The Buried Circle - Jenni Mills [13]
By my elbow, my mobile phone trills once. A text:
U ever going 2 call me back?
No. My thumbs work furiously. Please leave me alone.
As I come out of the bathroom after cleaning my teeth, the strangeness of Fran’s reluctance to sleep upstairs strikes me. In her old room at the back the bed is stripped, the dressing-table layered with dust, nothing on the floor except my own boxes of stuff. The wardrobe is empty, apart from a cardboard poster tube leaning against the back. I shut the mirrored door again quickly. I know what’s in there: my bloody mother, making an exhibition of herself.
All that can be seen in the blackness of the uncurtained window is my own reflection, backlit by a dingy forty-watt bulb on the landing. I press my nose right up to the glass. Lights, buggerin lights. What was that all about? The bungalows behind are already dark. The light from our bathroom falls on the square of mole-riddled lawn that passes for Frannie’s garden, neglected in a way she would never have tolerated only a year or so ago. In the distance, towards Windmill Hill, there’s a single fuzzy gleam that must be one of the Bray Street cottages. Otherwise the night is a creepy sort of void.
The emptiness of Steve’s stare comes back to me. Slowly, the picture that’s burnt into the back of my head is changing. Now one eye’s fixed on me, the other off beam and staring towards the front of the helicopter. His pupils are huge, both as bleak and black and empty as the night.
CHAPTER 3
Next morning everything seems brighter. Frannie has her hat on, ready to stump off to church with a sunny grin on her face, carrying two cans of carrot soup as her harvest offering.
‘Off to do good works?’
‘Being good in’t what takes a body to church. You don’t want to come?’ Dying to show me off to her friends. My granddaughter, works in telly…
‘I’d prefer to get straight first. Unpack, maybe go for a walk. Tell you what, I’ll stroll with you to Big Avebury’
It’s glorious weather: deep blue sky, and the beech leaves shivering in a gentle wind, the first loving nip of autumn. The stones have already snagged the day’s first minibus-load of visiting hippies, who are wandering through the inner circle behind the Methodist chapel-cum-tourist office. Another half-dozen people are marching fat-tyred pushchairs round the top of the banks. Frannie meets one of her friends in the high street, and the pair of them totter through the churchyard together to St James’s. I sit on the bench by the lich-gate, to check the map for the route of my walk. A ragged ‘We plough the fields and scatter…’ floats from the church as I set off.
It takes me nearly half an hour from Avebury at a brisk clip. The fields either side of the broad, level track are indeed ploughed, greyish-white flint scattered across the brown earth. I’m ever hopeful that one day I’ll spot a prehistoric stone arrowhead, a perfect leaf shape, lying on the surface, and every so often something catches my eye–disappointingly, when I stoop to check, always a leaf.
Yatesbury boasted an airfield used during the First and Second World Wars, mostly for training. The RAF closed the base some years ago, and microlights fly out of there now. The church, crouched like a grey rabbit among trees, is silent; Sunday services must rotate from parish to parish. Ancient yews shade the path to its door. An old box tomb leans at an angle defying the laws of geometry. The grass between the graves hasn’t been cut for a while, and the hems of my trousers are soon soaked.
It isn’t difficult to find Grandad’s memorial. At the far end of the churchyard there are several rows of white stones with RAF insignia. Young men’s graves, blank tablets of unlived lives. Like Steve