The Buried Circle - Jenni Mills [185]
‘The nurses don’t want you around overnight. Better not to antagonize them, believe me.’
‘What–patients and their relatives get in the way of the smooth running of the hospital?’
‘Something like that.’
We’ve reached the pay machines. I push the parking ticket into the slot. ‘Drop me at Trusloe. I’ll be fine.’
‘No.’ The overhead light reveals concern on his tired face as I feed in the coins. ‘I’ve bodged the glass in the back door with a sheet of plywood, ought to hold but…’
‘Whoever it was isn’t coming back. They were so scared, they didn’t even stop to nick her purse.’
‘Yeah, and where are her door keys, then?’
My knees lock. ‘What?’
‘Not on the hall table. Not on the hook by the back door. I checked her handbag while you were in the loo–not there either. I even asked the nurse on the ward if they’d been on her when they undressed her. No keys.’
‘Jesus.’ I lean against the pay machine, feeling shaky. ‘That’s creepy. You think they’re planning to come back later and clear the house?’
‘It’s not exactly full of valuable antiques, is it? Could have been another panic thing–saw the keys, grabbed them. They’re probably in a hedge by now. All the same, I’d rather you didn’t sleep there until the locks are changed.’
He takes the ticket from the machine and walks towards the pickup, his face screwed up in thought. Something else he’s not sharing?
‘Have you told the police about the keys?’ I ask.
‘They’d left, hadn’t they?’
‘You could have phoned them.’
The ponytail quivers; his mouth turns down tightly. ‘Don’t believe in telling the police everything. Never trust a pig.’ He makes it sound like an old country saying rather than a piece of outdated hippie slang.
But what’s he concealing from me?
On the way out of Swindon, we both realize we haven’t eaten. John swings the truck round and we find a late-night chippy in a row of shops off the ring road. ‘What do you want?’ he asks.
‘What are you having?’ I’m too tired to make decisions for myself.
‘Nothing.’
‘John, you haven’t eaten all day, have you? Unless you managed a sandwich this afternoon.’ His face tells me he didn’t. ‘Oh, no. Don’t tell me you’re fasting. Not tonight, John. I want to sleep, don’t want to be kept awake by your bloody drum.’
‘I’ll use a CD and wear headphones.’
‘Do you have to?’
The trouble is, John’s so rational most of the time that I forget he can also be Mr Weird.
‘I need to go looking for your grandmother’s guardian. After a shock, she could have lost it.’ He doesn’t need to carry on, to remind me what a shaman believes about the power animal buried in the psyche of each and every one of us, a guardian spirit that protects us.
Without it, you die, sooner or later.
The sheets on the spare bed at John’s are chilly, and my legs are restless. He’s still moving around downstairs, assembling his stuff for the journey, perhaps stewing a pan of magic mushrooms, though he’s so experienced a psychic traveller he doesn’t need hallucinogenics. The drumming is enough to take him into a trance and go wherever a shaman goes, through the cave into the Lower World, where everything is…different. The same place as the real world, according to John, but altered, like a transparent film that overlies it, or vice versa. You see things there that are magical: magic, that is, in the sense that they represent what is deep down true. So when someone’s sick, the way a shaman sees it in the magic world, they’ve lost their power animal. The shaman has to journey to find it and give it back to them, or they die.
‘How do you know it’s theirs?’ I asked, as we came into the cottage tonight. Silly question.
‘It appears four times,’ he says. ‘That’s the sign. Fourth time you grab it. Besides, I’ll–know.’ He looked at me, unapologetic. ‘I realize you have trouble with this, Indy, but think of it as symbolic. Jung’s archetypes, that sort of thing. Psychological concepts represented by symbols. Works for me, same way God works for some people.’
Downstairs, the living-room door closes softly. Wherever he’s going, he’s about to set off to find what my grandmother