Hol stiffens again. ‘Kit,’ she says, ‘have you got a fucking erection?’
‘Oops,’ I say, letting go and backing off.
‘Jesus,’ she sighs, folding her arms again and looking away.
‘You check the rugs,’ I tell her, kicking one of the rolled-up carpets. ‘They might be sellable. I’ll come back for the carpet tiles.’
I take the boxes in the hall down to Guy.
7
‘I might have found something,’ I tell Paul. He’s sitting in the shed, on an old bar stool he and Guy nicked from a pub, twenty-plus years ago. He’s been taking out whole drawers of junk from the various chests of drawers crammed into the shed; some under the workbench, most piled around the walls. In places they are three chests tall. They all look ancient.
Mostly, Paul’s been using a blunt wood chisel to lever the tops off a variety of nine-tenths-empty paint tins, which seem to form at least a quarter of the ecology of clutter, debris and scrap the shed contains. Then I take the drawers out to the big pile of stuff in the middle of the lawn and dump them.
So far, the stacked drawers are making up a large part of the overall shape of the slowly building bonfire. All that old paint should burn well, though I guess there will be a lot of blackened tins left afterwards.
Even the weather is cooperating; the skies are almost clear, the wind is gentle and the air mild and the next rain isn’t forecast until tomorrow afternoon, when everybody will have gone, though there is a chance we might get some this evening; I’ll check the latest forecast soon.
‘We’re probably going to contravene some Clean Air Act, when we burn all this ancient shit,’ Paul is saying, and then looks at me. ‘What?’
‘I might have found something,’ I tell him again.
‘The tape?’
‘Maybe. I’m not sure. It’s not very accessible. It’ll need to be checked out.’
Paul looks round the dim interior of the shed. ‘Not in here, I take it?’
‘No.’
‘Whose …’ He smiles. ‘Whose jurisdiction is it under, then?’
‘It’s not where any of us are looking,’ I tell him.
He stares at me. ‘Kind of renders this whole operation somewhat moot, doesn’t it?’ He sighs, puts the chisel down. Its wooden handle is splayed at the top where it’s been repeatedly hit with a hammer over the years. Paul sighs. ‘I say moot, I mean pointless.’
‘It might not be the tape we’re looking for,’ I say. ‘That might still turn up, somewhere in the house. Out here; wherever.’
Paul does not look good. You can see he’s hung-over, and tired. He frowns. ‘So why can’t you just—’
His iPhone, lying on the workbench, rings. His eyes close and he grimaces, then he opens them, leans, looks at the screen. ‘Oh, fuck,’ he breathes. ‘Excuse me,’ he says to me. He picks up the phone. ‘Ben, hi. What?’
He listens for a while, making a variety of funny faces as he looks out of the window. Eventually he says, ‘Yeah, well, they’ll just have to … Well, no, they just will. That’s—’ He looks at me as the other person talks to him some more. I can hear their voices, though not what they’re actually saying.
Paul puts on an expression like a stupid person and slowly crosses his eyes. I smile. Then, after a sigh or two, he says, ‘Ben … Ben … Ben. Ben? Ben. Ben. Yes, right. See, the thing is; that’s … that’s just not covered. It’s not there, in what we have, in our instructions. This is a new direction, new proposal, new ball game, so it just isn’t something we can speak to. This is a client decision, and they’re not contactable until Tuesday p.m. earliest; more likely Wednesday, on past form. Even then, they’re never going to come back with a clear yes or no immediately. They’ll go away and think about it. Probably for a mystifyingly long time. So … So … No, yeah, I hear you, yeah, loud and clear and unam-fucking-biguous, partner, but, well … Yeah, understand. Understand, yeah, yep, understand. Totally understand. Totally understand. Don’t sympathise, barely care, but completely understand …’ Paul gazes up at the ceiling of the outhouse for a moment, as though looking for a sign. Or cobwebs. We have plenty of those.
Then, with a sigh, he says, ‘… Yeah, well, this is, clearly, an unspeakable human tragedy for them, but wait for another day or two is exactly what we’re going to have to ask the poor little souls to do, bless them … Well, God knows it’s a big ask, I realise, but they’ll just have to try to draw the strength from somewhere. Maybe there’s some therapy with heated coprolites of just the right healing frequency they could …’
The person on the other end is talking again. Paul takes the phone away from his ear and puts it to the outside of his right thigh, pressed against the fabric of his jeans. He looks at me and shakes his head. ‘Dear fucking God,’ he says, then sighs again and brings the phone back up to his ear.
He listens for a bit, then he holds the phone in front of him – I can hear the voice of the other person almost well enough to make out the words – and presses the screen. The voice stops. Paul holds the iPhone’s top right button down for a few seconds until the power-off screen presents itself, then he slides his finger along the top of the touchscreen, which goes black. ‘There,’ he says with a small smile, putting the phone back on the bench, face down. ‘And if I could take the fucking battery out, I would.’
He turns to me. ‘So,’ he says. ‘This thing that might or might not be the tape, that you can see but can’t … access.’ He shakes his head, looks confused. ‘Is it in the window of a shop or something?’
I put some of the paint-tin lids into the latest cleared drawer, stacking them neatly against one side. ‘It’s a little complicated,’ I tell him.
Paul’s eyes close briefly. ‘Oh, goody. Please, do tell, then. I … I feel the need for some additional complexity in my life, goodness knows.’
I push the tin lids from one side of the drawer to the other. Then I push them back the other way. After a moment, Paul says, ‘Kit?’
‘It’s a sex tape, isn’t it?’ I say, looking at him.
Paul sighs mightily. His head goes down, his chin almost on his chest. ‘Yes, Kit; it’s a sex tape. A porn tape. Debbie Does Bewford, I do believe we called it.’
‘Aha.’
‘Yes, as you say; aha.’
‘So, embarrassing.’
Paul nods. ‘Embarrassing would be one word for it, at the … at the very mild end of the spectrum of adjectives one might care to employ. Yes.’
‘So, which of you guys would be most … embarrassed?’
Paul smiles. ‘Oh, I think we’d all find it quite thoroughly embarrassing if it came to light and was ever seen by … well, anybody, but clearly it might be potentially harmful for my political career, in particular. Hence my close interest in the matter. There; are you happy?’
‘So, is it, like, one couple, of you, I mean, or a threesome or—’
‘It’s pretty much all of us getting it on with everybody else. We kind of got carried away. It’s utter filth from beginning to end, Kit, with erect cocks and close-ups of penetrations all over the place, not to mention come-shots and some anal and a little guy-on … male-on-male action and … and quite a lot of lesbian stuff too, and even simulated sex with a dog at one point.’
‘Wow,’ I say.
‘Yeah; simulated sex with a dog. But simulated quite convincingly, if I say … I mean, no animals harmed, etc. Though … even so, obviously.’
‘Was this the dog Dad used to have?’
‘Yup. Old Brassica himself.’
‘Brassica?’
‘Yeah. Brassica. Why?’
‘I thought he was called Mixtape. Because he was a mongrel.’
Paul shakes his head. ‘No. Guy told us he was called Brassica because he was a collie.’ Paul looks thoughtful. ‘He looked mostly collie.’
This is not exactly LOL territory. Actually I’m not even sure this is worth a little cursory half-breath-down-the-nose micro-laugh, so I don’t bother. ‘Maybe Mixtape was
like his first name and Brassica was his surname,’ I suggest. Paul looks at me. ‘Or something,’ I add.
‘Yeah, or something,’ Paul says. ‘Or this is just Guy being Guy again. Or they were different dogs entirely.’
‘Okay,’ I say, nodding. ‘Yeah.’
Paul gazes into the middle distance. ‘I blame the E,’ he says quietly. ‘We did far too much Ecstasy back then. Amongst other stuff, but … a lot of E.’ He shakes his head.
‘Mm-hmm.’
‘And the camerawork is … terrible, it has to be said. Well below our usual standards. Really shaky, focus poor. Or on a tripod with nobody manning it; we’re part out of frame half the time. But still, ample footage to get us all as fully disgraced and as fired as our respective employers might deem fit.’
‘It’s all starting to make sense,’ I tell him.
That’s me almost out of filler phrases, apart from ‘Really?’ Hopefully we’ll get back to the conversational main sequence shortly.
‘So, where is it?’ he asks. ‘Or where might it be?’
(Aha!)
‘It might be in the quarry,’ I tell him. ‘On a ledge about four or five metres up from the base of the cliff, the work-face just over the back garden wall.’
He looks at me. ‘So you’ve seen it?’
‘I’ve seen something that might be it. I tried to get down to it earlier but the rope wasn’t long enough and I got too tired. Climbing up from the bottom shouldn’t be too difficult. There’s a ladder in the garage that might reach without any real climbing at all.’
‘Can we get into the quarry?’
‘Definitely. Might even get the car in; depends on whether the gate’s been locked at the far side.’
Paul looks out of the shed window for a moment, nodding as though to himself. ‘Well, I don’t think I’m fit to drive, frankly, but you could.’
‘There’s a charity shop in town that lets you leave stuff for them outside the back door, in these sort of skip things, plus the recycling centre is open seven days a week; I thought I’d wait until I have to make a trip, then just come back via the quarry.’
‘Volvo filling up, is it?’
‘Fairly quickly. Another half-hour or so and I’ll have to head into town. Or its springs’ll collapse.’
‘You okay to do all this yourself? Or do you need help?’
‘Fine myself. Just letting you know.’ I pause. ‘Of course, we could just tell the others.’
‘Yeah,’ Paul says, taking up the old wood chisel. ‘We could, but let’s not.’
‘You not wanting to keep this stuff?’ Guy asks.
It’s a box of old drawings – things I did when I was a kid.
I pick up a sheet of A4 with some incomprehensible crayon scrawls on it, mostly purple. ‘Not really.’
Guy leans down to the box and picks up a truly ancient sepia-coloured school book. It has his name on it, but that’s been crossed out and my name substituted. He flicks through it.
‘This was one of mine,’ he says. ‘No idea why I kept it the first time either. Remember this?’ He holds up the book, fanned open. There are lots of imaginatively drawn numbers of various sizes.
‘No.’ It looks like it might be my childhood doodling style, but it means nothing.
Guy laughs. ‘Think that was the first time I knew you were going to be a proper handful.’
‘Really?’
‘You asked why there were no capital numbers.’
‘Capital numbers?’
‘You said there were capital letters so there ought to be capital numbers too, like at the start of big numbers, or important ones.’
‘Oh,’ I say, squinting at one of the scrawls. ‘That’s why this three is so big and the point one four is so small.’
‘Took me a day to realise there were capital numbers,’ Guy says as I drop the book back in the box. ‘Only they’re roman. Big v’s and little v’s and suchlike.’
‘So, no capital zeros,’ I say.
Guy nods, sighs. ‘Yeah, that’s what you said back then, too.’
‘I’m going out in the car now,’ I tell Paul. He’s finished with the paint tins and is stacking old offcuts of wood into a rusted wheelbarrow. The floor of the wheelbarrow is fifty per cent hole, but he’s put a bit of plywood over it to stop everything falling through.
‘Want a hand?’ he asks. ‘I could hold the ladder or something.’
‘Okay.’
We’re in luck; there’s a truck-sized side gate to the quarry itself that allows access without entering the compound where the buildings and machinery are, and this gate’s closed but not locked.
We’ve been to the recycling centre and the skips at the back of the charity shop off Bishopsgate. Paul wanted to go to the quarry first but understood when I said the car was too laden; we’d ground it on the rough quarry roads unless we got all the weight out the back first.
I close the gate behind us and drive up the shallow ramp of crushed rock to the right, taking the north-west side round the great scoop of removed rock. The quarry’s two great stagnant pools, divided by a single thin causeway of crushed rock, lie still and dark green at the lowest level, five metres below us. A modest ten-metre cliff circles the next tier up, its base level with where we are now. The main, most recently worked face is above us, taller still and set back even further.
Paul leans forward in his seat. ‘Fuck me. You don’t realise how big it is from up top, do you?’
‘They’ve removed about twenty million tons of rock from here,’ I tell him. I think that was the latest figure I heard quoted. Whatever; Paul looks suitably impressed.
We’re in second gear and going quite slowly, but the car’s meeting lots of grey and khaki-coloured puddles, deeper dips and hollows, and the sort of random, jagged stones and small boulders on the track that a truck wouldn’t notice but which a car struggles to cope with; we’re getting bounced around a lot.
Paul’s holding the dashboard and looking a little pale. ‘You okay?’ I ask him.
He stares out through the windscreen, swallows, nods. ‘I’ve been better,’ he admits.
I slow down, go into first gear. The bumping and jostling becomes less violent. When we get to the top of the ramp that leads to the shelf around the base of the main cliff, the road levels out and the surface becomes more even; we can do nearly twenty without getting thrown around too much. Big boulders the size of hatchbacks line the cliff edge like outsize traffic bollards. Ahead, at the far end of the quarry, the bit where the little landslide took place is just about visible if you know what you’re looking for. The wall of the house is a small straight line across the skyline, its tilted roofs like dark tents against the clouds, sheltering behind the trees, though the house disappears as we get closer to the far south wall.
Paul looks relieved as we get out of the car. Little piles of earth and turf and dirty-looking stones lie at the foot of the cliff, beneath the site of the landslide. We both have a look round but there’s nothing man-made lying around down here. I’m not even sure from this angle whether I can tell which shelf I decided might hold the thing that might or might not be the tape. I un-bungee the ladder from the roof-rack and slide it out to maximum extension. We lever it up against the cliff, roughly in the middle of the landslip. We make sure both feet are firm and slightly embedded in the track, then Paul holds the ladder while I climb it.
It all looks quite different from when I was dangling on the end of a rope earlier. I get to the top, take a good look around. The ledge I saw before is, I think, about three metres away to my left, but a metre higher than the top reach of the ladder.
I climb back down. ‘It’s over this way,’ I tell Paul.
We reposition the ladder, step back and wait while some earth and small stones shower down, rattling and bouncing, and then I go up again.
‘Should have brought a hard hat,’ Paul says.
The ledge is a bit more than a metre above. I climb again until I’m standing on the topmost rung of
the ladder. The cliff is pretty rough and there are numerous holds so it’s not difficult.
‘Fuck’s sake, Kit, be careful,’ Paul yells.
‘Yeah!’ I shout. ‘Don’t worry!’ Which sounds a bit pointless, but I suppose you have to say something.
My head’s still not quite at ledge level. I look down, find footholds, and use the earth-spattered lip of the ledge as a handhold to steady myself as I push up.
‘Jesus, Kit!’ Paul shouts.
‘Just keep the ladder where it is,’ I tell him, trying to sound reassuring.
I feel for another couple of footholds. I find only one but that should be enough. There’s a straggly-looking but sturdy-feeling bush growing on the ledge. I use this to steady myself, push up again and slide chest-first onto the ledge, which is about half a metre wide and sloped with dirt.
I hold onto the bush with one hand, find a handhold on the cliff behind with the other, and sort of pull and wriggle myself round until I’m sitting.
The straight-edged white objects I saw from further up this morning are still plausibly some bleached bones from a fallen lamb or a large bird; or something man-made, maybe plastic. Whatever they are, they’re about another metre away along the ledge to the left, past and partly underneath another misshapen, dead-looking bush.
I’m sort of half sat on the narrow ledge now, legs hanging over the edge, bum balanced on the angle of soft earth. This would be a lot easier if there hadn’t been a landslip, turning the ledge from a flat shelf to a slippy, unstable slope. If I’m to get over there I’ll have to bump my way along on my backside for a metre, over more slidey earth and past this other bush. I think I can probably do it, but there’s nothing much to grab at if I start to slip, apart from this lifeless-looking shrub. Or I could turn around again – a bit dangerous in itself – push up to stand on the ledge and then sidle along. Then have to get back down to this sort of level to pick the tape up. Or kick it over the edge.
I bend at the waist, look down and shout, ‘Can you reposition the ladder again? Metre that way?’ I nod.