The Buried Circle - Jenni Mills [130]
I climb out of bed and peer through the streaming glass. Lights flash on the hill, bobbing and weaving to and fro. Nighthawks, searching for treasure under cover of the rain? The ghosts of Neolithic farmers?
Or was that part a dream?
At any rate, it was a disturbed night, lying awake mithering, as John would call it. Worrying what to do about Frannie. I’m afraid she’s becoming too confused to look after herself, but it’s no exaggeration to say putting her in a home would kill her. Old folks wither in them places like rows of dead runner beans, she says. Rot from the inside. I couldn’t do that to her.
Mithering, too, about other stuff, Ed and piles of paper that keep growing, letters that come in bank envelopes and tell me I owe thousands of pounds, bank statements that are endless columns of numbers, changing faster and faster until they become a flickering blur, streams of numbers running down the windowpane, streams of numbers bubbling down a hillside, pouring into stone pits in the circle, dark holes under the trees, mud slides of numbers, fragments of paper and bone, the dark thud of helicopter vanes overhead, whirlwinds of letters that make no sense, old photographs that fade and grow unfocused, Alexander Keiller smiling like a Cheshire cat at the camera, the water dissolving his face into a mask of carved bone, nothing left of his essence but the grin, a grin that wavers and becomes a ripple on water, water making everything sodden and unreadable, water that explodes into fragments of glass and fire under the trees…
Then I’m awake again and a miserable damp Friday dawn is bleaching the curtains.
In spite of Kit’s promise to finish before Solstice, this is the last day we can work before the masses start to arrive, and it’s clear to everyone the stone won’t be cemented in place by the end of the afternoon. The megalith is fully uncovered, lying in its pit under a heavy sky, but at two o’clock the students still haven’t finished trussing the sarsen with honeysuckle ropes to Kit’s satisfaction.
‘Look at the size of him,’ says Ibby, admiringly, as Harry pans along the side of the stone where a brawny lad in shorts is tugging away on the Neolithic equivalent of a reef knot.
‘Her,’ says Martin. ‘Assuming you mean the stone. This would be what Keiller categorized as a Type B, lozenge-shaped rather than a straight-sided pillar, therefore symbolically female.’
‘A Goddess stone, in another words?’ suggests Ibby, ignoring Martin’s pained expression.
‘You’re not going to attempt to raise it, now, are you?’ says Martin, to Kit. ‘Maybe we should hold on, till after Solstice.’
‘Martin,’ says Ibby. ‘Stop fussing.’
‘There won’t be time to cement it in place. I cancelled the delivery’
‘We can still make it safe,’ says Kit. ‘Chalk blocks, that’s all the original circle-builders needed. But if you want to leave raising it until the week after next…’
‘No,’ says Ibby fiercely. ‘I don’t have a crew to film it the week after next. Now or never, Martin. Leave Kit to it. You and India go and do a piece to camera about stone types.’ She squats down by the portable monitor again and concentrates on the screen.
‘Yeah, go on, piss off,’ says Kit. ‘We’ll be faster without you.’
‘No problem.’ Martin picks up his satchel, huffily extracts a Mars Bar and strides away. ‘I’m only the bloody archaeologist, after all’
Carrying the mini-DVC and a lightweight tripod, I follow, scanning the bank, hoping that Ed might appear. As a result, I almost trip over Martin, who has squatted to examine something on the ground. ‘Hey, India. It’s a modern offering.’
At his boots is a newly turned mound of earth, easily mistaken for a molehill if it weren’t for the wildflowers strewn on top, and the protruding corner of a glossy photograph. Martin starts to scrape off the dark brown soil, mixed with pellets of chalk.
‘Hold on,’ I say, kicking