Crow Stone. Jenni Mills
I can see the stringy-haired archaeologist staring, his mouth set in a hard line. He’s in his early thirties, I’d guess, younger than me, with cavernous red-rimmed nostrils and a face on the slide, like an unstable slope. He looks down at his papers quickly when he realizes I’ve caught his gaze. My eyes shift focus and, over his shoulder, catch a shadowy, slight, dark-haired woman in a red fleece staring back at me from the glass of the window. From this distance she might be in her early thirties too, though close up that pale skin will betray her. Her eyes are secretive and sad. I rub a hand across my face and she does the same, brushing a spiky-cut fringe back from a high forehead. It looks like she’s waving, and I wonder if she knows what I’m doing here. Katie, Katie …
I have to wrench my concentration back to the room. But even while I’m trying to fix in my head the names of the different areas of the workings they’re discussing–Stonefield, Mare’s Hill, Paradise Woods, Chog Lane–I keep catching my reflection’s reproachful gaze. What’s wrong with you? You’ve done a dozen jobs like this, Kit, you should know what you’re doing by now.
The meeting breaks up an hour later. Gary escorts me back to my car, in case I’m too dim to find it myself. He’s probably right. It wouldn’t surprise me this afternoon if I managed to fall down the hole in the middle of the site: a vertical shaft, our main access to the quarry workings. Fortunately they’ve planned for idiots and floodlit the area. In spite of the lights, darkness seems to well up from the shaft entrance.
‘Where are you staying?’ Gary asks, polite as ever. I can’t see his eyes, deep in shadow under the brim of his hard-hat.
‘Bathford, for the moment. A hotel I found on the Internet.’ I may not be making Africa money, but I don’t do so badly that I have to stay in B-and-Bs. ‘I’m going house-hunting this weekend. The estate agents told me there’s plenty of properties to rent.’
‘Do you have any plans for dinner tonight?’
Uh-oh.
‘I’ve got the OK to take you out on expenses,’ he goes on, quickly.
I’m instantly embarrassed. Why should I assume he fancies me? He must have read my wary expression, and decided to make clear that this is an official duty, not a come-on. Still … a leisurely bath and a quiet evening by myself was what I’d had in mind for tonight.
But quiet evenings leave too much time for introspection. And although this is Gary Bennett, a part of my past though he doesn’t know it, surely I can encase him safely in ice, like Gilmerton’s goldfish. We’re colleagues. We’re going to have to work together for months, maybe years, and I may as well get used to it. So I make myself smile. ‘That would be very pleasant.’ Behind him I can see a sleek black car bumping over the hardcore towards us. ‘I’d better go and check in at the hotel first, though. I’ve got some calls to make.’ If he wants to think they’re to a husband and family, that’s fine by me.
Gary grabs my arm, just a moment too late. I’m drenched as the black car hits a puddle beside me. ‘Wally,’ I snarl. The bastard could easily have avoided it. ‘Who was that?’
‘Dickon,’ says Gary. ‘The archaeologist.’
‘Pity he can’t drive.’ I pluck at my sopping trouser leg.
‘I’ll pick you up about seven thirty, then?’ Gary asks. ‘Is it the hotel by the weir?’
‘Yes.’ Frankly, I’ve no idea, but it’s called the Weir House, which suggests it almost certainly is. I give him my mobile number, in case I’m wrong.
As I drive across the site, I see him in my rear-view mirror, looking after me. Then he turns and heads towards a 4x4, so mud-covered it looks like it climbed out of the ground. I indicate left out of the site entrance and hope to hell that’s the right direction for the hotel. The way I’ve been behaving all afternoon, I doubt it.
When I woke up the morning after my father hit me, the side of my head was throbbing, and I could see purplish-brown bruising seeping out from my hairline when I pulled my hair back from my face. It was too sore to run the brush through; I gathered it gently into a ponytail, wrapped a ribbon round it, and let the shorter bits at the sides fall forward. Messy, but normal.
By the time I got downstairs he had already gone to work. I poured cereal and milk into a bowl, but when I picked up the spoon I didn’t want to eat. I scraped it into the bin instead.
There was something glinting at the bottom under the soggy cornflakes: smashed glass. The photograph of my mother in its broken frame had gone from my bedside table. My father must have come into my room while I was asleep. I imagined him scooping up the glass quietly so as not to disturb me, listening to my breathing and tenderly slotting back together the splintered pieces of the frame.
Leaving the house, I saw Gary across the road, coming out of the Bennetts’ garden gate. He didn’t close it behind him; he was still trying to get one arm into his denim jacket. Perhaps he’d overslept. For a moment, our eyes met. He gave a brief, embarrassed nod, then set off briskly up the road.
Had he seen me the night before? I remembered his eyes locking on to mine through the binoculars. Maybe the lenses had caught the light and given me away. I followed him along the road. At the end, he turned left towards the bus stop, and I went right, uphill, towards Green Down and school.
In summer I liked to walk, thinking about ammonites to help me up the steep bit. I knew they would be buried deep in the soil under the pavement. Sometimes I wished I could curl up like them and lie hidden for millions of years.
Trish would be toiling up the other side of the hill, from the south. If I’d timed it right we’d see each other at the top and walk through the village together. I was later than usual. I didn’t think she’d wait. Often I’d spot her striding ahead, and have to run to catch up.
There were a dozen or so green blazers coming up the hill, and a few more straggling along the main road towards school, but no sign of Trish with her thick plait of dark hair. As I got closer to St Anne’s, there were more and more green uniforms. It was like looking for graptolites in rock; at first you can’t see any, then you get your eye in and there are zillions of tiny fossilized creatures winking back.
I went through the school gates and tried to look like everyone else.
‘O rose, thou art sick,’ said Mrs Ruthven, the English teacher, her eyes fixed on the beech trees through the classroom window. Out of the corner of my eye I saw Trish jabbing a finger towards her mouth to mime puking. Poppy, all long legs and freckled arms, hunched her shoulders, hiding giggles. Mrs Ruthven shifted her weight–she had one leg shorter than the other, and wore a special shoe with a built-up sole–and continued, oblivious:
‘The invisible worm
That flies in the night,
In the howling storm …’
We were doing the Romantic poets this term, and I thought Wordsworth was dull, sometimes too difficult to understand but mostly just plain wet. But Blake’s short lines stuck inside your head, and throbbed there, even if you weren’t always sure what they meant.
‘… has found out thy bed
Of crimson joy,
And his dark secret love
Does thy life destroy.’
Mrs Ruthven swivelled back to the class, pivoting on her platform shoe. ‘What’s this about, Trish Klein?’
She had seen, after all.
‘Sex, Mrs Ruthven.’ Trish was wearing her most innocent expression.
Mrs Ruthven sighed. She was one of the younger teachers, which meant none of us was yet scared of her. She was our form teacher as well, and she was learning fast that it was