The Quarry (17 page)

I take my big blue mug of tea and head up to the old servants’ rooms. The last of the sunset light is leaching out of the sky. The lights up here tend to be bare bulbs hanging from the middle of the ceiling; old incandescent things that come on startlingly quickly, but which burn out more frequently too. Most don’t work. I take the brightest – a hundred-watt bulb – from light fitting to light fitting, depending on what room I’m in, to see what I’m doing. This requires using an old T-shirt to stop it burning my fingers.

There is so much junk up here.

I find more old newspapers, stacked and yellowing, whole damp cardboard boxes full of ancient promotional stuff from the late nineties and early noughties when Guy worked at
North 99
, old suitcases stuffed with musty-smelling clothes and sorry-looking shoes, mostly men’s, and entire tea chests crammed with empty plastic bags.

A lot of this crap could be usefully recycled, but Guy refuses to give me permission; for somebody with the reputation of a wastrel of legendary proportions, he can be remarkably small-minded and conservative about stuff like this. ‘You never fucking know when something will come in useful.’ So he’s just a hoarder like any other, except he’s foul-mouthed about it. I see this junk cluttering up the house and I itch to sort it and get it properly recycled, but I can’t.

I like recycling. In some ways it’s a bore, and I have a sort of inherited nostalgia for the old days, when – according to Guy – you just chucked everything into a big, shiny, cylindrical, metal dustbin and left it out for the bin-men (a simpler time), but recycling has its own rewards.

Nowadays we’re expected to clean and sort almost everything; tins, bottles, plastics, paper and cardboard, kitchen and garden waste, wood, metal and residual landfill. Oh, and batteries, light bulbs, engine oil, mattresses, small and large electrical items, tyres and so on. Technically it’s a chore, but once you get into it it’s sort of quietly satisfying.

First, you feel you’re doing your bit for the planet. It might be a very small bit, it might be too late by some estimations and it might shrink into insignificance compared to the industrious carbon-loading going on elsewhere (‘Are you still taking the sticky tape off that same fucking box? The Chinese’ll have built another couple of coal-fired fucking power stations while you’ve been picking away at that last square millimetre’ – guess who), but at least you feel you’re playing your part, and while you might be with everybody else in the same big, ever-deepening hole, if nothing else you’re trying to dig as slowly possible.

‘This is your fucking religion, isn’t it?’ Guy said once, watching me use the special knife I keep for such tasks as I slit the label on a tin of beans, laid the label flat on a pile of others and rinsed the empty can. We were in the main outhouse, where I do all this stuff. He was leaning on his stick at the time, otherwise fairly ambulatory. Must have been about two years ago. Anyway, I thought about this.

‘I don’t think it’s a religion,’ I told him. ‘But the process helps fulfil a certain need for order and ritual I seem to have.’ Guy looked oddly furious at this. ‘Order and … ordering,’ I added.

‘Just an excuse to go through my fucking bins,’ he muttered, and stalked off.

And that’s another reward: you feel more connected to your own life in a way, more aware of what you – and any others in the house – are consuming. It’s a think-about-how-you-live thing. And a calibratory thing. I like calibratory things.

Lastly, you feel that even with this used, now seemingly useless, thrown-away stuff, you’re bringing order to it, and so helping to make it useful again. And that’s just a nice feeling.

Some of the music promo stuff bulging in these slightly damp cardboard boxes might be saleable on-line. I find some
North 99
‘Millennium Meltdown Survival Kit’ goody bags, each complete with a candle, a T-shirt, a discount voucher for a station-branded, wind-up radio (apply by post to the
North 99
Post Office Box address in Bewford, enclosing a cheque or postal order, P&P inc.), a cigarette lighter and a decade-and-a-bit-out-of-date Eccles cake. Everything but the candle carries the old, garish station logo of
North 99
.

I wonder how much one of these will be worth on eBay. I have a bet with myself: a bit less than a quid. Still, we have two dozen of them, so that’s maybe twenty, if I can sell them all. It would mostly be local people interested, too, so the postage shouldn’t be off-putting either. None of the lighters I try works; their fuel’s all leaked away or osmosed or something.

In the bedroom above Haze – I can hear him snoring – I find a cracked plastic stackable box full of old VHS cassettes, and I get hopeful, but they’re just ordinary, not the special one that lets you play one of the smaller-format tapes inside it.

Something occurs to me and I go back to the room I looked in before, where all the old newspapers are; our collection of
Bew Valley and Ormisdale Chronicle and Post
s. I heave the great heavy bundles of damp, smelly papers out of their collapsing boxes and start sorting through them, looking for those from around the time of my birth and the year or so before.

When I find those I leaf through a few; they’re hard to handle and easy to tear because they’re so damp. I nearly give up, but eventually I find myself mentioned in the Births, Deaths and Marriages section. It’s in an edition dated nearly five weeks after I’m born. ‘To Mr Guy Hyndersley, a son, born 12 Arpil.’ Arpil. I find it oddly depressing that even the – much delayed, shamefully terse, small-detail-of-not-mentioning-who-the-mother-is – announcement of my arrival into the world contains a misprint.

I look through a few other papers from the year before, to see if there’s anything about us. All I find is a short obituary of Guy’s dad.

Dad’s parents split up not long after he was born. His dad went off to London with his new woman and his mum moved back here, to the family home, with her parents. She was an only child. She became a lecturer in Classics at Bewford and, later, the first woman ever to become a professor in the university. Her parents died within a year of each other while she pursued her career and brought up Dad with the help of various aunts and nannies.

Then, when Guy was twelve, she died of ovarian cancer. Her husband returned; they’d never divorced and she’d left the house to him anyway. He came back alone, though he had a few different girlfriends over the years once he settled here. I don’t think Guy and his dad ever really got on.

When Guy was seventeen his dad met somebody else and effectively moved out, back to London again. He was an antiques dealer and apparently quite a gifted pianist, though not concert standard; he’d long before worked out there would be more money in antiques.

According to Guy, his father really only came back to the house to use it as a place to store stock he’d bought locally and would later move down to the showroom in London; he was back to see Guy every weekend at first, then every fortnight, then once a month, and so on. He died the year I was born, from a heart attack. ‘He was a fat, boozy, sixty-a-day man whose main exercise was levering himself out of the car or away from the bar,’ Guy told me, years ago. ‘Well, that and industrial-scale coughing. His expiry did not exactly come as a total shock.’

‘SHOCK DEATH OF BEWFORD MAN IN LONDON.’ That and a single, not terribly illuminating paragraph is all that Guy’s dad’s death merited in the paper.

Anyway, all this might be why Guy ran a bit wild, before, during and even after his university years. But especially during, when he had so many accomplices.

There’s a creaking, iron-framed, single bed in the room where the newspapers are. I leave the copies from the twelve months before my birth lying out on the old mattress, to dry as best they can. The mattress is stained, as though somebody’s spilled a full pot of tea over it. I glance up at the ceiling; it’s probably a leak up there that’s caused this. The ceiling plaster looks damp. I haul the bed into the middle of the room, under a drier part of the ceiling, as quietly as I can, but the action still seems to resonate throughout the house. I pull the mattress off the bed – it’s amazingly heavy – and dump it more or less where it was, except on the floorboards, not on the bedstead. The mattress may well have been providing a sort of floodplain for the leak above, trapping the moisture within it to stop it from descending into my room, directly underneath.

I start to lay out the newspapers I want to dry on the chain-link surface stretched between the side-bars of the bed frame.

‘Found you,’ Alison says from the doorway. ‘Need a hand?’

‘Oh, hi. Yes.’ I’ve just finished laying the papers out to dry. ‘Let’s do the room above you. Or is Rob asleep?’

‘Skyping with his dad,’ Alison says, looking round the room, wrinkling her nose. ‘Brazil or Argentina or something. Smells a bit in here, doesn’t it?’

I try to keep a sort of mental Fart Log for such moments. Reviewing it, I can find no recent activity. ‘Dampness,’ I tell her. I nod upwards. ‘The roof leaks.’

Alison sighs, looks like she’s deflating. She shakes her head. ‘Sad old place, these days,’ she says quietly.

I don’t know what to say, so I don’t say anything.

After a moment I say, ‘Let’s try the other room.’ I wrap the old T-shirt round my hand, reach up and take the bulb out. It goes very dark; the single window faces north and there are no curtains but there’s little light left in the sky. There’s no light in the corridor outside save for what comes up the narrow stairwell from the floor beneath. ‘Just the one good bulb up here,’ I explain to Alison.

‘Marvellous.’

‘I just think we need to do this logically.’

‘Why is starting from the attic logical?’

‘You need a programme for this sort of thing, Kit. A shape, a design, something everybody can follow. There has to be elegance. That’s primary.’

‘But the attic’s just got lots of old empty boxes in it,’ I explain.

‘One of which might contain the tape.’

‘Not really.’

‘You can’t be sure, Kit. The whole point is that it’s somewhere we don’t know, so we have to look everywhere. If we start from the top and eliminate that, then we’ve made progress. You need the feeling of making progress.’

‘Uh-huh. Thing is, Guy got me to move everything heavy in the loft down here or into the outhouses years ago when he started worrying about the house falling down; he thought it might be top-heavy.’

Alison frowns at me. ‘Really?’

‘That’s what he told me. He was worried that the quarry edge coming closer might shake everything to bits and bring it all down on top of us.’

‘That’s not likely to happen, is it?’

‘I don’t think it ever was, but we did it anyway. All that’s left up there is empty boxes that things like the TV came in, or computers, and, you know, other household appliances. All they have in them is the expanded polystyrene packing they came with.’

‘So they’re not totally empty?’

‘They’re as good as totally empty.’

‘Maybe, but you can’t be absolutely sure the packing material is all they contain.’

‘I’m pretty sure.’

‘Pretty sure doesn’t cover it, mister,’ Alison says, and makes an expression that I think indicates she means to be funny.

‘I’d put it at about ninety-nine per cent sure,’ I tell her.

This throws her, briefly. ‘That’s what I mean, though, Kit; you have to be one hundred per cent sure.’

‘Yes, ultimately. But there’s a lot of places in and around the house where the likelihood of finding the tape is a lot higher than one per cent, so we ought to prioritise those locations first, because we haven’t got unlimited time; we really want to find this before lunch on Monday.’

‘You still can’t be sure it’s not up there,’ Alison says, her gaze flicking to the ceiling. ‘And meanwhile we
are
wasting valuable time. So we should get to it.’

‘Well, I was kind of … doing …’ I say, waving at the boxes I’ve already checked. I can let her fill in the gaps.

We’re still in the room above mine; I put the bulb back in when we got into this argument about how to conduct the search.

She nods once. ‘So we need to move on. Come on.’ She nods towards the stair head, where the trapdoor to the loft is. She makes to move, then stops when she sees that I’m not shifting. ‘Look, Kit,’ she says, hands on her hips. ‘This is important to me. Very important. To me and to Rob. Most important to me, though. Do you understand that?’ (I just raise my eyebrows.) ‘There are things on that tape that would affect my career a
lot
more than Rob’s, a
lot
more than Paul’s. They’re men; they’re allowed to get away with more, they always are. I’m under more threat from that
fucking
tape than anybody else here; the men because they’re men, and Pris and Hol because they have less to lose. I’m not running a couple of homes for pensioners stinking of urine, I’m not writing about films nobody watches in magazines nobody reads; I’m on course to have the kind of power that can buy and sell the sort of politician Paul
dreams
of being. So I
need
this done properly, do you understand? Now come
on
!’

This is a knotty one. I’m as good as certain the tape won’t be up there, but there is some force to Alison’s argument about absolute certainty, and a kind of elegance in having a clear top-down plan, only I’m starting to feel like she’s insisting on this just to establish who’s in control here (her, she would like), and my automatic reaction is to resist.

If she was a man I would definitely resist, because men tend to be more forceful and pushy and always trying to be top dog in situations like this, and that’s sort of like bullying, which Guy always told me to fight back against, even if it hurt. But Alison’s female, and I take her argument about things generally being easier for men, and them getting away with more, and so my instinct is to defer to her just so as to
not
be like a typical male, refusing to listen to women and sure that they (the man) has got it right. On the other hand, she has kind of been acting a bit like a man in this. Tricky.