The Wood and The Burn

The hallway of FifePark Seven was littered with drinking trophies. There were road signs, bar signs, poles and sticks, and one night Frank even brought back a full rotary clothes line, which he erected over my bed, while I was sleeping. Then he pegged an old pair of pants above my nose.

Frank was not a discriminating poacher. While Gowan and Will were the steeliest of scavengers, with a discerning eye for genuinely ambitious trophies, Frank would simply uproot whatever was largest and nearest to him on the way home, and leave it somewhere funny or inconvenient.

Because I was, according to various reports, ‘weak sauce’ or ‘a total pussy’, I did not bring home trophies. I have a personal rule about not stealing. [I’m so averse to the idea of stealing, that I’ve even been known to unsteal, by making copies of things like movies, games, music...] I guess I must have been missing out on the thrill of dragging some weighty object home, and the resulting satisfaction of the age old hunter-gatherer instinct, because one night, I broke my rule – and possibly some others, too.

Frank and I had been drinking together in the Tudor, avoiding local trouble as best we could, but we got out of there before closing time. I suggested that we take two gigantic wooden constructions that were leaning against a skip on Greyfriars.

‘Nobody wants them,’ Frank said, but that was beside the point, and false in any case, since I wanted them.

So Frank acquiesced, if nothing else because of their sheer size. That was his style, at least. They were at least eight or nine feet long, and looked like different sides of the same construction project. They looked like rafters, or the blades of some gigantic wooden sled, but they were made of a fairly light wood, and we could easily manage one each.

‘Want to go home a well wicked way?’ Frank asked.

‘Maybe?’ I said, wondering if it would involve anybody’s garden.

‘Down by the KFB,’ he told me. ‘There’s like this secret path. I went home that way last night. It was well scary.’

‘OK,’ I said. ‘Can we take the wood?’

‘Yes, Quinine,’ Frank conceded. ‘It’s a crazy way, though. I was well freaked out walking back last night. It’s really dark.’

‘Right,’ I said. ‘Enough, mate. You sold me on it already.’

I figured that I was holding an eight foot piece of timber, which certainly put me in the ballpark of formidable. Frank was equally well equipped, and furthermore, he was apparently also the Walrus. It seemed obvious that if there were to be a meeting of two parties on this secret way, then I had probably picked the best side.

The ‘secret way’ turned out to be a wide and well trodden footpath, running alongside the Kinnessburn. It was neither dark nor foreboding, but did provide enough space for Frank to swing his wood at more or less arm’s length. He did just that for a few minutes, until it began to tire him. Then, standing at the edge of the path, he raised the artefact above his head with both hands, and announced ‘I am the wood!’

Unfortunately, on this particular occasion, Frank was not the wood. Nor was he in any way at one with the wood, or even particularly aware of how the wood was getting on. It was overbalancing him, in fact, so that he had to take a small step backwards to counter the effect.

Behind Frank there was a slope. He had to take a slightly larger step backwards to counter its influence on his centre of gravity. The slope did not stop after that step, and neither did Frank. He continued to fight for his balance, seemingly in slow motion, until he reached the bottom of the slope, at a pace I’ve never seen him approach before or since.

Behind the slope was a ten foot drop, at the bottom of which lay only the Kinnessburn and some sharp rocks, and not necessarily in that order. Frank did a backwards roll into the void, sending his wooden Waterloo spinning into the air alongside him. There was a sickening crunch as Frank landed on the rocks, and another slightly less sickening ‘whump’ as the wood landed on Frank. Then there was silence.

I ran to the top of the slope without pausing for thought, to find Frank floating face down in the burn.

‘Frank,’ I shouted. ‘Fuckmefuckmefuckme. Frank!’

Scrambling down the slope on my butt cheeks, I reached the drop in a matter of seconds. I struggled to let myself down to the burn, trying as best I could to keep the human casualties down to one.

‘Fuck,’ Frank said, standing up.

‘Fucking hell, Frank,’ I said, ‘I thought you were dead. Are you alright?’

He didn’t reply. He just turned his head from side to side, scanning the scenery and looking for all the world as if he had woken up on Mars. He waded into the middle of the burn and looked around, before patting his pockets down. He found what he was looking for in his shirt.

‘Thank fuck,’ he said, reaching into the deck. ‘My cigarettes are dry. I really fucking need a cigarette.’

I sat on the bank, while Frank stood in the burn, murky water flowing around his knees. He stood there for minutes on end, finished his smoke before he made any effort to move. He looked strangely thoughtful.

‘Let’s go home,’ he said. ‘I’m fucking soaked.’

‘Are you hurt?’ I asked him. ‘Are you concussed?’ There was blood in his hair.

‘Dunno,’ he said, climbing out of the water. I grabbed the wood and followed him.

Frank’s secret way narrowed until it ran through what looked like somebody’s garden gate and, from there, went on to Lade Braes. We walked along the path as it goes parallel to Hepburn Gardens and along the top side of Cockshaugh Park, and eventually came out a short traipse from Fife Park.

We dropped the wood in the hallway, and went into the kitchen. Dylan was making something with cheese, so we recounted the story for him, and then again when Gowan came in.

Frank, standing in the burn, knee deep in running water, blood dripping from his matted hair, smoking a cigarette like nothing could have hurt him; that’s the moment I remember from that year. That’s what I wanted to be, what I sometimes felt I was. Defiant, vigorous, and immortal.

‘He’s still bleeding,’ Gowan said.

‘Tell Will the bit about the backflip,’ Dylan said.

As I talked it up, Frank interrupted every so often, swearing that there had been an old style bathtub in the burn, and that he had thought for just one moment that he could climb into it and sail off down the stream.

There might have been, I’ll say that much, but I certainly never saw one.