To Dream of the Dead

29 Nutters

Dirty pink light had fallen on Jane’s face in the bathroom mirror. A drawn and worried face. A face reflecting the awareness that today could actually be more life-and-death crucial than she’d figured.

She’d awoken long before daylight, heartsick about selling out the Coleman’s Meadow Preservation Society — turned against her own people by the disgusting police state. Yet there was a painful logic in Mum’s argument about possibly sheltering someone who thought barbaric violence could further the cause. In the pre-dawn sludge, the slaughter of an old man and the taking of his head was real and frightening, and when she tried to summon the startling excitement of yesterday — the epiphany — something else came bobbing up like a cork in a toilet. Something Coops had said, in Coleman’s Meadow last night, about Bill Blore and Trench One.

… got it scheduled for early in the next series — and that starts in the New Year.

As she rolled out of bed, the implications came crunching into place. She had two university interviews set up for late January. If Bill Blore’s programme on Ledwardine was near the start of the new Trench One series, then the university guys doing the interviews would almost certainly have seen it.

Seen and heard Jane Watkins talking about Coleman’s Meadow. And they’d remember. As soon as they met her they’d remember. So this just had to be good. Didn’t it? However bad everything else was, she had to make this interview work for her.

By six-thirty, she was dressed and out there. When the dawn came, the signs were not too scary: a salmony sheen on the horizon, no menacing cloudplay. Certainly better than last night’s TV forecast had implied. Jane went to see the river and found him still dangerously high, brown and racing, clearly recalling what it was like to be young and hungry, and she reminded him that he was part of this, that he’d been around in the Bronze Age when the stones had been erected and Ledwardine had come into being.

She stood on the bridge… could lean over the wall and almost touch the rushing water. She needed some of that — his energy. Needed to sound enthusiastic and driven. But in an authoritative way. Not just some kid who’d accidentally stumbled on something of major importance that she didn’t really understand. Because she did understand, that was the whole point. She understood what the stones had meant. And what they meant now.

‘You OK?’ Mum said over breakfast.

‘Yeah. Fine.’

‘Hmm.’

Mum was in Saturday civvies, jeans with a hole in one knee and an old Gomer Parry Plant Hire sweatshirt.

‘No, really,’ Jane said. ‘I have to go for this, don’t I? The words bastards and don’t let them grind you down occur.’

‘Erm… my advice — not that I’ve ever exactly distinguished myself on TV, as you know, so maybe you can learn from my mistakes — is not to actually think about it too much beforehand. Know more or less what you want to say but don’t rehearse how you’re going to say it.’

‘No, I wouldn’t do that,’ Jane said.

Having just spent twenty minutes mouthing at herself in the mirror. Bill, I have to say I couldn’t believe it at first. It seemed just too perfect. But over the next couple of days I checked out all the points on the line, and it became clear to me that Coleman’s Meadow must’ve been a very significant location. So when the stones were actually found… no, I wasn’t too surprised, actually.

Wondering what the chances were of getting in a mention of Lucy Devenish, as the person who’d awakened in her this heightened awareness of the underlying landscape. Maybe Bill Blore’s crew could get a shot of Lucy’s grave.

‘And don’t arrive too early,’ Mum said, ‘or you’ll just be hanging about in the cold, getting more and more on edge.’

‘It’ll be fine,’ Jane said. ‘Look, I never got around to asking, with one thing and another, but were you able to check out Mathew Stooke? Like, apart from buying his book?’

‘Who told you about that?’

‘Mum, it’s on the desk. He’s a tosser, isn’t he? Next time I see that bloody Lensi—’

‘No! Don’t mention it. Don’t indicate you know who they are. It’s better if we don’t at this stage.’

‘Why?’

‘Because… I don’t know, really, something’s not right. Call it a feeling.’ Mum was admitting to feelings now? Be the full Traherne in no time at all. For some reason, Jane felt a little lighter.

‘We seem to be talking all round something here, don’t we?’ And Jane would have pushed harder, but time was short, and she needed to go up to the apartment and figure out what to wear that was casual but authoritative.

‘Go on,’ Mum said. ‘Make yourself look wonderful for the telly.’

In the end, Jane dressed down. Jeans and a big dark sweater. A smudge of make-up. Too glam, too sexy would give the wrong impression. Well, sexy was all right, in a cerebral way; when Bill Blore interviewed her, there should be a little chemistry. Bill liked women, was renowned for it.

Jane was cool with that.

She drank a mug of tea with extra sugar and Mum told her to break a leg. As she walked across the square, she felt destiny nudging her, the sensation of standing on the cusp of something. The red earth giving up its long- buried secrets, the Dinedor Serpent and the Old Stones of Ledwardine linked by ancient electricity and connecting with Jane’s own nervous system.

In the churchyard, she didn’t spend too long with Lucy, who would surely understand. Pausing only to give the shoulders of the gravestone one squeeze, for luck, before proceeding directly into the dank and dripping orchard.

She imagined a short, lyrical video-sequence of her and Bill following the ley, with music playing underneath — maybe Nick Drake’s ‘Hazey Jane 2’.

The oldest part of the orchard, gnarled and primeval-looking, was loaded with big balls of white-berried mistletoe. Perhaps she’d come back here before nightfall, with secateurs, and try to reach some. After all, Eirion would be here on Sunday. Feeling kind of turned on now, Jane spun towards the pale light at the end of the orchard, and…

Wow. If she’d thought it was crowded last night…

Standing under the exposed waxy sky, she was looking down at something like a reduced rock festival. More tents, an extra caravan, a camper van, the big crane… cars parked at all angles, including a police car. Big clusters of people turning Coleman’s Meadow into another village. A separate community had mushroomed overnight.

Jane counted three separate TV units, guys shouldering cameras, and a bunch of other men and women were hanging around the new galvanised gate by a smaller green caravan.

Adrenalin spurting, she ran down to where Neil Cooper was standing, on his own. Fair-haired, wafery Coops, jeans and a canvas shoulder bag — his day off, too, but who’d miss this?

‘Bloody hell, Coops, I had no idea there’d be all this…’

‘Jane.’ Coops taking Jane’s arm, drawing her away and saying nothing until they were behind the bloated bole of an old oak tree. ‘It’s not quite what you think.’

‘What isn’t?’

‘The media circus. Nothing to do with the excavation.’ Coops shedding his shoulder bag and undoing it. ‘It’s about this.’

Handing her a folded paper.