This is a fictional story.
24 July 2055: Steven Moss’s arthritic fingers leafed through the photo album he pulled out on his birthday, and only his birthday. He hated looking back, but sometimes you had to remind yourself.
2055. His lips moved with mental arithmetic. That made him 82 today. No, 81. He prodded a calculator: 82. “Fuck,” he whispered. Where the hell did all that time go?
He got up wincing and moved towards the backdoor for his and across the garden to the sycamores, to the lift shaft, to his day’s work.
He had no mortal illnesses but was still in bad shape. There is a big difference between the moderate exercise doctors recommend and years of backbreaking labour.
“Things wear out,” his doctor had said, leaving no room for discussion.
Moss got into the lift, closing the door behind him, putting on his headlamp and pressing down. The lift shuddered. He trailed his fingers against the wall as he slowly descended, the surface tracing his lifelong effort.
Moss’s labour started early, from the moment he was able to dig. In the sandpit he would shovel with spade or bare hands or stick until he reached the dark earth at the bottom, and still continue digging.
His mother, Janet, would like to remember how she received a letter from his school headmaster about Steven having been found “repeatedly defying warnings about excavating the subsoil of the sandpit”.
“We knew we had a digger,” said Janet, shaking her head as if she still couldn’t quite believe her luck. “Our own little digger,” she would say again and again smiling gaily, ruffling the shy, blushing boy’s hair.
A seaside holiday to Southport he spent exclusively on creating sand castles, complete with moats, and ramparts. Nobody could part him from his toil. A go on the penny falls or loop the loop roller coaster could not coax him away.
He made the most of his time. Dragged away by one or both his parents he sat panting, gulping down warm orange squash, and crunching through soggy sand-filled tuna spread sandwiches, brow furrowed in earnest silence.
“He’s our proper little Stakhanovite, isn’t he eh, Janet?” his dad would say. Baffled, Steven swept his hand forward over his hair, thinking it must be standing on end.
“Oh leave him alone, Jim, he doesn’t know what Stakhanowatsit means.”
Back home the young Moss’s work shifted to a barren patch of under the sycamores, an area where nothing would grow.
“No harm in him digging there,” his dad said. “It will aerate the soil.”
For the next few years Steven established an ever-evolving network of trenches, bunkers, shelters and tunnels. His indulgent parents referred to them as his “earthworks”. Ones camouflaged with branches and leaves were known as “elephant traps”.
By around nine, like all boys, he began to decide his future. Imagination fired by a holiday to the caves of Lascaux the young Moss put two and two together and resolved to become a cave-dwelling Neanderthal.
There were no caves in south Manchester so he had to make his own. He secured the walls of a four foot deep circular pit with chicken wire and bamboo canes, to avoid a fatal landslide, all topped with an elephant trap roof.
Once finished he prepared to sleep for the night.
“What if he gets cold and scared,” his mum had said.
“Being cold and scared never did me any harm,” his dad replied. PTSD was not a thing in those days.
“If you say so,” his mum replied.
And cold and scared Steven was. His sleeping bag was no match for the September chill. As he shivered Steven listened to the rustles and scratchings and scrapings in the leaves and branches of the roof, gripping his torch.
“It’s nothing,” he said to himself, “It’s just the wind.” That became his mantra for the next few hours. There was an unusually loud rustle. That was not the wind and then he felt something step on his sleeping bag.
He triggered the torch and saw the sharp features and piercing red eyes of a fox, before it turned and ran screaming out of the shelter. With the bolting animal left his ambition to live a life as a troglodyte.
Digging instead became like submarining was to Jacques Cousteau. The spade took him to a different world to different times, a kind of under-land. Old clay pipes and pottery, old penny pieces, shoe buckles, false teeth soon gave way to prehistoric eras of stones, rocks, gravels and coal seams.
One day he was going to dig deep enough to reach Australia.
“Of course you are, son,” his dad said, not quibbling with the physics. “I want to hear about the expression on those kangaroos’ faces when you pop out of the ground.”
At 12 he appeared on the BBC’s Record Breakers TV show for having won the Guinness World Record for the deepest hole dug by a child amateur. The host meticulously measured the depth with a retractable tape that he still had on his toolbelt.
Down and down again he went, to the exclusion of all else, no friends, no fun, no wife, no kids. He had no ambition for work-life balance and or a heroic Hollywood story arc. He wanted no dramatic ups and downs, no rises and falls, no falls and rises, just down, more down, even more down. Then when he was done going down, no heaven, no hell, just some sort of closure.
So, year by year, decade by decade, Steven Moss dug, learning his craft as he went: Pit props, underpinning, ground water pumping, dynamiting, heat extraction and, after a carbon monoxide explosion, the pressing need for air conditioning.
Intermittent media coverage won him sponsorship from power tools and work boots. The spoil heap towering comically over his house was a great photo-op. He did not mind looking ridiculous, so long as it allowed him to carry on.
By his 30s Steven was 500m below and by his sixties he had managed 1km. He had long broken through the millstone grit into the carboniferous limestone and well beyond, deeper than anyone had gone. Every shovel was uncharted territory.
And now he was 81, or 82, whatever, he felt like he had only just begun at 2km down, only his body was failing him. The lift reached the bottom of the shaft. He climbed into the pit, the current work face. This rockface was now.
He began pickaxing the chalky rock below him. It was nearly 45 degrees from the heating of the earth’s core. He had not turned on the airconditioning. On and on he worked, drenched in sweat from painful effort, stopping only briefly.
Then there was a hollow sound, and then the rock beneath gave way with an explosive crack. It was a pocket of gas, carbon monoxide, which rushed in and filled the shaft. His legs started to give way.
On his knees, before he passed out, he smiled to himself as the gas overwhelmed him, relieving the pain of his broken body. He thought he heard movement and shone his torch into the darkness of the hole.
A long animal face in the blackness. Two bright eyes. “A fox?” No, not this time. This creature did not run scared or scream, but looked back solemnly chewing. It was a kangaroo.
How would he describe its expression? It looked kind, friendly and welcoming. Steven Mos half crawled, half fell through the narrow aperture into the pocket on the other side.
Stephen Moss had found his closure. ■