David Peace - 1974

She nodded.

“Open it.”

She pulled back the door.

I shoved her inside.

There was a work-bench and tools, bags of fertiliser and cement stacked up, plant pots and feed trays. Empty plastic sacks covered the floor.

It stank of the earth.

“Where is he?”

Mrs Marsh was giggling, the tea-towel up over her nose and mouth.

I spun round and punched her hard through the tea-towel.

She shrieked and howled and fell to her knees.

I grabbed some grey perm and dragged her over to the work bench, forcing her cheek into the wood.

“Ah, ha-ha-ha. Ah, ha-ha-ha.”

She was laughing and screaming, her whole body shaking, one hand flailing through the plastic sacks upon the floor, the other squeezing her skirt up into her cunt.

I picked up some kind of chisel or wallpaper scraper.

“Where is he?”

“Mmm, ha-ha-ha. Mmm, ha-ha-ha.”

Her screams were a hum, her giggles rationed.

“Where is he?” I put the chisel to her flabby throat.

“Ah, ha-ha-ha. Ah, ha-ha-ha.”

Again she began to kick out, thrashing through the plastic sacks with her knees and feet.

I looked down through the sacks and the bags and saw a piece of thick muddy rope.

I let go of her face and pushed her away.

I kicked away the sacks and found a manhole cover threaded through like a giant metal button with the dirty black rope.

I coiled the rope around my good and bad hands and pulled up the manhole cover, swinging it to the side.

Mrs Marsh was sat on her arse giggling under the bench, drumming her heels in hysterics.

I peered into the hole, into a narrow stone shaft with a metal ladder leading down into a faint light some fifty odd feet below.

It was some kind of drainage or Ventilation shaft to a mine.

“He down there?”

She drummed her feet up and down faster and faster, blood still running down from her nose into her mouth, suddenly spreading her legs and rubbing the tea-towel over the top of her tan tights and ruby red knickers.

I reached under the bench and dragged her out by her ankles. I pulled her over on to her stomach and sat astride her arse.

“Ah, ha-ha-ha. Ah, ha-ha-ha.”

I reached up and took some rope from the bench. I hooked it round her neck and then ran it down round her wrists, finally knotting it twice round the leg of the bench.

Mrs Marsh had pissed herself.

I looked back down the shaft, turned round and put one foot into the dark.

I eased myself down into the shaft, the metal ladder cold and wet, the brick walls slippery against my sides.

Down I went, ten feet down.

I could hear the faint sound of running water beneath Mrs Marsh’s shrieks and screams.

Down I went, twenty feet down.

A circle of grey light and madness above.

Down I went, thirty feet down, the laughter and the cries dying with the descent.

I could sense water below, picturing mine shafts sunk with black water and open-mouthed bodies.

Down I went towards the light, not looking up, certain only that I was just going down.

Suddenly one of the sides to the shaft was gone and I was there in the light.

I twisted round, looking into the yellow mouth of a hori zontal passage leading off to my right.

I went a little way further down and then turned, putting my elbows on to the mouth of the hole.

I pulled myself up into the light and crawled on to the shelf. The light was bright, the tunnel narrow and stretching off.

Unable to stand, I forced my belly and elbows across the rough bricks, along the passage towards the source of the light.

I was sweating and tired and dying to stand.

I kept on crawling, thinking of feet and then miles, all dis tance lost.

Suddenly the ceiling went up and I got to my knees, shuffling along, thinking of mountains of dirt piled on top of my head, until my knees and shins were raw and rebelled.

I could hear things moving in the dim light, mice or rats, children’s feet.

I put out my hand into the shale and the slime and brought back a shoe; a child’s sandal.

I lay on the bricks in the dust and the dirt and fought back the tears, stuck with the shoe, unable to throw it, unable to leave it.

I stood in a stoop and began to move again, banging my back on girders and beams, making a yard here, a foot there.

And then the air changed and the sound of water was gone and I could smell death and hear her moaning.

The ceiling went up again and there were more wooden beams to bang my head on and then I turned a corner at an old fall of rock and there I was.

I stood upright in the mouth of a big tunnel in the glare of ten Davy lamps, panting and sweating and thirsty as fuck, trying to take it all in.

Santa’s bloody grotto.

I dropped the shoe, tears streaking through my dirty face.

The tunnel had been bricked up about fifteen feet ahead, the bricks painted blue with white clouds, the floor covered in sacking and white feathers.

Against the two side walls were ten or so thin mirrors all lined up in a row.

Christmas tree angels and fairies and stars hung from the beams, all shining in the glow of the lamps.

There were boxes and there were bags, there were clothes and there were tools.

There were cameras and there were lights, there were tape recorders and there were tapes.

And, beneath the blue wall at the end of the room, lying under some bloody sacking, there was George Marsh.

On a bed of dead red roses.

I walked across the blanket of feathers towards him.

He turned into the light, his eyes holes, his mouth open, his face a mask of red and black blood.

Marsh opened and closed his mouth, bubbles of blood bursting and popping, the howl of a dying dog coming up from within the pit of his belly.

I bent down and looked into the holes from where his eyes had once seen, into the mouth from where his tongue had once spoken, and spat a little piece of me.

I stood up and pulled back the sacking.

George Marsh was naked and dying.

His torso was purple, green, and black, smeared with shit, mud, and blood, burnt.

His cock and balls were gone, flaps of loose skin and pooled blood.

He was twitching and reached up to me, his little finger and thumb all he had left.

I stood up, kicking the blanket back at him.

He lay there with his head raised, praying for an end, the low moan of a man calling for death filling the cavern.

I went to the bags and to the boxes, tipping them over, spilling out clothes and tinsel, baubles and knives, paper crowns and giant needles, looking for books, looking for words.

I found pictures.

Boxes of them.

Schoolgirl photographs, head-shots of wide white smiles and big blue eyes, yellow hair and pink skin.

And then I saw it all again.

Black and white shots of Jeanette and Susan, dirty knees pulled up in corners, tiny hands-across shut eyes, big white flashes filling up the room.

The adult smiles and the child’s eyes, dirty knees in angel suits, tiny hands across bloody holes, big white laughs filling up the room.

I saw a man in a paper crown and nothing else, fucking little girls underground.

I saw his wife stitching angel suits, kissing them better.

I saw a halfwit Polack boy, stealing photos and developing more.

I saw men building houses, watching little girls playing out across the road, taking their photos and making their notes, building new houses next to the old.

And then I was staring down at George Marsh again, the Gaffer, dying in agony on his bed of dead red roses.

“ George Marsh. Very nice man .”

But it wasn’t enough.

I saw Johnny Kelly, a hammer in his hand, a job half done.

It still wasn’t enough.

I saw a man wrapped in paper and plans, consumed by dark visions of angels, drawing houses made out of swans, pleading for silence.