The Buried Circle. Jenni Mills

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СКАЧАТЬ dressing of ripening barley. The helicopter’s shadow races across it, a tiny black insect dwarfed by the bigger shadows of the clouds.

      Steve, crouched behind me, taps me on the shoulder. I turn my head towards him, very, very carefully, in case even this simple movement unbalances me and I go tumbling out to become another shadow on the chalk. He’s saying something, but the wind and the noise of the rotors snatch his voice away. He makes cupping motions with his hands by his ears.

      He wants me to put the earphones on so I can hear him–he’s wearing a set with a microphone attached. Like I have, too, only mine are round my neck and not on my ears yet, and to put them on I’m going to have to let go of my death-grip on the door frame.

      With both hands.

      I send a signal from brain to fingers to unprise themselves. Nothing happens. Fingers know better than brain what’s sensible. They’re going to stay firmly locked onto something solid, thank you very much, until someone hauls me back safely into the interior of the helicopter and there’s no more of this dangling.

      Steve taps me on the shoulder again. Maybe if I try just one hand at a time?

      My left thumb, fractionally more adventurous than the rest of my hand, comes free. Right. That wasn’t so bad, was it? Clear proof it is possible to move and not fall out of the helicopter. In fact, now my thumb’s no longer involved, the fingers are really not doing that much to secure me, so I might manage to let go altogether that side…

      Very good, Indy, but one hand doesn’t seem to be much help getting the headset onto my ears. All I’ve achieved is to get my hair into my eyes. Should have tied it back more securely. The headset has knocked the pins outs. I can’t see. Perfect moment for the helicopter to bank and drop down towards Pewsey Vale.

      Oh, God, I’m going to fall out…

      Steve’s hands gripping my ribs, hot breath in my ear. ‘Let GO!’ he yells, practically rupturing my eardrum. The shock loosens the other hand. ‘I’ve GOT you.’ His arm snakes round my waist. ‘Now put the flicking headset on.’

      ‘OK.’ Not that he can hear me until I do. I could spout a stream of hangover-distilled vitriol and the wind would whip it straight out of my mouth into nowhere. ‘I hate you, you spotty little toilet-mouth. I despise the fact you walked straight out of a media-studies degree and into a job as a producer just because your father was a foreign correspondent for ITN, while I’ve had to spend two years hoovering the coke off the edit-suite floor. I loathe that you get to tell me what to do, although I’m the more experienced of the two of us and you’re far and away the biggest twerp I’ve yet met in my admittedly not extensive media career. In fact, right now, because you made me do this horrible, scary thing, I’d be delighted if you leaned over too far and tipped yourself out of the bloody aircraft.’

      Of course, I never would say it, don’t really mean it (not all of it, anyway), but imagining it has made me feel a whole lot better. I fumble the headset off my neck and onto my ears, using it as a kind of Alice band to keep my hair off my face.

      ‘Everything OK back there?’ Ed, the pilot, his voice tinny through the earphones.

      ‘Marvellous.’

      ‘Fine.’ Steve and I speak at the same time, both of us lying through our gritted teeth. He wants Ed to think we bear some resemblance to a professional TV crew; I want the man I slept with last night not to notice I’m a gibbering wreck.

      Steve–the man I didn’t sleep with–retracts his arm. ‘Comfortable now?’

      Comfortable doesn’t seem to be in it, but I feel more secure, and can admit it would be pretty difficult to fall out. Tough webbing straps are digging into my shoulders. They join in a deep V at the waist, meeting the belt that circles my middle and the strap that comes up from the groin. I’m very glad indeed, now I come to think of it, that I don’t have testicles, though to be truthful, life would be less painful without breasts. Wrapped in layers against the wind chill, even though it’s August–a duvet jacket I borrowed from Ed over two fleeces, and thermal long Johns under my jeans–I could still use more padding under the chafing straps.

      ‘Ready for the camera?’ asks Steve.

      ‘No.’

      ‘Look, you’d feel more balanced if you rested a foot on the strut. That’s what most cameramen do.’

      ‘Steve, I’m not most cameramen. I’m not six foot three. I’d have to be leaning right out of the helicopter for my leg to reach. You saw me try when we were still on the ground.’ I’m taller than scrawny little Steve, but that’s not enough–though it might have something to do with why we haven’t hit it off on this series. The main trouble is that Steve considers himself an expert. He’s been aerial filming more often than I have–which means he’s been out exactly once, and that must have been with a cameraman who had legs long enough to span the Severn Crossing.

      ‘Well, whatever.’ His real concern is how steady the shot will be. We both know we should have hired a footrest to screw to the helicopter’s landing skids, but it would have cost too much. ‘Now, can we please get a bloody move on? The budget only runs to two hours’ filming up here.’

      Budget is, as usual, to blame for everything. The only job my limited experience (and lack of famous father–any father, for that matter) qualifies me for is assistant producer/researcher/camera/dogsbody at Cheapskate Productions, a.k.a. Mannix TV, who are making an entire series (working title: The Call of the Weird) on the televisual equivalent of about two and a half p. Today we are filming episode four, ‘Signs in the Fields’, which is about Wiltshire’s world-famous crop circles, after Stonehenge the county’s main tourist attraction. In fact, one year a farmer with crop circles in his field took more money from visitors than the ticket office at Stonehenge.

      It took some doing to screw enough money for aerial filming out of the digital channel that commissioned the series, but crop circles can’t be fully appreciated from ground level. As it is, most of the programme will be made up of interviews in the back bar of the Barge Inn, on the Kennet and Avon canal and right in the heart of crop-circle country, with avid cerealogists, as crop-circle investigators are called. They will tell us (I know because as the series’ researcher I’ve already spent several hours listening to their theories) that only aliens could be responsible for such intricate and portentous patterns. It is simply not possible that such a primitive civilization as our own could have produced them. How could they have been made by humans? they ask, plaintively and rhetorically.

      Well, I know the answer to that too. You need a thirty-foot surveyor’s tape, a smallish wooden plank, and a plastic lawn roller, obtainable from any good garden centre. I watched John do it, one moonlit May night in 1998, with a group of his friends who call themselves the Barley Collective. I was supposed to be the lookout but I was laughing so much that an alien mothership could have landed behind and I wouldn’t have noticed. The bizarre thing is that since people like John came out in the 1990s to admit they trample out the crop circles–gigantic art installations, the way John sees them–more people than ever have become convinced they can’t possibly be man-made. Apparently there’s a sociological term for it, John says, something to do with disconfirmation leading to strengthened belief, an idea that also lies at the heart of most religion. I gently put it to one of the cerealogists at the Barge that I’d seen it done, and he almost punched me.

      Our time aloft this afternoon is limited, thank God, so limited I doubt we’ll achieve half of what Steve plans. He can’t afford to hire a proper cameraman–or a proper camera-mount, for that matter. Any СКАЧАТЬ