The Buried Circle - Jenni Mills [96]
The letter to Steve’s father is still in my hand. Perhaps I shouldn’t send it or, at least, wait a day and write something more considered. Folding it and tucking it into my pocket, my fingers encounter a smooth, cool shape: John’s piece of amethyst. It’s a deep purple with layers of white streaks folded into it. Margaret used to tuck similar stones under our pillows in the van. Keir was fascinated by Mum’s crystals and used to squat on the floor for hours, lining them up, rearranging them.
As usual, the thought of Keir makes the black crystal, the shiny lump of onyx in my head, twist for the light. Fathers and sons…By an enormous effort, I shove it back where it should stay, in the darkest corner, and reach for one of the brighter memory crystals instead, one that shows Keir and me racketing around the Downs that summer of 1989. We roamed all over by ourselves. In Bristol you had to tell Mum where and with whom and what time you’d be back, and mostly she said no anyway, so this was paradise.
‘You can go anywhere you like,’ she said, tidying away Keir’s sleeping-bag. He’d left it in a heap on the floor of the van in Tolemac. ‘But stay together. And watch out for the cars when you cross the road.’ No problem–we were used to traffic. And don’t go in the church,’ she added, as an afterthought. ‘That’s a bad place for pagans.’
So that was one of the first places we went.
* * *
Going into the church was Keir’s idea. Dare you.
I’m not afraid.
I’d never been into a church. It felt wrong. It was where the other people went, Christians. The ones who stole places like Avebury, stamped out the old religion. As we chased each other between the gravestones in the churchyard, I kept hearing Mum’s voice in my head. Mind the traffic on the main road, mind your manners, and don’t go in the church.
Why not?
Because they don’t like pagans.
Frannie had wanted to take me to church once, when I was visiting her, but Mum had found out the night before and kicked up a terrible fuss. Put your grandmother on the phone this minute. I’d handed it over, shaking already. Mum’d screamed down the phone, so loud I’d heard all the words. How DARE you docternate her? Frannie had held the phone away from her ear, wincing. Afterwards she said, maybe when you’re older, Indy Or your mam’ll call down forty terrible curses on my head.
Keir stepped out of the sunlight into the darkened porch. His hand was hovering near the heavy iron door handle.
I was afraid. You didn’t know what kind of bad things might happen to you if you went in a church. You might get nailed to a cross.
Don’t, I said. Keir turned his head and gave me a wicked smile from under his tousled fringe, bleached by the sun. Keeping his eyes fixed on me, he stretched out his hand and grasped the iron ring. Slowly he turned it. It made a rusty clunking noise. I could hardly breathe. Mick’ll be furious with you, I said.
Keir stuck out his tongue, leaned his shoulder against the door to open it and slipped through the gap. I waited for the strangled scream that would surely come, but there was silence. I gave it a moment longer, then followed him in.
It was huge inside, much bigger than I’d expected, and not as dark, though there were rows of hard, forbidding pews. Sunlight filtered into the nave from a tall window, but the chancel was much darker, behind a fretted screen of age-polished wood. I nearly yelled when I looked above it: there was a huge metal cross on the wall, wrapped with barbed wire. That must be where they hung the pagans.
There was no