Shadow Walker

Rooftop Conversation

The apartment block loomed overhead, high and dizzying, a tower of grey, inset with hive-shaped windows, giving it the look of concrete honeycomb. His heart thundered and his breath rattled in his chest as he jumped the security gate and rounded the corner of the building, taking the external staircase two at a time.

He was barely one storey up before he was heaving for breath and sweating though his t-shirt. The ground spun away from him like water down a drain and though he tried not to look past his canvas shoes through the grated steps, his eyes were drawn to the drop like an atom to a black hole.

He pushed on. Two, three, four storeys later and he felt as though he might be sick. Twelve stories and he really was sick. He bent over the railing and spewed forth a conical flask's worth of black tea. It caught the wind and make an abstract splatter design on the brick wall below, missing a bee hive window by less than a meter. He allowed himself a few lungfuls of air before he pushed on again.

The higher he went, the lighter the sky became, as though he was rising from the depths of an ocean about to break the surface. If he wasn't so worried for his mum, and if the climb hadn't taken the whole of his breath, the view of the city would've taken the rest. Gridlines of lights, following the veins and arteries of the city, undulated with the dips and crests of the land. Apartment lights stood like sedentary coordinates in the vast grid, through which light streams from cars and busses flowed like luminescent blood.

He checked his palm pod. Changeover was a little over an hour away. He still had time to get his mum back before the police rocked up at their garage. He pumped his legs and heaved himself up the last set stairs to the top storey.

He burst onto the rooftop balcony to a blood sky. The first traces of dawn light swirled and billowed, a marble of rusty red and smoky iron bark. He remembered what his mum used to say: 'Red sky at night, sailors delight. Red sky in the morning, sailors take warning,' and how it had always struck him as a prelude to disaster, despite the fact that none in their family were sailors, or particularly superstitious for that matter.

He didn't know whether to be relieved or apprehensive when he saw her, standing at the edge of the four-foot retaining brick wall, looking out at the city, hair sticking up in jagged chunks like a rooster's comb on a wind vane. The rooftop looked the same as it had all those years ago. The rickety lamp was still there. As was the cracked ceramic pot in the corner. Even Bear, Squid and Dick, childhood nicknames for himself, Mel and Tommy, were still carved between the grout like a relic from another era, reminding him of the rock paintings Tommy's ancestors had etched into the limestone cliffs of Quarry Cove. He remembered how it felt to carve those names, how tantalisingly illicit, like they'd just accomplished the most dangerous feat in the world and which now seemed like the juvenile scratchings of spoiled children.

"Mum?" he said.

Adele turned. She'd tied a chequered blue handkerchief over her mouth and fastened it around the back of her head so that only her eyes were showing. If he ignored her haywire hair, the clarity in her gaze was that of pre-illness Adele, back in the time before everything went to shit. The handkerchief muffled her words as she spoke. "There's going to be a dust storm," she said, glancing back at the horizon. "It's coming in thick and fast. The alarms will go off any minute now."

Dec didn't know how to reply. It wasn't what he'd expected her to say and yet, as he turned to the horizon, he saw she was right. The blood sky culminated in a thick, dark shadow on the horizon, blotting out all traces of moonlight and stars. It could've been nothing but a low hanging rain cloud. But they didn't get rain this time of year and Adele had a way of predicting the weather.

He remembered the last time the alarms had sounded, he'd been so young, all he could remember was getting the day off school, then the whole city being thrown into an early night. His mother had closed the blinds so they wouldn't be scared and set up a board game in the living room to take their mind off the howling wind, which shook the windows of their apartment in vicious gusts. Dec had spent the whole time wanting to peek through the blinds and being too scared to at the same time.