Terroir (31 page)

He leads, the bearded man, down to the boulder choke, crawling on his hands and knees in the low passage to do a recce. He'll dig for now. The other man will drag the trug back and the woman will take it to tip it into the bigger chamber below the ladder. They have headlamps and batteries strapped to their waists. Limestone gleams and the tunnel curves inside the earth's gut, its infinitely slow peristalsis. They reach the choke through its old digestions. Sixty yards of standing water, crawling, head down. The woman takes a look, nods, then turns back. He starts to dig in the tight space, though the roof is higher here, so they can crouch. He uses the spade and his hands. The trug fills with rounded river pebbles and sand and water. He guesses that a larger boulder has dropped into the space and allowed debris to gather, gradually choking the tunnel's throat.

Think like the animal,
her father said when they were chasing game. They'd wounded her and she'd been spotting blood over heather and moss like a bitch in season. They'd have followed her. They'd have an idea where she was – if she hadn't slipped away over the fell. They'd bring their dogs over and wait, enjoying the thought of her fear. They'd fuck her before they killed her, or they'd try. She'd paunch them before that happened, the rank bastards. She isn't afraid, not now they've drawn blood. She's in hate of them and always has been and always will be after Daniel. Hannah creeps back to the cave entrance, crouching behind the sheet of falling water. She thinks she smells a peat fire, hears the whimper of hounds, laughter. Their low voices are like smoke, absent and present at the same time, carrying and dissolving in the air. The noise of the water cloaks everything, makes her unsure. She needs to piss and lowers herself to the cave floor, balancing awkwardly.

After an hour the two men swap positions and all three of them take a breather. The bearded one has a smear of clay across his face.

– Will it go?

– What, tonight?

The woman is doing something with her lamp cable and the light flickers yellow then burns white again. She turns to listen, a faint smile on her face.

– Doubt it.

That's almost a night's conversation used up between them. The woman turns back to pick up the trugs.

– Come on. I need to be home before midnight. I've got a clinic first thing.

The bearded man moves aside so the other can get to the crawl. The woman upturns the trug and tips out water. He can't remember the name for what she is.

– Bugger it.

– Let's have another bash.

The digging, dragging, digging goes on. They've pulled out about nine metres of debris over the past weeks, maybe more. Pebbles, boulders, sheep bones, rabbit spines. The dead. History's mulch.

Hannah waits. She binds up her arm with a strip of cloth cut from her skirt. It's awkward and she pulls it tight with her teeth. It hurts now with a dull pain and the muscle is stiffening. She dozes for a while and then the barking of a dog close by jerks her awake. She must have slept for hours because darkness has fallen and light risen again as she lies against the cave wall. She's stiff and wet and cold, hungry now the nausea has passed. Her arm throbs and feels hot. It's maybe an hour from dawn. She's guessing that. They have mastiffs. If they let the dogs into the cave, she's done. She'll have to go inside and trust to darkness. If she makes it home there'll be blood let, though. The thought satisfies her, slakes her, gives her purpose. She sees it bubbling from Eric's throat into his beard. He'll die like a slaughtered tup if she gets her way. Hannah finishes the bread, scooping water to her mouth. Them she crawls in twenty feet or so. The tunnel curves slightly and it's absolutely dark ahead, only a faint glimmer behind, where they are waiting for her. A rivulet of water runs between her knees. She can feel the steady current guiding her. It's so dark that white stars dance in front of her like tiny maids at a maypole.

The shovel strikes against a bigger stone and the man with scarred hands prises and levers it to one side. There's a faint draught of air and the water under him begins to quicken, emptying the shallow lake behind. He calls back to the others but his voice bounces off the rock walls, distorted.

– What's happening?

– She's draining out. We're through. Or close.

– That'll do.

Their voices sound stifled in the hall of rock. The bearded man is panting when he reaches the others, the skin around his eyes pale in the electric light. He withdraws to the entrance and they take it in turns to crawl to the dig to watch the water level falling. Enough for one night. They pack away their gear and climb out to the moor. There are stars mixed with clouds, the faint gleam of limestone from the escarpment as their eyes adjust. They drag the timbers back over the entrance. Then the walk back to their vehicles, their helmet lights bobbing on the wooden causeway, its darkly oozing water. The stone path is rough underfoot. A dog barks from a nearby farm. There's the rasp of sheep close by, their teeth tearing at grass. An aircraft goes over with its wing lights blinking. Then they're fumbling for car keys and the fascias of their vehicles light up, showing their hollowed cheeks. The woman climbs into the passenger seat of the Peugeot.
Home James.
She laughs and they start engines, headlights nosing down the bridleway in convoy to where the faint lights of the village stain the sky.

Hannah crawls on through water that covers her knees and freezes them. The tunnel narrows and she feels ahead with her hands. She wonders if there is a God. They rent their farm from the monks and their agent is a fat
-
gutted Italian friar. He comes twice a year with his black
-
grey beard and leather cap and halting accent to take their money. The tunnel widens slightly, letting her breathe, then narrows again almost at once. She has to pass though a pelvic girdle of rock. There in the dark she retreats and strips, lying full length, shuffling out of her clothes, loosening the bridle and harness. She ties her things together awkwardly with the leather straps, then loops them to her ankle so she can pull them behind. She rests, panting, ignoring the pain in her arm and knee. Nearly naked, she forces herself, her head and breasts and hips, through the squeeze and into the wider passage beyond. She's cold and bruised and blind and the rock has scraped her skin the way they scarify a scalded pig at Yuletide. She crawls on, thinking of Daniel, what they did to him; thinking of that man in the alleyway dying because of her. Because of his own foul
-
breathed presumption. Hannah sees the faintest gleam of light, as if Christ has stepped into darkness to bless her. She crawls towards it until it glows bright and clear as vengeance.

They return to the dig on a fine day with white clouds rising at the horizon, an unsteady breeze bending bog cotton, throwing crows from the moor like charred fragments of a burning. They drop the ladder and file down into the chamber. They are able to follow the passageway to the almost
-
cleared obstruction, its scattering of stone that they shovel free and cart back in the trugs. Then they crouch for the final push: the man with his scarred hands, the bearded man, the woman with pale blue eyes. They're through and they crawl for a long time, along a tight squeeze towards the entrance under the waterfall until they see light, hear the beck thrumming. The doctor with blue eyes finds a handful of dull beads, a rusted tang of iron, some scraps of leather in the diggings. She sifts through gravel and collects the beads in her pocket. She'll give them to her niece. The bearded man let the rusted metal fall back into the stream and shrugs. Somehow it doesn't feel archaeological; it doesn't feel as if anything has ever really happened here. He has a nose for these things. The other man, the one with scarred hands, is already coiling the rope. That way you know a job is done. He's forgotten his camera, but there is always tomorrow. They'll get their names into the club newsletter, maybe more. Thumbs up. They clamber out and sit happily on the moor in daylight, trailing their rubber boots in the stream. A heron flies off from the pool below them. A grey omen, a premonition taking to the air.

FIRE FOX

T
here it was, in Sophie's memory. The time her dad had told her how he'd seen a fox on his way home, how it had flickered like a flame from the larch woods to stare into his headlights.
Met a fox
, he said, not
seen
but
met
, as if it was meant to happen. There was snow on the road, but he had winter tyres on the van and put the brakes on before he hit it. The van had skidded to a halt, slewing in the road. Then it had stared at him, the fox, its retinas flaring.

– It was daring me! Bold as anything!

Sophie thought of the fox staring at her father.

–
How
was it daring you?

Her dad shrugged and laughed, pulling off his shoes.

– Oh, I dunno. Daring me to run away to the woods, mebbe!

– That's silly!

– Mebbe…

He rubbed his nose against hers and she giggled.

– Mebbe not.

Then her mother was calling up the stairs and he picked up his shoes and padded out.
Like a fox
. That's what went through her mind, round and round as she pressed her face into the feather pillow.

Her father told her that after arriving home. He'd been working late, fitting a kitchen in someone's house, all whiskery, smelling of adhesive, cigarillos and beer. Later she woke in the middle of the night because the fox was licking all the windows of the mill. She could hear its fur crackling. Her mother had been making yoghurt in the kitchen and a smell of sour milk rose up the green painted staircase. Then the smell of smoke, her mother wrapping her in a blanket so she could watch instead of going to sleep. Tomorrow she'd have a day off school.

The mill burned all night and they watched from the window, feeling the heat, seeing frost melt on the glass, white ferns running to water. The mill workers and the firemen in their yellow jackets teemed in the darkness under arc lights, their shadows thrown onto trodden snow. Her parents watched with her at the bedroom window, their arms around her. Her dad couldn't stop shaking his head.

– All that cotton, it'll burn like a wick!

Her mother tightened her arms around Sophie.

– My God! All that waste.

Want not. Cotton waste. Candlewick.
The phrases banged against each other and Sophie piped up.

– Waste not, want not!

Her mother gave her a queer look and Sophie went quiet. Afterwards it became a family joke, what she'd said when the mill was burning. But they would want, all those people moving below. Water arced from the hoses into the windows and ran back out down the road towards them, glistening blackly as if the tar itself was melting, as if it would engulf the house.

The mill did burn like a wick. It burned for three days as if it was sucking up some reservoir of wax from below the surface of the earth. Thousands of rats had fled from the basements, invading the neighbourhood. People talked about them as a latter
-
day plague. Sophie thought of them panicking out from under spinning frames, pouring out from windows and under doors and down the winding staircases. A river of rats; a rat
-
river. For weeks afterwards their big grey limping cat, Janus, laid one on the back door mat with its head neatly bitten off. A gift.

The boy was still asleep. His head turned sideways on the pillow, his hurt mouth fallen open a little. She'd let him sleep a few more minutes and then wake him. She'd wake him with a kiss, watch his eyes flutter open, his wry smile. There was a smattering of freckles across his nose and his neck was translucently white. He looked as if he'd never been in the sun. His breath was soft and even and when he breathed in his nostrils pinched a little.
Stephen
.

The mill fire happened the winter Sophie was nine years old. It was their own apocalypse: things either happened before or after it. In the morning, she woke to see the walls of the mill still smouldering. It looked like one of those monochrome photographs from the war. Collapsed roofs and tilted beams and shattered windows blackened like broken lamp
-
glass. Snow was still falling sparsely, rising as steam from the ruins. Flames kept appearing as the wind stirred cotton bales that were still burning at their core. Hosepipes criss
-
crossed the ground and their little leaks turned to streams and deltas of ice. Firemen were picking through the rubble with axes fastened to their waists and the mill owners arrived in a long grey car to look on. A crane was delivered on a huge trailer. When it was assembled, it began to knock down the walls with a wrecking ball. The brickwork crumbled to dust and ash and sparks shot up from the debris. It took almost a year to rebuild it, a whole storey shorter in height and with a modern steel roof instead of slate. The old chimney came down too, and the little red hawk that had nested there moved on.

The memory had nudged her this morning, heading to work. Why, she wasn't sure. Walking through an avenue of poplars on a spring day. Wearing fresh clothes. Feeling her youth coiled in her, propelling her into the future: more days like this, Gérard, of sun shining through new leaves. It was at the back of her mind as she ordered a latté at the coffee stand – a little three
-
wheeler van specially kitted out with hot water and a coffee maker. The owner was from Spain or Italy and he liked to talk as he snapped on the espresso machine, frothed the milk and poured it into the paper cup.