The Quarry (14 page)

‘Um,’ Paul says, pressing his lips together and frowning.

‘Actually, I’d best stay back with Dad,’ I tell them as they start getting up from their seats.

Guy looks at me. ‘You’ll be staying home by yourself then, lad. I’m going too.’

‘Oh,’ I say, thrown. I was sure he’d need a snooze and I was looking forward to going tape-searching in some of the other rooms. ‘We’ll need the wheelchair.’ Guy has been very reluctant to use his wheelchair.

‘Throw it in the back of the Vulva,’ Guy says. This is what he calls the Volvo estate when he’s being childish. ‘I could use some fresh air.’

I bet you get there and smoke
, I think of saying. Instead I say, ‘Okay. I’ll fetch the chair.’ I get up, hesitate. ‘You sure you won’t be too tired?’

‘I’m fine!’

‘Well … Maybe loo first, yeah?’

‘Will you just stop fucking fussing and fetch me my fucking cripple-chariot?’

‘Yeah, she just sat there staring at the screen after the final fade-out and said, “Hmm. More
Citizen Smith
than
Citizen Kane
,” cheeky bint,’ Guy says.

‘Sounds like me,’ Hol agrees. She and Haze have joined us in the Volvo. ‘May even have been my first proper bit of criticism.’

‘Surely fucking not,’ Guy says. He has the front passenger seat, as is usual since he stopped driving. We are heading through the country lanes, swishing along the wet tarmac, thrumming through puddles and larger stretches of standing water, and rattling over broad fans of gravel and small stones washed out of the surrounding fields.

‘First bit of passing-for-properly-thought-out film criticism, then,’ Hol says. ‘I tried developing that theme, but “More Vegas than Degas” really only works on the page, and, frankly, barely even there. What was it even about, this film? Which one was it?’

‘
Un Chien On Da Loo
, I think, wasn’t it?’ Haze says, then adds, ‘Oh, yeah; terrible.’

‘I vaguely remember,’ Hol says. ‘Some pretentious piece of black-and-white bollocks.’

‘I was proud of that little film,’ Guy says. ‘It was a fucking heartfelt
homage
, you cow. Just because you—’

Hol starts laughing.

‘What?’ Haze says.

‘It was cheesy,’ she says. ‘More like
fromage
. Ha ha ha.’ Her laughter turns to hiccups and then she starts crying with laughter and sniffing as well.

‘Buggering fuck,’ Guy mutters, though it sounds like he’s smiling. He looks at me. ‘We nearly fucking there yet?’

‘Bugger. I need a pee,’ Guy announces when we’re about five minutes from Yarlsthwaite.

‘They installed any loos at the tower car park?’ Hol asks.

‘No,’ I’m saying as Guy says,

‘I need a pee
now
!’

I pull over into a field entrance, between high hedges. The road is narrow but I think there’s about enough room for the others in the Audi to squeeze past the Volvo; they’re somewhere behind us but Alison was taking it very easy in the big, wide Audi and I kind of lost patience.

‘Sorry, obviously,’ Guy is saying as Hol and I help him out of the car and fit the forearm crutch to his right hand.

‘Leave you to it,’ Hol says as we get Guy to the side of the hedgerow. He makes a sort of tripod of his legs and the crutch and begins undoing his zip with his free hand.

Guy’s barely begun peeing when there’s the noise of a big engine from behind us and I think at first it’s the Audi, but it isn’t; it’s an enormous green tractor with an orange flashing light on top. It’s towing an even bigger, high-sided trailer and it’s signalling to come into the field.

‘What’s that?’ Guy asks, trying to look behind him.

‘Nothing,’ I tell him, watching his thin dribble of wee falling into the tussocky grass. Guy’s no better than most men at peeing when there’s any pressure.

Hol appears on the other side of Guy. ‘You shift the car,’ she tells me.

‘But—’ I begin.

‘Yeah,’ Guy says, his wee-stream drying up completely. ‘But.’

‘I’m not touching the car,’ she tells me. ‘Still drunk. With my luck, tractor-driver Seth here will turn out to be a special constable or something with a thing about even the most cursory drink-driving and a chip on his shoulder about sexy, middle-aged, metropolitan film critics. You shift it. I’ll get the gate. You okay for a moment, Guy?’

‘Oh, fuck, yeah,’ Guy says. ‘Never fucking better.’

He’s not, though; I think his legs must be giving out because I can see him wobbling. I need to help him but I’m supposed to open the gate and I need to move the car as well and the tractor engine sounds like it’s throbbing or even being gunned, but probably the most important thing is helping Guy and I just don’t know what to do first or in what order, and so I hesitate. I can feel myself hesitate; in fact I can feel myself starting to panic. I glance back at the car but it looks like Haze has gone to sleep.

‘Actually, I’m sort of struggling here,’ Guy admits. Even his voice sounds shaky.

‘Shit,’ Hol says, then moves in to Guy’s left side. He puts his left arm round her shoulders, letting her take a lot of his weight. I think his legs have almost given way and he’s mostly supporting himself on Hol and the crutch on his right arm. ‘How’s that?’ Hol asks. To me she says, ‘Get the gate first, Kit. Then move the car.’

‘Brilliant,’ Guy says. ‘But now I’m going to wet me trousers.’

‘Here,’ Hol says, leaning in with her free hand and taking his penis in her fingers, directing the just-resumed stream of pee away from his legs. His cock looks very small and pale, in the cold late-evening light, like a soft little worm in her hand.

Guy clears his throat. ‘Didn’t know you cared, Hol.’

‘Nothing I haven’t handled before. And fuck off.’ She looks at me, eyes flashing. ‘Kit; the gate!’

I fumble the gate open, push it creaking back and latch it to a metal post, then jump into the Volvo, reverse it half a metre and then drive on up the lane a couple of car lengths.

‘Oh,’ Haze says from the back seat, stretching his arms and then wiping his face. ‘Blimey. Yeah. Must have nodded off there. Is there some sort of problem?’

The tractor honks its horn then trundles, slowly, carefully, engine roaring, into the field past Guy and Hol. The giant trailer is very clanky.

Hol smiles wanly at the driver. I think he shouts something at her and she nods once and does a thumbs-up. The tractor and trailer bustle up the field towards the skyline.

‘All under control,’ I tell Haze.

‘Oh, good,’ he says, folding his arms and closing his eyes again as his head tips back against the headrest.

Hol is shaking Guy’s penis as I reverse back down the lane, and just zipping his trousers up as I get out to help him back into the car.

‘What about the gate?’ I ask Hol.

‘We’ve to leave it open,’ she says.

As I’m putting Guy’s crutch into the back of the car – Haze is doing his just-waking-up thing again and peering woozily at Guy – I see Hol stoop and dig her hands into some rain-wet grass on the other side of the gateway, then wipe them against each other.

Paul’s Audi drives up and Paul leans out of the front passenger’s window. ‘Lost already?’ he asks Hol.

‘Shut up and follow this car,’ she tells him, slapping the roof twice and swinging back in, slamming the door.

Yarlsthwaite Tower sits on the brink of the tallest cliff of Utley Edge, a ridge running north-east to south-west along the Pennines. Local lore has it that if you pronounce ‘Utley’ to chime with ‘ugly’, you’re not local. If you pronounce it ‘Ootley’, you’re an outsider pretending to be a local, and if you pronounce it somewhere in-between so it sounds more like ‘Oatly’ (though not
exactly
like that) then you can, tentatively, provisionally, on sufferance, be accepted as, probably, being one of God’s own people; i.e., a local.

The tower is triangular, built of millstone grit – one of the local rocks – and is four tall storeys in height, with gothic battlements. It was built in the 1840s as a folly, to improve the view from Cherncrake Hall, hereditary seat of the Spilesteynes, to this day one of the area’s biggest landowners. Even from the base of the folly you can see the square towers of the house peeping over its sheltering screen of trees. Guy and I took the tour round the place six years ago; he still grumbles over the cost of the tickets – no discount for local people – though the main thing I remember is the intricately tessellated floor of the orangery; the lord of the manor who had it built was into mathematics.

It occurred to me some years ago that if my mother is two-hundredth or whatever in line to the throne, and I am the illegitimate son of Guy and a local gentry woman, she might have been from Cherncrake Hall. I’ve done a bit of research via Wikipedia, Google and so on, but from what I can see there was no female Spilesteyne the right age at the time I was born to fit Dad’s (probably completely made-up) description.

‘It’s a fucking quagmire,’ Paul says at the gate from the car park leading onto the path for the tower.

‘I’m up for it,’ Guy says, gripping the wheels of his wheelchair hard and staring at the muddy, puddled surface of the path to the tower, fifty metres away.

‘Yeah, good for you,’ Paul says. ‘You don’t have to carry you.’ He’s wearing the same white parka-style jacket he wore to lunch.

‘We can do it,’ I tell everybody.

I’m wearing an old green wax jacket of Guy’s and a pair of ancient black wellington boots that I had to patch with a bicycle repair kit last year. The jacket is so worn it has pale green crease marks all over the dark green. It’s supposed to be waterproof but it isn’t any more. I found a pair of green and white ski gloves in the jacket’s pockets; they fit fine. They say Killy on them, a brand I’ve never heard of.

‘Really sorry,’ Haze is saying, ‘but my back will be out for months if I … It’s a real pain. I mean, like, literally, too, you know? A real pain.’

‘Yes, you are,’ Hol mutters, not quite loud enough for Haze to hear, I think. ‘Rob? Take the other front corner?’

‘On it,’ Rob tells her.

‘Together?’ Hol says, squatting by Guy’s knee and gripping the chair’s metalwork near the small front wheel on the right. Rob is at the other front corner, Paul and I at the rear. We agree we’re ready. A watery sunset is spreading pinks and reds across the western sky; the wind is dry, almost mild. Ours are the only two vehicles in the car park.

‘Tell you what; I’ll bring the brolly,’ Haze says. ‘Just in case.’

Haze is wearing an old Bewford University hoodie and has borrowed another of Guy’s worn-looking huntin’-shootin’-’n’-fishin’ jackets. I slipped an even older cycle cape over Guy before we left the house. It’s the easiest way to keep him dry; the more layers he has on, the more painful it is for him to move his arms to get jackets and coats on and off.

‘One, two, three – hup!’ Hol says, and – only a little alarmingly, as Hol and Rob raise the front of the wheelchair higher than Paul and I can raise the rear at first – Guy is elevated to hip height.

‘Sure we’re all sober enough for this?’ Guy says, holding even tighter to the chair’s wheels as Paul and I adjust our grip and get him level.

Hol laughs. ‘We’re exactly drunk enough, I reckon,’ she tells him as we start forward. ‘Whoops!’ she says, staggering. Guy is thrown to one side.

‘Christ!’ he says.

‘Oh, fucking marvellous,’ Paul mutters, looking down at where the wheel of the chair has left a dark mark on his white jacket. ‘Oh well; had this at least a week.’

‘Puddle deeper than anticipated,’ Hol says. ‘No problem.’

We set off again.

‘How you doing there, Kit?’ Paul asks.

‘I’m doing fine, thanks,’ I tell him.

‘Yeah,’ he sighs, ‘you always are, aren’t you?’

Alison and Pris are walking on the heather to the side of the path while Haze brings up the rear.

‘Nice wellies, Hol,’ Pris says. ‘Those Barbours?’

Hol shrugs as best she can. ‘Something like that.’

Alison glances down. One eyebrow rises. ‘They’re Le Chameau,’ she tells Pris. ‘Bit posh for you, Hol. Doc Martens not run to wellies?’

‘They’re from an ex,’ Hol tells her. ‘I got custody of the footwear. Were his; I need three pairs of socks and an insole not to walk out of them.’

‘You should have stuck with that one,’ Alison tells her. ‘Boy who can afford to kiss off a pair of Le Chameau’s probably loaded. Neoprene inside?’

‘Neo-what?’

‘They blue, inside?’

‘Um … Sort of … fawn, I suppose.’

‘
Leather
lining?’ Alison says. Her waterproof jacket makes a hissy, sliding noise as she crosses her arms. She shakes her head. ‘Oh my. You really did make a mistake there. Or … Oh, sorry. Did he dump you?’

‘Mutual consent,’ Hol tells her, her breath a little laboured. ‘He found me too “abrasive” and I got fed up with his simple-minded obsession with female footwear.’

‘Ah well,’ Alison says. ‘Maybe next time.’

‘That is my sole ambition, patently,’ Hol says.

At the tower, with the skies clearing to the west and the wind freshening and the rain-washed air making everything look nearer than it really is, even in the slanting light of late afternoon, we discover that the door that used to guard the stairway has been removed.

‘It was metal,’ Guy tells us. ‘Nicked a couple of years ago by entrepreneurs who’d perfected the business model of swiping copper wires from railway signalling equipment and manhole covers from city streets and thought they’d branch out. Council put up a sign saying
Don’t dare climb these stairs and it’s at your own risk if you do
, but looks like that’s been nicked too.’

‘Requires investigating,’ Paul says, stepping into the dark doorway and looking up the winding stair. ‘Anyone else with me?’

‘After you,’ Rob says.

‘Yeah, I’m up for it,’ Pris agrees.

Alison sighs. ‘Oh, I suppose so.’ She hugs herself and frowns.

‘You sure?’ Haze says. ‘There might be spiders and bats and all sorts.’

‘You’re right,’ Paul says, taking off his white jacket. He holds it out to Guy. ‘Warmed up anyway. You mind, Guy?’

‘Ta. I’ll use it as a blanket, keep me legs warm.’ Guy takes Paul’s jacket and arranges it over his knees.