The Buried Circle

by Jenni Mills

  ‘Oh, God.’ I scramble up the slope to where I left the camera bag. ‘I didn’t film any of it.’

  When I return home, John’s battered pickup is parked outside the house. The front door opens before I’m halfway up the path. ‘It’s OK,’ he says. ‘I wanted to reassure you she–’

  ‘Reassure me about what’

  ‘Sssh. She’s asleep.’

  It’s a quarter past four. ‘How long’s she been home? She shouldn’t have been back until five. And why are you here?’

  ‘Come into the kitchen. Adele did try to reach you but your phone was off.’

  ‘I was filming, most of the day’ I follow him through the hallway past Frannie’s closed door. ‘Why didn’t she leave a message? What’s been going on?’

  John shuts the kitchen door behind us. There’s a bottle of wine open on the table. He pours us both a glass.

  ‘She was…difficult at the day centre. They called me to fetch her home.’

  ‘What do you mean?’ It sounds like the title of a song–Geriatric Punk, ‘Difficult At The Day Centre’. But in all fairness, I could see the portents this morning through the car window.

  ‘Someone seems to have thought it was a good idea to get her to cut out paper tulips. Frannie couldn’t see the point.’

  ‘Frankly, neither can I.’

  ‘According to the wally I met, it’s a normal part of the assessment procedure.’

  ‘Assessing what, for Christ’s sake? She’s arthritic in her right wrist, it’s almost impossible for her to use scissors with any degree of dexterity–’

  ‘Indy, don’t get angry with me. Sit down.’

  ‘I’m not angry with you, I–’ I am angry with myself, though, for letting them take her to the day centre and allow her to be humiliated. I glare out of the window, over a pile of breakfast plates, still in the sink. Feel like I betrayed her. The garden’s a mess too. There are more molehills. Ought to have mown the lawn weeks ago.

  ‘She told them she wanted to go home. They said there was no one free to take her. Then they left her to her own devices while they were getting ready to serve lunch, and she wandered off. Somehow they lost track of her until she started screaming the place down, according to the wally. Not sure I entirely believe his version. She seemed perfectly calm when I got there.’

  Hysteria isn’t Frannie’s style. ‘I’m going to ring Adele,’ I say.

  ‘She’ll have gone home by now.’ Having worked briefly in social care, John doesn’t have a high opinion of the system; according to my watch, it’s only twenty-five past four. The pipes start to rumble as the downstairs loo flushes.

  ‘Uh-oh,’ says John. ‘Frannie’s up and about. Maybe you should ask for her version first.’

  ‘Didn’t she tell you anything on the way home?’

  ‘Not a word, apart from how buggerin’ stupid it was having to cut out paper tulips.’

  I open the kitchen door at the same time as the cloakroom door opens. Frannie spots me, tries to retreat.

  ‘Hey,’ I say, before she can. ‘What’ve you been up to?’

  ‘Forgot to pull the chain.’

  ‘You didn’t–I heard the flush go. What happened at the day centre?’

  ‘Buggerin’ tulips. Like we was at nursery school. What’s the point of that? I’m not a basket case.’

  ‘Was that it?’

  ‘In’t that enough?’

  ‘I thought something else must have upset you. They told John you were screaming.’

  ‘Social workers are bloody liars. Might’ve got a bit heated, tellin’ em to take me home. Didn’t scream, as such.’

  ‘And that was it, then? You wanted to go home because of the tulips?’

  ‘Nothin’ there for me. All old people. Load of old men with dribble down their jumpers playing cards, old women staring into space. Not even a decent newspaper to read, only the Star, and somebody’d filled in the quick crossword with a load of gobbledegook words.’ Her eyes are sliding away from mine towards the half-open bedroom door. ‘I’m tired, India. Let me go back to bed.’ There’s a plaintive crack in her voice.

  ‘Go on, then.’

  I watch her shuffle into her room. Before she closes the door, she peers out and gives me an apologetic smile. For a moment her face is lit with the ghost of the old Frannie. ‘Lysol, cabbage and pee,’ she says. She watches my face for a reaction. Clearly this is supposed to mean something, but I haven’t a clue what. ‘Sorry,’ she adds, looking disappointed. ‘Don’t mean to be a trouble.’ Her refrain.

  There’s a choking feeling in my chest. The tap thunders in the kitchen sink as John tackles the washing-up. The letter from Social Services, with Adele’s telephone number, must be somewhere…It’s on the dining-table along with the gas bill, which I’ve forgotten to pay.

  The switchboard answers immediately, but Adele is not in her office. While I’m waiting for them to track her down, I plug the mini-DV camera into the television so I can play back the film shot this afternoon, belatedly, of the badger sett on Windmill Hill. Martin refused to dig into the spoil heap again–’Sorry, petal, not even in the interests of reconstructive telly’–so I made do with wide shots, and a piece to camera as he crouched by the side of a yawning hole under the tree roots.

  John sticks his head round the door. ‘I’m off…sorry, didn’t realize you were on the phone.’

  ‘It’s OK. Thanks for everything.’

  ‘Would stop, but I’ve a client due in twenty minutes…’

  ‘Adele Kostunic,’ comes a voice in my ear. I wave goodbye to John, who is backing out of the room.

  ‘I thought you’d phone,’ Adele says, when I tell her who’s calling.

  ‘So what happened?’ I ask.

  ‘Can’t get to the bottom of it–I wasn’t there at the time. I gather Frannie took against–’

  ‘I know about the tulips.’ On the television screen, a close-up of the mouth of the badger sett wavers in and out of focus. ‘But was there anything else that upset her?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ says Adele. ‘Bob reckons she’d wandered off into the other room. Which is fine–we encourage them to amuse themselves. Then suddenly she’s screaming her head off.’

  ‘Shouldn’t Bob should have been keeping more of an eye on her? Wasn’t assessment the whole point of today? Besides, she says she didn’t scream.’

  ‘Well, I know for a fact she did because I heard it. I was in an office down the corridor–it was that loud.’

  On the rushes, Martin begins his piece to camera. ‘What did happen at Avebury, five thousand years ago?’ I grope for the remote to turn down the volume. ‘This badger sett, on the slopes of Windmill Hill, could hold some of the answers…no, dammit, start again–’

  ‘Frannie isn’t a screamer,’ I say into the phone. ‘She’d become angry and shout, perhaps–though she’s far too polite to do that among strangers. But she’d never scream. Not unless something really bad happened. Have you asked the other old people what they saw?’

  ‘It’s a geriatric psychiatric centre. Most of them are confused.’

  ‘She says there were old men in there playing cards. They can’t be that doo-lally…’

  ‘“Doo-lally”,’ says Adele, sternly, ‘is not a term we use.’

  ‘So how did people live here in the past?’ The piece to camera blares out again.

  ‘Sorry,’ I say. ‘Need to turn the telly down…’

  ‘This badger sett, on the slopes of Windmill Hill, is about to give up some of its secrets…’

  There’s a strange noise on the tape: a thin, high, breathy keening sound.

  ‘India, have you considered the possibility that your grandmother has been concealing from you how disturbed she is…’

  ‘In the spoil heap, dug out by a young badger searching for somewhere to live, ancient flint and bone…’

  ‘Sorry, what did you say?’

  A movement reflected on the TV screen, a white flicker like a ghost, makes me glance over
my shoulder. Frannie is standing in the doorway, transfixed by the picture on the screen, tears running down her cheeks. If there was more breath behind the sound she’s making, you’d call it screaming. Screaming that comes out like a whisper.

  CHAPTER 32

  1941

  Lysol, cabbage and pee: the hospital always has the same smell, winter or summer. In the almoner’s office we giggle about it, tell each other if we had a music-hall act that’s what we’d call ourselves. After a bit, the names get transferred to three of the young housemen, who we reckon are a bit bumptious even for junior doctors. Lysol’s tall and dark, with arched eyebrows and flaring nostrils and a posh voice. Cabbage is round and jolly, a Scouser, but turns nasty if the nurses don’t jump to it. Scholarship boy, they sneer behind his back, like they can’t forgive him for being poor and clever. And Pee is what my dad would have called a long streak of dripping, skinny and stoop-shouldered with glasses, pockmarked skin like he never ate a fresh vegetable in his life.

  It was Cabbage I saw in the day centre, his skin all loose and folding now like wet cheesecloth, but no mistaking that stocky barrel chest and whiny, sneering Liverpool voice. He was clutching his cards like someone was going to snatch them off him, and his glasses were held together with a piece of grubby sticking plaster. But it was Cabbage all right, Cabbage who could maybe take a guess at what those buggerin’ lights are looking for on the hill, if he put his confused old mind to it.

  He was always kind to me, but still I’m blowed if I want him to see me, here, now, and start reminiscing about what’s past and done. Never know but what he might turn poison, writing letters like that old bitch from Berwick Bassett that used to be the housemaid at the Manor, spying on me the night Mr Cromley made me go masked into the garden. I backs out of the room slow and careful, like. Then I’m standing in the corridor with its shiny green lino, and the smell of gravy floating down it from the dining room, and I think, Was it Cabbage, really? Or is it only the smell makes me think of him?

  That makes me feel all panicky and sick, because suddenly I’m in that place where I don’t know any longer when it is, where all the pathways of time meet and cross and twist round on each other, like the moonlit gravel paths between the box hedges in the Manor garden, and I think of Mr Keiller holding the chalky white thing aloft, and the Barber Surgeon’s bones smashed to smithereens in the Blitz but somehow whole again, and my torn drawing of him uncrumpling itself, and his eyeless sockets looking up at me from where he’d been hidden all them centuries under the big stone. I thinks, The truth will out in the end. What lies under stone don’t lie there for ever.

  And then I realize my hands are over my eyes and my mouth is wide open and my throat hurts, and that gay-boy social worker is trying to shush me. I in’t having none of it. Maybe if I shout loud enough, nobody’ll hear what Cabbage has to say. Because it’s rubbish, in’t it? It’s all old rubbish. Rubbish that has to be hid away where no one can see it. La la la. I can’t hear you, no one can hear you. None of it happened, after all. If I go far enough back I’ll lose meself and none of it will happen. La la la. Someone grabs my shoulders and starts to shake me, la la la, so my teeth clash together and I’m afraid my plate will fall out, then there’s footsteps down the corridor and Adele, the one thinks I don’t remember her name but I do, is saying:

  ‘What the hell do you think you’re doing, Bob?’

  CHAPTER 33

  ‘I can’t do this,’ I tell John. ‘I’m not capable–or qualified, for God’s sake. I don’t understand what’s happening to her…’

  ‘I’ll come over,’ he says. ‘I’ll get rid of my client–’

  ‘Oh, sorry, I’d forgotten. Shouldn’t have rung you. Why didn’t you let it go to answering machine?’

  ‘Call it shaman’s instinct.’

  ‘Don’t cancel your client. Frannie’s back in bed, anyway.’ The bedroom door is firmly closed. I feel like putting a bolt on the outside of it, but I know that’s not the answer.

  ‘You’re filming again tomorrow, aren’t you? I’ll be over first thing. Leave it to me to ring Adele and sort this.’

  ‘I can manage, really…’

  ‘No, Indy, you can’t. Not on your own–’ He breaks off. There’s a silence.

  ‘Oh, bollocks,’ I say. ‘I can’t let her be put into a home, John. She’d turn her face to the wall and die.’

  In the night it rains again. I hear it lashing the windows, imagine it running in hissing rivulets down the slope where we found the badgers’ sett, eroding the spoil heaps and washing away the bone and flint. Undermining the sett itself until it crumbles, melts down the bank and there’s nothing there.

  I climb out of bed and peer through the streaming glass. Lights flash on the hill, bobbing and weaving to and fro. Nighthawks, searching for treasure under cover of the rain? The ghosts of Neolithic farmers?

  Or was that part a dream?

  At any rate, it was a disturbed night, lying awake mithering, as John would call it. Worrying what to do about Frannie. I’m afraid she’s becoming too confused to look after herself, but it’s no exaggeration to say putting her in a home would kill her. Old folks wither in them places like rows of dead runner beans, she says. Rot from the inside. I couldn’t do that to her.

  Mithering, too, about other stuff, Ed and piles of paper that keep growing, letters that come in bank envelopes and tell me I owe thousands of pounds, bank statements that are endless columns of numbers, changing faster and faster until they become a flickering blur, streams of numbers running down the windowpane, streams of numbers bubbling down a hillside, pouring into stone pits in the circle, dark holes under the trees, mud slides of numbers, fragments of paper and bone, the dark thud of helicopter vanes overhead, whirlwinds of letters that make no sense, old photographs that fade and grow unfocused, Alexander Keiller smiling like a Cheshire cat at the camera, the water dissolving his face into a mask of carved bone, nothing left of his essence but the grin, a grin that wavers and becomes a ripple on water, water making everything sodden and unreadable, water that explodes into fragments of glass and fire under the trees…

  Then I’m awake again and a miserable damp Friday dawn is bleaching the curtains.

  In spite of Kit’s promise to finish before Solstice, this is the last day we can work before the masses start to arrive, and it’s clear to everyone the stone won’t be cemented in place by the end of the afternoon. The megalith is fully uncovered, lying in its pit under a heavy sky, but at two o’clock the students still haven’t finished trussing the sarsen with honeysuckle ropes to Kit’s satisfaction.

  ‘Look at the size of him,’ says Ibby, admiringly, as Harry pans along the side of the stone where a brawny lad in shorts is tugging away on the Neolithic equivalent of a reef knot.

  ‘Her,’ says Martin. ‘Assuming you mean the stone. This would be what Keiller categorized as a Type B, lozenge-shaped rather than a straight-sided pillar, therefore symbolically female.’

  ‘A Goddess stone, in another words?’ suggests Ibby, ignoring Martin’s pained expression.

  ‘You’re not going to attempt to raise it, now, are you?’ says Martin, to Kit. ‘Maybe we should hold on, till after Solstice.’

  ‘Martin,’ says Ibby. ‘Stop fussing.’

  ‘There won’t be time to cement it in place. I cancelled the delivery’

  ‘We can still make it safe,’ says Kit. ‘Chalk blocks, that’s all the original circle-builders needed. But if you want to leave raising it until the week after next…’

  ‘No,’ says Ibby fiercely. ‘I don’t have a crew to film it the week after next. Now or never, Martin. Leave Kit to it. You and India go and do a piece to camera about stone types.’ She squats down by the portable monitor again and concentrates on the screen.

  ‘Yeah, go on, piss off,’ says Kit. ‘We’ll be faster without you.’

  ‘No problem.’ Martin picks up his satchel, huffily extracts a Mars Bar and strides away. ‘I’m only the bloody archaeologist, after al
l’

  Carrying the mini-DVC and a lightweight tripod, I follow, scanning the bank, hoping that Ed might appear. As a result, I almost trip over Martin, who has squatted to examine something on the ground. ‘Hey, India. It’s a modern offering.’

  At his boots is a newly turned mound of earth, easily mistaken for a molehill if it weren’t for the wildflowers strewn on top, and the protruding corner of a glossy photograph. Martin starts to scrape off the dark brown soil, mixed with pellets of chalk.

  ‘Hold on,’ I say, kicking open the legs of the tripod. ‘This would be good to film.’

  ‘You want me to talk?’

  ‘Of course. Describe what you’ve found. I’m shooting over your shoulder.’ I focus the camera close-up on his big hairy fingers. ‘Speed. In your own time.’ The fingers brush away the final layer of dirt, revealing a family snapshot, a fair-haired boy holding a pink and green plush-furred dinosaur up to the camera and peeping from behind it.

  ‘Oh.’ The camera catches only a glimpse, before Martin’s fingers go into reverse and start sweeping earth back quickly to cover it. ‘I don’t think I want to describe this after all,’ he says.

  Someone was standing next to the boy, probably his mother, her arm round him–but all that shows is her hand and a few strands of blond hair. Her face has been fiercely scribbled over with black biro, so heavily that the glossy surface is pitted and scored, and part of the photo has been torn away, the jagged edge bisecting her breast. There are ashy flakes mixed with the soil.

  ‘Sorry,’ says Martin. ‘It seems–sort of private. And creepy, too. I think he’s burned the rest of the picture.’

  ‘You don’t know it’s a he.’

  ‘Take my word for it, it’s a he.’ Martin has completely covered the photo. ‘Let’s leave it, OK?’

  I turn off the camera. ‘Sorry’

  ‘No, I’m sorry. Stuff like that–well, it makes me feel a bit sick. Kind of black magicky Not that I believe in that twaddle, but I am the son of a vicar. Dad was always having to clear up peculiar things from the churchyard. Let’s go talk girl stones and boy stones.’