Living in the Past

by Jane Lovering

  I had to say the words. Hint at what might happen. ‘Have you thought about this? Me and you? What it’s going to do to you?’ If I don’t come back this time …

  Duncan raised his eyebrows and took another step back. ‘Are you having second thoughts?’ And then, when I shook my head, ‘Look, Grace. I’ve lived with it for all these years. And I’d rather have you with me and keep looking over my shoulder for the rest of my life than not have you. If you see what I mean.’

  ‘Duncan.’ I raised a hand and touched his cheek, trying to find a bit that wasn’t covered by either beard or blister. ‘I’m not having second thoughts. At least, not for me. This whole thing has affected you more than you realise. You’re snotty with everyone, you keep people at arm’s length, you won’t have a proper relationship in case something happens to her. I think calling you “Prickly Prof” is underplaying your anti-sociability to quite an extent.’

  ‘Wow. And you like me. Imagine what the people who don’t are saying.’

  ‘Yes,’ I said, gently. ‘Imagine.’

  He raised a hand and put it over mine. ‘I know. And I’m not the only one, am I? Och, I’ve talked to Tabitha and Millie. In fact, they came to find me and I don’t use the phrase “hunted down” lightly. Sounds like you’ve done a fair bit of keeping yourself apart so as not to get hurt again yourself. Tabitha called it borderline OCD, which I think was a bit harsh and, from your face, was probably a mistake to mention, but … yes, we’ve both tried to control our environments to keep ourselves safe, haven’t we?’

  I eased my hand out from under his. ‘My husband died, Duncan,’ I said, and was aware that my voice was a bit stiff. ‘It’s not an experience I would wish on my worst enemy.’

  ‘I didn’t mean it like … Grace? What are you doing?’

  I scooped up my rucksack and swung it onto my back. ‘I’m just getting a bit of space.’

  ‘I didn’t mean … look, I’m sorry, I’m shit at all this. You’re right, I’m a crabbit bastard, and the fact that I think I’ve got reason to be is no excuse.’ He held both hands up. ‘And I have literally nothing to follow that up, so if you want to leave, now would be good.’

  I had to squeeze my lips together so as not to smile, which made my mouth feel as though I’d had a rock rammed into it.

  ‘Grace. Wait.’ He held out a hand.

  ‘What am I looking at?’

  ‘This.’ He tipped a small object into my palm. ‘If you seriously want to do laundry, get Tabitha to run you up to the old house. There’s a washer there, probably full of spiders by now, but I’m sure you’ll give them a run for their money. Use that. Take the diggers’ washing too, if you want, there’s a line in the old barn you can use to hang it all up.’

  There was a look in his eye. Just a hint of something behind everything else, like an emotion playing peekaboo. ‘Your family house.’

  ‘Aye.’

  ‘And you aren’t worried?’

  ‘Take it as read that I am reassured you’re not going to vanish on me, all right? I’m even prepared for you to tell everyone where you’re going, when you offer to take their undercrackers off their hands. Just use tongs, be advised.’

  ‘Duncan—’ What if I don’t come back? ‘I don’t need the key, honestly, we’ll find a laundrette somewhere.’

  ‘For goodness’ sake, take the key.’ And then, in a softer voice, ‘Take it to show how much I trust you, Grace.’ He took another quick step in and put his arms around me. ‘I can’t lose you. I won’t lose you.’ His stubble snagged at my hair as he rested his chin on the top of my head. ‘I don’t need any more pain like that.’

  I closed my eyes. There was a wonderful feeling of security here in his arms. I didn’t want to walk out of that safety. ‘You won’t lose me, Duncan,’ I said, and felt his grip tighten. ‘Laundry isn’t that dangerous.’ And I nearly strangled myself with my own words. ‘But you’re going to have to let me go at some point, otherwise neither of us will get anything done. You want to risk the wrath of the entire wet sieves team, go ahead, dig director or no dig director, I’d back a bunch of annoyed students covered in mud any day.’

  He gave a small laugh and gradually uncurled from around me. ‘Och, woman, you know how to sweet talk a man.’

  I felt, and there was no other word for it, shitty. Here he was, giving me the key to the very place that his last real girlfriend vanished from, to prove how much he trusted me, and here was I, about to undertake the most dangerous trip of my life. With every chance I might not come back. Oh God.

  But what was the option? That I pretended I didn’t know what happened to Anya? That I swallowed it all down and let him be persecuted by the police for the rest of our lives together? I had one chance now to make things better, and I had to focus on that, not on the chance that it could all, for both of us, go so horribly wrong.

  ‘I’ll see you later. I mean, like later in hours terms, not millennia. I realise you archaeologists have a very loose definition of late.’ And then I left him, standing bemused in the tent. Pushed both arms through the straps of my battered old rucksack, and went back to the wet sieves for the rest of the day.

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  It was the end of the day. The sun had slowly seeped away from the site, so the teams had worked longer than usual, taking advantage of the extra light and the fact that the soil had dried out. Amid the house remains they’d turned up small domestic finds, loom weights, some amber beads, burned bone and pottery, while up on the sieves they’d found some micro flints and an arrow head. This had all the makings of a classic site, one that would be written up for years to come, revisited and redug, and probably a few theories formulated that would change the face of prehistory, at least for those students currently working here.

  Prehistory. A time with not much medical knowledge, no environmental controls and no citrus fruit. And a time which Grace seemingly could visit at will … Duncan took a deep breath. Did he hope Anya had done as Grace had, and fallen back into the past? Was it better or worse to think that she’d fallen through time and never tried to find her way back to him, or that she’d died a tragic death that day in the fog? After Anya’s disappearance he’d spent the two weeks before he left for the last time looking over and over at the photographs of her. He’d sat up late every night trying to fix her face in his memory. Trying to hold on to those times when they’d been so happy, before things had started to drift. They’d been so young … Where are you?

  Duncan sighed. He dropped his head so his chin was resting on his chest.

  I am overthinking this. I should trust Grace. Trust her feelings for me. The realisation that this was how he should have thought all those years ago about Anya. How her increasingly frequent disappearances had made him annoyed rather than protective. Was I really so bad as a boyfriend? Did I let her down so badly?

  He thought back over the years. They’d met during Freshers’ Week and been inseparable ever since. A relationship deeper than the typical student relationships that had broken out around them, they’d really thought they could make it as a couple out in the wide world … and then that spring day, the phone call … Anya inconsolable and he hadn’t known what to say, what to do; he’d tried to carry on as before, she’d become withdrawn and …

  Duncan slapped himself exactly where that putative flint arrow would have struck. All the realisations he should have had fifteen years ago slotted into his brain like one of the old index card filing systems that his college had had. Anya, an only child, had lost her parents that February morning, when a drunken driver had ploughed into their car. She’d been cut loose from her moorings with nothing left of her old life, nothing to depend upon but an immature archaeology student whose huge, rambling family seemed as permanent as concrete. She’d thrown herself ever deeper into her medical studies but she’d been depressed, she’d needed comfort and reassurance
, and what had he done? Tried to deny the change in their relationship. Tried to pretend that nothing had happened, handed her a tissue when she cried, quick arm around the shoulders. Duncan bit his lip hard as all the memories trickled back, but now coloured with maturity. I basically denied her her grieving. Because I was more concerned with my research, my degree. I didn’t understand how she felt, nothing had happened to me, so I wanted her to pretend to be unaffected, to let things carry on as before. I should have got her counselling, but I barely even let her talk about what had happened. And I left her alone.

  You stupid man, McDonald. You stupid, self-centred twat. All you’ve done since is bitch on about how terrible it’s been for you to have the police on your case; you never gave a single thought to how it must have felt for her, orphaned and with a prat of a boyfriend who behaved as though losing your parents just meant that there was nowhere to spend the summer holidays. His chest was squeezing so hard that, for a moment, he thought he was having a heart attack. Bit late now, heart, to react. Where the fuck were you fifteen years ago?

  Duncan rubbed his hands around the back of his neck, wincing at the feel of rough fingers against sunburn. The prickly, defensive weight that he hadn’t even realised he’d been carrying, one that he had lost since he and Grace had formed a relationship of sorts, climbed onto his back and settled between his shoulder blades as though it had never been gone, like a parasitic hedgehog. And no wonder really. The way I treated Anya was indefensible, and I certainly never deserved anyone as fabulous as Grace for my subsequent foray into coupledom.

  So. I’m a shit boyfriend, I’m a miserable bastard. His brain did a brief canter through some of his other previous relationships, all short-term, nothing truly meaningful. Even if they stayed in this time zone they certainly seemed glad to get away. He breathed a deep breath that juddered at the edges and his face reddened under the glow of his tan as he remembered the way he’d behaved generally, to his workforce, to his students, to his own family. Grace was right. The whole thing with Anya, the police; maybe they should have arrested me for being so crap and unsupportive, never mind her disappearing. And I used that whole ‘under suspicion’ thing to justify carrying on being a shit … oh hell, I am such a waste of space as a human being.

  Okay. Okay. So. If Grace – if she goes to the house and anything happens – Duncan couldn’t bear it any longer. The tent had become claustrophobically small, the smell of hot nylon and damp canvas was making him feel sick and the camp bed was reacting to his sudden, involuntary twitches by creaking in an ominous way, so he went and stood outside. Watched the last rays of the sun seep behind the barrow, streaking the sky with lurid colours, like a toddler was fingerpainting the sunset. The site was almost completely empty, the last few diggers were making their way back to the campsite, wheelbarrows full of equipment and, out here, the air felt fresh and not as though it had been sieved through plastic like it did inside. Duncan gradually unclenched everything he’d tensed up and blew out the held breaths into the darkening air. Inside his head, two voices carried on their singleminded arguments. Nothing will happen to Grace. She’s not going to vanish just by walking into the house. But if anything happens in the house, if the police come again … A flashback to that day, boots on the stairs, misplaced laughter of camaraderie, two constables taking down curtains, a man in an all-in-one white suit swabbing cotton buds down the paintwork. But I trust her to look after herself, she knows what it would do to me if … If I lose Grace, everything is ruined anyhow. And the past is there … just out of reach … He found he was stretching out an arm as though he could close those three thousand years in his palm and pull it all close.

  Why can’t I believe I have a future?

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  I stayed out of sight, sitting up on the hillside until it was fully dark. The thought of Tor and that scythe still made me twitch whenever I thought about it and the circlets of raw flesh around my wrists made me doubly doubt that I was doing the sensible thing. But … but if Hen was Anya … if I could talk to her, maybe get her to come back … okay, I had no idea where that would leave Duncan and I, whether he’d want to take up where he and she had left off I didn’t know, but I would have done the right thing.

  And I wanted to ask her so much. How she and I could travel like this. Why, what made us so different? And … and I only whispered this to myself in some tiny part of my brain … I wanted to go back to that time when things were so quiet. A time before Jamie and I had ever existed, because then I could know that he had never died – he still existed in some future universe, unborn as yet. I could, in some small way, unmake his death, reasoned my mind. Give him a second go at life, and maybe the next time around he wouldn’t die.

  It made my head ache to think about it. Morwenna and I had had a conversation about the nature of time whilst we’d sluiced and shaken the sieves; she had some interesting concepts about time being like the universe, bending until it went back to the beginning again rather than linear, and all times co-existing simultaneously. Then she’d looked out over the dig and said, ‘Of course, this would have been a real shithole back then,’ and I’d lost all sympathy for her and her theories. I’d wanted to tell her that it wasn’t a shithole. That it was quiet and calm and, okay, probably pustulous and you could die from things that nowadays would get you laughed at if you took to the doctor, but, even so. Clean air, unprocessed food and a way of life that meant you rose with the light and slept when it was dark.

  I found myself staring out across the site, deserted now, and frowned. I’d berated myself for fetishising Duncan’s Scottishness, and now here I was doing the same thing with the past. Yes, things had been simpler then, of course they had, but it wasn’t worth trading Tampax and warm showers for. How and why Anya had been able to, I wanted to find out.

  When the campsite had settled into bonfires and party cans of cider, I slid my way along the hilltop and down into the valley. There were more bonfires breaking out all over the campsite now, and I worried that some diggers might decide to go for a romantic wander through the heather, on this rare occasion that it wasn’t pouring with rain, so I wasted no time picking my way around the strewn rocks and around the bend. The darkness was so total that I rebounded off a large rock and ended up sprawled on the grass, winded and mud splattered.

  I was back. I could tell before I raised my head. It felt as though someone had ripped a set of earphones from me that had been playing a constant and unnoticed background noise, a twenty-first century soundtrack of distant road rumble, faint farm machinery and the shrill whine of military aircraft. Now there was only the sound of water running in the river and the occasional plop of a fish. Gathering myself to my knees, and with a wary eye out for men armed with sharp bits of metal, I looked around me. The huts were dark, with the faintest glow of low burning fires inside, and silent. No dogs barked or moved around, although the smell of sheep told me that animals were still very much present. Cautiously, and with my back against the stone barrier, I got to my feet, unhooking my rucksack in case I needed to defend myself, but there continued to be no evidence of people at all. A flicker on the horizon caught my eye. Up on the skyline, at the barrow, someone had lit a fire, and now I could hear the faintest trace of voices on the wind, what sounded like children laughing or calling, and someone singing. They sounded slightly drunk.

  It felt colder here. In fact, the ground was iron-hard under my feet, the grass sparkled and snapped with the frost on it, and I stopped as though I’d run into a wall. It’s winter. Time moved differently here, as though our present was the centre of a wheel and this age was outflung on an edge that moved at another speed. Anya looked younger than me, but had been here fifteen years, so maybe that time moved faster sometimes and slower at others? Like the difference between the way time drags if you are waiting for something exciting, yet speeds past to bring something dreaded to you faster than you’d ever have thought possible.

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nbsp; Keeping to the shadows, which wasn’t difficult as the moon was a low crescent in the sky and barely cast a light at all, I crept along a half-trodden path that wound through the frost dusted heather and grass up towards the high place. As I got closer I could smell something like roasted meat, and there were definitely children there, playing what sounded like a raucous game of hide and seek; the drunken song warbled into a bawdy chorus and faded out amid laughter. It sounded like a lot of people were up here. I breasted the hill and found myself beside a huge bonfire. There was a huge hunk of meat turning on a makeshift spit over one edge of the fire, and what looked like an entire sheep dripped fat on another edge. Three dogs rushed up and started barking so I lost any element of surprise I might have had, although I still had Tabs’s knife in my bag if I needed to lose ‘surprise’ and head directly for ‘shock’, although I reasoned that looking harmless was probably my best defence.

  Actually, it turned out, coming back was my best defence. Out of the fire shadows, Tor, the big burly man loomed, dragging the dogs back. He looked me up and down, and then across over his shoulder, to someone out of my line of sight, ‘Hen!’ he called. ‘Your tribe sister has returned.’ Then, still pulling the dogs, one of which was the bear cross mastiff that had intimidated me last night, which growled at me over its shoulder as it was hauled away, he went off beyond the circle of firelight, to where I could hear voices raised, presumably in question but I couldn’t hear the words, only the tone, over the splash and crack of meat roasting. A child, curly haired and indeterminate of gender, peeped at me from around the bulk of the barrow, ducking back down into the surrounding ditch to hide again when I noticed. Its face was smeared with what looked like beef dripping, but it was hard to tell in the flickering pulses of light from the huge fire.