What Lies Beneath

If you grow up in South Yorkshire, you're aware that under your feet is the ground, and under the ground are the men. The dads of all your friends, hewing away at the coal while you're stock still staring out the classroom window.  It's the same in London I suppose, that earthquake rumble of tube train that you feel in your soles and hear in the clink of glasses on the draining board.

But even when you think you know about the underground world, there are still surprises to be had. The Williamson tunnels under Liverpool that are only just being re-discovered or, even more fascinating, the maze of tunnels under the Balby flats in Doncaster. There was once a whole House cut into the sandstone here, with a ballroom that could hold 200 people and mysterious carved figures at every turn. When they were building the dual carriageway, they tried to bring up some of the carvings, the animals and the people, but in they end they just filled in the space.  So the elephant and mahout stand under the road, their unseeing eyes stopped with grout, still present but not to be seen again.  Just  -  there  -  enormous, permanent, invisible.

People are like this. Smooth-surfaced but with huge, eleborate things inside them that no one else will ever know, unless they tell the story.  It's the sharing of the elephants and ballrooms, the secret passageways of the inner landscape, the tales we tell of ourselves that enable us to see that surface with a different eye.  Listen carefully to learn the map of beneath, the opening of the clamshell, the beautiful unique network of memories and thoughts, of hopes and disappointments, of secrets and confessions as whorled and complex as a fingerprint.

Simple people, plain and straightforward on the inside, smooth as saucepans - they hold no fascination for me.  Yes I can endlessly trace my fingertips across the curl of your lip, the breadth of your shoulders, the line of hair pointing down from your navel.  But it's the richness of you beneath the skin that catches my breath and holds my attention.