by Sarah Moss
But when we got back, they were not busy about subsistence, nor communing with the natural world. Mum was hanging over her cauldron again and the guys were playing with big sticks, too long for firewood, and willow withies which they must have got from one of the three big trees in the field below. The sheep took refuge under them on hot days. Jesus, said Molly, they’ve actually made themselves Lego, haven’t they, I suppose it’s better than cowboys and Indians. Allies and Huns, I said, was the version we played at my primary school, I’ve sometimes wondered about that, if all the five-year-olds in England were still playing at bombing Germany in the late ’70s or if other towns had moved on. The boys used to run around the playground with their arms wide, making bomb noises. Yeah, she said, we did that too, it is weird, do you think American kids had moved on to Vietnam? No, I said, from what I gather they mostly have real artillery and just shoot each other properly. Anyway, it won’t be Lego, it’s probably some kind of war-game. Iron Age cowboys and Indians.
I was only bloody right. We’re seeing if we can make a ghost wall, said the Prof, sitting back on his haunches. I was just telling your dad, it’s what one of the local tribes tried as a last-ditch defence against the Romans, they made a palisade and brought out their ancestral skulls and arrayed them along the top, dead faces gazing down, it was their strongest magic. Wait, said Molly, ancestral skulls? He put down his willow twigs. You know about this, Molly, we did it last term, I must say I thought it would be memorable. Two lectures, third week? Fragmented Bodies and Using Your Heads? I remember, said Pete, who was plaiting fronds of willow in a way that looked even less useful than what anyone else was doing. Good man, said the Prof. Anyway Molly, some tribes seem to have decapitated their dead and preserved the heads, in some cases for centuries, and had them on display indoors, somewhere where there were fires, maybe in the rafters of their houses. You can tell from the accumulation of soot and smoke. And Tacitus passes on a story about the skulls being used in battle somewhere around here, up by the Wall. Did the Romans notice, asked Moll, I shouldn’t have thought they’d be put off by some old bones. The Prof leant forward again. He was interlacing willow to make some kind of fence-panel. Well, obviously they noticed enough for the story to get passed to Tacitus, but no, you’re right, it doesn’t seem to have bothered them. They approached in testudo formation, he said, you know, the tortoise effect under the wall of shields, and probably barely even saw the skulls. But it’s a powerful idea, isn’t it, and it speaks to the importance of human remains to the culture. Yeah, said Molly, erm, did you get anything to eat, any meat or fish? Dad looked up. Thought you’d gone vegetarian, any road.
Their failure to hunt did not seem to me the most obvious problem with the plan. Dad, I said, er, Professor Slade, what are you going to do for human remains? For your fence? Oh, said Mum, I’m boiling up the rabbits’ heads. And Professor Slade stopped at the meat market, there’s a couple of sheep’s skulls and a cow’s, not to mention skin for the drums. Dan snorted and then coughed and snorted again. What, he said, ghost rabbits, you serious? With their little teeth? He made a rabbit face and Molly giggled. Tortoise formation, she said, wonder who’ll get there first. That’s a hare, dumbo, said Dan. I could see Dad’s face darken. Don’t, I thought, don’t laugh at him, it won’t be you who catches it, don’t make him feel stupid. Yes, well, said the Prof, the university does have an Ethics Committee, not sure I’d get away with using undergraduates for the purpose though you never know, maybe we could do it to people who cheat in exams. What did you bring us, Molly? More delicious burdock, she said, I hear it’s especially good with rabbits’ brains, and bilberries for those of more delicate disposition, by which I mean me. Dad muttered. You’ll eat what you’re given, girl. I beg your pardon, Mr Hampton, said Molly, I didn’t catch that. My stomach clenched. Stop it, you don’t know what you’re stirring up, you have no idea how this goes, you can’t speak to him like that. I said, Dad said, looking up, enunciating clearly, I said picky lasses went hungry, back then, I said it weren’t for the likes of you to say who gets what. Ah, um, said the Prof, well, as I said I don’t know that we can really reflect the gender hierarchies of prehistory here, inasmuch as we know what they might have been, I’m sure Molly meant no harm, plenty of berries to go round, aren’t there, Moll and Silvie do you want to – to go – well, why don’t you go see if you can find a little more of that wild thyme, hmm, I’m afraid we’ve rather distracted Alison, may be a while before there’s cooked food so you two just have a little potter up the stream, hm, see what you come by?
Dad looked at him a moment, at me, and went back to weaving his ghost fence. I could feel already my skin shrinking and tightening, the hand across my face, the belt on my legs, the shame, and I saw Mum’s hands shake as she stirred the bones in the pan. Rabbit magic, said Dan, shaking his head, and I flinched.
I found some cress. I thought it might placate Dad. Molly sat on a stone and trailed her feet in the water, though it wasn’t really hot enough for that to seem much fun. Her toenails were painted sparkly gold now, and you could see the outline of her moccasins in the suntan on her feet. Any more of that business, she said, and I’m off to Morbury on the bus for a pie and chips, he’s a right chauvinist pig, he seems to think we all have to do what he says, he’s not the professor here. She leant forward to pick a quartz pebble from the bed of the stream and one of her plaits dipped into the water. He’s just taking it seriously, I said, he drives buses all year, he’s not like the Prof, this is his one chance to do what he’s really interested in. What about your mum, said Molly, when does she get to do what she’s interested in? I shrugged and went on nipping off stalks of cress with my fingernails. Obviously Mum was not interested in things, never had been, you only had to look at her to see that. Does he ever even ask her what she thinks, Moll went on. Why, I said, what about your mum, what does she do, what is she interested in. If you’ve got all the answers, I didn’t say, if you know how people ought to live. I ate a leaf of cress, more peppery than I was expecting. My eyes watered. She’s a teacher, said Moll, she teaches Physics, and yes she has interests, she does stuff. Aerobics. Gardening, she grows vegetables. Weird ones, mostly, says there’s no point growing stuff you can buy at the supermarket though some of us might think there are reasons the shops don’t stock what she grows. She’d like your cress. I’ll tell her about the burdocks. Keep fit and gardening, I thought, down south, in Hertfordshire wherever that is, bet they’ve got a huge house and garden, bet it’s the first time she’s sat down to eat with a bus driver and a supermarket cashier. She squeezed water out of the paintbrush-end of her plait. My dad left us, she said, when I was five. Mum’s coped on her own since then, he doesn’t even pay anything. She looked up. I’m proud of her. Yeah, I said, she sounds great. She didn’t understand, I thought, she couldn’t see what it was like for us. Try some of the cress, I said.
The guys were more interested in building the Ghost Wall, the Rabbit Palisade, than in eating, even once Mum had done her best with a sort of thyme dumpling. Molly stood with her arms folded, watching Dad and the Prof and now Dan and Pete weaving the willow lattice and trying to fasten the drumskins tight to their willow hoops. The wall was going to be big, and unless Molly and I went out foraging again, there was not going to be much by way of dinner. Mum had fished the rabbits’ skulls out of the cooking pot and lined them up in the sun to dry, like the heads of Tudor criminals. Memento mori. Poor bloody rabbits. The Prof had got the other skulls out of his car and they gazed eyeless from the rock where Mum often sat, their whiteness still shiny and tinged with blue, indecently exposed not weathered. The human skulls, I supposed, the ghost skulls, would have been leaf-brown, polished by long handling and by the smoke of decades of cooking fires, artefacts as much as body parts. I don’t know whether to laugh or cry, said Molly, it kind of reminds me of Swallows and Amazons but they’re grown men. Those little drums and a willow fence with rabbits’ heads on top, for what, to keep out the Romans? I’m off, she said,
Jim, I’ll be back later. Oh, said the Prof, yes, OK. Dad knelt up and watched as she walked off, shook his head. Spoilt little bitch. Silvie, go help your mum, she’s the dinner to get yet.
THEY SET UP the ghost wall towards sunset. The shadows of trees and grass leant long through air hazy with slanting gold light. Molly hadn’t come back and I was beginning to worry; I couldn’t think what she could find to do for all this time, or how she would get back after dark. Mum saw us beginning to carry the panels up the hill and said she was going to bed, but I hung around, wanting to see what happened, not wanting to spend longer than I had to in the dark hut. It was getting colder and Mum came back out with the blanket from my bed and folded it around my shoulders. There, she said, no need to go catching your death of cold, I’m sure they had the sense to keep warm, back in the day, what about your feet. I’m fine, Mum, I said, thanks, you get some rest. Well, she said, don’t stay up all night.
Silvie, bring the skulls now, said Dad.
I approached the cow’s head, its white bright against the softening colours of stones and grass. There were still shreds of dried flesh around the eye-sockets and it still, more or less, had ears. I didn’t want to touch it, felt as if I should do some reverence, ward off something, before picking it up. Its teeth grinned. I reached out and touched it between the eye-sockets. It wasn’t cold, nor quite dry. I would need to carry it in both hands, under the jaw. I would need to hold it tight against me. Silvie, called Dad, did you hear me, I said bring the skulls. I turned to the line of rabbits, to the sheep’s heads, more familiar from the dry bones encountered sometimes at the feet of crags and the edges of mountain streams. When I was little Dad had to lead me past them with my eyes closed, holding my hand. It’s just bones, Silvie, we all have them, you wouldn’t be out here walking, else. I didn’t then like the thought of my own bones, waiting inside me for their own eventual exposure. I went round behind the stone and picked up the cow’s skull, carried it facing forwards up the dimming hill.
Even Dan seemed to be working seriously now, quietly as the sun slipped towards the western moorland. Shadows reached. The noise of the day, the birds and small rustlers, the wind in the leaves, even perhaps the distant wash of traffic on the Great North Road, stilled. The moon, waxing, a couple of days off full, was crossing the eastern horizon, beginning to stand out from the deepening sky. I stood there, my hands cupping the space of whatever bovine desire and fear had been within that skull. I watched the men hammer posts and fix their woven panels. Mad play, the building of a wall where there was nothing inside, the conjuring of animal spirits on a summer’s night.
Bring the other bones, Silvie, don’t just stand about, it’ll be dark before we know it.
I brought the small heads one at a time in hands cupped as if to receive the body of Christ, the blood and bones of my fingers and palms a final brief protection. There had been minds there. Sheep cry for their taken lambs, even rabbits know alarm and need. I raised each one as a sacrament to the ghost wall, found myself bowing my head as Dad set them in place.
They made drumming, as the eastern sky darkened and stars prickled above the band of pale cloud. They made chanting, and I found myself joining in, heard my voice rise clear, hold its notes, above their low incantation. We sat on the ground before our raised bone-faces, sang to them as they gleamed moonlit into the darkness. We sang of death, and it felt true. Away to the south, orange light spilled across the sky from the town, and below us a single pair of headlights nosed the lane.
Why not, after all, make ceremony for the animal dead, for those we have deliberately killed. There is still a dying.
WE SLEPT LATE, all except Mum, who had a breakfast of bilberries and griddle-cakes ready before I came out of the hut, still in my pyjamas, to find the sun sharp in my eyes and the tree-shade already contracted. You were up late, she said, or I daresay early, sun must’ve been up again time you and him come in. Yeah, I said, nearly, I’m just off to the wood. I wandered through the trees until I found the bush that had become my peeing place, a very un-Iron-Age rhododendron under whose spreading skirts I could pull down my pyjamas and squat in reasonable security. I stroked the backs of my thighs, which were still sore, and when I stood up craned and lifted my top to see that the marks on my back were less angry. In a few days it would be over, until next time. And Molly, I remembered, had she come back? I should have thought of her last night, should not have been so absorbed that I forgot her altogether.
Of course she came back, said Mum, I waited up, how did you not see the car? Some lad brought her, bit the worse for wear if you ask me, the both of them, shouldn’t have been behind the wheel, I’d say. Don’t tell your dad. Not surprised if she’s still sleeping it off. Don’t tell your dad now mind. He’s off to the stream for a wash, get yourself dressed before he’s back. You know I wouldn’t tell him, I said, I’m not daft.
I thought there might be embarrassment on the air, an awkwardness at the memory of the Prof drumming with his head thrown back to the moon, at Dad himself sitting straight as if in church and joining a wordless chant, the two sceptical boys in the end not exchanging glances but intent on the bone-faces on high and swaying to rough music. I was wrong. Mum and I gave each other one look as Dad and the Prof stepped in and did a strange male back-slapping move, like gorillas. I had never seen Dad touch another man before, didn’t know he knew the steps. Great evening, said the Prof, amazing, what we did there. Yeah, said Dad, late night though, we’ve missed the best of the day. It happens, said the Prof, I’m sure it happened back then, the long summer nights, plenty of dark for sleeping in the winter. The breakfast’s all ready, said Mum, I can make you some tea if you want it, leastways herbal.
Molly and I went off foraging again. I don’t think it was even discussed: Mum was doing whatever Mum did, the boys were going with Dad and the Prof and whatever they were doing was important and didn’t need to be shared with the rest of us, Molly and I were dealing with plants, which required no ceremony. I’ve got food, said Molly, don’t worry, I stocked up in town yesterday, so we can go dig up more weird roots or whatever but first I want you to show me this ghost wall. It’s still there, right? This way? She set off through the trees and I followed her. Far’s I know, I said. I didn’t want her to see, knew it was going to look stupid under morning light. It was just a game, I said, just to see how things might have been, obviously it’s not a real ghost wall. Mm, she said, a real ghost wall, shall we think about that? I could see it now, below the brow of the hill, a rickety palisade and the cow’s skull balanced against the blue sky. Of course I know it’s not real, I said, but none of this is real, is it, this whole summer, the blankets came from a shop and you lot made the moccasins on a study day and the Prof had the grains delivered from the health food shop in Morbury, that’s not the point. So what is the—she said. How was your evening, I said, you got a lift back? She grinned. Yes I did. Well, with a bit of an interlude in a car park on the way, and very nice too. And I’m getting a lift back in again tomorrow. Come too, if you like, he’s got friends. Come where, I thought, a pub in Morbury, to drink and talk to men? Can’t, I said, no way Dad would let me. It’s there, look. The ghost wall.
Molly went up to the fence, stroked its weave. Her plaits, I saw, were woven too, their rhythm echoing the work of my dad’s hands. That’s seriously weird, she said, the heads. I thought it was just a bit naff but that’s creepy, they’re like trophies or something. What did you do last night, dance around them? No, I said, there was no dancing. Where do you want to go this morning, I asked, there’s not much on the moor except the bilberries, we could maybe go back to the beach, it’s not so hot and the tide’s out mid-afternoon. But damn, I thought, she will want to swim, she’ll think we should take our clothes off and she would see my back. Or we can try that next wood, I said, it’s too early for blackberries still but there might be more plums and maybe mushrooms, Dad could tell us if we picked anything poisonous. Molly was gazing at the sheep’s skulls, hands behind
her back as if she might be tempted and didn’t want to touch them. Don’t mind, she said. Woods. It’s too far to the beach. You sure your dad knows his mushrooms? Yes, I said, I’m sure. We turned away, began to walk back down the hill towards our foraging places. Silvie, she said, you’re really OK with this, the ghost wall? It’s interesting, I said, I didn’t think it would be but it is. You’re not scared, she said. I shrugged. Of what, bones? Of people, she said. Of your dad and Jim. Nah, I said, why would I be scared, we just said it’s not real.
We set off back to the woods, not hurrying. Molly said she’d been yesterday to visit the midwife, Trudi. But you can’t just go to someone’s house like that, I said, we only met her once. Well she did invite us, Molly said, she said if we wanted a hot shower we could go there and I did want a hot shower, I couldn’t go out with my hair all greasy, so I went and she was in. You should go too. Trudi had given her tea, with home-made cake that was a present from the mother of a patient, and let Molly use her expensive shampoo; I don’t think it surprised either of us that the brands Molly found exciting meant nothing to me. It felt so good, Molly said, a proper shower, I feel so much better, and she says we can go back any time. She’s really interested in what we’re doing here, she likes the Roman stuff. We could probably go tomorrow, if you like. No, I said, it would feel weird, I’ll get Mum to heat some water for my hair, or I can just use the stream, that’s what I do when we’re camping in Scotland. We found another plum tree and I climbed it and shook the branches while Molly skipped around gathering falling fruit. They did eat a lot of fruit and veg, I said, must have been such a relief when someone invented bread. And ovens. And pies. Come down and have some biscuits, said Molly, here, I bought them yesterday. Bet no-one got fat, anyway, she said, and poked her own belly as if she thought there was something wrong with it. I don’t know, I said, they had time to make jewellery, didn’t they, and to have rituals and festivals and decorative objects, they weren’t all busy with subsistence the whole time, there must have been a surplus at least sometimes. Yeah, said Molly, that or the women spent all their time foraging and cooking so the men could play with Lego and bang drums and howl at the moon. I did hear you, you know, when I got back, your mum and I had a bit of a giggle. I ate another biscuit. It was weird, I said, the way it went from being a bit daft to feeling like something real. I didn’t know people could decide to make that happen. Have some peanuts, she said, lots of energy and protein, what do you mean decide to make that happen? I shrugged. Don’t know. Like in a church, I suppose, do something that would be really silly if you did it in the street or even on your own in a room, but somehow it’s not when everyone joins in. Silvie, she said, you’re scaring me, this is sounding like a cult. What, I said, Dad and the Prof and some rabbits? Let’s see if we can find those mushrooms, I saw some in the wood the other day. Yes, she said, Silvie, what happened to your legs? I could see them, you know, when you were up the tree. The marks.