Living in the Past

by Jane Lovering

  ‘Not that I saw, but I did hear one barking.’

  ‘Did it sound big?’

  I shrugged. Katrin cleared her throat and picked up her plate. ‘Okay, well I’ll go and check in with Richard, shall I?’

  ‘Yep, you do that. Grace, you come with me and we’ll go and see this encampment. Find out what their deal is.’

  ‘Are you really the landowner?’ In that horrible waxed jacket with the slowly detaching pocket and mud-smeared sleeves, he didn’t look like the owner of anything more than a nasty case of scabies.

  ‘Like I said, Mum’s family have lived round here forever. We own this dale up to the barrow and out the other side for two hundred acres past the house. It’s not exactly fancy though, we rent the land out to the farmers on either side for sheep grazing and …’ He screwed up his face. ‘… whatever else it is they grow out here.’

  I glanced outside through the tied-back flap of the marquee. ‘I think we established it’s rain.’ The promised sun that had lulled me to sleep earlier had fled before the advancing army of rain and its drizzley outriders, and everything beyond the tent was like looking through a fine grey mesh. ‘Yep. Definitely net exporters of rain.’

  Duncan stood up from the table edge. ‘It can be sunny sometimes,’ he said. ‘You’ll have to come back next spring, we usually have beautiful Mays and Junes.’ Then he looked a bit embarrassed. ‘I mean … err …’

  At the other tent entrance, Katrin, having scraped and dumped her plate, looked back at me over her shoulder. She looked pointedly from me to Duncan, mouthed ‘keep him talking’, and went out, giving me a sturdy thumbs up as she went.

  He noticed my distraction. ‘What? Sorry, I never meant to suggest that you … God, I am humiliating myself so much here. Shall we just go and find these people in the valley and then I can go back to shouting at people, which makes me much more comfortable. I don’t mean to sound as though I’m trying to proposition you, by the way.’

  ‘Duncan.’ I stood up. ‘Asking me to come back next spring would only be propositioning me if you were a tortoise. Or some other really, really slow moving creature. A slug or something.’

  We walked out of the catering tent. Tabitha watched us go. ‘Oh great.’ He sighed. ‘I started the day as a controlling moron, and now I’ve worked my way up to slug. This is going so well.’

  Outside the renewed rain hit us and I pulled my hood up. Duncan just let the water run down his hair, almost as though he wasn’t aware of it. The plastic of my anorak made the rain sound like gunfire from inside.

  ‘This way.’

  I led him down, past where students were filling in trenches, waved to Millie who was wrapped in a plastic poncho and crouching on the edge of the wood hole, and we set out along the flat grass beside the little beck. ‘Haven’t you been along here?’

  Duncan looked at me. His eyes looked very big and dark and with his hair all slicked down by the rain and the growth of stubble that was turning into the beginnings of an actual beard, he looked a bit like a cat that’s got caught by an unruly hosepipe. ‘Yes. Came along earlier to check out the sites for the new trenches.’ He pulled a hand from his pocket and waved it at me. ‘Which is why I look like I’ve been trying a cheap self-tan.’ His hand was orange. ‘Marking the sites with spray paint. It blew back.’

  ‘And you didn’t see the settlement? Was it foggy?’

  He didn’t say anything, just pushed his hand back in his pocket and jutted his elbows, as though the rain was running down inside his coat. I pulled a face. There was something about his attitude, an uneasiness, that worried me, but I didn’t know what was causing it. Maybe it was the general worry about moving the site?

  We rounded the bend in the dale and I led him up to the rock barrier. ‘They’re just … oh.’

  There was no sign of the huts. No sign of the wide marshy expanse of the river, or of the wooden walkway that half-crossed it. No unruly sheep, no muddy, noisy children. Just a bare slope of heather and rock sweeping down to a grassy plain through which the beck carried on being nothing more than a narrow gully filled with water.

  ‘They must have packed up and gone …’ Although that didn’t explain the reconfiguration of the river, the unfamiliarity of the layout of the landscape. I turned to him as though he might be responsible. ‘Duncan?’

  ‘It’s always looked like this, Grace. I used to walk all along here, my brothers and I camped here. There’s never been a river. I thought you might have got confused, maybe gone the other way down the dale – there isn’t a river there either, incidentally, but …’

  He had to stop because I’d clambered over the boulders and run out onto the site. Where the muddy path had been was all as evenly green as the rest of the place. Where the huts had stood there was no sign of any disturbance of the ground or any footprints. No sign of the river having gone underground, the little boggy patches that had formed islands in it were just continuations of the dale. I bent down and ran my hand over the springy grass, patted harder and eventually banged at the ground, desperate for any rock, any stick, anything that would tell me I was in the right place.

  Duncan came and grabbed at my arm to stop me from giving the earth a good thrashing. ‘Hey, Grace. Stop it, you’ll hurt yourself.’

  ‘It was here.’ My eyes were filling with tears, I didn’t know why. ‘It was. Four huts, and a path just …’ I pointed. ‘… there, and a kind of bridge thing that only went halfway across over there.’ And now my head moved wildly as I tried to fix my vision on something familiar; the only thing I could see that had remained constant was the barrow, up above us, and the general lines of the hills. ‘I don’t understand, how can they have made it all so different so quickly?’

  Duncan pulled at my arm until I was right up against him. My breath was catching in little gasps, like sobs and, as he held me in to the warmth of his body, I realised I was shaking.

  ‘I’m not mad,’ I kept saying. ‘I’m not mad.’ At our feet was an orange line. Duncan had obviously planned a trench there. I stared at it as though the normality of it could stop this feeling that had pulled down over me, as though someone had crammed a tight hat over my head and yanked it down to pin my arms at my sides. ‘I’m not.’

  ‘Sit down.’ He pulled me back until I lined up with a rock.

  ‘It’s wet.’

  ‘We’ve got other things to worry about right now.’ Gently he pushed at my shoulder until my already wobbly knees gave way and I subsided onto the wet lump of limestone. I put a hand out to steady myself and the feel of its gritty hardness reminded me of the stone this morning up at the barrow. Was that real? Had that even happened? Am I sliding into hallucination?

  ‘Have you been having headaches? Any visual disturbances?’

  ‘Duncan, I have not got a brain tumour.’ All I could do was stare out at where those huts should have been. How did they do it?

  ‘Do you get migraines? Any history of …’ He stopped and his words came slowly, hand-picked. ‘… misuse of substances?’

  ‘They were there. They were real. The woman saw me this morning and panicked. Ran away into …’ Into that clump of trees that isn’t there either. ‘… into the heather. She was real, Duncan, she saw me just like I saw her.’

  ‘Okay, okay.’ He ran his hands through his already upright hair, spraying water over both of us. ‘You weren’t drunk, you weren’t high, you’re not ill. Did you pick anything and eat it? Mushrooms? Berries?’

  I gave him a stern look. ‘I am a teacher. I do Duke of Edinburgh walks with Year Ten. Believe me, if there is anyone less likely to go around picking and eating random fungi, then I have yet to meet them.’ My voice, I was pleased to hear, had steadied, even if my vision hadn’t.

  ‘Right.’ He didn’t seem to doubt me, that was cheering. At least, he hadn’t called me a liar or a nutcase. ‘Maybe you were
dreaming. Tell me what you thought you saw.’ A look at my expression and he corrected himself, ‘I mean, tell me what you saw. What it looked like to you.’

  I adjusted my position on the rock. It was surprisingly pointy and uncomfortable. Thought back over the last few days, over the woman outside the hut, the children, the man cutting hay with the young boy following him and the wooden walkway into the river. And then, as concisely as I could, I described it to Duncan. At one point I got up and paced the outline of the little village, walked to where, as nearly as I could remember it, the track had gone down to join the wooden pathway along beside the river. Gesticulated a lot, and closed my eyes to help the recall, until I stammered off into a breathless silence.

  Duncan was staring now, across the grassy plain. ‘Okay,’ he said. ‘Okay. The one you said … I mean, the one you saw cutting hay. What was he using?’

  I tried to remember, but, to be honest, mostly it was the bare torso that came to mind. ‘Just, like a scythe thing, you know. Bit of bent wood and … the blade looked … it was just normal, brown metal thing. Tied on to the handle with string.’

  ‘And he was wearing, what?’

  ‘I said …’ I described the clothing again, and then, to be sure, described the tunic dress with the leather tie that the woman had been wearing this morning.

  ‘And it was here?’ Duncan went to stand roughly where I’d seen the man. ‘You’re sure? Definitely?’

  ‘Well, I didn’t take a bloody photograph, but yes, as near as I can remember it, yes. The grass was growing all along that bit there, and there was this kind of woven fence thing to stop the sheep eating it. Further up the hill it was ditches to keep them out.’

  ‘Here?’

  I stood up. This was weird. Really, really weird. ‘Yes.’

  Duncan flopped down to the grass as though the rain didn’t exist. I pushed my hood back and felt my hair start to frizz; the hood of the cagoule cut my peripheral vision like a horse’s blinkers and I wanted to see the whole dale at once. ‘What is it?’

  He stood up suddenly and laid a hand on my arm. ‘I don’t know. I don’t know, Grace. But everything, all those things, the clothes, the huts, the scythe … it all sounds like a Bronze Age settlement. And the river … the beck is just what’s left of a much bigger watercourse.’

  ‘Stop it.’ Now his eyes looked mad. ‘Please, Duncan. Don’t do this.’ I wasn’t even sure what I wanted him to stop doing. His touch was reassuring, even through the millions of layers of clothing I was wearing; the feel of his fingers somehow tied me to the here and now. But what he was saying was … mad. ‘That’s just insane.’

  He pulled his hand back and scratched at his chin. ‘Go on then. You tell me what you think happened here. Where it’s all gone in the space of a day. Why people would be living out here in mud huts, cutting grass with scythes?’

  ‘I thought they were some kind of religious community that came here for the isolation.’ The rain was pounding off my head now and soaking into my trousers where the coat stopped.

  ‘Grace, there is a main road up on the ridge there!’ He stabbed a finger at the hilltop behind us, opposite the barrow. ‘Why would anybody camp down here for isolation? If we weren’t here digging, half of Middlesborough would be here having picnics and dumping stolen cars! If you want isolation, you go over the high tops there, you can walk for hours and not see a road or a car or a person, you wouldn’t build a hut here and expect not to have every lost toddler from here to Teesside wandering through every summer!’

  It really was wet. Ridiculously wet, creeping up my trouser legs and down my neck, pattering onto the top of my head like being slapped by an elf. Duncan was dripping. I probably was too, and the rain was splashing back up from the ground making the peat into tiny little sponges.

  ‘Grace!’ I stopped looking at the rain and forced myself to look at him. ‘I know. I know. But something has happened out here.’ He used his hands to slick back his hair. ‘Okay. So either there was an encampment of people here who vanished overnight, taking their buildings, their animals and managing to divert a river before they went, or … well. Something happened to you here.’

  ‘Or the third option?’

  ‘What’s the third option?’ He flipped his hands back into his pockets.

  ‘I don’t know, do I? But neither of those things are possible.’

  ‘Och, Grace …’ Duncan turned his face up to the sky. I watched the rain bounce off his eyebrows and roll down his cheeks to soak into the stubble that covered his chin. ‘I don’t know. I’ve got no answers for this one.’ A quick side-eye. ‘Unless this is all a wind up. Something you and Richard cooked up? He’s the only person I know with that level of detailed knowledge about Neolithic and Bronze Age farming practices. Although why either of you would bother stymies me, I’ve already decided to move the dig.’

  ‘What do you mean “detailed knowledge?” I’ve just told you what I saw.’

  Duncan sighed. The rain splashed down, but through it his face looked keener somehow. He’d obviously showered recently and made an attempt at shaving because the lines of his face stood out more, curved cheekbones and a surprisingly generous mouth. I could imagine him being the pin-up boy for the archaeology unit.

  ‘You ask most people to describe a roundhouse and they’ll give you a hole in the roof for the smoke to get out of.’

  I did a long blink. ‘These definitely didn’t have holes in. The smoke just sort of …’ I wiggled my fingers in the air, trying to illustrate fronds of smoke wisping through the thatch. ‘Wafted.’

  ‘Aye. If you put a hole in the roof, the fire draws too much. You’ll set flame to everything inside the hut on a windy day.’ A quick glance my way. ‘The specialists have done research. And the stuff about the scythe, blade lashed to a wooden handle. You aren’t, by any chance, a specialist, are you, Grace?’

  I swallowed hard. ‘General history degree. Don’t think we even mentioned anything prehistorical, I can tell you all about Napoleon though. If you’re interested.’

  Duncan turned around. ‘No, not really.’ And suddenly he was laughing, gazing around him at this little green dell, using the heel of his boot to draw a line in the mud. ‘Only one way to find out then, isn’t there? We’ll dig right here. Right on top of where you say you saw the huts, another trench down over there where the wooden trackway was. Where else?’

  I moved a little way away. The closeness of his body was making me restless. ‘There was a hut just up there. Sort of separate from the others, with a kind of hedged driveway leading up to it.’

  He inclined his head. ‘Okay. We’ll put a trench in over that too. Nothing turns up, well then, it was, what, an hallucination? Bit of a glitch in the ocular circuits?’ Now he came in really close. So close that I could smell the sour tang of his coat, a waxed jacket that never got a chance to dry out properly. My heart did a peculiar double beat.

  ‘And if there is?’ My voice sounded hollow, as though my throat didn’t want to let the words out.

  He used a sleeve to wipe the rain from my forehead. It didn’t really help, the sleeve was as wet as my skin, but it stopped the rain from running into my eyes. ‘We deal with that if it happens.’ His face was very serious now. I couldn’t tell if he was weighing me up, measuring me against some kind of mental parameter, searching for signs of madness, or whether he genuinely believed what I’d seen. ‘Nothing to lose, Grace,’ he said, quietly.

  I felt odd. No, not odd, just a bit displaced. There was a heat in my chest, a little bubble of something that felt as though Duncan and I were enclosed together, and this was just about us. I wanted him to touch me again, I wanted to feel the warmth of his hand, wanted to see the spark in his eyes when he laughed, and yet … I didn’t. Didn’t want the implications. Wasn’t ready for them, wasn’t ready for anybody yet.

  ‘What will you
tell Richard?’ For all those feelings, I didn’t step back.

  He shrugged. ‘We’re moving the dig anyway. We’ll just move some trenches a bit further.’ And then, as if he’d known what I was thinking, he curled his arm around my shoulders and gave me a brief hug. ‘It’s all right, Grace,’ he said. ‘Whatever you saw here … it’s all right. You’re all right.’

  But I didn’t think I really believed him.

  Chapter Sixteen

  Richard just raised his eyes to the wet sky. ‘You’ve lost it, man. Why d’you want to put trenches in here?’

  At least he’s stopped arguing. Insulting me is better, means he’s coming round. ‘I was wrong,’ Duncan said, reckoning that taking the blame was the best way. ‘I should have put the dig down the dale to start with. Now we’ve got that shale bracelet remnant … well. I’ve had a look down there, it’s still line-of-sight for the barrow and I’m just thinking … och, better place to put a settlement, maybe?’

  Richard stared. ‘Yeah, I saw you heading up there with whatsername from the wet sieves. I thought you were just taking her off for a bit of how’s-your-father, and I thought that was mad, I mean, I’m a fan of getting my end away as much as the next man, but in this weather? And she’s sharing a tent with you? And now it turns out you were scoping out a new site? I am this close to having you committed.’

  But he’d given in, Duncan could see that. He’d stopped dragging every decision out and making him justify it, now he was only a whisker from allocating teams. The diggers were split half and half, some already carrying their gear down the dale, while others hovered around their back-filled trenches, not knowing which side to come down on.

  Anxiety rose in his stomach and began to burn his chest. Am I right or am I going to look a total tit? ‘Look. There’s only another six weeks of the season left, we’re not coming up with anything other than some Neolithic rubble here, what have we got to lose?’

  ‘Money,’ Richard said, darkly. The dig was funded largely by the university and a complete waste of everyone’s time would not be looked upon favourably when it came to getting funding for next year’s dig.