Ghost Wall(2)

The bunks were exactly as uncomfortable as you’d expect. I had refused to sleep wearing the scratchy tunic that my father insisted in the absence of any evidence whatsoever to be the Ancient British nightdress as well as daywear, but even through brushed cotton pyjamas the straw-stuffed sack was prickly, smelt like a farmyard and rustled as if there were small mammals frisking in it every time I moved. The darkness in the hut was complete, disconcerting; I lay on my back moving my hands in front of my face and saw nothing at all. My father turned, sighed and began to snore, an irregular bovine noise that made the idea of sleep ridiculous. Mum, I whispered, Mum, you awake? Shh, she hissed back, go to sleep. I can’t, I said, he’s too loud, can’t you give him a shove. Shh, she said, go to sleep Silvie, close your eyes. I turned onto my side, facing the wall, and then back because it didn’t feel like a good idea to have my back to the darkness like that. What if there were insects in the straw, ticks or fleas, what if they got inside my pyjamas, what if there was one now, on my foot, maybe all the way up my leg, jumping and biting and jumping, and on my back, coming through the sack, several of them, on my shoulders and my neck – Silvie, hissed Mum, stop wriggling like that and go to sleep, you’re getting on my nerves summat proper. He’s getting on my nerves summat proper, I said, they can probably hear him in Morbury, I don’t know how you put up with it. There was a grunt, a shift. The snoring stopped and we both lay still, frozen. Pause. Maybe he’s not going to breathe again, I thought, maybe that’s it, the end, but then it started again, a serrated knife through cardboard.

When I woke up there was light seeping around the sheepskin hanging over the door. They probably didn’t actually have sheep, the Professor had said, but since we weren’t allowed to kill animals using Iron Age technologies we would have to take what we could get and sheepskins are a lot easier to pick up on the open market than deerskins. While I was glad we weren’t going to be hacking the guts out of deer in the woods with flint blades, I thought the Professor’s dodging of bloodshed pretty thoroughly messed up the idea that our experiences that summer were going to rediscover the lifeways of pre-modern hunter gatherers. The clue, I muttered, is in the name, you know, hunter gatherers? What was that, Silvie, said Dad, would you like to repeat what you just said to Professor Slade? Oh, please, call me Jim, said Professor Slade, and don’t worry, I have teenagers myself, I know what it’s like. Yeah, I’d thought, but your teenagers aren’t here, are they, gone off somewhere nice with their mum I don’t doubt, France or Italy probably. I turned onto my back, which was stiff, and bashed my elbow on the wooden ledge holding the straw sack. I wriggled cautiously over the splinters and stood barefoot on the bare earth, dry and dusty. There was barely enough light to see Mum’s and Dad’s bunks empty, the outline of the central pole disappearing into the darkness under the roof. Some of the Iron Age people kept their ancestors’ half-smoked corpses up in the rafters, bound in a squatting position, peering down empty-eyed. Some of the houses had bits of dead children buried under the doorway, for luck, or for protection from something worse.

Mum was crouching at the side of the fire, blowing on the embers, a pile of turfs at her side. So it does work, I said, how did you get the turfs off without burning yourself? She took another breath, leant forward and blew through pursed lips to the fire’s glowing base. The embers brightened in the sunlight. Leaf-shadows flickered. With great difficulty, she said, here, you try, it’s knackering my knees like nobody’s business. I went down onto my knees and elbows, hoped none of the students would come up and see my backside stuck up in the air, blew, and again. Watch your hair, said Mum. I took another breath, smelling earth and green wood. There, I said. Flames. What’s for breakfast? She shook her head. Porridge, she said, well I suppose you’d call it gruel, there’s no milk and it’s not oats, more like rye I think or let’s hope not barley else it’ll not be cooked this side of Christmas. Any honey, I asked; I would generally eat porridge only if it came with an equal volume of golden syrup, though Dad not so much liked it plain and heavily salted as believed in it the way other people believe in homeopathy or holy water. All this cancer, he said of Mum’s newly diagnosed friend, folk need roughage, weren’t never meant for all that processed muck, breakfast cereals and what have you, I’d as soon eat the box. Mum, what about dinner, I said, and tea? It’ll be whatever you gather this morning, she said, maybe fish, there must be berries, this time of year. You don’t, I thought, gather fish, there has to be murder done and you won’t be the one doing it, Mum, but instead of saying so I put a couple more kindling sticks on the fire and one of the nice dry logs the students had chopped as part of their archaeological experience.

Mum started pushing at the big stones at the edge of the fireplace and I went to help. They need to be in far enough to balance the pot, she said, he says we’ll be making a frame to hang it from later. Or a whatsit, a trivet. Out of what, I said, he’s never planning on blacksmithing, is he? Smithing was one of his fascinations. He remembered, he said, the last blacksmith in the village, who gave up a few years after the war, remembered being allowed to stand in the doorway watching the metal turn from solid to glowing liquid and back, the hiss and sudden billow of steam, the man’s scarred hands. It were sacred work, he said, in the old days, fire and liquid and tempered blades. Mum shrugged. He said to use stones for now. Bring us the pot, Silvie, it’s right by the door. The pot was iron, very heavy. I squatted, embraced it warmly, lifted with my knees but of course the thing was still ridiculous. Bloody hell, Mum, I said, how about a bit of toast instead, shove some sausages on sticks, but I could see from her face that I shouldn’t have opened my mouth. Dad was behind me. You know fine well they didn’t have toast, he said, and if I catch you sneaking off to eat rubbish there’ll be trouble, is that clear? Yes Dad, I said, sorry, only joking. Well don’t, he said, it’s not funny. And go dress yourself, put your tunic on, I don’t want to see those pyjamas and I certainly don’t want the Professor seeing them. The Professor, I could have pointed out, was the one wearing tennis socks because he thought the moccasins might give him blisters if he didn’t, but I went into the hut, rummaged in the suitcase Gran had passed on to Mum and put on knickers and a bra before the scratchy tunic. There’d been a discussion about that in the kitchen at home, weeks back. But you’ll be wanting us in our own undies, Mum had said to Dad, anyone might see anything else, those lads and our Silvie. She’d won a concession for toothbrushes too: stands to reason they didn’t worry themselves with that, weren’t going to live long enough to lose their teeth anyroad. And also, eventually, tampons, once Dad had pointed out once again that in the old days women weren’t going round forever bleeding all over the place anyway, all those doings starting later when there was less to eat and everyone better for it, and then women in the family way and feeding babies the way nature intended as long as they could, which was also what he said whenever he caught me or mum buying sanitary protection. Women managed well enough, he said, back in the day, without spending money on all that, ends up on the beaches in the end, right mucky. Or they died, I said, in childbirth, what with the rickets and no caesarians, but you won’t be wanting me pregnant, Dad, for authenticity’s sake? He’d put down the list he was writing, set the pen parallel to it on the counter and stood up, formal. Hush, said Mum, cheek, but she was too late, the slap already airborne. You court it, she’d say, you go just one step too far, what do you expect?