Cold Earth, page 8
‘Don’t you like your thesis?’
She picked up some of my shells and traced the spirals with her finger. ‘It’s fine. I think I’ll finish it. But I thought it might be my thing and it isn’t, really. I should probably have taken the risk and gone to art school. What about you, are you climbing the greasy pole to the top of the ivory tower?’
‘No. I mean, I say so. But there’s David and honestly, most of the time that seems enough to ask. It feels as though expecting more might jeopardise what I’ve got and – there’s no way to say this that’s not hubristic – but if the Fates aren’t listening –’
I wriggled on the cold rock. It doesn’t feel safe talking about you. I’m not sure I even want you to know quite how much you matter to me. I may not show you this notebook.
‘Then?’
‘It’s all I want. It’s all I could ever have hoped. Nothing else matters. And we’re four years in.’
‘God.’ She leant back and looked at me. ‘I didn’t think that happened. Really?’
I looked out to sea, eyes filling. ‘Mm. Well, it does. It happened to me. And now I’ve come here and left him and I keep wishing I hadn’t.’
Tears ran again. It feels as if I never quite stop crying here, not enough for it to be important when I start again.
‘Oh Nina.’ She rummaged in her pocket. ‘I’ve got tissues but they’re very used. Probably from before we left home. Never mind, go and e-mail him. You’ll be home in two weeks.’
I had more or less stopped crying when I found the others kneeling around the laptop as if it were an oracle. Ben’s face was red and even Ruth looked mildly interested in the unflattering blue light coming off the screen.
‘What is it?’ I asked.
Yianni looked up. ‘It’s not good,’ he said. ‘You won’t like it.’
I put my hands over my ears and shut my eyes. ‘Then don’t tell me. I don’t want to know.’
‘Nina? Listen to me.’
‘I don’t want to know.’
Someone put a hand on my shoulder. I opened my eyes. Ben. The laptop was still on, flickering in my peripheral vision, and the sky was huge and white. They were all looking at me.
‘Nina,’ said Yianni. ‘Stop it. Come on. We’re all living with this.’
‘No,’ I said. I met Ruth’s gaze and looked away. ‘OK. Tell me.’
Yianni glanced at Jim again, gauging what to say. ‘The epidemic. It’s spread. Several thousand people in the Washington area, another cluster in Charleston and a scattering of outbreaks up the East Coast.’
‘On the East Coast.’ Wind played over the grass towards us. My voice sounded too loud. ‘Not in England?’
Ruth rose from her knees and walked away, down towards Catriona and the beach. Catriona still thinking about her croft and her painting.
Ben moved his hand. ‘Things to do.’ He followed her.
Jim put his hand on my shoulder and Yianni turned to look into my face. ‘There’ve been a few cases. Some people who’d flown over.’
‘It’s not spreading?’
You dying, your perfect body coming apart. You, gone.
‘It does spread, Nina. They’re containing it.’
‘I can’t deal with this,’ I said. But there was no alternative.
The dark time has come. The bodies lie frozen in the outhouse. The snow gives off a faint gleam, and the pit above the beach yawns velvet black. The boys are down there, digging with whalebone spades. A woman robed in woven wool sits like a stone on the bench outside the house, her feet in their skin shoes buried in snow. I curl unseen beside her, so cold and tired that the grave itself tempts me with shelter and the promise of rest. The heap of earth grows, but they cannot dig deep in the frozen ground. There are no ashes or dust here, but ice fusing with ice, death sleeping through the winter until blood runs again in spring.
A howl rose from the dark hill, a human voice lifted in pain. My ear to the ground heard running feet before something dragged past the tents, down towards the new grave on the shore.
*
‘Nina? You having another bad dream?’
Jim’s voice, Jim’s voice deep like a cello.
‘No,’ I said. ‘I’m not dreaming. Did you hear it too? That cry?’
‘You were dreaming. It’s OK.’
‘It woke me. Jim, I didn’t make that noise.’
‘It’s all right, Nina. Go back to sleep.’ Yianni. At last, the others were hearing the Greenlanders too.
‘Yianni, it wasn’t me. That noise. Wasn’t it that noise that woke you?’
‘Just a bad dream. Go back to sleep now. There’s nothing there.’
‘Didn’t you hear the dragging? You must know that wasn’t me. It went away. I’m still here.’
‘Get some rest, Nina. We’ll talk in the morning.’
I unzipped my tent and looked out as soon as I woke up the next morning. Yianni was refilling the little stove, wearing fingerless gloves and a surprising woolly hat as well as jeans and fleece.
‘So you heard it last night, too?’
‘Morning, Nina. I heard you. You’re having a lot of these dreams?’
‘I am but it wasn’t me that howled. It woke me up. Couldn’t you hear, it was coming from up the hill?’
He shook his head, intent on the pouring paraffin. ‘Sorry.’
‘What do you mean, sorry? You think I imagined it? You think I could make that noise up the hill and then drag something through the tents and still be in my tent a minute later?’
‘Nina, there’s no one here. You know that. No one but us.’
I clenched my fists. ‘That’s why I don’t like these things moving about in the night.’
‘Yeah.’ He screwed the cap on the stove. ‘Well, get dressed and come and have some breakfast. I found some more dried peaches.’
‘Yippee,’ I muttered. I bet the Greenlanders were at least able to make some kind of bannock or pancake. There is some milk powder, from which in theory – admittedly given somewhere warm enough for it to ferment – one could make something like buttermilk, and there is some bicarb of soda for washing, so if there were flour there could be soda bread. But there isn’t, and everyone else seems happy enough to spend all their time digging and eating food out of packets. I still have the Papillon chocolate against a real gastronomic or moral emergency.
While I was dressing I heard Catriona churning around in her tent and then crawling out. The stove had begun its daily purring and I smelt the familiar mixture of paraffin and sulphurous dried apricots.
‘Yianni?’
‘Good morning, Catriona.’
‘Have you thought about what we’re going to do? If this, this epidemic, really kicks off? If they close airports?’
‘We’ll finish our work. What else? If anyone’s close relatives get dangerously ill, the insurance covers an urgent flight back, though honestly it would probably be too late. Otherwise, it’s just news. And we’re safer here than we’d be at home.’
Dishes clattered.
‘We are. But I do worry about my family.’
‘No cases in Scotland yet. Worrying won’t help.’
‘I know. But could we check more often? Things could change fast.’
‘We’ll see. I’ll think about it.’ Yianni sounded like a parent. ‘Could you make the coffee?’
Yianni asked me to work on my own that day, digging across the floor level of a lean-to addition to the barn where he thought hens might have been kept in the summer. The others were staking out a little plateau up near the scree, an area Yianni had been surveying and measuring the previous day. I hadn’t asked why, didn’t want to know, but there are things moving up there in the night, things we shouldn’t disturb. I settled down with my back to the wall and started to dig.
The fire crackles in the hearth. The hall is full, men gathered around the hearth, their words slurred now and laughter louder and more frequent. The children are playing around their feet, rolling pebbles at wooden skittles, squabbling when the game goes wrong. The women, faces hollow on the edge of the firelight, keep their hands busy with spindles and knitting. The cup passes around the men, one of the children jogs an elbow, spills mead and is slapped by an unsteady hand. He squalls, indignant, not hurt. The women exchange glances. Nearly bedtime. I draw my feet up in the sleeping place and lean towards the warmth.
A tall blond man, his words slurred and tumbling, boasts of the hunting journey he made last summer, North beyond the ends of the earth to a strange and beautiful place where the sun circled high in the sky and there were great white bears on the ice and huge eagles in the sky. Someone with a scar across his cheek begins on the stories of Vinland that he heard at Brattahlid this past summer, the land of warmth in the West where there is night even at midsummer and fish run through the rivers like grain poured from a barrel. Silence falls as they think about this, about the grapes that Leif Eirikkson claimed to have found there. I pull the skins up around my shoulders, still cold, and in the silence a strange sound rises and throbs close by the cold walls. The livestock in the byre bray as if it is on fire.
The men seize their swords and push each other down the hall and through the door. The children are quiet, wide-eyed, but the smaller ones whimper and the women pick them up and hold onto them, straining to hear against the wind and the crackling of fire. Silence holds, and then the terrible sound begins to ring through the hall and across the whole valley. It is hard to believe human voices could make such a noise, but it can – surely – be nothing else. It is so low it is felt more than heard, reverberating in our ribs and skulls. It rises and falls and the women and children freeze in the warm hall. Nothing earthly can make such a sound. And then shouts and screams rise above it, the voices of their own men in fear and fury. A tall woman opens the door and I slip out, although I know I am too late. The darkness outside is almost absolute and the cold air fills my chest like water. There may be the outline of the hillside against the sky but there is no moon and the stars are dimmed by cloud. Fewer men are shouting now, and there are whimpers and groans coming from above the byre. The other sound stops suddenly, silence loud in the dark, and I sense beings slipping away into the night. A faint rustle on the turf, perhaps a flicker of something pale flapping up the hill. Whatever came to the dark hillside has gone. For now.
I was very cold. My hand had set around the trowel, my arm too stiff to bend. A fine rain lay on my hair and face, my stippled glasses blurred the world. I looked at the earth I had not turned and began to cry. I was no longer sure I could manage another ten days here, except that I know I cannot leave. I cannot. I must, but I cannot. Breath came tight again and I gave in to the rising panic, which changed nothing but passed some time until I had to breathe and think again. In and in and out and in and in and in as the fallen stones dissolved and spun around me.
‘You OK, Nina?’ Jim in his shining armour.
‘No. I haven’t done any work. I’m not sure – I’m not sure I can actually keep going. I mean, not that there’s an alternative.’
He looked around. I was sitting huddled on the wet ground, hugging my knees, my trowel lying at my side. Mist eddied past the stones.
‘What happened?’
I looked at him, his sure shoulders and easy breathing.
‘Nothing. I keep – it’s like dreaming. I’m not hearing voices, I don’t think I’m having delusions, I know they’re not there. Not in the day, anyway.’
‘Stand up. You must be freezing. What aren’t there?’
‘Nothing. There’s nothing there, I know that. I’m so cold.’
I started to shake. My hands trembled.
‘Come on. Come down. It’s lunchtime, we’ll make you a hot drink.’
I knew they were worried about me because Yianni lit the stove and expended some powdered milk and cocoa powder making me an ersatz kind of hot chocolate. When I didn’t think about Charbonnel et Walker, it was warm and sweet, and the pain of the hot enamel mug in my cold fingers was consoling. The crispbread tasted more wooden than usual, a new kind that snaps into small squares along the perforations.
‘Do you not want that?’ Ben was watching. A square snapped across, a triangle and a pinch of crumbs.
‘Have it.’
‘Sure?’ He tipped the plate to his mouth and I looked away. Low cloud muffled the mountain and closed off the beach. Rain too fine to hear settled steadily on us and the ground and the stoically grazing sheep. I was so tired it felt like thinking underwater, gliding and bumbling through a silenced world.
‘Let’s get back up there, please,’ said Yianni. ‘We’ve a lot to do now, and it looks like the weather’s turning.’
‘Looks as if,’ I muttered.
Catriona caught my eye and smiled. ‘Pedant.’
‘Should we take the canopies up, then?’ asked Ruth. Rain falls on the groomed and the unbrushed alike.
‘Not yet,’ said Yianni. ‘It might clear. We’ll get down closer and then maybe put it under tarps for tonight, take a long day tomorrow and see if we can get them all out before dark.’
‘All what?’ I asked. I knew what.
Yianni sighed and looked away to where the big rocks peered through the mist and then receded. ‘I don’t know yet. It’s a pit. A big pit. Soil changes suggest organic remains.’
‘Did it have one of those holes for holy water?’
He told me about those. When the Norse Greenlanders were too far from consecrated ground to make the trip for a burial, they buried the body on the farm and left a hole for the priest to pour holy water and consecrate the grave when he next passed. Particularly common with winter deaths, which most were, when the darkness made travelling almost impossible.
‘No. Surprising, but no.’
‘So we’re camping by a mass grave.’
‘I don’t know yet, Nina.’
‘What if they died of plague? You don’t want to start your own little outbreak, do you?’
He stood up. ‘I’m operating in accordance with the University’s health and safety guidelines. I have run digs before, you know. Is everyone finished with lunch?’
‘I’d like another look at my e-mail before we go back up,’ said Ben.
‘Later, all right? Let’s use the daylight. I’ll see you up there, OK?’
After a few paces he thinned and vanished into the mist.
Ruth got up and put her plate on top of Yianni’s.
‘I’ll go help. But Nina? They weren’t that stupid. Nobody buries victims of a virulent epidemic near their house and upstream of their water. You really don’t need to worry about plague.’
She too faded up the hill. Ben set his shoulders.
‘I don’t care what Yianni says, I’m going to have a quick look at the Post. He seems to think if we ignore this it might go away.’
Catriona ran her finger around the edge of her plate. ‘I think he thinks it’s not actually here in the first place. And that whether we ignore it or not will only change how well we work here.’
‘Yeah, well. It’s where I live and I want to know what’s going on.’
He ducked into Yianni’s tent.
‘What if,’ I said to Catriona, ‘what if it really spreads? What if we can’t get back? Ten days is a long time with this virus, right?’
She shook her head. ‘Honestly. This isn’t the Middle Ages. Remember SARS? Remember the anthrax after 9/11? The bird flu scare? It’ll be selling newspapers like there’s no tomorrow but I’d still put my money on war rather than pestilence to finish us off. It may even be just an excuse for war. Bet you anything the Americans announce that actually it’s another terrorist outrage. A sinister plague from the East. Come on. I need to get back up to Yianni’s not-a-mass-grave.’
‘It is, isn’t it?’
A guy line pinged behind me. Catriona and I froze, eyes locked. I turned my head slowly, shoulders stiff, to see a tall shape moving away from the finds tent into the mist.
‘See?’ I whispered. ‘See that? There?’
She followed my gaze. ‘Where?’
‘It’s gone. Maybe not far.’ I clutched her hand, warm and dry in my froggy cold fingers. ‘But you saw it?’
She looked away. ‘I don’t know. Maybe something. I can’t tell, in this fog.’
‘You heard it?’
‘Oh yes. I heard it all right. Maybe one of the sheep?’
Ben poked his head out of Yianni’s tent. ‘Heard what?
Don’t tell me you’re scaring yourselves. Bad enough with your dreams, Nina.’
‘What’s the news?’
‘Oh, it’s spreading. As it would. Though the death rate seems much lower than they were saying earlier. About thirty percent so far, mostly old people and babies. Still. I had an e-mail from my sister. They’re all OK.’
‘And in Britain?’ asked Catriona.
The stones twitched the whiteness and loomed in again.
‘Same. Spreading but lower mortality. Mostly in London. Are you going to check your e-mail?’
She hesitated. ‘Later. I’ll get back to work.’
‘Nina?’
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Leave the computer. Yianni’s not expecting me up there anyway.’
Yianni’s tent smelt of dirty socks and unwashed hair, and it was dark after the Disney brightness of my pink one. The only book was something scuffed and bent with gold lettering on the cover, and discarded clothes lined the sides. I squatted in the doorway, as if warming my hands at the laptop’s fire, and went straight to e-mail. The rest of the country can lie dying in the streets for all I care as long as you are all right.
The fact of your message warmed me but I do sometimes wish you felt able to be more open when you write. Without the reassurance of desire, your words have no heat, and I have to remember the way you looked at me when I showed you that dress for the garden party and what we did that last night in the flat. And time has passed since then; it’s like looking at old supervisor’s comments to convince yourself that the next chapter will be good. You have, I think, seen Cassandra. Have you? I feel very far from you. E-mail works well enough to semaphore your survival but love is not a virtual commodity. I miss you. I need you. I want you. And I write back telling you what fun we are having because I still fear that if you knew quite how much I miss and need and want, you might run for the hills, the very life of late nights in the office and ready meals that you are pursuing at the moment. Perhaps you like it without me? I often think I would like it without me. I could eat mass-market chocolate and sleep in without monstrous anxiety snapping at my feet. At weekends, perhaps, I could go to bed without having put my mind through a mangle for a thousand words of academic prose first. I could have sex without trying to hold my stomach in all the way through. Other people, I know, live with themselves in these circumstances, and some of them are less productive than me and have bigger stomachs than I do. I could understand how you might find the company of such a person, in the abstract, rather restful.
