Union Belle (12 page)

It had been a good prank, but not as good as the one with Gerry Latimer’s teeth. Old Gerry, retired now, had been the owner of a set of false teeth he couldn’t eat with. One crib time he’d taken them out and left them on the table and, when he wasn’t looking, Johnno pinched them. After several days of listening to Gerry moan on about his lost teeth, Johnno told him his uncle had died recently but had left behind a perfectly good, hardly used set of dentures. Did Gerry want to give them a go? Gerry, who didn’t want to fork out for a new set if he didn’t have to, said yes, and Johnno duly brought to work the teeth he’d pinched some days earlier. Gerry shoved them in his gob, moved his jaws around a bit, snapped them open and shut, and declared it a miracle because they fitted him even better than his
old teeth. He was still telling people in the pub what an amazing coincidence it was that Johnno Batten’s uncle had had exactly the same-shaped mouth as he did.

Red Canning sat down and opened his own tin.

‘What have you got?’ Johnno asked.

Red peeked between two pieces of bread. ‘Ham and mustard.’

‘Not bad,’ Johnno said. They did this every crib time, although they didn’t need to ask; their sense of smell down the mine was so acute they could easily have guessed.

‘What about you, Joe?’

‘Boil-up.’

Another redundant question. Joe Takoko always had boil-up, which he brought in a thermos and ate with great hunks of buttered Maori bread.

They munched in silence for several minutes.

Johnno wiped his mouth on the back of his hand. ‘The roof’s still working in our new section.’

Doug nodded. ‘Been doing that for weeks.’

‘Anything solid come down when you were there?’

‘No,’ Doug replied, opening a stack of home-made peanut brownies wrapped in paper, ‘just water. You want to be careful, though, eh?’ he added. ‘Keep your eyes and ears open.’

Always do,’ Tom said.

At twelve-thirty the men packed up and went back to work, making sure to leave nothing behind that might bring the rats. Tom wanted a leak but couldn’t be bothered traipsing all the way back to the shithouse off the main tunnel. It stank anyway and was enough to make a man spew, so he unbuttoned his flies and pissed against the wall. Up ahead of him in the darkness he could hear Johnno whistling again, then getting stuck into the loose coal.

It was the noise of Johnno’s shovelling that prevented
Tom, when he started work again himself, from picking up the steady whisper of a small trickle of coal and dirt coming down from the roof behind one of the props. There was another trickle three or four feet further along, and neither of them heard that one either.

Just before two o’clock Johnno stopped and leaned on his shovel.

‘We aren’t going to finish this lot before McGinty comes back.’

Tom straightened up. ‘We might. We’ll get another blast in before knock-off, anyway.’

Tom nodded, took his hat off and scratched vigorously at the itchy, sweaty skin on his scalp.

As he held the hat upside-down, a fist-sized lump of coal from the roof dropped neatly into it.

They both froze.

Another lump came down, then another, then a shower of it. They only managed a few panicked steps before the whole lot came in.

Tom cautiously tried to move his head, and found to his profound relief that he could. He still had his hat on, and the lamp was still going, but the hat felt like it was on sideways. There was grit clogging his mouth and nostrils and something heavy across his back, but nothing hurt much, except for a vicious stinging above his left eye.

‘Johnno?’

There was no answer, except for the final, uneasy whispers of the coal and rock slowly settling, and a deep, unpleasant rasping noise.

He was lying face down, with one arm folded beneath him. He got his elbow out, pushed himself up and rolled over as far as he could. The weight on his back slid off and
he discovered that he could now turn himself all the way over. There was a hollow clang as his hat banged against something solid—the skip.

He turned his hat back the right way and saw in the light of his lamp that above him the roof had dropped about five feet, low enough now to prevent him from standing up straight. Some of the props had come down across the skip and were holding up sections of the roof, but surrounding him, within touching distance if he reached out with his boot, were nothing but walls of shattered coal and broken slabs of fireclay.

That liquid, rasping noise again. He sat up and as he did a trickle ran down his face and across his upper lip, and he tasted the warm tang of blood. He thought his nose might be bleeding too, and blew it into his hand. His lamp revealed a thick blob of dark blood made stringy with snot, and he wiped it off on his trousers.

‘Johnno?’ he said again.

This time there was a low grunt, slightly to his left.

Tom got to his knees and began to scrabble at the loose coal next to the skip until he found a boot, its toe pointing up.

It took him several minutes to very carefully clear the rubble and heavy timber off Johnno, who was lying on his back with his head under the skip, his shovel half-buried next to him. Tom ducked his own head and looked; Johnno’s eyes beneath the brim of his hat were open and he was blinking slowly.

‘Fucking hell, Johnno,’ Tom said.

Johnno lifted his hand but didn’t say anything.

‘I’m going to pull you out, all right?’ Tom said, and crawled on his knees back to Johnno’s feet. ‘Ready?’

There was no answer so he grabbed the other man’s ankles and began to pull, gently at first, then with more
urgency as he envisioned the roof suddenly dropping again and crushing the skip with Johnno’s head still under it.

Johnno came out, his hat falling off and his trousers riding up as he slid forward, revealing pale hairy legs and a shallow cut across his right shin. He grunted, just once.

Tom shuffled closer again. There was bright red blood on Johnno’s teeth and now his eyes were rolling back in his head.

Tom yelled in his face, ‘Johnno, we’ll be out in a minute! Stay awake!’

Johnno’s eyes opened again. He focused on Tom, coughed wetly and licked his dusty, bloody lips. ‘I’ve had it, Tom.’

‘Fuck off, we’ll be out of here soon, they’re probably digging already.’

Johnno coughed again, and bloody spittle flew up into Tom’s face.

‘Where does it hurt?’

‘Chest.’

Tom had already noticed the odd, flat shape of Johnno’s front as he’d pulled him out from under the skip, although he’d tried not to. Reluctantly, he slowly pulled up his friend’s singlet.

There was a deep depression in Johnno’s chest all the way down almost to the base of his ribs. Three of his lower ribs were coming through the skin, but the rest was more or less intact. But it was purple, almost black, the whole lot, and Tom winced at the thought of the damage that must lie under it.

‘I’m fucked, aren’t I?’ Johnno said.

‘You’re a bit flat, mate, but you’re not fucked. They’ll be here soon, don’t you worry.’

Johnno coughed a third time, then let out a long, gargling burp followed by a gout of blood that surged out of his mouth and down over his chin and neck.

Tom leapt back in fright. Red bubbles were coming out of Johnno’s nose now, as well, and it sounded like he was drowning.

Suddenly he gripped Tom’s wrist, and in his eyes was a calm and terrible acceptance. ‘Tell Donna I love her. Tell her I’m sorry about the birthday tea.’

And then his hand relaxed and let go.

Tom sat back on his heels, stunned.

‘Hey!’ he said, and gave Johnno’s shoulder a gentle nudge.

Nothing.

He put his ear down to the ruined chest and listened for ages, but heard and felt nothing.

‘Johnno, you bullshitter, wake up.’

But Johnno didn’t wake up, and Tom suddenly knew he wasn’t going to.

He remained sitting for some minutes, staring blankly at the body of his dead friend. Then an image slid into his mind of Johnno running to catch up, like he did almost every morning, his gear flapping and bouncing, a big smile on his face and a last-one-before-we-go-down smoke jammed behind his ear.

Tom lay down on his side in the coal. There was a roaring in his ears and he put his hands over them to try and stop it, but it wouldn’t go away. It was getting louder and louder and it took him some moments to realise what it was. It was the sound of utter silence.

Then, suddenly, it was filled with the noise of his own weeping. He was glad there was no one to hear it because he was howling like a kid, real sobs that came wrenching up out of his chest and tore at his throat and made his nose bleed again.

He was crying for Johnno, and he was grateful for it, because now there was a sharp little worm of panic stirring
deep in his belly, and he was starting to suspect that if it got out—if he let it out—he might not be able to squash it back down again. Being underground was one thing, and it had never particularly bothered him, but now he was beginning to feel as though he was
in
the ground, actually part of it, and that was something different altogether.

He didn’t know how long he went on like that, but after a while he sat up, took several deep, shaky breaths and wiped his snotty face on his arm. He checked his watch but it had stopped, at six minutes before two. How long had it been since the roof had come in? Not long, surely. Or had it had been hours? Perhaps he’d been knocked out by the fall. But either way, he was sure someone would get to them soon—they would never just leave them down here.

Did Ellen know yet? Probably. Whenever there was an accident underground news of it spread straight away. She might even be standing up there now, not right at the mine entrance because she wouldn’t want to get in the way, but not far away. Donna Batten was probably there too, and the wives and family of anyone else who might not have been accounted for.

Leaning over Johnno’s body, Tom switched off the lamp on his hat. His eyes were still open. Tom closed them very gently and mouthed the first few lines of the Lord’s Prayer, but he hadn’t been to church for bloody years and couldn’t remember most of it.

What the hell was he going to say to Donna?

A fresh trickle of sweat ran down his neck. It was getting stuffier and hotter and it occurred to him, for the first time, that he might not get the opportunity to say anything to Donna if he didn’t get out soon, because the air in here wasn’t going to last for ever.

He turned over onto his knees and began to crawl into a narrow gap beside the skip; unless it had moved drastically
when the roof had come in, he was pretty sure he was moving along the floor of the bord that eventually led out to the main tunnel.

But before he’d even gone a yard he came up against another wall of coal and fireclay. And he’d known he would too, because he’d seen it in the light of his lamp, but he had to try. Unless he was going the wrong way and was looking at the rubble-covered coal face he and Johnno had been working before the roof had come in.

He thought for a moment—how the bloody hell could he tell? Then it came to him; there was always a big cross painted on one end of the skips, and it should be on the end pointing away from the coal face because of the way the truckers brought them in. Except this end of the skip was buried in bloody coal and rubbish.

The gap he was in was too small for him to turn around, so he crawled backwards to the other end of the skip, but there was nothing painted on it. Well, fuck, that was a relief, at least he was going in the right direction. He looked around and spotted Johnno’s shovel. Right, he’d start digging himself out with that, and when he’d gone a reasonable distance he’d come back and get Johnno, and then dig some more and move him along and dig some more until they were both out.

Dragging the shovel between his knees he shuffled back to the other end of the skip. The roof was down here to the same height that it was near the coal face, so a couple of timbers were probably still holding it up. If he started digging at the rubble at the top of the heap, he should be able to go some distance forward without getting into any more trouble.

But he didn’t have a hope in hell of swinging the shovel the way he normally did, so he held the handle with both hands down near the base and began scraping at the rubble.
It occurred to him that he’d have to move everything he took out back into the bigger space at the other end of the skip, or he wouldn’t be able to get past it to go back for Johnno, but that was all right; working out how best to do that would keep his mind busy.

It was while he was scraping away, steadily but slowly so he wouldn’t use up more air than he needed to, that it also occurred to him that if the others were coming for them, why wasn’t there any noise? Why couldn’t he hear digging, or voices, on the other side?

Surely the whole fucking lot hadn’t come in?

The absolute horror of the idea stopped him dead, and that was a mistake because the worm rushed out of him then,
burst
out, and he screamed so loudly he almost deafened himself. He screamed again until he thought he might faint, then bent over with his fists shoved against his mouth and little black dots floating before his eyes.

Abandoning the shovel, he started digging furiously with his hands, tearing his fingers until they bled and not even noticing, thinking that if he could just get a tiny bit closer they might be able to hear him. He scraped and gouged and dug until his hands went numb, and when he uncovered a good-sized rock he wedged the shovel under it and leaned on it as hard as he could. The wooden handle creaked under the strain and the rock ground grittily against the rubble surrounding it, but it finally eased free and rolled out, coming to rest against Tom’s knees.

There was another creaking noise then, but louder. He looked up and realised, too late, what he’d done.

The roof above him dropped another two feet, bringing with it a dislodged timber beam that crashed down onto his right arm with a sickening thud. He heard the bone snap, and then he felt it, a deep, slow burn of pain moving along the length of his arm. Cursing, he drew it against his chest
and felt the broken ends of bone grinding together. But there were no bits poking through the skin, thank Christ.