by Rosie Thomas
‘He bloody hates fireworks, Raff does. He goes mental.’
‘I’m waiting for my friend Selwyn. We got separated in the procession.’
‘Is he one of you lot from the commune?’
‘Do I look as if I live in a commune?’
She rolled her head sideways and assessed him.
‘When were they in? You look and talk like you live in the century before last, if you really want to know.’
Amos laughed. The girl’s company was invigorating. She was very young and careless, and that appealed to him.
Jessie was a lively talker. From their vantage point on the hay bale she identified the people who shuffled into the tent and came out again with their liberal supply of drinks. Some of them she greeted, mostly with a jerk of the chin and a muttered, ‘All right?’ Then, out of the side of her mouth, she gave Amos the details. One balding man had had a series of Brazilian girlfriends, all of them met on the internet and brought over, as Jessie put it, scratching her index fingers in the air, as ‘servants slash sex toys’. A woman in a green Husky had had a ‘big ruck’ with her neighbour over a boundary dispute, and had ended up pouring a gallon of petrol into the neighbour’s garden shed and then setting fire to it. The house itself had almost gone up in flames.
‘Two fire engines,’ Jessie grinned. ‘And Mrs Hayes was arrested.’
This woman now shared a probation officer with a boy Jessie used to go out with before Damon, who had sold a bit of weed, the odd wrap, nothing too ambitious; the trouble was he was just too thick to avoid getting caught. She knew a load of other people who were bigger time, and they never got any bother.
Amos said in surprise, ‘And I thought it was so quiet here. As if nothing ever happens except harvest festival.’
There was a band set up on a hay wagon and people were beginning to dance, Greens with Maubys. He was thoroughly enjoying these new perspectives on Meddlett, which had up until now seemed a rather dull place for country bumpkins.
Jessie jerked her chin. ‘You incomers always think the same. As if it’s all green fields and divine views and bollocks like that. But people live their lives here, all kinds of lives, same as anywhere else. There are safe ones, and there are totally crap individuals. The only difference is we don’t have much choice about being here. We have to get on with it. We can’t go off and get ourselves a weekend cottage in Notting Hill, can we?’
Amos saw the yearning behind her narrowed eyes.
‘Don’t you have a choice, Jessie?’
‘Oh, yeah.’ She sat up straighter, rejecting his sympathy.
A pair of jeans topped by a cagoule stopped in front of them. Jessie said coldly, raising her voice over the blare of distorted music, ‘You again? What do you want? Can’t you see I’m talking to someone?’
The wearer obviously could see, but came another step closer just the same. Amos recognized the junior archaeologist with the dreadlocks and difficult skin who had been so officious on the site. Remembering names tended to be a problem nowadays, but somehow he dredged this one up. Kieran, that was it. The boy nodded an anxious greeting at him. To Jessie he muttered, ‘Can we have a word? I’ve got a bone to pick with you.’
‘Ha ha. Is that your little archaeology joke?’
‘You know what it’s about. It’s why you’ve been avoiding me, isn’t it?’
‘You can find me in the bloody Griffin, any time you want.’
In an undertone Kieran said, ‘I’m not dragging all this out in the pub. But I want to know once and for all. It was you, wasn’t it?’
Amos was interested. Unfortunately, good manners got the better of him. ‘I’ll go and find myself another drink,’ he said.
As he stood up, he saw Miranda.
She was ten yards away, closer to the bonfire, penned in by a knot of princess protesters. Her hands were dug in her pockets and her shoulders were defensively hunched.
‘Is there a problem?’ he murmured in her ear, as soon as he reached her.
‘This is Mr Knight. He’s the owner of the site,’ she told them. ‘Thank God you’re here,’ she whispered back.
He listened. These earnest people seemed to think that he and Miranda were to blame for the loss of the princess’s remains, first of all to the faceless bureaucracy of the museums, as they put it, and then for the theft by vandals of what remained.
Amos towered over them. He began, magisterially, to explain the planning and treasure laws.
Confused shouting interrupted him, followed by a scream rising over the music. Amos turned to see what was going on.
Jessie was at the heart of a scrum of people. The girl was definitely trouble. She was kneeling with her arms around her black dog. The animal was shaking and whimpering, its black coat drenched with sweat as she stroked it and whispered in its ear.
Over and around her three men were scuffling, dragging and pulling at each other’s clothes, swinging wild punches and tripping over their feet and the hay bale. Another girl was hauling at the nearest man, trying to pull him away. She was tiny, and when he lunged forwards she sailed with him, her feet bumping like a rag doll’s.
One of the men was Kieran, and he was clearly outnumbered. He raised his arms to protect his face as punches rained on his head. Amos broke away from Miranda and the protesters. Onlookers were now tentatively trying to break up the fight.
‘He’s got a knife,’ the girl shrieked. Several people swerved aside. At the outer margins parents hustled their children away.
Jessie jumped up. She held the dog on a short leash. She swung her free arm in a wide arc, smacking one of the other two men. She kicked the second for good measure. To the third, Kieran, she bellowed, ‘Go on, piss off out of here while you can walk.’
Amos reached them. He hauled Kieran aside and interposed himself between the others.
Amos said quietly, ‘If anyone’s carrying a knife, I advise you to get away from here right now and dispose of it.’
He must have summoned the right blend of threat and authority, because the two men and the girl immediately slipped past the onlookers and vanished into the dark. To Kieran, Jessie hissed, ‘And you. You better stay at your mum’s tonight.’
Amos released him. Kieran walked quickly in the opposite direction from the others, looking at no one.
‘That’s it. All over,’ Amos announced to the spectators. The alarm was rapidly mutating into excitement and curiosity. People shuffled into buzzing groups. The music throbbed more wildly as the band attempted ‘Mustang Sally’.
Jessie returned to soothing her shivering dog.
‘You were pretty good,’ she conceded to Amos.
‘You were better. I wouldn’t like to go fifteen rounds with you,’ he replied. He was impressed by her courage. Jessie was trouble, but interesting trouble.
Miranda reached Amos’s side. Her eyes were dark hollows of alarm in her white face.
‘Are you all right? Both of you?’
‘Damon took my dog out in the fireworks. Look at him,’ Jessie cried to her.
Amos and Miranda exchanged a look.
‘Is that what it was all about?’ Amos asked. ‘One of those two was your ex-boyfriend?’
Jessie frowned. She was a small, dark, spiky bundle.
‘Never mind,’ she spat out. ‘Here, Rafferty. Come on, Raff.’ She nuzzled her face against his soaking flank.
The princess protesters had gathered in Miranda’s wake. Two wilting No placards stuck out at angles, and they seemed to have acquired the vicar as an extra. One of the costumed men strode forward, twitching his skins and hemp skirts around his mud-caked calves as the vicar peeled away and began benignly to circulate amidst his parishioners.
‘I take your point,’ the Iron-Age tribesman continued to Amos, as if they were sitting in some committee room. ‘However, the fact is that these remains historically belong to the people of Meddlett. There are precedents, if I may draw your attention…’
He became aware that he didn’t have Am
os’s full attention, or Miranda’s.
Across the grass, passing the bonfire that was sinking into a mass of embers, came Selwyn. One side of his head was covered by a huge sterile dressing, held in place by a white turban bandage.
EIGHT
Polly sat on the modishly battered brown leather sofa at Alpha’s east London flat, watching her two girls prepare supper. They were waiting for Ben to turn up. He had told his mother that he really, really needed to see her, because talking on the phone just wouldn’t be good enough, yet he hadn’t quite managed to get there at the time he had suggested.
Alpha and Omega sidestepped between the sink and the fridge, like one individual with four hands, wordlessly passing the chopping knife or the colander. In the big kitchen of their old house Polly had taught them how to bake and make casseroles, and now their enthusiasm for cooking outstripped hers. The girls usually gave her chefs’ glossy hardback books for birthday and Christmas presents, but Polly didn’t read recipes in bed these days. Even if there had been a decent light to see by, she would have been too tired to keep her eyes open.
Omega was complaining that she still hadn’t met Jaime, Alpha’s new boyfriend, and did Polly think it might be because Alph was trying to shield him from her family in some weird way?
‘It’s so not right to keep us in the dark. I mean, where is he tonight?’
‘He’s working. You’ll meet him soon,’ Alpha said, not rising to the bait. ‘Tonight’s about Ben, anyway.’
The girls exchanged glances. Ben had insisted that he wanted to tell his mother the news himself.
Polly tried to concentrate on what the twins were saying. The flat overlooked a busy road, and the room densely contained the noise of traffic. The oversized plasma screen on one wall silently flashed East Enders, and some repetitive music chipped out of hidden speakers. In the end Selwyn had needed the car to pick up some tiles, so she had made a difficult train journey that involved a bus link to circumnavigate emergency works, and then a rush-hour transfer from the main line station to the Tube station nearest to Alpha’s flat, which wasn’t all that near.
When the doors opened and the mass of people spilled on to the platform, Polly was carried off the Tube, struggling with her shoulder bag and overnight case, her scalp damp and itching. People jostled at her back and she heard their sighs and clicks of irritation at the impediment. She had experienced a moment of pure panic. She had become too slow, too heavy and altogether too weary to cope with this city.
All her life, Polly had been used to speed: to thinking quickly, moving faster than her children, and manoeuvring Selwyn without letting on that she was doing so. Yet now, having once been the fertile source of so much energy, her body seemed to be solidifying into a block of dimpled lard. The bones that had once been hard under layers of plump satiny skin now seemed to be melting away. All that was left was fat. Her breasts stuck out painfully and she hunched her shoulders to protect them.
At the barrier she was trapped again, the pressure building at her back as she searched her pockets for her ticket. Her overnight bag was kicked sideways by flying people diverting past her into the snapping jaws of adjacent gates. As she stooped to retrieve it she briefly entered a nightmarish subworld of legs and skidding feet, sodden newsprint, stabbing heels. Finally, the ticket located, she bundled her new bruises and her luggage through the barrier and out into the street. Damp softened the dazzle of shops and traffic, splintered reflections shone out of puddled gutters. The air out here was mercifully cold and Polly sucked it into her lungs. She rested against the window of a tobacconist’s shop.
She felt lost in the welter of traffic and careless passers-by. Apparently she couldn’t hold her own any longer in London, and at the same time she felt crowded out of Mead. Selwyn’s obsession with the building work, and Miranda’s passion for the place coupled with her grand scheme for their life there combined to diminish Polly’s own stake in it.
Miranda won’t mind. Selwyn’s unthinking words about their children coming to visit chafed her even now. She wanted to feel at home at Mead: she had embraced the idea of the move, even encouraged Selwyn to see it as a solution to their money problems, but already the ideal of companionship and support was mutating into a much lonelier, less utopian reality.
In the old days she had been at the centre of a small world. She felt a spasm of extreme longing for her old house in Somerset, and with it sadness for the loss of her children’s youth.
All that’s gone, she told herself briskly. Moreover, the same thing happens to every mother. Maybe not the part about being broke and having to sell up, but moving from the centre to the margins of a family, that was a voyage more inevitable than any physical retreat from the shelter of four beloved walls.
We have to find a new way to live, and that’s exactly what Sel and I are in the process of doing, she continued. We have chosen Mead, and we will make it work.
A man came out of the shop, stripping the cellophane off a pack of cigarettes and glancing curiously at her as he did so. Polly immediately collected herself. She picked up her bags and began to walk slowly, against the gritty flow of traffic, towards Alpha’s.
Now she was here she perched on the squeaky leather sofa, drinking wine too quickly, resisting the urge to let her head fall back against the cushions. She would have given anything to close her eyes for a few minutes.
‘Mum?’
Alpha and Omega were staring at her.
Polly glanced down and noted splinters of wood trapped in the fuzzy fibres of her grey jumper. She picked at them, but they were embedded. This morning, rummaging in the halflight amongst her belongings, she had pulled out a pair of black boots that she had judged quite serviceable for two days in London. Now she saw that the leather was cracked and the uppers were rimmed in mud.
‘What?’
‘Mum, you look really tired.’
The entryphone gave its double chime.
‘Here’s Ben, at last,’ Alpha said.
Polly brushed aside their double concern. ‘I’m fine. The barn’s turning out to be a bigger job than I expected, that’s all.’
Ben came in, the picture of gloom, burdened with a bicycle wheel and two panniers. He shed a helmet and a pump and peeled off his anorak with reflector stripes. Polly heaved herself to her feet and Ben tramped across to her, the cleats of his cycle shoes rattling on Alpha’s wooden floor. He had stopped shaving and his face was fluffed with fronds of hair. He submitted to his mother’s embrace.
‘How are you, Benjy? Have you heard from Nic yet?’
‘Yeah. A text.’
‘Thank goodness. How is she?’
Ben held up his hand to his sisters. ‘Mum, it’s not that simple.’
Polly stared at him. As soon as the suspicion entered her mind it smouldered and then blazed into certainty.
‘She’s pregnant, isn’t she?’
Ben gave a gusty sigh and collapsed on the sofa. His jaw descended on to his chest.
‘She was. I don’t know if she still is or not. I don’t even know where she is, she won’t tell me. Mum, how am I supposed to cope with potentially being a dad if she won’t have anything to do with me?’
Over his head Polly glanced at Alpha and Omega. They gave her the old what-shall-we-do-with-Ben look, only now with less amusement and a sharper edge of adult concern.
A baby?
Polly admired what she had seen of Nicola. She seemed a calm, rather self-contained girl, necessarily independent because she was effectively motherless. She might well have decided to keep her baby, Polly guessed, and her disappearance seemed to accord with that. She could understand her wanting to remove herself from Ben’s orbit while she took stock of her situation.
A baby…
It would be Ben’s child, as well as Nic’s. The dawning realization forced a change of perspective, from yearning for the past to looking into the future, and it braced Polly. Often enough she had imagined her twins becoming mothers, Omie with her reliable Tom
, even Alph, for all her colourful love life about which Polly suspected she heard only a fraction. But not Ben, her own baby.
She reached for his hand and squeezed it.
‘I can understand why you’re worried. But you know, I think if Nic has decided to keep the baby, she’ll want to involve you in the end.’
He sighed again. ‘Will she? I mean, what will I have to do?’
‘I don’t know. That depends on Nic,’ she told him. ‘But one thing I do know, whatever it is we’ll deal with it.’
Ben looked a little more cheerful. ‘Thanks, Mum.’
‘Can I tell Dad about this?’
He twitched one shoulder. ‘S’pose so,’ he muttered.
Polly didn’t think that Selwyn would welcome the immediate prospect of becoming a grandfather. It would make him feel old.
‘I’m so glad I’ve told you,’ Ben added, brightening. ‘I made Alph and Omie promise not to breathe a word until I got the chance. I’ve been really bugged about what you might say.’
‘We told him you’d be totally understanding, Mum,’ Alpha put in.
‘And they were right, you’re as good as you always are. I do love you,’ Ben said sweetly. He wound an arm around Polly’s neck and kissed her, just like he used to do when he was a toddler.
Alph and Omie put the food on the table and they sat down to eat. Polly wished that Selwyn had come to London with her, so that he could have shared this family meal. She covered up for his absence by telling the three of them about his furious progress in the barn, making it comical, making them laugh.
As soon as they had eaten, Ben announced that he was going to have to dash. His editor had asked him to write up a gig for the review page of the magazine.
‘Do you really have to?’ Polly asked.
‘Yeah. It’s a nu-rave night,’ he added helpfully. ‘Two hundred words. That’s good, isn’t it?’
‘Well done,’ agreed Polly.
She walked with him to the doors of the lift. Longing to talk some more about Nic and the baby, she asked if he could perhaps meet her for lunch. Ben looked perplexed, but then agreed vaguely that yes, tomorrow, maybe that would be a good plan.
