The Buried Circle - Jenni Mills [133]
CHAPTER 34
On the Ridgeway, the air is thick and still, thunder on the way. My T-shirt is clinging to my back, and my head is pounding. Gone, done, forgotten.
I’m walking fast, punishing the ground with the impact of my heels, away from Avebury. But it doesn’t matter which direction I take. I can’t escape the vortex: I’m still going round in circles. This was the path we took in 1989, the night I first watched John make a crop circle: guiding the mothership in.
Mick Feather, Keir’s dad, was with us that night, though Keir stayed with Mum at the van in Tolemac, in case his hayfever flared up. Mick, with skin that always looked grimy like a coalman’s, irrespective of how often he washed. I was afraid of Mick. There was something forbidding about him, with those heavy black eyebrows and muddy skin. Keir said he was fun when they did things together. Much of the time Keir was with us, though, in our house, and then in our van under the trees at Tolemac.
Keir and I were almost the same age, best friends because he spent so much time at our place. Mick and the others had nowhere else to be apart from the pub, or the smelly vans and crash pads they inhabited after their wives and girlfriends had kicked them out. Mum wasn’t just saddled with me to look after, she had a tribe of dysfunctional kids who’d never grown up. No wonder she wanted rid of us and ran away.
I can picture her, face hard as sarsen, cheeks the same dirty, stained white as the chalk scars on the hillside. She grabbed hold of me by the shoulders, her hands trembling with anger, and shook me like a beanbag. ‘You stupid little cow. Who did you tell?’
I didn’t know what she meant. There was the sound of a helicopter overhead, and the air smelled of burned plastic. ‘Don’t you realize what you’ve done?’
I’ve lost track of time and place, under a lid of thick grey cloud, clamped over the Downs like the headache that’s screwed itself onto my skull. The sun is hidden, but it must be close to setting. Somewhere around here we made the crop circle. I’ve watched the Barley Collective, friends of John’s from Bristol, make crop circles half a dozen times since, but that summer was the first and most vivid. The western sky still on fire, though it was past ten o’clock at night, May bugs dive-bombing the flashlights. No one to see us, a mile at least from the nearest farmhouse, sculpting a field of ripening barley hidden in the folds of the downland. The little fellow with hair like a black man’s, the one who came into the church–what was his name? Rizla?–moving in a huge arc with the string and the pegs to mark out the design to John’s orders. ‘Callin’ in the mothership, babe,’ the little guy kept shouting. ‘Lovin’ the alien and callin’ in the fakkin’ mothership.’ Afterwards, he hoisted me onto his shoulders, and said: ‘Back to the mothership.’ Back to Margaret’s camper van.
I sit on a stile, with a view of the fields below. A creature is moving through the young grain, too distant to identify in the fading light. The night we trampled out the crop circle, a hare danced across our path, long-eared and leggy. John spotted it first, grabbed my shoulders and turned me so I saw it run across the field. When he became a shaman, he took a hare for his power animal.
In 1989, the landscape seemed touched with promise, under a rising moon near the full, made enormous and golden by dust in the atmosphere. Tonight the same fields are tired and colourless, sticky grey air thickening to twilight.
Across the valley, a long cigar shape looms on the misty downland. That night, it seemed between worlds, drenched in moonlight. I sat cross-legged in the barley, gazing up at it on the ridge, while John and his friends called out instructions and song titles to each other, all their old favourites, Pink Floyd, Hendrix, Echo and the Bunnymen, Angelfeather. ‘Set The Controls For The Heart Of The Sun’. ‘Hot Summer Night’. ‘Killing Moon’. ‘Callin’ In The Mothership’.
The other mothership. Watching us. Tall