Ghost Wall(7)

Aviate, navigate, communicate, Dad always said, and don’t expect that anyone will come and get you when it all goes wrong. I was pretty sure he’d never flown, nor even sat in a light aircraft; the aviation was metaphorical and what he meant by ‘communicate’ was ‘don’t ask for help’. I started to tuck the sticking-out ends into the weave of my basket. It was actually quite good, even and stable.

What about you, I said, you’re going to be an archaeologist? Molly’s plaits had come back to the front. There were green apples on them today. Maybe, she said, don’t think I want to spend my life digging though, I like walls and a roof and a bathroom. I might go into museums and galleries, maybe do teacher training first so I can work with kids and families, I’ve always loved museums.

Museums. My father regarded them as temples, the bone-houses of our ancestral past. There wasn’t much locally, just small-town collections going from the less exciting flint tools to patched hoop-skirts from someone’s granny’s attic, but my father was one of the few people who liked to go and look at them, and therefore to take me too. He had taken me once, years ago, to the Manchester Museum, told me I didn’t need to go to school that day, we had better things to do, he and I. He’d told Mum to put up sandwiches for us, sent me back upstairs to take off my uniform and put on ‘summat decent’, and then sent me back to change again when I, matching his one suit with the wide legs, came down in my party dress. Come on, he said, we don’t want to miss the train. I had never been on the train. We held hands and I trotted, as always, to keep up with him, past the butcher where the pork and lamb and beef in the window were divided from each other like the animals on the toy farm at school by plastic grass, past the Post Office where I went with Mum every Thursday straight after school to pick up the Child Benefit and we queued on the dusty lino floor around the metal barriers, because Thursday was also the day you collected your pension so there were old ladies with sweets in their handbags for little girls who knew how to be winsome, which I didn’t, mostly. Dad strode up the cobbled lane to the station, bought tickets, told me to stay behind the yellow line on the platform and not to act daft. It was only on the train that he started to explain where we were going, as I pressed my nose to the grimy window and took in the marine tartan of British Rail, poked my fingers into what turned out to be ash-trays in the arm of each seat. Stop that, he said, listen now. I knew about the peat bogs up on the moor, yes, the ones where the cotton flags grew, where we had to jump from tussock to tussock not to fall in the mire? Even then, when I must have slowed him down enough to be annoying, he took me walking up there every Sunday, whatever the weather; yes, I knew. Right, well those bogs have always been special places for folk round here, right back in ancient times, people saw the marshlights, probably, thought it was spirits or summat like, and probably they were frightened to fall in just like us because I knew, didn’t I, that the bog could hold you down and suck you in, he’d told me, hadn’t he, how hard it could be to get out. Aye, I said, yes. We were crossing the moor by then, the wires swooping along the tracks, and it was a clear enough grey day but I couldn’t see any bog, just heather and sheep and below us terraced houses like our own creeping up the hillside. Well, he said, folk used sometimes to give their precious things to the bog, like if you were to give it your Owl. In my mind I clasped Owl tightly, sent a thought to him left undefended in my bed, tried not to imagine his fur darkening as he sank, the bog swallowing his yellow felt feet. Or if you gave it your digging books, I said. There was a bookshelf for Dad’s digging books, by the gas fire in the front room. Mum couldn’t watch TV unless Dad was working a night shift because he liked to read them there in the evenings, in silence, and although I wasn’t allowed to touch them he’d sometimes show me the pictures when I came down to say goodnight. These are Bronze Age necklaces, Silvie, can you imagine how heavy to wear? That’s a sword, look at that inlay, think of the work in that. And on this rock, look, they carved a magic pattern, someone did that by hand three thousand years since. That’s where you come from, those folk, that’s how it used to be. I looked round and saw him tense at the thought of throwing his big shiny books in a bog. Ripped pages, spreading water. Aye, I suppose, he said, but you know you’re not to touch them mind. Anyroad, there’s been all sorts found in the bogs, the peat and the water preserve stuff that rots away everywhere else and of course there’s always been digging for peats so things get found. And Silvie, out Cheshire way they found a person, a man. From the really old days, the Iron Age. A man, I said, what, dead? Of course dead, you lummock, didn’t I just say Iron Age, when was the Iron Age? I knew that one. Two thousand years, I said, before the Romans came. Well, there you go then, he’s not going to be alive, is he. We were coming to the next station. The people who wanted to get off had to push the windows all the way down and lean out to use the handle on the outside of the door. Did he fall in then, I asked, get sucked down? Pushed in, more like, said Dad, and a rope round his neck and all. You’re going to see him, Silvie, today. They’ve got him all laid out in a case at the museum. A real man from the Iron Age, himself. But dead, I said again, unable to imagine it.

My dad likes museums, I said to Molly. He likes dead things. She pulled a strand out of her basket and started winding it around the spokes again. I’d like to make things be alive again, she said, like Louise does, let visitors see that people’s tools and jewellery and games are still here even when the people aren’t. And I wish I was better at this, I like the idea of making things the way people used to. Practice, I said, I bet the baskets in museums weren’t anyone’s first attempt.