Ghost Wall(19)

The men came back late and a little excited, het up. We heard their voices coming through the trees before we heard their feet; bloody hell, said Molly, do you think women have always been hearing the approach of men from two miles off, do you think it was like the football and they could tell from the calls in the woods if the woolly mammoths or the hunters had won? I didn’t like it when she talked like that, wanted to go on believing that men were also people, that there are not, in fact, two kinds of human. Women get excited too, I said, they get all shrill in groups, you can hear them laughing on trains sometimes. Mum, have they really been up there all day, without food? She’d been sitting with us under the trees, away from the heat of the dying fire, but now she got onto her hands and knees and pushed herself back to standing. Dad’s right, she really should do some exercise, I thought, go back to swimming or that keep fit class, though Dad hadn’t liked her doing either. Good thing we stewed them an’ all, said Mum, they’d be leather by now, else. She poked in the cauldron and a surprisingly appetizing smell drifted through the summer afternoon. Bring us the greens, Silvie, should be just done when the lads’ve had a wash and sat down.

It turned out that Pete had fallen, up on the moor. They’d been crossing one of the bogs that should be mostly dry at this time of year and he’d misjudged a tussock and gone headlong into the mire. It sounds funny, he said, still dusted with dry bog, but it wasn’t, it really does suck you in. Aye, said Dad, it does that, Silvie went in a few years back, didn’t you, and we got her out fine enough but the bog kept her boot, remember now? I did. A spring day, raw and damp, snow and ice newly thawed and even through the heather the ground dull under foot. We’d had to pick our way along the beginning of the track where the dog walkers go, and up on the tops grey sky lay heavy on land in winter’s dark colours. We weren’t hurrying exactly, but the afternoon was wearing on, the days still short, and the mud had made for slow going on the way out and would be no better going down. There’s a place up there, two ridges over from the hill fort, where the path goes straight across the marsh, which is fine in summer, treacherous in winter when only the spikes of dead reed sticking through the snow tell you where to put your feet, and mostly just a pain in the backside in between. You have to pick your way from tussock to tussock, checking for the footprints of earlier walkers and balancing on one leg to poke the ground with the other foot before you trust it. I had not been careful enough, had slipped, teetered, known one of those moments of inevitability, splashed. Cold water clutched me, earth pulled and sucked. It wasn’t quicksand, I wasn’t being pulled down, but I couldn’t get up either and the instinctive struggle made it worse. Don’t move now, girl, Dad had said, I’ll get you out, don’t fret, but don’t you go wriggling, you’re fine there, it’s just water, won’t go further nor skin, and he’d heaved a stone and a bleached white branch from some long-ago tree and balanced himself on them while he knelt in the mire and got his hands on my middle. I’d been sitting not waist-deep, but even so I couldn’t help myself and it took him a long time to work me free. It hurt. The bog seals around you, and it will of course go further than skin, or at least will fill the inner skins of every orifice, seeping and trickling through the curls of your ears, rising like a tide in your lungs, creeping cold into your vagina, it will embalm you from the inside out. The boot it took had been firmly laced over my ankle; I couldn’t have taken it off without undoing the laces but somehow the bog managed it in the struggle without me even noticing. Dad had held me when I stood again on the heather, looked away while I took off my jeans and put on the waterproof trousers he’d been carrying for me in his backpack, made me drink the last of the tea in the thermos flask. You’ll maybe be best without that other boot too, lass, hard when one foot doesn’t know what the other’s about and we’ll be heading right back, we’ll get you off the moor now. He took my hand, then, most of the way down, steered me around thorns and even cowpats.

Pete’s bog was smaller than the one I’d fallen in and, in August, as dry as it would ever be, but even so it had taken them a while to get him out and they’d made a mess of themselves. And we found summat, said Dad, thought for a minute we were onto – well, anyroad, it’s given us an idea, summat we can try. He and the Prof exchanged glances. Pete, if you give me that smock, Mum said, that tunic, whatever you want to call it, I’ll get it washed for you again. Can’t say it’ll be dry by morning, mind. Pete stood there. He was dry now, of course, but the rough cloth was swollen and stiff with fragments of ancient flora and water brown as bloodstains, and earth was thick under his fingernails. Defensive injuries, I thought. OK, he said, thanks Alison, if you’re sure you don’t mind. Pete, said Molly. What, he said. She should mind, Moll said, even if she doesn’t, you should, you don’t need some woman to wash your clothes for you, do it yourself. Oh, said Mum, I don’t mind, it’s no bother, not as if there’s ironing or any of that. Dan looked from Mum to Molly, as if following a ball. Please don’t do it, he’s perfectly capable, said Molly. Dad looked up. Wash the lad’s tunic, Alison, I’ve some kecks you can take while you’re about it. But give us dinner first, we’re all clemmed.

Mum started dishing up. Dining forks were introduced to these isles a mere five hundred years ago, give or take, but we’d convinced the Prof if not Dad that there wasn’t a good reason to be sure our imaginary Iron Age diners wouldn’t have used flat wooden spoons rather than fingers for stew. The Prof had agreed that we were too many to gather around the pot in the apparently authentic fashion and allowed individual bowls. Sit down, Silvie, said Dad, and I held his gaze while I took a deep breath and sat on my usual stone. It hurt. I saw his smile. Moll was watching us. So what was it you found, I said, the thing that might have been something? Oh, said the Prof, it’s not that interesting, Victorian at the oldest, but it might have given us an idea or two, wouldn’t you say, Bill? Aye, said Dad, happen it might. An old boot, said Dan, you’re clearly not the first, Silvie, to leave a shoe in a bog. A girl’s boot. How old, said Molly, can I see it? Nineteenth century, I’d say, said the Prof, and later, let me eat first, it was hungry work up there. That, I thought, was not work, that was play, that is what my dad is paying to do with all of his holiday entitlement this year. You’ll like it, Moll, the boot, said Pete, it’s got little buttons all the way up. Not to mention a heel, said Dad, right daft thing to wear on a moor an’ all, she got no less than she deserved, that one. That girl, I thought, that Victorian girl who owned a button-hook and a pair of pretty boots, where is she now, did she deserve only to lose her shoe or is she herself still there, her coiled hair reddening in the wet, her knitted shawl and lace-edged petticoat long since dissolved into the bog while the whorls on her fingers and the down on her legs toughen and outlast us all, is she curled up in the peat with the dark water in her lungs and earth stopping her mouth, hands flung out in the final struggle or folded in defeat?