The Buried Circle (34 page)

‘Don’t joke.’ He knelt down, and his fingers fumbled with the ankle strap on my other shoe. ‘Have to be quick. Now they’ve started switching on the decoy lights, fires’ll be next.’ Another light came on a few feet away. It looked for all the world like a carelessly blacked-out window, lamplight leaking through a gap in the curtains. All around us lights were winking out of the darkness. The ghost city was coming to life. Still not bright, had to be a city under blackout–but could easily have been Swindon railway yards.

‘How do they do that? It’s so real.’

‘Film people designed it.’ On his feet again, he yanked my arm. ‘You got about fifty yards to go. Come on, run. No, you got to jump the troughs. No time to run the length.’ He was pulling me towards the next fire basket.

I can’t.

‘You have to. Fifty yards, that’s all.’

He was lying, I knew. Now the lights had come on I could see the extent of the ghost city. Had to be a couple of hundred yards at least, and four or five of the black iron troughs. We’d never do it in time…

We jumped the first. I ran fast as I could across the open space towards the next, him pounding beside me.

WHUMP.

A line of orange brightness in the dark over to our left.

‘Oh, Jesus.’ Davey’s voice breathless, scared. ‘They’ve started igniting the troughs. Come on, Frannie, run like you never run in your bleedin’ life. Won’t all go up at once, but won’t be long.’

WHUMP. Another. Somebody was sobbing no no no. It was me. I jumped the next fire basket. Maybe three to go. There were lines of fire all over the site now. It looked like the ground was cracking open and letting loose the pit of hell.

WHOOMPH. One of the tanks had let go a gush of oil: flames shot up into the sky, no more than a hundred feet away. I could feel the heat on the side of my face like sunburn. Any second now the water would fall onto the blazing troughs too, and the night would explode.

‘Jump.’ Over the next. Then a bang, and brightness half blinding me. The next trough ahead had ignited. I stopped, looking desperately left and right for the easiest way through.

‘You–still got to–jump it, Frannie.’ Oily black smoke was drifting across the site, making it harder and harder to breathe. ‘We’re–all right till they start flushing more tanks.’

‘We’ll get burned.’

‘Better–burned than fried. Don’t–think–jump.’ He took my hand. ‘High–as you can.’

I soared. Ran. Soared. Terrible spitting crack split the night, a great shower of sparks, billowing clouds, a rain of smuts. One of the water towers had let go. As I ran on, somewhere in all this dreadful blatter, a different note, a low bass humming. The bombers were on their way. But we was out of the ghost city, beyond the reach of its starfish arms of fire.

‘Davey?’

‘’S OK. My trouser leg caught fire.’ He was limping across the grass, backlit by the flames, bending to rub at his calf. ‘Stings like billy-o. You all right?’

‘I’m
fine!
I was too. Could hardly breathe, heart up high in my throat and revving like Mr Keiller’s motorbike, but I was better than I ever been, before or since. I was
alive
.

As he came up to me, I took his hand again. ‘Davey, boy, you’re a bloomin’ hero.’

‘I’m an effing idiot, is what. Don’t know that you deserve rescuing.’

Never worth pushing your luck. There were Germans in the sky. I ran ahead past the Nissen hut and down the path, hardly feeling its sharp stones under my bare feet. Didn’t stop till I was in the car.

Seconds later Davey was in. Then we were off, bouncing and jolting. No time for three-point turns; better to go on ahead. The track twisted sharp downhill, under the ramparts of Barbury hillfort. Behind us the ack-ack started up. A searchlight beam swept the sky.

‘Where does this go?’

‘Quick way back to Wroughton.’ The track was plunging steeply down. ‘Levels out in a mo’, then we’re almost back where we started.’ Farm buildings ahead on the left; a plantation of trees to the right.

‘Stop. Please stop.’

‘Not again.’ All the same, he slowed.

‘You wasn’t anywhere near me when we saw Liddington burning, were you?’

He didn’t say anything.

‘You weren’t in the Starfish at all, then, were you? You came back in to fetch me.’

‘I was in the Starfish. Over the other side, though.’

‘Liar. You wouldn’t have been able to see it was Liddington if you had been. You’d gone right through the Starfish and out, and you was safe, but you ran all the way back through it to find me.’

‘Think that if it makes you happy’

I put a hand on the steering-wheel. ‘I said, stop the car.’ We drew to a halt at the end of the little wood, the steel on the roof clanking away. ‘You’re a damn bloody fool, Davey Fergusson. And you’re off to kill yourself on Monday. Give us a kiss.’

A bit later he says: ‘You sure about this, Fran?’

‘Wouldn’t be here if I wasn’t.’

‘Only…’ He lets out a long, juddering sigh. ‘You don’t…have to.’ Clear from the way he’s breathing there’s not much longer it’ll be a choice. ‘Oh,
God!

Then, a bit after that, he says, with his face in my hair, ‘You’re my first, you know. My first girl.’

I don’t tell him he’s not my first. That everything I know about what we’re doing was taught me by Donald Cromley and his twisted uncle.

CHAPTER 28

‘You look–different,’ says Ed. ‘And make it a latte.’ He wanders off to look at the cakes. If he’s trying to make a point, I don’t know what it is. I’m not going to forgive him that easily.

Corey nudges me in the ribs. ‘He only comes in on the days you’re here,’ she hisses.

‘Rubbish.’

‘He’s mad for you. Can’t keep his eyes off you.’

Nonsense. Ed’s eyes are undressing an organic flapjack. His hand wavers over the biscuits. He makes a decision, and pushes his tray back towards the till. ‘You were blonde last week,’ he says accusingly.

‘Copper.’

‘Well, different. This is…um. Need time to adjust to you dark.’ He counts out some coins, yawning. ‘Sorry. Graham and I were out first thing–and I mean first thing–dealing with a group of witches from Bristol who wanted to dance skyclad on Silbury Hill for May Day morning. Caught up with them as they were trying to climb over the fence.’ Ed’s getting the hang of Avebury. ‘Oh, and there’s a bender again in Tolemac. No sign of the occupant. We’ll try again this evening, and move him on politely’ He looks dubiously at his coffee, and digs in his pocket for change. ‘And if politely doesn’t work…’

–
a windscreen exploding into crystals of glass
–

‘Isn’t much else you can do, is there?’ I say nastily.

‘Graham says politely will work,’ says Ed, looking worried.

The bender’s occupant comes to Avebury to worship the Goddess. He’s here for every one of the eight festivals, takes time off work and hitches down from Cheshire. Man of few words, mind, so it took about half an hour to glean that much. Mostly we sat in companionable silence. I felt surprisingly easy with him.

‘Saw you at the frill-moon ritual,’ he said, when I landed on his side of the fire. ‘Which Path do you follow?’

‘Um…’ I was mesmerized by his bare feet in the firelight. The ground was squelching, but they were astonishingly clean. ‘Sort of…eclectic, me. No special path. Bit of this, bit of that.’ Thumbing in my memory through
The Bluffer’s Guide to Paganism
.

‘The Lady’s my Path,’ he said. ‘Brid. I feel her here more than anywhere else.’

‘Here at Avebury?’

‘In this wood. And at her spring. You know where I mean?’

‘Um…’

‘The Swallowhead. You ever been there?’ I shook my head. ‘I’ll take you.’

He offered to roll a spliff. I shook my head again.

‘You don’t smoke?’

‘No.’ I hated seeing my mother stoned: that stupid giggling. When we camped in Tolemac, her laugh bounced off the trees at night as she and John sat at the campfire after I had been sent to my bunk in the van.

‘It’s good sleeping close to the stones,’ he said. ‘You feel how the Goddess uses the circle for healing.’

‘Oh, no, it’s a place of the dead.’ Goddess knows why I felt bound to correct him. ‘I’ve a friend who’s an archaeologist. He says it’s where people came to be with the ancestors. That’s what the stones represent.’ I felt no shame in embellishing Martin’s tentative conclusions about the function of Avebury. ‘A woman’s skeleton was found in the ditch, laid in a ring of sarsen. Like she was the guardian of the place. Possibly a sacrifice.’

He shook his head in wonder. ‘Didn’t know that.’

We sat side by side, not saying much, the last of the rain dripping off the trees, his brown fleece hanging on a branch to dry in the gusty wind, his hair in damp ringlets. His skin glowed in the firelight. Eventually I stood up, stepped over the fire again and went home, not sure what had happened between us.

After clearing up in the caf, I set off again for Tolemac, to warn Bryn he’s about to be evicted from the wood. At least, my guess is he’s the mysterious Bryn Kirkwood, whose signature was scrawled in a book on Gurdjieff: the bender is in the same place under the trees as the one there at equinox. Names never entered yesterday’s conversation. Generous with information about the Goddess, he was sparing with what he revealed about himself. All I know is that he works on building sites, off and on, as a carpenter. Age, parentage, significant others: all a mystery. Not much small-talk, rather intense.

The bender’s still there, its sheeting scattered with wild white cherry blossom. No sign of Bryn. He has secured it by weighting down the front flap with a row of stones, as if to say ‘Private’, the fire banked with turves, emitting a thin trickle of smoke. He told me he spends most days walking with the dog, looking for crop circles; never becomes tired because the energy they give off is
amazing
.

I hesitate, unsure what to do. Sometimes the pagans abandon tents for no clear reason. Graham would have no scruples about dismantling the bender and dumping Bryn’s belongings in the skip.

…a handful of withered wild flowers on damp leaf-mould, a smell of burning, clothing scattered, a pair of torn jeans hanging off the bough of a birch tree, like the aftermath of an air crash
…

At Greenham, the children screamed when the bailiffs came to evict the women camping there. Frannie threw our backpacks into someone’s car just in time, but we lost Margaret’s tent and the sleeping-bags.

Nothing I can do. I shouldn’t get involved. I jog through the wood to the lane and climb back over the barbed wire. In the distance, someone is on the chalk track coming down from the Ridgeway, a dog racing ahead.

Then the dog’s tangling with my legs, jumping up to plant muddy paws on my jacket.

‘Hey, hey–what’s his name?’

‘Conan,’ says Bryn, arriving in time to save me from being licked to death. The late-afternoon sun picks out golden lights in his caramel-coloured curls.

‘The Barbarian?’

‘No.’ Not a flicker of amusement. ‘Spelt C-y-n-o-n. Celtic name, means Divine Hound.’

‘Right.’ Spattered with mud and burrs, nose jammed in my crotch, Conan/Cynon looks about as divine as my left buttock. ‘Glad I caught you. I came to warn you you’re about to be evicted. The National Trust wardens are on their way.’

‘Are they now?’ He doesn’t ask how I know this. ‘Movin’ on tomorrow, anyway. Goin’ home to see my boy.’

‘Your boy?’

‘His mother and I aren’t together. If I don’t turn up for his birthday, day after tomorrow, she’ll try and stop me seein’ him altogether. Got my solicitor workin’ on it, though. I could look after him better than her. She’s all over the place.’ He snaps his fingers to call Cynon, who is quivering ecstatically as he sniffs a pile of horse droppings, and starts strolling towards the wood. ‘There’s an amazin’ crop circle appeared below Barbury. Like–spheres, with interlocking zigzags. Met a feller along the Ridgeway said it represented the diatonic scale of musical notes because that’s the way aliens can communicate with us.’

‘Wasn’t that the plot of
Close Encounters?’

Bryn looks blank. ‘That the one set in the railway station? My foster-mother had it on video–made her cry every time.’ He hooks two fingers into the dog’s collar, to hold him safely as a vehicle comes trundling up the lane. ‘Hey, said I’d take you to the Goddess’s spring, didn’t I? We could go now.’

The vehicle is a National Trust Land Rover.

‘That’s not such a good idea,’ I say, as it parks on the verge by Tolemac. ‘I think you’re about to be evicted.’

‘Dawn, then? Best time. It’s
amazing
.’

I’ve no memory of agreeing to any such expedition. ‘Hurry up. The wardens will pull down the bender.’

‘I’ll wait for you at the lay-by on the A4. Half past five, sunrise.’

He lopes off down the lane. Ed, on his own, climbs down from the Land Rover. Instead of following Bryn into the wood, he strides towards me. ‘Who the flick was that?’

‘He’s the one who’s camping in the wood.’

‘I’d worked that out. You never said you knew him. You could have mentioned it this morning, saved me the bother of coming out.’ The lines by his mouth are chiselled more deeply than usual into his cheeks.

‘Hardly your business who I know, is it?’ I say, then regret it.

‘No,’ he says, turning and starting to walk back down the lane. ‘You’re right. None of my fucking business.’

I watch him climb over the fence into Tolemac to remonstrate with Bryn. As arses go, I’d say it’s level pegging.

On the way home, I remember Frannie’s social worker was calling in this afternoon. Frannie’s watching television. There’s a note on the hall table.

Ring me on my mobile. I think we should have your grandmother at the Geriatric Psychiatric Day Centre for assessment
.

Frannie looks up from
Neighbours
.

‘How are you feeling?’ I ask her.

‘Fine.’

‘What about Adele’s visit?’

‘Nosy.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Kept wanting to know who the prime minister was. I told her, Smarm Bucket Blair, much good have he done us pensioners. And she must’ve asked three times what day of the week it was.’