turned to look as she snarled and cursed at the old man. She was rubbing the place on her back where the biting cold of the chicken had touched her warm, naked flesh like a branding iron.
‘Sorry,’ said Harry.
Outside the shop, by the swinging Wall’s ice cream sign, Sam Beeley slipped on a discarded Coke can and hit the pavement with a painful thump, his ivory-headed stick clattering into the gutter. There was a flutter of consternation until two tall young
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men with Australian accents helped him to his feet and picked up his stick. Three girls who had leaned their hired mountain bikes against the shop window made a great fuss of asking the old man if he was all right and dusting him down, eyeing the
o o 7 J o
Australians. They all circled round Sam in a kaleidoscope of colourful shirts and brown limbs, like butterflies momentarily attracted to a dry, leafless plant before passing on to seek new scents elsewhere.
Finally, they left him to Harry and Wilford, who assured them he only lived a few yards away. Though supported by his friends, Sam didn’t get very far before he had to stop and rest on a wall, gasping with the pain from his legs. He lit a cigarette and squinted at the churchyard across the road, where the gravestones gleamed white in the sunlight.
o
‘You’ll be carrying me over yonder soon,’ he said, without
J O J ‘
self-pity.
‘We’re all heading that way,’ said Wilford.
Till not race you. It’ll happen soon enough.’
‘You have to accept the fact,’ said Harry, ‘that when you get to our age, death is always just around the corner.’
‘Do you remember that time in the mine, when I nearly got killed,” said Sam.
‘That was a good few years ago.’
Sam looked down at his legs. ‘Aye, but it left me a me
o J ‘
mento.’
The three men were silent, staring at the houses opposite, not seeing the cars that went past, or the young hikers who had to step off the pavement to get round them.
It had been over twenty years since the accident had happened at Glory Stone Mine. They had been in a six- foot-wide worked-out vein, nearly a hundred feet high. The face sloped upwards in a bank of calcite like scree, with a miner drilling at the top, fifty feet up, silhouetted against the speck of his light. The sloping face was dimly lit, and the air was smoky from the blasting, with the roof nothing but a dusky darkness way beyond the reach of the lights. It was a vast and misty cavern of greys and blacks, thick with the acrid stink of explosives and dust.
Sam had been the miner at the top of the face. He had been
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in his fifties then, an experienced man who had spent most of his working lite in the mines. When his drill spill the brittle rock and the face had opened under his feet, his body had been thrown instantly backwards, his arms and legs tumbling among their own thrashing shadows until he hit tho foot of the slope and had been buried by an avalanche of calcite. Wilford had found Harry in the darkness, and together they had dug Sam out with their hare hands and dragged him to safetv. They hadn’t realized his legs were broken until he started to scream.
‘If the pain got too much,’ said Wilford, to nobody in particular. ‘Would you think of doing away with yourself?’
Sam looked thoughtful. ‘Aye, I suppose so.’
Harry nodded. ‘If there was nothing left for you. No hope. I reckon you’d have to.’
‘Depends on what you believe in, though,’ said Wilford. ‘Doesn’t it?’
‘How do you mean?’
j
‘Some folk don’t believe it’s right to do away with yourself.’
‘Ah, religion.’ Sam smiled.
‘Well, it’s a sin, suicide,’ said Wilford. ‘Isn’t it, Harry?’
Then Harry lit his pipe. The others waited, sensing an impending judgement or decision. They knew Harry did his best thinking when his pipe was lit.
‘It seems to me,’ he said. ‘There’s different sorts of sin. Sin isn’t the same as evil. God would forgive you a sin.’
They nodded. It sounded right and reasonable. None of them had got through almost eight decades without committing the odd sin.
‘It’d take a bit of courage, though. There aren’t any easy ways.’
‘There’s sleeping pills.’
Harry cleared his throat contemptuously. ‘That’s a woman’s way out, Sam.’
‘You could throw yourself off somewhere high. Raven’s Side cliff,’ suggested Wilford.
‘Messy. And you wouldn’t necessarily kill yourself.’
