The Buried Circle - Jenni Mills [207]
‘So, will you do it?’
‘Sorry, Ibby. I don’t feel up to it.’
A sigh: Ibby calculating whether it was worth trying to push it any further. She decided not. ‘Fine, India. I understand.’
A lot of people having to do a lot of understanding at the moment.
There are not many idle moments in the caf now the holiday season has started. When Ed comes in, the queue stretches almost to the door, and Corey and I are red in the face and sharp with one another. He waves and backs out.
Half an hour later things have calmed down, and when Ed reappears, Corey says, ‘Take your break now, while it’s quiet.’
I pick up a couple of bottles of elderflower press and join him at one of the wooden tables outside. The day is sticky hot, under a sun like an over-boiled egg. The duckpond is shrunken, the purple flags flagging, a marshy stink coming off a layer of green scum over the surface. Waitress genes make me pile the dirty crockery onto a tray and take it back to the kitchen before I sit down.
‘So what couldn’t wait?’ I ask, unscrewing the bottle top, and taking a mouthful.
‘Ibby said you won’t do the aerial filming.’
‘No.’
‘Care to change your mind?’
‘Not really.’
He sighs. People are doing a lot of sighing over me lately. ‘You’re depressed.’
‘That’s your expert opinion, is it? Or are you about to suggest I see a psychotherapist?’
‘I value my tender parts too much.’ Ed smiles hopefully. I glare back. ‘And it wasn’t an opinion, it was more a question.’
‘Well, maybe I am,’ I concede. ‘Everything is so unresolved.’
A corrosive silence falls.
Drinking my elderflower, moodily staring at the thick green stew of the duckpond, I take a tally of unfinished business. Item one, Bryn, in hospital, outrageously lucky not to have lost his foot–Ed said the paramedics discussed amputating it on the spot, but they managed to lever up the stone and slide him out, though the mashed bones will leave him limping for the rest of his life. He’s charged with attempted murder–not mine, as it happens, I only rate an assault charge, but for an attack on Fergus’s mother that left her with three broken ribs, a cracked pelvis and a fractured skull. Item two, the inquest on last year’s crash–opened day before yesterday, adjourned for another fortnight. Item three, my relationship with Ed–where the hell’s that going? He and his wife may have separated, but he’s still married to her, and still in his smelly caravan. Item four, my nonexistent career–nothing on the horizon, unless I look for a course in Advanced Cappuccino-frothing. Added to all of that, I don’t understand what happened in the stone circle: Ed’s theory being that adrenalin can do weird things to your head, and John’s being something along the lines of advanced chaos magic.
And, finally, Frannie. Out of hospital, but in a convalescent home, for the time being. Unexpectedly loving it, revelling in the attention.
‘So?’ Ed delicately interrupts my self-absorption.
‘So…maybe I’m entitled to feel…like I’m in a murky, overgrown duckpond. Waterlogged. Weedy. Earthbound.’
‘Duckpond, in fact, half empty,’ suggests Ed, helpfully.
‘Not a duck in sight.’
‘Fuck it, you’re not depressed,’ he says. ‘You’re shit scared of being in that helicopter again.’
So, my legs are dangling. My non-existent testicles are dangling. My bum, perched on the edge of the open helicopter door, has gone entirely numb. Below me is a good six or seven hundred feet of nothing. Below that is hard Wiltshire chalk, with a skimpy dressing of barley. The helicopter’s shadow races across it, a tiny black insect dwarfed by the bigger shadows of the clouds.
‘OK?’ says Ed’s voice in the headphones.
‘OK.’ I don’t mean it. I’m not OK at all. But there is a dim chance that if I say it, I might start to believe it. This time, thank God and Ibby’s budgeting, I’m in the hire company’s strongest harness, the camera attached to its most solid mount, my feet on its broadest footrest.
‘I could have