Paris · 14e

Method Statement

You do not feel an absence.

Draft one·60 min read

Prepared by N. Hallam. Not reviewed. Distribution: whoever comes next.

Ref: none. This document has no project number and is not issued under any contract.
Works: descent, southern network, and return.
Location: Paris, 14e.
Dates: night of 14 to 15 March, and the four days after it.
Prepared by: N. Hallam
Reviewed by: not reviewed
Distribution: whoever comes next

1 · SCOPE

Describe the works to which this method statement applies.

This document describes a descent into the southern network on the night of the fourteenth of March, the route taken from the entry point to a chamber at roughly minus thirty two metres, the hazards encountered, the controls that were in place, and the controls that were not.

It is written in the wrong order.

A method statement is issued before the work starts. I write about forty of them a year for a contractor in Birmingham, for soft strip and scaffold and the removal of asbestos-containing materials, and the document is not the point of the document. The point is the front sheet. The front sheet has a column of ruled lines on it and the men put their names on the lines.

I have watched that happen four hundred times. It is a cabin with a kettle in it and somebody’s radio on, and the sheet goes round the table on a clipboard with a pen tied to it with string, and each man takes it and signs in the space where the last man’s signature stopped, and passes it on without looking up. Nobody reads the document. I have never once had one read back to me by the men it was written for. If I had to read them I would not read them either.

The sheet is not for the men.

It is for afterwards. It goes in a file and the file goes in a cabinet, and if nothing happens it is destroyed after six years and nobody ever opens it. If something happens, a person who was not there takes it out and runs a finger down the column of names to see whether the man it happened to had put his on a line.

I have written this one afterwards, on my own, in a hotel near the Gare du Nord with the curtain shut and the television on with the sound off, and there is nobody left to sign it who is going to.

I am aware of what that sentence does. I am going to leave it in, because it is accurate, and because the alternative is to write a sentence that is less accurate in order to be more comfortable, and that is the specific failure this document exists to avoid.

The controls listed in section nine were adequate. I want that on the record early. We were not idiots. We were fitter than most, we had the right kit, we had a man with us who had been going down there for twenty years, and every decision we took was reasonable at the moment we took it.

I have been through it for four days looking for the place where the reasoning went wrong.

I cannot find it.

2 · PERSONNEL AND COMPETENCE

State the names of all persons engaged in the works, together with their relevant competence.

N. Hallam. Me. Twenty six. I write these. No relevant competence.

S. Vale. Twenty seven. Ventilation. He commissions air handling for offices and hospitals, which means he spends his working life on his back in ceiling voids with an anemometer, establishing that a room is getting the air the drawing says it is getting and that it is coming from where the drawing says it comes from.

Sam has been like this since he was nineteen. He walks into a pub and tells you which door is propped. He does it the way other people notice a smell, without deciding to, and he cannot be talked out of it, and we have been taking the piss out of him for six years. He brought the anemometer. The actual one, from work, in its foam case, and by the time we found out we were a kilometre in.

R. Dunn. Twenty six. Warehouse shift manager, which he would want written differently and which I am not going to write differently.

Rafe is in a room before he is in it. That is the only way I can put it and it has been true since school. He is the reason any of this happened and he has been the reason for two years. He found the chamber first, in the sense that he found four people on the internet who said different things about it, and he treated the disagreement as evidence rather than as a problem, which in fairness is exactly what it turned out to be.

"Clef." Late thirties. Twenty years down. Guide, on a fee, arranged through a man Rafe knows in Lyon.

That is the name he gave us and it is the only one I have.

Nobody down there uses a real one. I asked, once, near the beginning, in the way you ask a man his surname when you are making conversation on a walk, and he answered the question I had asked without answering the one I meant, and I did not go back to it.

So there is a man in section nine of this document whose photograph I have and whose name I do not, and when I went to make enquiries on the sixteenth I found that this is the ordinary condition of every friendship he had, and that not one person I spoke to found it strange.

He was carrying a camera. A proper one, with a cage round it and a light he had built himself, and it was out within four minutes of the entry and it stayed out. It is in the schedule in section eight at one and a half kilos, which is a figure I know because I carried it for two hours on the second day and my shoulders knew it before I did.

He does not make any noise.

I am putting that under competence because I think it is the most professional thing about him and because it accounts for a great deal of what follows. Twenty years of moving through a place where sound is the only thing that travels any distance, and he had taken the noise off himself the way you take off a watch.

He was good at both of his jobs. The second one is what got us into difficulty and it is also the only reason any of this can be written down at all, and I have not worked out what I think about that and I am not going to pretend otherwise in a document like this one.

3 · ACCESS AND EGRESS

State the means of access to the place of work, and the means by which persons will leave it.

You do not walk in.

There is no door and there is no moment. There is a piece of the city busy doing something else, and a hole in it that was never meant to be a hole, and the entire transaction takes about ninety seconds. I am not going to put the location in a document whose distribution I do not control. Whoever is reading this either has a way in or should not be given one.

What was above it, in the order I noticed: a street with cars on it. A bin that had been emptied that morning. A woman on a balcony three floors up, smoking, not looking down.

I have thought about her more than I have thought about most of what follows. She is the last person alive who could have watched four men go into the ground, and she was looking at something else, and there is no version of this where that is her fault. I keep going back to it anyway.

Then the ladder.

Staples, steel, set into the shaft, of unknown age and unknown provision. You put a hand on each one and pull before you give it your weight. You do that for eighteen metres. Nobody tells you how long eighteen metres is at four seconds a rung.

A headtorch does not light a shaft. It lights about a metre and a half of shaft, and that metre and a half goes down with you, so you are not descending through the dark at all. You are standing in a small moving room, and the walls of the room are whatever your light happens to be on, and the room is going down. You never see the shaft. You see eleven separate pieces of shaft, one after another, and you assemble them afterwards on the surface, badly.

Seven staples from the top there is a date cut into the brick beside your left hand. I photographed it. It is legible, and it is 1937, and I have not been able to find out what happened in that shaft in 1937, and I have stopped looking. Somebody was on this ladder with a chisel and a reason. The reason is not in the brick.

The top of the shaft is brick. Somebody laid it. You can see the courses and the mortar and a place about four metres down where a bricklayer ran out of light or patience and let a course wander.

The bottom of the shaft is cut rock.

I went down it twice and I could not find where one becomes the other. There is no seam, no lintel, no change in the diameter, no course that ends. There is no point at which you could put your thumb on the wall and say that above this a man built something and below this a man took something away. It is one hole. It was made from both ends by people who never met, and it closes on itself somewhere in the middle, and I do not know where, and I went looking on the second day specifically to find out.

You learn who is who on a ladder without seeing anybody, because nobody on a ladder is looking at anything except the next staple.

Rafe you hear. He goes first because he always goes first, and by the last five metres he is bored and taking them two at a time, and each one he skips rings in the shaft like a struck pipe. Sam breathes through his nose. I have known the man six years and I have never once registered it, and in a vertical steel tube it was the only thing in the world.

Clef made no sound.

Not quiet. None. He came down eighteen metres of unknown steel in the dark behind three men he had met the previous afternoon, and I did not hear him start and I did not hear him arrive, and the first I knew of it was his light coming on beside me at the bottom, already pointed where we were going.

At the bottom there is a smell, and every written account of it I have found says clay, and all of them are wrong.

It is a cellar at a wedding venue. Cold, mineral, faintly sweet, and completely without the rot you have spent the ladder bracing for, because there has never been anything down there alive enough to go off. It is the cleanest bad-smelling place I have ever stood in.

Sam said it smelled like a plant room. Then he stopped, and said it again in a different voice, and was annoyed with himself, because a plant room smells of moving air and this had no business moving.

That is the first time he said it.

I am putting it here because I did not put it anywhere at the time.

The ladder is also the means by which persons will leave it. That is one field on the form and I did not notice it was one field until I typed the heading at the top of this page.

4 · SEQUENCE OF WORKS: HOURS ONE TO THREE

Describe, in sequence, the works to be undertaken, and state the anticipated duration of each stage.

We were down at 21:40 and the first three hours were, and I am going to say this plainly because the rest of this document is not going to be able to, some of the best hours of my life.

I had expected to be frightened and I was not. I had expected a tunnel.

It is not a tunnel. It is a town.

The galleries are two metres and a bit, cut square, with a flat floor, and they go off in four directions from almost everywhere, and you walk. You just walk. For the first hour I went about like a man in a multi-storey looking for his car, and the size of the thing did not arrive as awe at all. It arrived as a series of small domestic surprises.

There is a bench. Somebody has built a bench, out of blocks, and squared it, and put it where two galleries meet so that it faces the longer view.

There is a bin bag, tied, sitting against a wall, full of other people’s rubbish. The etiquette down there is that you carry out what you carried in, and that if you come across somebody else’s you carry that out too, and the bag had been tied by one person and moved by several.

Rafe was insufferable. He had been insufferable for a fortnight and now he had material. He kept stopping and putting both hands flat on the wall like a man checking a horse.

Sam took a reading inside twenty minutes because of course he did. He got the vane out at a junction and stood with his head on one side and said point four, which meant nothing to any of us, and Rafe asked if that was good, and Sam said it was fine.

Then he said that it was fine but it was coming from the wrong way.

Clef looked back over his shoulder. It is the first time I saw him do that.

Then Sam said the number again and Clef said something in French and kept walking, and Rafe said what, and Clef said that in the quarries the air always comes from the wrong way, and that if Sam stood still long enough it would start coming from the other wrong way, and that this is what air does down here and has done since before his grandfather.

And Sam said fair enough, and we walked on.

I want it recorded that Clef was not being dismissive. He was answering a question he had been asked a hundred times by people who did not understand where they were standing, out of twenty years of knowing, and he was right about the air. It is my view now that he was right for the wrong reason.

The other thing, and it is the one I keep going back to.

There are street signs.

Blue enamel plaques, set into the stone at the corners, with street names on them, the way a street corner has above ground. The lettering is the lettering you see on a wall in the fourteenth arrondissement. They are not a joke and they are not modern. They were put there by the men whose job is to stop the city falling into the ground, and they were put there so that a man underneath it would always know what he was underneath.

I stood under one for a while. RUE DE LA TOMBE ISSOIRE. I photographed it, and then I photographed about nine more over the two nights, because my French runs to roughly forty words and I had decided I would put them through a translator when I got home and find out where I had been.

I did that on the sixteenth. It took an afternoon.

I am not going to put what I found in this section. It goes in section thirteen, where there is a field for it.

On the night it was simply the best thing that had ever happened. We stood under a blue sign in a hole in the ground and Rafe read the name out in an accent that would have started a fight, and Sam said we should get a round in, and we laughed enough that Clef told us to be quiet.

It was the first time he told us to be quiet. He did it lightly.

5 · THE MARKS, AND HOW WE WERE NAVIGATING

There is no printed instruction at the head of this section either.

There is no way to know where you are.

That reads as dramatic and it is meant as a technical statement about what instruments are available. You cannot see out. There is no sky, no landmark, no line of sight past about fifteen metres, and a compass is close to useless in a place where every gallery meets at a right angle and there are four of them at every junction and they are all the same width, because they were cut by the same men to the same dimensions for the same reason. There is no signal. Your phone knows nothing.

So every single thing you know about your position is something that somebody else left behind for you, and they are all on the walls together, and the walls do not sort them.

There is a stretch near the top of the southern network, about four metres of it, that I went back and photographed on the second day because Clef had used it to explain this to Rafe and I wanted it. Left to right, at the height of your light:

A date cut into the stone in a careful eighteenth century hand, with two initials under it. Clef said that is a quarryman and it is probably a tally, because they were paid by the volume they took out and they kept their own count and did not trust the company’s.

A cast iron letter and number, bolted in. That is the Inspection. It is a structural reference and it is a statement about the ceiling.

An arrow in white paint with a number beside it. Clef said that is the war and it could be either side.

A tag from the eighties, sprayed, saying something obscene about a person who is probably now sixty.

Two modern arrows in different colours, pointing in different directions.

A phone number.

All of it is equally there. Stone does not date anything for you. Nothing down there is labelled with when it was made or who made it or what they thought they were doing, and the only man in our party who could tell any of it apart was telling us what he had been told by a man who had been told.

So Rafe, in the second hour, reasonably, looking at the quarryman’s tally, asked whether it was pointing at anything.

Clef said no.

Rafe said it looks like it is pointing at something, and Clef said it is a number, and Rafe said I know, but look at it.

And it does. It looks exactly like it is pointing at something. Those men were taking rock out for a living and were not leaving a message, and two hundred and forty years later a bloke from Dudley is standing in front of their arithmetic reading it as a signpost, and the reason he is doing that is that it is on a wall, and everything on a wall down there is presumed to be for you.

Clef was patient about it. He said the thing you have to understand is that most of what is written down here was not written to be read by you.

Then he said something I did not follow at the time, because his English went sideways when he was tired, which was that the marks that were made for you are the ones to be careful about.

Rafe said that was cryptic as fuck.

Clef said it was not cryptic, it was just true, and could we keep moving.

6 · FIRST WHITE FIGURE

There is no printed instruction at the head of this section. The template does not have a section six. It has Sequence Of Works, and Hazards, and Welfare Arrangements, and everything I have put in this document that turned out to matter is in a section I invented and numbered myself.

At 00:20 we passed a painted figure on the left hand wall.

It is about a metre tall. White, brushed on rather than sprayed, no face, no hands, the arms down at the sides. The paint has gone down into the stone instead of sitting on top of it.

And it is only a person from one place.

That is the thing about it I have not been able to get a single person interested in since. The wall is not flat. No wall down there is flat, because they were cut by men working a face, so every surface is a run of shallow scoops with a lip at the end of each one. Walk along it and your light moves across the figure and it comes apart. The head goes onto one plane and the body onto another, and for most of the approach it is a pale smear with a darker patch near the top, and you would not look at it twice.

Then you get to a point about four metres short of it.

It stands up.

I went back and did it three times. Rafe got bored and Clef waited without saying anything, which is what he does instead of being bored. It is exactly repeatable and it happens in the same place every time, four metres short, coming from the north. Going the other way it never assembles at all. I walked twenty metres past it and turned round and put my light back on that wall and there is nothing there but damp.

Somebody stood four metres north of a wall and painted a man who can only be seen from where he was standing.

I do not know what to do with that. I have not put it anywhere else in this document.

I asked Clef what it was and he said one of the whites.

I asked if it meant anything and he said no.

I asked if people thought it meant something and he said yes.

And then Rafe, who had read everything and most of it badly, said the thing about the electrician, and Clef said yes, that, and Rafe said is it true, and Clef said which part.

Then he told us to put our lights on the floor for a minute.

We did, and he did, and there was nothing anywhere, and he said listen, and there was nothing to listen to either, and he said good, and we picked them up and walked on.

I took it at the time for a piece of theatre for the tourists and was mildly annoyed by it in a way I did not say out loud.

He did it five more times over two days. Every one of them he made look like something he was doing for our benefit.

7 · HAZARD IDENTIFIED: AIR

For each hazard identified, state the control measure to be applied, and the residual risk.

At 01:05 Sam stopped in the middle of a sentence.

We were in a section with a low ceiling, about a metre forty, so all four of us were bent, and the sentence was about a girl he had been seeing in Selly Oak and it was not a good story and he stopped in the middle of it.

He has never finished it.

He straightened up as far as the ceiling let him and put his hand out flat, palm down, at about the height of his own face, and turned it slowly. Then he went back two metres the way we had come and did it again.

Rafe said what.

Sam said it has swapped.

Clef said the air always swaps.

Sam said no.

He explained it the way he explains things, which is badly, at length, and with his hands, and I am going to put it here in the form I eventually understood rather than the form he said it in, because he said it three times across two days and got clearer each time.

Air underground moves because of pressure and temperature and because the quarries breathe with the weather on the surface, and all of that is slow and stupid and reverses constantly and means nothing. That is the part Clef was right about. But when the breathing turns over it does not turn over cleanly. It slows, and it goes slack, and it sits still for a while, and then it comes back the other way. That is what a reversal looks like, and Sam has spent his whole working life watching them happen in ductwork.

A draught that changes direction without going slack has not reversed.

It has been replaced. Which means it is coming from somewhere new. Which means something has opened.

He could not tell us what. He could not tell us where. Rafe asked him how far and he said it could be a kilometre and it could be forty metres and that he genuinely could not narrow it, and Rafe asked him what we should do about it, and Sam stood there bent under a metre forty of limestone and said that he did not know.

And that is the problem, and I am going to set it out properly, because I do not think anybody who has not stood in it will understand.

We believed him.

That is the thing. Nobody doubted him for a second. Clef did not dismiss it and Clef had every reason to. All three of us believed Sam immediately and completely, because we had been listening to him do this for six years and he has never once been wrong about a door.

And there was nothing to do with it.

You cannot photograph a draught. You cannot show one to anybody, you cannot put one on a map, you cannot chalk it on a wall at knee height for the next man. It is not the kind of thing that can be handed over. Sam knew, the way a man knows his own trade, that something had opened somewhere in a system with four hundred kilometres of gallery in it, and the entire actionable content of that knowledge was nothing at all.

We stood in it for about ninety seconds. Then Clef said we should keep going, and we kept going, because keeping going was the only proposal anybody had.

I have written a great many documents in which a hazard is identified and a control is written down beside it. There is a column for it. It is the second column and it is the reason the first column exists.

I did not have anything to put in it then and I do not have anything to put in it now.

8 · SCHEDULE OF EQUIPMENT

List the plant, equipment and materials to be used, and confirm that all items are fit for purpose.

Laid out on the floor of a rented flat in the thirteenth on the afternoon of the fourteenth, in four piles, because that is what you do and because Rafe had been looking forward to doing it for two years. Sam counted the cells twice. I counted them a third time after he had gone to bed, not because I doubted him but because counting them was the last useful thing available.

Item	Qty	Note
Primary headtorch, 1100 lm	4
Secondary torch	4
Tertiary, chest	3	Clef carried two
Cells, AA	48	We used eleven
Cells, 18650	12
Water, litres	14	Carried in. There is water down there and none of it is drinkable
Food, kcal approx	9,000	Rafe ate most of the flapjack on the first night and it became a thing
Boiler suits	4
Knee pads	4	The single best item on this list
Gloves, pairs	8
Rope, 9mm, m	30	Not used
First aid	2 kits	Used, section 11
Camera body, cage, light	1	1.51 kg
Cards, 128GB	5
Battery, camera	6
Anemometer, vane	1	Sam’s, from work, not his, and this has since been an issue for him
Phone, in dry bag	4	No signal at any point after the ladder
Paper map, laminated	1	See section 12
Chalk	1 box	See section 12
Marker, paint, white	0

The zero is not a typo and it is not a joke. It is in the schedule because the schedule is a list of what we had, and a list of what we had is the only place in this document where I can put down that we did not carry one.

All items listed were fit for purpose.

All items listed performed exactly as expected, for the whole of both nights, without a single failure of any kind.

This is the only section of this document in which that sentence is true.

9 · WHAT I WOULD HAVE WRITTEN IN ADVANCE

No printed instruction. The template has no section nine of this kind. I have put one here because I wanted to find out whether I could have written it, and the answer turned out to be worth the page.

If somebody had come to me at work and asked for this before we went, which nobody did because it was a holiday and not a job, I would have written it in an afternoon and it would have been good.

Fall from height on the ladder. Fall from height at the fontis. Confined space entry. Oxygen deficiency. Elevated carbon dioxide. Entrapment. Crush from unstable material. Immersion. Hypothermia. Separation from the party. Loss of illumination. Cumulative fatigue over a period exceeding eighteen hours. Manual handling. Persons unfamiliar with the environment. Lone working in the event of separation.

I could keep going. I am aware that I enjoyed writing that paragraph and I am leaving it in, because a man’s pleasure in his own trade is a fact about the trade.

Every one of those is a real hazard in that place. The controls against all of them are known and written down and we had most of them, and where we did not have them we had a man who had been down there twenty years.

Then you do the controls, and there is an order you do them in, and the order is the whole discipline. You eliminate the hazard. If you cannot eliminate it you substitute something less dangerous for it. If you cannot substitute you engineer against it. If you cannot engineer you administrate, which means you tell people things. And if you cannot do any of that you give a man gloves and call it personal protective equipment and accept that you have run out of ideas.

There is not one line in that assessment about anybody else being down there.

I have written risk assessments for live sites in city centres with the public walking past the hoarding six feet from the work. I have written one where the hazard was a man in a van at seven in the morning who did not know the road was closed. Other people are the second thing you learn.

And it did not occur to me, at any point, in six weeks of planning, that the principal hazard in four hundred kilometres of unlit gallery under a city of two million might be a person who wanted us to be there.

I have since gone through the order properly, the way I would at work, and it does not help.

You cannot eliminate a person. You cannot substitute a safer one. There is nothing to engineer against, because he is not a machine and he is not a gas and there is no guard you can put on him.

Which leaves administrative control, which means telling people things.

10 · SEQUENCE OF WORKS: HOURS FOUR TO FIVE

Describe, in sequence, the works to be undertaken, and state the anticipated duration of each stage.

At 01:40 we came into a chamber Clef called the small beach, and there is a painting on the wall.

I am not going to be able to do this and I am going to have a go.

It is about four metres across. An island, in the sea, at night, with tall dark trees on it, and a white shape standing at the front of a boat that is coming in. Five colours, maybe six. Blues that have gone green, a bone white, and a black that is doing most of the work.

It is painted straight onto the quarry wall. The tool marks are still in it. The man who cut that face two hundred years ago left the surface in shallow diagonal scoops, and whoever painted it did not fill them and did not flatten them and did not work around them. He put the sea where the scoops were and let them be the water.

You cannot see it all at once. The gallery is two metres wide, so you cannot get far enough back, and a headtorch gives you about a metre and a half. Four of us stood in front of it with four lights and looked at it the way you look at anything with a torch, which is in pieces, one part at a time, while the parts you are not looking at go dark again behind you.

Nobody has ever seen that painting whole. Not the man who made it. There is nowhere to stand.

We sat down on the floor and ate. That is all there is to do with it. Four blokes on the floor of a quarry at two in the morning with flapjack, in front of the best thing any of us will ever see in person.

Rafe cried a bit and pretended he had not. Sam was the one who noticed the scoops and said the thing about the water that I have used above, because it was a better observation than anything I managed.

I asked Clef why it is not in any of the articles and he said because the people who know where it is do not tell anybody.

I said that seemed a shame.

He said it is the reason it is still there.

Then he said the only bitter thing I heard him say in two days, and he said it the way you would say that a pub had closed.

Every room down here that got famous is full of concrete.

Then he got up and put the camera away.

I noticed it because the camera had been out for four hours by then and the best thing we had seen was on the wall in front of us and he put it in the bag and closed the bag.

I asked him about it on the second day. He gave me an answer. The answer was not true, and I knew it was not true while he was saying it, and I let it go, because we were nine hours in and I was tired and letting it go was easier than not.

That is not a hazard I can put in a column either. I am putting it here.

11 · INJURIES

Record all injuries sustained, the treatment given, and the person by whom the treatment was administered.

12 · CONTROLS THAT WERE IN PLACE

State the control measures applied, and the arrangements for monitoring their effectiveness.

Chalk.

We marked every junction. That is the system, it is Clef’s, it is everybody’s, and it works like this. At each junction you crouch and put a mark on the wall at knee height on the side you came out of, so that when you come back the other way you can see which of the four holes you arrived from.

Chalk on wet limestone does not look like chalk on a blackboard. It goes slightly into the surface and slightly translucent, and it is very bright for about a day, and it sits there looking like the only deliberate thing in the gallery.

You use chalk because chalk washes off. It washes off because the alternative is that you spend twenty years adding permanent marks to a place that already has more marks on it than anybody can read, and because a mark that outlives the man who made it will eventually tell somebody something that is not true any more.

I liked that. I liked it more than anything else I was told down there.

It is the most considerate piece of professional ethics I have come across in any trade, including my own, and it is practised by people with no qualification, no regulator, no insurer and no name, and there is nowhere it is written down. Clef did not explain it to me as an ethic. He crouched at the first junction and made the mark and said at the knee, always the knee, and stood up, and it was four hours before I worked out why it was at the knee and another day before I worked out why it was chalk.

Somebody is always crouching. That is what eleven junctions with four men actually looks like.

The template asks for the arrangements for monitoring the effectiveness of the control.

We counted them on the way out.

We marked eleven junctions on the way in.

On the way out there were fourteen.

13 · EMERGENCY ARRANGEMENTS

State the arrangements for summoning assistance in the event of an emergency, and the means by which the location of the works will be communicated to the emergency services.

Five fields. I am going to complete all five properly, because I have completed this section about forty times a year for four years and I know what it is for and who reads it, which is nobody, right up until the day it is the only page anybody looks at.

(a) Means of raising the alarm.

None.

There is no signal below the ladder. Not weak. None, the way a room with no window has no light. Four handsets, three networks, eighteen metres of limestone and then four hundred kilometres of gallery, and after 21:42 every one of them was a torch and a clock.

The control against this, in a document I would have written, is a nominated person on the surface holding the plan with a callout time. We had that. Rafe’s sister had the entry point, a sketch, and instructions to call the fire brigade if she had not heard from us by six on the Sunday evening.

She did exactly what we asked her to do, at the time we asked her to do it. I want that written down in a document that will outlast my memory of the phone calls.

(b) Nearest emergency department.

Hôpital Cochin, 27 rue du Faubourg Saint-Jacques.

I know that because I looked it up on the sixteenth with the photographs open on the other half of the screen, doing the translations.

At about 03:10 on the fifteenth we were underneath the rue du Faubourg Saint-Jacques. Thirty two metres underneath it, give or take, which is a distance you could shout across in a street.

I am not going to do anything with that. I am putting it in the field it belongs in.

Rescue from a confined space cannot be carried out by the persons who are in it. That is the first line of every confined space document ever written and it is the reason the discipline exists.

There is a team in Paris who do it. They are good. They go in for people several times a year and by every account I have read since they are extremely competent and entirely unsentimental about it.

Reaching them requires field (a).

(d) Persons trained in first aid.

One. Me. Three day First Aid at Work, certificate expired in November, which I knew, and which had been on a list since January, and which I had not done because it costs two hundred and ten pounds and my employer only pays if you are the nominated person on a site.

I let a certificate lapse to save myself two hundred and ten pounds and then went down a hole with three other men.

The training would not have changed the outcome. I have been over that with somebody qualified and he was clear and he was kind and I believe him. I am recording the expiry because it is true, and because this is a document in which the honest entry and the comfortable entry are different entries, and I decided which sort it was going to be on the first page.

(e) Location reference, and the means by which it will be communicated.

This is the one field I can complete to a standard that would satisfy any client, any principal contractor and any inspector in the country.

I can give you the streets we were under, in order, with times, because I photographed the plaques as we passed them and the camera writes the time into the file. Boulevard Saint-Jacques at 22:51. Rue Dareau at 23:30. Rue de la Tombe Issoire at 00:04 and again at 01:58 coming back the other way. Rue du Faubourg Saint-Jacques at 03:10. Avenue René Coty at 04:40, which is the last one I have.

Two hundred and forty years ago a group of engineers went down there and wrote the surface onto the underside of it, in iron and enamel, so that a man in the dark would always know what he was beneath. They did it carefully. They maintained it through every government since. It is the most generous piece of work anybody has ever done for a person in that position, and they did all of it for people who had not been born.

Underneath field (e), in smaller print, the template asks for the point of access at which a vehicle can stop.

14 · SEQUENCE OF WORKS: HOURS FIVE TO EIGHT

Describe, in sequence, the works to be undertaken, and state the anticipated duration of each stage.

At 02:40 Clef stopped.

You do not hear the man stop, because he does not make any noise walking in the first place. What you notice is that the light in front of you has stopped moving.

He put his lamp flat against the wall so that it raked along the surface instead of shining at it, and the wall stopped being a surface and became a landscape.

You give up seeing tool marks after about two hours down there. Every wall is tool marks. It is brickwork on a street: the eye files it once and then declines to look again for the rest of your life.

Raked, it all comes back. A chisel mark is a shallow scoop with a lip at one end, and under a light held flat every single one throws a shadow the length of itself, and three kilometres of wall that you had stopped seeing turns into something that somebody did.

He moved the lamp along about three metres and then held it still.

The marks changed.

They got narrower. The angle they went in at changed, and the spacing changed, and the rhythm of them changed, the way handwriting changes when a different person picks up the pen. On one side of a line you cannot see, one set. On the other side, another.

The join is not a join. It is not a seam and it is not a step and there is no gap, and the two do not meet along anything you could put a finger on. One simply stops, and the other is there.

I stood with a hand flat on each side of it for some time. The stone is the same temperature on both sides. Of course it is. I do not know what I expected.

Rafe asked how old and Clef said older.

Rafe asked older than what and Clef said than the other ones.

And Rafe pushed, because Rafe pushes, and asked for a number, any number, a range.

And Clef said that he did not know, and that the men who would know had told him that the ones who really knew did not agree, and then he said the only thing about that wall that I have carried since, which is that you cannot carbon date a hole.

I have thought about it more than I have thought about anything else down there, including section eleven, and it took me until the seventeenth to work out why.

It is the only thing I saw in two days that nobody has made a claim about.

There is no legend attached to it. Nothing is painted near it. It is not on a route, it is not in an article, it does not have a name, and the people who know where it is have never agreed a story to tell about it. Everything else in that place is somebody’s assertion, including the walls. That one is just the place where one lot of men stopped cutting and another lot started, and you can stand with a hand on both of them at once, and nobody alive knows how long the gap was.

The template asks for the anticipated duration of each stage.

I have left that field blank for this one.

15 · SEQUENCE OF WORKS: HOURS EIGHT TO THIRTEEN

Where the sequence departs from the plan, record the departure and the reason for it.

We left them at about 05:30 with the wine label and two of the saucissons and directions that four people had agreed between themselves were correct.

They were not correct.

I want to put that as flatly as I can and then immediately qualify it, because the flat version is unfair to four people who were kind to us.

The directions were good for two thirds of the way. The arrows on the label matched what we found, junction for junction, for nearly three hours. Then there is an arrow that says go right at the pillar with the ring in it, and there is a pillar with a ring in it, and right takes you to a gallery closed with poured concrete, and the concrete is old, and there is a date scratched into it that is nineteen years ago.

The concrete is the Inspection. That is their work and it is what they are for, because a gallery under a school or a hospital gets filled, and the alternative is that one day it is not there any more and neither is what was on top of it.

So the route was real. Somebody walked it. They told somebody, who told her, who told us, on the back of a wine label, in good faith, with three other people cross-checking as she drew.

It stopped being a route nineteen years ago and the information never got the news.

Rafe stood in front of that concrete for longer than the problem needed. Then he said, not to anybody in particular, that it was fine, and that we had the whites.

The whites, the second time.

We picked them up at 08:20 in a gallery Clef knew.

I tested the first one. Four metres short, from the south this time, and it stood up exactly the way the one at 00:20 had.

I tested the second one as well.

I did not test the third, and I did not test any of the eight that came after it, and I am going to put down why, because the reason is not laziness and it is the only genuinely useful thing I have to say about how any of this actually works.

They kept being right.

A thing that keeps being right stops being a thing you check. That is not a defect of character. It is what a route is. You verify the first two and then the verifying tails off, because the alternative is to walk every stretch of a four hundred kilometre network twice in opposite directions, and nobody has ever done that and nobody ever will.

Eleven of them. Two hours. Not one wrong turn, past three junctions where the obvious way was the wrong one.

And every single one of them assembled.

Sam was the one who stopped.

He had been odd for an hour. He had said nothing about air since the water and I had assumed, because I wanted to, that the thing in section seven had gone away.

He stopped at the ninth and put his light on it and said that one is wet.

It was not wet. Rafe touched it and said so, and Sam said he knew, and told us to look at it properly. We did. It took me about thirty seconds and once I had seen it I could not stop seeing it.

The paint on the first eight is in the stone. It has gone down into the grain, and where it has come away it has taken a little of the surface with it, and the edges are soft because two hundred winters of damp have been working on them.

The paint on the ninth sits on top.

It is on the wall the way emulsion is on a wall. The edges are crisp. There is a run, one run, about four centimetres long, coming off the left shoulder, with a fat rounded end where it stopped, and nothing has touched it since it stopped.

Clef came back and looked at it for a long time and did not say anything.

Rafe asked how old and Clef said he did not know.

Rafe said but roughly, a year, ten years, and Clef said that limewash on wet limestone in a gallery with a draught through it can look new for a very long time, and that he had once been certain a wall had been painted the week before and then found a photograph of it from before he was born.

And Rafe said, and I could hear that he was asking a different question now, so it could be old.

And Clef said yes.

And then he said the other half, because he is honest, and because I think by that point he had decided something about us. He said yes, and it could be from Tuesday, and there is no way to tell the two apart, and that this is not a fact about this wall. It is a fact about lime.

Then Sam, who had not said anything else, said: the other eight.

That is the shape of it and I am going to set it down once, plainly, because it took me two days and a lot of lying awake to get it into words and whoever reads this should have it faster than I did.

We had been following them for two hours and they had been right eleven times.

We had no way of knowing whether we had been following one thing.

There is a second sentence that belongs with that one. I have written it four times and taken it out three, so it is going in.

Every one of them assembled, which means every one of them was painted by somebody standing where I was standing, looking the way I was looking.

The template asks me to record the departure from the plan and the reason for it.

We departed from the plan at the concrete, at about 08:00, and the reason was that the route was nineteen years dead. Everything after that was not a departure. We were following marks, in the correct manner, in the direction the marks are meant to be read.

16 · HAZARD: PERSONS

For each hazard identified, state the control measure to be applied, and the residual risk.

At 10:05 Clef put his light on the floor.

He had done it five times by then and every time it had been nothing, and every time we had been a little slower about it, the way you get slower about a drill that has never once been real.

We put ours down. He put his down.

And there was a light.

It was not a beam and it was not near. It was a change in the colour of the air at the far end of a gallery to our left, very slight, the sort of thing you see and then decide you invented. With my own torch on I would have walked straight past it and never known. That is what the ritual is for. That is what it had been for since midnight, and I had been mildly irritated by it for ten hours.

Nobody said anything.

We went back forty metres, got up onto a shelf in a side chamber, and turned everything off. Lights, phones, watches. Clef made us put the watches in a pocket because two of them had luminous hands.

Then we sat in the dark and did not move for thirty five minutes.

Things I did not know before that half hour and know now.

A boiler suit is loud. Not slightly loud. Nylon against nylon, every time you shift your weight, is a newspaper being torn in a church.

Nobody can hold still for thirty five minutes. There is no position in which a human body is quiet for thirty five minutes, so you are not choosing between making noise and not making noise. You are choosing when to spend it. There is a drip somewhere in that chamber at about eleven seconds, and inside four minutes the three of us had worked out that you move in the half second after it, and none of us had said a word about it.

Your own pulse is the loudest thing in the room and you become certain that it is audible. I do not mean that you worry about it. I mean that for two minutes or so I was convinced, past the point where I could argue myself back out of it, that the other men could hear my heart.

And total dark is not black. It goes grey, and it moves. Your eyes are looking for something and after twenty minutes they will begin supplying it, and I spent a good part of that half hour watching shapes cross a room I knew to be empty. I was not frightened by that. I found it interesting. I have since read that it is extremely common and that it has a name.

Somebody came past the end of our gallery at about the twelve minute mark.

I never saw anybody. The light on the wall of the main gallery changed once, and swung, and went. Boots on stone, unhurried. A bag. One short phrase in a voice, and then nothing at all for a long time, and then, a long way off, one more.

Two people. Walking normally. Having a conversation. Doing nothing whatsoever that anybody could describe as sinister.

We sat there for another twenty three minutes after they had gone.

We did not chalk the junction we turned back at.

I want that on the record, because it is the only control we deliberately did not apply. Chalk is a mark you leave for yourself and it is a mark you leave for whoever comes along behind you, and it is the same mark, and there is no way to make it be one and not the other. So when there is a light somewhere in the network you stop marking, and the system that stops you getting lost becomes unavailable at precisely the hour you are most likely to need it.

I have been asked since how we knew. The honest answer is that we did not know anything. Four men hid in a hole in the dark for over half an hour from two people who, on any sensible reading of the evidence, were exactly what we were: somebody down there for the night with a bag and a torch and a friend.

We did not hide because we knew. We hid because Clef put his light on the floor, and he did that because a man taught him to do it twenty years ago, and that man did it because somebody taught him.

The template asks for the control measure and the residual risk.

The control measure was a habit with nobody’s name on it, which worked, and which nobody in its entire chain of transmission has ever tested.

I have not worked out what to put in the other column.

17 ·

I am going to stop using the template here.

I have got to the part I came to write. I have noticed that I have written nine thousand words to avoid arriving at it, that the sections have been getting longer, and that section sixteen contains a paragraph about what the dark does to your eyes which is interesting and true and has no business in a method statement.

The template has thirteen more headings. I know all of them. Welfare Arrangements. Environmental Considerations. Waste. Monitoring And Review. Competence Of Persons. Sign-Off And Briefing Record.

There is a heading for everything except what happened.

So I am going to do it the other way round. I am going to write down what happened, and afterwards I will go back and put each part under whichever heading it belongs to, the way you are supposed to, and if it does not go under any of them then at least I will have found out something about the document instead of about myself.

The smoke came at 11:40.

Sam stopped and said it has swapped, and this time he said it in a different voice, and this time he said which way.

We had been walking into the draught for about fifty minutes. That is a thing you stop noticing, like a hill. He said it has swapped and it is behind us now and it has not slowed down, and then he said the part I want down exactly.

He said, and I can smell it.

I could not smell anything. Rafe could not smell anything. Sam has a nose like a dog and takes no credit for it because it is not a skill. About forty seconds later I could smell it too.

It is sweet.

Nobody tells you that. I had been imagining a bonfire and it is nothing like a bonfire. It is sugar taken too far in a pan. It is the bottom of a tray of flapjack that has caught. If you smelled it in a street you would look around to see who was cooking.

I have since found out what makes that smell and it is two things you can buy in any supermarket in Europe and a length of hose, and I am not putting the rest of it in here.

Then Rafe said something about his light, and we looked.

You do not see smoke arrive. You see your own light stop working. The beam goes from a beam to a cone to a wall, a flat white wall about two metres in front of your face, and what you are looking at is your own torch coming back at you.

A thousand lumens is worse than a hundred. Rafe, by every instinct a person has, turned his up.

Clef reached over and turned it off.

Then he turned his own down to its lowest setting and put his hand across most of that, and said low, and red if you have red, and Sam had red because Sam is the sort of man who has red, and for the next hour and ten minutes we moved through four hundred kilometres of quarry on about as much light as a phone screen.

We had perhaps ninety seconds of standing still. Clef asked Sam one question, which was where is it coming from, and Sam said behind and to the left and moving at about walking pace, maybe slower.

And Rafe said then we go right.

Which is correct. It is what any sane man says and it is what I would have said if I had got there first and it is very nearly what we did.

And Sam said no. We have to go into it.

I am putting the argument down because it took about forty seconds and it is the most important forty seconds in this document.

Rafe said into it.

Sam said the air is coming from there. He said if we go with it we are in it for as long as it lasts and it comes with us the whole way and we will be doing that blind, through junctions, and he said the word junctions in a way that meant something to all of us by then. He said if we go into it we are in it worse for a while and then we are upstream of it and it cannot reach us.

Rafe said how much worse. Sam said he did not know.

Rafe said how long is a while. Sam said he did not know.

Rafe said, and he was not being difficult, he was asking the actual question, he said how sure are you.

And Sam said he was sure about where the air was coming from and that everything else he had just said was arithmetic he was doing in his head.

Then Clef, who had twenty years on all of us, who had known that section since before Rafe could drive, said we do what Sam says.

Rafe said why, not as a challenge.

And Clef said because I know the galleries and I do not know the air.

I have thought about that a great deal. He was the most competent man there by a distance that was not close, and a man he had met thirty two hours earlier, who fits extract fans in Birmingham, told him to walk into a gallery that was filling with smoke, and he did it immediately, and explained himself in nine words while already moving.

You get down.

Smoke fills a gallery from the top because it is warm, and it comes down slowly, so for a while there is a layer along the floor that is nearly clear. You go onto your hands and knees and then onto your elbows and you find about thirty centimetres of air that is grey instead of white, and that is your world now.

Then two things happen at once and I want both of them in the record.

The first is that you cannot read anything.

Every piece of navigational information in that entire place is on a wall. Not on the ceiling, not on the floor, on a wall, because a wall is where a man with a light on his head can see, and two hundred and forty years of everyone who has ever been down there have independently agreed on this without ever discussing it. Plaques, iron, tags, arrows, tallies, whites, all of it on walls.

And you are on your stomach in half a metre of visibility with a torch you have had to turn almost off, and the wall is a white nothing from about knee height upward.

Everything anybody ever left for you is still there, exactly where they left it, forty centimetres above your face and completely gone.

The second thing is the chalk.

Our chalk was at knee height. Clef taught us that on the first night, crouching, saying at the knee, always the knee, and the reason it is at knee height has nothing whatever to do with smoke. It is at knee height because a headtorch throws light down the bottom of a wall better than the top, and because head height is already crowded with eighty other things people have written, and because that is where the man who taught the man who taught Clef happened to put his.

So when we went down onto our elbows, our marks were the only marks in the quarries at eye level.

I would like somebody to sit with that. The one marking system in that network still legible to four men crawling through a smoke attack was legible by accident, because of a habit with no reason attached to it, handed down by people who had never been in one and were not thinking about one.

We came out of it at 12:50 into a gallery with clean air coming down it.

We had passed nine junctions and we had read all nine.

We were three.

I do not know when.

That is all of it and that is what I have, and I have spent four days on it, and I am going to write down exactly what the arrangement was, because the arrangement is the reason and there is nothing wrong with the arrangement.

When you move in smoke you move in contact. Single file, and each man puts a hand on the ankle of the man in front of him. That is how it is done. It is how it has been done by everybody who has ever had to do it, in mines and in fires and in that place, and it works, and you can hold a line of men together through anything.

The man at the front is chosen because he can navigate.

The man at the back is chosen because he is the most experienced. The back is where you can see the whole line. The back is where you pick up anything that comes loose. The back is where a man can get to anybody.

And the man at the back is the only man in the line that nobody is holding.

Everybody else has a hand on their ankle. The rear does not. The rear has his hand on the ankle in front of him, and behind him there is nothing, and that is not an oversight. That is what the back of a line is. There is no other way to make a line.

Rafe was at the front because Rafe was taking Sam’s calls. Sam was second. I was third.

I need to be accurate about what a hand on your ankle actually is.

It is not a hand on your ankle. You are wearing a boot to mid calf and a boiler suit over the top of it, and a man behind you in the dark does not find skin and would not want to. What he takes is a fistful of the fabric at the back of your leg, and what you feel, through a boot and two layers, is not contact. It is a drag. There is a slight constant pull on your trouser leg, the way there is when the cuff has caught on something, and you stop noticing it inside about a minute because it is the most ignorable sensation a body can produce.

I felt it at the fourth junction. I remember it because the grip had gone lower, onto the boot itself, and I remember thinking that he had found a better hold.

I did not feel it when we came out.

I cannot tell you one single thing about the twenty six minutes in between.

You do not feel an absence. That is the only useful thing I have and I am giving it to whoever reads this. You feel a hand, and then later your attention arrives somewhere and finds nothing there, and the nothing does not have a time on it. Cloth going slack is not an event. It is the end of a sensation you had already stopped having.

I have been asked whether I counted. I did not count. Nobody counts. You are four men in a line and you know how many of you there are the way you know how many hands you have.

I was not negligent. I want that written down by me, in my own document, in the place where I write true things, because I have been told it by three people and by one professional and I have not yet been able to believe any of them.

I was on my stomach in a smoke attack under a city where I do not speak the language, in the correct formation, doing the correct thing, and I did not notice a grip come off my trouser leg.

We did the things you do.

We went back thirty metres into it and came out again. We did that twice. We shouted, and shouting in that is worse than useless because you have to breathe in first, and we found that out in about four seconds.

We stayed at that junction for fifty five minutes. We did not go back in a third time, and the decision not to go back in a third time was mine. Sam agreed with it. Rafe did not, and then did.

I want to put down the thing about the smoke that I did not understand until the seventeenth, when a man from the fire brigade explained to me, kindly, over a table, what the burn pattern in that gallery did and did not establish.

Nobody saw anybody.

We never saw a person, a light, a bag, a face, a shoe. We heard nothing that was not us. The smoke came from somewhere behind and to the left and went where the air took it, and it was in a place where people go, on a Saturday night, and there were at least six other people in that network that we know about because we met four of them and heard two.

It might have been for us.

It might have been for somebody else entirely, forty minutes before we walked into it.

It might not have been for anybody. Things burn down there. People take candles into a place with no ventilation to speak of and sometimes a bag goes up and sometimes it is a generator and sometimes it is nothing at all and a man walks away from it not knowing.

There is no way to find out. There is nothing to examine. It is the largest mark anybody made in the whole of those two days, it filled a kilometre of gallery, and it does not carry a hand, and it does not carry a reason, and it is exactly as unreadable as everything else on those walls.

I have spent four days deciding what somebody meant by it, and there is no somebody, or there is, and the two cases are the same case from in here.

Then we went to the water, because that was the arrangement.

He had given it to us on the first night in front of the painting, in the middle of a completely different conversation, in about eleven words, the way you tell a person where the fire exit is.

If we get split, go to the water and wait. Do not look for each other. Looking for each other is how one problem becomes two.

It is correct. It is what every rescue organisation on earth will tell you. It is the hardest thing I have ever done.

We got there at 14:20.

It is a puddle.

She was right. Her cousin was right. Everybody who has ever been disappointed by it was right. It is a dip in the floor of a low chamber, roughly two metres by one and a bit, maybe fifteen centimetres at the deepest, and the water in it is the same water that is everywhere down there, and there is a ledge along one side that people have sat on long enough to polish.

There are things around it. Not offerings. Leavings. Candle stubs, a great many, in the drifts you get where people have sat in the same three places for years. Cups. A chipped enamel mug with a blue rim that has been there long enough that people have started putting other things inside it. Coins, which is a habit that has come down there from somewhere else and does not belong. Two photographs, face down, which we did not turn over, and I am glad of that.

And names.

They are scratched, not painted, small, and they are low. They are down near the water line, and to put one there you would have to lie along the ledge on your side with your face about twenty centimetres from the surface and work with your hand at a bad angle in your own light.

Some of them are under the water.

Not many. There is a band of them, four or five centimetres of it, that you can see perfectly well through fifteen centimetres of very clear water and cannot touch. In a dry year you would be able to read those and not the ones I was reading. In a wet year mine would be under and theirs would be higher up and somebody would be lying on that ledge wondering who had been here.

Nobody has ever seen all of those names at once either.

We sat on the ledge and we waited.

I am not going to be able to convey the waiting, so I will put down the shape of it. Three hours and fifty minutes. We turned the lights off for most of it because of the batteries and because after a while you want them off. We did not talk much for the first two hours and then we talked a great deal.

At some point in the fourth hour Rafe said we should do it.

I want to be accurate about this because it is the thing I am least able to look at. He did not say it as a suggestion and nobody argued. Sam said all right. I said all right. Nobody made a speech and nobody said anything about it meaning anything, and we did not do one of the things we had been saying for two years that we were going to do. Rafe had the speaker in his bag. It stayed in his bag.

We had come four hundred and forty kilometres and two years for this and we did it in about four minutes, in the dark, with a man missing, because there was nothing else to do with our hands.

You drink it. That is all it is. You use the mug or you use your own cup and you take about a mouthful and a half and it tastes of the stone and slightly of tin and mostly of nothing at all.

This section is not going to describe what happened next.

I have tried four times. I am not withholding it. I have genuinely written four attempts and read them back, and they are embarrassing, and the reason they are embarrassing is that everything I can find to say about it would be equally true of a very good dream, and I am not prepared to put a sentence in this document that is also true of a dream.

So I am going to put down one fact about it, which is a fact and not an impression, and then move on.

At some stage the three of us had a conversation. It went on a long time. All three of us remember it in detail, all three of us think it was the most important conversation of our lives, and we have been over it since, in a hotel room and then twice on the phone.

We agree on almost all of the content.

We do not agree on who said any of it.

Not one line. Not a single line has the same speaker in all three accounts, and where two of us agree the third is certain, and the certainty is identical in all three of us, and none of us is lying and none of us is confused about anything else that happened that day. Rafe can tell you what the ledge felt like. Sam can tell you the time to the minute.

And the three of us are holding three versions of one conversation, in which each of us said things that one of the others is equally sure he said himself.

I do not have anything to add to that. It is the only thing that came out of that room that survives being written down, and it is not the thing I would have chosen.

We came up at 19:05 on the fifteenth, through a different exit, because the one we came in by is a climb and Rafe’s hand was not going to do it.

The street was a street. There was a bin. There was a woman further up getting a pushchair over the kerb, and Sam went and helped her without breaking stride, and she said something to him and he said pardon, and that was us back.

11 · INJURIES

Record all injuries sustained, the treatment given, and the person by whom the treatment was administered.

R. Dunn. Laceration to the left hand, approximately 40mm, at the base of the thumb. Sustained in the smoke, on the floor, on something none of us ever saw. Cleaned and closed with steri-strips from kit 1, at the water, by me. Seen at a pharmacy on the sixteenth. Four sutures, no tendon involvement. He is right handed, it is his left, he has been extremely lucky and he knows it.

S. Vale. Contusion, left knee, extensive. Fell at the ninth junction. Walked out on it. No fracture.

N. Hallam. Two ribs, cracked and not broken, going through the chatière at speed. I did not know until the sixteenth, because you do not, apparently, until you sleep.

Smoke inhalation, all three. Coughing for four days, black in it for two. Seen on the seventeenth. Chest clear, no treatment, told to come back if anything changed.

Kit 1 used. Kit 2 was in the bag that Clef was carrying.

There is a fourth person who was on this trip and he is not recorded in this section.

I left it blank for four days and I told myself that was because I could not face it, and that was not true, or it was true and it was not the reason.

The reason is that this section is called INJURIES. It asks what the injury was, and how severe it was, and what treatment was given, and by whom. There is nothing I can put in any of those columns about him, because an injury is a fact about a body that somebody has looked at.

I know what happened to Rafe’s hand. I can give it to you in millimetres.

That is the whole of what this document is able to hold about the four of us, and it holds it in that proportion, and I am leaving the proportion where anybody can see it, because the proportion is the truest thing on this page.

18 · COMPETENCE OF PERSONS

State the names of all persons engaged in the works, together with their relevant competence.

I went to the police on the morning of the sixteenth with Rafe. Sam came later because he had to find somewhere to leave the anemometer.

They were good. I want that recorded because I did not expect it and because there is a version of this that people would rather hear, in which nobody cared, and it is not what happened. The man who dealt with us took an hour and ten minutes over it, and was patient, and did not once suggest we should not have been down there, which he would have been entitled to do.

He asked me the name.

I said Clef.

He asked me the name.

I said that was what we had been told and that I understood it was not a real one, and he put his pen down, not unkindly, and said that he was going to need something else.

I sat there and went through everything I had.

I do not know his surname. I do not know his first name. I do not know which city he lives in and it may not be Paris. I do not know his age beyond a guess. I have no phone number, because the arrangement went through a man Rafe knows in Lyon who was paid in cash and who has now told us twice that he has nothing either, and I believe him.

I have nine photographs. All in a boiler suit, three with a helmet, all underground, all in bad light. Two show his face properly.

I gave them the photographs. I gave them section 13(e), which is the only part of this document that is any use to anybody, and which is a list of streets.

Then the man asked the question he had to ask, which was whether I had any reason to believe that this person had not simply gone home.

I did not.

I still do not.

Nobody has reported him missing, because nobody knows who he is. If there is a family, they have not connected an absence to a night in a quarry. He is not a missing person. He is not anything. There is no document anywhere in the world with his name on it that is waiting for him not to come back, and I have now put more of him on paper than exists in any other place, and what I have put on paper is a made up word, nine photographs, and a list of the streets I was standing under while he was doing whatever he was doing.

I have spoken to six people from down there since the sixteenth. Two in person, four through Rafe and through the man in Lyon and through the woman with the English, who we found again, and who was kind, and who cried.

Every one of them has told me the same thing, which is that he does this.

That he goes quiet. That he did it in 2019 for four months. That he has come out of worse than this and told nobody. That somebody saw him in Lille, or has a friend who did. That this is what he is like, and that we should not do anything stupid, and that he will turn up.

It is the kindest thing anybody has said to me in a fortnight and I have held onto it with both hands.

On the eighteenth I asked the woman where she had heard it, because she had said it in the same words as one of the men. She said from Piston.

I asked one of the others later and he said he had it from her.

I asked Piston, through two people, and Piston said that everybody knows it.

I stopped after that. I am not going to be the man who takes apart the only comfort four kind people have been able to give him, and I want it on this page that I know exactly what I have just described and that I have decided to believe it anyway.

I would also like to record, under a heading that asks about relevant competence, that he had twenty years and no certificate of any kind. That everything he knew he had from somebody who had it from somebody. That he had never verified a single piece of it against anything, and was right about all of it as far as I am able to tell. And that he handed a decision to a man with an anemometer inside forty seconds, because he could tell the difference between what he knew and what he had been told, and I have met perhaps two people in my working life who can do that.

19 · MONITORING AND REVIEW

State the arrangements for reviewing this method statement, and the circumstances under which it will be revised.

Clef was carrying the camera. It went with him.

I went a long way down the road of what would be on it before I turned round.

Four hours of the first night and most of the second. The tooling change, lit properly, raked, at a resolution I could go into. All eleven of the whites, close, clean, in his light, which was better than ours. The ninth, and the run of paint down its shoulder.

And on the sixteenth, in the hotel, I worked out what I would have been able to establish with all of it, and the answer is nothing.

A photograph of a mark tells you the mark is there. That is the entire content. It does not tell you who put it there, or when, or whether the man who put it there got out, and those are the only three things anybody down there has ever needed to know. I could have had that footage in ultra high definition on a large screen with a colourist sitting next to me and I would have been looking at a picture of some paint.

It records what was there. It does not record whether any of it was true.

What I have instead, on my own phone, is forty one photographs of blue enamel plaques, which are the most accurate objects in the quarries, and which between them tell me precisely where I was at every hour of both nights, and every one of which was put there by somebody who wanted a man in the dark to always know what he was underneath.

20 · SIGN-OFF AND BRIEFING RECORD

The persons named below have received a briefing on the contents of this method statement, have had the opportunity to raise questions, and confirm by their signature that they understand the hazards identified and the control measures required.

Name	Role	Signature	Date
N. Hallam	prepared this	N. Hallam	19.03
S. Vale		S. Vale	19.03
R. Dunn		R. Dunn	19.03
	guide

He briefed us.

He briefed us on the ladder, and on the water, and on what to do with our lights, and on going to the water and not looking for each other. He did all of it in ones and twos while walking, in a second language, without once making any of us feel stupid. Every hazard he named came up. Every control he gave us worked.

We briefed him on nothing.

There was one hazard in that place that nobody named. It is not in section nine and I have already written down why it is not in section nine, and it is the only one that happened.

I have left his row in because the row is the record. A briefing record with three rows would be a document about three men going into a quarry.

Four men went in.

I do not have anything to put in the first column.

Distribution: whoever comes next.

I have read this through twice. It is longer than it should be, about a third of it is not method statement content, and I know which third.

If you are holding this, you have it from somebody, and they had it from somebody, and at some point in that chain it came from me. I have tried to be accurate. I was there and I was awake for all of it and I have checked what I could check.

You should know that I have checked almost none of it, that the parts I am most confident about are the parts I was told, and that I have no way of showing you which of these pages is which.

Go to the water. Do not look for each other.