Minou, our beloved cat, indefatigable high-wire acrobat of the fifth floor, inexplicably jumps to his death.
Was it the swift shadow of a bird? The trajectory was more than six feet from the vertical. Can animals commit suicide?
Fortunately, Minou misses the grass verge and is killed instantly on the concrete path.
Anguish, tears, recriminations.
I am sitting on the balcony one evening when a man appears at the fifth floor of the apartment building opposite. He is tall and thin and lithe like a dancer. He wears a billowing white shirt pinched at the wrists and black trousers.
He stands on the barrier for a few seconds and raises his arms, then plunges in a perfect swallow dive. A few breathtaking feet from the ground, he flattens out and freezes in mid-air as though caught in an invisible net and lies suspended horizontally for a brief moment like a petrified bird. Then he takes off and soars up and disappears into the sky.
I sometimes have this terrible urge to spread my wings and take off from my balcony, not in a suicide leap, but in the perfect expectation that I will fly and soar over the trees and houses to the sea,
They say that vertigo is an atavistic urge to fly: Sitting here at dusk with my wax wings.
How would I jump? Sit on the edge of the barrier and drop forwards? Or swing a leg over and then the other and hold the rail with two hands and then drop? Or try to balance for a moment as though on the edge of a pool, pushing off with my feet in a dive? A dead drop would land me on the grass verge or the asphalt path. A determined leap might land me in the hedge. I could never reach the eucalyptus tree from here, swaying invitingly in the breeze like a woman with a full skirt. Would I panic after the moment of no return?
Jumping off the balcony is not a serious option.
The day has been hot and overcast with a stormy feel and brief flashes of livid sunshine. The evening is cooler. The sky to the east over the sea is the color of a ripening bruise. The buildings opposite glow pink in the sunset with reflected light.
A plane lumbers across the sky, red lights flashing on its tail, coming in over the sea to land at Nice Airport.
Two, three flights of starlings pass by in a perfect vee formation; except for one poor straggler trying desperately to keep up.
Indigo clouds like pieces of a half-completed jigsaw puzzle – an archipelago drifting ever so slowly in front of the full moon that appears and disappears. Set up a video camera and make a half-hour film. Music by Sibelius: the first symphony perhaps.
Roger Collis copyright 1997
