Cold Earth, page 13
‘What?’
They weren’t even pressing keys, just watching the screen as if it was about to give them instructions.
‘Catriona and I are going to eat now.’
‘What about Nina?’ asked Yianni, without looking up.
‘She’s frightening Catriona,’ I said. ‘And dinner’s ready.’
‘Down in five,’ said Jim. Yeah, right.
Nina was back in her tent.
‘Does she want any?’ I asked.
Catriona shook her head. ‘She says the pesto’s made with sunflower oil not olive and that potato flakes don’t feature in Italian cuisine. And pesto should be served with spaghetti, farfalli are for a heavier sauce. I did try. She says she doesn’t like eating the wrong stuff. We don’t have spaghetti.’
‘No. Well, seeing how Ben eats noodles I’d rather have farfalli.’
‘Are the guys coming?’
‘They’re in the world of men and malfunctioning gadgets. I said we’d eat.’
She pushed the green-flecked pasta around the pan. ‘I am hungry. And it’s nastier cold.’
I handed her a plate. ‘Eat.’
Nina was still silent and Catriona and I were discussing whether dried banana chips were better or worse than nothing for dessert when we heard the others coming down the path.
‘Did you fix it?’ I asked.
‘No,’ said Yianni. The wind flattened his hair. ‘The sites won’t update. The connection seems OK. Has anyone opened any attachments? Any weird e-mails?’
‘No,’ said Catriona. ‘I haven’t been on since Monday, anyway. Will you be able to sort it out? I know not much is changing but I’d like to know. About the epidemic.’
‘Sure,’ said Jim. He blew on his hands and rubbed them. ‘The anti-virus stuff’s all up to date. Might need to reconfigure the connection.’
‘Just don’t take any chances,’ said Yianni.
‘Will it be OK tomorrow?’ asked Catriona. ‘I wanted to check again.’
‘Do my best,’ said Jim. ‘But we’re not getting anywhere now.’ He looked towards the pan. We’d put a plate on top in a gesture towards keeping it warm.
‘Fucking machine,’ said Yianni. ‘Maybe I’ll just have one more go.’ He stared at his feet.
‘Yeah,’ said Jim. ‘Let’s eat, huh? I used to work on the helpdesk back home. Portability can be a disadvantage when you feel like chucking it across the room. We saw some strange accidental damage.’
‘I just don’t know what’s wrong with it. Everything looks OK. But it won’t bloody work.’
‘I’ll try again in the morning. Don’t worry. Your data’s safe, anyway.’
Yianni kicked at a withered plant.
‘I can heat this up,’ offered Catriona.
‘Don’t bother,’ said Yianni. ‘Don’t bother.’
I didn’t dream that night. I slept so deeply that it felt like coming up from the bottom of a well when I heard voices, and even then it was so dark that I couldn’t tell if my eyes were open or not. I thought for a moment that James was there in the blackness, and put my hand out to my right, where he used to lie. When my fingers met five cold points on the other side on the canvas I woke up.
‘James? James!’
Maintaining contact with one hand, I reached for my torch and pushed the end against the ground. There was a hand outside the tent, pressed to mine, and the outline of an arm shadowed on the canvas. It was too small. Nina.
‘Who is it?’ I called.
The hand slid down the tent, fingers clawing in.
‘Nina?’
There was scuffling as something crawled along the canvas, brushing against my stack of folded clothes and knocking over my body lotion. The zipper on her tent went.
‘Ruth? Is he still here?’
‘Nina, stop this. It’s not funny. We’re tired, the rest of us. We work. It’s too much, messing around in the middle of the night. However crazy you are, it’s too much.’
She laughed. I didn’t like it.
‘Sleep well, then, Ruth. Sweet dreams.’
When I woke again, grey light was filtering through the tent and I could hear the stove purring. The air in my nose tingled with cold. I’d pulled up the hood of my bag sometime in the night, and lay there content as a swaddled baby.
‘Any progress?’ came Yianni’s voice.
‘Not yet,’ said Jim. ‘It’s only been ten minutes. We should really let the battery charge, you know.’
‘Just solve the problem, OK?’
I rolled onto my side, knowing I should unzip the bag and face the cold. And another day teasing bones from their resting places. I opened my mouth and blew slowly to see if my breath condensed, which it did. I folded my hands back into my chest and dozed again, pulled equally by the knowledge that morning had come and the certainty that I was warmer and more comfortable than I would be until night came back.
‘Did you hear them, in the night?’ Catriona. The light was stronger now and the stove had fallen silent. A spoon scraped a bowl.
‘Ruth? Yeah, that’s why I’m letting her sleep.’
Someone, probably Ben, took an audible slurp of coffee.
‘How’s Nina?’
‘Still asleep. At least, not answering. She was probably awake a lot of the night.’
‘Do you think it was her?’ asked Catriona.
‘What, crawling about? Who else?’
‘I don’t know.’ There was a pause. ‘I do wonder. You’re sure she’s asleep? She doesn’t behave like that in the day. What if she’s – well, right?’
Someone put a bowl down on a rock.
‘Right?’ Yianni said. ‘You mean, what if we’re being haunted by the people we’re excavating but only Nina can see them?’
‘I suppose so. Don’t look at me like that. I’m just saying, she doesn’t act like that when we can see her. She reads Middlemarch and talks about food.’
‘Yeah,’ said Yianni. ‘Well, she’s always done that. But she hasn’t always claimed to meet dead people in the middle of the night. Or demanded baths when the nearest tap is about two hundred kilometres away.’
‘Oh, nearer than that,’ said Ben. ‘There are farmhouses.’
‘That’s what I mean,’ said Catriona. ‘If she usually went round communing with spirits it would be obvious that she had problems. But she does think she’s seeing them.’
‘Well, don’t you start thinking you are. There’s a lot of work to be done, you know. Concentrate on that, OK?’
‘OK. Just as you say. Shall I wake Ruth, then?’
‘I’m awake,’ I said. ‘Thanks for the lie-in. I’ll be with you in a minute.’
Since they’d already had breakfast and I knew Yianni was anxious to start I didn’t bother with my face. Rainwater’s meant to be good for your skin, if it’s not polluted. My hands were drying out and I put a travel size hand-lotion in my pocket to use on site before I put my gloves on. Then I ran the brush through my hair, pulled the previous day’s jumper over my clean T-shirt and crawled out into the day.
There was no sign of any further tampering on site. We lifted the tarps to find the other body as we’d left it, a relief figure in the soil lying like someone frozen in an energetic nightmare, with the legs twisted and arm flung out. James was an active sleeper, and he talked as well as apparently wrestling boa constrictors in dreams he couldn’t remember when he woke. I used to listen, convinced that his unconscious was muttering the key to his psyche, or at least the key to why he wasn’t asking me to marry him, but the only clear sentence I ever got was about repairing dress shoes. I even rooted through his closet the next day while he was at work, wondering how literally to take his unconscious, and they didn’t need repairing. That was when I found the letter from Polly.
I never told you about that. You were just waiting, weren’t you, all those sunny afternoons while the ice melted in the pitcher and the art deco Moulin Rouge coasters protected the coffee table, for me to reveal the fatal flaw in our relationship. Some reason why I wasn’t really as upset as I thought I was, some curtain you could pull so I’d get back on the twelve step highway and get rolling. Well, this isn’t it. They broke up three years ago, before I met him. So the letter was no betrayal, not technically, but he always said he left her, or at least told her, one Saturday morning when they hadn’t exchanged a kind word for weeks, that she had to move out. She couldn’t handle his job, kept nagging about how late he got home and how early he left, wouldn’t sleep with him if he had to cancel dinner. Towards the end, slobbed around painting her nails in front of the TV because she said it wasn’t worth putting on a show for an audience that only turned up one night in five. So I never complained, woke up obediently when he came in from the office at midnight, left meals on the counter for him. Learnt to keep myself pretty even when I was sure he wouldn’t be home for hours. But he still had her letter. ‘I have loved you so much and tried so hard to please you, but I can’t keep doing this. It’s damaging me, waiting when you don’t come and cooking what you don’t eat and never seeing anyone in case you want me. I can’t stop loving you, though. You know where I’ll be.’ I put it back where I found it, haven’t thought of it since.
Anyway, Greenland. Low clouds were rolling over the sea and the light was menacingly yellow. Yianni stood looking for a moment.
‘OK. I think we want all of you up here today. See if you can get this one out before that storm breaks. Even with a canopy, we don’t want him lying in a puddle.’
Ben sat on the edge of the pit, pulling his gloves on. ‘OK. You coming up here too?’
Yianni looked out at the sea again. ‘Later. I’ve a few other things to see to.’
‘What about Jim?’ asked Catriona. ‘Because this isn’t the last burial in here.’
Yianni dug at the turf with his boot. ‘I know that. He needs to get the connection working first.’
‘What, the computer? We don’t need internet access now, do we?’ I asked.
He shrugged. ‘I’ll be up later, OK? Come and find me if you need me.’
Catriona put her gloves on and pushed herself off the edge of the pit. ‘I hope it’s not that there’s news he doesn’t want us to know.’
‘What, the virus? You mean you think he’s faking the connection going down?’
She turned towards me, mouth open. ‘Of course not. I mean, that hadn’t even occurred to me. I just wonder why he’s so anxious. Maybe he knows something we don’t.’
‘Don’t go looking for trouble,’ I said. ‘There’s plenty of it right here.’
She looked down at the form emerging from the soil. ‘Yeah. But long-ago trouble.’
Ben hunkered down and began to tickle soil from the feet with a brush.
‘And what we’ve brought,’ he said.
I looked over at him. If he’s going to keep dropping hints I’d almost rather tell and be done with it. One day, if I tell enough people, I might even believe it myself. James is dead.
‘I’ll start on the head, shall I?’ I said.
I knelt down and began to stroke the earth where the hair must have been. Occasionally hair survives peat burials, but summer temperatures here are high enough to promote decomposition, and probably freezing and thawing rots flesh and bone faster than a more stable, higher temperature. It seems odd now to remember that the T-shirts I’m using as a second skin, even under pyjamas, were outerwear a few weeks ago. I’ve been wearing silk and flannel pyjamas from the first winter in Paris, when the company found us a magnificent Haussmann apartment in the cinquième, floor to ceiling windows, plasterwork spilling off a wedding cake ceiling, cute little fireplaces where we couldn’t light fires and original nineteenth-century radiators. Papa loved it. I used to sweep across the wooden floors to breakfast wrapped in a quilt, and one day he came home and handed me a package from Galeries Lafayette, with perfectly folded paper and ribbons the way only French shop assistants can tie them. Under the layers of tissue were pale blue silk pyjamas, lined with the only flannelette toile de Jouy I’ve ever seen. And then six weeks later we were posted to Jakarta and since then I’ve had central heating good enough for little chemises. Mom and Papa have enough stuff to fill several houses in storage, waiting for Papa to retire so they can settle permanently in a fermette in Bordeaux (Papa) and/or a saltbox in Maine (Mom), but I’ve kept those pyjamas with me in Jakarta and then Saudi and in the UK, where I wore them a few times, and New York, and now they’re here in Greenland, taking on the smell of tent-waterproofing and damp down.
‘Hey,’ said Ben. ‘Look, sesamoids!’
Tiny bones in the feet that rarely survive excavation.
‘The hands are pretty complete as well,’ said Catriona.
‘Though don’t you lose less bone on dark soil?’
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘And where it’s not stony.’
‘Shame you can’t research what archaeologists miss,’ said Catriona. She paused and looked down at the hand emerging from the soil. ‘Do you think he was just dropped in here? Or she?’
‘Either that or alive at burial.’
They both looked at me.
‘OK. There’s no real way of knowing. Prof. Mitchell said that once, about one in a messy position like this.’
Ben shivered. ‘That’s why I want to be cremated.’
‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘Well, ask your family. The funeral’s not for you.’
James had made a will. I guess bankers keep their affairs in order. He had left no indication about a funeral. That was all his mom’s idea; she planned it like the wedding that never happened, only with herself as the bride. Walking up the aisle with all those flowers.
Catriona was looking at me. I took a breath. Maybe I can be both people at the same time. Here is a safe place to try it out, with people I’ll never see again. A trial run.
‘I had to plan a funeral last year. My boyfriend died. A truck hit his car.’ The teeth were beginning to gleam through the soil, still in their sockets.
‘And he was killed. Immediately.’
I took a paintbrush and began to brush the teeth. The mouth seemed to be wide open.
‘And I was at home and I didn’t know.’
I looked up at her. She sat quite still.
‘We were together two years. He’s been dead nine months.’
‘Oh Ruth,’ she said. ‘I am sorry.’
‘Sorry’ is not, I eventually pointed out to James’s mother, an apology, but an expression of regret. People are claiming to feel sorrow, not responsibility.
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Thank you.’
The incisors were still there, but the upper canines had fallen out. Catriona was still, watching.
‘He was buried. I keep thinking how long it will take. Though he was very burnt. And I don’t know the soil ph. His parents’ church.’
‘Did you not want that? Burial?’
The lower incisors were also still in place, under the yawn or scream.
‘I don’t know. He was already so burnt.’ I put down the brush. ‘I guess I didn’t want to dispose of the body at all. I’d like a mortuary. At least an ossuary. Like those painted skulls in Hallstat. So I could see him instead of thinking about him all the time.’
Hallstat is a pretty town in Austria where, in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the skulls of the dead were exhumed, painted with flowers and the name of the deceased, and preserved in grinning rows.
‘Really? Have you seen them?’
I shook my head.
‘Only pictures. I just want something. Part of him.’
I picked up the brush again. One lower canine was gone. Catriona went back to the intricate puzzle of fingers.
‘When my granddad died, Mum said what she really wanted was to push him out to sea in a boat. Like the Vikings. He messed about in boats all his life.’
I shook my head. ‘You’d spend your whole life waiting for the boat to come back. You’d have to set fire to it and watch. But those bodies can’t have burnt, you know. Once the boat got down to the waterline the body would just sink, wouldn’t it, and you’d still be thinking about fish eating hands that had touched you and hair in the seaweed. I want something I can see and touch.’
‘That’s a bit creepy,’ said Ben.
‘No,’ I said. ‘Everyone you’ve ever kissed will die one day. Like this. Every hand you’ve held will rot.’
Though the list, it occurred to me, was probably not long.
‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘But that’s almost a reason to hold hands, isn’t it? You don’t need to think about death, it comes anyway.’
‘Don’t, then. But one day you’ll have to.’
If you’re lucky.
‘Ruth?’ asked Catriona. ‘Are you OK?’
‘Trying to be,’ I said. ‘Wondering what it would feel like.’
I’m still broken, aren’t I? I guess I’m beginning to realise that I won’t get over it. Death doesn’t get better. Maybe life does. The jawbone jutted forward and I began to work back towards the skull.
Yianni came up before the rain started, just as we were beginning to measure and photograph.
‘Any joy with the computer?’ asked Catriona. She had mud on her face where she’d wiped her nose on her sleeve.
‘No,’ he said. ‘Jim’s been trying all morning. It’s maddening, there’s nothing wrong with it. But all the sites are two days old and we can’t get onto e-mail.’
Catriona stood up. ‘Can I try? Maybe Edinburgh’s still working.’
‘I suppose so. I suppose you’ll all want to. Listen, are you sure you haven’t opened any weird mails or attachments? Not been on any dodgy sites? I mean, I’ve checked the history, but can you think of anything at all?’
‘We told you,’ said Catriona. ‘Yianni, we’ve got as much invested in this as you.’
‘What about Nina?’ I asked. ‘Did you ask her?’
‘She’s only been on e-mail. It all looks OK. But then why the fuck won’t it work?’
He still hadn’t looked down.
‘Yianni?’ I said. ‘What do you think?’
‘What do you mean? Oh.’ He slid down. ‘That’s interesting.’
