Living in the Past

by Jane Lovering

  I let out a little squeak of frustration and terror. I tried to muffle it into the earth, but the dog heard and growled again. And these growls weren’t the ‘warning, don’t come too close’ growls that you got from the pet dogs I knew. Not even the serious warning of a feral dog, roaming its alleyways and guarding a meal. These were primeval growls, more in the chest than the larynx, of a dog only half a step removed from a wolf. A dog that seriously would remove my throat and not worry about whether or not he’d been ‘a good boy’.

  My fingers were numb now. The fibrous tie around my wrists was absolutely unbreakable and slicing into skin, but I could hardly feel it because my unnaturally extended shoulders ached too much and there was a stone jutting into my hip that was giving me more problems. I wondered how long it would be before my hip went numb too. How long before dawn, how long before that man, Tor, held me down and cut my throat with that scythe? Would it hurt? How much? Another little whimper seeped into the grass. I’ll never see Duncan again. And, much as I hate to admit it, I was beginning to feel the first tiny tickles of anticipation at the thought of him, although, now I come to think of it I’m not sure how a relationship would work, when he travels about digging things up and I’m pretty much confined to a classroom, but … If we wanted to, we could make it work. Could have made it work.

  And maybe it was the knowledge that everything was going to be over for me, that there would be no more tomorrows, that drove home the realisation that I really could have had something with Duncan. That Jamie, much as I’d loved him, was gone. Really, truly gone, and my hanging on to his memory would neither bring him back nor bring me any comfort. But Duncan could.

  I tugged again, exasperated at these realisations coming too late to be any use, and the dog growled again. This time it stood up at the end of its rope and I could see the curled back upper lip, the glint of teeth in the moonlight. I might not even have to wait for Tor and his scythe, this dog could finish me off right now. I pressed my stomach closer to the ground and closed my eyes, felt the chill of a nose as the dog snuffed at my hair and face then, apparently satisfied that I wasn’t going to make a break for it, lay back down, and I could feel its breath puff against my neck, as though it was telling me it was right there, all pointy-toothed and ready. This was not a dog that was going to be won over with soft words and a head scratch, although the warmth of its body was welcome.

  I squeezed open one eye. Through the blades of grass I could see the sky to the east, over near where our campsite would be in another three thousand years give or take a decade, starting to lighten. A barely perceptible change of shade, like new jeans after a first wash. And the stars were fading, vanishing before the oncoming dawn. I remembered Duncan talking about them being there all the time, we just couldn’t see them, and I felt a momentary flash of comfort at knowing he was out there, somewhere, in the future. That he, and he alone, would know what had happened to me, while to everyone else I would just be a statistic. They’d probably all put it down to grief having overcome me, think that I’d gone away somewhere, ended everything in my pain at being unable to live without Jamie, and I almost laughed at the irony of my coming to terms with his loss and my interest in Duncan and being unable to tell them.

  Life, in any century, was a complete bitch sometimes.

  Suddenly the dog stood up, its whole manner different now. Its head hung lower, its tail wagged slowly, there were no hackles and no growling. I opened my eyes and looked up as far as I could without moving, to see Lady Hen coming towards me, her skirts sweeping a diamond-curtain of dew before her. The dog crouched, she raised her arm and I saw the first shimmer of the sun’s rays catch the blade of the scythe as she held it up above my head, her eyes on mine and her legs braced. There was a whirring sound, the blade came down and I closed my eyes, waiting for the pain or the dampness of blood, but there was only an easing of the burning drag on my arms and the dog’s uncertain tail waving against my cheek.

  I opened my eyes. The bounds that had held me to the earth had been severed, their ragged fibrous ends now free of the stake, and Hen was crouched, cradling the dog’s head in her lap, one hand cupping at a necklace around her throat, as though it was some kind of shield. She pointed out across the dale, arm outflung to indicate speed and kicked my legs. I staggered to my feet, my head singing with dizziness, my legs almost numb but my body responding to freedom by displaying an atavistic ability to run away really fast. The dog barked once, I heard a sharp command and it went quiet again, but by now I was near the stone barrier and didn’t look back. I hurled myself at the rocks with such urgency that I hardly needed to climb; my adrenaline-fuelled leap got me high enough to suspend myself from the top of the rough wall, and then with one roll I was down, falling onto the grass on the other side hard enough to drive the wind from my lungs.

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Duncan had almost given up hope. Dawn was etching faint lines across the sky and there was still no sign of Grace. Right. I’ll head back to camp, get my gear and start digging again. At least I’ll be here if … A sudden image of a few of the things that might have happened to her rattled at his brain. Survival had been the order of the day back then, Grace had walked into a situation she was ill prepared to face, and I let her. Why? Okay, I want to know what happened to Anya, I want that element of closure but who will it help? If she went … back, she’ll have been dead for thousands of years anyway. There’s nothing I can tell the police that will stop them from riding in mob handed every time a girl so much as breaks a nail in my vicinity, and even thinking that makes me feel shallow and uncaring. So I let Grace walk into danger.

  He walked back around the barrier, feeling the dew wet against his boots, dragging at his steps. But I didn’t ‘let’ her do anything. It was her decision, not mine to make or to change. She’s an intelligent woman, it’s not like she would have gone walking into the camp expecting everyone to be friends, is it? His stomach was a hot, hard ball as he tried to imagine telling Tabitha, telling anyone, that Grace was gone. Explaining what had happened would be an impossibility – he’d be lucky to get sentenced to an institution if he tried telling them she’d gone back to the Bronze Age, and, lack of a body notwithstanding, the police were going to get him this time, for sure. And I’ll never see Grace again. Never have the chance to actually get to know her properly, to see if we really could have something beyond this rather tentative friendship.

  There was a sudden blow that hit him in the middle of his back and sent him face down onto the wet grass, pinned by a weight that seemed to be breathing heavily. With an effort that made his arms ache, he managed to turn himself over, to find Grace gripping him ferociously, her face bumping the contours of his body as he turned underneath her, and finally doing her best to bury her face in his coat. She was making little whimpering sounds and he could feel her shaking, her tears dampening his skin. He wound his arms around her.

  ‘What happened?’

  She didn’t answer, or couldn’t, just kept burrowing against him as though she was trying to occupy his body. It was strangely erotic, and he tried not to think about the softness of her, the way her breasts flattened against his chest and the smell of her hair pressed against his cheek. This was definitely not the time.

  ‘Grace? Can you speak?’

  One last, shuddering breath and a small, squeaked, ‘Yes.’ Then she was sobbing, lying on top of him and crying as though he was a comfortable bed and she was a disappointed teenager.

  ‘What happened? Are you all right? Are you hurt?’ Asking was hard, and not only because she was squeezing all the breath out of him. What’s happened to her? What if she’s been assaulted? He gritted his teeth. Finding the guy responsible and killing him isn’t really possible if he’s already been dead for three millennia.

  ‘They … they were going to … kill me, but … Lady Hen let … me go.’ Grace eventually gasped herself to a stop, her words fractured
and sharp edged. ‘I nearly died, Duncan. They tied me up with a dog and Tor was going to come back and cut my throat with a scythe and …’ Air ran out of her lungs in a sigh.

  ‘Oh, Grace.’ He tightened his hold on her, a slow dawning of feeling that this could all have been so different outriding the sensation of relief. His heart was thundering and he wondered if she could feel it, as he could feel hers drilling between them as though her chest was an oil platform and he was a deep sea well.

  She struggled upright, pulling herself away until she was sitting on his legs and he was startled at the fact that she looked more angry now than anything else. Anger salted with an emotion that made her eyes gleam, and suddenly she was bending forwards again, this time to kiss him with a heat that almost melted his coat. Her lips were cold but her tongue was warm and Duncan forgot about the chill of the dawn grass underneath him, or the fact that the camp would be descending on them any moment now. All he could think about was that she was here, she was safe and she was sitting on top of him and kissing him so deeply that she’d almost reached his Roman layer.

  ‘Woah, Grace, hang on a minute.’ He gently pushed her shoulders away so she had to straighten. ‘I mean, yes, lovely and all but I don’t want to take advantage of you if you’re just scared.’

  She shook her head, pushing her hair away from her face. ‘Technically, since you’re down there, I was taking advantage of you, but that’s not what this is about, Duncan.’ Her face was flushed. ‘I nearly died. In the past. Three thousand years ago I almost got my head cut off.’ She rolled a sleeve and he winced as he saw her lower arm and wrist marked with gouges and tracked with lines of blood. ‘And I was lying there, thinking about you, about Jamie …’

  ‘Okay,’ he said slowly. ‘So, this …’ He waved an arm to indicate their mutual position.

  ‘I want you to take me to bed,’ she said. ‘I want you to make me feel alive, here and now. Well, not here, I’m not into that “sex in a public place” thing, and probably not right now because ditto, but …’ She leaned in and kissed him again.

  She really means it – och, they never covered any of this in the manuals … ‘Seriously?’ was all he could think of to say.

  ‘Never more so.’ Grace climbed off him and stood up.

  Duncan looked at her face. She looked a little bit wild, but there was a kind of joy about her that he’d seen before in people who’d faced almost certain death only to return to the world. Mountain climbers caught in avalanches, people lost in desert wildernesses, people who’d found life sweeter than before. He made an executive decision. ‘Right. Come with me.’ And, grasping her hand, he pulled her into a run beside him, up the hill and away from the dig site.

  Duncan took me to the house. I don’t really know what I’d expected him to do, there had been a huge relief in handing over control to him. In fact, the whole thing, us, here, was driven by relief and I now understood how people who escaped certain death could want to go off and do something crazy and reckless – the sheer joy at still being alive made me want to yell and dance and affirm that I was still breathing. Still here.

  The house was cold, but Duncan’s hand in mine was very warm. We’d driven over, hardly speaking, although he kept sneaking little looks at me and saying things like, ‘Are you absolutely sure about this?’ until I’d had to shut him down by kissing him. While he was driving. I had the curious feeling that I was immortal, that there was no way that Duncan could crash the Land Rover and kill us both, because I couldn’t die. I’d read enough to know that this feeling was probably temporary, but for the moment it was like riding on some golden cloud of superhero, and I was going to take full advantage of it for as long as it lasted.

  Duncan took me to a room we’d barely looked in on our previous tour of the house. It took up the entire loft, Velux windows letting in shafts of the just-emerging sun and making the room look like a stage set. A metal-framed bed stood unmade against one wall and the rest of the room was mostly taken up with what looked like boxes of papers and files.

  ‘Your room?’

  Duncan nodded. ‘But it looks like they’re mostly using it for storage these days. By the way, you ought to clean up those wrists.’

  ‘Later.’ A moment of shyness as my memory threw me back to Jamie, the first time, my tiny little room in the shared house … and then that was gone and it was just Duncan, in his old coat and sexy stubble and with his hair dreadlocked with damp. I wrapped my arms around him and kissed him again, hard.

  ‘You are absolutely sure?’ he asked, when I pulled away.

  In answer, I began peeling off my clothes. Invincibility still sat over me like a cloak. I didn’t feel the chill of the room, or the warmth of the sun slanting in, or the cool smoothness of the mattress when Duncan lay me down on the bed. All I could feel was the heat of his skin, the roughness of his dig-worn fingers and the pressure of his mouth.

  He was gentler than I’d expected from a man whose body was so formed from hard work. Slow and careful and serious, treating me as though I mattered, and it suddenly shocked me how perfunctory my love-making with Jamie had become, how we’d taken one another for granted all those years, when this man I barely knew was taking such time over each inch of my body.

  He kissed me and stroked me until I was a taut wire, giving myself over entirely to his body, whispering my desire into his hair, then fracturing, every muscle at once breaking into a sublime relaxation. And only then did he slide inside me, slowly, gently, as though he half expected me to stop him.

  ‘All right?’ he whispered. I tipped my hips in answer, drawing him further in, wrapping my legs around his pelvis, but he slowed his movements until he lay absolutely still above me. ‘I need you to say it, Grace. I need to know that you want this.’

  ‘Duncan McDonald, if you don’t screw me hard enough for me to see stars, I swear I shall do you an injury with your own trowel,’ I said, somewhat breathlessly.

  ‘Well, that was nicely unequivocal.’ And now he moved, steadily at first, on an increasing tempo. We laughed together at the noise the metal bedframe made when we eventually put all our energy into one another, it squeaked and squealed as though our efforts were torturing a family of field mice, and Duncan’s final whisper of, ‘Oh, Grace …’ was almost lost in its rattling attempts to shake itself to pieces. As we lay back down, arms wrapped around one another, a metal ball bounced off its position on the bedhead and rolled away underneath.

  ‘Still sure this was the right thing to do?’ he whispered with his lips pressed against the top of my head.

  ‘I needed to know I was still alive. This seemed the best way.’

  ‘Really? The idea of just having a bacon sandwich never occurred to you?’ As Duncan laughed, his chest moved under my cheek, the tufts of hair that covered it scrubbing against my face. It felt real.

  ‘I can’t explain it. It’s not just the “nearly being horribly killed” thing, there’s this feeling that … oh, I can’t explain it.’ I found myself tracing a little pattern with the tip of my finger against his skin. ‘Like all that, back then, it all happened to me this morning, but the people there … they’re all dead. I mean, I could smell them, I could see their clothes and their dogs and the rope around my wrists …’ I held up a hand to demonstrate. The rings of red were turning into raised wheals and a kind of blistering. ‘And it was real. But none of it exists any more and hasn’t for thousands of years and it made me feel …’ I made a sort of one-handed shrug gesture.

  ‘Okay, I think I’m getting it.’ Duncan moved his arm so that it was around my shoulders and I wasn’t clasped quite so hard against him. ‘Feeling a bit used, to be honest.’

  ‘No!’ I sat up and leaned across so that I could look in his face. ‘No, Duncan. Obviously, if I’d run into Richard when I came back, this wouldn’t have happened, or Kyle or any of the other men out there. I’d have … well, that bac
on sandwich would probably have figured largely. No, this is because it was you.’

  ‘Right, feeling a bit better now.’ He’d stopped looking at my face now, his eyes travelling down my body. ‘Are you still in the throes of existential angst? Because …’

  I actually giggled, and I couldn’t remember the last time I’d done that. ‘Won’t they miss us on the dig?’

  ‘Probably.’ His lips were on my neck now, warm as his teeth tickled my skin. ‘But I’m in charge so even Richard can’t really say anything, and you’re a volunteer, they’re not going to sack you. Besides, there are three bathrooms in this house, and power showers.’

  ‘No, but …’ I wriggled with pleasure at the feel of him.

  ‘Not the time for a work ethic to kick in, Grace, trust me.’

  This time the other knob fell off and a couple of screws hit the floor too.

  Afterwards, Duncan slept. I couldn’t really blame him, we’d put a lot of energy into making love, but I was still buzzing with adrenaline and the strangeness of a new man. Wasn’t quite sure I could relax enough to sleep with him yet. I slipped out from under his arm and off the bed, to a clanking noise that sounded like a pair of metal buckets being banged together. Duncan just muttered and turned over, revealing the strong line of his back, the dimpling of muscle along his spine and a T-shirt tan line around his neck and biceps. I stood and watched him sleep for a moment. Wondered how it must feel to be him, constantly under suspicion, constantly looking over his shoulder in case something happened to someone, knowing that he would never be free of that dread of the knock on the door.

  He muttered again and turned face down into the uncased pillows, his hair dividing to fall either side of his neck, his legs long and strong, and I wondered what he’d look like in a kilt. Whether he ever wore a kilt. And then berated myself for being racist, wondered very quickly if he’d ever played the bagpipes, and to distract myself from this obvious beginning of fetishising his Scottishness, I went to look out of the window.