Tunnel to the Wreck by Owen Townend

 

There is a tunnel beneath Birkby Hall Road connecting Norman Park to a place that locals know as ‘The Rec’ but I call ‘The Wreck’. Technically it is an extension of Norman Park, that was the original intention, but one side is considerably more neglected than the other and has been since the Millennium.

            I must have been about eight when my sister and I spent a sunny afternoon crawling through that tunnel. We leapt off the Norman Park swings onto the wood chip path, turned a sharp left and got down on our hands and knees. The stone structure was solid enough but I didn’t want to linger and admire it. Even so I could hear my sister close behind, quietly encouraging me to slow down and run my hands across the smooth curved texture.

Ahead of us, the circle of hazy light was steadily widening, flecks of barely visible grass boosting my resolve. My palms slapped cold stone faster, hoisting me the final couple of feet through the interior darkness. As I reached the end, fresh air tickling my cheek, I had this outrageous panic about the tunnel collapsing at the very last moment, rubble crushing our backs like cruel, heavy teeth. I feared being swallowed by the earth above.

            Of course, we came out the other side, no trouble. Unfortunately, the grass didn’t look quite so verdant up close. One of the distinguishing features of The Wreck is its abundance of weeds among tufts of yellow blades. Even so, I was glad to step outside and feel sunshine prickling the bare skin above my ankle. I stood up and helped my sister out of the echoey darkness.

            As we dusted ourselves down and lightly coughed, we saw that there was a large gathering of adults around the bushes nearby. There must have been more than twenty of them, all peering into the back garden of one of the houses beyond the low park fence. Spying our parents in the centre of the throng, I dragged my sister over to join with them. We had to make our way through the crowd of friendly neighbours, all wearing a look of wordless concern. One opened and closed her mouth, glancing between us and the empty back garden. She sighed and called our parent’s attention.

            Mum grabbed me close and Dad held my sister’s hand. I heard Dad grumble that we should be back at the Norman Park play area but Mum didn’t respond. Normally this led to argument but they were too preoccupied by the garden and the man that had just stepped out into it, closing the maroon back door behind him.

            He was a tall, skinny man in a slightly stained white shirt and black shades. This stranger threw down a cigarette on his back porch and crushed it with his boot heel. He swept a red hand through his frizzy black hair and breathed in deeply. Then he began to sing.

            His voice was croaky at first but smoothed out as it grew in volume. I recall that he sang a few songs but the one that remains vivid in my thoughts is Knocking on Heaven’s Door by Bob Dylan. The man’s voice resonated out of his garden to all of us standing in The Wreck. We were his captive audience. When he hit the chorus, I could imagine his voice adding new ripples to the stream on our left and reverberating through the tunnel to our right. Perhaps the people in Norman Park could hear it too.

After a couple of minutes in my Mum’s arms, I wanted to go back to the play area, to the swings. I thought about other kids using them and was instantly furious. I would much rather have been rattling the chains and flying high than stood still, listening to some singer in a tumbledown park. It had never happened before and didn’t make any sense to me. Nevertheless, I knew that this was an important moment, dreadfully important. That is to say, I could feel the crowd’s building dread of what might happen next.

I never did find out why everyone was gathered in The Wreck to watch a stranger singing Dylan in his garden. Usually that kind of congregation happens when someone is standing on a high window ledge, gazing down. Nobody died that day, as far as I know.

Before we left, I managed to free my head from Mum’s grasp and turned back towards the tunnel. Though I was outside and a safe distance from it, I felt this awful distrust for that underpass. That perfect black mouth would close someday, hard and sudden. Something would happen on the road above, perhaps a heavy goods vehicle bouncing too hard, sending down shockwaves that would weaken the stone and crush whoever might be shuffling through to the other side. I was an anxious child and the song in my ears wasn’t the cheeriest.

Of course, since that time, metal bars have been secured over both tunnel ends, blocking off entry from either Norman Park or The Wreck. I also came to truly understand the bereft meaning behind Knocking on Heaven’s Door. The passage of one thing to another.

These days when I go out for a walk, I avoid The Wreck with its overgrown trees hiding cracked paths and illicit deals. As for the tunnel, I doubt I could even fit into it anymore. I certainly wouldn’t like to try.