Ghost Wall(18)

I carried the burdocks down to the stream, the handle of the basket I’d woven cutting into my hands and the weight pulling on my shoulders. I bet they’d had some kind of backpack arrangement in the Iron Age, no-one would have wanted to lug stuff around in one hand. But Dad should be pleased, it was a good haul of food.

The stream was shallower and slower than it had been a few days earlier, but still the colour of whisky in a bottle, murmuring over the stones. I chanced it, didn’t take my tunic off but rolled it up and perched gingerly on a smooth rock in the stream while I rubbed soil off the burdock roots with my hands. Cold water wavered over my legs, stroked some of the soreness from my skin. I imagined the shame carried away like blood in the water, visible first in weedy streams, curling and flickering like smoke and then dissolving, fading, until although you knew it would always be there you couldn’t see it any more.

I wondered what they were doing on the moor, the men, what they’d found that was keeping them baking under the sun with the heather and the insects. There was a rounded hummock up there on a rise not far above the trees, east of the track at a point where it was and would always have been visible on a clear day for miles on the rolling tops. The map marked it ‘prehistoric monument’ in the Gothic font that the Ordnance Survey uses to show respect for the traces of those whose maps did not survive, and according to the Prof there was a cup and ring mark that none of the rest of us could see incised on one of the big stones. Dad would be fascinated by it as he was by the standing stones and the outlines of the hill fort above the town at home, but the Prof wasn’t, so far as I could gather, that kind of archaeologist and he’d already explained to Dad that he wasn’t funded or equipped to dig this summer. That’s not what we’re here for, he’d said, I hope that was clear when we arranged for you to join us, I might get a paper out of this but it’s teaching, mostly, little more than a game. Aye, said Dad, I knew that, right enough, course I did.

The burdocks were clarted with clayey soil and even once I’d got the lumps off I had to rub every root with my fingertips. I flexed my feet, stroked the green waterweed growing over a stone with my toes. Slimy and soft. Dad would like to find a body up there, I thought, most of all he would like to be the one out gathering peat to see us through the winter, the one who, aching after hours of honest labour, leans on the spade once again, levers the clod that’s lain for centuries over the compacted prehistoric trees of the peat bog and sees among the roots and frantic worms a human face, a face last seen two thousand years ago by the neighbours who led their friend naked across the moor, who bound him hand and foot.

I piled pale clean roots on my lap, felt the wet tunic sag between my thighs, leant down to rub my fingers in the water and watch grains of soil loosen and flow over the whorls of my skin. Dad had told me on one of our winter walks that if they gagged and blindfolded the bog people, it wasn’t so’s the victims couldn’t see what was coming, they knew fine well what was coming and it didn’t matter what kind of noise they made. No, the blindfolding and gagging were to protect the people whose job was the killing from the last looks and the curses. Makes a kind of sense, doesn’t it, he’d said, if folk believe in any of that stuff, ill-wishing and cursing and what have you. You wouldn’t want to hear owt they might say at the end, wouldn’t want it in your ears, so to speak. But didn’t the victims agree, I said, to be killed, I thought that was the idea, they ate the last meal and maybe had a few months of luxury and they suffered for it. He shrugged. We’d gone up onto the tops after Sunday lunch as usual and we were coming down the track back into town, just crossing the snow-line; behind us the sky fell darker than the gleaming moor. Happen no-one really knows, he said, some says one and some another. They don’t often find defensive wounds, but then with the drugs they’d had and the way they were tied up you wouldn’t necessarily expect it, happen they couldn’t have put up much fight anyroad. Did something new come out, I’d asked him, did one of your professor friends send you something? Over the years, Dad had established some kind of trade in knowledge with a couple of archaeologists, men, he said, who’d passed the eleven-plus and made summat of themselves, had begun to exchange his self-taught expertise in outdoor survival, foraging and mountaincraft for their answers to his questions and offprints of their research. We’d learnt to lie low, Mum and I, when these fat letters with university stamps on them crackled through the letter box. Mostly it meant a buoyant evening, silent but for the purr of the gas fire in the sitting room and the rustle of pages as Dad read and re-read his new treasure, told us new facts about British prehistory, but sometimes something upset him, maybe the thought of those other men who were paid to walk the places Dad loved and write the ideas he could have had. Then tea was late or over-salted or Mum should have remembered he couldn’t abide something he’d eaten happily enough the previous week or the least he’d hope given how little she had to do was that she’d keep a clean house. I was giving him cheek or suggesting that he and Mum weren’t good enough for me or wasting something he paid for, food or water or electricity. Then things got bad. He can’t help it, she’d say later, he always had a temper on him and of course he gets het up, stuck behind the wheel all day, a man like that, wanting to be outdoors, he weren’t meant for it and it’s a crying shame.

There were footsteps over the twigs in the wood and I scrambled off my rock, tugged at my tunic, slipped on weed, splashed, fell and dropped the clean burdocks back in the stream. My knees hurt. I stood up slowly, the tunic wet from the waist down, and there was indeed a little blood running down my leg. I wanted to cry at the shock, the indignity. I started to pick up the burdocks. Hey, said Molly, we were wondering if you’d fallen in, your mum says if we don’t get t’burdocks int’ pan soon they’ll be hard as little green apples happen lads come home. Don’t, I said, don’t laugh at her like that, that’s just how we speak. She sat down on the bank beside me, slipped off her shoes and put her feet in the water. I looked away. No, she said, I’m sorry, I wasn’t laughing, I just love it, the phrases, I’ve never really heard it before, only on TV. Yeah well, I said, we’re not stupid, just ’cos we don’t sound like you. I know, she said, sorry, Silvie, I shouldn’t have imitated her, I just really like the way it sounds. Well it’s not the way you sound, I said, so don’t. She touched my shoulder and I flinched. Sorry, she said again. Really Silvie, don’t be cross. It’s OK, I said, just don’t laugh at people’s accents, you do know yours sounds weird to me, posh. I just really like the way it sounds, I parroted, squeaky and clipped. It’s not a different country, the north of England, it’s not that far from you, we’re a tiny country to start off with, have you ever actually been past Birmingham before? Nope, she said, not even as far as Birmingham, actually, but I’m here now, aren’t I, and I do like it, the moors and the beach, I want to get my mum up here, she’d love it. Yeah, I said, well, tell her the natives can be unpredictable and don’t take kindly to mockery. I had never been as far south as Birmingham myself but I saw no particular reason to share that fact. It’s just traffic and throngs of people, Dad said, down south, everything built over, no sense in going there. So do you forgive me, she said, and I, having never, so far as I knew, been asked that question by anyone before, looked at her all rosy and fair, smelling somehow of nice soap, said yeah, sure, course I do, it’s fine.