In other words I was going to have find a different way to get on the roof.
I raced outside to the swimming pool area and located a pathway between two rows of the terraced apartments. At the end of the pathway was a short flight of stairs that led up to the second storey of apartments. I hiked on to the wall that led round the side of the apartment that I guessed joined on to the upper level of the reception area, and managed to grapple up on top of it. I have never been particularly good with heights and standing above the whole complex I felt light-headed as I looked down to the swimming pool area below. The noise was considerably louder up here. Standing on top of the wall I precariously inched my way towards the glass pyramid roof. There was no purchase so it was a pure balancing act on top of a wall the thickness of a breeze block. There was a light wind but luckily it wasn’t strong enough to affect my balance.
Gradually I got closer, my back aimed at the fall behind me. If I dropped it would be 25 feet straight onto concrete tiles, a guaranteed broken leg or two and maybe even a broken back. The idea of spending the night in the dark unable to move and prone to whatever was heading my way did not fill me with anticipation.
Shuffling sideways across the wall it took me about 90 seconds to make the 30 yards to the support strut that held up the pyramid roof and, more crucially, the alarm speakers.
The sound was impenetrable at this point. I could barely concentrate on putting my feet where they needed to go, but eventually I reached out and grabbed hold of the steel strut. The speakers were, of course, about a foot beyond my longest stretch and I cursed myself as I realised I hadn’t even brought anything to hit them with. I laughed ironically as I realised I would have given every worldly possession to have a baseball bat in my hand right then. Stretching as hard as I could without losing my balance I was still about nine inches short of the speakers which were by now almost comically loud. The sound drilled into my brain and I felt my eyes blurring with pain. It shrieked and whined, a constant nasal pitch that cut through the air like a knife. I strained extra hard in my reach but it was no good. My options were either to turn back and try and locate something to bash the speakers with, or to climb up the steel strut with nothing between me and 25 feet of air but the plate glass on the pyramid.
Shit.
Then I noticed the power wire running into the top of the speakers. It was stapled down to the strut but there was a small loop where it left the support and ran into the top of the left hand speaker. If I could somehow hook my finger through that loop and tug hard enough I could maybe sever the connection and cut the alarm. That, however, was going to involve a jump.
Drawing a deep breath, I focused my eyes on the loop of wire, willing my fingers to go where they needed to go. As I crouched down to get some momentum for the leap the distance between my outstretched arm and the speakers got greater, so I took a second to re-adjust my aim.
Then I jumped.
My hip came down on the strut at the very second my index finger slipped through the loop of wire and tugged it from its housing, and for a second I was perfectly balanced. Then the wire came out. On the plus side the noise stopped instantly, and I was so grateful that for a split second I forgot my predicament. But because I had no longer got a grip on the wire my only point of contact was my right hip on a steel beam no more than six inches thick.
Gravity took over as it had every right to do. My body weight pulled me over and I realised with horror that I was about to land on the plate glass of the roof on my back. The strut was only an inch or two proud of the glass and so the fall wasn’t far, more of a repositioning, but I gasped as my shoulders impacted on the glass sheeting, waiting for the crack and the weightless fall to the deck below that was sure to come.
Somehow the glass held me. I guess I must have lost a bit more weight that I had expected. I was lying on my back 25 feet above the reception area, on a sheet of glass, somehow suspended. My mind whirled as I looked for a way to get myself out of this predicament. The gradient of the slide was just great enough to stop me from slipping.
At first.
But I was still dressed only in beach shorts with nothing on top. Normally the traction of the skin on my back might have been enough to stop me from sliding down the glass, but that didn’t account for the heat and the exertion that had caused some pretty severe sweating to occur in that area. I groaned in realisation as I began slipping down the glass towards the edge. My hands desperately grasped for some purchase, but all they found was the inch of steel strut that was proud of the glass. My grip wasn’t strong enough.
In the silence that had returned since I’d disconnected the alarm my scream was all that could be heard as I slid off the roof and the ground rushed up to meet me.
Then all I knew was blackness.
90%
The numbers came before consciousness.
Dimly I was aware of the flashing as I lolled in the darkness. At first they were too blurry, as if I was viewing them through water, then a rush almost as if I had surfaced and a prick of light formed in the distance.
90%
It got closer and closer as I felt myself come around, blazing proudly in my line of sight, emblazoned upon the darkness that surrounded me. Then as always they faded away to ghostliness, leaving only the spectre of uncertainty that I had come to accept but not yet comprehend.
The world was a blur but I could sense a rhythmic bleeping, pulse-like, in the distance. I could sense the heat presence of other people, the warm draught of a body close to mine, passing by it and disturbing the air pressure ever so slightly.
I was aware of voices, maybe two males in low conversation and a higher pitched female in the background providing some sort of commentary. My body was numb; I couldn’t feel or control any of my limbs in the blackness. Only a constant, uncomfortable pressure existed on my chest, as if someone had laid a large flat stone on my sternum. I could breathe, but with every breath a dolorous pain rolled into my lungs and the pressure on my chest seemed to force the air out again as quickly as I could take it in.
The throbbing in my head had rescinded to a dull ache now, and although I was definitely not fully conscious I seemed aware of all my other senses. A sharp smell lingered in the air, like the tang a dentist’s drill leaves after it has performed. It hung over another smell; a pleasant, clean odour like a room that has just been disinfected.
I racked my brain for some semblance of logic that would clarify the situation. Was I alive or dead? Was I alone or in company? Was I awake or asleep? Nothing seemed to make sense in the blackness in which my head swam. Unseeing but aware. Unaware but feeling. Unfeeling but sensing. I sensed, therefore I was. That’s all I was. The world was a mixture of scents and sounds but no sights, fused together in mutual darkness.
The voices seemed to grow louder, but at the same time they seemed farther away. I was drifting, rolling on some unknown surface towards consciousness and just as I thought I was about to break through and finally, deliciously, gain the knowledge I sought the world exploded again in a massive deluge of pain, my chest expanding as if fit to burst, and the light that grew from the pinprick at the back of my vision expanded in a split second to be all-encompassing.