And I did. I got the phone. But leaning out that extra few centimetres was too much for the rotten wood of the fence. I heard the crack and felt the fence give. I half turned so that I could see Kenny. I saw his mouth changing shape – from a wide smile to an “o” of horror.

And then I was falling.

Eleven

Eleven

I think that half turn before I fell saved my life. Without it, I’d have gone straight down – head first onto the rocks beneath. Would you die if you fell down seven or eight metres? Maybe I’d just have broken my neck and spent the rest of my life in a wheelchair, only being able to communicate by blinking.

Anyway, that half turn meant I was able to throw out my arm, and I just managed to catch the edge of the cliff. There was no way I was ever going to stop myself from falling, but my desperate grab at the cliff slowed my fall. It made sure that I slithered down feet fist, crashing and bashing into the rocky cliff face as I went. My head took one big smash on a jutting fist of rock, but I hit the bottom before I registered it, and then there was a different kind of pain.

It’s a funny thing, pain. When it happens, it’s the most important thing in the world – a stubbed toe, a burned finger, a bad tooth. You live inside the pain. The pain becomes you. If it’s bad enough, you’d do anything to make it stop. You’d even betray your friend (or your brother). And then it goes away and you forget it. It’s as if you never had the pain. It must be because it’s impossible to remember pain the way you remember other things. Like a times table at school, or the French for dog, or where you put your secret stash of sweets. That kind of remembering means bringing the things back into your head. But to remember a pain would mean having the pain again, same as before, and that’s not how it is. So all you can remember is how you felt about the pain, but not the pain itself. And even that comes back in a weak way, like orange squash with too much water in it. There isn’t the horror you had the first time round.

So now, when I talk about this, it’s just words – words that I’ve tried to make true. But they’ll never take me back – back to landing on the broken rocks by the side of the stream.