Crow Stone. Jenni Mills
‘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.