The Buried Circle (49 page)
‘Sorry. I’m sandwich-making in the caf as soon as Corey opens up.’
‘I’ll manage.’ His eyes follow me as I open the cupboard looking for coffee and sugar. ‘Knowing Graham, he’ll probably turn up to help, in spite of being up all night chasing pagans off the verges. Sad bastard can’t seem to keep away from this place.’ He jumps down, puts his hands on my shoulders and bends his mouth to my ear. ‘Neither can I. Do you think there’s time for a quick snog before Michael arrives?’
The drizzle stops and the day brightens, so on my mid-morning break I make myself a sandwich and take it to eat at one of the tables under the trees by the museum, like a tourist, waving smugly at Corey when she comes out to clear crockery. It’s been an easy morning in the caf so far. Solstice celebrations put off the more staid National Trust members, and the pagans favour bring-your-own-tofu-burger barbecues on the campsite.
‘Keeping you busy enough?’ I ask.
She makes a face. ‘Why does it knacker you more when it’s quiet? We’ve more than enough sandwiches, I reckon, so you can piss off early if you want.’
The Trust’s Land Rover drives into the staff car park, the back loaded with black plastic bin bags full of rubbish. Ed and Graham climb out: Graham must have turned up, as predicted, after a short kip. They begin to unload them into the skips.
‘That Ed’s stronger than he looks,’ said Corey, with a sly glance. ‘Want a bet he’ll be over this way for a free cup of coffee when he’s done?’
‘He’ll be lucky’
Ed reaches for the last black bag; Graham lays a hand on his arm and stops him. A conversation starts, too low to hear.
‘Anyway, better crack on,’ says Corey. ‘You finished with that plate?’
Graham climbs into the driver’s seat and slams the door. The engine coughs, and the Land Rover heads off up the drive, the single black bin-bag jolting sluggishly in the open back.
As Corey threads her way through the tables with the loaded tray, Ed comes out of the car park heading for the caf, changing direction when he catches sight of me. He sits down heavily at my table. ‘Hi.’
‘You look like you’ve had a good morning,’ I say. The circles under his eyes are, if anything, darker.
‘Marvellous,’ he says. ‘Utterly marvellous. Litter all over the place. Hundreds of bloody tea-lights in the Long Barrow. Soot marks on the stone, which Graham and I had to scrub off. And, to cap it all, a dead dog.’
John has been washing T-shirts when I reach his cottage, hanging them on the line in the front garden.
‘You idiot,’ he says, when we’re nursing mugs of Brummie-strength tea in the living room. ‘You know what the Long Barrow is, Indy? It’s an entrance to the Lower World. The place I start when I’m making the Journey. Why the hell didn’t you tell me that’s where you went that night?’
There is absolutely no way I believe John goes anywhere beyond this room when he does his shamanic thing, the drums and the trance and all that, but all the same it gives me a chill to think of him sitting here bare-chested, chanting, picturing himself slipping between the big stones flanking the Long Barrow’s doorway and passing through its dark chambers into an alternative reality.
‘You ought to have more respect,’ he continues, ‘or at least understand that what you do there can have…repercussions. Sex is one of the most powerful elements of some magics. Under a waning moon, too. Not good Wyrd.’
I shiver, deciding I’d prefer not to know why a waning moon is bad, exactly, and wishing the fire were lit. The brick hearth holds a basket of pine cones around a dried-flower arrangement donated by one of his lovely ladies.
‘Why’s he killed his dog?’
John shakes his head. ‘You’re jumping to conclusions. Maybe it was hit by a car. Your…friend could have left it at the barrow as a burial. Or maybe it wasn’t his dog, someone else dumped it. He’s probably harmless, but from all you’ve said…’ He looks dubiously into the hearth, stretches forward to lift a pine cone out of the fire basket, and tosses it from one hand to the other. ‘I sometimes think the pagan movement is an alternative Care in the Community. And if I were you, I’d retrieve that note from the Swallowhead springs.’
Outside the window, grey cloud has muffled the sun again. John’s newly laundered T-shirts flap in the wind that has risen. One is black, fluttering next to a pair of dark, faded combat trousers.
‘What were
you
up to last night? Were you and your friends out near Alton Barnes, by any chance? Wearing black combats?’
‘All sorts of ways to celebrate Solstice,’ he says, standing up to light the candle on the mantelpiece, to ward off the gloom. ‘But let’s concentrate on the problem in hand.’ He stares into the cold fireplace. ‘You are such a pillock, know that? Why do you keep behaving like this? It’s like you have no respect for yourself.’
‘I–’ I can’t come up with an answer that sounds credible even to myself.
‘I’d like nothing better than to see you in a relationship. But you don’t do relationships. You do dysfunctional shags. Usually associated with an excessive consumption of alcohol, far as I can make out.’
‘Not this time.’
Tramadol, for God’s sake. Were you born yesterday? Thought I’d brought you up with a healthy respect for drugs.’
‘You’re not my father, John.’
He winces. ‘No. Maybe I should have behaved more like one.’ He starts tossing the pine cone again. It’s starting to remind me of a live grenade. ‘But my own dear dad wasn’t the finest role model. I’ve always tried to look out for you, though, haven’t I?’
‘Sorry.’ I take a sip of tea. It tastes awful, because I keep thinking of poor old Cynon, head crushed, according to Ed, and…
Get in the van, Indy
‘John,’ I say.
He puts the pine cone carefully down on the arm of the chair.
‘I think I need to talk about what happened to Mick Feather.’
‘Once saw a film,’ John says, bringing two more mugs of tea from the kitchen, ‘in which someone had their memory wiped by a sinister corporation, and they keep getting inexplicable flashbacks and go round trying to get their memory back. Made me laugh like a drain.’ He sits down again next to me on the sofa and puts a fatherly arm round my shoulders, squeezing tight. ‘You don’t need a sinister corporation. People wipe their own memories clean, happens every day. You think I really remember what happened when I shot that Argie? It’s like in another life, someone else’s…’
The memories are there, locked into the crystals. All you have to do to release them is turn them the right way, towards the light. First come the sounds–
The sound of the wind in the trees over Tolemac. Lying in the van at night hearing it, hearing…
Keir’s breathing. Heavy, for a kid. His nose was always a bit blocked up. Not snores, baby snorts and sighs. He kicked in his sleep. He was a couple of inches shorter than me, and a few months younger. His father had fought for custody of him–his mother had a drug habit, but the courts still found against Mick. He stole Keir back, kidnapped him, and Keir’s mother never once came to look for him, though Keir was certain she would when she was better.
The sound of the wind across the fields and…
Who are we?
We’re the Barley Collective
.
Calling in the fakkin’ Mothership
. Riz, the bloke with the curls, the one who caught Keir and me in the church. I rode on Riz’s shoulders as we walked home along the Ridgeway under the bright moon, my legs either side of his neck, his hands clasped across my thighs to keep me steady. At the bottom of the hill, by the padlocked gate into Tolemac, he bent to let me slide off his shoulders. Then I felt his lips against my ear.
‘You goin’ to the party, Ind?’
‘What party?’
‘The one where your mum’s dancin’.’
‘Don’t know about that.’
‘Where is it?’
‘What?’
He patted my bottom, and I scrambled over the gate and ran towards the van under the trees. The back door opened. Mum stood there, in her jeans and a sloppy T-shirt. She smiled at me, but her eyes were like Keir’s when the grass was cut, puffy and red.
My eyes focus on John, the other side of the hearth.
‘Riz,’ I say. ‘Short for Rizla? Funny little bloke. Mixed race? We made the crop circle with him.’
‘Little
shit,’
says John. ‘And not Rizla, Rissole, we called him, because somebody said his curly hair was like a plate of rissoles. He was a leech, clung on to whoever’d let him cling. Story was he’d been a Jehovah’s Witness for a while, then for a joke some chick invited him in, served him a hash brownie, turned him pagan and he never looked back. Don’t believe it, personally–Riz
always
looked back, because he’d be scared there was someone he owed money to on his tail.’
‘Why were we there?’ I ask. ‘Why
did
we go to Avebury that year, not Stonehenge?’
John sighs. ‘Because of a party. Your mother wanted to be there, nothing I could do to talk her out of it, or out of taking you along: she was being paid to dance, first time ever, by the people organizing it. Two little creeps from Clifton College she’d met in the pub in Montpelier, who had that poster of her dancing the sun up at Stonehenge on their study wall’
‘Louis?’ I have to dredge the name out of the sludge at the bottom of the crystal. ‘And…’
‘Patrick. Eighteen, hardly left school, spotted a business opportunity. Summer of Love? Summer of Money. They were running huge outdoor parties. People were paying to go, driving miles in convoys of cars from London, Bristol, dancing the whole weekend.’
Louis and Patrick were camping in a derelict farmworker’s cottage half a mile off the Ridgeway. Mum took me with her when she went to see them, soon after we arrived at Tolemac. The house was almost hidden among trees and scrub, the only sign of occupation a black VW Golf GTi parked outside, at the end of a valley littered with sarsen stones like dead sheep. The boys were sitting in what had once been the garden, on folding picnic chairs that were absurdly low for their long legs. On a table stood tall, misted glasses and a bottle of Pimms–they had mint leaves and cucumber and slices of lemon, and
ice
, for God’s sake: how did they produce ice in a tumbledown cottage that had no electricity? They must have had a generator because inside it was crammed with eighties hi-tech: boom boxes, an Amstrad computer with a green screen, and mobile phones hefty enough to make your arm ache when you held them to your ear. Mum left me in the garden while Louis showed her round inside. By the time they came out of the cottage again Patrick, wearing Walkman earphones, was asleep on his picnic chair, his T-shirt rucked up exposing a hairy stomach.
‘Meg,’ Louis was saying, ‘you think we’re being paranoid. But we could be stuffed if anyone finds out the location in advance.’
‘Your mother didn’t take it seriously,’ says John. ‘She didn’t understand this was the end for the free festivals, where people used to trade skills–half an hour of
reiki
in exchange for a bundle of perfumed candles, or servicing the engine of your van. Heroin dealers’ cars used to get burned out at the free parties. Now they were hanging round the back of the sound systems offering free samples and nobody gave a shit. Angelfeather had broken up by 1989–poor old Dan Angel was already in a mental home. But Meg thought she could go on dancing for ever, and she’d already told someone about Louis and Patrick’s rave: Mick Feather, who turned up Solstice Eve with his band of hangers-on, including Riz and a zoned-out dickhead called Biro. Mick’d taken Keir to Stonehenge, but they couldn’t get near the stones–been chased all over Salisbury Plain by police helicopters.’
Tried to break through the exclusion zone on foot
, said Mick.
Fuckin pig helicopter spotted us, pinned us down in a fuckin bush, couldn’t move for the fuckin downwind, and the pig cavalry came steamin over the fuckin horizon, fuckin pitched battle. Wasn’t anythin to do but fuckin run
…
‘I thought it was idiotic to take a kid,’ says John. There’d been violence the year before, anarchists from Class War hurling beer bottles at the police until they got fed up and baton-charged the crowd. But Mick thought if the Establishment was getting heavy, maybe this was Keir’s last chance to experience Solstice at the stones, could be a memory that’d shape his whole life. When they couldn’t reach Stonehenge, they turned round and headed for Avebury’
Can Keir kip down in your van?
Mick asked Mum.
Little bastard kicks in his sleep
.
‘We’ve only two bunks—’
‘He can go in with Indy’
‘He can go on the floor.’
Keir’s arrival meant I had someone to roam with over the Downs. His hair was turning white gold in the sun. He wore stupid cut-off shorts that had once been a pair of my jeans and were way too big for his skinny hips, though Mum had gathered the waistband and sewn in elastic so they didn’t fall down. He was into dens that year. He’d made one for us in Bristol that Mum didn’t know about, in the allotments beyond the railway embankment. But the Downs were miles better. Up at the Hedgehogs we had a mound each, under the beech trees, our castles where we laid siege to each other and fought shrieking battles with pretend swords made out of twigs. I’d already found my own secret den before Keir and Mick arrived, one I shared with some scabby-looking sheep, among scrubby bushes in a valley full of sleeping sarsens. I wanted to keep that one to myself, and I wouldn’t take him there. Keir was furious, and shouted he’d go off to find his own. He disappeared for a whole afternoon and never came back until after tea, by which time Mum was panicking and about to send John off to search for him. Mick said Keir could look after himself, and what was to harm him in the countryside? Mum’s lips went thin and I could see her picturing Keir squashed like a rabbit on the verge of the A4, or impaled on rusty old farm machinery in the corner of a field.
So it was this wonderful golden afternoon with a breeze ruffling Keir’s white-gold hair, and we’re walking along beating twigs against the side of our legs, for no reason, really, except that’s what you do when you’re eight, and Keir says, Why won’t you show me your den? and I go, Because it’s
mine
, stupid, it’s
secret
. Then I thought of how I could get him off my back, and I said: ‘Can show you something else, though.’