The Quarry (2 page)

Apparently Mrs Gunn is not the world’s most welcoming person.

‘Nice to see you too, Mrs G,’ Hol says quietly to our housekeeper’s retreating back. She pushes a small rucksack into my arms.

‘Oh,’ I say, startled, looking at it. ‘I haven’t got you anything.’

Hol sighs, takes the rucksack back. ‘Never mind. I’ll take this; you can get my case from the car. Heavier anyway.’

She stands aside and I go out to the car – the same old Polo – and take her case from the hatch. The car is red – the paint is faded on the short bonnet, which I’ve noticed tends to happen with red cars – and its rear is grey with motorway grime, making the hatch release feel gritty. I wipe my hand on my trousers but I’ll need to wash it again as soon as I can. Or I could just stand here with my arm outstretched and my hand flat like I was looking for a tip from God; it is, as usual, raining.

‘How’s Guy?’ Hol asks as we go up the stairs to her old room.

‘Oh, still dying,’ I tell her.

‘Jeez, Kit,’ she mutters, and I see her looking along the dark corridor towards his room.

I open the door for her and bring her case in as she stands there, looking across the rucked carpet and the sagging bed to the window with the faded curtains and the view over the densely treed back garden. The trees are only now coming into bud, so you can see the quarry between the network of restlessly moving twigs and branches; a grey depth opening into the rainy distance.

‘Was I being insensitive?’ I ask her.

‘He might have heard you,’ she tells me, not looking at me, still staring out of the window.

‘He’s probably asleep.’ I leave a space. ‘And anyway, he knows he’s dying.’ Holly is still looking away from me, but I see her head shake slightly. ‘Anything else I’ve missed?’ I ask her. ‘So far?’

She turns to me. She wears a faint smile. ‘You might have asked me how I am, how my journey was, Kit.’

‘Sorry. How—?’

‘I’m fine. The drive was mostly shit; it usually is, especially on a bank holiday. But never mind. I’m here now.’ She puts the rucksack down. Her glance flicks to the half-open door behind me. ‘How are you doing, Kit, really?’ she asks. She has lowered the volume of her voice.

I am about to repeat that I am generally pretty well, thanks, when I realise that the glance to the door and the lowered voice mean that she is thinking of Guy, and – I’m guessing – how I might be feeling about the fact that my father is going to die soon. I’ve got quite good at thinking about this sort of stuff, and quick at it, so I leave a little extra time before – with a serious expression on my face and also at a lower voice-volume – saying, ‘I’m okay, Hol.’

‘This must be hard for you, though,’ she says, coming up to me and putting her arms round me, hugging me and putting the side of her head on my upper chest. Hol is smaller than me. Most people are. I put my arms round her and hug her in return. I think about patting her on the back, but she is the one trying to comfort me, so I don’t.

‘Little whiffy, to be blunt, Kit,’ Hol murmurs, though she doesn’t lift her head away from where it is, her nose near my left armpit. She briefly squeezes me a little tighter, as though to compensate for the personal criticism. ‘You showering every day?’

‘Normally every second day,’ I tell her. This is my winter regime. In the summer I shower every day.

‘Hmm. Maybe you should change your T-shirt more often, hon.’

This is a regular theme with us. Usually I wear camouflage T-shirts and trousers – mostly green NATO fatigues, though sometimes I wear the basically beige British or US desert gear that has become more and more prevalent in the sort of shop or on-line store that sells such apparel. Sand-coloured fatigues don’t make much sense here amongst the browns and greens of the frequently damp north-east of England, but I don’t wear this stuff because I want to crawl around the countryside unnoticed (I don’t go out much beyond the garden at all, and I hate mud); I favour camo gear because you can wear it longer before you have to bother washing it. Stains just disappear. Dad says I’m a messy eater and shouldn’t wipe my hands on my T-shirt so much.

Today I’m also wearing an old yellow checked shirt of Dad’s and a padded olive gilet, because it’s cold.

‘Do you want me to go and change now?’ I ask.

‘No, love,’ Hol says, sighing. She pushes herself away and looks up at me, her gaze criss-crossing my face. ‘You getting proper help from the local health people?’ She still holds me, her hands on my forearms. She blows once, quickly, out of the right side of her mouth, attempting to shift some black hair from near one eye. Holly has collar-length straight brown hair, which she dyes black.

‘We’re getting some help,’ I tell her. ‘Though there seems to have been some sort of mistake with his last Work Capability Assessment. He was too ill to get there and we got a letter a week later saying he’s been put back on the able-to-work register. I think. Guy wouldn’t let me see the letter.’

Holly lets go of me and turns away, shaking her head. ‘Jesus fuck.’

‘I wish you didn’t swear so much.’

‘I wish there wasn’t so much to fucking swear about.’

The door is half open behind me. Across the hall the stairwell window facing the front of the house is as tightly shut as it can be but its frame is wonky and it admits both draughts and sound – and leaking water, too, if the weather is from the south. I can hear a noise of crunching stones from the driveway beyond.

I nod backwards. ‘Somebody else,’ I tell Hol.

We go out onto the landing, to look. Out beyond the slope of the front garden lawn, the straggle of assorted, unkempt bushes and the stone gateposts guarding the drive – the left one tipped precariously, as though trying to block the entrance, replacing the long-sold-off gates – a swell of ridged brown field hides most of the city; only the triplet towers of the Minster and the spire of St Thomas’s church show dark grey above the brown corduroy of the land.

A large white Audi swings round the loop of driveway in front of the house, narrowly avoids hitting Hol’s little red Polo and scrunches to a stop out of sight below, right by the front door.

‘Buzz Darkside’s arrived, then,’ Hol says.

She means Uncle Paul. As we start down the stairs the Audi’s horn blares quickly, twice. It is quite loud. Moments later a bell jangles distantly in the kitchen, as though the house is answering back.

I can tell the difference between the sounds of the bells for different rooms. ‘Dad’s awake,’ I tell Hol as we get to the bottom of the stairs. A car door slams.

‘Thoughtful as ever, Paul,’ Hol mutters, though her pace quickens as she approaches the door, where a shadow is looming. Her hand is out towards the handle but Uncle Paul opens the door himself, breezing in, kicking it shut behind him. Paul is below average height for a man but carries himself bigger. He looks tanned and has naturally black curly hair he keeps tidily short. He works out a lot, he says, though his face looks a little puffy. Hol thinks he’s had work done, certainly on his teeth and probably on the bags he used to have under his eyes. He’s about thirty-nine. They all are, because they were in the same year when they went to uni and this was their home in term time. Only Guy breaks this pattern; he’s a couple of years older.

‘Hey, Hol. Kit! Wow. You look even bigger! Here, take this.’ He shoves an old battered-looking leather briefcase into my arms. ‘We can get the rest later. Hol.’ He leans in, kissing her, cheek against cheek, while Holly cooperates resignedly. ‘How’s my least favourite movie critic?’

‘Fuck off, Paul.’

Uncle Paul looks at me as he lets Hol go. ‘Aww, her first words.’ He pulls in a breath as he steps back to take in Hol’s appearance. ‘Great to see you too, petal.’

‘If this is about
Kinetica
, it was still shit.’

Paul shakes his head. ‘Grossed one-fifty worldwide, for a budget of thirty. Slightly south of thirty, actually. If that’s shit let’s hope they all are.’

‘So it’s shit that grossed one-fifty worldwide. Still shit.’

Paul smiles broadly at her. ‘You are welcome to your biased, bitter and basically totally bizarre opinion.’

Paul is a corporate lawyer for Maven Creative Industries. Maven Creative Industries make high-concept cinema (movies, according to Uncle Paul; films, if you listen to Hol), have multiple interests in theme parks and are increasingly moving into electronic games and other virtual arts and entertainment spaces where they are poised to exploit the synergies offered by multiple-platform cross-conceptualisations. So says their website. (HeroSpace, the game that I play, is not one of theirs.)

When they all lived here back in the early-to-mid nineties, before I was around but when I was conceived, everybody coming here this weekend was a student in the Film and Media Studies department of the university. Except Dad, who was, nominally, originally with the English faculty before he changed departments. He changed courses a lot. His status was such he was sometimes described as the Student Without Portfolio (a Hol coining, apparently. It sounds like one of hers).

‘How are you, anyway?’ Paul asks Hol.

‘Just about keeping my head above water. You?’

‘Water-skiing.’ Paul grins. ‘Things are good. You heard I might be coming up here to, ah …’

‘Get parachuted into the local safe seat over the heads of the loudly protesting local party?’ Hol says, folding her arms in front of her. ‘Yeah, heard. Well done; you finally made it into
Private
Eye
.’

‘Yeah, I know; having that issue framed.’

‘I thought that was the police’s—’

Uncle Paul – he’s not a blood relation, he’s just always liked me calling him Uncle Paul – turns from Hol and smiles at me. ‘Hey, Kit, I could end up being your MP!’ He laughs. ‘I should court you!’ He frowns. ‘You are allowed to vote, aren’t you?’

‘Jeez, Paul,’ Hol begins.

‘Can I count on your vote, Kit, yeah?’ Paul says, smiling broadly at me.

‘No,’ I tell him. ‘We’re in Bewford South here. Not Bewford City.’

‘Really?’ Paul looks taken aback. He’s frowning. He reaches out and takes me by the right elbow. ‘Well, never mind,’ he says, sounding sympathetic. His attention leaves me. ‘Hey, Mrs Gunn! How you doing?’

I think I hear a distant ‘Huh’, then the sound of the kitchen door closing.

Paul frowns briefly, shrugs. ‘Same old Mrs G.’ He looks around the front hall, inspecting. ‘Same old everything, I guess,’ he says, more quietly. ‘Place looks a bit shabbier, that’s about it.’

I suppose the place does look shabbier. It is deteriorating all the time because although we have a big house we don’t have much money and Guy sees no point in keeping the place in good repair anyway. There are various leaks in the roof and many slates are missing or flap loose in gales and storms. (When the wind blows, it is, I’ve heard Guy say, ‘like living in a castanet factory in an earthquake’.)

Most of the gutters and downpipes are blocked – a small tree at least as old as I am is growing in the down-pipe on the north-west corner of the house. There’s a crack big enough to fit a finger into running down two storeys of the back wall facing the quarry; two internal doors fit so poorly they have to be shoulder-charged to gain entry to the bedrooms concerned – or hauled open with both hands if you’re inside and want to get out – while another fits in its frame so loosely that just walking past it on the landing outside is enough to make it click and creak open (easily confused people find this ‘spooky’).

Several windows are cracked across their corners and the one in the boxroom fell out entirely ten years ago and was replaced with hardboard, itself now warped with damp. The electrical system needed refurbishment twenty years ago (I estimate we go through about a metre of fuse wire per annum); the fire in the parlour produces a strong smell of smoke in the bedroom immediately above it, the two above that and the attic above those; the plumbing clangs and bangs; the boiler or something close to it groans and wheezes when called upon for hot water; and the central heating makes a noise like a slow drill and never really heats the two furthest bedrooms much beyond taking the chill off. The upper floor, which housed the servants in the old days, isn’t heated at all, though a little warmth finds its way up there anyway because nothing in this house fits or insulates properly.

Guy still talks with surprising bitterness about the folly of removing the Aga that used to take up half of one kitchen wall and replacing it with an electric cooker. That happened nearly a quarter of a century ago, when his parents were modernising the place. He used to talk of buying a new Aga, or at least one new to us, but he never did, and now, of course, never will.

I’ve grown used to the house slowly crumbling away around me – I’ve grown up with it – and of course I see it happen very slowly and incrementally, every day, while Paul visits only about once a year, so any changes will look more dramatic. He glances back to the front door. ‘Think the rain’s going off. I’ll get my gear.’

‘I’ll help,’ I say, remembering to be helpful. Holly comes out to the car, too. Paul points the key fob at the giant Audi and the rear hatch hisses up. ‘Cool,’ I say. We have a dark blue Volvo estate, which is older than I am. Guy bought it from an antique dealer in Buxton twenty years ago and now it’s practically an antique itself, he says. It lives in the wooden garage, which sort of leans against the south side of the house. I can drive it, after passing my test last year, though I’ve never driven it very far and I’m frightened of the motorway. I keep it maintained, too, though it’s a messy business, requiring several sets of overalls, and surgical gloves. Sometimes two layers.

‘Grab that antique Halliburton, will you, Kit?’ Paul says, nodding at an aluminium case. I lift it. Paul pulls out a posh-looking suitcase. I think it’s made from carbon fibre. Hol steps forward, hand out. ‘Hol?’ Paul says, sounding concerned. ‘You sure you should be carrying anything, in your condition?’ Hol glares at him. ‘You know, with that enlarged spleen and overactive bile duct of yours? Sure we’re not going against medical—’

‘I thought you might need help getting your ego into the house,’ Hol tells him.