Grasshopper Read online

  The foundations of a pylon can extend ten feet underground, and though they’re made of concrete, the pylons themselves are of steel, a latticework of steel bars, widely spaced at the foot and tapering to a point, the shape of the Eiffel Tower, and the big ones that carry 400,000 volts are more than 150 feet high. The line of them that marches across the field next to our house was put up in the late fifties to carry the power from the nuclear power station at Sizewell on the east coast – just visible, as I later discovered for myself, from the Silvermans’ country house – into Essex and Hertfordshire. These are the big ones, bearing the maximum voltage. The National Grid paid the owner of the field quite a lot of money to put up the pylons and the story goes that he used it to leave his wife and set up house with a man he had been in love with for years.

  The electricity is carried along the wires or conductors strung underneath the pylon in ‘quad’ or ‘twin’ formation – that is, two or four wires are suspended from each arm, being held apart along the span between the pylons by spacers at regular intervals. The stack of porcelain or glass discs hanging from the arms are the insulators which prevent the current flowing through the rest of the pylon and to earth. I know all this now, I didn’t then. When I was about fourteen I read a book about training electricians to work on live wires. It looked easy, it looked as if you just had to be fairly careful. There was an anecdote in the book about a man who pioneered work on live transmission lines and was raised to the line in a steel-mesh cage. That’s the point, that cage, as you’ll later see. He leant out and lit his cigar from the current. If he could do it, I could do it. The trouble was, I joked with myself, that I didn’t smoke. I started smoking the following year.

  Nearly all pylons have guards on them at about head height from the ground to prevent people climbing up. Some are like a raft of interwoven barbed wire and others are more of a frill round each of the uprights. Daniel said they were barbed-wire garters on the pylon’s legs and that that proved it was a girl like in the poem, but where he had seen real garters I don’t know. The guards wouldn’t stop anyone who really meant to climb up.

  On most big pylons there are four crossbars with struts criss-crossed in between them. Above that it’s all latticework to the top, which is a triangular shape or pentahedron. The six arms start about halfway up the latticework and end just below the top. By the time I met Daniel I had climbed all the pylons in the field up to the lowest arms, either cutting the barbed wire with wire cutters or, later on, when I was more proficient, climbing up inside the guard. Several times I saw the National Grid engineers come in their white van and mend the guards I’d damaged. Mum and Dad said they couldn’t understand such vandalism, what sort of a person would want to destroy a pylon guard, it was mindless wanton destruction by some idiot taking revenge on society. No one ever knew it was me, no one saw me on the pylons as far as I know. The fact is that a lot of people don’t see pylons, they’e unconsciously trained themselves not to see them because to most of us they’re as ugly as Spender said they were, a blot on the landscape, a violation of the countryside. So it seemed that when I was on them I became as invisible as the steel tower I climbed.

  Daniel was at school with me, the Upper School, a kind of comprehensive I had attended since I was eleven. He came at thirteen when his parents moved from where they had been living, somewhere in Norfolk. He was younger than me, but not the vast amount people made out after he was dead. I had become seventeen in the February and he would have had his seventeenth birthday in November if he had lived. It was October when we went up the pylon.

  It’s legal to ride a motorbike in this country when you’re sixteen. Daniel and I went all over the outskirts of London and the Home Counties on his Motoguzzi. Our elders disliked that motorbike. Mr and Mrs Fleetwood kept saying they wished they had forbidden it from the start; now he had got it, it was too late, and every time I went out on it my parents said that was the last time, Dad was going to put his foot down, it had to stop. They all said, and said repeatedly, that we’d be killed on that motorbike, it was one thing when they were young but the traffic was too heavy now and there were too many container lorries on the roads to make a motorbike safe. We’d be killed and it wasn’t fair on them, giving them all that worry. Ironical, wasn’t it? We never had a spill on the bike, we never had any sort of accident, not even a near-miss. It was on the pylon that we came to grief.

  That summer we made love in the fields. Sometimes we were lucky enough to have a bed when both his parents were out or both mine were. Such chances happened very seldom. I knew a girl whose parents let her have her boyfriend to stay, to sleep in the same room as her, in the same bed. I talked about it at home, I told Mum and she told Dad. Some part of me knew that would never be allowed in my home, but just the same it would do no harm to let them know, pave the way, prepare the ground. It wasn’t that I expected them to acknowledge that we were lovers now, but in the time to come, in a year or two maybe… I thought, of course, that there would be a time to come.

  That girl’s behaviour shocked them very much, the one whose parents let her and her boyfriend share a bed. Mum and Dad had been young in the sixties and we were always being told that those were the days, that was the time of licence and promiscuity, the sexual revolution. If it was, it had passed them by. Or they had put it behind them and forgotten. Also I’ve noticed that behaviour which was all right for a parent in his or her youth won’t be permitted in their children. What’s sauce for the goose and gander isn’t sauce for the gosling. When I did tell them about Daniel and me, that we had loved each other and been lovers, it was after he was dead and I don’t think they believed me. They thought it was all right to disbelieve everything I said because I was an irresponsible person. But we did love each other. We were as much in love as they had been when first they married. They said our love wouldn’t have lasted and probably it wouldn’t have. Had theirs lasted? I saw no sign of it. But what do I know except that I sent him to his death?

  I did. It’s not much use saying I didn’t mean to. I could read those black words printed on that yellow notice: Danger of Death. I’d climbed every pylon in that field – and stopped before I reached the lowest arm that carried the conductors. So why did I? Because I loved him. Because he loved me and wanted me to admire him even more than I did. Spiderwoman, he called me. When he watched me climb he’d call out, ‘I love you a lot, Spiderwoman.’

  This is how I began that piece I wrote about it:

  Marching across the field in which Daniel and Clodagh lay, striding in couples, the pylon line carried its heavy burden of black cables. It crossed the bright green and dun-coloured land, the little river with its double fringe of alders, mounted the other side where a cluster of white houses nestled and a white road wound and disappeared over the brow of the hill…

  It won’t do, will it? There is too much of the promising sixth-form essay about it. Maybe it was good enough for a therapist but it’s not good enough for me now and it’s not good enough for you. I suppose I was hiding what I really felt, my pain and remorse, under those descriptions of green meadows and nestling houses. Reality was different. Here goes, then.

  He wanted to go up the pylon. I didn’t dare him to climb it or ask him to prove something by climbing it or tell him, as I suppose some girls would, that I’d know he really loved me if he’d go up there to the top. But I did tell him about the man lighting his cigar from the live wire and once he had heard that story he was wild to try it himself, only in his case it would be a cigarette he was lighting.

  ‘I might light my cigarette from the conductor halfway up,’ he said, ‘and smoke it at the top.’

  ‘I’ll come up behind you.’

  That brought him a faint chill, I wrote. It wasn’t only that he would have preferred her to wait down here, stand down here looking up and see him light his cigarette from the conductor, but that he felt for the first time responsible for her. She had said she loved him and that, strangely, put him in charge of her
and made him her guardian.

  Did it? Or was I just passing the buck?

  The sun had barely gone. He thought he had never seen such a red sky, the clouds purple now, the great clear spaces that had been blue changed to flame and gold.

  ‘Better start, then, before the light goes,’ he said.

  He set his right hand to one of the steel diagonals. It was the first time he had ever touched a pylon. He expected it to be hot or at least warm but it was cool. Again he looked up.

  ‘There are footholds.’

  The steps. They jut at right angles from one of the four uprights and, spaced a few inches apart, they can have no other purpose than to make ascent of the pylon possible. Whether Daniel really said that about footholds and starting before the light goes I can’t remember, but I know he said, at this point, ‘People do go up, you see. They go up using the footholds, like climbing a ladder.’

  I should have said, for I knew it perfectly well, that when they went up the power was off. I didn’t say it. I didn’t remind him that the man in the anecdote was in a cage, not standing on the pylon. The pylons stand there in the fields, steady, strong, clean, they look harmless. You tell yourself, if you think about it at all, that they wouldn’t be allowed to be there, governments wouldn’t allow it, if they could really hurt people. Daniel and I would be quite safe if we were careful. When we came down we’d have proved they were safe and the people who had put up the notices just overcautious. I handed him the wire cutters.

  ‘Got your cigarettes?’ I said.

  ‘In my pocket.’

  I won’t quote any more from that piece I wrote. It attributes thoughts and feelings to Daniel I don’t in the least know that he had. For instance, I’ve no idea if by climbing the pylon he thought he was proving his love for me or even proving to himself that he was not afraid. Perhaps and perhaps not. But I knew then as I know now that he wanted to do it. Nor was he under some kind of malign influence exerted by me, for I’ve never been what Guy (referring to someone else) calls a femme fatale. But I could have stopped him and I didn’t.

  The guards on this pylon were the sort that Daniel had defined as the garter type, shelves or frills of barbed wire encircling each upright just below the second crosspiece. Because the steps only started higher up Daniel had to swing himself on to the lowest crossbar, get a purchase with his feet and pull himself upright. The pylon shone that afternoon, that early evening, every bar and strut gleamed in the slanting sunbeams. Pylons sing in wet weather, the damp rustling and humming through the wires, but that day ours was dry and shining. Daniel stood on the crossbar and began cutting the wire. He did it more methodically than I ever had, snipping each separate strand and bending it away from him against the upright. I climbed up beside him and let him go ahead once he’d made it easy to pass the guard. I read the Danger of Death notice as I went by and so did he but he didn’t say anything about it. As I passed that notice the sun was setting. I watched it drop and vanish beneath the horizon or, as anyone who honours Galileo and is a humble sort of scientist should say, I watched the earth turn away from the sun towards darkness.

  Even from as low down the pylon as this, we had a good view of things, the fields and woods, the river valley and the slope of the hills on the other side. The long shadows had gone as soon as the sun went, there was a duskiness lying over the land and in the west the sky was a dull red striped with thin black clouds. The only house to be seen was our house. A light had come on in the living room and one of the bedrooms. The pylon would be nearly invisible to my parents by now but it and its fellows generally were, even in broad daylight. They were among those who ‘didn’t see’ the pylons, somehow managing to envisage the field as it was when Constable painted it nearly 200 years before, a deep meadow, low between thick lush hedges and overhung by shaggy trees.

  Daniel climbed the ladder of steps and I followed, passing the third of the horizontals where the pylon became markedly narrower. I wrote in that piece that the sky had become violet and a single bright star had appeared, a clear white pinpoint high above the distant hill. It sounds like ‘fine writing’ to me now, I don’t know if it was so, I can’t remember. I saw Daniel pass the fourth crossbar, climbing on the steps, holding on to the latticework. I swung up on the lattice, ignoring the steps. We were both high up now, at least 100 feet up. I could see more houses in the distance or see their lights, and a church whose floodlighting brought to it an unearthly greenish glow. I said something to Daniel about climbing that church tower. Would he like to? One night when it wasn’t floodlit?

  A man was walking up the field from the river bridge. I recognized him as Guy Wharton, someone I’d met once or twice. He lived on the other side of the river, and was quite young, though older than us, and he owned all this land. It was his grandfather who had spent the pylon compensation on running away with his lover, but his father who had made the Whartons’ money.

  ‘Has he seen us?’ Daniel said.

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Better be quick, then.’

  Daniel was now under the first of the pylon’s arms. I expected him to light his cigarette from that position, reaching out to take a light from the lowest line suspended from the arm by its string of glass insulators. He didn’t. He went on. I should have told him not to, I thought of telling him not to. Something stopped me, his obvious enjoyment, I think. He laughed, he called out, ‘It’s great up here, Spiderwoman.’

  ‘I know,’ I said. ‘I told you.’

  ‘Come up a bit and when I’ve lit my cigarette I’ll pass it to you.’

  ‘I’m coming.’

  ‘We’ll go to the top and share it.’

  He did what I doubt I’d have dared do. He climbed across the struts, pulled himself up and stood on the first arm, the horizontal bar from which two lines are carried, one on each side. With his left hand he held on to the upright and reached up with his right, the right hand with the cigarette between his fingers. ‘Now!’ he said, ‘Now!’ or ‘Wow!’, I never knew which. But I saw him clearly enough and shall for ever see him as he was at that moment, in the twilight, against the dusky red sky, a tall thin boy with long legs in blue jeans, feet apart, standing on the pylon arm, his dark hair blown by the wind. He was laughing, exhilarated, up in the sky, on top of the world. Then he reached up towards the second arm, the dangling insulator and the conductor.

  I couldn’t have described this when I wrote that piece for whoever it was. In any case, I didn’t have the knowledge. I didn’t know what had happened but I do now. Four hundred thousand volts leaping from an overhead line to someone standing on the pylon cause an explosion. A small explosion, perhaps, but loud enough and bright enough to terrify. It seems as if the climber the line has struck has been engulfed in a ball of fire. To be a bit technical, just for this once, it’s not the voltage that flows through you but the current. The automatic protection equipment at the substation at each end of the line detects the change in flow and trips out the circuit. Although it does this within a fraction of a second, 20,000 amps can still flow through the human body.

  Daniel’s body. The flash was blinding and the noise like a bomb going off. I don’t think he cried out. The force of the electricity flung him off the pylon but instead of falling, he was caught in the struts. He hung in a diamond-shaped frame of steel, one knee hooked over a strut, the other dangling. I made a grab for him. I held him by the belt of his jeans and he hung there, half-seated in the latticework, his back to me, his head hanging, his arms limp and swaying.

  I began to shout and scream for help, I shouted at the top of my lungs. I screamed, ‘Help me, help me.’ I don’t know how long I was screaming before Guy came running up the field. It was Guy, but I hardly knew him then. He saw us, called out, ‘Hold on. I’ll get help,’ and ran to his car up on the road. Not many people had phones in their cars then but he did. I talked to Daniel, I said he’d be all right, I said help was coming, an ambulance would come and we’d get him down. I said, ‘I’m sorr
y, I’m sorry.’ Even then I said that. I so desperately wanted him to speak. I didn’t know then that he was past speech, that he would never speak again.

  It was just as well for me that I didn’t find out for a while what happens when that number of amps flows through someone. He effectively cooks from the inside out with deep and widespread burns, often to the bone. Nasty, isn’t it? Not something one wants to dwell on. An insensitive doctor, visiting me in hospital, hating me and blaming me, I suppose, compared it to what happens to meat in a microwave.

  It was some small consolation that the victim of the pylon would very likely feel nothing. The shock would be massive and the nerve endings destroyed. He’d probably die in hospital from secondary infection or organ failure. Weight will be much reduced due to fluid loss caused by the burns. A few have survived such a shock but they have always been disabled for life.

  Daniel didn’t survive. I thought he might be already dead when I held on to him by the belt of his jeans on the pylon. He felt heavy and inert. I could feel the warmth of his body through my knuckles. If he were dead, would he still feel warm? How did I know? I knew nothing. Then I heard him give a harsh whimpering groan. That sound I was to hear for years to come, I still hear it in my quiet moments, in my dreams. My husband has held me in the night when I’ve cried and shivered. I make the noise Daniel made, keening softly for a moment until a bubbling in his throat silenced him. I think it was the life going out of him.

  It was very nearly dark. Lights were on in houses on the hillsides around. I imagined the people in those houses who knew nothing of us, of what had happened, of how we hung there, people who were having an ordinary evening of food, television, talk. Mum and Dad were at home in the nearest house, unknowing, but not long to be in ignorance. The cars, ambulance, police cars, Super Grid cars, would all have their headlights on and they’d see them come up the road from the village.