After Ice-Walk

All my life I’ve tried to walk across the ice, out over the middle of the lake and on to the far side, daring the meandering micro-fractures that spread out from my heels to connect, wishing for them to create a fractal breach that will give way as I take my next step. All my life I’ve done it: daring, hoping, taunting, swaggering, trembling and finally revelling when I make it to the other side, victorious.

I call and arrange to meet up with Bellis to apologise for my behaviour during the most recent manic episode. I have the remnants of that flush of victory still coursing through my synapses, that same happiness and butterfly flutter of giddiness. The swan-dive to depression has not yet begun but my skin prickles and tautens; a cold creep beginning to work its way over me as I worry whether or not I have been a complete arsehole again.

When I cross the ice there are always spectators: usually my friends and loved ones but sometimes strangers caught up in the joy of it. They all watch me jog out onto the ice, and each reacts in their own way. In the past there would be laughter and cheers; giggles and fun and celebration. As I walked away in the moonlight, my toes scuffing up the light dusting of new snow, I would hear the happy chatter and the gaiety and the bonhomie and the admiration at my daring feat and I would feel grand that my antics added to the evening. The time I set myself on fire at Carole’s birthday, for example: that brought another chorus of cheers and whoops and my feet continued the race out towards the centre of the frozen lake, the ice glass-clear beneath me, my heart singing.

In recent years, my walking pace has slowed and the episodes last longer, and as I tread forward the ice seems less substantial, thinner. The spectators on the near bank of the lake have become fewer, too. Some have moved on with their lives, some have become bored, others are disgusted with it, sickened that I could be so reckless.

In recent years I’ve taken to drinking more; to regulate my feelings, I suppose, and recapture that flush of victory as I walk out; to replicate those whoops and cheers and laughs, but it rarely works. When the thrill is gone, I find myself at the far end of the lake, watching the meagre few spectators melt away. I feel too lonely to want them to leave and too ashamed to walk around and be with them, and yet I desperately want them to go. Go-away-stay. That’s when I take to the phone, somewhere around three in the morning, and start to call them. After this many years most of them have blocked my number.

As jobs progress, and mortgages are negotiated, and relationships solidify and develop, and children appear on the horizon like the mythical little nightmares of our twenties, the crowd has fallen to a mere handful. Most of the former spectators are gone now, thoroughly sick of the spectacle, annoyed to see the trick again in spite of its glister having dulled years before. They are weary of explaining that the ice-walk will go wrong some day, that the performer will fall through into the water and get trapped and drown. I suspect that some of the few remaining spectators only attend the performances on the off-chance that that exact catastrophe will befall the entertainer.

I lost Andie last month; the phone calls. I lost Dion the month before; a drunken ramble on a video call where I lost my wits and offended him and his whole family. I have vague flash-memories of saying "just listen to me for a minute" quite a lot in the last while. My memory now is as fickle as the crowd. Bellis is one of the last.

I take Bellis to the recreational ground near me, to the park in the centre, and we have a coffee by the pond. It’s a lovely spot for the summer’s day that's in it, where terrapins laze in the sun, and coots pick fights with the Canadian geese and little kids squeal with delight as the ducks bob at the feed they throw into the water. It is summer, but I am always near the ice. She steps away to answer her phone and, with her back turned, but still only a few feet away, I empty a miniature bottle of vodka into my coffee.

When she returns, I apologise to her, almost indifferent to the words I’m saying. I’m so tired. I feel that acidic surge of righteousness that only people who are truly in the wrong can know.

I have donned my heaviest steel-toed boots and I am dancing out onto the ice. I am probably giving a war-cry or bellowing a show tune.

As Bellis takes a deep breath before she pronounces her judgment, I am somewhat surprised that she has not placed a square of black silk over her platinum bob. Her porcelain features are suffused with the cold majesty of a Victorian judge, and from the cast of her eyes, I can tell that the accused will receive no clemency.

As I skip out across the ice, dancing under the winter moon, I hear the first deep crack beneath me.

“I’ve arranged to get help for it, for all of it. Starting next week. All of it: the head, the drinking, the issues with boundaries.”

A perfect eyebrow rises. “We haven’t been friends for a while now. Perhaps it’s best for both of us to leave it that way.” Her eyes hold the cool power-play, the fury. I am expected to beg.

The ice breaks and I fall through, and on the park bench she becomes another stranger sitting next to me on a sunny day. I take a slug of the coffee and watch some greylags start their flappy run to flight.

She says, “Take care of yourself, Shelly.” She doesn’t mean it.

I sink deep into the cold water, some malicious undertow dragging my clutching fingers across the underside of the ice before that too is beyond reach. The water fills my boots, impregnates my clothes, clutches at my face with a loving caress, and I am taken down. I take a last look up at the ragged hole where I fell through. It is moving away from me and the moonlight is dancing a lunatic gavotte in the disturbed water. I imagine I can hear cheering from the near bank.

“Fair fortune, Bell” I say.

She leaves, walking in the direction of the train station. She looks back once, angry, perhaps, at not having the last word. I don’t care, I am sinking.

I focus on the ducks, the moorhens, the Egyptian geese. I focus on my breathing. I add another miniature to the coffee. Russian coffee, they should call it. Why let the Irish have all the fun? I walk to the newsagents at the park entrance and buy more of the little plastic bottles and return to my sun-warmed bench. The coffee soon becomes nothing more than dirty coffee. I listen to the Sibelius Violin Concerto and watch the domestic politics of the waterfowl and my mood soars.

A text: You don’t deserve friends. You live in a fantasy world. I have a life to live okay so stay out of it.

She was angry after all, it turns out. I sit in the sun and watch the birds and happily cry. I feel a tremendous relief.

I am on the ice again and it cracks and I this time I fall through and my feet nearly immediately touch the bottom. I am soaked up to my knees. What I had always taken for a vast frozen alpine lake, fringed with pine forests and overlooked by stern mountains is, in fact, a frozen duckpond surrounded by stunted, bare sycamores.

I toss my Russian coffee onto the grass, bin the cup and make for home. I smile at everyone as I walk past: deep, heartfelt grins. I want them all to know that I love them. I want them to love me back. Why does everything have to be so dramatic? Maybe something has changed. The feel of the sun is delicious.

The ice doesn’t hold the same thrill for me now.