A Reason to Exist

Chapter 32

We followed Tucker up the stairs. Although it seemed architecturally impossible, there was a massive skate bowl upstairs.

'Tiled coping,' Tucker yelled in my ear.

'Huh?'

'The coping around the edges, it's pool tiles,' he said, pointing at the bowl. 'What a shame they've painted it white. I heard it used to be natural timber.'

The bowl looked patchy. Two guys were shredding it up. One was wearing long baggy black shorts with an orange Red Bull tee and the other was topless, wearing khaki shorts. He was skating barefoot, with a cigarette dangling from his mouth.

We stood on a tiny platform overlooking the bowl. There wasn't a lot of space to stand and watch, so people were crowded together closely.

'Only three other girls here,' Zuri shouted in my ear. 'I've counted.'

I looked around. She was right. This alpha male colosseum was packed with whiskers and body odour and caps worn backwards and hearts pumping not from love, but from the thrill of danger. One of the guys in the bowl lay down plank on his skateboard and the other guy was doing jumps over him. One mistake and the lying-down guy's head would be crushed.

'Cool, hey?' Tucker asked. He took my hand and squeezed it. A guy lit up a joint next to me. Now I was passive smoking weed.

Was I being pathetic? Should I loosen up? Should this be fun?

There was a new guy standing up in the bowl, near the edge. He was holding a skateboard in one hand. Another skateboarder launched into the bowl, pirouetted on the coping and jumped back into the bowl over the guy's head.

This wasn't a party. This was a demolition derby of skaters. Civil disobedience on wheels. This was watching guys perform bizarre acts of stupidity. I looked at Zuri wondering if it was polite to leave yet.

Tucker let go of my hand. The ceiling was low. He jumped up onto a wooden rafter, with his skateboard in one hand. He crawled along a beam. What the hell was he doing? The new recruit of this daring sideshow placed his skateboard under his feet and crouched on the rafter, waiting for the skaters to clear below. The crowd looked up, waiting to see what Tucker was going to do.

The guys in the bowl wound down. Tucker smiled, perched on his skateboard, and jumped into the middle of the bowl. He crashed straight to the ground. His body was splayed out. His trick had failed, but he'd succeeded in stunning the crowd. There was a brutish cheer as he rolled onto his back. Tucker stood up and laughed.

The room was closing in on me. My lungs were full of smoke, my heart full of alarm. Tucker was climbing out of the bowl on the other side. He placed his arm around the rafter. He was going to try the trick again. I couldn't watch. I said 'Let's go,' to Zuri. 'I feel sick.'

She saw the look on my face. 'Let's get out of here,' she said. She took my hand and pushed people out of the way. As we were rushing down the steps, I heard that sound again of Tucker's wheels smashing into the bowl and his body hitting the ground. I hated that sound. It was a phantom hit to my own spine. I felt his pain sharper than he did. We raced down the stairs, past the DJ and the dancers, past the skaters on the half pipe, stepping over crushed beer cans and cigarette butts. We burst out the door, into the fresh air. We could breathe again.