The Lives She Left Behind (12 page)

‘But they might be going to Pen?’

‘They might be going to Timbuktu for all I know. Come on, kid. Which one of them’s got her hooks into you?’

‘I don’t know,’ said Luke. ‘I can’t tell.’ He was staring out of the window avidly, thinking he might see them walking along the roadside or crossing a
field.

A gurgling noise which was a chuckle filtered through years of smoke and beer made its slow way out of Dozer’s throat. ‘Can’t tell? They’re not exactly identical
triplets. If it was me, I’d go for Lucy. I was always one for the blondes. Second choice, Jo. Third choice, Ali. Mind you, if you picked Ali you’d get fed regular plus you
wouldn’t have to worry about other blokes. Anyway, Ali’s mad keen on the digging – has to be with a mother like that. I think the others just came along for the ride, plus the
chance of boys maybe. They definitely had an eye for Rupe’s students.’ Dozer chose his words deliberately. He could see something desperate in the boy next to him. He feared some sort
of puppy love was stirring and it was clear to him that the students had a few years’ head start on the road to manhood. His words washed past Luke. The warning was irrelevant. The feeling
inside him was based on some utter and inexplicable certainty.

Before you ever love, you can dream of love. Jo was in the delight of such a dream, held by a vibrant boy who laughed and whispered poetry in her ear. She woke with two lines
running through her head.

Someone had shaken her and the poem had run away, leaving a warm residue which turned to waking disappointment as she saw dawn light filtering through the tent, ancient bugs
crawling across the damp nylon just above her. She rolled over, thinking Lucy or Ali had woken her, but they were curled up asleep.

‘It wasn’t them, it was me,’ said Gally’s voice clearly in her head. ‘Come with me.’

Gally led her up the hill as if they were hand in hand. Jo stared ahead, wondering if the police were up there, if they had stayed all night, or whether they had trusted to their tape barriers
in the darkness. They followed a narrow trail, shunning the path – a way made by deer or badgers or foxes that snaked up the steeper contours and brought them to the terrace. There, just
ahead, were the brown stripes of the two trenches. Jo walked to the place where she had been working, knelt and reached tentatively down with her fingertips extended, holding back just short of the
earth as if afraid. She thought this must be why she had been brought here. Driven by a craving for that feeling which had come to her the day before, she touched her fingers to the dry surface but
there was just the crumbling earth, inanimate with the anticlimax of finding absolutely nothing there.

‘No,’ said Gally to her. ‘That was not why. Sit down. Breathe easily. Breathe deeply.’ Jo sat on a tree stump, did what she was told, slowed her breath, searching the
landscape.

‘Do not try so hard,’ said the voice. ‘Look slowly. Clear away the trees.’ And she found to her surprise that she knew how to do it. She used her eyes like a brush,
swinging her gaze slowly around, wiping the trees away to let in the dawn sky and the bright east off to the left. As the trees faded, something obstinate remained – plants in rows, lower.
When she let them stay they grew a crop of golden green globes and she knew them for vines, and Gally nudged her to a brief vision of men stooping to tend them – men in monks’
robes.

‘Now leave it to me,’ Gally whispered inside her. ‘Watch.’

The vines had withered. Young trees grew again, little more than saplings, and the sun moved back on its course, sinking just below the eastern rim so that only dawn’s fingers were in the
sky. Men were busy all around her, men she could not see to start with, but then she could smell their sharp sweat, see the dark blades of shovels arcing back and forth in the dim light, see the
shrinking earth pile as they laboured to bury it out of sight, hurrying to leave this dangerous place. She turned to stare back down the slope, hair prickling, a lookout, watching for the enemy:
And behind her, watching at the other side, she felt the vast comfort of his presence – the other half who made her whole.

‘You were here,’ Gally said quietly. ‘More than once. Long ago.’

Then she heard voices below, saw other men moving up through the trees, men in uniform, and opened her mouth to hiss a warning before reality intervened and she knew she was back among the
modern trees, on the edge of the terrace where she should not be, where the old explosives oozed danger in the bunker below and these men were coming to deal with it. Love abandoned her again as
sadly as in waking from her earlier dream, and she crept down the hillside, picking her way through the cover, anxious to avoid discovery.

Around the corner of the contour, safely away from them, she stopped to address with the swirl of sensation and memory in her head and found Gally with her. ‘You know what this is,’
said Gally.

‘No I don’t.’ She said it out loud.

‘Of course you do. Last night, round the fire, you told our story. How else did that happen?’

‘It was the darkness and the woodsmoke.’

‘Yes, but you opened your mind and remembered and you told them all around the fire. Why would you remember if not for love? Love is the fuel that fires memory. Now you must find
him.’

‘I can’t remember him,’ she wailed.

‘You can. He was here,’ said her voice.

‘But that was long ago. You said so.’

‘That was yesterday,’ said the voice. ‘He touched the earth as you touched the earth and you felt each other.’ And Jo gasped as she understood the full meaning of that
moment. ‘Go to him. You know where to go.’

Jo shook her head.

‘Yes you do,’ Gally insisted. ‘Do it by yourself. You will find me there too.’ And she seemed to walk away.

Left alone, Jo climbed down the hill on the far side to the camp and circled around through the fields. She sat in the empty marquee which slowly filled in ones and twos of quiet and
disappointed diggers until Lucy and Ali joined her.

‘Where have you been?’ Lucy asked.

She didn’t want to say. ‘I got up early.’

‘I can’t bear this.’ Ali was looking around. ‘It’s like everyone is already halfway home in their heads.’

‘Real life is leaking in,’ Lucy said. ‘Our island is crumbling.’

Andy and Conrad came into the tent and heaped bowls full of cereal as if to emphasise that they, at least, still had work to do.

‘So what about you three?’ Conrad asked Ali, staring at her intently.

‘We’ll go back home, I suppose.’

Conrad frowned and that was when Jo sowed the seed of the plan that had come to her on the way down the hill. ‘I don’t see why,’ she said. ‘My mother’s away. Ali,
your parents are in Ireland, aren’t they?’

‘Yes. Mum’s digging, Dad’s painting – if she lets him.’

‘Lucy, where have yours gone?’

‘Who knows?’ Lucy said theatrically. ‘I’ll tell you when the postcard comes,’ although she knew perfectly well that they were in Tuscany.

‘So there’s no point in going home, is there?’ asked Jo.

Ali looked uncomfortable. Jo knew she was worrying that her mother would be cross if she found out the dig had ended and they had stayed away. She also knew Ali didn’t want to admit that
in front of Conrad.

‘It’s a pity there isn’t another dig we could go to,’ Jo said, and Conrad picked it up, just as she had hoped he would.

‘But there is,’ he said eagerly. ‘There’s this next one we’re going to when we’ve finished here – the place Rupert was talking about last night.
What’s it called? I could ask him. I bet he wouldn’t mind if you came along. That would be really super.’

‘Would it?’ said Ali cautiously, but her face was shining.

‘Yes,’ said Jo quickly, ‘and you might say that the dig hasn’t ended. It’s just moving somewhere else. That sounds a really good idea.’

‘Why not?’ said Andy, putting his arm round Lucy’s shoulders. ‘We should be there quite soon. I can’t see this one taking more than another week. Come on, guys,
let’s go and ask him.’

Jonno went with them and the girls saw them standing at the other end of the tent waiting for Rupert’s attention. He was talking to an army officer.

‘A week?’ said Lucy. ‘What are we going to do for a week? Hang around waiting for them?’

‘We could go there.’

‘Where? To the place with the three castles, whatever it’s called?’

‘Pen Selwood,’ Jo told her. ‘That’s what it’s called. Yes, we could go there. I’d like to see it.’

‘How would we get there? Is there a train?’

‘We could walk,’ said Jo.

‘Walk? How far is it?’

Jo looked off to the north-east. ‘A day or two going slowly, I expect,’ she replied. ‘We’ve got nothing else to do, have we? Why don’t we go by the fields and the
paths and see the country the way it’s meant to be seen?’

Ali was frowning. ‘We’ll have to eat. I haven’t got much money.’

‘Don’t worry,’ said Lucy, ‘I have,’ and they looked at her in surprise. Generosity was not usually her strongest quality. ‘I can lend you some,’ she
added.

The students came back. Conrad was beaming. ‘He says yes. He can’t say how long we’ll be here but probably a week or so. If you don’t mind shifting dirt he says
he’ll feed you. How about that?’

So they said all their goodbyes and studied Ali’s map. It was twenty-five miles from Montacute to Pen Selwood. ‘We could do that in a day or a day and a bit,’ said Ali.

‘Leaving us six days hanging about in a place that barely shows on the map. Why don’t we go somewhere fun first?’ Lucy pointed. ‘Look, Glastonbury. That’s all magic
and King Arthur and stuff. Let’s go there.’

It was further north, in the wrong direction, at a tangent to the way her heart demanded, but Jo didn’t argue. It got them moving and committed and once they were on
their way, she was sure they would make it to Pen Selwood. Right from the start, the journey did not go well. Lucy’s rucksack straps and her unsuitable shoes and her thin socks all combined
to slow them to a frequently interrupted crawl. They were still miles from Glastonbury when evening came and they began casting around for somewhere to camp. The countryside, which had seemed so
open, now took on an unexpected inaccessibility. The fields contained sheep or cows or crops. They came to a wood and saw signs saying
PRIVATE SHOOTING. KEEP OUT.
A track
led around the wood but beyond it was a farm with windows that seemed to stare at them suspiciously. Back on the road, they walked on until they came to a field that had no animals and no crops,
just grass, so they climbed the gate, walked to a corner where the hedge shielded them from the road and put up the tent. They ate the pasties they had bought on the way and fell asleep,
exhausted.

Engine noise and a voice, shouting, woke them in the morning. They unzipped the flap. A tractor was parked just inside the field and a young man was standing outside the tent shouting,
‘Out, out! You must get out!’

Lucy crawled out and stood upright, facing him. She was wearing a long T-shirt and not much else and he seemed disconcerted. ‘Go,’ he said, ‘Now. I must pray.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘I must pray. Here.’ He was pale-skinned, pale haired, thin.

‘You’re not making sense,’ she said. ‘We’re not doing any harm. Go and pray somewhere else. We’re going to pack up in a minute.’

He held out his wrist to her, tapping his watch. ‘Must pray. Right now. You. Go away.’

‘You’re very rude,’ said Lucy. Ali and Jo were out of the tent, collapsing it and packing away the parts in their backpacks.

He held up his hands as if in invocation and said something incomprehensible.

‘You’re not from this country, are you?’ asked Lucy.

‘Estonia,’ he said.

‘I don’t know where that is, but we don’t pray in our fields. We grow things in them and, if we want to, we sleep in them, so go and boil your head.’

‘Come on,’ said Ali. ‘Leave it, Lucy. Give us a hand.’

‘I don’t see why I should leave it. He’s got a nerve, talking to us like that.’

The young man had retreated to his tractor and was fiddling around with the equipment mounted on the back. He pulled down two long arms which stuck out at the side and climbed up to check the
contents of the plastic tank mounted behind.

They walked out of the field, Lucy looking pointedly in the other direction while Ali and Jo waved apologies at the man, who gave them an uncertain smile and waved back.

‘Halfwit,’ said Lucy. ‘He should go back to Esty . . . wherever it was and do his praying.’

‘You saw that thing on his tractor?’ Ali asked.

‘Yes.’

‘I think that was a sprayer.’

‘So?’

‘He was saying “I must spray.” He didn’t want to spray us.’

There was a long silence after that.

‘Well, he should speak English better,’ said Lucy in the end.

‘That’s how fights start.’

‘What?’ Lucy swung round to look at Jo, who had spoken as if her attention was elsewhere.

‘Two people up against each other, and one doesn’t know the language well. Normally we have all these tricks to make our point. Word tricks. We can wheedle and we can half-joke and
when it gets too serious we know just how much to back off, but not if we don’t know the ins and the outs of the language. That’s how fights start. That’s how wars start. Not
because people hate each other but because the wrong words drag them to a crisis.’

‘Where did that come from?’ asked Lucy in surprise.

‘Oh,’ said Jo. ‘Someone told me that once.’

Glastonbury was not quite what they expected. They soon tired of the shops selling crystals and plastic swords and resin models of Merlin. They shared two sandwiches between
them for lunch and went into the Abbey ruins.

‘Look. This is where they buried Arthur and Guinevere,’ Lucy declared, staring at the sign in front of her. ‘I read about it in that shop. They found a huge oak coffin with two
skeletons and a lead cross with lettering saying it was them. That was 1191, it says here. Then they buried them right here in a black marble tomb in 1278. Isn’t that amazing?’