Kit's Wilderness

  At first Grandpa was gloomy, watery-eyed and silent. He hardly seemed to know me. I heard Mum whispering that Grandma’s death would mean the death of him as well. At night he used to sigh and whisper in his room as I dropped off to sleep next door. I dreamed that Grandma was with him again, just beyond the thin wall beside my bed, that she had come to comfort him as he died. I heard her voice, soothing him. I dreamed that his sighs were his final breaths. I trembled with fear that I would be the one to hear him die.

  But he didn’t die. He started to smile again, and tell his tales and sing his ancient pit songs in his hoarse cracked voice:

  “When I was young and in me pri-ime,

  Eh, aye, I could hew . . .”

  He took me walking and showed me that the evidence of the pit was everywhere—depressions in the gardens, jagged cracks in the roadways and in the house walls. Lampposts and telegraph poles were twisted and skewed. Fragments of coal darkened the soil. He told me how things had been in his day: the huge black slag heap beside the river, the great wheels and winding gear, the hundreds of men disappearing every morning and every night into the earth. He showed me where the entrances to the shafts had been, told me about the dizzying drop in the cage to the tunnels far below. He pointed up to the hills past Stoneygate, told me they were filled with shafts, potholes, ancient drift mines.

  “Look at the earth and you think it’s solid,” he said. “But look deeper and you’ll see it’s riddled with tunnels. A warren. A labyrinth.”

  As we wandered, I used to keep on asking him: How deep did you go? How dark was it? What was it like to go down there, day after day, week after week, year after year? Why weren’t you terrified, Grandpa?

  He used to smile.

  “It was very deep, Kit. Very dark. And every of us was scared of it. As a lad I’d wake up trembling, knowing that as a Watson born in Stoneygate I’d soon be following my ancestors into the pit.”

  He used to draw me close to him, touch my cheek, run his fingers through my hair.

  “But there was more than just the fear, Kit. We were also driven to it. We understood our fate. There was the strangest joy in dropping down together into the darkness that we feared. And most of all there was the joy of coming out again together into the lovely world. Bright spring mornings, brilliant sunshine, birdsong, walking together through the lovely hawthorn lanes toward our homes.

  Grandpa used to swing his arms and sing out loud and turn his face toward the sun. He used to grip my shoulders and smile and smile and I felt his body trembling with the love he held for me.

  “This is our world,” he used to say. “Aye, there’s more than enough of darkness in it. But over everything there’s all this joy, Kit. There’s all this lovely lovely light.”

  One Saturday morning I woke early and heard him singing. I went to his room.

  “Grandpa,” I said. “What’s the monument?”

  He laughed.

  “Aye,” he said. “That’s another thing on my list to show you.”

  And we crept out of the silent house and he took me to St. Thomas’ graveyard. A pretty place: old stone church, old trees, leaning headstones.

  “Through here,” he said.

  We followed the narrow pathway between the graves. We came to a larger grave, a high narrow pyramid. It was a monument to the Stoneygate pit disaster. It happened in 1821. A hundred and seventeen were killed. The stone was worn by rain and wind and age, but the long list of names remained. Nine-year-olds, ten-year-olds, eleven-year-olds, twelve-year-olds. The sun poured down through the ancient trees on us, dappling the stone, the earth and us with the shadows of trembling leaves.

  “Imagine it, eh?” he said.

  I reached up and ran my finger across the names. I caught my breath. Right at the top was the name I knew.

  “John Askew,” I said. “Aged thirteen.”

  “Aye. There’s lots of names you know on this old list, son.” He smiled. “You ready?”

  “Eh?”

  “Watch.”

  He took my hand, gently drew my finger to the foot of the stone. The names there were becoming unreadable, worn away by trickling water and rising damp. Bright green moss grew over the letters.

  He scraped away the moss with his fingernails. I read the final name, caught my breath again, felt the thudding of my heart.

  “Aye, Kit.”

  He smiled. “A great-great-great-great-uncle? Yours was always one of the family names.”

  I traced it with my finger: Christopher Watson, aged thirteen.

  He put his arm around me. “Don’t let it trouble you, Kit. It’s long ago.”

  I picked more moss away from the base of the stone.

  Neither can they die any more, for they are equal unto the angels.

  Grandpa smiled.

  “All it shows is how you’re in your rightful place now: back at home in Stoneygate.”

  He looked into my eyes.

  “Okay?” he whispered.

  I gazed back into his dark and tender eyes. “Okay,” I said.

  I stared at our two names. John Askew, Christopher Watson, with the long list of the dead between us, joining us. I kept turning as Grandpa led me away, until the mark of my name had blended once again with moss and stone.

  “Used to get a laugh here long ago,” he said. “Used to come at night as kids. Used to dance in a ring around the monument and chant the ‘Our Father,’ backward. Used to say we’d see the faces of those old pit kids blooming in the dark.” He giggled. “Bloody terrifying. Used to belt home laughing and screaming, scared half to death. Kids’ games, eh? What they like?”

  He put his arm around me as we walked home.

  “It’s great that you’ve come here,” he said. “I’ve wanted this, wanted to show you where you’ve come from, where we’ve all come from.” He patted my shoulder. “Don’t let it trouble you. The world’s so different now.

  He pointed out across the wilderness.

  “We used to say we saw the ancient pit kids playing down there by the river. They’d come out from the dark. The ones they hadn’t been able to get out from the blocked tunnels. The ones that hadn’t been properly buried.”

  “And did you?”

  “We said we did. Sometimes I almost believed we did. I squinted, saw them there at dusk, on misty days, days when the sun glared and the earth shimmered, days when the things you see seem to shift and change . . .” He laughed. “Who knows, Kit? We were young. You start to believe anything when you’re young. And it was all so long ago.”

  That night, I stared out from my window across the wilderness, watched for skinny children playing. I narrowed my eyes, squinted, saw nothing but a dark thickset form walking above the river, a black dog at its heels. John Askew, aged thirteen, watched by Christopher Watson, aged thirteen.

  It was Grandpa who showed me Askew’s place. We wandered one day toward the fringes of Stoneygate, where the houses petered out and the hills started. Skylarks flew up from the turf before us, gulls flew in with the mist from the sea. There were lanes that followed the tracks of abandoned coal lines, fields and paddocks that rose toward distant dark and misty moors. Ruined stone walls, ruined cottages with weeds growing through gaping windows. All around were ancient hawthorn hedges, red berries burning brightly among the dark green tiny leaves.

  “Went nesting here as a lad,” Grandpa said. “Shinned up to the nests, popped the egg into my mouth, clambered down to my mates. Cut pinholes in them, blew the insides out, rested them in neat rows in boxes of sand. Not a thing that’s done these days. Against the law. But then it was what all lads did. And there were rules: Don’t leave any less than two, don’t destroy the nest. Rules that let the bird families survive, generation after generation.”

  Grandpa cast his eyes across the steepening landscape, pointed to where the disappeared pits once were.

  “Now it’s proper countryside again,” he said. “A great place for you to live and grow. Great place for young life to flourish.
”

  And he closed his eyes and smiled and listened to the larks, dark tiny specks that belted out their songs from high up in the sky.

  The Askews lived in the final street, a potholed cul-de-sac of old pit cottages before the hills started. Most of the cottages were boarded up. Close by were a shuttered Coop Store and a tumbledown pub, The Fox.

  Grandpa pointed into the cul-de-sac. A skinny dog roamed there, its tail curled up between its legs.

  “That’s the one,” he said. “In the corner there. Where your mate lives.”

  Curtains were closed at the windows. There was an upturned pram in the beaten garden, an empty rabbit hutch. We stood for a moment. We saw the curtains tugged aside a few inches, a woman’s face peeping out. Nothing but the dog moved. There was sudden music from another of the houses, a heavy pounding beat, then a woman’s bitter scream, and silence again. The woman at Askew’s window stared. She stood in front of the curtain, holding a baby in her arms, watching us.

  “The mother,” said Grandpa, and we turned away.

  We met the father as we passed The Fox. He stumbled out, cupped a cigarette to his mouth and tried to light it. He muttered and cursed, leaned against the pub wall, flashed his eyes at us. His face was red and strained.

  Grandpa nodded at him. “Askew,” he said in greeting.

  The man stared at us, blinked, refocused. “It’s you,” he said. “Watson.”

  “Aye,” said Grandpa. “And this is my lad. My son’s lad, Christopher.”

  The man glared at me, spat down onto the broken pavement.

  “Christopher Watson, eh?” he said. He wiped his lips with his sleeve. He coughed and cursed. “So what am I to do, eh? Kiss his bloody precious feet, eh?” He stuck his head forward. “Eh?” he said. “Eh?” Then laughed and coughed and cursed again.

  Grandpa drew me on, back toward home, back toward the wilderness, where we passed through the children playing and came upon Askew himself. Jax was at his side. He sat on a rock above the river with his sketch pad on his knees. His hand moved quickly across the paper. He turned and saw us there, and his face darkened. I raised my hand, but he ignored me and quickly turned toward his work again. The dog Jax watched us and growled.

  “A guided tour of the Askews,” said Grandpa as we walked back home. He laughed. “They’re like the Watsons. True Stoneygate folk. Generation after generation of them, stretching back into the deep dark past. And aye, they’ve always been a queer crew, but when you needed a mate, they was always there.”

  Later that evening, he knocked on my door. “Thought I had this somewhere,” he said. He showed me a little pit pony carved from coal. “Lovely, eh?” he said.

  I held it in my palm. It was black and smooth as glass, worn by time, but you saw how real it was, how sharp its detail had been.

  “Carved by that lad’s grandpa,” he said. “Many years ago.”

  “Askew’s an artist as well,” I said.

  I showed him the drawing that Askew had done of me.

  “That’s how it goes,” he said. “Things passing down generation to generation.”

  It was Allie Keenan who helped to draw me in. I walked through the gates one afternoon and saw Askew’s group gathering there. There was Bobby Carr, the others, then Allie standing silent on the fringes. She saw me watching and she grinned. She was in my year. She lived behind us in one of the houses by the green at Stoneygate’s heart. One morning she’d run to catch up with me as I walked to school.

  “Name’s Allie Keenan,” she said. “Knew your grandma. Used to baby-sit me sometimes when I was little. Led her a dance but she loved it really.” She laughed. “She used to tell me about her precious little Kit. Perfectly behaved, she used to say. Not like one little madam I could mention.”

  We walked on together.

  “Perfectly behaved,” she said. “Is that still true? Was it ever true?” She watched me and grinned.

  “Dunno,” I said.

  “Certainly the proper gent in class,” she said. “Or is that just the new boy’s way?” She kept on watching me, kept on grinning.

  “Dunno,” I said. “Dunno what to say.”

  “Ha. Butter wouldn’t melt, eh?”

  We kept on walking.

  “She was so lovely, though,” she said. “Must have been awful for you. We were all so sad when she passed away.”

  Allie was little and thin and got into trouble for the lipstick and eye shadow she wore in school. She wore red shoes and yellow jeans. In class she giggled at the teachers and hunched over her books and scribbled fast and frantic stories filled with dragons and monsters and maidens in distress. In classes she hated, like geography, she stared out of the window and picked her nails and daydreamed about being in a soap on television one day.

  “So?” asked Mr. Dobbs, the geography teacher one day. “So, Miss Alison Keenan, what have you learned of terminal moraines in the last half hour?”

  Allie blinked, refocused, pondered.

  “Forgive me, Mr. Dobbs,” she said. “But I simply fail to see the relevance of the subject to a person of my inclinations and ambitions.”

  For that she was given detention, and a warning letter was sent home.

  The morning after I saw her at the school gates we walked together again to school.

  “You’re one of John Askew’s friends,” I said.

  She looked at me, her lips tight shut. “Hm,” she said.

  “I saw you with the others, at the gates.”

  “Hm,” she said again. She quickened her step.

  “Okay. You’re not, then,” I said.

  I let her get ahead of me, but she hesitated. “Why d’you want to know?” she said. She turned and stared right at me.

  “Dunno,” I said. “There’s something . . .”

  “Something! He’s just a brute. He’s a caveman.”

  “I talked to him.”

  “And he grunted back, I bet.” She just watched me, hands on hips.

  I chewed my lips. I wanted to tell her that I saw how brutal Askew might be, but that I felt drawn to him. I wanted to tell her that I’d begun to believe what he said was true: that I was like him, that he was like me. I thought of what my grandpa said about the pit, that he was terrified of it, but that he was driven to it. But as she stood there with her eyebrows raised and her head tilted to the side, I knew she’d just laugh and scoff.

  “Listen,” she said. “From what I’ve seen of you I don’t really think we’re the thing for you.”

  I looked away.

  “Mr. New Boy,” she said. “Mr. Perfectly Behaved.” She tapped her foot and pondered. “He’s a caveman,” she said again. “You know that, don’t you? If you don’t know how to deal with him, he’ll cause you all kinds of bother. You stick to your homework and your stories, Mr. New Boy.”

  I shrugged.

  “He’d have you for breakfast,” she said. She pondered again, then shook her head. “Look at you,” she said. “Somebody’s got to protect you, haven’t they?”

  Then she turned and danced away.

  I woke with a start in the middle of the night.

  “There he is! After him, lads! There he is!”

  It was Grandpa, calling out.

  Then silence. Just one of his dreams, I thought. I smiled, turned over and began to sleep again.

  “Aye! Aye! Again! Follow him, lads!”

  The wall beside me trembled. I heard how he twisted and turned in his bed.

  I pulled a shirt and shorts on, tiptoed out, tiptoed to him, sat on his bedside. His legs kicked and his arms jerked. He was panting, gasping for breath.

  “Grandpa,” I whispered. “Grandpa.” I spread my hand over his brow. “Grandpa.”

  His eyes opened, stared, reflected the light from the moon that shone in through his window.

  “Aye, that’s him!” he said. “After him! After him!”

  I held his shoulder, shook him gently. “Grandpa. Grandpa.”

  He blinked, shook his head
. “Eh? What’s that?”

  “It’s me, Grandpa. Kit.”

  I leaned across and switched the bedside lamp on.

  He stared again, seeing me now. He let out his breath in a long sigh.

  “Kit. It’s you, Kit.” He shook his head again, squeezed his eyes and smiled. “Ach. And we almost had him that time.”

  He laughed and eased himself up, leaned back against the headboard. He glanced at the clock and grinned.

  “Old blokes and lads should be asleep at this time of the night, eh?” He pressed a finger to his lips. “They’ll have our guts for garters, Kit.”

  “Who was it?” I whispered.

  “Little Silky.”

  “Silky?”

  “Called him that ’cause of the way the lamplight fell on him. ’cause it made him shine like flickering silk as he flashed through the tunnels before our eyes. A glimpse, and then he’s gone.”

  “A ghost?”

  “Little lad in shorts and boots that many of us seen down there. Sometimes just looking at us from the deepest edges of the dark, sometimes slipping past our backs as we leaned down to the coal.” He smiled. “If ever a lamp went out or a pitman’s bait was pinched, that’s Silky’s work, we’d say. Little mischief, little Silky. A glimpse, and then he’s gone.”

  He smiled again. His eyes looked deep into the past, deep into the pit.

  “Some said he’d been trapped down there after one of the disasters. One they’d never been able to get to. One of those that never got taken out and buried. Not scary, though. Something sweet in him. Something you wanted to touch and comfort and draw into the light.” He smiled. “Ask any of the old blokes left round here and they’ll tell you about our Silky.”

  He stroked his chin.

  “Sometimes chased him, like in the dream, but never got to touch him.”

  Someone stirred in another part of the house.

  Grandpa switched the light off. “Guts for garters, Kit,” he whispered. “Back to bed, eh?”