Living in the Past

by Jane Lovering

  Duncan looked at me. His tongue stuck into his cheek as though he were thinking deeply and trying to stop himself from talking too soon. The rain was hanging off his chin in lengthening drips and catching on his eyebrows as it fell from his hair. He looked like a tramp. A damp tramp.

  ‘What are you grinning at?’ he asked.

  ‘You look like a cross between a bag lady and Indiana Jones.’ I looked into the slice through the earth at his feet. ‘What’s that?’

  ‘“That” is why I wanted you here.’ Now his voice held a note of barely contained excitement. ‘D’you see that colour change in the earth there?’

  I bent down and squinted. ‘No. Everything is just brown. And wet. It’s like an exploded Starbucks.’

  Now he bent beside me, trowel in hand, and ran the point along what looked to me to be a random part of the slot. ‘Just here. It goes from a lightish colour to a darker colour and then back. D’you see now?’

  ‘Oh. Yes,’ I said, to cut this short, despite the fact that it all still just looked brown to me.

  ‘I think it’s a drip gulley.’

  ‘A what?’ And then a sudden flashback … the huts with their peat roofs stretching down almost to the ground, and a shallow ditch dug in the ground beneath them.

  ‘Where the water would have run off the eaves. Either formed or dug to keep the walls dry.’ He was watching my face very closely. ‘And you’ve seen it,’ he added, very quietly. ‘Haven’t you, Grace?’ His voice was almost threateningly soft. ‘Because this is exactly where you told me you saw that roundhouse, the one separate from the rest. Now, do you know what I’m going to do?’

  ‘Have me committed?’

  His eyes were very dark, but they held a glimmer of something that looked like sympathy. ‘No. What I’m going to do is put a trench in right across here.’ He threw an arm wide. ‘Try to get the whole of the floor inside the hut. And what do you think I might find?’

  I thought back to the little glimpses I’d had of the inside of the hut, when the woman had stood outside it with the curtain thrown back. ‘There was a fire, somewhere around there …’ I pointed. ‘And some kind of platform thing on the other side from the door.’

  ‘That’s all?’

  ‘I didn’t go round for tea, did I?’ I snapped. ‘And I hardly think there’s going to be the remains of a Laura Ashley sofa and an avocado bathroom suite. It’s the Bronze Age, what are you expecting?’

  There was a quiet moment. Around us the students continued to chatter and bicker, and the rain carried on making a background whirring sound as it fell. Somewhere a grouse made a noise like a very small JCB starting up, but Duncan and I were in a circle of silence.

  ‘Why don’t you tell me, Grace?’ he asked, very softly. ‘Right here, right now, it looks like you are the expert.’

  ‘But it wasn’t real,’ I whispered back. ‘It was … I don’t know, some kind of brain fart or something.’ I realised how angry I was when there was a tearing noise from my cagoule, where I’d got my fists bunched, pushing against the plastic fabric.

  ‘Brain fart it might have been, but this bit,’ he said, using the point of his trowel to describe a rough circle, ‘looks pretty accurate. I’m sure there are statistics for randomly coming down on top of a roundhouse, but I think they are vanishingly small chances. So, anything you’ve got, I could use it.’

  And really, what else did I have? I could throw a tantrum, storm off the site, get a probably tight-lipped Tabitha to take me to the nearest station and go back to my new house, where I could lie alone in the dark thinking of might-have-beens, and spend my days sitting in empty classrooms reading new Government Teaching Directives and trying to write lessons to make the rise of communism sound gripping enough to keep a bunch of Year Tens occupied.

  Or I could stand here in the rain with this man in his coat with the ripped pocket and the patina of mud, pointing to places and saying, ‘I think there was something there’ and ‘that’s where the bridge-thing went into the river’, being stared at by half-bearded young men and women with interesting hair choices. And yet surrounded by the kind of camaraderie that only really occurs when you are marooned in the rain miles from anywhere.

  ‘The trackway went halfway across the river, just where Morwenna is standing, I think,’ I said, aware I sounded a bit sulky. ‘And the other three huts were around where that bloke is measuring things. A bit further up the hill there was a field of something like wheat and it had a ditch round it.’

  Duncan was scribbling things on a bit of soggy paper. ‘You are brilliant, you are,’ he said, still scribbling.

  ‘Brilliant, insane, who’s counting?’

  He stopped writing. ‘Look, DNA and the periodic table are only around because people dreamed of them, who knows what happens inside the human mind? Maybe some people are more receptive to things than others, perhaps there are things going on that we don’t understand. Don’t you think we’re being a bit arrogant, thinking this or that is impossible, just because we don’t get how it works?’

  There was something rather schizophrenic about a man dripping with rain and with mud stains up his cheeks, lecturing me on the unknowability of the universe. ‘You sound like you should be shouting on street corners.’

  ‘And you sound like someone who has had some kind of time-travel experience but won’t believe it, despite it having happened, because someone somewhere says it’s impossible. Which one of us is wrong there, do you think?’

  There was another of those quiet moments where Duncan and I seemed to exist in a bubble of our own blowing, and then he let out a sharp laugh and gave me an exaggerated hug. ‘Right. Come on then, genius, let’s get some trenches marked out, and if you’re very good I’ll let you have your very own trowel.’

  ‘I bet you say that to all the girls,’ I said, weakly, but allowed myself to be scooped along and included in a bunch of students walking around with orange spray paint cans.

  Although Duncan was nominally the one in charge of marking where we’d dig, he was watching me all the time, and at each point where he thought of digging he’d raise an eyebrow at me. If I nodded, he’d spray a line, if I frowned he’d move on. And the weirdest thing wasn’t even the overlaying of the past and present, or the wading through liquid peat with a spray can, it was the feeling almost of power that I got from it all. The feeling that, somehow, I had a knowledge that could be useful, that I knew more than everyone else here about how this site had been laid out, and that information was actually worth something here. I hadn’t really felt like that since my first day of teaching; seeing interested faces just waiting to hear what I had to say. Of course, that had worn off by about day three of teaching, but here … here I actually felt I belonged.

  Chapter Seventeen

  2000 BC

  Hen ran. Not daring to think, she fled down the hillside, passing Arthfael and his brother bringing wood down to the houses, passing the three women sitting outside Airwen’s hut spinning and chattering, and ran inside her own home, pulling the curtain down behind her to block out the day. Then she stood in the darkness, pinpricked with the light that edged its way through the thatch and given a glow by the embers of the fire, and she breathed. Breathed in the scent of smoke, of drying meat, the straw that filled her mattress. Heard the rustle of a mouse making its way through the eaves, the distant voices of the women, Vast’s little dog barking as it chased the children …

  Home. This is home. What I saw – that woman, looking so wrong – it could not be. Hen felt her chest slowing as her breath caught up with her, steadied herself with a hand against the central pillar of her house. The roughness of the wood beneath her fingers was real. The dust that covered her feet in their skin shoes was real. The smells and sounds of a late summer day around the village were real. The moments I shared with Tor, up on the high ground, tumbled in the bracken with my s
kirts around my waist, were real.

  A voice at the door, but staying carefully the other side of the curtain. ‘My lady?’ Morcant. ‘My mother sent me to ask if you are well? She says you seemed frightened as you came from the hill.’ Then the formality of his voice dropped. ‘Did you see the spirits of the ancestors? Genofeva said she saw her father’s father up at the sleeping place when she was playing, but I think it was a deer in the fog. She is a stupid child sometimes.’

  Despite herself and her panic, Hen smiled. ‘Thank you, Morcant, you may tell your mother I am well. I was hurrying home to care for my fire, I could see no smoke from the hillside and I feared it may have died.’

  There was a pause while the child thought this over, but she had chosen her lie well. A dead fire meant carrying embers from another house and starting afresh with kindling, it could be a laborious process.

  ‘Oh.’ Another pause. Then, ‘Will you come up on the hill with us later to gather some more berries? Drustan says he wants this Ripening to be the best festival we have ever had.’

  ‘I will. Go and gather the others, we shall all go picking.’ Hen’s heart swept and squeezed with the knowledge that Drustan was hoping this would be his last Ripening with them, that Midwinter would bring permission for him to leave them for life with another family, across the dale or even across the seas. She must lose him, and she knew that. He was of age. But he was still her son, even unacknowledged as that relationship was. ‘I have a task to do first, and then I shall come.’

  She waited until she heard the scampering sound of Morcant off to gather his cousins, and then, slowly, her fingers went to her neck. Driven by she-knew-not-what, from beneath her tunic she drew out her necklace, the one she had worn when she came to this place. Carefully, reverentially, she removed it, laid it on the woven cover of her bed and ran a finger over its shapes and the slippery coolness of its making. This necklace, its strangeness and its contours, had been one of the reasons she had become ‘other’, given the role of shaman, medicine woman and outcast, and she both loved and hated it for those reasons, and for its tie with her life before this place. The blue and white of the angular forms threw her back to her encounter on the hillside, with the woman who had smiled and called to her, and she shivered, refastening the clasp behind her neck and tucking the amulet away beneath her hair and the folds of her dress, as though pushing it out of her sight could help her to forget.

  Chapter Eighteen

  ‘Chips?’ Duncan ducked into the tent and made me jump.

  ‘No, this is what we call a book, but given your upbringing I’ll forgive you.’ I snapped the book shut and moved the torch beam upwards. I’d been sitting on the crate reading one of Duncan’s books, trying to cheat my brain into thinking that it had read something previously that I’d conjured into reality.

  ‘Well, if you’re going to turn down a plate of chips just so you can be sarcastic, I think I win.’ He began taking off his coat, which had to be done with care so that the thing didn’t come to pieces during removal. One sleeve was now held on by some cursory stitching, the pocket had completely detatched and there was a gap between the zip and the rest of the coat that I could see his sweater through. ‘Just thought you might fancy something hot and a quiet chat about today.’

  I twitched the narrow beam of light up onto his face. ‘You say quiet chat like it’s a bad thing.’

  Duncan screwed his eyes against the light. ‘We had the flashlights out, I’ve only just shut the dig down for the night. Thought you might like to hear about what we found.’

  ‘And I have to do that with a plate of carbohydrates in front of me?’

  A sideways motion of his head. ‘Might help. It’ll give you something to throw at me if you don’t like what I’m saying, at the very least.’ The coat plopped to the floor and he started shucking off the sweater, disappearing inside the fawn wool as he pulled it off from the back of the collar over his head.

  ‘How much more are you taking off?’ I stood up slowly, trying furtively to rub away the sensation that my backside had been cheesewired. ‘Because I’m sensitive and might go blind.’

  ‘Och, that’s your lot.’ The sweater followed the coat to the floor of the tent. ‘So, was that a yes to the chips then?’ A pause and then, in a softer voice, ‘I really do want to talk to you, away from this place.’

  ‘Let me change my jeans. I’ll meet you up at the Land Rover.’ Something in his tone made my mouth go dry and my heart dodge to the other side of my chest.

  ‘Okay, see you up there in … what?’ He eyed me. ‘Ten minutes?’ I just eyeballed him back and he eventually shrugged and flipped up the tent flap. ‘Okay, okay, I’m going.’

  I went into my sleeping compartment and began to change out of my wet and muddy clothes, but as I did so I felt oddly compelled to explain to Jamie what I was doing. ‘He’s weird and he’s Scottish, but I think you’d like him. He’s not really rude, just … he speaks before he thinks, I think, and he really doesn’t seem to care what he looks like because he’s actually quite good looking but he doesn’t do anything about it. I mean, he shaves like he’s had his beard eaten off by yaks. But he must have showered because he’s not that filthy, and his hands are always reasonably clean. Unless he’s caked in mud, of course, but then we’re all pretty much covered in the stuff …’ I trailed off. I hadn’t talked about me, only Duncan. I always talked to Jamie about myself: how I was feeling, how much I was missing him, how life was without him … but now, here I was, talking about Duncan as though he was important.

  I pushed my legs into the only clean jeans I had left, put my smart boots into a carrier bag and my wellingtons back on, gave my hair a quick brush, popped in earrings as a concession to dressing up and changed my moist fleece for a clean shirt, then went out of the tent, trying not to think about the implications of talking about Duncan to Jamie. Duncan was waiting, leaning against the Land Rover, watching the last of the light sink out of the air behind the barrow, in stripes of pink and blue, bringing the night in on a golden raft.

  ‘They will have looked at this, just like we are,’ he said, without acknowledging me in any other way. ‘They will have laughed and cried and sulked and loved, exactly like us. And yet we think of them as different.’

  I looked out over the sky too. ‘People are always just people,’ I said. ‘I should think the same things worried them as worry us, although we’re not going to die of measles or a bad winter. Losing someone was still losing someone, even thousands of years ago.’

  I saw him as a dark shape, giving me a quick glance, then unlocking the Land Rover and waiting for me to hop up.

  ‘Chips, then.’

  ‘And gin. If it’s going to be “that” kind of a talk.’

  The engine buzzed into life and began rumbling us along the trackway down to the road. Duncan didn’t say anything else and I was quite liking the silence, away from the camp’s continual background chatter-buzz, the thump of the generator, the perpetual music from someone’s iPod through speakers. In contrast the rattle of the Land Rover was peace and quiet. Since Jamie had died I’d got used to spending a lot of time alone, contrasting the over-stimulation of school days with the lack of anything in the flat. At first it had been painful, as though my mind was secretly waiting for Jamie to come leaping through the front door shouting ‘Gotcha!’, but I’d gradually come to depend on that downtime. The ringing-in-the-ears that came from a lack of noise when I woke up before dawn. I’d started talking to Jamie to break the sensation that I’d gone deaf.

  ‘You’re wearing earrings,’ Duncan said, not looking at me. I was slightly impressed. They were small studs, little orange beads, mostly hidden by my hair.

  Self-consciously I reached up and twiddled one. ‘Yes. I just thought—’

  ‘They look like Lego.’

  ‘What? No, I mean, I’ve sort of got used to you now, but even
so, what?’

  He looked across at me and his face creased into a frown. ‘No, it was a compliment. I like Lego, nothing wrong with Lego. I just didn’t realise they did jewellery.’

  ‘They are not Lego.’ I took a deep breath. ‘Jamie bought them for me as a joke. Can’t even remember what the joke was now, something to do with him giving me a present that looked like it came out of a Christmas cracker, I think.’ I screwed my face up. ‘I’m not going to waste nice earrings on going out for chips and gin, am I?’

  ‘Just flattered that you’re prepared to waste Lego earrings on going out for chips and gin.’

  I sniffed haughtily, and looked out of the window. ‘Yes, well, we don’t all have your complicated relationship with plastic toys, you know.’

  Silence resumed until we pulled up at the pub and I changed my shoes and then went ahead while Duncan locked the Land Rover, finding the place almost deserted, but the air thick with the smell of fried potato products and the noise of a distant fiddle.

  ‘It’s folk night. Everyone’s in the other bar.’ Duncan wandered in after me. ‘I’ll pop round and order.’

  He vanished somewhere into the labyrinthine depths of the pub and I walked around rooms, looking at the pictures on the walls while I waited. They were photographs, mostly old ones, of the surrounding moorland and dales, filled with shepherds in old-fashioned smocks, ancient horse-drawn machinery and long-shadowed shots of local sites of interest. One picture was of the barrow above our site, at least, that’s what it looked like.

  ‘Is that our barrow?’ I asked Duncan as he came back balancing a tray of chips, a half-pint of cider and a long glass of what I really hoped was very strong gin.

  ‘Yep. Why?’

  I looked around quickly in case there was someone who was going to tell me off, but the bar behind us continued uninhabited, so I slipped the photograph off the wall and took it over to one of the pink-shaded lamps that I supposed gave atmospheric lighting, but in reality made everyone look as though they had high blood pressure. I turned the picture over. On the back was written, in old-fashioned loopy writing, ‘Long John, barrow above Farrowdale. 1931.’