NORTHMAN, page 3
The archaeologist, Doctor Weatherall, was wet but excited. He was an old man, past retirement, but still enthused by his subject. A boyish smile hovered on his face as he hopped from bone to bone: a sprite in Arcadia.
His assistant, Kate, wished she were somewhere else. She had made a mistake, a serious error of judgement in becoming an archaeologist. But how were you supposed to know at eighteen? How could you plan your life, when you didn’t know what life was? Then it was too late. The labels were applied after Cambridge, after that sodding double first. Euphoria for two years, and then a gradual tightening of the noose of opportunity, the drawer labelled ‘archaeologist’ closing so slowly, but so definitely, so finally around her until only a chink of choice remained, that too, fading fast.
And now, at thirty-two, unmarried, unbedded for the last eighteen months and intellectually unfulfilled, she stood in the middle of a muddy field, with an archetypal mad professor, catching two miserable weeks of flu’ for the sake of a twelve-hundred year old Scandinavian hooligan.
She brushed a dark fringe of hair from her eyes and kicked one of the exposed bones. “Okay Sven, where to now?”
The doctor ran up with a muddy bone. “A scapula, Kate, a whole scapula.” Then he was gone, hopping from mud pile to mud pile, his excitement almost glowing in the fading light.
Kate put the scapula into her bag, along with the other bones. I am a failure, she thought, without surprise. As if I expected to be from the start. I tried hard, didn’t I? But trying hard isn’t enough. My personal life is a mess, too. Part of the same problem. Trying too hard? Yes. That’s what they thought at school. Too fierce, too absorbed, old Mr Jennings said. Chemistry is only stinks and bangs, not a reason for living. He was kind and said it, but some of the other teachers drove me on, enthused by my passion, for their own reasons. My parents said it too, but I wouldn’t listen because I wanted them to be proud of me, wanted them to…
I miss mum and dad so much.
I loved them and they died. When I wasn’t ready. She grunted in disgust. Self-pity, more of it as I get older, but is there really anything to live for? They’re gone and Sam’s gone. Who else is there? Even to talk to.
The ground parted easily to her trowel. She saw her fingers wrapped around the handle and for a moment they were not part of her, but loathsome worms mindlessly moving through a pointless, programmed function.
“More bones, Kate.” The doctor’s face turned towards her, smiling in the distance. She smiled back, hating the appeasement reflex, and turned again to the earth.
She had disinterred several small bones when her trowel hit something a little larger. Carefully, she scraped away the mud from the object. It was about the size of a grapefruit and smooth. She lifted it from the ground, seeing the large black hole, feeling the jagged edges breaking the near perfect dome.
A skull. Tiny. No more than a (baby) child. Brushing away the mud encrusted around the eye sockets, she held it like a jewel, starting as the jawbone dropped away into her hands. Her fingers found the hole and probed inside, dislodging the mud, and for a moment it was as if she felt the soft skin of the infant under her hand, the downy hair a delight under her fingers, and saw the dark, liquid eyes of a young child look up at her from the empty skull.
Save him. Save my baby. Old thoughts flashed through and were gone like thistledown.
The sorrow came from nowhere catching her unawares.
She began to sob, holding the tiny skull in her arms, kneeling in the mud rocking backwards and forwards, the feeling of grief and loss so terrible, so all enveloping... then, it was as if a bird had flown and the emotion evaporated, replaced by an awful heaviness, and that was worse.
I’m sorry, Mum, sorry Sam. Sorry. Sorry. The words came like flies.
The doctor’s hand was on her shoulder, but it didn’t matter, nothing mattered.
Lost. Lost. My baby. It echoed through her emptiness, not her voice, or language, but she knew it well, that secret cry.
My baby. Mine and Sam’s. Not lost. Thrown away.
“Kate… Kate… ” The doctor came down to her eye level and stared at her with a worried expression. “It’s all right Kate.” He removed the skull from her hands and placed it on the ground.
She didn’t stop him. She was drained, the loss a dull weight pushing her into the earth. She would never rise, just sink into the mud to be with her baby, but the vision had faded and the skull was just an old piece of bone, in a field, in the rain.
Wiping away the tears from her face with a grimy hand she turned to the doctor with a tight smile that turned down. “It was real. I saw... I saw… a child... ”
The doctor lifted her to her feet. “It’s late and,” he paused, examining her closely, “you’re very tired. It’s my fault, I do get carried away, I’m afraid.”
“No, you don’t understand… the child, I saw… ” But as she spoke even her voice was unreal and she couldn’t remember what it was she’d seen. Only the dreadful, aching sense of loss remained.
She breathed deeply, in control again. “I’m fine now Doctor, thank you, expect it was a dizzy spell or something.” She glanced down at the skull. “Letting my imagination run away with me - foolish really.”
“Probably hormonal,” said Weatherall, patting her on the back with as much warmth as he felt proper. “Used to happen to a lady acquaintance of mine, swore that she could see through my body from time to time. I told her to lay off the Sanatogen and take a cold shower.” He laughed and held out his hand to the rain. “Preferably in a bathroom. I think a good, stiff, five star Napoleon and a hot beef pie would do us both good, so let’s repair to our hotel and begin anew in the morning. Equitable?”
Kate nodded and began to collect the implements, picking up the skull and placing it carefully in the bag. She stopped for a moment as they moved to the car and looked back. Momentarily a shudder passed through her body; the air seemed colder, clean but tainted with a faint smell of salt, a breath of the sea.
The copse was quiet, rain beating into the brown earth with the monotony of a heartbeat. It was simply imagination, of course, or the echo of heavy machinery from the Toyota factory across the nearby A38, but as she stood there it seemed as if she heard a sigh, a long reverberating exhalation that rolled along the ground gathering pace and volume, becoming distant laughter: the laughter of a madman.
******
It was nearly midnight. In Bernard’s Armoury, close to Derby city centre, a burglary was in process.
Mark Cottingham, on his way home from a night on the town, passed the shop and heard the sounds of the burglary and in a glow of good neighbourliness - caused by several whisky chasers - telephoned the police. Said police arrived three hours later to find the shop ‘totally fubar’, the investigating officer phrased it, as if someone had ‘driven a JCB through it’.
That same officer noted that it must have been a small JCB since there were no signs of unlawful entry and the expensive alarm had not been tripped.
Some time later, the shop owner, Bernard Jenks, arrived and verified that nothing had been stolen, but several firearms had been vandalised with what appeared to be a blowtorch, since all the affected firearms had fused firing mechanisms or melted barrels.
The police suspected Mr Jenks of insurance fraud, but since nothing was missing, filed it and forgot it.
The insurance company grudgingly replaced the damaged stock, but it was not until the annual audit that Bernard Jenks noted the loss of a solitary item. He wrote it off as a shoplifting loss, and sent for another one from the wholesaler. A Finnish dual-purpose deer skinning and fish de-scaling knife. Very popular with local farmers for rabbit, that was.
6.
COMING HOME
The red chariot with the emblem of the prancing horse pushed its way through the drizzle, gliding over inked tarmac as easily as a young girl’s hand on silk; the muted heartbeat of four hundred horses pounding the air with a barbaric throb of raw power.
Two thousand years ago others had travelled this road: long lines of men dreaming of vineyards and hot sun, dark-haired women and warm nights. Then, as the universe turned they were gone, leaving only the traces of their passing - long, straight roads that bisected the soft body of Albion with geometric efficiency.
The chariots of the Legions were mouldered wood and iron, rotting under the rolling hills of England, testimonials to the shortness of life and blindness of purpose of man the conqueror. Now they were back, fashioned by hands removed a flicker in time, but still the same hands, and for a purpose which would not have been unpleasing to their warrior ancestors.
Michael dropped down a gear as his ‘92 Ferrari Testarossa hit another bank of fog, and slowed the car to forty miles an hour. Behind his head the elderly Flat-12 burbled in displeasure, eager for the road, eager to scream its power to the night.
Beside him, Jack Pointer was asleep, mouth open, dreaming, no doubt of Brutes, Pups, Inky-Dinkies and all the other paraphernalia with which he practised the art of cinematographic lighting. Feeling perhaps, the incandescent caress of a burning Blonde, the torrid kiss of a radiant Redhead.
Michael glanced at him and smiled. It was curious how men feminised their equipment, the tools of their trade, as if there was a need for a constant reminder of females, a touchstone to reality, away from the posture and aggression of male conflict to a more peaceful place where softness was not a revealed target and tears a sign of mental instability.
He thought of his wife Celia from whom he had finally separated. She was cold to him now, their child Anna the only reminder of a passion that had once seemed limitless. But that passion had shifted focus for her, away from him to others, many others. Michael did not hold any resentment, but he wanted it over, finally over.
‘Shit.” Jack awoke and shifted position. “Twisted my knackers, why can’t you get a decent motor with a bit of legroom.” He yawned and looked out of the window. “Friggin’ Fosseway, should’ve come on the M1, talk about boring,” he grinned at Michael, “All right then out with it mein direktor, what was she like, gimme a shotlist.”
“Who?” Michael dipped the main headlight beam as an Audi A4 repmobile shot by on the other side of the road at ninety in the fog.
Jack laughed. “Indira Ghandi, who do you think? Sophie Tosspot, pudendal icon of the western world, shaggers and wankers working men’s club equivalent of Joan of Arc, the mass of distressed fleshliness we have come to know and despise over the last few weeks, or is it eons?”
Michael grinned. Jack was happily married to Linsey - Michael’s former production assistant - had four beautiful children and a stability which was unshakeable, but seemed to regard Michael’s rare sexual encounters as his property and always insisted on a blow by blow account, of which a true one was never forthcoming.
It would be no good telling Jack that nothing had happened, that Sophie had passed out from a chemical overload of angel dust, vodka, and possibly pepperoni, before - to Michael’s great relief - the grisly deed had been done. No good at all. Jack would persist for months, years if necessary.
“Nearly as good as Linsey.” Michael continued to grin.
“That good, eh, you lying toerag. Come on out with it, the truth, I’m writing an expose for when you’re rich and famous, and I’m old and plonkerless. Porno details, that’s what I want, give.”
“Think of it this way, Jack. It’s a bit like a guided tour of the Millennium Dome, sorry, O2 arena. You go in, rattle about for a bit and then wonder what you’re doing there.”
“Wizard’s sleeve. Didn’t touch the sides, eh?”
“There were sides?” Michael smiled in the dark. “Sophie’s the sort of woman who could lose an outside broadcast truck...”
“A half scale model of the Eiffel Tower, and the entire regiment of the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders...” interrupted Jack.
“Without breaking wind and sit down to dinner with a smile on her face…” said Michael, falling into the rhythm of the sort of old, pathetic and much loved litany with which some male relationships are cemented.
Jack drew in a breath and in a mock Scottish accent said, “And only the lonely skirl of the pipes could be heard, lamenting through the eternal darkness... ” They both laughed, a cosy familiarity.
Jack peered through the side window. “Not far to the motorway, should be in sunny Leicester within the hour. Home to ma wee bairns and ma ane hearth.” He glanced at Michael. “Celia still at it?” He knew the answer, but always felt obliged to ask.
Michael nodded.
“Pity,” said Jack, but didn’t care - he’d never liked Michael’s estranged wife.
There was a small silence, and then Michael said, “Where are you off to before we do the next feature?”
“Guatemala”, snorted Jack. ‘Six weeks in the soddin’ jungle with that shirt lifter whassisname... Stark, Melvin Stark, did Eco 2011 and all that crap… should be nice, time for the wooden underpants, shooting the Guatemalan Fartstrangler or some other flying turd machine, up to me neck in guano and undiscovered Mayan tribes trying to flog you an iPhone… still, Nobby’s along on sound… last time I was pissed with Nobby... ”
“I thought you’d given up docs’?” Michael said.
“Gotta sing, gotta dance, gotta eat… anyway the documentary format is a valid form of artistic expression in a sometimes Orwellian existence.” Jack poured a cup of coffee from a thermos flask. “Dear old Channel Four… where would I be without their artistic integrity, their artistic way of signing cheques.” He rubbed condensation from the side window. “A bleeding motorway sign…civilisation, Big Macs, pollution, no nasty green stuff, concentrated bastards,” he said with satisfaction, taking a sip of the lukewarm coffee. “More, more… put your foot down Herr Direktor, let’s see what this antique, eyetalian spaghetti can will do, or is it just a substitute for a donger?”
Michael notched the gearbox down into third and floored the accelerator of the Ferrari.
Jack cursed as the coffee in his plastic cup accelerated to one and a half gee marginally faster than his hand, depositing its contents in his lap.
With practised fluency Michael went through the gears, the released Flat-12 howling freedom through the redline on the tachometer, speedometer settling down to a steady one hundred and thirty miles per hour. He turned to Jack with an innocent smile. “Perhaps a bib might be useful next time?”
“I fail to see either significance or humour in such immature behaviour,” Jack said darkly, wiping coffee from his lap with a wedge of Kleenex. “And I would remind you of the words of our beloved Prime Minister… ” he farted squeakily, and moved his rear to disperse the heat, “Windy pops. So sorry. May I retrieve my testicles from your parcel shelf? Can I have my balls back, please?”
The Ferrari shot on into the night, a red rip in the clearing fog.
******
Kate lay on the bed and gazed at a crack in the ceiling.
The ‘Three Tuns’ was 17th century and had that taproom and polished wood smell only this side of lavatorial. The landlord was friendly, if a little coarse and the food, although overcooked, had a comfortable quality to it and a lack of pretension that disguised its inedibility until a later reckoning. Four brandies and a passable Beef Wellington had relaxed Kate into a state approaching catatonia.
The events of the afternoon, each detail remembered vividly, were subject to rationalisation. She was only a few days off a usually heavy period, had not eaten since the morning and felt that she was sickening for something. Imagination had done the rest. The memory of Sam - dead eighteen months - had contributed. Sexual frustration (huh, maybe) had formed a depression framework.
Mentally, she elbowed the self-pity. Soddit, they were only bones. Bones that she’d handled many times before for what they were: dead things, pieces of calcium, relics of innumerable lives which had as much significance as the soil in which they lay. They had lived, but did not live now. They were dead. Incapable of assuming a persona.
Even Sam’s bones.
She shivered, feeling again the coldness of that place, the way it... waited.
Taking her eyes from the contours of the crack she glanced at the leather bag containing the bones. The bag was caked with dried clay, one strap still undone, unusually for Kate, who was normally so painfully diligent, so organised. It was, perhaps the twentieth time she’d looked at the bag since bidding goodnight to an ebullient and mildly sloshed Doctor Weatherall, and it was the twentieth time that her convictions had wavered.
The bag contained the oddly heavy bones of a male, aged about thirty, taller than any known Viking male remains at six feet three approximately, in good physical condition and without signs of any injury or disease to account for his death. Yes, there was the skull of a baby, aged about one month, who had died by a violent blow, sacrificially, accidentally or as the result of war, and yes it was unusual to find the skull of a baby buried in a male Norse barrow - probably without precedent - but the bones were dead things. Neither death was her concern; they’d occurred a long time ago.
She smoothed down her dress, the one she always took on digs, the one to show everyone that she was not just a brain, that she was approachable as a woman. The talisman that had never worked. She stood, a little unsteadily, dragging her eyes away from the bag, clearing her mind of Northmen, dead babies, old bones.
Standing, it seemed as though her head cleared. The bag was just a bag, the bones it contained, nothing other than that. She smiled to herself, the tight, sub-zero, old friend of a smile that had rendered many a latent relationship stillborn, and for which she kept no apology.
Removing the dress and her underwear she looked at her body in the mirror of an elderly dressing table. Running her hands down her sides, feeling the softness of her skin, the contours of her hips, she lifted her long, dark hair, allowing it to slide down her body, over and between the mounds of her breasts and examined the effect in the mirror, meeting her own dark eyes as a stranger.
