Cold Earth, page 11
‘I heard the guy line.’ Catriona stirred the greenish water in her dish, witch-like in the dark. ‘I suppose it could have been a sheep. I just can’t think where she’d be. It’s not as if she’s gone to the library or decided that a swim would help her relax. I’ve looked right along the shore.’
‘Let’s hope she hasn’t gone swimming, anyway,’ said Jim. ‘That’s the thing, though. If we can’t see her she must have gone somewhere on purpose. There are places to hide but I can’t see how she’d get lost.’
Ben gasped. ‘What the hell is that?’
‘What?’ Catriona froze. ‘Where?’
He stood up and pointed. Not, then, something in his soup. There was a yellow light down by the river, and as we watched it circled and began to sway up the slope towards us, raking the gleaming wet turf.
‘Lord have mercy,’ muttered Jim.
They all watched. I drank the last spoonful of MSG soup before it was cold as well as green and salty. The spectral presence, it was obvious to me, was in possession of a torch and was wearing pants which were not a medieval fashion.
‘Nina,’ said Catriona. ‘Her hair’s wet.’
Her hair was dripping, but she was wearing her waterproof coat and her clothes were dry. She was looking down and her face was hidden by her hair. Bare feet poked from under her flapping jeans.
‘Where have you been?’ asked Yianni. ‘We looked for you.’
She didn’t look up. ‘Please can I have some hot water? I need to wash.’
‘Why? What have you been doing?’
‘Please, Yianni. There are dead things on my skin. I need to wash them off.’
She rubbed her gloved hands. Drops of water fell from her hair onto her toes.
‘Where’ve you been all afternoon?’ He stood up and put his hand on her arm. She pulled it away and stood hugging herself. Did Lady Macbeth have OCD? Discuss.
‘Nina, did you go in the river?’ asked Catriona. ‘You look cold.’
She raised her head for the first time, her skin yellow and eyes huge in the lantern light.
‘I’m cold as ice,’ she said. ‘Please could I have a bath?’
Catriona and Yianni looked at each other. Yianni shrugged.
‘There isn’t a bath, Nina,’ said Catriona. ‘Do you remember? We’re in Greenland. No plumbing.’
‘But I’m so cold.’ Her shoulders shook and she started to cry.
‘Yianni,’ Catriona put her arm round Nina, and was not pushed away. ‘Heat some water. Come on, Nina, let’s get you to bed. Yianni will bring us some water in a minute.’
Catriona led her away. Yianni went over to the stores tent and poured a few pints of our drinking water into the biggest pan. Lifting from the knees, he carried it back, re-lit the stove and balanced the pan. We watched until steam began to rise.
‘She’s not right,’ said Ben. ‘Now what do we do?’
Yianni ran his finger around the edge of the pan. ‘Don’t say that. Maybe she’ll be better in the morning. She hasn’t been sleeping.’
‘And you think she’ll sleep tonight? Seriously, Yianni, are there any sedatives in the first aid kit?’
‘No,’ said Yianni. ‘And we’re not going to try to drug anyone. If she’s having serious problems we’ll call the coastguard and get her helicoptered out.’ He dipped his finger in the water. ‘I’ll take this over.’
Ben and Jim and I looked at each other.
‘Looks like serious problems to me,’ said Ben.
‘Not great.’ Jim picked up the plates, where cold noodles lay like drowned worms after rain.
‘Chocolate pudding?’ I asked.
I dreamt one of the ‘trauma dreams’ that night, the one where I run up flight after flight of stairs because at the top James is trapped by flames. The stairs are slippery and I keep passing the bodies of fallen children, crumpled and bleeding on the landings. Sometimes I am carrying a baby, its warm head rolling heavily on my shoulder, and I bend to smell its vanilla hair and it falls, a single thud on the concrete, and is still, and James burns. I wake up, and I’m right. James burns. James burns, as if I’m keeping him in hell.
So I was already awake when the zipper on a tent ripped up and feet stumbled over the tent pegs. I lay there, wanting our own bed to cry in and thinking that returning to Plum Street could well be worse than it was getting into the cab and leaving his clothes and wine glasses to wait alone. There was rustling from one of the tents, and another zipper.
‘Nina?’ Jim calling. ‘Nina?’
More footsteps, steady and fast. I sat up. A torch shone out.
‘Jim. I heard something. Is she gone?’
‘Her tent’s open. Nina?’
‘I’m here. Did you hear him?’
‘No,’ said Jim. ‘I heard you. You OK?’
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘But I don’t like it when they come in the night. The dead ones. He opened my tent and looked in. Blood on his face.’
‘Nina. Come on. Don’t talk like that.’
‘Did you hear him?’
‘No,’ said Jim.
‘Ruth,’ said Nina. ‘You’re awake. You heard. You were awake before he came. I heard you moving.’
‘I wasn’t.’ I lay down again. ‘I woke when you opened your tent and started stumbling about.’
‘I haven’t left my tent. It wasn’t me. You heard him. The one they can’t find.’
‘Who can’t find?’ asked Jim.
I pulled my lavender pillow into the hood of my sleeping bag and pushed my hair back so it wouldn’t tangle while I slept.
‘I wouldn’t fuel the delusion, Jim. If you take it seriously you reinforce it. Good night.’
‘Nina? You going to be OK for the rest of the night?’
‘It depends,’ she said, ‘which of them is about.’
‘Good night, Nina.’ I heard Jim zip his tent again. ‘Sleep well. Don’t get cold.’
‘Nina?’ said Yianni. ‘Look, if it’s bad, call me, OK? Don’t just lie there feeling scared. I’m right here.’
I got up at first light. Yianni was up, smelling like old fish in the pants and sweater he’s worn for days and hunched at the laptop again.
‘You want breakfast?’ he asked.
‘Later. I want to get started.’ The sky was white not grey. ‘If the weather’s OK I should get the first one out by nightfall. Save putting the canopies up.’
‘Sure,’ he said. ‘Go for it. I’ll come up in a bit. See how you’re doing.’
‘You can’t have much power left there.’
The computer was cradled in his lap.
‘Half an hour. I can get these notes done. The sun’s nearly up.’
‘I hope you’re backing up.’
The turf was slippery with dew, and I transferred my tools to one hand to use the other for balance. At the edge of the pit I paused. The tarps were down, but not, I was sure, quite as I had left them. I’d used a lot of stones, edging in lines, paying unnecessary attention to the arrangement. Whoever had been there in the night had done a much more basic job. Some of the spare stones were arranged in a little cairn above the corner where I’d uncovered the long bone.
I left the tools there and went carefully back down the slope. Yianni looked up. ‘Found something already?’
‘Nina’s been up there,’ I said.
‘Nina? In the burial? It’s the last place she’d go.’
‘I bet that’s where she was. When we couldn’t find her. Someone’s been playing with the tarpaulin.’
He put the laptop on the groundsheet. ‘You’re sure?’
‘Yeah. I used lots of stones as weights. Someone’s built a cairn with them.’
‘The burial’s still protected?’
‘It is now. I don’t know what’s been exposed. Yianni, if she’s going to mess with the site we really do need to send her home. She could cause real damage here.’
‘You don’t know it was her.’ He shut the computer down.
‘Come on,’ I said. ‘Who else? We can’t have her sabotaging the dig, Yianni. Think what the research council would say.’
‘Let’s have a look.’
We climbed back up. The sun came over the mountains and faint shadows appeared.
‘Look,’ I said. ‘I certainly didn’t build that. It’s just where I want to start work.’
Yianni squatted down at the edge.
‘Have they all been moved?’
‘Don’t know. I left a lot more than are here now.’
‘Hm.’ He looked up at the mountain. ‘Nina does build cairns. I’ve seen her do it on beaches.’
‘She’s made some on the shore here,’ I said. ‘Bigger than this. I just hope she hasn’t messed with anything else.’
‘Let’s get those tarps up and see.’
I jumped down and took the cairn apart while Yianni piled the other stones on the grass, and then we lifted and folded the blue plastic.
‘Looks OK to me,’ said Yianni. ‘Anything look different?’
I shook my head, and went over to the corner. The soil was patted down as I’d left it.
‘No. I don’t think she’s tampered with anything under the tarps. But Yianni, that’s not to say she won’t.’
‘Leave it with me.’ He stood up and looked down the hill. ‘Jim’s up. And Catriona. Breakfast in fifteen minutes?’
I promised Mom I’d stop skipping meals and mostly I have, but once I’d teased the soil out of the skeleton’s elbow I wanted to go on, to see the shoulder and the wrist and how they’d left his hands. I have learnt – it’s one of the few things I’ve learnt – that once you’ve accepted that you’re going to go on living it is necessary to eat at stated intervals. But I wanted to see his hands.
James’s hands were perfect. I used to watch them when he was cooking or fiddling with something the way he did. If you look, most people’s fingers are a little warped, bent or scarred by whatever they do. My right index finger curves in, I guess from years of writing with a heavy fountain pen the way French schools like you to do. My thumb is scarred from the first and last time Papa let me open my own oyster, and recently my nails have ridged, presumably from some deficiency resulting from grief or Greenland. I’m keeping them polished but it still shows. You have that white line across your middle and forefingers, I guess from a cooking or carpentry accident? James’s hands looked as if they’d done nothing but grow in the sun, as if he’d never tried basketball or barbecuing or mending a bicycle. His fingers were straight, not knobbly at the joints, and on the backs of his hands fine blond hair shone in the sun. He used to stroke my face with his cool fingertips, brushing over my eyes closed in readiness. They would have been crushed, those hands, between the crumpling dashboard and the steering wheel. My guess is his hands never even made it out of the wreck. And maybe he was still there, still alive.
I took a brush and began to smooth the black loam, the particle ghosts of muscle and blood, away from the wrist bones. The arm lay across the body and the rib cage began to emerge between the fingers. When I first met James you could see his ribs, even through those close-fitting T-shirts he wore. I liked his thinness, his quickness, as if there were nothing hidden, but I also liked it when he started working out and muscles rose across his torso. No one really needs a six-pack, but it was probably my favourite of the unnecessary things he acquired at Chase Garmon. I gave the bikes to his brother. The juicer and the bread-maker and the pasta machine are still there. I can neither use them nor give them away so they sit there as if they don’t know he’s gone.
The tips of the fingers were folded over the other hand. I knew that I’d have to lift both hands, and that the joints might come apart and lie like marbles in a box, but I left them shapely while I exposed the other arm. The bones were pale brown, the colour of the lattes I used to sip in Barnes and Noble.
‘Ruth? I brought you some breakfast.’
Yianni stood at the grave-side, on my horizon.
‘Thanks. I thought I’d skip it for now.’
‘You’re not ill? You need to eat.’
‘No.’ I knelt up on the soil. ‘Just keen to keep going. Now I’ve started. You know what it’s like.’
‘Better to eat. You’ll be digging all day. Look, it’s not dried fruit. I’ll leave it here. You’ve got wipes for your hands?’
He stooped and then squatted down and peered in. ‘It’s in good condition?’
‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘As you’d expect.’
‘Good.’ He stood up again. ‘I’ve got a couple of things to do – I want to chat to Nina, but I’ll send Ben up when he’s eaten and I’ll be up later. Looks as if there’s plenty to do here, huh?’
I looked at my skeleton, nestled in the corner, and the size of the pit. There was room for at least another four or five bodies.
‘I’d guess so.’
‘Remember to eat.’
He was silhouetted against the sky for a moment and vanished.
I turned back and began to free the collar bone. James had a hollow there that I used to kiss. His neck smelt of him, no sweat, none of the garlic and chilli that often clung to his fingers, nor the staleness of feet nor the sea smells below the belly. I used to bite his shoulders, sometimes, lying on his chest, and – sorry. Well, I suppose I already know I’m not going to send this to you. Though since we have to take all our trash back with us I can’t discard it either.
I left the head for last, I don’t know why. As if it were a gingerbread man or a jelly baby. As I’d expected, the pelvis was that of a man and he was tall, taller than James. I knelt in the mud and began to work on the feet. Feet are complicated, which makes sense when you think of something six feet tall and weighing one hundred and seventy pounds running and balancing on such little pads of flesh. I never liked James’s feet. They always smelt and they were always cold, and he used to sit in front of the TV ferreting around in his socks and picking bits off his toenails until I wanted to take his shiny new cleaver to them. I always liked the idea of curling up together to watch a movie but in practice, on the rare occasions when we found something we could both tolerate, I had to sit where his feet weren’t in my line of sight and keep knitting. I took a smaller brush to coax out the little bones in the toes.
‘Hi there. You’ve done a lot.’
Ben loomed above me.
‘I got up early.’
‘And you were awake in the night.’
‘Yeah.’ I straightened my back. ‘How’s Nina now?’
‘Asleep, apparently. Yianni’s leaving her to it.’
‘I don’t see how we can have her digging. Did he tell you she’s been messing around up here?’
‘He said the stones weighting the tarps were disturbed.’ Ben walked around the edge, deciding where to start.
‘And built into a cairn. Like the ones she’s built on the shore.’
‘Didn’t they use to use cairns as grave markers?’ he asked.
‘Who’s “they”? Some prehistoric British cultures had funerary cairns with burials inside.’
‘But the Norse ones were mostly memorial, right?’ He climbed down and began to scoop out the opposite corner.
‘Some of them. Some are just way-markers. Don’t tell me you believe there’s a Norse revenant erecting memorial cairns in the night?’
‘No. Obviously not. I was just wondering. I mean, some of what Nina says – well, never mind. OK if I start here? Yianni said choose a corner and work out.’
‘Be my guest.’
He climbed down and took up his trowel. He was wearing exactly the same clothes he’d had on for days, a pair of generic jeans and a dull red sweater under his waterproof parka. He looked up. ‘Can I ask you something?’
I shrugged, thinking, no.
‘Is there a reason you’ve done it like that?’
‘Like what?’
‘Leaving the head. It’s like you’re keeping the face covered.’
‘Maybe I am.’
I came, at last, to the head. His hair burnt, all of it. I know because when I asked them for a lock of it, when they said I couldn’t see the body, they said no. It’s not so much the hair I mind; he himself cut his hair, hair doesn’t carry pain. But his face. Think about it. Or don’t, if you can refrain. Skin melts. And eyes – blue eyes that used to look at me as if I was some beautiful statue he’d just seen for the first time. He must have gone by then, surely. If I knew he was already gone I could stop forcing myself through those final minutes.
I worked around the skull with my fingers and a brush. It was dull and dry like wood left out in the rain. The teeth grinned at me through the soil before I cleared the eye-sockets, young strong teeth with plenty of eating and talking left in them. I was slightly daunted by James’s teeth, and more so when I learned that he cared for them as if they were the family pet. No candy, even when I brought nougat from the Christmas market in Dijon. An arsenal of toothbrushes, several of which buzzed and jiggled. Three different kinds of floss which I borrowed indiscriminately when I remembered, and dental appointments with a frequency that made the hypochondriac French look British. (It’s true about the Brits and teeth, you know. Nina should have had braces twenty years ago and if I had Catriona’s teeth I’d get them capped.) They rewarded him by being white and straight as a picket fence, straighter and whiter than yours, Adam Blumfeld, until Earl Upton forgot that he was driving his truck as well as listening to the news.
I worked along the cheekbones. James was beginning to get tiny wrinkles below his eyes which sent him to the beauty counters for the first time in his life. He didn’t believe me, but I meant it when I said I liked them. Maybe it’s just growing up in France, but I admire the crinkles at men’s eyes. There’s something sexy about an experienced smile. I brushed the soil of the dead man’s skin from his bones and wondered pointlessly what smile these grains of earth had been. You told me the dead live on as long as people remember them, that love keeps the dead alive, but that’s not true. Love plus death equals nothing at all. Death kills, you know, that’s the truth that puts you out of a job. There’s no virtual James in my head. What lives on is my memory, which is part of me and not him. My memory cannot surprise me, call me in the middle of the afternoon with a explicit request for the evening, smile when I wake him with croissants on Sunday mornings. He is ash and bone, James. Gone.
