by James Long
Ali stared at her. ‘You haven’t been taking your pills, have you?’
‘Not for three days,’ said Jo. ‘Mum forgot again. She’s picking them up today.’
‘Don’t you feel the difference it makes?’
Jo shrugged. ‘Yes, but then I forget.’
But for Fleur’s approach to life, the friendship of the three girls might not have survived the amount of time Jo spent shut down in her chemically-dulled world. Fleur always put Jo second to her business activity and that meant there were regular periods when they ran out of pills. For three or four days, every now and then, Jo would emerge from that chrysalis and remind her friends why they stuck with her.
The other two, Lucy in her studied flightiness and Ali in her stolid determination, were on a mission to save Jo from malign adult forces.
One day in early May 2010, with the start of their GCSE exams only two weeks away, Ali summoned the other two to join her in a cafe on the way home from school.
‘My mother’s got this idea,’ she said, and Lucy groaned.
‘The answer’s no,’ she said. ‘Now what’s the idea? Somehow I already know it’s not going to be fun.’
‘No, it will be. Listen.’
‘Does it involve digging?’
‘That’s not the point. It—’
‘It’s digging. Count me out.’ Lucy got to her feet and reached for her bag.
‘Give her a chance,’ said Jo. She was dull that day.
‘Why? I know all I need to know.’
‘There are boys,’ Ali said quietly, and Lucy sat down.
Lucy was currently playing the role of tragically spurned lover. She had spent the past three months entwined around sharp-tongued Matt, tall, slim and nearly twenty – Matt, with his own band which played evening gigs in some of the town’s bars and cafes. Matt’s drummer, Whizz, liked Jo in a hopeless and unrequited fashion but Ali knew none of them were interested in her.
The group had been broken up by Matt’s sudden switch of affection to a nineteen-year-old music student.
‘It’s such a tragedy,’ Lucy had said. ‘Horrible Harriet’s stolen him and it’s not just my pain, it’s yours too.’
‘Don’t worry about me,’ Ali said immediately.
‘I didn’t really mean you, I meant poor Jo.’
‘I’ll probably survive,’ said Jo.
Lucy was getting tired of the tragic role. ‘What boys?’ she asked.
‘Twelve students from Bristol University.’
‘Twelve students? They could be girls.’
Ali shook her head. ‘By the law of averages half of them will be boys. That’s two each.’
‘No it’s not. It’s one each for you two and four for me.’
‘One?’ said Ali, ‘Only one?’ but the fact was she would have given anything for one.
‘You can have mine,’ Jo offered. She knew Lucy would be able to take her pick. Lucy had been surrounded by boys since they had first met. Jo had no obvious beauty yet, just a pleasing curve of cheek and chin framed by dark brown hair, but her smile turned heads and that smile, once so rare, was seen more often these days. The boys who were drawn to it got no more than polite interest. Jo found them all too young and wondered briefly if a Bristol student might not have attractions.
‘Seriously,’ said Ali, ‘none of us knew what to do after the exams, did we? At least none of us could think of anything our parents would actually let us do.’ She meant her parents and Jo’s mother, because they all three knew Lucy’s would let her do whatever she wanted within reason. ‘The advantage of this is that my mother thinks it’s a good idea.’
‘My mother wants to send me off to some camp because she’s going to a conference,’ said Jo.
‘Hang on,’ said Lucy. ‘Just before we sign up for this, what exactly is it?’
‘It’s a three-week dig at a place called Montacute on the site of a Norman castle.’
Jo looked at her, frowned, looked away.
Lucy studied her. ‘Astonishing. You manage to sound excited about that.’
‘It’s three weeks of freedom,’ Ali said with a note of pleading in her voice.
‘Where will we be staying?’
‘Everyone’s camping. All the diggers. I’m glad. It’s much more fun that way.’
‘I have very firm views on camping,’ said Lucy. ‘I don’t mind sleeping under the stars so long as there are five of them and they’re fixed to a hotel wall.’
‘No, it’s really fun, I promise. They have campfires at night and they sing songs and stuff.’
‘Is there a pub?’ asked Lucy.
‘Probably.’
‘They’ll serve us if we’re with all the others, won’t they?’
‘Maybe.’
‘I haven’t been ID’d for ages. Will they have power at the campsite? I don’t want my iPod going flat.’
‘Power? It’s a field. A field with boys in it,’ said Ali hopefully.
‘But I know what archaeologists look like,’ said Lucy. ‘I’ve seen them on television. They’ve got long straggly hair like old sheep and they’re bald on top. They get incredibly excited about very small broken bits of pottery. They’re always drinking beer and they knit their own sweaters.’
‘Where exactly is Montacute?’ Jo asked.
‘Near Yeovil,’ said Ali, and brought out a map.
As Jo looked at the map, some of the names on it penetrated the curtain in her head, prompting a small thrill almost like pleasure – Martock, Somerton, Wincanton. She put her finger on Montacute and knew she wanted to go there.
A month and a half later the three girls got out of the Yeovil bus in the middle of Montacute village and lined up on the verge like some demonstration poster of different body types: Lucy, the tall blonde with the aquiline profile; Jo, half a head shorter, dark and curved; Ali, who barely reached Lucy’s shoulder, stocky and with hair which looked, as Lucy had once said in a far-too-honest moment, as if it had been assembled from other people’s leftovers.
Jo was looking all around her and seemed to be sniffing the air. It was the nearest to liveliness that her friends had seen all week. The other two had come out of their GCSE exams released from pressure but completely true to type. Lucy had indulged in a theatrical spectrum ranging from comic despair after the Maths exam to claiming the best answers ever written to an English paper. Ali had been quietly pleased with all of them, but anxious not to rub that in if she was talking to anyone less confident. Jo had only said they were mostly all right.
‘Jo,’ said Lucy, ‘before we get there, Ali and I have got something to say.’
‘Yes?’
‘Fleur made us promise something before she agreed you could come.’
‘I can guess.’
‘She made us promise to watch you take your tablets every day.’
‘Oh, don’t worry,’ said Jo with a sigh. ‘I will.’
‘No. That’s what we want to say. We’re not going to do it. It’s up to you. You don’t have to take them.’
‘Why?’
‘Because we know what you’re like when you don’t. That’s the real Jo.’
She looked at her friends, unsure what to say, so used now to the dulled-down world that the idea of weeks away from it sounded almost frightening, then she nodded slowly.
Ali looked at her instructions and the map. ‘It’s this way,’ she declared and set off. They made a hundred yards before Lucy stopped them.
‘My straps are hurting.’
‘I’m not surprised they’re hurting. You can see through that cotton,’ Ali said. ‘Didn’t you bring an old sweater or something?’
‘I don’t own any old sweaters.’
‘Didn’t you bring anything serious?’
A Land Rover was coming up behind them.
‘All my clothes are extremely serious. Those Bristol boys won’t know what’s hit them. Just make sure you’re on my tail. Where I lead, you follow.’
The Land Rover pulled in ahead
of them.
‘You said they’ll all have big white beards,’ Ali said. ‘They’re not even going to notice the fact that you’re hardly wearing anything at all.’
The driver of the Land Rover opened his door as they reached it.
‘You look like the rest of my diggers,’ he said. ‘I’m Rupert. I’m running the dig. Would you like a lift?’
‘Where’s your big white beard?’ said Lucy.
‘You’ve got to be Christine Massey’s daughter,’ said the Land Rover driver, glancing at Ali as he let in the clutch. ‘You look just like her.’
Ali sighed.
CHAPTER 4
The last thing Ali wanted to hear on this first day of freedom was that she looked like her mother, so she was still frowning as she pulled the components of their tents out of their bags. She was also cross with Lucy, who had sat in the front of the Land Rover deliberately swaying as it bounced through the potholes so that her shoulder collided with Rupert’s, though he had seemed oblivious.
‘You’ll be pleased to hear the forecast is fine,’ he said. ‘I can promise lots of food and good company. As for the archaeology, I’ve made my offerings to the gods of dirt and we will see what they provide.’
He turned in through a field gate and nosed the Land Rover against the hedge on the end of a line of cars.
‘Grab your stuff. Pitch camp at the far end of the tents. Tea, cake and first get-together in about an hour.’
He walked off towards a billowing pile of camouflaged green canvas where a group of young men were struggling with wooden poles.
Lucy stared after him. ‘Six foot two, eyes of blue,’ she said. ‘Who said archaeology was boring?’ Then she saw him join the men at the marquee. ‘Those must be the students,’ she said, ‘One, two, three, four, five, six, seven. Well, seventy-five per cent of them are the right gender.’
‘Fifty-eight and a third,’ said Ali. ‘Seven-twelfths is fifty-eight and a third per cent. You divide a hundred by seven and—’
‘That’s what I have you for,’ said Lucy. ‘You do the dividing and Jo and I will go and do the multiplying.’
Jo had been staring up at the steep wooded hill that rose two hundred yards away from their field. She smiled, glanced towards the marquee and began straightening out the tent and its tangled nylon cords. Lucy walked off towards the marquee without a backward glance and Ali stared after her a little nervously. She had gone along with the bravado of the boy talk. She had lived through varied fantasies of this adventure since the first moment her mother had suggested it. All of them had a boy in them somewhere – a boy who would fit Ali perfectly, a boy who would like doing what she did, who would rather listen to the birds singing than something on earphones, who would have read Cormac McCarthy’s novels and Alice Oswald’s poetry – above all, a boy who wouldn’t keep looking at Lucy or Jo when he should be looking at her. None of those fantasies had the flapping of canvas and the sound of strange male voices in them. The figures round the marquee were frighteningly real and only a short walk away.
Ali knew Lucy would be straight in there like a manseeking missile and she feared she would be left, awkward and unappealing. She finished fitting together one of the poles, a long snake of glass-fibre sections, and started on the other one. They put up Ali’s big tent to sleep in and Jo’s tiny pup tent to put their bags in and made themselves dizzy blowing up airbeds.
‘Don’t do it. Leave it to her,’ said Jo as Ali turned to Lucy’s deflated mattress.
‘Oh, I don’t mind,’ Ali replied but before she could start, they heard Rupert shout. They walked across to where the camouflage canvas had been propped up, stretched and pegged down into a marquee so that what had been a ragged block of wind was now a tamed, friendly space – a place of tables, benches and a score of people talking animatedly like old friends meeting again. Lucy was in the middle of a group of boys.
‘This is Andy,’ she said, putting her arm round the shoulders of an athletic looking student with curly fair hair, ‘and these are Sandy, Randy, Dandy and . . . um . . .’
‘No we’re not,’ protested one of them, ‘I’m Doug and this is Jonno, Conrad and—’ He was interrupted by a shout from Rupert.
‘Okay everyone, settle down,’ he called. ‘If you’re not holding a mug of coffee, grab one quick. It’s good and strong and there’s chocolate cake on an epic scale.’
The girls headed for the trestle tables with the food. Lucy hissed at them, ‘He’s mine. You choose from the others. There’s no competition.’
‘What do you mean?’ Ali whispered back.
‘The girls. I think they dug them up but they haven’t washed the dirt off yet.’
They filled mugs and plates and followed Lucy back towards the bench where all the students were sitting. Rupert called out, ‘Find yourselves a seat, everybody, and we’ll get started.’
The renewed buzz died down, the end of one woman’s sentence left tapering in the air, ‘. . . shoulder brooch, second century at the very latest, as it turned out.’
All faces turned to Rupert. ‘Some of us know each other from here or there. You’ll get to know my students. They’re moderately house-trained but don’t lend them any money. You might remember Paul Tatham – he hasn’t been around for a few years. Something about Australia, wasn’t it? So welcome back to proper archaeology, Paul. There’s the famous Dozer, of course. Every dig needs a Dozer.’ There was a scatter of laughter and the girls looked round to see who he was talking about, but everyone was looking back at them as Rupert pointed.
‘I don’t think any of you know these three,’ he said. ‘They’re Alison, Jo and Lucy. If you’ve ever laboured under the iron rule of Christine Massey, you’ll spot where Ali’s DNA comes from. OK, now, down to business. The reason we’re all here is because a dog disappeared down a rabbit hole. Its owner, Mr Hogarth, was shouting down into a space which seemed to echo and a few minutes later, when he was starting to panic, the dog – Heineken by name – came bouncing up from somewhere behind him covered in earth. From which we deduce that there is a large subterranean void down there. Mr Hogarth, being an unusually sensible man, called English Heritage and lo and behold, here we are in a remarkably short time to investigate Mr Hogarth’s hole.’
He turned to a display board and pointed at a plan.
‘St Michael’s Hill, Montacute,’ he said. ‘The tower on top is an eighteenth-century folly but the rest is pure Norman motte and bailey, built in 1068 by William the Conqueror’s half-brother Robert of Mortain – part of his campaign to subdue Somerset. There’s been a bit of archaeology here over the years but there is no record that anyone found any kind of void or chamber. This is a natural pile of earth and rock which once had a timber castle perched on top. Solid is the word. You do not, in the normal way of things, fall into holes in a place like this.’
He looked around at the attentive faces and pointed to a cross on the plan. ‘That’s where Mr Hogarth’s hole appeared, so we’re going to sneak up on it carefully. There’s some vegetation to shift so while Johan and Sheila get the finds tent ready and Bobby does food, the rest of us will grab mattocks, hoes and shovels and get stripping.’
It was a steep climb up to a terrace on the side of the hill, in amongst the trees that covered almost all of it. The three girls were given wheelbarrows and told to dump the turf and weeds on the shoulder of the hill. Ali did it with the experienced determination of someone who had been brought up on such digs. Jo watched her and followed suit, two barrow-loads to Ali’s three, using just the minimum effort required to keep up with the waste heap. Lucy found indirect routes which took her past where the boys were working with Andy stripped to the waist. Her gossamer stamina soon evaporated and she began to display a theatrical incapability which produced the entire spectrum of possible mishaps – upturned barrows, downhill runaways and uphill collisions with those trying to come down. When Rupert finally told them to pack up she was sitting on a tree stump, trying to take it all seriously enough to s
ulk.
They went to wash and then the other two waited while Lucy changed, complaining about the lack of a proper mirror in the tent. The marquee was already full of hungry diggers.
‘Their table is full,’ Lucy complained. ‘We’ll have to sit somewhere else. We should have got here sooner.’
As the sun dipped behind the side of the hill they ate a vegetable curry ladled, bubbling, from a vast wreck of an aluminium pot that had fed thousands since it last shone. An elderly giant of a man, white hair tied back in a ponytail and biker’s tattoos on his arms, was sitting next to them and he smiled at them as they ate.
‘I’m Dozer,’ he said in a voice that sounded like a truck engine on tick-over. ‘What was your names again?’
They told him. ‘Got it,’ he said. ‘You enjoying yourselves?’
‘It’s not very exciting yet,’ said Lucy, and Ali kicked her under the table.
‘Exciting? You came for excitement, did you? You did know it was archaeology?’
‘I want to start finding things.’
Ali cut in, her voice stiff with embarrassment. ‘She knows that. I’ve told her. It’s not treasure-hunting.’
Dozer winked. ‘That’s what we all say but we’re all fibbing.’ He piled up their dirty plates. ‘Fire time,’ he said. ‘I’ll start fixing it.’
‘A campfire?’ asked Lucy. ‘Here? Oh good.’
‘Not here,’ said the old biker, sniffing the wind. ‘Over there.’ He nodded across the field.
‘That’s so the smoke doesn’t affect the trenches,’ said Ali didactically. ‘It messes up the radiocarbon dating.’
The man looked down at her and grinned. ‘Is that right? And I thought it was so the smoke doesn’t blow into our tents.’
When he had got the fire going, the older diggers brought wine and beer from their cars and passed it round in plastic mugs. Dozer had dragged logs into a ring around the fire as makeshift benches. This time Lucy made sure they got in early, sitting herself firmly down next to Andy and towing the other two after her.
