The Courage Consort

by Michel Faber

  'Those three arches there,' she said, making sure he was looking where her finger pointed (he was—and so was his dog), 'those arches are originally from the south wall, yes, and when they were reconstructed in the 1920s, they were propped up against the northern boundary wall, yes. Rather odd, I admit. But it's all the original masonry, you know. And at least those arches are safe now. We'd love to restore them to their original position, but they're better off where they are than in a pile of rubble—or don't you think so?'

  'I'm sorry, I'm sorry!' he pleaded facetiously. 'I didn't know I was treading on your toes…'

  'I have some books and brochures that explain everything, the whole history,' she said. 'You can read those—I'll give them to you. A nice parcel. Loggerhead's Yard, wasn't it?'

  'Oh, but no, really,' he grimaced, flushing with embarrassment. 'I should buy them myself.'

  'Nonsense. You're welcome to them.'

  'But … but they're yours. You've spent money…'

  'Nonsense, I've got what I needed from them; they're not doing me any good now.' Seeing him squirm, she was secretly enjoying her modest subversion of twenty-first-century capitalism, her feeble imitation of the noble Benedictine principle of common ownership. 'Besides, I can smell cynicism on you, Mr. Magnus. I'd like to get rid of that, if I can.'

  He laughed uneasily, and lifted one elbow to call attention to his sweat-soaked armpits.

  'Are you sure it's not the smell of BO?'

  'Quite sure,' she said, noting that two of her colleagues were, at last, straggling into view. 'Now, I think it's about time I started work. It was lovely to meet you. And Hadrian, of course.'

  She shook his hand, and allowed herself one more ruffle of the dog's mane. Nonplussed, Magnus backed away.

  A few seconds later, when she was already far away from him, he called after her:

  'Happy digging!'

  That night, Siân fell asleep with unusual ease. Instead of spending hours looking at the cast-iron fireplace and the wooden clothes rack growing gradually more distinct in the moonlight, she slept in profound darkness.

  I'm sleeping, she thought as she slept. How divine.

  'Oh, flesh of my flesh,' whispered a voice in her ear. 'Forgive me…' And the cold, slightly serrated edge of a large knife pressed into her windpipe. With a yelp, she leapt into wakefulness, but not before the flesh of her throat had yawned open and released a welter of blood.

  Upright in bed, she clutched her neck, to keep her life clamped safely inside. The skin was unbroken, a little damp with perspiration. She let go, groaning irritably.

  It wasn't even morning: it was pitch-dark, and the seagulls were silent—still fast asleep, wherever it is that seagulls sleep. Siân peered at her watch, but it was the old-fashioned kind (she didn't like digital watches) and she couldn't see a thing.

  Ten minutes later she was dressed and ready for going out. Packed in a shoulder bag were the books and pamphlets for Magnus: 'Saint Hilda and her Abbey at Whitby', A History of Whitby, the Pitkin guide to 'Life in a Monastery', and several others. She slung the bag behind her hip and shrugged experimentally to confirm it stayed put; she didn't want it swinging forward and tripping her up. Getting your neck slashed in a dream was one thing; breaking your neck while trying to get down a steep flight of stairs in the dead of night was quite another.

  In the event, she managed without any problem, and was soon standing in the cold breeze of the White Horse and Griffin's side lane, cobbles underfoot. The town was so quiet she could hear her own breathing, and Church Street was closed to traffic in any case, yet still she ventured forward from the alley very, very carefully—a legacy of her accident in Bosnia. Even in a pedestrianised cul-de-sac in a small Yorkshire town at four in the morning, you never knew what might come ripping around the corner.

  In the dark, Whitby looked strange to Siân—neither modern nor medieval, which were the only two ways she was accustomed to perceiving it. In the daylight hours, she was either working in the shadow of the abbey ruins, coaxing the remains of stunted Northumbrians out of the antique clay, or she was weaving through crowds of shoppers and tourists, that vulgar throng of pilgrims with mobile phones clutched to their cheeks or pop groups advertised on their chests. Now, in the unpeopled stillness of night, Whitby looked, to Siân, distinctly Victorian. She didn't know why—the buildings and streets were much older than that, mostly. But it wasn't a matter of architecture; it was a matter of atmosphere. The glow of the streetlamps could almost be gaslight; the obscure buildings and darkened doorways scowled with menace, like a movie backdrop for yet another version of Bram Stoker's Dracula. Any alleyway, it seemed to Siân, could disgorge at any moment the caped figure of the Count, or a somnambulistic young woman of unnatural pallor, her white nightgown stained with blood.

  Gothic. That's what the word 'Gothic' meant to most people nowadays. Nothing to do with the original Germanic tribe, or even the pre-Renaissance architectural style. The realities of history had been swept aside by Hollywood vampires and narcissistic rock singers with too much mascara on. And here she was, as big a sucker as anyone: walking down Church Street at four in the morning, imagining the whole town to be crawling with Victorianesque undead. Even the Funtasia joke shop, which during the day sold plastic vampire fangs and whoopee cushions, seemed at this godforsaken hour to be a genuinely creepy establishment, the sort of place inside which rats and madmen might be lurking.

  The house in Loggerhead's Yard was easy to find; when she'd asked about it in the hotel, half a dozen people jostled to give her directions. Magnus's father had been well known in the town and all the locals took a keen interest whenever a death freed up a hunk of prime real estate. Only when Siân approached the front door did she have her first doubts about what she'd come here to do. An action which, in daylight with people strolling round about, would look like a casual errand, seemed anything but casual now—the eerie stillness and the ill-lit, empty streets made her feel as if she were up to no good. She could be a thief, a cat burglar, a rapist, tiptoeing so as not to wake the virtuously sleeping world, squinting at a slit in a stranger's door, preparing to slide a foreign object through it. What if the door should open suddenly, to reveal Magnus, still naked and warm from his bed, rubbing his eyes? Or what about the dog? Surely he would go berserk at the sound of her fumblings at the mail slot! Siân steeled her nerves for an explosion of barking as she fed the books and pamphlets, one by one, through the dark vent, but they dropped softly onto the floor within, and that was all. Hadrian was either uninspired by the challenges of being a guard dog, or asleep. Asleep on the bed of his master, perhaps. Two muscular males nestled side by side, different species but both devilishly handsome.

  For goodness' sake, she sighed to herself, turning away. When will you grow up?

  Bag empty and weightless on her shoulder, she hurried back to the hotel.

  Siân had never been fond of weekends. They were all very well for people with hobbies or a frustrated desire to luxuriate in bed, but she would rather be working. Half the reason she'd switched from paper conservation to archaeology was that it required her to show up, no matter what, at the appointed hour, and dig. It wasn't easy, especially in raw weather, but it was better than wasting the whole day thinking about the past—her own past, that is.

  Saint Benedict had the right idea: a community of monastics keeping to a strict ritual seven days a week, helping each other get out of bed with (as he put it) 'gentle encouragement, on account of the excuses to which the sleepy are addicted.' Siân knew all about those.

  To prevent herself moping, she spent most of her weekends wandering around Whitby, back and forth across the swing bridge, from pier to pier, from cliff to cliff. She'd walk until she tired herself out and then lie on her bed in the Mary Ann Hepworth room with a book on her lap, watching the rooftops change colour, until it was time for her to go to sleep and get what was coming to her.

  This week, Saturday passed more quickly than usual. Her early-morning excur
sion to the house in Loggerhead's Yard had been quite thrilling in its stealthy way, and afterwards she fell into a long, mercifully dreamless doze. She woke quite rested, with only three-quarters of the weekend left to endure.

  In the afternoon, while she had a bite of lunch at the Whitby Mission and Seafarer's Centre, a gusty breeze flapped the yellowing squares of paper pinned to the notice board near the door. 'Don't leave Fido out in the cold,' said one fluttering page. 'We have a separate coffee lounge where pets are always welcome.' Siân left the ruins of her jacket potato consolidating on her plate and walked over to the opposite lounge to have a peek inside. Her nose nudged through a veil of cigarette smoke. Strange dogs with strange owners looked up at the newcomer.

  On her way out of the Mission, Siân paused at the bookcase offering books for fifty pence each and rummaged through the thrillers, romances, and anthologies of local writers' circles. There was a cheap, mass-produced New Testament there, too. What a comedown since the days when a Bible was a unique and priceless object, inscribed on vellum from an entire flock of sheep! Siân closed her eyes, imagined a cloister honeycombed in sunlight, with a long rank of desks and tonsured heads, perfect silence except for the faint scratching of pen nibs.

  'Now here's a blast from the past!' brayed the disc jockey on the radio. 'Hands up anyone who bopped along to Culture Club when they had this hit—come on, 'fess up!'

  Siân fled.

  Early on Sunday morning, not long after getting her throat slit, Siân was out and about again, her hastily washed hair steaming. She couldn't be bothered blow-drying it, and besides, now was when she ought to be going—at exactly the same time as she'd set off for work on Friday. If Magnus and Hadrian were creatures of habit, this would send them running after her any minute now.

  She walked along Church Street, quite slowly, from the hotel façade to the foot of the hundred and ninety-nine steps and back again—twice—but no chance meeting occurred.

  Tantalised by the thought of the man and his dog running high up on the East Cliff, in the wild grasses flanking the abbey ramparts, she climbed Caedmon's Trod until she could see the Donkey Field. No chance meeting occurred here, either, at least not with Magnus and Hadrian. Instead, she met a bored-looking boy and his somewhat frazzled dad, returning from what had clearly been a less than inspirational visit to the abbey.

  'Another really interesting thing that monasteries used to do,' the father was saying, in a pathetic, last-ditch attempt to get the child excited, 'was give sanctuary to murderers.'

  Siân saw a flicker of interest in the kid's eyes as she squeezed past him on the narrow monks' trod.

  'Has Whitby got McDonald's,' he asked his dad, 'or only fish and chips?'

  It was Monday afternoon before Siân saw Magnus again. In the morning, she loitered around the town centre before work, in an irritable, shaky state. Her nightmare hadn't yet receded, and her throat was sore where, in a befuddled attempt to deflect the knife, she had hit herself with her own hand. The lump in her thigh throbbed like hell.

  In the town's deserted market square, on a bench, someone had discarded a copy of the current Whitby Gazette. With half an hour still to kill before 8:00 A.M., Siân settled down to read it. For some reason though, every single article in the Gazette struck her as monumentally depressing. Not just the sad stories, like the one about the much-loved local janitor dying of cancer ('He never moaned about his illness and was always cheerful', according to a colleague—a chip off Saint Hilda's block, then). No, even the stories about a holidaymaker being struck by lightning and surviving, or a charity snaileating contest, or the long-overdue restoration of Egton Bridge, brought Siân closer and closer to irrational tears. She flipped the pages faster, through the property section, until she was on the back page, staring at an advertisement for a beauty clinic on the West Cliff. 'Sun-dome with facial and leg boosters' it said, and to Siân this seemed like the most heartbreakingly sad phrase she'd ever read this side of the Book of Ecclesiastes.

  Get a grip, she counselled herself, and laid the paper aside. She noticed that someone had joined her on the bench: an obese, spiky-haired punkette, an unusual sight in Whitby—almost as unusual as a monk. Siân goggled just a few seconds too long at the infestation of silver piercings on the girl's brow, nose, and ears, and was given a warning scowl in return. Chastened, she looked down. At the punkette's feet sat a dog, to help the girl beg perhaps. Apart from the pictogram for 'anarchy' doodled on his wheat-coloured flank in black felt-tip, he was a very ordinary-looking dog, a Labrador maybe—nowhere near as beautiful as Hadrian.

  Face it: compared to Hadrian, every other dog was plain.

  At ten to eight, Siân began to climb the hundred and ninety-nine steps, and gazing for a moment across the harbour, she suddenly spotted Hadrian and Magnus on the other side, two tiny figures sprinting along Marine Parade. Her melancholy turned at once to a sort of indignant excitement. Why would they choose there to run instead of here on her side? They must be avoiding her! Surely nobody could prefer the stink of raw fish and the pierside's dismal panorama of amusement parlours and pubs to what lay at the foot of the church steps…

  Her sudden, fervid impulse to jump up and down and wave to Mack, despite the fact that there was no chance of him noticing, alarmed her—clearly, she was farther gone than she'd thought and should make an immediate start on restoring her sanity before it was too late.

  I am here, she reminded herself, to work. I am not here to be torn apart. I am not here to be treated like dirt.

  She imagined her emotions embodied in the form of a hysterical novice nun, and her judgment as the wise and kindly abbess, counselling restraint. She visualised the bare interior of one of Saint Hilda's prayer cells lit up gold and amber with sunbeams, a merciful ebbing away of confusion, a soul at peace.

  When Siân reached the burial site, Pru was already lifting off the blue tarpaulins, exposing the damp soil. Towards the edges of the excavation, the clay was somewhat soggier than it needed to be, having absorbed some rainfall over the weekend in addition to its ritual hosing last thing Friday afternoon. Siân was glad her appointed rectangle was towards the middle of the quarter acre. All right, maybe Saint Hilda wouldn't have approved of her desire to keep her knees dry at the expense of her fellow toilers, but the sheath of Tubigrip under her tights lost some of its elastic every time she washed it, so she'd rather it stayed clean, thank you very much.

  'Sleep well?' asked Pru, rolling up another tarpaulin, exposing Siân's own appointed shallow grave.

  'No, not really,' said Siân.

  'Lemme guess—you stayed up to watch that movie about the robbery that goes wrong. The one with … oh, what's-her-name?' Regurgitation of facts was not Pru's forte. 'The one who's gained so much weight recently.'

  'I'm sorry, I haven't a clue,' said Siân.

  Jeff was next to arrive, a wizened old hippy who seemed to have been on every significant dig in Britain since the war. Then Keira and Trevor, a husband-and-wife team who were due to lay down their trowels and mattocks tomorrow and flee to the warmer and better-paid climes of a National Geographic dig in the Middle East. Who would replace them? Very nice people, according to Nina, the supervisor. Coming all the way from north Wales.

  By ten past, everyone was on site and working, distributed like medieval potato harvesters over the subdivided ground. Fourteen living bodies, scratching in the ground for the subtle remains of dead ones, peering at gradations in soil colour that could signal the vanished presence of a coffin or a pelvis, winkling pale fragments into the light which could, please God, be teeth.

  The skeletons exhumed so far had all been buried facing east, the direction of Jerusalem, to help Judgment Day run more smoothly. Four years from now, when the research would be completed and the bones reburied with the aid of a JCB and vicar to bless them, they'd have to sort out their direction for themselves.

  Today, one of the girls was in a bad mood, her mouth clownishly downturned, her eyes avoiding contact with the
young man working next to her. Yesterday, they'd been exchanging secret smiles, winks, sotto voce consultations. Today, they did their best to pretend they weren't kneeling side by side; separated by mere inches, they cast expectant glances not at each other but at Nina, as if hoping she might assign them to different plots farther apart. A cautionary spectacle, thought Siân. A living parable (as Saint Hilda might call it) of the fickleness of human love.

  'I think I may've found something,' said someone several hours later, holding up an encrusted talon which might, once it was X-rayed, prove to be a coffin pin.

  At four-thirty, as Siân was walking past Saint Mary's churchyard on her way down to the hundred and ninety-nine steps, she spotted Hadrian's head poking up over the topmost one.

  'Hush!' he barked in greeting. 'Hush, hush!'

  Siân hesitated, then waved. Magnus was nowhere to be seen.

  Hadrian ran towards her, pausing only to scale the church's stone boundary and sniff the base of Caedmon's Cross. Deciding not to piss on England's premier Anglo-Saxon poet, he bounded back onto the path and had an exuberant reunion with Siân.

  By the time Magnus joined them, she was on one knee, her hands buried deep in the dog's mane, and Hadrian was jumping up and down to lick her face.

  'Excuse me, I'm just going overboard here,' she said, too delighted with the dog's affection to care what a fool she must look.

  Mack wasn't wearing his running gear this afternoon; instead, his powerful frame was disguised in a button-down shirt, Chinos, and some sort of expensive suedy jacket. He was carrying a large plastic bag, but apart from that he looked like a young doctor who'd answered his beeper at a London brasserie and been persuaded to make a house call. Siân had trouble accepting he could look like this; she'd imagined him (she realised now) permanently dressed in shorts and T-shirt, running around Whitby in endless circles. She laughed at the thought, her inhibitions loosened by the excesses she was indulging in with Hadrian. Casting her eyes down in an effort to reassure Mack that she wasn't laughing at him, she caught sight of his black leather shoes, huge things too polished to be true. She giggled even more. Her own steel-capped boots were slathered in mud, and her long bedraggled skirt was filthy at the knees.