by Helen Slavin
‘I bloody hate rain,’ his voice crackled under the plastic shelter. He looked out. ‘At home, I used to shut myself in the dining room and turn some music on. Bloody depressing sound if you ask me.’
I registered ‘at home’. He’d had one, then.
‘Was a tip that room. Full of junk. Neither of us ever even ate in that room. She put a table in the kitchen. Like her mother.’ He finished with an odd little snort. Drained the tea mug, tipped the contents onto a mudpatch spattered with drowning blades of grass and turned back to the trench.
At home. Us. I wondered if this Us was Annie. Or if Annie had split up Us. That was why he was here. See how the possibilities start to open up?
He never said he wasn’t married. Come the moment when Bridget, tired of his unresponsiveness asked, ‘Are you married Mark?’ Evan/Mark shook his head. His eyes couldn’t keep contact with Bridget.
‘Divorced then?’
He looked pained. Couldn’t confirm or deny. Not even with a shake of his head. Bridget, wishing to find something wrong with him that wouldn’t make her unattractive, latched onto the idea of a painful divorce. Aversion therapy that would make any man think twice about getting involved on any level with another woman. Not me speaking. That’s what I overheard her discussing with Andy in the kitchen later. After this she adopted gentler tactics. Sitting near. Brushing against. A hint or glance. All coy.
She let her hair down one evening. Her usual style was an untidy bun pinned or speared by a variety of hair accessories, most of them with broken edges, worn-off gold paint. It was always tumbledown, home dyed, at least three different shades of brown.
This particular evening she had redyed it one solid colour, a burnished red. Thing is, she had no idea how beautiful she looked. Washed. Hair brushed, swept to the front of one shoulder. Her saggy moth-eaten bathrobe. Her bare feet. Eating yoghurt out of the pot with a soup spoon. Reading a magazine on the work top. Bridget not trying. The Real Bridget. No one saw her that night except me. They had gone to the pub. It was like glimpsing a kingfisher as you cycle down the towpath. An electrical blue flash, fleeting and rare.
I savoured the moment and no more. I wasn’t about to embark on a sexual liaison with Bridget. Bridget would be staying around and that would lead to all manner of unfinished business. That’s my pragmatic view. If you poke my romantic side I might tell you that I was already unconsciously under Annie’s spell. Or at least, the spell the gods were casting for us.
They rolled in quite late and Evan/Mike/What’s-my-name decided to steal some bread for toast. Clearly the art of foraging is a hard thing to kick out of. Evan Bees was adept at filching foodstuffs, had had years of training. Like Snow White he would take a little from this bowl, a slice from that loaf, a biscuit from that packet, a splash of milk from this jug. Slivers and sips. If you steal a handful of teabags you get caught. If you steal one a day, in turn, from everyone, you never have to buy tea. It’s the boiling frog idea.
Evan chose his moment well. Andy was in the showers. Bridget had gone to bed hours ago. As the only woman she was privileged to have a room to herself. Her privacy was only intruded upon once or twice by the odd female hiker. There were two freckled girls from New Zealand one week. Even I kept clear of them. They spoke in code, their own language to shut out others. One morning I found Bridget asleep in one of the airport lounge chairs by the fire doors in the corridor.
So. Everyone’s busy or asleep. I wasn’t in the kitchen. I was standing by the airport lounge chairs near the fire doors in the corridor, which is partly why I was remembering the New Zealanders. I was looking out across the overgrown courtyard formed by the layout of the buildings. There were wild buddleia there. In the daytime the huge purple flowers scented the air with butter and honey. Whenever the sun managed to shine down into that courtyard there were so many butterflies drinking the nectar that it looked as if the bushes were growing them. Peacock and painted lady blooms, flittering.
I’m gazing into the emptied night, remembering this spectacle of nature, when I see movement in the kitchen. There is a long row of windows above the sinks. I see Evan. I see the theft. A couple of slices of Bridget’s bread. Some of Andy’s cheese. As he stood by the toaster waiting for his booty to be done he caught sight of me. There was a long moment and then I gave him a sort of salute. A sign of acknowledgment.
By the time I had got round to the kitchen Evan/Mark/Mike was eating the evidence. He looked guilty and all I did was brew some tea.
Everyone was in bed. The hostel was locked up for the night and I was enjoying the solitude of the common room, the comfy chair. A hand of clock patience on the wooden coffee table. Evan Bees took a glass of milk (property of?), a flick through a magazine and a couple of coughs before he approached me. He simulated interest in the game, making small understated astonished or cheering noises. As I picked up the cards and began to shuffle he made his play.
‘How did you lose your eye?’
Floored me. I’d expected some ingratiating comment. Some sort of you-scratch-my-back deal he might broker. Instead he’d gone for a vulnerability. My view is he thought he intended to be sympathetic and win me over. That’s when I’m feeling charitable. In reality he hoped to find a weak spot. Something to hold against his thievery. An eye for an eye, as they say.
He perched on the arm of the chair opposite. He shocked me because he was the only person ever to ask outright. I had noted Bridget’s stolen glances at my eye patch but she’d never asked. Andy had had a good long nosey at it the first day, addressing all his chit-chat to it, staring, memorising. Then onwards, not bothered. Others had a quick embarrassed glance and then studiously addressed their look to my right eye.
Evan Bees, fair play, asked a forthright question.
‘I understand if it is too traumatic to recall.’
I smiled to myself.
‘I’ll tell you how I lost the eye…’ I said, leaning to deal a hand of klondike. Seven on seven. ‘…if you tell me about Annie.’
Moments later I was once again enjoying the solitude of the empty common room.
That night Andy is with Bridget and Evan Bees sleeps once more under the bunk. He has spent most of the time hidden in the shower room but when he thinks I am asleep he skulks in. I listen to him in the dark as he packs his bag and I’m panicking that I won’t ever know. He settles at last and I am willing him to sleep. He falls eventually and although it is fitful, he begins to talk and the pieces that are Annie come spilling out of him. I don’t have all the corners yet, but I have some of the middle of this puzzle. As he murmurs and stirs she is there, like a ghost.
Following day. Evan Bees is out before anyone and the rumour is he is having breakfast at the roadside café near the fort. Or the town, as it is fast becoming. We all head out later. We find him in the new edge of settlement trench looking for the perimeter walls of what we thought was a villa. He’s already knee-deep in a hoard of amber beads.
Doesn’t look up. Keeps digging. It’s as if all the history of the site is rushing towards him, showing itself, revealing its secrets. Turns up more beads. A knife blade with an ornate and virtually intact hilt. Bronze. Decorated. A fragment of the leather sheath that held it. A handle from a bronze bucket. The hilt of a broadsword. Variety of ornate and perfectly preserved bone combs.
Bone.
He hits the first pelvis at about eleven. He goes easy and, with concerted brushing and an abandonment of both eleven o’clock tea break and one-thirty lunch break, he uncovers the whole pelvis and is starting to reveal femurs. He calls in two of the archaeology students that are on attachment this month and they all brush and chip and dig.
Ribs. Scapula. Sternum crushed in on the vertebrae below and behind. Humerus. Fibula. Tibia. Latin terms. Would our buried pelvises have understood them?
As the students uncover hands, Evan hits the motherlode and finds two skulls. One belongs to this body, the other has rolled in from another burial. As earth is moved so the other skeletons a
ppear. By half past four Evan and his students have partially uncovered the confirmed remains of one woman and three other skeletons, yet to be confirmed as male or female. The second skull appears to be male but the bones remaining have not yet given up their secret identities.
Above us. Hot July. Thunderhead massing. A mob of livid grey-purple nimbus clouds are piling and tumbling, blotting out the daylight. The air is a surreal mix of heavy pressure and cool temperature. Bridget develops a headache. One of the students leaps suddenly from the skeleton dig as he starts a nosebleed. He is helped to the portakabin where the computer is set up, and the first-aid kit. Bridget goes with him to find an aspirin.
Evan Bees never looks up into any of the faces of those around the trench. I am a short distance away finishing for the day on the granary floor we’re uncovering. I’m erecting a rain shelter and the wind rattles it from time to time, assessing it. Will it be back later to blow it down? It rattles on through the site, not bothering. There is an audible gasp of excitement as two more skulls, or at least the bottom jaw of one and the eye socket of another, emerge from the dirt.
Bridget Flinch is in deep discussion with a beardy bloke from the National Trust who commutes every day to have a nosey round. They are without a doubt the highest points on that land.
It is Evan Bees who is struck by lightning.
Struck
THEY THOUGHT he might have been struck by lightning.
We had been battered by electrical storms. The town was alive with the sound of fire engines responding to strikes. Blazing chimneys, battered rooftops, a fire in the church opposite the library. St Mark’s. Shortly after, when it was discovered that the damage was going to run to a million pounds and it would be cheaper to knock down the church and build new, the vicar resigned. He turned in his dog collar and ran away with the lady who was in charge of the flower arranging. She was married.
The local paper ran a story detailing their love affair, comments from friends and relatives all left shocked and winded by the events. The vicar had thought it was the Hand of God. A thunderbolt sent to make him do the right thing. The right thing was to be honest about his love. To be brave. To stand up and be counted. To open a florist shop in the next big town.
They thought the dead man might have been struck by lightning. Marcia had forgotten to put the bin out and was sneaking out, picking her way in her slippers through the puddles. It was half five in the morning. She tripped over him.
He was lying on the top step of a set of three stone steps that move you up towards her handkerchief lawn. He was wet. Had been lying there some time. He looked as if he had been sunbathing or was relaxing after a tiring swim. Except for his wide-open eyes. Marcia’s neighbour, Alan, had been heading home after his late shift. He had already done the right thing and called the police.
In the yard Police Constable Terry Adam was looking over the body and calling for an ambulance and all the legal stuff. He’d made a decision. This young man had been hit by lightning as he cut through the gardens on his way home. It was all very simple to a police mind. It was about calm talk on a two-way radio. It was about uniformed efficiency, a friendly smile. He draped a bench cover over the body and asked Marcia if she’d like to make a cup of tea while they waited for the ambulance. He could take down a statement.
Faced with this, Marcia didn’t think twice apparently. She just turned to her son, Justin, who was yawning in the back doorway and said, ‘Get Annie.’
Justin was surprised that I answered the basement door without him knocking. If truth be told I think I freaked him out. It was early enough in the morning for him to think that I was still asleep probably, and dreaming probably. He didn’t know that I’d had a wakeful night, going over Fran Dart’s details trying to work out ways of looking for her. I had seen him coming down the steps.
I think everyone was wakeful that morning. The air was clearer now after the storm. The noises and the freshness combined to keep everyone awake and if the weather heated up in the afternoon they would all be asleep at their desks or at the wheels of their buses, in front of their classes. The fire at St Mark’s was raging still, sending its own nimbus clouds of thick black smoke heavenwards.
At Marcia’s I didn’t go through the house. I squeezed through the side gate. The house rises tall against the side of a banking and her little side entrance is narrow, stonework on the house side and a damp banking of grass and wildflowers on the other. It rises above your head, mosses and ferns encroach on the stone path. Through the gate at the end. Only this time I didn’t get to the gate. He was blocking the way. The young man was wearing a chocolate brown T-shirt and chocolate brown jeans. He looked surprised.
‘I don’t get it,’ he said, although it was clear from the wavering, teary tone of his voice that he did get it and it was sinking in. Sure as mud.
‘I don’t get this. Where am I?’
‘You’re in Marcia’s garden,’ I said, trying to keep it calm and friendly. ‘The end house on Archbold Terrace. Do you know where that is?’
‘Yeah. Yeah, I was cutting down the back lane. Heading home.’
He looked hemmed in now. Didn’t look back. Marcia had a lot of trouble with the right of way, the back lane, that ran the length of the terrace. Her insurance premiums were upped annually on the strength of that access path. It was hidden and it was easy to get in at the back of any of the houses and not be seen, either from the road or from the other houses. It backed onto a dense woodland. It was pretty in the daytime and sinister at night, as if wolves or witches might come out of there.
He wasn’t looking back, because he could have seen his dead self. I didn’t push this.
‘You were heading home. From the pub?’
‘He’s so fucking jealous…Christ…’
‘What’s your name?’
I could almost hear the crumpling of a form. I was getting very efficient.
‘I wanted to. He knows that. But I never.’
‘Can you remember what happened?’
He was shaking his head, teary-eyed, his throat making odd gaspy, raspy noises as he struggled with tears. You’d think he was crying because he was dead. You’d be wrong. He was crying because he knew who had killed him. Aunt Mag would have described him as ‘beside himself’. In more ways than one.
‘I never. I never. I wanted to, but I never. He’s so fucking jealous…I never. I wanted, but I never.’
He sobbed it out. Then he walked past me, through me and disappeared into the darkness at the front of the house. The streetlights were out tonight. The storm.
‘Who were you talking to?’ said a voice. I spun round. It was Terry Adam, giving me a hard stare. He glanced over my shoulder, as if I might be hiding someone. A suspect. He didn’t speak. He seemed to be off in a trance for an instant and then he rubbed his hand across his face, looked very tired suddenly, took in a breath.
‘What are you doing here?’
I had stalked Oliver Howard for a week. Now here I was spectating at a mystery death. Marcia was there to save me from the Inquisition.
‘She’s a friend. I called her over. Feeling a bit dodgy myself.’
Terry Adam looked blank. Yes. That is it, as if he was blanking it out. The words came out of his mouth by rote.
‘Be prepared for some delayed reaction.’
He flicked open his notebook. Clicked his pen a few times. It was only afterwards that I realised he was standing in the alley so that he too could avoid looking at the green bench cover and thinking about who was underneath it. He was attentive and businesslike. Taking notes. Then he opted to take a short hike back along the lane. As he disappeared into the early dawning light, his Maglite torch a shooting star, Marcia leaned towards me.
‘Did you get to speak to him?’
She nodded her head towards the body, sprawled under the bench cover.
‘Not really. Just confusion. Jealousy. And he’s gone, in case you’re worried.’
‘Well, always worth a try eh?
And if he comes back I can give you a bell.’ Marcia, ever the pragmatist.
Terry Adam was moving back across the handkerchief lawn now and I shut up. Could not help looking, frankly, shifty. Marcia glugged at her tea, poured the dregs onto some ropey-looking nasturtiums in the nearest flowerbed and said she’d better get in and get dressed.
We stood there a moment. He managed a smile. It was painful to see, his policeman politeness-training smile. It was a smile he had practised in front of a mirror. Passed exams in. A smile he had copied from a series of instructional smiling photographs in a training manual. And now his face was shifting into a neutral look as we heard the ambulance arrive and Justin came running through the house.
‘They’re here.’
Marcia trotted inside. Terry Adam looked right at me then, for just a nanosecond. If I hadn’t turned I would have missed it. But I did turn. His eyes locked mine. It was like one of those shooting star moments when you happen to glance at the night and a star scorches the sky above you. Something rare. Something electric. Before he looked away.
The ambulance team arrived and we were separated suddenly by a gurney clattering, by fluorescent jackets and quick efficiency. Without looking my way again, Terry Adam accompanied the body as the young man, Danny, was bagged up and wheeled away as swiftly as a dog turd in the park.
Next morning it was clear that Danny had put the word out in Heaven. I was a useful police informant in the ‘missing presumed dead’ department.
Hence the presence of a dog at breakfast. A little chocolate brown terrier skittered into the kitchen as I yawned over the kettle. The elderly lady followed after him, in her chocolate brown cagoule and sensible outfit. Her glasses had a lens broken.
