Cold Earth, page 12
My eyes filled as I began to dig deeper around the buried skull, curved like an eggshell. Ben in the corner was working intently with a brush and I knew he’d found another skeleton. I shifted around to hide my face and kept going, stroking the bone as if it were sore skin. His face emerged from the ground, and then at the back of the dome, just about where James’s parting ended, the eggshell was broken, pushed in as if by a tentative cook. The edges hung together, polished where bone had been forced into brain. I cleared more soil and kept going, pausing to sketch the skull in situ before I turned it slightly and found a stone axe-blade cradled in the round head like an apple in a bowl, nestled in what had once been a brain, a brain that made ideas and words and, no doubt, surprise presents and dirty suggestions. A brain that was now black soil.
‘Ruth? What’s up?’
Ben squatted beside me, his hand on my shoulder. I looked up. Tears dripped onto my jacket. I had meant not to tell. I hid my face in my hands.
‘Hey. What is it?’
I bit my lips together. ‘I lost someone. I mean, he died. And I’ve been thinking about him.’
The bones lay inert, mocking.
‘Someone close?’
‘James,’ I said. ‘I’ve lost James.’ When can I stop telling people?
The earth was soft between my fingers and my face.
‘Ruth?’
‘He was my boyfriend.’
‘Oh Ruth.’
He reached out to pat my back. Ashes to ashes. I wanted to bury myself. His fingers moved over my back but I sat still, knowing I’d have to look up and let him see tears and earth on my face. I know you think I should have done more of this, wailing and rending, but the problem is that after a while you have to stop and nothing has changed. Histrionics only pass the time and then there is the awful moment when you have to stop and sit up and wash your face. I could tear my clothes and shave my head and he still wouldn’t come back.
‘This is recent?’
I still feel like a fraud, telling people the date. As if births and deaths should stop for more glamorous disasters. I pushed the tears off my face and sat straight, looking into the side of the pit, away from Ben.
‘Last Fall. November twenty-first, actually.’
‘Ruth, I’m so sorry.’
You’re right, on this, I know. There’s no hierarchy of loss with terrorism higher up than road traffic accidents. Comes he slow or comes he fast, death is the same for everyone. But it still feels stupid.
‘Yeah. Well. He wasn’t in the subway. He was driving. Not even going home for Thanksgiving. Just a meeting, an out of town client. And the guy coming the other way was listening to the radio and not looking where he was going. A big truck. Head on. He was dead on arrival. James. The truck driver is fine.’
‘Listening to the news?’
‘Yeah.’
There were roots of turf and grass sticking out of the side of the grave, and above us the clouds moved fast. I waited for Ben to say that it was an ironic way to die, and I felt my face smiling as if it knew a secret joke. There is, I know there is, something ridiculous. Collateral damage. Death by rolling news.
‘Do you think he knew about the bombs? James?’
I tried to stop smiling and pushed my finger down the side of my boot, which was fastened too tightly and hurt.
‘I often wonder. He usually had a CD on, in the car. Nick Cave or PJ Harvey. I like the idea that he died without knowing, except that it makes him feel even more gone. Part of a different city.’
I reached out to touch the skull, and years of training stopped me. Don’t touch the finds unnecessarily.
‘Ruth?’
‘Yes.’
‘What are you doing here?’
I pushed my hair back and soil fell in my eyes. ‘Making a fool of myself. Sorry. I wasn’t going to tell anyone. It’s meant to be good to have new experiences. When you’re ready.’
‘I won’t tell anyone else if you don’t want me to. Though it’s nothing to be ashamed of. Doesn’t Yianni know?’
‘I didn’t tell him. My supervisor might have done. I didn’t ask. Look, shall we get on with the digging? Yianni’ll be up here any minute.’
I turned away from him and crawled back to the skeleton, now lying exposed to the grey light and fast wind. Bones are not meant for wind and sun and they crumble surprisingly fast without the layers of muscle, blood, fat and skin that make up people. I could have told Nina; bones are no good on their own.
‘OK. If you want. If you’re sure you’re OK.’
‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘I’m OK.’ I began to lay out the rulers before taking more photos, knowing that the next stage might separate legs from hips and neck from skull as surely as an execution. You can get bones out intact but there’s not much holding them together. ‘And whether I’m OK or not, we need to get these guys out before nightfall.’
I looked at the skull. I needed to remove and sieve the soil from inside, and when I did I would be able to see the stone axe, the murder weapon, through the eyes.
‘Had you been together long?’
Ben was at work again, tunnelling down somebody’s rib cage.
‘Two years. But it was the beginning.’
Tears prickled again. Two years can be a long time. Compared to his mother’s loss, mine is easy. (I know. ‘Ruth, you have the right to grieve. Only you know what you lost.’) But she has lost her past and I have lost what was my future. Most of my future. Thank God for the doctoral thesis.
‘Was he a grad student too? James?’
Yeah, I thought, a graduate student with clients and out of town meetings. I knew I shouldn’t have told anyone about him, shouldn’t let people who never knew him invent their own versions. I had decided not to. Stupid, stupid Ruth, to go weeping over the finds as if displays of hysteria make any difference. I can be so dumb. (‘Ruth, you can’t suppress these things entirely. You need to find ways of working through it.’ Oh piss off.)
‘Please, Ben, can we stop talking about this? This is a chance for me not to be the tragically bereaved one for a few weeks, OK? People at home have either lost patience and gone away or they’re still bringing me soup and telling me how bad I feel and I just want not to be that person for a little while.’
Mark Twain says something about the person asking another to keep a secret expecting of his interlocutor a discretion of which he himself is incapable. I’d put myself in the hands of a small sweaty guy from a place they could probably bomb to bits without anyone on the international stage caring much at all, and I’d have to wait and see if he could keep it to himself.
‘Of course. I see that. Only, Ruth, couldn’t you be both people? Is it a choice between tragically bereaved and functional?’
‘Yes.’
‘OK. You know what you’re doing. But I’m here, if you want to talk.’
You are, regrettably, there whether or not I wish to talk, I thought, you with your fat frog hands. The way people go on, you’d think the need to talk was equivalent to the need to breathe or eat. Talking makes no difference except to let people get off on vicarious bereavement. Or make a living out of it. I found last Fall that even taxi drivers like slowing down for a close-up of technicolor grief.
‘So,’ he said. ‘How do you think these guys ended up here, then?’
It was already clear that his burial had not been as carefully interred as mine. The body lay on its side, arms out and legs curled as if asleep, and it was tall. Assuming that Ben had another young man, also with deliberate injuries, it was obvious how they got there, and until we knew whether that assumption had any basis there was no point in speculating.
‘We’ll have to wait and see, won’t we? Depends what happened to your guy.’
I picked up the pad and sketched in the detail of the bones, still nestled where they had been left seven or eight centuries earlier.
‘I hope Nina’s OK,’ he said. He was still looking at me, not working. I still, of course, had soil on my face.
‘Yeah. Just let me concentrate on this a minute.’
‘Of course. Yianni’s a long time.’ He brushed the ribs. ‘Do you think she’s still sleeping?’
I took a breath. ‘How would I know? I’ve been up here since dawn.’
He looked up at me, and then went back to the ribcage. I took the photographs, and after a few minutes he picked up his trowel again.
I was still finicking around, postponing the moment when the bones might come apart, when Yianni reappeared. His hair, which he hadn’t, unlike the other guys, cut short before leaving home, stood on end and his face behind the scrubby beard was paler than usual.
‘He’s out!’ He peered at the shape laid below his feet.
‘Yup. You have another boy. I’ve made drawings.’
‘Great. And I guess we know the cause of death.’
‘I’d say so.’
‘That’s a stone axe?’
‘It is. I’ll tell you something, though, it’s not a stone from round here.’
He climbed down and squatted at the skull, like someone paying a hospital visit. ‘No. Well, the Norse had iron axes, didn’t they?’
‘Mostly,’ I said. ‘We’ll see, won’t we?’
Yianni raised his eyebrows. ‘Of course. Er, Ruth, you seem to have earth on your face.’
‘Yeah. I rubbed my eyes.’
He looked at me for a moment. ‘You be careful. I agree it looks like death from trauma but no risks, OK?’
Pathogens in the soil. It’s not a good idea to rub decayed organic matter into your eyes.
‘I know. I just forgot.’
Ben had stopped working again and was watching us. I looked back at him. Yianni waited, puzzled. The wind sang through the grass above our heads.
Ben looked away. ‘How’s Nina?’
‘Better than yesterday. Not so distressed.’
‘So is she making sense now?’
Yianni shifted, looking at my skeleton again. ‘Sort of. She’s reading Middlemarch.’
‘Still talking about taking a bath?’
‘Not this morning.’
I handed Yianni the camera. ‘Hold this while I climb up. I want some pictures from above. You know she’s going to have to go home, don’t you? She’s not safe around the finds.’
He fiddled with the string. ‘Let’s give it a few days. It’s not an emergency.’
‘Yianni, she’s out of her mind. She needs to go home.’
‘We’ll see.’
I looked down at them, two living men and two dead. I glanced behind me but there was no one there.
‘We can’t look after her here. And she’s obsessed with the remains. She can’t be trusted.’
‘No. But the thing is, the insurance doesn’t cover pre-existing mental illness. I don’t want to discover after we’ve called out the plane that the department is going to have to find thousands of pounds when she’s not even an archaeologist.’
He was looking at a point below my feet.
Ben looked up. ‘Pre-existing?’
Yianni shuffled his feet. ‘It was years ago. I told you. Before she met David. Jesus, you can’t let one crisis shape someone’s entire life.’
‘You haven’t told them, have you?’ I said. ‘You haven’t told anyone she’s here.’
‘Oh, I have. I said she was a doctoral student from Oxford.’
‘And you didn’t say she does English. You didn’t say you were using research funding to bring a friend along for the ride.’
He rubbed a circle in the earth with his foot. ‘They didn’t ask.’
I started taking pictures. There are pictures of James which they won’t let me see, even though I keep telling them that I took forensic archaeology, I know what dead people look like. ‘It’s different,’ said the family liaison officer. ‘You don’t want to see those pictures. It’s different when it’s your own. It has to be, or we’d all go crazy. Remember him the way he was.’ So I keep track, in my mind, of the way he is, and in some ways it will be easier when we reach the end and there are clean bones to think about.
It was clear that night that Nina was not better. It was her turn to cook and usually she’d have been fussing with bits of plants she kept deciding were edible, nagging Yianni about ingredients he hadn’t brought and then, I will admit, producing something more palatable than the pasta-pesto and watery soup with noodles that the rest of us dished up. When Ben and I came down at dusk, carrying my skeleton in a long box, the stove was still in its holder and Nina’s torch glowed from her tent. We slid the box into the finds tent and I took the cleaning gel and went off, at last, to wash my hands and sponge my face. I touched up my face too, and when I came out Catriona was heating water.
‘You’re doing Nina’s cooking?’ I asked.
She pushed her hair back and looked up. ‘She’s not well. I don’t mind.’
I sat on my preferred stone and stretched my legs out. Catriona watched the pan and the last birds flew through the dusk.
‘You finished your burial?’
Burial doesn’t finish. That’s the point.
‘One out. Ben’s halfway through another. We’ve left him in situ with the tarps over.’
She looked round at Nina’s tent, from which no sound came, and dropped her voice.
‘Are there more?’
I spoke normally. ‘Looks like it. At least another three or four, could be more.’
Nina rustled. ‘I wish you wouldn’t,’ she said.
‘Wouldn’t what, Nina?’ I asked.
‘You’re disturbing them. They won’t like it.’
I looked at Catriona, who was stirring the water into a vortex. ‘Nina, it’s an archaeological dig. We came here to disturb them.’
‘They won’t like it.’
‘Nina?’ said Catriona. ‘Do you want to help me cook? It’s going to have to be pasta and pesto. We had noodles yesterday.’
The zip on Nina’s tent went up and her torch beamed out, making the twilight suddenly darker. Her face appeared, uplit and hollow.
‘Don’t overcook the pasta. Use lots of water. There’s nothing else to get wrong.’
‘What shall we have for pudding?’
‘Even with polenta I could have made something. You could probably make rice pudding with reconstituted milk. And cardamom. Really it needs rose water.’
‘But mostly it needs rice, which we haven’t got.’ Catriona tipped a packet of pasta shells into the pan. ‘There’s some tinned sponge pudding. I could boil it with the pasta.’
Nina traced the path up the hill with the beam of her torch.
‘Don’t,’ said Catriona. ‘You’re making me nervous.’
‘They’re not coming yet,’ said Nina. ‘Later. Sleep in the middle of your tent, Ruth. Harder to reach.’
Catriona’s shudder shook the spoon against the pan.
‘Where are the guys?’ I asked.
‘Yianni’s having computer problems. In the big finds tent.’
‘I knew he’d run out of power,’ I said.
‘It’s the internet connection.’ Catriona scooped a shell out onto the spoon, prodded it and put it back. ‘Sites not updating, or something.’
‘Don’t put a tin in with the pasta,’ said Nina. ‘For one thing, we’ll end up eating the glue from the label. Not to mention whatever’s on the outside of the tin. And for another, you don’t want to reduce the temperature suddenly when it’s in the middle of cooking. It’ll go gluey.’
A cry came from the shore. Catriona froze, staring at Nina.
‘It’s that woman,’ said Nina. ‘Looking for her sister.’
‘It’s a bird,’ I said. ‘A gull. That’s all.’
‘Bad enough,’ said Nina. ‘If it’s got that virus.’
Catriona stirred the pasta, shoulders hunched. ‘They’ve all gone to sleep,’ she said. ‘It’s got too dark for birds now. I wish …’
‘What?’
‘Nothing. Not really.’
She lifted a shell again and watched as steam wavered in the blue light of the paraffin stove. Nina directed her torch down towards the shore, where it picked up waving grass and sent long shadows skittering across the field.
‘It’s a mistake, you know. You’ll regret it.’
‘What will we regret, Nina?’ obliged Catriona. I inspected my nails.
‘Bringing that man down here. He’s lost. They look for him. They’ll come here now.’
‘Nina, for pity’s sake,’ I said. ‘It’s bones. We’ve all got them. If he was lost it was six hundred years ago and someone found him and buried him. Stop it.’
She blinked at me as if there was light in her eyes, which there wasn’t.
‘The pasta’s done,’ said Catriona. ‘Ruth, I’m sorry, but I’m too nervous to go off up there and find the boys. Would you? And can you work the lantern? We’ll need it to eat by, anyway.’
‘Sure,’ I said. ‘You want me to light it before I go?’
She nodded, glancing round again at the hill and the path down to the sea. ‘You’ll be quick, won’t you?’
Up at the finds tent, the boys were kneeling before the com puter as if it were a little god.
‘Dinner’s ready,’ I said.
‘Yeah,’ said Jim, staring at the screen.
I waited a moment. The screen lit their faces, picking them out in the dark.
‘It’s pretty dark in here. Dinner’s ready.’
‘OK,’ said Ben.
It was like trying to get James away from a big game.
‘We’ll save some for you, shall we?’
