Archive > Earthworks
Earthworks
Progress is slow today. On the other hand, it depends how you look at it. In terms of centimetres, OK. But in terms of time - think of that. I’m down through maybe a decade of earth. Ten years in a day, that’s not so bad. On good days, when I’m stronger and don’t have to keep stopping after each scrape, I can do twice that.
I think I must get somewhere soon.
I blame the birds. That’s a bit unfair, chemicals are the main culprit here of course, but we can’t just let the birds off. They played their part.
Seagulls and crows told the story of my early years. They are there scattered like punctuation throughout the narrative; sets of black-and-white quotation marks perched in opposing pairs above the lines. Black and white, land and sea, introversion and extroversion - always negative-images of each other. The shiny and mysterious crows that lived in the trees when there were only the trees to be lived in. Then the garrulous, soaring, white-and-grey seagulls. Incomers from the sea. Never content to be bound to the land.
At first it was mainly that crows that provided the theme-music. I ran and walked in woods and the crows flapped around up there above me, raucous and indifferent. But I grew to love them anyway.
Later, it was the seagulls that took over. Their strident cries becoming increasingly hard to ignore. They told of other lands and of journeys away over the sea or through the air, to places far, far away from the self-possessed, inward-looking crows.
Perhaps if I hadn’t listened and stayed, things would have been different. Or maybe they planned for that eventuality too.
I’m over two metres down now, my head well below the muddy edges of the trench when I stand fully upright to stretch my cramping back. Tall walls of soil and shale surround me, clearly divided into horizontal strata of dark and light and dark. Each is only inches from my face. The shaft is just wide enough me to stand in and dig, or sit down in with my knees drawn tightly up to my chin. A crooked chimney-stack let down into the ground that I clamber up and down like any poor Victorian urchin.
I’ve come to know the look of the walls well. I gaze at them now whilst I get my breath back, like someone studying the pictures in a gallery. The pain in the side of my chest slowly subsides. Above me, the world is reduced to a simple square of light, filtered to muddy grey by the bubble walls. Beneath my bare feet is a layer of small, sharp, densely-packed stones. It is hard going. I have to break the ground by stabbing my spade in hard and levering shards of stone up. A few hours of this and I might have enough to fill the piece of sacking I use to haul the spoil up to the surface.
The first metre only took me a couple of weeks – those two excited, frantic weeks immediately after I got the fax - but progress has slowed since then. I like to think that means I’m getting nearer. Like a line on a graph tending towards infinity, or perhaps to zero.
Yes, and while we’re on the subject, let’s not forget about the geometry either. Geometry, mathematics, science, chemistry. They’re all linked.
At school I hated the stuff. They warned us repeatedly about sex and about drugs but no-one ever mentioned logarithms. The most pointlessly abstract, the most wilfully irrelevant of subjects. A time in your life when there is so much going on that is genuinely important - matters of passion and blood; long-term, life-time choices to be made – and they ask you to fiddle around with cosines and pi and the surface area of spheres.
That’s maybe where things started. I think geometry became offended with some of the things I came out with and started to take its revenge. I always said it was petty.
It started with circles. I can still look through the eyes of that quiet nine-year old girl, lying there in bed, the warm, clean sheets crisp against my legs. I’m still a little dizzy, fascinated by the way the walls spin, winding slowly forwards then whipping backwards to where they should be.
My mother looks in every few minutes to check on me. I smile back at her to say I’m OK. On the walls are my posters of pop-stars and ponies. A warm sunny light seeps in around the edges of the drawn curtains, casting a corrugated shadow on the ceiling that slowly creeps sideways as the strange day wears on. Outside, half a mile away, I hear the babbling racket from the school playground. Occasional whoops of excited joy rise above the cacophony. It’s where they found me yesterday of course, walking around and around upon a small circle painted onto the ground where netball is played. My eyes down as I concentrate furiously on the never-ending line. At first everyone thinks I’m playing, then that I’m being disobedient as the teacher tells me to stop and come inside. But I keep on, oblivious to my friends, unaware of why I am doing it or even who I am. To silence, I am eventually led gently away by my own teacher.
There are birds there, too. Inevitably. All day I hear the gentle, constant twittering of a flock of finches, as if they have massed in the tree outside my bedroom to heckle.
Later on, there were others, too many for coincidence. Traffic-systems, bureaucratic paper-chases, philosophical quandaries. You know the sort of thing. And never an exit, never a chink in the perfect symmetry. Then it was their hoodlum cousins, the vicious circles. There was a bad patch where I was homeless and unemployed. Couldn't get a roof without money, couldn't get a job because I didn't have a house.
And spirals - of poverty, of low self-esteem, of compulsive and addictive behaviour. I had them all. I’m sure I can’t have been that rude. Let’s not even get into triangles. Being the hypotenuse in a love-triangle is a messy business. At school, geometry was made to sound so clean.
But, somewhere along the line, a pattern started. I remember a dusty, hot summer day in my doctor’s surgery. My mother is there again. The leather seat is sticky and uncomfortable on my bare legs. A grandfather clock picks slowly through the passing seconds. There is silence as the doctor reads through some papers. The results of tests. Then there is gentle, hushed talk of immune-responses and allergen-reactions and other words too long for me to grasp. At the end of the consultation I recall he shakes his head slightly, looking across his huge desk and down at me, his eyes genuinely sad behind his old half-moon glasses.
To be fair, they tried everything. But without success. The modern-age and I, they eventually said, just weren’t going to get along.
Basically, it was me or it. That suited me fine. I was always the one reading books when I was supposed to be watching television. I think I've always mistrusted machinery, their utilitarian stupidity, their functional ugliness. Maybe I was delivered by suction pump or something. I always just wanted to be outside, walking in the wilds. Maybe science took offence at such terrible heresy. I still half-suspected the birds. Although, true, it was a circle that got me in the end. The plastic bubble I have to live in is, inevitably, perfectly round – a hemisphere of thick, translucent, sterilised, hypoallergenic plastic. I can barely bring myself to touch it.
The Earth is another circle. I don’t like to think about that, and keep digging. Three meters down now, and getting deeper each day. The escape-tunnel is coming along well. I’m burrowing my way out of the modern age. Sometimes I just sit down there, amongst the reassuring walls of mud and shale and breathe in the deep, rich, loamy air, as if it is a medicine I have to inhale. The wooden grip of the spade is worn smooth now, whilst my own hands have grown rough and blistered from holding it. I suppose a machine could have dug the hole in an hour or two. Maybe that’s the point.
I think about the layers I’ve come through. Each age deposits its own debris on top of the ground, burying what has gone before. Beneath our toxic veneer, the Victorian ground-level is still there. Beneath that the pre-industrial, the Anglo-Saxon, the Roman, the Celtic. Down through layers archaeological, palaeontological and geological. I don't know. I just know it feels good to dig, to touch the earth from those older, safer, friendlier days.
I think about Cormack and his next visit. He’s pretty much the only one who can be relied on to visit these days. My family don’t, but then they are all dead and buried. I must ask him how it is all these layers pile up on one another, as if the Earth is slowly swelling. It’s the sort of thing he knows about.
I dream about him that night. Our whole childhood gang is there. Him, me and the rest. I’m not even sure how many of the others are still alive. We walk across open countryside, over endless fields and down meandering lanes as if somewhere, somehow we are still going. Our young legs could walk and walk forever. We lie on a hillside in long, green grass, the clouds drifting by above us, the sun hot on our faces. There’s only them and us and the smell of grass in all the world. And high, high up there, swathes of birds, swallows maybe, exploding to-and-fro across the sky.
Later on, they built a factory nearby. It was an ugly, ugly mass of pipes and ducts and functional square buildings and wire mesh. I hated it more than I’ve ever hated anything in my life, sitting there like a tumour on the land. A tall chimney, perfectly cylindrical, surface-area 2 pi r h, lifting fumes into the air where they drift away to touch down elsewhere. The Doctors wondered about that at the time. One day I went up there, running from bush to bush right to the wire-mesh barrier, and threw in stones as hard as I could. Most ricocheted impotently off the high fence. One or two hit something solid inside with a satisfying, resonant clang. I doubt I did any real damage. But somewhere, I’m sure notes were being made.
There are bones at the bottom of the pit now. Big, stained, unidentifiable bones. I think about mammoths and the brontosaurus. Maybe that explains the hostility of the birds. It has always seemed odd, a little unfair. Maybe they still carry a weight of resentment about mammals from their dinosaur days. Being out-evolved. Maybe I’m just an easy target.
In the end I forget to ask Cormack about the way the Earth is swelling. He’s excited about something and I don’t speak much. I’m tired, and the walls of the bubble seem especially thick today. His face distorts as he talks, as if it’s him that is made out of plastic. One moment I can still see the little boy there in front of me. The next, the slightly shabby, slightly careworn man, his hair starting to thin out, his clothes comfortable, sensible.
Beyond him is the red smudge of the house. The house I bought to be as far away from civilisation as possible but never lived in. Never even went inside, just peered in through the windows once or twice. Beyond, mere washes of indistinct colour, the fields and woods.
He’s bought his young son with him. For the first time, as if previously he’s been worried about the effect on him, or me, or both of us. What might have been, maybe. The boy looks at me, fascinated at the sight of a woman standing inside a large plastic bubble in a garden in the middle of nowhere. His name, I know, is Gavin. His face is plump, healthy, full of life. I can’t help feeling just a little resentful. He has a painting for me. A stick-woman floats upwards into the sky inside a huge soap bubble, surrounded by lower-case m birds. Through the intercom I tell him it’s lovely. Which it is. He smiles warmly, and sticks it to the outside of the bubble looking in, with some sticky tape he has brought with him for the purpose.
Whilst Gavin, bored already, investigates the garden, Cormack tells me of a medical article he has read. He takes some folded pages from his pocket and shows me them. Close columns of tiny lettering interspersed with charts and graphs. He thinks there is real hope for me this time. Immunosuppressant drugs, a sheltered environment, a lot of care and I may be able to live something like a normal life.
He sits down on the weathered, wooden stool placed next to the intercom. “I spoke to the Doctors at the hospital. They think the new therapies are very promising. We’d be able to get together. I mean properly. I could come round to see you and talk. Without these barriers getting in the way all the time.”
He doesn’t know about the pit. No-one does. It and the spoil-heap are in my inner sanctum, invisible from outside. I know there is no hope. Chemicals and technology got me into this mess. They’d only make things worse. I know I just need to get away from them all. I’m probably even allergic to antihistamines.
I smile gratitude. I am genuinely grateful to him. “I can’t imagine it Cormack. That’s wonderful but I daren’t hope. Not after everything.”
“Of course, but they’re making advances all the time. Who knows what will be possible in five year’s time?”
I look down, look away. He sees it of course.
“Or maybe just a couple of years. But one day soon, I’m sure.”
I smile at him through the plastic. I don’t want to disillusion him. If I could take one thing with me from the modern age.
“And until then I’ll keep coming. Whenever I can. If you like?”
He has some apples in his hand I see, 100% organic no doubt. In my inner sanctum, in the wooden bowl on the old wooden desk next to my cot, the last load that he passed in through the airlock waits untouched. These days my appetite seems to have all but vanished.
“Of course Cormack. Of course. Please.”
Gavin has returned from his foraging in the overgrown wilderness of the garden. He stands next to Cormack. "Dad, can we go home now?"
The birds played a long game. It was several years after I left home that they made their move. When the end came, it wasn’t crows, or seagulls, but a swan that got me.
It is late on a rainy evening and I'm driving along on a big main road near my home in the city. Streetlights and car lights gild a bright, electric sheen onto the wet road surface. An adult swan, big and ghost-white has become confused, thinking it has found a river to roost on. It soars along just above ground level, outstretched wings as wide as my car, neck, head and beak thrust forwards like a harpoon. It hits the windscreen directly in front of my eyes.
Cars do the rest. A frantic panic of feathers, glass shards, blood and screams and I lose control, veering across the carriageway into the oncoming traffic. I hit a lorry, a suddenly huge metal grill slamming into me and over me. I'm knocked unconscious, the martyr swan crushed to a pulp.
The physical injuries from the crash, the broken bones and bruises, all heal eventually. I'm left with just a small, v-shaped scar on my forehead where the swan's beak hit me, marking me out. What does for me is the long stay in hospital, the invasive medical procedures and injections and drips that last for months.
There is a point where I stop getting better and start going downhill again. At first the doctors respond with different drugs, more drugs, new investigative procedures. But they only make things worse. Medicine does all it can. Eventually we have to admit that medicine is part of the problem. Something has broken inside me, has finally rebelled against the technology.
I become increasingly moribund. At the same time my entire skin flares up bright red. I'm sick all the time, lose weight quickly. Where the drips and monitors are attached, my skin rebels, turning into open weals as if trying not to touch the plastic and metal, as if they actually burn.
I can see through her eyes too; that young woman lying there in her isolation room. I've just emerged from a feverish dream where I'm attending my own funeral. As they lower me down the smoothly-cut shaft I sigh and say to someone standing next to me, It's for the best. The other - maybe it's me - says nothing.
I come round and Cormack is there, sitting beside the bed and looking in at me through the plastic. Too much of this stuff has come between us over the years. The walls of the room are a uniform, clinical white. Someone has put fresh flowers into the vase on the window ledge. He says, "Once your stronger, you'll get your resistance back. You'll get well again." He must have grown tired of trying to be so positive over the years.
It wasn't to be. I ended up here in my hermit's cell. Where I've really been very happy. OK, you might call it a prison. Lots of people have. But I prefer to think of it as a small piece of earth I've reclaimed. I lie in my inner sanctum at night and feel genuinely content. Like that little girl all those years ago listening to the world going on outside. The snapping and cracking of my plastic walls in the wind and, beyond, the cries of animals and the gentle roaring of the trees.
But the birds had one more card to play. When we first set up the refuge we added a computer to help me communicate with the outside world. I was very unsure of it at the time; I suppose I should have known better. It sits inside its own little isolation cell in the heart of mine, a small plastic cube, volume s cubed, with a set of scary laboratory gloves built into it so that I can operate the keyboard without actually touching it. A box within a box like matruishka dolls. A small splinter of the outside world embedded in my own world, like a dormant virus or an unexploded bomb in paradise.
This time it is a hot summer day. The transparent walls of the bubble trap the heat unbearably so I've withdrawn inside my opaque, inner-sanctum. Half-heartedly I'm replying to emails, tapping away languidly, one slow keystroke at a time.
This time the agent is a skylark. For a long time I don't notice it, high, high in the sky somewhere above the bubble. For, I don't know, half an hour or so it sings its intense, relentless, twittering song before I take note. It suddenly strikes me how similar the sound is to the squeals the computer makes when it is communicating with another modem or a fax machine.
The next step is obvious and surprisingly easy. The skylark must have been practising hard. I play the sound in and, first time, an image starts to appear on the screen. It is crude, indistinct, as if seen through a swirl of feathers, but clearly there.
A rough circle, large, shaded roughly in as if with a clumsily held pencil. Within it, another circle, a cavity in the shading.
That night, when it is cool, I start digging.
And now the digging is over, I’m down to the root. The sun is coming up as I break through. I’m maybe, I don’t know, thirty, fifty metres down but I know because I hear the dawn chorus start up. I’m weary; it has been a long, long night. So I’m confused as to what order events are happening in. But, unexpectedly loud, as if they are there in the shaft with me, the birds start singing. At about the same moment, my spade cuts through the last layer of soil and hits wood. The sound is an unmistakable, hollow thud.
Ancient, rusting clasps hold the square of dark, closely-grained timber in place. I scrape away the soil and unearth the handle used to lever the hatchway open. It is awkward in the confined space.
For one last time I scramble my way back up to today. The sky is noticeably lightening, the scene very clear as if the plastic of the bubble has thinned away overnight. Colours are bright in the fresh dawn glow.
Birds are there in great numbers. Songbirds throng in the trees and bushes, flitting and skipping excitedly between branches. Seagulls slide and drift overhead. And crows too, I’m pleased to see them there, gathering on the tops of distant trees. Even swans have come; a number of large, white shapes are scattered about on one of the fields. A pheasant struts and pecks its way around like a baby dinosaur. Some large bird of prey soars high overhead, as if crucified to the sky. And many other species I only half recognize, as if they are all waiting their turn to follow me down the tunnel.
I think about leaving a note for Cormack. It’s the very least I can do. I’m perhaps going to say that I love him, but he knows that already. Or maybe that he should cherish Gavin. But I know he already does. In the end I just write It’s for the best on a piece of rough parchment in large, pencilled letters and stick it to the bubble wall, underneath Gavin’s picture, looking outwards.
I leave the spade along with everything else up on the surface and half-climb, half-fall down the long, knotted rope. The hatchway is heavy to haul open but I’m not going to be denied now. Underneath, a flight of stone steps leads away. Warmth and light glow up, a slightly steamy and humid air, unexpectedly fresh and also, somehow, cool.
Carefully I start to walk downwards, taking one step at a time.
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