Ghost Wall(8)

Though some of the bog bodies must have been someone’s first attempt. It would have been a skill to learn like any other, the art of taking someone into the flickering moment between life and death and holding them there, gone and yet speaking, moving still, for as long as you liked.



There were cold bannocks for the meal we called tea and the Prof called dinner, with greens Dad had found while we were weaving baskets and more of the fish, which were lasting well partly because they were so small and bony that only Dad had the patience for more than one. Half a bannock left lumpen on my plate, I watched him use his fingers to work flakes of pale flesh from skin and bone and then suck on the heads, shrunken eyes open to his tongue and teeth. What, he said, picking his teeth with a fingernail, summat bothering you, not enough refinement round here for you? No, I said, nothing. Good, he said, they wouldn’t have wasted food you know, wouldn’t have left what could be eaten. And nor will you, eat the bannock your mother made now. I saw him looking at Molly’s plate; she’d refused fish and only tasted the greens. You don’t go wasting what people have worked for, he said, but into the air between me and her. No Dad, I said, and afterwards, when the others went off up the hill to see the sunset, he made me stay and help Mum, wipe weird bowls and rough wooden spoons with bunches of reeds he’d told her to gather earlier, then rinse them in the stream. Bits of fish caught in the reeds. He wouldn’t have a dishwasher at home, said they wasted water and it was good for folk to clean up after themselves with their own two hands, but there was a washing-up ritual that he supervised for months before he trusted me alone: scrape into the compost bucket, hot water rinse, soap scrub, second rinse, dry with a fresh cloth, put away. Can’t abide to see dishes left all heaped, how can you clean the sink if it’s like that. Even when we went camping, we had tin plates and after I’d rinsed them in the stream they got a proper wash in water heated over a driftwood fire. Won’t we get sick, I said, why don’t we just eat off leaves and then throw them away? I suppose they didn’t get sick, Mum said, the whojamacallits. Ancient Britons. We’d have to wash the leaves first, anyroad, and I can’t think of big ones that aren’t poisonous. They might well have got food poisoning, I said, something was keeping life expectancy down, the Professor said in most cases they didn’t even live long enough to die of cancer. Oh well, she said. There was a new bruise on her arm. Here, she said, put these back in the hut and then maybe we can sit down a bit before bedtime. Mum often spoke of sitting down as a goal, a prize she might win by hard work, but so rarely achieved that the appeal remained unclear to me. She worked as a cashier for the local supermarket, a job mostly conducted from a seat but apparently not meeting whatever need was meant by ‘sitting down’. You go now, I said, you go sit down, I’ll sort these last bits. I carried the bowls and spoons down to the stream, plopped them into a pool where the water eddied smooth and deep and left them to rinse a bit. I meandered in the evening light, feeling heather and stones under my feet, breathing the smell of leaves and dew. I slapped at midges, picked a few clover leaves and watched them shimmy away on the stream into the dimming evening, dipped my fingers and admired the way the water distorted their lines. A few dark fish ghosted the pool. I saw a bog myrtle bush leaning over the water downstream, pewter leaved, and picked my way towards it, rubbed a leaf between my fingers and inhaled the scent of eucalyptus and sandalwood. I squatted for a little while on the bank and listened to the sounds of the night, no birds now but the stream hurrying over stones it had worn to roundness, small lives rustling somewhere within reach, a distant owl and a nearer response. I didn’t leave until it occurred to me that I was going to have trouble carrying everything back to the camp in the dark, although I found I could see well enough until I came within sight of the fire. Light blinds you; there’s a lot you miss by gathering at the fireside.

The students were still not back, although by any measure sunset was gone. Dad and the Prof were talking about fighting, the way men do when they’re really fighting about talking. It would just have been intertribal squabbles up here, the Prof was saying, until the Romans came, no training at all for taking on the imperial army, they’d never have seen the like. At least part of their defence was magic, did you know that? War trumpets, scary noises coming at you over the marsh. Aye, said Dad, maybe so, you’re thinking of the carnyxes, but they had their horses and swords as well, didn’t they, put up quite a fight and after all sent them packing in the end, there weren’t dark faces in these parts for nigh on two millennia after that, were there? Carnyces, said the Prof, in the plural, and hang on, we don’t—And anyway, I said, don’t the Americans use magic and scary noises to this day, don’t they paint pictures on their bombs and play heavy metal outside their enemies’ compounds? Dad looked at the Prof as if I were his second-in-command, as if I’d just backed him up as planned. Yes, said the Prof, they do, and you’re right, it’s probably very much the same thing; one of the things you learn in my line of work is that there’s no steady increase in rationalism over the centuries, it’s a mistake to think that they had primitive minds and we don’t. The Britons had enough training that the Romans had to build the Wall, Dad said, they wouldn’t have bothered with that, would they, if the British hadn’t put the wind up them. Well, said the Prof, they weren’t exactly British, as I said before, they wouldn’t have seen themselves that way, as far as we can tell their identities were tribal. Celts, we tend to call them these days though they wouldn’t have recognized the idea, they seem to have come from Brittany and Ireland, from the West. Dad didn’t like this line. Celts, I suppose, sounded Irish, and even though Jesus had only recently died at the time in question Dad didn’t like the Irish, tended to see Catholicism in much the same light as the earlier form of Roman imperialism. Foreigners coming over here, telling us what to think. He wanted his own ancestry, wanted a lineage, a claim on something. Not people from Ireland or Rome or Germania or Syria but some tribe sprung from English soil like mushrooms in the night. What about Boadicea, Dad said, she routed them an’ all, didn’t she. Boudicca, said the Prof, we call her Boudicca these days, it seems to be a more accurate rendition. For a while, yes, but she led the Iceni in the south, there’s not much evidence that the people round here caused the Romans any major alarm, the Wall was much more of a symbol than a military necessity.