the car â winds the window slowly down as I do the same. Does he think I have a shotgun? Matches?
â Un problème ?â
â Non, pas de problème ⦠Jâattend un photoâ , holding up the camera, ââ de la lune â¦â
â Dâaccord â, he says, calmly â not the slightest reaction â and they drive off.
God knows what they say. Maybe nothing. The moon, after all, is a remarkable thing. Even gendarmes watch it. Or might have â I think as I drive away â an hour ago, as they paced the D32, huge and dangerous through the bars of the trees.
THE CELLAR
He sometimes thought it was to avoid her but it wasnât. If it was to avoid anything then it was to avoid everything, but he wouldnât have said that.
The cellar had always been there, the idea of it. An openness under the house. A cool, dark space, with the damp earthen smell of a cave. Some sort of presence, or unconsciousness, and if you listened closely enough â as he had discovered the first time, clambering in through the hole under the veranda â the faint sound of trickling water. It had been precarious, that first time, climbing down, not knowing where to put his feet, only the thin blade of torchlight bouncing about: down the face of a granite boulder into the sea of broken bricks and rubble that turned out, as best he could understand it, to be the remains of the house that had been there before, collapsed into its foundations to save the cost of carting it away, so that there was no knowing, until you removed it, how deep was the hole really.
It was this that had intrigued him and played on his mind, a sort of deferred planless plan to one day find out how deep it was and make a cellar, to store wine or use as a darkroom, or just as a place to put away the kinds of things that one puts away in the dark underneath, old bassinettes and wooden-barred cots and tricycles and trainer-bikes and steamer trunks full of old uniforms, not that, as it had turned out, there had been children, or uniforms.
So that when in â96 they were having a new set of shelves built in the kitchen heâd had the carpenter cut a hole in the floor of the boot-closet under the stairs and put in a trapdoor and a wooden ladder though he, the carpenter, had been uneasy about the unstable rubble at the base and had dragged in an old piece of eight-by-four to firm it. Then in â04, with a light now installed, he â the subject of this story, not the carpenter â had rented at first a small mini-skip and then a larger one and then a larger still and had spent half a year of Sundays getting rid of the rubble, the floor getting gradually lower and lower and the unstable base of the ladder more and more of a problem until he replaced it with a longer one so he could adjust the angle as the floor descended until at last, just as heâd hoped, he found solid rock. In some places it made him think of the back of a large cetacean part-surfaced from earth-ocean, around the edge of which, from the front of the house running directly down and back into the last remaining pool of rubble, there now ran and had probably always run a trickle that in periods of heavy rain he could almost call a stream. It gave him a delicious feeling, getting up in the middle of the night and staring out at the upper branches of the huge Sydney Blue Gum, Eucalyptus saligna , in the moonlight from the third floor window, thinking that far beneath â a dozen feet below street-level â a small spring trickled, bathing and feeding the roots.
But how to preserve it, the stream, while at the same time turning the sub-floor space into a cellar truly? Reluctantly (but it was not without precedent; it had happened with the Tank Stream), he decided to bury it alive, and channelled the water into a PVC pipe. There was still, where the ground seemed to fall suddenly away, a part of the sub-floor covered with rubble. The
â Un problème ?â
â Non, pas de problème ⦠Jâattend un photoâ , holding up the camera, ââ de la lune â¦â
â Dâaccord â, he says, calmly â not the slightest reaction â and they drive off.
God knows what they say. Maybe nothing. The moon, after all, is a remarkable thing. Even gendarmes watch it. Or might have â I think as I drive away â an hour ago, as they paced the D32, huge and dangerous through the bars of the trees.
THE CELLAR
He sometimes thought it was to avoid her but it wasnât. If it was to avoid anything then it was to avoid everything, but he wouldnât have said that.
The cellar had always been there, the idea of it. An openness under the house. A cool, dark space, with the damp earthen smell of a cave. Some sort of presence, or unconsciousness, and if you listened closely enough â as he had discovered the first time, clambering in through the hole under the veranda â the faint sound of trickling water. It had been precarious, that first time, climbing down, not knowing where to put his feet, only the thin blade of torchlight bouncing about: down the face of a granite boulder into the sea of broken bricks and rubble that turned out, as best he could understand it, to be the remains of the house that had been there before, collapsed into its foundations to save the cost of carting it away, so that there was no knowing, until you removed it, how deep was the hole really.
It was this that had intrigued him and played on his mind, a sort of deferred planless plan to one day find out how deep it was and make a cellar, to store wine or use as a darkroom, or just as a place to put away the kinds of things that one puts away in the dark underneath, old bassinettes and wooden-barred cots and tricycles and trainer-bikes and steamer trunks full of old uniforms, not that, as it had turned out, there had been children, or uniforms.
So that when in â96 they were having a new set of shelves built in the kitchen heâd had the carpenter cut a hole in the floor of the boot-closet under the stairs and put in a trapdoor and a wooden ladder though he, the carpenter, had been uneasy about the unstable rubble at the base and had dragged in an old piece of eight-by-four to firm it. Then in â04, with a light now installed, he â the subject of this story, not the carpenter â had rented at first a small mini-skip and then a larger one and then a larger still and had spent half a year of Sundays getting rid of the rubble, the floor getting gradually lower and lower and the unstable base of the ladder more and more of a problem until he replaced it with a longer one so he could adjust the angle as the floor descended until at last, just as heâd hoped, he found solid rock. In some places it made him think of the back of a large cetacean part-surfaced from earth-ocean, around the edge of which, from the front of the house running directly down and back into the last remaining pool of rubble, there now ran and had probably always run a trickle that in periods of heavy rain he could almost call a stream. It gave him a delicious feeling, getting up in the middle of the night and staring out at the upper branches of the huge Sydney Blue Gum, Eucalyptus saligna , in the moonlight from the third floor window, thinking that far beneath â a dozen feet below street-level â a small spring trickled, bathing and feeding the roots.
But how to preserve it, the stream, while at the same time turning the sub-floor space into a cellar truly? Reluctantly (but it was not without precedent; it had happened with the Tank Stream), he decided to bury it alive, and channelled the water into a PVC pipe. There was still, where the ground seemed to fall suddenly away, a part of the sub-floor covered with rubble. The
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