No Man’s Land. Simon Tolkien

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ shaking his head.

      ‘Do you know who Whalen reminds me of?’ asked Adam, remembering his encounter with Rawdon’s father in the mine – the hard unforgiving voice and the cruel flinty eyes.

      Ernest shook his head.

      ‘My dad – he used to be just like him. Any excuse to fight the oppressor and too bad if people got hurt in the process. He was a fanatic, a true believer, until my mother died. And then everything changed. He’s a better man now, more sensible, more reasonable, but it’s also like he’s lost his spark, his passion – whatever you want to call it. It’s like something in him died when she died. God knows how it’ll all end,’ he finished sadly, sounding like an astrologer who’d lost his ability to read the stars.

      ‘I’ll tell you how it ends,’ said Ernest, looking hard at his friend. ‘No, better – I’ll show you. Come on. It’s not far.’

      They walked on quickly now with Ernest setting the pace. Over another hill and down into a valley where the path passed through the cool shadows of a beech wood, where bluebells grew in clusters beneath the gnarled mossy green trunks of the old trees. And then out into the open again as they climbed up the other side, walking between tall grasses under the cloudless azure sky.

      ‘You’re a liar,’ said Adam, stopping to wipe the sweat from his brow. ‘This is twice as far as we walked before.’

      ‘But worth it,’ said Ernest, beckoning to his friend to join him on the ridge. ‘Worth it to see what the end of the world looks like.’

      Adam stood stock still, staring down into a bowl-shaped valley similar to the one containing the Scarsdale pit but smaller and with just a single headstock at the bottom that had toppled over on to one side. Its wheels were brown with rust and the shack-like buildings around the pithead were in a state of pitiful disrepair, left to rot amid a sea of weeds and strangling vines. And the same was true of the miners’ houses that stretched up the sides of the valley – the same mean streets as in the Scarsdale valley but built here of less durable materials which hadn’t stood the test of time. A few of the windows still had broken glass but most were just holes in the walls – openings into black empty interiors, home to rats and spiders.

      ‘What happened?’ Adam asked.

      ‘The seam was exhausted so they went down deeper; too deep, and the mine flooded. Some miners were drowned and the rest were laid off, so they moved to Scarsdale or other pits and the village died. Thorley it was called, and now the name means nothing.’

      ‘When did it happen?’

      ‘Fifteen years ago – same year I was born. In another fifteen there probably won’t be anything left and no one will even know that there was once a mine here and a village and a pub and a union. And one day Scarsdale will go the same way and there’s nothing my dad or your dad or Whalen Dawes can do to stop it.’

      They had gone down the hill a little way to where a street of tumbledown houses began. On a whim Adam pushed open the rotted door of the first one they came to. It creaked on its rusted hinges and immediately a pair of angry black birds – rooks or crows, it was too quick to know which they were – flew past him up into the air where they were joined by a flock of others, rising in a whirr of wings from the eaves of the other houses. They circled overhead, cawing angrily at the interlopers.

      ‘Be careful,’ said Ernest, who had stayed back in the street. ‘The roof will cave in if you give it half a chance. A lot of them already have from the looks of it.’

      But Adam didn’t respond. He had moved to the centre of the room, standing gingerly on the rotten joists that were all that was left of the floor as he listened intently to a sound of rocking that was coming from the upper floor. In the corner a rickety staircase was missing several of its steps. He didn’t need Ernest to tell him that it would be stupid to climb it and yet he didn’t think twice. He had to see who or what was making the noise above. He was halfway up when it stopped and the stairs began to give way beneath him. The nightmare memory of falling in the pit cage flashed across his mind and he reached out and grabbed the newel post at the top of the stairs and pulled himself up to safety just as the staircase collapsed behind him and the house seemed to tremble on its foundations.

      He was in a square room, standing across from a small sash window that had long ago lost all its glass. Below the sill an emaciated black-and-white cat was standing, precariously keeping its balance on a rocking chair that was rocking violently to and fro again, responding to the shaking of the house. The animal was clearly enraged – its fur was standing on end, its back was arched and an angry snarl had exposed its teeth. Adam just had time to take a step back and put his hands up to protect his face before it sprang at him through the air, scratching his arms before it leapt down through the hole in the corner where the staircase had been and disappeared.

      Adam looked down and inspected the damage: livid lacerations along the backs of both forearms that were starting to bleed. He took off his shirt and used the sleeves to staunch the blood. He felt faint and sat down on the cherry-wood chair, keeping his feet on the floor to stop it rocking. He could see it was handmade, each arm and leg lovingly carved and crafted to enable it to stand the test of time. The miner who had lived here had made it, Adam guessed, for his wife perhaps to sit at the window and look out at the sun rising over the hills.

      He closed his eyes for a moment, imagining the past, and was startled by Ernest shouting his name from down below.

      ‘I’m all right,’ he said, getting up and leaning out of the window. ‘I’ll come down in a minute.’

      ‘How? You’ve broken the staircase, you idiot. I told you to be careful,’ said Ernest, laughing. ‘Wait there and I’ll find something for you to jump down on to.’

      Adam turned to go back and sit in the chair but jumped, knocking it over, when a mouse scuttled under his feet, looking back at him for a moment before it vanished into a hole in the wainscot. And down next to the opening, he saw a toy train half hidden by some rags. He bent down and picked it up. It was made out of the same shining cherry wood as the rocking chair with each detail beautifully executed down to the wheels that slowly turned as he rolled it to and fro along a floor plank.

      The chair for the wife and a toy for their child: Adam could see them in his mind’s eye, looking out of the window at just this time of day, waiting for the miner to return home, putting their trust in a future which was about to be snatched away from them. Just like his own mother had in London. And thinking of her again, he suddenly saw her bedroom in the house in Islington as clearly as if he had been transported back in time and was standing on the half-landing looking in. There was the little desk in the corner where she did her accounts, there the cross on the mildew-stained wall, and there the empty bed covered with the cheap eiderdown to which she would never return. She had hoped and dreamed too, unaware of what lay in store for her just around the corner.

      ‘Come on,’ shouted Ernest, his voice breaking in harshly on Adam’s reverie. ‘Time to jump!’

      Adam looked down and saw that Ernest had dragged an old mattress below the window.

      ‘Better land on your feet,’ he said. ‘I wouldn’t want to put my face in this fleabag.’

      Adam tried to lift the sash but it came away in his hands and so he knocked away the rest of the frame and laughed when he hit the ground amid an explosion of dust and feathers. He was young and the strong blood pumping through his veins wouldn’t let him stay melancholy for very long.

       СКАЧАТЬ