The Buried Circle

by Jenni Mills

  ‘I’m more upset by the idea of you filming aerials.’ Under a cloudy sky, the entrance to the Long Barrow looms over us, huge stone snaggle teeth hiding its dark throat. The entrance to the Lower World. Tbby doesn’t know you were involved in the Alton Barnes crash. You think she’d be happy about letting her crew fly with you if she did?’

  ‘I need the money’

  Harry the cameraman appears from behind the stones masking the entrance to the barrow and, without a word, picks up a new battery, clipping it to the back of the camera.

  ‘Sell the bloody house and barns,’ I hiss.

  ‘They belonged to my wife,’ he says, so quietly I have to lean forward to make out the words. ‘I owe more than a hundred thou. Told you. I’m flicked unless I keep flying.’

  Ibby arrives, face flushed from the climb. ‘Martin’s here. Saw him parking as I came up the hill.’ She goes to confer with Harry, handing him a PAG light to attach to the camera.

  I kneel and open one of the silvery boxes to find the radio mic. Ed hasn’t moved.

  ‘Go on, piss off,’ I tell him. ‘I’m working. And while you’re about it, don’t suppose you noticed the white van in the lay-by?’

  ‘You’re kidding.’

  ‘Aviation-archaeologist Karl on his lunch break.’ I check the mic’s power pack and start unwinding its lead. ‘I gave him fifty quid to replace his metal detector. Broke as you are, you might like to stump up a tenner too, if he’s still there.’

  Ed snorts. ‘Christ, Indy, you can be so nave. Aviation archaeologist, my arse. They were nighthawks, all right. Vultures. And it is against the law. I looked up a couple of metal detectorist sites.’

  ‘What’s so illegal about hunting down old airfields?’

  ‘That’s not what they’re after. They’re looking for crashed planes–Second World War, usually, and that is against the law, regardless of whether they have the landowner’s permission, because it might be a war grave. If the plane burned, the bodies weren’t always recoverable. Sometimes the site was simply covered with earth. And if it was a German plane, there’s a thriving market for Nazi memorabilia. Anyway, now you know what your fifty quid’s going towards. Excuse me if I don’t contribute.’ He throws the last battery onto the ground and walks off.

  I stare at the microphone in my hand, thinking of what Frannie said about Davey Fergusson. He in’t buried. He’s with what was left of his aeroplane, ashes, mostly

  Where?

  ‘Sorry to hear about your friend,’ I tell Martin, as I pin the tiny radio mic to his lapel.

  Martin, for once not making his usual flirtatious comments when I’m fiddling with his clothing, grunts.

  ‘And…your married man. I didn’t know. You let me blether on about all my romantic entanglements and…’

  Martin’s cold stare dries the words in my mouth. ‘If you weren’t so bloody self-absorbed, India,’ he says, ‘you might have picked up the clues.’ He wrests the mic from my fumbling fingers. ‘Leave it. I’ll fix this.’

  ‘Sorry,’ I mumble, as he stalks off towards the camera at the barrow entrance.

  ‘Pub, India?’ asks Ibby, at the end of the afternoon. Martin has already left, without another word to me. ‘Celebrate our last day of filming, apart from the aerials? Unless you can have another go at your grandmother to be interviewed?’ ‘I don’t think she’ll do it.’ ‘Pity. Well, come and have a drink.’ ‘Sorry. Something else I should do while I’m here.’ Why did I leave that note for Bryn? Stupid idea. With luck, it’ll have disintegrated already in the rain. As the crew car pulls away, I set out across the meadow towards the spring to make sure.

  Goddess, water, willow. A late-afternoon gleam of sunlight on the broken mirror tiles, and I could swear the Goddess winked. On the branch that overhangs the water, Cynon’s red fabric collar shivers as I stand on tiptoe to pull down the branch with my scrap of blue cotton.

  It’s looped loosely round the bough. I was in such a rush this morning, can’t have tied it properly, the note’s fallen out. On the ground, into the stream?

  But deep inside (the place where, in all of us, the entrance to the Lower World yawns) I know that however hard I look I won’t find it. Someone took it.

  John’s pickup passes as I’m waiting to cross the A4 to the stile onto the field path home. The brakelights go on, he pulls over and reverses to the lay-by. As he walks back to meet me, I can tell he’s making an immense effort to keep a smile on his face. My heart contracts.

  ‘You been home yet?’ he asks. Too casual.

  ‘Is she all right?’

  ‘Phoned a couple of times. Thought she must be sleeping–you said you’d woken her early. Didn’t want to disturb her, and my client was due. But afterwards…Anyway, still can’t raise her on the phone so I’m on my way over. I’m sure she’s napping, that’s all…’

  He’s trying to keep it light, but there’s something he isn’t telling me.

  ‘What’s the matter?’

  ‘Nothing,’ he says. I take him by the shoulders and stare into his eyes. His pupils are tiny black pinpricks.

  ‘There was no client, was there? You went into a trance.’ I’ve started to shake, with anger or fear or both. ‘For Chrissake, did you see something about Frannie?’

  PART SEVEN

  Killing Moon

  Avebury was a place where the living walked with the dead. The landscape was dotted with earthworks, tumuli, stone settings, and palisaded mortuary enclosures where corpses were laid out for excarnation–what Tibetans call ‘sky burial’–before the defleshed bones were put into long barrows or used in rituals at the henge. People gathered in the circle year after year, to remember the ancestors and petition for their help and protection in an uncertain future.

  Was ritual murder a part of the proceedings? There is no hard evidence. The skeleton of a woman, buried in the ditch near the southern entrance and surrounded by a ring of small sarsens, may have been a sacrifice, or she may have been an important person in the clan, entitled to burial in sacred ground. Charlie, the child burial found in the ditch of the enclosure at Windmill Hill, may have been killed deliberately, or died of a congenital condition that caused the distortion of the skull. Some would even like to claim that the Barber Surgeon, pinioned under his stone in the fourteenth century, was the victim of ritual murder.

  But that is the way of archaeology. We dig down through the layers of history, and often as not, instead of answers, expose more questions.

  Dr Martin Ekwall,

  A Turning Circle: The Ritual Year at Avebury,

  Hackpen Press

  CHAPTER 47

  29 August 1942

  Hurts like buggery. But I’m good at keeping quiet when it hurts. If I try to lift my head, even an inch off the ground, everything goes woozy. Be all right if I lie still a moment; I’ll get up in a bit, if I could remember how I ended up on the floor. Cold as charity lying here. Aches summat terrible down below, and I’m sick as a bloody dog. Head thumping, and a mad bird in my chest trying to flap its way out. Need to lie quiet a bit, gather meself…

  29 August 1942. Don’t want to remember but, with the ache in my back, can’t help it.

  When I woke at six, there was already a steamy feel to the day, though the bedroom window had been wide all night. I lay for a bit, trying to will myself out of bed, hearing morning sounds, milk cart, cat moaning on next door’s porch, my landlady moving about downstairs, her man scraping the razor over his chin in the bathroom. Usual thing was to eat breakfast with the pair of them, but this morning when the call came, I shouted back I wasn’t feeling so good.

  At last the front door slammed as they left for the aircraft factory and the railway yards. I dragged my body out of bed. This morning it didn’t feel like it was mine. I’d been transplanted into someone else’s clumsy lump of flesh. There was a low, griping pain in the small of my back, as if I’d lain awkward in the night, and my feet were puffy again. I hobbled into the bathroom and tried to wake up.

&n
bsp; Tiredness sandbagged me in the kitchen. The smell of singed toast hung in the air; I’d no appetite, but I was thirsty. There was lukewarm tea in the pot and I poured a cup and swallowed it, then had to make another dash for the loo. That was nothing new. Last week or so, it’d felt like tiny hands wringing my kidneys all the time. Near seven months, now, but still my belly hardly showed.

  The oak-cased clock in the hall chimed: eight flat bongs. In response my belly vibrated eight times. Could it hear in there? Lie quiet, I told it. A shiver went through me. That was the first time I’d spoken aloud to it.

  Had to get a wiggle on or I would be late for work. I hauled on a cardigan, then took it off again and tied it round my waist. My ankles were bulging over the tops of my white socks. Catching a glimpse of myself in the hall mirror, I looked a fright, hair sticking out at all angles because I’d forgotten to pincurl it last night. Too late to sort it, too tired to care. I opened the front door and stepped out into the sweltering heat.

  The sky was blue, but yellowish white round the edges, like a sickly eyeball. Sullen clouds with dark bellies had puffed up on the southern horizon, loitering with intent on the edge of the Downs, but there was no wind to carry them closer. My legs were two heavy logs as I started the walk to work at the hospital. I was late. Drove Road was deserted, apart from two little girls playing hopscotch on the pavement. Where did they find the energy?

  Today I’d look for Cabbage at the hospital. I’d ask him for the address of that place in Liverpool. Then I’d go to the almoner and tell her my dad was ill, and the cousins couldn’t cope, so I had to go north to nurse him. A lie, of course: he was settled comfortably with them now.

  When the baby was born, I’d have it adopted. There, I said under my breath, that’s made you lie still, you little kicker. Maybe it was as exhausted as I felt. I pictured it rolling gently in the waves made by my walking, a sea creature on a stalk, opening and closing its tiny mouth in warm water. Were its eyes open in there? No. Tried to stop thinking about it as a live being. It was the devil’s tadpole.

  The leaves hung limp on the pollarded trees that laced over the churchyard path where Mr Cromley had dragged me, near seven month ago. I counted back. Cabbage had worked out my due date for me, but I’d pushed it out of mind, hadn’t wanted to believe it would ever come. I’d no appetite since Mam died, but I kept growing fatter. How big was it? Did it have hair and toes and fingernails?

  Overhead, the thunder of a plane shook the jelly air. I couldn’t help flinching, though the siren hadn’t sounded. A long way off, over the Downs, I thought I saw a trail of smoke, maybe a crippled night-fighter limping back to the nearest base. When I looked down again, I found my hands clasped protectively over my belly.

  It grew hotter and stickier as the morning passed, the day tightening and whitening like the head of a boil. There seemed to be no end of forms to fill in. The typing pool in which I sat was airless, stinking of sweat and cheap scent, though every tall window was open. My lower back ached insistently.

  I found an excuse to slip away to the wards, to look for Cabbage. No sign of him on Men’s Surgical, but Lysol’s tall back stalked the corridor ahead of me. He would know if Cabbage was on duty. I tried to run to catch him up, but my feet could get no grip on the shiny green lino and the ache in my back began to burn like I’d torn something. Breathless, I had to stop at the junction of two corridors. Which way had Lysol gone? My head felt heavy and dull. I closed my eyes and could feel myself swaying where I stood, wheezing like an old woman.

  Someone cannoned into me with a muttered ‘Sorry.’ It was Pee, the youngest of the three housemen, head down, white coat flapping, bony lantern jaw sunk onto his hollow chest. He stopped a few yards along the corridor.

  ‘Miss Er…?’ He could never remember any of the girls’ names. ‘Are you all right? You’re very pale.’ He started to walk back towards me. His eyes were fixed on my feet.

  I followed his gaze down. There was a tiny puddle, hardly more than a couple of teaspoons of fluid, on the lino between my legs. I baked in shame. I’d wet myself, dear Lord, without even noticing. I’d have to pretend it hadn’t happened, was nothing to do with me. Puddle, Dr Matthews? Some careless nurse must’ve slopped a bedpan.

  ‘Hot,’ I said. ‘Sticky day. Didn’t sleep.’ Waving my hand all airy, fanning my face, anything to take his eyes off my soggy shoes. ‘You seen Cab–Dr Prentice?’

  ‘Dr Prentice is off duty,’ said Pee, like it was mothballs in his mouth.

  ‘When’ll–’

  ‘Clever Dr Prentice has the Almighty on his side. His next shift isn’t until tomorrow.’ There were bruised bags under his eyes, a crpey look to his pale, pockmarked skin. I’d heard the girls in the office this morning talking about a car crash in the blackout last night, and remembered that Pee had been called out with the ambulance. He’d had to cut off a girl’s leg to free her from the wreckage of the passenger seat. The firemen kept their torches trained on the girl’s feet so Pee wouldn’t have to see the boyfriend’s severed head watching him from the back. He was young, in his mid-twenties, but today he looked like a grey ghost of an old man.

  He wiped a hand across dry lips before carrying on: ‘But they’ll probably call him in later. All hands to the pump when the casualties arrive.’

  ‘What casualties?’ My heart started thudding.

  ‘There’s been a big raid on Bristol. The infirmary there can’t cope, and they’re talking about sending the overspill to us.’

  ‘They can’t…’ My head was spinning with the thought of it. ‘We’re full–I was doing a requisition to move some of the convalescents out.’

  ‘Full or not, they’re already on their way,’ said Pee. Are you running a temperature, Miss Er…?’

  I was in a muck sweat and dizzy with it. My back ached like blazes. My skin was so tight and tender I flinched when he put his hand on my forehead.

  ‘You’re more than a bit clammy,’ he said. ‘That’s all we need, some bloody bug rampaging through the staff. Go home.’

  ‘The paperwork,’ I said weakly.

  He gave a croak of a laugh. ‘Bugger the paperwork. What we need today are nurses, not pen-pushers. Go home. And while you’re about it–’ his face grew pink, and his eyes went to my feet again ‘–you might, er, want to change your sanitary towel.’ He turned and went steaming off up the corridor.

  I glanced down and saw what I’d missed–a streak of bloody mucus on my white ankle sock. This couldn’t be it, could it? What I knew about babies was no more than village gossip and earwigging in the church porch when new mothers whispered the details of epic deliveries to each other. Waters broke, all of a gush. I were splitting from stem to stern. Hurt summat terrible. Those women let go at least a gallon apiece: the Red Sea parted, Niagara Falls ran down their legs. Not a pathetic trickle like I’d globbed on the lino. No, this couldn’t be it. I had an overwhelming urge to lie down, but any minute now the glass doors would swing open and the corridors echo with trolley wheels and running feet. He was right, I should go home.

  The day turned into flashes then, like the lightning that was flickering along the top of the Downs. Outside the hospital the sky was near black, the street lit with a last gleam of sunlight before the darkness swallowed it. The air was like a bath, sweat and electricity running along the nerves in my skin, which felt as tight as a tick. No recollection of asking permission to go home, though I must’ve stopped off at the office: I had my handbag, but no hat or cardigan. My belly dragged, like the baby inside had turned to a lead brick.

  God knows how I got there, but suddenly I was on Drove Road, staggering like a drunk with the weight of my belly threatening to topple me. Still no one about, only the two little girls hopscotching, ignoring the livid sky. There was a blink of bright light, and I started counting, waiting for the thunder. Mam used to say if you went one a hundred, two a hundred, three a hundred, you knew how many miles off the storm was. I was up to eight a hundred and still no crack, and if it ca
me after that I never heard because instead there was a cramp in my belly that near split me while I stood on the step fumbling for the key.

  Then there’s no little girls, only the airless, silent hallway. Must’ve been stairs too, and bugger me if I know how I climbed ‘em, but the next flash comes and I’m on my bed, and counting again, but this time I’m counting the time between the cramps because I know that’s what you’re supposed to do. No question now but that summat’s coming, and I’m cursing myself for not stopping at the hospital where there’s doctors and maybe by now Cabbage, Cabbage who understands what’s wrong with me, Cabbage with his fat sausage fingers helping me down there, but then I remember there was a raid over Bristol way and they’ll all be busy with that, saving lives, doing important things for good people, stitching rips in flesh and straightening mashed bones and mopping up blood–

  And there’s another flash, and that reminds me I couldn’t possibly have stopped at the hospital where people knows me and I can see their faces gawping, mouths open in shock, as they watch me writhing on the corridor floor, the monster wrestling with my body like the devil that was its father the night he caught me in the churchyard–

  And now a rumble of thunder much closer and the monster’s got his teeth in me, I’m on all fours, panting like a dog, only way to stand the pain, and then comes something so strong and vicious I have to howl, only it isn’t me howling at all, it’s the Warning, middle of the afternoon, and I can’t take it in, there’s people out at work and little girls playing in the street and they’re sounding the Warning but there’s nothing I can do about it; no buggerin’ way will the pain let me off the bed to crawl downstairs to the Anderson shelter in the back garden. The bedroom’s gone black like it’s night, it’s one of them August storms that sometimes come near harvest, rolling off the Downs and flattening the corn, and there’s the crackle of electricity in the air and a burning smell and the rumble overhead–