The Buried Circle

by Jenni Mills

  He strides off briskly. I fold the tripod and follow, with a faint sense of unease.

  At three o’clock, Kit pronounces herself satisfied with the ropes and prehistoric-style pulleys, and assembles three teams of students and onlookers to haul on them, as well as a fourth team (mostly girls) to dart around slotting timber props into place as the stone starts to come upright.

  ‘Can we do the whole thing twice?’ asks Ibby. ‘It’d be easier to film.’

  ‘No,’ says Kit. And keep your people well out of the way. This is dangerous. Remember what happened to the Barber Surgeon?’

  Ed and Graham have been co-opted to help. There are beads of perspiration sparkling in Graham’s blond beard as his team takes the strain, and the stone judders an inch or two above the lip of its pit.

  ‘Get a prop under there,’ shouts Kit. ‘Reuben, your team mustn’t slacken off.’

  Ed’s navy T-shirt is dark with sweat, his arms as corded as the honeysuckle rope. A blonde student in shorts and a bikini top darts under the hawser to jab a prop into place.

  ‘She’s coming up,’ calls Martin. ‘Steady…’

  Ed clenches his jaw and grunts, catches sight of me filming, and mouths something that will have to be pixillated.

  ‘Don’t let her twist!’ yells Kit.

  Rain starts to fall as, slowly, inch by inch, the stone is levered from its bed. We’ve gathered quite a crowd, standing under umbrellas on the henge banks for a grandstand view. There’s scattered applause at the moment when the huge diamond finally comes upright.

  ‘You can’t relax,’ shouts Kit. ‘Hold her there while we check the props.’

  Chalk blocks are packed into the stone hole. Eventually Kit announces she’s satisfied the megalith is secure. The teams release the ropes, which are attached to stakes in the ground. Kit tests every one.

  Martin is still looking worried. ‘I’d have liked to cement her in. And backfill the trench.’

  ‘It’d take an earthquake to shift her. Even without the ropes, the blocks would hold her. We’ll come back and finish the job when Solstice is over.’

  ‘Well, on your head be it.’

  ‘Or yours,’ she says, punching him lightly on the arm.

  I miss the rest of the conversation because I’ve caught sight of Ed, chaining together metal barriers to keep the public away from the trench containing the trussed stone. The blonde girl in shorts is leaning on one, helping steady it while he loops the padlock through. He bends his head towards her and says something; she grins and laughs.

  Rather than go straight home, I walk down to John’s. Frannie woke this morning before I left the house, entirely lucid, though without any memory of having caused so much fuss. John has been with her most of the day, leaving mid-afternoon for a couple of reflexology appointments.

  By the time I reach his cottage, the weather has done one of those conjuring tricks it likes to pull in June and unexpectedly hauled out a steamy sun. Raindrops are sparkling on the summer jasmine outside the door.

  He looks tired: he’s wearing his old glasses, instead of contact lenses.

  ‘So, did Adele have anything useful to suggest about Frannie?’ I ask, as he makes tea for us.

  ‘Yes.’ His voice through the kitchen door is unusually wary.

  ‘And Frannie was OK when you left?’

  ‘Not too bad.’ He comes back in carrying two mugs. I’d swear that’s guilt on his face.

  ‘You said on the phone she was fine.’

  ‘Yes, of course, that’s what I meant.’ His eyes slide away towards the brick hearth. ‘Sorry, fire’s a bit miserable. It’s been so damp today I thought it worth getting one going. I’ll stick a log on.’

  ‘So she seems OK now?’

  ‘Well…’ He throws some kindling onto the embers, then kneels to hold a sheet of newspaper across the fireplace to improve the draw. ‘You know what she’s like. Weather conditions variable on Planet Fran.’ He seems to be spending an inordinate amount of time building an elaborate pyramid of coal and repositioning the newspaper.

  ‘John. What’s going on? Did you find out something else about what happened yesterday?’

  ‘What?’ The newspaper catches fire. ‘Ouch.’ He lets the flame take it up the chimney in a roar of sparks, and finally turns to face me. ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘I’ve never seen you this tense.’

  ‘Sorry.’ Getting to his feet, he wipes a hand across his face, leaving a black smudge on one cheek. ‘This is a bit difficult.’

  My heart’s thundering. ‘What is?’

  ‘I told Adele I thought you needed help. That it’s too much to ask you to cope with Frannie by yourself. I told her about the helicopter crash, and how badly it affected you…’

  The bastard. How dare he?

  I storm straight out of his cottage, leaving the tea undrunk, slamming the front door so hard the window panes rattle. The door opens again behind me before I’m more than a couple of yards down the path. ‘Don’t flounce off with your arse in your hand,’ roars John. ‘This isn’t about you, it’s about what’s best for Frannie.’ The front porch frames him with pink sprays of summer jasmine, like a parody of an old-fashioned Valentine card.

  ‘I was managing fine until you and sodding Social Services stuck their oar in.’ I lash out at a molehill on the lawn, which disintegrates in a shower of damp earth. The garden gate has warped in the rain, and I have to struggle to open it.

  ‘Indy’ He’s holding out a sprig of jasmine. ‘Peace offering? I agree, we shouldn’t have let them take her to the day centre. But…’

  ‘There is no but,’ I say. ‘I have to look after her because she took me on after…after…’ The words are sticking in my throat. ‘When Mum didn’t want me any more.’

  His hand tightens on the framework of the porch. ‘Life’s not a series of emotional IOUs,’ he says. ‘Frannie’d hate you to crucify yourself on her behalf. Besides, it wasn’t that way, you know it wasn’t. Jesus, I’ve been stupid. I should never have suggested you came back to Avebury after the crash. Didn’t take into account this place has other memories for you. I should’ve understood that’s unfinished business too.’

  ‘Yeah, yeah, time wounds all heels, et cetera,’ I say, with pressure building up in my chest. ‘But I was eight. I got over it. Gone, done, forgotten.’

  ‘Forgotten?’ He throws the piece of jasmine onto the damp Tarmac of the path. ‘If you’re not limping, ask yourself why you hit the bottle every night. Why you can’t convince yourself you weren’t responsible for that lad dying in the chopper, why you still see his eyes every night when you go to sleep…’

  ‘How do you know about the eyes?’

  ‘…why you won’t let anyone talk about what happened in Tolemac to Mick Feather.’

  My throat closes up completely. ‘I don’t know what happened to Mick Feather,’ comes out as a croak. ‘I don’t. Want. To hear.’ I turn and run down the path, and my eyes are so blurry I can hardly find the catch on the gate.

  CHAPTER 34

  On the Ridgeway, the air is thick and still, thunder on the way. My T-shirt is clinging to my back, and my head is pounding. Gone, done, forgotten.

  I’m walking fast, punishing the ground with the impact of my heels, away from Avebury. But it doesn’t matter which direction I take. I can’t escape the vortex: I’m still going round in circles. This was the path we took in 1989, the night I first watched John make a crop circle: guiding the mothership in.

  Mick Feather, Keir’s dad, was with us that night, though Keir stayed with Mum at the van in Tolemac, in case his hayfever flared up. Mick, with skin that always looked grimy like a coalman’s, irrespective of how often he washed. I was afraid of Mick. There was something forbidding about him, with those heavy black eyebrows and muddy skin. Keir said he was fun when they did things together. Much of the time Keir was with us, though, in our house, and then in our van under the trees at Tolemac.

  Keir and I were almost the same age, best
friends because he spent so much time at our place. Mick and the others had nowhere else to be apart from the pub, or the smelly vans and crash pads they inhabited after their wives and girlfriends had kicked them out. Mum wasn’t just saddled with me to look after, she had a tribe of dysfunctional kids who’d never grown up. No wonder she wanted rid of us and ran away.

  I can picture her, face hard as sarsen, cheeks the same dirty, stained white as the chalk scars on the hillside. She grabbed hold of me by the shoulders, her hands trembling with anger, and shook me like a beanbag. ‘You stupid little cow. Who did you tell?’

  I didn’t know what she meant. There was the sound of a helicopter overhead, and the air smelled of burned plastic. ‘Don’t you realize what you’ve done?’

  I’ve lost track of time and place, under a lid of thick grey cloud, clamped over the Downs like the headache that’s screwed itself onto my skull. The sun is hidden, but it must be close to setting. Somewhere around here we made the crop circle. I’ve watched the Barley Collective, friends of John’s from Bristol, make crop circles half a dozen times since, but that summer was the first and most vivid. The western sky still on fire, though it was past ten o’clock at night, May bugs dive-bombing the flashlights. No one to see us, a mile at least from the nearest farmhouse, sculpting a field of ripening barley hidden in the folds of the downland. The little fellow with hair like a black man’s, the one who came into the church–what was his name? Rizla?–moving in a huge arc with the string and the pegs to mark out the design to John’s orders. ‘Callin’ in the mothership, babe,’ the little guy kept shouting. ‘Lovin’ the alien and callin’ in the fakkin’ mothership.’ Afterwards, he hoisted me onto his shoulders, and said: ‘Back to the mothership.’ Back to Margaret’s camper van.

  I sit on a stile, with a view of the fields below. A creature is moving through the young grain, too distant to identify in the fading light. The night we trampled out the crop circle, a hare danced across our path, long-eared and leggy. John spotted it first, grabbed my shoulders and turned me so I saw it run across the field. When he became a shaman, he took a hare for his power animal.

  In 1989, the landscape seemed touched with promise, under a rising moon near the full, made enormous and golden by dust in the atmosphere. Tonight the same fields are tired and colourless, sticky grey air thickening to twilight.

  Across the valley, a long cigar shape looms on the misty downland. That night, it seemed between worlds, drenched in moonlight. I sat cross-legged in the barley, gazing up at it on the ridge, while John and his friends called out instructions and song titles to each other, all their old favourites, Pink Floyd, Hendrix, Echo and the Bunnymen, Angelfeather. ‘Set The Controls For The Heart Of The Sun’. ‘Hot Summer Night’. ‘Killing Moon’. ‘Callin’ In The Mothership’.

  The other mothership. Watching us. Tall stones like teeth.

  The Long Barrow.

  The path climbs the downland towards the barrow. A pulse throbs in my temple. Panting in the claggy air, I can’t stop myself glancing uneasily over my shoulder, sensing someone or something behind, shadowing my footsteps. Like one who on a lonesome road, doth walk in fear and dread…But when I turn the whole narrow valley is laid out below me, empty.

  And having once turned round, walks on, and turns no more his head…

  The ground levels out towards the barrow, sinister in the fading light, with its massive stones guarding the forecourt.

  Because he knows a frightful fiend doth close behind him tread.

  Pressure builds up in my ears, my heart kicks, pumping ice-water and adrenalin and superstitious terror. The fiend isn’t behind, but ahead: a shape wrapped in darkness, on the mown grass in front of the barrow. Twilight has wiped blank its face. Wearing a cloak emblazoned with mystic symbols, motionless, cross-legged, stiff-armed, head tipped back, it stares at a starless sky. Behind it, an unearthly light seeps out of the barrow between the megaliths.

  Not cool to run, but on this occasion…

  Too late: I’ve been seen. The shape moves its head. A grey shadow slips from its side.

  CHAPTER 35

  ‘I knew you were coming,’ says Bryn.

  Cynon the Barbarian, giving up the struggle to masquerade as Hell Hound, is as pleased as ever to see me, leaping up and trying to land flying licks on my face, dancing away, then coming back for another slobbery go.

  Bryn’s wrapped in a dark, fleecy blanket, beaded with dew, whose mystic symbols turn out to be the crest of Newcastle United Football Club. The unearthly glow between the megaliths is a small campfire in the mouth of the barrow.

  His rucksack is open beside him, by his bare feet an enamel mug and a half-empty tin of baked beans with a plastic fork sticking out of it.

  ‘Your boy around too?’ I ask. ‘Weren’t you going to bring him with you for Solstice?’

  ‘Didn’t work out.’ He reaches for the beans. The blanket slips from one shoulder, revealing he’s bare-chested beneath it. ‘None of it: home, boy, lady. Goddess told me I’d be better off alone.’ He rummages in the rucksack and produces a plastic cap that fits exactly over the can’s rim. Waste not, want not. ‘Tomorrow’s breakfast,’ he says apologetically.

  ‘You haven’t got a paracetamol in there, have you?’ I ask. My head is still thumping.

  ‘Got something better.’ He pulls up a Velero flap on a pocket of the rucksack, with a tearing sound that sets my teeth on edge. ‘Try one of these. Tramadol. It’ll take the edge off anything. Headache?’

  ‘That’s it.’

  He nods. ‘Give it ten and it’ll be gone.’ He pops the pill out of its blister pack and proffers it on a grubby palm. ‘Sorry. No washing facilities up here. There’s bottled water to wash it down, though. Have two–that’ll magic away the pain.’

  I take a long swig of water with the pills–headache probably dehydration as much as anything–and settle myself on the ground. ‘What–’

  ‘Sssh,’ he says. ‘Give it time to work. Breathe steady.’ We sit in companionable silence, gazing upwards, looking for stars coming out, but the cloud’s too thick. The air’s still, the quietness occasionally broken by the far-away hum of traffic on the A4. The ache in my temples eases. With it, the huge over-inflated stress-zeppelin that is Frannie, the row with John, dead Steve, live Ed, television that may or may not be about my grandfather, seems to shrink and float away into the distance. A sense of well-being steals over me.

  Eventually Bryn shifts his position and smiles.

  I smile back. ‘Better already.’

  ‘Good.’ Quiet confidence in his voice; he’d known it would work. ‘I were thinkin’ of walkin’ up to the Wansdyke, spend the night watchin’ for crop circles. If you’re there when one forms…amazin’. Sun comes up and there she is, grown like a mushroom in the dark. But now…’ He pats Cynon, snuggled against the Newcastle blanket. ‘Have to wait for your walk till mornin’, boy.’

  ‘Are you camping in Tolemac?’ I ask, massaging crampy calves.

  ‘No, no. Sleepin’ here, in the womb of the Goddess.’

  I’m used to John chucking the odd mysticism into conversation, but how seriously does Bryn take this Goddess stuff? He strikes me as a lost soul, casting about for a philosophy to make sense of his life. Last year it was Newcastle United, this month the Goddess. Next week he could move on to bodybuilding, computer gaming or creative writing.

  But there’s something lovely about his devotion to simplicity. He pulls the blanket closer, not ashamed of his bare skin but sensitive to what I might think. ‘Washed a couple of T-shirts at the spring, didn’t dry quickly as I thought.’ He does the nature-boy bit well, knows how to look after himself, builds a neat fire.

  He’s looking at me hopefully, an invitation in his eyes.

  ‘Cynon and me are well set-up here,’ he says. ‘Come and see.’

  ‘Bit spooky for me.’ I’m reluctant to go into the barrow. ‘At Tolemac, you’re not far from people. This…well, it’s a tomb.’

  ‘Told
you, it’s beautiful,’ he says, clambering to his feet, and holding out his hand.

  We step over the small fire that dances in the forecourt of the Long Barrow. Perhaps this is how it looked five, six thousand years ago. Fragments of what I’ve read, or Martin’s told me, come back. The stones guarding the entrance are later additions: someone decided that what happened in the forecourt and the tomb should be secret, hidden from uninitiated eyes. Both Bryn and I have to stoop beneath the massive stone lintel to enter the narrow passageway. Not all of it is constructed of sarsen. Some of the drystone walling between came from as far away as Bristol. They built the barrow of stones that meant something to them, stones they brought with them from their original distant home, or familiar stones used for generations to polish flint tools and axes.

  To left and right are dark, empty chambers, two on each side. When Stuart Piggott opened the barrow, in the 1950s, he found the skeletal remains of more than forty individuals, children as well as adults. Many skulls and jawbones were missing, probably removed for use in rituals, and in some chambers the long bones of legs and arms had been neatly stacked together against the walls.

  Piggott rebuilt the barrow, placing a porthole of thick glass in the roof of the passageway to let daylight in. Tonight the stone passage is illuminated by small flickering flames. On every ledge, in every cranny, Bryn has put tea-lights: Neolithic Fairyland. In the end chamber, glittering with candles, a black plastic groundsheet is spread over the muddy floor. On top he’s laid a worn Indian bedspread like a carpet, and unrolled a straw beach mat under his sleeping-bag to insulate it from the chill of the tomb’s earthen floor. The Gurdjieff book from the bender is open, face down, on the sleeping-bag.

  He’s looking at me for a reaction, nervous pride in his eyes.

  The light from the candles winks and shifts, as if the earth around us is breathing. The barrow insulates us from all notions of the real world outside: it’s another space, another time, a parallel universe, between worlds. The mothership, maybe. So when he touches my breast, it seems…