Крис Бекетт: Spring Tide

‘Only you went all quiet yesterday. I could see the hole in the floor through your window, but you didn’t seem to be there.’

‘I popped out to see my mum.’

‘Oh.’ He stood with his mouth open for a while, staring at my face. My lie had completely floored him. ‘It’s just that your car was still parked on the street, and I could see your bike round the side.’

As Dave knew, my mother couldn’t drive, and she lived in a village twenty-five miles away that was ten miles from the nearest station. In fact, he’d once very obligingly given me a lift there, when my car was temporarily off the road. But I reminded myself that there wasn’t a law that obliged us to explain our travel arrangements to our next door neighbours.

‘I said to Betty perhaps I should break down the door,’ Dave went on after a difficult three-second pause which my explanation was supposed to have filled. ‘Or call the police. I was really worried about you, mate. Specially when it got dark and your curtains were still wide open. I wondered whether you’d had a fall or something. I was pretty relieved when Betty got up this morning and saw your curtains drawn. “Well, they couldn’t have drawn themselves, could they?” Betty said. “ So someone’s alive in there, for sure.”’

‘I appreciate your concern, Dave, but I’m absolutely fine.’

Fine wasn’t a very accurate description of how I felt, though. I was terribly tired, and desperately agitated. What was more, though Dave had always got on my nerves, I was experiencing for the first time a whole new level of irritation that was still novel to me but was soon to become the norm in all my dealings with the outside world. As long as I was with him, I was acutely aware that every single minute the conversation lasted was a minute lost forever when I could have been under the ground, exploring the pristine spaces beneath my house.

When I’d finally managed to wrap things up with Dave, I shut the door so quickly after him that it was really more of a slam, hurried back to my living room, and was already descending the stairs when I suddenly remembered that I had friends coming for lunch.

Cursing, I climbed back out again, found my phone and called to tell them I wasn’t well.

‘Oh, poor Jeremy,’ exclaimed my friend Liz. ‘Hope you feel better soon. Anything we can do for you? Shopping or anything?’

Again, I felt that irritation. Why was she wasting my time with these trivia, when the cellar was down there waiting?

‘I’ll be fine, thanks,’ I said and hung up, so keen to finish the call that I didn’t even take the time to say goodbye.

I was hurrying back towards the cellar, when it occurred to me that I couldn’t just leave things like this in my living room. Anyone who came to the house would immediately see the piled furniture, the rolled carpet, the big hole in the floor, and the descending stairs.

Seething with resentment at the wasted time, I drove to a builder’s merchant at a dangerous and illegal speed, bought wood, hinges and a new rug, and hurtled back again, shooting two red lights, and getting honked at angrily by other motorists. Flinging my purchases down in my hallway, I returned to the living room and moved the furniture again so I could roll up the fitted carpet and remove it altogether. My impatience seemed to give me superhuman strength and I not only shifted the dresser on my own this time, but managed to lift it right over the rolled carpet.

That done, I set to work fashioning a hinged door in the middle of my floor, which I could conceal under the new rug in case of visitors, but uncover quickly when I was alone, so as to cut delay to an absolute minimum. Through all of this I kept the curtains drawn, in spite of the sunshine outside, and in spite of the curiosity which this would inevitably arouse in Dave. God damn it, it was none of his business! I’d always hated the benign, cow-like curiosity of Dave and my other neighbours up and down the street, beaming over their garden fences as they waited to be told the identity of a weekend visitor, the reason for an unusually early departure for work or the contents of a package they’d kindly taken in for me, but up to now I’d always felt obliged to indulge it. Not any longer, I decided. There was no time.

I’m no carpenter, and I’d forbidden myself peeks until the job was properly finished, so it was after 5 p.m. when I finally descended again into my cellar. I had an aching back and several small cuts and bruises from my furious hammering and sawing, but none of that mattered. As I put my foot on the stairs, I was in a kind of trance of anticipation at the prospect of all that space, trembling, dazed and almost floating, like an adolescent boy on the way to his very first sexual experience.

I’ve moved a few things down there over the months since then, and made a few changes. One of the rooms on the top level is now a store. I’ve left a few strategic buckets here and there: the last thing I want when I’m ten storeys or more below the world is to have to come up to the surface to take a leak. And, in a room on the twelfth level, near to the stairs, I’ve also established a kind of base camp, with a comfortable chair, a couch, bottled water and canned food. I can sit down there for hours quite happily, doing nothing at all other than savouring the empty, private space that I know is all around me, and listening to the extraordinary silence.

But I continue to explore as well. Lately, I’ve taken to sticking a blank post-it note on every door I enter, so that I’ll know for certain when I’ve seen them all. I’ve never yet found a room that was different in any way from any of the others – there’s never been the slightest trace of any previous occupant, or even the smallest clue as to the purpose for which all this was hollowed out – but it didn’t take me very long before I found the edges. Not counting those initial flights of stairs, the twenty-second floor down is the bottom, and, on every level, each of the four radial corridors ends in a T-junction after thirty-five rooms. So each floor, in other words, is a grid that is seventy rooms deep and seventy rooms wide, and, since there are twenty-two floors, that means that my house has in excess of a hundred thousand rooms: six of them above ground and the rest below. I’d once gloated over the idea that I had as many rooms as all the rest of the street put together, but that turned out to be a ridiculous underestimate. A few corridors on a single level could equal my street. In the cellar as a whole there were as many rooms as there were people in the entire city above me. Who could blame me for not wanting to go out any more, when I have so much space of my own at my disposal?

And yet I have to admit that lately I’ve started to feel that it isn’t quite enough. I still love my cellar, and I still appreciate its extent. But the limits are chafing a little. Without my having made a clear decision to do so, I’ve found myself beginning to tap on the outer walls of the perimeter corridors, listening out for the hollow sound of yet more rooms beyond the ones I’ve come to know. And then, of course, there’s the possibility to consider of even more space below . Well, why not? If this is possible, then so is that.

Outside in the world under the sky, my old friends laugh and quarrel, meet and part, have babies, go to work, take their dogs for walks in the park, watch TV and go to the pub. Deep down below them, I am pulling up the lino on the bottom floor, searching for hatches that might take me through to new and untouched spaces.

Eli waited. Behind and above him was complete darkness. In front of him was an empty arena. His fellow archangels around its perimeter were shadowy forms in the dimness, waiting silently, just as he was doing himself, for the performance to begin.