The Lives She Left Behind (8 page)

Too late, Luke saw the swing of a girl’s hair between all the older people as they turned away. He sat up but she was lost to view. He looked up at the steep face of the slope he had
fallen down and the man with the ponytail followed his eyes.

‘Fifteen feet, maybe more,’ said the man. ‘Can you get up? I only ask because we need the trench. If you’ve finished with it, that is.’

Luke took the outstretched hand and stood up carefully.

‘I’m Dozer,’ the man said. ‘You okay?’

‘Yes. What are you doing?’

‘Digging. Just started. All we’ve done is get the turf off.’

The boy looked at the long strip of earth and recognised it for what it was. ‘You’re archaeologists?’

Dozer nodded. ‘So what do we call you?’ he asked.

Part of the boy thought it would be good to get away as fast as he could, to leave his embarrassment far behind and take his aches with him back to the anonymous world below. ‘Luke,’
he answered, and the man laughed.

‘Luke Skydiver,’ he said. ‘Just right.’ Then from behind him another man’s voice said, ‘Hang on, I know you, don’t I?’

Turning, he saw a familiar face – a teacher’s face where there shouldn’t be a teacher. Two hours from his school. That wasn’t fair. Embarrassment would travel home with
him now.

‘I’m Luke Sturgess, sir.’

‘Yes, of course. My History Club.’

They stared at each other in equal awkwardness. Luke had signed up for the after-school club entirely because he liked the picture on the poster. He had gone twice and it had gone badly.

‘How did you get here, Luke?’ The man was looking up the hill as if more people might come raining down. ‘Are your parents here?’

Martin. Luke’s memory gave him the name. Mike Martin. They’d hardly come across each other.

‘No, I came by bike.’

‘From Wincanton? All that way? Why?’

And there were so many possible answers to that question. There was Barry, who had his mum in tears. There was his birthday in two days, which would have Barry right in the middle of it for the
first time ever – Barry who did sly, small things to get at him. Then there was some sort of fifteen-about-to-be-sixteen sap rising in him, which seemed to have no outlet but physical
exercise. Above all there was that feeling of something missing, something he might find if he just looked hard enough. If he just knew where to look. It was an overwhelming certainty that wherever
he was it was not the right place, and whoever he was with they were not the right person.

‘I don’t really know,’ was all he said.

‘You’d better come with me,’ said the teacher. ‘Come and see Rupert. He’s in charge. We might have to fill in a form or something.’

The boy didn’t want to move away. He felt that the impact, the moment when there was no breath in his body and the roof of his world had been made up of three girls’ faces, had
bonded him to this particular earth, but obedience made him follow the teacher round a shoulder of hillside to where a man was spraying yellow lines on the grass. The boy searched for the girls as
they walked but they had vanished like wood nymphs.

‘Rupert,’ the teacher called, and the man with the can looked round. ‘Sorry to bother you but we’ve had an unexpected visitor.’ He explained and the archaeologist
looked the boy up and down.

‘Do you feel all right?’

‘Not really’ would have been the truthful answer. Luke was somewhere outside himself, floating above his own head. Nothing was the same any more. ‘A bit sore,’ was all he
said.

‘Bad luck. Did you come to see the dig?’

‘No. What are you looking for?’

‘An explanation of why there’s a large hole where no hole should be. Are you interested?’

He nodded.

‘Really? All right. A dog fell into an underground chamber. We’ve peered down it and there’s an echo, so we’re trying to find out what it is.’

And Luke’s mind, still a little loose from its moorings after his fall, conjured out of nowhere a picture of scared men with spades. Burying something? Retrieving it? He couldn’t
tell.

‘Why are you spraying the grass?’

‘I’m marking out another trench. We can’t go in from the top because we might ruin whatever is down there, so we’re coming in from the sides.’ He pointed to the
spur of earth which stood between them and the other diggers like a buttress to the hill. ‘I suspect our chamber lies right under
that
.’

The boy stared at it as if it should mean something to him, then shook his head.

‘This is what they call the bailey, this flat area,’ said Rupert, looking around him. ‘It’s the part of the castle where they all lived.’

The purple spheres came back to Luke as bunches of grapes. ‘No it wasn’t,’ he said, ‘this was the vineyard,’ and immediately wished he could pull the words back
when the archaeologist swung round and looked at him sharply.

‘Oh, I see. You’re an expert on Montacute, are you?’

‘On what?’

‘Montacute.’

‘What’s a montacute?’ said the boy, though he felt he should know.

‘This is Montacute,’ Rupert said, frowning. ‘Mons Acutus, the steep hill. That’s what the Normans called it.’

The teacher was staring at the boy curiously. ‘You mean you don’t know where you are, Luke? You just happened along?’

‘Yes.’

‘So where did that vineyard stuff come from?’ demanded Rupert. He sounded almost affronted.

‘I don’t know why I said that,’ Luke replied. That wasn’t strictly correct. He had said it because those brief purple shapes, just above him as he lay there, had been
grapes.

‘Go easy, Rupert. He’s shocked,’ said the teacher.

‘Did
you
know about the vineyard theory, Mike?’

‘There really is a vineyard theory?’

‘Well, yes. There were vineyards listed in the Abbey lands and these terraces face the right way. The theory’s common knowledge but only if you happen to be a keen reader of obscure
archaeological monographs.’ He turned to Luke and smiled enquiringly. ‘Is that what you read at night, young Luke?’

‘No. I must have heard it somewhere.’

‘Yes, it must be the talk of . . . where do you come from? Wincanton?’

‘Cucklington. It’s near there.’

‘How did you get here?’

‘On my bike.’

‘Why?’

‘I just wanted to go for a ride.’

‘I don’t get it, Luke. You didn’t come to see the dig, you didn’t know this was Montacute, and you start talking about the vineyards?’

The teacher was studying the boy intently and he saw a brief trace of a hunted expression. A deep wonder stirred in him and the chilling edge of an absurd idea. He found he didn’t want the
boy to disappear. ‘Rupert, maybe Luke could stay for the day?’ he suggested, and looked at the boy. ‘If you want to, that is. I’ll be heading home about six o’clock. I
could give you a lift back.’

‘If you like,’ Rupert said, surprised. He looked at Luke. ‘Would you like to have a go while you’re here?’

‘What, dig? With a trowel?’

‘Yes. Mike says I should do more to educate the young.’

‘You didn’t let me dig anything for ages,’ the teacher objected.

‘You, Michael, have the deftness of a hippo and the eyesight of a mole. This young man, if I’m not mistaken, is in the first bright-eyed flush of youth and treads lightly on this
earth.’

Luke suddenly found himself nodding his head, wanting to see under this modern grass into the older secrets.

‘Shall I have him in my trench?’

‘No,’ said Rupert. ‘You stick to teaching things you know about. I’ll put him with Dozer.’

So Luke found himself kneeling in the same trench he had fallen into with the big man who had helped him. Dozer looked strong enough to break rocks with his bare hands despite his white hair.
‘Here you go, kid,’ he said, pulling a trowel from his back pocket. ‘You can borrow Maureen. She’s my spare.’

The boy wished he had gone with the teacher. He could see the girls in the other trench, twenty yards away, standing with their backs to him. The teacher was with them.

‘Come on,’ said Dozer. ‘There’s dirt to shift. Just take it nice and easy, like this. You can’t do much damage.’

Luke crouched, stretched out his hand and pulled a skim of soil towards him as he had seen the man do. He looked up again and saw the girls kneel down to work. He reached out for a second scrape
and this time, as the blade touched the earth, he snatched his hand away as something travelled up through it, through his fingers and up his arm. He looked around. Dozer hadn’t noticed. He
reached out again and there it was, flowing through him, a flood of light and peace and knowledge and something startling that felt like love.

He knelt there utterly still, letting it wash through him like the best of gifts until it drained away so abruptly that he wanted to chase it down into the ground. There was a sudden commotion.
Everyone in the other trench was standing up – the three girls at the far end and the rest of the diggers. Luke found he was touching inert earth with nothing coming from it at all. The
others were hurrying towards him.

‘Up, you two,’ said the man called Rupert, who was leading the way. ‘No questions. Just come with us, right now.’ He didn’t stop until they were down the hill and
out of the trees where the footpath came up from the village below.

‘Okay, listen up,’ he said, and the diggers gathered round. Luke saw the three girls on the far side, with four boys who were a little older. The other diggers were in their fifties
or even sixties and they were all focused intently on Rupert.

‘Conrad had a bright idea earlier,’ he said, nodding at the young man standing next to him. ‘He pointed out that the dog escaped all by itself, which meant there was clearly a
second hole in the ground because the owner was still looking down the first one, so we decided he would go and search for it. Five minutes ago he found it. Tell them, Conrad.’

‘It was in the bushes,’ Conrad said. He wore thick glasses and he was sweating. ‘Maybe a badger’s sett, I thought, but it was big. You could crawl down it, like at
forty-five degrees. I got a torch and stuck my head in but when I saw what was at the bottom, I got out again double quick.’

He looked around at their faces. ‘There’s a wooden crate down there at the base of a tunnel. It’s a bit rotten, coming to pieces, but you can see stuff inside – round
sticks. There’s metal strapping around the crate holding it together, and there are four or five hand grenades wired on to the strapping.’

A murmur went up. Rupert was frowning. ‘It fits with Lucy’s electric cable. We think it’s a wartime bunker of some sort,’ he said. ‘That means the grenades and the
dynamite or whatever it is in the crate could be highly unstable by now. No one goes near the site until Bomb Disposal have dealt with it. I want groups of you spaced out around the bottom of the
hill to stop any walkers wandering up there. Dozer, can you sort that? Anyone not needed should go down to the campsite and wait. It’s safe there. I’ll go and call up some help.’
He turned to Michael Martin. ‘Mike, I think we need to clear the site of anyone who’s not camping here. I’m sorry. Can you take the lad with you?’

‘You’d think he was half dead,’ Lucy had said when they were back in their trench. ‘They’re making such a fuss of him. What a dork.’

‘Stop being horrible,’ said Ali. ‘Poor guy. I bet it hurt.’

After that they worked silently, thinking about the story they would have to tell that night, but Jo was starting to feel a weight of history stir and wriggle from the layers below her as if all
the particles, sifted and compressed by time, had stories of their own requiring her to listen. The three of them had been first to the trench when he fell out of the sky and she had bent over him,
seeing he wasn’t breathing and looking at his staring eyes, terrified that he might indeed be dead. Then she saw him fighting for breath and, as Dozer pushed them out of the way, feared he
might have broken his back. As they walked away she kept looking back to try to see his face, because it hadn’t lodged in her memory and Gally wanted to know. Gally wanted to know? She almost
laughed at herself for thinking that way but that was the way it had seemed for just a moment. She had seen so many faces when she looked at his.

It was the pills, Jo thought, as she stood beside the trench, barely aware of the others still talking about it. She felt a little sick, dizzy, her head loose from the moorings of her feet, only
slightly better when she knelt down. Then she touched her trowel to the earth again, and that was when the earth threw something back at her up the blade to wash through her hand and arm and head
like a spinning tide of light. She rocked backwards and stared at the surface of the trench. Next time she reached out cautiously but as the trowel scraped through the loose crumbs into the
undisturbed core of hard soil it came again but differently, more gently, as if her hand was a key sliding into a lock and lifting the tumblers to match it. She held herself still, entranced,
feeling something flow the other way, from her body down into this ground which seemed like a door into more of her than she had ever known was there. She looked all around for the source, fixing
her eyes on the other trench, and saw Conrad come marching up to it with Rupert beside him, bringing news of unexpected danger and forcing them to their feet. All the way down the hill she kept
looking back as if expecting the trench to be marked by columns of flame, and down at the bottom, as the day and their plans and the prospect of summer fun drained, she felt most sad that some
outstanding possibility of knowledge had been held out then jerked away. Fragments of a different story began to prod at her.

Dozer called them all around him, detailing off the diggers in groups of two or three to put a ring round the base of the hill, showing them on the map where he wanted them to go. ‘You
three girls,’ he said, ‘you’re young and fit, ain’t you? Go round to the main path, then up to the top of the hill. Check there’s nobody up there, then take this track
down to the far side. Do you see? There’s another path there and I expect there’s a stile. Stay there and warn off any walkers until I come and get you. Okay? Don’t go anywhere
near where we’ve been digging, will you?’