Sheila Armstrong

Sump
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Oweynamo, the farmer calls it. The cow cave.
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The rest of the description is a mime: a cow trotting along, the ground suddenly disappearing beneath it. A snapping motion, as if the farmer is breaking a twig between his two hands; whether the snap is a leg or a spine does not seem clear. Then: rain, in tumbling showers traced down by his fingers, knuckles jostling like the black keys of a piano. A scrabble of hooved forelegs against a vertical slope. Finally, the farmer makes a sharp slash across his neck, sealing and resealing his throat in a wet approximation of drowning.
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Teddy is annoyed by this performance. The path from the lodge to Oweynamo runs alongside the old man’s fields, so there is no avoiding him. The tumbledown boundary wall sags in places, and the farmer is perpetually repairing it, forcing the same stones back into the gaps they have vacated. But no animal of his has ever been lost in the cave, as far as Teddy knows, despite the weakened wall. Two cows are watching the small crowd now, with thick, broad-black faces. The tourists, helmeted and itching in rental wetsuits, look back. They think about bones snapping. The terrified bellows. The agony of drowning, upright, facing the stars. One cow flicks its head from side to side and grass-flecked spittle smears silver across the brow of its companion.
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Teddy leads the tourists away in horrified silence. He considers telling them that it is just a story, that if it happened, it happened years ago, in the farmer’s grandfather’s time, long before the Irish name, Uaimh na mBó, smudged into a lilting anglicisation. That the cow cave is safe, as safe as the adventure lodge where they are sleeping in orderly lines of wire-framed bunkbeds. But he is bored of easing their every discomfort: doling out concentrated DEET to fight the West-of-Ireland midges, providing plasters for chafing hiking boots, explaining that the unearthly night-screams are not murder victims, rather vixens in search of a mate. Then there are the lesser distresses: an intolerance to gluten, a preference for two pillows over one, a toilet clogged with a red-purple tampon, swollen with shit-water until he cannot imagine it fitting between any woman’s legs.
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The guests come in big and small groups – hen parties and stags, birthdays and corporate retreats – rattling through the hills in an ancient minibus from the larger town of Westport fifty kilometres away. The lodge is advertised as Connemara’s premier adventure hub: from there, they can bungee jump into a glacial wound of a valley, whitewater raft along a horseshoe river, or explore Oweynamo, the cow cave, a karst limestone cavern stretching almost a kilometre into the meat of a mountain. The booking requires some caving experience, with specific dates and locations, but the company does not check to confirm this: everybody lies. The waiver forms are lengthy and absolve the owners of everything from bruises to a slow, painful death, alone in the dark.
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*

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Further along the rocky path, wall, farmer and cows disappear as the ground drops suddenly down, along with the near-constant wind. It is clear to Teddy why the cows come here for shelter in a storm, to dully stare as the rivulets of water merge and become streams, until the gorge fills and the mineral-dark water reaches their knees. The downslope ends at a jutted lip of sandstone that covers the entrance to Oweynamo. A knotted rope is chained to the wall, slinks along the overhang, then disappears into the gap below. It is here where the cows fall – if there is any truth to the stories – a slit that narrows then widens again into a cave mouth, currently knee-high in water. Heavy rainfall and it fills entirely, until the black pool is level with the roof of the overhang.
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The tourists clamber down one by one, using their hands to slow their descent, making jokes about beer bellies as they eye the tight bottleneck. They are awkward in their wetsuits: Teddy’s is lightweight, expensive and well-fitted, theirs sag at the knees and the thickness reduces movement to a wide-legged waddle. Two, a Japanese couple, dropped out when they saw the wetsuits lined up in a tangled row, the dented helmets and shake-to- work headtorches, the gear suggesting a harsher, more physical experience than the glossy website suggested: brightly lit images of stalactites and stalagmites, underground waterfalls and mudslides, people of all ages with cheerfully mucky faces.
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The rest of the group are now feeling what the Japanese couple felt, facing into the gouge in the earth. The thoughtful silence is broken by the deep mooing of a young man, whose friends consider this the funniest thing in the world.
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*
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Teddy is thirty-eight and has recently returned home after a vicious breakup that left him with bruised knuckles and a stranger’s ash-blonde hairs across his pillow. For the past six months, he has been back living with his mother in Westport, and his old classmates recognise him in the street. When he was a teenager, he had a job hosing down the wetsuits in the adventure lodge, and twenty years later the manager still remembered him. The position of guide was offered after he mentioned a few caving trips in Tenerife and exaggerated his attendance at a climbing gym during his time in in Copenhagen: everybody lies.
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Each day, he drives back to Westport in his mother’s ancient Peugeot. He has not moved back into his childhood bedroom – the symbolism would have suffocated him – instead into his younger sister’s room on the ground floor which had a half-hearted en suite installed when his father got sick. By the time the paint dried, his father had been too unwell to use it, and had instead spent three months in a grateful haze in a Dublin hospice.
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When Teddy first arrived home, with three self-help books, the sweat-rank clothes he was wearing, and an apologetic Toblerone from Copenhagen airport, he had decided that he too was dying. He believed this for various reasons: the sheer loudness of the birds outside his apartment every morning; the sandbag heaviness of his own limbs; the hateful sight of his ex-girlfriend’s toothbrush poking out from under the bathroom cabinet.
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His mother did not ask why her adult son had appeared on her doorstep after five years of intermittent silence, other than to check if he had become vegan, because she will not abide that nonsense in her house. His sister’s son is vegan, but she still includes bone broth in her cooking; the child is so thin she’d feed him the Lamb of God with a clear conscience.
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She is a ridiculous woman, Teddy thinks, full of sayings that mean worse than nothing, that give the appearance of sense but suggest the opposite. What’s for you won’t go past you: as if the passage of time were a tour bus, willing to pause at any point of significance. It’s not off the ground you licked it: implying some depths to her own personality that he has no interest in exploring. Time heals all wounds: but he fights the suture needle like a pain- snarled dog.
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*
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Teddy hunkers down on a crag to give his briefing. Beyond the cave mouth, the tunnel meanders through a series of flooded sumps until it ascends and opens out into a large, dry interior: the cave itself, full of glittering architecture and quiet freshwater pools. The knotted rope disappears into the passage and travels along the roof, rising to solid metal brackets at intervals. They must lie back in the water until they are floating, then follow the rope, head first, pulling themselves hand over hand to reach the higher ground just twenty metres beyond. The water levels fluctuate as the passage meanders: in places it will come up to their shoulders, their ears; in others it will kiss the ceiling entirely and they must hold their breath and follow the rope until they emerge out of the sump again. Teddy describes the route as a run of clogged toilet bends, a weak comparison, but it gets the usual laughs and dissolution of nerves.
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There are nine in this group, Teddy reminds himself, nine, not to be confused with yesterday’s eleven, or the five the day before, or the overbooked twenty-two from the Paddy’s Day weekend. Nine: he will count them on entry into the cave, again as they emerge into the interior, again at each bend and obstacle, again at the turning point, again at the exit, and lastly as they reemerge into the gorge. He counts heads by touch, ignoring the faces – they will soon be uniformly mud-smeared – seeking the reassuring hardness of a helmet under his gloved palm.
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He holds the rope and mimes climbing, each fist closing above the other and moving downwards in a slow, controlled motion. He makes each person copy him, pressing the rope into their hands one at a time to repeat the gesture. He has found that words are unreliable for this kind of communication, even if this particular group happen to speak the same language as him. Movement and repetition imprint themselves on the brain.
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*
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It came as a shock when he realised that the cosy telepathy of a long- term relationship had failed, that he was expected to talk to his girlfriend rather than transmit to her across an invisible wire. Each time he tried, the feelings felt too dense and fever-bright to contain in words: the cross- hatching layers of fear and dread and the simple act of existing took on a nauseating significance.
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The slide had been gradual, the movements familiar and well-practised. They still spoke cheerfully to each other every day, bickered over minor sins, took turns making meals and watering the plants. But early one morning, when she was snugged against his back for warmth in the chilly Danish spring, he woke and suddenly felt like a chloroformed captive stirring in the back of a cold, oil-slicked van. He could have easily slipped back into sleep, but instead he got up and splashed his face with cold water to cement this new alertness.
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From sanctuary of the toilet, he messaged his sister. He follows her Instagram and occasionally likes her posts, with a heart-faced smiley obscuring the features of her son. It has been so long since he saw his nephew, in truth, that his face could well have sprouted an outsized yellow mask. Although it was still an hour before first light, she replied quickly, as if to underline her moral standing as an early riser. Her message was a lengthy voice note, which he ignored, and a pastel graphic in a jaunty font: communication is the oxygen of any relationship. The profound stupidity and simultaneous truth of this statement made him tense his fists against the tiled wall, pressing until his knuckles turned white and he grew dizzy, until the stranger in his bed began to stir.
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This new, horrible clarity transformed his girlfriend into something uncanny, as if she were wearing the carapace of their past life together like a parasitic wasp. His nervous system flagged her as a threat, and the very sound of her keys in the door made his smartwatch send him reminders to meditate. He began to fantasise about her death in some tragic accident: the long period of mourning and pity and clasped hands; the slow healing that would mould him into a stronger, surer person, one who would emerge to take on the world again, untethered.
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When he tried to explain a diluted version of all this to her, every sentence seemed to come out wrong, written by a stranger and transposed onto his vocal cords. The arrogance of painting himself as a captive and her some crazed kidnapper was breathtaking – breathtaking, she told him. Still, she wanted to work on things, to try couples therapy, but her kindness made him spiral further. How dare she only be awful in small, human ways, compared to the putrid sloughing of his own skin.
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*
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From the crag, he explains to the tourists that he has already scouted the route and the water levels are good today, with only small stretches completely flooded. But a cave is a thing alive, expanding and contracting from the most minute changes in temperature, pressure, vibrations deep in the tectonic plates. He has learned, quickly, from the other guides, and now watches caving documentaries on his phone most nights. He impresses on them the dangers of panicking – a wide-eyed, hand-waving charade, followed by a sharp slash across his throat.
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Don’t act like a cow, man, he says, in the voice of Bart Simpson, and they chuckle.
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Finally, he tells them to watch as he demonstrates, sinking slowly into the inky water, flicking his headtorch on and lowering his goggles. The route through the flooded sumps should only take a minute, but time distends in the pockets of air that are refreshed through cracks in the limestone. Teddy has traversed the passage many times, sometimes without ever feeling the lapping close around his face, sometimes with five, ten long seconds between air pockets. If the timer on his watch beeps fifteen seconds before he finds a spot to surface, he will turn and make for the entrance, close off the cave for the day. The average person can hold their breath for sixty seconds, but a generous buffer is needed, for all the little panics that lurk in the dark.
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He feels for the VHF at his waist. The signal will be muted in the cave itself, most of the radio waves absorbed by the rock, and truthfully by the time those at the lodge realise there is a problem, it will be too late. But still, it is procedure that he checks in on entry and exit.
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Descending, he radios and is acknowledged.
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He clusters the tourists together and wraps their fingers around the knotted rope so they can track the thrum of his movement. Their eyes are dim below the lip of the helmets, but Teddy can sense the raptness of their attention. One flicks on a go-pro camera and trains it on his face.
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Wait, he tells the lens, one finger raised.
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*
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His mother’s favourite TV show involves a soft-spoken detective that solves crimes with the help of clairvoyant visions. They watch it together most evenings, over tea. His mother has reduced since his father’s death, subsisting almost entirely on toast and sliced Christmas ham from the freezer. Teddy usually eats with the guests at the lodge, from great vats of chips and sausages and spring rolls.
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The episodes usually boomerang between the investigation and the detective’s attempts to grapple with his unwanted power. There is usually a romantic interest, a witness or victim or expert, who is charmed by the detective’s self-deprecating nature. Teddy hates these parts of the episodes: dream-soft awakenings alongside another body, kisses that break down into laughter, moments of comfortable silence. But the show is sensible enough to shy away from the messy realities: anything more than innuendo ends in a carefully cut-away scene, and the detective is single again in the next series.
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In one slightly desperate episode in the sixteenth season, the detective travels into the past, and when he returns, the universe has filled with locust-like monsters. The special effects receive poor reviews, and the show is cancelled shortly after, when it is revealed that the lead actor has been soliciting foot pictures from interns on set. Not illegal, but distasteful enough to put off the core audience of Irish mothers and adult children in the middle of a nervous breakdown. Teddy breaks the news with glee, sending his mother headline after hysterical headline, hoping to shock her with his generation’s moral failings. But she is philosophical. All things on God’s earth are beautiful, she says, even feet.
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The dashed-together finale has the detective announce his retirement and engagement to a hitherto bit character, a wholesome blonde with a large chest who smiles at him beatifically from the background of the scene.
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When you are unhappy wherever you go, the common denominator is you, Teddy’s ex-girlfriend told him, with a cruelty so uncharacteristic as to be true.
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*
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After midnights, in shaded bars and at bright kitchen tables, Teddy will talk about Oweynamo. The story will change, depending on who he is telling.
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He might tell them how once, the cave seemed to inhale, tightening like a sphincter as he dove down from the last air pocket. The pressure was not cruel, just firm; the certainty of thousands of years of sediment settling into a new shape. How he was stuck there, the passage moulding itself to his shoulders, his waist, his hips, his arms pressed tightly to his torso as if he were swimming through the rock. He could hear his watch beep fifteen, thirty, forty-five seconds – he did not panic, but clamping down on terror is as exhausting as sprinting – until the cave finally sighed, the pressure falling slowly away, and he shoved off, bruising every part of his body in his scramble forwards.
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He might tell them about the time that a tourist stopped, right at the midway point. She refused to go forward or backwards, just clung to the rope, panting, her breaths too quick and gasping to allow the meagre scraps of oxygen to refill. He felt his own lungs becoming tight from the carbon dioxide build-up, even as he coaxed her: you are going to die if you stay here. Teddy thought of his mother, how she sat in front of the television and only seemed to spring to life when he came into the room, like a marionette left idle between performances. He wrapped his emergency line around the woman’s waist and clipped it to his own. He slapped her, with all the force he could muster while treading water, and the shock made her let go of the rope. He dove backwards, kicked off the ceiling and dragged her under with him, towing her back to the cave’s entrance. She surfaced, gasping, which quickly turned to spitting: despite the helmet, her face had scraped against the roof, shredding the skin on her cheek and jaw. Back on the ledge, she collapsed into great shuddering sobs, her husband screaming at Teddy for an explanation, an apology, that they were going to sue him for assault, for everything else under the sun. But if the woman ever made a complaint, it never made it to his ears.
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He might tell them how once, at the end of the tour, after the final three tugs on the rope had signalled the safe emergence of the final caver, he had paused at the entrance. The moonmilk calcite glittered in the light from his headtorch, and the walls seemed to ripple with the reflected texture of water. How he closed his eyes and listened. The thunk-thunk of his heart was punctuated by drips, a symphony that almost settled into a rhythm but was thrown off by droplets falling a half second slower or faster. How, over the creak and splash of rock and rainwater, he heard the lurching of drowned cows, searching for a way back to the surface; back to the farmer, forever rebuilding his wall.
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In all the tellings, one thing will stay the same: how the next day he went back to the cave, and did it all again, and the day after that, and the day after that.
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In the bar or around the kitchen table, his audience will shudder and refill their drinks. They will question the appeal of caving in the first place, why squeezing a soft human body into a tiny crack in the earth seems like a good idea. What madness makes a person look, not up to the open sky, but down, down where the moles burrow and the bats chitter and all other life is white, eyeless and as transparent as fingernails. What shared delusion sprouts web forums, WhatsApp groups, t-shirts with slogans like Craving That Caving or No Doubts In The Depths. Why scrabbling deeper and deeper into the soil commands such devotion.
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Some, if they are sober enough, will try psychoanalysis, using words like womb and umbilical and primal regression. Others will argue over toxic masculinity, suicidal ideation, the crushing malaise of modern society. There might be a person who praises the spirit of adventure, who bemoans the fact that the climbers of Everest and Kilimanjaro are famous, while those who plumb the greatest depths go nameless back into the surface world, blinded by the unfamiliar sun.
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If the party continues until faces turn from sepia back to full colour, until unslept hangovers begin to throb, when all that is left of the snacks is salted powder in the bottom of bowls, Teddy might try to explain.
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How one day, he lay curled in his duvet on the bathroom floor for hours, and when he could finally rouse himself, he tripped on a long-cold cup of tea his mother had set outside the bathroom door. How, for six months, his sister sent him a daily inspirational quote and tagged him in Instagram posts about self-care. How, after a casual chat one lunchtime, the kitchen lady at the lodge switched to serving the only brand of ketchup he likes. How an old hurling teammate saw him in the newsagents and hugged him three times in disbelief. How love and loving are not the same thing, but how lucky a life to have either.
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How the only way to clear a sump – that short bite of a word that mirrors the path of a flooded tunnel, of a life: the slide of an S, the broad U, the meandering M and the plug of the P – is to drain it, or blow it up.
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*
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Teddy emerges from the mouth of the cave, breathing heavily, and those waiting seem surprised to see him return so quickly, or at all.
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