Living in the Past

by Jane Lovering

  ‘Okay, “Tessa’s been found, I thought you’d want to know” who?’ The relief made Duncan flippant, want to continue the knock knock joke through to the end. Tessa’s fine. Marcus can shove his suspicions about me up his side-handle baton.

  ‘What?’ Grace looked up at him, stretching her legs out in front of her, seemingly trying to get comfortable. He could have told her it was impossible, sitting on those crates was like balancing on a chickenwire fence.

  ‘You know, “Knock, knock, who’s there? Doctor, doctor who? Yes that’s right?” Och, woman, don’t you ever do jokes in your school?’ The relief was making him buoyant, verging on the inappropriate, he thought, but didn’t want to stop.

  Grace gave him a look. He’d seen that look before, mostly on the face of his mother when his brothers were behaving badly, but he hadn’t seen it for pretty much the last twenty years.

  ‘What?’

  ‘If that is a sample of your sense of humour, then I certainly don’t want to be sharing a tent with it for the next ten days.’ Oh dear. He’d invoked the ‘schoolteacher’ tone of voice. He’d heard that from his mother too, but then, as mother to five boys, she’d had an excuse.

  Duncan pursed his lips and looked at her. ‘And if you’ve got no sense of humour at all, you won’t want to be sharing a tent with me anyway,’ he said. ‘As the youngest of five brothers I’ve got a lifetime’s worth of whoopee cushions and plastic spiders to get through, and you haven’t even experienced the delights of Vaseline on the door handles yet.’

  ‘We’re talking about sharing a tent, not getting married,’ she said shortly, and Duncan felt the reluctant creep of embarrassment tightening his chest.

  ‘Sorry. I was being … I’m just happy that Tessa has turned up safe and well. It’s a big relief, making me a bit stupid. I didn’t mean to cross a line there.’ He distracted himself by running his hands through his hair, feeling it slip between his fingers with the need of a good wash.

  Grace smiled at him, suddenly. ‘Yes, I’m sorry too. I wasn’t thinking. Of course, you’re even more relieved than the rest of us that she’s been found. And I’m actually quite fond of the odd whoopee cushion myself. A well-placed stupid noise has been known to diffuse many a difficult classroom situation, but the Vaseline on the door handles is a big no-no, I’m afraid. It’s a Sixth Form gag that’s been known to go awry. If you’ve never tried to get twenty-eight children out of a room during a fire alarm when the handles are all greased up, well.’

  A moment of silence. Duncan looked at his boots, where a long strip of leather had peeled away from one side. It was easier than looking at this woman, now the elation of knowing Tessa was safe had ebbed. She knew more about him than anyone other than Richard now, and it made his neck prickle with fear. If she so much as sprained an ankle while she was on site, Marcus Sunley and the Keystone Kops would fall on his head in a shitstorm of biblical proportions. And yet he’d asked her to share his tent?

  ‘If you’re having second thoughts about sharing, that’s fine,’ he heard her say.

  His expression must have been a giveaway, so he fought it, wrestled his mouth into a smile and squeezed his eyes to slits to make it look sincere.

  ‘No, it’s fine, it’s good.’

  ‘Duncan.’

  Now he had to tear his gaze away from that leather strip that had gouged away from the side of his boot to look at her. ‘What?’

  ‘Nothing is going to happen to me, honestly. I mean, I can’t say I won’t fall into the river or anything, obviously, but I can swim and it doesn’t look that deep, and I don’t think the police will come after you if I’m just plain clumsy, do you?’ Grace had her head on one side.

  Duncan rubbed both hands up his face to stop himself from saying, ‘Yes, miss.’ Instead he said, ‘You’ve already fallen in. I’m surprised there isn’t a helicopter over my head at this minute with a searchlight and Sunley and his men descending upon me to accuse me of trying to murder you through the medium of wet socks.’

  ‘I meant the proper river, the big one round the bend, where those people are living in those hut things. You know, that little religious community or whatever they are.’ She waved a hand in the direction of the dale.

  Duncan didn’t have a clue what she was talking about. There was nothing in this dale but the dig and some disgruntled sheep, but Grace seemed so sure, he wasn’t going to embarrass either of them by pointing this out.

  ‘Anyway. What do you think of this place? Do you think it will do you until you leave?’ Dramatically he unzipped the back portion of the tent. ‘I’m sorry there are no vases of flowers or smell of fresh coffee or whatever you’re supposed to do at moments like this.’ He stood back to let her poke her head through the flap, and felt a sudden jolt as she leaned against him to steady herself as she peered through. Her body was soft under the carapace of cagoule, and she’d clearly braved one of the shower cubicles on site because she smelled of something more sophisticated than the Impulse body sprays that he was used to the female diggers clouding themselves in.

  ‘It looks fine,’ Grace said, and he got another whiff of perfume and another brush past of nylon-coated body as she withdrew.

  ‘Ah. Good, good.’ He rubbed his hands, which had become uncharacteristically sweaty, down his thighs, then worried that this would make him look like a dirty old man and shoved them into his pockets. ‘Nothing fancy, but it’s somewhere to stay.’ Even his voice had gone peculiar, he sounded, even to himself, like an overeager landlord with a difficult to let property. He wiped his hands again on the insides of his pockets and wished that her proximity didn’t make him feel, inexplicably, so dirty-old-mannish. It’s ridiculous. She’s just another digger, nice lassie, so what’s with all this eye-to-chest thing? It’s never been like this sharing with Richard.

  ‘How’s the damp course? Dry rot, wet rot?’

  ‘Look, you’ve already made yourself look bonkers with the whole “river” thing. Don’t let’s compound things now. It’s yours, if you want it, if you don’t, well, I’ll just put all my paperwork back in there again.’

  Duncan felt that little lift of relief in his chest again as he remembered that he was only being like this because Tessa was okay. Of course. It’s that temporary reprieve from waiting for the knock on the door because they want to ‘talk to me’ about some other poor missing girl. It’s making me unnatural.

  Grace was quiet and he looked quickly at her face. Had he upset her by calling her bonkers? Aaaaaand here we are with another reason I’m no good at the interpersonals. I’m either too dour and they complain I’m bad-tempered, or I go so far the other way that I look like I’m hosting a programme on Channel 5.

  Grace was wearing an expression that made it look as though she was listening to something sideways. ‘No. I’m sorry, Duncan. It will be fine, honestly.’

  She still didn’t look at him. Was she taking advice in her head from … what was his name? Jamie? Or just thinking about the alternative, sharing a tent with her loved-up friends and having to face the fact again that she was on her own? Poor wee thing. Younger than him by a wee bit, he guessed, and she’d already lived through something like that. He shook his head at the unfairness of the world.

  She seemed to think he was having second thoughts. ‘No, really! I don’t need much space, just somewhere to sleep, and if I can’t sleep I generally go out for a walk so it’s not like I’ll disturb you or anything. We can just, you know, sleep together, and you’ll hardly know I’m even here.’

  Now, do I react to that? Call her on it, make a joke, lighten things up? Or pretend she’s not said anything? I’m either a miserable sod or an opportunist gag-cracker… hell, I’ve already brought the whoopee cushion into things. I am overthinking this. ‘Ah, exactly like all my past girlfriends, then.’

  A moment of silence in which Duncan oscillated between wishing he c
ould bite off his own tongue and wanting to pat her shoulder and tell her things weren’t so bad, and then she let out a long breath of laughter.

  ‘Duncan, you do realise that your history with the police makes me feel totally safe in sharing a tent with you, don’t you? This is probably the first time ever that it’s a good thing that they watch you so closely, because I know absolutely that you would not do anything to call their attention to you.’

  Oh hell. I never even thought of that. I’m so busy concentrating on the fact that if anything happened to her I’d be in the frame, that I never even considered that she’d be having to trust me on a day-to-day basis. I thought treating her as ‘just another digger’ was a good thing, when I should have thought … He scrubbed both hands up his face and scratched at his head to distract himself from the shame of not realising how vulnerable she must feel right now. That her choice was either throw herself on the mercy of a man she hardly knew, or subject herself to being faced with exactly what she’d lost. I am sometimes so thick … ‘I … errr … right, well, I guess that’s a good thing.’

  ‘Is it all right if I move my stuff over this evening, after we’ve shut down for the night? Only I’m making up some time on the sieves while Katrin and Kyle head off out for a bit, I’ve been a bit lax timewise lately and I don’t want people to think I’m not taking this seriously.’

  She walked over and held open the tent flap to reveal the rest of the camp going about its normal business. Duncan tried to shake off the feeling that this had all taken place in some kind of bubble outside the real world.

  ‘Ah. Course, yes. In fact …’ He pretended to look at his watch, although it hadn’t worked properly for the last six months. ‘… I’m supposed to be meeting Millie down at the trench in ten, so … you know, busy busy and all that. Tonight is fine.’

  ‘Well, then.’ She’d stopped, half in and half out of the tent, bent under the awning. ‘I suppose … I’ll see you later, then.’

  ‘How about going for another drink?’ The words were out of his mouth so fast that he almost didn’t realise he’d said them aloud, he’d barely just thought them. ‘To say welcome to the … err … tent?’

  She was still waiting, bent over to fit between the flap and the cover. ‘I suppose … yes, thank you, that would be nice.’

  ‘And you can drink enough that you won’t notice me snoring later.’ Shut up, Duncan, she said yes, there’s no need to humiliate yourself!

  ‘Well, there is that.’ And she was gone, slipping out into the open air like a snake shedding an unwanted skin, leaving Duncan to do the dirty-old-man hand wiping routine and bang his head against the central tent pole until it really was time to go and meet Millie.

  I swung the sieve. There was something very soothing in the whole ‘sluice, rock, rub’ format, letting the water run over the soil in the sieve, then swinging it and using a hand to break up the bigger lumps of mud. The slurry ran down through the sieve, leaving, in theory, any finds caught in the mesh, but in reality mostly leaving a rubble of small stones which I’d scrape to one side before the next bucketful went in. It was mindless, unless something unusual turned up and I had to shout for one of the finds experts to come over. Rhythmic and calming, if mucky and cold. And, with no Katrin, I had the chance to think about Jamie.

  Tabs had been right. Slowly, slowly things were beginning to blur in my memory of our time together. Just after he’d died it had felt as though every single day was a shining unit, separate and distinct. Every moment from our meeting in the bar at the party to his final few days in the hospital bed, all pipes and drips, had been like chapters in a book. Easy to flip through to find the memory I wanted. Jamie, proposing to me in the flat we’d just bought. Our wedding, with both of us so happy we’d laughed right through the whole day. Our first date, when we’d met for a coffee and he’d brought me a copy of a book we’d talked about. That last day, sitting beside his bed, holding his cold hand and waiting …

  Rock, rock, sluice. The generator purred, pumping the water up to the tank, and made the air smell of diesel oil and hot metal. It all sat in the back of my mind. I couldn’t even see the high-mounted sieve in front of me, all I could see was Jamie’s face, pinched and pale after the diagnosis, trying to smile, trying to reassure me. His whispered confession in the darkest hours of that night that he was afraid of dying. His plans for a future that I was increasingly despairing about, that, at the time, I’d thought were unrealistic, and now realised were designed to keep that fear at bay – too busy planning what we’d do when he got better to worry about what would happen if he didn’t.

  And he hadn’t, and I was the one left facing the future with those plans unmade. And, as Duncan had seen, it made me angry. Being angry with the memory of the man I’d loved so much made me angry with myself …

  ‘Hey, steady! You’re rocking so hard the frame is bending!’

  The cry from a passing digger brought me back to reality. Back to myself, standing up to my knees in the water overflowing the slurry tank, up to my elbows in mud and with stones splitting my fingernails into stumpy cracked little nubs.

  ‘Sorry,’ I called back, and passed a hand over the sieve. An extra-large lump of soil that looked as though it had been dug straight out of a hole without any kind of observation broke under my fingers and I swooshed water through it, half my mind still dwelling on the uncertainty of the future. Where once I had been the happily married owner of a flat, now I was a widow, forced to rent … What was that?

  Under my fingertips a small black piece of curved stone came free from the mud. The size of my fingernail, it could have been natural but Katrin had drummed into me that every single pebble must be overseen by a trained eye. ‘What’s this?’

  Morwenna, a pink haired digger who, according to Katrin, fancied Kyle, came over. ‘Hey, wow … yeah, definitely looks like something. I’ll fetch someone.’

  Of course, Duncan was the someone she fetched. But he was different here, focussed, professional; he hardly acknowledged me at all, just picked up the little curl of black and peered at it through a hand lens. ‘Yep. That’s part of a shale bracelet,’ he said, his accent clipped into a noticeable form here, when before it had rolled around words. ‘That’s what we’re looking for, signs of occupation. It can’t have got down here from the barrow, that’s too far away, so it has to have come from household debris. We’re in the right place, guys.’ And then he looked up. For the first time his eyes looked really alive, as though he wasn’t just processing whatever was in front of him, but seeing a future wrapped around a little object from the past. ‘Well done, Grace.’

  ‘I didn’t really do anything,’ I began saying, but my words were quiet under the excited discussion breaking out in front of me, about how there must be some kind of settlement around here, which apparently made the wood that Mills had confirmed more interesting because of … something. Morwenna came and bagged up the little bit of rock, scribbling on the bag in felt tip, and then everyone was heading off down the hill to the trenches near the beck and I was left with mud, water and a coughing generator. It was weird. As though I’d just been the centre of something fabulous and now that centre had moved on. And what was a shale bracelet anyway?

  I finished my day at the sieves alone, closed down the generator and shut off the water pump. Then I went down to Tabs’s tent to pick up my stuff, and met Millie, who was sitting just outside on a folding chair, looking at something in a white tray.

  ‘Hey.’ I ducked inside and came out with my sleeping bag and rucksack. ‘I’m off. You and Tabs can have the place to yourselves now.’

  ‘You didn’t have to move out.’ She had her head bent over the tray, picking at what looked like black worms. ‘Things would have been fine.’

  ‘It’s okay.’ And then, slinging my bag over my shoulder, ‘What have you got there?’

  ‘Wood. From the trench. It’s o
ld. Prof thinks it might be some kind of trackway or something.’ Millie, who I was used to seeing as a scatter of light, a flare of auburn and bright clothing, had something of the look I’d seen earlier on Duncan. Professional. Intense. ‘Could be a big deal, so I’m checking it out.’

  ‘Doesn’t look much like wood to me,’ I said.

  Millie squinted up at me. ‘After four and half thousand years, give or take a birthday, it’s surprising it looks like anything. Nobody is at their best after that many millennia.’

  ‘Well, you’re the expert.’ I looked dubiously at the black stringlike stuff in the bowl. After Millie’s poking activities it now looked more like an unravelled sweater of the type my mother knitted – ie, nondescript in colour and indeterminate of fabric.

  ‘Yep. Thousands of pounds of student debt says so.’ Millie stretched her legs out. In contrast to most of us, her jeans were clean. ‘Thanks for coming and keeping Tabs company, Grace. I know this isn’t really your sort of thing, but she didn’t want to come alone. And, hey, it looks like it’s doing you some good, you’ve got more colour in your face than you’ve had since Jamie …’ She trailed off.

  ‘He died, Mills, it’s all right, it’s not catching, you’re allowed to use the word.’

  She gave a half-apologetic shrug. ‘And you and the Prof seem to be doing okay. So, he actually has, you know, conversations with you? The kind of conversation where you don’t end up wanting to smack him?’ A big grin. ‘That is progress. Maybe he’s evolving.’

  She shook her hair away from her face. ‘Grace. About Tabitha …’ The wide grin faded and I noticed for the first time that Millie had freckles dotted around her pale forehead, which, in turn, made me realise that I’d never really looked at her properly before. She and Tabs had not long been together when Jamie got ill and I hadn’t had the chance to get to know her as a person. She’d been this tall presence alongside Tabs, while life was all hospital appointments and prescriptions and chemo, and now suddenly I was seeing her as she was. And this made me realise how much of a bubble I’d been living in since Jamie died, as though nobody else was real, just me and my sadness.