The Wire Jumpers
I look up into the dark blue evening, through my own misting breath, and sigh. I listen to the humming up above us.
“So what am I looking at?”
“It’s a power line.” Says Joe Malone, my childhood friend, lost all these long, lonely years, and back on the scene in the months since Jody left for Oz.
“Right. You see, I thought that was what it was. At least I haven’t totally lost it.”
“It’s where the power goes?” He says, confirming that we are both on the same page. We aren’t. I am already distracted by the lack of feeling in my toes. I look down at him. He is still as short as I always remembered him being.
“Riiight. Great. Well, this should help me get to Jody.”
I have come a long way in the years since Joe and I first played together. I have discovered sarcasm. My world is much richer for it, obviously.
“Well, yes, it should.” He says, not quite understanding. I look around, searching the field for anything like a pub. I am out of luck, it seems, although I do see the alarming shadows of some horses, drifting large and haughty in the gloom nearby.
I have somewhere elses to be, and other things on my mind, then hanging around in the cold with someone who may or may not be a bit not-quite-right. I’d be angry at anyone else for the massive time-suck this evening is becoming, but a look at Joe’s big, happy eyes, full up of worry and pity in a way that they never were for the eight-year-old me, takes the wind out of my sails, and a good deal of the vinegar out of my mood.
I’m still full of piss, and may need to do something about that in a bit, but I keep quiet about it. Checking the ground around me as best I can for cowshit, I slump down on the damp earth.
“I don’t see how, Joe. It’s just a wire. Maybe if it was a phone line, I could call her, but…”
“You said that if you looked your friend in the eye, and finally told her how you really felt, she wouldn’t have to marry that man she met, and you could both finally have what you really wanted.”
“I don’t think that’s exactly how I put it…” It sounded quite naive, put like that. “Besides, how does this have anything to do with that? Australia is, like, a million miles away, and I don’t think she’ll change her life on the strength of a phone call from a bloke who’s flaked out on her as many times as I have. And…” I add, somewhat feebly, “… It’s really bloody cold!”
“So look her in the eye.” He winks at me, but to tell the truth, it might just be him squinting against the moon, the angle he’s at.
“How?”
“Don’t you remember how it used to be?”
The first time I met him, I was an eight year old lad, who might or might not have just pissed himself. My main enduring memory of the event was that I was crying, and was embarassed that anyone might see me with snot and tears running down my face. Luckily, the reason I was crying was that the boys who had pushed me down the hill had had no interest in sticking around to keep me company, and I was all alone. So that had worked out okay.
Still, I sat there, sobbing my nose out. There’s a way of crying that you don’t tend to do once you’ve grown up a little… where your body shakes as if it is trying to throw the tears out of your little face, like some sort of ebola of sorrow. It is not pretty. And it meant that I didn’t notice Joe until he was right there in front of me.
“Hello. Do you want to play?” Said the strange little man. Although, of course, he didn’t seem so little to me, back then. I had rubbed the collected tears and mucous off my face, shy again, and had looked him up and down, but to be honest I can’t really remember much about what I saw, now. I was eight, after all.
“Mum says I’m not allowed to talk to strangers.” I sniffled.
“Well, then. What is your name?”
“I’m Joseph. Joe.”
“That, young man, is an incredible coincidence… I too am Joe. Joe Malone, the World Hopper. And you and I are no longer strangers. So shall we play?”
And of course, with the wisdom of adulthood, I realise how desperately dodgy that all sounds, but it was the beginning of the most incredible friendship, packed with incident and excitement, every day full of the promise of strange people and exotic lands, the details of which are admittedly hazy to me now, as I guess most people’s memories of the time before they discovered the wonderful world of puberty are.
Still, when he asks me if I remember it all, I can’t help but get an inkling of the magical. I get the strangest sense of having been in a different amazing place every day, and wonder how peculiar it is, that an eight year old could have imagined such things.
I look at him, and make a dumb noise, that indicates that I might or might not recall what he’s on about, and I might or might not feel some way or another about it. It is almost identical, I realise, to the sound I made whenever Jody brought up the subject of she and I being maybe more than just friends. My cheeks go red. But again, that might be the cold.
Joe Malone takes it as a signal to keep talking.
“So… Earlier today we were talking about power lines?”
“Well, yeah, we were. But I thought you meant, you know, ley lines or something like that. I mean, that seemed to be what you were getting at… Not pylons.”
“Power is power, Joe. There are lots of different ways to get to where you want to go, if you don’t go wanting to see things as lots of different things.”
“Okay. Right. I’m pretty sure most of what you just said doesn’t mean anything.”
“Well, that’s as maybe. But so is this: the distance between you and your girl is a million miles, and at the same time, it’s a heartbeat. If you picked up the phone and spoke to her, the distance would be the width of that humming noise coming from up above us.”
“Hm. Did this stuff ever make any sense to me when I was a kid?”
“To be honest, Joe, no, not really. You used to make that same dumb face that you are making now. But, okay, maybe I shouldn’t try and explain. Maybe I should just show you. Take my hand?”
And he offers me a pick me up, pulling me from my muddy seat, and then somehow, we’re perched way up high, on a wire, and I can look down and see the horses and the field below. And suddenly it all comes back to me.
“Oh, hang on a minute… I just remembered why you were called Joe Malone, the World Hopper.” I try not to let it occur to me that I am standing atop a buzzing filament only an inch across, and I do a fairly good job of it, all things considered. Because my mind is full of a thousand bright adventures, and I have realised that I really will soon be seeing Jody, and everything will be alright. “We used to go all over the shop… every country under the sun, and some that were under others. And you always found a different way to take us there.”
He grins at me, and I know that it is just my new grin reflected back.
“Actually, I was called Joe Malone because that’s your name. But you are right about the rest. Except… the journeys were only different in some ways. In another way, they were always the same. We always left from point ‘a’. And we always ended up at point ‘b’!”
And then he winked, and the wire beneath our feet started to vibrate more than before, faster and faster.
“Joe Malone, you are right.” I say to him. “Shall we be off?”
“Right you are, Joe Malone!” He winks again. And the cold, dark, blue night blinks away around us.
And then we are off; Joe Malone and Joe Malone, off on their greatest adventure.
