The Buried Circle - Jenni Mills [101]
I was scared, but I couldn’t help myself laughing, because Mr Cromley was so solemn. In the cut-out eyeholes his eyes narrowed like he was cross with me for not taking it more serious. There was an insect, a big late-in-the-season blowfly, buzzing round and round the room, swooping at the candle flames and bumping into the windowpane.
They laid me back on the bed, and I went limp like Mr Cromley had told me to, while they lifted my arms above my head and tied a cord round my hands. He had explained what would happen weeks ago, but it had sounded special then. Now I could see myself in the cloudy mirror on the wardrobe door: I looked like a plucked chicken, shivering in the unheated bedroom, goose-bumps on my skinny arms and legs. Mr Cromley drew a pattern on my stomach, and on each breast, and on my face, with the dagger. His hand was shaking so much I was afraid it would slip and cut me. Then he stood up with a sigh of relief, unravelled the cord around his waist, and opened his arms wide, so that his robe fell open. The other man, silent still, lifted the robe off his shoulders, picked up the cord from the floor and, as Mr Cromley leaned over me, lashed his back with the knotted end.
It hurt like a dagger, and he couldn’t seem to get it in properly, and then it was all gush and stickiness.
He collapsed onto me and I brought my bound arms down over his head in a clumsy embrace, because it seemed like the thing to do. His back was rigid under my fingers like a boy who’s messed up.
The tall man was angry, I could tell. Donald had spoiled the ritual. He didn’t say anything, but his eyes glinted through the eyeholes of the mask, and his mouth was set hard beneath it.
But the tall man was gentle with me. He smoothed my hair, and he let his finger trail over my dry lips.
‘Spit,’ he said, a whisper. The first time he’d spoken. ‘Lick my finger.’
The wrecking ball was there by half past eight. I stood outside with the others, the wind nipping at me through my thin cardigan. Old Walter was letting himself out of his little cottage across the road. He shuffled through the wooden gate, and smiled a bleak smile when he saw me in the waiting crowd. He didn’t stay to watch but shuffled down Green Street towards the crossroads.
This time the crowd was silent, not like when the blacksmith’s place came down. There was dread in the air, a dull resentment, and a sense of awful expectancy, like they were waiting for an execution.
‘Anything on the wireless this morning?’ I asked the woman standing next to me, Mrs Paradise, the blacksmith’s wife. She shook her head.
Yesterday Hitler’s troops had rolled into the Sudetenland. The BBC had broadcast the sound of an air-raid siren, an awful howl that set your teeth on edge. We were expecting to be at war any day now, though Mr Keiller’s view was that Hitler and Mr Chamberlain probably had a secret understanding, and would carve up the world between them. ‘Let ‘em have Russia,’ he’d said, standing outside the caravan on the dig site, hands on his hips, as he often stood when he was making a pronouncement. ‘That’s what the Germans would really like to get their hands on, to give old Joe Stalin and his Communists their marching orders.’ He spoke like he knew what was what. Mrs Neville Chamberlain had been to see the dig in August; maybe she’d let slip something over lunch.
Three