Free Boy on the Wire by Alastair Bruce Page B

people arrived and drove to the cottage they were renting. It was hot and there was no swimming pool and they had heard about the rock pools up in the pass.
    After parking their car – a Chevrolet – at a viewpoint, they picked their way through gorse on the slope of the mountain, moving slowly into the valley. There were five of them. The man, who carried a basket, was in front, followed by two children, his wife with the third child in the rear.
    The father held the basket in front of him. The child behind him, Peter, had to catch the branches as they flew back. It seemed to be a sort of game. Peter was becoming a man. He had to show this.
    Behind him, Paul. It is harder to see him. The picture is faded.
    The youngest child lagged behind and the mother called to him, or shouted.
    Their path led out from the bush onto rocks by the side of the river. The youngest was the last to emerge and he walked between the members of his family, looking up at them, their attention elsewhere.
    The party laid out their picnic at the uppermost pool. It was the largest and the warmest, they thought, and there was space on the rocks to sit. The mother had a camera with her. It belonged to one of the boys – the youngest, me. But she was using it. He did not mind. He said he did not mind. It was new. It was a deal they had. It was his camera – a birthday present – but she would use it sometimes and she would show him how to use it properly too and maybe one day he would be a photographer and she would buy all the film he wanted, of course. He liked their arrangement, but maybe she was using it a little bit too much now. She was taking pictures. The father told her she was wasting film. It was easy to tell he was not being serious, was just humouring her.
    She took photos of the boys mainly. Of the three of them together, or in pairs, when they weren’t looking. In one, the two older boys were standing with their arms around each other’s shoulders, posing for the camera. The eldest was flexing his left bicep, his face in a grimace. In the background of that photograph, the third boy slipped into shot. Facing the camera, features blurred. He is not meant to be there.
    After a while, the two boys went off, followed by the youngest. ‘Look after your brother,’ the mother called. Or did she? Do I remember those words or do I think of them just because they are the obvious ones to say?
    The two older boys set off down the path. The youngest followed. The path led through thick bush – thick, at least, to a child.
    He kept up with them for a while, but the path was steep and uneven underfoot and he had to push his way through branches that scratched at his face.
    He began to lose them. He lost sight of them, could not hear them either. He stopped and looked around him. The sun, the bush, the cicadas.
    He began to move again and he called out too, but as he did he stumbled and fell to the ground. That must be where the cuts came from, though I cannot see them.
    There was a noise from down the path and the eldest came back and looked at him and said something. Or, he said nothing and just looked. The youngest was quiet too, his voice stopped by the expression on his brother’s face. He was left alone. He turned and looked back. He could not see his parents. He heard a voice, he thought, or was it a bird? Nothing else. He looked back down the path, down the trail of white rocks disappearing around a corner and into the deep blue of the sky.
    He wanted to go back to his parents. He wanted to be sitting on the rocks with his mother and father, sitting between them. He didn’t want to be here, but he had been told to go and now he couldn’t go back on his own.
    What did he do next, as he got to his feet, what did he see? I try to remember, try to put myself back in the skin of the boy, try to imagine myself there. It is hard. Twenty-eight years. I close my eyes and try to think myself there. But it has gone.
    There was a policeman at the