NORTHMAN, page 10
Edie had seen the rise, the fall, the rise again and the (perhaps) final funeral of the British film industry, the coming and going of flavour-of-the-month directors, and was a woman who could smell the bullshit at a thousand yards downwind. A woman for whom Michael had an ultimate, and reciprocated respect.
She suffered neither the intelligent nor fools gladly, bowing only to the needs of the picture if it had any value, or to the vision and integrity of the director if he, or she, could be proven to possess any. She was unmarried and, so the rumour had it - a rumour propagated by her victims - totally seamless between the legs.
The second, and hopefully final cut on thirty-five millimetre film would be done with her, using the timecoded video cut as a reference.
It was a hands-on job, cutting and cementing together disparate pieces of film: a tactile experience that many directors found satisfying, but missing in the invisible world of electrons represented by digital editing.
It would not be easy. It never was, with Edie. During the edit Michael would endure a level of abuse, which, received from anyone else would have ensured extensive facial restructuring for the abuser.
But Edie was special. Abuse from her was only a sign that she cared, a sign that the picture was good, and that at sixty-nine she still had passion.
Michael pressed the switch to fire up the Betacam edit suite. While it was warming up he flicked through the battered and heavily pencil marked shooting script of ‘Footfall’, checking the scenarios, beginning to feel the structure, being mindful of the compromise shots - the ones that looked fine on paper, but not in real life - searching for those moments of ‘movie magic’, when everything came together seamlessly and actually bloody well worked. And then grabbing that series of captured static images by the scruff of the neck, breathing movement and emotion into them: those random crystals of silver halide buried in celluloid from which sprang sadness and joy, sin and repentance, life and death. It was probably the last movie he would be allowed to do on film as the digits marched on.
He placed the first tape into player one and pressed play, settling back into the high back chair in which he expected to spend most of the next four weeks with an expression of anticipation and a quickening of the heart.
Just as the first clapperboard moved out of shot and the face of Sophie came onto screen waiting for the signal from the director, the telephone rang.
“Shit.” Michael reached for the edit controller and froze the picture before picking up the telephone.
“Yes.”
“Mr McLaren? Kate Elliot.”
The head case. Something had come up. She could not make it. Hardly surprising. She would leave the clothes at the Three Tuns if that was acceptable, and thank you again Mister McLaren, I hope that we meet again (not bloody likely) and goodbye. Michael put down the phone. That was a relief, in an oddly uncomfortable way. He grunted. Could do without spare women around when there was a picture to be cut. Edie was quite enough.
He looked at the frozen picture of Sophie, mouth open about to speak, got the memory of a hard on, released the picture and dived headlong into the first sequence of ‘Footfall’.
******
The following day was bright and frosty. By lunchtime Professor McCrum and his band of students, researchers and ‘refugees from the cesspit of academic failure’ - as Weatherall put it - had arrived at the copse, divided it into sections with string and sticks, and were digging in the iron hard ground with the enthusiasm of pigs after truffles.
Kate spent the morning supervising the dig, but a feeling of anti-climax, a sure knowledge that all that remained in the copse were rags, bones and old wood tempered her already strained ability to enthuse.
Similarly, Doctor Weatherall exhibited little taste for continuing the dig. He had a shield. He was sure that any other important artefacts had been stolen, and there was a certain pleasure to be had from trusting one’s judgement - even more to be had from seeing McCrum’s unpleasant, little face, if his judgement was right. It was a little like gambling. So he had spent the morning being overly solicitous to McCrum, polite to the point of rudeness and been rewarded with an aggressive outburst from the professor concerning the discovery of the shield, which, vacuum-sealed was now on its way back to Cambridge.
But I have the shield. It is mine. He would have giggled, but it was unseemly. McCrum could have the bone fragments. It was right and proper.
He rubbed his hands in the cold air and began to compose his paper to the Royal Society.
Kate stared across the fields at the cooling towers. She could just make out a few vehicles parked at the base of tower number two: a lorry with a tarpaulin-covered low loader, a crane, three RAF Land Rovers, a large, white police van and a red saloon car of some sort. They looked unreal in the bright morning light, as if they were cardboard cutouts. The only traces of the crashed plane were a ragged hole in the tower and a smear leading downward from it, like a scuffmark from a heavy rubber-soled boot.
Another crane was levering the remains of Delta Charlie Bravo from the bed of the Trent. Faintly, she could hear competing instructions shouted; hard, male voices full of authority and confidence. In front of this activity the fields stretched out, glittering like the newly washed hair of a baby. So clean.
She took a deep breath, filling her lungs with the cold, fresh smell.
It didn’t happen. Any of it.
She swivelled to the copse, covered now with bright anoraks and earnest faces, and laughed quietly to herself. Nothing could happen here. Nothing that wasn’t mechanical, like the dead aircraft. There was no fear now, just soil and broken trees and the river and the cold air. Her eye was drawn to the oak stump. It too was frosted, but through the frost she could still see the brown marks of sacrifice, soaked in to the whitened wood.
Sacrifice.
So apt, but why? A thin trickle of ice ran down her spine. Accident, she corrected herself, just an accident.
The doctor wandered over, rubbing his hands together, his thin nose reddened, but unable to stop smiling.
“Lovely day isn’t it, my dear? Just the sort of day to dig up the Viking counterpart to an Oxfam shop.” He laughed and turned to look at Professor McCrum striding across the hardened mounds of earth. “Should be here for, oh, at least three or four weeks, wasting money, and,” he turned back to Kate, “absolutely nothing to show for it, nothing for the balance sheets, nothing for the sponsors… oh joy!” He spread his hands to the sky, ‘Sometimes I wish I wasn’t an atheist, then I could thank someone in authority.” He dropped his hands and patted Kate on the shoulder. “Cheer up Kate, you are on the winning side.”
Kate returned his grin like an automaton. “I’ll go back to Cambridge, there’s little I can do here, now.”
“Fine, fine,” said the doctor, “you can check on my… sorry, our shield, and perhaps begin categorising some of the lesser finds, the amulet, the infant skull, if you would.”
Kate nodded. Where was the child’s skull? The doctor didn’t know about the adult skull, thank goodness, but it should have been on the site the morning after her flight and rescue by Michael. So should that of the child, but neither skull had been found. She would have a lot of explaining to do later. But that was later. Now the object was to get away, back to sanity, back to the apartment and to Cambridge.
“I will, but I’d like to take a day or two off, if I may, Aloysius,” she said, keeping the tone casual. The doctor assumed that everyone was as dedicated as him and normally greeted requests for time off with argument against.
This time he waved his hands in an expansive gesture. “Take as long as you like my dear, one or two days should suffice. You know, we have a lot of work to do if we’re to keep that pirate,” he indicated McCrum, “off our case, as my American colleagues say in their quaint and almost endearing vernacular.”
“I’ll check with Martin to make sure the shield is preserved first, of course.” She set out across the field.
Weatherall watched her go with fondness. “Kate,” he shouted.
She turned to him. “What?”
“Thank you, my dear. We did it together and I will ensure that you receive some of the credit.”
“Not necessary Aloysius, you found the shield.”
She continued up the field, crunching through the stiff grass, feeling suddenly clean and new at the thought of home.
Weatherall saw her cross the stile, climb into her car and leave with a wave through the open window. Beyond her, three white horses ran in a neighbouring field, tails streaming. He turned back to the copse. “Yes, I did find the shield, didn’t I,” he murmured to himself, picking out the now crouching figure of the Professor. “McCrum. I say, McCrum…. need any help, old man? I’m becoming quite good at this now. Not as good as you of course.”
The professor glanced up. He stared back hard for a moment and then continued examining what looked like a desiccated stool from a Viking midden with the renewed energy of the desperate.
******
Three weeks later Kate had recovered some of her old confidence. The answer was, as always, work, and plenty of it. She launched herself back into the safe shallows of the university after just one day’s absence, throwing off the fear of darker, deeper waters for the safety of the academic marina.
She had intended to extend the leave but a disturbing occurrence on her second night back changed her mind.
It was around twelve o’ clock when she finally put down the collection of photo albums in which she could yet again track her life, and had been her rock in times of crisis. All but one album.
The face of her Mother, now dead, smiled at her out of the page, holding Kate as a baby, congratulating her at the school concert and then looking on proudly as she displayed her double first.
“Mum. I wish you were here, now.” Speaking to the empty room felt foolish, but she knew it was simply a comfort.
In that last photo her mother looked old; not the face Kate remembered. The school concert photo more closely approximated the image held in mind. The baby photograph was of a different woman, someone who might have been a college friend, not a mother. But the smile was the same throughout. The same smile on the face of three different women, only one of whom tallied with memory.
Kate smiled at the woman she knew, closed the album, and prepared for bed.
She slept fitfully, waking several times with the repeated image of her mother at a distance, calling something that she could not hear. It wasn’t frightening, just uncomfortable.
On the third occasion of waking she turned the bedside lamp on, almost expecting to see her mother across the room, but the room was empty.
Sitting up, she peered at the clock. It was two thirty three a.m., the central heating had gone off, and the room was cold.
It was as if she felt a touch, something on the inside of her thigh. Light and cold, like the brush of a snow covered leaf. She moved to switch the lamp out, rubbing both legs together to dispel the feeling.
As she turned, the touch came again, stronger, more insistent. She paused, hand hovering over the lamp switch and reached down between her legs. Nothing. She pressed the lamp switch down, but the light refused to go off. She cursed to herself and continued to press it, speaking aloud with a rush of anger that came from nowhere.
“Switch off.”
The lamp flickered. Kate could hear a sizzling sound from its base, and smelt the odour of warm electrical insulation. She reached down to unplug it from the power point. Her right hand began to hurt, burning in the palm.
“Switch off, you bastard!”
The room seemed to be filling with the electrical smell. With a jolt Kate realised that the smell was not that of burnt insulation.
It was the reek of putrid seaweed and rotten meat.
She jumped from the bed and stood, heart pounding, eyes straining into the darkened recesses of the familiar room. She took a breath and began to walk to the main light switch by the door of the bedroom.
But she could not. It was as if she were walking through viscous oil. Her feet wouldn’t move forward. She remembered the copse, the terror…. the memory shot through her like an iron spike.
No.
It would not beat her this time. She gritted her teeth and pushed against the thickness.
Remorselessly, she was pressed back, the stench increasing, the tick of the bedside clock and her own tortured breathing the only sounds.
Her strength began to ebb as the power of the dense air increased, pushing her back onto the bed, flat, spread eagled on the warm duvet. The furniture in the room crept inwards, encircling her, and the room shrivelled, collapsing like a ruptured football.
Again she felt the cold touch - burning now - and screamed, but her throat wouldn’t work, it came out as a gurgle.
She lay flat on the bed, and it was as if something wet and leathery were being pushed into her face, covering her mouth and nostrils. The cold, burning touch moved up her thigh. Soundlessly, she tried to scream, tried to breathe under the mass of cloying wetness, under the weight that pushed her down into the bed.
And the weight began to move, rhythmically up and down on her body. She gasped for air and tried to push her hands into the thickness. But it continued, thrusting down on her, then releasing, thrusting, releasing. The coldness spread between her thighs, throwing flames of ice into the pit of her stomach.
No. No. No! Her mind screamed at the insanity of it as she pushed up through the solid air, up to grasp it, to tear at it, for this… invasion and her hands contacted something solid, something real.
She didn’t realise her eyes were closed until her fingers grasped wet hair, scraped down cold skin. She beat out at the face under her hands, gouged deep into flesh and pulp that tore away like decayed fruit. She screamed again and her voice came from another part of the room.
Kate opened her eyes to see the face of the thing that pounded up and down on her.
Her mother smiled down with approbation, face split apart, skin hanging off in strips, eyes a pulp of white matter in black sockets.
“Well done, Katie, well done.” Her mother’s lips cracked apart and the voice was so dear, so dear.
The scream came again, closer now, and she felt it flow back into her own throat.
The lamp had been knocked over and flickering, it went out with a precise click. The pressure lifted instantly.
Kate lay in the dark, tears in her eyes for the thousand memories of her mother. A nightmare. Nothing more. The fear receded but the sadness remained. She righted the table lamp and pressed the switch. It flickered briefly and came on.
“Mother. Mum?” No reply, just her voice, dull in the room.
She tested the air but found only the smell of stale perfume, Wilton carpet and sweat. She glanced down at her body and saw the wheals and scratches between her thighs; the blood under her fingernails. Her nightgown lay shredded across the duvet.
Not a dream.
Abruptly, the fear returned. She released the breath she was holding in one shuddered gasp and pulled the crumpled duvet around her cold body. The bedside clock ticked passively. Still two thirty three a.m. No time had passed.
A flood of relief coursed through her and laughing, she grabbed the clock, kissing its plastic face. She turned to replace the clock.
It was then that she saw the skull of Thorkild, resting on the bedside table, bathed in the yellow light of the table lamp.
******
That same skull now sat on the lab bench in front of her, lower jaw missing, eye sockets empty darkness. She turned it over as Martin the young lab assistant walked past carrying a demijohn of saline solution.
“Still playing with that old bone, darling?” He paused and came back to her. “Got a newer bone if you like, play with that?” He grinned lewdly at her.
The look from Kate sent him scurrying away. It was the same look that had frozen the balls of similar bovines over the last few years, and one in which Kate was well practised.
She watched Martin stop at the lab door and glare back, wanting to wound her, to slightly strangle her if necessary, but she knew he couldn’t recover the moment, could not recover the loss of pride. He kicked the door as he left and she smiled.
Kate put the skull back on the bench. It was remarkably heavy and had a dull, orange sheen to it that suggested it had been in contact with iron during its internment in the copse. A sliver of bone was being analysed in the university’s School of Medicine. The results were due within forty-eight hours and would at least reveal the DNA of Thorkild to check against previous Norse discoveries for familial similarities.
Martin re-appeared with another demijohn.
“Want to see something cool?” Without waiting for approval he walked to the bench and placed a small, metal object on the skull.
Kate shrugged, mystified.
Martin upended the skull and the metal object stayed in place, stuck to the bone.
“It’s magnetic?” Kate tugged at the object and it came free. “A magnet. Why the hell…?”
“Don’t thank me. First thing I thought when I saw rust on the bugger. Like my Mark Two Escort. You have to be a bloke to get it, see? A bloke with an old car.” Martin smiled and chalked up an invisible point in the air. Whistling, he departed.
Kate smiled. Martin although obnoxious - like a child, she sometimes thought - had done what nobody else would have thought of doing. Orange equalled rust, defying the accepted wisdom that bone was not magnetic. This bone was. Out of the mouths… she thought, and ran the magnet down the skull. Most unusual, but probably not important. There were more important facts to consider, and none of them to do with the physical properties of human bone.
