Extinction Event (2) Andy looked down and saw that he stood about eight inches from the edge of a hole that could happily have swallowed his Dad's wide-screen TV and possibly the table it stood on as well! "Fuck me!" Said Andy and backpedalled, deeply disturbed by the way the turf around the hole was sloping downward as though it were being sucked inside, rather than just crumbling away like a cliff-edge into the sea. In the centre of the funnel-shaped depression was a black hole that was football sized. A child could easily disappear down a hole that big. Needless to say, the breeze block was nowhere to be seen. "Jesus, it's fucking huge!" Shouted Ray, clearly distressed. He was looking around, his eyes wild and wide, as if hoping for a strolling evening Bobby who could be called upon to summon the Home Guard. A pointless hope really because Bobby's didn't walk these streets, they spun through in Area cars at 29 miles per hour and people called them Pigs and oinked as they passed by with their windows shut tight. Ray turned a circle and swallowed to moisten his throat. When he spoke his voice still croaked. "What if someone's fallen in? It'll be my fault. They'll say it was my fault!" "Shut up Ray. It isn't your fault. You're not the only person who seen it. It's big enough, someone else musta seen it by now. Who's gonna believe us anyway? Who are we supposed to tell?" That silenced them. Who were they? Just a couple of teenage boys, troublemakers, pulling a stunt, just larking about.... Who would believe them? Now it was Andy's turn to look around in the hope that someone else might turn up who could validate their story. The Pope perhaps. Ray got to grips with it first. "We have to phone the police, that's all, or the fire brigade. They'll come out and see it and after that it'll get sealed off an' someone will fill it in. Come on, I'll call." They turned and walked away, slowly at first, but the further they walked the faster they got. Andy couldn't run so what they made it to was a slow jog. The pay phone was only at the top of the street but even so, by the time they got there, Andy was fighting for breath. Ray called an ambulance as well, just for good measure. There was a shitstorm of course. Ray was verbally assaulted at the hospital by Andy's Mum who had a mean tongue and wasn't afraid to use it. Ray's Mum stepped in to defend him and was bitten herself. On the way home she had been grim, silent and stony faced as though Ray had created the whole situation just in order to ruin her day. He remembered her doing the same thing to his Dad. He hadn't tried to talk. Hopes of reprieve from Australia were slipping away. This was confirmed at bedtime when his Mum stuck her head around the door to say that she had decided, after tonight, that the sooner they got out of this hellhole his Dad had brought her to the better. The whole place was going to fall into the ground and the people around here were scum. They would be moving to Australia before the beginning of the month. Ray had two weeks to get used to the idea. Two weeks! He hadn't slept. The next morning he was out before she was up, dressed for school but not going there yet. He walked up to the Park, curiosity dragging him back. He got as far as the metal gates and was stopped by a Pig. Around here? "Sorry son. Can't come in 'ere this morning. There's a landslide up at the top end. Grounds a bit risky. We've been told to close off the park until the council's been up to look. Could be a while. Sorry." The copper was inordinately polite. Normally the lads on the estate earned only sneers and derision from the local constabulary. Members of the community both young and old did regularly came into contact with the Law but most usually from the wrong side. It was unusual for Ray to be spoken to by someone in uniform and not have it come in the form of an accusation. Mostly the lads avoided the drugs, the pimps and the Law and, in return, the Law left them alone. It was a shit place, really, but it was home and from dawn to dusk the boys owned it. It was unnerving to suddenly be denied access to such a crucial part of their territory. Ray wandered up to the school instead and found Hughie sitting outside the bike shed with Emma Burton, his girlfriend. Ray felt immature and awkward. Girls were still alien beings to him, floating on the extremity of his vision, soon to be needed but presently extraneous. Emma Burton, however, was not a girl. Seventeen, sexy and scarily grown-up. Ray wasn't sure he could talk about the hole in the Park with Emma there. She, however, was full of gossip and proved to be a fine source of information. Her father was the Surveyor for the Town Council. He had got a call at home the evening before warning of a dangerous looking hole that had appeared in the park. "They made him go out at ten o'clock!" She exclaimed, outraged. Ray looked at Hughie who looked back. Our hole?... was the unspoken query. Ray nodded and Hughie began to look interested in the female prattle. "So obviously I stayed up 'til 'e got back. He didn't say much about it but he was dead ratty. I reckon it really worried him. He only gets like that when he's worried. He said he would have to get the County Planners down here. My Dad never needs the County Planners! It must be serious." Hughie silenced her by planting his lips forcefully over hers, one hand in her hair, the other offering his half smoked cigarette to Ray, who took it carefully, trying not to blister his fingers, and finished it with four deep drags as he wandered away across the playing field, thinking of Andy's lungs as he did so. Andy had needed to stay overnight in the hospital. They had said they would let him out today. Ray didn't expect him to be at school so it was a surprise to find him lurking by the door to the Computer room, waiting for the Tech teacher to turn up with the keys. Andy was grinning, but underneath the smile he looked pale. "Thought your old lady would have kept you home today." Said Ray, more pleased than he could admit. "Nah!" Replied Andy, "She's got a double shift. I came straight from the hospital. She never said nothin' about stayin' home. I'm okay. Thought I'd come in here and find out some stuff about your hole. I know some guys who might be able to help. "Doesn't matter now. The Council 'ave closed off the Park. Guess they must know what it's all about. By the time we finish school it'll probably all be filled in." The Council, however, were completely perplexed by the appearance of the hole. Despite common belief, there were no mine workings under the park and never had been. It had always been an open space so no half-buried factory basements lurked in the ground beneath the copse. The Council dropped plumb lines down the hole but, three hundred feet of cord later and they had still not reached the bottom. To all intents and purposes the hole itself appeared to be narrow, probably no more than ten inches wide at the base of the funnel, but by the end of the day, no one had any further ideas what could be causing the phenomenon and the diameter had increased by another two or three inches. Ray got a visit from the Police that afternoon. They had with them a grim-faced man in a grey suit, Emma's Dad, and another man from the County Surveyors office. No one was smiling and Ray wasn't inclined to be that helpful. He felt surrounded and singled out although he knew these men were planning on talking to all the boys. His Mum sat through the whole meeting without comment. Ray had to weather a roomful of disbelieving looks when he told them that the hole had not been visible two Saturdays ago but, in the end, they left without actually accusing him of lying to cover up something the boys had done out there in the Park. "Perhaps they thought we'd been diggin' an escape tunnel out of this fuckhole?" Declared Mark Luteen with a sour face. That had caused some laughter. Ray joined in with the banter but was disappointed that, despite all being interviewed, none of them had managed to learn much about the hole. They had been forced from the Park to the kids playground at the back of the Primary School. There wasn't enough room here to play football so they had resorted to throwing the swing seats up over the top bar and dismantling the seesaw instead. Now, with darkness closing in, they lounged on the roundabout and slide smoking and drinking cans of beer pillaged from the corner store. Andy couldn't smoke but he could drink and he had brought a bottle of vodka from his house which they were passing amongst themselves. "Emma said her Dad wasn't giving much away. She overheard him tell her mum that they are planning on filling it in tomorrow. They've got a load of rubble from the old warehouses on Brook Street." Said Hughie. "Rubble? They aint gonna fill that in with rubble!" Piped up Andy, immediately drawing attention to himself. Ray could see his chin tuck in defensively and his eyes grow wide and scared when he realised that all the boys (some of whom had beaten him up in the past) were looking at him as if a worm had just popped its head out of the ground and called them all shitheads. "What the fuck do you know about it Fog Breath?" Said Fat Mickey. Andy coloured up and Ray's heart bled for him. "Just that it ain't no hole you can fill with rubble, that's all..... I saw it..... It was kinda weird....fucking weird....." He trailed off. Ray knew that there were other things Andy wanted to say but, afraid of looking like a fool in front of the gang, he had clammed up. Probably a good idea. Ray knew what Andy's geeky Internet mates had been talking about, Volcanoes and vortexes, wormholes and other sci-fi paranoia. Ray only partly believed any of that. It was still a pretty small hole, a long way off being a volcano. 0"Ahh, who gives a shit what it is! Why did it have to be in our Park, that's all I care about? What are we gonna do if they close it off for good? We can't hang out here for ever! It sucks!" This came from Hughie, who they all respected, but it killed the speculation and after that the gang began to drift away home. Ray and Andy were left behind and it was then that Ray told him he only had another ten days left before his mother intended to fly him to the other side of the world for ever. Andy was silent. Ray was important to him in lots of ways. Life would be much harder here without him. "We can e-mail though." He said, without drawing much comfort from the thought. "I'll tell you what happens to the hole. Maybe your Mum will let you come back to visit. Maybe I could come out there. Maybe...." "Yeah, maybe." But it was a faint hope. During the following week while the boys were in school buried up to the eyeballs in mock GCSE exams, the County council went to ever more drastic measures to fill in the hole in the park. Two thousand tonnes of crushed rubble disappeared into that hole over the next five days, delivered noisily on big tipper trucks and shovelled over the edge by a fleet of bulldozers contracted in for the task. Everything disappeared, even larger chunks were going down by the end of the week. By the following Saturday the hole in the park was the size of a garden shed and the rate of opening seemed to be increasing. It was time to call in the experts. A group of seismologists and geophysicists came from London to view the hole and set some monitoring equipment up. All over the weekend they ran tests and measurements, estimating the rate of increase and examining the depth of the hole. On Sunday afternoon they held a press conference at the Park gates and during the half hour they stood there the hole increased in size enough to swallow a good many of their instruments and the County Surveyor's pickup truck which had been parked unwisely close. The rate of opening seemed to be increasing. By Monday morning the story was by-lining in the papers and by the evening, it was on the national news. Suddenly the whole community was turned upside down and everyone was a target for photographers and journalists seeking an angle on the story. For Ray the developing situation outside his home seemed to mimic the upheaval and confusion which reigned inside. His mother had started to pack up the house as soon as she had confirmed the start date of her new job in Perth, Western Australia. A friend living over there had found an apartment for them. "You can see the beach from your bedroom window!" His Mum had excitedly reported to Ray who had never seen the sea, and to whom all this seemed an impossible dream. Over that week before news of the hole hit the national awareness, Ray's house became a depressing mausoleum of boxes and empty spaces where things had stood his whole life. Trips were made to the dump with what seemed like half of his childhood crammed into the boot of his Uncle's car. He was forced to decide between books and possessions he had never expected he would have to discard. As his home was emptied out, Ray felt as though his life was being emptied at the same time. He had two or three morose and uncommunicative visits with his Dad that week. He had prayed for reprieve, for a word to suggest he might be able stay behind when his Mum went, but his father never even brought up the fact that within a week they were going to separated by fifteen thousand miles. Instead, he took his son to a midweek fixture at Old Trafford and for a blessed two hours, Ray was able to completely forget the turn of events that had upended his life. They were due to leave the following Tuesday. That Friday before the news broke was his last day at school. After being embarrassingly pointed out to all and sundry by the Head at Assembly and made to stand at the front while the whole school apathetically wished him success in his new life, Ray took the remainder of the day off with ten of his best mates and they went up to the town, hanging out at the shopping centre until they were chased out by the security guards who were sure they were shoplifting. They ended up at the Park, coming to it from the canal side where the fence was down and three hundred yards of scrub and bramble separated them from the football pitch they were no longer allowed to enjoy. Without a real plan in mind the boys tracked along the well trodden paths winding through the bramble patch to where it opened out at that top end of the Park. Here they did meet a formidable cordon fence but all the suits and boots were at the far end of the Park dealing with the assembled media and the ever-expanding hole. The boys were able to lurk up there, sharing cigarettes and talking football whilst they checked out what was going on in their Park. It was while they were sitting, watching, waiting for school to be out so that they could rejoin mainstream life, that the first of the oak trees became victim to the inexplicable crater. They were too far away to see that the hole, which had started at a spot fifteen feet from the copse, was now sucking soil from the roots of one of the knarled old oaks. All they could see, at first, was the top of the tree beginning to shake as though a bull elephant was standing at the bottom headbutting it. "Hey, look at that!" Exclaimed David Russell, pointing. They all looked, eyes widening as the shaking branches gradually convulsed into a fit and the tree began to rock back and forth like the tall mast of a sailing ship in a sudden storm. "Holy moly!" Said Ray, the butt of his cigarette smoked, from economic necessity, down to the filter dropping from his fingers. As they watched the ancient tree began to sink, not tumbling sideways in the fashion of most felled trees, just sliding elegantly and erectly beneath the surface of the world as though the ground had simply opened up beneath it which, of course, it had. The tree dropped about twenty-five feet and then jammed, the spreading width of the lower branches bracing themselves against the ground like a faller through an ice hole. "That's that then." Said David, "they didn't need all that rubble, they just needed a tree." They all laughed at that one but the laughter was extinguished as the two biggest branches suddenly snapped off and the leafy top was sucked quickly into the ground with the crash and crackle of branches being put through a wood-shredder. As the top of the tree disappeared from sight, the big branches left dangling over the edges of the hole upended and followed it. The boys were speechless. It wasn't until another tree began to shake, rattle and roll that the boys broke position. "I'm outta here." Said Hughie without reserve or fear of ridicule and as one, they all turned and followed him out of the park. Suddenly it seemed that what had, at first, appeared to be just a curious anomaly might actually be something that could affect their lives. "If it doesn't stop, its gonna suck up the whole town!" Andy commented to Ray as they walked back to Andy's house. Both his parents were still working and his older sister was no doubt down at the pub with her unemployed boyfriend so they had the place to themselves. Andy got edible snacks and Ray put a CD-ROM into the computer, but the game was irrelevant, neither boy could stop thinking about what they had seen in the Park.
Copyright © 2000 Carey Lenehan |