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‘Yes,’ says Ruth. ‘Leo did this.’ Cathbad’s lips are dry and chapped. Ruth looks round for something to moisten them. Surely, everyone carries water these days? But her UNN bottle and Kate’s school-issued receptacle are still in the car. Has Cathbad been here for three days with no water? He’d be dead, wouldn’t he?
‘Mum.’ Kate is holding out a plastic container, half full of water. ‘There’s a sandwich wrapper here too.’
So someone– presumably Leo– has been feeding Cathbad. Ruth holds the water to his lips. She doesn’t want to waste any. She looks at her phone. Still no signal. She should turn it off and save the battery but she dreads being left in the darkness.
‘What’s going to happen to us?’ says Kate. She crawls even closer to Ruth and Ruth can feel her trembling.
‘Someone will find us,’ says Ruth. She draws on all her years of mothering, all those times she’s said, ‘It’ll be all right,’ not knowing whether it would be, all those times she has smiled when she wanted to cry, all those cheery meals and comforting stories. Ruth is Kate’s mother and, while she’s around, Kate will never be really afraid. That’s the power of the mother goddess.
‘Don’t worry, Kate,’ she says. ‘It’s darkest before dawn.’
‘Hecate,’ whispers Cathbad.
Michelle is also fairly lax about George’s bedtime. Nelson always used to be the one initiating noisy games in the evenings or persuading Michelle to let the girls stay up to watch a film. But today he finds himself longing for some peace and quiet, for some time to himself. But, eventually, after several more games with Bruno and on his Nintendo Switch (isn’t he too young for such a device?), George consents to go upstairs for a bath and a story marathon.
‘I’ll come up to say goodnight,’ says Nelson. But he stays in the garden. What does Michelle mean by coming back? George had interrupted after she said the words and Nelson hadn’t wanted to raise the subject again. It’s as if his life is spooling backwards. One moment he was with Ruth and their adolescent daughter, thinking about retirement. Now he’s back at home, eating shepherd’s pie with his wife while their almost-toddler rampages around them. Even Bruno is exhausted. He lies at Nelson’s feet, sighing occasionally.
Nelson is thinking so deeply that he doesn’t hear the patio door open.
‘Harry?’
‘Is George ready to say goodnight?’
‘He’s asleep,’ says Michelle. ‘He went out like a light.’
She sits in the chair next to Nelson and shakes out her hair. The gesture still has the power to stir him.
‘I think I’m ready for bed too,’ she says.
Ruth is trying to ration her phone. A quick look every ten minutes or so. She has thirty per cent battery left but who knows how long that will have to last? She and Kate sit in the darkness with Cathbad lying beside them. He’s still breathing, a rattling and distressing sound, echoing against the stone walls, but seems to have lapsed into unconsciousness.
Ruth and Kate have both crawled past the headless torso to the ladder and climbed to the top, hoping to get a signal. But there were no comforting bars in the corner of the phone screen. Ruth hadn’t liked leaving Kate underground while she climbed and she hadn’t liked seeing Kate’s school shoes, now completely covered in chalk, disappearing through the tunnel when it was her turn. She’d really like them both to wait at the bottom of the shaft. At least they can stand upright there and can see that thin square of light, their link to the outside world. But she doesn’t want to leave Cathbad. What if he died here in this awful cave? At least if she sits next to him, Ruth can will him back to life. And Ruth wants Kate next to her.
‘Shall we sing?’ says Kate.
They try ‘Thunder Road’. Ruth taught Kate the lyrics when she was still a baby. The song had been playing in the car when Ruth first met Frank. When she crashed into him, in fact. Ruth hopes that someone will hear the voices under the earth declaring singing about the screen door and there being magic in the night, but, of course, Grime’s Graves is deserted. Only the sinister trees will hear them. Perhaps they are even now moving closer, turning the field into a forest. Burnham Wood coming to Dunsinane.
After ‘Thunder Road’ they sing ‘Born to Run’ and a medley from Disney.
‘My throat’s dry,’ says Kate.
Ruth gives her some water. There’s less than half a bottle left. ‘We shouldn’t sing any more.’
‘Shall I try the ladder?’
‘OK.’
Ruth gets out her phone. A brief glance at the comforting home screen with its picture of Flint. It’s ten past ten. Everyone will be safely in their own homes by now. Zoe with Derek. Judy with her children. Nelson and Michelle. . . Don’t think about that, she tells herself, but it’s too late, the mental screenshots come flooding in: candlelit meals, his and hers chairs, who’s going to walk the dog, time to turn in, up the wooden hill to Bedfordshire, bedside lights switched off, bodies turning towards each other. . .
Ruth passes the phone to Kate who tucks it in the belt of her skirt and crawls away. Her poor knees must be in agony. Ruth is in trousers and hers feel as if the skin has been scraped away. It’s true that, even without any light, the shapes of the caverns are starting to emerge. Ruth dismissed Leo’s ‘womb’ comment at the time, but it occurs to her now that the grey shapes with their dark openings look like her first scan when she was expecting Kate. She’d gone on her own. Nelson hadn’t even known that she was pregnant at the time. She remembers the cold gel on her stomach and the sight of the pulsating screen, the four circles that would form Kate’s heart, that indomitable organ.
Kate is back. Her face is very pale as it emerges from the dark O of the cave, but she still looks determined. She hasn’t given up yet and neither will Ruth. Kate takes up her position next to Ruth. There are hollows in the rock that almost seem to fit their bodies. Perhaps the miners slept here sometimes? Perhaps their spirits are around them now.
‘Mum?’ says Kate. ‘Can you tell me a story?’
Ruth’s mind is blank, but she knows the comfort of the spoken word. She dredges her memory for books that she has read to Kate. Perhaps it’s no surprise that she lights on one with a famous, though rather unfortunate, opening line.
‘In a hole in the ground,’ says Ruth, ‘there lived a Hobbit. . .’
