Crossing over.
Chapter 1, part 4
Valley wasn't a valley at all, but nobody knew anyone who didn't call it that. It was a joke of course, an ironic reference to how opposite and other this outlying borough was.
In truth it was a plateau, the top of an escarpment that rose west from the river and then buckled into an ugly ridge where the land fractured and fell away. The coal seams were exposed in part on this eastern flaw, and the pit had been established in a wide bowl below the cliffs, hidden from the NCB estates that'd sprung up on the plateau above. The lucky ones had houses with windows that faced out across the true valley and the morning sun and the snaking silver line of the river that marked the edge of coal country and, for many, the limit of their lives.
It was three miles to school and there was no bus. There weren't even any proper roads that went that way, not directly. Either they'd never pictured anyone from Valley ever making it to Medway or they'd deliberately made it as difficult as possible.
Connor didn't mind. He'd missed this escape over the summer, and delighted now in his downhill journey through forgotten twitchells with their rampant brambles and fallen crab-apples, Storksbill in the slabs (the scent of lemon underfoot), the exploding thistle-heads and purple nettles and rusty dock leaves that reclaimed these cryptic pathways. He'd skipped breakfast and was hungry, but this September morning and its sensations, with its evidence of life, was some kind of sustenance.
The only road bridges were miles away, upriver to the farmlands or downriver to the city, but between these two, and exactly halfway to school, a monolithic obstruction spanned the fast-moving water. The Medway sluice had been built to stop the floods that intermittently plagued this section of the river and threatened the city lower down. It was a fuck-off blockade of concrete, brutal more by accident than design, a magnet for vandals and truants. Valley mothers told their kids if they were bad they'd be 'sent to the sluice', and there were countless stories of drownings and suicides in the brown waters that churned beneath its arches.
But the sluice was an easy hurdle for Connor and he'd mastered the traps that Medway council had set to deter Valley miscreants. The high gangway that ran the length of the span was a lifeline to a better world and no barbed steel coils or spiked railings could stop him scaling the concrete pylons that held it. In fact he relished the challenge, and with every crossing endeavoured to perfect his high-wire technique. Look, mum! No hands!
And no safety net. So roll up, roll up! Marvel one and all at the plucky lad from over the tracks as he takes a final run-up and jumps… and hoop-la! he lands safely on the other side. The safe side, where there are meadows. And there are cows. Where Medway Grammar sits in a pretence of country and a symmetry of sports fields. Where there is hope.
Seven Fifty Four is a literary experiment, a serialised novel released in 500-word episodes.
Ah, the Sluice gates...