The Hole

The Hole

Little grew in the little garden, not enough sunlight seeped past the rows of terraced houses to spark more than moss and bindweed into life. He was not green fingered, he drowned cactuses and neglected spider plants, but he had time on his hands now, so he chose to dig a fish pond.

On the morning of the first day he drove a circle of sticks into the ground with the back of a spade to mark out the intended excavation. The shed door gaped open and a a grime encrusted cobweb stretched out like a laundry line and shivering in the wind. He leaned on the spade, noticing the give in it, and surveyed his plan, trying to picture silver water and golden fish. He chewed the word over in his mouth. Redundancy. Redundant meant no longer useful, superfluous. Redundant meant discarded. Redundant meant three months money for nothing. Redundant meant time to consider his options. Redundant meant gardening leave.

He dug, a foot deep trench around the outside, and then piece by piece chipped away at the island of earth inside until there was nothing but one broad shallow pit and, behind it, a small mound of discarded, redundant, earth. After lunch the give in the spade gave and it broke at the bracket. He jammed the jagged shard of wood into the ground and gave up for the day. His arms ached, and his shoes and the hem of his jeans were filthy.

The following morning he drove out and bought a new spade, a fork, and a pair of gardening boots. He had woken up at six thirty out of habit, and, after an hour hanging around the house doing nothing, he had to wait another hour outside the garden store before it opened. He dug all day, pausing only for lunch and a cup of tea in the afternoon. When he finished the hole was three foot deep straight down. In the evening he soaked his aching limbs in a long hot bath and nearly fell asleep on the sofa halfway through a pizza.

On the third day, so stiff he could not raise his elbows above his head, he walked out and bought an armful of newspapers in which to search for jobs. He stacked them neatly on the kitchen table and tackled them one by one, holding a red pen in his mouth to circle likely opportunities. His eyes strayed to the window and he doodled designs for the pond on the margins of the employment sections. Never much of a draughtsman he drew simple childlike plans out of scale, and decorated them with blood red bulrushes scribbled in vertical lines, and circular waterlilies that supported grinning bobble eyed frogs and shaded bubble blowing fish. In the afternoon he went outside and worked through the stiffness, feeling his muscles spasm and twitch as he forced them into action, each sharp knot of pain bringing a smile to his lips.

He dug and dug, day after day. He dug to relieve the frustration and the boredom of searching for work. When he was not digging, he thought about digging, when he was digging he thought about nothing. He came to love the feeling of strength in his arms, the twang and pull of his muscles, the sensation of his shifting limbs. He revelled in the satisfying slice of the spade into earth, the strain and give as the fork broke stubborn clay, the achievement of looking down into a hole slightly deeper than it was. He forgot the dry touch of paper, and the cold light of computer screens, he dug shirtless in the heat till the sweat ran off him in rivers, he dug in the rain, titling his face upwards and catching the water on his tongue. He took new pleasures in food, he found realms of possibilities in producing the perfect fried egg, in the evenings he prepared himself elaborate and complicated meals. When he showered the dirt coming off him stained the water black as it disappeared down the plughole, afterwards he felt lighter than air, cleaner and fresher than he had ever felt in his life. It was like the saturation had been turned up on his world, every colour seemed more intense.

One day he dug so deep he had to cut steps in the wall of the hole to climb out. He went to buy himself a small ladder but came back with a ladder that extended in three parts to forty foot. Disposal of the dirt became a problem, the garden, already piled high with the stuff, would take no more, and he took to loading his car with cardboard boxes and emptying them at lay-bys. Each spadeful of earth had to be carried individually up the ladder now and his rate of descent slowed dramatically, but still he dug.

When the hole was ten feet deep he looked up at the circle of sky and thought of words like subsidence and cave-in. The following day he bought several long lengths of two-by-four and constructed braces and supports to hold the sheer vertical sides of the hole. He bought a saw, hammer, and nails, and built the bones of a roof over the hole which he covered with a tarpaulin. Two weeks later he bought an electric water pump and set it up to keep the hole from flooding. Still he dug, deeper and deeper. In a moment of idle contemplation he scratched a drawing of a fish into one of the support struts, it was as close as he wanted to having his hole turned into a pond.

The redundancy money ran out and he started eating into his savings. He made economies where he could, he knocked off the booze, he bought veg and meat at the market, he took his time to shop around for the best deals. When one of his old colleagues rang him up and said they were building up a new team somewhere else and there was a position for him if he wanted it he was surprised to hear himself decline. Afterwards he went and sat in the hole for a while, and then he dug some more.

Summer turned to winter and still he dug, the drum of rain hammering on the tarpaulin ever further above his head. He went to his sisters for Christmas and everyone commented how healthy he looked and commiserated at how hard it was to find work these days. All he could think about was the hole and he left on Boxing day morning to get back to it.

He dug below the reach of his ladder and started building his own ladder into the wooden supports. He bought a pickaxe to cut through the ever harder soil, he worked rocks with sledgehammers, laboriously chipping them away into small pieces, he rigged a bucket on a pulley to remove the debris. One day he found a note his sister had left, she had called round, seen the hole and shouted down it, but he had not heard.

He lost his healthy complexion, the bottom of the hole was dark now, far from the sun, and his skin became pale and clammy, his eyes developed a wide open stare, his limbs were like rope. Sometimes he caught his reflection in the mirror and it reminded him of a thing that lived in a hole, blind and mechanical like a funnelweb spider, or slick black sinew like an eel. There were days when he just sat in the hole and did not dig, days when he took lunch down there with him and did not emerge again until after dark, days when he did not eat, nights when he slept down there.

Finally, one day, as he leaned on the hammer, he heard movement from above and looked up to see the tarpaulin drawn back to reveal a tiny circle of sky. From the circle his sister descended, muttering and whimpering about vertigo. Her words washed over him, he could barely look her in the eye, and when she climbed up again he followed meekly after.

She made him phone his old colleague and they arranged an interview for the following day. Upstairs in the wardrobe his sister found his old suits, they barely fitted any more, his shoulders were broader, his waist thinner. His sister ironed his shirts while he went out for a haircut. When he got home she had reconnected his phone and thrown away his work clothes. Before she left she untied the ladder from the woodwork at the top of the hole and threw it in.

The following morning, dressed and shaved and ready to go, he looked down into the hole and for the first time could not see the bottom. He draped the end of the hosepipe over the edge and turned on the tap, then he went for the interview.

The hole took more than a week to fill, and though he periodically stocked it with fish, he never saw any of them again. When people came round they often asked why no lilies or grasses grew in the pond. He never told them that it was because it was sheer sided full forty fathoms deep.