The Buried Circle

by Jenni Mills

  The scratchy thing was against my flat little chest. I knew what it was now. The crumpled page Riz had torn out of the Bible in the church.

  And the Lord God said unto the woman, What is this that thou hast done?

  My mouth’s unbearably dry. On the footstool, my mug of tea has gone cold; it tastes vile.

  John lights another cigarette, and I’m amazed to see his hands are trembling. ‘Trouble is, the dead wrap their arms round your neck and cling on. You got to prise their dead fingers off you. Whose eyes do you think I see at night, Indy? He’s waiting for me in the Lower World, every time, first thing I have to step over a poor bastard in Argentinian uniform, lying in the mud of that God-forsaken place, the wind tugging the photo of his wife and his two kids that’s clutched in his hand. And sometimes he has Mick Feather’s eyes.’

  ‘I’m not ready after all,’ I say. ‘Let’s…not talk about it, John. Please, not now.’

  ‘Riz was the problem,’ says John, implacable. ‘Riz owed money to a dealer. Somewhere further up the food chain, someone was interested in finding out where the party was being held, and who was organizing it. Louis and Patrick thought they were so clever, but they didn’t have a clue. They saw themselves as hip young businessmen cashing in on a new idea, but they had no idea how much of a business opportunity those parties were for the people who controlled the Es and whiz that kept people loved up and dancing all night. So Riz found out somehow where Louis and Patrick were hanging out and, armed with that information, he did a deal.

  ‘Few days before the party was to be held, Louis and Patrick had a visit from some heavy gentlemen. They brought a contract for the boys to sign: a partnership opportunity, was the way they put it. To help them understand the advantages of this new business arrangement, they smashed the computers and set fire to the garden. Then the same gentlemen, for reasons that remain obscure, possibly for no more than fun, turned their attention to the hippies camped in Tolemac’

  Keir and I were sitting under the trees by the side of Mick’s van, taking turns on an Etch-A-Sketch Mick had picked up cheap at Eastville market. Mum and John were over by the fire, talking. Mick was…‘Mick was sprawled on the ground at the back of his van with one of his mates, both of them about six light years out of it because they’d been doing K and Es together.’ John rubs his face. ‘Is it me, Indy, or has it gone cold? Riz was nowhere around–maybe somebody slipped him the word to make himself scarce. First we knew of it was revving engines, then this bloody great crash that was the gate, smashed to matchsticks.

  ‘Two Range Rovers came slewing across the grass into the wood, one doing a handbrake turn so he was pointing the right way to make a getaway when they’d done what they came for. The doors flew open and these guys–don’t ask me how many, could only have been four or five at most but it looked like a frigging army–came piling out with sledgehammers and, Christ albloodymighty, a couple of shotguns. Had no notion who they were, what they wanted, or what the hell to do. I still had the insane idea they were only pissed-off locals and I’d be able to talk them out of it, until I saw that the one at the back was a huge black guy with a sawn-off, and you don’t get many of those to the pound in rural Wiltshire.’

  Keir and I looked up, and saw Mum rising to her feet, flapping her arms at us and screaming: ‘Get in the van!’

  It felt like one of those dreams where you see danger coming but you can’t move. Keir was round-eyed. I tugged on the back of his T-shirt, but Mum had to shout again before we scrambled to our feet and jumped into Mick’s van through the open passenger door.

  ‘The wrong van,’ says John. ‘Meg meant you to run for hers–she probably had some notion she’d follow you and drive you out of there to safety, though it was too late for that: the second Range Rover was parked across the gateway. I’ve no idea if the guys with sledgehammers even saw you because they were already going for Biro’s ridiculous little Citron van, the nearest and easiest target. The sides crumpled like paper. I started yelling, but the black guy with the sawn-off shotgun stood in front of me, making it crystal that discussion was not an option. You think this can’t be happening–middle of the afternoon, hardly a quarter of a mile from houses, cars, buses, visitors, telephones. Someone had to be walking round the stone circle; someone had to hear the noise. But it all happened so fast. The other shotgun was pointing at Mick and Biro, who were not laughing now, lying on the ground with their mouths open wondering if they’d dropped acid by mistake.’

  ‘They set fire to Mum’s van, didn’t they?’ I ask.

  John nods. ‘Meg tried to go over there but I grabbed her arm and wouldn’t let go. The doors were open. I could see the bunks, pillows still dented, covers half pulled up, your old Ted lying on the quilt next to a pair of your shorts. The guy jumped out of the back of the van, a metal can in his hand. He tossed a lighted rag inside and everything caught at once with a whoosh. Then the guys with the sledgehammers got fed up of battering Biro’s Citron into scrap metal and went for Mick’s van, where you were.’

  Keir, first in, had wriggled along the bench seat towards the steering-wheel, and I threw myself face down on the cracked brown plastic upholstery. On thy belly…The van was parked with its nose towards the woodland, away from the clearing. We couldn’t see what was happening, but from all the shouting I knew it was something bad. There was a crash, glass breaking. Maybe this was what Rissole meant, about Christians hating pagans.

  ‘Indy,’ said Keir, his face all crumpled. ‘Where’s Dad?’ He never called him Dad, always Mick, so he had to have been frightened.

  ‘John’s with him,’ I said. ‘John’s been a soldier. He’s got a power animal.’

  ‘Better be a fucking tiger, then,’ said Keir, trying for brave. He was clutching my hand, his fingernails digging into my palm.

  ‘Course it’s a fucking tiger.’ Better not let on it was only a big rabbit. ‘But, anyway, I’m going to lock the doors.’ I sat up, and risked a look out of the side window. Mum and John were standing by the fire. Someone else was there, in front of them, and I couldn’t see what was happening. ‘I can see your dad,’ I lied. ‘He’s with John and Mum.’ I pushed down the button to lock the door, then squirmed back along the seat and locked my side too. ‘Maybe we should stay down. Mum wants us to hide.’

  Keir slid down, almost under the steering-wheel. I lay along the bench seat, my nose full of the sweaty, farty smell of the cracked plastic. There was a flat whump, like someone had kicked a soggy football, and the glass on the passenger side shone with orange light, tipping Keir’s blond hair with red-gold.

  ‘What’s happening?’ Not being able to see was really frightening. I couldn’t remember the Battle of the Beanfield, when the police had attacked the Peace Convoy, but Mum had told me about helicopters overhead and policemen with shields and sticks, and John punching one of them and ending up flat on the ground with three of them kicking him.

  Keir shuffled upright to peer out of the side window. The glow from outside reflected his face onto the windscreen, a crumpled autumn leaf, golden brown and orange. I thought he was probably crying.

  Then the windscreen exploded.

  ‘When the guy with the sledgehammer went for Mick’s van, your mother and I forgot we were looking down the barrels of a shotgun. Soon as I moved, I got the rifle butt in my face, but Meg managed to duck under his arm, and was at the van before anyone could stop her, pulling on the door handle and screaming her head off that there were kids in there.’

  ‘We’d locked the doors,’ I say. ‘I thought that was what she wanted us to do.’

  ‘She was terrified the pyromaniac bastard was chucking petrol in the back already, though he was nowhere near. The bloke with the sledgehammer was in a trance–couldn’t work out how this fury had got past the shotgun, which right then was being jabbed handle end into my stomach. At the back of the van, the other shotgun’s screaming On yer feet, at Mick and Biro. Get up, you cunts. Then Keir’s little face appears over the lip of the windscr
een, tears rolling down his face and shouting for his dad…’

  * * *

  Mum’s yelling and there’s glass all over the place, can feel it in my hair, it’s on the seat and when I try to push myself up a piece jabs into my hand and there’s red blood on the brown plastic. Thunder overhead, too much noise.

  Keir’s going, Dad! And What shall I do, Indy? and Mum’s shouting, Get out of there, fast as you can, and peering in through what’s left of the windscreen is this man with thick red lips, and a tattoo on his neck, blue curling flames licking out of the top of his black T-shirt. Then Keir’s reaching for the key that Mick’s left in the ignition and I don’t know if this is a good idea or a bad idea but I know we have to get away somehow. Never occurs to me that Keir can’t drive the van, his feet don’t reach the pedals.

  Keir turns the key and the engine coughs but the van doesn’t go forwards. It jumps backwards, and the wheels bump down hard. Something screams like air coming out through a tiny hole, a thin sharp needle of sound skewering through the thunder overhead, transmitted from the heart of the memory crystal.

  And the Lord God said unto the woman, What is this that thou hast done?

  ‘The other guy with the shotgun had been telling him to get up, and he couldn’t,’ says John. ‘When Mick took ketamine, his legs went. Mr Softeeland. He was at the back of the van, trying to remember what his feet were for when Keir started the engine. The van’d been left in reverse. It leaped back and stalled. Mick’s legs were under the back wheels. You didn’t see this, of course.’

  ‘I heard him,’ I say. ‘Oh, God, I heard him.’

  ‘The bastards had done what they came for, and more. They were already piling into one of the cars because the column of smoke from the burning van had attracted the attention of a military helicopter that was on exercise over the Marlborough Downs.’

  The memory crystals are releasing more pictures. Billowing black smoke, leaves crinkling, trees on fire. Helicopter rotors fanning the flames. Sirens, men in dark blue jackets and yellow trousers and helmets, hissing snakes of water, the acrid stink of wet, charred plastic. Keir, white and terrified, clinging to my hand, thinking the dinosaur bird was coming for us. Mum’s face through the passenger window, shaking her head, her face hard.

  She wouldn’t let us out until the helicopter had taken off again.

  John rubs his hand over his face. ‘Meg lost it. She was out of her mind that she’d come so close to losing you, and she started yelling at you like it was your fault, the way people get angry when they’re frightened. You don’t remember that, I hope?’

  What have you done, Indy? Who did you tell?

  I shake my head. ‘Not a thing.’

  ‘The military chopper airlifted Mick to hospital, which saved his life–for the time being. Both legs were amputated, he couldn’t adapt to life in a chair, and managed, after a couple of wretched years, to overdose himself. I’d like to believe in cosmic justice, and tidy endings, and that, years later, the bastards who torched Meg’s van died in a fireball crash on the M4, or had their legs shot to blazes by a fourteen-year-old crack-addict, but I doubt it. Wyrd never works that way. The police didn’t catch them, but instead they had us, a group of good-for-nothing travellers, and a pile of drugs from the back of Mick’s van. When they realized there were two children involved, Social Services stepped in.’

  ‘Did Mum even try to get me back?’ I ask.

  John stands up to light another cigarette from the Solstice candle. To my amazement, his hands are shaking. ‘Meg was never lucky,’ he says. ‘Her lawyer was useless, Frannie was furious with her for putting you in danger, and she was beating herself up so badly about what a crap mother she’d been to let it happen that all she wanted to do was run away. Took me long enough to crawl back into your grandmother’s good graces. Only reason I managed it was that I’d backed Frannie when she tried to talk Meg out of taking you to Tolemac that summer.’

  My eyes meet John’s. ‘This is why I needed to come back to Avebury after the helicopter crash, isn’t it? Whoever my grandfather may have been isn’t the point, is it? I’ve been digging up the wrong past, chasing the wrong ghosts.’

  He nods, slowly, as if he’s not entirely convinced. ‘Nothing’s over till it’s over. You have to let Wyrd work itself out–all the interconnections.’

  ‘What happened to Keir after his dad died?’ I ask.

  He shrugs. ‘No idea, except that Social Services swooped on him too.’

  The dinosaur bird caught him in the end, then.

  CHAPTER 46

  ‘See, Frannie’s a great woman,’ says John, ‘but she doesn’t believe in looking back. That’s why, whatever the truth about your grandfather, you won’t necessarily hear it from her lips. And after Tolemac–well, as far as Frannie was concerned, there was nothing to discuss. The pair of you had to carry on living life as it was, not chewing over stuff that would upset you. Bet you never saw her cry when Meg died, did you?’

  ‘Not really.’ The scent of the bonfire on which I burned everything that was left of my mother is in my nostrils. I’m not willing yet to tell John that I never cried either–because I thought you weren’t supposed to.

  The phone is painfully loud, startling me so I kick the stool, spilling cold tea from my forgotten mug. A brown stain spreads across the pale carpet. In the confusion, I fail to recognize my own ring tone, so by the time I find the mobile in my jacket pocket it’s gone silent. Half a minute later, voicemail pings.

  ‘Where the hell are you?’ barks Ibby. ‘You were supposed to meet us in the lay-by on the A4. Well, too effing late. I’ve called Ed and he’ll lend a hand carrying the gear. But if you care to honour us with your presence, I need someone who knows one end of a radio mic from the other. I’ll be hands full directing the presenter–when he deigns to show himself.’

  John is on hands and knees with a J-cloth and a bowl of cold water, blotting the tea-soaked floor.

  ‘Sorry,’ I say. ‘I should be doing that.’

  ‘Don’t worry. You’d better run.’ He looks up at me, with a worried expression. ‘Or ring them back and tell them something’s come up…’

  ‘No,’ I say firmly. ‘I’m fine. But do me a favour? I hauled Frannie out of bed so early she probably thinks it’s teatime already. The more tired she is, the more confused she becomes.’

  ‘I’ll ring her to make sure she’s OK,’ he says. ‘I’ve…a client due in half an hour, but I’ll ask Fran if she’d like me to go over and make tea for her later, if you want.’

  ‘No need. Filming should be over by five, latest.’

  ‘Stop mithering,’ says John. ‘And…I’ll come over tonight anyway’ He has a remote look in his faded eyes, thinking through something else. ‘We should finish what we were talking about.’

  I’m out of the front door and halfway to the A4 before I start wondering whether he means Tolemac or the uncompleted conversation about Bryn and the dead dog.

  At the lay-by, Ed’s Land Rover is parked behind the Overview crew car. A distant figure is toiling up the slope to the Long Barrow, the occasional gleam of sun flashing off silvery lighting boxes. Ibby is at the side of the Range Rover with a phone to her ear.

  There is only one other vehicle in the lay-by, at the far end. A dirty white van.

  Ibby acknowledges me by lifting her fingers, and turns her attention back to the phone.

  There’s mud splattered over the rear doors of the white van, half obscuring the Stargate Earth Project sticker. Wyrd is giving me the chance to put one thing right at least. I walk round to look through the windscreen, rooting in my backpack for my purse.

  Karl’s in the front, eating a cold pasty. There’s no sign of Pete. Instead a black-and-white collie raises its head from the passenger seat.

  ‘Here,’ I say, shoving the two twenties and a ten through the window at him. ‘All I have on me. It’ll help buy another metal detector.’

  He stares at me, mouth open and full of pasty, with no sign o
f recognition, but takes the notes, folding them and zipping them into the breast pocket of a fleece emblazoned with a logo saying ‘A2B Drains’. Then he raises the pasty in a gesture that I hope means ‘thank you’. I walk back to Ibby at the Range Rover.

  ‘Fine,’ she’s saying, the politeness conveying that whoever is on the other end of the phone is dead meat, ‘you do that. Make it quick as you can. We’ll be setting up.’ She folds up the phone and catches sight of me. ‘Thank Christ for small mercies. Bloody Martin’s still looking for the ring road round Chippenham. Apparently he was staying with his old chum in Bath last night and she’s about to leave her boyfriend. Couldn’t very well dash off, could I? he says.’ She kicks the side of the car. ‘What kind of an outfit does he think we are? We’re television professionals. We don’t fucking do relationships.’

  ‘Is the tailgate unlocked?’ I ask. ‘I’ll sort out the sound gear.’

  ‘Ed has it.’ She runs a hand through her heavy fringe, then pinches the bridge of her nose. ‘Take up some more batteries if you want to be useful. Sorry. I’m being an old cow today. Hormones. And getting up at three a.m. for nothing. Oh, for some real sunshine.’ She kicks the car again. ‘If not today, for the aerials, now we’ve arranged the chopper hire.’

  ‘Aerials?’ I say uneasily.

  ‘Of course. Your mate Ed’s going to help.’

  ‘He doesn’t have a helicopter.’ I can’t believe Ed would do this, with the inquest imminent. It’s asking for trouble.

  ‘Told you, we’re hiring one.’

  ‘When?’

  ‘Soon as the weather improves.’

  ‘You OK?’ asks Ed, taking an armful of camera batteries from me at the top of the hill. ‘That dog seemed to upset you, this morning.’