The Quarry (10 page)

Valentine got up. There was soil and blood on his hands and glass lying everywhere like frost. He was dimly aware of a periphery of faces turned heavily towards him like sunflowers. He ran at
the faces. They parted in front of him and drew back and he was at the head of a street that stretched away in diminishing perspective towards an invisible point. He ran towards the point. Houses
went past on either side and gardens and kerbstones like loaves of white bread. Then there were no more houses but grass and stones on each side and he continued to run at the point that receded
and the township rose in silence in front of him. He ran at the point and the point was the plaza and then the point was the church. The doors were open under the lopsided cross and there was no
sound except the sound that he made and the point was inside the church. And he ran towards the vanishing point.

The church emptied quickly. Only he was left. He sat for a long time in the witness box. Then he got up and walked down through the nave of the church to the doors. Nobody
arrested him, he was detained by nobody.

He walked down the street. In the houses with their naked brick faces the lights were going on like stars and from the gardens that he passed small plaster gnomes watched him, their colours pale
from the sun and time, and he knew he was not part of any of this, it not part of him either.

He came to the edge of town. The last house, the last fence, and what unrolled away beyond that was what had always been here. The earth was hard and brown. Across it the road ran level as a
plank. He took off the burned black robe and shed it there on the verge like a skin which no longer fit him. He walked.

He spent the night at the quarry. There was a rock overhanging the edge and he curled up and slept on this like an innocent, a figure in a story not his. In the morning when he woke it was
already full light. A procession was passing in the road. He walked a little way and watched. The wagons rode in file, tardy and tremendous, their wheels cutting tracks in the dirt. There were
caravans and horses and midgets and girls and the cavalcade passed with tumultuous slowness. Some of them called to him but he didn’t call back. He stood and watched them come over the
ridge.

Then from the wagons he saw the rider appear on the machine, moving very fast. He was going back and forth between the vehicles. The man watched him with curiosity at first. The sound of the
engine was tiny and metallic, the noise of a bee in a room. It was hard to see clearly in the glare and dust and only when he came closer could the man see what he was wearing.

Then he headed out along the edge of the quarry, leaving the road behind. He was running. The rider was perhaps five hundred metres distant and this was all that was between them as he resumed
his journey on a morning still cold, still pale with a pure early light.

It ran as far as the wharf and when it came to the edge with the sea heaving darkly below it turned and tried to get past him but he was close behind it with his gun already
drawn and he dropped to one knee and fired and missed and fired again and this time hit it in the side or the neck and it fell backwards kicking and into the sea and he ran to the edge and stood
braced on the planks wet with weed and spray and it was rolling in the water below and he fired twice more for the crazed joy of it, the water upleaping to the kiss of the bullets and the sad
carcass sinking from sight. He watched till it had vanished. He pushed the revolver back into its holster. It was hot like a hand on his hip. He walked slowly back down the wharf between the
bollards and coils of rope to where a crowd had gathered near the road.

‘Did you get it?’

‘
Ja
. It’s gone.’

‘Captain Mong?’

‘
Ja?
’

‘One of the prisoners escaped. The other one tried too but he –’

He ran all the way back to the white church. Empty and desolate, its doors thrown open on darkness. He went in. The pews stood skewly and bibles and hymnbooks were scattered on the ground as if
the place had been sacked. He came back out again running and only when he was halfway between the town and the township did he slow again to a walk. He was limping slightly and gasping. He sounded
like an angry child crying. By this time it was night.

Before he reached the plaza he could see it. The glow was still soft and secretive but the smell was unmistakable. He knew. He swore in a quiet voice and started running again. He ran into the
plaza. All around like dumbfounded junkies stood watchers with mouths hanging open.

He told them to form lines. They obeyed him. Buckets were passed hand to hand and when they reached the end of the line were emptied and sent back again. Then the fire-engine came. It was the
only one in the town and it had last been used three years before. It drove into the plaza, bell dinning, one front tyre flat and all its hubcaps missing and a bird’s nest built on its
bumper. The driver was the only fireman. He jumped down, muttering and wall-eyed, frenetic. There was a ragged hose on the back. There was nothing to fix the hose to. The fireman stood cursing with
the useless black hose and the lines of people who were passing the buckets stopped what they were doing and the buckets were put down on the concrete. Someone climbed up on the engine, the better
to watch the conflagration. Others followed. In the end even the fireman sat up in his cab, eating a sandwich and watching.

How the little church burned. The bricks built up to astonishing heat and shattered in sudden explosions and the rafters groaned and shifted like bones and tiles slid and broke on the ground.
The fire was like an envelope with a picture sealed inside it. Pigeons flew blinded by smoke and night and their shadows were punched out on the clouds overhead like ancient more terrible birds and
one of them caught alight and flew burning in a long trajectory and fell. The glare was like noon. The plaza reflected it and people congregated along the edges were talking and shouting but no
human voice could be heard only the voice of the fire. Smoke rose in long supple lines.

There was one man apart from the rest and that was the Captain. His face had been blackened by ash and his uniform was rumpled and dirty. Even his buttons were dulled. He moved up and down along
the edge of the fire and he picked things up sometimes and then put them down again. A bucket. A stone. A shoe that somebody had discarded. He was saying words to himself. He turned at one point
and she was standing there, the woman. They looked at each other without speaking and he knew that he wouldn’t ever touch her again though he didn’t understand why. He turned away from
her. The fire was twinned and reflected in his eyes like some other fire burning in his brain.

He walked across the plaza. On the wall of sandbags outside the police-station three policemen were sitting and watching. When they saw him coming they stopped talking and when they saw his face
they got to their feet uneasily and looked around.

‘I want you to find him,’ he said.

‘Captain?’

‘Find him and bring him to me.’

They went away.

In an hour they came back again. The fire had passed its height and the flames were subsiding in the ruins. But the pop and hiss of wood were audible behind him. He sat crouched down on his
heels. He didn’t stand up.

‘He’s not in town, Captain.’

‘Someone saw him going south.’

‘North.’

‘South.’

‘We can get dogs in the morning.’

‘Dogs?’ He blinked up at them, weary, confused. He looked old.

‘To follow him, Captain. If we can give them a scent, from the blanket in the cell, maybe –’

Now he did stand. His face had cleared again. ‘Who?’ he said. His voice sounding quiet and thin.

They looked at him. ‘The prisoner, Captain.’

‘No,’ he said. ‘Not the prisoner.’

‘Not the prisoner?’

He gestured behind him.

‘Did the prisoner do this?’

They looked at the fire. They looked back at him. One of them looked down at the ground.

‘I don’t know, Captain.’

‘Bring me the minister,’ he said. ‘It’s the minister I want.’

When they came back again it was past midnight and the fire had burned down low. The watchers had mostly dispersed except for two or three at the far end of the plaza. Captain Mong was sitting
on the wall of sandbags, staring in front of him.

‘We can’t find him, Captain. He’s nowhere.’

‘Look again,’ he said. ‘He’s somewhere.’

‘Captain, we’ve been all over the –’

‘Look again,’ he said.

This time they were gone for three or four hours. He didn’t move from where he sat. It was dawn when they came back for the last time, their faces pinched and drawn with fatigue. They were
carrying the cassock. He took it and held it up and shook it and asked them where they had found it. They told him and he nodded and thanked them and then he drew it over his head. They looked at
him, astonished. He walked past them without looking at them.

In the fire-engine parked at the edge of the square the fireman was uncomfortably sleeping. He woke to an unfamiliar guttural sound and sat up in the cab. He saw the dark foundations of what had
been a church with part of one wall somehow standing and through the fibrillations of heat still arising from it he saw a motorbike moving away.

‘Now it’s morning again,’ he said.

As he went down the road out of the township the Captain saw that the circus had gone. There was a bald place on the ground where the tent had been standing but no other remnant or sign. He rode
slowly at first. Only when he had passed through the town and was on the road going out did he open up the throttle. The day was still and clear with a thin fur of dew on the grass. There were
birds flying in cryptic formations overhead and once he saw a creature at the side of the road sitting vertically upright in surprise and then bolting away but he was otherwise the only living
thing abroad. An emissary bearing bad tidings.

The road travelled straight into the sun and then swung and went up a ridge. The circus was here. The trucks and wagons were strung out in a line on the road. He didn’t slow down as he got
to them though he was going fast by now. The cage at the very back of the line was empty. He swung wide of it and around the front and wove his way between the vehicles like this all the way up the
ridge. He came to the top. The road dropped away below with the line of wagons and cars continuing on it and the quarry was on the left. The bike lifted from the ground and hung and came down and
he was moving between the radiators and the astonished faces and animals shying away behind bars. When the slope evened out he had almost drawn level with the quarry. He knew already what it was
that he would see: the man the hole the man running

He went past the quarry and turned. The man was heading east, already some distance away. The policeman drove across the gravel with stones spraying out behind him and when he came to where the
grass started he went on. He didn’t know what he expected. That he would continue to ride where no road was. That nothing material could stop him. The bike went a short way and then it hit
something and stopped. It bucked and keeled over and he went over the handlebars, performing an elaborate gymnastic in the air before he also hit the ground. He landed on his side with one arm
extended and a large pain passed brightly across him.

When he sat up the world was moving like water and he could hear laughter from a distance. His bike lay nearby with oil dribbling out of it and its front wheel spinning around. He turned and
looked back and along the road all the wagons had stopped and the people were laughing at him. Parked in a long line in the sun, gesticulating and jeering. He turned and looked the other way for
the man but he wasn’t where he had been. He was remote and diminished by distance. A tiny figure, going from him.

He stood up. His thigh felt stiff when it moved. There was a deep graze on his hand. He took the gun out of its holster. The laughter got louder and more raucous and someone shouted something at
him. He turned and fired at them. Now there was one bullet left. The laughter stopped immediately and all along the wagons the watching figures dropped out of sight.

He yelled wordlessly back at them as he pushed the revolver back into its holster. He picked up a stone and threw it and it fell in an arc into the quarry. He heard it strike. He turned again
and went after the man. He was hobbling and lurching. When he had gone a little way the people emerged from their wagons again to watch him. Somebody made a joke and a few of them laughed loudly
and then the circus went on travelling down the road.

The man heard the shot behind him. It was distant and tiny, a door slamming far away somewhere. He was running already but he ran faster now though he didn’t have the
strength to sustain it. When he had gone a little way he stopped and looked back behind him. There was a commotion of some sort at the quarry. He could see the wagons strung out along the road,
though they seemed to be stationary now, and a little centre of movement out in the veld from which a fine haze of dust was arising. He turned and ran on.

The distance between him and the quarry became quickly greater and greater. He ran out through the wasteland of grass as if he was being pursued. The sun was climbing now and the dew had dried
from the grass and the air was stiffening with heat. He ran. He tripped in a hole once and fell but he got up without pausing and ran on. When he couldn’t run any further he stopped and
looked behind him again but he couldn’t see anything except grass.

He went on, walking now. His body felt lessened, as if something had ebbed out of it. He had pains in his side and head. He breathed shallowly and fast and he found it hard to keep upright. The
sun was hot. There were no clouds. At noon there was no shade anywhere. He stopped and stared around him and the landscape continued in a dry yellow sameness of grass. He walked towards what he
thought was east but there was nothing to mark out any direction. Heat shimmered around him and the grass hissed softly. He imagined water and he thought about its clearness and he thought about
the sounds water made.