TRAPPER
HE WAS A small boy, no more than eight years old, but already he had been in the mine for two years – years of damp, draughts and silence; of twelve and fourteen-hour days squatting on his haunches, one hand on the swing-door. Two dozen months of relentless, sweated misery, but only now had he stopped snivelling for his mother and come to understand his one purpose: to anticipate the arrival of the coal-trucks. Every few minutes they bumped down the incline, rattling towards him with a rusty growl like a dog snapping at its chain. The first few times he’d barely opened the flap. The consequent judder of metal on wood left his whole arm bright-hot and dead, as though he’d received a violent blow. Now he listened hard for the vibration of the rails, opened the door well in advance. The trucks thumped past in a burst of gritty wind.
With each passage the terror eased a little, leaving his mind free to wander. In time, he learned to appreciate the swift, blank space of a departing truck, the way it leant and wobbled into the turn, small blue sparks thrown off by the wheels casting shadows on the rock-wall. When one great, overladen truck passed by, he couldn’t help himself.
‘Whoa, Nelly!’
Bobby Joseph laughed as the sparks died away. After a day underground his voice sounded small and tinny, faint as a penny-whistle blown by a beggar, or the half-hearted whinnying of the retired pit-ponies on the way home. They looked up at him from beneath thick black eyelashes, snuffled up apple cores from his palm.
‘Good horsey. Don’t take on, now.’
In time, too, he began to see differently in the clear, fathomable darkness.
It was not like everyday sights – mother scrubbing father’s back in the tin-bath, or his grandfather tamping tobacco – but pure and all his own, somehow, for not being ordinary. He did not close his eyes (the black depths were much the same either way) but let his vision expand into the darkness until pictures started to form, and the track rattle with the next truck.
One Sunday his grandfather told him the story of a strange German boy. A younger man had heard it from the newspaper-reader as he ate his snap, and passed it along. The boy was a mute – or so they thought – possessed of a few nonsensical phrases; a dolt, an idiot, but fascinating in the completeness of his mystery.
‘Kaspar Hauser.’
A mighty puff, the clatter of the pipe-stem coming to rest between the old man’s teeth. Bobby leaned forward, sniffing the odour of cherries.
‘Kaspar who?’
‘Hauser. Like them ropes they tie the ships up with. Dunt matter, lad. It’s the story that matters. So this boy gets to Nuremberg from who knows where in Germany, all fuddled-up, carrying two letters. One from some feller saying he’d looked after him from a babby, one from his mother, saying he was sixteen, the son of a soldier. They take him in for a bit – put him in some castle tower – then adopt him, you know. Got to be known in the town, talked some, too. And people talked to him. Some nob down London way went over and took him on. Told this tale about living in a hole, in the dark, with wooden horses and bread and water with a funny taste, now and then. He’d wake up with his hair cut and fresh breeches. But one day he gets slashed with a knife. No one knows why, and after a bit more time he goes to a park but don’t come back. Whoever’d wanted him got him good, slit open his belly, and he died curious as he lived. Or that’s what the reader telt Archie, anyhow.’
His grandfather’s pipe had gone out. He set to scraping and prodding the bothersome coals.
Now, with the last truck gone and the next still minutes away in the belly of the mine, Bobby lay back on his heels and opened his mind. He tried to imagine that castle tower, but couldn’t. All that came came were pictures of ravens and a man in a tall red hat. So he thought about bread and water. Grandfather said the boy wouldn’t eat nothing else – just crusts and cold water, sometimes sprinkled with salt. He wondered how the boy saw to eat, imagined small gaps in the planks over his head letting in tiny darts of light. He held up his water flask to see if he could catch one, but the mine-dark was resolute, its silence thick as soot. He turned the flask in his hands. Down the side its stitched leather humped and crinkled before running smooth to the base, where his fingers met. Suddenly there leapt into his mind a profound sense of animals.
‘Horsies!’
He held up the flask like some huge, nibbled apple core, understood without telling that the boy must have learned with his hands, not his eyes, in whatever darkness he’d endured. The idea was vast – tall, deep, lit with joy like faces around a bonfire – and he felt his eyes widen and his lips part, new understanding coursing into the parts of his mind he ordinarily kept small and gated-shut each hour of the day. He wanted to jump up and tell his mother, grab his sister or his grandfather and dance them round the hearth.
Then he remembered the truck, but it was too late.
A heavy one, loaded over and sparking too fast down the rails. It hit a kink, jumped out into the black and struck a row of props like an axe splitting apart kindling. The swing-door sheared through the boy and the roof came down in one great jagged rock fall, but what of it? He was a trapper. His thoughts were brief, scant as a moth’s wings, and his mother would have another boy in the mine before the week was out.
First published in Funicular Magazine (Summer 2019)
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