legends · 4 min read ·
Headcount at the Quarry
Six friends swim in a flooded quarry and count seven heads in the water.
There were six of us when we climbed the fence at Hartley Quarry, and I know there were six because Dev counted, as Dev always counts, out loud, with a finger. Dev, Priya, Marcus, Joanne, Tom and me. It was the hottest day of the year and we were thirty-four years old and the quarry pool was a flooded black eye in the middle of a white chalk bowl, forbidden, fenced, with a sign about cold shock and drowning that had been shot at.
I will say how it looked, because that matters. The water was green near the edge and then, further out, a very deep blue that seemed to belong to another sky. The chalk cliffs went straight down into it. You could see the white walls continue below the surface for a long way, getting bluer, until they were lost. Someone had left a rope swing on a dead tree. Nobody wanted to touch it.
We swam. I want to be clear that it was lovely. The water was so cold it felt like a thing with edges, and then it felt like silk. We shouted. Tom did something stupid off the lower ledge. Joanne floated on her back with her eyes shut and said it was the best she had felt in a year.
About an hour in, Dev counted again, from the shore, because he had got out first and was sitting on a towel with a flask. He called out a number. Seven.
"Seven what?" said Priya.
"Heads," said Dev. "I've got seven heads in the water."
We laughed, and counted ourselves, treading water, in a ring. Five. Dev on the shore. Six. We said, you can't count yourself twice, you dill, and Dev counted again, slowly, pointing, and still said seven.
"Where?"
He pointed with his chin. "There. Out past the rope. By the cliff."
We looked. The water was empty and flat and blue. Nothing. Marcus said Dev had had too much sun. Priya said we should go in. Joanne was still on her back with her eyes shut, a little way out, and nobody had noticed that she had been drifting.
It was Tom who saw it first. Not a head. A shape under Joanne. A pale shape, a long way down, directly under her floating body, the colour of the chalk, as long as she was. It was not rising. It was mirroring her. Where her arms were out, its arms were out. Where she turned a little in the water, it turned.
"Joanne," Tom said. Very calm. "Come in now."
"Mm," she said.
I have wondered since why none of us shouted. I think that when the thing you are looking at is so plainly wrong, the body treats it as a manners problem. We did not want to be rude to it. Marcus swam out slowly and took her under the arms. It took him two attempts, because she was heavier than she should have been, as if a hand were holding her ankles lightly, and then he had her, and we were all going for the shore in a clumsy panic.
When Joanne opened her eyes she looked at us as though we were the ones who were strange.
"Did you see the other one?" she said. "She was lovely. She said I could stay."
We did not tell her that we had not heard anyone speak. We dressed at the top of the track, in a silence like a held breath, and Dev counted us one more time, at the fence, out loud, as he always does.
He got to six. Then he stopped. He was looking at the quarry over our shoulders.
"There were seven of us at the start," he said.
"No, there were six."
"No," he said. "Seven. I counted seven when we came in. And I kept counting seven, I just thought it was me counting myself." He said it very softly. "I thought you were all just quiet."
We looked at each other, and the odd thing is how long it took us. Priya was the first to say it. She said: "Who came in with us?"
Nobody knew. Nobody could say who the seventh had been, or what they wore, or what they had said. Only that somebody had been with us from the fence, had gone into the water when we did, and had been so ordinary that no one's memory held a single detail. And now Dev counted six, and everyone could agree to six, and the one place in the count where the seventh had been was a smooth, well-fitted gap, like water closing over a stone.
We drove home with the windows down. We have not been back. Joanne has taken up open-water swimming, though, and talks about it a great deal. Last month she sent a photo from a lake in the north, six of us, a reunion, standing on a jetty in our swimming things. Dev counted, in the caption.
He counted seven.