by Jenni Mills
I lay back on the barrow top, and let the wind play with my skirt and tease my goose-pimply legs. Charlie was playing in the sunshine somewhere below. I could feel the vibrations of his running feet.
I sat up. I could feel vibrations.
The wind had blown the sound of the engine away from me. There were two of them riding the motorbike, bouncing at speed over the tussocks of grass. Davey was in front, controlling the bike, his hair blowing half over his eyes, and Mr K, wearing a leather helmet and goggles, was behind him. His arms were round Davey’s waist, and as I watched he bent his head as if he would bury his face in Davey’s hair. Neither of them had noticed me: they were travelling away from me across the top of the hill towards the stand of trees that tumbled down the northern slope.
I stood up to wave–then sat down again. Even if Mr Keiller had turned his beautiful head at that moment, I wasn’t sure I wanted them to see me. The shifting wind tossed the growl of the bike back to me as Davey revved it towards the brow of the hill, like he was gearing it to jump into space and float through the air. Then they were gone. The sound cut out among the trees, and a cloud flicked its tail over the face of the sun so my arms went goose-pimply too.
CHAPTER 15
It’s a fact of life that television people delay and delay and then want everything done right now, no matter whether their schedule matches anyone else’s. The week after Ed’s arrival, Ibby from Overview calls to tell me Daniel Porteus is coming to Avebury, presenter in tow, to talk to the National Trust. He’s expecting me to be there, as Ibby herself will be otherwise occupied.
Corey is less than enthusiastic about rearranging my shifts. As I pant into the caf, she gives me a glare from behind the counter and jerks her head in the direction of the tables. Daniel Porteus and another man, his back to me, are at the far end. A fluffy mic on a boom pole is propped against the wall. Seeing me, Daniel stands up. ‘India, good of you to join us.’ Said with a touch of sarcasm: I’m late. We exchange the obligatory double-barrelled media air kiss. ‘This is Martin Ekwall…’
The other fellow stands too. He’s a bear of a man, in beige chinos and a bright red sweater, holding out a furry paw, a smile splitting his thick but well-barbered beard. Even the backs of his fingers are hairy. ‘Glad to meet you. Daniel says you’re good with a camera.’
‘Well, um…’
Daniel takes this for modesty. ‘You don’t mind shooting a few pieces to camera with Martin, while the sun’s out? May never use them, but it gives him practice.’
Beyond the window is a lovely day, chilly for April, but under puffs of cloud in a blue sky the lime leaves are unfurling, juiciest green. Martin is a palish shade of green to match, and rooting in a leather satchel slung over the back of his chair.
‘Standing, sitting or walking?’ I ask.
‘All three,’ says Daniel. ‘Can you walk and talk, Martin?’
‘About a minute, like you told me?’ says Martin, his head buried in his bag. ‘Sorry, need the loo…’ He bolts.
‘Want a coffee, India?’ Daniel waves in a lordly fashion to Corey, who looks thunderstruck since the caf is self-service. ‘I’ll take a flapjack.’
I pull up a chair, and he starts to examine the photocopies of archive stills I’ve brought him. Corey bangs the cup down on the table so coffee slops into the saucer. Martin emerges from the Gents, looking more confident.
‘So what’s the plan?’
‘I’ve a ten-thirty meeting to talk the National Trust into letting us dig up a stone.’ Daniel has to negotiate many strata of bureaucratic approval before so much as a skewer can penetrate the sacred soil. ‘You two start filming.’
‘Fine,’ says Martin. He looks relaxed, but under the table he’s picking at the skin round his thumb. There’s a smear of blood on his chinos.
‘Shall we go, then?’ Daniel wraps the uneaten half of his flapjack in a napkin, then puts it into his pocket. He ducks under the table and emerges with a padded camera bag. ‘You have used a mini-DVC before, India?’
My hands tense. It’ll be the first time I’ve touched a camera since…
But of course I can do it.
I thought I’d feel more, but it’s just grey plastic and cables, inert, innocuous, not an instrument of mass destruction. Maybe it helps that it’s so small, nothing like the heavier on-the-shoulder camera I used in the helicopter. I hold it up to my eye, half expecting to see through the viewfinder a flash of Steve’s head, welling crimson, but the frame is filled only with Martin’s hairy, worried face.
‘Fine,’ I say. ‘Know it like the back of my head. You ready, Martin?’
I’ll take that croak as a yes.
As we leave the caf, he hangs back and grabs my arm. ‘Be gentle with me, India.’
‘You have done telly before?’
‘Yes, but only as the chap being interviewed. Now I’m supposed to be front man, every sensible word has flown out of my head.’
I’m scanning the camera furiously, running my fingers over the casing. ‘Tell you a secret. I can’t remember where the eject button is so I can load the tape.’
‘Well, don’t ask me. I’m useless with technology.’
Somehow between us we set up in the henge with the camera loaded and Martin semi-coherent, and Daniel hasn’t noticed what a pair of idiots he has in his employ. Martin strikes a manly pose, staring into the far distance, while I position the camera.
‘Take off your jumper.’
‘You forward young thing.’
‘It casts too much colour up onto your face. You’ll look like a tomato. Can you hold this piece of paper?’
‘What’s written on it? “Beware, lunatic talking”?’
‘It’s for the white balance. Don’t ask me to explain.’ Daniel is wandering between the tall stones of the Cove. ‘Does Mr Porteus make you as nervous as he does me?’
‘Too right,’ says Martin, fervently, throwing his sweater to land untidily next to his leather satchel by the tripod. ‘Am I white enough?’
‘Lily-like. Now, in your own time, speak.’
‘Hang on–what am I supposed to do with the rest of me? Where do I put my hands? No, don’t answer that.’
‘Lean on the stone, looking casual…Oh, shit.’
A green Land Rover has pulled up on the verge by the gate. A pair of muddy cowboy boots descends from the driver’s door: Ed, wearing aviator shades. Michael, togged up for telly in a Barbour so pristine the wax gleams, is walking round from the other side.
‘What’s up?’ asks Martin, uneasily. ‘Haven’t got coffee froth in my beard, have I?’
‘Nothing. I thought they’d be meeting in the office.’ Another car parks behind the Land Rover, disgorging the National Trust’s film liaison officer, in green wellies, and the curator, in pink ones and a long flouncy skirt. ‘Carry on. We’re rolling…and speed.’
‘What?’
‘Sorry. Something camerapersons always say. It means ready, steady, go.’
Not everyone’s face works on camera, but Martin’s does, even with the beard. He’s a boyish mixture of earnest and enthusiastic, eyes warm and twinkly, and although the sun shows up the creases at their corners, he’s fit and muscled for a middle-aged bloke. Ed’s wiry, but nowhere near as buff.
‘Oh, Lord, I see what you mean,’ says Martin, coming over to watch a playback on the camera’s LCD screen. ‘I do need to smile more on a closeup.’
‘Relax and enjoy it.’
‘Easy enough for you to say. You try.’
‘Fortunately no one is ever going to ask me to step round the camera to the other side,’ I say. ‘There’s too much of me to be a presenter.’
‘Bollocks, India. Most men prefer a girl with some meat on her bones. You’re tall enough to carry it. You’d look great.’
Does he mean he prefers…? We’re standing close. The smell of him is warm, spicy, male.
‘One more?’ he says.
I readjust the tripod and bend to the eyepiece, while Marti
n faces the camera. ‘That’s good…No, hang on a mo.’
Behind him, Ed has reappeared, strolling across the grass towards us.
‘Before we carry on,’ I say, straightening up, ‘something else I want to show you. Watch the last take again in the viewfinder.’ When he’s beside me, leaning in to the camera, I lean in too, intimate. ‘There–see that thing you do with your hand? It’s a bit flouncy. Fine to use your hands, but you don’t want to look too gay when you do it.’
‘India,’ says Martin, his breath tickling my ear, ‘you do realize, don’t you?’
‘Realize?’
‘I am gay.’
Shit. Cold, hot, entire body thermostat throws a breakdown. ‘Oh. Sorry. I didn’t mean…’
‘It’s fine, blossom. I don’t make a thing of it, no need to shout it from the rooftops. I just don’t want you getting the wrong idea, given that we’ll be working together.’
‘Right.’ Whatever I say is only going to land me deeper in trouble. I stare fixedly at the LCD screen, my face on fire. ‘I hope you didn’t think…’
‘Er, hi, India. How’s it going?’
‘Oh, hi, Ed.’ At least my blush makes it look like something’s going on between us. ‘Martin’s a natural.’
‘Really?’
My eyes meet his–and find no hint of jealousy, damn it. Either he knows instinctively that Martin presents no threat, or he simply wouldn’t care if we flung our clothes off and got down to it right now on the Bonking Stone.
Over lunch in the Red Lion, Martin flirts outrageously with the curator–is there a woman he doesn’t count as a friend within two minutes of meeting her? The National Trust haven’t yet committed themselves to a dig, but it looks hopeful: Channel 4 have come up with the money, Martin has promised students and expertise, and Ibby arrives tomorrow with a full crew. Filming will take place over the next few months depending on weather and Martin’s academic commitments. Daniel, roughing out a schedule on the back of his paper napkin, leans across the table to interrupt. ‘How are you fixed towards the end of June?’
‘That’s Solstice,’ I say. ‘You don’t want to film then. The place is heaving.’ ‘Great!’ says Daniel. ‘Remember what Cameron said? Channel 4 want pagans. Know anything about modern pagans, Martin?’
‘Not much.’ Martin looks less than enthusiastic. ‘My speciality’s the ancient sort.’
‘Well, now’s your chance to learn. India, can you find out when the next stone-huggers’ shindig takes place?’
‘There’s a Wiccan frill-moon ritual, just before Easter, all comers welcome,’ I tell Martin, after a conversation with John on the pub’s pay phone. We’re watching the stream of cars for an opportunity to cross the main road.
‘That didn’t take long.’
‘I have a friend who’s pagan.’ I give a thumbs-up to Daniel, waiting for us among the stones on the other side. ‘Well, more than a friend. My spirit-father.’
‘Your what?
‘Equivalent of godfather. My mother held a naming ceremony for me at Stanton Drew stone circle when I was small. But, hey, you don’t want to hear my family history’
‘Of course I do,’ says Martin, with a brave grin. ‘I’m a vicar’s son. Trained to listen sympathetically from birth. Your mum was pagan?’
‘My grandmother says it was a rebellion. Meg married too young, then walked out on her husband and met up with a guy who took her to Stonehenge for the free festival one Solstice. She went back again and again–well, until 1989.’
‘Because the police set up an exclusion zone that year,’ says Martin. ‘Don’t look so surprised, blossom–I was studying for my PhD and my supervisor was digging the outlying barrows. So I remember the good old Second Summer of Love–been there, done that, got the smiley-face T-shirt.’
A gap appears in the traffic, and we scuttle across the road, the camera bag bouncing against my leg. While Martin was excavating at Stonehenge, my mother and I were in Avebury.
Margaret laying out the crystals, offering me the shiny black lump of onyx, the stone for secrets. Me opening my mouth, and the memories of a June afternoon in Tolemac pouring out in a thin grey jet of mist, a helicopter glimpsed through the trees, a column of filthy black smoke pouring into the sky, soaked up by the dark crystal.
Her voice whispers in my head. Time wounds all heels, but you don’t have to go on limping for ever, do you?
Martin has been saying something I didn’t catch. ‘Pardon?’
‘I said, free festivals weren’t my scene, but I once saw Angelfeather play Glastonbury’
‘You saw my mother then. She danced with them. The bloke who took her to Stonehenge was Mick Feather.’
‘Mick Feather? Martin’s goggle-eyed. ‘Your mother was friendly with Mick Feather? Mick Feather, as in “Calling in the Mothership”?’
‘Yep, that Mick Feather.’ One hit only, and that about aliens landing at Stonehenge.
‘Bloody hell,’ says Martin. ‘You have touched glory, young India.’
Mick Feather, skin grimy-tinged as a coalman’s no matter how thoroughly he washed, Keir’s father. Laughing Mick. ‘He wasn’t that famous,’ I say. ‘And it was a crap song.’
‘Iconic,’ sighs Martin. ‘Whatever happened to him?’
And a shudder runs down my spine.
‘No idea,’ I say, crouching on the damp grass to open the camera bag.
Daniel has definite ideas about what has to be said in this piece to camera. ‘Tie it to 1938,’ he says. ‘Same year as the cine footage.’
‘How about saying something about the Barber Surgeon?’ Martin points across the circle to a huge lozenge of a stone. ‘He was discovered that summer, over there. You don’t look keen, India. What’s wrong?’
‘Nothing,’ I say, prickles of electricity running up and down my skin. The Barber Surgeon stone has always been among the stuff of my nightmares.
‘Well, hurry up,’ says Daniel, over his shoulder. ‘Rain’s coming on.’
The clouds are threatening as Martin and I pick up the camera equipment to follow.
‘Was 1938 really the year they found him?’ I ask. ‘Because my grandmother was working for Keiller then.’
Martin almost drops the tripod. ‘Your grandmother worked for Keiller? Is there no end to your surprises? Are we interviewing her?’
‘She refused.’ The first raindrops are already pattering on the back of my coat. ‘But I’m working on it.’
‘Were you there?’ I ask Frannie, at home in Trusloe. Filming had to be suspended after an unsatisfactory twenty minutes’ dodging raindrops, Martin’s beard getting damper and stragglier with every take. ‘Did you actually see them dig up the Barber Surgeon?’
Her eyes are fixed on the TV screen.
‘Oh, yes,’ she says. ‘I drew him, didn’ I? Mr Keiller took his photograph, but my job was to draw a picture of him under the stone.’
CHAPTER 16
1938
That year the plan was to put back up the stones in the south-western quarter of the circle. There was only two or three showing above ground, but Mr Keiller seemed to think he could find the others that were buried, and even know where the ones had been that was gone for ever. He was like an old wizard: could tell you what had vanished simply by digging in the ground and looking at the soil. Those that had been broken up by old Stonebreaker in the seventeen-somethings, Mr Keiller would mark where they’d stood with a concrete pillar.
The workmen had already cleared the rubbish out of the ditch and dug right down to the chalk, flaying the banks of their green skin. A caravan had been trundled onto the field for a site office. I still had no permanent job, and was reduced to skivvy work all over again, sometimes, dusting Mr Keiller’s collections. He used to watch me, to make sure I didn’t break anything, his eyes narrowed and his lovely strong mouth a bit open, so you could hear his smoker’s breathing sucking at the air.
Heartbreaker, he’d say, you have a delicate touch. I’d run the duster so lightly over
the backs of them creamers you could almost see the cows shudder with delight.
Mrs Sorel-Taylour was hanging up her coat when I trailed back into the museum one afternoon after another lunchtime stroll to Windmill Hill. I’d taken my sketchbook: the barrows were a mass of spring flowers. She gave me one of her sterner looks. ‘You’re freckled, Frances. Didn’t you think to wear a hat?’
‘Didn’t know the sun would be so warm.’ While she went into the back office to look for Mr Young, I put my sketchbook down on the mahogany case nearest the door, and peered into the glass top to check my reflection.
The door behind me opened, and Mr Keiller walked in. ‘Miss Robinson! We keep colliding, don’t we?’
I straightened up and backed away. ‘I’m so sorry, Mr Keiller.’
‘Don’t be. You’ve gone quite pink. Is it the sun or that beau of yours?’ He picked up my sketchbook. ‘Whose are these? Yours? Heartbreaker, you’ve been hiding proverbial lights under bushels. They’re rather good.’
Hearing his voice, Mrs Sorel-Taylour and Mr Young came out of the back office, Mr Cromley trailing after. Mr Keiller held up a picture of a clover head I’d sketched. ‘Look, Mrs. S-T. Did you have any idea your protge was so talented?’
‘He’s summat,’ said Mr Young. He was more used to me now, and always kind, maybe because he understood how it felt to be not so posh as the rest of them. He’d been Mr Keiller’s foreman for years on the digs. ‘Where did you learn to draw so well? That’s almost as good as Miss Chapman could do.’