Reginald Hill - Under World

Some time later she woke to find the steam had all condensed and the water was nearly cold. She got out of the bath and towelled herself vigorously, enjoying the rough material against her water-tender skin. She was able to think now of her encounter with Colin, reducing it with each stroke of the towel to a fragment of pure sensuality. There was no getting away from it, compared with the other men she’d known, he pushed her into an extra dimension of pleasure. But it was not a dimension that played any significant part in her blueprints of possible futures.

She went into the bedroom where she was surprised to see how late it was. Fortunately the oven’s automatic timer was taking care of Gavin’s supper. She dressed quickly, but even so she was still making up her face when she heard the front door open and her husband’s voice call, ‘Hello, love. It’s me.’ She analysed tone and inflection, found nothing to concern her, and called back, ‘I’m up here. Down in a tick.’

But as she began to descend, she heard his voice again and needed no analytical expertise to know there was trouble.

‘Jesus!’ he exclaimed from the living-room. ‘Stella!’

She went in. Her husband was standing before the hearth. In the grate the fire had been lit and was now just a bed of glowing embers. But it wasn’t this that had caused his outcry.

Before he left, Colin Farr must have put both his hands into the soot-furred chimney, then pressed them against the wall above the fireplace and drawn them slowly down. It looked as if two monstrous black arms were being raised in supplication or in threat.

‘Stella, what the hell has been going on here?’ demanded Gavin Mycroft.

Nothing in her conversations with her class or her reading of their essays had prepared Ellie for the sheer terror of her first descent in the Cage.

She was the only woman in the group of visitors which included two local councillors — one Labour, one SDP — two Frenchmen who had something to do with the EEC, and an elderly research student from Doncaster who bombarded the harassed-looking pit-manager with disturbing mnemonics like MINOS, MIDAS AND FIDO, and most sinister of all, IMPACT.

It was IMPACT that stayed in her mind as they entered the Cage and she heard a melodramatic hiss of compressed air as the drawbridge they’d just crossed was withdrawn. Somewhere a bell jangled. And suddenly they were moving.

The acceleration was rapid. In seconds Ellie felt the rush of air through the sides of the Cage brushing her face and winnowing the few strands of hair not tucked up beneath her borrowed helmet. No one spoke, not even the politicians. Ellie waited for the Cage to attain a steady speed but to her horror its acceleration did not seem to be stopping. Suddenly there was a great clap of noise like a huge paper bag exploding or the collision of air-waves as express trains pass in a tunnel.

Someone shrieked. Ellie suspected it was her but she didn’t care. Her mind told her it was only the counter-balancing up-cage on its ascent, but down here reason was not enough. Religion took over, or rather its poor relative, superstition. Her hands joined in a tangle of pleading fingers and her mind gabbled the childish prayer which had remained a pre-dormitive necessity well into her pyrrhonic adolescence.

Godblessmummyanddaddyandgrandadand grandmaandunclegeorgeandauntiemadgeand cousindickandtimmyandroverandsamuelwhiskers andmepleasegodthankyouverymuchamen.

In the light of the beams from their helmet-lamps the speeding walls of the shaft streamed past.

Suddenly everything reversed direction. The walls rushed by the other way, the Cage was now ascending! She knew it was an optical illusion, but again knowledge was ineffective against terror.

And now came a sudden jerk on the cable sending them all staggering. The walls reversed again. Once more they were falling. The cable’s snapped! Ellie told herself. She could hear one of her companions retching drily. Another jerk, then another. It’s the brakes, she assured herself. We’re slowing down. It’s only the goddam fucking brakes!

At last the Cage was perceptibly slowing. The shaft became visible as more than a speeding blur. There was light outside, a strident glare of orange and white neon strips. The Cage hit its restraints, bounced, and sank back into blessed stillness. A moment later the gate was opened and they filed out into the pit bottom, drinking deep breaths of the warm air that blew in their faces, their relief so great that it was some while before they became aware of the humid stench of it. Mr Kavanagh the pit-manager took his farewell at this point.

‘I’ll leave you with one of our most experienced deputies,’ he said. ‘Mr Satterthwaite here will show you round and answer your questions. Stick close and do as he says, and you’ll be all right.’

This Satterthwaite in whose tender care they had been placed looked to Ellie as if he might be distantly related to Andy Dalziel. Broad, solid, mean-eyed, square-jawed, he should at least come in useful if the roof fell in.

‘If you’ll follow me, gents,’ he growled with all the enthusiasm of a jailer inviting his charges into the exercise yard.

‘And lady,’ gallantly corrected the SDP councillor.

‘Oh aye,’ said Satterthwaite. ‘This way.’

So, I’m an alien, in a man’s world, thought Ellie. She recollected what Adi Pritchard had said about miners: social radicals, sexual fascists. Well, she wasn’t going to sit down under that!

Her determination to assert herself was not easily satisfied. The two councillors were engaged in a private competition as to who could show the most intelligent interest and any gaps they left were immediately filled by the student’s technically pedantic questions about automation, both proposed and effective. The Frenchmen, perhaps in reaction against their unconcealed terror during the descent, were now suffering from a bad attack of galanterie , which involved much après-vous -ing and the placing of guiding hands on shoulders, elbows and occasionally an area at the base of the spine which if not an erogenous zone was certainly border country.

Satterthwaite, whether through inclination or ignorance, replied to most questions with that great Yorkshire stand-by: Oh aye , which can be made affirmative, interrogatory, sceptical or satirical by an almost Chinese subtlety of intonation.

Ellie’s use of the patois picked up from her students clearly didn’t impress him much either. In the end she abandoned questions and concentrated on observation. One thing she failed to observe was Colin Farr. Of course most of the miners they saw at work were difficult enough to distinguish at close quarters under their patina of sweat and dust, and became totally anonymous at any distance. But when they saw a team of rippers at work Ellie knew at a glance even from several yards away that Colin was not among them. How did she know? she asked herself. The answer was at once unsettling and exciting. Stripped to the waist as these men were, his easy grace and fluidity of movement could only be even more distinctive. She turned away from the thought, found it followed her, so turned it inside out by using his grace and beauty as a foil against which to see this most hideous of man-created working environments.

An hour later, with every muscle in her body aching, she re-entered the Cage, her mind as heavy as her flesh so that she hardly felt any of the descending terror as she rode the pit this time.