The Quarry (8 page)

Warming the sauce – as well as the mug – is my innovation, to ensure the mixture is at the right temperature when it gets to Guy. There used to be complaints.

Pris is silent, staring at her mug of tea, so I add, ‘When Guy asked the oncologist whether she’d continue with the treatment if it was her, she said she was supposed to dodge the question and say, well, it had to be his decision, but the honest answer was just no, she wouldn’t.’

‘Yeah,’ Pris says quietly. ‘Medics. Most medics are okay … Do you think we’ll find this tape?’ She looks up at me.

I have to think about this. ‘Probably?’ I suggest.

Pris looks down at the table again. ‘Wouldn’t be good if that came out. The others would … Well, they’re not in the sort of job I am. You know, caring. For vulnerable people.’ She makes a noise like a laugh. ‘Leaves me vulnerable, too.’

‘I’m sure we’ll find it,’ I tell her.

There is a pack of playing cards on the table. Guy likes to play a game called Patience sometimes. Pris lifts the pack up, turning it over in one hand. ‘Funny,’ she says. ‘It’s mornings when I miss smoking. First one of the day, with a cuppa.’ She looks up at me with a small smile. ‘Most people, it’s the evening, after a drink or two.’

I do a last stir of the egg mug with the teaspoon, take a glass of chilled milk from the fridge and a fresh teaspoon from the drying rack, put everything on a small tray and head for the doorway. I stop there and look back; first at the window, then at Pris. She looks quite small, all of a sudden.

‘Don’t forget a brolly,’ I tell her.

‘You still on the radio?’ Paul asks Holly as I put his toast in front of him. ‘Haven’t heard you for a while. Oh, ta. You got any napkins, Kit?’

I nod to show I’ve heard and tear him off a square of kitchen towel. He looks at it, sighs, and places it delicately on the lap of his dressing gown, which is deep blue and slightly shiny and might be silk.

‘Yup,’ Hol says, not looking up from the open magazine on the kitchen table in front of her. She is wearing green PJs I’ve seen her in before. They remind me of hospital scrubs. ‘Still on the radio.’

‘A face for radio, eh?’ Haze says, looking round at the others, then adds, ‘Just kidding, like, Hol,’ though she is already speaking.

‘Uh-huh,’ she says. ‘And a voice for mime.’ She looks up. ‘Anybody else?’

‘What are you on?’ Alison asks her.

Hol looks at her.

‘What radio station?’ Alison says, smiling.

‘Greater London Local,’ she says. ‘Horizons strictly fixed within the M25.’

‘I really should listen,’ Alison says. She and Rob are dressed in matching white PJs and cotton gowns. Alison’s blonde hair looks perfect; Rob’s shaven head gleams even more than usual.

‘I still listen to you, Hol,’ Rob says, putting his fork down. He had the last of the out-of-date eggs, scrambled.

‘
Do
you?’ Alison says, turning to him and sounding terribly surprised. He doesn’t look at her, but smiles and winks at Hol. Hol frowns and goes back to her magazine.

‘It’s on podcast,’ I say. They all look at me. ‘I listen on the podcast,’ I explain. They go back to their breakfasts. Except Hol, who is still looking at me. ‘I saw
The Hobbit
,’ I tell her. ‘I didn’t think it was that bad. You said it was Peter Jackson’s
Phantom Menace
.’

Paul chokes on his toast, or pretends to.

‘Phwoar,’ Haze says, sort of half laughing. ‘Harsh!’ Haze is wearing a brown dressing gown with a green cord. The gown has some interesting stains. The pale ones are probably toothpaste.

Hol shrugs. ‘Yeah, I didn’t think it was quite that bad, either, Kit, but it’s still a piece of disproportionate, self-indulgent wank with values driven entirely by the needs of the studio and the distributors, not the original story, and it needed saying.’

Alison sighs. ‘I loved it.’ She shrugs. ‘I can’t wait for the next two films. Sorry,’ she says to Hol, who has gone back to reading. ‘Guess I’m just such a low-brow these days.’

‘Always were,’ Rob says.

She play-punches him. ‘Why I married you. Darling.’

‘Knew there had to be a reason!’ Haze says, but then – when they both look at him – he clears his throat and starts humming while he pushes the last of his sausages round his plate with one finger.

‘Really?’ Rob is saying to Alison. ‘I thought you’d been sent by Fun-Be-Gone Industries to stop me enjoying myself too much. Or at all.’

‘What,’ Alison says, ‘shagging everything with an infrared signature and a cleft was your idea of fun?’ As Rob looks thoughtfully up at the ceiling and gives a small shrug, Alison turns to look round at the rest of us. ‘You’ll have to excuse my husband; he’s still having trouble with the whole quantity/quality dichotomy.’

‘You weren’t exactly parsimonious with your favours yourself, my love, were you?’ Rob says, smiling at her.

‘We ran the figures, remember?’ she says to him. ‘The ratio was – what? – one of mine to four or five of yours?’

‘Four point six,’ Rob says, grinning.

Alison spreads her hands. ‘Rest my case.’

‘Oh, get a room, you two,’ Haze says. Rob and Alison both look at him again, frowning. Haze goes back to humming.

‘Guy awake?’ Paul asks me.

I shake my head. ‘No, he’s sound.’

Hol, still focused on her magazine, mutters, ‘That’s a first.’

Haze stops humming just long enough to look at me and say, ‘Pris gone off to see what’s-his-name?’

‘Rick,’ I say. ‘Yes.’

Haze sighs.

Haze – his real name is Dave Hazelton but he’s been known as Haze since Fresher’s Week ’92, allegedly – is in local government; planning. Career-wise, according to Pris, he’s currently in a sort of ‘slumped, drooling-with-the-autopilot-on’ state and has been for the last ten years; they split up six years ago. His interests and hobbies have varied over the years as he’s looked for something he can invest his declining supply of enthusiasm in (this is all from Pris). Apparently he’s been through surfing, hang-gliding, green politics, landscape sculpture and Lib-Dem politics. He is currently managing an amateur women’s football team. They are bottom of their league.

Pris is back in the single-bed room she had when she first lived here; the original plan was for her and Rick both to stay here and have Guy’s room this weekend, before he got so poorly that this became impossible. Instead, Haze was asked to give up his double-bed room for them, but he didn’t want to.

Pris is an ex-social worker now running the local franchise of a care services outsourcing agency on the south coast.

Alison and Rob work for Grayzr. They’re back in the London office for the year but they’ve been all over the world, fast-tracked for the executive heights, apparently. I switched from Google to Grayzr last month but I feel shy about telling them for some reason. Hol calls them corporate bunnies.

Last year, when Alison and Rob dropped in while driving back from Scotland, Hol happened to be here for the week and I remember this exchange, over tea and cake:

‘… No, we’re thinking about buying a place out there.’

‘Oh, good grief,’ I heard Hol mutter.

‘Yeah,’ Rob said, ‘but not on one of the islands. Those are a bit … you know.’

Alison nodded. ‘Yeah. No. But there are lots of beautiful apartments near the Burj, though. Really tasteful. Cheap now but a really good investment in the medium-to-long. Honestly, Grayzr Arab Street is growing scary-fast, even faster than vanilla Grayzr. Ground-flooring there would be a sound move, strategically.’

Hol looked at both of them. ‘Seriously?’ she said. ‘Fucking
seriously
?’

‘And there’s more autonomy out there,’ Rob added. ‘You’re not exposed to the beady gaze of Head Office the way you are in Londinium.’

Hol looked at them for a bit, then nodded. ‘You should move to Saudi,’ she told them. ‘They take an even more hands-off approach there.’

… I believe the remark might have caused a certain frostiness.

But back to now, and breakfast:

‘Hon,’ Hol says to me, ‘you’ve been running after us for over half an hour. Sit down; have something yourself.’

‘I’m fine,’ I tell her.

I’ve been up for a while. I woke really early, played an hour of HeroSpace and then spent forty minutes in two of the top-floor bedrooms – where all the spiders live and there’s a near-constant sound of dripping water even on dry days – peering into old packing cases and soggy cardboard boxes, looking for S-VHS-C tapes (nothing, though if we ever discover an urgent need for damp back copies of the
Bew Valley and Ormisdale Chronicle and Post
dating from the nineties, I know just where to lay my hands on them). Then I had a shower, because Hol said I was a bit whiffy yesterday. I’m wearing a fresh set of clothes, three days early. I even stripped my bed; I’ll put new sheets on it tonight.

‘Paul,’ Alison says. ‘You still see Marty F?’

(I have no idea who Marty F is.)

‘Not for a while,’ Paul says. ‘He’s in LA these days. Married with two.’

‘What?’ Haze says. ‘Two
wives
?’

‘Yeah …’ Paul says, smiling faintly at him as he munches his toast.

‘Weren’t you thinking about going out to the States, Hol?’ Ali asks. ‘Thought you seemed all set at one point. What happened with that?’

‘It was being talked about,’ Hol says.

‘
New Yorker
, wasn’t it?’ Rob says.

‘Mm-hmm.’

Haze whistles appreciatively.

‘Hmm,’ Ali says. ‘That’s quite …’

‘Prestigious?’ Rob finishes for her. ‘About as cool as reviewing gigs gets, I guess.’ He smiles at Hol.

Hol just shrugs.

‘Way to go, Hol,’ Haze says. ‘The
New Yorker
; yeah.’

‘And?’ Ali says, gesturing. ‘Just … deal fell apart? Visa knocked back? You owned up to being in the SWP? What?’

‘I thought I could do it from here but it turned out it would have meant moving to the States,’ Hol tells her.

Ali glances at Rob. ‘Preferring London to New York, Hol? Really?’

Hol shrugs again. ‘Preferring home to away.’

‘No idea you were such a home-loving gal,’ Rob says.

‘But I thought you hated it here,’ Ali says.

‘No, just what and who’s happened to the place.’

‘Arooga,’ Haze says. ‘Politics alert!’

‘Amber warning of rants ahead,’ Rob says, and winks at Hol, who smiles thinly back.

‘But I thought that was your ambition, wasn’t it?’ Ali says. ‘Moving to NYC or LA? Get stuck into Hollywood at closer range? No? Once?’

‘Once,’ Hol says. ‘That was a while ago. There’s still the occasional decent film made here in dear old Albion, and our Continental cousins haven’t given up the medium entirely either.’

‘Yeah,’ Haze says, ‘but compared to Hollywood …’

‘They make more movies in Bollywood,’ Rob tells him.

Haze’s nose runkles. ‘Yeah, but they’re all musicals and that, aren’t they?’

‘The death of the British film industry, like its revival, is constantly being exaggerated,’ Hol tells them. ‘Anyway,’ she says. ‘Enough about me. What about the aforementioned Marty F?’

‘Hmm,’ Alison says. ‘It’s just … Wasn’t he on
Jim’ll Fix It
? When he was a kid. Wasn’t he?’

Paul chews on his toast, frowning. ‘Oh, yeah.’ Looks are exchanged. ‘Now you mention it.’ Paul nods slowly, then shrugs. ‘That’ll be something to tell his analyst.’

Haze seems to hesitate, then leans forward and says, ‘Yeah; in LA, if you’re not in therapy there’s something wrong with you!’ He sits back. There are more faint smiles. ‘Aww,’ he says, ‘come on …’

I have another walk, much longer than my round-the-garden walk. This walk means going down the driveway at the front of the house to the minor road there and turning left, heading slightly uphill, then after about eighty metres climbing a gate into a field and skirting two of its sides to the far corner, where there is a part of the drystone wall with projecting stones designed to be used as a sort of rough stairway. On the other side of the wall the agricultural land gives way to moorland. This is Holtarth Moor. Technically our house, Willoughtree House, stands on Holtarth Moor. That is also why the quarry is called Holtarth Moor Quarry.

Beyond the wall the land rises gently towards the sky and there is a sort of faded path across the grass and heather for a little more than a kilometre, then it peters out completely. You have to navigate by compass, GPS or dead reckoning, the last of which is made easier by there being a single, stunted, wind-blasted tree away to the north-east, which should start off at one’s eleven o’clock and which should be passed to one’s left at about a hundred and fifty metres.

As the swell of the ground summits, you start to see the distant hills forming the rest of the Pennines, while off to the east, on a clear day, you can see the North Sea, though it’s just a line. I suspect that on a mostly clear night, with the right amount of cloud directly above the city, you might see the glow of the lights of Newcastle, but I’m not sure – it’s a biggish city but it’s a long way away. Anyway, I’d never do this walk at night.

A small declivity starts to fold itself into the land once the lone, leaning-away-from-the-west-wind tree has been passed. The route then keeps to the right of this as the fold becomes a stream and then a shallow valley. Finally – and if the wind is from the west as usual, by now it’s normally possible to hear the motorway – a curving walk round the limit of a sort of scattered tor of rocks to the right brings you up over a last small rise to the cutting through the hill where the motorway lies.

The M1(M) slants south-west to north-east here; a B-road, following an old pack route through the hills and coming up from the south-east, crosses the motorway on a long arched bridge. You used to have to climb the wire fence meant to separate the moor from the road but it’s fallen into disrepair over the last few years and so you can just step over it now. The walk from there to the centre of the bridge takes a minute. I’ve looked on the relevant maps for a name for the bridge, but it doesn’t seem to have one.

There, at the middle of the span, is where I like to stand, leaning on the chest-high safety barrier, watching the traffic beneath.