by Jd Field
Song to Wake to
By J. D. Field
This book is a work of fiction. The names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the writer’s imagination, or have been used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to persons living or dead, actual events, locales or organizations is entirely coincidental.
All rights are reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission from the publisher.
Cover design by Oliver Prentice: [email protected], Twitter @ollydesigns
Preface
The woman watched them lay her love on a rough mattress beside the cave wall.
“What are you doing?” she asked. “How can you care for him like that?”
Her love turned his beautiful face. His eyes were closed and a purple bruise covered half of one cheek.
Nobody answered her. One by one the soldiers carried the other six heroes into the small cave and laid them on the floor.
“I said what are you doing?” Her voice was shrill. “They all need nursing.”
The old man turned and glared at her. “They will recover here, perfectly. Come outside.” He led her onto the hillside, then turned back to the soldiers. “Now fill it in.”
The men took spades and dug at the heaps of loose rocks and earth above and to the sides of the cave. They flung the stones and soil into its entrance.
“No! He’s not dead!” she screamed. “He’ll wake up. He’s so young, so strong, he’ll recover.”
The old man’s face was long and sharp, like a line of teeth. His voice filled the air all around, though he barely moved his thin lips. “They will all wake up. But not in your lifetime.”
“Don’t take him from me!” She could taste the mud as if it was in her mouth. She vomited, staggered and slipped forward. “Let him out!”
“Hold her back,” the old man snapped.
Two soldiers grabbed her arms. She pulled against them but they overpowered her. Tossing her head, she flicked her dark hair out of even darker eyes and looked into their faces. “You’re hurting me.” Tears spilled over her eyelids. “Imagine when he wakes up, trapped, in the dark. Imagine if that was you. Imagine the fear.”
One of the young men bit his lip. The woman knew the power of her face, her black brows and lashes and her pale skin. “Please help me,” she whispered. “I love him, oh I love him so.”
“Don’t listen to her.” The old man spoke over his shoulder. He focused his deep-set eyes on the mound of earth in the cave mouth and waved his hand at it. Green tinged the soil, then covered it. Thick grass grew long and the mound itself swelled upwards. Small bushes appeared on it and grew sturdy.
She screamed again, but then the woman couldn’t breathe. The hillside had closed over the cave mouth completely, as if it was never there. She felt as if she too had been folded into a bed of dark earth. Cold mud filled her eyes and mouth and all light had gone from the world.
Chapter 1: Head in Hand
London slipped away like water running down a window. I put my feet up on the dashboard and watched it go. Heading west out of the city, gardens grew bigger, spaces between houses expanded, and glimpses of green appeared in the distance. When London disappeared completely I switched my eyes to my feet, clad in my favourite pale blue ballet slippers. I wiggled my toes inside them and admired my best cream linen trousers that today I had paired with a new, suitably countrified blue body-warmer. Today I was in transit. Tomorrow the body-warmer would be joined by sensible cords and wellington boots and Maddie the city girl would become Madeleine the country maid. I pictured myself going to the farm in the morning to get eggs and milk from the farmer. I would be brilliant at it. I needed to get a guidebook to flowers and birds and stuff.
I looked from my feet to Mum’s face behind the steering wheel. She would have to be a country lady, but she didn’t seem to mind. She pursed her lips in her usual driving concentration. I stared at her for three minutes and she didn’t notice. Mum wasn’t pretty, better described as beautiful, or even handsome. She had a strong-featured face with gigantic blue eyes and long wavy hair streaked with grey. Maybe a bit too long for her age. Sometimes I tried to suggest she could wear it shorter, or dye it, because she looked like an old hippy. “So what?” she always replied. “An old hippy is what I am.”
My wavy hair and my build were the same as Mum’s; I replicated her broad, swimmer’s shoulders. My brown eyes and the colour of my hair, black as night, were the only souvenirs I had of my tall, dark and handsome father.
After five minutes she finally noticed me staring at her. “What?” Her eyes flicked sideways.
“Nothing. How are you feeling?”
“I’m okay. No, I’m good.” She had both hands wrapped completely around the steering wheel and the tendons in her forearms stood out.
“I mean, I’m going to go to school. Do homework. Maybe get a Saturday job. All the same stuff as I would have been doing in London, but with extra cows and sheep all over the place, and a guide to trees in my handbag. You, though...”
A leather clad motorcyclist sped past us.
“Me though?”
“Well aren’t you worried? You can tell me if you’re worried, Mum. I think you should.”
She glanced sideways again. The car rounded a hill and gave us a beautiful view across a great, hedgerow-seamed swathe of green countryside.
“I’m not worried, Maddie. I’m really not. I’ve always known this is what would happen. It’s the family business. The same thing happened to Grandma.”
“But she was never an HR manager in the city like you, Mum. She lived in the country all her life. You haven’t lived out here since you were sixteen.” I turned my shiny blue feet in, so they met at the toes. “Since you were the same age as I am now. If you want to talk to me about it, that’s fine.”
She smiled. “You really are very persistent. Okay, so I admit it’s going to be odd. Life in Glastonbury is going to be a change. I haven’t lived there for twenty-five years. But I’ve never lost touch.”
“So what? I visited with you. Somerset is still a foreign country.” I imagined this as a dramatic, handwritten phrase. Of course a teacher would underline it in red and write “Exaggeration!” in the margin; every teacher I ever had loved writing “Exaggeration!” on my school work.
“It’s not a foreign country, Maddie, we visited every month.” Mum pushed a thick strand of hair away from her forehead. “You’ll understand in time, for us, for the Bride women, this is a natural thing to do. For me it feels absolutely right.” She nodded to herself. “Besides, life in the city was just getting harder and harder. Everybody there was stressed, or aggressive, worried about the future. We’ve got away from that.”
I shook my head. “Nope. Not me. I’m not a beekeeper, for crap’s sake, Mum. I’ll finish school there. Fair enough. Then I’m going back to the city to university and I’m never coming back.” I could only be a country girl for so long. After two years I would morph into a student behind piles of dusty books, beside an intellectual boyfriend with glasses and a scarf.
Now hurt tinged her sideways glance.
“I mean, of course I’ll come back. I’ll come and visit all the time. Every month. Just like you visited Grandma. But that’s it.”
She didn’t believe me, she felt she knew better, but she didn’t say anything and I didn’t push her. Holding back was how we managed to get along so well, the two of us, the Bride family. She clicked the indicator and we turned off the motorway, heading south towards Somerset. The road looked so familiar to me after visiting Grandma w
eekends, Christmas, July and August. Until I was four years old I thought that was why it was called Somerset, because we went there for the summer.
When I was little trips to Somerset were exciting. We set out early in the morning in a series of cute little cars, stopping for a picnic on the way. As I grew older the cars grew bigger, as Mum did better at work, but the trips annoyed me, distracting me from my friends and outings to the cinema. Weekends in the country saw the rare emergence of my sulky persona, punk Madeleine, who snapped at Mum and slammed doors.
For the last year the journey had been even grimmer. Mum drove in silence as Grandma got sicker and sicker. Then we had come down to arrange the funeral, and again to attend it. Now we were returning in the last executive car, a BMW estate, to take over Grandma’s life where she had left off. Beckerly Honey, the family business and 17 Chalice Drive, a tiny, semi-detached house with an overgrown garden and unreliable plumbing.
The road sliced through a space in the final range of hills and the Somerset Levels spread themselves before us, flat as the surface of a pool in which no one swam. In the distance Glastonbury Tor rose like an arm pushed through the water, holding a small tower on its summit.
“Nearly there.” Mum blinked hard three times and rubbed at her eyes.
“So Mum...” I tried to think of a subject of conversation to keep her awake. “What was it like when you were my age in Glastonbury?”
“Oh, it’s much better now. I just used to swim, a lot, and pretend I didn’t like the rich kids or the locals.”
“You were a rebel?” I gaped at her in mock surprise.
“I suppose so. It annoyed me that everybody knew each other. Everybody knew us, especially. The Bride women. The fact that your grandfather was never anywhere to be seen always seemed to fascinate people and that drove me crazy.” She indicated as she pulled around a motorcyclist stopped by the side of the road. “Everybody at Levels College was so rich and fancy, and we weren’t. But it’s not like that now.” She added the last sentence very quickly. Levels College was the private school I would be starting at the next day, fourth of September.
“So that’s why you went to London?”
“I think so. It seems so long ago now.”
The road dropped onto the levels, long, flat and straight as a ruler, with a drainage canal gleaming beside it in the low September sun. By the time we got to the house on Chalice Drive all light had gone, gloom and autumn cold pervaded the cramped spaces under its low ceilings. I went from room to room turning on lights. It didn’t take long. There were three rooms downstairs and three upstairs. My room looked over the four apple trees and long grass of the back garden and the Tor beyond.
I stacked my current favourite books on the shelf beside the bed. In the last year I had switched from fiction to biography. I didn’t know why, but the lives of men like Caesar, Henry the Eighth, Napoleon and Winston Churchill all fascinated me, though next year, of course, I would switch to something else.
Above the bookshelf I stuck up that month’s favourite poster, a print of the Maid of Shalott, and sat on my narrow bed to stare at it for a moment. The despair in her face made me feel better about living in a tiny house in a small country town and starting at an enormous private school with an absurd uniform. It lurked in my wardrobe, a grey jacket and skirt with a nasty blue shirt.
I read about the childhood of Nelson Mandela for an hour before turning out my light, then lay in bed trying to make out the face of the Maid of Shalott, through the darkness. The outskirts of Glastonbury were so very, very quiet after Hackney. There was nothing to distract me from my own thoughts. The pulse in my temple sounded loud as a drum and my eyelashes made a scratching noise against the coarse cotton of my pillow. What if nobody liked me? Or more probably, I didn’t like anybody? What if everybody looked down on me for not buying my uniform from a designer label, and for staying in Britain all through the summer holidays? For never having been to a private school before.
I got up, went to the window and looked down on the street. At this time in Hackney the sidewalk outside the Turkish takeaway and the corner shop would be thronged with people, but Chalice Drive stood empty and silent. Then a streetlamp flickered, and a shape moved through the space where its light had been. As if from the corner of my eye I caught the curvy form of a woman carrying something. I peered at the sphere swinging from her right hand. Was it a handbag or something much more gruesome?
