The Buried Circle - Jenni Mills [184]
A lightning flash lit the sky, and I wasn’t anywhere near it. I’d wandered right off the crown of the hill to the edge of the wood. A yellow seam joined the clouds to the hills in the west, and I knew this, after all, was my Charlie’s place, quiet and safe under the trees. I slipped and slithered down the slope a way, knowing I’d find the right spot, and there it was at the foot of a bank under the tree roots, a deep hole like it had been made for us, an entrance to the Lower World that faced not the rising but the setting sun.
I unwrapped him from the towel, a little dark animal with his damp coat of fine hair. I’d thought he’d be cold but he was warm from me holding him, and not stiff yet. I kissed his closed eyes and laid him under the tree roots, well back in the hole but with his tiny face turned to catch the rays of the sinking sun, and scraped soil from the crumbling bank to make it more of a cradle for him. There was old dead bracken mixed in with the chalky earth, but I didn’t think this place belonged to any other creature now. They had left it for Charlie.
The rain gradually stopped and the wind died, and soon there was no sound in my ears but the drip of wet leaves. I climbed back up to the crown of the hill, to the edge of the trees. The view from here was like a careless watercolour. Avebury village and the circle were hidden, but the top of the church tower rose above a viridian wash of leaves. To the south and west, there were drenched fields, umbers and ochres and a dash of burnt sienna, under a sky that was heavy Prussian blue and Payne’s grey except for that single bright lemon streak. I could see the brown gash at Trusloe where Mr Keiller had given the land for the new houses, and Longstones Field, and the woods that hid the racing stables and Yatesbury. I remembered the watercolour set he had given me, four summers ago, and the thought of it made me warm.
I sat for a while at the wood’s margin, waiting for the lemon crack in the sky to fade, and real darkness to fall. When I was as sure as I could be that the sun had set, I went back down the slope, whispered the Lord’s Prayer to Charlie, then dug my hands into the soft soil of the crumbling bank, and filled in the entrance to the hole, so that no one would find him.
I didn’t turn to look back, once my feet were on the track down the hill, because there was nothing left to see in the gathering night, but I knew he was there, and always would be.
Here’s what I think about in the night, though, the nights when I know there are lights up on Windmill Hill: someone looking for Charlie, maybe that devil come back to search for his son. I think of the moment before the bomb fell on the house two doors away, when I held him to my face and breathed into his tiny nostrils like he was a sick lamb. Did I imagine that his little chest heaved? And, if it did, what happened then? What happened between the bomb and me being outside the house?
CHAPTER 50
Fran looks smaller than usual in the hospital bed. She’s asleep, curled on her side, the bruising hidden but a padded dressing on her forehead. An oxygen tube emerges from her nostrils; more plastic tubing snakes from under the bedclothes to a drip stand by the bed.
‘Dehydrated,’ says the nurse. ‘Do you want to sit with her a bit? She’ll probably wake. Visiting hours are over, officially, but…’
She doesn’t wake.
She looks different, now, younger, a woman living in a place I have never been to, inhabiting a set of memories I can’t begin to guess. All present time, all will, all I am pared away to I was, and then even that whittled to nothing at all.
‘Stay at my place,’ says John, as we walk across the empty car park towards the pickup. It’s after eleven, what little light there is left in the sky swamped by the hospital’s halogen glare.
‘I ought to have stayed here.’
‘Don’t be silly. She’ll wake when she wakes. Nowhere to sleep, anyway.’
‘I could stretch out on a couple of chairs