Simon is cold. He should eat and then turn back. He is tired, his legs are trembling. There is this terrible sensation that he is not alone, which is so ridiculous. He turns sharply, the beam of his lamp jerking over the walls, making the dancers and their shadows judder and sway. The gurgle of the rock is like Roland’s laugh. No it is not. That is ridiculous. Oh so stupid. Pure fancy. His mind is playing tricks. ‘Get a grip on yourself,’ he says, and his voice is frightful in the cave, breathy and intimate.
He unscrews his water bottle and takes a swig. He unzips his rubber pouch and takes out a barley-sugar tablet to suck. He needs something. The sugar might give him strength. The sweetness is a comfort, strangely a female sort of comfort. Is sugar female then? And what is male? Cheese? Beef? Slugs and snails? Again the feeling – almost breath on his cheek this time – and he jerks round and sends the shadows chasing, glitters skittering over the mineral points and planes. The water disappears with a sigh.
He should go back, but there is this presence now behind him. It is not imagination. Simon prides himself on his lack of imagination. There is something made up of darkness behind him and beside him and he knows he must go on. There is no real choice here. The darkness is his companion. There is not far to go. Out of here there is a short descent into the entrance to the roaring river passage. His legs are weak. No, no, they are not weak. He takes a bite of oatcake and swigs water to wash the dry crumbs down. He has done this before. There is just the keyhole passage, just a matter of perseverance, back pressed against one side by the strength of his legs. And then there is the duck, the place where he will have to go under the water. But it is only short, one comfortably held breath, no obstacles. He has done it before. Followed by the burst out into fresh air. And it is the fact that it is fresh air that is significant. There is even a draught. He and Roland experienced a definite draught against their faces, which can mean only that there is an opening into the Boss System. And they had ascertained that there must be a way through, via a small tube that they had spotted.
He will find his way through. He will achieve what Roland set out to achieve. He must finish what has been started. He thinks briefly of Nadia, asleep now surely, snuggled warm and soft in the softness of the bed. To get back there he must go on. He does not dare turn round and face the darkness behind him, which is, he has almost convinced himself, only the fear of failure made manifest. Strange things take on edges in this kingdom of dislocation.
The water rises again, more forcefully this time, a little spray like spit first, and then a chuckle and then the clear swelling flow. He’ll watch it rise and fall once more and then he’ll go on.
Limestone
Nadia lays Sophie on her changing mat in front of the fire and begins to unfasten her sleep-suit. The baby is filthy. An onlooker might suppose her neglected. Her front is covered in slimy drying vomit; yellow shit escapes from the legs of her nappy and oozes down her legs, soiling the pretty pink velour. It has also leaked upwards, Nadia discovers, dirtying her vest. She manages to get the sleep-suit off, but the vest fastens with poppers between Sophie’s legs, so that pulling it over her head is bound to dirty her face and hair. The only thing to do is to bath her. She picks up the squirming, stinking child and carries her – at arm’s length – upstairs to find the bathroom. There is no baby bath, but the washbasin is big enough to serve. She runs the water, testing it with her elbow, and then kneels on the floor and takes off Sophie’s vest and nappy. Nadia is horrified by the acidic pool inside the nappy, and by the redness of Sophie’s bottom. Perhaps she was dirty before, she thinks. Perhaps it is my fault. But she smelt so sweet before, only a clean sweet smell. Nadia wipes the worst away, and then lifts Sophie into the basin. At first she struggles and flails her arms, but then she relaxes. Nadia supports her head with her hand and Sophie floats, pushing her toes against the side of the basin and gazing into Nadia’s eyes. Her thighs have creases in them, gorgeous silky folds; her tummy is as round and fat as a puppy’s, her sex a tiny split almond.
‘I love you,’ Nadia says. ‘I will never let you go.’ Sophie smiles at her, a wide-open smile of such purity that it makes Nadia hurt. Sophie doesn’t know it’s a game. To Sophie it is real. Nadia is her mother and that is all right. More than all right. It is perfect. Nadia’s breasts ache with love. She wonders if June could ever have looked at her with such amazed love. The emotion is surely unique. No one else has ever ached with such love for a baby. Nobody who ached so much, who felt about to burst so full was she of love, could leave their baby in a pub to be looked after by God knows whom. By any lunatic who happened to be there. Lucky that Nadia was. Nadia soaps the baby, her fingers slipping on the perfect skin. Her grazed palms sting with the soapy water. It seems another life ago now, that cycle ride out of the city. And what it was that she was fleeing from.
Nadia closes her eyes for a moment as a wave of nausea sweeps her. She should eat. She is drunk. She cannot think straight, her thoughts are all rough and scribbled. But the important thing is this baby. She opens her eyes and sloshes water over the round tummy. Sophie kicks her legs with glee. But the water is cooling. Babies can die quickly of cold, she thinks, panicking. There is something about that she remembers. They cannot shiver, that is it. Nadia reaches for a towel from the radiator. It is almost impossible to manage the slippery slithery baby in one hand. The radiator is too far away. Nadia stretches and slips. How does she slip? She bangs her head on the radiator, there is a terrible clang that reverberates through all the pipes in the house and at the same time there is the more terrible quiet thud of the baby hitting the floor.
Nadia cannot understand this. What is going on? The baby is lying still and quiet on the hard scratchy carpet tiles. What a stupid floor to have when there is a baby to bathe. Her head is clattering, pain bounces off the planes of her skull, lights flash. She reaches for Sophie, who is limp and cold and wet. She pulls the towel from the radiator and swaddles her. She gets unsteadily up, feels herself sway, holds Sophie tight against her chest. The baby whimpers and Nadia breathes. She had not noticed that she had stopped breathing. Did she really think that the baby was dead? The moment is branded in her mind. It hisses and steams. Sophie wriggles inside the towel. Nadia can hardly bear to look at her. She carries Sophie carefully downstairs, putting both feet on each step and holding tightly to the banister. The pain in her head swoops nauseatingly at each movement. She thinks of a trapped bird in there beating its filthy wings.
Nadia sits by the fire and cradles Sophie for a long time before she dares to open the towel and look at what she has done. The baby’s eyes are closed and she looks pale. Does she look pale? Wasn’t she always a pale baby? Don’t they have rosy cheeks? Wouldn’t Nadia’s baby have rosy cheeks? The birthmarks on her forehead are livid. They are only tiny, a sprinkling of ink. ‘They will fade,’ Nadia says. She finds her tongue is thick in her mouth like a slab of cooked meat. She swallows away the awful taste. There is no more drink in her glass. She’d like more. Perhaps she should have coffee to clear her head. But it is perfectly clear, it clangs like a bell with pain, at each throb Nadia’s sight is squeezed, so that Sophie seems to pulse like some sea-creature. There is nothing else wrong with her, nothing obviously wrong. There is a graze on the side of her head, a tiny pattern of scratches from the hairy carpet. Oh, they have such tender heads! Such a tender space where the soft bones are not yet fused and the throb of the brain is visible. It must be so easy, so pathetically easy, to kill a baby. Is she asleep, or is she unconscious? Nadia’s heart scrambles. But babies do sleep a lot. Most of the time. Didn’t someone say that to her once, didn’t Sue complain about how boring babies are? She pleads with her memory to reassure her. And it is, after all, late at night. It is time she was asleep.
She puts Sophie down by the fire and finds some clean clothes in the carry-cot. As she leans over her head swims again, and she holds it in her hands. She might be sick. She does not want to be sick. How do mothers manage when they are sick? She staggers in
to the kitchen and drinks a glass of water. It is hard to swallow, as if it has edges that stick in her throat. And then she returns to Sophie to dress her. The baby is still sleeping, and she is cool. She fastens the nappy round her and then struggles with the white baby-gro. It is a stupid garment that has to be stretched to get it on, with endless poppers to get confused. She puts Sophie’s feet in first and gets the legs done up and then picks her up to get the arms in, but when she bends Sophie’s arm back to get it in the sleeve, the baby wakes and screams. It is not like her earlier cry, it is a scream of pain. Mothers know these things, recognise different cries. The arm looks odd. The baby flinches and screams again when Nadia touches it.
‘I have to dress you,’ Nadia says. ‘You’re cold.’
But she cannot bend Sophie’s arm back. She takes off the garment and starts again, this time easing it over the arm first and fumbling with the stupid fiddly poppers that flash in her eyes like sparks. Sophie is wide awake now. She struggles and squirms and kicks. Each time Nadia gets one foot in, Sophie kicks the other one out. At least she is awake, not unconscious; alive and kicking. But it is impossible to dress her and time is getting on.
‘All right, Sophie,’ she soothes, but the baby’s cries become wilder, and high-pitched, so that they hurt Nadia’s head like fingernails in her brain. She holds one foot firmly with one hand and the other under her chin so that she can manipulate the garment. She gets both feet in but then the baby falls again and bangs her head on the floor. ‘Oh stupid baby!’ Nadia shouts. The sound of her voice shocks her; Pulled you up short, says her mother from somewhere. She picks Sophie up. She, also, looks shocked. She stops crying and widens her eyes at Nadia. ‘Sorry,’ Nadia says, but Sophie turns down her lip as if she has realised that Nadia isn’t her mother, just some incompetent stranger who has hurt her, broken her arm perhaps? Damaged her brain? As if Nadia is an impostor.
At last Nadia finishes dressing the baby and wraps her in a shawl. Sophie calms down. She is, after all, tired. It has been a tiring evening. She drifts off to sleep. Nadia is sure her cheeks are rosier. She is sweet and clean again, a sleepy fragrant girl.
‘Time to go home,’ Nadia whispers. She tucks the slumbering baby in her carry-cot, then she telephones for a taxi. Half an hour, the woman promises. ‘Fine,’ Nadia says. ‘Tell the driver to sound the horn outside. I’ll be waiting.’
Simon is braced above the river which rushes under him, glittering in the light of his lamp like licorice-water. Its breath is cold and raw, the breath of January down here where the season is always the same. The roar of the water is deafening, deep, continuous, exhilarating. It’s like daring to stay in a tunnel with a train roaring past, the wind cold in your face. The water splashes up the sides of the walls, which have been worn into cusps by the torrents of millennia roaring through the channel of dissolving stone. It reaches up for him, long watery tentacles thrown up to splash hard and cold against his legs.
He laughs out loud at the power he has, at his own presumption. He has dared to do this thing. Alone he has dared to do it. He has cocked a snook at nature and at human caution and there is quicksilver in his veins. This is what he craved. Himself against the elements. And Simon will be victorious. He will worm out of the earth its secret ways. But he does not think, tries not to think of anything but this immediate moment, which is the inching-along of a body inside stone, over water. The water is high, but has recently been higher. Above the surface, caught in the flow cusps, are bits of twig, heathery sprigs that have been tumbled along with the water and then left stranded when the level fell.
The beam in his lamp is weakening. But he has more batteries. After this, after the rest of this slog and the duck, he will rest again. He will eat and drink and change his batteries. There is no question of turning back now; the water roars its challenge, and there is still something beside him, behind him, which prevents him looking round.
He slips a little, shocks himself, braces himself harder. He must not get cocky. Maybe Roland slipped. Perhaps he tumbled into the river, into the black roaring rush. It must be so utterly bone cold. But such a relief to let go … The water lashes up at him again. He is shocked suddenly by a trail across his face. He gasps. It is something against his face like string. He cannot jerk away as he would naturally do, he has to control his response, stiffen the muscles that panic, jam them against the rock. He cannot think in the rush. He opens his eyes and fingers the thing. It is like a soft stalactite. No, it is a root. The thin tenuous string of a root. It cannot be. How far below the surface? Two hundred and fifty foot, at least. It must be the root of a tree probing down through the earth in search of the water that rushes below. The roar of the water is like endless applause, but not for Simon. Simon is irrelevant in this drama of inner earth. He drops the root, and braces himself harder against the rock.
Nadia opens the door through into the bar.
‘How’s it going?’ the man asks. ‘Nipper asleep?’
‘Nearly,’ says Nadia. ‘I’m just getting something from my room.’
He nods and goes back to his conversation. The pub is almost empty now. It has gone closing-time and the diners have all gone, leaving only a handful of chosen regulars in the thick, rosy, lamplit smoke.
Nadia’s room is steamy, the curtains are open and condensation mists the black glass. The room is like a place in her head, a horrible memory, a scrap from a nightmare. She can hardly believe she was really here such a short time before – but there are her clothes on the radiators, her own wash-bag, her bed crumpled like a sickbed. There is her empty cup, and there the Bible lying splayed upon the floor.
She looks in the mirror at the bump on her forehead. She fingers it tentatively, and then pulls her hair down to cover it. She takes off the pink clothes and puts on her jeans. They are dry now, and the denim is hot; a metal button scorches the soft skin of her belly. The sweater is still damp but she pulls it over her head. Her hair has dried frizzily; she tries to run her fingers through it but they catch in the tangles and she winces at the pain. Even the skin on her scalp hurts. She straightens the bed and folds the borrowed clothes. The nylon cagoule has dried. She stuffs it in her bag and leaves the room. In her own clothes she feels stiff and reconstructed.
The man gives no sign of noticing that she has changed. He leans across the bar, laughing with someone, and only dips his head at her in acknowledgement as she passes. Nadia lets herself back into the bright rose-garden of a room. The clock is tickling the air, Sophie is breathing smoothly. Nadia picks up her bottle and the tin of formula. She puts the soiled baby clothes in a plastic bag and tucks it in the bottom of the carry-cot. Upstairs, she wipes the sink and folds the towel. There is a faint wet mark on the carpet. Nothing more.
She catches sight of herself on the mirrored wall. The bathroom is lined with mirror tiles. She is reflected many times. Strange she didn’t notice before – but then she was focused entirely on Sophie. Now she sees herself repeated. She puts her hand to her mouth. In her black jeans and scarlet sweater she is Nadia again, the real Nadia. All the hands have gone to all the mouths. She is scattered, split. She sits on the edge of the bath and holds her poor head. The game is over.
Still, she tries to pretend. Downstairs she puts on her cagoule and fastens the waterproof cover over the carrycot. She is ready. But when she peers into the cot at the sleeping face she sees not Sophie but a stranger’s baby. A baby called Paula. And she is in a stranger’s house, nothing more than a babysitter. The nausea rises in her throat and this time there is nothing she can do but stagger upstairs to the bathroom and vomit, averting her eyes from the bright reflected figures on the walls.
She comes unsteadily downstairs. In the kitchen she puts on the kettle for coffee. It has all been make-believe. What is real is the anger that is still there. What is real is that she has no baby, but that Celia has her baby, the baby that should have been Nadia’s. And somehow, the stranger’s baby has got hurt. The pretend-mother Nadia, the bad, drunken, prete
nd-mother has hurt the stranger’s baby.
Outside a car hoots. Nadia listens as it hoots again. And then she realises it is for her. It is her taxi. It should never have really come. It was only part of the game. Nadia stands perfectly still. There is the sound of a car door slamming, footsteps, a hammering on the door of the pub. A pause. The feet again, angry, scuffing steps. The slam of the car door, the engine starting up and driving away. Nadia takes off her cagoule and carries her coffee back into the sitting room. She sits on the sofa. The stranger’s baby begins to cry. Nadia picks her up. She can see her mistake now. This baby’s face is wrong altogether, her head is the wrong shape. There is nothing familiar about her. She’s quite a nice baby, but not Nadia’s. Nothing like Nadia’s.
The graze on the baby’s head is only slight, a faint cross-hatching of scratches. If only she had more hair it wouldn’t be noticeable at all. And there is another even fainter bump, just a reddening. It is her arm that Nadia is anxious about. What if it is broken? She has a choice now. She could wait for the man – the grandfather – and explain. Or she could just leave the baby, who has found her thumb and is sucking at it, her eyes closing again. Not say anything. Hope they never notice.
Holding the cup awkwardly away from her so she doesn’t spill any on Paula, she sips her coffee. Of course she will have to own up. What can they say? She has done nothing wrong. The baby was dirty, she washed her. Accidentally, she dropped her. It could have happened to anyone – even the real mother. The coffee is bitter, but it is doing her good. It is taking the taste of sick away. She sips it, grimacing. I did nothing wrong, she thinks again, but there is an unhealthy feeling of guilt hanging around her. Her nipples are a raw reminder of something that is wrong. That feels as if it was a sort of perversion – involving a baby in her game. In her fantasy. But was it wrong? It may have been a game but it really comforted Sophie. Paula. And where is the harm in that?
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