The Fall (8 page)

“You come down here at once!” the man shouted, but he fell silent as the true import of what he saw came through to him, this
boy moving up across the face of slate as though he was attached to it, as though it was his element. For a second Jamie looked
down. You could see his face like a white piece of rag against the gray of the quarry wall; then he slipped around the corner
and out of sight.

The guard turned on me. His face was red and shiny, sweat standing out in beads across his forehead. “You come along with
me, young man,” he said, and reached out to grab me.

I ducked away and then apologized for it: “I’m sorry, sir.”

“Don’t you
sir
me!” he shouted. He made another lunge and I ran. I had never run so fast in my life, not when I played rugby at school,
not when I ran the hundred yards on sports day. With the guard sweating along behind me, I ran along the quarry wall and skidded
around the bottom of the same corner around which Jamie, sixty, seventy feet up, had vanished. Slate clattered under my feet
like fragments of brittle pottery. Around the corner, ahead of me now, there was a slope of rubble leaning against the back
wall of the quarry, a tip where fragments of the rock had been cast down from the upper levels. Running up the slope was a
beaten pathway. I went upward, slipping and slithering, the fragments rattling beneath my feet. The slope reached a gangway
that split the face in two, where the shot holes were bored, where the slabs of steel-gray slate had been blown out of the
belly of the earth, where Jamie waited high up, beckoning. “Come on, Rob,” he yelled. “Come
on.
We can get out up here!”

The guard scrambled up the slope after me. I slid on the slate debris, three steps upward, two steps back, as in a nightmare — the
thing you dared not look at but was there at your heels, the running that got you nowhere.

“Come
on,
Rob.”

“Stop, you little bugger!”

Perhaps because he had larger feet, perhaps because he was able to compact the slate fragments better beneath his weight,
the guard was gaining on me. I slipped and fell onto my hands. Before I could get up I felt the grab of his hand on my shoulder.
He pulled me to my feet and turned me around so that I was looking straight up at him, at the angles of his face and the half-opened
mouth and the glaring eyes. “You little bugger,” he said. He was breathing hard, and his breath had the smell of gas, the
gas that came from the stove and the gas fires in the bedrooms at home.

“Rob!” Jamie called.

The man looked upward, over my shoulder. “I got ’im,” he called up. “You’d best come down too.”

“Stay there, Jamie,” I yelled. I yelled it at no one, at the blue overalls of the man who held me. “Stay there!”

But Jamie was clambering down the narrow gangway he had found, down over some steep steps that had once been used by quarrymen
to reach the upper tiers. I twisted to see. He was coming down and his face was set, and he was watching me and the guard
there on the slope below him. “You let him go,” he called. “He’s not done anything. You let him go.” I thought of the adventures
of the times, of the
Boy’s Own Paper
and brave kids who did things right, fought for their friends, didn’t abandon them in times of distress. I loved him. I recall
the emotion exactly. Love.

There was a cascade of slate, and Jamie joined us, standing there defiantly as the guard grabbed him too. “You come along
with me, young fellows,” the man said. I thought that maybe he wasn’t so bad after all.
Fellows
seemed a term of reconciliation. But still he held us as we slithered and stumbled down the slope of slate and onto the brittle
floor of the quarry.

“What are you going to do?” Jamie asked.

“We’ll see about that.”

“I want to ring my mother.”

“We’ll see about that too.”

He led us toward a shed that was sheltered in the shadows of the rusting machinery. It had a sign on the door that talked
of the mining company and the need to keep out. And the man came up against his problem. “Open it,” he said, holding us.

“You’re hurting me.”

“Open it.”

Jamie and I glanced at each other. There was a smile of complicity.

“Open it.”

“You open it,” said Jamie.

The man’s grip tightened on my shoulder. He’d identified me as the weaker of his captives. He pushed me forward. “Open the
door, you little bugger.”

I reached out and took the handle and turned it. The door was locked. “I can’t.”

The man swore. Jamie grinned at me. The man slackened his grip on my arm. “You just stay there, you hear me?” he said.

I nodded.

“Don’t you bloody move.”

I shook my head. Cautiously, as though I might overbalance if he did not set me quite right, he released me. I stood still.
He reached into his pocket, and I stayed there, waiting for the hand to go deep into the pocket and grope for the key.

“Go, Rob!” Jamie shouted.

I ran, skittering across the floor of the quarry, with the man’s curses following me and freedom all around me in the gray-blue,
bruised colors of the slate. “Run, Rob!” Jamie called, and I ran, panic chasing me. Only when I reached the narrow defile
between the slopes of slate and the road that led down toward the gate where the sign had told us to
KEEP OUT
did I pause.

I looked back. The man and Jamie were nowhere to be seen. They must have gone into the hut. He had opened it and shoved Jamie
in, and now maybe he would come out and start looking for me. I wondered what I should do. The problem was an acute one, compounded
by fear and guilt. The man was an official, and we had been trespassing. We were in the wrong. But what of Jamie, now held
hostage?

I waited, and there was no sign of the man, no sound from the hut, no sound at all in the whole desolate amphitheater of the
quarry. I waited. How long I don’t know, but finally, cautiously, I retraced my steps. The slate sounded like glass breaking
beneath my feet. I tiptoed toward the alphabet of rusting machinery and the crouching building. There was no sound. I crept
around the side. There was a window, bleary with grime, and beneath it some rusting steel stanchions. Carefully I climbed
up on them and raised myself to the sill and peered in.

Events in the stained shadows: a wooden-floored hut, a single room, maybe twenty feet by fifteen. Things around the walls — a
pickax, a spade, a coil of rope, slabs of slate. There was a bunk bed made with slats of wood against one wall. Light came
in from the window I look through and from another in the opposite wall, light from both sides creating a chiaroscuro that
was as mysterious as a religious painting, was like a religious painting in fact, with Jamie on his knees before the man,
as though at worship.

I was strung between childhood adventure and adult horror. I didn’t understand what I saw. I sensed something, a charge, like
the tension in the skin that you feel before lightning strikes, and the same dull sultriness, but I didn’t really understand.
Now, of course, yes. I can interpret the memory, the image that lies there somehow among the wiring of my brain. But at the
time I had no real idea, nothing against which I might judge, no yardstick, no place or point of reference.

For a moment I watched the hurried, urgent movements. Then, as carefully as I had risen, I crept down from my perch and made
my way around to the door. Softly, I tried the handle. There were sounds from within that I couldn’t identify, sounds that
drowned the turning of the handle, that drowned all innocence. The door flung open.

“What!”

Daylight came in on the man, ridiculous with his overalls around his ankles, his flesh exposed, his face a white mess of shock.

“What?” He grabbed at his clothes. “You little bugger,” he cried, in something like relief. Jamie had slipped away from him
and stood in the background watching. The man was tucking himself away and talking at me. There was a breathless quality to
his speech, as though he had been running. “Came back to see, did you? Dirty little bugger wanted me to do it. Little bugger
asked for it. You’re a dirty little boy as well, I’ll bet. Is that right? Did you want to see what we were doing?”

“We’re going home,” I said.

The man laughed. It was a sound without humor, but it was a laugh all the same. “I’ve got some pictures,” he said. “D’you
want to see? Girls. Their tits and all that. You want to have a look?”

“We’re going,” I repeated. I was on the doorstep, ready to run, and the man was talking and buttoning up his overalls and
shuffling toward me. From behind him Jamie was looking at me with an expression of something like fear. Was it fear? I didn’t
really know. I’d not seen fear, except in the cinema. But it was something like that.

The man came forward. “You want to look, don’t you? Tits.”

I moved back into the full daylight. “Come on, Jamie.”

And as though he had suddenly woken from sleep, Jamie moved. He pushed past the man and ran out into the open.

“He wanted to do it, the dirty little bugger,” the man called after him. And then, as we ran away toward the track: “You won’t
say nothing, will you? It’s our secret, isn’t it?”

We made our way back down toward the town in silence. The railway station was deserted. We found a bench and sat down and
waited. I don’t know how long it was before the train appeared. Say, three-quarters of an hour. Something like that. Jamie
said nothing for a long while. When he did finally speak, it was matter-of-fact, as though this was just an everyday kind
of thing: “He made me do it. That’s what happened. He said he’d let me go if I did it.”

“Are you going to tell?”

“Tell?”

“Your mum or something.”

“What is there to tell? He’s just a queer.”

The train came. A few passengers got out. We were the only ones to climb on board. A guard in uniform waved a flag and blew
his whistle, and the train pulled out of the station. Jamie seemed indifferent, staring out of the window. The train went
into the tunnel. There was blackness beyond the window, and Jamie’s face was floating in the darkness. I felt immensely distant
from him, as though he had gone far, far away and this was only some kind of image of him, a television image sent from a
long way away. “It doesn’t matter,” he said. He was speaking thoughtfully, as if he was trying to work out whether it really
did matter or not. “It doesn’t matter,” he repeated.

When we emerged from the tunnel, he glanced at me and then back out of the window. “It wasn’t that bad. Just a thing. Like
your own.”

His mother was on the platform when we reached Llanbedr, scanning the carriages for some sign of us and smiling and holding
out her arms when Jamie stepped down from the train. I saw her wry expression when he twisted out of her arms as she bent
to kiss him. Then she looked up and caught sight of me through the window and waved.
Did you have a good time?
her mouth said. Doors slammed and the guard’s whistle blew, and the small train drew out of the station.
Did you have a good time?
Strange how I could read the words on her lips.
Lips.
That buzz.

I
DIDN’T HEAR FROM
Jamie after that. The event had affected our relationship. Friendships were like that — fragile things that might withstand
a storm and yet could come to pieces in your hands for no very clear reason. Brittle, like slate. Was it something to do with
the man in the quarry? Maybe, maybe not. My mother had once been a friend of his mother’s — best friends, she said. And now?
That friendship too had vanished. Occasionally she might say something about Mrs. Matthewson, but it was always in dismissive
terms: “Oh, yes, we were close once, long before you were born. Before the war, during the war. But you know how people drift
apart.”

I nodded. I knew.

So Jamie Matthewson became nothing more than a memory, one of those passing acquaintances that punctuate a childhood, someone
you pick up and dump in the deposits of the mind and leave there, possibly to encounter again at some unimaginable time in
the future on a street corner or in a bar or at a party, when the differential of age no longer counts.

But then I received a postcard at school. There was no sender address, and the card had only reached its destination by a
fluke, for the address was a hazard of vague recollection on his part, the name of the school imperfectly recalled from a
casual conversation we must have had:
Robert Dewar, Rhodes School, Surrey
is what it said. When was this? Memory plays its trick of distorting time, bending the irreducible dimension. Years later,
perhaps three. The dimensions of time are strange and plastic, like Dalí’s watches that I admired in those days, like Henry
Moore’s sculptures with their deceptive curves, their mysterious orifices, their smooth and endless surfaces. The message
was signed
James,
and I wasn’t even sure who James was until I deciphered the scrawled question
See you in Wales?
at the end. The picture on the card showed mountains quite different from those low-slung Welsh ones that we had admired
as kids: they were the towering, snow-crusted peaks of the Bernese Oberland: Jungfrau, Mönch, Eiger. The Young Woman, the
Monk, and the Ogre, a trio of curious eroticism.
We climbed the Jungfrau,
Jamie had written; but who
we
signified was never explained.