Limestone and Clay (16 page)

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 into 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, pretend-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?

Simon shivers. He shakes his head and the drips of water fly from him, lit by the faint electric beam of his lamp. That was the worst of it. The duck under the water, his legs almost carried from him by the flow, his lungs burning. But it was all right. He made it. Burst through into the air and felt his lungs expand like the crumpled wings of a butterfly freed from its chrysalis. And now he is in the small grotto above the water looking up at the narrow aperture through which he must climb.

There are no batteries in his pouch. There were batteries when he made his preparations. He would swear there were. Surely Nadia wouldn't have taken them? No. Nadia would never do such a stupid thing, a thing so far beyond forgivable spite.

He unscrews the top of his water bottle and swigs from it. He sucks another barley-sugar tablet. There is no going back. He has light enough, faint though it may be, for another hour perhaps. And that may be all that is needed. And if it is not? Well, then, it is not.

He leaves his stuff on the floor. The tube ahead is tight. The floor in this grotto is curious, soft white sand, sand that would sparkle silver in the light of the sun. There are stumpy red formations projecting from it. He is careful with his feet. It would be desecration to destroy these mineral statues, so shockingly red against the soft white floor. He hoists himself up. It is so easy. He rises as easily as if someone is giving him a leg-up.

At first the tube is easy, far easier than he had anticipated. A simple crawl, the tunnel slopes upwards, low, but comfortably wide. He crawls some distance before it tightens. The roof seems to be scaled with overlapping ridges like slate roofing. He reaches his hand up and feels the sharp edges. They are the fossils of oyster shells. Once this tube of rock was part of the soft sea bed. He closes his eyes and experiences a wave of something like elation. This is discovery. ‘Neptune's Crawl' he christens it – and will anyone ever know? And then he is washed over with the sudden sensation of the earth as an unformed ball of matter, a vision of shifting, sliding, crumpling plates of rock, pits opening, ridges rearing, lava tumbling, watery expanses lapping and splashing and the whole thing tumbling through the space that is out there, outside the rock, outside the capsule of air. He feels a sort of helpless vertigo. He is out of control. It is all out of control. All he can do is go on.

The crawl has tightened and seems unaccountably to be sloping downwards now. And turning upon itself. This is not what he imagined. He stops for a moment, gathering his thoughts. What does it mean? He tries to make a diagram of the passage in his head, but it will not translate. If the bend continues, where will it lead? Maybe it will straighten again. He can only hope. He goes on, inching forward. The passage is becoming uncomfortably tight. The oysters are sharp against his back. Just what is round the bend, that is all he wants to know. It could be an opening-out, a cavern, an easy stroll. It could be a deadend. No one on the earth knows.

‘Go on, Si,' he hears. It is Roland's voice.

‘No,' Simon says. He closes his eyes. He will have to go back. Whatever is behind him. No. There was no voice. He is alone. Roland is five years dead. The squeeze is too tight and sharp. It is icy cold. Suddenly he is icy, although there is sweat running down his brow, drops of sweat that harden like frosty beads.

Hallucination, disorientation, dislocation, he thinks. These are enemies underground, that is all it is, the mind playing tricks. Or is it the air? These could be symptoms of CO
₂
poisoning. He should move back to the main airflow. There is a clean draught back there, in the grotto of the white sand. Is it poisoning or is it only fear? Whatever it is, get out. Whatever is behind him or ahead of him he must get out. Go back. He squirms back forcibly, but he cannot budge his body. His back is caught on the sharp scales. He is squeezed by the walls, which surely are tightening? No. It is not possible. He is psychologically stuck, that is all, not physically. Not. He has seen this happen to others and has talked them through it. But he has never been stuck himself before, never felt the panic that he holds at bay now, only just. Never felt the mineral clamp of the earth.