Mark Haddon - The Pier Falls - And Other Stories

She turns. An old man is standing in the kitchen doorway. He is wearing pyjamas and there is a battered yellow tank strapped to an old-fashioned porter’s trolley at his side. He presses a mask to his face and takes a long, hissy breath. “It’s good to see you.” His voice is raspy and small. She half recognises him and this reassures her somewhat but she has no idea where she has seen him before and doesn’t want to appear foolish by asking.

He presses the mask to his face, takes a second hissy breath, drapes the rubber tube over the handle of the trolley and rolls it past her towards the front door. He stops on the mat and holds out his hand. “Come.”

She is nervous of going with this man but the thought of staying here on her own is worse. She takes his hand. He opens the door and Carol sees, not the houses on Watts Road but long grass and foliage shifting in a breeze. He takes another breath through his mask and bumps the trolley wheels over the threshold. They step into cold, clear winter light. He leads her slowly down a cinder path into a stand of trees. She can feel how weak he is and how much effort he is making not to let this show. She moves closer so that she can share more of his weight without this being obvious. He takes nine steps then stops to breathe through the mask, then eight more steps, then another breath.

They are among the trees now, dancing submarine light and coins of sun like fish around a reef. The trees are birch, mostly, bark curling off the creamy flesh like wallpaper in a long-abandoned house. She wonders what will happen when the oxygen runs out. The tank is clearly very old, the yellow paint so chipped that it has become a map of a ragged imaginary coastline.

They enter a large clearing. It is hard to see precisely how big the clearing is because it is occupied almost entirely by a great mound of logs and branches and sticks, woven like a laid winter hedge in places and in other places simply heaped up higgledy-piggledy. The whole edifice rises steeply in front of them, curving away so that it is impossible to tell whether the summit is fifty or a hundred and fifty feet high.

The man squeezes her hand and moves gingerly forward again. They enter a narrow corridor in the structure, like the tunnel leading to the burial chamber of a pyramid. He is her father, she remembers now. There is something not right about him being here but she doesn’t know what. She is tired, her head hurts and she slept badly. Perhaps that is the problem.

Her eyes become accustomed to the low light and she can make out the monumental fretwork of beams and branches which surrounds them. Here and there shafts of sunlight cut across the bark-brown gloaming. Little twigs crunch underfoot and the poorly oiled wheels of her father’s trolley squeak. There is dust in the air and the smell of fox.

Now they are standing in the central chamber, a rough half-dome of interwoven sticks some eight or nine feet high, the tonnage above their heads supported by a central column as thick and straight as a telegraph pole.

“Carol…?”

The voice is muffled and distant. It is a woman’s voice and it is coming from outside. Only now does she realise that it was not her father who was calling her name when she woke. Was she wrong to follow him? He takes a little yellow can from his pocket, unscrews the top and pours the contents all over his pyjamas. The smell is potent and familiar but Carol can’t give it a name and there is not enough light to read the writing on the label.

“Carol…?” The voice is more urgent now.

Her father puts the can back into his pocket and lifts something from the other pocket. Only when he spins the flint does she realise what it is. The flame leaps the gap between his hand and his pyjama jacket, spreading quickly across his torso, climbing upwards over his face and digging its long violet fingers into his hair.

“Carol…? For God’s sake…”

She spins round looking for the corridor down which they came. It should be easy to spot for the latticed dome of sticks is now lit up in the jittery light but she can see no opening. Has the wood collapsed, blocking off her exit? Could such a thing happen without her hearing or feeling it?

If she were a cat or a dog or a rabbit she might be able to squirm her way out but the gaps between the branches of which the structure is made are too small for a human being. She grabs a long pole in the least dense part of the pyre and starts to pull but as she does so she feels a great shifting in the spars above. She tries doing the same thing on the opposite side of the chamber but it has the same effect. She turns back to her father. His face is alight now, flesh spitting like meat on a barbecue, lips gone, teeth snapping in the heat. The wood above his head is ablaze and the flames are running like excited children outwards and upwards through all the airways in the great wooden maze.

“Carol…?”

She can feel her hands and face blistering. She is going to die in here. Her father takes a couple of frail steps in her direction and lifts the oxygen mask towards her face. “Breathe. Trust me. Just breathe.”

I did not intend to tell our story here. This notebook was meant for notes of a technical nature only. I assumed that we would be able to give our individual accounts at our own pace and in our own words when we returned home, but I am now the only person who can tell those stories and unless a miracle comes to pass I will not be returning home.

There are people who will find some of what I have written distressing. I offer them my sincere apologies but I cannot dissemble. Leaving a true record of recent events is the sole remaining ambition I may be able to achieve.

I have one personal request of whoever finds this book. Please ensure that a copy of this one page at least is forwarded to Christina Murchison, formerly of Dundonald Street in Edinburgh’s New Town in Scotland, if she is still living. I care for her more deeply now than I have ever done. She will be my final thought. My greatest fault was to give insufficient weight to her misgivings.

I have lost track of the passing of days so I can no longer be certain of dates. Nevertheless I know that our final troubles began just over a week ago when we heard a faint roar and spied sunlight directly ahead of us. Emerging from the trees we found ourselves at the edge of a deep gorge of schist and migmatite. The far bank, where the jungle continued, stood some sixty feet away. Between the two banks the sides of the gorge fell sheer and slick to rapids which tumbled and foamed on jagged rocks. Downstream a rainbow hung in the spray.

After a month of laborious progress through dense, unvarying jungle I felt drunk with space and light and had to sit down while my head spun. It was now a fortnight since the death of Nicholas’s brother, and images of Christopher’s last hours had haunted me ever since, but this panoramic view of our one, shared sky connected me to other people and other places and thereby lifted my spirits a little. I only hoped that it might do something similar for Nicholas himself.

Bill attached a pan to the end of a rope and lowered it to the water, measuring the drop at two hundred feet and retrieving a gallon of liquid which tasted better than champagne. Edgar and Arthur then hacked their way through the undergrowth along the edge of the gorge in one direction while Nicholas hacked his way through the undergrowth in the opposite direction. They returned after an hour having discovered no easier crossing point. I built a fire and set myself to brewing tea and skinning and roasting one of the little monkeys we had caught the previous afternoon, and Bill applied his mind to the problem of engineering a bridge.