Crow Stone. Jenni Mills
getting out books on archaeology. We notice things like that, the other librarians and I. We call you the Little Digger.’
She was wearing a fluffy lilac wraparound cardigan instead of a coat, over a dress that tried to be the same shade but just missed. There was a thin gold cross on a chain round her neck. I couldn’t think what to say to her.
‘So, Digger,’ she said, ‘what a surprise bumping into you at my bus stop, eh? But your dad said you lived up on Green Down. Maybe we’ll keep bumping into each other, now we’ve done it once.’ She unzipped a big tapestry shoulder-bag. ‘Banana? I always get peckish on my way home.’
‘No, thanks,’ I said coldly. ‘I’m dieting.’
She raised her eyebrows. Her cheekbones were sharp, with little dabs of red blusher under them. ‘Exercise,’ she said. ‘Exercise is better than dieting. Do you dance, Katie?’
A bus was coming along the road. I squinted at it over Janey Legge’s fluffy shoulder. Not my bus. I wondered whether to get on it anyway, to escape from her. The bus drew to a stop beside us, and the noise of its engine drowned out whatever Janey was saying. She looked round at its number. ‘Well, this is mine. Been lovely talking. And you will, won’t you?’
‘Will what?’
‘Remember me to your father. What a lovely man. You can tell him I said that.’ She stood up, adjusting her bag on her shoulder. ‘See you soon.’
Over my dead body. I stared after the bus as it pulled away towards the bridge, trying telepathy to make it explode. But there was no fireball, no mushroom cloud. It carried Janey Legge and the rest of its passengers safely across the river.
Back at the hotel I’m folding clothes when the telephone rings. It’s Gary. ‘Sorry,’ he says. ‘That didn’t go very well, did it?’
‘You can say that again.’
‘Right.’ He pauses uncertainly. ‘What are you doing? You keep fading away on the phone.’
‘I’m packing.’
‘Packing? Just because a few miners were unfriendly?’
I stop trying to squash a red mohair jumper into my case, and tuck the phone more firmly under my chin. ‘Of course not. I found a place to rent. I’m moving out of the hotel tomorrow or the day after.’
‘That was quick.’
‘I spent the weekend going round the letting agencies. Got a cottage in Turleigh.’
‘There’s smart.’ His voice carries a note of envy. ‘Places don’t come up there very often.’
‘I was lucky. It’s somebody’s weekend retreat from London, but they’ve been posted to Minnesota, poor sods.’
I’m really lucky. It’s about ten times as nice as my Cornwall cottage, fond though I am of that. Cornish cottages are generally made of damp granite and poison you with radon, but Turleigh is cosy limestone. It has two en-suite power-showers, solid marble worktops in the kitchen, and a remote-controlled garage door.
‘There must be a snag,’ says Gary. ‘Maybe it’s haunted.’
‘I can live with that.’
‘Anyway. I just wanted to make sure you weren’t upset.’
‘Upset? What about?’
‘Well. You know. The miners.’ He sounds uncomfortable, and so he should.
‘You get used to it. Just like they’re going to have to get used to me.’
‘OK,’ says Gary. He sounds doubtful, though. ‘Well. I guess so.’
‘I’ve got to go,’ I say. ‘I’m expecting a call.’ After I’ve put the phone down I think, Yeah, right. A call from Granny.
I pull open the top drawer in the chest under the window, and pull out handfuls of underwear to cram into my case. All black or nude colours, plain, strong and practical. One falls on to the floor and I bend to pick it up, admiring its smooth curves that fit my smooth curves exactly. Its shape reminds me of a suspension bridge: perfect engineering. Was it Howard Hughes who designed a bra for Jane Russell on the cantilever principle?
Bollocks, Kit, says Martin’s voice in my head. Go and buy a bra in shocking pink.
In the night, I’m suddenly awake, staring into darkness. The room is pitch black, except for the red light on the television and a yellow line under the door. The only sound is the hiss of the weir water outside.
It’s nearly six weeks since the roof fall in the flint mine.
I’m here under false pretences. By rights I should be dead.
I turn over, then over again. I keep seeing the face I haven’t seen since I was fourteen. And fingers. Long, sensitive fingers. Fingers like white stalks, groping towards me in the dark … No. The room is too hot. I want to sleep, but know I won’t. I’m afraid to sleep, in case Death realizes he missed me and I don’t wake up again. I can taste garlic from dinner, and wakefulness, metallic and dry, on the back of my tongue.
Can’t someone turn the weir off?
White noise. White night.
I’m at my computer the next morning on site when the summons comes. It’s like the blast of icy air that comes into the Portakabin with Rosie, the admin assistant with whom I’m sharing an office. The purdah principle: lodge the women together so you can keep an eye on them. To do that, we’ve been given our own office eunuch, thankfully absent at the moment.
‘Brendan wants to see you,’ says Rosie. She’s balancing two brimming cups of coffee and trying to close the door with her bottom. ‘We have to get a new kettle.’
Our eyes swivel automatically towards the third desk. It carries a computer, its screen plastered with yellow Post-it notes, a pharmacopoeia of vitamin pills and antihistamines, and one of those really naff figurines of Priapus they sell in gift shops in Greek tourist resorts. A trowel, an archaeologist’s third hand, is propped in the crook made by its disproportionately huge member. Dickhead’s not here at the moment, praise the Lord and pass the ammunition, preferably a fragmentation grenade I can pop under the cushion of his special posture stool. It’s the sort that’s supposed to straighten your spine, but Dickon still manages to look like a long curved streak of piss when he sits at it.
Rosie and I especially loathe Dickhead today, because last night he left late and locked up forgetting he’d left the kettle on. It didn’t cut off automatically when it boiled, and the element has burned out. So every time we want a cuppa we have to totter over the frozen puddles to the big cabin where the kitchenette is. For Rosie and me that’s about every half-hour, and we’re already fed up.
‘I don’t suppose it’s the kettle Brendan wants to see me about?’
Rosie makes a face. ‘’Fraid not.’
‘Well?’
‘He should tell you.’ She puts down the coffees, one on her neat desk, one on mine, which is already building up sedimentary layers of crumpled paper. She sticks one finger up in the direction of Dickon’s posture stool.
Rosie and I have only known each other for a day and a bit, but I can see we’re going to get along. I give her about forty seconds before she cracks and tells me the bad news. It’s bound to be bad news: I’ve felt it coming since yesterday, underground, a minor quake to be sure, but destructive nonetheless.
She sits down at her desk, framed by a gallery of happy bouncing brothers and sisters and friends, all doing impossibly athletic things on ski slopes or rockfaces or amid raging torrents. Rosie’s in her late twenties, when the