The Dig

We dug for days on that forgotten farm. We dug the colour out of our hands. On the fourth day, Manny turned to me and said the unthinkable,

“Maybe she’s not here”.

It was a valid point, we hadn’t found a thing; not a bone, not a single rusted can. But it was never going to be easy. I reminded Manny of our duty to her parents,

“You saw the sign yourself; ‘that where there is no life is that where she will be found alive’”.

Manny shrugged, we reached this point of crisis every day.

‘That where there is no life is that where she will be found alive” he repeated aloud, tracing for a connection to the words. At last, spade in hand; he smiled, “for her parents and our caring media”.

We carried on, digging.

A week later, something strange happened. I was at the bank of the breakfast Stream, that is to say, the bank where we foraged for morning slugs, and looking up quite without thought I thought I saw high up in the adjacent towering tree the shape of a human boot. I should note that my eye sight is poor. I’m often mistaking things for other things and other things for things but on this there could be no doubt; an orange wellington boot, difficult to tell the size as only the toe end was visible.

Pushing what slugs I had into a polyethylene bag I rose and squinted at the boot. It was impossible to tell if it belonged to a foot or had arrived there by other means; the tree was a bubble of foliage. Were it not for the unusual colour I doubt I’d have seen the boot at all. And then the strange thing happened. There was an almighty rustling in the tree and then the boot had gone.

I raised my concerns at our morning slug-roast, “Manny, I think there might be people in the trees”.

“People?”

“Yes, people.”

“People in the trees?”

“Yes, people in the trees.”

“People in the trees doing what?”

“People in the trees doing-well, I’m not sure what they’re doing but I was at The Stream and I looked up and saw this orange boot.”

“Orange boot?”

“Yes, orange boot. And then there was a lot of rustling and I looked again and the boot had gone.”

“Interesting. And you’re sure it was orange?”

Manny didn’t seem in the least bit interested. If this had been a short story or a b-movie horror I’d have driven a stake through his skinny chest right then and there but as it was, he was all I had, and vice-versa. I silently scolded my eyes, ears and Manny. I prayed that we find the body sooner rather than later.

The day after the boot incident, Heaven wept and Heaven howled. The tarpauling pulled over the one corner of abandoned barn we’d managed to colonise held firm, but the wind pulled at our delicate bamboo walls as though they were her child. The choice was simple; either both stay here holding onto the one dry place we had or take a chance and continue digging in the hope we found what we had to find before things got worse.
In the end we compromised: one dug for four hours while the other collected foods stuffs and tried to look busy.
This went on for a week, a long week. It was lonely, just me and a spade, and I’m sure Manny felt the same. After awhile I saw the stripped cycle of Time; life as a spoke-less bicycle wheel, spinning between unalterable cycles of digging and not digging. Sometimes I heard things, sometimes I saw things. It was not uncommon when lost in these spinning cycles of Time to see things moving around the corners of one’s eye; little things, things consciously wanting to be unseen.

A week later the rain stopped, and in celebration I performed an immediately regretful sexual act on Manny. It had been a month since we’d arrived here and with each day the unspoken but overwhelming feeling that we might never see a woman again had gotten heavier and heavier.

- It’s unwise to shed, I should add, oedipal complexes for the even more fragile complexes of adult male abandonment -

We immediately turned away from each other, embarrased; the funny thing being that we ended up turning away to find ourselves facing each other in the barn’s icy windows. I mumbled something about ‘the mission’ and Manny agreed.

With the rain gone, we laboured silently under grey skies.

The hole grew in size, reflecting our effort. We constructed a ladder from branches and folded bits of corrugated steel. Every day or two we extended the ladder a little further. Eventually the hole got so deep it seemed easier to eat our slug-leaf dinners down there, among the soil and musty odour. The logical conclusion was Manny’s,

“If we just place the tarpaulin over the hole, we can sleep in here. The work will do itself” he said.

“We’d only have to leave the hole for shits, food, dumping the soil, and ladder bits. The rest would be digging and sleep. We’ll find the body in no time!”

Two days later and everything was set, digging by day, tarpaulin by night. I had managed to construct a pulley system for dumping the soil which relied on first filling a bag fashioned from old sweaters and then levering it up along a network of tightly wound vines. It worked surprisingly well. Sometimes we forgot to eat, other times the idea of actually climbing the ladder, finding some slugs, killing them (which wasn’t much of a problem), cooking them, climbing back down, eating them, climbing up again to shit them out and then descending back down in order to carry on digging seemed like a pointless waste of dig-time. The only thing we left The Hole for was ladder parts which was seldom in itself as we always brought back surplus amounts of useable crap.

One day,

we stopped adding to the ladder.

Manny, half way up the ladder, had paused and shouted down to me,

“Hey I was just thinking; if we find the body tonight, we won’t need to extend the ladder ever again”.

It was sound reasoning, right up to the point where we didn’t find the body. So we laboured on, in sometimes jovial spirit, knowing there was no way out.

We dug deep into the earth’s damp lungs, feeling for the heart with each shake of a spade. By now it was summer and the days were long, we were digging like crazy. We’d find the body soon and when we did we'd become popular culture -

‘THE GUYS WHO FOUND THE GIRL’S BODY’,

A million headlines in a million different languages.

“When this is all over, I’m going to write a book” Manny proclaimed aloud one morning.

“A book? About this?” I asked.

“Nah, about an Italian soldier in love with a nurse”.

I told him it was a book I’d dearly love to read and that when we found the body and got out I’d love to help him research the lives of Italian soldiers and nurses.

“No, no”, he cried,

“The nurse isn’t Italian, she might be French”.

I paused, felt the warm sting of tears on my cheek;

“It’s beautiful’, I told him,

“If you don’t write that book, I’ll slit my wrists on my mother’s birthday”.

We laboured on; for the book as much as the body.

At some point I must have stopped looking at the sky because the hole got darker. In the months when we had first moved down there I looked up all the time, it helped me remember how certain things might have felt but time spent looking at soil will turn your eyes to dirt. The times I did look up, I only ever saw shadows cut against the light of the hole. The last time it had happened, Manny had also been looking.

“One of us should go up, and I think that person is you” he had said.

As all things of consequence do, it came down to Rock-Paper-Scissors.

ROCK >SCISSORS

SCISSORS>PAPER

SCISSORS>SCISSORS

PAPER>ROCK

My superior system of randomly selecting three options in a random sequence not only beat his system, it showed it to be a poorly devised sham.

We hugged and i apologised for the blow-job.

The last I saw of Manny he was nearing the top of the hole, hoisted up in the Earth-Bag to meet whatever it was had made up those shadows. The next I saw of him he was coming back down in the same Earth-Bag. The conversation that followed went a little bit exactly like this,

“Well? What did they say?”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, what did they say?”

“That they’re going away”

“That’s it?”

“And something else”, he said slowly, as though the words were being fed through an ear piece.

“What?” I asked impatiently.

“That we should keep digging”.

The dig continues.