The two who fell were lucky and were learning to live with it. The boy who jumped saved himself by his competence, his decisive speed. Whereas Bad, who played center in rugby and played hard, who had been known to throw a punch after six cans yet had always shown the odd intelligent hitch of caution in his headlong boyishness—had shown it often enough to have earned one of the several obvious nicknames that went with Phelan—Bad had saved himself by an exercise of good judgment.
“But I didn’t speak out,” he said to his friends one morning as they were on the road between Kaikoura and Christchurch. “I didn’t shout, ‘Get off the fucking thing before it breaks!’ I thought I was being a nervous ninny. You did, too; you were laughing at me.”
“Are you mad at us for laughing?” the girl asked.
“No. But it’s—it’s like it’s the last thing I saw. Can there be a last thing you see if you go on living?”
“You were smart.” The girl turned to the window, keeping an eye out for the rest stop above the seal colony. She didn’t tell Bad, “There’s no shame in that.” They were tired of saying it to each other and tired of hearing it said. It was rational but felt untrue. After all, the only other survivor wasn’t with them—she was in care, unable even to dress herself. But she hadn’t fallen. She’d been behind Bad, farther back along the track, shaking a stone out of her shoe. When the platform collapsed, Bad, faster and fitter, ran to get help. She had climbed down the long way to the glacier and went from body to body, took turns sitting by the four who were conscious, while the boy who had jumped and was trapped in the thorns just under the edge of the drop called down tearful questions. He needed more than her first report, her shrieked, “They’re not breathing! They’re not breathing!”
After the trip, Bad’s parents told him he shouldn’t enroll at the university until the following year. They wanted to send him off traveling. He could go to Europe with his cousins who were off on a working holiday. His parents were happy to pay. They felt he should get away.
Bad went to England. He parted ways with his cousins when they were camping in Yorkshire. Someone offered him a job pulling pints in a pub on the moors. On weekends the pub was full of potholers. A group of them eventually offered to take Bad down, deeper than novices usually got to go. He borrowed gear and made a trip. And he loved it, the muffled silence and water noise, his light working its way through darkness, a world where the air was shaped and his view constrained.
Six months later he was in a cave system inside a mountain on the border between Italy and France. He was wise enough to sign in with the local zona—“Brian Phelan: a two-day transverse trip souterrains from the entrance at Passo del Abelio to the Grotte de la Hermit at Dardo”—his message a typical example of the mix of languages on that border.
During his two days underground Bad hoped to sleep in the big cavern called the Salle de la Nef, in one of the sleeping bags that had been there for twenty years and whose zippers had become a dust of rust, their teeth locked fast. Much of the system was dry, but Bad took his wet suit, because he wanted to go up through Le Lien Vert, a series of caves with waterfalls. None of it was close—Bad didn’t enjoy tight caves. There was nowhere he had to go pushing his pack before him. He was traveling light but could carry some bulk, his roll of foam, and his rescue blanket.
Bad enjoyed the trip. He passed through sections of composition cave, formed by water but dry for thousands of years and full of unimaginably slow growths of minerals, ramps of translucent flowstone, stalactites in tallowy streamers, and stalagmites in sturdier amber columns. There were cave floors covered in calcite snow and passages like greenhouse gardens, hung with gypsum flowers, with rigid petals and curled tendrils. Bad was hot and cold, damp and parched. He conserved his light, lay in the gritty damp sleeping bag in the Salle de la Nef submerged in a quicksand of night, his ears stoppered, stuffed with silence.
Early on his second day, only an hour after he’d started out, he had to back into a funk hole as another party passed him. They talked for a time, established that he was alert but not a native French speaker. They shone their lights into his face, impolite but concerned. They gave him some noodles to eat.
Neither he nor they knew that outside it had begun to rain heavily. It was July, and a deluge wasn’t seasonal, wasn’t part of the forecast.
It was hours before Bad first became aware of the rain. His map had said, of the duck near the bottom of Le Lien Vert, that the water was usually two feet from the ceiling. Bad was in his wet suit by then, and he found himself wading and swimming through the duck with his helmeted head tilted up and scraping on the rock, while his chin was underwater. Bad felt tiny; he became the size of the habitable world his sight showed him, flashlight bright between a pinkish rock roof and the satiny black water—six inches of air. Bad splashed and clambered up into the next chamber, then straddle-walked a stream up a short passage to the first wet pitch—the first of four pitches from that end. Together the pitches represented around seven hours of caving.
It was forty hours back the way Bad had come, but still he should have turned back straightaway, gone through the duck before it filled. But he was tired and his traverse was almost complete. He wanted to finish it.
Bad clipped his cow-tail onto the line attached to the rock face. He climbed the first pitch. The line—a semipermanent fixture—had been rigged out from the waterfall, from the best hold that allowed it to dangle beyond the normal course of the cascade. But the cave was flooding, and when Bad was at the bottom of the pitch he was under the water. He began to ascend.
He had expected to get wet, to be in the waterfall’s full force for a few meters at least. Instead he climbed for five. The water pouring off his helmet made his light dim but living—it flashed and rippled around him. In the thick of it, Bad had to hold his breath. Then his head was free, his light settled, and he dragged himself up the rope and out of the cascade, husked of its weight.
The art of every pitch is to get on and off it. That first pitch was very difficult to get off. The cataract was thick and had filled the whole horizontal opening of the pitch. Bad had dragged himself up through it. His hands and face were very cold, so he took a rest to revive them. He ate a handful of nuts and ran his light up and down the lower ten meters of the next pitch. The cave was cacophonous, its flooded river hosing through a confined tube of rock. He decided to climb up just this next pitch, where his map showed that the cave above, with its long fall of crester run, was broader, and possibly still dry in places. Just one more, he thought, then he’d make camp and climb under his rescue blanket.
Bad repacked his food. He got up and began to edge around the stream to the bottom of the pitch. It was fifteen meters high, and the rope was under the fattened cataract for half the height. The din of water was terrible, tiring. Bad tugged at the rope to test it and shook splinters of water out of the cataract.
He clipped his cow-tail on the rope, then the first of his foot loops. He stepped into a loop and under the water. His headlamp went yellow. Water thumped on his helmet. He was compressed by blows. He hooked on another foot loop and stepped up, reached back to retrieve the last, and was nearly washed off the rope. It swung and he tangled. He had to take his foot out of the second loop in order to free himself. Even with the background roar, the splashing on his helmet and the shoulders of his polypropylene suit was piercing. Splashes like someone breaking dry sticks right by his ear. For a moment Bad struggled to sort himself out, then his strength went, and he simply hung, only two meters up and right under the waterfall.
And then the waterfall moved. Or Bad believed it moved. He was under its edge; then he was out of it altogether, with the volumes of water that had washed down the neck of his wet suit already beginning to warm between his skin and its insulation. Bad began to climb, steadily and quickly, taking advantage of this inexplicable respite. The rope quivered as though it were attached to something flexible, a tree branch, not bolts in a rock face. When Bad was near the top of the pi
tch the rope moved—this time he believed it was the rope, not the cataract. He came closer to the falling water but was still clear; it only hammered at his shoulder. Bad concentrated on his climb. He got to the top of the pitch, where there was the usual obstacle, a jutting lip he’d have to haul himself over. He caught his breath, put his arms over, and began to kick and wriggle up. Then someone took hold of his harness and hauled him up and across the rock. Bad came to rest on his stomach, his ascender jamming into his ribs. He looked up—a quick crane just to catch the eyes of the other cavers, before he worked himself away from the pitch into whatever space there was near them. It was a polite, instinctive, economical glance—they would all shake hands once he was clear of the drop. But when Bad looked he saw bloodied knees, the torn hem of a long summer skirt, a blouse of some silky stuff, very much the worse for wear, bare legs, and sandals. Bad rolled over onto his back, still gasping from his climb.
The woman stooped closer, her face in a pale halo, her hair lighter at its roots. She unclipped his chin strap and removed his helmet, then came nearer still, so that Bad imagined she would kiss him. He felt the rock cold through the hair on the back of his head—then he lost consciousness.
When he came to he’d been dragged away from the top of the pitch. He was detached from the rope and his foam was under his shoulders. She had unzipped his suit and was lying on his bared chest, her shirt open and her damp skin against his. They were both covered by his rescue blanket, his helmet and headlamp under it with them, shedding its small warmth and reflecting magnified in the blanket’s creased silver fabric.
Bad’s mouth was full of blood. He’d bitten his tongue. It felt fat but numbed, as though by Novocain. When he turned his head a slime of congealing blood oozed from his mouth and across one cheek. The woman had her hand under that cheek, her face inches from his, a face with high cheekbones, a smooth forehead, creamy skin, and a narrow undershot jaw with a pointed chin. Her mouth was the most determined Bad had ever seen, her lower lip jutting from a habit of effort, from pulling her lower jaw forward so that her teeth could comfortably meet. She kept that lower lip in place by hooking it over her top teeth, which made her look defiant, jaunty, and haughty all at once. Her eyes were long, calm, and a light brown.
Bad was then nineteen—but he’d never lain quietly breast to breast with a woman. For a time he blinked at her, groggy. Then she moved his arm and her own into the helmet’s light. She consulted his watch—she had none. “Neuf-vingt,” she said, “mais lequel?” Nine-twenty, but which? Bad translated. He watched her put out her tongue to groom the grazes on her right hand, skid marks of flayed skin, the flesh around the wounds painfully pulled and puckered. He wanted a better look at the injury, so took her wrist in both his hands. The cold came under the blanket between them. He felt her nipples then, like bony fingertips, one pressed into his chest and the other against his forearm. He began trying to guess her age—anywhere between five and ten years his senior. He frowned at her hand. “How—?” he said, but there was too much to ask. She was at least a hundred and fifty meters underground and dressed for high summer. She didn’t even have hiking boots.
“Do you have a flashlight?” he said.
“It ran out,” she said. Her English was scarcely accented.
“How long have you been sitting in the dark?”
She shrugged, and the bony fingertips trailed caressingly across his skin. She pouted at him, rueful. He was surprised she understood him. His tongue was so swollen that it pushed about in his mouth against his cheeks like a young reptile about to tear its way out of the skin of its egg. He had to speak, though; she had to be brought to an appreciation of the gravity of the situation. A WIGU situation—as the cave rescue amateurs in Yorkshire would say, as they clustered into booths in Bad’s pub, waiting for a call-out on a wet Sunday. WIGU—When Idiots Go Underground.
She was grooming her hand again, her tongue keen, as though she liked the flavor of her flesh in its dressing of cave mud. She stopped to say—as though explaining something—that she thought his hitch had locked and he didn’t have a load release hitch.
She was a caver, after all, or a climber—but her clothes made no sense.
“Nine A.M. or P.M.?” she asked, and tapped the face of his watch with one torn but glossy fingernail.
“P.M.,” said Bad, and she sat up, shook off the silver blanket, and began to button her blouse. Bad saw that her breasts were small and beautiful.
“Why are you dressed like that?” Bad said. He had to shout now, to penetrate the water noise that filled the cave and thrust itself into the few feet of air between their faces.
The woman looked thoughtful, then sly and amused. She said she’d been at a party.
“In a wet cave?”
“In a dry one.” Then she said she was going. She pointed up the long slanting fall of the crester run that led to the chamber above and the penultimate pitch. There was no rope rigged on the crester run, which in normal conditions would entail only a long scramble to ascend. Now it was 80 percent covered by water in a thick, steady stream, with shallow spilling edges of mud-greased rocks. Bad believed he could climb it, but he had the right footwear.
He sat up, shawled in the rescue blanket, and unzipped his bag. He pulled out his Corduren overalls and threw them at her.
She caught them, stood holding them against herself, her form eclipsed by their silt-smeared vermilion, the ends of the legs trailing on the ground. Bad thought he heard her say, “Very fetching.” Then she stooped and stepped into them, stuffing her skirt down each loose leg, shrugging on the arms, gathering the dark ends of her particolored hair so that it wouldn’t get caught in the Velcro. She knelt to help Bad back into his wet suit, raised it from his waist, and guided his arms into its sleeves.
Bad had begun to shiver. “Why aren’t you cold?” he said.
She said, “Isn’t that better?” Then she gave Bad a quelling up-from-under look. She got him up and put his helmet back on. She fastened its straps and gently settled the plastic cup on his chin. Then she drew him closer to the bottom of the crester run so that his light shone on its speedy ripples. Bad took hold of her and began to explain. They should stay put and cuddle up. He was due out at one, but the people he’d left his intentions with wouldn’t come looking till the morning. If it was raining outside they might know to come sooner, might already be on their way, but they’d have to rerig those last two pitches—if it was still raining outside. And if it was still raining outside, then the cave would continue to flood, which meant that they would be pretty damp and deaf if they stayed put, but, since caves never flooded steadily, they’d be much safer staying put. The cave would pulse flood, Bad said. Somewhere above them a pool would fill to capacity and overflow and the flood would suddenly double.
The woman put up her uninjured hand and gave his cheek several slow pats. “I’ll lead the way,” she said. She walked to the foot of the crester run. Bad stumbled after her, off-balance—he’d had a good grip on her, he thought, but she’d stepped away and nearly pulled him over.
She began to climb. Bad saw her feet come clean in the little eddies of shallow water at the edge of the run. The flimsy sandals were gold, flat-heeled but gold—evening wear. Bad shouted at her and went on shouting as she receded in the light of his quaking headlamp. She was turned his way now, her back pressed against the wall as she edged around a jutting wet rock. She was making very good progress. Bad gestured at her, hooked her back, slapping both hands into his chest at the termination of each hook, desperate and imperative. Then the flood hurtled his shouts back into his face. They came back with a wave of air. The stream on the crester run doubled instantly, and the woman looked at Bad. Or looked toward him. He thought he saw her gaze measure the air between them. He saw her hands turn white, each knuckle and ligament standing out like an X ray. She rose a full foot out of the water, as if she’d jumped as the flood scooped her off the rock face. Her legs were swept out from under her and she fell on her bac
k in the shallow cataract and tumbled, twisting, all the way back down the crester run. Bad lunged at her as she passed him. His fingertips scraped the fabric of his own suit; then she was gone, before his head had turned to see her go, over the edge of the waterfall and down the pitch. He didn’t hear her land but felt it through the rock under his feet.
Bad wrenched his arm out of the water and scrambled back from the stream. For a moment he stared at its airy white sluice. For a moment he listened to an echo, a crash and complicated syncopation of flesh and bone—the sound of the collapsed platform hitting the glacier below Dart Ridge. Then he came to and, howling, crawled over to his pack to fetch his bolt kit. He went back to the pitch and, despite his trembling hands and the high-pressure hose of water at the pitch’s edge, spent the next hour hammering in bolts. He bolted out beyond the waterfall and rerigged the rope, then stuffed the rescue blanket back in his pack, put it on, and abseiled down the pitch.
She wasn’t there.
He couldn’t find her, so he found the driest spot, climbed between foam and rescue blanket, and sat in a silver tent, with his helmet in his lap, sobbing and nodding off.
A long time later he became aware that someone was singing rounds at him. “Dormez-vous? Dormez-vous?” Lights flickered and swelled around him. Above the flood he heard boots in soggy gravel; then someone shook him. “Are you Brian Phelan?”
“Bad. I’m Bad,” said Bad.
They were speaking a mix of Italian and French. Bad remembered that he had passed under the border. He was asked, in English, what day it was. They were checking for hypothermia—was he in the gray zone? Usually the first question anyone was asked was, “What’s your name?” But they’d given him his.
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