by Jenni Mills
The memories are there, locked into the crystals. All you have to do to release them is turn them the right way, towards the light. First come the sounds–
The sound of the wind in the trees over Tolemac. Lying in the van at night hearing it, hearing…
Keir’s breathing. Heavy, for a kid. His nose was always a bit blocked up. Not snores, baby snorts and sighs. He kicked in his sleep. He was a couple of inches shorter than me, and a few months younger. His father had fought for custody of him–his mother had a drug habit, but the courts still found against Mick. He stole Keir back, kidnapped him, and Keir’s mother never once came to look for him, though Keir was certain she would when she was better.
The sound of the wind across the fields and…
Who are we?
We’re the Barley Collective.
Calling in the fakkin’ Mothership. Riz, the bloke with the curls, the one who caught Keir and me in the church. I rode on Riz’s shoulders as we walked home along the Ridgeway under the bright moon, my legs either side of his neck, his hands clasped across my thighs to keep me steady. At the bottom of the hill, by the padlocked gate into Tolemac, he bent to let me slide off his shoulders. Then I felt his lips against my ear.
‘You goin’ to the party, Ind?’
‘What party?’
‘The one where your mum’s dancin’.’
‘Don’t know about that.’
‘Where is it?’
‘What?’
He patted my bottom, and I scrambled over the gate and ran towards the van under the trees. The back door opened. Mum stood there, in her jeans and a sloppy T-shirt. She smiled at me, but her eyes were like Keir’s when the grass was cut, puffy and red.
My eyes focus on John, the other side of the hearth.
‘Riz,’ I say. ‘Short for Rizla? Funny little bloke. Mixed race? We made the crop circle with him.’
‘Little shit,’ says John. ‘And not Rizla, Rissole, we called him, because somebody said his curly hair was like a plate of rissoles. He was a leech, clung on to whoever’d let him cling. Story was he’d been a Jehovah’s Witness for a while, then for a joke some chick invited him in, served him a hash brownie, turned him pagan and he never looked back. Don’t believe it, personally–Riz always looked back, because he’d be scared there was someone he owed money to on his tail.’
‘Why were we there?’ I ask. ‘Why did we go to Avebury that year, not Stonehenge?’
John sighs. ‘Because of a party. Your mother wanted to be there, nothing I could do to talk her out of it, or out of taking you along: she was being paid to dance, first time ever, by the people organizing it. Two little creeps from Clifton College she’d met in the pub in Montpelier, who had that poster of her dancing the sun up at Stonehenge on their study wall’
‘Louis?’ I have to dredge the name out of the sludge at the bottom of the crystal. ‘And…’
‘Patrick. Eighteen, hardly left school, spotted a business opportunity. Summer of Love? Summer of Money. They were running huge outdoor parties. People were paying to go, driving miles in convoys of cars from London, Bristol, dancing the whole weekend.’
Louis and Patrick were camping in a derelict farmworker’s cottage half a mile off the Ridgeway. Mum took me with her when she went to see them, soon after we arrived at Tolemac. The house was almost hidden among trees and scrub, the only sign of occupation a black VW Golf GTi parked outside, at the end of a valley littered with sarsen stones like dead sheep. The boys were sitting in what had once been the garden, on folding picnic chairs that were absurdly low for their long legs. On a table stood tall, misted glasses and a bottle of Pimms–they had mint leaves and cucumber and slices of lemon, and ice, for God’s sake: how did they produce ice in a tumbledown cottage that had no electricity? They must have had a generator because inside it was crammed with eighties hi-tech: boom boxes, an Amstrad computer with a green screen, and mobile phones hefty enough to make your arm ache when you held them to your ear. Mum left me in the garden while Louis showed her round inside. By the time they came out of the cottage again Patrick, wearing Walkman earphones, was asleep on his picnic chair, his T-shirt rucked up exposing a hairy stomach.
‘Meg,’ Louis was saying, ‘you think we’re being paranoid. But we could be stuffed if anyone finds out the location in advance.’
‘Your mother didn’t take it seriously,’ says John. ‘She didn’t understand this was the end for the free festivals, where people used to trade skills–half an hour of reiki in exchange for a bundle of perfumed candles, or servicing the engine of your van. Heroin dealers’ cars used to get burned out at the free parties. Now they were hanging round the back of the sound systems offering free samples and nobody gave a shit. Angelfeather had broken up by 1989–poor old Dan Angel was already in a mental home. But Meg thought she could go on dancing for ever, and she’d already told someone about Louis and Patrick’s rave: Mick Feather, who turned up Solstice Eve with his band of hangers-on, including Riz and a zoned-out dickhead called Biro. Mick’d taken Keir to Stonehenge, but they couldn’t get near the stones–been chased all over Salisbury Plain by police helicopters.’
Tried to break through the exclusion zone on foot, said Mick. Fuckin pig helicopter spotted us, pinned us down in a fuckin bush, couldn’t move for the fuckin downwind, and the pig cavalry came steamin over the fuckin horizon, fuckin pitched battle. Wasn’t anythin to do but fuckin run…
‘I thought it was idiotic to take a kid,’ says John. There’d been violence the year before, anarchists from Class War hurling beer bottles at the police until they got fed up and baton-charged the crowd. But Mick thought if the Establishment was getting heavy, maybe this was Keir’s last chance to experience Solstice at the stones, could be a memory that’d shape his whole life. When they couldn’t reach Stonehenge, they turned round and headed for Avebury’
Can Keir kip down in your van? Mick asked Mum. Little bastard kicks in his sleep.
‘We’ve only two bunks—’
‘He can go in with Indy’
‘He can go on the floor.’
Keir’s arrival meant I had someone to roam with over the Downs. His hair was turning white gold in the sun. He wore stupid cut-off shorts that had once been a pair of my jeans and were way too big for his skinny hips, though Mum had gathered the waistband and sewn in elastic so they didn’t fall down. He was into dens that year. He’d made one for us in Bristol that Mum didn’t know about, in the allotments beyond the railway embankment. But the Downs were miles better. Up at the Hedgehogs we had a mound each, under the beech trees, our castles where we laid siege to each other and fought shrieking battles with pretend swords made out of twigs. I’d already found my own secret den before Keir and Mick arrived, one I shared with some scabby-looking sheep, among scrubby bushes in a valley full of sleeping sarsens. I wanted to keep that one to myself, and I wouldn’t take him there. Keir was furious, and shouted he’d go off to find his own. He disappeared for a whole afternoon and never came back until after tea, by which time Mum was panicking and about to send John off to search for him. Mick said Keir could look after himself, and what was to harm him in the countryside? Mum’s lips went thin and I could see her picturing Keir squashed like a rabbit on the verge of the A4, or impaled on rusty old farm machinery in the corner of a field.
So it was this wonderful golden afternoon with a breeze ruffling Keir’s white-gold hair, and we’re walking along beating twigs against the side of our legs, for no reason, really, except that’s what you do when you’re eight, and Keir says, Why won’t you show me your den? and I go, Because it’s mine, stupid, it’s secret. Then I thought of how I could get him off my back, and I said: ‘Can show you something else, though.’
We went through the hunting gate and down the track that crossed the Gallops. (‘What’s this?’ asked Keir, and I said, ‘It’s for training racehorses, pus brain.’) After Mum had brought me, I’d often come here alone, not right up to the cottage because I was scared of the two young men,
but I’d scrambled through the wood into the overgrown garden, where the grass was so long you could wriggle unseen close enough to watch the comings and goings.
Today the black car wasn’t parked by the gate outside the cottage. So we walked down the track in the open, bold as buggery, as Frannie would say.
‘Fu-hu-huck!’ said Keir–his dad’s favourite word–when he saw the cottage. ‘That’s a den? It’s someone’s house, innit?’
‘No way. It’s a wreck, but someone’s camping there. With computers.’
I took him past the rusty folding chairs and the table littered with beer cans–Keir picked several up and shook them, hoping there were dregs left, but the only one that still held any lager also held a dead wasp and that stopped him in his tracks. We went up the steps–I was certain there was no one in–and I rapped at the front door self-importantly as if I was an expected guest. To my surprise, it gave, and I half fell into the hallway, almost wetting myself in terror. Keir was by now at the other end of the garden.
I picked myself up, expecting the sound of a chair scraping on the kitchen floor, or footsteps on the narrow stairs as someone came to investigate. Silence.
Nobody home. I’d been right all along. They’d left the front door unlocked because this wasn’t Bristol: this was a tumbledown old hovel in the middle of nowhere that you’d never find unless you knew it was there and, anyway, they were probably stoned when they’d left. I knew the difference between ordinary cigarettes and the lumpy ones that made people giggle, and I knew which ones Louis and his posh friend had been smoking when Mum and I came to the cottage.
Keir was back already, hovering on the doorstep, trying to make out he hadn’t run off like a scaredy-cat.
‘Where’s the computers?’ he said. Just like a boy.
In here,’ I said, pushing on the door in the hallway without the slightest idea whether I was right, but thinking I should look like I knew. It wouldn’t budge, to Keir’s disappointment–maybe Louis and his mate weren’t so stupid and had locked it, or maybe the wood was warped and the door was stuck. We went upstairs–camp bed in one room, double sleeping-bag on the floor of the other, clothes in untidy piles spilling out of expensive leather grips. The bathroom was disgusting; the toilet bowl was nearly black. When we came back downstairs, Keir gave the stuck door a good kick, but it didn’t shift, and then we had to go into the kitchen to find a cloth because his sandal had left a mark on the peeling paintwork.
Keir went for a pee in the garden while I cleaned the door; he said he couldn’t possibly use the toilet upstairs. As I took the smelly dishcloth back–it stank of old onions–I heard him call. ‘Indy! Car coming.’
I dropped the dishcloth and ran, only remembering just in time to pull the front door closed after me. Keir was diving into the bushes at the end of the garden. I followed him, wriggling under cover between overgrown raspberry canes. A bramble scored a line of blood-beads down my leg. I came to rest a couple of feet away from where Keir lay on his stomach, behind a clump of low, spiny bushes through which tall, bleached grasses grew. He pulled a fat gooseberry off one and passed it to me.
We heard the car engine cut. Two doors opened, then slammed, one after the other. The gate’s rusted hinges made a fingers-on-a-blackboard screech, then Louis and the posh one were coming through the long grass towards the house. They passed within kicking distance of us, but we held our breath, and anyway they were lads: children were invisible to them. If it had been Mum, she’d have smelt us at thirty paces.
‘You tit,’ said the posh one. ‘You left the door unlocked.’
‘You were last out.’
‘Was I bollocks.’ They disappeared inside, emerging a minute later with cans of beer. The psssh of the ring pulls made me thirsty. I popped the gooseberry into my mouth for moisture, then screwed up my face at its sour, metallic taste. I spat it out. Keir kicked me.
‘That was a wasted trip,’ said Louis, sinking onto one of the picnic chairs.
‘Worth a try’
‘They were slappers.’
‘Come on. We need more stage dancers. And they were better than that old slag you’re obsessed with.’
‘I’m not obsessed,’’ said Louis. ‘She’s iconic. Like that poster of the tennis player scratching her bum.’
‘She’s geriatric’
‘She’s pretty fit for her age.’
‘Don’t tell me you’ve had her. Jesus, you have. You sad git.’
‘I have not’
‘I can tell when a boy’s lost his virginity and become a man.’ A clunk, as the empty beer can Louis threw at his friend missed and hit the side of the house. ‘When did you manage to slip her the laughing carrot, then?’
‘Wash your mouth. She’s a goddess.’ Louis was grinning.
‘It was that time you took her off in the car to show her the party field, wasn’t it? Fucking hell, man. You are really twisted. I wouldn’t stuff her with a cold chip.’
‘What the flick you on about? Of course I haven’t shagged her. She’s old enough to be my mum.’
‘Word is, Townsend, that wouldn’t stop you.’ There was another liquid psssh, a screech, guffaws. They were having a play fight, drenching each other with beer. Keir rolled his eyes. We wriggled silently backwards on our stomachs, through the raspberry canes, past a crabby old apple tree and into the birdsong of the scrubby wood.
‘What was Stonehenge like?’ I asked him on the way back to Tolemac.
‘Mick let me drive the van,’ said Keir, proudly. ‘Round the field. I sat on his lap and he did the pedals but I steered.’
‘What about the helicopter chasing you through the stones and all that?’
‘Dunno. They left me in the van.’ Keir screwed up his face to think. ‘There were black helicopters flying low all night, making that horrible noise, like giant pterodactyls. I had a bad dream about one picking up the van in its claws and flying away with me. But I don’t think there was much of a chase, because Mick’s legs weren’t working when they came back. He kept flopping about and Riz did all the driving after that.’
On thy belly thou shalt go
‘Mick liked ketamine,’ says John. ‘You know what they used to call it, don’t you? Going to Mr Softeeland. It’s a horse tranquillizer, and your legs go rubbery. Not numb–you know they’re there, they just won’t obey instructions to move. Ketamine wasn’t illegal. People used to bring it back from India in pop bottles, pour it onto a baking tray and stick it in a warm oven until it turned to crystals and you could snort it. Delivered to the festivals on what used to be called the Special K Coach. By 1989, people were doing K and Es together. Lying there all night under the stars, loved up but limp as a wilted dandelion.’ He shakes his head. ‘Pointless bloody drug.’
‘I don’t understand why the location had to be so secret, though,’ I say.
‘The mystique of those parties was that you didn’t know where you were going until you got there. Map references left on answering machines, messages passed via mobile phones–relatively rare, then–convoys of cars driving round the M25 or up and down the M4. But that wasn’t the problem, so much as all the people who would have turned up if Meg had let slip exactly where the party was being held–people who had no concept of paying for anything. The Brew Crew would have insisted on their right to go in free, Louis’s security men would have beaten the crap out of them–there’d have been a riot. So now, far too late, Meg was being careful not to say anything about where or when in the hope Mick and his friends would get fed up and go away eventually’
I always knew when someone was moving in the van at night because the floor creaked and you could feel the bunks move. I came awake suddenly, thinking it must be Keir going for a pee. Mum wasn’t in bed yet; I knew because I’d curled up in her bed instead of my own top bunk. But Keir’s regular, snorty breathing from his sleeping-bag on the blow-up mattress hadn’t altered. Must be Mum then, though that was odd because I thought I could still hear her laugh among the voices outside
the van, where she’d been sitting with John and Mick and the others. They’d built the fire far enough away not to keep us awake, but the mutter of voices was a soothing reminder that Keir and I weren’t alone under the trees.
Someone sat down on the end of the bunk. I knew it wasn’t Mum: wrong smell, sour and oily and spoilt-meatish, the smell of someone who hadn’t washed for several days.
‘I know you’re awake,’ said Rissole, very quiet. I’d made the mistake of inching my legs away from the weight pushing down the side of the bed. His fingers stroked my hair, and he leaned down to breathe softly in my ear, ‘Shoulda mentioned it at the time. Seein’ as how I saved you from the Bad Guy in the church.’ His breath smelled garlicky, and the oily stench poured off his tight curls. ‘Wouldn’ look too good now, if you said anythin’ to anyone about me hangin’ round that ol’ church, nor the black fella you might have passed in the porch. Don’t want your mum thinkin’ I took you in there ‘cos then your pal Riz really would be up the fakkin’ creek. So seein’ as we’re mates, thought I’d pop in and remind you. No tellin’. You tell that to Keir, too.’ I could hear something rustling, something he was doing with his other hand. ‘Got a little reminder for you. You put out your hand now.’
‘Riz…’ I was scared, and not so innocent I couldn’t imagine what he might want me to touch.
‘Oh, come on, Indy, whatchoo take me for? We’re mates, right? Here, I’ll tuck it under the blanket.’ He lifted the corner of the coverlet and something crumpled and scratchy brushed my arm. ‘There. Nothin’ to worry ‘bout. But you keep your mouth shut, darlin’, or there might be. The Bad Guy with the long white beard don’t like people knowin’ he let a pagan escape.’ He patted my hair, and his weight lifted from the bed, but his mouth came down to my ear again. ‘On thy belly thou shalt go. ‘Magine that, Ind, no legs.’ The van floor creaked again, and he was gone.
