by Jason Foss
‘It’s as I told you – she’s mixed up.’
‘Well that’s what I thought, but she always seemed so confident, so sincere. But you told me, and everyone else tells me, she never properly joined in, sat to one side, kept herself secret. As soon as she gets involved in something, she covers it up, pretends she’s not really interested. But she was no introvert, it was a deliberate act of policy on her behalf. Most students are weird as a front, they exaggerate it as a way of showing off, but Lucy seems to have played it down if anything. The more I find out about her, the less I understand. My brain hurts.’
‘Then stop it. Leave it to the police, don’t go getting all depressed. You can’t do anything that they can’t do.’
‘I can.’
‘What?’
‘I can care.’
Bad renditions of Joni Mitchell songs still hummed in his ears as Flint lay awake in the pre-dawn light. The houseboat offered a cosy, secure refuge from twentieth-century London. Chrissie’s shoulder touched against his own. Mission accomplished, yet again, but Flint felt hollow. It was not only post-sexual guilt, or even Chrissie’s whispered words about freedom and changing scenes. He looked into the shadows of the main cabin. Shadows and half-light, a girl’s life clouded by incomplete truths. The towers of Salisbury Cathedral came to mind. A postcard, a clue, but why Salisbury?
Stonehenge, the summer solstice! Suddenly he knew how Lucy could live on air for five months, how she could drop out of sight completely, how she could drift around the countryside unobserved yet protected. Of course she didn’t want her mother to see her amongst punks and gypsies, hippies and travellers. A headband and beads would suit her so well as she dreamed away her summer days. The Glastonbury Festival was that weekend, with the summer solstice just a few days later. If Lucy and her friends were anywhere, they would be there.
By eight, he had shot a hasty goodbye to a confused and annoyed bedmate, found his hiking tent and cycled to Earls Court. Tyrone’s flat was located in a side street just off the North End Road. Son of a ‘developer’, he was following in the family tradition and investing in property. Given the money to buy the flat, Tyrone sub-let its second bedroom to a pair of fellow students and used the income to run his own car. Any other student would have opted for a 2CV and plastered it with stickers, but not Tyrone. Parked in the litter outside the decaying Edwardian terrace stood an old green Triumph Spitfire over sprayed with brown camouflage patterns. A huge RAF roundel graced each door whilst the owner had stencilled the letters TYR-1 down the rear wings. It was not a car in which to remain inconspicuous.
Abuse became muted when the flat-owner discovered who was ringing his doorbell. Within a few minutes, Flint was up in the front room, sharing coffee with Tyrone and a pneumatic brunette named Patsy. Both appeared sleepy and slightly hung-over. Patsy yawned over toast then said she was going to ‘sort herself out’. Flint kept hearing that students were not what they used to be and that AIDS was destroying the fun, but for his students and for himself, the game of roulette went on as before.
‘So what’s the plan?’ Tyrone began to liven up after the second coffee and the fifth piece of toast.
‘It’s midsummer and love and peace are in the air. Fancy going to a rock festival?’
Persuasion was hardly necessary and only fifteen minutes later, another woman was abandoned in a state of high pique.
‘Chocks away!’ Tyrone effused as Flint climbed into the Spitfire, stuffing his kitbag behind the seat.
Streaking away from London, Flint’s mood lightened. The jaunt had a purpose, but a jaunt is a jaunt and he was going to enjoy every minute. Every minute once he arrived, that was. Tyrone took pleasure in regarding all speed limit signs as minimums and all rules of the road to be inapplicable to drivers of gaudy Spitfires.
‘Can you drive, Doc?’ Tyrone shouted over the slipstream.
‘I learned at seventeen. My uncle runs a driving school.’
‘You’ve no car though?’
‘I have a fundamental objection to the whole concept of motor cars.’
‘You mean pollution and global warming?’
‘Mainly what it does to society. It fragments the local economic base, wrecks the national economy. Do you know that half our balance of payments deficit is due to imported cars?’
‘Nope.’
‘Ever thought how much urban crime could be prevented if people walked home at night instead of driving? Or how much easier it is for bank robbers or rapists or terrorists to move around than before the car came to blight our lives?’
‘Nope, but you’ve got to admit it, Doc, they’re useful things to have. You can’t live without one these days.’
‘That’s the shame of it.’
‘Anyway, if people stopped building motorways and car parks on historic sites, half the archaeologists in the country would be unemployed.’
‘Your ethics leave much to be desired. Following that logic, I suppose you’d say that road accidents keep doctors off the dole?’
‘Yep.’
Tyrone hit eighty and zipped into a traffic gap on the M3. Flint’s ecological notions were fine in theory, but even he could employ a little hypocrisy in a crisis.
Midsummer sees a curious ritual at Stonehenge: the deployment of vast resources by the Wiltshire police force to keep ‘hippies’ and ‘travellers’ away from the stones.
‘It will be the same this year, as every year,’ Flint shouted into the wind, ‘half a million quid on overtime just to spoil a few kids’ weekend out.’
‘The important thing is they stop long-haired weirdoes damaging the stones.’
‘But how can you reconcile the protection of the monument with the denial of access? If the ordinary man or woman cannot experience archaeology, what is it for?’
‘Ordinary man fine, but we’re talking drug-crazed drop-outs.’
‘They still have rights.’
‘No right to destroy my heritage.’
‘Rights to experience their heritage.’
‘They can pay at the gate like everyone else.’
‘No one should have to pay, that’s the point.’
Tyrone shook his head, whilst keeping his eyes fixed on the road. ‘The heritage industry can’t complain about funding if we let everyone in for free, then let them smash the place up. I mean, what are we bothering for?’
Impasse was reached, so Flint let the subject drop and Tyrone fiddled a Wagner tape into his cassette deck. Flint feared the Ride of The Valkyries would raise Tyrone’s adrenalin, and he was right. The back end of a British Telecom van rushed at them and the student gripped the wheel with fighter pilot zeal.
‘Hang on, I’m going to take this truck. I’ve just got space...’
The word ‘just’ proved accurate, but they survived to reach Wiltshire and gain a glimpse of the Monument. To their left, the Heel Stone threw its shadow across the car for a moment as they zipped by. Five days still had to pass before the solstice and the forces of reaction would not let them so close the following Friday. Over to the right lay barrows of Flint’s distant ancestors and he sensed the lure of the earth, even tearing past at world-destroying speed.
Glastonbury welcomed them, as pilgrims to the global capital of the New Age, scene of the pre-solstice warm-up, official festival, fringe festival, unofficial fringe-of-fringe events. The weather was baking but here the police played things cool. Magic and earthy indulgence were all around. If Lucy had assumed that no one would spot the significance of Salisbury, her confidence was about to betray her.
‘Got a tenner for some more petrol, Doc?’
Tyrone pulled up to a small petrol station and allowed the owner to fill his tank. The bill bit into two ‘tenners’ and whilst paying with Flint’s money, Tyrone allowed the man to keep the change and smooth-talked him into keeping his car safe around the back. With bundles stuffed under their arms and Flint sensing a large hole in his wallet, they made for the Peace Convoy.
Spread across three f
ields was a straggle of tents and caravans, interspersed by a gaudy collection of old buses, ambulances and beat-up motor cars. Behind them loomed the timeless hill of Glastonbury Tor, supposed seat of Arthur and the focus of much mythical nonsense. Flint remembered the poster in Lucy’s room, with the Holy Grail suspended above it.
‘I come seeking the Holy Grail,’ he muttered quietly.
‘But why the hell did I come here?’ Tyrone said. ‘We’re going to catch something, Doc.’
A brood of unkempt children ran past, yelling obscenities. Flint kept walking across the grass, sniffing at the wood smoke and squinting against the brilliant sun.
‘Doc, we’re going to get our throats cut. See those kids?’
Flint turned about and walked backwards, his face set in a mellow smile of satisfaction.
‘I mean, they were so filthy...’
‘Probably training to be archaeologists.’
Tyrone continued to grumble un-Christian thoughts, until Flint quieted him.
‘Oi, do me a favour, Tyrone. Try to blend in. Relax, smile at people and for God’s sake don’t tell anyone that your dad is a Tory councillor. Then someone will slit your throat.’
Flint’s mind drifted leftwards as he began to visually befriend the travellers. With the smile and the welcome came a photograph of Lucy and word of the five-hundred-pound reward offered by Barbara. They worked through the converted coaches, the tents and makeshift bivouacs meeting both suspicion and helpful co-operation. Also in Flint’s pocket was a photograph of Piers Plant which had appeared in Vikki’s paper under the headline ‘POLICE HUNT VANISHING CURATOR’. He had snipped off the headline, wary that Tyrone’s short hair and uneasy manner would cause suspicion.
Flint did most of the work, his assistant temporarily fazed by the culture shock as they squatted with the ‘hippies’.
‘You must teach me this street-talk,’ Tyrone commented, as they walked away from another camp fire, ‘you almost seem at home.’
Almost at home, but not quite. The tent was snug and its holes went untested as the week passed in a heat haze. Half naked (and fully naked) young people strolled about the fields or lolled in the sun. Groups of over-stimulated youths bunched together shrieking ‘Aceed!’ In the background, a laid-back Somerset Constabulary turned their backs on everything bar violence. Music flowed through Flint’s brain, he relaxed and regressed, almost forgetting his quest. By putting himself firmly into a role, he began to merge with the background, but was never at risk of vanishing into it. Chrissie had been right – he had grown out of festivals. The squalor distressed him almost as much as it did Tyrone and the dislocation from normality was just a little too great. The travellers had dropped out further than Jeffrey Flint ever wanted to go.
Tyrone finally caught the mood, acquired some cut-down jeans and slipped into a new mould. His survival instinct conferred an ability to conform to any norm and after two days he was able to fake a neo-hippie nineteen-sixties outlook and blend with the mellow throng. His conversion was aided by a wistful young lady who dreamed of moonbeams and loved sports cars. Flint tried not to give too much attention to the warm smiling eyes of the women, he came there for the sake of one girl only.
As Tyrone was missing, presumed still chasing moonbeams, Flint spent the next afternoon walking alone through the tented village of the main festival. A name outside the marquee caught his eye. R. Temple-Brooke would be reciting from his own poems at three, so Flint bought a bottle of Coke and chose one of the folding seats within the tent. An hour passed gently, and he watched dispassionately as two dozen earthy folk, mainly women, wafted in to join him.
‘Do you have all his books?’ An immense youth in an equally immense grey T-shirt leaned over to ask the uninitiated Flint.
‘I’ve a copy of Eyes on a Clear Day on my desk,’ Flint responded without blinking. It had been in Lucy’s room, he had read none of it other than the dedication to the mysterious Hazel.
‘He’s really brilliant,’ the youth continued from behind his pebble spectacles, ‘he’s captured the whole spirit of the age, y’know? He’s the guru of the next millennium.’
‘Really?’
The guru of the next millennium finally appeared when his audience peaked at forty and threatened to become thinner. Like most great men, Temple-Brooke was short, but charismatic and carried a sense of his own importance. An earnest, platinum-haired woman in her late thirties announced the poet with both hands clenched to her breast and an overdose of platitudes. Flint joined in the applause then sank back to doze through the doggerel.
Poetry was never Flint’s scene, and literary friends had ridiculed his own choice of Auden as his favourite poet. Temple-Brooke could have been brilliant, or awful, but to Flint, he simply seemed dull and self-opinionated. The man should be a politician, he thought. He should be making speeches about balances of payment and wage indexes. Flint watched the flies zig-zag around the tent and admired the mass of beads around the neck of the girl in the Apache jacket, then applause indicated that the reading was at an end.
Temple-Brooke signed six books, then looked up into Jeffrey Flint’s eyes.
‘You wouldn’t have seen this girl, ever?’ Flint asked, with a grimace, expecting the answer to be no.
The poet gazed into the picture. ‘One of the Earth’s fair children.’
Whilst he cradled the photograph, the platinum-haired woman came around his back and looked over his shoulder.
‘Do you know her?’ Flint asked hopefully, but a shrug and an apology were the best he received.
It was the best he received all week. Lucy was not at Glastonbury. Flint met up with some GreenSoc people from college, sang with a folk group and danced with self-proclaimed Somerset witches. A word with a co-operative police inspector resulted in a heap of leaflets to distribute, but still the result was nil. Tyrone reappeared and half in hope, half out of apathy, they spent one midnight with UFO-spotters at Warminster. Piers Plant’s picture wafted around Devizes museum where someone vaguely knew of him, but no one had seen him recently.
Friday came. Anti-climax and sensory exhaustion fought against exhilaration, but one more part of the cycle remained to be experienced before the experiment was over. Tyrone powered towards Salisbury, but some distance before Stonehenge they were stopped by the inevitable roadblock.
‘Gestapo,’ hissed Tyrone, slowing to a halt.
‘Whoever says England is a free country is wrong,’ Flint grunted, to be received by a shrug of the driver’s shoulders.
Making ironic use of the word ‘Sir’, the men in black turned the car around. Disruptive camouflage appears very much like psychedelia from behind visors. Backtracking, with Flint muttering ‘Bloody fascists’ they found the Peace Convoy again. Through the evening they spoke to another two or three hundred people, the hard core, those fully committed to rejection of late-twentieth-century mores. Lucy had to be near, Flint kept repeating to himself, and to Tyrone. If she was still alive, she would be amongst people like this – out of touch with normality, but close to the Earth. Not needing her chequebook, her wardrobe, or her BA Honours degree.
Tea was shared with an extended family group of twelve, all waiting for sunset. Finding a fire and a guitarist, Flint joined in with the songs whilst his student looked on bemused. Tyrone bedded down beneath a caravan, whilst Flint resolved to talk until dawn. He failed, and was surprised when he was prodded in his sleep.
Awoken at the appointed time, stiff and cold, lecturer and student followed the procession doomed to failure. Avoiding the mêlée with authority, they struck on to the plain and stood to watch the sun rise with others who lacked the determination to fight their way through to the stones. The distant druids’ horn blared as the sky brightened. Sky magic, Earth magic, this was what it was all about. A squashed red balloon was borne into the sky, its disc smeared by distant cloud. For a moment, the sun resembled Jupiter, streaked blue with a single eye winking mystery. Then it struggled free from the horizon, with burn
ers switching to full heat. Even the police paused and watched. There is a little Pagan in us all.
Chapter 8
Ancient British rituals gave way to modern English rituals. Mrs Gray served tea from a china pot and sliced her brown bread with surgical precision. Her modern cottage-style house had replaced an earlier cottage-style cottage and the new interior had been crafted to hide its age. The dining room was small, its fake roof beams too slender to ever have performed a structural function. Between the plate-racks of Victorian blue transfer-print china, the doorway into the lounge had been left open to add an illusion of space.
After his return from Stonehenge, Jeffrey Flint had been invited to tea.
‘Have you found the other boy who is missing?’ Mrs Gray was an older, plumper, less intense version of her daughters; ever busy, handing round her thin but thickly buttered brown bread.
‘No, his family had a postcard from the south of France,’ Flint replied. Cleaned and almost rested, with newly trimmed beard, he had deliberately attempted to dress smartly to take the week of free life out of his mind.
‘A postcard? That sounds familiar,’ commented Derek Faber, a smooth-faced accountant slightly older than Jeffrey Flint.
‘Perhaps Lucy is back in Scotland now. We might get another postcard soon,’ Mrs Gray said.
‘It’s always possible.’
‘I must say, you’re very kind making all this effort to find her.’
Flint smiled politely. Lucy had become an obsession. Some people collect telephone insulators, he chased wild geese. Mrs Gray continued to seek comfort.
‘You must excuse me, Doctor Flint – you must think I’m very stupid – but I don’t really understand some of the things I have been told. First I read all this rubbish in the newspaper about her and that awful man at the museum.’ Mrs Gray’s hand trembled as she made to pour more tea. ‘Then there is this pop festival at Stonehenge. Lucy was never interested in pop music, and she hated camping when we used to go to Cornwall.’