LOVERS BRIDGE

After we make love in her parents house she tells me of a man in her home village who decides to commit suicide by hanging himself from a disused and out-of-the-way bridge in the locality. The bridge was once an important crossing point over a river with plentiful trout in it, but the river was diverted into a reservoir nearly a century ago and now it is a bridge over dry and stony ground, with here and there a thistle poking through. There is not enough moisture there now to water a single red rose.  The man's choice of this bridge as the site of his suicide is bitterly symbolic. Underneath the bridge generations of villagers have courted and made love, taking advantage of the rent-free shelter and the seclusion offered there.  This shady space beneath bridge is still in use among teenagers for courting and perhaps for other purposes. The reason the man decides to kill himself is that he is no longer able to love his wife, or anyone else for that matter. He is extremely unhappy and resentful about this. He feels that if he is to be denied the enjoyment of love, then no one else in the village should be entitled to it either. The man knows that by killing himself in this locally hallowed place he will be ruining it for future local lovers and poisoning the memories of those many living locals who have previously made local love there. He goes discreetly to the nearest city to buy a length of rope.  There are no questions at the cash desk from the tired cashier. At home the man ties a knot  according to instructions widely available on the world wide web. He tests its strength by tugging hard on it, and notes the spiky rifting of its fibres against his neck. The rope will do the job required of it, for sure.  He lets go of the noose and feels the heft of it sliding down to rest weightily against his chest. Nine straight feet of rope hang loose from his neck, ending in curls at his feet that make him think of cobras, question marks, cosmic spirals and the gross innocence of piglets. He feels a little dizzy, a little tremulous. Fear and exhilaration and indecision are joining in tumult inside him. Quickening his resolve,  he tucks the rope into a knapsack and, for the last time, steals away from his house and from his wife adrift upstairs in the unaccompanied realms of her sleep.  He strikes out along a dark winding track between two steep banks of briars, rhododendron, and other undergrowth. He has not traipsed this way for decades but remembers it by heart from those earlier, tumescent dusks. It is the riverbed of old. Approaching the bridge, his heart beats louder with every  step. It is no longer his lifebeat, but the faster, stronger beating of his death, increasing steadily in amplitude, in the manner of Ravel’s Bolero, towards an annihilatory crescendo,. He drums his fingertips against his hips. He inhales the air deeply and resolutely, like a conductor whose tiny, vivid motions must push the whole gigantic orchestra onwards, or a workhorse who is half way through ploughing an enormous field. Once at the bridge, he wastes no time. He fixes the noose around his neck and checks again that all is correct with the knot. He says farewell to the world and everyone in it - all its lovers, all its haters -and jumps into the endless black. It takes less then a second for him to fall the  eight feet from the bridge to the stones below. He sprains his ankle so badly he has to cry out for help from a passerby, who turns out to be his wife's first cousin, an utter gossip. He is in crutches for weeks and weeks afterwards and people in the village and surrounding area are still laughing about it, sometimes whilst making love. Test Layout