by M. T Hill
* * *
At Milton Keynes, Shep opens his complimentary lager and downs it in one. Last time he visited London, the richness of the city was so distracting he could’ve starved to death just walking the financial core. Cranes, superstructure, crumbling facades – he’d wanted to climb it all. It was the layers and height and density of the place. Everything pushing down. It was the advancement, its sharp difference from home. Maybe with a fast beer in his blood, he’ll just about cope.
The train reaches Euston. The guard offers him a second beer for the drive. Shep takes it happily and alights. The stickiness of late-summer London, a static charge in the air. The guard walks beside him up the platform. ‘A van’s collecting you,’ he says, ‘for Heathrow.’ They crest a ramp to the station concourse, joining a flow of people and luggage, before fobbing through a STAFF ONLY door. ‘It’s a shame,’ the guard says, leading Shep through the cable-strung bowels of the terminus, ‘they don’t make this place more welcoming.’
A fire door, a pavement, and London exploding upwards. A black van across the road with its hazards going. There aren’t many vehicles like this in London since the ban – the wires from its bio-converted engine are secured to the exterior panels inside a carbon-fibre sheath.
‘Your carriage, Mr Shepherd,’ the guard says.
‘Cheers,’ Shep says, and slips the guard a ten-pound note.
The taxi driver, local accent, loads Shep’s kit. Shep insists on keeping his rucksack between his legs. Two other men are already in the van, heads in their phones. They don’t acknowledge Shep as he gets in, and he doesn’t recognise them from Portsmouth. Going by the cash in their outfits, they’re abseilers from the subcontracted team – and if they are, they won’t have much to say to each other. Not if Shep can help it. Abseilers tend to be sparky rich kids with degrees, and the divide between their trades is enormous. So you can rig some ropes, yeah? Fucking nice one mate.
‘You boys wanna go the scenic route?’ the driver asks.
The abseilers, if they’re abseilers, ignore him.
‘Sure,’ Shep says.
‘Might need to juice up at Brentford,’ the driver says. ‘Here, let me check the range.’
The car’s HUD reels stats in real time. The passengers’ heartbeats syncopated against the windscreen’s curve. Humidity is high, and air pressure hints at an approaching storm. Like the news says: London summers are only getting longer.
‘We’re good,’ the driver says. ‘Plenty of juice. We’ll do Heathrow in an hour.’
From Westway they descend towards the Thames at Hammersmith, then parallel with it, the river steely and teeming with water taxis. A haziness to the light. They traverse Hammersmith Bridge, pedestrianised except for a lane of electric vehicles. A suspended cycle lane hugs the outside of the bridge – a single sheet of glass that doesn’t seem attached to anything.
‘Can’t keep up with this place, can you?’ the driver says.
Shep shakes his head.
Then nothing till the M4, when the driver pipes up again.
‘On this long-haul thing, are you?’
Shep nods. He assumes the driver already knows more than he’s paid to know.
‘Been dropping crew all week. Similar-looking bunch. Offshore platform?’
‘Installing stuff. Pack-your-spare-pants-and-toothbrush job.’
‘You enjoy what you do?’
‘Yeah.’
‘Pay good?’
‘Sometimes.’
‘Beer money.’
‘Yeah.’
With some relief, Shep remembers the bonus lager in his bag.
‘Ever seen anything bad happen?’
Shep looks out of the window. Verges flickering. Barriers a steady waveform. He knows what the driver wants by this: action and gore. Preferably both. They always do. He reaches to unzip his bag.
‘I’ve only got one good one,’ Shep says, rooting for the beer.
The driver nods, eager.
‘Packing down a crane is a pain in the arse. So, some lads I worked with found a shortcut to get the outriggers back inside. Turned out there was a little button in the housing above the leg. Press it and the whole thing retracts on its own, skipping shutdown checks. One of them presses the button but doesn’t move his hand in time. The outrigger jumps and takes his hand in with it… and then his arm as well. He was trapped in the mechanism, right up to his elbow, in an inch-thick gap.’ He does the actions and the sounds. ‘Never heard anything like it.’
The driver winces and sucks air over his teeth.
Shep chuckles and angles his lager. ‘You mind?’
The driver waves him on.
‘We’re all there trying to tear the housing off,’ Shep continues. ‘But the worst thing was that his arm stopped the stabiliser mechanism closing all the way. We realised we’d have to send his arm further in before we got it out again.’
‘Oh my days,’ the driver says.
Shep takes a sip of his beer. Good and cold. ‘We didn’t tell him. We just did it. And when it came out, he hadn’t broken a thing.’
‘No way,’ the driver says.
Shep smiles and takes a long swig of beer. ‘Happened.’ Everything in order.
Everything as it should be.
‘Music you into?’ the driver asks.
Shep goes to reply, but splutters instead. The driver laughs nervously. ‘You good there, son?’ But Shep isn’t. His eyes are wide because there’s more in his mouth than beer. Something hard clacking behind his front teeth. A mouth full of beer and something else.
Just like that, the beer comes out. All over Shep’s lap. The beer and the something else. The tin can bounces off the seat, foaming out, and rattles between his boots. The driver screaming, ‘You can’t do that in here!’
Shep sits there, mouth slack and dripping, eyes streaming. The driver pulls on to the hard shoulder, a red and sweaty rage. The abseilers wake up behind, dazed and worried. Shep can’t look up. On the seat, between his wet knees, there’s a little brown kernel, ribbed and pitted. He picks it up. Rotates it. Like the stone of a peach or plum, but oozing from one end. It reminds him of a chrysalis. This thing that came out of him. A chrysalis.
‘Get out, then!’ the driver’s screaming. ‘Get the fuck out my cab!’
The driver’s out and Shep’s door opens and Shep falls out, clutching the thing to his chest.
‘Christ, lad.’ The driver kneels down at his side. ‘The hell’s the matter?’ A handkerchief from his pocket, wiping at Shep’s face. The handkerchief over his lips and chin. ‘Let me…’
Shep palms him away. He wants to stare at what came out of him. Can’t the driver see it, with its leaking shell? Can’t he see all these things that say the bunker chose him, and not the other way round? The van’s sliding door. A foot in the gravel. One of the abseilers leaning over: ‘This dickhead dying on us, or what?’
And the driver saying, ‘I don’t bloody know what he’s doing. Do I call an ambulance?’
Shep rests his head on the road. Cold gravel. A sign for Heathrow on a gantry overhead. For now, he’s content to come away from himself. The road playing through his hands and his skull. ‘My bag,’ he tells the men. ‘I’ve got medicine.’ The tub will fix him. He puts the thing under his nose. A chrysalis. The faint scent of petrol. Passing traffic disturbing the air. Had he grown it? Was it meant to stay inside him? He should open his throat for it. So he does. The men try and stop him, thinking he’s struggling with his tongue. He swallows. A chrysalis should be incubated, kept safe.
The Journalist
In the week following the mission, Freya tries to believe the bunker hasn’t marked her. If she notices subtle changes in her temperament, a mounting frustration at all the questions she can’t answer, then outwardly she blames the advancing autumn, an apathy for work that’s been building for months. If there are small changes in her appearance – painful whiteheads in unusual places, new grey hairs – then she points to the sugary food her
colleagues keep on their desks, to ageing. Maybe they’ve always been there. Or maybe she’s paying more attention to the mirror.
But the physical symptoms, the deeper ailments, grow harder and harder to ignore. An especially heavy period. Blinding headaches that leave her bedridden and nauseous. When she finds the appetite to eat, her mouth fills with the taste of tinfoil.
Or it’s stress, she tells herself. These bloody screens you work at.
Freya’s sleeping patterns change, too. If before she resisted sleep, now it comes too easily – a dreamless cocoon that seals hermetically around her. She asks her father to buy her a baby’s LED bulb for her bedside lamp, and finds herself leaving it on all night to prevent Dillock’s semi-rural darkness becoming so thick, so encasing, that she’s taken back to that dank corridor underground.
It’s mostly at night, then, when Freya admits the bunker is inside her. A contaminant. A steady ingress. In the bungalow’s pre-morning silence, she hears its ticks and leaks. Her footsteps on its floors. When she startles awake in the early hours, she sees both Stephen and Shep in the corners, obscured by shadow. When her alarm goes off, she’s free for mere seconds before the events of that night compress her chest wall.
In this sense, the bunker has caused Freya countless injuries, invisible but acute. And when she submits to its damage, the echoes and flashbacks, she can tell a splinter has breached her. Deposited a foreign body that her innards have shifted to accommodate. Sometimes there’s actually a sharp prick when she sits down or sleeps in a certain position.
After work – a day’s writing vanishing from memory as if she hadn’t worked at all – Freya comes home in fractious moods, takes early nights to escape. Over breakfast she starts petty fights with her mother. On her commutes, as cold and lonely as any she’s known since the break-up, she sobs the whole way to the office.
‘You can always tell us,’ her father keeps insisting. ‘Frey. You can just say.’
But Freya can’t say much about it. What would she tell them? She eats her breakfast mechanically and stops ironing her clothes and drives away from Dillock too quickly – because apart from snatches of sleep, work is the only respite, a dam against spiralling thoughts. If anything props her up, gives her a reason, it’s the job. Keep yourself busy, people told her after the split. Distract yourself, wait it out, because some things are better that way.
As she adjusts to this new routine, Freya begins to heal herself by editing her memories of the night that changed her. Her revision, gradually overwriting the truth, still has Shep and Freya exploring Lakeland mountains, stumbling upon the bunker, then discovering Stephen’s nest. But now Shep never shouts or incantates, much less terrorises her with his camera. Shep’s van, hurtling back towards Sheffield afterwards, is no longer fraught with tension or fear, but vibrant with a discussion about what they’d found.
Which is to say that, more than anything else Shep did that night, it is his pretending that nothing happened that angers her most. If the bunker hasn’t changed Freya, then Shep has. And Freya despises him for what he’s done. His deceit, his abuse of her trust. She’s ashamed that she’d been so wrong about him. Appalled that he clings to her like a smell, like damp; that he haunts her at every turn, a ghost, a shadow under the door, a dalliance of cold air on her neck. The way she sometimes catches his expressions in a stranger’s face.
What she hates even more is understanding why she can’t purge him. Knowing that, without another link to Stephen or Alba, she needs to see him again. To confront him, use him – understand what had surely happened to Stephen, through him. To ask him, why? What drew you all down there? What made you say and do those things? What made you chase those feathers and bones? What made you take me? What makes you like Stephen?
How has the bunker changed you, too?
* * *
As the workdays come and go, opaque time, these questions drive Freya on. She tries to call Shep, texts his phone, posts in his stream, but her words bounce back with error messages. She calls various steeplejacking firms pretending to be Shep’s concerned relative, having forgotten or repressed the company name partly hidden on the bonnet of his van, and is met with platitudes. When she eventually finds the right firm, Mallory Limited, a scheduler tells her he’s already overseas, and will be for some time.
From there, Freya is left to hunt Shep the traditional way. For hints of him in search engines, news on the project he’s contracted to. She tries vague physical descriptions, school records, even makes enquiries with a hacker about mining the firm for his medicals. Rifling news feeds with keywords like ‘steeplejacking projects’, or ‘bunker break-in’. She scans through reviews of Shep’s jacking firm’s services – every recommendation – in the hope of finding his name, even a simple allusion to him. She scours the urbex forums, where Shep’s reports continue to elude her, running in perfect confluence with his mystery.
Who is the real Shep? The climber she met at Big Walls – or that dread explorer in the Lakes?
Desperate, Freya also seeks the bunker itself. What’s stored down there? Who owns it? Who works there? She pirates some government mapping software to see if she can find the place manually. She eBays for late-nineties OS maps of the Lakes and pins them on her bedroom walls. There are no plots, no recognisable landmarks, no open tracts near trails and woods and water. As if the Lakes’ darkness had obscured much more than their approach. Later she makes enquiries to publicly listed landowners, garden centres and landscaping firms whose staff may or may not have worked there.
Nothing comes off. No one seems to have heard of a bunker in the area.
And so, on the longest nights, she can only fill her planners. Frantic handwriting that describes the bunker in real and abstracted terms. She makes it larger, deeper, darker. The fells of the Lakes now impassable mountains. Temporal shifts. Character changes. At one point she writes twenty pages about a stretch of road covered by trees whose boughs are full of nesting birds. She describes bloodied chicks – too many to count, all pink and raw – dangling down from the branches, screaming at their approaching van. As Freya and Shep pass under the birds a rook drops to the windscreen, cracks it with its beak, and forces its way inside. First the rook pecked holes in Shep’s clothing, Freya writes, then it went for my eyes. If I had known what I would see later, I would have let it blind me.
In the moment, each attempt seems to make the bunker understandable. But when Freya reviews her work over breakfast, none of it makes sense.
* * *
One morning, Freya goes into the office to find the editor sitting at her workstation. Freya’s desk phone is concealed by the editor’s hair, and the editor is still, obstinately still, and Freya can’t hear what she’s saying.
Freya stands in front of her desk. The editor doesn’t budge. She goes on scratching shorthand into a Moleskine.
‘Yes,’ the editor says down the phone, mouth almost too tight for it to come out. ‘Right.’
Freya’s own scowl hardens. She puts her handbag on the desk and leans on the partition.
The editor, still taking notes, shakes her head. She knows Freya’s there.
‘Who is it?’ Freya whispers, pessimistic.
‘I’ll suggest it, certainly,’ the editor says, ignoring her. ‘There’ll be some expenses issues this side, and it’s unfair of me to speak on her behalf. We’ll need to unpick your proposal.’
Freya’s skin runs cold. Proposal? The union, perhaps – a misconduct complaint? Or maybe it’s the ethics council. Freya’s done plenty to warrant investigation: if Stephen’s father has kicked off, worked out who she is, she’ll be out of here in minutes. Or worse – and now her stance weakens – it’s the police. But then again, maybe that’d be a kindness. Get her out of this stifling office. Get her out of this building. After all, as seeing Aisha had reminded her, she doesn’t have the gumption to jump voluntarily.
At last, the editor meets Freya’s stare. She winks.
‘Thank you,’ the editor sa
ys down the phone. ‘Yes, goodbye.’ She replaces the handset.
‘You always expect the worst of people, don’t you?’ the editor says.
‘Who was that?’ Freya’s voice is throttled, and she coughs into her hand.
‘You never expect anything good. You don’t trust yourself. You don’t give yourself any credit.’
‘Why are you on my phone?’
‘Because you’re an hour late.’
‘Am I?’ Freya looks at her wrist. It’s nine o’clock.
‘For you. Your phone’s been going since seven-thirty – I’m sure these bloody Europeans forget they’re an hour ahead.’
Freya kneads the skin at the back of her neck. Europeans? She realises her mascara might be smudging, a high-shine breaking out on her T-zone. Her nylon blouse suddenly coarse against her shoulders.
‘That was the editor of a French climbing magazine.’
Freya glares at the editor’s lips as she speaks.
‘Freya?’
‘A climbing magazine?’
‘Big one, as a matter of fact. Dalle. I’m told it means “slab”.’
‘They rang me? Why?’
The editor laughs. ‘Why do you think?’
‘I haven’t pitched anything.’
‘I know you bloody haven’t. And even if you had, I’d hope you weren’t stupid enough to give them your office number.’
Freya sits down on the floor, faces away from the editor. Some of her colleagues swivel to see what’s going on.
The editor stands up, comes round to her. ‘Remember telling me your ideas? About follow-up features?’
Freya nods.
‘I pitched some on your behalf. They’d seen your Stephen piece in the Mail, and now they want a feature.’
Freya’s stunned. ‘For their magazine?’
‘Yes.’
‘What?’
The editor shakes her head. ‘What’s the matter with you? Are you sleeping?’
‘Yes.’
The editor frowns. ‘I’m not complaining, here. Your work rate’s obscene at the moment – we’ve got juniors complaining of nothing to do. I’m just slightly concerned—’
