Crow Stone

I don’t want to die

How long have I been here? It’s so quiet. Not even the creak of settling rock.

‘Martin!’

Pathetic. Hardly a bat-squeak. Throat too dry, tongue too big for my mouth. The air’s full of dust–but at least there’s still air. For the moment.

‘Maar-tin!’

My ears feel wrong. They’re ringing, maybe something to do with the air pressure. I can hardly hear myself.

‘Maaar-tin!’

Don’t want to bring the rest of the roof down, shouting. Come on, Martin, answer, you bugger.

Fuck.

Dust and chalk fragments on my upper body, one hand’s free and I can feel that, even reach up to touch my face, but from the pelvis down I’m pinned. My legs seem to be under a lot of rubble. I can feel them, though, and I think I’m wiggling my toes–I think–so the weight hasn’t broken my back. I suppose I should count myself lucky.

On second thoughts, lucky isn’t quite the word.

It reminds me of the games we used to play as children: which would you rather? Be crushed to death by an enormous weight? Slowly suffocated? Starve? Die screaming voicelessly, tormented by thirst?

None of the above, thank you. I think I will just have that little cry, after all.

But I’m not crying. I’m shaking.

Jesus

Stop it. I’m shaking hard enough to bring the rest of the ceiling down over my face.

My body won’t pay any attention to what I tell it. It goes on shaking. Big, shuddering tremors start in my legs, travel up to my shoulders and into my head. Is this what soldiers get the night before battle: a mad uncontrollable jerking dance of fear?

Judging by the silence, Martin’s in more trouble than I am. He must be under the main fall. Between me and the way out.

‘MAAAR-TIN!’

Got to stop this shaking.

Breathe.

Think about anything other than dying.

Chalk is fossil heaven. Even the dust is a universe, composed almost entirely of tiny shells, minute cartwheels and rings and florets, the remains of plankton, which can only be seen under the electron microscope. Coccoliths, the smallest fossils on earth.

Easier, now.

Unlike angels, they actually know how many coccoliths you can get on to a single pinhead–upwards of a hundred.

I suppose my lungs are full of the bloody things.

How long does it take to die underground?

The human body can survive weeks or months without food, but only days without water. Days like this–I’ll never stand it. My tongue’s like sandpaper. No, it’s already died in my mouth and is slowly setting, like cement.

‘Mmmm-MAA—’

Everything tightens, my lungs shut down. I can’t breathe.

I’m starting to shake again and that isn’t a good sign.

And now the bloody torch is flickering and–blink–it’s going to go and–blink–it’s back no it’s not blink it’s gone it’s dark I’m stuck here in the bloody dark I’d rather die just get it over with

The Camera Man watching with his single bloodshot eye his long pale fingers reaching for me the darkness

HOLY Mary Mother of

It’s back. Thank God. The light’s on again. Shaking so much I hit my head on the ceiling and the damn thing came back on.

Breathe, Kit, take it slow and steady. I have to get myself under control, make the most of the light while it’s still on, start trying to dig myself out instead of lying here like I’m already fossilized.

Which would you rather? Suffocate, or bleed to death, wearing your fingertips down to raw stumps as you feebly try to claw your way out?

There’s something scrabbling around my feet.

Or be eaten from the toes up by rats? Slowly gnawed and nibbled, inch by bone-crunching inch?

Ha-bloody-ha.

A waft of fresh but sweat-scented air reaches my nose.

‘Martin, you fucker, you took your time.’

Above ground, the air has never smelt so good, even though it’s laced with rotting rabbit. It strikes me, sitting on the grass by the mine-shaft, that I can’t remember anything about the last fifteen minutes or so since Martin hauled me out by my ankles, spluttering chalk dust.

I’ve almost stopped shaking. That’s a plus.

‘Got a cigarette? I need a bloody cigarette.’

‘Kit, I don’t smoke. Never have, as you well know. Where are yours?’

‘Fuck knows. Under half a ton of chalk, probably.’

God knows how long Martin must have spent shifting rubble patiently out of the tunnel before he could get to me. I hope I was helpful, on the way out. I probably wasn’t.

‘So, nothing came down where you were?’

‘Not a sausage. Fortunately it was a fairly small collapse as roof falls go. Pitifully small, I’d say.’ He tries to smile. His face is pale, though, and it isn’t just chalk dust.

‘Yeah, well,’ I say. ‘You weren’t under it, Nancy Boy. I’m counting that as a near-death experience.’

I dust myself off a bit, and look at the sliver of moon. She’s on the turn. Funny thing, all these years of looking at moons, I’m still not sure which way round is the crescent and which is waning to dark. I promise myself I’ll find out now, for sure, and never forget.

Martin squats down beside me, and puts his arm round my shoulders in a big, rough, rushed hug. It’s so rare that we touch, I find my eyes filling with tears.

‘You OK? Really?’ he asks.

‘Really. I think. I’ll tell you after a hot bath.’

‘Didn’t you hear me calling? I could hear you.’

‘Struck deaf by terror, I guess, as well as dumb.’ My ears still feel funny. Like I was in an explosion.

‘I thought for a moment I’d lost you.’ His eyes look shiny in what’s left of the light.

‘You came and found me, though.’

‘If I hadn’t you’d have dug yourself out and come after me.’ He shudders. ‘I felt like a cork in a bottle after squashing my shoulders into that passageway. Anyway, if you can make it, we ought to start down before it gets too dark to find the track.’

‘Yeah, I’m fine.’ I shove him away, and try to get up. There doesn’t seem to be any strength in me, and I can’t push myself off the ground. He puts his arm under mine and hauls me to my feet. ‘I can walk.’

‘Like a geriatric.’

Did I get up the ladder on my own? He surely couldn’t have carried me. I have a dim memory of trying to cling to the rungs with no strength in my arms, Martin pushing from below. Right now, I’d love him to give me a piggyback, but I shake him off all the same.

We set off slowly through the beech trees. The ground drops away sharply in front of us. Through the last crisp copper leaves, lights glimmer on the farmland below. In the distance there is a smudge of orange that must be Worthing. I’m listening out for the raven’s cough, but there’s nothing except the crunch of our feet on the beech mast. My feet feel like lead.

One late winter afternoon when we were students, at the end of a long day walking in the Peak District, Martin and I came over a bluff with the wind in our faces. There were about two miles of darkening moorland between us and our tea, and not a glimmer of light below us, just a dipping, rolling plateau of green and brown tussocks, broken only by scattered clumps of rocks and trees.

We set off down the hillside, too cold, tired and hungry to talk. And then the wind brought us, from nowhere, the sound of singing. It was the eeriest thing I’ve ever heard, voices out of a wild twilight emptiness. I could have sworn the sound came from beneath our feet, and for one primordially terrified moment I was on the point of legging it. But then I looked at Martin. There was a wistful expression on his face. ‘Hi-ho,’ he said.

Amid a cluster of broken rocks away to our left, I saw the first bobbing light. And then another. Then a third. An orderly file of cavers in their helmets, schoolkids probably, judging by their size, came tramping out of the hidden entrance to the pothole like the Seven Dwarfs.

The next weekend I hid my fear and went caving for the first time with him.

‘You’re not thinking of driving back to Cornwall tonight?’ asks Martin, as we reach the gate to the bridleway where his battered red jeep is parked. My car is at his cottage, twenty miles away.

‘Without car keys?’ I may be emotionally screwed but I never forget a cover story. Though God knows how I’ll deal with explaining–Ooh look, my keys are in my handbag after all–when we get back.

‘Curses, knew we forgot something.’ Martin tries unsuccessfully to get his own keys into the lock of the jeep, gives up and peels back the canvas roof flap so he can get his hand in to open the door from inside. ‘You could always nip back.’

‘Fuck off and drive me to the nearest quadruple Scotch.’

He holds open the door for me: the driver’s door. The passenger side hasn’t opened within living memory. He claims he likes the jeep because it’s got a sense of humour, which is something you definitely can’t say about a Range Rover.

‘Seriously,’ he says. ‘Alcohol. Food. Early bed.’

‘Provided you’ve got some sheets on the spare bed,’ I agree. He isn’t looking at me, pretending to fumble with the keys. ‘Clean ones,’ I add. Martin’s all-male potholing weekends are legendary. In case you hadn’t noticed, there aren’t any proper potholes in Sussex.

‘I’ll change them.’

‘You’d better.’

‘And I’ll cook you crab cakes, if we stop at Waitrose on the way back.’

‘Maybe it’s worth almost dying.’

‘God, Kit, you’re really going to milk this, aren’t you?’

He starts the jeep, which pretends for one heart-plummeting moment that the battery is flat. ‘Like I always say,’ remarks Martin, as the engine finally catches, ‘a vehicle with a highly developed sense of fun.’

We lurch down the bridleway, whose ruts have ruts. Branches snatch at the windscreen, squeaking on the glass like fingers on a blackboard. I keep hearing that creak again, and feeling the hail of earth and stones on my legs. I try not to imagine what it would have been like with the weight of the roof fall on my chest.

I couldn’t have dug myself out. I was pinned like a butterfly. Whatever he pretends, Martin saved my life. The jeep’s motion throws me towards him. He turns and grins. I haven’t even thanked him, but where do you find the words? We’re not going to talk about what happened this afternoon. It’s not what we do. Emotions R Not Us. We’ll eat crab cakes sitting in front of the fire and pour Californian chardonnay down our throats, but there are places Martin and I never go.

‘Well, I suppose that knocks my idea of excavating a flint mine next season firmly on the head,’ he says, as we pull on to the road at the bottom of the hill. ‘Back to the drawing board. Or, rather, back to the book on mystery cults. I’d much rather be digging. Which reminds me–how’s your job search?’

I look at him, in the green glow of the dashboard light. I hadn’t thought until now that I’d be saying this. ‘Found one,’ I say. ‘I’ll tell you over supper. Filling in a bloody big hole in the ground, basically. You’d hate the job. Burying something for ever.’

Three hours later, I’m sharing the hearthrug with a pile of dirty plates. Darkness is a thick, velvety blanket round Martin’s cottage, and the chardonnay is doing much the same job to the inside of my head.

‘Have another slurp,’ says Martin, pouring. ‘It’s terrible stuff, but it reminds me of San Francisco.’ A wistful look comes into his eyes, then he smiles wickedly. ‘Only a few weeks, and I’ll be able to fill the cellar again.’

Poor old Martin. The public face of archaeology is still relentlessly heterosexual, although it’s attracted quite a few old queens I could name. And, apart from Martin, I’ve never met a real caver who cares to admit he’s gay. He gets by, but he looks forward to his Christmas trips to California. I think he lives in hope of finding himself at a party singing ‘Auld Lang Syne’ next to Armistead Maupin.

We got friendly the first week at university because we didn’t find each other threatening. Going drinking with him is the nearest I get to a night out with the girls. He wasn’t out then, even to himself, and certainly not to his father who was a vicar, but I guessed he was gay the night we met. I chatted him up because he was studying archaeology; still sometimes wish I’d chosen that instead of geology and engineering. When I turn my hand to re-erecting Bronze Age stone circles for him, or rebuilding Roman siege engines, I can kid myself I’ve got some level of archaeological knowledge, but he just uses me for the practical stuff: he’s the big thinker. He jokes about not enjoying writing his book, but he adores it, really, teasing out all the esoteric stuff about Roman religion.

Firelight glints, red, gold, on my glass, brimming with pale yellow wine. I raise it to him. ‘Here’s to lots of busy little Californian Christmas elves. On rollerskates.’

‘Mmm.’ Martin drinks deeply. ‘Though naturally I would hope Santa decides to explore your chimney too.’

I cough as my wine goes down the wrong way. ‘I can’t keep up.’

‘That’s what Santa says, too.’

‘Stop it, Martin. It gets tedious.’

‘You’re just jealous. When was the last time you got laid?’

‘None of your business.’

Martin looks like a puppy that can’t understand why no one finds scratchmarks on the furniture appealing. He’s happier if he can come up with a reason for my lack of interest in sexual banter.

‘Have you been getting calls again from Nick?’

‘No, thank God. Splitting the money from the London house seems to have shut him up for a bit. And I changed my mobile number.’

‘You should have divorced him as soon as you broke up. I resent him getting half of what that house is worth now when he pissed off to Wales nearly ten years ago.’

‘More than half. It’s only fair–I’m keeping the place in Cornwall, don’t forget.’ I shouldn’t feel I have to justify myself to Martin, but I always do where Nick’s concerned.

‘You’re too soft on him.’ Martin’s frowning. He once threatened to punch the lights out of Nick on my behalf, even though I can’t imagine he has ever punched the lights out of anyone. ‘He’s always taken advantage of you.’

‘Pity you didn’t tell me that before we got married.’

‘I thought it.’

‘I’m not psychic. Next time say it aloud.’

We lapse into silence. It occurs to me that if I hadn’t come back from the flint mine this afternoon, Nick would have had the lot. I haven’t got round to changing my will.

Martin settles back in his leather chair with the scuffed arms. I get out my cigarettes, glancing over to check he isn’t in one of his antismoking moods, gearing up for California. He frowns, but doesn’t stop me lighting up.

‘So what’s this new job, then?’ he asks. ‘I thought you were looking for something abroad. What changed your mind?’

The trouble with sitting on the hearthrug in a four-hundred-year-old cottage is that you freeze on one side from the draughts and roast on the other. The left half of me’s sweating like a side of pork, but my right side keeps shivering.

‘It’s Bath,’ I say, sitting on my right hand to stop it shaking. ‘Green Down.’

‘The stone mines? I didn’t think they’d got the funding yet.’

‘They haven’t, but they’ve already started emergency work. The consultants reckon the whole lot could come down at any time.’

‘What you’d call a big headache.’

‘And technically they’re quarries, not mines, even though they’re underground. Stone is quarried, not mined.’

‘They’re going to fill them all?’

‘That’s the plan.’

Martin spits a fragment of cork from his wine into the fire. ‘Criminal. Burying three hundred years’ worth of industrial archaeology.’

‘What about all the people living on top?’

‘I don’t suppose they’d fancy moving? … No, I guess not.’ He sighs heavily. ‘Not really my period, but fascinating stuff. You know they were dug out in the eighteenth century by Ralph Allan? He and his pet architect, John Wood–mad bastard with a penchant for freemasonry–were effectively responsible for developing Georgian Bath.’

‘And Wood’s son. John Wood the Younger.’

Martin nearly kicks over the pile of plates in his surprise. ‘Blimey, Kit, you’ve been doing your homework.’

I don’t tell him that I did the homework a long time ago, that I was at school in Bath and we used to go on educational walks round the Circus and the Royal Crescent and all the other famous buildings that the John Woods, Elder and Younger, designed between them. Martin thinks I was brought up in Bournemouth. But there’s quite a lot I haven’t told him.

‘You know,’ he says, leaning forward to poke the fire into a roaring blaze, ‘I reckon there’s something deeply perverse in your nature, Kit. This afternoon you nearly get yourself killed in a roof fall, and now you’re about to take a job where it’s possible an entire suburb will land on your bonce.’

I stare into the fire. ‘Glutton for punishment, I suppose.’

‘Anyway,’ Martin continues cheerfully, ‘we’ll call the AA out first thing in the morning so they can come with their lock-picking gear and get you on the road.’

Lying always gets me into this kind of mess.

And knocking back too much wine always stops me sleeping.

Martin’s snores echo down the stairwell while I prowl the kitchen in search of tea. Proper tea, that is, the sort that comes in bags, not the poncy caddy full of Earl Grey leaves Martin insists on.

‘You get bored in the night, flower, read this,’ he said, thrusting into my arms a hot-water bottle and a pile of manuscript. ‘Tell me if you think it’s too racy for Oxford University Press.’

How did he know I’d be awake at two in the morning?

Maybe it’s the wine. Maybe it’s what happened this afternoon. Every time I turn on to my back I think of my chalk coffin, the suffocating air full of coccoliths and the light from my head-torch getting dimmer and dimmer.

The teabags are in the canister marked Flour. Last time I stayed they were in the biscuit tin.

Mug of tea at my elbow, I settle down at the kitchen table with the latest chapter in Martin’s book. ‘My very favourite mystery cult. You’ll like it,’ he said. ‘Big butch soldiers. Lots of gender-bending. And ravens.’ ‘I can do without ravens.’

‘No decent mystery cult that doesn’t have a raven or two.’

In Persia, where Mithraism originated, ravens were associated with death because it was customary to expose corpses for excarnation–known as ‘sky burial’ in other cultures–leaving the flesh to be stripped away by birds and other scavengers. Symbolically, the neophyte has to die and be reborn before he can be admitted to the mysteries of the cult.

‘I love this kind of stuff,’ he said to me earlier, when we stopped discussing my next job and turned to what he’s researching. ‘Weird as hell, nothing written down, so everything has to be pieced together from the archaeological evidence. Our best guesses come from wall paintings and mosaics in Italy, but there are temples up by Hadrian’s Wall, and one was excavated in London too. Seven stages of initiation. Ordeals at every stage. Men only but, of course, the big laugh is that most of it’s nicked from an even older eastern mystery religion, the cult of the Great Mother, of all things, popular in Rome at the same time. Don’t you just adore it?’

Firelight and enthusiasm sparkled in his eyes.

‘And then the real symbolic giveaway is that they build their temples underground, or at least tart them up to look like caves. You couldn’t get much more Freudian than that, could you? Wait till you hear what they got up to during the initiation ceremonies–typical bloody soldiers, the slightest excuse to dress up as women …’

In the Mithraic myth, the raven takes the place of the Roman god Mercury, and bears his magical staff, the caduceus. He brings a message from the sun god, ordering first the hunting then the slaying, in the cave, of the bull–a sacrifice we can be almost certain was borrowed from the cult of Magna Mater. From the animal’s blood and semen gushing on to the ground, plants grow, generating new life.

Blood and semen. The dark heart of all male-centred cults. I look up from the manuscript, and outside everything is blackness, no light visible for miles from Martin’s cottage tucked under the lip of the Sussex chalk escarpment. It feels a long, long way from Green Down, and everything that waits for me there. Another sentence from the manuscript catches my eye, a translation of some priestly invocation.

I am a star that goes with you, and shines out of the depths.

It makes me shiver. Suddenly I’m tired, after all, and my feet are cold, and I remember that hot-water bottle still holding a ghost of its warmth between the not-very-clean sheets upstairs.

The same words are still reverberating in my head a couple of weeks later. I’m sitting in my silver Audi outside the semi-detached house on the outskirts of Bath, thinking about the circular motion that has brought me back here. There’s a big crack in its honey-stone facing. Underneath, hundreds of years ago, men tunnelled into the stone and drew out the bones of which Bath is built–oolitic limestone, carrying the imprint of millions of sea creatures, ammonites with their perfectly coiled shells, like snakes with their tails in their mouths.

My fascination with the bones of things, stone and fossils and the darkness underground where they lie, has never gone away, in spite of what happened that summer. I grew up here, and lived in this ugly yellow house until I was fourteen. I had no plan then to become a mining engineer. I wanted to track the origins of the human race. I saw my future in some heat-blasted gully in Africa or the Middle East, pacing the scree and looking for patterns. Turning over stones and occasionally recognizing the shape of a knucklebone, a fragment of tibia maybe or, if I was very lucky, a whole transfiguring skull.

Instead here I am, completing the circle, back where I started before I was fourteen and the big black car took me away.

Streaks of rain are beginning to dry unevenly on the honey-stone walls. I start the engine, put the car into gear and drive away up the hill, heading for the site.

On the day the black car took me away–big-bodied and lumbering, it was, a dinosaur with headlamp eyes and a radiator grille like long, shiny teeth–we drove this way. I can’t remember what I was thinking. I probably thought I was going to be famous. Time fossilizes, strips away thought and emotion, so all I have left is the bone of memory–the sight of a neat row of quarrymen’s cottages, the smell of the car’s leather upholstery.

If I went back to a psychotherapist, I could probably reflesh those moments. Remember the exact point I realized I wasn’t ever going back to the yellow house. Trace how I had succeeded in destroying everything. Understand I would never again see Poppy or Mrs Owen or Gary. It didn’t upset me then. Everything was unreal, just as it feels unreal now: a past fossilized and forgotten.

But a therapist would pick away at my memories, scraping a little fragment of dried-up flesh off the bone, culturing it and growing it and proving to me that I was hurt, I did cry, that I screamed, in fact, as they were dragging me out of the doorway and down the steep path to the waiting car.

I’d prefer not to know. I’ve put a lot of effort into not knowing. I don’t want to hear the voice I heard when the roof collapsed in the flint mine. The point of coming back is to bury it for good.

The entrance to the underground quarry is in the middle of a recreation ground, not far from Green Down’s high street. The site offices are metal-sided cabins, painted blue, green and yellow, jumbled like Lego bricks over a carpet of hardcore. Outside the high, solid fence some little kids in Manchester United strip are kicking a football in a bored sort of way. A security guard lifts the barrier to let me in. The boys stare at my car as I drive past and I wave, but they don’t wave back. I remember leaning on the wall years ago, watching another group of boys playing football. Just as in that long-ago summer there’s a cloudless sky, but today’s is cold and brittle blue, like ice on puddles.