Life Ruins

by Danuta Kot

  Kay sat there looking at the phone. Matt had worked with a lot of people over the years and even now, even a year later, she got calls from people who remembered him.

  The name didn’t mean anything to her. This Shaun Turner would either call back or he wouldn’t. She didn’t need to do anything.

  She went through to the kitchen and made a cup of tea, taking it with her to the front room. She piled more wood in the stove and opened the damper until the fire was blazing, then began sorting through Matt’s CDs, still stored in the bottom of the bookshelves. Milo groaned happily as warmth began to spread through the room.

  Remembering the whistled tune she’d heard earlier, Kay selected a Dubliners album and slipped it into the player.

  She evicted Milo and sat in the big armchair herself. Carefully avoiding her gaze, Milo climbed laboriously onto her lap and curled up, shuffling to get himself comfortable as music filled the room. Ignoring the dog, Kay tried to concentrate.

  But again, Matt eluded her. She’d hoped the music would bring back other memories, but all she could hear was the edginess beneath the jaunty tunes, the scraping fiddle and the harsh voices. When the disc reached the song she’d heard earlier, she couldn’t bear it anymore.

  ‘For love and porter makes a young man older,

  And love and whiskey makes him old and grey,

  And what can’t be cured, love, has to be endured, love . . .’

  She stood up and turned the player off. What can’t be cured can bloody well be changed. You couldn’t recreate the past, and you shouldn’t try.

  It was almost a relief when the phone rang. Caller ID told her it was Becca. After the message, Kay had been expecting – but not looking forward to – this call. She braced herself. ‘Becca, love. How are you? Are you settling in?’

  ‘No. I’m lousy. I’m not staying here. I’m leaving.’ Kay sighed and let Becca run on until she wound down with a final, ‘It’s a dump.’

  ‘What did you expect from a seaside town in winter? Yes, Bridlington’s a dump in January. Everywhere’s a dump in January. What you mean is, it isn’t Leeds so you’re not going to like it even if they serve it up with dancing boys and fairy lights.’

  Kay waited for the angry explosion from the other end of the phone. It was Becca’s way to let off steam before she calmed down. When Becca responded with a sullen, ‘Suppose’, Kay felt a niggle of worry.

  ‘It’s a big change. It’s not what you planned . . . No, I’m not getting at you, I’m just saying – it’s not what you planned. Is it?’ Kay waited as Becca’s voice chattered angrily at the other end of the line. ‘It’s what . . . What? You’re . . . Don’t be daft.’ She took a mouthful of tea, but it was tepid. She made a face, partly over the spoilt tea and partly over the way the conversation with Becca was going. Matt had always been much better at calming Becca down. The trouble with Kay was she had a big mouth and didn’t know when to keep it shut.

  She’d known Becca for eight years, from the day she’d arrived at their house, a thirteen-year-old bundle of anger and aggression. She’d run away from home on her twelfth birthday after being accused of setting a fire at the house where she lived with her mother and stepfather, spent a few weeks on the streets, several months in a secure unit and had a string of broken fosterings behind her. Her first action on coming to Kay and Matt’s had been to wreck her room with a thoroughness that had managed to impress them, veterans though they were of angry teenage room-wreckings.

  Kay had left Matt to deal with it – he was better at the quiet reason that could calm kids who were wound up beyond anything they could bear.

  Later, when a blank-faced, red-eyed Becca came down, hiding her distress behind the mask so many of them wore, all Kay had said was, ‘I hope you like pizza.’

  Becca’s gaze checked her over. ‘Has it got them olive things on it?’

  ‘No,’ Kay reassured her.

  ‘They taste like shit,’ was all Becca said. But she ate her tea quietly, with just the occasional hitch in her breath to show how distressed she had been.

  But in the end, Becca had been one of their success stories, settling down at school, passing her exams, starting a college course, and then . . .

  In the past few weeks, something had gone wrong. Kay didn’t know what had happened, but Becca had suddenly announced she was leaving college and had no interest in further training.

  Now she was in Bridlington working in a café at a drop-in centre for homeless kids, a job Kay had found for her by dint of calling in some favours. Kay still had contacts in all the youth groups and charities up and down the east coast, which came in handy at times like this. ‘So what’s the job like?’

  ‘It’s a café. What do you think it’s like?’

  ‘Like most jobs, I expect. Good bits and boring bits. Better than being a filing clerk.’ Did they even have filing clerks these days?

  ‘What?’

  ‘Nothing. Never mind. It’s what you chose, Becca. It’s not a bad job. You need to work. And it’s not just any café, is it? Think about it. You know all about this, right? Imagine it when you were sleeping rough – you come through the door of this drop-in place and what do you see?’

  ‘Me, looking like a loser in an overall.’

  ‘Don’t put yourself down Becca. Even if you do look like a “loser” – which you aren’t, by the way – you can talk to a loser in an overall, can’t you? She isn’t the police, she isn’t a social worker, she’s just . . .’

  There was silence at the other end of the phone as Becca absorbed this. ‘Yeah, OK . . . but they keep talking to me like I’m stupid, you know? Like I don’t know anything. I know more than they do. They’ve never been on the streets. They’ve never—’

  ‘As far as you know.’ Kay cut in before Becca could really get started. ‘And they don’t know you yet. Give them a chance. They’re just trying to take care of the kids, trying to make sure you don’t get it wrong.’

  ‘They keep telling me, do this, do that, they don’t give me a chance like I’m some kind of—’

  Kay intervened before the metaphor arrived. Becca’s metaphors tended to be more than colourful. ‘What worked for you?’

  Becca’s teenage years had been marked by a recklessness that Kay had become familiar with over her years of working with damaged children. It spoke of, if not a desire to die, a lack of interest in staying alive. She could hear the shadow of it in Becca’s voice even now.

  Down the line, Becca was mulling this over. ‘Knowing someone was bothered,’ she said after a long pause. The anger had gone out of her voice and she was thinking again.

  Becca had always had a problem with impulse control. Even at twenty, she was prone to quick, destructive acts when she was angry, like her sudden decision to leave her college course. She would throw biting insults at people who hadn’t even realised they’d upset her, or, as now, threaten to walk out of a job that could get her back on track. At one stage, a psychiatrist had suggested she was bipolar, but Kay thought this was a load of rubbish and an excuse to quieten down a difficult kid by pushing drugs down her throat. Psychiatrists were one step up the evolutionary ladder from cockroaches, as far as Kay was concerned.

  ‘So you can be someone who’s bothered, right?’

  ‘Suppose.’ Becca’s voice was grudging, but she was calmer. ‘They don’t go on like that at Alek.’

  ‘Alek?’ Kay knew most of the staff at the centre, but she wasn’t aware of an Alek.

  ‘The caretaker sort of guy. Alek.’

  ‘He probably doesn’t work with the kids.’

  ‘Yes, he does. He’s got this like workshop with all old engines and stuff that the kids work on. If they want to.’

  ‘OK. And you get on with him?’

  ‘Yeah. He doesn’t say much. He’s foreign. But he’s OK.’

  A bit of an outsider – that would appeal to Becca. Becca disliked and mistrusted anyone with authority over her, starting with her police officer stepfather and expan
ding outwards with almost no limit.

  ‘And the users?’

  ‘Mostly they don’t talk to me. Much. There’s one or two . . . like there’s this kid, Paige, comes in sometimes. I don’t get her, but she likes to talk. She thinks I’m cool because I come from Leeds.’

  ‘You see?’ Being cool carried a lot of currency. ‘What don’t you get about her?’

  ‘I dunno. She seems together, and then she doesn’t seem together, know what I mean? She used to come in with another girl, but now it’s just Paige on her own.’

  ‘What happened to the other girl?’

  ‘Dunno. She was there when I started but she hasn’t been around for a bit. It’s not like school or something. You don’t have to go.’

  Kay frowned. They should at least be curious when a user went off the radar. ‘Did she come in regularly, this friend of – what was her name, Paige?’

  ‘They’re not all homeless. Some of them – Neil says this – some of them use it like a sort of youth club, you know.’

  Which was probably true. Bridlington, like too many places, had nothing for young people and if Neil Cowper, the drop-in manager, was expanding his remit to provide a place for the under-occupied youth of Bridlington, then she wasn’t going to argue with him. ‘OK. Now, you listen to me. You’ve been there three weeks, you get on with one member of staff, at least one of the kids trusts you enough to talk to you – what’s the problem, Becca?’

  There was a long silence, then a sigh. ‘I get it. I’ll give it a go.’

  ‘Good for you. That’s the right thing to do.’

  ‘So why didn’t you say so in the first place? When I said I was going to leave?’

  ‘And you’d listen to me?’

  ‘I might. Just for once you could tell me what to do, stop all of this listening. All of this It’s up to you, Becca.’

  ‘And if I did? You’d be out of there so fast we wouldn’t see you go. Come on, Becca.’

  She heard Becca’s unfamiliar laugh. ‘Yeah, OK. Thanks.’

  Kay was left with the dialling tone. She put down the phone and leaned back in her chair as Milo climbed back onto her knee and settled down. ‘You’re too big to be a lapdog,’ she told him, patting his head absently.

  This was the second time she’d heard from one of her foster-children in the past couple of weeks. About ten days ago she’d had a call from Maireid – their last foster-child. They hadn’t planned on fostering again, but Maireid needed a home, there was no one else – the usual story. She’d come to them a few months before they realised the extent of Matt’s illness. When Matt became too ill to cope, they’d had to send Maireid back into care. No matter how valid the reasons, Kay knew she had broken her unspoken promise to the child.

  Can I come and see you? Maireid had asked, her voice tentative. It was the first time they’d spoken since Matt’s death.

  Course you can, Kay said.

  OK. I might . . .

  But Maireid never followed up on the call. She still wasn’t prepared to trust Kay. It was going to take time.

  You never really retired from fostering.

  The tea was cold and beyond redemption, but she couldn’t be bothered to make any more. It wasn’t Becca who needed to sort her life out, it was Kay. Special Kay, her foster-kids used to call her. She couldn’t remember who came up with the name, but it had stuck.

  The wind rattled the window frame and the chimney puffed smoke, filling the room with the smell of ashes. Kay leaned back in her chair, running her hands over the dog’s back, and listened to the storm building up outside – wind and rain, and a foul day promised tomorrow.

  Count your blessings, she said to herself, and felt like some kind of geriatric Pollyanna. She got up and poured a large gin.

  That was a blessing worth counting.

  Chapter 5

  In the light of Jared’s torch, the roof of the tunnel vanished into darkness. It was like the arched nave of a church – an old, abandoned church that had been left to the mercy of time and the weather. The evidence of water incursion was everywhere. The bricks were patterned with mineral deposits, and the pointing was worn away. He could see places where the bricks had moved, coming loose and falling out of line, but the structure looked stable enough for now.

  Groundwater trickled from the roof and the vent shafts. Crystals glittered from the arched ceiling, and in the distance, the tunnel curved away. Apart from the constant drip of water, it was silent.

  He moved on into the darkness. The air smelt of wet earth and ashes, and the clay underfoot gleamed and then vanished as his light travelled across it.

  His torch picked up a deeper shadow low in the wall. He let the light play over it. A brick arch opened onto a side tunnel. In the darkness, he could easily have missed it. Beneath the arch, the entrance was square, shored up with timber.

  It was lower than head height. He stooped and tried to see further along in the wavering light of his torch. It was probably a side shaft to dump spoil down the cliff side. He could smell damp timber with an undercurrent of sourness. Water lay almost a foot deep on the floor, like a thick brown soup. The walls were held up by planks, and pit props supported the roof.

  He crouched down to take a closer look and his back locked in a spasm. He swore and eased himself upright, gritting his teeth against the pain. He used the moves a genius physio had shown him and slowly the cramped muscle relaxed. If his back spasmed while he was in a narrow space, he’d be in deep shit.

  Gingerly, he crouched down again and let his torch illuminate the side tunnel. He could make out more detail now. The props were crude, the planks holding the walls back were bulging. Almost beyond the limits of the light, he could see a ladder that must lead to an upper gallery. Was this a mine? He ran his light up and down the ladder.

  He was going up there. He knew he was.

  The tunnel was dangerous. The old argument that the side tunnel had stood for decades and wasn’t going to collapse now was specious. Some of the props were twisted, showing the ground had moved. His actions could be the thing that caused the final shift, the thing that would make the supports move that critical millimetre and bring the roof down. He’d be buried under tons of mud. It would be crazy to go along there, especially equipped as he was now, without ropes and a head torch.

  He grinned as the rat stirred inside him, and, testing his footing, he moved forwards.

  Water and rotting wood soaked up oxygen. He remembered the narrow passage under the Derbyshire moors, waiting, listening to the sound of water dripping, dripping, every sense alert for what was coming.

  Not now! He forced himself to concentrate.

  He needed to watch out for foul air. He took out the lighter that he kept in his pocket for just this purpose and clicked it. It ignited at once and burned steadily. There was no flicker, and no trace of blue, which meant there was enough oxygen in this part of the tunnel. He wanted to keep it lit as he went forward, but the roof was too low for him to stand. His back wouldn’t allow him to stoop, or not for any distance, so he had to move in a clumsy crouch. He used one hand to hold the torch, the other to help him keep his balance against the spongy timbers.

  He stopped to test the air every couple of feet. Foul air could make you lose consciousness in seconds, and then it would kill you.

  The water flooding the tunnel was thick and muddy. As he moved through it, it released a sour smell. His back gave a twinge. It didn’t like this unsupported crouch.

  Closer to the ladder, the light from his torch revealed the walls were starting to cave in. They looked almost as if someone had been digging there. An amateur jet miner? Digging in this collapsing tunnel? How crazy was that?

  The light of his torch wavered and danced as his awkward stance sent him off balance. He put a hand out to support himself against the wall and felt the timber crumble away.

  In front of him, the ladder led upwards into darkness. It wasn’t something that had been put there recently. This wood too looked old a
nd rotten. What was it – some kind of escape route? To where? He had to know where it led. He gripped the rungs and the ladder held steady.

  No excuses left.

  Using the ladder for support, he eased himself upright, groaning with relief as the muscles in his back straightened. He shone the torch upwards, but all he could see was an opening and, dimly above it, the glitter of crystals.

  Slowly, moving as cautiously as he could, he put a foot on the first rung, part of him expecting it to snap under his weight . . . He brought his mind back to the present and focused on what he was doing as he pulled himself up – no slips, no sudden jerks to break the fragile wood – then onto the next rung, and the next. He shone the torch at the opening again.

  He could see more detail now. It looked as though there was another tunnel above running crosswise to this one. Something bulky lay across the opening, partly blocking it. It looked like a bundle of . . . what? Rags? Sacking? And there was something hanging down from the bundle, touching the top of the ladder – a piece of cloth or something. He gave it a gentle tug.

  And the ladder shifted. He gripped it with both hands, trying to keep his hold on the torch as well. He felt the precursor of the collapse as soil scattered onto his head and shoulders. Moving by instinct, he freed his feet from the rungs and slid down the ladder, rubble from the roof cascading with him. His feet hit the ground, sending a shaft of agony through him. He had to move fast, to get out of there before the roof came down on his head, but his arm, his legs, felt numb. The torch dropped from his suddenly nerveless fingers and he slumped to his knees in total blackness as the rush of debris cascaded down.

  Oh, fuck, oh shit, oh Christ, he was being buried alive, he . . . the fall from above slowed and stopped. He waited frozen in the moment for the fall to start again, but the roof seemed to be holding. Carefully, carefully, he tested his arms and legs. It all hurt, but movement was coming back. He felt around for the torch, but it was gone. The darkness pressed against his face. He slipped his hand into his pocket, tugged the lighter free. He clicked it once, twice, then held it up. The flickering, bluish flame created a small circle of illumination. He moved it towards the ladder and looked up.