Towards a red light

Be careful. It’s been raining and the steel is slippery. Also it’s a bit windy when you get this high. I say ‘this high’: I have not yet begun the real climb. I am wearing trainers; not very expensive ones. Not Nike or anything like that. These are from Marks & Spencers – but I guess they’ll do the job.

SHIT! That was close. There’s oil on this girder. Patches of it. My left trainer just skidded and went over the edge. I’m hanging on. So tight my knuckles are aching. My right knee is down on the cold steel. It’s hurting like hell where those big knobbly bolt-heads are pressing into it. My chest is almost up against the girder. I’m clinging like some geriatric limpet to the arching superstructure. And I am sweating now, despite the cold night air. And frightened.
Slowly, very slowly, I bend my left knee and start to inch it back up. Now it’s against the steel lip. But my forearm is in the way. How did that happen.
I know what it is. When I slipped, my body flattened itself against the girder. Now I will have to straighten up. Shit and more shit. I’ll have to let go with my left hand while I get my knee back on the girder.
The wind seems to have increased in strength. I can’t do it. I can’t let go. I think I have stopped breathing. I will myself to slowly lift my body away from the safety of the steel and release my arm. I can now drag my knee, painfully, up over the edge of the girder. I hear myself breathing a prayer.

Do you believe in God? Does God believe in you? I think about God quite a lot.
The other day I wondered whether God was not a person, an entity, or a thing at all – but a process. And to look for God ‘out there’ or even within is futile. Just like trying to cut open the brain and look for the mind. It is not there, because the mind is a process not a thing.
I still pray though.

I look up again at the red light; it is nearer now. The bridge is on the final approach to Liverpool Airport. (Actually, it’s ‘John Lennon Airport’ now – I wonder what old John would have thought of that: I imagine him, up there somewhere – laughing)
Here comes an aeroplane now. He’s got his headlights on, and he is so low the beams pick out the steel tracery. I wonder if he can see me up here? If he does, I imagine he will radio ahead, and there will be a patrol car out here right quick. They don’t half get worried when someone climbs up on the girders. They close the bridge while they try to talk them down. And all the motorists are cursing and saying ‘Why doesn’t the daft bugger jump, and I can get home for my tea.’
For some reason I start to think about Georgina.

CLIMBING

The massive green girder arches away from me, up into the night sky. It must be getting on for one o clock. They turn the floodlights off at midnight. There’s just the red light on the very top of the arch. It is a warning to aircraft to keep away. But to me, it beckons seductively.

I crouch forward and grip the edges of the steel on either side. This is no good. I can’t feel the metal properly through my thick woollen gloves. I pull them off and throw them over the parapet. As if on cue, the moon slides out of the thick cloud cover, and I watch the gloves spiralling lazily downwards. Floating down, down. I am not very good at judging distances but it is a long way. And then I see them alighting gently on the water. Yes the tide is in. I thought it would be.

It’s funny how it is the little things in life, the ‘accidents’, which make all the difference. I mean you plan and plan, and have got things all worked out, and one day you walk down a street and bump into someone, a perfect stranger – and everything changes. Do you believe in coincidences? Or do you prefer Jung’s notion of synchronicity: When an inwardly perceived event is seen to have correspondence in external reality? Buggered if I know.

I take hold again of the steelwork. God it is so cold. But at least I can get a good grip now.

The girder, which forms the main left span of the bridge, is about eighteen inches wide. I had thought this would feel like crawling up a pavement, but I am surprised now how the width seems to have shrunk alarmingly. I inch my way slowly, forwards and upwards. The bolt heads sticking out of the metal give me a reasonable foothold, but I was never a climber, and I did not realise how difficult this would be.

I was talking about my mother earlier. Well I didn’t exactly bump into her as I was walking down the street, but she certainly had a great influence on my life. And, by extension, on the lives of those people I met later on. Funny, but I’ve never thought of it like that before. And of course, she is still influencing us all, even though she has been dead for years. But isn’t that what life is like? We all influence each other. I often think we are like pebbles on the beach. We get our shape by bashing into all the other pebbles around us; have the corners and sharp edges rounded as time goes by. Of course, we haven’t got as much time as the pebbles on the beach. Unless the process continues in the next life. If you believe in a next life. I want to. Believe in a life after death, I mean There is so much to do. You can’t fit it all into one lifetime, can you.