The Buried Circle (59 page)
Never afraid when we take off. It’s coming back
Poor Davey. Should’ve stayed an erk.
And you know what’s the worst? When there’s no contact, and we fly all over the sky looking for the buggers and they never show up. When the order comes over the radio to head for home, I think, That’s torn it
Afraid, always, of the luck running out just when they thought they were safe. He sat in the car on Marlborough Common that day, telling me how scared he was of not coming back. Heart pounding, every time they flew, like it must have coming back from France that afternoon.
Listening to the note of the engine and thinking any minute God’ll change his mind and we’re going to fall out of the sky
‘They were nearly home,’ said Mr Keiller. ‘Nearly bloody made it. Sorry about the language, ladies. Bit upset.’
Davey reciting the Navigator’s Prayer.
When we see the Kennet and Avon canal, I know we’re nearly home
…If they could see the canal. They’re flying through a terrible thunderstorm. Sky black as night.
Rain coming down in sheets. And Donald Cromley, watching his instruments as they fly towards the darkened escarpment of the Marlborough Downs, notices there’s something amiss.
‘Port engine gave up the ghost, damaged in the skirmish with the German fighters. Colerne says they managed to radio in before the radio packed up too. They were going to try to bring her in at either Alton Barnes or Yatesbury.’ Mr Keiller’s eyes fixed on the corner of the room, like he can’t bear to look at any of us. ‘Donald would have favoured Yatesbury, of course, knew it like the back of his hand.’
Thought he did, anyway, cocky bastard. But this is a day like no day he’s ever flown before, a day that’s not so much like flying through a night as like flying under water. Does that matter? Of course not. Behind him he’s got Davey, good old Davey; Davey’s an ace navigator, knows his way around Wiltshire, from the air and on the ground. Knows all the roads, all the airfields, knows every fold and wrinkle of the hills. Give us a fix, Davey. Really? Well, you’re the numbers wizard. Donald, too tired to argue, believes him.
On the ground it’s pitchy black too. The airfields will have to turn on their lights for the boys coming home. Alton Barnes is dark: it’s a training base, no novices out flying today. Davey and Cromley are past and gone before the message reaches Alton Barnes to light up the runway.
‘Not more than a couple of miles short of Yatesbury field. Simple mistake. Poor bastards weary unto death, flying practically blind, radio not responding, catch a glimpse of what they assume are runway lights.’
Easton Down. Not so fancy as the Starfish at Barbury, but one of the Q-sites Davey’s chum helped to build. A fake airfield. Don’t tell me Davey forgot it was there. He knew where it was all right.
Easton Down wasn’t one of the sophisticated Q-sites. Weren’t no Hares and Rabbits, the lighting rigs that made it look like planes were taking off or landing, running across the empty farmland. For Donald Cromley, that was the pity of it, because if he’d seen what looked like a plane taking off he’d have known at once it couldn’t have been Yatesbury, like Alton Barnes a training airfield, so nobody except him and Davey likely to be flying in or out of it that terrible afternoon. Instead Easton Down had gooseneck flares, laid out like runway lights across the bumpy ground. They’d been lit most of the afternoon, since the crew in the pillbox had been alerted there were German bombers in the air, and nobody’d given them the stand-down yet.
There she is, says Davey.
You sure? says Donald, bit of doubt in his voice. Wasn’t expecting to be at Yatesbury yet, hasn’t seen any of the familiar markers he used flying in and out when he was piloting those trainee wireless operators round the field. But it’s a bugger of a day, Satan’s own picnic out there; maybe, thinks Donald, he’s missed the landmarks in the rain and the gloom.
That’s her, for definite. Davey knows exactly where he is, doesn’t he? Best sense of direction in the squadron, which is why Donald was so glad to have him volunteer as his navigator when George broke his leg.
And Davey does know exactly where he is.
‘Meant to be a fail-safe system,’ says Mr Keiller. His eyes are wet, I’d swear, in the lamplight. ‘Coded signals, so RAF crews don’t mistake them for the real thing. Red light on a pole, flashing the letter K in Morse, supposed to indicate they should back off, it’s a dummy field. Poor devils. Such a stupid bloody mistake, but they were tired. I assume Davey must have interpreted it as “carry on”. It’s happened before.’
No, Davey knows exactly where he is. He’s been planning this for weeks, waiting for the right opportunity. What you will shall be.
Wish I could’ve killed him
, I said to Davey, the day of the picnic on Windmill Hill, when I told him what Mr Cromley had done. Shook Davey’s world.
Can’t think about what you did, Fran, without getting angry
.
Get angry with him
, I said. When it came down to it, Davey would do anything for me. Would’ve married me, if he’d known I was going to have a baby, even though it was Donald Cromley’s bastard. But he didn’t know. Should’ve told him.
Donald fingers the old bronze dagger he stows in the pocket of his flying jacket, every mission, his compact with the forces of nature. He swings her round, begins the approach. Does he feel the slightest bit uneasy? Does he see, for a second, the contempt in his uncle’s eyes through the leather mask, that afternoon in the house in Swindon when cocky young Donald couldn’t get it in, and panicked, and disgraced the rite? Does he hear Mr Keiller’s bellow, the night he stole Charlie’s skull? Does he hear through his earphones, Davey shouting in triumph, as the fragile wooden Mosquito comes in and bellies, not on a concrete runway but on uneven farmland, the plane slewing and bucking as Donald wrenches the controls to steer away from a stand of trees that shouldn’t be in the middle of an airfield? He still thinks he’s going to make it, of course, until a wheel hits a sarsen jutting out of the ground and breaks off, the nose tilts, the plane cartwheels and finally ploughs into the side of a Bronze Age barrow.
For a moment, there they are, the fuselage smashing around them like black matchsticks, two young men locked together like driver and pillion passenger on a motorbike bouncing over the hillside. The fuel tank ignites, a slash of orange fire tears apart the unnatural dusk, and thunder rolls across the hills.
‘Missed you, Indy,’ Keir says, after a bit.
He always could best me at wrestling, even though he was smaller than me when we were kids. And his den, his stupid den on the Downs that he wouldn’t show me that summer–that would have been the Long Barrow, wouldn’t it?
‘You didn’t know I was India?’ This suddenly seems important. ‘Not when I jumped your fire in Tolemac. You’d have said.’
I’ve been stupid, yes, not realizing Bryn was the boy I played with as a child, but why should we recognize each other? It’s seventeen years since we last met: two lifetimes, for eight-year-olds. But I don’t want that night in the Long Barrow to have been…knowing. Because, looking back, I can understand why it felt so wrong and awful at the time.
‘My skin knew,’ he says. ‘My head didn’t. I understood when I read your note. Why didn’t you tell me your name before? We’d’ve been together sooner.’
Didn’t tell you my name because
my
skin recognized something: how weird you’ve become. Another long silence has fallen, giving me time to turn over the full, ridiculous awfulness of it. If only I
had
told him my name, by his campfire on May Eve…Well, I thought I was protecting myself.
If only I could see his face…But all I have is a view of the carpet, and the soft northern voice, the warm, damp breath on the side of my face. I picture him gazing dreamily over my shoulder into the embers of the fire, seeing his Goddess visions and all the other bonkers stuff he’s piled up in his head as his barrier against the world. And, oh, my God, did he–?
‘Did you mean to hurt Frannie?’ The words are choking me. ‘You said the Goddess had to be
held
, didn’t you?’
‘The Crone shifts shape in your arms,’ he says.
My stomach clenches. ‘Meaning?’
‘Meaning I love the Goddess.’
His voice sounds a million miles away, through the throbbing in my head. I’ll kill him, I swear I will. I’ll–
His arm tightens on my throat the moment I pitch myself back in an attempt to break his grip. He’s as steady as a rock behind me as he whispers: ‘And you, Ind.’
Another long, long silence in which that idea turns and spins in the candlelight. My breath scrapes through my constricted windpipe, making me more and more panicky. Eventually he slackens his grip enough to allow me a normal breath, still keeping a tight enough hold to remind me that these are carpenter’s arms, strong and muscled and capable of snapping a neck as easily as a discarded length of dowel.
‘I want us to be together,’ he says. ‘Here, in the Goddess’s place. In the circle.’
‘Keir…’ Better to call him Bryn? Are there two personalities, one rational and the other not? ‘Bryn, I mean…Was that what your foster-parents called you? You
were
fostered, weren’t you?’
‘Adopted, eventually. They didn’t like Keir, so they called me Dean,’ he says. ‘Chose Bryn for myself, when I left. More Celtic, like.’
‘Thing is, Bryn, we can’t be together here. This cottage isn’t mine. I don’t live here, I live with Frannie, outside the circle.’
‘I know that,’ he says. ‘We can still be together here, though.’
And everything goes distant and breathless again as he shows me the knife.
It’s a strange old thing, dull and nibbled by time. ‘Bronze Age,’ he says.
‘Where’d you find that?’ I’m trying to push my terror down, keep talking as naturally as I can.
‘Walking on Easton Down, with Cynon. He went nosing round the side of an old hump where rabbits’d been diggin’. There it was, half buried in the soil.’
He’s allowed me to sit up now, though he’s still behind, with an arm across my throat. He turns the dagger in the lamplight, somehow more malevolent than a modern knife would be.
‘You give me the idea, Ind,’ he says. ‘Was you told me about Avebury bein’ the place of the dead.’
I try to summon up everything John ever taught me about yoga breathing, meditation, calming the self for whatever purpose, and not one damn bit of it works. Or, rather, it won’t come back to me.
‘The ancestors,’ I say, at least an octave up on my usual pitch. ‘Not the dead in any…active sense.’ Not sure what I mean by this, except it would be good to disabuse him of the notion that people went around committing mass suicide in the Neolithic.
‘Thought a lot about the woman in the ditch,’ he says.
‘What woman in the ditch?’ My voice is tiny.
‘The one you talked about. Buried in the ring of stones.’
‘That was thousands of years ago.’ Not that I imagine for a second now that rational discussion will save me. This is a man who believes beings from Sirius make crop circles and the government is trying to stop us finding out about it.
‘Do I scare you?’ he asks abruptly, like he’s reading my mind.
‘No,’ I say. ‘Well, yes, a bit, because it hurts, and you won’t let go of me.’
‘No.’ The pressure of his arm eases slightly, though. ‘You have to win my trust back, see?’
The log on the fire has turned to glowing charcoal and collapses with a sigh. A small yellow flame leaps up and dances, as if it wants to partner the candle flame on the hearth, then flickers out.
The candle flame flickers in sympathy, bends…
There’s a draught. The door. The front door of the cottage is still open.
If I can somehow persuade him to relax more, if I could make a dash for it…
‘Keir,’ I say into the silence. ‘I’m really, really sorry about what happened to you. Must’ve been so
hard
…’
‘They kept her away from me,’ he says. ‘My real mother. She’ll have tried to fetch me back, but they wouldn’t let her.’ The same amorphous They, in Keir’s mind, who lie about crop circles, who send sinister black helicopters to hover over them and release radiation to poison seekers after truth.
‘Yes, probably.’ Humour him. If I can make him let go altogether, if I say I need the bathroom, or something? I don’t want to think about how the Goddess might have become twisted up in Keir’s head with the mother who abandoned him, or for that matter the woman who won’t let him see his son, the woman whose face was scribbled out in the photo Martin found buried in the circle, because intuition tells me Bryn was the person who left it there.
It’ll only work if I catch him off guard, when he takes his arm from my throat.
‘Can I look at you?’ I say.
The arm relaxes, in surprise, and I lash out with every iota of energy I possess, driving an elbow into his stomach, twisting out of his grasp, pain tearing across my scalp as he makes a grab at my hair. I arc backwards and drive the top of my skull up under his jaw, hearing the click of his teeth as well as his grunt of pain. Then I’m rolling over and trying to get to my feet, feeling huge and clumsy like in a nightmare, because he’s caught my foot and is dragging my leg from under me, so I lash out with the other foot and my heel connects with something hard, maybe the side of his head, sending a shock right up my leg, and pushing another grunt out of him, and I’m shouting, yelling as loud as I can, hoping someone’s going to hear, someone’s going to come and save me…
The point of the old, nibbled knife pricks the underside of my chin.
‘Lie
still’
he snarls, pushing the whole of his weight down on top of me, the way he used to when we played as eight-year-olds, so that the side of my face is squashed against the scratchy hessian carpet. He adjusts his position so he’s kneeling on my back, my ribs threatening to crack under the pressure
Then there is no breath left, all I can manage are small, terrified gasps, and the knife plays with the soft skin around my jaw and the side of my neck, while my body’s forced so hard into the floor that the pressure seems to turn inside out, and instead of being pushed down I’m dangling, again, floating over an immense void that opens up beneath me, feeling the suck and swirl of the dark greedy vortex…A bird is singing somewhere far away, and now I’m leaning right over Steve’s face, his eyes huge and black and blank, the oozing blood from his wound giving off a metallic stink that makes my nostrils tingle, then the red rises to drown me as I fall into his eyes…