The Wind And Rick

Rick and the wind have a history. Will they finally be able to reach an understanding tonight . . . ?

The wind’s blowing a gale tonight, and Rick is taking it personally. “Get Back!” he splutters angrily, “Get Back!” You can see his contempt in the way he strikes his fingerless hand into the unseen plunging body of his enemy.

It was this gale that had robbed him of the fingers on his right hand. Forty years ago, he was just a toddler, exploring the hinges of a door in his home. And the wind blew through the house and crushed his childish curiosity. They’d be able to save his fingers now. They couldn’t then.

Rick has no memory of these long-vanished digits. Once the pain had gone, and the horror in his Mum’s and Dad’s faces been forgotten, he was little troubled by their absence. It was only at school that Rick noticed his right hand was an oddity, that the loss of its fingers was something, something that had happened to him. And though he could not call his missing fingers to mind, his left hand, his whole body, seemed to demand them. The hands of all the other kids in school, and on the street, screamed for them. For years afterwards, in Rick’s eyes and in his mind, these absent fingers loomed large over the rest of him.

“Piss off!” Rick snaps as the wind punches his face. “Just go and . . . ” But the words are scooped out of his throat and tossed into the air. The audacity of it makes Rick livid. “Don’t fucking try to shut me up! You’re nothing!”

Rick hates the wind. He’s no believer in gods or spirits, and sees no evidence of intent in the forces of nature. But still, he hates the wind. Hates it for its moronic passage through the world, ponderous sometimes, maniacal other times, and always completely pointless. If it had a purpose, if it had attacked him deliberately, maybe he could have tried to understand its motives and reached some accommodation with it. But its blind stupidity was unforgivable.

Rick is crossing the high-level bridge now. The wind is buffeting him. “Come on then, do you want it?” Rick pummels his fists into the invisible waves heaving against him. And the idea comes to him to climb up onto the thick iron ledge and follow it till he reaches the other side. There’s plenty of room to walk along it: the only thing that would knock you sideways into the black void is fear. But Rick feels no fear, only hate. So he gives the finger - with his left hand – and clambers up onto the ledge. He stands, finds his balance, feels the iron rivets under his feet. He edges forward, then begins to walk slowly.

A gust comes: Rick is overpowered for a moment, but catches hold of the stanchion of a streetlight with his left hand; he steadies himself by wrapping his right wrist round a roadsign gantry. That was close. But Rick is aroused to even greater fury. Crouching now to lower his weight, his arms extended, he trots along the ledge as fast as he can to the next streetlight, where he pauses for a moment’s rest. And so he goes on, interval by interval. “Fuck you, fuck you, fuck you,” is his mantra. His eyes are raised and forward. Gaining in confidence he straightens, begins to leap, to bound along. Because the wind has dropped. Yes. It has dropped, as if it realises it has met its match. “Fuck you, fuck you, fuck you!” But the wind is now only a breeze. Rick senses its humility. He feels the gladness of one whose message has hit home against all the odds. The elation of finding dialogue with another world.

At last he reaches the opposite bank. Rick takes his final steps on the ledge and jumps down, back to the roadway. His anger has melted. He is moved by the deference he has been shown. Still, there’s a look of victory about him as he thrusts his fingerless arm triumphantly into the air.