by Kitty Sewell
‘I will,’ Eva said, knowing she wouldn’t. With tears running down her cheeks, she said goodbye to Linda.
It was not that Adrian would go to the ends of the earth to pursue a woman out of love. He was, and always had been, driven by his power-fuelled chauvinist pride. No woman, ever, could be allowed to give him the boot, and he was a man who held a grudge for however long it took. He’d reminded her often enough: ‘Don’t try and leave me, baby. If you’re tempted, remember Remus.’
With only a Spanish number to go on, it would be difficult to track her down to Gibraltar, but as a U.S. Federal agent, he had a number of cards to his hand. While following her scent, the silent phone calls were meant to unnerve her, break her down. She’d thought to cancel the mobile contract and simply get another one, but she’d ruled it out. It was better to have some contact with the devil – however frightening – than to have him approach her stealthily and pounce on her unawares.
*
‘I found out what you’re doing down there,’ said Jonny Risso, his face deadpan as he steered the boat nearer to the rock-face. He turned to Sebastian. ‘I saw your picture in the Chronicle. You’re the guy who’s spearheading the Frontiers Development Project. You had me for a right fool, didn’t you, believing you were Neanderthal hunters?’
He’d been bound to find out that they’d misled him on purpose, and now he felt humiliated.
‘Look, I’m paying you to take me out on your boat,’ Sebastian said. ‘I’ve never denied my guiding hand in the Frontiers Project, but I don’t always feel like offering it as a point of discussion or debate. I get enough of that wherever I go.’ He peered at the boatman. ‘But now that you know, why don’t you tell me where you stand on it?’
‘Me?’ said Risso, still looking put out. ‘Catalan Bay is a very special place for us Genoese descendants. Of course we’re worried about what this development is going to do to our culture and community. We’ve been there almost four centuries, speaking Genoese until a few generations ago. Where do you find a place like that? It’s a sociological museum.’
‘The project is well away from Catalan Bay,’ Sebastian said with calculated patience. ‘It won’t even affect Both Worlds.’
‘What about Gorham’s Cave?’ said Jonny Risso, pointing south. ‘They’re still excavating there, you know. They’re finding more and more Neanderthal stuff in there. I know you don’t give a damn about all that, but how are you going to get your development around it?’
Eva looked across the water at the enormous black mouth that was Gorham’s cave. If it wasn’t one thing, it was another. Since they got wind of the Frontiers Project, a prominent London archaeological society in conjunction with the British Museum was campaigning to postpone any development – yet again – until more excavation in the caves had taken place. The Princeton archaeologists had established beyond reasonable doubt that Gibraltar was the very last place inhabited by man’s Neanderthal forefathers as they clung to life, having died out in the frozen wastelands of Europe some seven thousand years previously.
Much as she was firmly in Sebastian’s camp, it seemed inconceivable that a big development should be allowed in a place where such an important archaeological treasure was unfolding. At the same time, history marched on. Thousands of years in the future, Sebastian’s work would be studied and treasured in turn.
‘They’ve just carbon dated a cooking hearth to twenty-eight thousand years,’ said Jonny. He paused and shrugged. ‘You can’t blame them for wanting to investigate, even at the expense of “progress”!’
Eva saw Sebastian draw too deep a breath and pre-empted him. ‘Look, we’ve got to get on. The tides don’t wait.’
They got busy gearing up, helping each other get into the heavy scuba units and adjusting all the straps and valves. When they were fifty metres from the works barge, they slipped on their fins and slid into the water. Sebastian swam hastily towards the cliffside. She had to accept that this was work; he wasn’t interested in the flora and fauna.
The barge was supposed to be attached to the cliff by an articulated steel arm, but a couple of mishaps during the anchoring of the arm had dislodged a large chunk of rock the size of a camper van. Until this fiasco was reassessed, the barge remained unusable, bobbing merrily on the waves, anchored to the seabed and attached to the cliff by some cables. She had heard from Sebastian that the team’s lead geologist, Lars Bengtson, had been down to assess it and admitted that this particular section of Early Jurassic Shale Formation contained atypical streaks of soft shaly sandstone interbedded with the harder bluish-black limestone. This wasn’t a catastrophic discovery, but the barge had to be secured to the cliff, come what may.
Sebastian began his inspection and when they found the place where the chunk of cliff had fallen away, he spent a long time examining the freshly sheared rock. Meanwhile, Eva saw a deep hollow at the rear of the collapsed section. She swam towards it. Far into the concave depression there was a small aperture, about half a metre in diameter. She approached it and shone her torch beam into the blackness within. A cave opened up beyond the entrance. The collapse had created a tiny window into a cavity inside rock. It was no particular surprise. The whole of the Rock was a veritable Swiss cheese, with over a hundred-and-sixty caves discovered to date.
The hole was very small, but at a glance Eva was certain a diver could get through. It would be a bit of a squeeze, but she was dying to have a nose about in its interior. Brian had asked her more than once – should he obtain clearance from the Ministry of Defence – if she’d join him diving in the Ragged Staff Cavern, one of the most spectacular and unusual underwater caves so far discovered in the world. Perhaps here was something she could show him in return.
As she studied the hole, Sebastian approached and touched her arm, signalling that it was almost time to ascend. She pointed to the opening, and he shone his torch in then shook his head. This was his work after all. There was no way she could argue with him underwater, but for once she felt she ought to be allowed to take the initiative. There was plenty of time left. She was by far the more experienced diver, with many accreditations to her name, so he should follow her lead. She hesitated, then signalled forcefully to him to follow her. She squeezed through the hole and swam into the submerged interior of the cavern.
Mimi
Two days had passed since the uncomfortable confrontation between Carlo and Sebastian. Seeing her brother so disturbed by it had worried her, so she thought it prudent to appease him by staying home like a good girl, and immerse herself in her writing.
Yet, she was torn. Carlo’s emotional declaration had made her hyper-aware of his proximity. She wanted to go and see him, at least to talk about her work, but she couldn’t quite come to terms with his unequivocal disapproval of Sebastian’s project. Thinking back on his words, they even contained a kind of threat. Hadn’t he said he’d do anything to send Sebastian and his monstrous development packing to the ends of the earth? At the same time, it was a free country and he had a right to his opinion. She could hardly blame him for his feelings. Gibraltar was his home and he felt strongly about it.
She sat on her bed with her iPad on her lap and struggled to concentrate on the fifth chapter. Useless: it was all over the place, nobody would make sense of it. Occasionally, getting mildly stoned would give the creative process a kick up the backside. She got up and looked around for the package of weed she’d scored off Horst and found it in her Omani bell-bag. The ziplock sandwich bag was partly filled with a powdery low-grade cannabis. She’d not examined it properly at the time, but now, just by looking at it she could tell it was shit.
She held the bag in her hand and wondered what to do with the damned stuff. She could make cookies with it, perhaps, though not just now. Baking was not her strong point.
She wandered around the room, studying the furniture, looking for somewhere to stash it. She couldn’t discount the possibility that her guardians snooped around to see what she had in her room when she was ou
t. Sebastian had caught her with drugs once before, and she hadn’t forgotten that Eva had found her birth control pills (much bloody use they were!). Then she remembered the loose floorboard that creaked loudly when she stepped on it.
Archetypal, she said with a chuckle. The plank was a mere foot in length and warped by age, easy to prise up with her penknife. She peered into the space below. It was filled with dust and cobwebs and smelled of old history books. She leaned in closer. A corner of something pink and silky poked out from the hollow space under the next board.
A strange excitement came over her and she pushed her hand through the cobwebs to retrieve it, then looked at it in consternation. It was an old-fashioned washbag. It had a snap lock instead of a zip. Weighing it in her hand for a few seconds, she popped it open.
Holy Jesus!
She stared into the bag, mouth agape.
This could only be one thing. Something to do with Mrs. Cohen’s lottery win. What else could it be? She stared at the bundle in her hand. They were all five-hundred euro notes. She threw the toiletry bag onto the bed and, one by one, she counted the notes. There were forty-four in all. With sudden dread she tossed the money aside, the notes fluttering like startled birds all over her sheets and pillows.
Sebastian
Eva had wedged herself through the opening and disappeared into the dark interior. He shone his torch into the cavern to see the graceful dancing movements of her fins, the bubbles from her breath rising in bursts towards some unknown place above. He smiled behind his mask. Leading the way was the woman he adored, the fearless rider of waves, a conqueror of the deep and – even though he was wary – he had no choice but to follow. He would swim to the bottom of oceans to follow her willowy shadow, but she would always be disappearing in the distance. He could never quite reach her, much as he yearned for the closeness she offered.
His tanks bumped against the edges of the aperture; it felt like a pinhole but was clearly big enough to get through. Once inside, he looked around and found himself inside a tube-shaped cavern. As he made his way inward through the passage, stalagmites began to appear along the floor. Directly overhead hung their icicle-like counterparts, the work of thousands of years of dripping water during some dry period of the cave. In some places the two had met, forming pillars, some thin and fragile as a finger, others the size of an arm.
Eva was swimming ever further inwards and he followed, dodging the slender pillars as he went. As they left the entrance cavern behind, they entered a huge chamber. The floor dropped away, the walls retreated and the ceiling rose to ever greater heights. Most striking was the astonishing clarity of the water. His torch beam illuminated no suspended particles whatsoever, but instead lanced cleanly through the water to pick out impossibly distant objects. The water was so transparent that to swim through it was like flying; but for the familiar burst of bubbles there was no sensation of being underwater at all. Their beams revealed distant rock faces, giving the impression of great spaciousness. Far below, on the floor, piles of sharply splintered rock were strewn about as though from some prehistoric calamity. For a time they just floated around in the absolute stillness of the giant cavern, until Eva pointed upwards and he made a reluctant gesture to indicate she was in control.
As they rose, everything in his torch beam suddenly became blurred and unfocused. Sebastian looked at his pressure gage, but it was impossible to read. His hand signals passed through a bizarre wobbly haze and Eva looked strangely distorted in the distance. After a moment, he emerged from this twilight and, adjusting his buoyancy, he continued the ascent.
As he swam towards the roof of the cavern he suddenly broke through and was floating on the water’s surface. Eva had already pulled out her mouthpiece and was obviously breathing real air. Perhaps it wasn’t surprising: air had to filter through fissures, and fissures there were many.
He regarded Eva’s excitement with a mixture of worry and indulgence. He was himself a seeker of thrills, but this was different. The implications of their find were coming to him, one by one. He was almost certain this space was directly in the way of a bracket site.
They lifted up their masks.
‘Unbelievable,’ Eva said.
He looked around at the space, which had the dimensions of a cathedral. ‘Awesome.’
‘Are we lucky or what?’ she said with childlike enthusiasm.
‘A very strange thing happened to me down there,’ he said.
She laughed. ‘Yeah, that’s a rare phenomenon. We swam through a halo-cline, the division between fresh and salt water. Fresh water must be seeping in. If no man or beast has ever set foot in this space there is nothing to stir the water. It probably hasn’t been stirred for millennia.’
Using their torch beams they illuminated the cave. It was more extensive than it had looked at first glance. They swam up to a ledge, beyond which was a dry receding floor, big enough to house an orchestra. It tapered towards the back, becoming narrower and lower, then disappearing from view.
‘Let’s explore a little?’ Eva suggested, pointing to a step in the ledge. ‘Look, it’s easy to get up on dry rock over there.’
‘Oh no, come on, we’d better not leave Jonny to wonder where we’ve disappeared to. He’s pissed off enough as it is. We can do a proper cave dive here sometime and anyway, look at your oxygen gauge.’
‘Well, okay,’ she said, looking disappointed. ‘Let’s do it another day. If we’re allowed.’
‘What do you mean…if we’re allowed?’
‘When we report it, they might want to close access to it, pending research.’
‘Report it?’ he said. ‘Are you kidding?’
Eva looked at him. ‘Have you any idea what this might mean? Thirty thousand years ago the water level was a hundred meters lower than it is now. If Gorham’s cave is a jewel, God only knows what this cave might house.’ She pointed her torch into the receding back of the cave. ‘That opening there might even join up with a larger cave system. Do you realise we’re probably the first ones to set foot in here for thousands of years, perhaps ever?’
She was right of course, but his first priority was his project, and the further delays this discovery might cause. He also acknowledged a fierce need to own the cave. Eva was prodding his arm. ‘We can go to see someone at the Gib museum. They’ll know what to do about this. They’re the ones who—’
‘Listen, Eva. Let’s keep this place to ourselves for the moment, OK? I mean it. A few weeks here or there don’t matter. And don’t let on a single thing to the tobacco smuggler. His eyes and ears are too keen for my liking.’
‘I don’t agree, Sebastian.’
‘Don’t do this!’ he implored. ‘You know what’ll happen. Think of my project, for Christ’s sake!’
‘Sebastian…this has to be reported. We can’t just keep quiet about it. It would be iniquitous, verging on criminal.’
‘Yes, we can keep quiet about it, and we will.’
She stared at him. ‘You can’t be serious?’
‘I am serious. I can’t bear having further delays to my project. To hell with the Neanderthals and whatever else might be lurking here. They’ve been left alone for thirty thousand years, another few hundred won’t make a difference.’
He didn’t like what he saw in her eyes the moment before she put her mask on. And she hadn’t given him a promise.
Mimi
Every time she was alone in the apartment she carried out a systematic search, room by room. She tried to be Esther Cohen, think, worry, walk, reason and be confused like Esther Cohen. She found all sorts of interesting things, like a gold ring behind the bath tub, and some ancient love letters from her young husband.
She speculated relentlessly about the money under the floorboards. To withdraw a chunk like that from the bank confirmed her serious gambling problem. Or perhaps she was worried that the bank might go bellyup or that the world was coming to an end. Poor old lady, she’d lost track of how much, where and how the money got spent,
and forgot about the stash she’d hidden. Perhaps things would have turned out differently if she’d remembered, or would she just have gone on, gambling until her pockets were well and truly empty?
Should she tell Carlo? Mrs. Cohen had confided in him about the money, she’d trusted him. He probably was the most deserving of it, but with his moral righteousness he might decide that Mrs. Cohen’s rich and neglectful nephew should have it, or that ‘found’ money belonged to the Gibraltar taxman.
No, neither the taxman or the nephew was going to get their paws on it. For now!
Mimi continued her search, but as the days went by its aim started to change. She realised she was searching not for more money, but for the woman. She began to make notes about Esther Cohen, tried to let her spirit tell her story, her hopes as a young woman, her marriage, her faith, losing the husband she loved, her loneliness, the desperate message scratched on the violin. Then the thrill of the lottery win and how it fed her addiction to gambling, the humiliation of it being known around Gib. Her subsequent poverty, followed by forgetfulness, terror of losing her mind, the decision to hang herself.
One morning she found a pink half-knitted baby’s jacket, abandoned with the needles still in it. It was wrapped in a green cloth and hidden on the top shelf of the hall cupboard. The little jacket spoke to her – there was something significant about it – even if it just meant she’d got fed up with knitting.
She located a music shop on Main Street and bought new strings for Esther’s violin. It was both scary and thrilling to play the first notes. Her sadness about Dad and the loss of music first suffused her, then gradually vanished as she felt the instrument warm in her hands and the young Esther Cohen inhabit her.
