The Lives She Left Behind (5 page)

‘But right now, I’m here and they’re here and . . .’

‘And what?’

‘. . . and I’m nearly sixteen and I still don’t have a boyfriend and I wish I did,’ Ali wailed.

‘Ali, that’s like crying on Monday because it’s not Thursday.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Your life will come along at its own speed and when you’re not expecting it, and there’s nothing you can do to hurry it up.’

‘But it might not.’

Jo moved a little away from her and stared out at the wider world as if she were listening to something, and when she turned back Ali thought some mystery had come into her eyes. ‘There
used to be times when there weren’t enough men or women to go round,’ Jo said, ‘usually men because they caught the rough end of the world. Then if you were stuck, like most
people were back then, and you couldn’t get away, you just had to put up with it, but even then the good ones found their match. I don’t mean people like the Six, I mean the really good
ones – people like you, the sort of people someone would want to spend their life with. The right person comes along. And it’s so different now. You meet so many people these days, so
very many people. Nobody stays in one place any more but that helps, you see? Just breathe deeply and be patient. Your time will come.’

Ali stared at her. ‘You haven’t been taking your pills, have you?’

‘Not for three days,’ said Jo. ‘Mum forgot again. She’s picking them up today.’

‘Don’t you feel the difference it makes?’

Jo shrugged. ‘Yes, but then I forget.’

But for Fleur’s approach to life, the friendship of the three girls might not have survived the amount of time Jo spent shut down in her chemically-dulled world. Fleur always put Jo second
to her business activity and that meant there were regular periods when they ran out of pills. For three or four days, every now and then, Jo would emerge from that chrysalis and remind her friends
why they stuck with her.

The other two, Lucy in her studied flightiness and Ali in her stolid determination, were on a mission to save Jo from malign adult forces.

One day in early May 2010, with the start of their GCSE exams only two weeks away, Ali summoned the other two to join her in a cafe on the way home from school.

‘My mother’s got this idea,’ she said, and Lucy groaned.

‘The answer’s no,’ she said. ‘Now what’s the idea? Somehow I already know it’s not going to be fun.’

‘No, it will be. Listen.’

‘Does it involve digging?’

‘That’s not the point. It—’

‘It’s digging. Count me out.’ Lucy got to her feet and reached for her bag.

‘Give her a chance,’ said Jo. She was dull that day.

‘Why? I know all I need to know.’

‘There are boys,’ Ali said quietly, and Lucy sat down.

Lucy was currently playing the role of tragically spurned lover. She had spent the past three months entwined around sharp-tongued Matt, tall, slim and nearly twenty – Matt, with his own
band which played evening gigs in some of the town’s bars and cafes. Matt’s drummer, Whizz, liked Jo in a hopeless and unrequited fashion but Ali knew none of them were interested in
her.

The group had been broken up by Matt’s sudden switch of affection to a nineteen-year-old music student.

‘It’s such a
tragedy
,’ Lucy had said. ‘Horrible Harriet’s
stolen
him and it’s not just
my
pain, it’s yours too.’

‘Don’t worry about me,’ Ali said immediately.

‘I didn’t really mean you, I meant poor Jo.’

‘I’ll probably survive,’ said Jo.

Lucy was getting tired of the tragic role. ‘What boys?’ she asked.

‘Twelve students from Bristol University.’

‘Twelve students? They could be girls.’

Ali shook her head. ‘By the law of averages half of them will be boys. That’s two each.’

‘No it’s not. It’s one each for you two and four for me.’

‘One?’ said Ali, ‘Only one?’ but the fact was she would have given anything for one.

‘You can have mine,’ Jo offered. She knew Lucy would be able to take her pick. Lucy had been surrounded by boys since they had first met. Jo had no obvious beauty yet, just a
pleasing curve of cheek and chin framed by dark brown hair, but her smile turned heads and that smile, once so rare, was seen more often these days. The boys who were drawn to it got no more than
polite interest. Jo found them all too young and wondered briefly if a Bristol student might not have attractions.

‘Seriously,’ said Ali, ‘none of us knew what to do after the exams, did we? At least none of us could think of anything our parents would actually let us do.’ She meant
her parents and Jo’s mother, because they all three knew Lucy’s would let her do whatever she wanted within reason. ‘The advantage of this is that my mother thinks it’s a
good idea.’

‘My mother wants to send me off to some camp because she’s going to a conference,’ said Jo.

‘Hang on,’ said Lucy. ‘Just before we sign up for this, what exactly is it?’

‘It’s a three-week dig at a place called Montacute on the site of a Norman castle.’

Jo looked at her, frowned, looked away.

Lucy studied her. ‘Astonishing. You manage to sound excited about that.’

‘It’s three weeks of freedom,’ Ali said with a note of pleading in her voice.

‘Where will we be staying?’

‘Everyone’s camping. All the diggers. I’m glad. It’s much more fun that way.’

‘I have very firm views on camping,’ said Lucy. ‘I don’t mind sleeping under the stars so long as there are five of them and they’re fixed to a hotel
wall.’

‘No, it’s really fun, I promise. They have campfires at night and they sing songs and stuff.’

‘Is there a pub?’ asked Lucy.

‘Probably.’

‘They’ll serve us if we’re with all the others, won’t they?’

‘Maybe.’

‘I haven’t been ID’d for
ages
. Will they have power at the campsite? I don’t want my iPod going flat.’

‘Power? It’s a field. A field with boys in it,’ said Ali hopefully.

‘But I know what archaeologists look like,’ said Lucy. ‘I’ve seen them on television. They’ve got long straggly hair like old sheep and they’re bald on top.
They get incredibly excited about very small broken bits of pottery. They’re always drinking beer and they knit their own sweaters.’

‘Where exactly is Montacute?’ Jo asked.

‘Near Yeovil,’ said Ali, and brought out a map.

As Jo looked at the map, some of the names on it penetrated the curtain in her head, prompting a small thrill almost like pleasure – Martock, Somerton, Wincanton. She put her finger on
Montacute and knew she wanted to go there.

A month and a half later the three girls got out of the Yeovil bus in the middle of Montacute village and lined up on the verge like some demonstration poster of different body
types: Lucy, the tall blonde with the aquiline profile; Jo, half a head shorter, dark and curved; Ali, who barely reached Lucy’s shoulder, stocky and with hair which looked, as Lucy had once
said in a far-too-honest moment, as if it had been assembled from other people’s leftovers.

Jo was looking all around her and seemed to be sniffing the air. It was the nearest to liveliness that her friends had seen all week. The other two had come out of their GCSE exams released from
pressure but completely true to type. Lucy had indulged in a theatrical spectrum ranging from comic despair after the Maths exam to claiming the best answers ever written to an English paper. Ali
had been quietly pleased with all of them, but anxious not to rub that in if she was talking to anyone less confident. Jo had only said they were mostly all right.

‘Jo,’ said Lucy, ‘before we get there, Ali and I have got something to say.’

‘Yes?’

‘Fleur made us promise something before she agreed you could come.’

‘I can guess.’

‘She made us promise to watch you take your tablets every day.’

‘Oh, don’t worry,’ said Jo with a sigh. ‘I will.’

‘No. That’s what we want to say. We’re not going to do it. It’s up to you. You don’t have to take them.’

‘Why?’

‘Because we know what you’re like when you don’t. That’s the real Jo.’

She looked at her friends, unsure what to say, so used now to the dulled-down world that the idea of weeks away from it sounded almost frightening, then she nodded slowly.

Ali looked at her instructions and the map. ‘It’s this way,’ she declared and set off. They made a hundred yards before Lucy stopped them.

‘My straps are hurting.’

‘I’m not surprised they’re hurting. You can see through that cotton,’ Ali said. ‘Didn’t you bring an old sweater or something?’

‘I don’t own any
old
sweaters.’

‘Didn’t you bring anything serious?’

A Land Rover was coming up behind them.

‘All my clothes are extremely serious. Those Bristol boys won’t know what’s hit them. Just make sure you’re on my tail. Where I lead, you follow.’

The Land Rover pulled in ahead of them.

‘You said they’ll all have big white beards,’ Ali said. ‘They’re not even going to notice the fact that you’re hardly wearing anything at all.’

The driver of the Land Rover opened his door as they reached it.

‘You look like the rest of my diggers,’ he said. ‘I’m Rupert. I’m running the dig. Would you like a lift?’

‘Where’s your big white beard?’ said Lucy.

‘You’ve got to be Christine Massey’s daughter,’ said the Land Rover driver, glancing at Ali as he let in the clutch. ‘You look just like her.’

Ali sighed.

The last thing Ali wanted to hear on this first day of freedom was that she looked like her mother, so she was still frowning as she pulled the components of their tents out of
their bags. She was also cross with Lucy, who had sat in the front of the Land Rover deliberately swaying as it bounced through the potholes so that her shoulder collided with Rupert’s,
though he had seemed oblivious.

‘You’ll be pleased to hear the forecast is fine,’ he said. ‘I can promise lots of food and good company. As for the archaeology, I’ve made my offerings to the gods
of dirt and we will see what they provide.’

He turned in through a field gate and nosed the Land Rover against the hedge on the end of a line of cars.

‘Grab your stuff. Pitch camp at the far end of the tents. Tea, cake and first get-together in about an hour.’

He walked off towards a billowing pile of camouflaged green canvas where a group of young men were struggling with wooden poles.

Lucy stared after him. ‘Six foot two, eyes of blue,’ she said. ‘Who said archaeology was boring?’ Then she saw him join the men at the marquee. ‘Those must be the
students,’ she said, ‘One, two, three, four, five, six, seven. Well, seventy-five per cent of them are the right gender.’

‘Fifty-eight and a third,’ said Ali. ‘Seven-twelfths is fifty-eight and a third per cent. You divide a hundred by seven and—’

‘That’s what I have you for,’ said Lucy. ‘You do the dividing and Jo and I will go and do the multiplying.’

Jo had been staring up at the steep wooded hill that rose two hundred yards away from their field. She smiled, glanced towards the marquee and began straightening out the tent and its tangled
nylon cords. Lucy walked off towards the marquee without a backward glance and Ali stared after her a little nervously. She had gone along with the bravado of the boy talk. She had lived through
varied fantasies of this adventure since the first moment her mother had suggested it. All of them had a boy in them somewhere – a boy who would fit Ali perfectly, a boy who would like doing
what she did, who would rather listen to the birds singing than something on earphones, who would have read Cormac McCarthy’s novels and Alice Oswald’s poetry – above all, a boy
who wouldn’t keep looking at Lucy or Jo when he should be looking at her. None of those fantasies had the flapping of canvas and the sound of strange male voices in them. The figures round
the marquee were frighteningly real and only a short walk away.

Ali knew Lucy would be straight in there like a manseeking missile and she feared she would be left, awkward and unappealing. She finished fitting together one of the poles, a long snake of
glass-fibre sections, and started on the other one. They put up Ali’s big tent to sleep in and Jo’s tiny pup tent to put their bags in and made themselves dizzy blowing up airbeds.

‘Don’t do it. Leave it to her,’ said Jo as Ali turned to Lucy’s deflated mattress.

‘Oh, I don’t mind,’ Ali replied but before she could start, they heard Rupert shout. They walked across to where the camouflage canvas had been propped up, stretched and pegged
down into a marquee so that what had been a ragged block of wind was now a tamed, friendly space – a place of tables, benches and a score of people talking animatedly like old friends meeting
again. Lucy was in the middle of a group of boys.

‘This is Andy,’ she said, putting her arm round the shoulders of an athletic looking student with curly fair hair, ‘and these are Sandy, Randy, Dandy and . . . um . .
.’

‘No we’re not,’ protested one of them, ‘I’m Doug and this is Jonno, Conrad and—’ He was interrupted by a shout from Rupert.

‘Okay everyone, settle down,’ he called. ‘If you’re not holding a mug of coffee, grab one quick. It’s good and strong and there’s chocolate cake on an epic
scale.’

The girls headed for the trestle tables with the food. Lucy hissed at them, ‘He’s mine. You choose from the others. There’s no competition.’

‘What do you mean?’ Ali whispered back.

‘The girls. I think they dug them up but they haven’t washed the dirt off yet.’

They filled mugs and plates and followed Lucy back towards the bench where all the students were sitting. Rupert called out, ‘Find yourselves a seat, everybody, and we’ll get
started.’

The renewed buzz died down, the end of one woman’s sentence left tapering in the air, ‘. . . shoulder brooch, second century at the very latest, as it turned out.’

All faces turned to Rupert. ‘Some of us know each other from here or there. You’ll get to know my students. They’re moderately house-trained but don’t lend them any
money. You might remember Paul Tatham – he hasn’t been around for a few years. Something about Australia, wasn’t it? So welcome back to proper archaeology, Paul. There’s the
famous Dozer, of course. Every dig needs a Dozer.’ There was a scatter of laughter and the girls looked round to see who he was talking about, but everyone was looking back at them as Rupert
pointed.