Limestone and Clay (17 page)

Stress causes expansion. He knows this. The minute expansion of the body caused by stress can be enough in a narrow space to make the difference between movement and not. And what of Roland's voice? What of that? He cannot see behind him. He cannot see much ahead of him. In the dimness of his lamp there is the glimmer of a round white rock. That is all. How can he go back against the serrated edges of the shells? He tries to breathe deeply in order to relax before he attempts the gradual worming back, the serpentine wriggle that will save him. But he cannot breathe deeply, there is not room. His ribs are held clamped, ribs against stone. They will not expand. There is not room for breath. Not room. His heart scrambles and tumbles against the stone of his ribs. Not stone: living bone, warm, flexible, but unable to flex.

There is a sound again. A voice. Or voices. Is it Roland? It is like a sort of song, or chant. Ahead or behind? And then at once he realises what it is, recognises the rhythm. It is not voices and there is no one. The sound is his own heart beating through his ribs against the walls of the cave and amplified by the tube. He almost laughs – would laugh if there was room enough for inhalation – with relief that it is only the chant of his heart that he can hear. There is nothing supernatural to fear. Only the natural. All he has to do is free himself. Oysters are biting through the rubber of his wetsuit into the flesh of his back. He cannot go back against their edges. He will have to go forward. One arm is ahead of him, the other pinned to his side. There is not room for both arms and his head. All he has to do is move forward. The light is growing fainter. It illuminates weakly the wall ahead of him, glimmers on the white ovoid stone. Soon it will be dark. He will be entirely in the dark.

When the light is gone there will be utter, choking dark. Even in the womb there is no such darkness. Nadia's womb is empty but Celia's contains the first beat of life. His. Only now does the deep stupidity of this wash over him in a wave that leaves him breathless, tightens the stone against his ribs. Utter bloody stupidity. He never thought, never followed it through. All the implications. Easy enough to fuck Celia, eyes shut, thinking of Nadia. Stud. Father. Only
not
father. Father means things: a deep voice, a bristly cheek, a smell of tobacco. It means the grip of a big hand, the lighting of fireworks, the filling of stockings. It does not mean just a squirt of white. He is not, will not now ever be, a father. But perhaps they will come. Perhaps they will make it right, make everything all right. Perhaps someone will come and there will be light. This is not worth dying for. Mother, oh Mother, switch on the light. Tears squeeze from his eyes – which he finds are shut.

The grandfather, Stan, comes through the door in a waft of beery smoke.

‘All right, my dear?' he asks. Nadia looks down at the baby in her arms and nods. ‘Can I get you anything? I always have a coffee and a sandwich at this hour. Very reviving.'

‘No thanks.' Nadia sits holding the baby stiffly like a pretend baby in a Nativity play, a bundle of shawls.

Stan goes through into the kitchen to put the kettle on and then comes back. ‘I should get off to bed then,' he advises. ‘Comfortable beds in those single rooms. Tolerably new mattresses. We sleep in each room at least once, doncha know. Quality control.'

‘Oh?'

Stan leans over and looks down at Paula's face. ‘Land of Nod,' he says approvingly. ‘First grandchild, you know. We think the world of her.' His smell reminds Nadia of her father's smell after his snifter on Sunday mornings.

‘I dropped her,' she says.

Stan pauses, still half bent over, his breath whisky warm on Nadia's face. ‘Dropped?'

‘You see, she was filthy. She needed a wash … I dropped her in the bathroom – on that scratchy carpet. I …' Nadia's voice clogs with tears and she cannot finish.

‘There, there,' Stan says awkwardly. ‘No call for that.' He sits heavily down beside Nadia and pats her knee. ‘No damage done by the look of it.'

Nadia sniffs and wipes her eyes on her sleeve. She pulls back the shawl. ‘Look,' she points at the faint graze.

Stan looks at it, and then at Nadia, curiously. ‘Can't see it myself,' he says. ‘Dropped her on the carpet you say? Like India rubber, nippers, aren't they? Bounce.'

‘And there's her arm … it looks funny. She cried when I dressed her. I think … I think it might be broken.'

‘This arm?' Stan says, touching Paula's right one.

Nadia nods and tears are tipped from her eyes. Stan takes Paula from her arms. ‘I'll tuck her up,' he says. He gives a grunt of effort as he kneels. His big belly stretches his pullover out of shape. He has big hands, big and red as a butcher's hands, but they are tender as he puts the baby down and arranges her covers.

‘Nerve damage,' he says as he stands up.

‘What?' Nadia is startled. Fresh tears stand in her eyes and she is dazzled by prisms.

‘Difficult birth, doncha know, a shame but it could have been worse …'

‘Ah …' Nadia blinks.

‘The wife should have said … You look pale, my dear, let me get you a brandy.'

‘She
was
in a rush,' Nadia says.

‘What'll it be?'

‘Oh nothing, thank you.' Nadia stands up. ‘I'm tired. I'll get off to bed now.'

‘Well good-night, my dear. Thanks for your help.'

‘No trouble,' Nadia says weakly. She walks through the deserted pub where smoke hangs in ghostly wreathes over the empty tables. She pauses at the foot of the stairs. She cannot bear the thought of entering that miserable room again. She wants only to go home. Perhaps she'll be able to think straight at home. There is no need to go back up there. She has all her things in her bag. There is no need to stay. Quietly, she opens the door and steps outside. It is a fine, dry, cold night. Would she really have taken the baby? No. It was only a game. In games things are easy, you can do anything, you can break the rules. There are no implications. Because in a game you can stop playing whenever you want, whenever you have had enough. If the cold fishy pain that is Simon's treachery was only a game, Nadia would stop playing. But it is real.

She finds her bicycle and begins to wheel it along the road. She switches on the lights – bright thanks to Simon's batteries. A rabbit skitters in front of her, stops, sits up on its haunches, paws dangling, dazzled. She smiles at the stupid thing. God, I'm tired, she thinks. The cold air presses like stainless steel against her face. Her head throbs in time with her footsteps. It is a long road home.

The light has gone. There is nothing but a phosphorescent glimmer on the cave wall. Or is it in the eyes, a memory of the light?

Has the earth got him then? There will be a search. There is his car outside, his stuff on the sandy floor below this squeeze. But the earth has hold of him now and it feels a greedy thing. He never thought this would be the way he'd go. Nadia said. Nadia feared. Nadia. Nadia. Nadia. Sleeping now, in the warm hollow of the mattress.

The earth got Roland. Now they are joined in failure. It is utterly black. There is no blackness like it on the earth, only inside in the secret windings.

His eyes are useless in the blackness. Useless orbs. He tries again to wriggle forward. The fretted oysters slice his back. Have they cut through the rubber and the skin? Is there blood? There is not room to bleed. In the utter darkness it is difficult to think, to grasp hold of a thought. He is dislocated. Thoughts are like strings dangling just out of reach. If he could catch one with a loop of his mind he could think. For a moment he would be out of the crush. He could be anywhere in his mind, put himself anywhere. Only in imagination, but imagination is all he has. His only faculty. He can hardly feel now, wedged into the rock. He has lost the boundary between himself and the stone. The flesh is turning to stone. He loops a memory, a tenuous string, but it is only an old story and no comfort. There is a face on the end of the string with writhing scaly hair, a blur of flickering tongues. A stone stare turning flesh to stone. The string slips away. The feet can move. The toes wiggle. If the toes wiggle it means blood must be flowing. He thinks they are wiggling. Somewhere far away.

It is the Nadia string he wants. He wants to see her. Wants her. Wants Nadia and light to see her by. Wants to breathe in light. Oh if only the lungs could fill. They are screwed like fists. He wants his head on the soft, friendly loll of Nadia's breast. Or to watch her reading. Or to see her standing on her head, her hair a fuzzy corolla on the floor around her, her face red, her legs swaying, her shirt falling away so that he can see her stomach, the smudge of her belly-button through her nylon tights. Colour and light and warmth. And room to breathe. But that is only imagination. The string falls away. All that is real is dark and cold and stone. There is no connection.

The greatest freedom is the freedom of the ribs to move, the lungs to bloat like wings. That is all he wants. If only the lungs could swell. The thirst for air and for the room to spread is the main thing now. The only thing. Panic is there just ahead. It glimmers ahead of him in the dark, a round white stone. No, there is nothing. It cannot be real. It cannot be a real sight. For the eyes are useless. Like a switch when the power has gone, he cannot tell whether they are open or shut.

He cannot believe in light that travels freely through the air. In sound. He can hear, muffled, something. There was something before. Sound. What is it? Particles, dust-motes sparkling. No, ribbons, unfurling, dissolving as they travel, firework trails. But not here. Here, sound is only the muffled mineral tick of time, concentric circles in the stone. The pulsing sea-beat of his own heart. It is … there is … something more, something that makes him think of fur; of the intimate smell of flesh. But it is not smell. It is sound. Before there was not this sound. Was there? Is it sound, or is it feeling? It is a sort of rushing. A watery sound, but confused in the babble of his own heart. Babble, babble, babel. Tongues of Babel. His heart is like the tongue of a bell striking the stone. The rushing is the sound of a train, or the wind buffeting trees. It is the rushing to be heard inside a seashell – a memory of the sea. It is water, the rushing of the water that made this press of blackness, this taste of stone in the mouth, this coldness, these icy seams of blood. There are silly flaps of skin, cold leaves, whorls stuffed with sea-sand, soft silly appendages. They are the ears with which he is supposed to hear. But it is his skin that hears; through the planes of his squeezed body he hears, feels, tastes the echo of his own sea-salt, sea-cold blood. And what is it that the blood is singing? Mother will come. Mother. To switch on the light. Night-night. Oh the rock so lovingly tight. Sleep tight.

Champagne

Celia holds a heavy strip of pasted paper across her arms. Carefully she climbs the step-ladder. She has the air of bearing something precious – a gift for a king. At the top of the ladder, she stretches up, lets the paper unfold, presses the top against the wall, eases the edges together, butts them with her deft fingers. Celia is the decorator. Dan brings her tea, makes helpful comments, admires the way her fingers smooth the paper. It is her efficiency he loves, her sexy capability. She drives fast, changes her job regularly and rises swiftly to the top like cream, converses wittily, cooks like a professional. Even conception. Once, it took, thank Christ, only once. And now she stretches her long limbs, her buttocks tensed under her black leggings. He climbs up the ladder and presses his face against her bottom.

‘Oi!' Celia objects, half laughing.

He climbs down. ‘Don't overdo it.'

‘I'll just finish this wall.'

‘You should take it easy.'

‘Would you like to take over?' She looks down at him over her shoulder. There are hairs stuck to her cheek with a smear of wallpaper paste, and she shrugs her cheek against her shoulder to remove them. Dan steps back and watches. She wears her body like a perfectly fitting suit. No odd corners, no clumsy or sagging bits. It is lovely to see her move, she should have been a gymnast or a dancer. Soon she will begin to swell. He cannot wait to feel the curve, to slide his lips down the white hill. It is odd that the memory of the birth of his daughter, Lucy, is so dim. At twenty-two he had taken it all for granted. The pregnancy, the thick gracelessness of Ellen. He had been there at the birth, a spare part, clutching Ellen's hand and looking away. He must have been moved, he supposes. Isn't it supposed to be the most moving experience on earth? Why can he only remember the bloody slime on the baby's head and the ugly twisted cord? He had fallen out of love with Ellen before the birth. Perhaps he was distancing himself strategically, to minimise his own loss when he left.

Lucy is ten now. He hasn't seen her since she was five. The photographs show a stolid, toothy little girl, a miniature Ellen, whom he might one day like to meet again.

‘Pass me the cutter,' Celia says. He does so and watches as she trims a tiny strip from the top so that it is perfectly level with the coving round the ceiling. She climbs down the ladder to attend to the lower wall. She squats, her legs apart, the black fabric stretched impossibly tight like the skin of a ripe fruit, ripe to bursting.

‘I love you,' he says.

‘Hmmm.' She frowns over a minute nick on the edge of the paper.

‘I want to fuck you now, on the pasteboard, all slithery with paste. I want …'

‘Give me a break, Dan!' She stands up and grins at him. ‘Half done.' She unrolls more paper and cuts across it with large scrunching snips. ‘Anyway it's full of fungicide.'

‘When you've finished I've got something to tell you.'

‘What?'

‘When you've finished.'

‘You tantalising sod. I thought you had work to do.'

Dan groans and goes off to unpack his briefcase.