Bars

“Chicken!”

Tom said the word and it sent a chill of self-disgust down Jimmy’s spine.

“I’m not,” said Jimmy to his older brother. “I just hurt my arm in PE today.” He could feel his face reddening. There were three other boys there, all friends with his brother and all eleven, two years older than Jimmy.

“Yeah right,” said Tom. “You're just scared. Chick-chick-chicken!” He was imitating a chicken and pecking at invisible seeds in the woodchips.

“No way!” cried Jimmy in his own defence; although he knew what Tom was saying was perfectly true. “My arm’s hurt!”

“Liar,” sneered Tom. “You’re afraid.”

“I’m not afraid of the dumb monkey bars,” lied Jimmy. “No way.”

“He’s a chicken,” agreed one of Tom’s friends. “Let’s go.”

“Yeah, and leave the chicken,” said Tom.

They turned and began to walk away, leaving Jimmy standing alone in the park’s playground. He stared at their retreating backs in dismay.

“No, wait!” he yelled desperately. “I’ll do it!”

He regretted saying it instantly, but he didn’t want them to leave. It was rare that he got to spend an afternoon with his brother, and he didn’t want to end it.

“Alright then,” said Tom, turning back towards Jimmy, his friends following obediently. “Do it.”

Jimmy turned to face the climbing frame and tried to ignore the lump rising in his throat. He had to do it now. He couldn’t let them see him bottle it.

He walked slowly towards the climbing frame, woodchips crackling under his feet. Despite the bright sunshine, the rusty frame with flaking brown paint and bent support posts looked eerie and deadly, like a crippled dragon.

He reached the short ladder leading up to the first platform, where the slide was, and started climbing. It creaked and rocked ominously beneath him. At the top he turned and looked back. The four boys were stood at the gate watching him. Tom had a predatory grin on his face. He knew Jimmy was terrified.

“Go on,” Tom said. “Get on with it. We haven’t got all day.”

Jimmy turned away from them and clambered up a second short ladder. He was then on the second platform, the one with the monkey bars leading off to the last platform, an eternity away.

He shuffled up to the edge of the platform and looked down. The woodchips were only about eight feet below, but it seemed like a hundred miles to Jimmy. He looked up at the first bar and stretched his hands out for it. The monkey bars were clearly designed for kids bigger than him, because he could only just reach it. Despite the July heat the bar felt cold under his grasp. He took a deep breath and tried to lift his feet, but he couldn’t. It was almost as if his trainers were glued to the platform beneath them. There was no way Jimmy could get himself to step into air. He would just stand there like an idiot while the others laughed scornfully, arms stretched above him and feet firmly planted on the platform. He felt embarrassment and shame turning his cheeks crimson.

“Boo!”

Jimmy gave an involuntary scream as someone pushed him, swinging him forward.

The next few seconds happened very quickly. One moment he was hanging off the first bar, the next he was hanging off the fourth, the middle bar, panting.

“Gotcha!” said Tom triumphantly from the platform behind him. The peals of Tom’s friends’ laughter rang in Jimmy’s ears, but he didn’t dare look back at them for fear of falling.

“Get me down!” he cried, his voice almost drowned out by their mirth.

“Just let go,” said Tom from behind him. “It’s not far down.”

“I can’t!” yelled Jimmy, too scared to care how pathetic it sounded. “Help me off!”

“Sorry, little bro,” said Tom. “You’ll have to solve this one for yourself.”

Then Jimmy could hear him turning and jumping onto the first platform, and then to the ground.

“Don’t leave me, please,” he wailed, but he heard Tom closing the gate and wandering off with his friends. They were still laughing.
Then they were gone and Jimmy was alone, heart hammering in his chest.

He knew it wouldn’t be long before his arms became too weak to hold him. They were already starting to ache, so he had to do something quickly.

He forced himself to stare straight forward, not daring to look down. He could see the final platform before him. There were only three more bars to negotiate to reach it, but there might as well have been a thousand. Jimmy couldn’t bring himself to let go of the bar he was holding with either hand.

He considered swinging to try and get his feet onto the platform and made an attempt, but he stopped immediately. It made his grip on the bar seem extremely precarious and there was no hope of him reaching the platform. He was only nine and was short for his age.

As he took a moment to change his grip, which was becoming slippery with sweat, a flake of paint came off the bar. He unintentionally followed its progress as it fell, looking down. What he saw caused a small moan of horror to escape his lips.

There was an abyss below him, a dark hole in the ground. It hadn’t been there before, he was certain, but it was there now. The blackness seemed to go on forever and the flake of paint was engulfed instantly.

Jimmy turned his eyes heavenward, feeling goose bumps break out all over his body. He was hanging over a bottomless pit by a thin bar and his arms were aching. He was in serious trouble.

Conquering his fear of movement, he turned his head to look back at the platform he had come from, but that was just as far away as the other. The only possible way of getting off the bars was by swinging to the end, something he had never done in his entire life.

He tried to force himself to peel one of his hands off the bar, but it wouldn’t budge. Even though it was greased by his profuse sweating, he couldn't release his own vicelike grip.

Jimmy found his thoughts travelling back to his first experience of monkey bars. He had just turned eight then, and Tom was ten. His dad had taken them to the park and Tom had been showing off on the monkey bars. Of course, Jimmy decided he wanted a go too and got his dad to lift him up so he could reach the bars. As soon as his dad let go he started screaming to get down, but his dad had told him to at least try first. He didn’t. Instead, he fell to the ground, landing on his feet but not bending his legs at all. For the rest of the day his back had hurt and his dad had to carry him everywhere on his shoulders.
The memory that stood out most strongly for Jimmy from that experience was one of helplessness. When his dad let go of him and he was left hanging, he’d felt utterly alone and unable to cope.

That was the feeling Jimmy had now, only it was made a hundred times worse by the knowledge that if he feel today he wouldn’t just hurt his back, but fall and fall forever. And there was nobody to help him.

The muscles in his arms felt stretched and hurt badly now. It was like someone had stuck hundreds of pins into them.

A breeze was picking up, swaying him steadily backwards and forwards. He began to wonder if this was what it felt like to be a pendulum in a clock. If he didn't concentrate, he felt like the world was swinging and not him, and for a moment the sensation was so real that he almost let go of the bar in surprise. He stopped himself just in time.

More minutes trickled past. He tried not to think of the abyss. He thought of his brother instead, laughing and jeering at him. Would Tom be sorry if he let go and plummeted to his death? Jimmy wasn't sure.

He thought of other things too, little things that didn't really mean anything from the day gone by. His mother, handing him his school bag as he left for school. His teacher, giving him a good work sticker. The ice cream he had been eating on the way home. All these things, incidents from only hours ago, seemed to stretch infinitely into the mists of time, like the abyss stretching below him.

He glanced down, unable to help himself, and saw it was still there, like the great, yawning mouth of a giant. He wondered if the gentle wind rocking him was the giant’s breath, and decided it was.

He tried fixing his gaze on little things that were visible, anything to avoid looking down into that horrible pit. He could make out the swings, a little to his left, and the hedges bordering the nearest side of the park. He stared at these things, and others, but it didn't help much. It certainly didn't stop the awful, numb pain in his arms and wrists, the pain that he knew meant he wouldn't be able to hold on very much longer.

He tried his times tables. He tried counting sheep. He tried naming all the people on his class register. Nothing would draw his mind from this terrible situation.

Surely someone should have seen me by now, Jimmy thought. He tried to look around at the path running through the park, but it was behind him, and trying to twist his body to bring it into view made his arm muscles scream in protest. Instead he took to shouting for help, but gave up quickly. He could feel it sapping away his little remaining strength.

Another minute passed, by which time he would have gladly had someone cut his feet off just to get rid of the weight. They felt like great lumps of lead. Or is that my trainers?

Jimmy decided that it must be the trainers that were weighing him down and kicked them carefully off, trying not to upset his arms more than necessary. Of course, he never heard them land.

He immediately regretted getting rid of the trainers. His feet felt no lighter and, even worse, it seemed he could feel the emptiness below him more without trainers. Possibly it was the feeling of the breeze chilling his feet.

He looked up. The sun cast the shadows of the bars over his face, so Jimmy could only see shafts of light. He imagined that this was how it felt to look out of the window in a prison cell. The occasional bird flying overhead looked so free, while he was trapped below. If only he could get between two of the bars. It might have been possible once, he supposed, when he had some strength left in his arms, but he was far beyond the point where he could do anything but try to hang on now.

How long had passed? An hour? A day? A year? Jimmy didn't know. He barely remembered what time was anymore. His world seemed to now consist solely of the abyss, himself and the bars. Time had been replaced with pain.

"Oh no, oh no, oh no," whispered Jimmy in horror, the sound of his voice seeming like a strange, alien thing that came from many miles away. He could feel something weird happening to his arms. It was almost as if they were stretching like rubber bands. They felt loose and floppy. The pain was still there, but it had become number. He thought that it was over, that his muscles were finally giving up the go.

He gave another small cry for help, but even if there had been someone on the path, they would not have heard it. After he gave the cry the loose feeling in his arms faded and was replaced with something different yet again. This wasn't so much a pain as an ache, worse than anything Jimmy had ever known.

This was it, then. The ache was too much for him. It was a bolt shooting to his brain, screaming at him to let go. There was no resisting it, abyss or no abyss.

He felt a tear trickle down his face. Why was this happening? What had he done to deserve it? He was just a kid, a normal kid, who was scared of monkey bars. He didn't deserve to suffer like he was.

"Help me," he whispered, though there was nobody to hear him. "Please help me."

Then he screamed as gravity prised his fingers from the bar and he fell, flailing his limbs helplessly and watching the bars shoot up away from him as he dropped.

It was quite a while before the echoes of his screams faded away, and then the abyss quietly and without any fuss closed itself up.