Dying to Write

by Judith Cutler

  I unlaced it and passed it to him. He pulled out the lace and held one end on Eyre House. Then, holding it taut, he swung it in an arc across the map.

  ‘Won’t work. Better to trace the road with it,’ he said, easing along the road to the main gates and then to the right.

  ‘But he’d turned left when he torched George’s van,’ I said.

  ‘OK, trace that footpath and see if we meet up.’

  Our index fingers moved hesitantly together.

  ‘Yes!’ I said, on my feet and folding the map. ‘Got to be, hasn’t it?’

  ‘Now what?’

  ‘We go and look.’

  ‘What about Groom – shouldn’t you tell him?’

  ‘If he takes any notice, he’ll refuse to let us go too. Or,’ I said, more reasonably, ‘we could talk to him on your car phone as we go.’

  ‘I’ve a feeling Matt might want to go with us,’ said Hugh.

  ‘Course he would. Is he awake and dressed?’

  ‘I doubt it.’

  ‘Tough, then. We go without him. He can go with Chris.’ I was rethreading the lace. ‘We’ll need kagouls and a torch at very least. Any tools in your car? He won’t have tied her up with string.’

  ‘Enough. Get your things – I’ll meet you at the car.’

  At reception we went our separate ways. I hardly nodded to the officer on duty in the student corridor, as I pushed into my room grabbing torch and kagoul and, as a hopeful after-thought, my asthma spray. All the other students would be busy packing – Shazia’s cleaners would want the rooms vacant by nine thirty. Toad was not packing: I could hear the sound of Bach being played not at all badly. A bourrée from one of the cello suites. I found myself humming it under my breath as I sprinted out through reception. Hugh had brought the car round. I flung myself in.

  Half the time I’ll swear we were aquaplaning, Hugh was forcing the car so fast down the waterlogged roads. He passed the car phone to me.

  I hesitated. ‘How d’you use one of these?’

  ‘Jesus!’

  ‘I haven’t got one on my bike.’

  ‘Sorry. Same as any other phone.’

  As I tapped, I could see his knuckles white on the gear lever. He was there, with Kate, knowing from experience the fear she was going through. If she was still alive.

  ‘What the fuck are you up to this time?’ Chris asked.

  ‘Trying to find Kate. Hugh remembered a mine he got trapped in as a kid. It ties up with the Black Panther keeping that poor child down the sewer. We’ve found a mine.’

  ‘Where?’

  I read out the map reference, as accurately as I could guess in the bucking, sliding car.

  ‘I’ll come.’

  ‘Bring some friends. And Matt.’

  At last Hugh swung the car towards a gap in the hedge. There were some other tyre marks. But I don’t think he was worrying about preserving evidence.

  He was out and over a stile well before me. I had to run to catch up, slithering over the long, wet grass. The ground was hummocky, water already flooding some of the dips. Then there was a strip of ash-covered path. I set off down it. Hugh followed. After a hundred yards or so it branched into two smaller tracks. Right or left?

  ‘You take this one. I’ll go down here. But when we’ve looked we come back here. No heroics!’ I said.

  ‘OK.’

  I took the left-hand path. The grass was so coarse it was impossible for me to tell if anyone had used it recently. There was a strange, isolating blanket of sound – the motorway, never far away, the rain, the pad of my feet, my increasingly rough breathing. A minute for a drag at the Ventolin. Must be stress, not the exercise. I told myself I had nothing to worry about. Toad was working his way through Bach. Chris knew where I was heading. I was linking up with Hugh again, as soon as we’d checked the possibilities.

  I had nothing to worry about.

  There was nothing here, anyway. The path just petered out in a scribble of thin broom and bracken. There was a little gorse up to the right.

  I turned back. Better report to Hugh. He’d be worrying about me.

  And then I saw him. Sidney. As wet as I was. Thin. A cut down one flank. But Sidney nonetheless.

  If only I had something to offer him. Some chocolate, anything. I couldn’t imagine him coming to me without a bribe. I inched closer to him but he pursued a dogged course, skirting me. I followed, gaining unobtrusively on him. Perhaps I’d risk calling him.

  ‘Sidney! Sidney?’

  If anything, he scuttled on rather more quickly. I stripped my kagoul off. I was wet enough, anyway, for a bit more rain not to matter, and I’d be less visible without it. And the thought crossed my mind that I might even be able to throw it on top of Sidney and catch him that way. Catch him! I had to catch up with him first.

  He made his way purposefully towards the bracken. And disappeared.

  I followed.

  A wooden beam, presumably once a lintel, now leaned crazily. The gap it left was scarcely larger than me. I squeezed through.

  I knew it would be dark inside. I wasn’t prepared for absolute blackness. But perhaps it wasn’t absolute. My eyes weren’t used to it yet. Perhaps it wouldn’t be so bad. And I had my torch.

  I switched it on in time to see Sidney’s tail disappearing. There were two routes, one high enough to follow at an awkward walk, the other a hands-and-knees affair. He chose the hands-and-knees one.

  I followed.

  I don’t know how long for. There was no easy way to carry the torch. I knew I mustn’t lose that torch. It was my lifeline. And I mustn’t bang my head on one of those lumps of rock – or coal? – that formed the roof. I ought to have had a hard hat with a light, a miner’s helmet.

  As I crawled, the noise started. A low rumble. It got louder and louder. I must be close to the motorway. I had to go back. I couldn’t get any closer. The noise was a solid black wall I couldn’t penetrate. I banged my fists on it. And I knew it was solid, and that it was coal.

  So where had Sidney gone?

  The noise hurt so much I found myself crying. I couldn’t hear myself, but I knew I must be. If you cry you blow your nose and wipe your eyes. My handkerchief was in my kagoul.

  So was Sidney.

  If I started to laugh I’d soon be hysterical. Somehow I had to turn round – my God, had the miners been a race of midgets? – and feel my way back. First I’d zip Sidney into the big front pocket. He didn’t like being grabbed, and struggled. So did I. As I shoved him, tail first and wriggling, down into the pouch, I must have hurt him. He bit me. I shoved harder and zipped. I’d better leave a gap for him to breathe. Just enough for his nose, no more.

  Because I’d no idea how far I’d come, I’d no idea how far back I had to crawl. And my torch was getting dimmer. Long-life batteries, indeed. If I came out of this alive, I’d never buy that brand again.

  I shouldn’t have thought of that. Of not getting out alive.

  I tried common sense. Perhaps the batteries were loose. I gave an experimental shake. Nothing, either better or worse. But the beam was very dim, now. Perhaps it would be better to wear the kagoul. I might be hurting Sidney as I dragged it along. So I propped the torch between my knees and struggled in. I’d buy one with a front-opening next time. Of course there’d be a next time.

  The torch slipped and went out.

  I groped for it, and found it. It was wet and slippery. I fumbled for the switch, and pushed it. Light again. I rubbed a sleeve over the lens: that improved things. Not the batteries but grime on the glass. It would be all right.

  I made good progress for the next few yards, but the tunnel was now very wet indeed. Water was dripping from the roof, quite audible even above the rumble of the road. But I couldn’t have far to go, not now. Any moment I would hear a furious Hugh yelling for me. Any moment.

  And then I saw the roof tremble. Not much. Enough for me to stop, and then wish I’d rushed forward. And, quite delicately at first, then more persistently, a li
ttle black avalanche cut me off from the entrance to the mine.

  I was screaming.

  If I screamed much longer, my voice would give out. But if I sang, I could keep that up for an hour or more. And I might give myself courage to start picking the lumps from the heap that had trapped me.

  ‘Voi che sapete’. ‘Three little maids from school’. ‘Summertime’.

  And then I heard another voice.

  ‘God Save the Queen’.

  A woman’s voice. Kate’s. I had found Kate.

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  I ought to sit tight and wait for them to come – Hugh, Chris and the rest. They’d be out there, looking for me. Hugh knew where I’d gone. Roughly. Chris would come with a posse of men and women trained in all sorts of rescue work.

  But I wanted to get out and I wanted to find Kate. Now.

  I knelt and reached and lifted and pushed back. A rhythm, I needed a rhythm. A long time ago, at school, a teacher more inspired than most taught us George Orwell, ‘Down the Mine’, all about these men who worked in confined conditions heaving coal. She’d made us all kneel under our desks and pass piles of dictionaries back, back, back, until our knees and backs and arms screamed. About five minutes. Then we’d giggled and dusted ourselves off and gone back to our desks and never quite forgotten about miners.

  The pile was smaller, but the beam from the torch was dimmer. I shoved it between my knees so I couldn’t possibly lose it, switched it off, and worked in the dark. Occasionally I would stop and sing again. ‘The Ash Grove’, ‘Londonderry Air’, ‘Greensleeves’.

  ‘Rule Britannia’ and ‘I vow to thee, my country’ came back. Much more clearly. I was winning. And then it occurred to me that scrabbling sounds were coming from the far side of the roof-fall. Someone was helping.

  I don’t know what order the thoughts came in. That whoever it was was not trying to call to me. That Toad had been playing Bach uncommonly well. That it was not Toad and his viola but a professional musician playing a cello. A recording. That I had nowhere to run to. That as long as I had my torch, I had a weapon – I shoved it up my left sleeve. That, overriding everything else, I was very frightened indeed.

  The last of the coal was nearly cleared. A very bright light dazzled me. I couldn’t see who was speaking. I didn’t need to. Trust Toad to have acquired a torch as viciously powerful as his ghettoblaster.

  I dragged the kagoul-pouch zip completely closed, and prayed Sidney’d have enough air. I wanted to deal with Toad without the complication of rats.

  But it was he who was dealing with me. Shazia hadn’t mentioned any knives going missing from the kitchen. But Toad had one. And I didn’t doubt he’d use it.

  He grabbed my hair and inched me forwards. Forwards until I could stand upright. And then he threw me off balance, and caught me by the arm as I lurched. I ought to thank God it was the arm not holding the torch, but all I could do was scream as he wrenched it behind my back. Then he jerked it again. The message was clear: shut up or he’d dislocate it. I shut up. I would concentrate on keeping my balance. I could see reasonably clearly where I was going in the light from Toad’s torch. From the angle it fell, he must have fastened it somehow or other to his waist. Now we slithered down the other tunnel, our feet sometimes covered by black water. The smell became rank: foul lavatories and menstrual blood. We were brought up against thick stakes of wood – old pit-props, perhaps. They’d been hammered in vertically to form a crude cage. The floor was solid wood – it looked like the bottom of an old railway wagon, but Toad didn’t give me time to look properly. He’d found a metal-barred gate from somewhere, hingeing it crudely with chains and fastening it with another, padlocked chain. A cage.

  And in the cage was Kate, naked except for a disposable nappy and a sheen of coal dust.

  At least there were now two of us.

  Two of us together – we must be able to deal with him. Two of us.

  He’d have to let go of me to unlock the padlock. Maybe I could bolt then. But that would mean leaving Kate. I hesitated. He held the knife to my neck. Then he passed the key.

  ‘Open it.’

  I fumbled and dropped the key. He sliced my ear. I could feel the blood warm on my neck.

  ‘Pick it up and don’t drop it again.’

  I did as I was told.

  He thrust me inside the cage. The water was to my knees.

  ‘Two for the price of one,’ he said.

  ‘Garth,’ I said, trying to sound cool and reasonable, ‘could you tell me what’s going on? I came in out of the rain and got trapped and –’

  He hit me hard across the mouth.

  Kate stood up. I dared not hope she’d seen the bulge in my left sleeve. But she was going to distract him.

  Her chest was heaving. ‘Asthma,’ she gasped. ‘A spray.’

  ‘You know what you have to do,’ he said, pointing to the bottom of the cage, swirling with water. He lifted his left foot. And she knelt in the foul water to kiss it.

  I hit him very hard. He sagged forward, but then started gently twitching.

  I grabbed Kate’s hand and pulled her up and towards me. I pushed the key into her hand.

  The gate swung open, desperately slowly. Water was now to our thighs. And the floor was tilting.

  At least she was out. But the gate was pushing me back towards Toad, and he was already staggering to his feet.

  And then I heard voices, and I knew I could swing on the gate, like a monkey if I had to, and wait for them to help me. But nothing would help Toad. He was no longer twitching, but threshing in huge convulsions, literally foaming at the mouth. And by the second he was going deeper into unconsciousness and closer to death by drowning.

  Getting me out hadn’t been as easy as I’d thought. Eventually I had to let go, wait for the gate to swing, and literally swim out. Chris was there to pull me up.

  I was afraid for a moment that I’d drowned Sidney. He was very quiet inside that pouch. But maybe the fabric had kept enough air in.

  I pulled off the kagoul and helped pull it over Kate. And I made them wait while I gave her my jeans. I could cope with a blanket. She deserved more dignity.

  Chris and Ian would have carried her. But she found the strength to stagger out, a comic, grotesque parody of a woman, and when she saw Matt she broke into a tottering run. Neither said anything. You couldn’t tell what streaked the coal dust on her face, tears or rain. Matt tried to pat her face clean with his handkerchief. He said something and pointed to the movement in the kagoul.

  And then we heard them laugh.

  ‘God knows how Casualty will cope with a rat,’ said Chris, watching the ambulance drive away along the ash-covered track.

  ‘Send a squad car with his cage,’ I said briefly. ‘And, while they’re at it, some clothes for me.’

  I was very cold, now I came to think about it, and I would have to succumb any moment now to Chris’s insistence that I have my ear stitched. But I couldn’t have gone in the ambulance with Kate and Matt. It wouldn’t have been fair. They had Sidney to play gooseberry in any case.

  Hugh was still white. When I emerged he hadn’t hugged me as I’d expected: he’d grabbed my shoulders and shaken me until I an Dale had stopped him.

  ‘No heroics, you said,’ he was shouting. ‘No bloody heroics! My God! And look at you!’ He turned from me, not to weep but to vomit in the gorse.

  Ian silently hitched up my blanket and led me away. Without asking, he fastened my seat belt for me. And then he passed me a mint.

  I don’t think we spoke all the way to the General. I didn’t really want to anyway. My mouth was throbbing viciously and my nose insisted on streaming. Eventually Ian passed me a box of tissues. I left black fingerprints on the packet and on every tissue I touched. I reached for the mirror on the sun visor. The face I saw might have been Kate’s. I wondered if the National Health would run to showers.

  As we approached the city centre, Ian slowed and pointed. Down side streets we could
see the fire service still at work, and bulldozers were clearing wrecked cars. The rain hadn’t come early enough for some.

  As he parked in an ‘Ambulance Only’ space, I said, ‘I’m not staying in, you know.’

  ‘Of course you’re not. You’re going back to Eyre House for lunch. I promised Shazia. And Chris. He’ll want to talk to you.’

  ‘Yet another statement?’

  Ian grunted, and came round to my side to help me out. A wheelchair appeared. I rejected it. Ian sniffed and offered his arm. As we started our dignified progress, a police car screamed into view, slowing sharply as the driver recognised Ian, no doubt. The driver parked with care and scurried after us, a rat cage in one hand and a polythene carrier in the other.

  ‘For the lady,’ he said, thrusting the cage at me.

  ‘Wrong lady,’ I said, taking the carrier instead.

  The National Health ran to a student nurse with sponges and warm, soapy water. I asked him to leave me to it for a couple of minutes, and managed to dunk my hair too. I longed suddenly for the privacy of my bathroom at home. It would be good to be back, to lie and soak. Perhaps a little Haydn on the radio. Maybe a drop of single malt. And then the nurse came back with the casualty officer, a young woman with designs on my ear. A difficult place to stitch, she admitted at last. We settled on a butterfly dressing. More Melolin for the worst of the abrasions: I looked at the messes that constituted my knees and wondered why they’d not hurt when I was crawling on them. She tutted over the puncture marks Sidney had left, but at least I was spared another tetanus shot. I signed myself out this time, but asked to see Kate before I left.

  ‘Two minutes,’ said the student nurse, leading the way.

  There is nowhere to knock on a curtain, of course. Ian and I looked at each other quizzically, coughed in unison, and he waited for me to put my head round the curtain.

  They’d been cleaning her up, too: her hair had been tied back, and her face was no longer bizarre with coal dust. But there were dark circles under her eyes, and her face, once plumply middle-aged, was gaunt, with cruel lines around the mouth. She wore a hospital-issue gown, and was obviously about to be admitted – there was a name tag on her wrist. Matt was holding her right hand against his cheek. He seemed completely oblivious of us, and of the streams of tears that ran down his cheeks, plunging into the forest of his beard. As we watched, she drifted into sleep.