Crow Stone. Jenni Mills

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      Chalk is fossil heaven. Even the dust is a universe, composed almost entirely of tiny shells, minute cartwheels and rings and florets, the remains of plankton, which can only be seen under the electron microscope. Coccoliths, the smallest fossils on earth.

      Easier, now.

      Unlike angels, they actually know how many coccoliths you can get on to a single pinhead–upwards of a hundred.

      I suppose my lungs are full of the bloody things.

      How long does it take to die underground?

      The human body can survive weeks or months without food, but only days without water. Days like this–I’ll never stand it. My tongue’s like sandpaper. No, it’s already died in my mouth and is slowly setting, like cement.

      ‘Mmmm-MAA—’

      Everything tightens, my lungs shut down. I can’t breathe.

      I’m starting to shake again and that isn’t a good sign.

      And now the bloody torch is flickering and–blink–it’s going to go and–blink–it’s back no it’s not blink it’s gone it’s dark I’m stuck here in the bloody dark I’d rather die just get it over with

      The Camera Man watching with his single bloodshot eye his long pale fingers reaching for me the darkness

       HOLY Mary Mother of

      It’s back. Thank God. The light’s on again. Shaking so much I hit my head on the ceiling and the damn thing came back on.

      Breathe, Kit, take it slow and steady. I have to get myself under control, make the most of the light while it’s still on, start trying to dig myself out instead of lying here like I’m already fossilized.

      Which would you rather? Suffocate, or bleed to death, wearing your fingertips down to raw stumps as you feebly try to claw your way out?

      There’s something scrabbling around my feet.

      Or be eaten from the toes up by rats? Slowly gnawed and nibbled, inch by bone-crunching inch?

      Ha-bloody-ha.

      A waft of fresh but sweat-scented air reaches my nose.

      ‘Martin, you fucker, you took your time.’

      Above ground, the air has never smelt so good, even though it’s laced with rotting rabbit. It strikes me, sitting on the grass by the mine-shaft, that I can’t remember anything about the last fifteen minutes or so since Martin hauled me out by my ankles, spluttering chalk dust.

      I’ve almost stopped shaking. That’s a plus.

      ‘Got a cigarette? I need a bloody cigarette.’

      ‘Kit, I don’t smoke. Never have, as you well know. Where are yours?’

      ‘Fuck knows. Under half a ton of chalk, probably.’

      God knows how long Martin must have spent shifting rubble patiently out of the tunnel before he could get to me. I hope I was helpful, on the way out. I probably wasn’t.

      ‘So, nothing came down where you were?’

      ‘Not a sausage. Fortunately it was a fairly small collapse as roof falls go. Pitifully small, I’d say.’ He tries to smile. His face is pale, though, and it isn’t just chalk dust.

      ‘Yeah, well,’ I say. ‘You weren’t under it, Nancy Boy. I’m counting that as a near-death experience.’

      I dust myself off a bit, and look at the sliver of moon. She’s on the turn. Funny thing, all these years of looking at moons, I’m still not sure which way round is the crescent and which is waning to dark. I promise myself I’ll find out now, for sure, and never forget.

      Martin squats down beside me, and puts his arm round my shoulders in a big, rough, rushed hug. It’s so rare that we touch, I find my eyes filling with tears.

      ‘You OK? Really?’ he asks.

      ‘Really. I think. I’ll tell you after a hot bath.’

      ‘Didn’t you hear me calling? I could hear you.’

      ‘Struck deaf by terror, I guess, as well as dumb.’ My ears still feel funny. Like I was in an explosion.

      ‘I thought for a moment I’d lost you.’ His eyes look shiny in what’s left of the light.

      ‘You came and found me, though.’

      ‘If I hadn’t you’d have dug yourself out and come after me.’ He shudders. ‘I felt like a cork in a bottle after squashing my shoulders into that passageway. Anyway, if you can make it, we ought to start down before it gets too dark to find the track.’

      ‘Yeah, I’m fine.’ I shove him away, and try to get up. There doesn’t seem to be any strength in me, and I can’t push myself off the ground. He puts his arm under mine and hauls me to my feet. ‘I can walk.’

      ‘Like a geriatric.’

      Did I get up the ladder on my own? He surely couldn’t have carried me. I have a dim memory of trying to cling to the rungs with no strength in my arms, Martin pushing from below. Right now, I’d love him to give me a piggyback, but I shake him off all the same.

      We set off slowly through the beech trees. The ground drops away sharply in front of us. Through the last crisp copper leaves, lights glimmer on the farmland below. In the distance there is a smudge of orange that must be Worthing. I’m listening out for the raven’s cough, but there’s nothing except the crunch of our feet on the beech mast. My feet feel like lead.

      One late winter afternoon when we were students, at the end of a long day walking in the Peak District, Martin and I came over a bluff with the wind in our faces. There were about two miles of darkening moorland between us and our tea, and not a glimmer of light below us, just a dipping, rolling plateau of green and brown tussocks, broken only by scattered clumps of rocks and trees.

      We set off down the hillside, too cold, tired and hungry to talk. And then the wind brought us, from nowhere, the sound of singing. It was the eeriest thing I’ve ever heard, voices out of a wild twilight emptiness. I could have sworn the sound came from beneath our feet, and for one primordially terrified moment I was on the point of legging it. But then I looked at Martin. There was a wistful expression on his face. ‘Hi-ho,’ he said.

      Amid a cluster of broken rocks away to our left, I saw the first bobbing light. And then another. Then a third. An orderly file of cavers in their helmets, schoolkids probably, judging by their size, came tramping out of the hidden entrance to the pothole like the Seven Dwarfs.

      The next weekend I hid my fear and went caving for the first time with him.

      ‘You’re not thinking of driving back to Cornwall tonight?’ asks Martin, as we reach the gate to the bridleway where his СКАЧАТЬ