by Guy Burt
The shale and loose rock at the lip of the quarry, and on the path down, were wet with dew or with night rain; I wasn’t sure which. I set my feet carefully, one after the other, and sideways on so as to maintain a better grip on the incline, just as Sophie had shown me. With one arm half outstretched behind me for balance, I made my way without incident to the bottom of the quarry, and looked around. The sky overhead was the colour of old metal gone white, and at one point I saw two or three dark birds wander lazily into my field of vision, and then move away again into the world beyond the quarry. There was a strange, alien sensation in me, and for several minutes I couldn’t work out what it was. And then I realized that I had never been in the quarry alone; never been here, not even once before, without Sophie beside me.
I shivered, and set off less determinedly across the quarry floor. Scattered around were rocks that I recognized, especially the ones too big to move, which had sat there, unchanged and unchanging, ever since I had first seen this place. That would have been four—no, five years ago. Over there was where Sophie normally sat to write; over there, the place where we had once had a picnic; over there, the place I had found my best fossil, the one I had given to Sophie. The days of the fossils and the rock hammer seemed so very far away, measured against their memory. The air seemed colder down here, and I rubbed my arms vigorously. I found that I had come right across the quarry floor to the start of the slope that led to the cages.
I looked up at their blank openings and swallowed uncomfortably. Sophie had told me about them; abandoned workings that had been closed off with bars to stop people playing in them. It seemed a waste, to me; I couldn’t imagine anyone wanting to go inside one of the cages, for whatever reason. Especially, for some reason, the farthest one, into which I had once—many years ago—thrown a rock. The cage had swallowed that up, and I knew in my belly that it would swallow me up, too, if I were able to go inside. Even the smell of them was disquieting; it seeped between the bars to dissipate in the fresher air outside, but if you were close enough you could smell it. At the foot of the farthest cage, held down by a rock and protected in part by an overhang in the quarry wall, was the canvas bag. I retrieved it, and then stood, suddenly more scared than I had been, and not knowing what to do. If I went back to the centre of the quarry, I was in full view. But if I stayed here, I was only three feet or so from the cage. For a long moment I hesitated, my mind whirling, and then I trotted hastily down again to the open arena of the quarry floor. I didn’t think that Sophie would come. She had gone into town. . . . In the back of my mind, I wondered what she would do if she did find me here.
I took the biscuit tin out of the bag and put it down in front of me. It was a large, square tin, and the legends round the sides proclaimed that it had once held a teatime assortment. Much of the red paint had been battered and flaked off, through constant friction with the other contents of the bag; the screwdriver, chisels, hammer, were all there, as if I could step back into the past if I felt like it, and pick them up once again. I studied the tin carefully, noting where scratches continued across from its body to its lid. I squared it in front of me, and then prised the lid off and set it beside the tin, keeping its alignment identical. I had no idea whether Sophie would have marked the tin in some way, or whether she simply relied on the location of the quarry to guard it for her, but I was reluctant to take any chances at all.
Inside, there were several plastic bags, their openings twisted round and secured with clothes pegs. Inside were the rather tattered exercise books in which Sophie kept her sort-of diary. I undid one carefully and opened the book inside. Line after line and page after page was filled with jumbled idiocy. It was one of the earlier books; there were none of the neat columns of letters I had seen in her more recent writings. There seemed to be no dates, no obvious breaks from one section to the next, except an occasional change in the ink colour of the Biro she had used. I looked through it carefully, and then flicked back to the beginning. From my pocket, I took the paper and pen I had brought with me, and laboriously started to copy out the first page of the quarry book.
For the first time, I interrupt him. “What made you choose the quarry books?” I say. “I thought you were scared of them.”
He looks up, startled. “Why did I choose them? Because they were the biggest secret, I suppose.”
“Is that true?”
He looks at me, and there is something strange almost hidden in his eyes. “Is what true?”
“That they were the biggest secret.”
He laughs. “At that point, they were,” he says, and laughs again. I feel myself shiver, and the candle flame—burnt low now—flickers and darts in the centre of the floor.
I pulled shut the door of my bedroom after taking a quick look around the house and satisfying myself that Sophie was not back yet. It was just past midday, and there was an hour or so before lunchtime. I knew perfectly well that I was unlikely to see my mother if I was careful, and that she would assume Sophie had taken care of me. I didn’t know when Sophie was planning to return, but I felt confident that I would hear her when she did.
Sitting on the floor by my bed, I spread out the pages of my Leonardo project in a convincingly chaotic fashion, and then took from my pocket the four folded sheets of paper onto which I had transcribed passages of the quarry books. I had taken one segment—the first page, in each case—from each of the four books in the biscuit tin. They had been the thick blue exercise books that had been phased out at our school about a year before and replaced with thinner types with a variety of brightly coloured covers. I started with the one I had assumed was the earliest; there was a degree of change in Sophie’s handwriting over the course of the sequence, and I had been able to assign the passages a chronological order fairly easily.
I stared at the meaningless strings of letters in incomprehension for five minutes before shaking my head and deciding to try a more organized approach. The first thing I tried was reading the passage backwards, but that made no sense at all. I tried writing out the alphabet on another sheet, and seeing whether that helped. I tried substituting one letter for another, but my own ignorance of the best ways to do this left me confused and irritable. By one o’clock, I had had enough; I folded the four sheets carefully, and then stopped, trying to decide what to do with them. If I hid them, there was no guarantee that Sophie would not find them. She knew everywhere I went, everything I did. The only secret place that I had was inside my own head.
I took the papers out into the garden, down behind one of the sheds in the orchard, and burned them.
twelve
He is not telling me everything. I have been sure of that for some time now. I think everything he has said has been the truth, but he is avoiding something that is central to it all. If I knew him better, perhaps I could judge what it is that he is withholding; but one of the things that has been brought home to me in the course of this night is that I know Matthew hardly at all.
There is another side to that, of course. He doesn’t know me, either. He is seeing me as an echo of his childhood—but that childhood only exists in his head.
The storm has subsided. The rain hisses and patters outside, but there is no more lightning, and the wind has fallen. Matthew doesn’t appear to have noticed. He sits, head down, as if buried deep in thought. It occurs to me to wonder how he sees this from his point of view—whether it all makes perfect sense, or whether he is aware of the discontinuities, the lesions between his story and the real world of this room. In a strange way, I think he is beginning to be. He seems not as sure of himself as before, and the pauses when he stops talking and waits in silence have become more frequent. At times, he looks like a man struggling. I watch him, seeing this, and am scared; I don’t know what the struggle is about, or what I might precipitate by interfering.
It might be my imagination, but I think I can see a faint lightening of the darkness glimpsed between the boards of the window.
At the weekends, more often t
han not, Sophie and I would meet up with Steven and Andy at the barn. Sometimes we would all stay there, talking, but generally Andy and I left the other two alone and went off to other parts of the farm, or to the woods on the hill above. I found, rather to my surprise, that I liked Andy, and enjoyed being with him. We talked about most things, and he told me about the school he was at, which sounded very different from anything I had experienced. I told him that Sophie might be going to a boarding school—something she’d only recently mentioned to me—and he laughed, and said that was fine if you could afford it. He also said that it might be the best place for her, which I found funny but also disturbing, because it made me think of having to live at home for two years without Sophie.
We left crisp tracks in early morning frosts on these walks, and our breath trailed away behind us ethereally before fading into transparency. When we talked about sex, I was surprised and pleased to find that I knew more, in a technical sense, than Andy did, although he knew about things the books didn’t mention. We traded jokes, and I told him about asthma, and we decided that we were a splinter group from the barn. The sun and sky had turned to winter by now, and Christmas was within sight.
On the last day of school, Sophie was waiting for me by the gate, surrounded by struggling children clasping paintings and costumes for the end of term show, along with school books and satchels stuffed with belongings. By contrast, she was carrying just a shoulder bag, although I was laden with stuff.
“Hi,” she said. “Do you want me to carry some of that? Look, if I take this big thing here, you can use both hands for the rest of it.”
“All right,” I said quickly, and let her take a long cardboard tube filled with rolled-up pictures.
“We’re hardly early at all,” she said, disapprovingly. “Never mind. What do you say we get a can of something and some sweets before we go home?”
“Yeah, sure! Why?”
“I don’t know. It’s the end of term. We should celebrate.” We went left instead of right out of the gates, and made slow progress as far as the high street, where Sophie ducked into a shop and bought food and drink. Returning with her pockets bulging, she said, “Right. Head for home.” I nodded, and we set off.
Christmas itself was usually a dull time at our house. This year it was both better and worse; my father remained away, wherever he was, and the time I spent actually inside the house was for the most part intolerably boring. Of course, all this meant in practice was that Sophie and I took every opportunity to escape, despite the weather. My mother never made any protest, or, if she did, I never heard it. By this time, Sophie was running the house, and although no one would ever have said such a thing, I think my mother and I both knew it to be true.
We would head out at dawn and spend our time at any of our several places, depending mostly on the weather. I could sit and read quietly in the seclusion of the holly bush for a morning, or, if the rain was heavy, we could run across the fields to the barn and stay there for the day. We would talk, and I would play with my fighters or draw pictures, and Sophie would sit reading or thinking. As the holiday progressed, I noticed that she spent more and more time absorbed in her own thoughts. We bought new batteries for the torches in our concealed room, and new candles for the holly bush.
Secretly, we were both planning the presents we would give the other for Christmas, and Sophie told me she had decided to hold a Christmas party in the straw fort, so we were collaborating to decorate it with holly and other greenery. It was an exciting time, and we enjoyed it together.
“Come on,” Sophie said. “What have you lost?”
“My anorak.”
“It’s in the hall where you left it.”
Suitably clothed, we set off for the quarry. The sky was clear but covered by a thin mist of winter cloud, high up, so that it looked like frosted glass. The white sun was still low over the trees as we climbed the hill.
“Are we going to see Andy and Steven soon?” I asked.
“Maybe. I haven’t really thought,” Sophie said casually. I knew it wasn’t true; she had always thought things out beforehand. “There’s a new hairdresser opened in town.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah. I thought I might go there and see what difference it makes.”
“You’re getting vain,” I told her.
“So? Girls are allowed to be vain. It’s part of our personality profile. We can get away with lots of things boys can’t.”
“Oh.” There didn’t seem to be much else to say.
“And I should buy some clothes as well,” she went on. “But carefully. I don’t want people noticing. Shop assistants get worried if kids spend money.”
“What are you going to buy?”
“Some jeans. Decent ones. And some tops. You know, sort of sweatshirt things. And I’m going to get a bra.”
“Really?”
“Yeah. I don’t really need one all that much, but what the fuck. I’ll get one of those tiny little things for nervous teenagers.”
We got to the edge of the quarry and began to work our way down. I was struck suddenly by the thought that this was the first time we had visited the quarry since I had come here alone. What if I had made a mistake, and Sophie noticed something was wrong? I could feel my heart hammering faster, and the air seemed to have turned very dry.
“—in any case. Yeah?”
“What?” I said.
“Wake up. I said I look thirteen in any case.”
“Yeah, you probably do,” I said.
“We won’t stay too long. There’s lots else to do, and it’s pretty cold.”
“OK. I’ll get the bag, if you like.”
“Fair enough.” We walked together to the middle of the quarry, and then I went up to the cages and retrieved the bag. As I walked back to where Sophie was standing, I felt as if I were carrying a grenade in my hands. I passed it to her.
“Thanks.” She opened the tin, unwrapped the latest book, and turned to a new page. Unconsciously, I had been holding my breath, but at this I let it out, and it formed a drifting haze in front of my face.
“I’m going to look round the woods,” I said.
“I’ll be about ten minutes,” she replied. “Don’t go too far. Watch out for bears and stuff.”
“Bears hibernate in winter,” I said, feeling pleased with myself, and Sophie laughed.
“So they do. Now piss off, you’re spoiling my concentration.”
I grinned, and made off back the way we had come, relief flooding through me that I had not been discovered. At the top of the incline I looked back down at Sophie, sitting on a rock, a small colourful figure hunched over the book she was resting on her knees.
Later that afternoon, we talked about the Christmas party.
“We’ll have it in the upper room,” she said. “A proper secret party.”
“Who else will be there?”
“No one but us.” She thought for a second. “And I think we should have it at midnight.”
“Yeah? Really?”
“Why not? It would be pretty cool. We’ll get some food and stuff. And bring the torches up. We can cover them with some of that crêpe paper, make them different colours.”
I was immediately enthusiastic. “Yeah! That would be really great. When do we get it ready?”
“This weekend. It had better be fairly soon. Christmas is—a week on Thursday. It’s not long.”
“I’ve never had a real party before,” I said.
“Yeah, I know. Well, this is the last Christmas before—you know, before I go away. So I thought we’d make it special.”
“Oh.” When she said that, I felt suddenly cold.
We were at the top of the rise now, and could see down into the next dip in the landscape. Off in one direction I could see the roofs of the town, and the snaking roads leading out away from it. Back the way we had come, our house was out of sight around the shoulder of the hill. Sophie was carrying our lunch in a plastic bag.
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��There’s so much to be done,” she went on. “Exciting, isn’t it?”
“It is,” I said. I wished she hadn’t reminded me about next year, and new schools, and her going away.
“Let’s go down there. We can sit on the wall and eat, if you like.”
“OK. I’m getting hungry,” I said.
“Race you.” She was off and running before I realized what she had said.
“That’s not fair!”
He stays silent for a moment, rubbing his face with one hand as if trying to decide something. When he speaks, it is almost in a whisper.
“I’ve never got this far before,” he says.
Instinctively, I know what he means. “In the story?”
He nods. “Yeah. I—when I tried before, I could never get far enough.”
His face is twisted, as if in pain. “Wait a bit,” I say, surprised at myself for my calmness. I have no idea whether this development is to my advantage or not.
With a sudden, unpleasant jolt of recognition, I realize that I am behaving exactly as he has accused me—secretively, hiding things, inspecting opportunities that I may be able to use. I find I am shocked by the thought that I can be, even in part, the way he sees me.
He says, “The real problem was that I didn’t realize—until afterwards—how much I loved you. It took absence to force that on me. You filled up my whole world. You were my barrier against the outside.”
“Was it just love?”
Immediately, I wonder if I have made a mistake. The last thing I need to do now is to anger him, make him lose this tenuous link to whatever constitutes the rest of his story.