Emergency Read online

  I was standing and waiting for the vole or the kestrel to move and something clicked. It was physical and visual, like a camera finding focus. The V-shaped tunnel, going down, and then veering back toward the surface, literally spelled out to me the fact that the vole had hit water—that water was rising through the earth, high up the sides of the quarry. I had seen the panel of clay landing in a pool of water on the quarry bed. But the picture bobbed meaninglessly among the debris of what feels like a tidal wave of random information that crashes over me every moment. I like to think that I would go mad if I tuned in to everything, all the time, the squirrel’s heartbeat or the roar of growing grass, but this is most likely a lie—realistically, the business of relentlessly prioritizing and deleting the details of the world is the mad element. There shouldn’t have been a pool of water on the quarry bed.

  The quarry had flooded, just a little, years earlier, but since then it had been drained because the flooding had caused problems. The animals who had made their homes in and around the quarry began to move, which put pressure on the territories. Humans were no exception. Most adults in the area were employed by the quarry or the bacon factory, and the gardens on my street were built right out up to the patch of scrubby edgeland I was standing on.

  Our quarry produced gravel which was sent all over the world. The requirements of Norwegian motorways and new cities in China determined the shape of the quarry and the size of the space it left, though the relationship went in both directions, in every direction. Stones, single hairs, and skin flakes from the workers’ bodies and fragments of rubber from the old tires of the quarry’s two vehicles traveled the globe. The place was dynamited apart and distributed throughout the world in vanishingly small splinters and particles. As a child I watched it go but I couldn’t see where it went. As an adult I have a stronger but still slight understanding of how my resources reach me, or how my life extends into the dams, logging operations, fulfilment centers, makeshift mining towns, oilfields, or containment facilities on which my daily life depends. These resources, like my quarry, are sited not only where they will be cheap, but also where they will be largely unseen by human eyes.

  I never went inside the pigsties but they were impossible to ignore because they were on the horizon and the lights never went off—the pigs lived in perpetual strip-lit daytime. Ann’s mom said it made them more eager to die. Ann’s mom, sitting in a plastic chair in her back garden with her head tipped back to catch the remaining UV, once told Ann and her sisters and me the story of her working day, how she stood, wearing waders, for five hours at a time in a windowless, high-walled room with a hole in the floor. Cleaned pig corpses, suspended over her head on a wire track, were pulled into the middle of the room. Their cavities would open down a central line and their insides landed in front of her. She had a broom with a hose running through it that was used to clear blood and heaps of offal into a chute toward the part of the factory that produced the sausage meat.

  I enjoyed this story not so much for the gore as for the way Ann’s mom shrugged, cool, when we children expressed our horror, and told us that the worst thing was the boredom. She was a tiny woman with faded roses tattooed along one arm and shoulder, red hennaed hair, three young daughters, a nineteen-year-old boyfriend, and a talent for peaceful enjoyment which she spread around her house and garden—a part of me wants to say that she was living her best life, but that would be glib. When she told us stories about her job she began to open up some basic understanding of the human landscape in my mind. I could see an unequal difference in the space between the work my parents did (my father was working on short-term contracts at universities and colleges, and as a painter and decorator; my mother was a supply teacher) and the things Ann’s mother went out to do. There was another distinction between the unsteady work my parents did and the real teachers or doctors, who had cars and took holidays. Farming, which my grandmother did nearby, was altogether a different way to be. I would have struggled to explain how these things related to one another with any consistency.

  The first time it was known that the quarry was flooding, the local councillor called a meeting in the community center. It was not well attended. There was no great sense of urgency, perhaps because the quarry was operating as usual, only with a big puddle on one side. At the community meeting the conversation moved instead toward the fox problem. It was breeding season and foxes were fucking and feuding in our gardens over territory. When they cried they sounded tortured, as though they were experiencing some psychological horror that was worse than any physical pain. Sometimes they triggered the security light that Matthew and Grace had set up above their back door, and my bedroom was immersed in a reflected white glare. I kneeled up in bed to look out of my window just in time to spy back legs and long tails flowing out of the pool of light and into the tattered shadow around the edges. The stainless-steel dustbin lid would drop, clang, then roll in a long curve, ringing deeply. It sounded merry, like it found the whole situation a laugh.

  I saw the foxes in my own garden just once. It was disturbing. They were dancing. Kneeling on my bed I could see two foxes close to the back wall of my house in the open part of the concrete yard. One fox was very small. She flattened herself down onto the ground, hip bones making small hills in her flank. The other fox was huge and he was facing her. He had a broad face, a thick, fluffy neck, and a wide tail with a white tag. Slowly, as the small fox united herself with the ground, the large fox reared and rose until he was standing on his hind legs, and then he stepped from foot to foot, his front paws hanging in the air, his long body not quite stable—he heeled from one side to the other, just catching himself at either extreme. This went on for minutes. The small fox watched. I watched. And then I noticed another fox, a little way back, face turned intently toward the pair of them from behind a patch of the ivy which grew thickly on the fence. I could see the third fox’s narrow head angling toward the dancer, then toward the one he was dancing for. I realized that she wasn’t watching them, she was turning to catch their scent.

  I got out of bed and went downstairs to tell my parents but it was later than I’d thought. Nobody was awake and the lights were out. When I tiptoed into the middle of the darkened room something stirred on the sofa. My mother sat up and pushed away blankets. I halted in front of her. She told me that there had been an argument. “Things will be normal in the morning.”

  I noticed nothing unusual in the morning and I didn’t give it much thought. But when I went with my father to the community meeting about the quarry I wasn’t surprised by the fact that those who attended argued over what to do about the foxes. Commuters wanted to accommodate them and farmers wanted to shoot them—one farmer said that he had lost several valuable Christmas geese to a huge dog fox which he had shot the previous weekend, and the bullet had gotten sucked into the fox’s hide.

  At the end of the meeting the principal from my school stood up and suggested that the quarry should be decommissioned and returned to nature. This was happening, she said, with the slag heaps from the closed mines, which were being given to local wildlife trusts. She made the quarry sound like an object which our community had purchased, though it didn’t suit us. Sparsely dispersed throughout the community hall, the group responded evasively. There were tiny, noncommittal noises in the backs of throats. Fractional nods, just to register that she was audible. These days I would say that her proposal was a good idea.

  There were two classes in my school, with three year-groups in the lower class (mine) and four in the upper. Ms. Carr taught top class and so she had a special aura to those of us in lower class. She held assembly, made announcements, and came into our classroom only on exceptional occasions, like the spring day when our usual teacher, Mrs. Hepton, vanished at dinnertime. Beside the teacher’s desk, occupying the space where our nature table had been, there was a wheeled cafeteria cook’s cart, and Ms. Carr stood in front of it. She told us to practice our spelling in silence. She left the room and closed the door.

  Heads lifted and we looked around at one another. The classroom was an environment of its time: the boys all had curtains or shaved heads; the girls wore high ponytails like fountains, two strands of hair released at the front, and the tiny plastic trolls on their desks had received the same treatment, neon hair bunched in tiny scrunchies. These silent, uniformed heads, male, female, troll, all seemed to be listening to Ms. Carr’s soles sticking on the linoleum as she walked across the corridor, opened the door to her own classroom, took a reading of the quality of quiet inside, and then closed it again. When she reappeared in front of us our interest in her waned and we looked down at our desks again.

  The desks came from a different era: old, wooden, lidded, with inkwells and hollow insides that were regularly inspected to ensure that all books were stored regularly, in ascending order of size, and perhaps also to show each child that there was no private space. I must have spent many weeks in total staring into mine, and before me another child, and before that another, each one of us working with our faces so close to the surface that our breath warmed the wood, which exhaled its own dry scent, so oppressively close that we could see an irregular elongation in the patterns where the tree had swollen rapidly through a wet spring sometime in the nineteenth century, and the place on the surface where the carpenter, a few years later, had shifted his plane to a different angle, and the place beneath the loose hinge where somebody, more recently, had drawn a tiny pair of breasts.

  A few minutes after Ms. Carr’s return a subtle shift of attention moved within the line of students who were sitting closest to the window. Outside Mrs. Hepton was opening the double gates to the road. She walked backward onto the grass so that a van could reverse into the playground. A man climbed out and opened the doors at the back of the van so that they mirrored the gates to the playground: two pairs of wings spread wide.

  Inside the van there was a very large cardboard box. Our teacher and the man lifted it out and placed it on the ground behind the van. There were two smaller boxes behind it. I closed my eyes and listened. A car passed through the village. Sparrows squabbled on the concrete. Clare, who was sitting in the desk in front of me, scribbled her pen back and forth to obliterate something she had written. There was a thud in the corridor and somebody swore, then apologized. I opened my eyes to look at Clare, Clare turned around and widened her eyes at me. Nobody dared to laugh. Then at last the door burst open and the boxes were brought in, one by one, and placed in front of our trolley. Each one was taller than a child. I could see, from the way they were carried, that they were heavy and valuable.

  After the man had gone Ms. Carr and Mrs. Hepton stood together at the front of the room between their pupils and the huge boxes. Ms. Carr tall, remote, and serene; Mrs. Hepton short. Both wore huge plastic-framed spectacles and had tightly curled set hair, but down on the ground their differences were undeniable: Mrs. Hepton’s orthopedic sandals revealed large toes webbed by flesh-colored tights. Ms. Carr’s low-heeled shoes were white, matching her white artificial silk skirt and t-shirt: she floated above her colleague, high and triumphant—she looked like a calla lily, a white flame, a victor. Her fingers twirled with nervous excitement which made the smeary gold on her rings flash, as she announced that our posters and fundraising fêtes had been successful. She had purchased the school a computer. In the future, she told us with her voice shaking very slightly, we would all work on computers. Every word we wrote would be word-processed.

  As she spoke she caught our eyes, one by one—it felt uncomfortable, I could see that it was a deliberate effect. Meanwhile Mrs. Hepton raised her eyes and fixed them grimly on the clock at the back of the room. It was Mrs. Hepton who had, patiently and against the odds, taught each one of us to read and to write with a sharpened HB pencil, in lowercase. Once we had mastered this, beginning again at “a,” we learned to connect the letters, until eventually, in ones and twos, we were presented with a pen when—and only when—the joined-up handwriting merited ink. A few children were never awarded pens and Mrs. Hepton did nothing to take the edge off their shame: shame was elemental to her teaching, together with chanting, tidiness, obedience, and silence.

  As we unpacked the computer Mrs. Hepton remarked on how much space it took up and the fact that it occupied the nature table’s area. She wondered aloud why it was not placed in Miss Carr’s classroom. Ms. Carr replied that the nature table could be moved into the back corner and that her own class already had a greater number of students within a smaller room. She no longer corrected the Miss.

  When the computer was assembled on the trolley it stood higher than the teacher’s desk. It was browned white, the color of the stone from the local quarry, and I wonder now why the plastic was chosen in that particular shade, as though the designers wanted their machine to represent something geological—the mine or quarry from which its internal minerals had been unpacked before they were processed, bestowed with new forms of intelligence, and then closed away again within the plastic shell. We opened the box with curiosity and caution, as though it was a live animal, gaining confidence as the computer emerged from its den of cardboard, polyethylene slips, and polystyrene bows. One child drew a fingernail across the grainy surface of the monitor’s casing and it made a low, rasping noise. Ms. Carr flinched.

  Then the hard drive, the monitor, the removable disk drives, and the keyboard were in place, and we were left with a snake’s nest of wires and cables with plugs of different shapes at the end of them. John Green, one of those who had not yet earned a pen, and who skipped school if his dad was doing something interesting on the farm, plumped down on the floor behind the trolley with a look of happy concentration on his face, connecting machine to wire, wire to machine. Eventually he stood and gave the nod. Ms. Carr pushed the largest plug into the wall and flicked the switch beside the socket, and nothing happened.

  “It doesn’t work,” said Mrs. Hepton.

  Ms. Carr frowned.

  “This is where you switch it on,” said John, allowing himself the suggestion of a smile. He pressed the button.

  There was a feeling of a sudden swelling and filling, as though a hot wind was gusting into the room, when the fans inside the machine first breathed. After a short time, the cursor appeared with a bleep, blinking.

  The school computer didn’t have an internet connection and I did not yet know any homes with a desktop monitor, though many of us had Sega Genesis’s and Game Boys. I used to play on the computer at Clare’s house on the days when the pesticide sprayers went out. She and I looked forward to these days because our mothers kept us inside and we had snacks and television and computer games in exchange for keeping quiet. When we played Sonic Clare was on a level so high that it seemed theoretical to me, like heaven, and she didn’t even bother playing Tetris anymore, but when we played the game that involved shooting down airplanes, each one a rudimentary construction whose wings were ziggurats of pixels, my nervous reflexes were quicker than hers and I took down plane after plane after plane. Clare cackled with pleasure at my unnerving ability. “It’s not like you.” It felt good to win.

  Spraying days happened mostly in late spring when the weeds came up and rain came down. Molds and mildews bloomed in the fields. Our street was a row of semi-detached houses that had been built between the wars. The four on the edge of the village, which included Clare’s, faced out above the quarry. They were council-owned. The other four, including mine, were closer to the center of the village and were owned by their inhabitants. Clare’s home faced the quarry and mine faced large cultivated fields, bare and sloping, whose hedges had been stripped out, where wheat and barley were rotated with broad beans. These fields caught the sun but their soil was heavy and water-retentive and so they needed pesticides in order to produce a yield. They needed them: this was one of the facts that were produced inside the world we lived in; it was necessary and therefore it had to be true.

  I played deep inside these fields and so I knew its other pests well. Small shiny-coated insects crowded at the base of the hairs on an ear of barley, each cluster bulging to the size and shape of one blob on a blackberry. Grey beardy stuff that looked like cotton fluff or goose-down grew between the stalks and retained water after a rainfall. This material compounded the problem of a third pest that manifested as pinpoints of black dust that marbled the criss-crossed grains on an ear of wheat.

  Even in dry weather the interior of the field was damp. If I played inside it my bare arms or legs would come out soaked and itchy with a white bumpy rash. The smell of wet barley, like washing that has been left too long in the machine, rose out of the fields on hot still days after rain, nauseatingly static. But the spraying was beautiful and I loved it—I loved the opportunity it gave me to stay inside Clare’s house for hours at a time, and I admired its verve, Thomas Gray in his tractor racing up and down, flying too fast over the bumps, with ballerina skirts of vapor pouring behind him, still puffing, in fading asthmatic stutters, as he returned along the road. My mother gave a basic explanation of how this mist crept into lungs and how its tiny dots would morph into floating shapes that would then twirl through the blood. I pictured particles tumbling chaotically like Tetris blocks, which needed to be addressed swiftly and decisively if they were to slot correctly into the body.

  Perhaps these stories gave Clare and me a cue: while we were inside we discovered the rush that came from hyperventilating. We would breathe rapidly until our minds spiraled off giddily and our bodies laughed without knowing why. This was not a silent game and Nic told us to keep it down. “You’ll shrink your brains,” she said. Then she left. I looked at Clare and Clare began to count us in again. Spraying days gave me something to respect. If the invisible air was loaded with invisible poisons, if my own bloodstream could be modeled by its tiniest contaminant component, then it was only logical to understand that the whole, infinitely detailed world, within and beyond the things that I could make sense of, was dangerous. This was not what I felt as I moved freely around the village and the wood. I had a sense of total safety and this was a function of my background—my white body and my parents’ confidence gave me a relationship with that environment that ran somewhere between feeling that I belonged to it, and feeling that it belonged to me, though I did not know of any child in our community, along any of the axes that were used to identify us—rich or poor; black or white; girl or boy; beautiful or ugly; strong or weak; bright or thick—who was kept inside out of a concern for their bodily safety. I had access to the wood, the fields, and to other people’s homes as though I was an element of infrastructure, piped water or electrical wiring, running under the ground, between the trees, through and within the houses with a supply of something that the inhabitants, whether through habit or deep dependence, had stopped noticing. They trusted me because I was small, indeterminate of gender, slow, and wheezily asthmatic: clearly unthreatening—in fact, barely functioning—and because I was polite. Politeness was rare in the community and though the people there, who were mostly pragmatic, did not have much time for it, they feared it: it stank of power. My parents were deeply invested in the concept of manners and I found that it was easy to gain entry to anybody else’s house by thanking and pleasing the people who lived there. I was given a lot of biscuits and I drank a lot of squash. These days most of my relationships are with less pragmatic people and my politeness more frequently emerges as uncertainty in this habitat.