‘Go on,’ he said. ‘You might learn something.’
They jumped out of the van, and Cooper scrambled up the path after Stride to reach the top of the quarry. The chimes were moving slowly in the birch, jingling gently. One of them turned and caught the sunlight,
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and Cooper could almost make out the words scrawled on the silver foil in felt-tipped pen.
Stride turned to him at the top of the quarry face and held his hand to his ear, like a bad actor miming his reaction to a knock at the door.
‘Can you hear it? We’re right on the edge.’ ‘The edge?’
Cooper listened. All he could hear was the wind which caught at him now they were on the plateau. It carried a whispering in the bracken and the jingle of the chimes. He listened more carefully. He heard several types of bird call - finches twittering nearby, a robin singing in the birches, the jackdaws in Top Quarry; and something else further away, possibly rooks and a blackbird. There was nothing more. Cooper looked up. There was a kestrel hovering over the rough grass on the edge of the quarry, but it was absolutely silent.
‘Do you hear it?’ said Stride. ‘That’s great.’ ‘The edge of what?’
‘The reality zone. From here on, all that stuff down there disappears.’ He waved vaguely in the direction of Matlock and the A6.
‘Not for me, it doesn’t.’
Suddenly, Stride threw himself full-length into the damp bracken. For a moment, he disappeared completely as the brown leaves closed over him. Only his laugh could be heard from somewhere in the dripping depths.
‘Look at this!’ he said. His head appeared. He wiped a bracken leaf across his face, smearing the rain water on his skin and licking the moisture off his lips, closing
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his eyes in ecstasy. Bits of foliage and fragments of dead heather were clinging to his hair and shoulders; the sleeves of his jacket were soaked.
‘I suppose you think this is just a weed. Farmers tear it up and burn it, because it’s a pest. But bracken is a miracle. All ferns are a miracle. Look, look.’ He stroked a tiny, furled leaf. It would probably never open now - it was too late in the year. ‘Each of these produces hundreds of spores. They’re spread around by the wind or animals. I’m doing it now. Look!’ He rolled over on the ground, laughing breathlessly. ‘I’m part of the process! I’m part of nature!’
Stride plucked a larger leaf and held it in front of Cooper’s face. ‘Every spore that lands grows into a little disc. And do you know what? It has both male and female sexual organs. It’s a bisexual. Humans will tell you that isn’t natural. But it is!’
He thrust the leaf into Cooper’s hands. It smelled damp and green and broken. Cooper held it lightly, not sure what to do with it, reluctant just to walk away, too intrigued by the performance to stop it.
‘The male organs release sperm. Oh, yes. We know about sperm, don’t we? But ferns … their sperm use the rain water. See? The leaves are always damp up here, in the autumn, so the sperm can travel through the moisture to reach the female organs and fertilize the eggs. And then a new plant grows. A new fern. More bracken. More and more of it. And you know what else? Ferns have been doing that for three hundred million years.’
Stride stared at Cooper wildly. ‘Prehistoric tree ferns
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grew to over a hundred feet. They’re way down there now, under the ground, still there. Fossilized tree ferns. We call them coal.’ He snatched the leaf back from Cooper as if he wasn’t worthy to hold it. ‘So which is the most successful species? The cleverest? The most efficient? The most useful? Humans?’ He laughed. ‘I studied botany. They tried to tell me it was a science; they tried to make me study mycology and phytopathology. They wanted me to look at diagrams of a monocotyledon or analyse the process of hydrotropism. They wanted me to see pistils and radicles and calyxes. But all I saw were miracles everywhere. Miracles of life.’
He stepped out of the bracken and bent down to the ground near the path. He picked up a small piece of quartz. He held it with gentleness, handling it as if it were a living thing, sensitive to his touch.
‘Look at the earth. She looks so attractive, you could stroke her. Her fur is like velvet. But she’s a wild creature, she can never be tamed. A huge beast, sleeping. Or maybe only pretending to be asleep. This is her body.’
Cooper was silent, feeling foolish and embarrassed, like a man who had wandered into the wrong church service and didn’t know what to do when everyone else prayed.
‘The dancers know all about it,’ said Stride. ‘The dancers became part of her body.’
A suggestion of movement on the moor made Cooper look up. For a moment, he thought there were people standing in the trees at the scene of Jenny Weston’s
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murder - grey shapes that passed each other slowly, leaning to whisper to one another across the sandy earth of the clearing. Then he realized that he was seeing the Nine Virgins themselves, the stones momentarily transformed by the intensity of Stride’s conviction.
‘I can understand why our ancestors worshipped trees,’ said Stride. ‘Can’t you? When you hear a chainsaw in the woods, when you see a JCB and smell new tarmac, don’t you feel it? Don’t you feel, deep inside your head, the cry of “murder”? Do you understand?’
Cooper frowned, wanting to see what he meant. ‘I understand that you’ve found some sort of truth for yourself.’
‘Believe those who are seeking the truth,’ said Stride. ‘But doubt those who say they’ve found it.’
When they got back to the van, Stride seemed rapidly to become exhausted. He collapsed on the cushions, stretched out full-length, limp and breathing raggedly. After a few minutes, he spoke, though his voice was barely loud enough for them to hear.
‘I can still see her face,’ he said.
Stride’s own face was hidden by the shadows of the candle, expressionless, moving with the flickering light in unnatural ways. Cooper felt too warm in the claustrophobic interior of the van. He was uncomfortably hemmed in by the rugs and blankets and the smell of unwashed bodies, too tightly embraced by the metal walls. He longed for escape.
‘Whose face?’ he said.
