They rode to the train station on their bikes and over the concourse through unamused looks to the ticket machines where they each bought a return, which the barriers swallowed and spewed back out to let them through.
The platform for the local stops was tucked away from the mainline. A single track, with two rails smoothed syrupy and golden, and between them slender-necked weeds growing out of the grey ballast between the sleepers. Pigeons shuttled back and forth across the wooden struts in the eaves above them, cooing as they went. Wary of the smack of bird shit on the platform, they walked further down and found a bench and sat soaking up the sun, staring through orange lids.
‘We could go anywhere we wanted,’ said Bennett with a mouth full of salt and vinegar crisps.
‘We could.’
The two boys stepped off the train with their ears ringing because all the windows had been open. Even so, the carriage had still felt like an oven.
The platform was made of plain concrete with its edge striped yellow. There wasn’t even a bench. Daniel watched the two carriages disappear round the bend in the track, listening until he could hear nothing except for the birds and the breeze in the trees.
When he turned round, Bennett was waiting patiently. ‘Are you OK?’
‘Yeah,’ said Daniel.
‘It’s just a day trip.’ Bennett held up his ticket. ‘We’ve already paid to go back.’
Daniel felt for his own ticket in his pocket too and then nodded.
The lane wound between high hedges. Daniel stopped every now and then to get his bearings, boosting himself up on to his tiptoes as he stood on gates and stiles. Each time he stopped and thought about going back, he looked at Bennett, saying nothing, until the moment passed.
Once, standing on a five-bar gate, he watched a blue car on the horizon wending its way along the road in the shimmering distance until it disappeared behind the curve of a hill. He was about to turn round when the car reappeared, beetling back the other way. Daniel watched it, sunbeams strobing off the wing mirrors, until it vanished again, as if swallowed into the ground.
He jumped down quickly, as hard as he could, to reassure himself how firm the lane felt beneath his trainers, before they continued cycling.
‘Over there,’ said Daniel, pointing across a sea of wheat to a meadow and the woods beside it. The boys heaved their bikes up and over the gate and walked down a bumpy tractor channel, the wheat hissing all around them, until they emerged from the field on to the grass.
Daniel remembered how the skyline had looked in the dark when he had crawled his way out of the ground, and wiped a film of sweat from his brow. Before he could turn round and say anything, Bennett was pedalling past him, waving him on, ringing his bell as loud as he could. And Daniel followed him, scared of being left on his own with his thoughts.
The opening to the tunnel was canted at an angle of about forty-five degrees, as if the ground had found a mouth to open in an ‘O’ and gawp in wonder at the sky. It was cool and filled with shadow as the sun beat down.
Wooden posts had been hammered into the ground in a rickety circle all round the tunnel entrance, and up over the grassy hump that rose behind it and down the sides, and were strung with bands of new barbed wire. Lying on the ground were little bouquets of faded wild flowers with notes attached. Letters and cards had been tacked to the fence posts and some were hooked to the barbs on the wire.
‘You’ve turned this place into a shrine,’ said Bennett as he scanned a letter asking for someone’s daughter to be cured of cancer. Before dumping his bike down, Bennett detached the headlight and then hitched himself up over the wire, ignoring the wooden sign telling him to KEEP OUT in red painted letters. He took the few steps across the grass on the other side and crouched by the entrance, staring into the tunnel.
‘It’s just a hole in the ground, Dan,’ he said matter-of-factly. ‘And you know what’s down there anyway.’ He crept on through, picking his way round the boulders and rocks scattered inside the opening, and vanished.
Daniel stood listening to Bennett’s shoes slipping and sliding until there was just the grass prickling beneath his feet and the wind in the wire and the sign knocking gently. He raised his arms and waited for the goose-bumps to melt in the sun. Then he climbed over the fence and edged carefully towards the tunnel.
The sound of the waterfall was just audible above his breathing.
He remembered how cold the water had been.
He peered into the cool dark mouth of the tunnel, watching the crown of Bennett’s head bobbing below him. His friend was already halfway down before Daniel started to follow.