Ready or not

In the darkness, things were whispering. I was sure, as I tried yet again to scramble over the shattered square of rock blocking the passage, that if I turned my head to look behind me, I would see it there. 

What was it? I didn’t know. Still don’t, which is exactly why it bothers me as much now as it did that first time.

“Sean?” I called, keeping my voice low to stop the echoes of my words knocking against the stone ceiling and adding to the indistinct chorus around me. “Sean, mate?”

I stopped struggling, listening for his footsteps over the roaring silence. Not far behind me, something clattered.

“Sean!”

“Yeah?” His voice drifted from nowhere and everywhere, lethargically calm, like a post-nap yawn.

“I’m, uh, not sure I’m fit enough for this climb.”

Silence. Another scraping sound that might have been Sean snuffling. Or his wellie scuffing in the dirt. Or something else.

“We’re nearly there.” He spoke with a fuzzy delay, as though we were communicating through can-and-string.

“Not helpful,” I said to myself, resolving to find a way forwards despite his indifference. 

So much for an expert guide, I thought. So much for a lot of things.

Trying my best to ignore the sounds that my more rational mind knew posed no danger to me, I stepped back and reassessed the climb. Low down, a sliver of space between the boulder and the ground marked where Sean had squeezed through but, after years of office work, pubs and biscuits, that way wasn’t an option for me. And if you can’t go under (or round or through, and I tried both) you’ve got to go over.

Only I’d been trying that for the past ten minutes. But the underground, empty of light and just about every other familiar benchmark, made time pass abnormally, so it could have been hours, just as easily. Either way, I was getting exhausted. Considering we’d barely started the trip, it didn’t bode well.

“No, come on, now,” I said to myself, hoping the sound of my voice would provide some small comfort. “You’re not here to get turned around by a climb.”

So I looked again, and this time my headlamp cast useful shadows at last. A long ridge in the rock—like the cave wall had started splitting in half; like it longed to separate, rise to the sky and send the light of summer morning rushing through these lightless corridors—would provide a perfect foothold. 

For anyone else, maybe.

When I tried to cock a leg up, it stopped halfway, as though my foot was attached by a taut string to the floor.

It was the undersuit. The oversuit. Every piece of gear I’d borrowed from Sean, all of which were too small. Kitting up an hour ago, I’d laughed, thinking my protruding belly would be the biggest inconvenience, but now I was forced to reconsider. The complete lack of mobility in the short, tight legs, it seemed, would be my primary antagonist. I wasn't off to a great start.

But I persevered, using my hands and brute force to wrestle my leg up despite the protesting material of my clothes. When I finally had my foothold, things were looking up and I was going up! With one swift kick, I was rising, scrabbling at the rock for a handhold and then, suddenly, wheeling over the other side.

I landed at Sean’s feet, hard on my bottom.

“You talking to yourself again?” he said, but he offered me a hand so I didn’t mind the insinuation against my sanity.

“I thought you’d gone ahead?”

“Nope.”

“And you didn’t think to come back and give me a hand?”

“Would you have wanted me to?”

I smiled despite my initial offence. “No. That was pretty good.”

“Pretty good,” Sean said, turning to walk away. “Pretty good, he says. We’ll make a caver of you yet.”

The going was easier then, the ground rising and dipping and twisting and only occasionally leaping up or down by a few feet at a time. Like passing through the fossilised digestive tract of some subterranean titan, we had progressed from the cavernous mouth of entrance chambers through tall, throat-like chasms and their egregious blockages. Now we arrived in a long, high-ceilinged hall of dripping stone that warranted the designation of a stomach; dichotomous between my feeling of being deep underground and my knowledge that we had barely scratched the surface of the cave system. Sean had shown me the surveys before we left and, though I was woefully unprepared to navigate, I suspected we stood now in a chamber which was not—at least in the grand scheme of the cave—far from the entrance.  

Wherever we were, those distant voice-like sounds resumed their eerie ebb and flow.

“You can hear that, right?” I said, finding a bank of smooth mud to rest upon.

“Yeah, don’t worry about it,” Sean said, gulping at a pristine water bottle. “Just cave echoes.”

“Echoes of what?”

Sean shrugged. “You learn to ignore it after a while. Same stuff I used to hear, so unless it’s some sort of immortal cave gremlin, it’s probably just water.”

“Not helpful,” I said to myself and then, to him: “And where are we now?”

“Gnome chamber.”

“Ha ha, very funny.” I found my feet to busy myself from thinking too much about it. “Really, though?”

Sean didn’t answer. He turned his head to cast a beam of light from his helmet down the chamber to illuminate dozens of tiny figures standing in the midnight hall, and a new kind of hot flush raced through my body. I was thankful to have stood up, or I’d have probably fallen again.

I yelled some words I hadn’t used in decades, drowned out by Sean’s high laughter.

“Calm down, mate, they’re just stalagmites,” he said when his composure returned. “Look.”

Though my instincts pleaded otherwise, I fought to return my eyes to the passage. True to Sean’s words, the creatures revealed themselves as stumpy mounds of dirty calcite. I spoke, pacing, to hide the remnants of my trembling.

“Don’t stalagmites hang from the ceiling?”

“Mites and tights,” Sean said past a mouthful of Mars Bar. I stared at him to prompt an explanation and, after the world’s slowest demonstration of chewing and swallowing, he said: “Mites climb up, tights come down. That’s how you tell them apart.”

“Right,” I said, suddenly wishing I’d packed snacks of my own. “But isn’t that the same the other way around? You pull tights up and mites presumably crawl down, too?”

“Oh, I don’t know. Maybe. It’s been ages since I’ve heard someone say that, I don’t remember. What does it matter?”

“It doesn’t really,” I said, deciding not to share my mounting insecurities after he got us lost earlier. “I just thought you were an expert on this stuff.”

“Ha ha,” Sean said, mimicking my earlier faux laughter. “Yeah, I’m a real expert on caves.”

“Why do you say it like that? You said you’ve been caving for ten years.”

“Haven’t been.”

“Haven’t been,” I repeated, just another cave echo.

“Haven’t been caving in ten years,” he said, screwing the empty chocolate wrapper into a pocket as if he’d just said something very casual—not like he’d admitted luring me into a deathtrap!

“What the hell!” I said, the hot flush rushing back over me. “I thought you knew what you were doing!”

“Hey.” He snapped his fingers in my face with the stern voice that had always managed to dial me back to his words, even when we were kids, twenty years before he met me in a Lidl car park, took one look at the baby on board car sticker and the overhang of belly over my belt and said: ‘What the hell happened to you?’

“Hey!” Another snap. “It’s like riding a bike, alright. And it’s an easy cave, just calm down. Have we had a single tight squeeze yet? Have you even been able to touch the ceiling yet? No. And look, see that massive passage going off on the left over there, yeah? That’s where we’re going. The Corkscrew. Does that sound tight?”

“A little,” I said, disliking how much I sounded like a child.

“Alright, well it is. A little. But it’s tight in an interesting way. It’ll distract you.”

Focusing on my panting, I decided I would give him one more chance. “Fine, let’s just keep moving, alright. I don’t like the gnomes.”

“They don’t bite,” he said as he stepped away, his voice once again soft and slow.

So I followed. Honestly, it was just as well I had resolved to continue. If I had refused to take another step and he had walked away, I would have followed him without a second thought anyway. Rather the devil you know than the gnomes you don’t, right?

But it turned out the devil I knew wasn’t particularly reliable, because the so-called ‘interesting distraction’ was the most treacherous part of the cave yet. The muddy scramble down was one thing, but at least it was scattered with well-rooted rocks to substitute as lumpy, higgledy-piggledy stairs (and, once, a buffer-stop when the slope became a slide). The cliff at the bottom was something else completely.

“It’s not a cliff,” Sean said. “It’s like, what, eight foot? Maybe fifteen?”

“That’s a pretty massive margin of error. And try thirty foot.”

“Now you’re exaggerating.”

I realise now that I was, but at the time I was furious. The slow simmer of my anxiety had fully evaporated to a salt of raw anger: at Sean (how dare he bring me down here!) at myself (how dare I let him bring me down here!) and at my wife and daughter (how dare they let their overweight stay-at-home dad pretend he still had a little adventure left in him!).

“How are we supposed to get down there?” I said, pacing, pointing, still panting. “I suppose you expect me to climb that, too?”

“There’s a route cut into the rock face, actually.”

“Oh,” I said as he pointed, feeling at once like I had overreacted. Rushed by a moment of clarity, I felt like a real asshole. What kind of person shouts at someone kind enough to drive you to Wales and—

“What the fuck is that?” I like to think I didn’t scream the words but, looking at the tiny hole in the ground, I probably did.

“Oh, come on.”

“No, stop it. Look at it.” He looked at it. “Now look at me.” He looked at me. He gave an unconvincing smile.

“You’ll be fine!”

“No, listen—”

“No, you listen. You’re always overthinking things but, and trust me here, this is absolutely fine. Yeah, so it’s a bit tight, but that’s why you’re here! At our age, we’re more likely to develop new phobias before we get a chance to kick one, but here’s your chance. I know it’s hard, but you’ll regret it if you don’t push through. I’ll be right in front of you. Just take your time. Keep breathing. Yeah?”

I closed my eyes. Every fibre of me wanted to shout no and race back the way I had come. Somehow, a solitary adventurous gene won out. “Fine.”

“That’s the spirit,” Sean beamed, trying hard to hide his surprise. He slapped me on the back. “You’ll be so scared of falling, you’ll be glad if you get stuck!”

“Right, that’s it,” I said. “I’m out.”

And as I turned away, I think I was joking, but Sean took me too seriously. Hearing his plea for me to wait, I spun back just in time to see his ankle twist on his way to rush after me; to watch, frozen, as his body staggered and slipped; to hold out a redundant hand as his headlamp disappeared over the edge.

Then there was silence.

Then there was a great clatter.

Then there was an unholy wail.

I rushed to the edge, dropping onto my stomach to peer down, my legs splayed and my hands fastened around any available handholds.

“You bastard!” Sean—a dark silhouette writhing over the rocks—screamed. My initial relief at his survival did not last long. “Oh my God, you pushed me! You pushed me and now—Oh my God—my legs are broken! Is a knee meant to bend like that?”

Just about managing to convince my hands to work, I fumbled to turn my light up. As far as I could tell, all his limbs were pointed in the right directions.

“Calm down, you’re—”

“I’m going to die down here! Jesus Christ, I’m going to die in this hole!”

“You’re not going to—”

“You’ve got to help me,” he said, clutching onto a fleeting control when he seemed to notice my light. “Help me, you’ve got to. Go get help.”

“I can’t. I don’t know where we are. I don’t know how to get back. I—”

“Go get help, Goddammit!” 

Never calm in a crisis, I felt Sean’s panic smashing through the last of my defences. As the reserves of my composure ran dry, even the faintest recollection of the route we had taken to get here disappeared.

“Listen to me, Sean: I don’t know how to get out.” Then, with a chain reaction like bursting popcorn, my doubts multiplied. “Who would I even get help from? Surely someone’s coming?”

“Why would you think that?”

“You must have told someone we’re down here.”

“No! Are you stupid? It’s been ten years. Who was I supposed to call? I don’t know anyone!”

I rolled away from the edge, trying to ignore the continued howling from below. I turned off my light.

High above me, jagged shards of light and shadow cut across the ceiling like fireworks in two dimensions. Whenever Sean moved his head to look at his knees (I could tell he was looking at his knees, because it evoked a fresh scream) the light swept away. Then the darkness was overwhelming. 

I’d been in the remote countryside at night, which I’d always considered as being true darkness, but even the countryside had stars. The countryside had wind. Here, the darkness was a thick sensation of its own. Regardless of the rock against my back, the syrupy blackness rose me up to float in oblivion. The air was still against my face and hands. There was nothing. Only me.

“Okay,” I called out, turning my light back on and rolling to my feet. “I’m coming down.”

And he screamed something else at me, but I wasn’t listening. I was talking to myself again.

“Ready or not, here I come.” And, absolutely not ready, I slipped feet first into the hole. 

Overestimating the tightness of the squeeze was my first mistake; one which sent me tumbling down the passage until my arm hooked around an outcropping. The position I came to rest in sent a bolt of lightning through my chest. I had been prepared for tightness. I was ready to get stuck. I wasn’t ready for the wall to disappear, revealing a previously hidden chasm which disappeared down into unbroken abyss.

And though my feet were planted firmly, the continued way down folded back underneath itself—under me—with no clear way of supporting myself well enough to turn. I did not move for a long time, counting twenty breaths before I realised they weren’t slowing down. My breathing was keeping pace with my rapid pulse; my arm burning from holding myself tight against the rock.

When I found my spare hand on the switch of my headlamp, I didn’t have time to realise what my subconscious had planned before a finger twitched and the darkness swallowed me. Then, in a moment of sensory depravation, the cave whispers filled my ears. Only this time they weren’t distant and indistinct. This time they held a memory of Sean’s voice. 

“That’s where we’re going. The corkscrew.”

My toes twitched and my legs faintly loosened.

“The corkscrew.”

It was a bold move—a stupid move, in the dark—but at once my knees buckled and twisted, my body turning so that my back swapped places with my front and my knees, previously pressed up against the turn in the passage, could bend.

I slipped again, this time controlled, corkscrewing my body to follow the route down. When my chest wedged, my claustrophobia was lost in the mail. My hands rose instinctively, pushed against the wall, and I popped through.

I didn’t notice my lamp was still off until Sean’s light washed over me. Maybe it was the dark, or maybe it was the stress, but when I turned mine back on, he looked very pale.

“You’ve calmed down,” I said, trying my hardest not to endorse another fit.

“You too,” he said.

Later (days for me, months for Sean) we would laugh about that surreal greeting. At the time, I offered him an arm, and we made our incredibly slow return journey to the surface.

Progress was difficult. Sean was lighter than I, but his weight on my supporting shoulder, coupled with my non-existent technique, made even the easier corridors a challenge. For the life of me, I don’t know how I managed to negotiate him up the corkscrew, but he did it. The boulder climb was no easier but, charged by the adrenaline of my rescue, I pushed us through.

And though it felt like we would rejoin the world in deep midnight, we were both shocked to fling the entrance gate out into the soft, elder rays of summer sunshine. 

Minutes later, lying side-by-side on the grass, cocooned by the sweet smells of ozone and earth; hummed to by the wind and whistling grass; welcomed back to the world by a thousand above-ground sensations, I turned my head to Sean.

“So, what cave are we going to next time?”

Sean groaned and a distant bird tittered.

“Not helpful,” he said.