Honourable Mention
The Climb
Tanya Scott
As my boots skid on the wet platform and my legs shoot out from under me, all I can think is, Not yet.
For a wild, panicked moment, I’m falling, weightless. I latch onto the guardrail, and my arms jerk out to their full length under my weight. Somehow, I cling on. The scaffolding sways and groans with complaint, and I swing like a skinny pendulum. Knocked loose, my hard hat tips forward on my face, pauses a moment to consider its loyalty, then abandons me. I twist to watch it fall. It buries itself in the mud, four metres down.
Panting, I haul myself back to safety on the platform.
The world around me has turned to water, grey and opaque and unrelenting. I squint into the storm, shielding my eyes with one saluting hand, the other clutches, white-knuckled, to the railing. Wind whistles a banshee descant in the pipes of the metal scaffolding, and my high-vis vest flaps a frenzied staccato in counterpoint to the drumming rain. It shouldn’t be dark at this time of the morning, but it’s as though the night never left, as though the sun took one look at today and decided to give it a miss.
‘Zeke! What the hell are you doing up there?’
Far below me, Mick leans into the wind to keep his balance, his feet planted wide. He looks at my fallen yellow hat, up at me, back at the hat. His question fades by the time it reaches me, diluted by the wind and rain.
I have to get up to the roof. My voice is as frozen as the rest of me. Icy fingers of water seep under my collar and down my back. In the gusty wind, the scaffolding rocks like a boat battered by waves. My stomach reminds me that I don’t like boats any more than I like heights.
Fear swells inside me, a vast, formless black hole that draws me in with magnetic force. It tugs at the edges of my mind and body, as though I’m stretched out on a medieval rack and at any moment I might come loose, dismembered into constituent parts; arms and legs flying in opposite directions, my brain separated from my skull, my consciousness a cloud of floating atoms.
Black spots pepper my vision. I can’t lift my hand to wipe the hair off my face. Frozen, I’m unable to catch my breath. My brain is off-line.
‘Get down!’ Mick paces back and forth in the mud. His voice sharpens into anger. ‘Zeke! It’s not safe! GET DOWN!’
The words dance around me, meaningless.
***
I didn’t sleep a wink last night. How could I rest, after that letter arrived? Registered mail, oozing with official importance. After weeks of expectation – of nail-biting, soul-dark apprehension – it still hit me like a punch in the face. Worrying about it hadn’t prepared me at all, hadn’t protected me from the impact. The letter was the icing on the bitter cake I’d first tasted when I wrote off my Commodore on the back road out of town. The car’s fate was bad enough – I’d saved every penny for it – but that was the least of my worries.
When I close my eyes, it replays like a horror movie, with no option to pause or delete. Even fast-forward would be a relief.
Six weeks ago, we’d scored a supporting gig at the Caledonian – Kyle, Cooper our drummer, Ryan, our bassist, and me. The opportunity was gold, but when the time came, I was trashed: I’m up at six am for my day job on the building site, labouring for Mick, and I finish each day with my back and shoulders aching from the hard yakka. Kyle’s car was on the blink, so he convinced me to drive. The half-hour trip into town felt like an interstate haul. I was red-eyed before we even got there.
After a late set-up, I was disappointed by our amateur performance. Put it down to experience, said Kyle, who wanted to stay for the main act. Arguing with Kyle was a waste of time. He laughed at my lame excuses. Sleep when you’re dead, he said.
We got away after two in the morning. The deserted back roads tunnelled into blackness so dense the headlights bounced off without penetrating. I flicked on the high beams, and the eucalypts lining the road strobed in the light, their glowing trunks outlining sinister shapes in the darkness, shadow creatures and ghouls and bunyips. The white line danced, hypnotising me, until my body felt numb and disconnected. My face ached with the strain of keeping my eyelids up.
With a crunch, the tyres hit the gravel verge, and I snapped back to my senses as the steering wheel jerked under my hands. A cold wash of panic froze me. I gripped the wheel and held my breath. Time paused, as though the world had stopped turning, arrested in space in its orbit around the sun. And in an instant, it moved again, gears grinding back into motion. The car rolled and I was thrown into Kyle, my stomach flipping. For a beat, gravity reversed, and I tumbled through time and space. I lost contact with the seat under me and hung upside down in my seatbelt as the car completed its roll, jarring to a stop against a post-and-wire fence, jauntily angled with the driver’s side up.
Detached, I observed it from above, as though I could cheat reality by not participating. The slow-motion acrobatics of the car, the screech of the brakes – I’d jammed my foot so hard on the pedal I thought I’d punch through the firewall – and the crunch and squeal of tearing metal, like fingernails on a chalkboard. Kyle’s terrified scream before he smacked his head on the dash. My airbag exploding, filling the space with unexpected solidity.
In the silence that followed, I sat like a muppet, my hands still tight on the steering wheel. The airbag deflated with a hiss. Long after the car stopped moving, my head still spun, a sickly vertigo that filled my mouth with vomit. Sounds returned; the engine ticking over, something dripping, metal creaking and settling.
I reached out for Kyle, silent beside me, and my fingers touched stickiness. I jerked my hand back and gagged. I’d never realised that blood had a smell. Metallic, like iron. It lodged in my nose, filled my sinuses and my mouth and my soul. I vomited onto my lap.
Kyle. Words stuck in my mouth, clinging to my tongue. Kyle.
He didn’t answer.
Part of me wants to block it all out. Another part forces me to face it. To suffer it. I should have insisted I was too tired to drive. I should have stood up to Kyle, for once in my bloody life.
Kyle, who surfed the big waves, talked to girls, drove too fast. Kyle, who wasn’t afraid of heights. Of anything. I spent all my school years hiding behind his confidence, trying to catch a glint of reflected charisma. A fraction of his bravado would be enough for me.
We’d always slotted together like puzzle pieces, opposite but complementary. Counterpoint rhythms. We were twelve when we started the band, never doubting we would make it big one day. I didn’t care much about fame – I preferred to see myself as an artist – but Kyle loved the idea of being a household name. He was a born performer, a natural frontman with his booming voice and peacock strut. I was happy to be the quiet achiever, concentrating on the mastery of my instrument, hiding behind my indie-rock curtain of hair. Even when I was killing a guitar solo, Kyle was still in front, the centre of attention.
I never wanted the limelight. Not like this.
***
And now – now that I can’t go back and undo what I’ve done – I glance down at my knuckles, white with fear on the guardrail. These hands are made for power chords and complex arpeggios, not for climbing scaffolding or wielding a hammer. The callus on my fingertips tells the story of my life’s search for the perfect riff.
The weight of reality bows my head: the dream is over. Saltwater tingles my nose, the back of my tongue.
Hand over hand along the guardrail, placing each foot with nervous care, I make my way to the next ladder and edge onto it. It hurts to breathe, as though the air is thinner – as though I’m climbing Mt Everest, not a two-storey suburban build. The third platform is level with the ceiling joists. Tarps drape the rafters of the gable roof, held down with ropes and artfully placed 2×4 boards.
A metre above me, near the peak of the gable, a sheet of paper is plastered to the tarp like a band poster on a billboard.
Panting for breath, I climb onto the last platform. As though in sympathy, the rain pauses, softening to a drizzle. I wipe my face, smearing snot and tears. It’s like I’ve been standing with my face into a shower head and then switched it off. For the first time since I started climbing, I can see and hear.
A rope secures the tarp, and I tug at it to test its strength. I haul myself onto the roof to sit astride the ridge board at the peak and knot a hand into the rope in front, like I’m riding a horse. The wind sings in my ears, ruffles my sopping hair, makes my eyes water.
I’ve done it. The knot in my stomach unravels with unexpected triumph. My lifelong terror of heights – the horrifying emptiness of space around me – seems ridiculous now. There are far more important things to fear. I sit on my perch in awe of my achievement: I’m on top of the world, exposed to the elements, to everything. The rush of power makes my head float, as though my mind is dissolving into the clouds above.
***
Yesterday, I visited Kyle in the rehabilitation ward. It was the first time we’d spoken in private since the crash. We joked about Kyle being in rehab. He’d laugh about it one day when he was famous. I was nineteen the first time I went to rehab. I didn’t laugh for long, because no one could tell me if his voice would ever recover.
A shaved patch on the side of his head revealed the train-track scar where they’d stapled the skin over his left ear. When the car rolled, he’d hit his head so hard that a piece of his skull pierced a blood vessel. The doctors had drilled into it to release the bleeding. His swallowing and speech had been affected, and his right arm and leg were weak, but he was lucky he wasn’t dead.
‘I know you think it was your fault.’ As though he’d had six beers, Kyle’s words were slurred; his voice was husky, but his eyes were clear. It was still Kyle behind them. My eyes felt hot. Since the crash, I’d been a heartbeat away from tears at any moment.
‘Everyone knows it was my fault,’ I said.
I couldn’t say more, even to Kyle. Words were inadequate to describe the way everyone looked at me; words like accusation and judgment didn’t go far enough. There was pity, too, which felt even worse. I’d had too much attention from parents, friends, the police – uncomfortable attention, a level of scrutiny that made me flop my hair over my face to hide even more than usual.
‘Zeke.’ Kyle stuck out the index and third fingers of his right hand, pointed at my eyes and then at his own: a classic Kyle gesture. Look at me. ‘It wasn’t your fault, bro. You hit a roo, went off the road. It happens.’
I stared at him for a long time. ‘Is that what you told the cops?’
I’d been waiting for the summons to arrive in the mail. Dangerous driving causing serious injury, I’d been told – a hefty charge that could land me in jail. But swerving to avoid an animal was a reasonable explanation for a single-vehicle accident. It changed things. The charges could be downgraded, even dropped. I tried to remember what my solicitor had said, but instead of logic and facts, all I found was a paralysing fear that loosened my guts.
The idea that I could go to jail was crazy, an impossible parallel universe, like a world with dragons or unicorns. I wasn’t important enough to go to jail. No one had cared about anything I did before. I’d had to screw up before they noticed me. It wasn’t that I didn’t deserve to be punished, but what I’d done to Kyle was punishment enough. Shame hit me like a sucker punch.
I said, ‘I don’t remember seeing a roo, Kyle.’
A lopsided grin spread over his face. Even in pyjamas, with his voice reduced to a whisper and his head shaved like a madman, he was still more confident than me.
***
As though the conversation had conjured it, the summons had arrived in the afternoon. I hid it from my parents, hid in my room, cowered under my doona like a stupid scared kid. Opening it meant accepting the reality of what had happened.
After a night of no sleep, I shoved the cursed envelope into my pocket and rode my bike to work early. Sheltering under the scaffolding, wary of the threatening grey sky, I jiggled on my feet and fidgeted as I waited for Mick.
The letter burned a hole in my pocket. No matter how I tried to distract myself, I knew it was there. It felt like a bomb about to explode.
The tension got to me. I stuck my thumb into the top of the envelope, tore it open, pulled out the folded sheet of paper, and held it up to the light.
CHARGE-SHEET AND SUMMONS, said the top of the page.
Before I could read more, the storm descended, the ominous sky collapsing to earth. A gust of wind snatched the page out of my hand, seizing it like a child’s balloon. All I could do was stand with my mouth hanging open, watching the paper spiral upwards. It wrapped around a pole of the scaffolding, then, caught once more by the gale, it was swept toward the roof. It stuck to the tarp near the peak just as the rain started to pelt down.
In panic, I launched after it.
***
Gripping with my legs to balance, I reach over to peel the wet paper from the tarp.
Sitting on my perch with the soaked page in my hand, I can see the events that led to this moment like the verses of a song. The band. The crash. The letter. The climb. Kyle, the chorus, and a refrain that repeats and fades.
I peer up at the dome of sky above me. Moments ago, it had been like an oil slick on a grey ocean, but the rain has lifted, and optimistic streaks of white lighten the sky. Like a key change, minor to major, it’s possible to imagine that the sun still exists somewhere behind the clouds.
Without the rain to blind me, the spectacular view takes my breath away. All that matters in my life comes into a crystalline focus, as though through a magnified lens; my house, my old school, even the hospital. I wonder what Kyle is doing. If only he could see me now, up here by myself, without anyone to lead me. Hey bro, look at you!
The paper in my hands demands attention. Peeling the wet folds apart, I wince as it tears in one place, then another. I baby it open.
The words dance before my eyes.
My breath comes out in a hiss, like the sound the airbag made as it deflated. Ever since the crash, I’ve been unable to breathe past my throat. I suck cold air all the way to the base of my lungs. My fingers and toes tingle with the rush of adrenaline.
‘Zeke! Get down!’ After all this time, Mick is still trying.
The cool breeze fans my long hair, whipping it into my face. I read the words again, then release the page, letting it float down to where Mick is pacing. It settles on the mud, beside my hard hat.
Like an elastic band giving way, the stranglehold of uncertainty snaps, releasing me from invisible bonds. I ease onto all fours, then stand, balancing on the roof with a foot on either side of the ridge. For the first time in weeks, I know what I’m doing. I know what’s going to happen.
The wet scene below sparkles as the sun emerges with tender light. I turn my face into the warmth and close my eyes.
Mick yells again; all I hear is a short, melodic phrase that resolves into a perfect cadence.
‘Don’t worry, Mick.’ My words are a whisper. ‘I’m coming down now.’
Tanya Scott is a writer / doctor / reader who lives on the Surf Coast of Wadawurrung Country. Her debut thriller, Stillwater, has recently been released.
Return to the Geelong Writers Prize 2025 page
Leave a Reply