A Near Miss - A short story

The day I nearly died, for the second time, started out well with a hearty breakfast of poached eggs, bacon and butter-drenched toast swilled down with tea and fresh orange juice - fresh from the fridge, at any rate. The local station was playing on the radio and the DJ chirped on in the kind of desperately optimistic tone reserved for the truly insane, between a predictable playlist of the latest pop tunes and the old classics. The sky outside the window was beginning to brighten as the sun broke through the clouds for the first time in days and the Dorset countryside underneath it seemed to bristle with appreciation and crackle like stretching limbs first thing in the morning.

It was January 1999, a year that held so much apocalyptic fascination, full of portent when we’d ushered in the new year just a couple of weeks previously. Was there a thought breaking through the drink-induced haze that night that maybe, just maybe, the end-of-the-worlders might be right and this could be our last year on Earth?

I was at the home of my sister and her husband, helping with the renovations to their new house, which was providing me with a much-needed distraction following the disastrous and sad end to a love affair.

I’d just come home for Christmas from London, where I’d been trying, without success, to finish my university degree. It was my final year and I was in ‘grave and serious danger’, as my tutor put it, of failing my BA in Classics as I’d missed so much of my Ancient Greek language course. And he’d seen little of the great dissertation I was supposedly writing on the role of myth in Greek literature with specific reference to Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex. I’m sure Professor Michael Cotton was waiting with baited breath in anticipation of the searing insight I was going to bring to that rarest of final year dissertation topics. Almost 20 years later and I’m afraid he’s still waiting.

Ironically, the reason I’d missed so many of my Ancient Greek language classes was because I was so heavily involved in directing that year’s production of Oedipus Rex, performed in the original Greek. Somehow we got away with charging real money to people, to sit for two hours to be tortured by the stuttering pronunciation of this long-dead dialogue. At the same time, the enthusiastic young actors tried to make the best of a baffling interpretation of the script by the production team and director, in this case myself and my girlfriend.

It was that girlfriend and our own small tragedy that eventually led to me getting on a train at Waterloo Station and heading west back to my family’s home, vowing never to return to the city I’d taken on almost three years before and which had now knocked me out and left me sprawled unconscious on the canvas.

So it was, a week before Christmas, that I turned up at my parents’ front door and collapsed into tears when my mother opened it. I think it was the overwhelming sense of relief at being out of the situation that had been threatening to crush me so completely that produced those tears, and perhaps it was the first time in my 21 years that I had felt real heart-wrenching pain in love.

But it wasn’t as if Rachel was the love of my life never to be repeated, it was just the places we went on our emotional journey, a journey out of control and without direction, that sent me crying back home to my mother.

It’s also true that my mother was apt to step in to fight my battles ever since I was little. Despite being more than 100 miles away, it was as if her words coming down the phone line had managed to exert a force strong enough to drag me out of that place, like a stricken passenger on a sinking ship being winched into the rescue helicopter.

My tactical retreat, and the beginning of the new year, brought the opportunity to start again. At the same time my sister, who lived just a few miles away, made me an offer that sounded too good to refuse.

We’d always referred to Sarah and her family as the Darling Buds Of May and gently mocked their country way of life but, in truth, it said more about our quiet envy of what they’d achieved.

Aged 17, Sarah had met John, a lad from the village, and fallen in love. Nobody thought it would last, how could it, they were only kids after all? But, he was ‘the one’. Within two years they were married, and within ten years they had three lively children. In that time they had also bought, refurbished and sold enough property to end up with a large four-bedroom detached house sitting in about five acres of land in a small village in Dorset.

It was a very traditional house, constructed from large smooth blocks of sandstone in an almost square shape. A pitched portico sat over the large white front door, with wooden framed sash windows on either side.

It was the type a child might come up with if asked by their teacher at school to draw a house. Well, perhaps if it was a nice school, in a nice village in a nice part of the countryside. They’d probably come up with something quite different growing up in inner city London.

But, as traditional as it was, and as much as it radiated the rural idyll, it was in such a state of disrepair and dilapidation that the only option was to strip it back to four walls and a roof and start again, which is what Sarah and John were in the process of doing.

Seeing an opportunity to involve me in something other than wallowing in self-pity, they asked if I’d like to help out with their latest project. Time wasn’t necessarily on their side on this one. It was midwinter and they had three children under the age of ten who needed a semblance of stability and at least somewhere warm and dry, even if it was just one useable room.

At the point I’d joined the project, all the wallpaper had been stripped back, the carpets and electrical wiring ripped out, and all but the most essential furniture had been skipped. Water was being supplied from a standpipe and the electricity had been turned off, with the only source of power coming from a generator at the back of the house.

Work had already started on breaking down the walls on the upstairs floor and where once there were four bedrooms and a bathroom there was now mostly brick dust, broken plaster and piles of masonry. The boards and joists that had formed the bedroom ceilings had been ripped out, leaving just the exposed underside of the roof high above.

As a result, the whole family was sleeping in the lounge, which had become a makeshift bedroom, and the kitchen served as a main living area. What always amazed me was the air of complete normality that pervaded throughout the renovations. In fact, they seemed to relish the conditions they were living in, driven by a seemingly endless sense of humour and supply of teabags. And, despite the severely limited resources, my sister was still able to serve up an amazing breakfast and three square meals for the children every day.

It could not have been further from the world I’d been living in just a few weeks before and, for that, I couldn’t have been more grateful. I felt like I was pushing myself physically in a way I’d not done since working on a farm one summer in my teens. The sense of re-connecting with the family I loved and, to an extent, the world around me, was helping me slowly put myself back together.

It was Monday morning and the children had been dispatched off to school in a whirlwind of lunchboxes, missing gym kit, coats and scarves, and half eaten porridge. The tea was as ever flowing freely and, now that the matter of eggs and bacon was out of the way, we were sitting at the kitchen table discussing the plans for that day’s demolition.

“We’ve got to finish clearing the main bedroom upstairs so we can start taking up the floor on that side of the house,” John said. “That means taking out the remaining wall on one side, but also the fireplace in that room and the chimney breast.”

“You really are getting rid of everything, aren’t you?” I said, sipping more tea.

“We’re moving the kitchen to that side of the house so we don’t need the chimney there and, if anything, it will just be taking up space,” he explained.

“Which means we can increase the size of the kids’ bedrooms without making the master bedroom smaller, doesn’t it?” said Sarah, with a beaming smile.

“Something like that, although I don’t see why the kids need so much space, it only gives them more room to make a mess. I’m not sure what I’m getting out of it apart from backache,” said John, joking, mostly.

“You love it, you old bugger,” Sarah said as she dragged him half off his seat and tried, without much effect, to put him in a half Nelson as she kissed the top of his head. “Right, I’ll leave you boys to it, I’m going back over to mum and dad’s to get a load of washing done.”

She stood up and took hold of a wicker basket that was over half her height, full to the brim with the weekly laundry, and wrestled it out of the back door.

Everything was being approached with a pragmatism that I personally couldn’t relate to, as if the usual home comforts were unnecessary impediments that were just slowing them down. I used to get nervous if a light bulb had blown and wasn’t replaced within ten minutes, and positively palpitated at the thought of a limited supply of hot water or clean laundry.

Perhaps I’d still not shed the cotton wool my parents had been careful to wrap me in since birth. I was more than ten years younger than my sister and our parents really hadn’t expected my arrival. Possibly as a result of my mother being older, I’d been born dangerously premature. It was, according to one particularly compassionate nurse on the maternity ward at Dorchester County Hospital, a ‘bloody miracle’ I’d made it through my first day on Earth at all.

Despite the age difference, in many ways Sarah and I were very similar. We were both blessed, or cursed depending on your point of view, with a fair complexion - for her that meant hair which was an attractive shade of blonde, but for me that manifested in a colour too close to ginger for comfort in the school playground.

We were also the same height, 5’6, fine for the captain of the ladies’ hockey team, not so great for an aspiring goalkeeper. And we were both drawn to studying and spending time in the library, which helped her towards the lofty heights of head girl, though did less for my attempts to prove my budding masculinity.

But Sarah exuded a natural confidence I didn’t share and a strength that I could never emulate, however hard I tried. She also lived her life as if being propelled by a force of energy that had no end to it, and orbited furiously around John who was able to provide the gravitational pull necessary to keep her from spinning off.

At 6’4, John was tall and had been since his teens, which meant he had been a big target from an early age. But despite having the breadth as well as height to make the England rugby team, the idea of reacting violently to any situation simply baffled him.

Not a pacifist exactly, I’m certain he’d tear any man limb from limb if they ever dared to harm those he loved, but he was known on more than one occasion to be the peacemaker, both in our family and in any number of the pubs he was welcome at around the area.

He was really the first person I’d met in my life who I thought could probably walk through walls. And I would follow him.

Because of this, I thought nothing of picking up a sledgehammer on this morning and swinging it with all my strength at the area of the wall John pointed at, as we started on the plan to clear the top floor and take down the chimney breast.

We made a good start to the day by smashing through the brick and plaster separating the main bedroom from what was the bathroom at one time. The air was thick with brick dust as we worked together to fill the rubble buckets to be tipped down the chute running from a first floor window into a skip below. The radio played on in the background, reminding us of the world outside, and every now and then we’d chip in with answers to the quiz questions that came round every hour or so.

Gulps of welcome fresh air were taken occasionally if we were near an open window, but otherwise we worked through it. My hair, which was tangled and unkempt most of the time, now felt stiff with brick dust and the sweat running off my forehead turned the dust to a paste-like consistency on my face.

At about midday we stopped for a quick tea break. John surveyed the scene, the grand plan in his head playing out around him as he could see exactly where each part of the new design would fit together. It just looked like rubble to me.

“It’s coming on,” he said, between sips. “The extra pair of hands is helping. We’ll just have a go at that chimney breast and that should take us up to lunch, I reckon.”

Tea and supermarket-brand chocolate biscuits having been consumed, we went about dismantling the small fireplace under the chimney. Almost as soon as we started, a sizeable chunk of brick fell away and smashed one side of the fireplace, and its 100-year-old tiles, to pieces.

“Balls!” said John. “I think Sarah wanted to keep those tiles. Oh well, what is it they say, can’t make an omelette without breaking a few eggs.”

We carried on our work breaking up the brick surround of the chimney breast and started to expose the stonework that gave the structure its shape. The chimney shaft stretched all the way up to the top of the house and out through the roof, which meant we had to put together a platform from scaffold poles and wooden planks to stand on, in order to reach. It’s the kind of thing John had done a hundred times before, so despite feeling a little unsure myself about the rickety construction, I put my faith in my brother-in-law and climbed on board.

After an hour or so, we’d worked our way up to the top of the chimney breast and cleared all the brickwork. What remained was a column each side of large, heavy slabs of stone, roughly rectangle shaped. They had been fixed into the wall at right angles to enable the original stonemasons to build the chimney around them.

The slabs, each of them not much smaller than a modern paving stone, had been slotted in sideways so that they faced each other on either side of the chimney shaft, and gave the impression of a row of teeth in the jaw of some prehistoric granite monster.

“This is going to be a bit more of a job than I’d thought,” said John, catching a breath and standing back to view the task ahead of us.

It was clear that each of the slabs would need to be carefully removed. Simply swinging a sledgehammer and breaking them off would risk damaging the wall housing them.

We started at the bottom and used smaller lump hammers to tap around the base of the lowest slabs, where they were wedged into the wall, and gently eased them out one by one.

We went as far as each of us could reach just by standing on the floor, which was much further for John than me, then took to the scaffold again. Removing the large heavy stones with just the scaffold as support proved more difficult - not only did we have to coax the slabs out of the wall without the stability of the floor beneath us, but we had to be careful not to let them drop in case they crashed through the floorboards below.

It probably took another hour of painstaking and careful deconstruction until there was just four left, two on each side at the very top of the chimney shaft where the wall met the roofline. We’d foregone the idea of lunch, determined to get the job done, and there was no sign of my sister returning from her laundry trip to interrupt us.

John decided he needed to get closer in order to get the right kind of leverage so I jumped down and went in search of something to place on the scaffold platform.

I unearthed an old six-rung stepladder, slightly battered and covered in paint splashes, which we opened up and found just about fitted across the width of the platform, providing the extra height needed.

“Right, this is probably not what they teach you on a City & Guilds bricklaying course, but it will have to do,” said John, trying to fix the stepladder in the most stable position he could find. “If I get up there, you’re going to have to stand on the bottom rung to keep it stable, and I’m going to need your help to get those last stones out of their positions and down to the ground without letting them fall. Are you okay with that?”

“Okay. I can do that,” I said, without a lot of confidence but I couldn’t let John down, he was counting on me, and I’d walk through walls for him.

There was a hint of tension in his voice now and we decided to turn off the radio as we focused entirely on this tricky operation.

“Let’s have a look at these stones then,” said John as he took to the stepladder. As soon as his foot had left the first rung I replaced it with my own two feet. Although, in a flimsy pair of trainers and weighing barely more than ten stone after weeks of student living, I hardly felt I was providing the adequate ballast necessary for this giant of a man.

He climbed up slowly, the scaffold creaking, until his head was level with the top of the chimney shaft and the remaining stones. He raised the small lump hammer carefully towards one of the stones on the right of the chimney and tapped against it, gingerly at first. The sound of iron on stone was evocative of a more ancient time when masters of their craft built monuments to God, rather than loft conversions.

“Come on you so-and-so,” urged John and with a couple more taps at the point where it was connected to the wall, it slowly started to come loose. “Get ready,” he said, gathering the piece in his arms as it came away, and then resting it on the top rung of the ladder.  “I’m going to use the rungs of the ladder to slide it down to you, okay?”

I nodded and braced myself. Between John’s controlled lowering and my outstretched arms, it was only a matter of inches that the stone actually slid freely, but even in that short space it gathered enough momentum for me to feel it when it came to a halt against the top of my chest. I drew it into my arms, and with John holding on to the wall for stability, I took a step backwards off the bottom rung and carefully laid the stone down on the wooden planks of the platform.

“Okay, one down, three to go,” I said, returning to my post.

John repeated the same careful extraction of the next slab, which had been above the one we’d just taken out on the right hand side of the chimney.

It was very quiet and outside the light had started to melt away as it does so easily in January, which meant we would soon be relying on the building site lights to work from. The unmistakable sound of the old diesel VW my sister drove encroached on the silence, signalling that she had finally returned.

“Hope she doesn’t come up here and see this, she’ll go mad,” said John, as he drew out the stone and got it ready to send down the ladder to me. “Ready for this?”

“Yep, hit me with it. But not, you know, literally,” I said.

Once again the pockmarked, dusty slab of sandstone slid down the ladder, with a bit more force this time which knocked a little air out of my lungs when it came to rest in my arms.

“Oof, that was a heavy one,” I observed, turning in the very limited space to lay it on the platform next to the others.

I could now hear Sarah coming into the house and shouting up to see how we were doing. “I’ll just put the kettle on and bring up a pot of tea, then I’ll start dinner,” she hollered from below.

Just two slabs of sandstone were left, jutting stubbornly out of the wall. John turned his attention to the lower one, knocking around it with the lump hammer and working it loose at the same time, expert now in the art of stone slab removal.

I turned my head for a second as a ray of the setting sun caught my peripheral vision. I stood looking out the window at the fading light when suddenly I heard John cry out and felt the slab of stone rush past me as it slipped from his hands. There was an almighty crash and the sound of splintering wood and scraping metal as, in a split second, it obliterated everything below it, sending me and John and the stepladder falling helplessly after it. We landed on the floor in a heap of broken wood, split sandstone, scaffold poles and more than one or two cuts and bruises.

“Jesus fucking Christ!” spluttered John. “Quick, get up, get up, get up,” he ordered, dragging me out of the mesh of metal and masonry. And as he spoke, I realised the urgency as the final stone came loose and, without warning, fell directly onto the spot we’d been just moments before, smashing into several pieces as it hit the ground.

Barely able to take in what had happened with the first stone, we were both struck dumb by the second.

For the few seconds that followed, all I could hear was the sound of my own heart beating, so loudly that I couldn’t even make out whether John was still in the room, let alone still breathing. And then, inevitably, the sound of Sarah’s footsteps thumping urgently up the stairs.

“You alright?” said John.

“Yeh,” I replied. “You?”

“Yeh.”

“Good job,” I said, “‘Cos Sarah is going to fucking kill us.”

“You’re not wrong,” said John. “You’re going to wish that stone had hit you by the time she’s finished with us.”

THE END