The Buried Circle - Jenni Mills [59]
‘Another chance to exercise my natural authority?’
‘That would be the natural authority that worked so well this morning on the Druids?’
‘Titter ye not.’ He pulls the Land Rover onto the verge by the side of the wood. The sun has dropped behind clouds while we’ve been driving and the day has a sharp grey edge. Tolemac is gloomy and forbidding.
Ed jumps down. ‘Can you manage to climb over the fence?’
‘Of course I can.’ Hanging onto the post for balance, I hook my foot onto the lower strand, and try for a contemptuous swing of the other leg over the barbed wire. There is a ripping sensation.
‘Hold on, you’re caught. Let me help you.’ His hands run over the back of my thigh. ‘There. All free now.’
He’s let go and is jumping the fence easily, but I can still feel the imprint of his fingers. The tear in the back of my new jeans is wafting cool air onto my bum, a mixture of horribly embarrassing and bizarrely sexy. I glare at his back as he strides ahead under the trees towards a grey, ghostly shape. The smell of woodsmoke is strong.
‘A bender,’ he calls. ‘Nobody home.’
It’s made of thick transparent polythene sheeting, strung between tree branches. Stones hold down the edges to stop them flapping in the wind. Ed lifts one and ducks into the shelter.
‘Hey, don’t…’ One of my earliest memories is Greenham, Frannie coming with Margaret and me to embrace the base. We camped, all three of us, in a bender like this, and then the bailiffs came and evicted us, chucking people’s possessions into the back of a dumper truck. Watching Ed stroll confidently into someone’s private space feels like a violation.
‘A rucksack…’ His voice is muffled behind the plastic. ‘Cooking gear. Couple of books.’ He lifts the sheet. ‘Bit smelly in here. Come on in.’
I follow him inside, feeling it’s an intrusion. The smell isn’t that bad, damp earth with a sour undernote of wet dog. Now it’s the outside world that’s ghostly, grey and distorted through the thick polythene walls.
‘We’re not supposed to take this down, are we?’ Ed asks.
‘No. Looks like they’ll be back.’ A muddy black plastic groundsheet is spread underfoot, wrinkled and rucked, a couple of blankets in one corner, a sleeping-bag in the other, navy blue quilted nylon, greyish with age. ‘The villagers would love it to be dismantled, but that’s not the way to do it. You ask them politely to move on. Unless it’s been abandoned.’
‘None of this is exactly valuable. No self-respecting earthquake victim would be caught dead under one of these.’ He prods the heap of blankets, meagre beige, so grubby and threadbare they do indeed look like Oxfam rejects, with the toe of his boot. A small rip in the sleeping-bag oozes filling. ‘But the rucksack’s a good one, brand new.’
Beneath its flap, the eyes of a small boy stare up at me from a creased photograph.
It’s Keir.
No, of course it isn’t. Keir’s hair was fairer, almost white-blond. This lad has a mass of freckles but Keir’s buttery skin tanned. For a moment, I was fooled by the smile, the chipped front tooth, like the one he broke coming off his skateboard going too fast round the corner into York Road when we lived in Bristol.
Fooled by Tolemac. The ghostly trees outside the bender suddenly seem dangerous. I drop the flap back on the rucksack. Ed has picked up the book that was lying on top of the blankets–a biography of Gurdjieff–and is leafing through.
‘Leave it. Graham can come back tomorrow and tell them to clear off It feels like we’re prying, and I want to be away before the owner comes back. ‘Let’s go.’
Ed tosses the book back but it misses the blankets, its pages flipping open on the dirty groundsheet. I pick it up, wiping a smear of mud off the cover. There’s a name on the flyleaf, inked in rounded handwriting that’s almost childish. Bryn Kirkwood. In charity shop pencil, ’1.99’. There was a Welsh lad at my school called Bryn. I thought it was such a pretty name, though everyone else called him Bryn the Bin because his dad worked for the council.