The Quarry (12 page)

When he woke again the train was juddering to a stop. The sky through the door was light. He crawled to the crate and took two more bottles out. The other man was sleeping in the corner with his
face pressed against the wood. He nodded to his back and when the train had stopped completely he climbed out of the car. The train was standing at a siding and there were other carriages and other
tracks nearby and a line of low buildings in the distance and the smell of the sea on the air.

He went towards the buildings. They looked shuttered and barred but there were people moving around between them who didn’t pay him any mind and he went around them to the back. There was
a marsh here with beyond it a town of some kind. He saw streets and windows and cars moving and he set out across the marsh. Mud sucked at his feet, reeds were sibilant around him. When he came to
the other side he was smeared in the primeval murk and encased in it up to the knees.

He thought at first he was in a city. There were so many people in the streets and cars parked everywhere at angles. Then he saw that the people were here for some reason. They stood around in
groups and some of them had cameras in their hands or mounted on tripods and some of them were holding pieces of blackened glass that looked insanely beautiful to him. They were looking up into the
sky and he also looked up but he could see nothing in it.

He was very hungry now and he wandered through the dusty streets looking for food. He didn’t know where he was but he supposed that all towns were alike. Only after he had stumbled its
length for an hour did he look up and see the spire of a church and something in it, the angle or shape, arrested him. He went closer. He stood astounded, looking up. He went closer again and when
he stood on the blue slate outside he cast around him wildly as if something had been lost. He seemed about to cry. But he didn’t cry. He stood still and looked around at the town and then he
dropped to one knee for a moment and got up.

In the wilderness in the night the policeman came to the top of a rise and saw a farmhouse below him, tiny and square with lighted windows and smoke rising from a chimney like
a small child’s dream of a house, and he hesitated only a moment before he came staggering down the slope towards it. As he came closer he saw an old black man in old clothes chopping wood at
the back and the old man stopped chopping and stood with his axe in his hands and stared. A huge inbred dog got up from the shadow at the side of the house and ran at him, barking. A chain pulled
it back as it lunged and he passed while it yearned with its mouth. He went in through the back door. A kitchen with a wooden table with a family sitting around it. A man, a woman, two daughters.
They sat with knives and forks in their hands and stared slack-jawed and stricken at this apparition that had entered their lives. Ragged and reeking like the survivor of some ultimate
catastrophe.

He pulled up a chair at the table and sat down. There was a meal piled up on plates waiting to be served, food wrested from branches, from under the ground, from inside the bodies of animals. He
reached out with his filthy, his bloody hands and began to eat without looking at them. Such was his hunger, such was his need.

He didn’t notice the commotion and the fleeing around him but at some point he looked up and saw overturned chairs and the room empty except for the glowering face of the farmer. Two
barrels pointed at him.

‘No,’ he said, still chewing.

‘What no?’ said the farmer. ‘What no?’

‘I’m with you,’ Captain Mong said. He was gnawing a piece of chicken and he laid a fine bone down on the edge of his plate. ‘I’m the law,’ he said, wiping his
mouth. ‘I’m with you.’

In the morning the farmer took him home. The two daughters stood hand in hand outside to wave him goodbye. The farmer drove down rutted tracks scarcely discernible to the eye and through gates
that stood in the desolation to mark the entrance to nothing and in time they came to a road and that road led to another. Hours had gone past by now. Then he saw where he was. The road came to the
quarry and went past it and over a ridge and on and there were other cars on the road, all of them going towards the town.

He said, ‘What is it? What’s going on?’

The farmer looked at him and shrugged.

‘The cars. Where is everybody going to?’

‘I don’t know,’ said the farmer.

All along the streets of the town there were cars parked and people walking and the commotion was charged as if an event was imminent. The farmer dropped him in the main street. They said
goodbye and shook hands and said they hoped to see each other again but they didn’t and then the farmer was gone.

The policeman went in search of the doctor. He found him in his office near the wharf. The doctor made him take off his clothes. He lay naked on the cool table while the doctor peered and
prodded at his body with his fingers and the tips of his tools. Lift your arm, he said, lift up your leg. Turn over.

‘What’s happening outside?’ he said. ‘Why are all the people here?’

The doctor straightened up. ‘It’s the eclipse today,’ he said.

‘The eclipse.’

‘This is the centre of it.’

‘Oh,’ said the policeman.

‘Does it hurt when I push here?’

He came out of the doctor’s office trussed-up and bandaged like a birthday present. He had a cracked rib and a torn ligament and a variety of bruises on his body. The little finger on his
left hand was broken. He smelled bad even to himself. He limped all the way to the white church and past it along the road to the township. Everything looked different to his eyes but it may have
been the quality of the light.

He came to the plaza. The blackened shell of the church stood at one end but he averted his eyes from it. His motorbike was standing outside the wall of sandbags in the place where it always
stood. But it didn’t look the way that it had. The paint was scarred and scuffed and the front tyre was shredded and spokes stood out as if in shock. He went past it and the sandbags into the
charge office at the front with its counter and the pimply boy sitting behind it.

The boy looked at Captain Mong as if he were famous or dead.

The Captain went past him too and into his own office and looked around at the desk and the noticeboard and the cabinet and the picture of Jesus on the wall. He went around behind his desk and
sat. The glass bowl was there like a gypsy’s crystal ball but the goldfish was floating on its back. The Captain stared into the transparent globe as if his fortune were indeed revealed there
and then he dipped his fingers into it and retrieved the fish with distaste. He held it by the edge of its tail. He looked at it and then he flung it up and it hit the roof and stuck there. In time
it hardened like a fossil.

A few minutes later a policeman came into the office. There was a threadbare place in the carpet which other feet had worn down and the policeman stood here too. ‘Captain – ’
he said.

Captain Mong didn’t look up. ‘Can nobody feed the fucking fish,’ he said. ‘It’s only been three days.’

‘Captain, they’ve got him. We’ve just heard. In the town.’

Now he did look up, eyes brilliant and steady. ‘Got who?’

‘The prisoner, Captain.’

He dropped his eyes again. ‘The prisoner,’ he said. He looked tired.

‘They’ve got him down at the café in the main road.’

‘
Ja
,’ he said. ‘
Ja.
’

‘Are we going to get him, Captain? Or must we –’

‘
Ja,
’ he said again. ‘
Ja.
’

The strips of light coming in through the blinds were diminishing steadily in power.

‘The darkest place in the world.’

‘Here?’

‘On this side. On the other side it’s night.’

‘Here?’

‘When?’

‘Now. The light’s going already, you can see.’

‘I can’t see.’

‘Look.’

‘I can see.’

‘Look!’

‘Is it him?’

‘What?’

‘It is. Look at him. It is.’

‘Where?’

‘There. What’s the matter with him?’

‘Who? Who? Who?’

‘It’s him.’

‘What’s the matter with him?’

‘Let’s get him.’

‘With what? What with?’

‘With this.’

‘And this.’

‘Let’s get him.’

‘Yes.’

‘Come.’

‘Yes.’

Valentine woke alone in the box-car with a regular metallic gonging sounding in his ears from somewhere. He drank down a bottle of the bright yellow cooldrink and pocketed
another for later. He climbed down out of the car. There was a man a little distance away who was bent down at the wheels of the engine and striking at them with a hammer. Valentine went past the
mad musician and on. The siding was in an empty lot that was rank and thick with weeds and he walked across several rows of tracks that crossed each other crazily like ladders piled up and went
through a hole in the fence. There was a flat marsh in front of him and beyond it a town sketched thinly on the sky. He went towards the town.

There were weeds with plumed tips like brushes but the sky had no colour in it. He came out of the marsh into the street. It was a town like the town he had lived in but also like no town
he’d seen. The light that came down was diffused and spectral and the outlines of buildings unclear. The air was still and dead and hot as if in the aftermath of lightning.

There was something in Valentine that was altered. He carried his head like a beaker filled with water and indeed his eyes were liquid and centreless. He came slowly down the pavement with his
exaggerated gait and when he came to the corner opposite the café he stopped. He stood there on the corner, shaking his head and looking around.

He had been there for three or four minutes when the people came out of the café. There were four men and two women and they advanced on him in a phalanx. One of them was carrying a
crowbar and one of them had a stick. He thought that one other had a gun. He watched their progress with interest. They came over the street and up on to the pavement towards him. They moved with
purpose and they encircled him and took hold of him with their hands. They were speaking harshly to him though their voices seemed wordless and their faces were hard with their thoughts. He went
with them across the street to the café and the light was greatly lessened by now.

He walked away from the white church down a side-street but there were people a little way ahead on the pavement and he turned again and went back. He went down another street.
He went only a little way before he sat down abruptly on the kerb and bowed his head suddenly into his hands.

He sat there quite still for a minute and then he stood up again and walked with intent. He went round the side of the white church. The road to the township ran on level and straight with grass
on either side.

He walked to the west of the road to avoid people travelling on it. He went north towards the township. In the dead place where the circus tent had been there was a family sitting in deck-chairs
around a blanket. The mother looked curiously at him with a black ring around her eye from the burnt glass she was holding. He went past. As he came closer to the township he walked more warily
till on the outskirts he paused. There was a boy in the road throwing a tennis ball up and catching it. He called the boy over to him. They spoke briefly. He asked the boy if he knew the woman and
the boy said that he did. He asked him to call her. The boy said that he would and he fumbled through his pockets for payment but he didn’t own anything to give. In the end he held out one of
the bottles of cooldrink and the boy took it and walked away between the houses.

He waited for fifteen minutes before he knew the boy wasn’t returning. He sat down again where he was to consider. He spoke a few words softly to himself. Then he got up again and walked
in the direction that the boy had gone in, walking between the houses, going slowly. The light had thickened greatly by now.

He came to the edge of the plaza midway between the police-station and the house. He looked at the police-station but the sandbags and the hanging flag were static and he could see nobody
outside. He looked the other way to the church. The church was gone. He looked at the rubble strewn and blackened and the single charred wall with its irregular edge and the footprints crossing
hither and thither. He looked for a long time and then he raised one hand to the side of his head and dropped it.

He looked at the house. It was closed. The door and the window were closed and in the room that he’d slept in the curtains were drawn. There was an acre of concrete between him and the
house and he looked at the police-station and at the house again but there was nobody outside either.

Then a hand pulled at his shirt. He turned. It was a woman. There was another woman with her. They began to remonstrate with him in a language different to his and the first woman kept pulling
at his shirt. He stared at them without comprehending. Then one of them gestured to the church and he understood that they were two of the faithful.

He took a step back. ‘No,’ he said. ‘No.’

They continued to talk. He sensed a hunger in them but he didn’t know what it was. He moved away from them. He went back down between the houses to the grass and walked across the grass to
the road. There was another figure coming down the road from the township and when they saw one another both stopped. They stood very still in the unnatural dusk and looked at each other in the
road.

they herded him into a corner of the shop between shelves of tins and magazines piled up and fridges humming, they leered at him, they shouted, one of them prodded him with a
stick. a crowbar. one of the others was using a telephone. their voices chafed around him. he found a clear place on the floor and sat down. on the shelf that was level with his head there was a
box of biscuits and he opened it, hands shaking. inside were lurid rectangles of pink blue white with animal shapes stamped out in icing on them and he ate three before he was seen.