Head Injuries by Conrad Williams

through.'
        He sighed and drank from his can. I was irritated by his telling of the past; he was so unreliable that I was convinced he was dressing up a part of his history that was dull as double maths.
        'It was like being in a sauna. At the bottom of Boulder Falls, Dale got sick and by the time we got to Apricot Pit, which is a deep fucker, let me tell you, about 500 feet in some areas, he was vomiting bad. Bob Sinclair sat him down and tried to get him to control his breathing. Me and Evan were pissing ourselves. The speleologist arsehole wasn't going to make it. These guys were supposed to be experts. Bob said he was going to take Dale back and did we want to call it a day? Evan and me just shook our heads and waved bye-bye.
        'It was a hard caving trip. Both of us had heavy gear with us so we took it slowly, both a bit spooked over Dale and hoping it wouldn't hit us, knowing that this was the only way out and that things were going to get tough. At the bottom of Apricot Pit we rested and Evan took some photographs on the way. It was so beautiful inside, David. Heaven carved out of the rock. Great columns of gypsum crystal eight metres long, calcite that looked like it had been sculpted. Everything white. And the names of the chambers on my map. Firefall Hall, Lake of the Blue Giants, Ocean Wave Room. We were abseiling and prussiking all over the shop. My arms were on fire but I couldn't feel a thing. I felt like I was tripping, that these structures couldn't be real unless they were inside my mind.
        'We had a big climb ahead of us, up 200 feet to what they call The China Shop. At the top we bivvied for the night-we'd been in the cave for about 18 hours. After a night's sleep we all awoke and had some dried fruit and energy bars. We were shivering with excitement.
        'We went fucking wild. Hyperventilating and all that shit. If we saw a black hole we'd swing into it whether it was ten or two hundred metres deep. I was convinced we were going to discover something incredible: a brand new colour or a family of troglodytes or a fucking dinosaur! We took off up a sixty-metre wall of aragonite crystals. Got cut to ribbons. Exhausted at the end of it-humidity was 100 per cent. And then we arrived at a sump.' He'd become more animated, the tendons on his neck sprung like taut cables.
        The girl had wandered into the room. She was drinking from a bottle of red wine. I saw her cadge a roll-up from Deep Pan who made space for her on his knee. She lay her head against his chest and looked at me. She said something and Deep Pan laughed, the sound rattling in his chest.
        'What's a sump?'
        'A flooded passage. You can't help coming across water in the caves. We went in and waded for about twenty metres before the ceiling of the cave started to slope down closer to the water's surface. Soon, we were at a point where we could either chicken out or swim underwater, see if we came out anywhere. We were all for that-the thought we might discover a new cave was too great a pull. Evan went first.
        'We were underwater for about half a minute-it was getting to the point where I was ready to turn back-but then we surfaced in a tiny pocket of air. Evan asked me if I wanted to go on. I felt pretty claustrophobic there, we were practically kissing each other. I said we should go on. So I killed him in a way.'
        Even though I'd been waiting for a line like that, it still sucked the blood from my cheeks when he said it. I offered some kind of weak encouragement but it was unnecessary; he was going to finish whether I wanted to hear or not.
        'We surfaced again not long after. We were in a small passage-you couldn't get two abreast so I followed him. He stopped and took some Vaseline out of a bag, smeared it on his arms. He didn't have to say anything, he just grinned at me because he knew how much I hated crawling through narrow tunnels. Suck your belly in, Shay, he said