“Why not?”
“Because I’m not going to let you, Woody. Look, I can never make it up to you, what happened to Lennon, but I can at least do what’s best for you now. And you know, if there’s one single thing I’ve learnt from my half-arsed attempts to be a mother, it’s that you don’t give kids what they want; you give them what they need. Even if they hate you for it. So going out there, getting yourself shot, that’s not what you need. It won’t bring your brother back. But these kids, they follow you. You can help them.”
His hand went to his mouth, knuckle between his teeth. I took hold of his wrist and drew it down. From beyond the iron gate, the spanking of the helicopter was unmistakable. It had found us.
“Please?” I said to Woody.
He snorted, but turned into the cavern, back to his boys. When I stepped into the fray, Charlie and Billy gripped my legs. The cavern was teeming with shrill voices and the clattering of rocks underfoot. Chaos. Joni emerged out of the dark next to me. Maggie was standing with the Lost Boy, holding hands, talking close into his ear. In fact, I realized, she was singing to him. I nudged Joni and pointed two fingers at my lips. She gave one of her long piercing whistles. Silence, but for one of the Harrys, who stumbled and got shushed.
“We’re leaving right now. Quickly and quietly. Jack will lead the way. We go crocodile-style, do you remember that from little school? So get into twos, like this.” I pushed Maggie and the Lost Boy into the center of the circle to show how. Pulling other pairs of boys into line, clamping their hands together. Most of them groaned. “You will hold hands,” I said, “because we need to help each other. The path is rocky, uneven, and if one of you stumbles, the other will hold him up. But if one of us goes down, the rest will fall over him. And we don’t have time. Understand? So hold hands. And we’re going to sing—quietly, mind—a marching song. To keep in time, and so we don’t get split up, right?” I moved along the line, spacing the pairs out. Joni came along the other side, telling them to leave their stuff, it wasn’t important. “Who knows a song?” I asked.
“Dumb Ways to Die,” came a wobbly voice from the front, feet stamping a rhythm on the spot. The others picked it up.
“Not that one,” I snapped. “What about this—‘I don’t know but I been told.’”
“I don’t know but I been told,” Jack echoed as he set off down the tunnel.
“St. Govan boys are made of gold,” I said, pushing the first pair after him.
“St. Govan boys are made of gold.” The next two strode away in time.
“I don’t know but I believe,” I sang, gesturing at Lola to go halfway down the line.
“I don’t know but I believe.” The whine of the helicopter engine threatened to drown me out, and I had to shout over it.
“Chopper’s coming, it’s time to leave.” I hefted Billy into my arms.
“Chopper’s coming, it’s time to leave.”
The light faded as the lamps swung down the passage. Joni ducked in a few pairs behind Lola. I counted them all out; seventeen people, with my party and the St. Govan boys. When all the kids had gone, I pushed Maggie and the Lost Boy ahead of me. The cavern dropped into darkness with the leaving of their lamp. Outside, the trees thrashed beneath rotor blades, obliterating the echoes of footsteps in the tunnel, the small voices still chanting. I pushed my Maglite into Charlie’s hands. “Stay close,” I said and gave him a little shove into action.
“I got one,” he said, matching his stride to mine, pointing the torchlight so that we both hurried to catch up with it. “I don’t know but it’s been said.”
His voice whispered round the tunnel: “I don’t know but it’s been said.”
“Let’s get gone before we’re dead.”
Down the mine proper, the air was swollen with noise and effort. There was the odd cry as someone stumbled and twisted an ankle, scraped a knee—but tears were for later; we all sensed that. The boys were quicker than me, and I lost sight of them when the tunnel bent farther into the hillside. I lumbered on. My arms were so numb that Billy’s body fused into my own. His skull beat a steady rhythm against my collarbone. The darkness loomed behind me, so that its heat bore down on my neck like an outstretched hand. The Cleaners must move faster than us, even in those biohazard suits. And I won’t even hear their footsteps over all this racket. I could sense fingertips on my collar. Once, I glanced over my shoulder, but the movement spun me off course into a jagged wall. There was no one there. Just darkness. I staggered past the occasional dark mouth that led to one side tunnel or another, but I pushed ahead, not wandering from the path: kept my head down, kept my boots straight, kept expecting a shot through the back of the head.
“Billy,” I whispered to him, “if Mummy falls down, you start running, okay? Okay?”
But his head just nodded against my shoulder as it had all the way down the tunnel.
The passageway slowly cleared of rocks and leaves until it was smooth and flat. We might have walked for hours or just minutes; I was quarry now, intent only on eluding that outstretched hand. We descended again onto bigger stones, a rockfall perhaps, and a few puddles had formed along the path. Billy drew his legs up from the splashes. Then the tunnel narrowed again, and I had to bend at the shoulders to fit under a corrugated iron tube that fed us into a small, wet cave with a jagged, flinty ceiling and further corrugated iron tubes shooting off into the rock. Lola was there, and Charlie and Maggie clung onto her, but I urged them on, my voice brusque. Now we were climbing. An orange glow ahead caused my breath to stall in my throat—we’re back at the cavern!—but then the light glowed brighter and whiter, and I saw it wasn’t oil lamps but real sunlight. The ground was again littered with rocks and leaves, and the scrabbling of feet over stones was joined by a hiss of wind in the trees. Stick-figure silhouettes stepped into the sunshine ahead of me, and I followed, until we all emerged into painful brightness.
I dropped Billy onto cushiony grass at my feet and rubbed my fists into my eyes like a blubbing baby. As my blindness cleared, I could literally not believe my eyes. We stood outside a stone hut, which looked more like a privy than a mine shaft, on the edge of a manicured garden. The shag-pile lawn was fraying at the edges, but the topiary hedges retained their shape—nothing fancy: pyramids, balls—and the flower borders were thriving with late-summer blooms. A long row of purple agapanthus heads stood bolt upright on long stalks, caught in the act of sunning themselves.