by Michel Faber
'You and Hadrian better not get too friendly,' Mack remarked. 'He might run off with one of your precious old bones.'
It was such a feeble joke that Siân didn't think anyone could possibly blame her for ignoring it. She heaved herself to her feet and, fancying she could feel his eyes on her dowdiness, she sobered up in a hurry.
'Have you read any of the books and pamphlets?' she said.
He snorted. 'You sound like a Jehovah's Witness, on a follow-up visit.'
'Never mind that. Have you read them?' Be firm with him, she was thinking.
'Of course,' he smiled.
'And?'
'Very interesting,' he said, watching her straighten her shapeless cagoule. 'More interesting than my research, anyway.'
As they fell into step with each other towards the town, Siân rifled her memory for the subject of his paper. It took her a good fifteen seconds to realise she'd never actually asked him about it.
They'd reached the bench on the resting place near the top of the hundred and ninety-nine steps, and he indicated with a wave of his hand that they should sit down. This they did, with Hadrian settled against Siân's skirt, and Mack carefully lowering the plastic bag onto the ground between his lustrous shoes. Judging by the sharp corners bulging through the plastic, it contained a large cardboard box.
'That's not your research paper in there, is it?' she asked.
'No,' he said.
'What is it?'
'A surprise.'
Michael, one of Siân's colleagues from the dig, walked past the bench where they were sitting. He nodded in greeting as he descended the steps, looking slightly sheepish, unsure whether to introduce himself to Siân's new friend or pretend he hadn't trespassed on their privacy. It was a gauche little encounter, lasting no more than a couple of seconds, but Siân was ashamed to note that it gave her a secret thrill; how sweet it was to be mistaken for a woman sharing intimacy with a man! Let the whole world pass by this bench, in an orderly procession, to witness proof incarnate that she wasn't lonely!
For God's sake, get a grip! she reproached herself.
'My research,' said Mack, smirking a little, 'examines whether psittacosis is transferable from human to human.' His smirk widened into a full grin as she stared back at him with a blank expression. Siân wondered if he'd make her ask, but, commendably, he didn't. 'Psittacosis,' he explained, 'is what's popularly called parrot fever—if popular is the right word for a rare disease. It's a virus, and you catch it by inhaling the powdered … uh … faeces of caged birds. In humans, it manifests as a kind of pneumonia that's highly resistant to antibiotics. It used to be fatal, once upon a time.'
Siân wondered just how long ago, in his view, 'once upon a time' was. She, after all, had had to convince herself, after reading the 'Health & Safety' documents covering archaeological digs, that she wasn't frightened of catching anthrax or the Black Death.
'And this disease of yours,' she said. 'Is it transferable from human to human?'
'The answer used to be "Maybe." I'm aiming to change that to a definite "No"'
'Hmm,' said Siân. Now that she'd been sitting for a minute, she was suddenly rather weary, and her left leg ached and felt swollen. 'Well, I'm sure that'll put some people's minds at rest.' It sounded condescending, and she had the uneasy feeling she was being a bitch. 'No, really. With diseases, it's always better to know, isn't it?' An inane comment, which reminded her of the lump in her thigh she was so determined to ignore. Irritably, she wiped her face. 'Sorry, I'm tired.'
'Another long day exhuming the dead?'
'No, I just didn't sleep so well last night.'
Again to his credit, he didn't pry. Instead he asked, 'Where do you keep them all, anyway? All the skeletons, I mean. Sixty of them, I read somewhere.' He nodded towards the East Cliff car park. 'Enough to fill a tourist bus.'
Siân giggled, picturing a large party of skeletons driving away, taking their last glimpse of Whitby through steamy coach windows as they began their long trip home.
'We've only found a few complete skeletons,' she said. 'Usually we find half skeletons, or bits and pieces. Clay isn't as kind to bones as people imagine; in fact, they'd last longer just about anywhere else. Stuck in the ground, they crumble, they soften, they dissolve. Sometimes we'll find just a discoloration in the clay. A tell-tale shadow. That's why we have to be so careful, and so slow.'
'And these people you've dug up—who were they?'
A single word, Angles, sprang to Siân's mind, which made her feel a pang of guilty sorrow. How ruthless History was, taking as raw material the fiercely independent lives of sixty human individuals—sixty souls who, in life, fought for their right to be appreciated as unique, to earn the pride of their parents, the gratitude of their children, the loyalty of their colleagues—blending them all into the dirt, reducing them to a single archaic word.
'They were … Angles, probably,' she sighed. 'Difficult to be sure, until we do carbon-14 dating on them. They lived after the Romans, anyway, and before the Norman Conquest.'
'Any treasures?'
'Treasures?'
'Gold, precious jewels … Bracelets and swords that can be buffed up to a sheen for the English Heritage brochures…'
Siân was determined not to be goaded by his tone. Be firm with him, she counselled herself. Firm but dignified.
'These people were early Christians,' she reminded him. 'They didn't believe in taking anything with them when they died. You know: "Naked came I into the world, and naked—"'
'Ha!' he scoffed, hoisting up a stiff index finger in a theatrical gesture of triumph. 'I've read up on this stuff now, don't forget! What about all those fancy trinkets they dug up in the 1920s, eh? Brooches, rings, and whatever? Saint Hilda's nuns were rolling in it, weren't they?'
Siân leaned down, scorning to look at him, but instead stroking Hadrian tenderly. She spoke directly into the dog's furry, trusting face, as if she'd decided there was a great deal more point talking to Hadrian than to his master. 'People nowadays would love to believe the nuns were as corrupt as hell,' she murmured. 'Did you know that, Hadrian?' She ruffled his ears, and nodded emphatically as though the shameless cynicism of humans was likely to beggar the belief of an innocent canine. 'It makes people feel smug, you see. Gives them a warm glow, to think of those religious idealists betraying their vows of poverty and swanning around in fancy gowns and jewellery.'
'And didn't they?'
Siân turned her attention to Magnus, looking him straight in the eyes while her hands carried on stroking. 'I prefer to give them the benefit of the doubt. Abbeys weren't just for monastic orders, you know; they were places of prayer and seclusion for … well, anybody really. All sorts of rich people ended up in them—unmarried princesses, widowed queens … They'd retire there, servants and all. I like to think it's those powerful ladies that left behind the rings and brooches and buckles and whatnot.'
'You'd like to think,' he teased.
'Yes, I'd like to think,' she said, barely able to keep a sharp hiss of annoyance out of her voice. 'If there's no way of proving anything, why be cynical? Why not choose to think the best of people?'
His eyes twinkled with mischief.
'That's what I'm trying to do!' he protested mock-innocently. 'These old nuns sound as if they had a pretty dismal time. I want to cheer 'em up with a bit of the good life.'
Siân was imagining the twelfth-century ruins she knew so well, trying to reconstruct, in her mind, the lost seventh-century original that the Vikings had destroyed.
'Funny what "the good life" means now…' she said wistfully. 'And what it used to mean…'
'Back in the Middle Ages when you were a nun?' he ribbed her. Then, sensing he'd gone too far, he hoisted up his plastic bag and carefully removed the cardboard box from it.
'Anyway, I want to show you something. Something I'm sure you'll appreciate more than anyone else, being a—what was it again?—a conservationist?'
'Conservator,' she said, intr
igued despite herself as Mack opened the box to reveal, in a nest of crumpled toilet paper, a glass liquor bottle without any label, discoloured and dull, clearly antique. Inside the bottle was a large candle—no, not a candle, a tight scroll of papers. Water damage, evidently followed by ill-managed drying, had fused the layers of the scroll into a puckered cylinder. There was handwritten text on the outermost layer, and the few capital letters Siân could make out at a glance were unmistakably nineteenth- or even eighteenth-century.
I want, I want, I want, she thought.
Mack held the bottle up close to her face, turning it slowly so the scroll revealed its text like the beginning of a Web page stored in the world's most ancient VDU.
'Look,' he said. 'You can still read it.'
Confession of Thos. Peirson, in the Year of Our Lord 1788
In the full and certain Knowledge that my Time is nigh, for my good Wife has even now
That was as much of the text as was visible before it swallowed itself inside the roll.
'Where did you find this?' Too late, she heard the tremor of excitement in her voice, and—damn!—he noticed, too, and grinned.
'I didn't find it, my dad did. It turned up in the foundations of Tin Ghaut when the town planners demolished it in 1959. He took it home before the bulldozers came back.'
Siân watched him replace the bottle in its nest of toilet paper. She took a breath, priming her voice for what she hoped would be a casual, matter-of-fact tone.
'That scroll—it could be unrolled, you know. We could find out what this man was confessing.'
'I don't think so,' said Mack, fingering the glass regretfully. 'I've tried to get the papers out. With forceps, even. But the paper's gone rigid, and it's wider than the neck of the bottle. Of course I could just break it open, but the thing is, the glass never got broken all this time, even when it was dug up by bloody great earthmovers. My dad thought that was a miracle, and it is kind of cool, I must admit. Smashing it now would be … I don't know … wrong somehow.'
Siân was touched by this glimmer of rudimentary morality when it came to preserving ancient things, but also impatient with his ignorance.
'We have tools to slice the bottle open without smashing it,' she said. 'We could open the bottle, extract the papers, gently separate them, read them…'
'Who's "we"?' he challenged her gently. 'You and me?'
Siân smiled, keen to stay on the right side of him. The thought of him closing the lid on his treasure box and carrying that scroll out of her life was hard to bear. Give it to me, give it to me, give it to me, she was thinking.
'There's a man I know at the University of Northumbria who could do the bottle for me,' she said. 'The papers I could do myself, right here.'
'Mm.' He sounded noncommittal. Hadrian had wandered off, restless, miffed that the humans had allowed both the stroking and the running to lapse. He was in Saint Mary's churchyard again, pondering the bas-relief horses stabled at the base of Caedmon's Cross—horses that looked puzzlingly like toy dogs in a kennel.
'So…' said Siân. 'What do you think? May I?'
Mack reached into the box, and lifted the prize back into view.
'Are you sure you can put it all back together? Just the way it is now?' He handled the bottle firmly but with great tenderness. You'll make a good doctor, Siân thought.
'Sure,' she replied. 'A thin seam in the glass, that's all you'll see. And we'll do it where hardly anyone would think of looking.'
He raised one eyebrow dubiously. 'We will, will we?'
But, God bless him, he handed it over. One moment it was in his hands, the next she had received it into hers. Flesh brushed against flesh during the transfer.
'Trust me,' she said, as a thrill passed through her from wrist to toe, like a benign electric current looking for earth.
It was very late that night before she could begin. Neville, her pal at the University of Northumbria who could cut the bottle open, was unavailable to see her until he'd finished giving his evening lectures, and then he had some story about his wife expecting him at home. Siân forced him to call his wife on his mobile and tell her he had a quick job to do. Then she flattered him about his way with a laser.
'Honestly, Siân, can't it wait till tomorrow?' Neville had complained as he led her into his sanctum, switching on lights he'd only recently turned off.
'This thing has been waiting for me since 1788,' she replied.
Hours later, in the privacy of the Mary Hepworth Room, Siân fondled the paper scroll with gloved fingers. It was light, as she'd expected from its loss of moisture, but also much more brittle than she'd hoped. Any fantasies she might have entertained of simply unrolling the sheets and smoothing them out flat were out of the question. Progress would be slow, methodical, painstaking—as always when rescuing anything from the ravages of time. Nothing ever came easy.
This paper had clearly been sized with a lot of gelatine—and a rich gelatine at that, involving generous amounts of animal skin, hooves, bones. A nice smooth glossy paper it must have been, in its day—but water damage had turned the gelatine to glue. And whatever had dried the soggy paper out again had hardened it into something very like papier-mâché. She prodded it gently with tweezers, and it responded with all the pliancy of driftwood.
She should, she supposed, count her blessings: this treasure had survived, when it could easily have disintegrated altogether. But why did the process of retrieving anything from the distant past always have to be making the best of a bad job? Why couldn't anything spring from antiquity fresh and intact? Why must all documents be blemished and brittle, all vases broken, all skeletons incomplete, all bracelets rusted, all statues vandalised? Why should only tiny scraps of Sappho's poetry survive—why not all of it, or none?
She chewed her fingernails, knowing her irritability was really just nervousness: excitement about what she might disclose, fear that she'd bungle the job. She threw on her jacket and went out to the garage near the railway station and bought four different chocolate bars. By the time she returned to her hotel room, she'd already eaten three of them and her pockets were crackling with the wrappers. She paused in the doorway of her bedroom to take a long swig of complimentary mineral water. Then, highly alert and faintly nauseous, she laid out the tools and equipment for her surgery.
By 3:00 A.M., she was nudging the confession of Thomas Peir-son into the light of the twenty-first century. For hours, she'd been humidifying the scroll, rolling it gently back and forth on a metal grid suspended over a photographic tray of warm water, then resealing it inside a garish placenta of blue plastic. The paper had finally absorbed enough vapour to relax a little, and the gelatine was loosening its grip. Now, with a palette knife, Siân began peeling the outermost sheet from its companions.
Confession of Thos. Peirson, in the Year of Our Lord 1788
In the full and certain Knowledge that my Time is nigh, for my good Wife has even now closed the door on Doctor Cubitt & weeps in the room below, I write these words.
The fibres of the paper were exceptionally frail; the rags from which the paper had been made must have been shabby stuff indeed, poorly pounded. The brown ink of Thomas Peirson's handwriting stood out tolerably well against a background that hadn't discoloured much, but then the paper's whiteness had less to do with thorough washing of the rags than with an expedient douse in that brand-new invention (well, brand-new in 1788, anyway) chlorine bleach. Inevitably, the bleach had left its own acid legacy, and with every gentle nudge of Siân's knife, the weakened grain of the humid surface threatened to disintegrate. The words themselves were fragile, the gallic acid and iron sulphate in the brown ink having corroded little holes in the e's and o's.
below, I write these words. In my fifty years of life I have been
Been what? A thread of the paper had come loose, damaging the crown of one of the words in the line below. Siân paused, dabbed her eyes with her sleeve. She ought to give the paper longer to relax, get some sleep while it did so.
Outside in the street, a drunken male voice shouted an ancient word of contentious etymology, and a female voice responded with laughter. The act from which all humans originate, evoked in a word whose own origins were long lost.
Siân laid her head against her pillow, one leg hanging off the bed, the other twitching wearily on the mattress. She closed her eyes for just a moment, to moisten them before getting back to the task.
'I love you—you must believe that,' the man with the big hands whispered into her ear. 'I'll risk my soul to save yours.'
He sounded so sincere, so overwhelmed by his love for her, that she pressed her cheek against his shoulder and hugged him tight, determined never to be disjoined from him.
Within minutes, of course (or was it hours?), her head was disjoined from her neck, and the seagulls were screaming.
Later that same morning, when the sun was high over Church Street and the hundred and ninety-nine steps were glowing all the way up the East Cliff, Siân stood poised at the foot of them, breathing deeply, getting ready for the climb. The sharpness of the sea air was sort of restorative and yet it was making her dizzy, too, and she was finding it hard to decide if she should keep breathing deeply or cut her losses and get moving. She still hadn't begun the climb when, half a dozen breaths later, she was jolted from her underslept stupor by the shout: