On the Edge

by Jane Jesmond

  She thrust the key into the padlock. It clattered as she fought to keep her anger under control. I kept my mouth shut, flexing my muscles, preparing to attack when she came through the door.

  ‘Seb. My Seb. He thought you were wonderful. Always going on about you. How fearless you were.’ She paused and bowed her head over the padlock for a moment and then raised it and threw her last words at me. ‘What a fucking inspiration you were to him.’

  There was no point in talking to her but I couldn’t help it.

  ‘Kelly. I never meant to encourage Seb to go free running. I was off my head. All that time. I…’ The padlock sprang apart and the chain rattled to the ground. Her face was wild with anger. My moment was coming but I mustn’t rush it. Wait, I told myself. Wait till she’s closer. I tensed, ready to leap and shove and kick when she burst in. She didn’t. Instead, she bent down, reached inside her bag and pulled out a long, dark object.

  It was a gun. A twelve-bore shotgun.

  Fuck.

  Waves of alarm shot along my nerves as she took up the shooting stance. The one Talan had drilled into me on those damp expeditions. Feet shoulder-width apart, one slightly forward, knees bent.

  I didn’t wait to see how carefully Kelly aimed or how she squeezed the trigger. I leaped for the narrow passageway to the prison cave and rolled inside it. A shot whizzed past my feet as I landed outside the door to the cell. Displaced air rushed down the passage and then the noise blasted everything else from my head. It shattered against the rock and reverberated down the passage. A splintering smash followed by a cry before another shot crashed into the echo of the first. More cries rose from the cell next to me.

  Two shots. She’d fired twice. After two shots she’d have to reload. For a moment, we were on equal terms. Only a moment, though, because as soon as she’d reloaded, she’d come after me. She’d do what she should have done in the first place and only fire when she had me trapped with nowhere to go.

  I had one chance. Rush out now and fight her. But I couldn’t. My body still shook with the dying echoes of the shot and all I could force it to do was peer round the edge of the passage into the stope. She wasn’t there. I moved further round and looked out beyond the bars. Still nothing.

  A movement on the ground. I was looking too high.

  She was a black figure sprawled on the floor of the rock, only visible now because she’d lifted her head. I knew what had happened. She’d taken her time over the first shot, prepared herself, but the second, fired in rage at seeing me leap to safety, had knocked her back and she’d fallen.

  We locked eyes. She grabbed the gun and staggered up, slamming her back against the door so that her weight held it tight shut. She broke the gun open and fumbled at the spent cartridges. I had seconds before she reloaded. I stumbled back into the passage, scrabbled on the floor and found the rope I’d seen earlier, grabbed it near the centre and folded it in two. The familiar feel of the nylon was smooth against my skin. I forced myself back out into the stope. Kelly was still fumbling with the gun, her back turned to me.

  I poked the loop through and round the outside bar of the door and its frame, threaded the ends of the rope through the loop and pulled as tight as I could, as quickly as I could, so it would hold the door firmly shut. My eyes were tied to the rope. Hers were fixed on the gun. The noise of the barrel clicking shut warned me time was up. As she turned I fled back into the passage, round the corner and out of her sight, my hands gripping the rope ends like a shark’s jaw locked into its prey.

  She was shut out. Without the ends she couldn’t undo the loop holding the door closed. I felt her tug, tentative at first, then a fierce yank that jerked my arms forward while my hands held tight.

  Opposite my hiding place, a face rose from the bottom of the barred hole in the prison cave door. They shot me a quick glance through deep brown eyes, then ducked. Someone said a few curt words and the eyes arrived again and then the face of a youngish man with a moustache straggling over his mouth and deep hollows below his cheekbones. He started to speak. I shook my head. Not now. I needed to listen. The man raised his hand, made the shape of a gun and mimed firing it. I jerked my head towards the outside. Towards Kelly. Towards the rope. Trying to tell him I was not the one with the gun. That the rope was all that was protecting us. He nodded, threw a few guttural words over his shoulder, provoking a babble of replies and disappeared.

  I waited. Did Kelly have a knife? Please God don’t let her have a knife.

  The minutes went on forever. Until I heard her swear. The clink of the chain wound back round the door, the padlock snapping shut, footsteps fading. The door further down the passage slammed behind her.

  She’d gone but how long before she came back with a knife or a saw to cut the rope?

  Inside the prison cave, a tight mass of bodies huddled as far from the door as they could, the fluttering flame of a candle casting glimmers of light over their faces. Little details imprinted themselves on my eyes as I looked for the man with the moustache. In one corner, a young woman held an older one tight against her shoulder with hands splayed out as though to protect every bit of her head. At the front, a man with curly grey hair squatted, holding one of the filthy mattresses in front of his little group. Helping him was the man with the moustache.

  ‘Please,’ I called. ‘Please, I need to talk to you.’ He didn’t move. I tried again. ‘The woman with the gun has gone but she’ll come back. Please. I need your help.’

  Two hands stretched out from behind him, pushed him out of the way and a woman emerged from the shadows. Tall and upright, she left the frightened huddle, picked up the candle and came towards the door. A headscarf shadowed her features until she was close and raised the candle. Its light flattened her jutting cheekbones and leached the colour from her face. She was an older woman with the shut-in look of the very exhausted but behind the stretched skin of her jaw, her teeth were clenched.

  Did she speak English?

  ‘The gun,’ I said. ‘The woman with the gun.’ I mimed the gun.

  ‘Eisha,’ she said.

  Eisha? She didn’t speak English. She hadn’t understood.

  ‘I am Eisha.’ She turned and beckoned to someone in the mass behind. A gangly lad emerged from the shadows and came to join her. ‘He is Farid.’ No expression broke the rigid lines of the youngster’s face. Eisha put an arm round his shoulders.

  ‘We are from Afghanistan.’ She spoke quickly now, nudging Farid until he took the candle she thrust into his hands as she rummaged in a bag round her waist.

  ‘I am a nurse. I have papers.’

  There was no time for this.

  ‘I’m Jen. Jenifry. My name is Jenifry.’ The words tumbled out in an ungainly muddle. ‘I need –’

  ‘We worked with your army.’

  ‘Please. Later. I will help you later. I am a prisoner, too. I don’t have keys. The gun. You heard the gun. She will come back and kill me.’

  ‘Where are we?’

  ‘A tin mine. An old tin mine.’

  She looked confused.

  ‘In Cornwall.’ I said urgently.

  ‘Cornwall?’

  ‘In England.’

  For the first time Farid’s face changed. England meant something to him. He turned to tell the others. Voices rose in response.

  ‘Please,’ I shouted over them. ‘Please, Eisha. Farid. All of you. I will help you. I promise. But first we must stop the woman with the gun. Then we will escape before the men who shut you in come back.’

  I’d have said anything to get them to help but I meant this promise. Underneath the roiling waves of fear that Kelly would return before I could explain what I needed them to do, I was angry as fuck. Horrified. How could anyone treat people like this?

  ‘Tell me,’ Eisha said. ‘Tell me and I will translate for the others.’

  I explained as quickly an
d simply as I could, all the time clenching the rope tight in my hands. The man with the moustache and the grey-haired man who had held the mattress came forward as Eisha translated and asked her questions in a language I couldn’t identify.

  In the end, they nodded. I thought they’d understood. Farid reached out for the rope and I passed it through the hole in the door and went back into the stope, only checking to see they’d pulled it tight.

  I scrambled up into the raise again, taking care to upend the tower of crates with a last kick and wedged myself once more in the passage above the stope. Every bit of my body protested. Every cut and bruise screamed that enough was enough.

  Kelly was gone a long time. It was probably only minutes but it was longer than I’d dared to expect. Long enough to hope that Kit had got my message and the cavalry might arrive. Long enough to fear my muscles might grow tired and slip. To fear Eisha might not have understood properly or that the men might not do exactly as she’d said. The waiting was unbearable. Ideas dropped like heavy stones into my mind and broke my concentration. I might never see the sun again. Might never leave this hole buried underground. Everything depended on Eisha and Farid and the others. I wished I’d asked them all their names. It would be good to know whose hands held my future. Focus, I told myself. Listen for Kelly. But my mind wandered, wondering where they’d come from. How they’d ended up in here. My hand slipped, damp with sweat and blood. How much longer could I hold on? How much longer would she be? Already I could feel the adrenalin oozing away. Stabs from my muscles warned me they were near the end. Think of something else. I thought of Eisha. Travelling alone with the teenage Farid. Maybe her work with the army had put her in danger when they pulled out so she’d had no choice but to flee, leaving everything behind. They’d all lost everything except maybe some hope that the future could be different. It wouldn’t be unless we got out. Keep holding on. Their escape was as much in my hands as mine was in theirs. Our life stories ran intertwined through this narrow gap in time and none of us knew what lay the other side.

  The clatter of the big door down the passage as it was unlocked jerked me back to the present. Kelly made no effort to be quiet, kicking the bars still held tight shut by the loop of rope when she reached the entrance to the stope. Her bag jangled as she threw it to the ground. I sensed her rage. It pulsated through the dead air. A beam of light stabbed the dark. She’d got a torch. A head torch, I thought, as the sound of the chain tumbling to the floor rang out. Her hands were free.

  Then came the noise of sawing. I gripped the rock tighter, despite the pain from the cuts in my fingers. Kelly had found a hacksaw somewhere. I peered down. The rope, stretched round the corner, trembled with the force of her wild, jagged cuts. Eisha started to shriek. Joined swiftly by bellowing male voices. Make a noise, I’d said, as much as you can, as soon as she starts cutting the rope. And they did me proud, hammering the door with fists and throwing empty cans and stones through the hole in the cell door, to bounce off the rock and clatter into the stope. But it was their screams that made the most noise. The cries torn from their depths echoed round the mine. Even I, who knew the plan, shivered. Kelly faltered when the noise began. The rope stopped vibrating for a few seconds then she carried on sawing as though deaf to the cacophony around her.

  The rope slashed from side to side despite the hands holding it tight. Nothing could resist the sharp teeth of the saw. A few seconds later it fell to the ground. She’d cut through the last strand and now nothing prevented her from entering the stope. The prisoners’ screams masked the sound of the barred door opening. I waited though, thanking the gods that Kelly had worn a torch because I could see from the stillness of its light that she wasn’t moving. Maybe she’d paused at the threshold, letting herself anticipate the moment when she’d hunt me down through the little passages, blasting holes in my body when I ran out of places to hide.

  But my moment was coming. The most dangerous moment. The moment when my timing had to be perfect. The beam of light jolted. She moved into the stope and the prisoners’ screams and the terror flowing through my body became pure fuel, ignited, and roared through my blood.

  At the last moment, I thought she sensed me above her. Or that the movement as I tensed my body, ready to push down, sent a warning breeze to disturb the hair on the top of her head. She began to look up, suddenly understanding that I wasn’t at the end of the rope but she was too late.

  I burst out of the dark hole above her head and knocked her flying. The gun scuttled into the dark. I tensed, ready for her next move, but she lay motionless at my feet, a black shadow in the dimness. Instinct told me to stamp on her knee, kick her, punch her face, but something about her stillness stopped me. She shifted, a slight curl of her body round itself, and moaned. My assault had knocked the rage out of her, flattened her and left her quivering like an empty bag rustling in the wind. I thought she was weeping. The violence and anger seeped away until only the cries of the refugees echoing round the mine were a reminder of what had gone before. Her mouth opened. I thought she was speaking but I couldn’t hear her.

  I knew it was stupid but I knelt and put my ear to her mouth.

  ‘My knee,’ she said. ‘My knee. My knee.’

  I picked up the shotgun, gleaming gently in the light from the raise, broke it open and removed the cartridges; then I went back to Kelly and forced her body against the bars at the entrance to the stope. She shrieked. I thought about tying her up but I couldn’t bring myself to prise her hands from her knee. Even between her fingers the joint looked all wrong. She wasn’t going anywhere. It was over. But I felt no joy, not even relief, just a grey sadness that things had ended the way they had.

  I picked up Kelly’s bag, with all the keys rattling and clinking at the bottom and went to let the refugees out. Their cries stopped as they saw me. Farid, still clutching the end of the rope, smiled. My fingers hurt too much to unlock the door so I posted the keys through the bars and let Eisha try while I leaned against the rock and bit my lips shut to stop me shouting at her to hurry up. The traffickers could come back at any moment. We weren’t safe yet.

  When we emerged into a Cornish afternoon, the air sweet with moisture and the only sound the rush of the river swollen by storms far down in the valley, the man with the moustache knelt on the ground and dug his fingers into the peaty earth, dragging up great handfuls and rubbing and smelling it.

  Even here, we weren’t safe. I hurried them away. Up the valley. Away from the main roads. Until we were far away from the mine. I stopped in a clearing, half hidden among the scraggly oak trees, and sat.

  The man with the moustache came over and sat by me. I shook his soil-covered hand and said thank you. Asked him his name. He was Hassan. From Syria. A farmer. The older man who’d held the mattress was Jamal, also from Syria. He’d had a shop. He introduced me to his wife, Fatima, who stood under a tree and gazed at the grey sky through its naked branches, reaching out every now and then to touch its bark. I understood. If it hadn’t been for the pain in my fingers, I might well have started stroking leaves and tree bark myself.

  I stood up and tried to ask them all their names and where they’d come from. Most told me. Some smiled and repeated my name back to me. But a few slipped away before I could get to them and gradually the others followed. Eisha and Farid were the last. I didn’t notice them go but they must have because when the cavalry finally arrived, I was all alone.

  Twenty-Eight

  A few days later, another boatload of refugees was rescued in the Mediterranean. I watched it on TV. They huddled together, damp and fearful, their worn out clothing hanging in shreds. It was like seeing someone’s story backwards: Eisha and Farid had lived the same experience. Fear had sent them on the same terrible journey. They must have faced the same hardship and felt the same despair, along with Hassan and Jamal and Fatima, all of them. The relief I’d seen on their faces in the quiet valley outside the mine as they’d wande
red round in the sweetness of the open air stayed with me.

  If only it had lasted.

  In between the news, I watched the daytime soaps and chat shows, swallowed antibiotics to combat the infection in my fingers, and dozed. From time to time, I’d wake to find I was watching cartoons with Rosa sitting next to me. From time to time, the police would come to visit.

  They’d arrived at the mine with Kit. He’d got my message as he left a long meeting with the bank in Plymouth, gone straight to the nearest police station and told them what I’d said, then left and come to the mine himself. The police had made the necessary connections and by the time he arrived, a posse of armed police had already found the mine empty except for Kelly and were making their way up the valley. They found me and went on to pick up the refugees, one by one. Their freedom was short-lived.

  I lied from the start, concocting a story that omitted all mention of Nick. I told them I’d been looking for Ma and gone to Talan’s house to ask for help, interrupting him and some others in the middle of organising the transport of the slaves to the mine. They’d seized me and locked me in the mine. I’d hidden in the shaft above the stope and overpowered Kelly when she came. Kit confirmed the first part. Talan wasn’t around to confirm or deny the second part and Kelly refused to speak to anyone.

  For a while, the police came regularly to ask if I’d remembered anything else and to show me photos of possible villains. Gradually their interviews tailed off and when they picked Talan up in France, they stopped coming.