The Quarry

  ‘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.

  ‘You be okay down here?’ Paul asks Guy, with secondary glances at me and Hol.

  ‘As rain,’ Guy tells him.

  ‘Brilliant.’ Paul disappears up the stairs. ‘Anybody got a torch?’ he calls back.

  ‘Oh, great,’ Alison says as Rob motions her and Pris to go before him.

  ‘Just wanting to look at my arse, Rob?’ Pris says over her shoulder as she follows Alison into the dark doorway.

  ‘Yeah,’ he says. ‘That’s right.’

  ‘No farting!’ Haze says, following Rob.

  As well as the sound of shoes on stone, there are ominous pretend-ghost whooo-hooo noises from the stairwell, some laughter and a couple of muffled curses.

  Actually I do have a torch; a little credit-card-sized thing Mrs Willoughby gave me as a birthday present a couple of years ago, but it’s for emergencies only, and I wouldn’t call this an emergency. If somebody falls on the stairs and needs help, that would be an emergency; then I could use it.

  Of course if I let them have the torch, that might help prevent them falling on the stairs in the first place, so maybe I should loan it to them after all. However, by the time I think all this through it’s a bit late anyway, and I might even cause an incident if I suddenly dash up the stairs after them, yelling about having a torch and saying I’d forgotten, sorry, but here it is – who needs it most?

  I get quite hot thinking about all this; it’s just the kind of thing that trips me up and makes me panic. I start taking deep, measured breaths, the way Mrs Willoughby taught me.

  ‘You two can go if you want,’ Guy says, looking up at me and Hol. He reaches under the cycling cape and takes a battered-looking rolly from a jacket pocket. ‘Won’t run away, I promise.’

  ‘I’m fine here,’ I tell him.

  ‘Frightened of heights,’ Guy says, nodding. ‘Forgot.’

  I am not unduly frightened of heights, and wonder how I may have given Guy the wrong impression.

  ‘Bastard,’ Guy says. He’s having problems lighting the rolly; he’s cupping his hand to shield the little plastic lighter and the cigarette from the wind but his hands shake a lot these days and because of the wind, or his shaking hand, the flame keeps blowing out. He peers at the lighter, tries to adjust it, shakes it a couple of times. ‘Work, ye bastard,’ he says, and tries again.

  ‘Oh, give it here,’ Hol says, taking both from him. She sticks the cigarette in her mouth, cups her hand and lights the rolly, handing it back as she exhales. The cloud of smoke is shredded and dissipated by the gusting wind. I don’t think she inhaled properly. I have a swooning moment, thinking of the smoke leaking into her lungs and a single molecule of carcinogenic compound settling in an alveolus and triggering cancer in one of her cells, starting a primary tumour that metastasises throughout her body, killing her, taking her away as well. But I really don’t think she inhaled; not properly, just enough to get the rolly started. She lifts the cape and drops the lighter into one of Guy’s jacket pockets.

  Hol coughs. The cough is good, I tell myself; it means that she is clearing her trachea of the tars in the smoke, and, probably, that she isn’t used to smoking and doesn’t smoke in secret, even occasionally.

  ‘Still a filthy habit,’ she tells Guy.

  ‘I’m full of them,’ he tells her, drawing deeply on the rolly and sitting back to take in the view. I move to stand upwind, out of the smoke. Guy breathes out with what sounds like satisfaction. ‘Ha. Used to be, at any rate,’ he says. He looks up at Hol, grinning. ‘That not true, Hol?’

  ‘Yeah. One-man vice squad,’ Hol says. ‘That was you.’

  Guy studies the glowing tip of the skinny roll-up. ‘This is my last vice, Hol.’ I think he sounds sad.

  ‘Alcohol not count, then?’ Hol says, smiling.

  ‘Nah, not really. Don’t enjoy it the way I used to, anyway. Don’t enjoy much of anything any more. Last time I tried speed it nearly gave me a heart attack; same with coke. Ecstasy had me grinding my teeth to stumps and wanting to hug everybody.’ Guy shudders at the memory. ‘Got some Viagra from the doc to see if I could raise more than a smile but it just gave me a headache.’

  I start humming to myself. I’ve got my phone with me, of course, and I’ll have headphones in a pocket somewhere. Two concrete uprights against the west-facing wall of the tower show where there used to be a bench, but the wooden spars that spanned the gap and formed the seat have gone.

  ‘Chased the dragon a few times, back in the day,’ Guy says. I think he sounds wistful. His voice has changed and it’s almost like he’s talking to himself now, as though Hol and I aren’t here. ‘Maybe I’ll take up heroin if it all gets too fucking desperate and demeaning; get on the needle like a proper fucking junkie and go for an overdose.’

  ‘Thought you had opiates to chug when the pain got bad,’ Hol says to Guy, though glancing at me and sort of shrugging.

  ‘Yeah,’ Guy growls. ‘That’s all right, I suppose. Bit of a buzz off, that. Though it doesn’t feel like a vice when it’s medicinal. Fucking cancer,’ Guy says, suddenly vehement. ‘Even takes the fun out of opiates. Fucking shit!’

  ‘Hey!’

  We look up and see Paul waving from the top of the tower. He shouts something else but the wind is making such a noise it’s hard to hear. We just wave back. The others appear at the parapet too and also wave, then they disappear.

  ‘Wonder if they got into the rooms,’ Hol says. ‘Remember, even in the old days when the place was unlocked, you could never get into the three or four rooms that led off the stairs?’

  ‘Wooden doors,’ Guy says. ‘Probably left those.’ He looks at the tip of the rolly again. It’s nearly finished. He stubs it into the white jacket across his knees.

  ‘Guy!’ Hol says, tearing the butt from his hand to throw it away. She pulls the jacket off him, spits on it and tries to brush the burned bit off, but it stays; a little black crater.

  ‘Oops,’ Guy says. r />
  ‘What the fuck did you do that for?’ Hol asks him. She glances up at the top of the tower but there’s nobody there.

  ‘Me hand slipped.’

  ‘You lying fuck; you did that deliberately. What fucking age are you? You’re acting like a spoiled brat!’

  ‘Can I have that back, please?’ Guy says. ‘My legs are cold.’

  Hol makes as though to throw the jacket back into his lap, then stops, thrusts it into my arms instead and quickly unzips her fleece. She wraps it round Guy’s legs, tucking it in. ‘There,’ she says, as the wind tugs at her shirt and she does up the top couple of buttons by her neck. ‘Make a mess of that and I’ll make a fucking mess of you.’

  ‘Thank you so much,’ Guy says, like none of this has happened.

  I think Hol is shivering. ‘Would you like this?’ I say, offering her Paul’s jacket.

  ‘No thanks,’ she says, hugging herself and looking away to the view. Her shirt ripples in the wind.

  ‘Our Holly has always favoured martyrdom over comfort,’ Guy tells me.

  ‘Twat,’ Hol mutters.

  ‘Right!’

  ‘Come on!’ With a noise of laughter and slapping soles, Paul and Rob appear, running down the stairs and bouncing out. ‘Buckle up, you old bugger,’ Paul tells Guy. ‘The view’s brilliant. We’re getting you up to the top.’ His face is flushed and he looks excited. Rob is laughing.

  ‘I’m not going up those fucking stairs,’ Guy says. ‘Are you fucking mad? You’ll tip me on me head and leave me properly paralysed, you—’

  ‘No, we won’t,’ Rob says. ‘Just trust us.’

  ‘I don’t fucking trust you!’ Guy protests, shouting now. ‘I’ve never fucking trusted you!’

  ‘Well, start,’ Rob says, going to the rear of Guy’s chair. Paul stations himself at the front, turning his back as he squats and grips the tubes holding the front wheels.

  ‘Let me go, you cunt!’ Guy starts kicking weakly at Paul’s back as he and Rob lift him and head for the tower’s empty doorway. ‘Hol! Kit! Make the buggers stop!’

  ‘No,’ Hol says, standing aside, still hugging herself.

  There is the sound of applause from the top of the tower, where the others are leaning over, looking at us and clapping and cheering.

  ‘Kit! The fuckers are going to kill me!’

  ‘Guys,’ I say, ‘are you sure about this?’

  ‘Positive,’ Paul shouts back. ‘We’ve worked it out.’

  Hol looks at me. ‘I’m assuming you have the local hospital on speed dial?’

  I shrug. ‘Just be 999, I reckon.’

  ‘Let me go! I can see the fucking view from here! What do you think that is? Look!’

  ‘Better up there,’ Rob tells him. ‘You need to feel the breeze. It’s bracing.’

  ‘I’ll fucking brace you, you – mind me head!’ Guy yells as they get to the doorway and nearly crack his forehead against the stonework.

  ‘Can I help?’ I ask, getting behind Rob as he and Paul rearrange themselves in the little vestibule at the bottom of the steps, Rob setting himself to go backwards up the stairs, holding the chair’s handles, while Paul holds the front wheels up high. I have to shuffle round, then step back out again, to make room for this to happen.

  ‘No room, Kit,’ Paul says, breathing hard as Rob sets off up the narrow twist of steps. Paul follows. I step back inside again. And there is no room; Paul’s shoulders are a couple of centimetres from filling the whole width of the stairwell. I think of offering my torch, at last, but I don’t know how they’d hold it or what use it would be.

  ‘I’ll fucking sue!’ Guy shouts, voice echoing up the winding stair. He does look rather precariously balanced.

  ‘Fine. I know a good lawyer,’ Paul tells him.

  ‘You’re going to need a good fucking lawyer, you fucking maniac bastard!’

  They go up one step each.

  ‘Okay down there?’ Rob asks.

  ‘Fine,’ Paul says. ‘Keep going.’

  They head on upwards.

  ‘Bastards,’ Guy mutters. His voice echoes.

  ‘Leave them to it, Kit,’ Hol says quietly from outside.

  ‘I thought I could at least be a sort of human airbag,’ I tell her. ‘You know; if they fall.’

  She smiles. ‘Probably just break your neck too. You’ll be more help waiting around to pick up the pieces if it does all go tits up.’

  ‘You sure?’ I say, as Paul’s shoes disappear up the turn of the steps.

  ‘When we get to the top and I ask you nicely,’ I hear Guy say, ‘will you toss me off?’ Then he wheezes with laughter.

  ‘No probs,’ Paul says.

  ‘I’m sure,’ Hol tells me.

  We stand outside, looking at the view.

  The weather in the west provides a fine display of colours as the sun sinks between the ragged remains of the spreading clouds, and the hills and Dales crumpled against the horizon. The wind gusts, still smelling wet, rocking us as we stand there.

  ‘I will take that jacket,’ Hol says, and puts it on. I hold it open for her, something Hol taught me was okay to do. I used to think women would shout at me if I tried to do this but Hol says it’s all right to offer and can even be done for men as well.

  Hol glances towards the summit of the tower. ‘You been to the top, Kit?’ she asks.

  ‘Yes, a few times,’ I tell her. Four times, actually, but I’m wary of letting people – even Hol – know how much I count stuff. ‘You?’ I ask.

  ‘Once or twice,’ she says. She does up the jacket’s zip. Paul’s white jacket is far too big for her. She looks bundled up in it, half disappeared, like a child.

  She glances back up again. Somebody – Haze, I think – waves from the battlements, and I wave back. Hol is looking out to the west.

  ‘We came here once in a storm, twenty-odd years ago,’ she says.

  ‘That was brave.’ As far as I’m aware the tower has always had a functioning lightning conductor, but still.

  ‘Yeah, in the hearse.’

  Dad used to drive a hearse. I suspect he was just trying to prove how wacky and eccentric he was, but he says it was dirt cheap and an outright bargain; a geriatric Daimler being replaced by a sleeker Ford. He was into surfing at the time and ex-hearses were relatively popular amongst surfers, allegedly, not so much because you can fit a board inside but because you can stretch out for a proper sleep in them and use them as sort of camper vans. You can fit a fair few people inside them, too, though the police take a dim view of passengers travelling lying down in the back without proper seats and seat belts.

  Guy used to dress the part sometimes, too; he’d found an old top hat in the Bewford Oxfam shop and put black ribbons on the back, and he had a big black cane and a frock coat and all that stuff. He wore dark glasses and was often mistaken for a rock star. Or a twat, as he has himself admitted.

  ‘You had to be fairly brave just to get into the hearse,’ Hol tells me. ‘I don’t mean being superstitiously sensitive, I mean being mechanically aware; it was falling apart.’

  I suppose back then the house wasn’t. The quarry would have been shaking it every few days but the place must have been kept in reasonable repair. Maybe there’s always been something in Guy’s life that was falling apart. Until finally, as well as the house and the car and whatever else, the thing falling apart ended up being himself. Not that cancer makes you fall apart so much – that would be leprosy or something, I suppose – as add bits on. Cancer makes bits of you grow that are supposed to have stopped growing after a certain point, crowding out the bits you need to keep on living, if you’re unlucky, if the treatments don’t work.

  I bet the old Daimler was falling apart, but I also bet I could have saved it. The older the car, the more you can do with it, self-maintaining and repairing. Of course, on the other hand, the older the car, the more need for maintenance and repair in the first place.

  ‘Middle of the night,’ Hol is saying. ‘We were all drunk,
all stoned or wired or whatever. One of those things that seemed like a good idea at the time.’ She looks back at the door of the tower, then at the top. ‘Near the end of term; we’d been celebrating. Came out here to watch the lightning after the rain had mostly stopped; there’d been a power cut back at the house so getting into the Daimler and going for a drive seemed like a wizard wheeze anyway. The rain was still coming down in bursts and gusts but you could see between the showers sometimes and watch lightning playing way over in the Lake District. So we stood out here and watched it, or sat in the car some of the time and watched it – we’d forgotten to bring enough warm clothes, or anything waterproof at all. The tower was closed, locked up, back then, so you could only shelter behind it, not get inside.’

  Hol hugs herself in her big white cocoon of jacket. From this angle, I can’t see the muddy mark on the sleeve or the burn hole on the back.

  ‘Usual quota of ongoing emotional crises happening at the time,’ Hol says. ‘All part of the Willoughtree House merry-go-round. Your dad and I had been an item for a half a term in first year but then went our separate ways, amicably enough. Pris had succumbed to his charms too, a few times, but they were never really a couple. Ali had had a thing with Rob most of that term – this was second year – but then that had fallen apart a bit messily and she’d moved out for a week or two, slept on some girlfriend’s floor. She’d been back that night to try and sort things out – with Guy, about whether she should stay the next term, not with Rob, who was enjoying being single again. She and I ended up sitting cross-legged like a pair of little pixies on the bench there.’ She nods back at the two concrete uprights against the wall of the tower. ‘We’d never really got on that well – she was closer to Pris, though I think Pris was sleeping in the back of the hearse at the time while the guys were off looking for interesting places to pee or something – but for some reason she decided I was her best friend that night. Said she was thinking about leaving the course, the uni, not just the house, because she was so upset at what had happened with Rob.’

  ‘Oh dear,’ I say, in a gap, while Hol is gazing out to the sunset.

  ‘Thing is,’ Hol says, sighing, ‘I sort of had a quiet thing for Rob myself; had had almost from the start, but by the time Guy and I were apart he was with Ali, and after that he was enjoying screwing around too much … But he’d said just that evening that he was already getting tired of these meaningless first-year fucks – we had all the world-weary wisdom and ennui that comes from not being a first-year oneself, so—’