Living in the Past

by Jane Lovering

  Duncan bent next to him and watched Richard clear the artefact with a brush. ‘Is that – an earring?’ He had the horrible feeling that his brain was being jerked backwards through centuries.

  ‘Yep. We are deep in anomaly central here, mate.’ Richard took a small can of water and used it to wash the tip of the anomaly as it protruded from the soil. ‘It’s a plastic bead earring, completely twenty-first century, completely sealed in context. Look, you can see the plastic post too.’

  Grace. Those mad plastic earrings she’d been wearing the other night. Oh God. Oh God … but how? He looked again at the wall of the trench. It was neatly cut, beautifully cleaned up, a slice through into history with an orange plastic bead sealed in the middle of it. Duncan felt the world reel. Okay, okay, so … has she been up here? Lost an earring and somehow … somehow it’s managed to work itself into the side of the trench? At exactly the right depth, with the rest of the Bronze Age deposits? His mind danced around the possibilities. Either that or … she’d been here. Then. No. It wasn’t possible.

  Duncan’s legs hit the edge of the trench and he sat hard, and very unprofessionally on the turf. Memory seared through him, Grace’s hair whirling around the orange plastic bead. Just a trinket, just a laugh, a cheap little gewgaw …

  ‘You okay, mate? You’ve gone green.’

  ‘Close it down, Rich.’ Duncan’s voice sounded, even to him, alien. ‘It’s an anomaly.’

  ‘Anomaly? You sure?’ Richard looked dubious. ‘Looks pretty much sealed in—’

  Duncan heard himself break into an account, mostly invented, of how artefacts could be presented as being in situ whilst in reality having been carried in on deposits, the wind or by birds.

  ‘So you’re saying …’ Richard’s voice oozed disbelief. ‘… that a bird might have put that in there? Once the trench was open?’

  ‘Magpies.’ Duncan forced himself to nod. ‘They hide their finds in places like this. If the trench was left unattended at any point …?’ Please, God, let them have left the trench unattended …

  ‘Well,’ Richard said, staring down into the hole, ‘we did open up last night. But the trench was covered.’

  Why would Grace have come up last night and opened a covered trench? How would an earring have managed to get wedged in the right layer? It would have fallen to the bottom of the trench, surely? ‘Have you got any other reasonable explanation why an orange plastic earring, obviously made circa, what, 2010, would be in a Bronze Age deposit?’

  A hint of doubt crossed Richard’s face. ‘Well, no …’

  ‘You don’t reckon then, that a Bronze Age community could have discovered the secret of petrochemical derivatives?’ Oh God, oh God. It was all real …

  ‘Don’t be a fuckwit, Dunc.’

  ‘There you go then.’ Duncan forced so much brightness into his voice that it could have illuminated a football pitch. ‘It’s just an anomaly. If you’ve recorded it, I’ll take it. Might do a paper on it sometime, how open trenches can produce out of place finds.’

  Without waiting for Richard’s agreement, Duncan reached in and managed to pull the little shape free. He tried not to let on how much effort it required, he wasn’t quite sure of the pushing power of the average magpie, and Richard was already exuding suspicion. But the fact that the trench had been opened, and probably not properly covered, and the fact that Duncan was better qualified, seemed to settle it for Richard.

  ‘Well, okay, I’ll explain it when they get back after lunch.’ And then he grinned, wiping his face with a handkerchief that showed signs of having been much misused in the past. ‘Wasn’t looking forward to trying to come up with a reasonable rationalisation for in-context plastic, to be honest. Could have set their degrees back years, that one.’

  Duncan clapped his friend on the back, displaying, he hoped, a blasé camaraderie between friends who’d so nearly been misled by a mistake. ‘Aye. Look, why don’t you go up and grab some lunch yourself? You look …’ He hesitated. Richard’s robust form was unchanged by six weeks’ digging miles from the nearest McDonalds. ‘Peckish.’

  And I need to find the only person I can talk to about this.

  I emerged from the toilet and shower block to find Duncan waiting for me.

  ‘Ah. Remember when we had that talk about stalking?’

  I was actually very pleased to see him, we’d not really had a chance to talk over the past few days and I was a bit worried that he’d rethought the whole date thing.

  ‘I’ve got a problem.’

  Now I came to think of it, he did look pale. ‘Well …’ I gestured to the temporary building behind me. ‘It’s all yours, although there’s not much paper left so I hope you’ve got tissues.’

  That brought a smile, which made him look more cheerful, if not more relaxed. ‘We need to go somewhere we can’t be overheard. Please, Grace,’ he added, and the Rolling Stones T-shirt he was wearing puckered over his chest; I presumed he was clenching his stomach. Nervous, then, and that wasn’t like Duncan, even faced with the police he managed to look more bored than scared.

  ‘What about sitting in the Land Rover?’ I knocked drying mud off my jeans. ‘Everyone seems to have gone to lunch, they won’t miss us.’

  We walked, without speaking, down the dale to where the cars were parked off the trackway, and climbed into the Land Rover. It was hot and airless but he didn’t wind down a window. Instead, he sat, almost rigid, fists clenched and his jaw, underneath what was now most definitely a beard, was tight.

  ‘Would you like me to throw some chips at you?’ I asked, eventually.

  ‘What? Oh, no, sorry. I’m just … look, Grace, I’m …’ He cupped his hands over his face and rubbed them up and down. I tried not to be impressed by the muscles in his arms as he did it, clearly excavating for fifteen years was better than the gym. Eventually he left his hands covering his lower face and spoke through his fingers, almost as though he didn’t want the words to get out. Above his eyes looked wild and strange. ‘I’m sorry.’

  There was such a loaded tone to his voice that I felt my own heart sink under it. It was the tone of a man who’s about to say something along the lines of, ‘I can’t see you any more, this has to stop,’ and I felt the crush of disappointment for a second before I pulled myself up. Why would you feel like that, Grace? Haven’t you been arguing with yourself about not feeling ready for anything with another man? So why do you feel so … so … whatever this feeling is? ‘Okay.’ I pushed as much levity into my tone as I could. ‘So, what have you done?’

  ‘Did you go up to the site last night?’

  The sudden change of topic – was it a change? – made me screw up my face. ‘No. Why? I mean, I went the other day when you asked me, but otherwise, nope. I’ve been wet sieving as though my life depended on it.’

  ‘Are you sure?’ There was a definite tightness about him now. As though the answer mattered more than it should have done.

  ‘I was with Kyle and Katrin last night, Duncan. We chatted, and then I went to bed. I’m sure they’ll give me an alibi if I need one, and you saw me come in. Look, what is this?’

  ‘And how many pairs of those orange earrings have you got? On site, I mean, not overly interested in the Lego delights of Swindon.’ His hands went up over his face again, almost as though he was trying to hide from me.

  ‘I’ve never found the need to own more than one pair of cheap plastic orange earrings, Duncan. I’m not five. And, for the record, I don’t have any dressy-up shoes here either, or princess outfits. Look, what the hell is this all about?’

  He gave a sigh that shuddered its way out of his body. ‘I doubted you. I tried not to, admittedly, but even so, there was this element in my head.’ He’d lowered his hands now, and lined them up on the steering wheel.

  ‘Mercury?’ Keep up the levity, Grace, that expression
he’s got on is scary.

  Now I got a grin. ‘Right, now you’re going to recite the periodic table at me?’

  ‘I hang around with science teachers, I’ve picked up a thing or two. So. You doubted me. About the travelling to the Bronze Age thing? No need to apologise about that, Duncan, believe me, I’ve doubted myself about that one.’

  He gave a sort of apologetic head-tilt.

  ‘So. You’re talking about doubting me in the past tense here, has something happened?’

  He licked his lips and sucked his teeth. ‘This is kinda difficult.’

  ‘No more difficult than telling me that you really did secretly think I was bonkers, surely?’

  He smiled, sighed, and then started talking. ‘They found something down on the dig this morning and I had to lie through my teeth to get it away.’ One hand went into a pocket and emerged, a mud-encrusted object on the palm.

  His obvious horror wasn’t letting me in at all. ‘Okay. I’m going to need a bit more context before I can panic as much as you clearly are.’

  He gulped. I’d never heard it done in real life before. ‘It’s one of your earrings, Grace, and we found it in a sealed context. In a Bronze Age layer.’

  My hands automatically went to my ears. I hadn’t taken my earrings out after the other night, I’d been too traumatised by Duncan’s being arrested to even remember I had them in. They were both there, firmly anchored.

  ‘But you’ve still got them both in.’ It was almost a whisper.

  ‘Oh God. There isn’t going to be some terrible anti-matter explosion if they touch, is there?’

  His face was pale, but he gave me a smile that was an obvious effort. ‘This is real life, not an episode of Doctor Who!’

  I looked at the object on his hand. Now I looked closer I could see the tip of the orange bead poking out. ‘But … there are three now. Mine are still here in my ears and … my head hurts.’

  ‘You haven’t lost it yet.’ His voice was faint. ‘But you will.’

  ‘I feel there should be some sort of special noise for “weirdness alerts”.’ My voice was equally faint. ‘So this means …’

  ‘It means, yes, it’s real. Yes, you travel between times. And yes, you are going to go back there and lose an earring. This was in a ritual deposit, it’s been bent, here, look, so it’s my guess that you’re going to be involved, somehow, with those people.’

  With half an ear open for any kind of approaching anti-matter collisions, I touched the muddy ball with the tip of a finger. ‘Ritual deposit? So they’re going to see me as some kind of god?’

  ‘Don’t push your luck. All kinds of things were deposited, not necessarily religious. Although we don’t really know, so … yeah, maybe they’re going to worship you.’ A quick, warm sort of glance that I didn’t want to dissect just now. ‘But now, with this, and it doesn’t mean I doubted you before, at all, only maybe a wee bit, but …’ A hand rubbed through his hair and then down over his face. ‘It’s made me think. About Anya.’

  I looked at him. He was staring down at the soil-encrusted object in his hand, his face in the set lines of someone still struggling to deal with something bigger than the universe they’ve always felt settled in.

  ‘You think she … somehow, she did what I did? That she travelled?’

  ‘Think about it.’ He spoke quickly too. It was as though this find had speeded his whole body, his whole life up. ‘She walked out on me and vanished. I mean totally vanished. I’ve been working on the assumption that she died, just wandered around in the fog until she lay down exhausted and … maybe hypothermic. But no one ever found a body, there’s never been anything … and I mean anything, no trace of her bag or her clothes … It’s really hard to get rid of a body completely, even if you’re trying … please stop looking at me like that.’

  ‘You just seem to know a lot about disposing of bodies.’

  It was hot in the Land Rover. An enveloping, enclosed heat. Duncan seemed to notice now, because he wound my window down. A small breeze flapped at my face and I could feel how tight my skin had become.

  ‘Well, of course I do! I’m an archaeologist, we have to study bodies that have been disposed of in all kinds of ways. I’ve done courses, Grace, not murders.’

  He sounded so indignant that I had to smile, even though that smile also felt tight. Implications were painting my skin, shrinking it tight to my bones. ‘I didn’t mean that. Of course I know you aren’t a murderer, you plonker. Okay, sorry, so, there’s been no trace of her.’

  ‘So. Maybe. I don’t know … is it possible?’

  I stared out of the windscreen, where a collection of dead flies didn’t provide me with much of a view, and then turned to look at Duncan. He still looked wary and hyper, there was a little furrow between his eyebrows as though he’d been squinting for years, and I surprised myself by putting my hand on his arm. ‘And you want me to try to find out whether that happened?’

  ‘What? No! Do I?’ He looked down at my hand, as though he suspected it of being separate to me and making its own decisions.

  ‘It would be a sensible thing to do, if the word “sensible” can be applied to absolutely anything going on at the moment.’

  His skin was warm, each individual hair pricked at my palm as though to make me extra-aware of its presence. My nails were ragged, one had broken off so far down that it was bleeding and every crease had become embedded with dirt and I thought about how far those hands had come in the last couple of weeks. Far enough, evidently, to be touching a man.

  ‘But how would you do it?’ Duncan was still looking down at my hand. Slowly he moved one of his hands and put it over mine. ‘Och, what I meant to say there was, “No, I can’t have you putting yourself in any danger”, but it just came out a bit self-interested, didn’t it?’

  I could feel the rough skin of his palm grazing against my knuckles. ‘If I can find that girl who ran away from me again, I might be able to talk to her. There’s something weird going on with the whole language thing, they’re talking in … whatever, Celtic or something, but I’m hearing it in English. So we might be able to communicate, somehow.’

  Duncan twisted around in his seat and grabbed me by both arms. ‘But what if you don’t come back, Grace? What if you get stuck, or something happens to you?’

  ‘Is this an “I can’t bear anything to happen to you” or a “the police will come and get me” question?’

  Although his grip was quite tight, it wasn’t enough to hurt, and there was something rather reassuring about it. As though Duncan wouldn’t let anything happen to me. I found myself making a quick, and really unwanted, comparison – Jamie always had such faith in my ability to get myself out of awkward situations, it would never have occurred to him that I might find myself in danger or out of my depth. Maybe that hadn’t entirely been his fault either, I was so much twenty-first-century-woman that I’d never given him any reason to think I might need saving. Having a man actually worrying about me was refreshing. If unnecessary.

  Duncan dropped his eyes away from my face. ‘Ah. Little bit of both, if I’m honest.’

  ‘Perfectly reasonable. Don’t really know. I can’t exactly head over there with a bit of string tied round my ankle, can I? But I’ve kind of crossed over before without even realising it, and nothing happened to me then, so why should it wait until I know what’s going on before the Big Bad Wolf jumps out and goes boo? I’d have thought that, if something was going to happen, it would have happened by now. Besides …’ I waved an assumed-casual hand at the single earring he held. ‘We know I go back again. It looks as though I interact.’

  He sighed heavily. ‘I just don’t know what to—’

  We were interrupted by a sudden banging on the back windscreen of the Land Rover, and a slightly annoyed Richard, who’d come up behind us, thrusting his face at
Duncan’s window.

  ‘Right, put the lady down now, mate, only we’ve got work to be doing. Need you down at the village site, p.d.q, there’s some shards of pot turned up that we’d like you to look at.’ Then, as an afterthought, ‘Sorry to interrupt.’

  Slightly embarrassed, as though we’d been caught out in a teenage snogging session, Duncan and I clambered out of the Land Rover.

  ‘Well, I’d better—’ he began.

  ‘Yes, yes, you should.’ I cleared my throat. ‘And I’ll … have a think about what we were just talking about, shall I?’

  Richard raised his eyes to the sky in an attitude of ‘Oh, for heaven’s sake’ and the two men headed off back to the dig site, leaving me to wander back to the joys of wet sieving and Katrin’s increasingly soap operatic speculations about her relationship with Kyle.

  Chapter Twenty-One

  I waited until the sounds of the camp had died away and Duncan had stopped wriggling around on his camp bed on the other side of our division and begun to breathe deeply and regularly. Then I climbed out of my sleeping bag and crept through the tent.

  If I told him what I was doing, I was pretty sure that Duncan would, at the very least, have tried to come with me. And, since I’d never had any contact with that other time when he’d been there, I was also pretty sure that it wouldn’t work. So my only real choice was to get out and do this alone, under cover of darkness – which wasn’t, it turned out, all that dark, since the moon was still the right side of full and the sky so clear that the world looked like a black and white film. I half expected to see Charlie Chaplin come wandering over the hills swinging his cane …

  You’re getting hysterical, Grace. Focus. Nothing will be achieved by you running off to do the ‘brave’ thing. You need to treat this like you’d treat a tricky lesson in front of a bunch of uppity Year Nines, all hormones and Lynx body spray. Plan, prepare and perform, remember? Although the planning and preparation had, of necessity, been a bit truncated, and was pretty much limited to making sure I’d got my earrings in, and there wasn’t much ‘performance’ I could do that would convince anyone that I was born to the Bronze Age, but I felt a bit more in control when I treated it as if I knew what I was doing.