Simon Tolkien - No Man’s Land

‘Masher,’ said Rawdon, laughing. ‘Good choice, eh?’

But Adam had no stomach for laughter. His heart was beating hard as he felt the pony’s hot breath on his hand and, forgetting the apple, he reached up and wrapped his hands around the collar, holding hard.

‘I’ve got him,’ he shouted back. And immediately he could hear Rawdon working at the pony’s back, uncoupling the shafts that connected the harness to the overturned tubs behind. But then, sensing he was free, the pony lunged forward, kicking out with his hooves. Adam just about kept his hold on the collar and he was aware of Rawdon, who was now on the other side of the pony’s head, trying his best to bring the animal under control. Using all their strength, they were just about able to stop its forward momentum, but then they couldn’t stop it reversing direction, kicking backwards into the timber props that held up the entrance to the passageway. There was a noise of creaking and cracking and the roof began to collapse in a roar of sound that was like a vast ocean wave crashing down on to the shore. Adam and Rawdon ran down the passage, trying to drag the pony with them but where they led it could not follow: the falling cascade of shale and rocks poured down on its hindquarters, trapping it where it stood, and cutting the boys off from the main tunnel. The pony’s front half was curiously unaffected as it sank to the ground, mortally wounded.

The animal was clearly in intense pain. The thick muscles under its skin were visibly trembling and the pupils were dilated in its glassy eyes. It panted out each laboured breath through its flared nostrils but it would not or could not die.

‘We can’t leave him like this,’ said Adam.

‘I know that,’ said Rawdon angrily. ‘’Ave you still got that apple I gave thee?’ he asked.

He took it from Adam and held it to the animal’s mouth but it couldn’t eat.

‘Joe uses a spiked cap when ’e has to do it,’ said Rawdon. ‘I’ve seen it; ’e keeps it in the stables. Got a ’ole in the middle where the bugger’s brain is and ’e bangs in the spike with a ’ammer. Me, I got to use a bloody rock.’

He reached over and picked up a big jagged stone that had fallen from the ceiling, set his feet, and then brought it down with all his might on the pony’s head. Again and again, until there was no possibility that the animal could still be alive. For some reason he didn’t understand, Adam forced himself to watch. It felt like an obligation and, looking back on it afterwards, he wondered at the paradox that the act of terrible violence against the defenceless animal made him think so much more of Rawdon than he had before.

Rawdon’s hands were shaking when he was finished and he stood for a moment with his hands on the wall, drawing deep breaths of the hot air into his lungs as he tried to steady himself before he bent down and picked up the lamp. ‘All right,’ he said, turning his back on the dead animal and setting off into the darkness of the passageway. ‘Let’s get on our way, although I doubt we’ll be much better off than Masher afore this day is done. Ain’t nobody’s ganna come lookin’ for us – they don’t know you’re down ’ere and they won’t be frettin’ about me.’

‘Why?’

‘Because I weren’t in the fire. They’ll know that. An’ my father’s got other things on his mind than worryin’ about where I’ve got to.’

‘Like what?’

‘Like startin’ the bloody revolution,’ said Rawdon bitterly. ‘’E’s been hopin’ for a disaster like this to ’appen for as long as I can remember.’

They walked in single file, soon losing all sense of direction as the passage twisted and turned this way and that. And their feet were sore and aching when they stopped to rest after what seemed like hours of wandering, although without watches they had no way of knowing how much time had elapsed. They sat with their backs to the wall and shared the apple that the pony hadn’t been able to eat before it died.

‘You know, if I ’ad to make a list of all the people I’d least like to spend me last day on earth with, I reckon you’d top the list,’ said Rawdon conversationally.

‘Higher than Joe?’ Adam asked.

Rawdon laughed in spite of himself. ‘No, maybe you’re right,’ he said. ‘Joe’s a pain in the backside, ’e is.’

They went on in silence with Rawdon leading the way, holding the lamp aloft. Here and there, on either side, they passed old stalls where miners had once worked. There were chalk marks on the walls and sometimes a scrawled name. Adam picked up a cloth haversack from a wooden shelf and it fell apart in his hands, the stitching long since gnawed apart by rats. Each time they stopped, they could hear them scurrying away through the dust, squeaking news of the boys’ arrival as they ran. The noise reminded Adam of when old Beaky had shut him up in the school cellar when he was small and the remembered sense of claustrophobia made him shudder, weakening him at the knees.

All at once the tunnel widened out and they felt a sense of space opening out around them. In the lamplight the boys made out a succession of tall black columns on all sides, supporting the roof. Adam gasped in surprise, momentarily forgetting their plight. The place was beautiful; it was like a crude version of one of the old Greek temples that were illustrated in his school textbooks.

‘What is this place?’ he asked.

‘Old workin’s – pillar an’ stall, they call it,’ said Rawdon. ‘Sometimes they mine like this, leavin’ pillars to support the roof, although they usually takes ’em out at the end. Lucky for us, I s’pose, that they didn’t.’

Whenever the path significantly divided, as it did on the other side of the pillared hall, Rawdon stopped to sniff the stale air on either side of the crossgate, trying to work out which way the oxygen was coming from. The air quality was poor, but the fact that they were able to breathe at all meant that there had to be a way back to the upcast or downcast shafts if only they could find it. Sometimes they were encouraged as they felt the ground rising beneath their weary feet but then for no apparent reason they would start going downhill again, back down into the labyrinth.

The gradient changed but the heat and the darkness remained constant. They had found no trace of the mine’s ventilation system since the rock fall and they’d long ago stripped down to their underwear. Thirst was fast becoming the worst of their problems. Rawdon had a half-full water bottle and they used tiny amounts when they stopped to rest to wet their lips (despite his reminder of their declared enmity Rawdon seemed to take it for granted that everything they had should be shared equally between them), but there was not enough in the bottle to enable them to take a proper drink and the coal dust that flew up into the air as they walked got into their mouths and added to the parching of their throats. The overhead pipes dripping water that Adam remembered from his last visit to the mine were absent from this district and he looked longingly down at the puddles of black water that lay here and there on the ground, although he didn’t need Rawdon to tell him that they were poisonous, impregnated with coal, and gas too probably.

Above their heads the roof sagged and Adam sensed that it was only a matter of time before some of the rotten timber props gave way and another rock fall left them buried alive, dying slowly and painfully without even the hope of the bloody euthanasia that had delivered the pony from its suffering. They were both exhausted and, although he wouldn’t admit it, Rawdon’s bad leg had begun to cause him intense pain. Adam could see him wince with every step they took.

Despair overtook them when the passage opened out again and they emerged into the same pillared hall that they had passed through hours before. Rawdon sank to the ground, leaning his back against one of the black columns and closed his eyes.