‘What…? Oh, whatever, Stoney!’ she’d snarled as she pressed a button and closed him down.
When she’d stabbed her phone to turn it off, she hadn’t talked to him since. Who needed it?
Now with Charlie at her side, Mia was camped in an open field with a bunch of avid pagan worshippers and Glastonbury travellers, all waiting for the day of the summer solstice when the sun would rise and shine through the stones. It was the best place she could locate herself. The Watchers had told her the Henge meant something, that it was the place between life and death, perhaps a gateway to another dimension. That was her take on it. The summer solstice was pending. Where better to be if she wanted to reconnect with the Angels. Surely this was the place to be. There was no question in her mind.
a balmy Tuesday evening left her rummaging through the supplies in her rucksack. She put her hands on a large bottle of mineral water. ‘Yes,” she sang. She thought she’d run out. The final bottle was a life saver since she was dying for a cup of tea. Thirsty as a beached goldfish. When she looked up, a strange figure was standing right next to her. “God, you frightened the hell out of me.” She sat with her hand on her chest.
“Sorry,” he said.
By the looks of his clothes, he was a traveller. He was old, maybe sixty-five or seventy, she guessed, although if it hadn't been for the startling lines on his face from too much sun, he could have been younger. He was tall and thin and he had a straggled, knotted grey beard falling in two pieces from his chin to the length of his scrawny neck. There, entwined in his hair, and around his neck, strings of coloured beads dangled next to lengths of frayed leather twine holding various emblems and stones. On his head he wore a striped woolly beanie, pulled down over his ears where wisps of grey hair hung from the side and down his back, tied like the hair on his face. Even though the whites around his eyes had turned yellow with age, Mia was struck by the vivid blue of them. She imagined he would have been okay looking in his day. Now, however, he smelled, like he hadn't washed for a decade. Or four!
"Do you want something?" Mia asked. She was cautious as she always was when someone got too close to her on the overcrowded campsite. Those days, nowhere was safe when you were a girl alone. So said her father when he presented her with a rape alarm.
“Some tea,” he said. His accent West Country mixed with a hint of Welsh.
“Oh, sure. I have tea bags. Is that ok?” She took a handful of tea bags from her small supply box.
He held out some coins in the flat of his hand. “I can pay.”
"Oh! No that's okay. Take them. I was just going to brew up." Damn, that sounded like an invitation.
“And I have water.” His eyes went to a van, parked six random pitches towards the centre of the field. It was a relic of a bygone age, with hand-painted patterns, now rusted over, with some parts sanded and not yet sprayed. It reminded Mia of the Scooby-Doo van, from an old TV show they ran on Channel 4. It was definitely a relic of a flower power age. “I can bring you some,” he said.
“Oh, you mustn’t worry, I’m…” she watched him strut towards his van, “...fine!”
His back was slightly hunched at the shoulders as if he'd spent his whole life stooping at the waist, and his trousers hung off him, held up by a tightly buckled frayed leather belt around his hips. He had no backside to speak of.
She cleared away some cups inside her camp. Camp! It was a small inflatable tent with every possible modern-day home comfort. Hers, amongst the others in the field, felt like an advert for Camping World. Where others in the field burned real fires, Mia had a camping stove. Where others lit candles, she had a blue gas lantern. Where they boiled water from rusted cauldrons, she had a brand new shiny kettle, and where the other campers walked around in bare feet or old worn sandals, she kept her slippers on. Now that she was there, she just wished she hadn’t gone out and bought everything from new. Thanks, daddy.
The strange hippie man returned with a white plastic drum half-filled with water. “Hand me your kettle,” he said.
She obliged and watched him top it up before he screwed the plastic cap back on the canister and tightened it as tight as could be. His water was so precious he wouldn’t spill a drop.
“Thank you.” He stood watching her with his hands tucked into the front pockets of his jeans, as she turned on the gas under the kettle and perched on her little camping stool. “Okay if I join you?” he asked.
“Oh, yes…of course.” She proffered a hand to a patch of grass the other side of the stove.
“Are you sure?” he waited for her to assure him. She appreciated his manners a lot.
“Please…Take a pew.”
He lowered himself down and sat cross-legged on the grass. She noticed his brown weathers fingers, adorned with silver rings and embellishments. He had six beaded thongs around his wrist but no watch. “My name is Jesus,” he said.
“Huh? Excuse me?”
He nodded and smiled. “I’m used to that reaction. I had it changed by deed poll in ‘89.
Mia laughed. "My parents were around in the eighties." She thought of her mother and father, and how they were always so busy with their careers. It suddenly occurred to her to question why they hadn't talked more about the past. The last century was a vague memory to most people those days. Life had moved on, and not in a good way, some would say. In the nineteen eighties, the people were more liberated. Apparently, computers hadn't even begun to roll out in domestic homes, I-pods and I-phones were a futuristic device that would have been considered impossible. A mindset like that was hard to imagine. Her parents still had their old collection of CD's stored in the attic; round plastic discs that played ‘albums'. No one made albums anymore. Since the world recession of 2019, most of the music they listened to now were downloads from the Internet and while their quality of life had taken a sharp downturn after twenty-nineteen everyone just listened to old music and watched old TV shows. Since the entertainment industry had collapsed they had nothing new to call a trend. Although there was some talk of garage music making a comeback.
The kettle boiled. She switched off the gas and poured the steaming water into the two cups, where inside, tea bags dangled from a tagged piece of string. "So...um…Jesus," she struggled with the name. It didn't sound right. Kind of blasphemous! "Have you always been on the road?"
He nodded as he wrapped his stained nicotine fingers around the steaming cup. “All my life.”
“What about your family? Are you married?”
He bowed his head. “I had a wife but she died.”
“I’m sorry.”
Mia watched him look away, to the people gathering around their own campfires. Some were chanting and some were strumming guitars. Most of them were eating and all of them had a drink in their hands. The atmosphere in the field on the opposite side of the road to where Stonehenge stood was earthy and wholesome and pleasantly atmospheric. Over the past week, Mia had begun to feel like she belonged there, despite her brand new camping equipment standing out like a shiny new pin in a field full of aged artefact.
“Ever heard of the Battle of the Beanfield?” Jesus asked.
‘No.”
He plucked at a tuft of grass. "1985 it was. Forty-one years ago. There were about six hundred of us. We came every year for the solstice, but that year we were prevented from reaching the Henge. We still don't know why. We knew it was by order of the government. That was the Thatcher years. You weren't born then. Some said Maggie endorsed the attack."
“Attack? What happened?”
"The police were waiting for us. Thirteen-hundred of ‘em with riot shields and truncheons. They smashed our vehicles, hit our women while they carried children in their arms, and pinned the men to the ground like they were dogs..." He shrugged. "We were peaceful. The attack was unprovoked and unnecessary." He looked as if he was staring into the past as if he could see what happened in his mind's eye like it had happened yesterday. "I was twenty-two at the time and my wife was just nineteen."<
br />
He sipped his coffee and offered a nod of approval at the taste. He continued with his story. "It was a travesty. No one has ever got over it. It was one of those ‘public outcry' things, where the press got involved and the public offered an opinion of outrage, until the next event and they forgot about it and moved on. Everyone they arrested was eventually let go without charge." He shook his head and laughed with irony. "They filled up all the cells in the whole of the South-West, just to accommodate all those they'd arrested." He looked around him as he spoke. He did that a lot as if he was checking no one was going to rob him or his van. "There wasn't even an inquiry."
“And what about you…?” That name of his! She couldn’t say it. “What happened to you?”
“They took my wife away from me. Shanna, her name was. She was five-months pregnant and I watched them drag her across the field. I was pinned down on the grass with one of the copper’s boots on my head.” He pointed to a small indent on the side of his skull. “See that. That’s what those bast’...Excuse me. That’s what they did.”
“What happened to your wife?”
“We found each other two days later. Our van had been wrecked so we had nowhere to go. Then she miscarried.”
“Oh my goodness! That’s terrible.”
He pulled his hat off and offered a solemn nod of the head. Underneath, his greasy hair was thin on top and dark grey. “She died two years after that. Cancer it was. She wouldn’t have any treatment, so I brought her here to die. She went on the solstice of ‘88.”
Mia was staring into her coffee. She could see the sun going down in its reflection like a tiny orange ball of light rippling in her cup. She thought about Jesus and the hard life he’d had.
“You got any more of that tea?” Jesus asked as he ruffled Charlie’s hair.
“Yes! I most certainly have,” she said, resolute.
Chapter 17
New York
“Hey, Pi,” Tom said enthusiastically when Jay answered the phone.
His new friend’s voice came back sounding pretty cheerful. “Can you stop calling me that? I’m not a pumpkin.”
“Hey, you’re quick this morning, considering the state you were in last night.”
“Don’t know what you’re talking about kid.”
Tom chuckled. “So…are you going?” Tom had already guessed the answer to that.
“Going where?”
Yeah, he knew it. “England.”
“Why would I want to go to that foreign country?”
"Ha, after all you said last night. You're not going to go, are you? I knew it!"
“Kid, I had a gut-full last night. I could have said anything.”
“You said you were going to get her back…Fran, I mean. You said you couldn’t live without her anymore and that you were going to England to find her and ask her to marry you.”
“I’m not the marrying kind, kid, believe me.”
“So you’re not going?”
“Nope.”
Tom knew it! "Tosser!" he spat before he ended the call.
Despite the abrupt end to their conversation, the two of them had become good buddies over the past week. They'd hung out together practically every day, usually in Jay's loft. Jay still treated Tom like a little kid, but Tom was used to that now and he couldn't visualise it changing anytime soon.
The night of the siege had sealed the deal on their allegiance when they saw the Watchers take out the terrorists. After they’d finished blowing away the ashes of the five men and disappeared into the forest, Tom and Jay had made their way back to the train dumbstruck, until they saw the hostages.
Most of them were still onboard wondering what to do. Some had run away and hidden in the trees, while the rest stood outside the carriages, huddled together in groups. When Tom and Jay walked out of the woods, they fired questions like bullets, asking where the terrorists were and what was going to happen next?
“Where’s the driver?” Jay shouted into the jostling crowd, as more of the hostages emerged from the train.
“Here.” A guy dressed in an Amtrak uniform stepped forward.
“Man,” Jay shook his head. “I’m kinda glad you didn’t, but why the hell didn’t you just get the train outta here when we were gone?”
The driver looked from left to right as his bushy eyebrows moved up and down on his forehead like black crawling caterpillars. “I didn’t know if I should. I didn’t know...”
When the train pulled in at that next station, no one had been more surprised than the cops and the press, as the headcount included two additional civilians after counting the one dead hostage.
That was over a week ago and since then Jay and Tom had talked to the feds, the police and the press, and spent many hours doing interviews and features for Sky News. It had been one crazy week. The news now hailed the Watchers as hero’s, vigilantes sent by God to protect the good citizens while the good government put the country back together again. It was propaganda at its best.
Last night, the unlikely pair had gone to a bar down a backstreet near Jay’s apartment. He called it his local. By midnight, Jay had drunk himself into oblivion, until he passed out in the comfort of his own home, where Tom had dragged him.
That morning, as if Jay backing out of the England trip wasn’t enough to ruin his day, along with regretting every minute that he hadn’t taken a single picture of the Watchers when he’d had a chance, Mia had gone off on some crusade to Stonehenge where Tom couldn’t reach her unless she wanted to be reached.
Life was a bomb, Tom Stone thought, as he slammed the door to his room and once more left his mom’s apartment through his window, to go onto the streets of New York City.
Jay Pullman began to wish he'd never woken up that morning. What with a mighty hangover and a call from the kid shouting the odds down the phone at him. It was too much, especially when he'd only managed to drink two cups of black coffee so far. He pushed himself to walk into the kitchen area. His feet dragged along the floor, scraping the bottom of his black leather mules, a Christmas gift from his mother. He pulled the coffee pot from the hotplate and poured himself another cup and when he sat down on the couch and put his feet up on the table, his memory of the night before started to unfold. He'd felt like drowning his sorrows since he realised he was missing Fran more than he’d care to admit. After the beers and the chasers, and the girl who’d poured herself all over him, the one who looked like Fran with something missing…
Fran! He had tried to reach her but she wouldn’t take his calls. He’d lost count of the number of texts he’d sent her, the number of messages he’d left. But she still hadn’t responded. It was like she’d disappeared off the face of the earth.
The phone rang again. It was the kid, calling from his cell phone. How could the little twerp even afford the line rental? Jay pondered.
“So, are we going to England or not?” Tom asked.
Jay grinned. He was impressed with the kid’s resilience to his bad humour. “Yeah. I must be crazy, but yes, we’re going to England.”
“Great.”
“Hey, hold on there. Who said you were coming?”
“You did, last night. You said you couldn’t live without me.”
“You’ve gotta be kidding.”
“Nope. And by the way, I can’t afford it, so you’re picking up the tab.”
The phone went dead.
Okay, so this is it, Jay thought. I'm gonna come and get you, Fran Shriver. At great expense, I'm bringing you back to New York where you belong and I'm not taking no for an answer. He picked up his cup, closed his eyes, shook his head, and took a long gulp of his hot black coffee.
Chapter 18
Wiltshire, England
With Charlie at her side, on a lead,Mia took her nine o’clock walk up to the stones as she had every morning since she’d arrived ten days before. It was a pleasant ritual. She felt such peace and calm within the circle that she often thought, when it was all over, how much she was going to
miss being there. Each time she went to the Henge and closed her eyes, she played back in her mind the meeting she’d had with Uriel and the amazing things he’d revealed; like the bond they had with each other. How seven Angels were brothers, inseparable and indestructible, never apart.
The morning mist covered the top of the slope and the circle of stones, still not burnt away by the sun. It was always a breath-taking sight when she walked up in the morning. Somehow it looked different every time she saw it.
There weren't many people milling about at that hour, but generally, at other times of the day, most of them were eager to be among the stones before the dawn of the summer solstice in a week's time. Some of them chanted and danced, in tune to homemade wooden instruments. They made such strange movements, that Mia couldn't help chuckling to herself at their devotion to the pagan rituals. The truth was, to Mia it just all seemed a little over-the-top. It was just a little too extreme!
Up ahead Mia spotted Jesus. He had his head down with his hands in his pockets, strolling along the path to the stones looking like he hadn’t a care in the world.
When she caught up with him, he was sitting on the grass within the stone circle with his legs crossed, meditating. He’d discarded his woolly beanie hat in favour of a well-worn brown leather Stetson. His head was bowed beneath it, with only his bony shoulders and his knees protruding, as he crouched over his bare feet tucked inside the folds of his legs.
Charlie was panting with his tongue hanging out, but Jesus clearly hadn’t heard him. She didn’t want to disturb him; she had her own meditating to do. So she left him there and found the spot where she’d sat that night with Uriel.
“Hello, Mia.” She looked up. It was Jesus.
“I didn’t want to disturb you over there.”
He tossed his head towards the area he’d been sitting. “Hmm, yeah, praying!”
She laughed. “Is that right?” He had a dry humour, which kind of suited him.
“What do you do when you come here?” he asked.
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