Imagine That: Other lives

the lip as the road streaked away under me. Another tiny slip and I would have fallen, cracked my head open, snapped my spine. I was lucky that day. Someone grabbed my shoulder and hauled me back from the brink. I could have died but I didn't.

When I was older I had dreams of riding the biggest, oiliest brute of a motorbike in the whole city. I wanted to be black, and leathery, and slide into the seat like it was part of me. I needed to have a huge, metallic, machined space between me and the world. The motorbike growled and roared defiance at everyone and everything. It sounded like my thoughts.

But I chose a smaller machine and meekly went at the speed limit around the city. The biggest thrill was the open road, with the nor'wester pushing, and the cattle trucks sucking as they passed. I should have died many times on the road. I had so many near-misses I lost count.

One night I catapulted down a bank, and smashed the bike so badly there was nothing left to retrieve. It may still be there, grass-encrusted, rusting into the earth. Another time I somersaulted into a ditch. Another time a car missed me by a whisper. I should be very dead.

Lew and I got a long way round the hill, then we stopped, trembling, gasping for breath. Our hearts felt as if they were struggling to jump from our chests. Our legs shook. We looked back at the glasshouse.

The rock had sliced a path through the broom and gorse and now, even as we watched, it smashed into an outcrop of poplar trees, which exploded like a fireworks display, showering the valley with branches and sticks and smaller pieces, then the world seemed to go very still. Every bird was silent, and the wind whispered, like a shocked bystander, appaled at some unexpected horror. The rifle-shot crack of shattering rock and splintering trees echoed up to our ears, and the world held its breath, listening.

All those fragments. All those little pieces. Each one had gone a different way from the same explosion. So many different paths for them to take. How long had they waited, hidden so to speak, inside the uncracked rock? How long had the stone mother waited for us to come along, and split her into a thousand fragment children? How long had the rock been buried under the soil, rising slowly towards the sunlight as the weather dragged the soil away from it?

The valley had once been the sides of a volcano. Hot lava and thick, poisonous fames had spewed down the sides, tumbling and steaming, thick like molasses, hot like burnt potatoes. And then the world had spun a few thousand times and people had come. People with bare