The Buried Circle (50 page)

We went through the hunting gate and down the track that crossed the Gallops. (‘What’s this?’ asked Keir, and I said, ‘It’s for training racehorses, pus brain.’) After Mum had brought me, I’d often come here alone, not right up to the cottage because I was scared of the two young men, but I’d scrambled through the wood into the overgrown garden, where the grass was so long you could wriggle unseen close enough to watch the comings and goings.

Today the black car wasn’t parked by the gate outside the cottage. So we walked down the track in the open, bold as buggery, as Frannie would say.

‘Fu-hu-huck!’ said Keir–his dad’s favourite word–when he saw the cottage. ‘That’s a den? It’s someone’s house, innit?’

‘No way. It’s a wreck, but someone’s camping there. With computers.’

I took him past the rusty folding chairs and the table littered with beer cans–Keir picked several up and shook them, hoping there were dregs left, but the only one that still held any lager also held a dead wasp and that stopped him in his tracks. We went up the steps–I was certain there was no one in–and I rapped at the front door self-importantly as if I was an expected guest. To my surprise, it gave, and I half fell into the hallway, almost wetting myself in terror. Keir was by now at the other end of the garden.

I picked myself up, expecting the sound of a chair scraping on the kitchen floor, or footsteps on the narrow stairs as someone came to investigate. Silence.

Nobody home. I’d been right all along. They’d left the front door unlocked because this wasn’t Bristol: this was a tumbledown old hovel in the middle of nowhere that you’d never find unless you knew it was there and, anyway, they were probably stoned when they’d left. I knew the difference between ordinary cigarettes and the lumpy ones that made people giggle, and I knew which ones Louis and his posh friend had been smoking when Mum and I came to the cottage.

Keir was back already, hovering on the doorstep, trying to make out he hadn’t run off like a scaredy-cat.

‘Where’s the computers?’ he said. Just like a boy.

In here,’ I said, pushing on the door in the hallway without the slightest idea whether I was right, but thinking I should look like I knew. It wouldn’t budge, to Keir’s disappointment–maybe Louis and his mate weren’t so stupid and had locked it, or maybe the wood was warped and the door was stuck. We went upstairs–camp bed in one room, double sleeping-bag on the floor of the other, clothes in untidy piles spilling out of expensive leather grips. The bathroom was disgusting; the toilet bowl was nearly black. When we came back downstairs, Keir gave the stuck door a good kick, but it didn’t shift, and then we had to go into the kitchen to find a cloth because his sandal had left a mark on the peeling paintwork.

Keir went for a pee in the garden while I cleaned the door; he said he couldn’t possibly use the toilet upstairs. As I took the smelly dishcloth back–it stank of old onions–I heard him call. ‘Indy! Car coming.’

I dropped the dishcloth and ran, only remembering just in time to pull the front door closed after me. Keir was diving into the bushes at the end of the garden. I followed him, wriggling under cover between overgrown raspberry canes. A bramble scored a line of blood-beads down my leg. I came to rest a couple of feet away from where Keir lay on his stomach, behind a clump of low, spiny bushes through which tall, bleached grasses grew. He pulled a fat gooseberry off one and passed it to me.

We heard the car engine cut. Two doors opened, then slammed, one after the other. The gate’s rusted hinges made a fingers-on-a-blackboard screech, then Louis and the posh one were coming through the long grass towards the house. They passed within kicking distance of us, but we held our breath, and anyway they were lads: children were invisible to them. If it had been Mum, she’d have smelt us at thirty paces.

‘You tit,’ said the posh one. ‘You left the door unlocked.’

‘You were last out.’

‘Was I bollocks.’ They disappeared inside, emerging a minute later with cans of beer. The
psssh
of the ring pulls made me thirsty. I popped the gooseberry into my mouth for moisture, then screwed up my face at its sour, metallic taste. I spat it out. Keir kicked me.

‘That was a wasted trip,’ said Louis, sinking onto one of the picnic chairs.

‘Worth a try’

‘They were slappers.’

‘Come on. We need more stage dancers. And they were better than that old slag you’re obsessed with.’

‘I’m not obsessed,’’ said Louis. ‘She’s iconic. Like that poster of the tennis player scratching her bum.’

‘She’s geriatric’

‘She’s pretty fit for her age.’

‘Don’t tell me you’ve had her. Jesus, you have. You sad git.’

‘I have
not’

‘I can tell when a boy’s lost his virginity and become a man.’ A clunk, as the empty beer can Louis threw at his friend missed and hit the side of the house. ‘When did you manage to slip her the laughing carrot, then?’

‘Wash your mouth. She’s a goddess.’ Louis was grinning.

‘It was that time you took her off in the car to show her the party field, wasn’t it? Fucking hell, man. You are really twisted. I wouldn’t stuff her with a cold chip.’

‘What the flick you on about? Of course I haven’t shagged her. She’s old enough to be my mum.’

‘Word is, Townsend, that wouldn’t stop you.’ There was another liquid
psssh
, a screech, guffaws. They were having a play fight, drenching each other with beer. Keir rolled his eyes. We wriggled silently backwards on our stomachs, through the raspberry canes, past a crabby old apple tree and into the birdsong of the scrubby wood.

‘What was Stonehenge like?’ I asked him on the way back to Tolemac.

‘Mick let me drive the van,’ said Keir, proudly. ‘Round the field. I sat on his lap and he did the pedals but I steered.’

‘What about the helicopter chasing you through the stones and all that?’

‘Dunno. They left me in the van.’ Keir screwed up his face to think. ‘There were black helicopters flying low all night, making that horrible noise, like giant pterodactyls. I had a bad dream about one picking up the van in its claws and flying away with me. But I don’t think there was much of a chase, because Mick’s legs weren’t working when they came back. He kept flopping about and Riz did all the driving after that.’

On thy belly thou shalt go

‘Mick liked ketamine,’ says John. ‘You know what they used to call it, don’t you? Going to Mr Softeeland. It’s a horse tranquillizer, and your legs go rubbery. Not numb–you know they’re there, they just won’t obey instructions to move. Ketamine wasn’t illegal. People used to bring it back from India in pop bottles, pour it onto a baking tray and stick it in a warm oven until it turned to crystals and you could snort it. Delivered to the festivals on what used to be called the Special K Coach. By 1989, people were doing K and Es together. Lying there all night under the stars, loved up but limp as a wilted dandelion.’ He shakes his head. ‘Pointless bloody drug.’

‘I don’t understand why the location had to be so secret, though,’ I say.

‘The mystique of those parties was that you didn’t know where you were going until you got there. Map references left on answering machines, messages passed via mobile phones–relatively rare, then–convoys of cars driving round the M25 or up and down the M4. But that wasn’t the problem, so much as all the people who would have turned up if Meg had let slip exactly where the party was being held–people who had no concept of paying for anything. The Brew Crew would have insisted on their right to go in free, Louis’s security men would have beaten the crap out of them–there’d have been a riot. So now, far too late, Meg was being careful not to say anything about where or when in the hope Mick and his friends would get fed up and go away eventually’

I always knew when someone was moving in the van at night because the floor creaked and you could feel the bunks move. I came awake suddenly, thinking it must be Keir going for a pee. Mum wasn’t in bed yet; I knew because I’d curled up in her bed instead of my own top bunk. But Keir’s regular, snorty breathing from his sleeping-bag on the blow-up mattress hadn’t altered. Must be Mum then, though that was odd because I thought I could still hear her laugh among the voices outside the van, where she’d been sitting with John and Mick and the others. They’d built the fire far enough away not to keep us awake, but the mutter of voices was a soothing reminder that Keir and I weren’t alone under the trees.

Someone sat down on the end of the bunk. I knew it wasn’t Mum: wrong smell, sour and oily and spoilt-meatish, the smell of someone who hadn’t washed for several days.

‘I know you’re awake,’ said Rissole, very quiet. I’d made the mistake of inching my legs away from the weight pushing down the side of the bed. His fingers stroked my hair, and he leaned down to breathe softly in my ear, ‘Shoulda mentioned it at the time. Seein’ as how I saved you from the Bad Guy in the church.’ His breath smelled garlicky, and the oily stench poured off his tight curls. ‘Wouldn’ look too good now, if you said anythin’ to anyone about me hangin’ round that ol’ church, nor the black fella you might have passed in the porch. Don’t want your mum thinkin’ I took you in there ‘cos then your pal Riz really would be up the fakkin’ creek. So seein’ as we’re mates, thought I’d pop in and remind you. No tellin’. You tell that to Keir, too.’ I could hear something rustling, something he was doing with his other hand. ‘Got a little reminder for you. You put out your hand now.’

‘Riz…’ I was scared, and not so innocent I couldn’t imagine what he might want me to touch.

‘Oh, come on, Indy, whatchoo take me for? We’re mates, right? Here, I’ll tuck it under the blanket.’ He lifted the corner of the coverlet and something crumpled and scratchy brushed my arm. ‘There. Nothin’ to worry ‘bout. But you keep your mouth shut, darlin’, or there might be. The Bad Guy with the long white beard don’t like people knowin’ he let a pagan escape.’ He patted my hair, and his weight lifted from the bed, but his mouth came down to my ear again. ‘On
thy belly thou shalt go
. ‘Magine that, Ind, no legs.’ The van floor creaked again, and he was gone.

The scratchy thing was against my flat little chest. I knew what it was now. The crumpled page Riz had torn out of the Bible in the church.

And the Lord God said unto the woman, What is this that thou hast done?

My mouth’s unbearably dry. On the footstool, my mug of tea has gone cold; it tastes vile.

John lights another cigarette, and I’m amazed to see his hands are trembling. ‘Trouble is, the dead wrap their arms round your neck and cling on. You got to prise their dead fingers off you. Whose eyes do you think I see at night, Indy? He’s waiting for me in the Lower World, every time, first thing I have to step over a poor bastard in Argentinian uniform, lying in the mud of that God-forsaken place, the wind tugging the photo of his wife and his two kids that’s clutched in his hand. And sometimes he has Mick Feather’s eyes.’

‘I’m not ready after all,’ I say. ‘Let’s…not talk about it, John. Please, not now.’

‘Riz was the problem,’ says John, implacable. ‘Riz owed money to a dealer. Somewhere further up the food chain, someone was interested in finding out where the party was being held, and who was organizing it. Louis and Patrick thought they were so clever, but they didn’t have a clue. They saw themselves as hip young businessmen cashing in on a new idea, but they had no idea how much of a business opportunity those parties were for the people who controlled the Es and whiz that kept people loved up and dancing all night. So Riz found out somehow where Louis and Patrick were hanging out and, armed with that information, he did a deal.

‘Few days before the party was to be held, Louis and Patrick had a visit from some heavy gentlemen. They brought a contract for the boys to sign: a partnership opportunity, was the way they put it. To help them understand the advantages of this new business arrangement, they smashed the computers and set fire to the garden. Then the same gentlemen, for reasons that remain obscure, possibly for no more than fun, turned their attention to the hippies camped in Tolemac’

Keir and I were sitting under the trees by the side of Mick’s van, taking turns on an Etch-A-Sketch Mick had picked up cheap at Eastville market. Mum and John were over by the fire, talking. Mick was…‘Mick was sprawled on the ground at the back of his van with one of his mates, both of them about six light years out of it because they’d been doing K and Es together.’ John rubs his face. ‘Is it me, Indy, or has it gone cold? Riz was nowhere around–maybe somebody slipped him the word to make himself scarce. First we knew of it was revving engines, then this bloody great crash that was the gate, smashed to matchsticks.

‘Two Range Rovers came slewing across the grass into the wood, one doing a handbrake turn so he was pointing the right way to make a getaway when they’d done what they came for. The doors flew open and these guys–don’t ask me how many, could only have been four or five at most but it looked like a frigging army–came piling out with sledgehammers and, Christ albloodymighty, a couple of shotguns. Had no notion who they were, what they wanted, or what the hell to do. I still had the insane idea they were only pissed-off locals and I’d be able to talk them out of it, until I saw that the one at the back was a huge black guy with a sawn-off, and you don’t get many of those to the pound in rural Wiltshire.’

Keir and I looked up, and saw Mum rising to her feet, flapping her arms at us and screaming: ‘Get in the van!’

It felt like one of those dreams where you see danger coming but you can’t move. Keir was round-eyed. I tugged on the back of his T-shirt, but Mum had to shout again before we scrambled to our feet and jumped into Mick’s van through the open passenger door.

‘The
wrong
van,’ says John. ‘Meg meant you to run for hers–she probably had some notion she’d follow you and drive you out of there to safety, though it was too late for that: the second Range Rover was parked across the gateway. I’ve no idea if the guys with sledgehammers even saw you because they were already going for Biro’s ridiculous little Citron van, the nearest and easiest target. The sides crumpled like paper. I started yelling, but the black guy with the sawn-off shotgun stood in front of me, making it crystal that discussion was not an option. You think this can’t be happening–middle of the afternoon, hardly a quarter of a mile from houses, cars, buses, visitors, telephones. Someone had to be walking round the stone circle; someone had to hear the noise. But it all happened so fast. The other shotgun was pointing at Mick and Biro, who were not laughing now, lying on the ground with their mouths open wondering if they’d dropped acid by mistake.’