Imagine That: Fate

We started to walk along the tracks, stepping from sleeper to sleeper, so we didn't have to stand on the brown, oily stones. They were sharp and sometimes painful under our shoes.

"You can't blame Fate for everything," said Weed, after a bit of a think, "What about when you get up. You decide what clothes to put on, and what to eat for breakfast. If you just lie in bed, you never get dressed do you? I mean, the clothes don't jump on to you do they?"

"You were meant to he in bed then." I said, "Everything you decide to do is what you were going to do anyway. That's how Fate works."

"I can't accept that," said Weed, "No free will, no choices. You know what that means in the end?"

"What?"

"You're never responsible for anything."

"How do you mean?"

"Well," said Weed, "What if you decide to be a criminal. You can go about killing, and stealing, and blowing things up, and then say you were going to do all that stuff anyway, because you were Fated to do it. Right from when you were born, you were going to be a criminal, so there was no point in anyone trying to stop you, and no point in you trying to stop being one either!"

I had to think about that for a while. Weed had a good point. I didn't know what to say, so I said nothing.

We walked along the sleepers until we had come to a bridge. It was a long, wooden bridge, which ran across an overgrown riverbed. Below us were wild lupins and masses of willows. Bulldozers had left the shingle in heaps, and pools of dark, oil-coloured water lay about. I felt like I was sort of flying as I walked above the chaos below. A god in the sky, walking above the turmoil of the earth.

The bridge had a sign each end, written in black on yellow. It was a warning to pedestrians, to stay off the bridge at all times. There was barely enough room for the train and a person to share the space. The sleepers just stuck out each side of the rails like a zipper. But Weed and I didn't care. We knew the train wouldn't be along for at least an hour.

We went along the bridge, looking down at the sparkling pools far below, throwing stones down, (which we'd picked up and stuffed in our pockets when we started),