Living in the Past

by Jane Lovering

  ‘Apart from money.’

  ‘Apart from money, there is absolutely nothing going on for us.’ Richard folded his arms. ‘So. You’re not going to tell me why we’re really moving? Is it just to prove a point to me? Or is it something to do with—’ He jerked his head and Duncan looked over to see Grace, picking her way through the rapidly abandoning site like a ghost, her eyes fixed on the far horizon.

  Duncan watched Grace walk towards their tent. She looked pale, he thought, and not surprisingly. He’d basically told her she was either a nutcase or a psychic, and clearly a lifetime of teaching lively secondary age kids hadn’t prepared her for either possibility. And now he remembered her dead husband and had a flashback to his own feelings when Anya had vanished – the conversations he’d had with her in his head, asking her why …

  ‘I need to go and talk to her. Can you get everyone organised? I’ve marked a few places to put in some trenches but I want to put some specific teams in.’

  Richard was still staring at him. ‘How many digs have we done together, Dunc?’

  ‘Dunno.’ He hunched his shoulders. The rain had stopped again, but there was no sign of sun and his damp clothes were chilly. ‘Eight, maybe?’

  ‘I made it ten. And I have never seen you like this before. You look like someone’s taken your head and twisted it, like you are losing your sense of perspective here, and I seriously hope it’s not because you’ve got a hard-on for some fly by night volunteer. Because if it turns out that you are moving our entire dig down that dale on the say so of some flaked out hippy with a dowsing rod, then this will be the last dig we ever do.’

  Duncan looked at Richard, unused to this tone of voice from his co-organiser. Richard was usually so flippant, so up for anything, that this serious attitude was weird. ‘Look, Rich. You know me. Ten digs, you said? And, in all that time, have I ever called it wrong? Okay, okay, there was that Viking site up near Bridlington that turned out to be an abandoned medieval farmstead, but we still got a dig out of it, didn’t we? Students went back satisfied, wrote it up, graduated. So, trust me now. There is something here. Not here,’ Duncan thumped a heel against the ground, ‘but further down the dale. Little bit further than I was going to put it, that’s all. And Grace …’ He thought how best to frame the words. He wasn’t sure what had happened to her out there, something truly mystical or a brain-glitch, but Richard was a self-proclaimed ‘woo-woo atheist’, who had never so much as believed in Father Christmas, so he kept quiet about his less-than-scientific reasoning. ‘She’s had a little bit of experience in Bronze Age sites, gave me a few pointers.’

  Richard sighed. ‘She’s a teacher, Dunc. They always think they know best. But, yeah, okay, you’re in charge. You say we move, we move.’ A slap on the shoulder. ‘But we find nothing and you are buying the drinks to infinity, you Scots bastard, yep?’

  The knotted feeling that Duncan became aware that he’d been holding just beneath his stomach vanished. What the hell? When did all this make me so anxious? And why? It’s my job, something I’ve been doing for more than ten years, and now I’m doubting myself. It’s my own fault that we were digging in the wrong place, because I listened to other people instead of my gut. All I’m doing now is putting things back as they should be, and I should stand up and have the courage of my convictions, not put it all onto a woman who saw something. ‘I’m right. I know I’m right. I should have held out for digging there before.’

  But Richard seemed to have lost interest in the whys and wherefores of the dig move. ‘Okay. I’m on logistics, you go and calm down your whacked out girlfriend there, and then head over, show me where you reckon these new trenches should go.’

  Another shoulder slap and Richard was heading down towards the group of students awaiting instructions. ‘Come on then, you lot! Let’s get the equipment tidied up!’

  Duncan headed for the tent, shaking his head slightly. So, Grace had just been the final thing that had convinced him. And given him some actual sites to aim for, rather than digging likely points. Whether what she’d seen had been real or not, didn’t matter, it was just another less arbitrary way of choosing where to start. And if they found anything … well. They could deal with it then.

  He ducked in through the flap. Her compartment was zipped up, but he could see a dark shape hunched in the middle, through the thin nylon. ‘Grace?’

  ‘Go away.’

  ‘I just wanted to make sure you …’ He unzipped the top two inches and poked his head into the gap, snatching it back when she screamed.

  ‘I’m changing, you prick! You might not have noticed, but it’s pissing wet out there and I don’t want to catch trench foot!’

  The zip was firmly closed again and Duncan tried to ignore the fact that he’d just seen her down to her knickers and bra. ‘Sorry! I just wanted to check that you were all right.’ He chewed a fingernail, realised what he was chewing was mostly orange paint, and spluttered it out.

  ‘Well, I am,’ she said, from the other side of the nylon wall. The dark shadow was moving about and he had to grit his teeth firmly against his mental images.

  ‘You looked a bit shell-shocked earlier.’

  There was a pause and then a gradual unzipping. Her face appeared in the hole. ‘You’d just told me I hallucinated a Bronze Age village. That’s hardly going to fill me with the desire to skip about and giggle, is it?’

  Her hair was drying, bits of it sticking upwards whilst other strands clumped around her ears and Duncan thought she looked terrific, then hated himself. He’d basically told her he thought she was a bit mad, he hardly thought she’d welcome any observations about her appearance.

  ‘Correct me if I’m wrong, but I don’t think I told you that, just mentioned it as a possibility.’

  The zip slid a little further down. ‘Stop being passive aggressive about it, Duncan. Either I was seeing things, in which case I’ve got a problem, or I was making it up, in which case, ditto.’ She was still pale and her eyes were so wide it looked as though she had no eyelids. ‘I am cold and I am scared and I have no idea what happened to me out there,’ her voice wavered a bit. ‘But if you ever try barging into my bit of the tent without knocking or waiting to be invited again, then I don’t care what I saw, I am packing up and getting Tabs to drive me to the nearest railway station.’

  She might leave. She can’t leave. Duncan backed away from the flap. The knot in his stomach was back. I need to know what she saw, where she saw it, just in case the unthinkable really is true and she looked back into some kind of time-slip. Oh, and also because I actually quite fancy her and even if it comes to nothing I am liking spending time with her. ‘Sorry, sorry. Yes, you’re right, I shouldn’t have barged in like that.’ Even if it did give me a glimpse of something I am going to be thinking about at night for a while.

  The zip went all the way down and Grace emerged into the main tent. ‘Well. Good.’ And then she sat back on her heels, bowed her head and put her hands over her face. ‘I am so scared, Duncan.’ There were tears in her voice, and something about the way she sat, as though she felt that life had cheated her somehow.

  Duncan didn’t even think about it, even after her recent ultimatum. He closed the space between them and put his arms around her, pulling her into his chest until he could feel her ragged breathing.

  ‘It’s okay. You’re okay.’

  And now she really wasn’t, but at least she was crying into his sweater, not alone. ‘If I can see things – things that happened before – why can’t I see Jamie?’

  ‘I don’t know. I don’t know.’ It was all he could say, as he held her and stroked her back, rather ineffectually he thought, but better than sitting like a statue and ignoring her distress. She smelled of shampoo and wet earth, as though the planet had recently washed its hair, a friendly approachable sort of smell and he had a sudden flashback to previous girlfriends
and their attempts to expunge all traces of real smells from themselves under chemicals with fancy names and even fancier prices.

  ‘It’s not fair,’ she said, bending her head further into his shoulder. He could feel her heartbeat now, he didn’t know where from, she was wearing a significant amount of clothing. But while her body was rocking with the weight of sadness and confusion, her heart was skittering with uncertainty and he wasn’t up to contemplating how much she had on. And then, almost before he’d finished appreciating the feel of her body there in his arms, she was straightening away. ‘Sorry. God, I don’t know what got into me there.’ She mopped at her face with her sleeve. ‘I just … sorry, Duncan. I didn’t mean to come over all girlie on you, I’m just a bit … well, it’s been a bit of a shock.’

  Reluctantly he moved back, gave her space, then cleared his throat. ‘Think nothing of it. Shock, like you said.’

  ‘Shock. Yes.’

  The space where she’d been felt empty, and his arms still held the impression of her body, like memory foam, wanting to circle back around her where they’d felt so natural.

  Duncan took a deep breath. ‘Look. Why don’t you take yourself up to the catering tent, get a warm drink? Maybe a sandwich or something? You need …’ He was fighting the urge to say ‘something inside you’ with everything he had, but was afraid if he stopped concentrating on words, that the phrase would slip out. He knew his speech sounded stilted and unnatural, but that was better than sounding like a Frankie Howerd sketch. ‘… Building up. Come down to the new site later, then you’ll … then we might have some idea whether there’s anything there.’

  ‘But the sieves …’ She was still wiping her face. Trying, if he wasn’t mistaken, to stop her nose from running with the sleeve of her sweater. He wanted to tell her she looked fine, better than fine, but he’d been warned, hadn’t he?

  ‘I’ll just put a double team on with you tomorrow.’ He let himself smile. ‘Go on. Get something warm in … I mean, have some coffee with lots of sugar.’ Shut up, Duncan!

  She smiled back at him. It was a wobbly, watery smile, but she looked better, he thought. Better than she had, anyway. Less … transparent. ‘Okay. Thanks, I will.’

  He sat back and watched her blot her face dry, straighten up and leave the tent, then banged his head gently and pointlessly against the fabric wall. You are such a muppet, McDonald. Buggered if I know what else you could have done, but … still a muppet.

  The catering tent was quiet. Tabitha was nowhere to be seen, but one of the diggers up fetching hot drinks for what seemed like an entire regiment said that he thought the catering crew had gone down to town for supplies. I didn’t know whether to be relieved or disappointed that she wasn’t there to talk to. Tabs would have spotted that I’d been crying, she had the well-honed skills of anyone who’s cared for a bereaved person for knowing when I was having a down moment. Although, I thought, pouring myself a coffee from one of the permanently plugged in machines, come to think of it, I’d been doing really well lately. I’d been gradually getting better almost without realising.

  Jamie would have hated me wallowing in pain. That was the awful thing – he’d have hated me to be like this, but it was only the fact that I’d loved him so much that had made me grieve so deeply whilst knowing he wouldn’t have wanted it, in a sort of catch-22 of mourning. If he’d been able to arrange it, I had the feeling that he would have liked to have vanished, rather than have me sitting by his bedside until his final breath. He’d whispered it often enough to me, on those nights before it all got too much. ‘I’m dying, but you have to go on living.’ And right then I hadn’t wanted to. I wanted to die with him rather than go on, breathing my way through days that no longer had him in, walking around inside this thin, plastic shell that had formed around me on the day he died, containing me and my unhappiness and stopping the rest of life from touching me.

  I took a swig of the bitter brown coffee. It wasn’t hot, as such, but it was warmer than me. Duncan had lent me a little of his warmth for a while, but now I was back out in the cold world again … albeit with a pressure against my chest where he’d hugged me and a growing sense of confusion about how that had made me feel. Because it had felt nice. I had had that tiniest tickle inside again; despite how bewildered and cold and downright terrified I’d been, I’d still been capable of enjoying that closeness. The smooth chill of his waxed jacket against my face, the firm sensation of a pair of arms holding me against a heartbeat … he wasn’t Jamie, but it had still been comforting. And I liked Duncan. He was a prickly old sod, but underneath he was kind, with a vulnerability that stopped him from coming across as an utter arse. He’d been through a lot, was still going through a lot if the police treatment of him when Tessa had gone missing was anything to go by.

  I drank my coffee down to the sludgy depths, but carried on sitting with my hands wrapped around the plastic cup, staring unseeing across the tent and out over the valley visible where one of the walls was tied up to allow the rain in. The barrow hunched on the skyline like a dispossessed toad, floating in and out of sight as gusts of mist blew across, almost as though it was taunting me. What had I seen? Had it been real or had I fallen asleep and dreamed it all? I remembered the smell of the mud and the animals, the smoke trickling through the peat roofs of the huts, the careless happiness of the brood of children running about the hillside, collecting wood … Where had I got it all from? I screwed my eyes shut, trying to remember a book, a film, a television programme that I might have seen. Nudging my brain back to my degree, trying to remember if anything like this had been alluded to at any point.

  No success. I couldn’t remember ever having had any interest in the Bronze Age, except as in Britain having passed through it to get to flushing toilets, hot water and syphilis. I’d had no interest in it, couldn’t have told anyone, even under torture, about the modes of dress or fashions in housing. I probably could have made a rough stab at recreating it, but even so, as Duncan had said, I would have drawn houses with holes in the roof for the smoke, proper fencing to contain the livestock rather than the woven hurdles and ditches that had served in my visions, and there probably would have been more coughing and skinnier children.

  But I didn’t have time to wallow for long. There was a sound of running boots, splashing through mud, and then a panting pink-haired Morwenna arrived in front of me.

  ‘Oh good, you’re still here,’ she puffed. She must have run quite a distance because her face was the same colour as her hair. ‘Duncan wants to see you. Down …’ Her arm formed a walking stick shape, indicating direction and distance. ‘… over there.’

  ‘Why?’ I stood up. ‘What’s happened?’

  ‘Dunno. He started a couple of trenches, then he asked me to come and find you.’

  My heart started to skim in my chest. Did I want to go? What might he have found? Unless there was absolutely nothing there at all, the whole thing was an hallucination … but what if it wasn’t? What if there really was something there? What the hell did that imply? ‘I’m not sure if I—’

  ‘Please,’ Morwenna said, helping herself to a coffee. ‘Do us a favour. He’s been a lot less arsey since you turned up. I dug with him last year and he was a miserable twat for the entire two months. This year I’ve actually seen him smile, and he said, “well done” to someone last week, breaking the habit of a lifetime, apparently. So please, just go down and see what he wants and stop him from ruining the lives of twenty of York University’s finest.’ She looked at me over the rim of her plastic cup and raised her eyebrows.

  ‘Okay.’ After all, either way it wasn’t good, was it? Either I’d imagined or dreamed the whole thing, or there was something there and a whole new can of worms.

  I left her steaming quietly in the tent and headed down, following an already forming path through the slippery mud. Teams of diggers were heading in both directions, plodding through the
rain like Sherpas ascending Everest up the hill, or skidding down towards the new dig site carrying various implements. There seemed to be a huge element of ‘trudge’ going on, along with some muttering, some of which reached me, most of it casting doubt on Duncan’s ability, academic qualifications, experience and, in one case, his parentage. It sounded as though the diggers were not happy about moving.

  Although, once I rounded the dale, the atmosphere was very different. There were people marking out trenches, a few had started digging, and, in the middle of the site, a knot had collected around a figure that had to be Duncan. He was crouching beside a slot cut through the dark soil, like a slice in a chocolate cake, indicating something with the point of his trowel to Richard, who was standing beside him, coat collar turned up and his shoulders hunched.

  Duncan was streaming with water but his expression was one of barely restrained excitement. It made me feel slightly sick for a moment, but I kept going.

  ‘Hey there, Grace,’ he hailed me as I splashed onto the site, carefully avoiding any newly dug patches of soil – these archaeologists could get really tetchy if you stepped into their trenches while they were recording – and headed over to where he crouched.

  ‘You sent for me, my lord.’ I managed an attempt at sarcasm.

  He didn’t respond to it. ‘Yes, yes, I did. Okay everyone, you know what you’re on with, let’s get cracking while we’ve still got what passes for daylight.’

  Richard looked at me for a second, then at Duncan, who stood up away from the trench. Then he looked back at me again and I wondered whether Duncan had told him what I’d seen over here. Then he slapped Duncan on the shoulder, giving rise to a fair amount of spray, and walked off over to a group of students clustering together roughly where the wooden causeway would have begun to jut into the river. Everything looked the same, just … different, as though someone had rubbed out all the details and only left the background outlines.