Crow Stone. Jenni Mills

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СКАЧАТЬ You know. The miners.’ He sounds uncomfortable, and so he should.

      ‘You get used to it. Just like they’re going to have to get used to me.’

      ‘OK,’ says Gary. He sounds doubtful, though. ‘Well. I guess so.’

      ‘I’ve got to go,’ I say. ‘I’m expecting a call.’ After I’ve put the phone down I think, Yeah, right. A call from Granny.

      I pull open the top drawer in the chest under the window, and pull out handfuls of underwear to cram into my case. All black or nude colours, plain, strong and practical. One falls on to the floor and I bend to pick it up, admiring its smooth curves that fit my smooth curves exactly. Its shape reminds me of a suspension bridge: perfect engineering. Was it Howard Hughes who designed a bra for Jane Russell on the cantilever principle?

      Bollocks, Kit, says Martin’s voice in my head. Go and buy a bra in shocking pink.

      In the night, I’m suddenly awake, staring into darkness. The room is pitch black, except for the red light on the television and a yellow line under the door. The only sound is the hiss of the weir water outside.

      It’s nearly six weeks since the roof fall in the flint mine.

      I’m here under false pretences. By rights I should be dead.

      I turn over, then over again. I keep seeing the face I haven’t seen since I was fourteen. And fingers. Long, sensitive fingers. Fingers like white stalks, groping towards me in the dark … No. The room is too hot. I want to sleep, but know I won’t. I’m afraid to sleep, in case Death realizes he missed me and I don’t wake up again. I can taste garlic from dinner, and wakefulness, metallic and dry, on the back of my tongue.

      Can’t someone turn the weir off?

      White noise. White night.

      I’m at my computer the next morning on site when the summons comes. It’s like the blast of icy air that comes into the Portakabin with Rosie, the admin assistant with whom I’m sharing an office. The purdah principle: lodge the women together so you can keep an eye on them. To do that, we’ve been given our own office eunuch, thankfully absent at the moment.

      ‘Brendan wants to see you,’ says Rosie. She’s balancing two brimming cups of coffee and trying to close the door with her bottom. ‘We have to get a new kettle.’

      Our eyes swivel automatically towards the third desk. It carries a computer, its screen plastered with yellow Post-it notes, a pharmacopoeia of vitamin pills and antihistamines, and one of those really naff figurines of Priapus they sell in gift shops in Greek tourist resorts. A trowel, an archaeologist’s third hand, is propped in the crook made by its disproportionately huge member. Dickhead’s not here at the moment, praise the Lord and pass the ammunition, preferably a fragmentation grenade I can pop under the cushion of his special posture stool. It’s the sort that’s supposed to straighten your spine, but Dickon still manages to look like a long curved streak of piss when he sits at it.

      Rosie and I especially loathe Dickhead today, because last night he left late and locked up forgetting he’d left the kettle on. It didn’t cut off automatically when it boiled, and the element has burned out. So every time we want a cuppa we have to totter over the frozen puddles to the big cabin where the kitchenette is. For Rosie and me that’s about every half-hour, and we’re already fed up.

      ‘I don’t suppose it’s the kettle Brendan wants to see me about?’

      Rosie makes a face. ‘’Fraid not.’

      ‘Well?’

      ‘He should tell you.’ She puts down the coffees, one on her neat desk, one on mine, which is already building up sedimentary layers of crumpled paper. She sticks one finger up in the direction of Dickon’s posture stool.

      Rosie and I have only known each other for a day and a bit, but I can see we’re going to get along. I give her about forty seconds before she cracks and tells me the bad news. It’s bound to be bad news: I’ve felt it coming since yesterday, underground, a minor quake to be sure, but destructive nonetheless.

      She sits down at her desk, framed by a gallery of happy bouncing brothers and sisters and friends, all doing impossibly athletic things on ski slopes or rockfaces or amid raging torrents. Rosie’s in her late twenties, when the joints are still elastic, and I bet her lithe, slender body is bouncing there alongside her chums, behind the camera snapping photos. Perhaps her boyfriend figures in some of them. He’s one of the miners working on site: Huw, Welsh, from the Valleys, not one of Ted’s crew.

      ‘So?’ I say.

      She twists her jaw-length blonde hair into a corkscrew and secures it on top of her head with a bulldog clip. She’s not finding it easy to meet my eye.

      ‘Well …’ She faces me, and looks angry, helpless. ‘Oh, rats, this is awful.’

      ‘Cough it up.’

      ‘Ted’s crew have complained. Say they don’t want a woman working underground.’

      ‘Thought so. I could see it in their faces yesterday.’

      ‘But they can’t stop you, can they? It’s sex discrimination, surely.’

      My fingers find a dried-up wad of gum on the underside of my desk, and pick away at it. ‘Well, technically it is. But …’ I don’t know why I’m so calm.

      The door opens, letting in more needles of freezing air. It’s Gary. He’s furious. ‘I’ve just heard.’

      He can’t stand still. He’s striding up and down our tiny seraglio, which gives him about one and a half steps before he bangs into Dickhead’s stool. In the end he gives up and sits down on it abruptly.

      ‘Heard?’ I say.

      ‘You must know. Fuck, I can’t believe it. The free miners say it’s bad luck to have a woman underground.’

      ‘Yep. Brendan wants to see me.’

      ‘I don’t know what the hell he thinks he can do about it. They’re threatening to quit. I’ve just had three in my office, claiming the last time a woman went into the workings there was a collapse the following day. That was you, by the way, Rosie. I can’t believe—’ He slaps his hand on Dickon’s desk. A nasal spray teeters on the edge, and falls to the floor. He looks at me properly for the first time since he came in. ‘Why aren’t you more upset?’

      I glance down at my ragged fingernails. ‘I am upset.’

      ‘You don’t bloody show it. I suppose you’re used to it …’

      ‘Actually, no, I’m not.’ Suddenly I am angry, after all, really angry. I can feel tears pricking at the corners of my eyes, and a terrible wobbly feeling round my jaw, but I’m buggered if I’ll give in to it. ‘I’ve been all over the fucking world and nobody’s ever refused to work with me before. And now a bunch of superstitious, pig-thick …’

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