Moleman

Today the welfare called for me while I was working outside my front door. Knew it was the welfare from their shoes. Barratt’s brogues. I climbed my rope, eye-level with that leaf-gloss leather, and made myself comfortable. They’d have preferred to be inside on the sofa but they couldn’t brave my plank gangway. As they started on my shortcomings I kept an eye on those brogues. Someone punched tiny holes in real skin to make them. Maybe that person didn’t have a choice. Maybe they were a kid, who had tiny holes punched in them too. But the welfare choose to buy them.

*

I first heard of the Moleman when I had no plans for my life. When just the thing to fill a day was a walk along the canal to look at his home. Everyone should have a spell of no plans in their life. It leaves you susceptible, wide open.

For once rumour was not exaggerated. The Moleman’s house was more shocking, more of a vertiginous dream, than I’d been told. A corner plot of a down-at-heel East London square. Every window masked with yellow newspaper. He had moled his way down through the garden, past the foundations... right under the house. Its fragile balance made me look up, afraid it might unhook its moorings and float away. The Moleman and I evidently thought as one on this. He’d attached butcher’s hooks to the corners of his walls, high up near the eaves. Steel guy ropes, tied to the hooks, were pulled taut into the earth below, creating a makeshift tent of that Victorian pile. I was impressed even then.

His garden startled me. I stood on his patch of pavement, peering down into the steep pitch of mud slopes, shored up in random spots with old fridge doors and sides of cars. It had to be forty foot deep. No final ground was visible. I felt sucked in, lured. I had to close my eyes and turn my back before I could walk away.

*

After that I found reasons to walk past although it was a six mile round trip from my flat. But, as I say, in those days I had no plans.

His butchers’ hooks fascinated me. He’d fastened them to the corners where the two walls meet. They were nowhere near a window and there were no skylights in his roof. How had he reached them? He’d dug away so deep he couldn’t possibly have used a ladder, there was nowhere to foot it.

No one, bar the welfare, had ever seen him. But everyone knew of him, and the stories they could tell! He’d once been a grand philosopher, a pamphleteer. Had thousands upon thousands of his pamphlets printed, which proclaimed his vision of utopia, but when nobody bought them he went underground.

I stared more closely at his windows after I’d learned that. The sheets of print were too small to be newspaper. They were his pamphlets, looking out at the world in place of him. I tried to get close enough to read a line or two but he’d much to say and had said it in a tiny, compressed typeface.

*

He was a compulsive tunneller. He’d tunnelled for miles under the streets of Hackney and De Beauvoir Town. He was the reason the London Underground couldn’t extend to Hackney: the district might sink into his labyrinth. The welfare tried to stop him when city bankers began to gentrify the square and discovered the cause of their subsidence. Council officials called round to complain three times in a row and had no reply. They fretted! Hackney council, who’d rather grind you to corn and scatter you on the ground of some illegal cockfight than show compassion, had fretted that he was missing in one of his tunnels and sent special constables in. They searched for three weeks by torchlight, confirmed the tunnels ran for seven miles or more, but found no trace of him or any other living thing. It turned out he’d fancied a holiday and been in Belgium.

*

I had a portrait in my head of him. A short man, shoulders stooped from all that tunnel dwelling. Pale, with thinning hair. Then one night I was coming home from drinking with people I barely knew, a little wild on wine and walking streets I didn’t recognise, when I saw a lighted window, high on the wall of a house. I looked in. As I did a breeze whisked up, steel guy ropes hummed, and I realised I was outside his home. I stared through that window. The walls behind were mottled yellow—maybe pamphleted—a bare bulb, nothing else. Then he walked into view.

Of course it was him. Of course he was more marvellous than my mind. His shoulders were not stooped from tunnel dwelling. They were vast from all that digging. His hair was thick, buckling silver that ran down to his chest and his hands as he lifted them to rinse a bright red plate - he was washing up - were enormous spades. Perhaps he sensed my focus because he suddenly threw open the window and lurched forward, those hulking shoulders filling its frame. I lifted my hand to greet him from the street below, wanting to speak. I had already decided I would accept if he invited me in. He saw me and raised his spade hand in salute. I stepped forward, face lifted to his light. He moved out of view. I waited, expecting his feet on the stairs, watching his door for an hour. When it didn’t open, I understood.

*

I went home and slept. Next morning I woke early, dressed and went outside. I took a shovel to the front garden. The soil was knitted tight with grass and didn’t yield with ease. I made an incision in the turf, a metre square, and lifted it clear. I dug. And I’ve dug on, uncovering more earth.