The Buried Circle. Jenni Mills

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СКАЧАТЬ Navigator in the RAE Hardly trained, then he was killed. Long time ago, though.

      Killed on a bombing raid?

      A flicker of impatience around her mouth. On a mission, she said firmly. Her lips pursed.

      So…

      So that was it. Sad, but it happened a lot in the war. Had to get used to it. Frannie had eyes like knives. That’s why I don’t talk about ‘im, easier not to, see?

      Her eyes have that same steely flash now. ‘Davey,’ she says. ‘That was his name.’

      ‘Where’s he buried? You never–’

      ‘He in’t buried. He’s with what was left of his aeroplane, ashes mostly. There’s a headstone to him in Yatesbury churchyard.’

      This is so much more than I’ve gleaned previously that it almost drives the gruesome picture of Grandad’s cindered remains out of my head. ‘Yatesbury? That’s–’

      ‘Coupla miles away, yes.’

      ‘So…’

      ‘India,’ she says, ‘not tonight. I’m bone tired. Don’t mind if I crawl off to bed, do you?’ Her supper is only half finished.

      ‘Didn’t mean to upset you.’ I take her hand again.

      ‘You didn’t. All a long time ago. But I don’t like digging them days up, bad time for everyone.’ She pulls her fingers out of my grasp, and stands up, leaning on the table to balance herself. ‘Can I leave you with the washing-up?’

      The line of light under Frannie’s door winks out as I sit at the kitchen table after supper, the washing-up done, turning the stem of my wineglass between my fingers, seeing how the overhead light slides inside it and sparkles. My mother had a bag of polished stones she took everywhere, arranging them some nights in a circle on the fold-down table in our travellers’ van. My memory crystals, she’d say. The clear oily one with a rainbow in its heart is a Herkimer diamond. It can remember things for you: you pour thoughts into it and retrieve them later. That milky pink-banded crystal–agate–is layered, like your mind: it helps you tease out memories that are laid underneath each other. The blue boji stone is for healing hurtful ones. This is phantom quartz–see how there’s another crystal inside it, a ghost crystal? It reveals what you’ve forgotten. And that black one’s onyx, a stone for secrets. It will soak up your memories, the dark ones you want to hide.

      I’ve managed to forget almost everything that led up to the moment of the crash. What time we took off, how long we were up there, what I filmed, Steve’s instructions in my headset. I hardly even remember the last part, the moment when the helicopter started to spin, the sounds of grinding and tearing as it skidded on its side over the barley field. But I do remember that we spun widdershins. And Steve’s eyes. I don’t think I’ll ever succeed in blanking out Steve’s dead eyes.

      Through the party wall comes the thud thud thud of the neighbours’ stereo. It’s chilly: the central heating must have gone off, though it’s not yet ten. The kitchen’s never warm: draughts sneak through its seams from the wind-raked fields. The previous owners were into a fatal pairing of acronyms, DIY and MFI, and the cupboards look very nice, cream Shaker style with big brown doorknobs, but close up, everything’s crooked. The extractor fan in the cooker hood hasn’t worked since the year zero, and if you turn on the grill, smoke pours out of the oven. Frannie hasn’t done a thing to the place in the four years she’s been here.

      By my elbow, my mobile phone trills once. A text:

      U ever going 2 call me back?

      No. My thumbs work furiously. Please leave me alone.

      As I come out of the bathroom after cleaning my teeth, the strangeness of Fran’s reluctance to sleep upstairs strikes me. In her old room at the back the bed is stripped, the dressing-table layered with dust, nothing on the floor except my own boxes of stuff. The wardrobe is empty, apart from a cardboard poster tube leaning against the back. I shut the mirrored door again quickly. I know what’s in there: my bloody mother, making an exhibition of herself.

      All that can be seen in the blackness of the uncurtained window is my own reflection, backlit by a dingy forty-watt bulb on the landing. I press my nose right up to the glass. Lights, buggerin lights. What was that all about? The bungalows behind are already dark. The light from our bathroom falls on the square of mole-riddled lawn that passes for Frannie’s garden, neglected in a way she would never have tolerated only a year or so ago. In the distance, towards Windmill Hill, there’s a single fuzzy gleam that must be one of the Bray Street cottages. Otherwise the night is a creepy sort of void.

      The emptiness of Steve’s stare comes back to me. Slowly, the picture that’s burnt into the back of my head is changing. Now one eye’s fixed on me, the other off beam and staring towards the front of the helicopter. His pupils are huge, both as bleak and black and empty as the night.

       CHAPTER 3

      Next morning everything seems brighter. Frannie has her hat on, ready to stump off to church with a sunny grin on her face, carrying two cans of carrot soup as her harvest offering.

      ‘Off to do good works?’

      ‘Being good in’t what takes a body to church. You don’t want to come?’ Dying to show me off to her friends. My granddaughter, works in telly…

      ‘I’d prefer to get straight first. Unpack, maybe go for a walk. Tell you what, I’ll stroll with you to Big Avebury’

      It’s glorious weather: deep blue sky, and the beech leaves shivering in a gentle wind, the first loving nip of autumn. The stones have already snagged the day’s first minibus-load of visiting hippies, who are wandering through the inner circle behind the Methodist chapel-cum-tourist office. Another half-dozen people are marching fat-tyred pushchairs round the top of the banks. Frannie meets one of her friends in the high street, and the pair of them totter through the churchyard together to St James’s. I sit on the bench by the lich-gate, to check the map for the route of my walk. A ragged ‘We plough the fields and scatter…’ floats from the church as I set off.

      It takes me nearly half an hour from Avebury at a brisk clip. The fields either side of the broad, level track are indeed ploughed, greyish-white flint scattered across the brown earth. I’m ever hopeful that one day I’ll spot a prehistoric stone arrowhead, a perfect leaf shape, lying on the surface, and every so often something catches my eye–disappointingly, when I stoop to check, always a leaf.

      Yatesbury boasted an airfield used during the First and Second World Wars, mostly for training. The RAF closed the base some years ago, and microlights fly out of there now. The church, crouched like a grey rabbit among trees, is silent; Sunday services must rotate from parish to parish. Ancient yews shade the path to its door. An old box tomb leans at an angle defying the laws of geometry. The grass between the graves hasn’t been cut for a while, and the hems of my trousers are soon soaked.

      It isn’t difficult to find Grandad’s memorial. At the far end of the churchyard there are several rows of white stones with RAF insignia. Young men’s graves, blank tablets of unlived lives. Like Steve’s. For a moment, I have a creepy sensation of him here too, behind me, sitting with his back against the box tomb watching me as I walk slowly along the ranks of headstones.

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