Allen Bond fell.
Allen Bond fell, but not in a philosophical Heideggarian way of falling.
Nor did he fall in a magic realist metaphysical fatwa inducing way.
He fell.
He fell simply because, like the majority of humans, he was unable to fly.
Allen found that contrary to certain beliefs ‘Being’ was incredibly heavy.
Heavy - in the strawberry jam on the pavement sort of way.
Heavy in Allen’s case, as in fifteen stones too heavy.
Allen therefore fell in a real, honest-to-God-listen-to-me-scream sort of way.
Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaahhhhhh!!!!
Aaaaaaaaaahhhhhh!!!!
Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaahhhhhh!!!!
In fact mental health assistant social worker Allen Bond was not having a good day.
As days went it probably couldn’t get much worse, but there again……
Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaahhhhhh!!!!
Allen fell at a reasonably constant rate of thirty two feet per second, per second, not taking into account wind velocity, which he was happy not to do.
It might to true to say that Allen plunged in an I-could-do-without-all-this-gravity
please-give-it-to-someone-more-needy, sort of way.
It has been said that gravity is an entirely natural phenomenon - one way in which bodies with mass attract each other, and is indeed one of the fundamental forces in the known universe. This knowledge did not, of course, mollify Allen Bond in any way at all.
Embraced by the full force of Earth’s magnetic force Allen descended rather too rapidly towards the underlying lake. This, curiously, also preventing him from drifting off into space, a small detail yes, but significant considering the circumstances.
Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaahhhhhh!!!!
“I wish that bloody noise would stop”, Allen said mentally to no-one in particular, as he plummeted.
The long and one could ascertain quite heartfelt, piercing scream assailed Allen Bond’s sharply conscious stream of thought.
It was a loud wailing, eerily and uncomfortably reverberating within Allen’s head - strange yet remarkably familiar. The protracted agonising scream seemed to last an eternity threatening to become a constant if not permanent fixture in Allen’s conscious reality; though, actually, barely a few moments had passed and, as the cliché goes, Allen found that the scream was indeed issuing from his own mouth.
Allen continued to scream.
Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaahhhhhh!!!!
Somewhere quite sceptical, in the dust-cupboard of his mind, Allen added a “bloody” to the screamed phrase Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaahhhhhh! As it thought, quite rightly given the circumstances, that Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaahhhhhh!!!! Was probably not quite punchy enough to give the true essence of the situation, and his mental attitude towards it, therefore some sort of expletive ought to be injected into the vocalisation, hence Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaahhhhhh! In his mind, became Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaahhhhhh!!!! Bloody Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaahhhhhh!!!! - Which only goes to show that at least one tiny part of Allen was not taking the situation as seriously as it could have.
The chill March wind rushed past Allen carrying his voice upwards and away as his body plunged at an accelerating rate downwards.
On the journey down, it had, in fact, been quite a learning experience for Allen. For instance Allen had learned that you didn’t automatically crap your pants when you fell headlong towards a lake, and he was thankful for that. Allen had also learned that adrenalin could not only make you exhilarated, it could make you entirely pissed off too.
Just when Allen thought he had learned all there was to learn about falling, he discovered that it just wasn’t true that your whole life flashed before your eyes as you fell. In fact all he could think about was …..falling.
There was no sudden revelation, no defining moment to his, quite possibly truncated, life. No blazing light at the end of tunnels. Just the ever chill wind of winter dashing past his descending body, stopping on its way to nibble his considerably opulent ears, then continuing its path upwards, as he continued to descend.
Allen Bond fell with his arms crossed, and for some reason known only to him-self desperately clung to his black nylon padded winter jacket, no doubt to prevent it catching the wind as he plummeted towards the winter wind ruffled lake.
Logic, if it were possible to engage in logic while tragically plummeting towards earth, would have reasoned that Allen was probably going to fall slightly faster, rather than the opposite, while holding onto his jacket. But thought being what it is, decided to concentrate on one salient point at a time, and it obviously felt that the mere fact of its extinction should maintain priority.
The screaming stopped and curiosity got the better of Allen. Momentarily Allen’s previously falling body seemed to linger in midair. Allen opened his eyes just wide enough to observe scummy black water inches from his nose. In that sacred moment of idleness a slow thought crept to the front of Allen’s mind as he evinced a “Huh!”
But before Allen could tilt his head to gain a better view, or engage in a lengthier dialogue with himself, his body was jerked mightily upward - like some human fish caught on a giant’s hook and line, being yanked and snared in preparation for the landing.
Allen’s potential corpse one again shot through the air, but this time not in a neat, orderly line, but upwards and at a dizzying angle. Allen’s body ricocheted until he could see nothing but clouds and sky, and those only in constant blur.
Allen had reached the full elastic extent of his braided latex bungee cord’s stretch.
Without any form of warning, no bell ringing, no warning light, no excuse-me-but-I-think …., the tightly stretched elastic whipped all fifteen stone of Allen Bond back up into the air, whisking him by his ankles, backwards to the clouds, then down, then up, then down, then up, then down as he danced and bounced at the mercy of gravity and the elastic.
Allen didn’t know whether to be thankful that he hadn’t drown in the lake, or to be most concerned that he was now, seemingly, doing everything in reverse. Allen probably would have screamed again, but his mind was preoccupied with his feet, trying not to get them twisted round the thick braided elastic cord which was snaking around threatening to either hang him or break off some irreplaceable limb or other.
At that precise moment it really didn’t matter to Allen that the cord tied around his ankles was ‘quality checked through Dynamometric testing in order to constantly check the correspondence of the tension/extension values by means of defined parameters’, as one company explained. But that the damn thing didn’t hang him.
Each yanking bounce was thankfully a little shorter than the last, but still seemed to replace Allen’s stomach firmly back in his mouth, his face turning overtly emerald, shade by shade as the motion continued.
With each disruptive bounce Allen idly wondered if he would spray vomit over the wind swept lake – perhaps airbrushing the various gawping onlookers with carrot chunks – it had to be carrot chunks, it always was. He, momentarily, became curious to know if this was expected, perhaps even the highlight of the experience.
Allen S Bond was a victim of his own charity. Allen Bond was in fact at the mercy of a very vicious, take-no-prisoners sort of gravity and, he hoped, securely attached to a strong elastic cord bound to his ankles.
The disconcerting whipping appeared to stop. There was once again the sense of falling, but this time slowly, gently, in a measured sort of way.
From his precarious upside-down position Allen, on craning his now quite painful neck could espy the small black lake again getting slowly bigger, and a sadistic looking crowd of observers standing, heads looking up, gathered by the lake shore. Allen pondered “is this what a hanging crowd might have looked like?”, “or ghoulish spectators accompanying a beheading by Madame Guillotine!”
Looking up and to one side of his bungee wrapped ankles Allen could just about see the ominous great black arm of the 300ft high crane, and the, now small, metal cage from which he had been launched.
Allen S Bond, it has to be said, is not the bravest of souls, but once his word was given he would do his utmost to carry out any promise he may have made, be it in haste or fool heartedly. Such was proved to be the case in the galvanised iron cage some three hundred feet above ground.
After being weighed, and having the correct weight of bungee cord fixed to his ankles Allen had been escorted via a small metal cage to the top of the crane. Not a one for heights at the best of times Allen’s nerve had finally given way when the bronze Adonis muscled male, potentially Gay thought Allen for no particular reason, New Zealander asked him to jump.
All through the preliminaries Allen had been assailed with doubts. He was not by nature sporty, and the very idea of extreme sports appeared to him just that – extreme, but hardly sport. Badminton, which he engaged in on Wednesdays, was extreme enough, especially when faced with his mate Ed, who had once taught at Pro level, so the very idea of risking his life in a sport was contrary to all his self preservation beliefs.
Allen stood rigid, unable to move a tendon, a multiplicity of doubts assailing his mind all at the very same time. The young patient bungee coach repeated his request for Allen to jump, and gave him the option to return to the ground, as many others were waiting to jump.
Allen’s body had frozen, it seemed no longer to belong to him - a body snatching alien had taken control of Allen’s body and had rooted it to the spot. The mental command that Allen’s head was issuing was being fragrantly disobeyed by his rebel alien controlled body. But Allen, like the trooper he was, insisted that he must go through with the jump, but needed time, preferably a lot of time, perhaps even more time than that, to persuade himself that he would indeed survive. This seemed to be quite important to Allen.
