Under World

Chapter 6

‘Carry your bag, miss?’

For a sliver of a second Ellie’s hand started to proffer the battered old briefcase. She had felt unusually drained after today’s class and had taken her time packing her papers while the cheerful chatter and clatter of the young miners faded down the corridor. When she finally followed them, Colin Farr had emerged from the door of the Gents as she passed. He was dressed in motorcycle leathers and carried a helmet.

‘Real offer or just winding me up, Colin?’ she said.

He fell into step beside her.

‘Depends, miss.’

‘On what?’

‘Whether you think it’s real or winding you up.’

‘But which depends on which?’ she wondered.

She also wondered, but this to herself, if Farr had emerged coincidentally or if he’d been lurking in that doorway.

‘Don’t follow you, miss.’

‘Yes, you do, Colin,’ she said, smiling at him. ‘That’s one game you can stop playing. Another is calling me miss all the time. I told the others last week that if I was going to use their first names, they’d have to use mine. Even though you seemed a little abstracted today, you may have heard one or two of them call me Ellie.’

‘Ell ee. Thought them were your initials, miss. Or mebbe a title.’

He grinned openly as he spoke.

They had reached the central landing. They were on the fourteenth floor of the Ivory Tower, a glass and concrete monument of the expansive and affluent ’sixties whose gnomonic shadow marked the passage of epochal as well as diurnal time on the scatter of redbrick buildings which had survived from the old civic university. Descent was by stair, conventional lift, or paternoster. The stairs were long and exhausting and the lift took an age to arrive, but Ellie usually preferred one or the other.

Farr, however, had made straight for the paternoster. The moving platforms were just large enough for two. He glanced at her, touched her elbow, and stepped forward. She stepped with him but as always the sense of the floor sinking away beneath her was so disconcerting that she gave a slight stagger and leaned against Farr whose arm went round her waist to support her.

‘I’m all right,’ she said, trying to disengage herself. But there was little spare room on the platform and he made no effort to move away.

‘You’d not do to ride the pit,’ he observed.

‘Ride the pit?’ she said brightly, aware of the closeness of his body and aware also that she was slipping beneath a protective carapace of schoolmarminess. ‘Let me see. That means go down the shaft in the Cage, doesn’t it?’

‘Aye. Down or up,’ he said, smiling slightly.

He knows how uncomfortable he’s making me feel, thought Ellie.

She said dismissively, ‘At least the Cage is standing still when you get in.’

‘You’re right. And when it starts going down, you wish it’d stood still for ever.’

His tone was so intense that she forgot her discomfiture and said curiously, ‘You hate it that much, do you?’

Strangely this shift towards conversational intimacy seemed to affect him as the physical contact had affected her. He removed his arm and swayed away from her and said in a much lighter voice, ‘Energetic buggers, these students,’ nodding at the graffiti-scrawled interstitial floor beams. ‘They must’ve had to go round three or four times to get them written.’

‘That sounds like a considerable misdirection of effort,’ said Ellie.

‘Most things are when you look at them straight,’ said Colin Farr. ‘This is us.’

His hand grasped her elbow lightly, its touch chivalric rather than erotic, and they stepped out in a unity of movement worthy of Astaire and Rogers.

Outside in the cool air of the shadowy side of the Ivory Tower, they paused.

‘I’m going over to the crèche,’ said Ellie.

‘The what?’

‘The nursery. Where staff can leave their children while they’re teaching. And students too.’

‘Very democratic. I’m off to the car park. Where staff can leave their cars. But not students.’

‘That’d be a male decision,’ said Ellie. ‘It’s a wonder the attendant doesn’t get you. He’s a terror. It took three phone calls to persuade him I was entitled first time I came.’

‘You should try a motorbike,’ said Farr. ‘You can be round the back of his hut before he notices.’

They stood in silence for a moment. Ellie glanced at her watch.

‘See you next week, then.’

‘Likely,’ said Farr. ‘If I can manage.’

‘Colin, I was sorry to hear about your bit of trouble.’

She did not care to hear herself using the euphemism, but she was treading carefully. No one had mentioned the young man’s week in jail today and she’d taken this as a signal that he didn’t want it mentioned.,

Now he gave her his crooked little near-smile and said, ‘It were nowt. I’ve been in worse places.’

‘The pit, you mean?’

‘Oh aye. That’s worse. But I meant worse jails.’

He grinned openly at her look of surprise.

‘I’ve not just been a miner,’ he said. ‘I’ve been a sailor too. Did you not know that?’

‘How could I?’ prevaricated Ellie. ‘I mean, you’re so young!’

‘Old enough. I went down pit at sixteen like all me mates. But I got a bit restless after a bit and when I was nineteen I jacked it in and went and joined the Merchant Navy. I were in for nearly four years. I came back to Burrthorpe just in time to go on strike for a year!’

‘And will you go back? To sea, I mean.’

‘Mebbe. I can’t say.’

There was another silence.

Ellie said, ‘I’ve really got to go and pick my daughter up. Till next week, then. Goodbye.’

‘Aye. See you.’

She walked away. He watched as she passed from the shadow of the Tower into the sunlight before disappearing into one of the two-storey red-brick buildings on the scattered and disorganized campus.

He checked the car park was clear before loping towards the gleaming Suzuki 1100 which cost him more than he ever dared tell his mother in monthly payments. But it was money he didn’t grudge. As he started her up, the attendant rushed from his hut shouting, ‘I want a word with you!’

Farr waited till he was about thirty feet away, then opened up the throttle and sent the bike leaping forward towards the man.

‘Jesus Christ!’ he cried, jumping aside.

‘See you next week!’ yelled Farr over his shoulder.

He wove his way at a steady pace through the city traffic but once out on the open road he rapidly took the powerful machine up to the speed limit and held it there for a while. Then as the exhilaration of the streaming air, the blurring hedges and the throbbing metal between his legs got to him, he gave it full power and was soon cracking the ton on the straights.

It couldn’t last long. Soon his eye registered the brief image of a police car sitting in a lay-by, waiting for just the likes of himself, and a couple of minutes later it was in his mirror, too distant to have got his number which in any case he always kept as muddy as he could get away with, but not receding. Ahead the road wound down a shallow hill to a small township which seemed to pride itself on having traffic lights every ten yards. Also there was a police station there, easily alerted by the car radio.

There were no turn-offs before he hit the town. He was travelling very fast downhill towards a sharp left-hand bend. Straight ahead was a tall hawthorn hedge with woodland behind it. There was a gap or at least a thinness in the hedge where it met a wall at the apex of the bend.

Instead of slowing for the turn, he twisted the throttle to full open. There might be something coming the other way; he might find the hedge more solid than it looked; even if he got through, the close clustering trees would be almost impossible to avoid.

He went straight across the road.

The hedge parted like a bead-curtain. He felt its branches scrabble vainly to get a hold on his leather jacket, then he was among the trees, bucketing over exposed roots, leaning this way and that as he twisted through the copse, decelerating madly. His shoulder grazed bark, a low bough almost took his helmet off. Finally he mounted the steep mossy bank of a drainage ditch, let the bike slide from between his legs and lay on the ground, his ragged breath drawing in the odour of leaf-mould and damp earth while his pounding heart settled back into the monotonous rhythms of safety.

Distantly he heard the police car go by. He sat up and removed his helmet. He was hot in his leathers and he took them off too. Almost without thought, he continued undressing, peeling off shirt and trousers till he stood naked among the trees feeling the cool air playing on his feverish flesh. He was sexually aroused. He thought of Stella Mycroft. And he thought of Ellie Pascoe. His hand moved to his groin, but a sudden gust of wind heavy with a chilling rain got there first.

Like a pail of cold water over a rutting dog, he told himself sardonically, Thanks, God!

He pulled on his clothes and protective gear, pulled the bike upright and set out across country easing the bike along ploughed furrows but opening it up across pasture land. Sheep scattered; cows regarded him with gentle curiosity. A man on a tractor stood up and waved an angry fist, mouthing inaudible abuse. Colin Farr waved back.

Ultimately he hit a farm lane which took him out on to a minor road he did not know. Using the declining sun, he turned to the south-west and soon was back on a main road he recognized.

When he reached the outskirts of Burrthorpe, he stopped at a telephone box, went in and dialled.

The number rang a while, then the phone at the other end was lifted and the pips demanded his money before he could be heard, like ghosts gibbering for blood. He pressed in his coin.

A woman’s voice said, ‘Hello? Burrthorpe 227.’

He didn’t speak.

‘Hello?’ Impatient now. ‘Who’s there?’

Still he kept silent.

And now the voice changed, the pitch lower, the tone anxious.

‘Colin, is that you?’

But still he did not reply and the woman cried out angrily, ‘Get stuffed!’ and banged the phone down.

Colin Farr left the receiver dangling and went home.