splattering onto my denim. The field lights behind the hall diffused through the mist to give me a blurry sun to stand under. The air danced around my neck and my hair ebbed around the shore of my scalp, smothering my scar and raising my cheeks. But I could already see the scar in the mirror. It ran from my eye and curved away from the base of my nose.

I wanted to see the rest. I unzipped my hoodie and tried to quickly get it off, fumbling with the damp sleeves that I refused to look at because I was so enthralled with the colours that were me. I tore open the top two buttons of my shirt, peeled back the bandage, and approached the mirror, giving definition to the scar that tore from my shoulder to my sternum, rounding as it crossed my right breast.

I was alone in that image on the building, surrounded on all sides by a fog that hid the rest of the world. Everything but me. All the threads that I had woven into the town were supposed to represent this? This intricate fabric of my form. My plan was to draw Pangea at this place and not even that idea was original. I thought It'd wanted it's foetus form at my death scene. But I'd just learned that I didn't believe that people were all of some continent anymore. Lyle saw it as truth, that we were all one, a family named humanity. But was that true?

I left my hoodie and my bag on the ground and walked out into the car park of the Intermediate School. I just needed to move. To see the low cloud give way to all the things around me. The trees at the edge of the car park, the lights that stood high above the hockey turf, the sound of the rushing water passing under the small bridge at the edge of the school. I stood on that bridge, looking down on the water streaming under me and my hand went into my pocket for my phone.

"Hi Mum." For some reason I was whispering.

"Isla." She whispered with me, albeit a bit more concernedly. "Are you all right?"

"Yeah, fine. How are you?"

We spoke for a long while, my mind ran in real time because I remember checking my phone and seeing that it had been an hour long call. The pills I'd taken some time ago were starting to take effect and my mother began to notice.

"Have you been smoking, love?" she asked.

I was sitting on the railing of the bridge watching ducks float. Giggling like an idiot. "Yep. I took some pills too."

"Oh, Isla." She gasped. "Why?"

"Because I was gonna kill myself tonight."

I heard the sound of her choking and a series of loud claps that meant she had dropped the phone. I giggled again.

"Goodness, Isla! Where are you?"

"It's okay," I hummed. "I mean, it took like three hours, and so many pills, and a half-arsed striptease in a school window, but I figured out that I'm not suicidal."

She let out another anxious gasp.

"In fact, I figured out that... like... no one is suicidal until they actually go through with it. And I'm so not like that. I love you Mum."

She sounded relieved. Though I'm not the expert on how you're supposed to interpret gasps and long exhales through a phone.

"Where are you, darling?" she asked. "Are you with Lyle?"

"I'm at the bridge at my old Intermediate," I laughed. "Did you know that Lyle told his mother that I was his girlfriend."

"N-no, I didn't." I could hear a ruffling under my mother's voice. "Listen, love-"

"Gross, eh?"

"Listen. I want you to wait right where you are, okay?"

"I'll wait right here."

I had every intention of parking myself right where I was and waiting for her. She'd be quick and we'd hug and this episode would be over. God, I wish that'd happened.

But then I saw a shadow riding the current down under the bridge. At first I thought it was a huge duck. In fact I kept thinking that until I saw his shoes. My heart sank and my inebriated mind froze. My mother was saying something through the phone and her voice was the last thing I heard before my screaming started. I called his name as I vaulted the railing and waded through the stream to get to him. The night's earlier showers had given the stream some volume and some strength, and with walls like trenches, I had no chance of pulling him out. So I kept him surfaced as we drifted under the bridge and through the cloud. My head swerved from side to side like the hazy revolving lens of a lifeless lighthouse. I could feel the bottom of the stream but the current was so strong and my head was too feeble to force a footing. I could only try to keep both our heads out of the water.

When my back found earth I used all my strength to pull my friend up and out of the water. Pills and bottles leaked out from his pockets and sat with us, embedding themselves in the soil. I kept calling his name and slapping him, trying to perform CPR but forgetting what to do and getting lost in the number of chest presses and breaths. Everything was a haze and my own voice sounded like it was calling from another room.

The last thing I remember was the flash of ambulance lights and my mother's arms around me.

#

Whether or not he'd really wanted this, I do not know. I could never know. Even if he woke up I could never understand his thinking. It would be like trying to read the truth in the heart rate monitor by his hospital bed, deciphering the squiggly lines that flashed by on the screen.

The police questioned me about the night and I gave them very little, a sentiment they returned, giving me some hours of community service and counselling. Jenny continued to come up with witless jibes about my comatose friend and told me to 'try again', Robert collared me on my first day back at school and threatened to snap me if I told anyone about what happened outside those shops. No one seemed to recognise our painted works as anything but childish vandalism. A last minute cry for attention before we offed ourselves... failed to off ourselves.

As I sat at Lyle's bedside I wondered about something he'd talked about. The truth that our sentience lets us see: The fact that we are not all connected. Social propriety might be the biggest mutual illusion but the shared psychosis of love and friendship is the biggest foul that humans are capable of. You can't fully know someone, because if Lyle had really known me he'd have known that I couldn't do what we set out to do.

There's a transcendence in the world and its name is obscurity. It is the fog of dissimulation that separates people so that they never really connect. But I cherish the smallest distance that I can reach for. I hug my mother and know that this closeness is all I need.

Lyle lay alone, with empty bottles washing up on his shoreline and no hope of surviving. Islands in the stream. That is what we are. And after a time, you realise... there's a victory in knowing that.

4