Common Ground by Rob Cowen

Author:Rob Cowen
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781473506541
Publisher: Random House

THE TURNING TIME

It was just after dawn when I broke into Bachelor Gardens Sewage Works. To my surprise, no alarms rang. There were no security guards, no flashing lights or sirens cutting through the muggy air. You’d think that in our surveillance-swept world I’d have triggered something, somewhere. At least, I thought so; so I waited a while, my legs crawling and burning with nettle stings, bracing myself for the inevitable detection, rehearsing the words to talk my way out of arrest. Minutes passed in half-light; the pain intensified; nothing happened. The metal doors in the spectral floodlit buildings and sheds remained shut. No one yelled at me from the shadowy tanks or the gangways running between rust-streaked vats and water channels. There was just that simultaneous hum and whine of machinery I’d heard so many times from the other side of the fence, now louder and accompanied by the muddy brew of human waste and chemicals rising from filtration beds.

My thoughts turned to escape, for this was not a deliberate act – who in their right mind breaks into a sewage farm? Rather it was the result of a wandering mind and some (in hindsight) ill-advised off-the-beaten-track running. The baby kicking and turning inside Rosie had been giving her restless nights. I’d risen early to let her spread out across the bed and to try to shake off the shackles of too-little sleep. Approaching the edge-land from a new direction, east, through an unexplored labyrinth of cul-de-sacs and estate roads, I chanced on an unruly doorway of tree and shrub leading down to a little river. I ignored a path looping back and, instead, plunged on, running along the water’s side through chest-high vegetation to where I hoped the beck might link up with the Nidd further on. Then, suddenly, my legs were on fire. Nettles concealed in the hogweed and jungle-dense Himalayan balsam had ambushed me. Flailing, flaying, angry leaves waited for the slightest movement to inflict new wounds, but the closest shore in this sea of stings lay ahead and I leaped for it like a triple jumper, hardly noticing the ramshackle wall or the collapsed curtain of fence and old wire. Hardly noticing, that is, until I’d climbed over and pushed through and by then it was too late anyway. I was trapped in this otherworldly facility.

No one was coming. That was clear. So I searched for another way out, one that might spare my legs a second lashing. The perimeter was locked-down; all high walls and sturdy mesh topped with barbed wire. The main gate was chained and its sign graffiti-scrawled: ‘The Smokers Yard’, sprayed in blood-red paint with a scattering of roach ends and cider cans to illustrate the point. Almost willing to be discovered, I headed back to where I’d broken in, but via a different route, a small road that wound between the conglomerations of barrack-style buildings and choppy brown lagoons, past surreally idyllic stands of Scots pine and triangles of mown lawn.

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