The Buried Circle

by Jenni Mills

  A bit later he says: ‘You sure about this, Fran?’

  ‘Wouldn’t be here if I wasn’t.’

  ‘Only…’ He lets out a long, juddering sigh. ‘You don’t…have to.’ Clear from the way he’s breathing there’s not much longer it’ll be a choice. ‘Oh, God!

  Then, a bit after that, he says, with his face in my hair, ‘You’re my first, you know. My first girl.’

  I don’t tell him he’s not my first. That everything I know about what we’re doing was taught me by Donald Cromley and his twisted uncle.

  CHAPTER 28

  ‘You look–different,’ says Ed. ‘And make it a latte.’ He wanders off to look at the cakes. If he’s trying to make a point, I don’t know what it is. I’m not going to forgive him that easily.

  Corey nudges me in the ribs. ‘He only comes in on the days you’re here,’ she hisses.

  ‘Rubbish.’

  ‘He’s mad for you. Can’t keep his eyes off you.’

  Nonsense. Ed’s eyes are undressing an organic flapjack. His hand wavers over the biscuits. He makes a decision, and pushes his tray back towards the till. ‘You were blonde last week,’ he says accusingly.

  ‘Copper.’

  ‘Well, different. This is…um. Need time to adjust to you dark.’ He counts out some coins, yawning. ‘Sorry. Graham and I were out first thing–and I mean first thing–dealing with a group of witches from Bristol who wanted to dance skyclad on Silbury Hill for May Day morning. Caught up with them as they were trying to climb over the fence.’ Ed’s getting the hang of Avebury. ‘Oh, and there’s a bender again in Tolemac. No sign of the occupant. We’ll try again this evening, and move him on politely’ He looks dubiously at his coffee, and digs in his pocket for change. ‘And if politely doesn’t work…’

  –a windscreen exploding into crystals of glass–

  ‘Isn’t much else you can do, is there?’ I say nastily.

  ‘Graham says politely will work,’ says Ed, looking worried.

  The bender’s occupant comes to Avebury to worship the Goddess. He’s here for every one of the eight festivals, takes time off work and hitches down from Cheshire. Man of few words, mind, so it took about half an hour to glean that much. Mostly we sat in companionable silence. I felt surprisingly easy with him.

  ‘Saw you at the frill-moon ritual,’ he said, when I landed on his side of the fire. ‘Which Path do you follow?’

  ‘Um…’ I was mesmerized by his bare feet in the firelight. The ground was squelching, but they were astonishingly clean. ‘Sort of…eclectic, me. No special path. Bit of this, bit of that.’ Thumbing in my memory through The Bluffer’s Guide to Paganism.

  ‘The Lady’s my Path,’ he said. ‘Brid. I feel her here more than anywhere else.’

  ‘Here at Avebury?’

  ‘In this wood. And at her spring. You know where I mean?’

  ‘Um…’

  ‘The Swallowhead. You ever been there?’ I shook my head. ‘I’ll take you.’

  He offered to roll a spliff. I shook my head again.

  ‘You don’t smoke?’

  ‘No.’ I hated seeing my mother stoned: that stupid giggling. When we camped in Tolemac, her laugh bounced off the trees at night as she and John sat at the campfire after I had been sent to my bunk in the van.

  ‘It’s good sleeping close to the stones,’ he said. ‘You feel how the Goddess uses the circle for healing.’

  ‘Oh, no, it’s a place of the dead.’ Goddess knows why I felt bound to correct him. ‘I’ve a friend who’s an archaeologist. He says it’s where people came to be with the ancestors. That’s what the stones represent.’ I felt no shame in embellishing Martin’s tentative conclusions about the function of Avebury. ‘A woman’s skeleton was found in the ditch, laid in a ring of sarsen. Like she was the guardian of the place. Possibly a sacrifice.’

  He shook his head in wonder. ‘Didn’t know that.’

  We sat side by side, not saying much, the last of the rain dripping off the trees, his brown fleece hanging on a branch to dry in the gusty wind, his hair in damp ringlets. His skin glowed in the firelight. Eventually I stood up, stepped over the fire again and went home, not sure what had happened between us.

  After clearing up in the caf, I set off again for Tolemac, to warn Bryn he’s about to be evicted from the wood. At least, my guess is he’s the mysterious Bryn Kirkwood, whose signature was scrawled in a book on Gurdjieff: the bender is in the same place under the trees as the one there at equinox. Names never entered yesterday’s conversation. Generous with information about the Goddess, he was sparing with what he revealed about himself. All I know is that he works on building sites, off and on, as a carpenter. Age, parentage, significant others: all a mystery. Not much small-talk, rather intense.

  The bender’s still there, its sheeting scattered with wild white cherry blossom. No sign of Bryn. He has secured it by weighting down the front flap with a row of stones, as if to say ‘Private’, the fire banked with turves, emitting a thin trickle of smoke. He told me he spends most days walking with the dog, looking for crop circles; never becomes tired because the energy they give off is amazing.

  I hesitate, unsure what to do. Sometimes the pagans abandon tents for no clear reason. Graham would have no scruples about dismantling the bender and dumping Bryn’s belongings in the skip.

  …a handful of withered wild flowers on damp leaf-mould, a smell of burning, clothing scattered, a pair of torn jeans hanging off the bough of a birch tree, like the aftermath of an air crash…

  At Greenham, the children screamed when the bailiffs came to evict the women camping there. Frannie threw our backpacks into someone’s car just in time, but we lost Margaret’s tent and the sleeping-bags.

  Nothing I can do. I shouldn’t get involved. I jog through the wood to the lane and climb back over the barbed wire. In the distance, someone is on the chalk track coming down from the Ridgeway, a dog racing ahead.

  Then the dog’s tangling with my legs, jumping up to plant muddy paws on my jacket.

  ‘Hey, hey–what’s his name?’

  ‘Conan,’ says Bryn, arriving in time to save me from being licked to death. The late-afternoon sun picks out golden lights in his caramel-coloured curls.

  ‘The Barbarian?’

  ‘No.’ Not a flicker of amusement. ‘Spelt C-y-n-o-n. Celtic name, means Divine Hound.’

  ‘Right.’ Spattered with mud and burrs, nose jammed in my crotch, Conan/Cynon looks about as divine as my left buttock. ‘Glad I caught you. I came to warn you you’re about to be evicted. The National Trust wardens are on their way.’

  ‘Are they now?’ He doesn’t ask how I know this. ‘Movin’ on tomorrow, anyway. Goin’ home to see my boy.’

  ‘Your boy?’

  ‘His mother and I aren’t together. If I don’t turn up for his birthday, day after tomorrow, she’ll try and stop me seein’ him altogether. Got my solicitor workin’ on it, though. I could look after him better than her. She’s all over the place.’ He snaps his fingers to call Cynon, who is quivering ecstatically as he sniffs a pile of horse droppings, and starts strolling towards the wood. ‘There’s an amazin’ crop circle appeared below Barbury. Like–spheres, with interlocking zigzags. Met a feller along the Ridgeway said it represented the diatonic scale of musical notes because that’s the way aliens can communicate with us.’

  ‘Wasn’t that the plot of Close Encounters?’

  Bryn looks blank. ‘That the one set in the railway station? My foster-mother had it on video–made her cry every time.’ He hooks two fingers into the dog’s collar, to hold him safely as a vehicle comes trundling up the lane. ‘Hey, said I’d take you to the Goddess’s spring, didn’t I? We could go now.’

  The vehicle is a National Trust Land Rover.

  ‘That’s not such a good idea,’ I say, as it parks on the verge by Tolemac. ‘I think you’re about to be evicted.’

  ‘Dawn, then? Best time. It’s amazing.’

  I’ve no memory of agr
eeing to any such expedition. ‘Hurry up. The wardens will pull down the bender.’

  ‘I’ll wait for you at the lay-by on the A4. Half past five, sunrise.’

  He lopes off down the lane. Ed, on his own, climbs down from the Land Rover. Instead of following Bryn into the wood, he strides towards me. ‘Who the flick was that?’

  ‘He’s the one who’s camping in the wood.’

  ‘I’d worked that out. You never said you knew him. You could have mentioned it this morning, saved me the bother of coming out.’ The lines by his mouth are chiselled more deeply than usual into his cheeks.

  ‘Hardly your business who I know, is it?’ I say, then regret it.

  ‘No,’ he says, turning and starting to walk back down the lane. ‘You’re right. None of my fucking business.’

  I watch him climb over the fence into Tolemac to remonstrate with Bryn. As arses go, I’d say it’s level pegging.

  On the way home, I remember Frannie’s social worker was calling in this afternoon. Frannie’s watching television. There’s a note on the hall table.

  Ring me on my mobile. I think we should have your grandmother at the Geriatric Psychiatric Day Centre for assessment.

  Frannie looks up from Neighbours.

  ‘How are you feeling?’ I ask her.

  ‘Fine.’

  ‘What about Adele’s visit?’

  ‘Nosy.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Kept wanting to know who the prime minister was. I told her, Smarm Bucket Blair, much good have he done us pensioners. And she must’ve asked three times what day of the week it was.’

  ‘What did you tell her?’ Holding my breath.

  ‘Told her to look on the calendar in the kitchen.’

  ‘She was playing with you,’ I tell Adele on the phone. ‘Being deliberately obstructive.’

  ‘Well, I could see on the calendar that she marks off the days. So she clearly has some difficulty with short-term memory’

  ‘Maybe I mark off the calendar. OK, I admit, she does keep track so she knows she’s taken her pills, but I have difficulty remembering which day it is, and I’m twenty-five.’

  ‘India, you have to accept your grandmother finds it harder to cope than she used to. I did a couple of standard cognitive-function tests on her. Not a perfect diagnostic tool, but it gives us a yardstick. She did significantly worse today than she did six months ago. It’s time we had a proper assessment done. I’ve booked her in for the first appointment I can get.’

  Behind me, Fran calls from the lounge: ‘Ind! Forgot to tell you, those buggerin’ lights were there again last night, up on the hill.’

  The sun hasn’t yet lifted over Waden Hill as I make my way down the river path, wondering what on earth to do about Frannie. It’s impossible to see any hill from her bedroom downstairs. Whatever she sees is in her dreams, which suggests she has trouble sorting what’s real and what’s not.

  The early-morning light is pearly, and a white skirt of mist clings to Silbury. Cobwebs beaded with dew are strung across the path. Yesterday, May Day, there would have been people around, but this morning there’s no one on the path, and hardly any early commuters on the A4. No sign of him in the lay-by. I wait a few minutes, scanning the road from Avebury, until I look behind me over the hedge and spot him making his way across the field, Cynon the dog racing ahead.

  ‘I was expecting you from the other direction,’ I say, going through the gate to meet them. ‘What were you doing up that way?’

  ‘Spent the night in the Long Barrow.’ He tips back his battered trilby, and brushes ragged curls out of his eyes.

  ‘That must have been spooky.’ A five-thousand-year-old tomb isn’t my idea of a cosy campsite.

  He looks at me as if he doesn’t understand what I’m talking about. ‘It’s beautiful there at night. So quiet.’

  ‘So dark.’

  ‘Not with candles. Come on, let’s get to the spring before the world wakes up.’ He sets out confidently across the field. ‘We’ll take the long way–less muddy’

  The sun has risen, and our shadows stretch ahead like long peg dolls. Bryn leads towards a plantation of trees clinging to the hillside below the Long Barrow. We skirt the top of the wood, then drop down into the trees, following what can barely be described as a path. He reaches out a hand to help me over a fallen branch. His fingers are dry and warm; he doesn’t let go. It seems perfectly natural, like children holding hands.

  ‘There she is,’ he whispers.

  ‘Who?’ I peer through the tree-trunks for an animal: a deer, perhaps.

  ‘The Goddess.’

  There’s a flash of blue, something winking in the sunlight. As we step out of the trees I see her, sitting under a willow by the sparkling water, legs tucked to one side, head slightly bent. She’s the river-daughter, the naiad, the water nymph, iridescent as a dragonfly’s wings, silver-haired, scaly-skinned. A shiver goes through me: she’s beautiful and terrible, and watching me out of the corner of her eye.

  A step further and she resolves into humbler parts: a shop dummy, with huge painted eyes, mosaic pieces of china and coloured glass glued all over her like fish scales, a tinsel wig stuck to her bald head. Something so urban ought to be grotesque, here in the middle of a wood with tiny green leaves unfurling overhead, and dog’s mercury and celandines pushing through the leaf-mould at her feet, but instead the effect is graceful, magical. The tree above her is threaded with coloured ribbons.

  ‘She’s lovely,’ I say. ‘You didn’t make her, did you?’

  He shakes his head. ‘Wish I had. It’s a healing place, this.’ Beyond the Goddess, a shallow brown pool trickles away in two streams, sunbeams striking dancing lights on the surface.

  I’m still holding his hand. Embarrassed, I slip my fingers out of his grasp, sensing his reluctance to let go. ‘Thank you,’ I say.

  ‘What for?’

  ‘Bringing me here.’

  ‘Are you going to make an offering?’ Bryn digs in his pocket and brings out a scrap of silky blue material, perhaps part of a woman’s scarf, and ties it round a willow branch. It’s the kind of thing my mother would have done. When the fabric rots and falls away from the bough, so will sickness and hurt fall away too…

  How Ed would scoff.

  ‘For you,’ Bryn says. ‘Blue’s your colour. Like hers.’ He nods towards the Goddess.

  ‘And for your boy?’

  The smile lights up his whole face.

  I stand on the stepping-stones that jut out into the pool, watching strands of weed ripple in the current. Coins glint in the water, half buried in silt. ‘What’s he called?’

  ‘Fergus. Means “best warrior”.’

  ‘How old?’

  ‘Five.’ He bends to pick a celandine from the bank, and drops it onto the stream before joining me on the stepping-stones. It swirls lazily away in the direction of Silbury. ‘I’m going to bring him here in the summer. We’ll hitch down together, come for Solstice.’

  ‘Won’t he still be in school?’

  ‘I’ll bring him out. Educational, I reckon, to come to a place like this.’

  ‘My mother brought me to Avebury when I was small,’ I say. There are tiny fish in the water, hardly visible against the muddy bottom. Cynon is nosing around the edge of the wood, hoping for rabbits. I hunt for a twig to play Pooh sticks.

  ‘Will you come for Solstice?’ Bryn asks, unaware that I live here.

  I shrug my shoulders and throw my twig into the stream before walking back across the stones to the bank. There are empty tea-light cases scattered around the Goddess’s feet, and I automatically begin to pick them up, my hair as usual coming loose from its pins as I stoop to reach them.

  ‘Hey, you shouldn’t do that.’ Bryn, from behind me.

  ‘I was only tidying…’

  ‘They’re offerings. Leave them.’

  ‘But they’re finished.’

  ‘Doesn’t matter.’ Not angry, but determined to get his way. He
takes them out of my hand, and places them carefully back on the ground. Straightening up, he turns to face me. His eyes are clear blue, long-lashed. He brushes the hair off my face with careful fingers, and a thrill goes through me. ‘You have lovely hair. Like chocolate.’

  The Goddess is watching us, with calm, indifferent eyes. We’re inches apart. What would that soft, sulky mouth taste like? But no, it would be like kissing a damaged flower.

  ‘Thank you,’ I say again, turning to the path that leads through the wood.

  We part on the track to the Long Barrow.

  ‘Have to get my stuff,’ he says, jerking a thumb in the direction of the barrow. The megaliths ranked at one end jut up on the skyline, making it look like a sleeping dinosaur. He keeps looking steadily at me until I understand, too late, I’m meant to respond to an invitation.

  ‘I’d better head…um, back where I’m staying,’ I say. ‘So…er, goodbye. Have a nice time with Fergus.’

  ‘Goodbye,’ he says. ‘Goddess go with you.’ He holds me with his eyes a moment longer, like he’s memorizing the look of me, then sets off briskly up the hill, the dog at his heels. I walk back to the gate, and watch them until they eventually disappear between the tall stones guarding the entrance to the barrow, wondering what it is about him that still feels so hauntingly familiar.

  PART FIVE

  Earth Magic

  One of the ideas about ancient religion that gained currency in the 1930s was that of the Great Goddess, a female deity believed to be common to all primitive cultures, the embodiment of fertility so essential in agricultural societies, and the prototype for later divinities such as Demeter or Isis, or the triple goddesses of Celtic folklore–Maiden, Mother, Hag. Archaeologists produced as evidence big-bellied and breasted figurines from digs in the Near East; Margaret Murray’s claims about witch cults and Robert Graves’s book The White Goddess seemed to add body and blood to the theory.

  Alas, like most simple and pleasing theories that claim to explain everything, it turned out to be wrong or, at least, unproven and unprovable. (Keiller was one of the first, incidentally, to debunk Murray’s research into witch trials and prove that she had twisted the evidence to fit her thesis.) The big-bellied figurines may or may not have been goddesses. But the idea of the Goddess had caught the popular imagination, and has since proved difficult to shift, particularly among modern pagans.