The Quarry (13 page)

then he was beaten. by a woman. her face was transfigured with a fury of which he was not the real object and she lashed at him with the stick while screaming out vile imprecations as if the
biscuits were unspeakably priceless. every blow that landed made dust squirt out of him in jets. he tried to shield himself at first but the blows were distant and unreal. the stick broke. the top
of it spun away into a corner and the woman bounded fiendishly behind it.

he leaned on one of the shelves to get up and it broke. tins and newspapers slid and splashed to the floor and he walked backwards from the gathering chaos. horrified. he went to the door. when
he got there he started to vomit. pinkwhiteblue coming out of him in spurts like the ghastly essence of himself. he staggered out in the crimson twilight and started to go down the road.

then the voices rose baying like a mad chorus and they were running behind him in a thicket of flesh, many-armed multi-eyed ravenous

He turned away from the policeman and started to run down the road towards the town. The policeman started running behind him. They went very quickly down the level straight
road with the light ebbing steadily around them. Even the birds had gone silent

and clutching and dragging and pulling at him he broke free of them and ran up the main street between the solemn assembly of watchers sitting in their chairs lying on their
backs standing their telescopes and cameras and fragments of coloured glass pressed to their eyes and the light was the light of some other planet with a dwarf star for a sun cooling slowly to an
ember whole continents and seas below sealed up in ice preserved in the layered gloom that might have emanated from him he ran in all the thick hot stillness he was the only point of motion of
frenzy

He ran past the white church and on. He ran down a road that joined another road that went into the main street. He ran down the middle of the street. It was almost full dark
by now but the windows at the edge of the street were lit and silhouetted against them were the outlines of people squatting or lying or crouching in postures that seemed to betoken something but
what. It felt that his whole life had been expended in motion, had consisted of no substance but flight

The policeman ran behind in his befouled and bespattered uniform and his pristine white bandages and the ruined cassock overall and while he ran he tried to pull his gun from
the holster with one bullet left in it to fire

And ahead of him in the street he saw somebody running towards him. He couldn’t slow down or change direction so he continued to run as he was. Very straight, very fast.
The other man was to one side of him, to the right, and they passed each other in the weird red dusk, both of them running at speed. If they knew each other it wasn’t spoken. He ran on and to
his right there passed a collection of people in pursuit of the other man running. He saw their faces demented and yearning for blood and one of them clutched at him and then he was past. He ran on
down the road. He passed the lighted window of the café on one side with shelves of goods visible behind it and then a butchery and a hair salon and then there was a darkness ahead from
which came the susurration of the sea. There was a metal boom across the road. He started veering to go around the boom. When the shot came he didn’t hear it entirely, just the first edge of
the report that seemed to slice off suddenly in the air and in the silence on the far side of it he was falling as if through measureless space.

The metal boom hit his cheek. Then the ground. He lay there in the road with his face pressed down to the tar and with his last strength remaining pushed down with his hands. Rolled over. He saw
the sky with stars burning in it and the policeman’s head outlined against them. The sun was a dark disc punched out on the sky with one fiery rim still protruding and then it went out

the darkness was sudden and complete and it came as he drew opposite a house there was a low fence a gate he went in through the gate there was a dustbin and he crouched down
beside it on the far side of the fence in some other world altogether he heard the cries and footfalls of pursuit grow louder and then diminish and taper he moved still at a low crouch from the
dustbin down the length of the wall he went down the side of the house like a blind man reading braille with his fingers there was a wall here another gate he went through and on through another
garden another street and on

‘He’s gone.’

‘I thought I saw –’

‘No, he’s gone.’

‘Somebody ran the other way.’

‘Was it him?’

‘Look everywhere. Look more. Look, look.’

‘He’s gone.’

‘What about that other one running?’

‘That was somebody else.’

‘Are you sure?’

‘How do you know?’

The body lay in the road next to the metal boom for less than five minutes in all. Then somebody brought a stretcher. They loaded it on to the stretcher with its face looking
up and hands hanging loose at its sides. There wasn’t a lot of blood. Somebody else brought a blanket and they threw it over the body and two youths were conscripted to carry it. The little
cortège went slowly down the street, Captain Mong limping ahead. Along the sides of the road the spectators gathered to watch and it was as if somebody important was gone and they had come
to pay homage. The procession went all the way up the main street and through two side roads past the church. On along the road to the township. They moved very slowly and the sun came back quickly
and by the time they reached the plaza it was light.

She came out of the house with her suitcase in her hand. She was wearing jeans and a shirt. She put the suitcase down for a moment. She closed the door behind her and stood
with her hands on her hips, looking around. The plaza. The sandbags. The blackened foundations with the part of one wall left standing. There was a boy playing with a tennis ball in the rubble,
throwing it up and catching it. When he saw her he stopped and watched her. After a moment he came over.

‘There was another uncle,’ he said. ‘He was looking for you.’

‘Oh,’ she said. ‘Today?’

‘No,’ the boy said. ‘I think it was another day.’

She looked through her pockets for money and took out a coin. She gave it to him. He walked away holding it. She watched the tiny figure diminish till distance had consumed it entirely. There
were other children playing and they stood up with ashened faces and looked at her. She picked up the suitcase and walked stiffly away over the plaza. The sound of her feet on the concrete became
softer and softer and then she came to the edge of the plaza and her feet made no sound at all. She disappeared between buildings, walking fast.

In the cell at the edge of the plaza Small lay on the bed on his back. He had been lying in this position for some hours now, hands clasped on his stomach and the heels of his
feet placed together. He was looking up at the ceiling.

In the ceiling he could see a face that had been made by water long ago. It was indistinct and distorted but he could see in it the places for eyes nose and mouth and he had projected a nature
upon it. He stared intently at the face. He didn’t move at all except to breathe. It was hot in the cell but as the afternoon went by it became gradually cooler and the sunlight that slanted
in moved from the bed to the wall.

He had written his name on the wall.

Then the sun faded and it started to get dark and he couldn’t see the face any more. Still he lay there on the bed, not moving. The electric light came on overhead and he shifted his
position abruptly. He crossed one leg over the other leg and placed his hands at his sides. Valentine. Where are you Valentine.

He was walking at the edge of a tar road that ran like a stripe from horizon to horizon. The land was flat. The road went south across the flat land. He came along walking
slowly, dragging his feet, and every now and then he would stop completely and stand there looking around. Then he started walking again.

Later when he heard a car behind him he moved off the road into the grass and crouched down till the car had gone past. When he stood up again he was holding a broken parasol that he’d
found in the grass. He walked out into the road with it, turning it round in his hands, looking at it.

It was buckled and tattered but it opened and he held it over him and walked in its shadow. He held it in his left hand because the right still hurt from the fire. The cloth had come off and the
blister was weeping in the centre of his palm like a religious marking of some kind. He himself looked crazed and messianic in his rags and his filth and his hair. He had only been on the road for
three days but already he had taken into himself some of its logic, its lore. His sole destination was motion. He was thinner and stronger than he had used to be. There was a certain look in his
eye.

He was buried in an unmarked grave in the corner of the graveyard next to the body of the minister. There was no service and nobody came to mourn. The coffin was a plain pine
box and it was delivered to the cemetery in the morning by two policemen in a van. They carried it, cursing and slipping, to where the grave had been dug. They lowered the coffin on ropes and
pulled the ropes out of the hole and went.

Then the gravedigger called Jonas got up from the flat rock where he’d been sitting and started to fill in the hole. He had been doing this job for thirty-seven years with unvarying
punctiliousness and diligence. The graves were all the same depth and took the same time to dig and to fill. When he had finished he beat the earth flat with the back of the spade and propped up
the spade against a tree. He went back to the flat rock and sat. He took tobacco out of his overall pocket and rolled a cigarette for himself. He was in the warm sunlight, smoking, looking out on
the little crosses in the ground.

In the middle of the day everything in the quarry is lit from above by the sun. The boulders, the tiny trees, the vine growing up the cliff-face. All still and clear, static
and visible. Nothing moves in the quarry.

Maybe a grasshopper flickers. Maybe a bird flies over, calling.

As the sun gets lower a shadow starts to go across it, beginning at one wall and spreading slowly across to the other. It climbs, filling up the quarry from below in much the way that water
would. It is blue and cool, this shadow, and nothing is hidden by it yet. Only softened.

Then the sun goes down and the shadow in the quarry changes. It gets darker and objects are slowly lost in it, their outlines erased and consumed. The shadow thickens. Then it isn’t shadow
any more. It’s darkness and the darkness in the hole is no different to the darkness above it but you can’t see down into the quarry. It was dug a long time ago and it goes down deep
into the ground. There might be water in the quarry, or movement, or nothing. There might be no bottom to it.