The Buried Circle (54 page)
‘Hang on,’ came Fran’s voice from inside. ‘Where’s the baby? He’s all right, isn’t he? Is he already at the hospital?’
‘She’s still in A and E,’ says John, putting the phone down.
‘Still?’
He shrugs his shoulders helplessly. ‘It’s Solstice. Not the best day to be carted off to Casualty. Place jammed with kids who celebrated too enthusiastically’
There’s a knock on the front door. Without waiting for a reply, a man in a dull red anorak steps inside, the policewoman a deferential two paces behind him. Under the anorak he’s wearing a navy blue suit, the lapels shiny with aeons of dry-cleaning. His face matches the anorak, and his eyebrows are two thick furry tassels set at an angle of perpetual surprise.
‘DI Andy Jennings,’ he says. ‘Hello.’
I was outside the house on Drove Road and there was glass in my hair and something in my arms, wrapped in a bloody towel. More flashes–lightning or bombs, couldn’t tell which, I’d gone deaf when all the windows blew out. The first fat drops of rain were beginning to fall and it was still dark as the Day of Judgment. How did them German pilots see to aim their bombs?
The house next door was a ruined tooth, half shorn away. But where the house beyond it had been–the house where the little girls lived: the hopscotch chalk marks were still on the pavement, blurring in the rain–there was nothing but a hole. Bricks were scattered in the road, dust hung in the air, and a man in a filthy ARP uniform was standing by it shouting. At least, I guessed he was shouting: his mouth was open and he was waving his arms at me, but it was like I was under water, couldn’t hear a thing, my arms and legs moving with a current that was pushing me along past him, away from the far end of Drove Road that was all on fire. Up there was the aircraft factory, the Germans would have been aiming for that, but most of the bombs had fallen short and hit houses instead. I kept looking back, wondering if the factory girls had got to the shelters in time, wondering if my landlady was all right, wondering why I was holding a wet, bloody bundle. Another ARP man was clambering over the rubble with something limp and bloody in his arms, too, and there were tears cutting tracks through the dust on his face.
Wouldn’t be safe to go west, towards the railway yards, because they was likely being bombed too, and so I began walking down Drove Road as fast as I could, which wasn’t very fast at all, my body one big ache and my knees like jelly. I thought of Pee at the hospital, waiting for the Bristol casualties, now finding he had to sew arms and legs back on Swindon factory girls too. As I came to the end of the road, an ambulance tore past me and stopped by the house that was gone, but anyone who’d seen that hole would’ve known it was far too late.
I tottered in a daze through the Old Town. My hearing started to come back and I heard a clock strike. Four bongs, that was all. Four o’clock in the afternoon. I’d lost all track of time and it was so dark I thought for a second it must be four in the morning, but the light in the sky was to the west, not the east. The All Clear hadn’t sounded and the side streets were empty. The rain started to come down in sheets. When I reached a junction I saw more ambulances clipping along the main road but they couldn’t have seen me. I limped on with my bloodied bundle towards the countryside.
A car stopped for me before I’d gone as far as Wroughton village. I was drenched by then, hair in rats’ tails, and the bundle in my arms was so small and soaked that the airman behind the wheel could’ve had no idea what I carried. The rain had washed us clean, Charlie and me.
The airman wound down the window, his face a white blur intersected by the line of a neat blond moustache, and told me to hop in, the buses weren’t running because of the raid, he was on his way to Yatesbury and where was I headed? I told him, voice still muffled in my ears, that he could drop me on the main road between Avebury and Winterbourne Monkton. Not if it’s raining, he said, what do you take me for, an army oik? I’ll deliver you to the door, my darling.
I asked him if I could lie down on the back seat, I was sorry I was so wet, but I was wicked tired with walking in the rain. He turned off the engine and went out into the downpour to find a blanket from the boot for me to lie on, and a coat to put over me, and he held the car door open with the rain turning his blue-grey uniform black on the shoulders.
I fell asleep in the car, Charlie in his towelling shroud on my lap under the RAF greatcoat.
In the end, I persuaded the airman to drop me on the main road after all: told him my mam didn’t like me taking lifts, she’d give me what for if she saw me climb out of a strange car. Only a short step home, I said, look, the rain’s stopped. But after the airman had driven away, as I struggled up the chalk track to Windmill Hill, Charlie in my arms, the rain started coming down heavy again, the trees tossing. It was one of those storms that prowl round the horizon like a bad-tempered dog, still growling and baring its teeth when you hoped it had backed off. Lightning snapped every now and then, but far away. Couldn’t have been later than six, but the clouds pressed down and drowned the light. Rivers of chalky water flooded the path.
By the time I reached the flattened crest of the hill, I was soaked to the skin again, face burning up, a sickly ache in my back and legs, and terrible tired. There were never ceremonies for a stillborn at the hospital. Scraps of flesh like him counted for nothing, waste; they were burned in the incinerator. But I could do something for him, like the first Charlie’s mam had done for her child. He’d been laid in the earth with his face turned for the sunrise in the ditch at the top of Windmill Hill. It was near fifteen years since the hill had been excavated, and the archaeologists had hidden the scars of the digging under a skin of turf. The humps of the round barrows pushed out of it like gurt pimples. Charlie and me, we weren’t anyone special. We didn’t belong in a chieftain’s grave. I’d scrabble out a little bed for him in the ditch, if I could find the ditch in the driving rain.
A lightning flash lit the sky, and I wasn’t anywhere near it. I’d wandered right off the crown of the hill to the edge of the wood. A yellow seam joined the clouds to the hills in the west, and I knew this, after all, was my Charlie’s place, quiet and safe under the trees. I slipped and slithered down the slope a way, knowing I’d find the right spot, and there it was at the foot of a bank under the tree roots, a deep hole like it had been made for us, an entrance to the Lower World that faced not the rising but the setting sun.
I unwrapped him from the towel, a little dark animal with his damp coat of fine hair. I’d thought he’d be cold but he was warm from me holding him, and not stiff yet. I kissed his closed eyes and laid him under the tree roots, well back in the hole but with his tiny face turned to catch the rays of the sinking sun, and scraped soil from the crumbling bank to make it more of a cradle for him. There was old dead bracken mixed in with the chalky earth, but I didn’t think this place belonged to any other creature now. They had left it for Charlie.
The rain gradually stopped and the wind died, and soon there was no sound in my ears but the drip of wet leaves. I climbed back up to the crown of the hill, to the edge of the trees. The view from here was like a careless watercolour. Avebury village and the circle were hidden, but the top of the church tower rose above a viridian wash of leaves. To the south and west, there were drenched fields, umbers and ochres and a dash of burnt sienna, under a sky that was heavy Prussian blue and Payne’s grey except for that single bright lemon streak. I could see the brown gash at Trusloe where Mr Keiller had given the land for the new houses, and Longstones Field, and the woods that hid the racing stables and Yatesbury. I remembered the watercolour set he had given me, four summers ago, and the thought of it made me warm.
I sat for a while at the wood’s margin, waiting for the lemon crack in the sky to fade, and real darkness to fall. When I was as sure as I could be that the sun had set, I went back down the slope, whispered the Lord’s Prayer to Charlie, then dug my hands into the soft soil of the crumbling bank, and filled in the entrance to the hole, so that no one would find him.
I didn’t turn to look back, once my feet were on the track down the hill, because there was nothing left to see in the gathering night, but I knew he was there, and always would be.
Here’s what I think about in the night, though, the nights when I know there are lights up on Windmill Hill: someone looking for Charlie, maybe that devil come back to search for his son. I think of the moment before the bomb fell on the house two doors away, when I held him to my face and breathed into his tiny nostrils like he was a sick lamb. Did I imagine that his little chest heaved? And, if it did, what happened then? What happened between the bomb and me being outside the house?
Fran looks smaller than usual in the hospital bed. She’s asleep, curled on her side, the bruising hidden but a padded dressing on her forehead. An oxygen tube emerges from her nostrils; more plastic tubing snakes from under the bedclothes to a drip stand by the bed.
‘Dehydrated,’ says the nurse. ‘Do you want to sit with her a bit? She’ll probably wake. Visiting hours are over, officially, but…’
She doesn’t wake.
She looks different, now, younger, a woman living in a place I have never been to, inhabiting a set of memories I can’t begin to guess. All present time, all will, all
I am
pared away to
I was
, and then even that whittled to nothing at all.
‘Stay at my place,’ says John, as we walk across the empty car park towards the pickup. It’s after eleven, what little light there is left in the sky swamped by the hospital’s halogen glare.
‘I ought to have stayed here.’
‘Don’t be silly. She’ll wake when she wakes. Nowhere to sleep, anyway.’
‘I could stretch out on a couple of chairs–’
‘The nurses don’t want you around overnight. Better not to antagonize them, believe me.’
‘What–patients and their relatives get in the way of the smooth running of the hospital?’
‘Something like that.’
We’ve reached the pay machines. I push the parking ticket into the slot. ‘Drop me at Trusloe. I’ll be fine.’
‘No.’ The overhead light reveals concern on his tired face as I feed in the coins. ‘I’ve bodged the glass in the back door with a sheet of plywood, ought to hold but…’
‘Whoever it was isn’t coming back. They were so scared, they didn’t even stop to nick her purse.’
‘Yeah, and where are her door keys, then?’
My knees lock.
‘What?’
‘Not on the hall table. Not on the hook by the back door. I checked her handbag while you were in the loo–not there either. I even asked the nurse on the ward if they’d been on her when they undressed her. No keys.’
‘Jesus.’ I lean against the pay machine, feeling shaky. ‘That’s creepy. You think they’re planning to come back later and clear the house?’
‘It’s not exactly full of valuable antiques, is it? Could have been another panic thing–saw the keys, grabbed them. They’re probably in a hedge by now. All the same, I’d rather you didn’t sleep there until the locks are changed.’
He takes the ticket from the machine and walks towards the pickup, his face screwed up in thought. Something else he’s not sharing?
‘Have you told the police about the keys?’ I ask.
‘They’d left, hadn’t they?’
‘You could have phoned them.’
The ponytail quivers; his mouth turns down tightly. ‘Don’t believe in telling the police everything. Never trust a pig.’ He makes it sound like an old country saying rather than a piece of outdated hippie slang.
But what’s he concealing from me?
On the way out of Swindon, we both realize we haven’t eaten. John swings the truck round and we find a late-night chippy in a row of shops off the ring road. ‘What do you want?’ he asks.
‘What are
you
having?’ I’m too tired to make decisions for myself.
‘Nothing.’
‘John, you haven’t eaten all day, have you? Unless you managed a sandwich this afternoon.’ His face tells me he didn’t. ‘Oh, no. Don’t tell me you’re
fasting
. Not tonight, John. I want to sleep, don’t want to be kept awake by your bloody drum.’
‘I’ll use a CD and wear headphones.’
‘Do you have to?’
The trouble is, John’s so rational most of the time that I forget he can also be Mr Weird.
‘I need to go looking for your grandmother’s guardian. After a shock, she could have lost it.’ He doesn’t need to carry on, to remind me what a shaman believes about the power animal buried in the psyche of each and every one of us, a guardian spirit that protects us.
Without it, you die, sooner or later.
The sheets on the spare bed at John’s are chilly, and my legs are restless. He’s still moving around downstairs, assembling his stuff for the journey, perhaps stewing a pan of magic mushrooms, though he’s so experienced a psychic traveller he doesn’t need hallucinogenics. The drumming is enough to take him into a trance and go wherever a shaman goes, through the cave into the Lower World, where everything is…different. The same place as the real world, according to John, but altered, like a transparent film that overlies it, or vice versa. You see things there that are magical: magic, that is, in the sense that they represent what is deep down true. So when someone’s sick, the way a shaman sees it in the magic world, they’ve lost their power animal. The shaman has to journey to find it and give it back to them, or they die.
‘How do you know it’s theirs?’ I asked, as we came into the cottage tonight. Silly question.
‘It appears four times,’ he says. ‘That’s the sign. Fourth time you grab it. Besides, I’ll–know.’ He looked at me, unapologetic. ‘I realize you have trouble with this, Indy, but think of it as symbolic. Jung’s archetypes, that sort of thing. Psychological concepts represented by symbols. Works for me, same way God works for some people.’