The Buried Circle

by Jenni Mills

  This is a blow, because I’ve only recently managed to talk Michael into letting me do the odd day helping the estate wardens, who are soon to become even more short-handed when one of them disappears on maternity leave. Four months’ working part-time in the caf and I’m bored rigid. I’m determined to prove I’m wasted wiping tables but, alas, my BA in creative studies (described on the CV as an upper second, not altogether accurately) doesn’t seem to impress. On the other hand, with the weather so bad, browsing in a cosy archive trumps litter-picking soggy plastic bags any day, not to mention the pervasive odour of Graham’s socks. So I muster a grateful smile. ‘Be delighted.’

  ‘Rightio.’ Michael stands up, anxious to usher me out before I start plaguing him again for a full-time job. ‘Thought it’d be up your street. And ask your gran what she remembers of AK. They don’t make archaeologists like him today. Shame he never finished what he started.’

  As things are still quiet in the caf, Corey sends me to exercise my toilet-cleaning expertise in the education-centre lavatories behind the Barn Museum. We’ve been visited this morning by a party of schoolkids from Salisbury. Half of them forgot to pull the chain, and one was sick in the Gents.

  Still, snowdrops under lime trees. Life returns to the frozen land. I can’t help my heart beating a little faster at the thought of a TV crew turning up. It sets ideas buzzing in my head. On the way to fetch a fresh bottle of disinfectant, I check out the display in the Barn Museum on Alexander Keiller’s life, and help myself to a couple of leaflets to refresh my memory of the story every Avebury resident knows: how the Marmalade King bought himself a village and a stone circle.

  Mop into bucket, wring it on the squeezer, shake it aloft like a ritual staff, and go cantering sunwise round the Gents bestowing my blessed droplets of disinfectant on the tiles.

  Corey cashes up early. The caf has been virtually empty the whole afternoon, the weather deterring all but the hardiest stone-huggers. But the day has saved its best till last. The rain has blown over and the Downs are washed in clear light. Setting out for John’s, I clip the iPod on my belt, and Dreadzone’s ‘Little Britain’ crashes into my ears.

  A gust of wind conjures a vortex of dead leaves. A couple of sheep grazing among the stones lift their heads and stare at me, amazed as sheep always are at the sight of humans: life, Jim, but not as we know it. On the high street a few raw-fingered tourists are trying to capture the gap-toothed grin of the circle on their mobiles. There’s said to be a stone buried under the metalled road where I’m walking. Whenever I pass over it, I feel a little shiver, crossing a boundary.

  Better respect the stones, girl…

  Frannie would tell me stories about growing up in Avebury, playing among the stones. Overgrown, then, hidden among trees and bushes. Loved them stones, we did, but we didn’t think they was anything special, not until…She brought me here to show me where her parents’ guesthouse had been, now an empty green space. Pointing down the high street. Baker’s there. Butcher’s further on, used to slaughter ‘is own meat. That white cottage was the forge. Blacksmith was called Mr Paradise. Sam Pratt, he were the saddler…Wouldn’ believe it today, would you? Nothin’ but a post office, everythin’ else for bloomin’ tourists. Eyes narrowed against the smoke from her cigarette, searching for the lost village, wishing it back. Could imagine ‘em coming along the high street now, ‘cept they never comes back, do they? Nineteen twenties, thirties, when I were a little girl–I tell ‘ee, India, thic there times was magic. Frannie tried to speak what she called ‘nicely’, but Wiltshire dialect crept in whenever she talked about the past. No, they never comes back, that’s for sure. Not the ones you want to, anyway.

  She took me to the museum, and showed me the skeleton of the little boy that had been dug up at Windmill Hill, in the 1920s, with his big, misshapen skull. She patted the top of his glass case, and said, You’m still here, then, Charlie. There was a funny smile on her face, the muscles around her mouth twitching, her jaw grinding and wobbling as if her false teeth had worked loose.

  Keiller, though…did she ever talk about Keiller? She must have mentioned him–you couldn’t talk about the village in the 1930s without reference to what he did to it, but I don’t remember her banging on about him the way everyone does here, with that mixture of admiration and loathing usually reserved for figures such as Oliver Cromwell, Margaret Thatcher and Bill Gates.

  I cross the main road on the bend by the Red Lion and follow Green Street through the stones, past the gap in the houses where Frannie’s old home stood. The lane continues beyond the circle, eventually petering out to become a white scar on the flank of the hill: the old coach road from London to Bath, now a chalky, rutted bridleway, known as the Herepath. Thousands of years ago, it might have been another ceremonial route into Avebury. Some people think that since there were stone avenues to south and west of the circle, perhaps rows of stones ran east and northwards too. John swears that by dowsing in the fields he’s found evidence of buried megaliths beside the main road to Swindon.

  The skyline is dotted with spiny beech hangers–the Hedgehogs, Wiltshire people call them–planted over ancient round barrows. The Ridgeway, a track even older, runs along the top of the Downs. When dusk gathers, it can feel like the loneliest place in the world up there, peopled only by ghosts.

  A small red car with European plates is parked on the verge at Tolemac–the stretch of the lane I like least. The neat, wedge-shaped plantation of pine, ash, wild cherry and beech holds a particular set of memories from my own childhood and still gives me the jitters, all these years later. Bare twigs scrape against each other like dry, bony fingers. This afternoon woodsmoke is in the air: someone’s camping under the trees.

  woodsmoke overlaid with the acrid smell of burning plastic, a van on fire, branches above it catching light. A cut on my hand, blood beginning to ooze between my small fingers…

  Most of my itinerant childhood is a blur: odd moments caught in the memory crystals. My mother Margaret–Meg to her friends, but always Margaret to me–never had a job, unless you count dancing on stage with Angelfeather at free festivals. In winter we lived on benefits in Bristol, but in summer we followed the band from festival to festival in her decommissioned ambulance, painted purple. Stonehenge, Glastonbury, Deeply Vale, Inglestone Common; we wandered through Wales and stayed in tepees, we joined the women at Greenham and slept under plastic benders. And in 1989, the year they call the Second Summer of Love, we camped in Tolemac: our last summer together. I was eight. That year the ambulance had been replaced by a British Telecom van with windows hacked out of its sides and a door at the back. Because John hadn’t sealed the glass properly, everything leaked if it rained.

  The first thing Margaret always did when we arrived at a new place was collect up her crystals, which always fell off wherever she’d put them and rolled around when we were travelling, and arrange them in their proper places. Black tourmaline outside the door, for protection and geopathic stress, in case she’d accidentally parked on a dodgy ley-line. Citrine in the money corner, behind the passenger seat, to dispel negativity and in the hope we might actually make some dosh that summer. Rose quartz behind the driver’s seat, in the equally vain hope that Margaret would find love. The irony was that she could have had love, if only she could have brought herself to accept it, from John. He’d done her van for her but she wouldn’t let him sleep in it with us: he was camping twenty yards away under his old green army poncho, like a faithful dog forced to sleep outside in its kennel. Then Margaret would go out and gather wild flowers to stick in a glass of water on the fold-down table. They’d be shrivelled and wilting by nightfall, but she always convinced herself they’d survive.

  ‘There,’ she’d say, every time when she finished these rituals. ‘Home.’

  Behind me the red car starts up, its engine sounding like an old sewing-machine. I step off the road to give them room to pass, but it slows to a halt and the driver, a girl with hair chopped in a lank brown bob,
winds down the window. She’s wearing an expensive mohair sweater. Not one of the campers, then. ‘Excuse me. This road takes us to Marlborough?’ Her accent is Germanic.

  ‘I’m afraid not. It ends up ahead.’

  ‘It goes to the Ridgeway, no? It shows it on our map.’

  ‘You can’t drive the Ridgeway. It’s not allowed. Anyway, you’d never make it without a four-wheel-drive. There’s a farmyard further on where you can turn.’

  Her thin olive-skinned face settles into petulant disappointment as she slams the car into gear. The Road Less Travelled turns out to be a No Through Road. Isn’t it always the way? I get a fleeting memory of Margaret’s face the day Social Services took me to Frannie’s. The odd thing is, I remember there being tears in her eyes. Perhaps I’m imagining it, because I’ve always assumed it was a relief to her to be rid of me.

  You’re too hard on her, Indy, says John.

  The red car comes chugging back with part of the hedgerow attached to its bumpers. I send Margaret’s crocodile tears away with it, pffft, evaporating into the exhaust gases that hang on the frosty air, then wish I could call them back, make the tears real, make her real too. Sometimes I find it hard to recall what she even looked like.

  High on the Herepath, the air is exhilarating. Everything is still crisp and clear, a last flush of brilliance before night, though light will already be fading in the fields below. The sun’s dropping fast, an egg-yolk stain seeping up from behind Waden Hill to meet it. I sit down on a sarsen. This one, bum-freezingly cold through my jeans, lives up to its geological past: a stone shaped and tumbled by ice sheets. Sheep baa somewhere below, as a farmer drives the flock into another field. Sound carries weirdly up here, especially on frosty air. John says there are places on the Ridgeway where you can hear voices from within the stone circle itself: Neolithic landscaping was about sound as well as space.

  Some way off something splashes, startling me: a boot, maybe, in one of the water-filled ruts on the old chalk track. The gate at the top of the Herepath clicks as someone comes off the Ridgeway. There’s a whistle, and a dog comes racing across the field, like Whip used to when I called him.

  He was my dog when I was small, but I lost him at the Battle of the Beanfield. Another of the iconic moments of Alternative History: 1985. I don’t really remember it. It’s a story I’ve been told, caught in crystal. We were among a convoy of a hundred and forty travellers’ vans on the way to Stonehenge, but the police put up a roadblock. Margaret drove after some of the other vans crashing through the hedge into a beanfield. And then it was like some Hieronymus Bosch nightmare, says John, smoke and rage and contorted faces, people slipping in mud and blood, Whip and the other travellers’ dogs barking, screams, moans. Somebody with dreadlocks making a weird ululating noise. Overhead, the dogged whump whump whump of helicopter rotors. John says Margaret was holding me in her arms, but still the police kept on coming, truncheons raised, still they hit her on the shoulder as she turned away to protect me. There’s a picture of John, which was in the newspaper, looking ridiculously young, blood running out of his hair and down his face into his beard, being led away by policemen in riot helmets, made faceless by sunlight reflecting off their Perspex masks. I never saw Whip again. The travellers’ dogs were taken away by the police and put down.

  I turn round in time to see the walker bending to pat his dog, then he strides off again down the hill towards me, the animal running ahead at full stretch, leaping the puddles. It’s some sort of small hunting dog, more solidly built than Whip was, with a shaggier coat. It stops a metre short of me, and stares, panting, mouth half open like it’s never seen a girl sitting on a sarsen before.

  ‘Here, boy.’ I rub my fingers together. It takes a step forward, quivering with curiosity, as its owner follows it towards me.

  A dark woollen trilby jammed over light brown corkscrew curls, a long grey scarf wrapped round his neck, a blush of cold on the smooth-skinned cheeks: it makes him look hardly more than a boy, though he’s probably early-to mid-twenties. The cool eyes, half hidden under the tangled fringe, hold mine for a moment, then slide away, gone before I can get out a ‘good evening’. He carries on down the hill towards Avebury. Strong shoulders, hands tucked into the pockets of a brown fleece jacket, legs in mud-spattered skinny jeans. He takes a hand out of his pocket–no gloves–and snaps his fingers. The dog swivels its head after its master, looks back at me, blinks, then races off to follow him.

  Reluctantly, I clamber to my feet and start to walk up to the Ridgeway, turning to catch a last glimpse of the twilight walker before he disappears below the curve of the slope. He’s taking the steep, slippy bit fast, with a polka-ish sideways gait like he’s scree-running. Perfect balance. Perfect arse. You have to admire.

  John’s home below Overton Hill is not pretty by Wiltshire-cottage standards: instead of thatch and sarsen, it’s square-built of plain red brick, with a tiled roof. Living room downstairs, with a kitchen at the back, like an afterthought; two small bedrooms and a minuscule bathroom upstairs. Seventy years ago, when Fran was a girl, a farm worker and his wife would have brought up half a dozen children here.

  I’m half expecting John not to be in, but the door opens almost immediately when I knock. In the living room, the stool he uses for reflexology sessions is drawn up to the sofa, and there’s a green silk scarf on the floor. ‘You haven’t got company?’

  John bends down to pick it up. ‘She does that every time. Leaves something so she’s an excuse to pop in and collect it.’

  ‘Thinking she might catch you at it with one of your other clients?’

  He grins. ‘Does make me nervous. Sit down, kettle’s on the stove.’ He disappears into the kitchen, and I settle myself in front of a cheerful fire, checking first that no other female client has left a memento, like a pair of knickers stuffed behind the sofa cushions. In the corner of the room, leather-skinned drums are stacked on top of each other, next to a shelf full of drumming cassettes and books with beefy, muscular titles like The Way of the Shaman, Recognizing Your Power Animal, and Psychic Self-Defence.

  ‘How’s Frannie?’ he calls from the kitchen.

  ‘Still refusing to utter another word about Grandad.’

  Every time I’ve tried to raise the subject, her eyes fill with tears and her mouth turns down. When I questioned her after seeing the date on Davey Fergusson’s headstone, last autumn, her response was to suggest I’d found the wrong grave marker. Then she told me I’d misremembered Margaret’s birthday. Your mother was always coy about her age, she said.

  This was true, but there’s coy and there’s eye-wateringly unbelievable. Margaret liked people to think she was still in her thirties long after she’d hit the big four-oh, but I’m certain I’ve seen 1945 written down. I’d had her passport, once, with a whole parcel of other stuff that had been returned to us after she died in Goa, when I was thirteen–a stupid accident, falling off the side of a stage. That was so Margaret it can make me smile now: she was graceful when she danced, but clumsy in every other setting. I burned everything on a ceremonial pyre. Now I wish I hadn’t.

  John returns with mugs of tea. ‘You should stop nagging her. Frannie’ll tell you in her own time–if there’s anything to tell. She OK otherwise?’

  ‘Fine, I think. Except…’ I stir mine vigorously, then remember I promised myself I’d cut out sugar this week. ‘Except she keeps having air-hostess moments.’

  ‘Having what? John, in the middle of stoking the fire with another log, stops and turns round. ‘Air hostess?’

  ‘Calm, polite, smiling, but sort of empty’ I’m groping for words to describe the indescribable, but deep down, very deep down, worrying that it is describable, with some horrible medical term like dementia. ‘I’m not sure if it’s to stop me pestering her about the past, or her way of trying to conceal when she gets confused. You know how air hostesses delete part of their personality. “Please fasten your seatbelts, ladies and gentlemen, a little turbulence is not any cause f
or concern.’”

  ‘Know what I think?’ John kicks the reflexology stool into place between us as makeshift coffee-table, and settles himself in the armchair. ‘Could be TIA.’

  ‘That some sort of airline?’

  ‘A mini-stroke. When I was nursing, we used to come across it all the time.’ After he left the army, with a bad case of combat stress, one of John’s jobs was in a geriatric nursing home in Bristol. ‘You find them on the floor, all in a tizz, can’t remember what happened, how long they’ve been there. No paralysis, none of the obvious symptoms of stroke, but it wipes part of their memory. Very common.’

  ‘You think that has anything to do with not wanting to talk about my grandfather? Like she really can’t remember?’ Relief is sluicing through me. At least John didn’t suggest Alzheimer’s. Maybe it won’t become any worse.

  ‘Who knows? I’m no expert.’

  I hate it when he talks about Frannie as if she’s ill. Makes me want to shout: You’re supposed to be a bloody shamanic healer. Can’t you do something? But he’d only tell me there’s no healing old age. Instead I say: ‘Maybe I should take her to the GP?’

  John, not the greatest fan of the NHS having worked on the inside, pulls a face. ‘Half the time what’s wrong with people is the last set of pills the doc prescribed.’ He pulls out his tobacco pouch and papers. ‘Not much can be done about TIA, anyway, apart from putting her on blood-pressure medication, and she’s already on that.’

  ‘I wish she was closer to the doctor. Why’d she have to move out here, miles from all the stuff old people need?’

  John’s faded blue eyes meet mine, telling me I know the answer. She came back to end where she began. Where her mother and father are buried, in the churchyard at St James’s. A neat little roll-up starts taking shape between his fingers. ‘And how are you? he says.