Living in the Past

by Jane Lovering

  Well, actually, I do mind, because I’m feeling a bit ‘used’ here, but arguing won’t do any good. The relief I’d felt at seeing him and the comfort I’d derived from the closeness of his body turned into an embarrassment that flamed up over my shoulders and made sweat run down my back.

  ‘I … of course. Yes. I’ll … I’ll probably see you on site, then.’

  I turned towards the front door, but stopped like a dog on a short lead, practically trembling, when he said my name.

  ‘Grace.’

  ‘Yes?’ Trying not to look too eager, I looked back over my shoulder. Duncan was slumped down on the bottom step, beardy and raggy-haired, patches of sunburn starting to flake on the skin in between, and yet … I wanted to be there, sitting next to him.

  ‘I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have let things get this far.’

  I looked back to the front door and started walking.

  Duncan kept his eyes on his knees. Saw her shadow move, heard the door slam, and then felt the dropping within him that was his heart trying to save itself by wrapping itself in duty. Work. It had got him through life this far. Should get back to the dig. Ought to start writing some of this up, get the pictures emailed to me. This is worth publishing, maybe talk to Angus’s agent, see if he can get me a deal?

  He hardly noticed what he was doing until the pain stabbed at him. Chewing at his fingers, gnawing at the sides of his nails in a way he hadn’t done since he was a child, trying to balance being ‘a good boy’ with the desire to run as wild as his brothers. He’d been ‘the quiet one’, the no-trouble child, a little disregarded but none the worse for it. Until now. Until I realise that I have no idea how to handle interpersonal relationships. Keeping quiet, keeping out of the way when the rest of them were yelling and fighting, being the one that Mum relied on to be no trouble … head down, make no waves.

  He looked at the picture nearest him, all the family, bar Mum who’d been behind the camera, sitting round a picnic spread on a rug near the stream. He remembered the day it was taken; Dougal and Angus had climbed the biggest tree they could find and refused to get down. Mum had called for Dad and they’d stood under the tree telling the boys how dangerous it was and how they could break their necks. Alasdair and Alexander had shouted encouragement from the ground, while Duncan had hidden in his room, surrounded himself with books and paper and drawn the valley, until the crisis was over and the boys had climbed down and been sent to the kitchen for their punishment of peeling potatoes, giggling and shoving.

  Shit. He rested his head on his knees. Remembered when Anya had come to him crying – her parents dead, nobody but an aged great grandmother to help her through – that awful, falling sensation that things were changing despite him. Anya no longer the bright, energetic girl he’d known for so long but a grey, sobbing shade who moved through life as though dodging the light. And all he’d wanted was for things to go on the way they had been. Head down, avoid trouble, make no waves …

  It had all seemed so normal when they’d been growing up, in the way, he supposed, that all children take their day-to-day life to be normal, however weird or damaging it might seem to outsiders. A big scramble of noisy brothers, a dad who worked hard and didn’t really know how to talk to children, and a mother who’d had a tough upbringing, trying to recreate some fantasy of what family life should look like. Duncan pulled his head down to his knees and cupped his hands around the back of his neck, a physical echo of the way he’d often sat when he’d been younger. Blocking out the world.

  ‘You were a child,’ Grace had said. ‘You didn’t know how to look after Anya.’ But I should have done, shouldn’t I? I should have shown a bit of sympathy, if nothing else. What the hell is wrong with me?

  He remembered all those pictures, both of them young and carefree, mugging to the camera as though that moment was all there was, all there would ever be. Lighthearted and laughing. But life couldn’t stay like that, could it? University was a bubble, and outside was a real life that held loss and pain – was that why he’d never really left? Why he’d never really faced what had happened with Anya? Why he’d felt nothing but betrayal, even as the police tiptoed along behind him in their shiny boots, with their intent expressions, always trying to turn up some dirt on a life that, despite the elbow-level mud, was squeaky clean?

  His cheeks stung in sympathy with his fingers, and he swiped across his face, only slightly surprised to find that the sting was tears running across sunburned skin. Anger. And grief. For Anya, for myself, for the loss of something, for the inability to have anything new, with Grace. For this self-denial. And why? So that I can limp from day to day, avoiding anyone in uniform?

  He put his head down on his knees again, and cried.

  Chapter Thirty

  I spent the day swinging the sieves in an aggravated way. Bloody Duncan! There I’d been, worrying about visions of the past in case I had some kind of hallucinatory illness, and he waltzes in to my life like … A large clump of soil fell apart and I spread wet handfuls of it around in case it contained anything interesting. … and I just start to think that maybe, just maybe I can find a relationship with someone other than Jamie, start to care a little bit about myself in relation to another person, when … The frame creaked ominously and a swoosh of water ran into my boots. … when he starts bloody thinking! Just because his ex-girlfriend walked out and into the Bronze Age, he’s decided to come over all guilt-ridden!

  I knew it wasn’t his fault. I’d done enough bereavement counselling to understand a little of how he was feeling, albeit fifteen years after the event, and it must be even worse to discover that the person you thought was simply dead had had the power to stop your suffering. It was obvious that Anya had never thought of the repercussions of her actions, and now …? Well, she’d got her own life. So very different to her old one, but containing all the things she’d lost: family, a man who cared for her, that place in life that all young adults strive to find. Why would she think of the boy she’d left behind?

  There was no sign of Duncan on site all that day. Richard bustled about, throwing me the odd curious look but never coming over to ask if I knew about Duncan’s whereabouts; he was too busy organising the new dig teams as they gradually uncovered the wooden platform that had jutted out into the river all those years ago. Millie was running to and fro, identifying wood and trying to stop earnest and keen amateurs from treading on anything important, and pointing out the order of excavation. Several students were videoing the proceedings and that evening, when the dig closed down for the night, there was a lot of gathering in huddles, reviewing footage and scribbling of notes. This was big, even I could feel it.

  And Duncan wasn’t here.

  But why should I care? He’d said he didn’t want to take things any further, couldn’t fault him there. He’d not strung me along with vague promises, just ended a budding relationship he didn’t feel ready for. Completely understandable. Very fair and decent.

  Bastard.

  I slunk into the tent and huddled in my sleeping bag. Wondered how Airwen was, whether she ever recovered from … well, it was hardly an operation, more like amateur butchery. Wondered how Anya had explained away what she’d done to Tor. As magic, perhaps? Magic that left a scar.

  The worst of the images and sounds had faded from my memory now, it was more a blurry impression of events, but even those were enough to make me gather the sleeping bag close around me again and breathe deeply. It was over. In the past, quite literally. And in a few more days I’d be heading back to Swindon with Tabs and Millie, back to a life of lesson planning and Ofsted avoidance and …

  I fell asleep. Hunched and huddled as I was meant waking several hours later to the view of the nylon inside of my sleeping bag came as a shock. I wasn’t sure where or when I was, for a moment.

  Something was moving outside the tent, brushing up against it cautiously as though knoc
king cobwebs from the flysheet.

  ‘Who’s there?’ I sat up sharply, clutching my sleeping bag around me like a virginal dressing gown.

  No reply. Just a shadowy shape, half seen by the moonlight that filtered through the tent.

  ‘Seriously, who is it? Be aware, I know martial arts.’ Despite the bravado of my words I was huddling further into the sleeping bag’s not-very-defensive nylon and stuffing.

  ‘Two terms of kickboxing, wasn’t it?’

  ‘Duncan?’ I pushed and shoved my way free of the bag and wriggled my way through the tent to the open front. Outside, looming against the dark of the night, stood Duncan. ‘What the hell are you doing here?’

  He threw his arms wide. ‘It’s my dig. Where else would I be?’

  ‘With the way you were earlier I sort of thought, Patagonia. And anyway, I didn’t mean here, the site. I meant here, the tent.’ I actually meant here, with me, but didn’t want to say it aloud.

  ‘Because I’m an idiot.’

  ‘Why? Were you supposed to be somewhere else? How could you get lost on your own dig site?’ I rubbed my face with the back of my sleeve. Part of my brain was still half asleep and I needed it to wake up and be with me on this one.

  Behind his head, across the valley, the moon rose above the barrow. Dressed only in clouds it danced up into the sky, throwing enough light for Duncan to come into a little more detail. His hair was wild around his head and he was wearing a shirt, half tucked in and half just rucked into his belt, as though he’d got dressed in a hurry. ‘Grace,’ he said, and there was a timbre to his voice that made the hair on my neck prickle. ‘Grace,’ he said again and then laughed. ‘Actually, yes, I want grace, the old meaning. Mercy. Compassion.’

  ‘Have you been drinking?’ I stood aside to let him stoop past me into the tent. He smelled clean, as though he’d showered recently and I thought he must have stayed up at the house. A momentary vision of Duncan walking alone through those empty rooms, remembering, made me want to touch him, but his strangeness of manner stopped me.

  He stooped and lit the torch lantern that lay beside his metal-framed bed. As the sudden light illuminated us both properly, I almost laughed at the contrast between us. I was wearing a onesie, dotted with dogs wearing bowler hats. Duncan looked wild. A little bit like a Bronze Age dweller himself now, with his hair sticking up, his stubble rapidly turning to beard along the contours of his face and sunburn highlighting his cheekbones like rouge. If he’d been wearing a tunic and breeches rather than his flapping shirt and muddy boots he could almost have walked through the barrier.

  ‘So,’ I said, carefully. ‘What brings you here? Apart from the fact that it’s your tent and all your belongings are here and I really didn’t think that question through, did I?’

  Because of the oppressively small space and the awkwardness of trying to stand and hold a conversation whilst bending my head to allow for the lack of clearance, which made it look as though I was either hugely deferential or talking to his knees, I sat down on the bed.

  ‘I’ve been walking around the house all day, y’know. Thinking.’ And again, there was that tone of voice. ‘Mostly about how stupid I’ve been.’ He half turned so that he was facing away from me now. ‘No, not stupid, that’s wrong. But, here I’ve been, all these years not knowing and now you.’

  He stopped speaking suddenly and turned back round. In the barely-there light from the lantern his face was all angles and shadows, and his eyes were dark with little glimmers of light reflecting from them. I clutched at the baggy knees of my onesie and felt my heart start taking its job seriously. ‘Me?’ And my voice was squeakier than I would have liked.

  ‘Yes, you.’ He came over to where I sat. It didn’t take long enough, I would have preferred all this to be taking place in an enormous hall rather than this tiny tent. I needed time, had no idea what was coming next, as though he’d taken all the control I’d so carefully established and walked straight through it, and I wanted to catch my breath and tell him to ‘wait a minute, let me get a handle on this’. But he didn’t.

  Now he half-crouched in front of me and reached out a worn finger to touch a strand of my hair. ‘My wee clean tidy girl from the world outside.’ His eyes were dark, not just of colour, but holding dark thoughts within. ‘You’re the first person to make me wish it was different.’

  ‘Great, so all this is my fault?’ I kept my tone light, even though I had a horrible feeling that I was saying goodbye to him. And I really, really didn’t want to.

  ‘Och, no. None of this is anybody’s fault except mine. For being such a self-absorbed jerk when Anya was suffering. I’m taking full responsibility for it all, and that’s why it has to stop.’

  My heart was beginning to skid in my chest. ‘Duncan, you are frightening me here. Okay, okay, I will walk out of your life, pretend we never met, will that help?’ I tried to catch hold of his hand but he moved back sharply, bunching his fists by his sides.

  ‘I’m a little bit in love with you, Grace.’ He’d turned away, was talking to the dark, to the walls of the tent, to the pillowed clumps of heather that patterned the ground and were visible through the flapping opening. ‘That’s what it comes down to. I’m tired of living this half-life. I walked round and round the house, up and down those stairs, I should have thighs like a wrestler by now, hating myself, hating her, hating Marcus and his uniformed monkeys. Think I hated everyone I could think of today.’ He dropped onto the groundsheeted floor, hunched as though trying to warm himself over a fire that had been gone for three millennia. ‘Except you. I tried, my God, I tried to hate you too. What you did, going back again when you could have been killed – yeah, I tried to hate you too.’

  A moment, in which the breeze blew in as though trying to raise ghosts.

  I cleared my throat. It ached, and I realised I wanted to cry. ‘Did you manage it?’

  His head came up and those eyes, that held an impossible moonlight, settled on mine. ‘No, Grace. I didn’t. I couldn’t.’ A deep breath, but no more words.

  ‘So.’ Around the emotion my words came out sounding horribly teacherish. ‘What happens now?’

  Duncan stood up again. He managed to get almost to full height, just having to crouch a little so that his head didn’t go through the top of the tent. ‘What do you think of me, Grace? I want you to be honest here.’ And then, in a slightly less weighted tone, ‘Although, please bear in mind I’ve been through quite a lot lately and I’m aware I’m not looking my best.’

  I half laughed. My throat eased and my heart gave a little twitch. There was a warmth on my skin that the onesie didn’t quite merit. ‘“A little bit in love.” Those were your words, Duncan, and I think they are appropriate. It’s very early days, and I’ve never known anyone like you before, anyone quite so—’

  ‘Muddy? Self-absorbed? Obsessed with chips?’

  ‘Quite so prickly, I was going to say. And yes, you’ve been through a lot. I shouldn’t have let you think I was going to the house, I didn’t think you’d go up there and worry, but I went back to talk to Anya. To give you closure.’

  Duncan sighed. ‘You know there will never be closure, though, don’t you? Not as far as the police are concerned. But, yes, now I know what happened to her, that was part of what I was telling myself today. Now I know. And, yes, it does make it easier.’

  I stood up now. The bed snapped shut as I moved and fell like a metal skeleton, legs upwards, onto the floor of the tent. ‘What does it make easier, Duncan?’

  He pulled me in to his body until I could feel the flush of his skin and the beat of his heart. ‘It makes it easier for me to ask you if we could have any kind of future together.’

  I rested my head against his shoulder and put my arms around him, let my body answer for me as I hugged him hard. ‘I hope we can,’ I whispered.

  ‘You can live wit
h me being arrested all the time?’ His heart speeded up as he asked me and I understood the sheer weight of worry that loaded those words. ‘You are the only person in the world, no, wait, I’ll amend that, you are the only person in this time frame who knows what really happened to Anya. You are the only chance I will ever have at having someone who won’t, deep down, still be wondering.’

  ‘Way to make a girl feel special, Duncan.’ I moved half a step back. ‘Are you sure it’s me you want, not the feeling that you don’t have to justify yourself all the time?’

  A deep laugh. ‘I deserved that. No, Grace, it’s not that. And, before you ask, neither is it the fact that you are the only person who can put up with my rudeness and lack of socialisation. Although you are.’

  Almost before I could register what was happening, he leaned in closer, tipped his head and kissed me. It was a hot kiss, one which made me shiver paradoxically inside my fleecy covering, and I felt the final protective layer around my heart bubble like melting varnish. Just as I was about to slide my hands into his shirt, because, despite the general grubbiness and lack of niceties, his body was calling to me like a yodeller across a Swiss mountain, he raised his mouth from mine and said, ‘I just needed closure, Grace.’

  I stumbled half a step backwards, pulling him with me into my compartment, where my sleeping bag would offer us some protection against the bones of the moor underneath us. My hands were busy but my brain was busier.