David Belbin - Bone & Cane

Getting down turned out to be the easy bit. The drop was only a couple of metres. Once Nick had his feet on dry sandstone, he urged his brother to follow.

‘Those ridges I told you about. They’re steps, cut into the side.’

Gingerly, Joe climbed down. They looked around the dank cavern. It was about the size of Nick’s bathroom, twenty square metres. There was a power line taped to one wall with several large electric bulbs attached to it. The sloping walls were covered with heavy, turkey-size aluminium foil. There were several large, plastic tubs, each with a little earth in them.

‘Looks like you’ll be getting into grow-your-own,’ Joe said.

‘I’m not sure about that,’ Nick said, glancing round the makeshift dope dungeon. ‘Remember what happened last time?’

‘No risk of anyone spotting this by accident.’

Joe was referring to the story that Andy Saint had also reminded her of, when he and Nick nearly got done for growing their own. Sarah had helped him, moving the plants. No career in the police for her if she’d been caught, but that hadn’t occurred to her then. Nick hadn’t dabbled in homegrown since that close call. Given his job, the risk was too big. A dope conviction got you chucked out of teaching. Also, he’d never had an attic, which was what most growers used. Anyway, by the early nineties, attics were becoming dangerous. He’d heard of the police catching growers by using heat sensitive cameras in helicopters. Growing the stuff underground, in a safe dry place, was a new idea. If he got the lighting and ventilation, he could be quids in.

‘Here we go,’ Joe said, picking up a fragment of dry leaf from the ground. He crushed it with a forefinger and thumb, then smelt his fingertips.

‘Result!’ he said.

‘I wonder if these caves go any further back,’ Nick said.

Nick, lamp in hand, led the way. The sandstone caves were not picturesque, but nor were they damp. The gaps between caverns were narrow, yet not too tight. Some caves showed signs of having been widened to let people get through, but none bore any trace of recent use.

‘How many of these fucking things are there?’ Joe asked, as they ran out of cable for the lamp.

The caves turned out to cover half of the street, reaching back into the gardens of the big houses on Cavendish Crescent, behind. There were several spaces larger than the one beneath Nick’s flat and, crucially, air was getting in from somewhere.

‘I don’t want you telling anybody else about this place,’ Nick told his brother. ‘Nobody at all.’

For the rest of the summer, and into the new term, Nick spent many of his daylight hours, when his neighbours were out, working underground. There was plenty to do: clearing, wiring, putting fireproof matting underfoot, testing different varieties of lighting. He read books on caves and on cannabis cultivation (Mushroom, the alternative bookshop in Hockley, turned out to be a good source for them). He went on potholing expeditions to ‘see how he got on’, then weaselled out of joining the club, blaming a bad back that was aggravated by all the twisting and turning.

After this, Nick risked extending one of the gaps at the end of the network. He knocked through a little at a time, slowly creating a passageway just wide enough to squeeze through. These caves, too, were dry, without the rank, earthy smell he’d come across when pot holing. There must be decent ventilation. The new hole led to another hole, which, as he’d hoped, led to a wide, low cave, one of many that had an entry in an overgrown garden on the Park’s south slope. He disguised the enlarged hole with a foul smelling oleander bush that was easily moved should he ever need another way out of the caverns. Then he began to grow weed.

It took a while to source the right strains. At first, Nick was paranoid about fires. He installed a smoke alarm, but it was unnecessary. The sandstone soaked up excess heat. Conditions were perfect. The plants grew quickly, soon acquiring bushy leaves and moist, pungent buds. As the plants thrived, Nick rethought getting a lodger. He didn’t want to share his secret with anyone he couldn’t completely trust. Joe pronounced the first batch of weed, dried out and ready just in time for Christmas, to be top quality.

As the plants grew, so did the mortgage rate. Nick’s flat was worth less than he’d paid for it, eight months earlier, yet kept costing him more and more. Nick sold a bit of grass on, but money remained tight. He saw what he had to do, and used his credit card to buy more lighting. By spring, he’d expanded into two of the neighbouring caves.

Paranoid about the electricity board noticing an unusual pattern of high activity, he bought a small generator. It would power the lamps to heat his plants twenty-four hours a day. Now that electricity usage was no longer an issue, he brought even more of the caves in the system into his hydroponics operation. He visited organic garden centres and subscribed to arcane magazines.

It was easy to keep the equipment and literature hidden from visitors. The biggest problem was the smell. The cellar above the caves acted as a buffer but not enough of one, especially when Nick began growing new strains of skunk weed that gave a heady, dense high. The skunk also gave off a pong that combined the sweet odour of grass with the earthy, lingering stench of overcooked Brussels sprouts. Nick became so inured to this stench that he didn’t notice how the flat smelt until people commented on it. He stocked up on joss sticks and air freshener. Even so, the perfumed reek would cling to him.

Selling the stuff on was a problem. It was no use saying to mates ‘I bought a big bag of homegrown, cheap, do you want to take some off me while it’s fresh?’ The quantities were vast and the quality was rapidly increasing. Nick could have gone down Hyson Green or the Meadows and asked around. Maybe he’d hook up with a wholesaler who could do him some good. Equally likely he’d get beaten up, busted or both. Nick didn’t know people who moved in those kinds of circles. But he knew somebody who did. Sarah didn’t ask him to elaborate on this.

By mid-1991, Nick was turning round a new crop every month, with each cave containing plants of different varieties and ages. It was more work than he’d anticipated. This, rather than teaching, was his real career. That summer, he went onto a job-share, 0.5, telling colleagues that he was buying time to write a novel. He could easily have lived off the dope plants alone but needed a legitimate job to explain his income. Also, he did enjoy teaching English, especially now that it was only two or three days a week, which made the work much less exhausting.

What he needed most was help. The friend who gave Nick the distribution network contacts promised never to breathe a word of where the stuff came from. He gave Nick the starkest of warnings. Trust nobody , he said, when Nick showed him round the caves . The business is incredibly cut-throat. Let nobody know where you grow the stuff and, if you don’t get greedy, keep things around this size, you can get away with it for ever. Never have anyone with anything to do with this business round your flat. Don’t give your distributors your real name. If you want, I’ll show you how to set up overseas accounts. If I were you, I’d buy property. It’s the best bet in the long run.

Nick needed to start investing the money he’d made. The mortgage was paid off. He had piles of cash stacked in cardboard boxes in one of the smallest, driest cellars. Seeing them made him feel like a comic book miser. He could do with advice, but his friend was in New York (escaping, Nick suspected, from a little trouble of his own). There was only one person Nick trusted to help, the only other person who’d been into the caves with him. But Nick wasn’t sure if Joe was ready.