Head Injuries (8 page)

    'Why isn't she coming with us?' I asked.

    'Because when you went to the toilet I told her I wanted to have you to myself for a while. She can see you some other time. Tomorrow most likely.'

    I really loved the sound of that. I don't think. I felt like something that was to be shared between squabbling children. I told him this, and then: What if I decide I want to be on my own? What if I'm unavailable tomorrow?'

    'Suit yourself,' and he stalked away, capped head bobbing to the rhythm of his gait.

    Where are we going?' I said, trying to keep up without breaking into a trot.

    'Somewhere quiet.'

    He led me through Market Square. Some wag had polluted the fountain with bubble bath: shivering sud structures lolled over the concrete rim; the roof of the museum was patchy with snow.

    He ushered me into the pub so quickly that I didn't get a glimpse of its name.

    'I thought you wanted to go somewhere quiet,' I hollered, over the brittle shriek of an electric guitar, but he'd vanished into the pack of bodies at the bar. Sweat leapt from my skin; the pub was like a sauna. Large, ineffectual fans lumbered on the ceiling, windows spawned spreading centres of mist. I shrugged off my coat and pulled the sleeves of my jumper back. Everybody seemed to know everyone else.

    Fluorescent green posters told me that this band were called Lettuce: they were a three-man combo-drums, bass, lead-the singer screaming his lyrics out of the side of his mouth while his eyes nursed the fingers on the frets as they shaped the most basic of chords.

    'Get this down you,' yelled Seamus, pushing a pint of Guinness into my chest.

    'Why are we here?'

    'I told you, I wanted to tell you something. Great band, eh? Fucking curvy.'

    There was no point in pushing him. I watched the band slog through a series of pseudo Nirvana thrashes that were more cringe than grunge before they finished with a predictable kicking-over of the drumkit and a
Fuck you!
to the audience, who applauded in return.

    Seamus was still tapping his foot, even though the only sound from the speakers was a ragged hum. He traced a nail up and down his glass, which was already half empty.

    'So what's the news?' I asked, my voice, after the noise, sounding strangely unlike the one I recognised as my own.

    He pursed his lips as though searching for a way to begin, or considering whether or not he should tell me after all.

    'In the summer-August-me and a friend went to New Mexico for a week. Caving holiday. It's the first time I'd been away. Like I said earlier, we'd done the wild caves in Britain-the ones worth doing anyway-and it was, like, New Challenge Time.' He boomed these last three words and raised his arms for emphasis. Beer slopped down his hand; he ignored it. The lights over the bar grew brighter for a second before dimming. The band were sitting on the dais where they'd performed, affecting slouches, drinking from green-gold bottles, their eyes brimming with shade. It seemed they were all watching me and Seamus.

    'Me and Foley, Evan Foley-he's the friend, if you've not worked it out for your fucking self yet-met up with a couple of guys he'd been in touch with who were into caves too. In a big way. One of them, Dale Paris, was a prick. Didn't call himself a caver, he was a speleologist, the cockhole. The other guy was okay. Bob Sinclair, his name. Both came from Colorado. Big caving community in Colorado.'

    I could see he was stringing the story out because he didn't want to tell it. I finished my pint and motioned I should get another. He shrugged, then looked over at the band. I went anyway and ordered two more drinks just as the barman rang last orders. The pub had lost about a quarter of its punters though I couldn't remember seeing anybody leave. The lights buzzed above me, sometimes winking to the point of death before flourishing once more. The barman was a pale strip beneath them, red tie like a yawning, Technicolor split in his chest.

    When I returned, Seamus had found an empty table. The singer/guitarist from Lettuce was sitting next to him, a cowboy boot covering the stool I might sit on.

    'Look out,' I said, my voice suddenly regressing to that of a twelve-year-old. I couldn't keep my eyes off the gold chain which joined an ear-ring to his nose or the shaved part of his head where two small chips from a circuit board had been glued.

    'Look out yourself,' he rumbled, but moved his foot away.

    I laughed in what I hoped was a jolly all-mates-together kind of way but which probably sounded like I was about to piss my pants. He looked at the drinks as if to say
Where the fuck's mine?
but instead he started rolling a cigarette.

    'So you'll come along then?' he asked, watching his fingers work. I started, thinking he was addressing me, but obviously Seamus was his focus.

    'Course,' he said. I couldn't tell if he really wanted to go-wherever it was he'd been invited-or stick around and finish his story. I wondered if he'd told Helen. I wondered who the Yeti sitting next to me was, and how he knew Seamus. It had been a long day; I wanted my bed. 'All right if Davey comes?'

    'Davey? Shit. Yeah, I suppose so. You up for it, Davey-
Wavey?'
He rested the roll-up in a mouth that was little more than a slit surrounded by stubble.

    'Up for what?'

    'We have a party after every gig we play. Sod it, we have a party even if we haven't played a gig.' He looked at my scarf, at my rip-free jeans. 'Think you can handle it?'

    I saw myself smashing my pint glass on the edge of the table and swooping its fangs about his face:
'Oi, Yeti, think you can handle this?'

    'Yeah. Could be good.' The fat, white pillow of sleep deflated in my mind. What's your name?'

    He paused as he rose from his stool. 'Deep Pan,' he said. 'But you can call me Deep Pan.'

    I laughed because I felt I ought to but he'd already turned his back on me. The rest of the band followed him outside.

    'We should go,' said Seamus.

    'I don't know. I'm pretty jiggered.'

    'Aw David. Please come. I've got to get all this shit out of my system.' And his face looked so woeful that I could do nothing but smile and nod and wish I was a bastard.

    

    

    We walked for what seemed like an age. The snow had returned with muscle, liking the taste of this town. It was accompanied by a single thunderclap and a wind which couldn't make up its mind about the direction in which to blow. Swirls of snow attacked us from all sides. The coal of Deep Pan's cigarette was a beacon to follow in the confusion. I heard a short bark of laughter sprint over my head and the hiss of traffic. The smell of burned grease from a chip shop.

    We filed into an off-licence where a tired woman wrapped up bottles of cider and my four-pack of cheap bitter. I turned in time to see Deep Pan's friends scrutinising me from outside, their hands leaving stars of white mist on the window.

    'What's going on?' I asked Seamus.

    He turned the corners of his mouth down by way of reply and walked out of the shop.

    I could hear the party before we turned into the road where it was being held. Houses on either side killed the wind to such an extent I could also hear the drummer from Lettuce chewing his gum. I guessed we were pretty close to the railway station though I hadn't been paying much heed to road signs. Deep Pan kicked open the front gate and threw an empty can at the upstairs window through which somebody was mooning. We waited at the front door, which was little more than a rotten frame of wood filled with an opaque plastic oblong of purple bubbles. Deep Pan looked ready to kick that in too but a black guy, naked from the waist up, let us in. The band headed for the kitchen, trading shoulder slaps and insults on the way. I dithered in the hall with Seamus. There was a woman on the stairs who I looked at because she was so still. Her face was half buried in her hands. A small bottle of something clear sat next to her. The tip of a gold tattoo peeked from the V of her T-shirt; I was suddenly desperate to find out what it was. She opened her eyes and looked at me. Only when she moved her arms did I see that it was the girl from the car. She was smiling. My heart spanked against its cage.

    'Come on, Davey. We look like a pair of twats standing here.'

    I cracked open a can and followed him into a room whose walls danced with candlelight. I couldn't tell how large the room was: its perspective kept swimming in and out of focus with the flame. Vague dark lumps littered the floor, breathing and smoking and drinking. The sweetish odour of dope hung in the air like an awkward question.

    'Let's sit here,' he said, crossing his legs before lowering himself into a gap by the television.

    'Whose house is this?' I asked.

    'Fuck knows. Probably one of Pan's mates.'

    'Deep Pan? So you know him then?'

    'Course. I met him about a year after we finished college. He was gigging then, but with a different band. Ruptured Gut I think they were called. I saved his life. Rolled him over on to his side when he'd drunk himself stupid. He vomited in his sleep as well. Knows MacCreadle, believe it or not.'

    MacCreadle. Everyone seemed to know him. I managed to quell my own thoughts of MacCreadle only by a great effort of will and an even greater swig of lager. 'So how come he's here in Lancaster?'

    Seamus offered me that bowed lip again. 'Could be on some pissy little concert tour. Could be visiting mates. I don't know. I just heard he was playing at the pub tonight. Thought it would be good to see him.'

    A blast of something raucous fled from a room upstairs, so loud it made my lungs vibrate. I downed the rest of my can, suddenly in a party mood and wishing I'd bought more beer.

    'So are you going to finish your story?'

    Seamus smiled feebly and nodded. I got the impression he didn't want to talk about it and yet at the same time he seemed desperate for me to egg him on; that he wanted to purge himself of the memory but couldn't without my signal. It must have been on his mind: he picked up the story where he'd left off.

    'There's a cave in the Guadalupe Mountains called Lechuguilla. It was my ambition, ever since I found out about it. We were like kids, the four of us, when we got there. I kept expecting someone from my life in England to appear and burst the bubble, you know? As if I wasn't worthy of the moment and I was just hallucinating the whole thing.

    'There's a steel tube at the cave's entrance. It stops rock-falls from blocking it. In the morning we kind of stood around the entrance once we'd got our gear together and it was like,
The Moment.
All my needs were wrapped up in what that steel tube signified. We all felt it. It's just that we applied something almost holy to what we felt when the opposite was true. We camped just outside and the wind blew across it during the night-none of us could sleep-and it was like the cave was calling to us. When we opened the lid we got a blast of air that nearly blew us over, must have been 50-60 miles an hour. We crawled through.'

    He sighed and drank from his can. I was irritated by his telling of the past; he was so unreliable that I was convinced he was dressing up a part of his history that was dull as double maths.

    'It was like being in a sauna. At the bottom of Boulder Falls, Dale got sick and by the time we got to Apricot Pit, which is a deep fucker, let me tell you, about 500 feet in some areas, he was vomiting bad. Bob Sinclair sat him down and tried to get him to control his breathing. Me and Evan were pissing ourselves. The speleologist arsehole wasn't going to make it. These guys were supposed to be experts. Bob said he was going to take Dale back and did we want to call it a day? Evan and me just shook our heads and waved bye-bye.

    'It was a hard caving trip. Both of us had heavy gear with us so we took it slowly, both a bit spooked over Dale and hoping it wouldn't hit us, knowing that this was the only way out and that things were going to get tough. At the bottom of Apricot Pit we rested and Evan took some photographs on the way. It was so beautiful inside, David. Heaven carved out of the rock. Great columns of gypsum crystal eight metres long, calcite that looked like it had been sculpted. Everything white. And the names of the chambers on my map. Firefall Hall, Lake of the Blue Giants, Ocean Wave Room. We were abseiling and prussiking all over the shop. My arms were on fire but I couldn't feel a thing. I felt like I was tripping, that these structures couldn't be real unless they were inside my mind.

    'We had a big climb ahead of us, up 200 feet to what they call The China Shop. At the top we bivvied for the night-we'd been in the cave for about 18 hours. After a night's sleep we all awoke and had some dried fruit and energy bars. We were shivering with excitement.

    'We went fucking wild. Hyperventilating and all that shit. If we saw a black hole we'd swing into it whether it was ten or two hundred metres deep. I was convinced we were going to discover something incredible: a brand new colour or a family of troglodytes or a fucking dinosaur! We took off up a sixty-metre wall of aragonite crystals. Got cut to ribbons. Exhausted at the end of it-humidity was 100 per cent. And then we arrived at a sump.' He'd become more animated, the tendons on his neck sprung like taut cables.

    The girl had wandered into the room. She was drinking from a bottle of red wine. I saw her cadge a roll-up from Deep Pan who made space for her on his knee. She lay her head against his chest and looked at me. She said something and Deep Pan laughed, the sound rattling in his chest.

    'What's a sump?'

    'A flooded passage. You can't help coming across water in the caves. We went in and waded for about twenty metres before the ceiling of the cave started to slope down closer to the water's surface. Soon, we were at a point where we could either chicken out or swim underwater, see if we came out anywhere. We were all for that-the thought we might discover a new cave was too great a pull. Evan went first.