Mum about the blackbirds’ nest and about Mr. Myers’s daughter. His house looked so dirty and dark as we passed by it.
“Wonder who’ll buy it,” I said.
“Somebody who doesn’t mind getting their hands dirty,” she said. “Somebody who can imagine how it’ll be when it’s all done up.”
We walked to Heston Park. We passed very close to the entrance to the Underworld. I quaked inside, and I must have trembled or twitched or something, because Mum came to a halt.
“Are you OK, Mina?” she asked.
The locked steel gate was close behind her.
“Yes, Mum,” I said.
“Are you certain?”
“Yes, Mum.”
I wondered if I should tell her the tale of the day I went through the steel gate all alone. I didn’t. When I think about it, there’s quite a few things I don’t tell her about. Like most kids, I suppose. Sometimes it’s best just to keep things to myself because I don’t want to upset her. Sometimes they’re just too weird to explain. Sometimes I just don’t know how to get the words out. It doesn’t matter. I guess she knows there’s lots of things she doesn’t know about me. But it doesn’t matter. You don’t have to know every single thing about a person in order to understand them.
She smiled and hugged me.
“You’re a strange one,” she said as we walked on.
“I know,” I said.
I’ll write the story of the Underworld for her and maybe I’ll let her read it. Somehow it might make more sense if it’s written down.
Night. Even at night the city rumbles and roars. Traffic drones on the motorway that circles the center. There are machines and engines that can never be allowed to rest. And even the breathing and snoring and whispering must add to the din. And the running of water through pipes, and the humming of electricity, and the chatter of televisions watched by people who can’t sleep, and dogs that bark and cats that yowl. And there are the owls, as always, hooting as they fly over Crow Road and Heston Park. Hello, Owls. Hoot. Hoot. I try to hoot like an owl but it sounds nothing like an owl.
I thought I’d write the story of the Underworld in the first person, and say, “I did this and I did that.” But somehow it’s better to write this in the third person, to say, “Mina did this and Mina did that.” I write it by moonlight, to the hooting of the owls.
She was just nine years old. She was very skinny and very small and she had jet-black hair and a pale pale face and shining eyes. Some folks said she was weird. Her mum said she was brave. Sometimes she seemed very old for her age, and sometimes she seemed just like a little girl. All those things were true. She felt so strong and bold, lonely and lost, and the world seemed very big and she seemed very small. Her mum said that everybody felt like that at some time in their lives, no matter how old they were, but that for Mina it was more difficult because of what had happened to her dad. She said that as Mina grew, she’d feel stronger more often and not feel so small.
Mina’s mum was strong. To Mina she seemed brave and gentle. She had glossy red hair and dark green eyes and Mina thought that if there was such a thing as a saint in this world, then her mum was one.
In the past, Mina had heard her mother arguing with doctors, especially with the doctor who talked about giving pills to Mina, pills that he said would make her feel better.
“They won’t make her feel better!” said Mina’s mum. “They’ll stop her from feeling anything at all. She’s not some kind of robot. She’s a little girl that’s growing up and she can do that without your stupid pills!”
Mina’s school was St. Bede’s Middle, very close to the park. It was a Monday morning in spring. The lesson was called History. The teacher, Mr. Henderson, talked about the city’s past. He said that once the city had been surrounded by coal mines. For hundreds of years, men and boys had gone down into the earth to dig out coal. Imagine that, he said. He laughed. Imagine going into the pitch darkness to bring out stuff as black and bright as Mina McKee’s hair. He said that if they could travel into the earth beneath the classroom, they would discover a warren of shafts and tunnels. His eyes widened. They might even discover the bones of those who had died down there. He said that the days of the coal mines had been very perilous, but people had lived and worked together, and shared their tragedies and joys.
He read some poems about pitmen, and played their songs on a CD player. He sang some pitmen’s songs himself. He said that his own grandfather had been a pitman, and that he had been brought up with tales of the underground, of the men who traveled deep into the earth every day, of ponies they had down there, and of the ghosts they said they had seen down there.
He showed them maps of the city as it used to be. There were pit shafts that plunged hundreds of feet down into the earth. There were tunnels that crept from the city’s fringes towards its heart. He said that very close to the school, in Heston Park, there was an entrance to a tunnel that once was used to carry carts of coal from the coal mines down to the river. He said the tunnel was being repaired. There were plans to reopen it for tourists and for those who wanted to study the city’s past. Maybe when it opened, he said, they’d all go into the tunnel together on a class trip. Then the lesson ended.
Mina already knew about the entrance and the tunnel. She’d seen the ancient solid steel gate behind some rhododendron bushes. She’d seen the girders welded across the gate. Recently, she’d seen that the girders had gone. Men wearing hard hats and carrying big torches went into it. There was a new orange sign there. It said DANGER KEEP OUT and there was a skull and crossbones symbol on it.
In Mina’s mind, the gate, the tunnel, and now Mr. Henderson’s stories mingled with many other stories that she’d heard – stories from ancient times about heroes and heroines who lived in the underground: Daedalus, who built an underground maze with a monster called the Minotaur at its heart; Pluto, the King of the Underworld, and Persephone, his wife; stories about the dead, who were taken from this world to live in the darkness below. And they mingled with the tale of Orpheus, the greatest singer in the world, whose beautiful wife, Eurydice, was killed by a venomous snake. Orpheus would not accept her death. He traveled the world, searching for the entrance to the Underworld. When he found it, he went down into the Underworld, and begged for her to be given back to him.
Mina knew it was silly, but she was only nine years old, and she was often very sad, and in her imagination and in her dreams, the entrance to the Underworld was there, behind the rhododendron bushes, in Heston Park. And she told herself she’d dare to go through that entrance. She’d go down to the Underworld like Orpheus did. He didn’t manage to bring Eurydice back. But Mina would succeed. She’d go down, she’d meet Pluto and Persephone. She’d persuade them to let her bring her dad back into the world.
It happened the following Monday, just after the next of Mr. Henderson’s History lessons. At the end of the lesson, he stood in front of them and started to sing
Mr. Henderson paused for a moment.
