Robert veers across the pavement and trips onto the road, steadying himself with a hand on the tarmac. Revelers edge around him. A group of young women on the other side of the street turn away. He tries hard to keep a straight course. He manages perhaps twenty steps before stopping to rest.
The spot is next to an alleyway that leads to a large area enclosed by plywood boards, emblazoned with the lettering and logo of a well-known building contractor. Behind the boards, there is a noisy building site. It has been there for several years and keeps changing shape and enveloping then releasing new tracts of land. Nobody Robert knows has seen what is being built behind the boards, but he probably could have found out easily.
If he read newspapers, listened to the radio or watched television other than football, he would know that a deep hole is being dug. A new underground line is being built, deep below the earth. The plywood boards mask huge machines. Diggers loosen the topsoil and move piles of earth, before shifting it onto trucks and out of the city. Vast drills bite into the bedrock. They swirl and cut and push debris to the surface. There are pumps to pour water to cool the drill as the friction rises. The machines rumble. The rock and soil and buildings around them rumble too. As the hole gets bigger, the machines go deeper. The rumblings get deeper too.
Robert leans against the wall, steadies himself and catches his breath. As he waits, he sees a figure approach, slowly. The streetlight is reflected on her pale skin and her synthetic clothing. She looks herself like a slit of light, a single ray, the crack between a door and its frame. She continues to wander toward him and he blinks several times to clear his vision. He tries to steady his focus so he can see the figure as single and crisp, not double and frayed.
“Oh,” he says as she gets near enough to be feet and legs and arms and body and a head with hair and a face. “It’s you.”
She slinks forward and joins him in the shadows. He looks at her eyes and sees the blood within them and the lines beneath them, as he did earlier in the day. He sees the cracks in her skin around her nose and mouth and scars where previous cracks opened, healed, opened, healed.
“What are you doing here?”
Her reply is whispered. “Archbishop sent us out looking for the tremors what I felt. They’ve gone home, but I’ve stayed. I know this is where it’ll start again.”
The reply means little to Robert. He’s too far gone to listen.
He nods all the same, and grasps Cheryl’s arm; Cheryl, who is known to most people in this part of the city as Debbie McGee.
Robert leans in and says to her: “You take care of yourself, now. Promise me you will.”
She promises in fragile whispers.
“You take care of yourself and if you get in any bother—any bother at all, mind—come straight to me and I’ll sort it out. You hear. Straight to me.”
A fragile nod.
Robert pushes himself off from the wall against which he’s been leaning, and shunts himself down the road toward home.
Cheryl, the woman they call Debbie McGee, remains. She returns to the building site. She finds the opening of the huge crater, and a ladder leading down. She descends. She does not return.
The End of September
Suburbs
The city is far too clean. All the good dirt—the earth, the soil, the compost, the organic matter—has been cleared away, shunted along tarmacked streets and out to the suburbs. It sits in gardens and parks, and at the center of roundabouts and the sides of motorways. Surfaces are wipeable. Windows are washed, carpets are hoovered, countertops are disinfected. Even the streets are cleaned, cleared of dust, dead pigeons, fallen leaves. There is no time for good dirt. No time to let it settle, dissolve, disintegrate, rub along with the dirt that’s already there, then re-emerge as something new and beautiful: a flower, a tree, a decorative fungus. Instead, there is grime: the residue of noxious solvents, a thin film of condensed smog on buildings, soot that seeps into nostrils and the pores of skin.
In the suburbs, Jackie Rose sits on her garden bench. Jackie likes her garden and she likes to garden. She has lived in this house for thirty years. She and Keith have raised three sons here. All three are tall, athletic, intelligent and kind. Jackie and Keith couldn’t be more proud. The eldest is at university but still lives at home. He gets the train to Queen Mary and studies engineering. His name is Harry. They named him after Prince Harry. Jackie cried when Diana died. The second son is an apprentice carpenter. Andy is probably the most handsome: girls stare at him in the street. Jackie takes a strange, vicarious pleasure in it. Yes, she thinks: this is my son. I made him. The youngest is Mark. He is studying for his GCSEs. He’s got a girlfriend but Jackie and Keith think he might be gay.
Jackie sees the garden as hers. Everything else belongs to her and Keith together: the house, the cars, the motorhome, the furniture. But the garden is hers alone. “My garden,” she says. “What have you done to my garden?” when the boys hack through the tulips with a football. “We’ll get that for my garden,” when she and Keith spot an attractive planter at the garden center. “How’s my garden looking?” when she’s away from home, working on a case.
She plants, prunes, mows, puts up wire for the climbing roses, and bamboo poles for sweet peas. She digs holes for the bulbs then tops them over with compost. She trudges and tramples and squelches in green wellies after they’ve
