I’m in my camping chair, propped at the lip of the hole. So deep now it’s like I’m near the edge of a small cliff. Step off the grass, and it’s a six feet drop into the dark brown earth, and my husband is down there, sweating, continuing to dig.
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At the start, I would call down to him to see if there was anything he wanted or needed, but I’ve learnt better by this point, three weeks in. I know that when he’s in his hole he cannot hear me, or does not, so I don’t bother trying to speak to him. He’s too engrossed in the project, too involved in the shovelling of soil.
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It would make more sense if Andy had been interested in digging, or any kind of DIY, before he began his tunnel, but he wasn’t, not at all. In fact my sister used to make a joke of his incompetence: Handy Andy strikes again, she giggled, when I rang to tell her about how he’d spent a whole afternoon swearing at flat pack, or when he accidentally bludgeoned his thumb with a hammer and had to have it in plaster for a month. He was very much not the kind of man who’d start digging and not stop, but then again, I don’t know. Maybe he’s a different man than the one I thought he was.
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Andy began his hole on the first day of lockdown. As soon as Boris made the announcement, he went out to the shed, fought through the cobwebs, and grabbed his tools. At first, when I asked, he said he wanted to do some gardening, and I thought he meant planting some flowers. I was pleased. I had visions of colour and growing things, a patch of tomatoes and runner beans from which we’d pluck to make our own salads. We could build a deck and drink cocktails on it as the sun went down.
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I thought it was a good thing, when he started digging, and it kept him busy. He’s always been a worrier, so I was glad that he had some focus, especially when he was furloughed and all the structure bled out from our lives in one long gush.
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That first day I was in the spare room, trying to download Zoom on my laptop. I didn’t realise that he was still out in the garden until later that night, when I was cooking and realised that he hadn’t come back in.
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I walked out and was shocked. The hole wasn’t even that deep at that point, but it was already up to his waist. He looked like a gopher, peering out, like even he was surprised.
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Babe, I said, what’s going on?
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But he didn’t really say anything.
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Dinner’s ready, I said, and he jumped out of the pit, and came, dazed, inside to the kitchen.
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The next morning I woke up, and he wasn’t in bed next to me. There was an absence where he’d been. I thought he must be downstairs, having breakfast, maybe even making some for me too. I had a shower and took my time getting changed, but there were no eggs or bacon on the table, and no Andy sitting at it either.
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I checked in the living room, and the bathroom. I couldn’t find him. And then I walked out into the garden, and there he was: the chasm was bigger again. He was up to his neck already, and there were molehills of dirt all around his head.
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He didn’t look up when I came out, or when I spoke to him. He just kept going—down, down, down. When I realised he wasn’t responding at all, I stood on the grass, breathing, my arms hanging by my sides. And then I returned to the house.
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I was going to call Anaïs, but I thought she’d laugh at Handy Andy again, and I couldn’t decide if I wanted that. I couldn’t decide if I wanted to take it seriously or not. I looked out the window: he was in a trance, sleepwalking while awake.
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I rang Lee, his best mate since school.
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Lee, I said, it’s me. Andy’s being weird. He’s digging a big hole.
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What do you mean “big hole”? Lee asked.
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So I sent him a photo. He sent a wow react.
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That is a big hole, he texted. But he didn’t seem worried.
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Andy’s Andy, he said. He’s like a dog with a bone sometimes.
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I looked out. He’d given up on the shovel for a while, and had started to dig with his hands, filling his palms with earth and throwing it up to the side.
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Yeah, I texted. You’re probably right. Thanks, Lee.
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Andy stayed in that hole all day. It swallowed him by night-time, and he didn’t stop for the dark. Because I’d tried, and he hadn’t listened to me, and because of what Lee said, I thought I’d leave him to it. Let him get it out of his system. I tried not to mind that my garden was being devoured—swallowed up, and spat back out.
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We can sort it, I thought. Maybe we could put in a water feature.
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I got back to work, and it felt good. It felt like my own version of being in control. I could ignore the death toll for a while, and immerse myself in something else. It was no different from what Andy was doing, I told myself. Just a more socially acceptable version.
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I logged off and made dinner again, but this time Andy wouldn’t come in when I told him it was ready. He wouldn’t listen to me at all. So I left a plate for him in the microwave and ate alone, with a big glass of wine, and then I cleared up and got ready for bed, and he was still digging by the time I got under the covers. I could hear the crunch of the uprooting, the rhythm of it, like white noise. And I didn’t know if he did eventually come in, because the next morning he still wasn’t beside me, and the white noise continued. It bleached everything.
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It’s a trauma response, Anaïs said, when I did finally speak to her. She didn’t laugh when I told her all the details. I don’t know if that made it better or worse.
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She said, We’re all in this very scary, unprecedented situation. It’s a fucking plague, Corinne. (She always had a flair for the dramatic). It’s natural that people will behave in odd ways.
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Are you behaving in an odd way? I asked her.
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When have you ever known me not to? she said, and I conceded the point.
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I went online and Googled it. Apparently it was A Thing: I found lots of articles about how to discourage the behaviour in dogs, but then also a Reddit thread with a woman talking about her boyfriend who was also compulsively digging in the back garden. Apparently it’s called hobby tunnelling.
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A British civil engineer called William Lyttle spent forty years digging; Austrian Michael Altmann only stopped, after fifty years and 590ft, when he reached a block of granite. An urban legend said that an Irishman had dug a tunnel from his bedroom to the pub, unbeknownst to his wife, using only a spoon. I hoped that Andy wouldn’t be that bad, but it was a relief to read of others.
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Okay, I thought, it’s bad. And it’s a pain. But at least it’s not unprecedented!
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It was a much bigger comfort than I expected, to know that a precedent existed.
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I then, ironically, went down a rabbit hole: the California Gold Rush of 1848; JR Ewing, and oil rigs; Basil Brown and Edith Pretty, the excavation of Sutton Hoo.
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Maybe it will be a good thing. Maybe Andy will find something beneath our garden: ores, an Anglo-Saxon hoard. Prehistoric fossils. We might be rich and famous.
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It made me smile, the thought.
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I stopped smiling when, for a whole week, Andy dug twenty four seven, and froze me out. He wouldn’t speak, even to me. But I guess I was the only one he could speak to, if he wanted to. We were locked down—grounded. It was only he and I, and the crater he was building.
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Is it a tunnel? I asked him, when he started to dig horizontally.
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No answer. Perhaps it was a stupid question.
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Are you trying to go somewhere?
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I remembered being a child, and the stories people would tell about the possibility of digging right through the earth to Australia; of starting off in drizzly Cardiff and ending up in Brisbane, with the surfers and wallabies and red rocks. Or was it China? Ending up, suddenly, stood on the Great Wall?
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Are you trying to get to the Great Wall? I said, but Andy didn’t stop.
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He was a Great Wall to whom I was speaking. To him I wasn’t even there.
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There was a time, I think, when Andy and I were madly in love. We met at university, when we were both reading Foucault and telling ourselves we understood it. We would chat for hours about literature and politics and modern art, and the State Of The Nation, and then we would have sex in the afternoon, again and again, until we wondered if we’d get noise complaints.
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And then we graduated, and lived in a flat in Cathays, pretending to be grown-ups. He asked me to marry him with a fortune cookie, which was meant to be ironic. I said yes anyway, unironically. Anaïs was my maid of honour, and Lee, as Andy’s best man, made a speech about him losing his virginity to a dinner lady, and we all laughed, even Andy, as he cringed.
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And then we bought this house, and eight years went by, and we couldn’t have children. Andy’s dad died. I lost my job and got depressed, then got another job. I wanted a dog but Andy wouldn’t have one. He claimed to be allergic. We stopped having sex. I wondered if, when he wanked, he thought less about me than about dinner ladies.
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He felt far away, even before the digging.
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One evening, as we were planning Andy’s surprise birthday party, Lee and I got very close, and he fucked me on his kitchen floor. I worried I’d end up pregnant, but it turned out that, as far as fertility was concerned, I’d been the problem all along.
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I went back to Lee’s the next night, and the next, and said to Andy I was working overtime. Reports were just coming through about a new virus in Wuhan.
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And then, before I knew it, we were stuck, and Andy was reaching for his shovel.
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Do you think it’s because of us? Lee messaged me, when I mentioned the digging. Do you think he knows?
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No, I said, but it had occurred to me.
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For a brief, chilly moment, I wondered if he was making a grave. But that was just the Anaïs in me coming through. Andy wouldn’t do that, even if he knew. But then, like I say, I don’t know how well I know him.
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He likes puns, and Van Halen. He likes an egg and cress sandwich and an IPA (but not together). He couldn’t cry when his dad died, and thought that made him a bad person. His mother gave him bowl cuts as a child, and that’s why he doesn’t like looking at old photos. He is, as Lee said, obsessive: he loves a passing fad. There’s a set of golf clubs in the shed, next to the lawnmower, which got used every day for two weeks then never again. But I didn’t expect this.
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Sitting on the camping chair, looking down into his hole, I can see him sweating, but not stopping to wipe his brow. There is so much concentration, so much focus, like I’ve never seen in him before. So much drive. There is, in the lines of his face, the light of his eyes, turned down to the ground, a kind of animal need. I think there was a time when he looked at me like that.
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Look at me, Andy, please, I said during the second week of digging, when the hole was a canyon. And he wouldn’t.
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He looked like he was looking for something. Not golden nuggets, or coins, or oil wells, but something else. Something huge and vague and always just ahead, always just beyond his grasp, and he couldn’t stop until he found it, even if he never did.
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Andy is a lapsed Catholic. Perhaps for years he’s been in training for this.
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Last night I was sitting at the edge of the hole. I’d had a few glasses of wine. The bottle to myself. Andy was digging, and as the sky turned pink, then orange, then blue, then black, I drank, and wrapped myself in a jacket, then drank. Everyone I knew was getting ill, and I missed them all. I missed them something physical.
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I couldn’t see Andy anymore. He was just the sound of grunting and shovelling, so God knows what he could see, if anything, down in his hole. Nose to the grindstone, the coalface.
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I want out, I said, and he kept going.
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Andy, I said. I had sex with Lee. We were planning you a party, which you obviously can’t have anymore, and then we started fucking in his kitchen. I enjoyed it so much, and I hate myself. I am a liar and a cunt and I don’t deserve you. I thought I didn’t want this life we have. I’m still not sure I do. I just thought there would be more to it, you know? I didn’t think it would be as small as this, all the emails and bin days and too-fast years all rushing by. I’ll quite often think, what’s the point, what’s the point of all this effort, and it never gets easier, never ever.
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I thought Andy had stopped for a second, in the dark, in the garden.
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But he didn’t. He just kept tunnelling.
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Now I’m in my camping chair, propped at the lip of the hole. So deep now it’s like I’m near the edge of a small cliff. My husband is down there, sweating. I don’t call down, or wave. He won’t hear or see me. He occasionally sends up soil in a spray, which used to bother me, but doesn’t anymore.
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It has been three weeks, or maybe even longer, but I don’t suppose it matters. He will stop when he needs to, when he’s reached his limit.
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This is as low as I’ll go, he’ll say. And then he’ll climb out of his hole, and talk to me.
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I’ll wait for it; I don’t mind waiting for it.
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I’ve nowhere better to be.

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Brennig Davies was the winner of the inaugural BBC Young Writers Award in 2015 and the Crown at the Urdd Eisteddfod 2019, and was shortlisted for the Rhys Davies Short Story Award 2021. His work has appeared in Poetry Wales, Litro USA, and a number of anthologies, including The Mays and No Place Like Home (Macmillan, 2022).

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