Walking the wagons was tough on his legs, but it saved his arms for the shovel work at the end. Cement and brick going in, granite going out. Of the two operations, pushing the wagons out was the more dangerous, for the track sloped down towards the entrance and unless checked the wagons could piek up a dangerous momen-tum of their own. Crushed legs, crushed hands, broken ribs, a punctured gut—the wagons had taken their toll. A hospital, that’s what they were building, a hospital with kitchens and laundries and everything, even a cinema, though at the moment it was just rock and soil and the reverberation of a hundred hammers. Two long corridors they had hacked away, and in between, connecting them, a series of long domed rooms looking more like catacombs in a cathedral, where stone plinths covering the crumbling bones of ancient saints should reside, than dormitories built to raise the wounded from their beds. Not that he would ever lie on one of them. There was only one sickbed waiting for him. Collapsed from exhaustion? Sling him in the back of the truck. Back broken by a fallen roof? Sling him in the back of the truck. Blinded by blast fragments, coughing up too much blood, arm wrenched out of its socket? Sling him in the truck. And if he survived the day? Put him on the boat to that other island from where no one returned. They would die here, he knew it, wither and die and be chucked away, tipped out over the cliffs like so much rubble.
He had been working the tunnels for three months now in numbing twelve-hour shifts, twelve hours on, twelve hours off. Up at first light, a hard tear of bread, a bowl of cloudy water speckled with torn cabbage leaves and unwashed potato peelings, perhaps a strip of dog in the bottom, and then out in the half dark, with the overseer alongside them, whipping the air with his little tin pipe, deformed merriment playing down the narrow streets, their uniform a mixed bag of rags, here a long nightshirt hanging down over a municipal trousers, there a string vest behind a railwayman’s jacket, baggy linen trousers and calico shirts and flat caps atop every one, appropriated headgear of the defunct Czech army.
It was cold and weary, marching along with the wind from the coast adding a final chili to their bones. He’d never seen the sea before he’d been sent here. Two years and he still hated the sight of it. Last summer one afternoon they’d been let loose on one of the long beaches past the harbour, but though the rest had run down to the water’s edge, jumping and splashing and pushing each other as if they were on holiday, he had stood on the shore, unable and unwilling to move. It scared him, the sea, so huge and cold and without remorse. Not like the river by his village, and the towpath where he’d gone fishing with his dad, the cows mooching up and down in the meadow behind them. They’d shot them all that second afternoon when the other soldiers came, the dogs, the pigs, the cows, shot the lot of them, casual and laughing, as if they were out for day’s fun at a distant country fair.
So here he marched, with the weight of the sweeping sky calling to a stilled life beyond, no not marched, but shufïled in a frozen shivering sleep, ragged arm to ragged shoulder, ragged shoulder to ragged arm, feet black and raw and wrapped in blood-hardened rags, with the road bright and shiny from the night and the distant sound of the great green water sucking at the island’s heart: up the hill, past houses and cottages and hidden lives which he could guess at all too well. Were these the whitewashed walls behind which he had once lived, this cracked smudged pane of glass the window looking into his own forgotten life? Was this the meadow, this the pond, this the deserted apple grove where once his family’s pigs broke ground? Was that creaking iron pump, so sturdy in its stone casement, the pump under which he pushed his dirty traant face, that the handle, that the gush of water washing away, what, his mother’s ire, his sister’s gibes, his father’s loud lament? As they reached the lip of the hill, and starled down into that deep valley, half running, half stumbling, clanking like a medieval siege machine with the tin cups and billycans hanging from their sides, it seemed to him that the closer they came to the great dark hole the lusher the valley grew, as if God Himself was taunting them, showing them all the green wonder of the world before bidding them to depart. Thick ferns rose up out of the wayside grass, buds of he knew not what had pushed their way through the dark soil, the lattice of bare branches now replaced by a canopy the colour of succulent evergreen. And then, as it appeared that the road was leading them ever deeper into this impenetrable fertility, came the clearing, a bare slice of burnt and flattened ground, announced by black-lettered noticeboards peppered with exclamation marks and protected by wire fencing twelve foot high. Waiting behind the opened double gates, in two long rows, stood the guards, bristling in their brushed uniforms, barking at them as they trotted past, towards the iron grille and the grinding lorries and the great maw of a mouth beyond, ready to swallow and chew and spit them out, digested.
They went in slowly, some directed to the wagons, some to the lines of pickaxes and shovels leaning up against the wall, their handles still greasy from the night shift. The air was chili and damp, and his clothes stuck to his skin almost immediately. Water dripped from the roof, mud slid under his feet. Though electric lights were slung along the walls it took time to appreciate the length and breadth of the gallery and the dark brilliance of the imagination that had created it. Moving along that first long corridor, hewn of granite, the traces of past pickaxe blows pressed like fossils into its slick black walls, the tunnel stretched beyond the limit of light and dark into a stone labyrinth of implacable strength. There was no beginning to be found here, no end, such was its depth and its vast disdain for life. Though he knew that he had been banished to fashion a terrain upon which his life might come to a flickering halt, he felt that unwittingly he had uncovered a land of dim eternity. This was not simply a man-made device. This was a vision of a world to come, beyond man’s calling, God’s gift to a cursed world, a place of unspeakable holiness. He had been driven into this darkness, to fight amongst his brethren, to jostle and squeal like another lost rat, gnawing at the earth’s heart, and here, he had concluded, was where he belonged. Up top he was nothing, a number to call, a mouth to feed, a back to beat. Up top there was air and sun and the sight of the world. It was too bright, there was too much colour, too much light. The day hurt him, hurt him for what he had lost, though he saw only the dawn grey and the blood dusk of it now, and he was glad of that. Down here, with nothing but echoes of his fading memories to remind him of his fairy-tale past, it was easier to dwell. Down here doom and hope mingled like blood and sand, with sudden milky mists rising from the floor to hide him from their most searching gaze. This was of its own. Here he would make his mark, searching for the mystery of it all, and they knew it not.
For the past three weeks he had been engaged in building a connecting passage between the hospital and what would be ammunition stores, with an escape shaft set halfway between, some seventy-five feet high, an iron-rung ladder strapped inside. It was hard work, with falling roofs and unexpected subsidence taking their toll, but despite the danger it was along here, in a dark abandoned recess, now hidden behind one of the giant air filters ranged along the main corridors, that he had fashioned his tiny room, four foot high and three foot square and lined with sacking. To begin with, he did not know what he would do with his invention, nor why he had spent back-breaking minutes furiously hacking at this illegal excavation, for it was not an escape route leading to an outside salvation, it was a cell constructed within a prison. But in the days when he had dug it out, chucking the earth into his wagon, tipping the evidence of his own private domain into the waiting lorries, it came to him that what he had created was not an exit, but an entrance, not a hiding place, but the beginnings of a state of being, and that if he were careful enough and constructed it cleverly, he could expand it, build other rooms, food stores, sleeping quarters, listening posts. He would learn the tunnel’s secrets, its nocturnal habits, and adapt to its calling. He would feed and clothe himself from their provisions, take warmth from their furnaces, run wires from the generators, tap into the air compressors. He would wear a stolen officer’s cap and a pair of good boots and on his leather belt would swing a torch and a dagger and a length of rope. He would fashion a new world, unsuspected and bidden, one which he would command and one which would grow in power. He would take the old man in with him. Others later on. Burrow under the whole island. When they were secure they could bring some of the whores down. Start a new civilization. Rot the other world from the inside.