The Quarry (34 page)

Now they’re all looking at me.

I try to keep calm and not blush. ‘Yes I did,’ I agree, nodding and trying to look serious and unflapped.

‘In the fucking
quarry
?’ Guy says.

‘There’s been a landslip, just over the back wall,’ I tell him, then look round at the rest. This is something I’ve been thinking about, preparing for. ‘I wanted to check it was just the topsoil that had fallen away with all the rain, not the start of the rock crumbling, so I got a rope from the garage and took a look.’ They’re all still staring at me. I nod in what I trust is a reassuring manner. ‘We’re fine. Just topsoil and … stones and a few roots and stuff. No problem.’ They’re still staring at me. In the silence, I almost add, ‘You’re welcome,’ but that might be a bit too cheeky.

‘Is this where you were when you should have been helping me get up this morning?’ Guy asks.

‘Yes.’

‘
How
do you know it’s safe?’ Ali asks. ‘You’re not a geologist.’

‘Bit dangerous, no, Kit?’ Rob says, smiling.

‘You daft bugger; you could have fucking killed yourself!’ Guy says. ‘Who’d look after me then?’

‘You didn’t think to
say
anything?’ Hol is saying. She’s been mostly quiet this evening. She drinks from her glass of red.

‘Well, before, I didn’t want to worry anybody,’ I tell them. I shrug. ‘After I’d done it, I felt kind of foolish for worrying myself, so I didn’t say anything then either.’

‘And you,’ Hol says, looking at Haze. ‘You didn’t say anything.’

‘I just thought, like, this was something Kit did every day or something.’

‘
What?
’ Hol says.

‘For exercise,’ Haze says, looking down, as though he’s only now realising this sounds a bit odd.

‘… Anyway,’ Paul says. ‘On to other business. We have the tape.’

He smiles widely.

I can hear the rain; a flurry hits the window, dies away again.

‘No fucking kidding?’ Guy says, as Pris says,

‘When were you going to tell us?’

‘Yeah, no kidding,’ Paul says to Guy, then looks to Pris. ‘This is me telling you now, honey,’ he says.

‘When did you find it?’ Rob asks.

‘Where was it?’ Ali demands.

‘Let me hand you back to my capable colleague, Mr Kitchener Hyndersley,’ Paul says, waving one hand in my direction. ‘Kit; if you’d be so kind.’

‘Oh,’ I say, suddenly on the spot. ‘Okay.’

So I tell them about looking down from the cliff and seeing stuff on ledges below me. Then about asking Paul for his help and us going to the charity shop and recycling centre, and then driving into the quarry and using the ladder to climb up to the ledge.

‘You’ve had it since this
morning
?’ Ali yelps, glaring at Paul, then me.

‘Yeah,’ Paul says, ‘but we weren’t sure we had the right one until I’d got it working. It was jammed. I wanted to be sure it was the right tape before I said anything. That took a while. Didn’t want to stop people searching in case the real one was still out there.’

‘So …’ Rob is saying, glancing from me to Paul and back again. ‘It is definitely the tape?’

‘Almost certainly,’ Paul says.

‘Only
almost
?’ Hol says. ‘What the fuck else could you mistake it for?’

‘Has … Kit seen … the tape?’ Pris asks.

‘Nope,’ Paul says. Meanwhile I’m shaking my head, to confirm. ‘Want to see it?’ Paul asks, looking round at us all.

‘With Kit here?’ Rob says, frowning.

‘Yeah.’ Paul is smiling. ‘That’s not actually going to be a problem. Trust me.’ Paul looks at Guy. ‘Guy?’ he says.

‘What?’ Guy looks angry.

‘You okay with this?’

Dad stares at him. ‘Fuck it, yeah. Let’s at least watch the start, eh?’

Paul stands. ‘I’ll get the gizmo.’

Once Paul has left the room, Guy looks at me. ‘Keeping this very quiet, weren’t we?’ he says.

‘I’m getting another drink,’ Haze announces. ‘Anybody else?’

I shrug. ‘Like Paul says, didn’t want to say anything until we knew.’

Another couple of top-ups and cans are requested. Haze leaves the room.

Rob is switching on the old combo player under the telly. ‘Yeah,’ he says. ‘When did this start working?’

‘When I fixed it,’ I tell him. They all look at me.

‘So,’ Guy says, ‘do you know what was—’ He breaks off to cough. ‘Do you know what’s on the tape?’

‘Something embarrassing,’ I tell him.

‘One way of putting it,’ Ali says.

Hol is looking at me. It’s a funny look, like she almost doesn’t know who I am. I don’t think I remember her ever looking at me like that before. It gives me a strange feeling in my insides; not a nice one.

‘How the fuck …?’ Rob says, pointing the TV remote and clicking repeatedly.

‘Let me,’ Ali says, reaching, but he turns away so she can’t take the control from him.

‘No, I can—’

‘Will you just let me do it? You’re never any good …’

‘It’s just—’

‘Will you give it here?’

More pointing and clicking. ‘Maybe the batteries …’

They keep on arguing.

Guy looks at them with what might just be an affectionate sneer. Definitely a sneer, anyway. ‘Well, ladies and gents,’ he says, in an old-style, radio-DJ voice, ‘we seem to be experiencing a few technical difficulties at the moment, but we hope that isn’t spoiling your enjoyment of the smooth sounds here on RTFM …’

‘Fuck
off
!’ Rob says, as Ali tries to grab the remote from him.

‘Give it to the kid,’ Guy says.

‘You’re just being stubborn!’ Ali tells Rob, trying to take the remote again. Rob, still on his knees in front of the TV, has to raise the device over his head to stop her getting it.

Guy leans forward with a grimace, takes the remote from Rob’s hand and throws it to me.

His aim’s a bit off but I reach and catch it, then click a couple of buttons. The TV screen flashes, then fills with the fuzzy monochrome visual static I sort of vaguely remember from watching VHS tapes long ago. ‘There you go,’ I say.

‘Wait a minute,’ Haze says from the doorway, laden. ‘Was it a Newkie Brown or a Guinness, Guyster?’

‘Has it got alcohol? Is there a “Y” in the day?’ Guy asks, accepting a brown can of the former. He sticks the remains of the joint in the old can, drops it to the floor.

Ali looks at Rob, then me. ‘That’s what I was going to do,’ she tells him.

‘
That’s what I was going to do
,’ he mimics back at her in a pretend-lady voice.

She sort of almost smiles and slaps him on the arm.

‘Sit your fat arse on the couch,’ he tells her. This is unfair, as Ali does not have a fat arse.

‘Sit yours on my face,’ she tells him, still nearly smiling, then goes back to sit.

‘You should be so lucky.’

‘Yeah, I should,’ she says, lifting her wineglass.

‘That’s the wine box empty,’ Haze tells Pris, filling her glass from the silver pillow he’s extracted from it. He puts the remainder into mine, showing me how to get the very last drops out by careful squeezing and getting the tap-angle just right. Useful.

‘Ate viola,’ Paul says, returning, brandishing the trick VHS cassette.

The tape starts with more visual static and the sound of crackling. Then it switches to a view of Bewford, probably taken, I reckon from the angle, from the field that rises between the house and the city. You can tell it’s old because there’s what looks like a microwave tower on Almsworth Hill, and it appears they’re just building the multi-storey car park near Marshgate. The picture quality isn’t great.

‘The Irreconcilable Creative Differences Film Partnership Presents,’ says some cheesy-looking digital lettering across the middle of the screen. Ali sighs.

‘Are you sure Kit should be …?’ Pris is saying.

Paul holds up one hand. ‘You’ll miss the soundtrack,’ he says, as some organ music starts.

‘Christ,’ Hol says. ‘“Je t’aime” … etc. I’d forgotten.’

‘Seriously, Paul,’ Pris says, sounding panicky. ‘We can’t let …’

Her voice trails away as the music stops abruptly and the screen flickers, goes dark, flickers again, shows what might be a half-second of the same panning footage of Bewford, with some cursive writing in pink starting to slide across the screen – you can see the edge of the pane of glass it must be written on – before going grey-black again. I think the word in pink said ‘Debbie’, but only because Paul already told me the film was called
Debbie Does Bewford
; really it’s gone too quick.

Then there’s more scratchy static and then, suddenly, we’re looking at an interior, and the retreating back of a man … who is my dad, we realise, as he sits down on a seat facing the camera. He smiles. Actually the smile is more of a gurn. He’s sitting where he’s sitting now, in the same seat, in this same room. He looks only a year or two younger. He still has the comb-over remains of a full head of blond hair.

‘Right then,’ he says. He sits back in his seat and folds his arms. I wouldn’t have thought you could fold your arms pugnaciously, but Guy manages it. ‘The standard fucking disclaimer. If you’re watching this I must be dead. You lucky fuckers. Patently all your meagre supplies of talent were sublimated into staying alive.’

Paul asked for the remote when he inserted the tape. Now he points it at the VHS machine, clicks, and the image judders, stalls. It doesn’t freeze tidily like a paused DVD or something off a hard disk; it sort of slides to a stop halfway across the screen, the picture all mushed up and smeared like it’s a still-wet painting that somebody’s wiped with a damp cloth. Seems to have gone monochrome, too.

Paul looks at Guy, who is gazing at the screen with an odd expression that might be sadness, resignation or even mild amusement. ‘I listened to the first bit of what follows, Guy,’ Paul says quietly. ‘Do you want the rest of us to hear it?’

Guy looks into his can, then nods. ‘Yeah, why not?’ he says. ‘Why should you have all the fucking fun?’

‘Okay.’ Paul restarts the tape.

‘Right,’ Guy says, from the screen. ‘Obviously I don’t actually want to die, but I am trying to find what positives I can in the shitty circumstances, and one of those is that I shall be glad to see the back of this poxy little country and this fucked-up world and this bunch of fucking morons constituting my fellow stakeholders in the species
Homo
so-called
sapiens
.’

(Rob sighs heavily and looks at Ali, though she doesn’t look at him.)

‘I shall,’ Guy says, from the screen, ‘consider myself well rid of this island’s pathetic, grovelling population of celebrity-obsessed, superficiality-fixated wankers. I shall not miss the institutionalised servility that is the worship of the royals – that bunch of useless, vapid, anti-intellectual pillocks – or the cringing respect accorded to the shitting out of value-bereft Ruritanian “honours” by the government of the fucking day, or the hounding of the poor and disabled and the cosseting of the rich and privileged, or the imperially deluded belief that what we really need is a brace of aircraft-free aircraft carriers and upgraded nuclear weapons we’re never going to fucking use and which would condemn us for ever in the eyes of the world if we ever fucking did. Not that we can, anyway, because we can’t fire the fucking things unless the Americans let us.

‘I shall not have to witness the drowning or the starvation through mass-migration of the destitute of Bangladesh or anywhere else low-lying and impoverished, or listen to another fuckwit climate-change denier claiming that it’s all just part of some natural cycle, or down to sunspots, or watch as our kleptocrat-captured governments find new excuses not to close down tax havens, or tax the rich such that the fuckers actually have to pay more than they themselves or their lickspittle bean-counters deem appropriate.’

(Rob is shaking his head. Hol is half smiling, half sneering at the screen, eyes bright. Haze says, ‘Yeah, tell it like it is, dude!’ as he builds another joint.)

‘And I shall not miss being part of a species lamentably ready to resort to torture, rape and mass-murder just because some other poor fucker or fuckers is or are slightly different from those intent upon doing such harm, be it because they happen to worship a very slightly different set of superstitious idiocies, possess skin occupying a non-identical position on a Pantone racial colour wheel, or had the fucking temerity to pop out of a womb on the other side of a river, ocean, mountain range, other major geographical feature, or, indeed, just a straight line drawn across the desert by some bored and ignorant bureaucrat umpteen thousand miles away and a century ago.

‘None of these things shall I miss. Frankly it’s a relief to be getting shot of the necessity of watching such bollocks play out. I would still rather have the choice, mark you, but, as this would appear to be being denied me, I am making the best of a bad job and looking on the bright side: I shall be free, at last, of that nagging, persistent sensation that I am, for the most part, surrounded by fucking idiots.’

Paul points and clicks. The picture judders to a stop again.

‘I fast-forwarded from about here, Guy,’ Paul tells him. ‘Didn’t catch much else you said.’ He looks round at the rest. ‘Okay to do the same now?’

‘There anything at the end?’ Rob asks. ‘Of what was originally on there?’

‘Nah,’ Guy says. ‘I said my piece then left it running to the end of the tape. Though what I had to say still filled most of it.’

‘Almost all,’ Paul agrees.

‘I assume the next line was something about present company excepted?’ Rob says, swigging his wine. He nods at the screen with its frozen image of a slightly younger Guy poised like he’s about to open his mouth and start talking again. ‘That – this whole tape – was meant for us, for us here, yeah?’

‘Yeah,’ Guy says, glancing round everybody else in the room. ‘Basically for you lot.’

‘So when you say “surrounded by fucking idiots” you mean other people, not us.’

Guy looks at Rob for a moment. ‘Partly,’ he says eventually. ‘Though the next couple of minutes might not make particularly … ego-boosting …’ He looks angry, waves one hand. ‘The next couple of minutes might not be particularly edifying for any of you.’ He grins. ‘I spend the time detailing the personal inadequacies of each of you and listing the many ways you’ve failed to live up to your early promise and your own ambitions, however preposterous and pathetic. So, I wouldn’t advise watching any further. Not now we’ve reached the watershed.’