by Dan Vyleta
A fist the size of a ham hock. Black, casting a shadow over her face. But Livia feels outrage rather than fear.
“It’s illegal, that’s what it is. It’ll land you in jail.” The newspaper’s warnings come back to her, well-wrought phrases, warnings for the custodians of land and Crown. “What does it want, your union? Riots in the street, I suppose. Burned manor houses, looted granaries, and free gin for every man, woman, and child. Anarchy! There’ll be famine before you know it.”
Jake drops his fist.
“We are fighting for proper insurance,” he answers with an odd sort of dignity. “When there’s an accident. Last month a man got cut by a snapped cable. Lost both hands. Manager wouldn’t give him a penny.”
He lifts up the lamp, opens it, blows out the flame.
“You must keep it off. There is shale gas in the area. Besides, the next shift will start soon. Light travels a long way down here, and colliers’ eyes are sharp.”
The darkness is so total the words are disconnected from their speaker. Jake no longer exists. Her own body has disappeared. All of a sudden, Livia is to herself just the breath of her lungs, the taste of her tongue between her teeth.
“No light?” she asks, her voice spilling out of her then evaporating in the dark. “How will we live?”
Jake’s answer has the simplicity of truth.
“You’ll get used to it.”
ф
Very soon she is alone.
It isn’t true, of course, but it feels like it. Abandonment. As though she has been left here to rot.
“Listen for the canaries’ movements. If they die, there’s gas in the room. But don’t worry, you’ll be just fine. I’ll send someone down to look after Thomas. At the start of the shift after next.”
It was Mr. Mosley who said it and why would he lie? But it was dark already when he spoke, and his voice had no body, no presence, sprang from no source. Like God’s, when He spoke on the day He made the world. But that’s blasphemy. No wonder though that the first thing He made was light. The dark is a lonely place. Livia has been here for no more than a thousand breaths. And already she knows it.
Of course, she is not alone. There is Thomas whom she heard being bundled into one of the beds. And Charlie, not five steps away. The wound has reopened, he has announced. Now he is busy at Thomas’s bedside, muttering to himself, trying to stem the bleeding in the dark. She fights with herself not to speak to him, distract him from his work. And so she waits, listens, drowns in the black.
The disorientation is total. She is, to her own senses, only her breath, the gurgling of her stomach. Her outside has dissolved, can be made present only by running her palms down the length of her skin, her face and neck, and (bashfully this) down the front of her dress, all the way to its hem, touching her sides, her knees, her calves, making herself real to herself and preserving her image, assembled through a hundred run-ins with a looking glass.
She bites her lip, and savours the reality of flesh and pain.
Time slips by, moves through the dark in slippered feet. In the absence of sight, other senses become vivid, fill the void with meanings true or false. At times it seems to Livia as though there are other people in the room, creeping around in silence, just inches from her, brushing her clothes, pulling faces in her sightless face. Sounds tug at her, have no origins other than the dark. It might be Thomas moaning, or Charlie’s mutter. Lovers embracing in the cave next door. A miner screaming far away as his hands are burned by shale gas. The canaries’ brittle talons raking at the cage as they slowly suffocate.
For suffocate they must, since there is no air down here, just a cold, leaden thickness that presses on her along with the weight of the rock, hundreds upon hundreds of yards of rock, held up by some mouldy timbers, like matchsticks holding aloft the slab of a giant grave. Livia shudders, grows angry at her fear; forces herself to move, explore. She does not trust her feet, slides to the ground, needs to feel the floor with her bare hands to know it is there. On all fours then, like an animal, she crawls about, finds a wall, a shelf, a tin filled with something that might be food. Shortbread, oatcakes, hardtack? Her fingers feel stupid in the dark, unable to interpret texture, and her nose cannot make out the scent. She grabs a piece, too hard, feels it crumble and scatter on the floor. It is now that she starts crying. There is no one to see it, each sob silent, hidden, swallowed down. And yet Charlie finds her. She is alone, distraught, crumbs on her palm, sweat running down her back. The next moment his voice is in her ear.
“It’s eerie down here,” he says as though he’s sitting at the breakfast table, commenting on the porridge and toast. “Like being in a strange kind of church. One daren’t even speak.” He pauses but his voice does not change. “Are you afraid, Livia?”
“No.”
“Well, I am.”
She pictures his face as he says it, eyebrows arched in wonder at himself. Something touches her between her throat and her chest, reaches, searches, then hastily withdraws as though stung. Too late she realises it was his hand. Looking for hers. Embarrassed by what it found: the softness of her body.
It almost makes her laugh.
A moment later she reaches out herself, touches some part of him, clothed, his hip, perhaps, his knee, the narrow strip of his flank. The possibilities taunt her: how easy it would be to linger, in this absence of all sight. But she, too, withdraws her hand. They settle on a subtler sort of touch, sit leaning one against the other, shoulder digging into shoulder, until her legs fall asleep beneath her and she has lost all sense of where his body ends and hers begins.
“How long have we been here?” she asks.
“Ten minutes,” he answers. “Ten weeks. But shorter than a miner’s shift.”
A miner’s shift. How long is that? Eight hours? Ten? Twelve?
Help won’t be coming until it ends.
ф
When help does come, it bears a familiar voice. Familiar, but hard to place: calling quietly in the darkness and rousing her from sleep, Charlie’s jacket underneath her cheek and serving as her pillow. It is only when a match is lit—feeble, flickering, shielded by a glowing hand; and all the same blinding, radiant, a beacon from another world—that a face attaches itself to the voice. Immediately, all of Livia’s relief turns sour.
“You? What are you doing here?”
The voice that answers is as surprised as hers. And sulky.
“This is my home village! Half your servants hail from here.” Then: “If I’d known it was you I wouldn’t have come.”
It’s Lizzy, the scullery maid they let go for thieving on Christmas Eve. She is dressed in collier’s breeches and jacket, and is carrying a safety lamp; opens the glass and lights the wick, turns it down to a faint glow, sends it sweeping through the room.
“You are the talk of the village, you are. Ravished by Gypsies. Only some say that it was an elopement of sorts.” She sneers, is unguarded in her anger. “Who’s sick then? You look just fine to me.”
Her manner changes when the beam finds Thomas. The bandage is drenched, blood sitting on his face like a crab, red-black and many-legged, dredged up from the sea.
“It’s him! Mr. Mosley didn’t say. Just that they needed a nurse. I thought it was a collier. Or someone on the run. Hiding from the law.”
The last word is chased by a shadow: Smoke in the lamplight, falling through its beam like dust. It has no smell.
And just like that Lizzy’s anger leaves her again. She kneels by the bunk bed, begins to peel off Thomas’s bandages; wets a cloth from the mouth of a water bottle she has brought and sets to cleaning the wound. She beckons to Charlie to sit with her, asks him to hold her bag open for her.
“Quick now, Mr. Cooper. I promised I’d keep the light off as much as possible. It’s against our rules.”
Livia hovers behind them, watches Lizzy work.
“What do you know about nursing?” she asks, unable to reconcile what she is seeing with her knowledge of the girl. “Y
ou’re a maid.”
“I help out when a miner gets injured. Cuts, burns, smashed limbs. Got ’prenticed to it when my pa was brought in one night. Broken spine.”
“What happened to him?”
Lizzy’s shoulders stiffen.
“What do you think happens to a man with a broken spine?”
Again Smoke leaps from her mouth. Again it carries no smell. As it turns to Soot it joins the coal dust on the floor, the walls, their skin and clothing. Lizzy takes no notice. She turns to Charlie, and gives him instruction to fetch a bucket of water from a barrel farther down the tunnel outside; a rope is fastened to the tunnel wall and will guide his way. The moment Charlie is gone, Lizzy returns her attention to Thomas, never once looking at Livia. It is as though she has wished her out of existence. So marked is the reversal of their former relationship that Livia finds herself intrigued rather than vexed.
“Why are you angry with me? Because I caught you stealing?”
“I wasn’t stealing.”
“You were. I caught you red-handed, rifling through the pile of presents.”
“I wasn’t stealing,” Lizzy repeats. “I was wanting to add a present. Hide it in the pile.” After a moment she adds, “For him,” and points at Thomas with her chin. “And then you came in and called me a thief.”
“You are lying. I saw you smoke: thick green shrouds. It was as good as admitting it.”
Now Lizzy does look at her. It’s a hard look. Coal has caught in her lashes and lends a startling beauty to her eyes.
“I was angry, that’s all. I could’ve scratched out your eyes.”
Still Livia does not believe her. “You never said any of this. And you didn’t hold any present. Nothing of your own.”
“I shoved it down my blouse. Oh, I know, I could’ve showed it to you, and explained. But I couldn’t stand it. You’d have laughed at it, it was so pitiful next to all your splendour. And of course you would’ve read my note, and made fun of it.” Her voice drops to a hiss. “It was for him, not you.”
Livia is taken aback by the force behind Lizzy’s words.
“And he?” she asks. “Would he not have laughed? At your pitiful present and your note?”
“Perhaps not.”
At last Livia understands.
“You like him.”
Lizzy’s chin rises with the answer. Back in the manor house, Thorpe would have slapped a servant for such a show of pride.
“He looks at everyone the same. You, your mother, the servants. Not friendly, like, but the same. High and low.”
Livia considers this, remembers her own encounters with Thomas’s eyes. “He looks at one as though he means to search one. Down to one’s petticoats. Strip one of all secrets. It isn’t a pleasant look.”
But Lizzy only shrugs. “I don’t mind. I haven’t got nothing to hide.” She sighs, bends over him. “He was handsome then. He’ll be ugly now forever.”
“Hush! He might hear you.”
Again anger returns to Lizzy like the gust of a draft. “So? This one, he’s not afraid of the truth.”
She falls silent, turns back to her patient, her fingers stained with coal and blood.
As she watches Lizzy get on with her work, Livia marvels at how much the girl has seen and understood. And from what? Three or four moments of interaction. No, not interaction: less than that. Proximity. A greeting or two, a look exchanged as she passed Thomas in the corridor. And yet she has seen him more clearly than Livia ever did.
She takes a step to the side, for a clearer view, and studies Thomas. His face is laid bare. The girl is using a razor to shave the hair around the wound. Despite her efforts with the washcloth, the coal dust is everywhere and has already seeped into the open skin. It will be there forever, an ink stain blooming in his hairline and eating into the upper portion of the cheek. The top part of the ear is gone, the stump swollen and knotty. Ugly. Yes, no doubt. But for the first time Livia sees something in Thomas she has missed before. Nobility: something quite separate from bloodlines and the lottery of birth. His eyes are open, unseeing. Soon a bandage covers one of them and his head is swathed in layers of cotton, quickly turning from white to grey.
Charlie returns, laden with a six-gallon bucket, black water slopping over its rim. When Livia steps over to help him, an urgent whisper rises up from the sickbed, like the hiss of a kettle.
“Fever,” Lizzy says, dowsing the lamp. “He is talking in his sleep.”
The next instant they have returned to a darkness given texture by the ravings of the sick.
ф
As Livia soon discovers, there are no days in the dark, no nights. They eat when they are hungry, relearning the sense of taste disassociated from sight; sleep on the bunk beds when they tire; walk the dark tunnel beyond their door when they require exercise. There are other rooms down here, connected by a system of rope handrails that assist navigation. Some are filled to the bursting with food, clothes, furniture, tools, as though the miners are preparing for a siege. Two rooms hold giant water barrels; one is a communal latrine. Beyond that the tunnel leads to the sheer wall of a coal face, oddly soft to the touch.
People come and go. Lizzy does not live with them, but looks in periodically, changing the bandages and searching the wound for signs of rot. Mr. Mosley also stops by at irregular intervals, as does Jake, blandly inquiring after Thomas’s condition. At times they are accompanied by other men, known to Livia only by their voices, or by their outlines when Lizzy briefly lights a lamp. These do not introduce themselves. Nor do they ask any questions; avoid the use of names even amongst themselves. If the men are curious what they are doing there, these three scions of the gentry, not one of them puts it into words.
Listening in to their conversation, Livia gathers that they are all part of the inner circle of whatever revolution is brewing here, down in the depths of the earth. Her sole interaction with one of these “Union Men” occurs when she feels her way into the latrine and, with outstretched hands, suddenly comes into contact with a man’s face and wiry whiskers, hanging waist-high in the darkness. It comes to her that he is squatting there, trousers around his ankles. She gives a cry and recoils.
“I am sorry! I didn’t know—”
The man answers with a husky laugh.
“Sorry about what, lassie? Dark as a badger’s bum down here. We could all be running around with no clothes on for all anyone would know about it.”
She hears him rise, pull up his trousers.
“Don’t ya worry, now, I’ll leave you in peace. Guard the door if you like, make sure you’ve got yer privacy. You young ones are shy about this sort of thing.”
She hears him walk off, stamping his feet loudly, so she knows where he is. It is just as well she would not know him from Adam if they met in the light.
ф
In this sightless, featureless world in which she finds herself, the one thing that remains to her is talk: whispered conversations in the void, sitting on the floor, more often than not, her shoulders leaned back against the wall, and speaking as one does in one’s own head, with a newly found abandon. Most of the time she talks to Charlie. To her surprise, their talk often drifts into argument.
“What did you think of me when we first met?” she will ask, careless in this darkness of the vanity unmasked by her question.
“That you were stiff.”
“Stiff?”
“Yes. Stuck-up, I suppose. And pretty.”
“I suppose now that you can’t see me, I am merely stuck-up.”
“You are trying to be holy, that’s all. But it doesn’t suit you.”
“Doesn’t suit? You are saying I am bad at heart.”
He pauses over this, for longer than is comfortable. “Not bad, no. You are just yourself.”
And later: “We don’t choose how we are made.”
She moves away then, to be alone with her thoughts.
ф
Next time they speak, she finds herself punishing him for
this “doesn’t suit.” It’s Charlie himself who gives her the opening. He wants to know about Thomas’s father: the details of his crime.
She does not immediately satisfy him with an answer.
“You don’t know?” she asks instead, as though overcome by wonder. “You are his best friend and you don’t know?”
“All he told me is that his father killed someone. I thought he would explain it, sooner or later. But he never did.”
It is only when she hears the hurt in Charlie’s voice that Livia realises what she is doing. And feels ashamed.
“I will tell you what Mother told me,” she offers. They are lying side by side on a blanket in one corner of the room. Their forearms very nearly touch; she can feel his hairs caress her skin. They have been doing this a lot lately: almost touch. If there were light by which to inspect, to judge herself, she would have condemned such licence. But in the dark their closeness has no censor.
“It’s like this. Thomas’s father got into a fight with one of his tenants who claimed Mr. Argyle had taken liberties with his wife. Apparently, he stormed into the public house in broad daylight and bashed in the man’s skull. He was arrested and tried, but then he died in prison before the sentencing could take place. ’Flu, Mother said. Thomas had just turned eleven.
“When the news reached her, Thomas’s mother was already sick. A growth on her chest. They were impoverished, the estate heavily in debt, but she refused all offers of help. It was thought that she had sent her son to a local school. Somewhere up north: a provincial establishment, for the children of the minor gentry. But she must have kept him instead, to look after her. He comes from an isolated place: no visitors, the closest neighbour twenty miles away. Nobody took any notice—nobody who mattered—not until she died. But when she did, lawyers got involved. Mother says they always do. The custody of the estate went to Thomas’s uncle—his father’s brother—until Thomas turns twenty-one. A Lord Wesley, of Pembrokeshire.
“Apparently Lord Wesley never went up himself. He sent a steward instead, to look after the estate. Mother says the steward found Thomas living alone on the grounds, holding court over a gaggle of village urchins. All the servants were gone. So the steward wrote to Lord Wesley who in turn wrote to Mother, and she arranged to have him bundled off to school.”