Remains of an Altar

Gomer, breathing hard, was feeling his way along an old barbed-wire fence, not the kind of fence you tried to climb over at night without a torch. He’d wanted to go back to the jeep for his lambing light, but Jane had been frantic by then, and anyway … there were headlamps on the JCB. She could see them at last through the trees, and the shape of the big yellow digger itself, monstrous now and brutal, an implement of scorched earth.

Gomer found the stile and tested its strength with both hands before climbing over and waiting to help Jane down. But Jane didn’t need any help and she hit the ground running, ripping the back of a hand on the bottom of the sign on which she could have read, if there’d been any light, Herefordshire Council Planning Department.

‘Bast—’

‘Janie—’

‘Stop it!’ Jane screamed. ‘You total bastards!’

Bursting into Coleman’s Meadow where they’d taken down a section of the new fencing to let the JCB in. The JCB that was approaching the middle of the meadow along twin bars of yellow-white headlamp beam. Moving in for another attack.

Jane ran out towards the digger – and hands grabbed her. The JCB reared up like a rampant dinosaur and its mud-flecked lights went spearing across the meadow towards Jane as she wrenched herself away, and then ricocheted from the yellow hard-hat worn by the man who’d held her arms.

‘Health and Safety regulations are very explicit,’ he said. ‘That’s as far as you go.’

Jane backed away, coughing, pulling hair out of her eyes, as he bent and picked up a lamp, throwing the beam full in her face.

‘Might’ve known,’ he said.

‘This is…’ She could hardly speak for the rage and the shock. ‘This is wrong. This is illegal. This is a crime against—’

‘Not wrong at all,’ Lyndon Pierce said, ‘and certainly not illegal. This is private land, and the man in the digger is the owner of the land. And also of the digger, as it happens.’

The lamp beam swung to one side to find Gomer. He was panting and his ciggy had gone.

‘By God, you en’t bloody changed, Lyndon, boy. En’t changed one bit.’

‘Not your problem, Mr Parry. I don’t know what you’re doing here.’ Pierce’s tone was remote; he didn’t look at Gomer. ‘But I strongly suggest you leave immediately and take this … girl with you before she gets into any more trouble. It’s not your business.’

‘En’t your business, either. You’re supposed to be a councillor, boy. Supposed to see both bloody sides.’

‘I’m not taking sides. I’m observing. I’m here as a member of the Herefordshire Council Planning Committee. An official … observer.’

He looked out across the meadow, and Jane followed his gaze. The digger had reversed back into a corner of the meadow, its blade up and retracted, its headlights illuminating what it had already done to Coleman’s Meadow, revealing the extent of the massacre.

‘Here I go now, in fact,’ Lyndon Pierce said. ‘Observing.’

Jane was too shattered to cry. It looked like pictures she’d seen of the Somme. More than half the central track had been dug up, ripped away. The surface turf torn off and dumped in rough spoil heaps, and deeper, more jagged furrows dug out where the ground was softer. Water coming up from somewhere, pooling in the glistening clay-sided trenches.

They’d systematically destroyed it. They’d all but obliterated the ley. They’d waited until it had got dark and the few protesters had gone and then they’d opened the fence and let in the JCB. Like letting a hungry fox into a chicken house, to do its worst.

The enemy was pointing at them across the meadow and Jane could see the shape of its driver, hunched behind the levers in the reinforced glass cab. Gerry Murray, presumably. Sitting there watching them now, waiting, an agent of the darkness.

‘Stop him.’ Jane’s fingers were sticky. ‘Stop him while you can. While there’s still some of the track left. Because it’s not going to look good for you tomorrow when … when the truth comes out.’

‘Truth?’

Pierce laughed. Jane felt the delta of blood washing down from the back of the hand she’d slashed on the sign, oozing between her fingers.

‘Jane, the only truth that’s coming out is the kind of truth that’ll be damaging to you and your mother and your mother’s hippie boyfriend. Now go home quietly before you make things worse.’

‘Like I’m really going to let you destroy an ancient monument?’

‘We’ve been there, Jane. This is no more an ancient monument than your friend Mr Parry.’

‘You’re just … you’re just a scumbag and a…’

All the names she wanted to spit at him, but that would just be abuse and childish, like the sad underage drivers you saw howling wanker at the traffic cops in all those cheap TV documentaries.

‘Why do you—’ She stared up at him, and then turned quickly away, feeling tear-pressure. ‘Why do you have to do this?’

‘I’ll remind you one more time,’ Pierce said, ‘that you’re on a development site and you’re not wearing protective clothing. If you don’t go, I’ll be calling the police to have you removed, and we’ll see how good that looks in the papers. Now be a good girl and let Mr Murray finish the preparation of his ground.’

‘Preparation? He hasn’t even got planning permission yet, even if it’s as good as a done deal. This is just sick, mindless … peevish … destruction. Why do you have to do this?’

‘Because of you, you stupid little—’ Pierce’s face coming at her, dark with evening-stubble. ‘What do you think all this fencing cost, to keep those cranks out? Eh? What if they come back tomorrow and there’s even more of them? What then?’

‘Well, good…’

‘No. Not good, Jane. Bad for all of us. Costly. So, to forestall the possibility of further public disturbance, Mr Murray took the entirely sensible decision to remove what our county archaeologists have formally confirmed was never there in the first place. And invited me, as the local representative, to come along and observe that no regulations were breached, and that’s what I’m doing. That’s it. All right?’

He turned away, adjusting his hard hat. He was wearing a khaki-coloured shirt and cargo trousers, like he was in the SAS or something, on a special high-risk mission.

‘So he invited you, is it?’ Gomer said.

‘I gotter say everything twice for you, is it, Mr Parry?’

‘Sure you din’t invite yourself? Strikes me this is just the sorter thing you’d think of all by yourself, that’s all.’

Lyndon Pierce didn’t reply.

‘Because, like, all you care about,’ Jane said, ‘is protecting your corrupt schemes and the bungs you’re getting from the guy who’s flogging his land to the supermarket firm, and the bungs you’re probably getting from the developers of the luxury, executive…’

Pierce turned slowly. Too late to stop now.

‘You’re just … totally fucking bent. Just like your dad. With your crap Marbella- style villa and your naff swimming pool and your … You couldn’t lie straight in bed.’

Gomer said quietly, ‘Janie…’

‘Right…’

Pierce turning to Gomer, the lamp under his face, uplighting it, the way kids did to turn themselves into monsters.

‘Now, I want you to remember this, Mr Parry. First off, I don’t give a fig what this nasty little girl says, on account she’s too young to think of any of it for herself—’

‘Like fuck she is!’