The Quarry (7 page)

I don’t go out much. I never liked having to go to school every weekday and it’s a relief that that’s over. I didn’t hate school; I learned things and even met one or two people I still keep in touch with, plus I was too big to bully efficiently – and I have been known to lose it and lash out – but I always hated leaving the house.

My main exercise is walking round the garden. From my bedroom window I can see a large part of my regular walk. My bedroom is on the opposite side of the house from Guy’s and looks out to the north-east, over the back garden and the trees towards the wall and the quarry. My regular walking route takes me from the kitchen door, curves away to skirt the rear of the garage and the sides of the outhouses, passes between the vegetable patches, disappears into the rhododendron clump, crosses the lawn at a diagonal, veers past the weed-choked bowl of the long-drained pond, weaves between the trunks of the trees – mostly alder, ash, rowan and sycamore – before arriving at the remains of the old greenhouses and the tall stone wall defining the rear limit of the property.

The wall is about two metres high but there is one place where a pile of stones at its base and a projecting piece of ironwork a metre up allow you to climb it and see over the top and into the quarry. On the other side, there is only a metre to two metres of level, sparsely grassed ground before the earth falls away. The quarry is at least forty metres deep, stretches back for over a kilometre and widens out in a giant, irregular bowl shape nearly half a kilometre wide. It is tiered, with stone ramps for trucks cut into the different levels; big rocks line the edges of the clifftop roadways to stop trucks falling in. The bottom is a series of flat arenas on different levels, the lowest filled with green-brown water. The rock is the grey of old warships.

At the far end, where the remains of the hill curve round like cliffs, with just a small gap giving a glimpse of the agricultural land beyond, there are some tall, gawky structures made of rusting iron. A few stand like upside-down pyramids on skinny metal legs, while others sprout wonky-looking conveyor belts that straggle across the ground like fractured centipedes, disappearing behind piles of stones sorted into different sizes. It’s been years since I saw anything much move here. I can remember when piles of rocks undulated along the conveyor belts and dust rose from the stone piles as the big yellow vehicles swung across the ground, scooping up stones and dropping them again. When the wind was in the right direction you could hear distant clanking and thudding noises.

Back then, twice a week, most weeks – after the sirens had sounded for a couple of minutes, usually at about two in the afternoon, so that I experienced it only when there was a school holiday that wasn’t an everybody-else holiday – there would be that sudden quiver that shook the whole house and made the old servant-summoning bells in the kitchen ting faintly. It rattled the windows in their frames and once or twice made dust drift down from cracks in the ceiling. The noise of the blasting charges came a second or so later, because the shock waves propagate faster through rock than air.

The local crows and the rooks from the nearby rookery would already be in the air; other birds reacted to the detonation rather than taking the warning of the sirens, and went flapping and panicking into the skies, chirping and calling. The corvids made sounds it was hard not to think of as contemptuous, or just as laughter.

Then there would be another, longer, rumbling sort of shaking; this was the curtain wall of stone that had been shattered free from the bedrock, falling and slumping to the ground beneath. More tinkling and rattling. A noise like a heavy, distant crump came and went. The sirens shut off half a minute later.

I used to watch from my room, when I could, when I heard the sirens, and a couple of times I was able to be at the back wall, standing on the footrest of the loop of iron projecting from it – even though I was banned from being there for safety reasons – but I only once ever saw the explosions and the falling face of rock, from my room, when it was raining and the view was slightly misty. The blast was far away, near the end of the quarry where the rusty structures were, and disappointingly undramatic: just some small vertical bursts of dust appearing suddenly from one or two of the half-dozen blast holes on the ledge above, then the cliff collapsing along a thirty-metre front and briefly flowing like a mush of dirty ice, spreading out across the ledge beneath and quickly coming to a stop, with more grey dust that quickly joined with or was defeated by the mist and rain. I was watching through binoculars, but still saw hardly anything. Even the shake the house got from that blast was sub-standard; the kitchen bells stayed silent.

The machine that drilled the holes for the blasting charges looked excitingly like a complicated anti-aircraft gun, tipped up near the edge of a cliff, producing dust in dry weather. Sometimes you could hear it, working away.

My return walk takes me from the back wall via the other clump of rhododendrons, skirts the lawn on its western edge, loops round the remains of the summer house with its fallen-in roof and broken windows, and reaches the house along the side of the old flower beds and the terrace, with its kinked, uneven stone balustrade and its weed-outlined flagstones, roughly a third of which have suffered significant cracking.

If I stand by the window of my room I can see approximately ninety per cent of my garden walk. In some places I can see where individual footprints occur as I pace out the same walk day after day, so you can see where I’ve left my mark on the garden. This makes me smile.

The whole walk, disregarding the bit about shinning up the rear wall to look into the quarry, consists of 457 steps. The number 457 is, satisfyingly, a prime. The original walk was – completely naturally, as it were – 456 steps, but I adjusted it.

In the morning I am in the kitchen when Pris comes in, wrapped in a big white towelling robe. ‘Hey, honey. You’re up early.’ Her face looks a little crumpled, eyes puffy. Her glossy black hair needs brushing but it looks attractively tousled on her. When my hair needs combing I look like an axe murderer.

‘I’m making Guy’s breakfast.’ I look at the clock on the wall. ‘And it’s not really early.’ I am boiling a couple of eggs in a pan.

‘Early for the weekend, sweetheart. It’s weekend early.’ She scratches her head and goes over to the kettle. ‘New kettle. There you go. Something has changed.’ She looks out of the window at grey clouds and dripping black trees. ‘Though sadly not the weather.’

She makes a mug of tea, sits at the table. She glances at the clock. ‘Just having a cup of tea,’ she tells me, unnecessarily. ‘Meeting the other half in Ormers for breakfast.’

‘That’s nice,’ I say.

‘That’s nice’ is one of those pointless phrases I would never have used but for Hol. My natural response to something like what Pris has just said would be to say nothing. So, she is going to Ormiscrake to meet her relationship partner for breakfast. Does that really require any reply from me? No.

Yet Guy would sneer and be sarcastic towards me on such occasions. ‘Still perfecting the blank look, are we?’ he’d say (or something similar). ‘Good for you, kid. Treat these phatic fuckers with the contempt they deserve.’

Hol eventually took exception to this behaviour, too. ‘You just say
something
, Kit,’ she told me, when I protested that usually these misunderstandings occurred when I had nothing useful to say in return to something I’d just been told. ‘A nod, or a grunt, would be an absolute minimum, or an “Uh-huh”. Just a “Really?” or “That’s nice”, or “I see”, or partially repeating what you’ve just been told, or thinking it through a little so that if they say they’re going out you ask, “Anywhere exciting?” or suggest they take a brolly cos it’s pissing down. You don’t just stare blankly at them. Apart from anything else these meaningless replies are like saying “Roger”, or “Copy that”; you’re letting people know that you received their message. If you don’t use them you’re getting the whole communication thing wrong. You’re making them think they need to repeat themselves or rephrase what they’ve already said because you didn’t get it the first time. That’s unneeded redundancy and inefficient and, frankly, I’d expect better of you. Get the procedure right, Kit; your comms protocols need refreshing.’

I think this little diatribe shows Hol knows exactly which of my buttons to push. I took note of some of the phrases she’d mentioned, and started using them. I still find it bizarre that we get away with spouting such inanities, but they seem to work. I get fewer funny looks.

That said, I’m still thinking of replacing ‘That’s nice’. I think ‘Aha’ serves just as well and sounds less potentially sarcastic. ‘
What’s
fucking “nice”?’ is Guy’s usual, half-sneering, half-incredulous reply to that particular phrase.

‘Have you met Rick?’ Pris asks, frowning. ‘My chap?’

‘No,’ I tell her. The sweep hand on the kitchen clock reaches twelve; I switch off the ring beneath the pan with the eggs. I think about Hol’s advice regarding thinking things through. ‘What’s he like?’

Pris snorts a little laugh. ‘Mostly he’s not like Haze,’ she says. She and Haze used to be a couple. ‘Got some gumption. Some get-up-and-go.’ She plays with the fluffy white belt of her gown. ‘Not sit-down-and-whine.’

‘Aha.’

(That was definitely not a gap during which to employ ‘That’s nice’. I feel quite pleased with myself and I am liking the neutrality of ‘Aha’ more and more.)

‘He’s sweet,’ she tells me. ‘I mean, he’s not like, you know, one of … He’s not been to uni or anything, he doesn’t … Anyway, hopefully you’ll see him later. Hope you like him. Be nice if people liked him.’

‘Of course,’ I say.

‘Anyway,’ Pris says, in that slightly drawn-out way that I’ve come to recognise means we’re finished with that particular topic (and it’s cross-platform; by which I mean that this signal is used by other people, not just Pris). ‘How are you, Kit? Really, I mean.’

‘Really?’ I say (look for a part of the question you can repeat). I nod. ‘I’m well.’

‘Yeah, but
really
really?’

‘No, really, I’m—’

‘I mean about Guy; about the house,’ she says, interrupting.

The kitchen clock’s second hand reaches the top of its arc again. I remove the pan from the hob, take it to the sink and run cold water into it. The eggs shake and bounce around in the water, clonking against the pan’s sides. ‘You know when—’ I begin, at the same time as she starts saying something.

‘Sorry,’ she says, ‘what were you—’

‘No; you, please,’ I tell her, taking the eggs out and placing them on the breadboard.

‘I was just going to say,’ Pris says, ‘that we all … We all feel for you, Kit. We all love you. We’re maybe not all very good at showing it, but … That’s always been … None of us …’ She makes a noise like she’s exasperated with herself. ‘Well, we do. We just do, okay?’ She gives a laugh that isn’t really a laugh. ‘Listen to me, eh? Anyway, I interrupted … What were you saying?’

I’m shelling the eggs. The eggs were past their use-by date but they smell okay.

‘I’m just taking it one day at a time, Pris,’ I tell her, and feel suddenly very mature. It’s one of those phrases you hear a lot on television that seem to work well in reality. ‘It’s all you can do.’ I feel even more mature now; that’s sort of my own embellishment and seems to reinforce the first statement, so it’s not left hanging out there alone like the cliché it is. I smile quickly at her, look back to the eggs. I chop them up. The yolks are just off completely hard, which is how Guy prefers them. I put the warm pieces in a mug pre-warmed with water from the kettle.

‘Well,’ Pris says, ‘that’s all you ever can do. But if you want to talk, about anything – anything at all – you know you can talk to me. You do know that, don’t you?’

‘Yes, thank you,’ I tell her.

‘I’m serious, Kit. I deal with people facing bereavement in my job all the time. In some ways it can be harder for the people being bereaved than it is for the person who’s going to die. There can be all sorts of emotions involved, often conflicting, often – usually, even – ones people feel anxious, even ashamed, about having. If you need to talk about any of that you can talk to me … you know; completely confidentially. I mean, as a friend, I hope, but also as somebody who knows about this kind of thing, who’s dealt with it professionally.’ She has an expression on her face that looks like she’s in some pain. ‘I always wanted to be more of a friend to you, Kit. More like Hol’s been, you know?’

I nod.

‘I’m so sorry I just never had the kind of job where I could take that sort of time off, not when I always had other people to think of as well. I just want you to know that.’

I nod again.

‘So, please, let me do this for you, if I can. Talk to me, any time, about anything. Okay? Yeah?’ She smiles.

I set my mouth in a tight line. I wait a moment or two, then nod. ‘Thanks, Pris,’ I tell her. ‘I’m okay for now, seriously, but thanks.’ I go back to the breadboard.

‘Okay,’ she says, letting a breath out. ‘So … how long do they think he’s got, now?’ she asks, watching me dice up a piece of soft white bread.

‘Maybe a month,’ I tell her. ‘Maybe two.’

‘Jesus. Well … that’s what I’d heard, but … really? Is that all?’

‘Yes. That’s the oncologist’s best estimate. But she did say you should never give up hope.’ I scoop the little squares of bread into the mug and stir with a teaspoon. Pris looks at the eggy mug like she wants to say something, but she doesn’t.

‘Is there nothing more they can do?’ she asks.

‘There is more they can do,’ I tell her. ‘But Guy doesn’t want it done. They could continue the radio and the chemo and maybe get him another month, but maybe not, and none of it’s very pleasant. The side effects are … distressing.’ I’m doing, I reckon, really well here, using euphemisms and semi-technical terms and everything. Guy would be a lot more blunt. ‘They seem to have his pain relief sorted now,’ I tell her. ‘That’s been a good change.’ There is a plastic tomato sauce bottle half afloat in a basin of warm water in the sink. I add a generous squirt of the sauce to the mug of egg and bread, wipe off the sauce bottle and return it to the cupboard.