Head Injuries by Conrad Williams Page A

and vanished into this crack in the wall. I went after him. About ten metres in I mashed my face up against his boots. He was stuck. He started joking about it-he'd been in this mess before, you see-talking about how crap his crash diet had proved to be and what a great view he had from his position. I realised it was serious when I saw blood spreading on the back of his vest. He was pinned fast. I was kind of glad I couldn't see his face, just the back of his head. I tried to pull him towards me but I couldn't gain purchase on anything so I tried pushing and he screamed.'
        A shudder racked through Seamus, almost in slow motion, starting at his feet and ending in his shoulders, which he hunched in against his neck. His face was white around the eyepatch. I passed him one of my cans of bitter and he took a drink.
        'I said I'd get help and he started shouting at me. Whenever he took in breath a new stream of blood would work its way out of the wound on his back. "What's the fucking point?" he yelled. "What's the fucking point?" And he was right. There was no way you could get more than one person into the tunnel. I said I'd tie a rope round his feet and scramble out backwards, try to pull him out when I could stand up and use some leverage but he said I'd rip his spine out. It was like the part of ceiling that had him was curved forward, he'd been able to slide into it but its hook caught him whenever he moved against it.
        'So I stayed with him. I talked to him. I talked to him even when I could hear him weeping. I talked him through the panic when he thrashed about. I stroked his legs. He stopped for a long while and pressed his lips together. When he carried on, it was in a much quieter, calmer voice. I talked. It was strange because he died sooner than I thought he would. I thought he would go from lack of food but no. His body started shaking-he'd been quiet for a long time-and he just went. As if his body had just given up hope. Can you die from sudden depression? Anyway, probably the cold that did it. Just cold.'
        Seamus stood up and walked away. I looked into the dark space he'd vacated, my heart beating so loud it was muffling the sound of drums from upstairs. All I could see was my head being lowered into a bank of mud, body in liquid spasm as my lungs filled.
        To keep myself from rekindling the horror of my own recollections, I went after Seamus for more of his. All he could say though, out in a garden littered with red napkins from an earlier barbecue, was: 'The poor cunt's still down there for all I know. Buried in his beloved fucking cave. With a camera that's got pictures of me grinning in the Throne Room. Sticking the Vs up at him. I was wrong to say Lechuguilla was what mattered to me. It was Evan Foley. He was my ambition. Not the damn hole in the ground.'
        I felt bad that I'd considered his retelling of the tragedy fanciful; a tale of effect rather than bereavement. I put my hand on his shoulder and immediately took it away again, feeling like the worst kind of hypocrite. 'Come inside, Shay,' I said, the first time I'd used his foreshortened name. 'It's cold. You'll catch your death.'
        I left him in the garden, wishing-as one does in such situations-that I could impart some simple phrase of wisdom. It was easier to understand the absence of hope here though. It felt as though there was a vacuum drawing us in to a place that was dark yet so familiar it was as if we'd known all its colours and sounds and moods since birth; that it was a destiny of ours, its co-ordinates punched in as we slumbered in the womb, the three of us searching each other out without ever having to use our eyes.
        If there had been a Big Bang in our past, only now were we beginning to notice its ripples, feel them assume control over the way our lives were shaped. Though I was in the dark about most things, and blurred because of that night's excesses, I began to believe that