‘Okay. Hold on.’
Paul struggles to lever the ladder away from the cliff. I’m starting to worry he’ll pull it back and lose control and it’ll land on the car, or go whanging over the cliff behind and down into the deepest level of the quarry.
‘Just sort of turn it,’ I tell him.
‘What?’
This takes some explaining. We get the ladder to where I want it eventually, just under the relevant bit. I bump along in that direction, digging little heel-of-the-hand holds as I go. My hands are getting absolutely filthy. Getting past the dried-up bush is slightly exciting, too.
‘What can you see?’ Paul shouts.
‘Well,’ I shout back down, ‘one corner of a white plastic TDK-branded VHS tape case, partially covered with earth.’
‘Well, yeah!’ Paul shouts.
With my left leg dangling only half a metre above the end of the ladder and one hand holding onto a two-fingers-wide handhold, I swing over and plunge my hand into the earth, just shy of where it needs to be. I bump closer, having to trust to the bush now. I think it feels trustworthy. I’ve already opened one big gilet pocket, for the tape.
Finally, I pull the tape case out of the loose earth around it.
‘Well, it’s not empty!’ I shout to Paul. I bump back a little along the dirt-smothered ledge, get my hand back to the good hold on the rock, then risk letting go – trusting the compacted earth beneath my bum to hold me on the ledge – and using both hands I slide the cassette most of the way out.
It’s a Sony inside, not TDK. It isn’t an ordinary VHS tape; it feels unbalanced somehow and half of it has a sort of smoke-brown window over it, with a smaller tape visible inside.
I shove the cassette back into the case and stick the case into the big outer pocket of my gilet.
‘Got it!’
‘Brilliant!’
‘Okay,’ I shout. ‘Hold it steady. Coming down.’
I edge back a little the way I came, about a bum-width. My camo trousers are going to be filthy as well.
‘What are you doing?’ Paul shouts.
‘Just getting in position. Keep the ladder where it is.’
I get as firm a grip as I can with one hand, then turn round, using the other hand to grab a hold on the cliff behind. My legs should be directly above the ladder; I can’t look to check, but now I can control myself better.
‘Is the ladder beneath my feet?’ I shout.
‘Yes!’ Paul hollers back.
I lower myself slowly, swinging my feet from side to side a little to feel for the ladder. Clonk. Got it.
‘You’re there!’ Paul yells.
I get both feet on the ladder and start stepping down, a rung at a time, until I can grasp the sides of the ladder again.
I pull the tape case from my pocket, then the cassette from inside the case. ‘That what you’re looking for?’ I ask Paul.
He nods, takes it. ‘Could well be.’ He slides a switch on one surface, tries it a few more times. ‘Hmm. Jammed. Surgery may be required.’
I start bringing the ladder down, walking the bottom further out from the cliff so it clatters down the rock face. ‘Suppose that makes me a professional climber, now,’ I tell him.
‘Yeah,’ Paul says. ‘Don’t worry, Kit. You’ll get your money.’
‘What are you going to do now? Do we tell people?’
‘Let me take a quick look, assuming I can get it working, and then, yes, we’ll tell people.’
‘Okay.’
I get the ladder flat on the ground, unclip it and collapse it. We put it back on the roof-rack. I take some time to brush off all the dirt that I can from my clothes but then put an old bin bag between my bum and the Volvo’s seat anyway. The Volvo’s driver’s seat is kind of stained and filthy already, frankly, but there’s no need to get it totally minging. I use a rag to clean my hands as best I can.
Paul looks a little healthier and happier as we head out of the quarry. He sits with the tape on his lap. Before we get to the quarry buildings and the gate he’s taken out his wallet and extracted five fifty-pound notes, folding them and depositing them into my gilet’s left breast pocket.
‘Bonus for the hair-raisingly risky climbing,’ he explains.
I smile. ‘Ta.’
‘So,’ he says, after we’re clear of the quarry approach track and back on the public road. ‘How do we think the tape got there?’
I have a think about this. ‘That’s a very good question,’ I tell him. I am extremely pleased with this answer.
‘Any thoughts?’ Paul asks.
‘About how it got there?’
‘Yeah, Kit,’ Paul says, ‘that’s kind of what I thought we were currently talking about.’
‘Well, a few,’ I say, reminding myself not to get too cocky. ‘It’s just … I don’t want to accuse anybody.’
‘Strictly between us, then,’ he says. ‘I’ll give you my word it won’t go any further.’
‘Your word?’ I ask him. I’m not even entirely sure he’s being serious, though he looks like he is. I don’t think anybody’s ever offered me their word on something before. It sounds so old-fashioned.
‘Yes, my word, Kit. Believe it or not, that actually counts for something, for some of us. Try not to gasp.’
‘Okay. But it’s not just that; I’m not even sure whether the landslip happened first or afterwards.’
‘Do we … think somebody buried the tape? On the far side of the wall? Is that …?’
‘Not very likely. I think it must have been thrown over the wall.’
‘And … who would do that?’ Paul asks.
‘Not me,’ I tell him.
‘You must have theories,’ he says.
‘Hmm …’
‘So … on balance. Take a guess; was the tape thrown over before the landslip, or after?’
‘I think … after, from the way it was lying,’ I tell him. ‘Though more stuff had sort of dropped on top of it too, I think, so it’s hard to be certain. Don’t think it had been there all that long. It’s not faded with sunshine or anything. Well, apart from the spine, compared to the front and back, but that’ll have happened in the house, I suppose, when it was on a shelf.’
I guide the Volvo through the narrow lanes, coming to the T-junction where we turn left and head up the road that leads to the house. The tree branches are arched above like too many thin, tented fingers.
‘Wonder why someone would want to throw it away,’ Paul says, as we pull out of the junction.
‘I can’t imagine,’ I tell him. I’m guessing he knows this is an outright lie and I’m just trying to be discreet, or protect somebody.
‘Where the fuck have you been?’
‘Took longer than expected,’ I tell Guy.
Paul has gone back to his outhouse. I have a big backlog of boxes and assorted bits and pieces to run past Guy and either take out to the car – I’ve left it parked closer, to make this easier – or dump on the steadily growing bonfire. Which is bigger than it was when we left; obviously some people have been adding to it themselves without waiting for me to do the donkey work.
I go back to emptying the house, shuttling the rubbish onto the bonfire and the recycling into the Volvo.
There’s a break for tea and bacon sarnies. ‘Think I’ll take a little snooze, after,’ Paul tells people. ‘Just an hour or so.’
‘Have you finished with the outhouse?’ Ali asks. She’s busy carefully stripping the little glistening lengths of fat from the bacon rashers, depositing them at the side of her plate.
I’d have cut them off with scissors before grilling if she’d said, or done her rashers longer to turn the fat into something more like crackling or even just let her have trimmed medallions if she’d wanted, but she never said. She uses her nails to remove the last bits of fat, then rebuilds her sandwich. It’ll be cold now. If enough people do this I’d happily grill up the remains till they’re crispy and have them myself, all lovely and crunchy in a folded bit
of bread.
Paul isn’t really going to have a snooze; he’s going to use the time in his room to try to get the mini-VHS tape working and play it in the VHS player he brought with him.
‘Yup,’ Paul tells Ali, yawning. ‘All done. Just a last few boxes for Kit to take away.’
This isn’t entirely true; there are still a few drawers to be looked through but I’m pretty sure I know what’s in all of them and I’ve agreed to check them and then do whatever needs doing; won’t take long.
‘Is there any more brown sauce?’ Haze asks.
‘Think that’s it done,’ I tell him.
‘Good bacon sarnies,’ Hol says, not looking at me.
‘I’ll be glad to get shot of you gannets,’ Guy says. ‘Thought Kit ate a lot. Christ.’ Guy insisted on a full-size sandwich like everybody else, though I know he won’t finish it. He’s taken only two bites.
‘On our way home tomorrow, bright and early,’ Rob tells him.
‘This has been fun,’ Pris says, smiling, looking round at all of us. ‘Don’t you think?’
‘Yeah,’ Guy says, bringing his sarnie up towards his mouth and focusing on it. ‘Just like the old days, except with me dying.’ He puts the sandwich back down on his plate again.
Ali takes a long-drawn-in breath and fixes her gaze at the table; Rob purses his lips and restirs his tea. Hol is looking blankly off to one side. Haze appears fascinated by Guy’s sandwich.
‘Oh, Guy,’ Pris says, her face pinched. ‘Honey, is there really nothing—’
‘No. Nothing,’ Guy says. ‘Tried everything.’
‘Have you tried alternative or holistic—’
‘No. Not fucking going to, either. You can keep that bollocks. Whatever I’ve got, the fucker can keep growing despite industrial fucking doses of gamma radiation and laugh in the fucking face of chemicals they originally used in mustard gas. I therefore find the prospect of it being turned around by tiny amounts of infinitely diluted water or the power of closing one’s eyes in a nice dark room and thinking about pink ponies somewhat unlikely, to say the least.’
‘Well,’ Pris says, frowning. ‘It’s just—’
‘No, love,’ Guy says. ‘Whatever you’re going to say, it’s not.’
Pris frowns and looks round at the rest, finds no support, and with a little shake of her head says, ‘Well, it’s you … It’s your body, Guy. I guess none of us can live your life for you.’
‘You can die my death for me, petal,’ Guy offers, sounding almost jovial now.
Pris appears, I think, hurt at first but then looks up at him and gives a small explosive laugh when she sees him smiling, winking at her.
‘Anyway, remissions happen,’ Ali says. ‘You can never give up hope. You mustn’t. You can’t.’
‘I live in bloody hope, Alison,’ Guy tells her. ‘Permanent bloody resident. Every morning I wake up thinking, Hey-hey; maybe it’s gone and I’m fine! Never has been so far, but I don’t let that discourage me.’
‘I think you’re finding your own way to be positive about it all,’ Pris says.
‘Mr fucking Positivity, that’s me.’ Guy raises his teacup. ‘To fucking Positivity!’
We all toast fucking Positivity. Even me, and I don’t normally swear.
Paul gazes up at the top of the still unlit bonfire in the centre of our lawn, then down at Guy. ‘This isn’t a … pyre, is it? You’re not going to throw yourself on top of it, are you?’ he asks.
‘Will you fuck off?’ Guy says. ‘I have to listen to this bollocks every fifth of November.’
Paul reappeared from his room after about forty minutes, and went to work with Rob, going through the various cupboards. When I raised my eyebrows at him – Rob was too near for us to talk properly – Paul just blanked me.
The fire is finished, or as finished as it’s ever going to be before it’s lit. It’s about four metres high and the same across, largely composed of bits of ancient soft furniture too old to have fire-resistance labels attached, various worn, moth-eaten carpets, lots of old drawers and their associated chests, assorted bits of vintage plastic and many boxes and bin liners full of papers and old clothes Guy doesn’t want to go for recycling.
There’s still more stuff that might get added to the bonfire, and the temptation is to leave lighting it until dark, in an hour or two, but the latest forecast is for heavy rain around the same time and the sky to the west is already thickening with dark clouds, so we need to get it going now.
I’ve packed the heart of the fire with the most combustible stuff, like sawdust, small dry bits of wood, oily rags and the old paint, and left a hole in the side of the fire to give access to the centre. Guy leans awkwardly on one stick and holds a last oily rag from the garage. I use a lighter on the knotted rag and it catches, flames pale in the last watery light filtering through the outskirt tatters of the clouds massing to the west. Little coils of black smoke lick up round the sides as Guy gives it time to catch properly, then he sort of half throws, half pendulums the fiery rag into the heart of the bonfire.
Five minutes later it’s already a decent blaze; we stand watching it, transfixed both by the ever-changing flames themselves and the slowly seeping, waving smoke, and by the progress of the burning as it spreads through the fabric of the bonfire, catching quickly on the oily rags and paint-soaked sawdust, producing quick bursts of fire and thick, dark smoke, and crawling more slowly along pieces of wood and crumpled cardboard before starting to lick and lap at the bulging sides of the bin bags, which are beginning to melt and slowly split, exposing and oozing out their contents like bursting sausages in a frying pan. Things are starting to crackle.
Within ten minutes we have to start retreating from the heat, stepping back across the grass. Flames are shooting from the top and beginning to spread laterally everywhere. It feels like the fire has awoken and begun reaching out, as if before it was something small and lazy that was just happening to the pile of stuff that is the bonfire; a function or property of the massed debris, like its height or its mass. Now it’s like it’s become its own thing, like it’s something alive and separate inside the pyre, something with its own independent life and needs and a determination to feed and grow.
There’s an urgency to the rise and flick of the flames now as they feed on their own heat and more and more air is sucked into the blaze, to be heated and used and transformed, the resulting gases thrown upwards through the writhing basket of fire. Before, the smoke was rising the way steam rises from a plate of hot food, gently curling through the air, all relaxed and lazy; now it looks propelled, excited, turbo-charged, throwing itself at the sky like something furious, impatient, angry.
It must be the melancholic in me that can already look forward, past the time when the fire is at its peak, fully ablaze – when even where we’re standing now would be impossibly, damagingly, skin-crispingly close – to when it’s starting to die back again, and then to when it’s half collapsed and then fully fallen in, to – hours and hours from now, even if the rain somehow holds off – when it’s just black cinders, grey ash and a few half-hidden, low-glowing embers producing a little heated air and not even any smoke any more.
It’s like a river, I think suddenly. It starts small and hesitant, becomes bigger, quicker, more assured as it grows, bursts with power and fury in its prime, then returns to slow, meandering quietness towards the end, eventually giving itself to nothing, recycled into its constituent parts.
It’s hardly uncommon: something going from near-helpless small beginnings, through childhood and youth to vigorous adulthood, then decrepitude, and an end. So a process, like many others, but short enough and vivid enough for those of us with the time and interest to observe it and draw our own comparisons, if we’re that way inclined.
I’m not stupid. I am weird and I don’t think the way other people do, I realise that, plus, like a computer, I struggle with some stuff that normal people find easy to the point of not even thinking about, but I’m not stupid. I know t
hat part of the reason I’m finding it so affecting standing here looking at the fire – especially with these people, especially with my dad at my side, leaning on his stick, his skeletal fingers clutched like talons round the knurled top – is because this is like looking at an image of our own lives, our own abandoned histories, our own past, baggage and legacies; all that hoarded meaning going up in smoke and flame, reduced to no more than bulk fuel for a mindless chemical reaction.
It’s been nearly quarter of an hour now, I reckon, and I don’t think anybody’s said a thing. If they have, it’s been very quietly, and just one person to another, right beside them. I’ve never heard this lot so quiet when they’re all together.
Then there’s a sound over the roar of the flames. Guy sounds like he’s choking at first, and I start to turn to him. He isn’t choking. He puts his head back then jerks it forward and spits into the fire.
Against the riot of flames, it’s hard to tell whether the gobbet of spit gets there, falls short, or is even vaporised by the heat before it can land. Anyway, it vanishes.
‘Well,’ he says. ‘Before we all get totally fucking mesmerised and turn into … fucking … Zoroastrians, d’you not think it’s time for another cup of fucking tea?’
‘Well, we have a result,’ Paul tells me, after tea and biscuits, on the first-floor landing, while the rain is just starting and we’re clearing the last walk-in cupboard.
‘And?’ I ask, when he doesn’t add anything immediately.
‘Tell you in the big reveal,’ he smiles. ‘Shall we just stick to the truth? About the sequence of events?’
I have a think. ‘Maybe not mention the money?’
‘Agreed. Let’s say you just asked me for help after we’d done the recycling, that was the first I knew.’
‘Okay.’
There’s the noise of the loo flushing, and when Rob reappears, I’m already heading downstairs with another box. My back is quite sore now.
‘Yeah, but it’s true, isn’t it?’ Haze says, nodding slowly, eyes partially closed, staring into the middle distance, or at least whatever portion of it is available within the confines of the sitting room. ‘When you stare into the void, it, like, stares back at you.’