The Buried Circle - Jenni Mills [4]
I bring the camera viewfinder up to my eye, and Steve’s hand grips my shoulder, helping to steady me while I get used to the weight.
‘Looks fabulous on the monitor,’ comes his tinny voice, breathless with relief. ‘We couldn’t be luckier with the weather, could we? Shame about the haze–makes the horizon a bit murky.’
‘Can you give me a white balance?’ I say, and he leans over me, inhumanly unworried by the yawning void, holding a piece of white paper in front of the lens. I make a quick adjustment, set the focus to infinity, and film the ground like a gold and green carpet being pulled away beneath us. Slowly tilt up to reveal Silbury and the whole damn distant shebang, humps, bumps, ridges and secrets you can only see from above, fading into a wash of pale umber that then shades into an overhead blue so intense it hums. Through the lens, height, motion and scariness are pared down to beautiful. OK, I’m a bit ropy still on the technicals (did I remember to set the toggle switch to daylight?) but this is what I’m good at, composing a picture: colour, angle, geometry.
Euphoria unexpectedly fills me, and I can even admit the sex last night was good; not to be repeated, but maybe forgivable. Guilt sneaks back with the memory of his fingers strapping me into the harness, and I enjoyed that too–why do I get myself into these scrapes? I should have made it clear before breakfast: I don’t do married men, full stop, after a nasty experience with a tutor at college–but there wasn’t time for conversation.
The helicopter loses height as we fly towards West Kennet Long Barrow–‘Just like a big vulva,’ says one of the passengers, the American woman, as I tilt down so it fills the frame–and then banks to the right, so my lovely shot ends abruptly in the clouds. I can hear the gnashing of Steve’s teeth because we’ve missed a close-up. We cross the A4–‘The old Roman road,’ calls Ed–and come over the green shoulder of the hill. A sigh comes out of me. There, at last, the first white tooth of the Avenue. I hadn’t even noticed I was holding my breath. The rotors are saying it: home, home, home. The image in the viewfinder is blurry, the wind pricking water into my eyes. England’s full of little exiles, and one of them happened at Avebury, for my grandmother, sixty-something years ago. One of them happened there for me, too, in 1989, so both of us were, in our own way, expelled from Eden.
Get in the van, Indy. Now
As far as blood relations go, Frannie is all I have. Grandfather, mystery man: not only did I never know him but neither did his daughter, born at the end of the Second World War after he was killed in action. Mother: well, best not to go there, but let’s just say she died, abroad, when I was in my early teens, having left me with my grandmother when I was eight. Father: itinerant Icelandic hippie my mother met in a backpacker’s hostel in Delhi, and never saw again. That was how I came to be called India. Could have been worse–Mum had been doing the world trip and I might have ended up with any name from Azerbaijan to Zanzibar.
We’re almost there, following the Avenue as it marches up the hillside. From above, the double row of stones looks tiny, but at ground level most are taller than a person. A single figure is walking between them, a dog racing ahead, then wheeling back to jump at the legs of its owner.
‘This must be the way they would process,’ comes a Dutch accent, female, in my headphones, separating the syllables. ‘Up from the Romans’ road, led by their priestess…’
Only a few thousand years out, not to mention one or two other errors, like there were no roads, unless you count the Ridgeway. And as for priestesses–well, I wouldn’t mind betting the boys were in charge back then, with the Neolithic equivalent of Steve leading the party. I swing the camera round–‘Great shot,’ breathes Steve, watching the image on the monitor wedged behind the seats–and pan along the course of the reconstructed Avenue, as we approach the village.
If Silbury Hill is an upturned pudding through