Cold Earth, page 5
But all the water is cool here, and the nearest we come to escapism, having escaped, is staring at the sea. I am trying very hard to save the Dorothy Sayers and the Margery Allingham until I really need them. So when my tiredness becomes disconcerting, I go down to the river, splash my face and sit on the bank with my feet in the water. They turn blue, but it seems to help. I needed it yesterday. The sun was warm by afternoon, and Ben and I were working in one of the antechambers. We were down to floor level and had found nothing whatsoever, not even a potsherd. There was no wind and the sun warmed my back. I was thinking of you, knowing that whatever I hope you will not water the plants and will then drown them the same day you check my flight number. And not thinking about what else might be happening back home.
‘Nina, you OK?’ said Ben. I blinked. His hair shone red in the strong light and the freckles on his face were joining up. There were fewer flowers in the grass than there had been when we arrived.
‘I said, are you OK?’
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I think so. Why?’
‘You’ve not moved in ages. It looked weird.’
‘Oh. Sorry. No, I’m fine. Just thinking.’
‘Yeah.’ He started to dig again, working fast because we’d already decided that the room had been deliberately cleared before the inhabitants left. ‘Well, if I was thinking like that, I’d take a break. Ruth has. She went by a while back.’
I straightened my back, which clicked, and rolled my shoulders. ‘OK. I will.’
I saw from the hillside that Ruth was down at the river as well, sitting curled on a rock midstream as if she fancied herself as the Little Mermaid. I wondered about heading back to my tent instead, but I knew I’d fall asleep and a nap didn’t seem worth the potential trauma. As I came down the path we were wearing between the house and the stepping stones, I saw that she had taken off her trousers. She was shaving her legs with one of those bright pink disposable razors, and there was quite a lot of blood.
‘What are you doing?’ I asked. Meaning, I suppose, why are you doing it?
‘I’m shaving my legs,’ she said, without looking up. She was doing the easy bit above the knee at the front.
‘Is the cold a good anaesthetic or does it just mean you can’t tell when you’re cutting yourself?’
‘Both, I guess. But I get dry skin, doing it without water.’
There was a bottle of Clinique body lotion on the rock beside her trousers, which were perfectly folded.
‘Do you really need to do it at all?’ I asked. Mine, I’ll have you know, are as hairy now as in the middle of the woolly tights season.
‘Yes,’ she said, engrossed. ‘I didn’t get a wax before I left. Dumb, I guess.’
‘No,’ I said. ‘Not dumb at all. I never understand why women spend their hard-earned cash paying strangers to pour hot wax on their bare bodies. I think it’s obscene. I mean, does it matter if you’ve got hairy legs inside your jeans on the west coast of Greenland? Yianni’s growing a beard and I don’t believe the other two are shaving more than twice a week. Who cares?’
She looked up. It was like making eye contact with one of those brooding, hate-filled sheep. She might, of course, care if she had hopes of any of the guys. I hadn’t thought of that.
‘I care, of course. It’s a matter of basic self-respect, isn’t it?’
I turned over a pebble with my foot.
‘Not for me. I’m happy to say my identity is entirely distinguished from the length of the hairs on my legs. Grooming is for dogs. If you like your dogs groomed. People could be reading or at least cooking. I don’t bother in winter anyway, and in summer I do it on a need-to-know basis if there’s a particular reason to wear a skirt.’
‘Well.’ She went back to scraping away at herself, as if she were hoping to see under her own skin. ‘I care how I look. Even here. You can’t just let yourself go.’
‘Good Lord.’ I half-hoped she was Christian enough to be offended. Jim is. ‘If I let myself go I hope I’d come up with something more exciting than stubble on my legs. It’s not exactly running away to sea, is it?’ I stopped myself. What an impoverished imagination.
I turned to go. ‘By the way, you might like to check on that Achilles tendon.’ Blood was flowing fast from a deep gash above her left heel.
‘I have run away,’ she said. ‘And now I’m here, I’m taking care of my skin.’
‘Go for it,’ I said. ‘Good luck.’
So much for American politeness. It was a shame we were going to share every meal and hear every sound for the next two weeks, but at least I had a sure-fire way of waking myself up. Irritation is almost as good an anti-soporific as retrospective embarrassment. As I left her to her self-lacerations and went back up to the ante-room, it occurred to me that hers was surely not the first blood to flow in that river.
‘Better?’ asked Ben. ‘Does it seem odd to you, working outside?’
I picked up the trowel again. ‘Doesn’t really feel like work. Because of being outside. I mean, work is something I do on my own with books and I measure it in words on a screen. I like the idea of fieldwork. Having something real to know about.’
His pale hands worked the earth. ‘I never got on with English. I don’t really like novels. Can’t see the point.’
Better, I suppose, than people who confide that they read a book only last summer, what was it, with a picture of a house on the cover. I could see no point in offering a defence of fiction.
‘So did you go to America for genuine academic reasons or because you fancied it?’
He looked up. Funny how enviable colouring is so often wasted.
‘Well, both. My sister’s been in the US for years. Liz. She’s married to a scientist in Washington DC. I always liked visiting. The way people don’t tell you you can’t do things. You know? At school, there was a real sense of who do you think you are, a kid from round here saying you want to be an archaeologist? There’s none of that. I’m enjoying it. I like being the foreign one.’
‘Surely not the only foreign one, even in the Midwest?’
He put his trowel down. ‘I bet Madison’s more diverse than Oxford. It’s more diverse than Sheffield. Politically as well as culturally.’
‘Yeah, right. So they’re selling the Socialist Worker on campus?’
‘They’re probably writing the bloody Socialist Worker on campus. Seriously. Spend some time in the US.’
I knelt up again. ‘I have. And I think America is a good idea that doesn’t work.’
He looked at me for a minute. ‘Look, Nina, I dare say it goes down well in Oxford. saying things like that, but you’re not there now. They’re not always going to be too polite to pick you up on it, you know?’
I shrugged. ‘Well, you’re making assumptions about Oxford, aren’t you? I don’t even live there any more.’
He turned another scoop of soil. ‘Suit yourself.’
There is a grey light over the mountains to the east but the sun has not risen and I am cold, huddled on the rocks above the little house. A lamb calls, the sheep answers. A small rearrangement among the flock nestled under the stone wall below the farm and silence falls again. There is no wind, and I wait.
I see them coming up the valley, moving fast and quietly. Only four men, tall and bundled in shapeless clothes. But they have belts, and knives gleam at their waists in the black and white light before dawn. I want to run and call out. The farmer has a crossbow and the mother and baby might at least hide among the boulders scattering the hillside above me. The men reach the stone wall and the sheep scatter, but they are used to people and only the lambs bleat a little. One of the men grabs a lamb and his knife flashes. I cannot see clearly but a sheep calls loudly and runs towards the small pale shape on the ground. I know what is going to happen.
Something held my arms and I woke struggling and shouting for help. Fear hammered in my chest and cold surged in my head as I fought for air. I sat up. It was the sleeping bag, of course, just my four-season down sleeping bag, close as a shroud around my upper body. Which did not explain the distinct memory of a cold grasp on my arm, or the rustling in the grass outside too low and slow for wind. The night was dusky, and I sat there a long time, mummified in my bag, listening to something that did not stop moaning and muttering until the sun came back.
It was colder the next morning. Even inside the tent, I could see my breath, and when I came out the canvas and the grass were washed with dew. Catriona was sitting on the wicker hamper, looking through a thin mist towards the silent sea with her artists’ block on her lap and her watercolours at her side.
‘Can you paint mist?’ I asked.
‘Don’t know yet. I tried, in Skye. Only it didn’t come out very well.’
The mist thickened and eddied between us and the beach.
‘Did you hear anything in the night?’
She looked round, her hair beaded with tiny drops of mist.
‘No. But I was pretty tired. Why, what was there?’
‘Oh, I don’t know.’ I ran my finger down one of the wet guy lines. ‘Probably nothing. I just keep thinking I hear things. Only the sheep, I expect.’
She picked up the brush again and dabbled it.
‘Sheep can be pretty weird. Ever heard one eat grass?’
‘Yes. First night here. I was convinced it was a long-legged beastie coming to get me. And they look at you in a funny way. I don’t like them.’
She laughed. ‘Still, it’s nice to be somewhere where the worst thing you have to worry about is a hostile sheep. One of my housemate’s friends got mugged last month, and they slashed her face because she didn’t have a mobile phone or a card. I think they thought if they threatened her she might produce some more.’
‘Was she OK?’
‘Stitches. And the shock. But yes, the knife was sharp enough that they think there won’t be much of a scar. The police said she shouldn’t have been walking home alone at two in the morning. At least here you could wander about all night if you wanted to.’
I shivered, although the mist was clearing and a watery sun looked over the sea.
‘I wouldn’t want to,’ I said. ‘Not for any money.’
I took a cup of that horrible coffee to keep warm, but by the end of breakfast the sun was bright again. I took off my fleece – well, your fleece, it still smells of you, which is both a comfort and a stabbing pain – and watched as Ruth carefully unbuttoned her angora cardigan. It’s pale grey and the buttons are real shell.
‘Yianni, I’ll check my e-mail today,’ Ben said. He was looking at the swirl of powdered milk substitute he was stirring into the coffee granules and water in his mug.
Yianni looked up as if he’d heard a hunting horn on the hill behind Ben, and then round at our faces. ‘OK,’ he said. ‘Sure. After breakfast, if you like. But remember to disconnect and compose in Word, then cut-and-paste. We really need to keep that connection to an absolute minimum.’
‘Can I too?’ asked Catriona.
‘Sure. Everyone can, as far as I’m concerned. I thought you wanted to spread it out to get the news more often. Only please don’t settle in for a long session with the weekend supplements.’
‘It’s not the weekend supplements I’m interested in,’ said Jim. ‘If the first five headlines don’t mention the epidemic, I’ll stop right there. There was nothing else until the news section, last time.’
I looked up. He hadn’t mentioned it until now.
‘Is it OK to download and then read stuff off the hard drive, then?’ asked Catriona.
Yianni frowned. ‘I’d rather you didn’t. We’re sunk if we get a virus here. I’m not that good with computers.’
‘I work on the IT helpdesk back home,’ said Jim. ‘You’ve got good virus protection, haven’t you? You shouldn’t get anything from downloading ordinary files.’
‘OK,’ said Yianni. ‘Just please be careful. We’ve got no other means of keeping our data here. The computer’s wrapped in the towel by my sleeping bag. If you open Explorer it’s easy to connect.’
Ben and Catriona went off and I started stacking bowls. Ruth had left half her breakfast.
‘Are you finished?’ I asked.
She glanced up as far as my neckline.
‘You’ve spilt something there. Yeah, I’m done.’
She got up and went into her tent. Not even someone as self-conscious as Ruth can crawl into a tent gracefully.
I picked up Yianni’s bowl from the rock beside him.
‘Are you OK?’ I asked. ‘You look as if you’d really rather we didn’t use the net at all.’
He smiled reluctantly. ‘You’re probably right. Partly, it doesn’t seem worth any risk to our work here just to access information we can’t do anything about. They only want to know what’s in the news out of habit. And partly, I suppose, I like the idea of isolation. It seems silly to come to West Greenland and then check your e-mail.’
‘What, you want the full nineteenth-century heroic experience? Messages in bottles and all?’
He shrugged. He was rubbing the rock with his boot and the laces were coming undone.
‘Anyway,’ I said. ‘We can’t do anything about the news at home either. At best it’s habit, at worst voyeurism. That’s why I don’t watch it on TV. Nobody needs to watch other people suffering.’
Jim had been reading the Bible he carries around. He reads it after breakfast, and I can’t help feeling that it’s somehow indecent. Sometimes he closes his eyes and moves his lips and I’m embarrassed to see him. If people want to commune with invisible beings they should do it in private. He closed the book, the pages riffling like money in the wind, and opened his fleece to put it back in the pocket of his polo shirt.
‘Are you keeping it there to stop bullets?’ I asked.
‘Why not?’ he said. ‘And you need news for democracy.’
‘Not much use when the news belongs to big business,’ I pointed out. ‘And the UK doesn’t feel like much of a democracy, anymore. What do you think would have to happen for the people of Britain to make enough fuss to change anything?’
‘Poll tax,’ said Yianni. ‘People only really care about money. If you did it in stages, you could probably introduce public executions of religious minorities without effective popular unrest.’
‘What about America?’ I asked Jim. ‘Is there anything the government could possibly do to make enough people cross enough to take effective action? Because it seems to me you’ve always been able to do anything at all as long as you keep talking about freedom and the American Way.’
Jim stood up, smiling as if I were a small child showing him how I could stand on one leg.
‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘They vote. And it works. Sometimes it takes a while but it works. I guess you only hear about what we’re doing overseas. Foreign affairs don’t control our political agenda.’
‘That,’ I said, ‘is abundantly clear. Last time I was in the US, foreign news meant something that happened in the next state. I’ll do the washing up.’
I was bringing the plates back up from the river when Catriona came down to meet me. I could see from the hunch of her shoulders that something was wrong.
‘What is it? What’s happened?’
‘The virus. They think it’s mutated and it seems to be spreading.’
The sun was still glinting off the sea but the air seemed darker.
‘Where? Not in Britain?’
‘No. Six cases in Washington DC and one in Carolina. Thing is, they don’t know how it got to Carolina. They thought it was isolated in DC. The incubation period seemed really short. If it’s longer … ’
If it’s longer we might all have it. We walked back up the hill, the plates rattling in the basket. The shadows of small white clouds scudded over the turf and a seagull ululated from the shore.
‘Any dead?’
‘Two. One was a nurse who was working with the first one.’
You full of tubes and fighting for breath. You dying. You not there anymore.
‘Have they stopped transatlantic flights?’
She shook her head. ‘Same rhetoric as last November. You can tell they’ve only practised for terrorism. Standing shoulder to shoulder and not letting the forces of fear turn the tide of democracy. Or something. Every Briton’s duty not to panic. Shoulder to shoulder’s the last place you want to be if someone’s got a viral respiratory problem. I expect your David’s right. By next week they’ll have decided it’s a terrorist outrage and they’ll invade another oil state to give us something else to think about. I wouldn’t worry, honestly. Not yet. More people die in car crashes in one day than have got sick in the last week.’
‘Well, I worry about car crashes too. Is Ben OK about it? With his sister there?’
Catriona shrugged. ‘It’s a bit hard to tell with all that northern masculinity washing around. Probably? He’s had an e-mail from his sister, he says she’s not panicking. He says there are a lot of people in DC and probably more of them think they’re God than have contracted this thing.’
