The Buried Circle - Jenni Mills [75]
‘We’re going to lose the sun if he doesn’t get a move on,’ says Harry.
‘Engine note’s changing,’ says the soundman, clamping one headphone to his ear. ‘He’s heading away.’
‘OK, ready to go again when Keith gives us the all-clear,’ says Ibby to Martin.
‘Hold on,’ says Keith the soundman. ‘There’s a chopper as well’
My stomach tenses. The helicopter is a long, black-bodied machine flying high and fast.
‘You seen that footage on YouTube, Harry?’ asks Keith. ‘Round here it happened, wasn’t it?’
‘Bloody terrifying,’ says Harry. ‘Is it still there?’
‘What footage?’ asks Ibby, but my gut has already turned to ice.
‘Helicopter crashed while it was being used for aerial filming.’ Harry applies his eye to the viewfinder again. ‘Cameraman let go of the camera, and it bashed the director’s brains out–tape still running. Someone posted it on YouTube last week. Bound to make ‘em take it off once the family finds out. You don’t see much, but it starts with a clear shot of the bloke’s face as the helicopter goes into a spin, and the sick bit is knowing the poor bastard dies.’
‘Cameraman’s revenge,’ says the soundman. ‘Now you know, lb, what happens to directors who demand too much.’ He draws a finger across his throat and guffaws.
My hands are shaking as I dial Ed’s mobile number in the ladies’ loo at the Red Lion. Somehow I managed to hold it together through the morning’s filming until we broke for lunch. My head’s pounding and I’m too nauseous to eat.
Nothing happens. I look down at the mobile screen, already knowing what I’ll see.
No bloody signal.
* * *
‘You all right, blossom?’ asks Martin, at the picnic table outside the pub, veggie burger in one hand. ‘You’re a bit pale.’
‘A bug.’
I sit down, my knees wobbly. Why did this have to happen when I thought I was over it? I didn’t know the camera had gone on recording. Who put the video on YouTube? What does it show? Not much more than a blur, the camera jerking and tumbling, a final glimpse of Steve’s lolling head, a red flower on a broken stalk? Please God, don’t let it be in focus…
‘Have a chip,’ says Martin.
‘Really, I don’t want anything.’
‘What’s the plan for this afternoon, lb?’ Harry returns from the bar with a tray of drinks. ‘Shoot the shit out of the stone circle?’
‘Martin, I’d like an introductory piece from you,’ says Ibby. ‘What was Avebury for? Feasting? Healing? Giant astronomical computer?’
‘Forget all that seventies bollocks,’ says Martin. ‘It’s the place of the dead.’
‘How d’you reckon that?’ asks Harry.
‘It’s a stone monument. The theory goes, wood for the living, stone for the dead.’
I didn’t go to Steve’s funeral. His parents had him cremated at Golders Green, then scattered his ashes in a park near Elstree. Essence of Steve floating on the breeze, drifting across the garden of the Big Brother house. I check my phone again for a signal, and imagine his open, dead eyes staring back at me from the screen. Haunting me, like Frannie’s buggerin’ lights. Like the ghosts that whisper to me from the trees at Tolemac.
‘Ten minutes,’ says Ibby. ‘Then we need to make a move.’
‘Slavedriver,’ says Martin, sounding completely happy about it.
As soon as we leave the pub the rain starts, sheets of it, sending us scurrying for the shelter of the museum.
Martin and I, trying not to get in the way, stand next to Charlie’s glass coffin while Harry sets up to film the Barber Surgeon’s scissors.
‘What you said about Avebury being a place of the dead?’ I ask, sidestepping as Keith the soundman comes past with a couple of lighting stands. ‘Literally? Are there burials?’
‘Well, there’s the odd thing,’ says Martin. ‘The burials seem to be almost entirely outside the henge–like Charlie here, on Windmill Hill’
As if on cue, the whole room is washed in a harsh glare as Harry switches on one of the lamps, shining through the side of the glass and illuminating the child’s skeleton in its foetal crouch.
‘But inside–’ Martin stops suddenly, narrows his eyes, whips out his glasses and peers at the skull. A trick of the light makes it a different