Читать книгу The Hundred and Ninety-Nine Steps - Michel Faber - Страница 5
ОглавлениеTHE HAND CARESSING HER CHEEK was gentle but disquietingly large – as big as her whole head, it seemed. She sensed that if she dared open her lips to cry out, the hand would cease stroking her face and clasp its massive fingers over her mouth.
‘Just let it happen,’ his voice murmured, hot, in her ear. ‘It’s going to happen anyway. There’s no point resisting.’
She’d heard those words before, should have known what was in store for her, but somehow her memory had been erased since the last time he’d held her in his arms. She closed her eyes, longing to trust him, longing to rest her head in the pillowy crook of his arm, but at the last instant, she glimpsed sideways, and saw the knife in his other hand. Her scream was gagged by the blade slicing deep into her throat, severing everything right through to the bone of her spine, plunging her terrified soul into pitch darkness.
Bolt upright in bed, Siân clutched her head in her hands, expecting it to be lolling loose from her neck, a grisly hallowe’en pumpkin of bloody flesh. The shrill sound of screaming whirled around her room. She was alone, as always, in the early dawn of a Yorkshire summer, clutching her sweaty but otherwise unharmed head in the topmost bedroom of the White Horse and Griffin Hotel. Outside the attic window, the belligerent chorus of Whitby’s seagull hordes shrieked on and on. To other residents of the hotel (judging by their rueful comments at the breakfast tables), these birds sounded like car alarms or circular saws or electric drills penetrating hardwood. Only to Siân, evidently, did they sound like her own death cries as she was being decapitated.
It was true that ever since the accident in Bosnia, Siân’s dreams had treated her pretty roughly. For years on end she’d had her ‘standard-issue’ nightmare – the one in which she was chased through dark alleyways by a malevolent car. But at least in that dream she’d always wake up just before she fell beneath the wheels, whisked to the safety of the waking world, still flailing under the tangled sheets and blankets of her bed. Ever since she’d moved to Whitby, however, her dreams had lost what little good taste they’d once had, and now Siân was lucky if she got out of them alive.
The White Horse and Griffin had a plaque out front proudly declaring it had won The Sunday Times Golden Pillow Award, but Siân’s pillow must be immune to the hotel’s historically sedative charm. Tucked snugly under the ancient sloping roof of the Mary Ann Hepworth room, with a velux window bringing her fresh air direct from the sea, Siân still managed to toss sleepless for hours before finally being lured into nightmare by the man with the giant hands. She rarely woke without having felt the cold steel of his blade carving her head off.
This dream of being first seduced, then murdered – always by a knife through the neck – had ensconced itself so promptly after her arrival in Whitby that Siân had asked the hotel proprietor if … if he happened to know how Mary Ann Hepworth had met her death. Already embarrassed that a science postgraduate like herself should stoop to such superstitious probings, she’d blushed crimson when he informed her that the room was named after a ship.
In the cold light of a Friday morning, swallowing hard through a throat she couldn’t quite believe was still in one piece, Siân squinted at her watch. Ten to six. Two-and-a-bit hours to fill before she could start work. Two-and-a-bit hours before she could climb the one hundred and ninety-nine steps to the abbey churchyard and join the others at the dig.
A bath would pass the time, and would soak these faint mud-stains off her forearms, these barely perceptible discolorations ringing her flesh like alluvial deposits. But she was tired and irritable and there was a pain in her left hip – a nagging, bone-deep pain that had been getting worse and worse lately – and she was in no mood to drag herself into the tub. What a lousy monk or nun she would have made, if she’d lived in medieval times. So reluctant to subject her body to harsh discipline, so lazy about leaving the warmth of her bed …! So frightened of death.
This pain in her hip, and the hard lump that was manifesting in the flesh of her thigh just near where the pain was – it had to be bad news, very bad news. She should get it investigated. She wouldn’t, though. She would ignore it, bear it, distract herself from it by concentrating on her work, and then one day, hopefully quite suddenly, it would be all over.
Thirty-four. She was, as of a few weeks ago, over half the age that good old Saint Hilda reached when she died. Seventh-century medical science wasn’t quite up to diagnosing the cause, but Siân suspected it was cancer that had brought an end to Hilda’s illustrious career as Whitby’s founding abbess. Her photographic memory retrieved the words of Bede: ‘It pleased the Author of our salvation to try her holy soul by a long sickness, in order that her strength might be made perfect in weakness.’
Made perfect in weakness! Was there a touch of bitter sarcasm in the Venerable Bede’s account? No, almost certainly not. The humility, the serene stoicism of the medieval monastic mind – how terrifying it was, and yet how wonderful. If only she could think like that, feel like that, for just a few minutes! All her fears, her miseries, her regrets, would be flushed out of her by the pure water of faith; she would see herself as a spirit distinct from her treacherous body, a bright feather on the breath of God.
All very well, but I’m still not having a bath, she thought grouchily.
Through the velux window she could see a trio of seagulls, hopping from roof-tile to roof-tile, chortling at her goose-pimpled, wingless body as she threw aside the bedclothes. She dressed hurriedly, got herself ready for the day. The best thing about hands-on archaeology like the Whitby dig was that no-one expected anybody to look glamorous, and you could wear the same old clothes day in, day out. She’d have to smarten herself up when she returned to her teaching rounds in the autumn; there was nothing like a lecture hall full of students, some of them young males, scrutinising you as if to say, ‘Where did they dig her up?’ to focus your mind on what skirt and top you ought to wear.
Before descending the stairs to the breakfast room, Siân took a swig from the peculiar little complimentary bottle of mineral water and looked out over the roof-tops of Whitby’s east side. The rising sun glowed yellow and orange on the terracotta ridges. Obscured by the buildings and a litter of sails and boat-masts, the water of the river Esk twinkled indigo. Deep in Siân’s abdomen, a twinge of pain made her wince. Was it indigestion, or something to do with the lump in her hip? She mustn’t think about it. Go away, Venerable Bede! ‘In the seventh year of her illness,’ he wrote of Saint Hilda, ‘the pain passed into her innermost parts.’ Whereupon, of course, she died.
Siân went downstairs to the breakfast room, hoping that if she could find something to eat, the pain in her innermost parts might settle down. It was much too early, though, and the room was dim and deserted, with tea-towels shrouding the cereal boxes and the milk jug empty. Siân considered eating a banana, but it was the last one in the bowl and she felt, absurdly, that this would make the act sinful somehow. Instead she ate a couple of grapes and wandered around the room, touching each identically laid, melancholy table with her fingertips. She seated herself at one, thinking of the Benedictine monks and nuns in their refectories, forbidden to speak except for the reciting of Holy Scripture. Dreamily pretending she was one of them, she lifted her hands into the pale light and gestured in the air the mute signals for fish, for bread, for wine.
‘Are you all right?’
Siân jerked, almost knocking a teacup off the table.
‘Yes, yes,’ she assured the Horse and Griffin’s kitchen-maid, large as life in the doorway. ‘Fine, thank you.’ She sighed. ‘Just going batty.’
‘I don’t wonder,’ said the kitchen-maid. ‘All them bodies.’
‘Bodies?’
‘The skeletons you’ve been diggin’ up.’ The girl made a face. ‘Sixty of ’em, I read in the Whitby Gazette.’
‘Sixty graves. We haven’t actually—’
‘D’you ’ave to touch ’em? I’d be sickened off. You wear gloves, I ’ope.’
Siân smiled, shook her head. The girl’s look of horrified awe beamed at her across the breakfast room like a ray, and she basked shyly in it: Siân the daredevil. For the sake of the truth, she ought to disabuse this girl of her fantasy of archaeologists rooting elbow-deep in grisly human remains, and tell her that the dig was really very like gardening except less eventful. But instead, she raised her hands and wiggled the fingers, as if to say, Ordinary mortals cannot know what I have touched.
‘Braver than me, you are,’ said the girl, unveiling the milk.
To help time pass, Siân crossed the bridge from the less corrupted east side to the more newfangled west, and strolled along Pier Road towards the sea. Thinly gilded with sunlight, the façades of the amusement arcades and clairvoyants’ cabins looked almost grand, their windows and shuttered doors deflecting the glare. Siân dawdled in Marine Parade to peer through the window of what, until 1813, had been the Whitby Commercial Newsroom. ‘The Award-Winning Dracula Experience’ said the poster, followed by a list of attractions, including voluptuous female vampires and Christopher Lee’s cape.
The fish quay, deserted just now, was nevertheless infested with loitering seagulls. They wandered around aimlessly in the sunrise, much as the town’s young men would do after sunset, or simply snoozed on top of crates and the roofs of the moored boats.
Siân walked to the lighthouse, then left the terra firma of Aislaby sandstone to tread the timber deck of the pier’s end. Careful not to snag the heels of her shoes on the gaps in the wood, she allowed herself the queasy thrill of peeking at the restless waves churning far beneath her feet. She wasn’t sure if she could swim anymore; it had been a long time.
She stood at the very end of the west pier and cupped her hand across her brow to look over at the east one. The two piers were like outstretched arms curving into the ocean, to gather boats from the wild waters of the North Sea into the safety of Whitby harbour. Siân was standing on a giant fingertip.
She consulted her watch and walked back to the mainland. Her work was on the other side.
Ascending the East Cliff, half-way up the one hundred and ninety-nine stone steps, Siân paused for a breather. Much as she loved to walk, she’d overdone it, perhaps, so early in the day. She should keep in mind that instead of going to sit at a desk now, she was going to spend the whole day digging in the earth.
Siân traced the imperfections of the stone step with her shoe, demarcating the erosion caused by the foot traffic of centuries. On just this spot, this wide plateau-like step amongst many narrow ones, the townspeople of ancient Whitby laid down the coffins they must carry up to the churchyard, and had paused, black-clad and red-faced, before resuming their doleful ascent. Only now that tourists and archaeologists had finally taken the place of mourners did these steps no longer accommodate dead people – apart from the occasional obese American holiday-maker who collapsed with a heart attack before reaching the hallowed photo-opportunity.
Siân peered down towards Church Street and saw a man jogging – no, not jogging, running – towards the steps. At his side, a dog – a gorgeous animal, the size of a spaniel perhaps, but with a lovely thick coat, like a wolf’s. The man wasn’t bad-looking himself, broad-shouldered and well-muscled, pounding the cobbled surface of the street with his expensive-looking trainers. He was dressed in shorts and a loose, thin sweatshirt, a shivery proposition in the early morning chill, but he was obviously well up to it. His face was calm as he ran, his dark brown hair, free of sweat, flopping back and forth across his brow. The dog looked up at him frequently as he ran, revealing the vanilla and caramel colouring in its mane.
I want, I want, I want, thought Siân, then turned away, blushing. Thirty-four years old, and still thinking like a child! Saint Hilda would have been ashamed of her. And what exactly was she hankering after, anyway: the man or the dog? She wasn’t even sure.
Another glance at her watch confirmed there was still a little while to fill before the first of her colleagues was likely to roll up. They all slept soundly, she gathered, in spite of the dawn chorus.
‘Hello-o!’
She turned. The handsome young man was sprinting up the hundred and ninety-nine steps, as easily as if he were on flat ground. His dog was bounding ahead, narrowing the distance to Siân two steps at a time. For an instant Siân felt primeval fear at the approach of a powerful fanged creature, then relaxed as the dog scudded to a halt and sat to attention in front of her, panting politely, its head tilted to one side, just like a dog on a cheesy greeting card.
‘He won’t hurt you!’ said the man, catching up, panting a little himself now.
‘I can see that,’ she said, hesitantly reaching forward to stroke the dog’s mane.
‘He’s got an eye for the ladies,’ said the man.
‘Nothing personal, then.’
The man came to a halt one step below her, so as not to intimidate her with his tallness: he must be six foot three, at least. With every breath his pectorals swelled into his shirt in two faint haloes of sweat, and faded again.
‘You’re very fit,’ she said, trying to keep her tone the same as if she were saying, ‘You’re out and about very early.’
‘Well, if you don’t use it,’ he shrugged, ‘you lose it.’
The dog was becoming quietly ecstatic, pushing his downy black brow up towards Siân’s palm, following her fingers with his eyes, hoping she would get around to stroking the back of his head, the right ear, the left, the part of the right ear she’d missed the first time.
‘What sort of dog is he?’
‘Finnish Lapphund,’ said the man, squatting on his haunches, as if seeking to qualify for a bit of stroking himself.
‘Beautiful.’
‘A hell of a lot of work.’
She knelt, carefully so that he wouldn’t notice any problem with her left leg. ‘Doesn’t look it,’ she said, stroking the dog’s back all the way to his plushly fringed tail. All three of them were eye to eye now.
‘You bring out his contemplative side, obviously,’ the man remarked, grinning. ‘With me, it’s a different story. I’ll be an Olympic runner by the time he’s through with me.’
Siân stroked on and on, a little self-conscious about the ardour with which she was combing the creature’s sumptuous pelt. ‘You must have known what you were taking on when you got him,’ she suggested.
‘Well, no, he was actually my father’s dog. My father died three weeks ago.’
Siân stopped stroking. ‘Oh, I’m sorry.’
‘No need. He and I weren’t close.’ The dog, bereft of caresses, was poking his snout in the air, begging for more. The man obliged, ruffling the animal’s ears, pulling the furry face towards his. ‘I didn’t like our dad much, did I, hmm? Grumpy old man, wasn’t ’e?’
Siân noticed the size of the man’s hands: unusually large. A superstitious chill tickled her spine, like a tiny trickle of water. She distracted herself from it by noting the estuary twang of the man’s accent.
‘Did you come up from London?’
‘Yeah.’ He frowned a little, intent on proving he could please the dog as much as the next pair of hands. ‘To bury the old man. And to sort out the house. Haven’t decided what I’ll do yet. It’s in Loggerhead’s Yard, so it’s worth a mint. I might sell it; I might live in it. As a building, it’s a hell of a lot nicer than my flat in West Kilburn.’ He cast a deprecating glance back at the town, as if to add, Except of course it’s in bloody Whitby.
‘Did you live here as a kid?’
‘Many, many, long, long years,’ he affirmed, in a querulous tone of weary melodrama. ‘Couldn’t get out fast enough.’
Siân puzzled over the two halves of his statement, and couldn’t help thinking there was a flaw in his logic somewhere.
‘I like this place myself,’ she said. It surprised her to hear herself saying it – given the nightmares and the insomnia, she had good reason to associate Whitby with misery. But it was true: she liked the place.
‘But you’re not from here, are you?’
‘No. I’m an archaeologist, working at the dig.’
‘Cool! The sixty skeletons, right?’
‘Among other things, yes.’ She looked away from him, to register her disapproval of his sensationalist instincts, but if he noticed, he didn’t give a toss.
‘Wow,’ he said. ‘Gothic.’
‘Anglian, actually, as far as we can tell.’
Her attempt to put him in his place hung in the air between them, sounding more and more snooty as she replayed it in her head. She returned her attention to the dog, trying to salvage things by stroking the parts the man wasn’t stroking.
‘What’s his name?’
He hesitated for a moment. ‘Hadrian.’
She snorted helplessly. ‘That’s … that’s an exceptionally crap name. For any dog, but especially this one.’
‘Isn’t it!’ he beamed. ‘My dad was a Roman history buff, you see.’
‘And your name?’
Again he hesitated. ‘Call me Mack.’
‘Short for something?’
‘Magnus.’ His pale blue eyes narrowed. ‘Latin for “great”. Grisly, isn’t it?’
‘Grisly?’
‘Sounds like I’ve got a big head or something.’
‘I’ll reserve judgement on that. It’s a fine, ancient name, anyway.’
‘You would say that, wouldn’t you?’
The familiarity of his tone worried her a bit. What delicate work it was, this business of conversing with strangers of the other sex! No wonder she hardly ever attempted it anymore …
‘What do you mean?’ she said.
‘You know, being an archaeologist and all that.’
‘I’m not actually a fully-fledged archaeologist. Still studying.’
‘Oh? I would’ve thought …’ He caught himself before he could say ‘at your age’ or anything like that, but the implication stabbed straight into Siân – straight into her innermost parts, so to speak. Yes, damn it, she didn’t look like a peachy young thing anymore. What she’d gone through in Bosnia – and since – was written and underlined on her face. “It pleased the Author of our salvation …” Pleased Him to put her body and soul through Hell. In order that her strength might be made perfect in weakness. In order that people she’d only just met would think she was awfully old to be studying for a degree.
‘I would’ve thought archaeology was a hands-on kind of thing,’ he said.
‘So it is. I’m a qualified conservator, actually, specialising in the preservation of paper and parchment. I just fancied a change, thought I should get out more. There’s a nice mixture of people at this dig. Some have been archaeologists for a million years. Some are just kids, getting their first pay-packet.’
‘And then there’s you.’
‘Yes, then there’s me.’
He was staring at her; in fact, both he and his dog were staring at her, and in much the same way, too: eyes wide and sincere, waiting for her to give them the next piece of her.
‘I’m Siân,’ she said, at last.
‘Lovely name. Meaning?’
‘Sorry?’
‘Siân. In Welsh, it means … ?’
She racked her brains for the derivation of her name. ‘I don’t think it means anything much. Jane, I suppose. Just plain Jane.’
‘You’re not plain,’ he spoke up immediately, grateful for the chance to make amends.
To hide her embarrassment, she heaved herself to her feet. ‘Well, it’s nearly time I started work.’ And she steeled herself for the remaining hundred steps.
‘Can I walk with you as far as the church? There’s a run I can do with Hadrian near there, back down to the town …’
‘Sure,’ she said lightly. He mustn’t see her limping. She would do what she could to prevent his attention straying below her waist.
‘So…’ she said, as they set off together, the dog scampering ahead, then scooting back to circle them. ‘Now that your father’s funeral’s over, do you have much more sorting out to do?’
‘It’s finished, really. But I’ve got a research paper to write, for my final year of Medicine. So, I’m using Dad’s house as a kind of … solitary confinement. To get on with it, you know. There’s a lot of distractions in London. Even worse distractions than this fellow …’ And he aimed a slow, playful kick at Hadrian.
‘You’re partaking of a fine Whitby tradition, then,’ said Siân. ‘Think of those monks and nuns sitting in their bare cells, reading and scribing all day.’
He laughed. ‘Oh, I’m sure they got up to a hell of a lot more than that.’
Was this bawdy crack, and the wink that accompanied it, supposed to have any relevance to the two of them, or was it just the usual cynicism that most people had about monastic life? Probably just the usual cynicism, because when they ascended to the point where the turrets of Whitby Abbey were visible, he said: ‘Ah! The lucrative ruins!’ He flung his right arm forward, unfurling his massive hand in a grandiose gesture. ‘See Whitby Abbey and die!’
Siân felt her hackles rise, yet at the same time she was tickled by his theatricality. She’d always detested shy, cringing men.
‘If the Abbey’d had a bit more money over the centuries,’ she retorted, ‘it wouldn’t be ruins.’
‘Oh come on,’ he teased. ‘Ruins are where the real money is, surely? People love it.’ He mimicked an American sightseer posing for his camera-toting wife: ‘“Take a pitcha now, Wilma, of me wid dese here ruins of antiquiddy behind me!”’
Squinting myopically, acting the buffoon, he ought to have looked foolish, but his clowning only served to accentuate how handsome he was. His irreverent grin, and the way he inhabited his body with more grace than his gangly frame ought to allow, were an attractive combination for Siân – a combination she’d been attracted to before, almost fatally. She’d have to be careful with this young man, that’s for sure, if she didn’t want a re-run of … of the Patrick fiasco.
‘Antiquity is exciting,’ she said. ‘It’s good that people are willing to come a long way to see it. They walk up these stone stairs towards that abbey, and they feel they’re literally following in the footsteps of medieval monks and ancient kings. They see those turrets poking up over the headland, and it takes them back eight hundred years …’
‘Ah, but that thing up there isn’t the real Whitby Abbey, is it? It’s a reconstruction: some tourist body’s idea of what a medieval abbey should look like.’
‘That’s not true.’
‘Didn’t it all fall down ages ago, and they built it up in completely the wrong shape?’
‘No, that’s not true,’ she insisted, feeling herself tempted to argue heatedly with a complete stranger – something she hadn’t done since Patrick. She ought to dismiss his ignorance with the lofty condescension it deserved, but instead she said, ‘Come up and I’ll show you.’
‘What?’ he said, but she was already quickening her pace. ‘Wait!’
She stumped ahead, leading him past Saint Mary’s churchyard, past the cliffside trail to Caedmon’s Trod – the alternative path back to the town below, along which he’d meant to run with Hadrian. Teeth clenched with effort, she stumped up another flight of steps leading to the abbey.
‘It’s all right, I believe you!’ Magnus protested as he dawdled in her wake, hoping she’d come round, but she led him straight on to the admission gate. He baulked at the doorway, only to see his cheerfully disloyal dog trotting across the threshold.
‘Bastard,’ he muttered as he followed.
Inside, there was a sign warning visitors that all pets must be on a leash, and there was a man at the admissions counter waiting to be handed £1.70. Siân, so used to wandering freely in and out of the abbey grounds that she’d forgotten there was a charge for non-archaeologists, paused to take stock. Mack’s running shorts, whatever else they might contain, clearly had no provision for a wallet.
‘He’s with me,’ she declared, and led the hapless Magnus past the snack foods and pamphlets, through the portal to antiquity. It all happened so fast, Hadrian was dashing across the turf, already half-way to the 12th century, before the English Heritage man could say a word.
Siân stood in the grassy emptiness of what had once been the abbey’s nave. The wind flapped at her skirt. She pointed up at the towering stone arches, stark and skeletal against the sky. The thought of anyone – well, specifically this man at her side – being immune to the primitive grandeur and the tragic devastation of this place, provoked her to a righteous lecture.
‘Those three arches there,’ she said, making sure he was looking where her finger pointed (he was – and so was his dog), ‘those arches are originally from the south wall, yes, and when they were reconstructed in the 1920s, they were propped up against the northern boundary wall, yes. Rather odd, I admit. But it’s all the original masonry, you know. And at least those arches are safe now. We’d love to restore them to their original position, but they’re better off where they are than in a pile of rubble – or don’t you think so?’
‘I’m sorry, I’m sorry!’ he pleaded facetiously. ‘I didn’t know I was treading on your toes …’
‘I have some books and brochures that explain everything, the whole history,’ she said. ‘You can read those – I’ll give them to you. A nice parcel. Loggerhead’s Yard, wasn’t it?’
‘Oh, but no, really,’ he grimaced, flushing with embarrassment. ‘I should buy them myself.’
‘Nonsense. You’re welcome to them.’
‘But … but they’re yours. You’ve spent money …’
‘Nonsense, I’ve got what I needed from them; they’re not doing me any good now.’ Seeing him squirm, she was secretly enjoying her modest subversion of 21st-century capitalism, her feeble imitation of the noble Benedictine principle of common ownership. ‘Besides, I can smell cynicism on you, Mr Magnus. I’d like to get rid of that, if I can.’
He laughed uneasily, and lifted one elbow to call attention to his sweat-soaked armpits.
‘Are you sure it’s not the smell of B.O.?’
‘Quite sure,’ she said, noting that two of her colleagues were, at last, straggling into view. ‘Now, I think it’s about time I started work. It was lovely to meet you. And Hadrian, of course.’
She shook his hand, and allowed herself one more ruffle of the dog’s mane. Nonplussed, Magnus backed away.
A few seconds later, when she was already far away from him, he called after her:
‘Happy digging!’
That night, Siân fell asleep with unusual ease. Instead of spending hours looking at the cast-iron fireplace and the wooden clothes rack growing gradually more distinct in the moonlight, she slept in profound darkness.
I’m sleeping, she thought as she slept. How divine.
‘Oh, flesh of my flesh,’ whispered a voice in her ear. ‘Forgive me …’ And the cold, slightly serrated edge of a large knife pressed into her windpipe. With a yelp, she leapt into wakefulness, but not before the flesh of her throat had yawned open and released a welter of blood.
Upright in bed, she clutched her neck, to keep her life clamped safely inside. The skin was unbroken, a little damp with perspiration. She let go, groaning irritably.
It wasn’t even morning: it was pitch-dark, and the seagulls were silent – still fast asleep, wherever it is that seagulls sleep. Siân peered at her watch, but it was the old-fashioned kind (she didn’t like digital watches) and she couldn’t see a thing.
Ten minutes later she was dressed and ready for going out. Packed in a shoulder bag were the books and pamphlets for Magnus: ‘Saint Hilda and her Abbey at Whitby’, A History of Whitby, the Pitkin guide to ‘Life in a Monastery’, and several others. She slung the bag behind her hip and shrugged experimentally to confirm it stayed put; she didn’t want it swinging forward and tripping her up. Getting your neck slashed in a dream was one thing; breaking your neck while trying to get down a steep flight of stairs in the dead of night was quite another.
In the event, she managed without any problem, and was soon standing in the cold breeze of the White Horse and Griffin’s side lane, cobbles underfoot. The town was so quiet she could hear her own breathing, and Church Street was closed to traffic in any case, yet still she ventured forward from the alley very, very carefully – a legacy of her accident in Bosnia. Even in a pedestrianised cul-de-sac in a small Yorkshire town at four in the morning, you never knew what might come ripping around the corner.
In the dark, Whitby looked strange to Siân – neither modern nor medieval, which were the only two ways she was accustomed to perceiving it. In the daylight hours, she was either working in the shadow of the abbey ruins, coaxing the remains of stunted Northumbrians out of the antique clay, or she was weaving through crowds of shoppers and tourists, that vulgar throng of pilgrims with mobile phones clutched to their cheeks or pop groups advertised on their chests. Now, in the unpeopled stillness of night, Whitby looked, to Siân, distinctly Victorian. She didn’t know why – the buildings and streets were much older than that, mostly. But it wasn’t a matter of architecture; it was a matter of atmosphere. The glow of the streetlamps could almost be gaslight; the obscure buildings and darkened doorways scowled with menace, like a movie backdrop for yet another version of Bram Stoker’s Dracula. Any alleyway, it seemed to Siân, could disgorge at any moment the caped figure of the Count, or a somnambulistic young woman of unnatural pallor, her white nightgown stained with blood.
Gothic. That’s what the word ‘Gothic’ meant to most people nowadays. Nothing to do with the original Germanic tribe, or even the pre-Renaissance architectural style. The realities of history had been swept aside by Hollywood vampires and narcissistic rock singers with too much mascara on. And here she was, as big a sucker as anyone: walking down Church Street at four in the morning, imagining the whole town to be crawling with Victorianesque undead. Even the Funtasia joke shop, which during the day sold plastic vampire fangs and whoopee cushions, seemed at this godforsaken hour to be a genuinely creepy establishment, the sort of place inside which rats and madmen might be lurking.
The house in Loggerhead’s Yard was easy to find; when she’d asked about it in the hotel, half a dozen people jostled to give her directions. Magnus’s father had been well known in the town and all the locals took a keen interest whenever a death freed up a hunk of prime real estate. Only when Siân approached the front door did she have her first doubts about what she’d come here to do. An action which, in daylight with people strolling round about, would look like a casual errand, seemed anything but casual now – the eerie stillness and the ill-lit, empty streets made her feel as if she were up to no good. She could be a thief, a cat burglar, a rapist, tiptoeing so as not to wake the virtuously sleeping world, squinting at a slit in a stranger’s door, preparing to slide a foreign object through it. What if the door should open suddenly, to reveal Magnus, still naked and warm from his bed, rubbing his eyes? Or what about the dog? Surely he would go berserk at the sound of her fumblings at the mail slot! Siân steeled her nerves for an explosion of barking as she fed the books and pamphlets, one by one, through the dark vent, but they dropped softly onto the floor within, and that was all. Hadrian was either uninspired by the challenges of being a guard dog, or asleep. Asleep on the bed of his master, perhaps. Two muscular males nestled side by side, different species but both devilishly handsome.
For goodness’ sake, she sighed to herself, turning away. When will you grow up?
Bag empty and weightless on her shoulder, she hurried back to the hotel.
Siân had never been fond of weekends. They were all very well for people with hobbies or a frustrated desire to luxuriate in bed, but she would rather be working. Half the reason she’d switched from paper conservation to archaeology was that it required her to show up, no matter what, at the appointed hour, and dig. It wasn’t easy, especially in raw weather, but it was better than wasting the whole day thinking about the past – her own past, that is.
Saint Benedict had the right idea: a community of monastics keeping to a strict ritual seven days a week, helping each other get out of bed with (as he put it) ‘gentle encouragement, on account of the excuses to which the sleepy are addicted’. Siân knew all about those.
To prevent herself moping, she spent most of her weekends wandering around Whitby, back and forth across the swing bridge, from pier to pier, from cliff to cliff. She’d walk until she tired herself out, and then lie on her bed in the Mary Ann Hepworth room with a book on her lap, watching the roof-tops change colour, until it was time for her to go to sleep and get what was coming to her.
This week, Saturday passed more quickly than usual. Her early-morning excursion to the house in Loggerhead’s Yard had been quite thrilling in its stealthy way, and afterwards she fell into a long, mercifully dreamless doze. She woke quite rested, with only three-quarters of the weekend left to endure.
In the afternoon, while she had a bite of lunch at the Whitby Mission and Seafarer’s Centre, a gusty breeze flapped the yellowing squares of paper pinned to the notice-board near the door. ‘Don’t leave Fido out in the cold,’ said one fluttering page. ‘We have a separate coffee lounge where pets are always welcome.’ Siân left the ruins of her jacket potato consolidating on her plate and walked over to the opposite lounge to have a peek inside. Her nose nudged through a veil of cigarette smoke. Strange dogs with strange owners looked up at the newcomer.
On her way out of the Mission, Siân paused at the book-case offering books for 50p each, and rummaged through the thrillers, romances and anthologies of local writers’ circles. There was a cheap, mass-produced New Testament there, too. What a come-down since the days when a Bible was a unique and priceless object, inscribed on vellum from an entire flock of sheep! Siân closed her eyes, imagined a cloister honeycombed in sunlight, with a long rank of desks and tonsured heads, perfect silence except for the faint scratching of pen-nibs.
‘Now here’s a blast from the past!’ brayed the disc jockey on the radio. ‘Hands up anyone who bopped along to Culture Club when they had this hit – come on,’ fess up!’
Siân fled.
Early on Sunday morning, not long after getting her throat slit, Siân was out and about again, her hastily-washed hair steaming. She couldn’t be bothered blow-drying it, and besides, now was when she ought to be going – at exactly the same time as she’d set off for work on Friday. If Magnus and Hadrian were creatures of habit, this would send them running after her any minute now.
She walked along Church Street, quite slowly, from the hotel façade to the foot of the hundred and ninety-nine steps and back again – twice – but no chance meeting occurred.
Tantalised by the thought of the man and his dog running high up on the East Cliff, in the wild grasses flanking the abbey ramparts, she climbed Caedmon’s Trod until she could see the Donkey Field. No chance meeting occurred here, either, at least not with Magnus and Hadrian. Instead, she met a bored-looking boy and his somewhat frazzled dad, returning from what had clearly been a less than inspirational visit to the abbey.
‘Another really interesting thing that monasteries used to do,’ the father was saying, in a pathetic, last-ditch attempt to get the child excited, ‘was give sanctuary to murderers.’
Siân saw a flicker of interest in the kid’s eyes as she squeezed past him on the narrow monks’ trod.
‘Has Whitby got McDonalds,’ he asked his dad, ‘or only fish and chips?’
It was Monday afternoon before Siân saw Magnus again. In the morning, she loitered around the town centre before work, in an irritable, shaky state. Her nightmare hadn’t yet receded, and her throat was sore where, in a befuddled attempt to deflect the knife, she had hit herself with her own hand. The lump in her thigh throbbed like hell.
In the town’s deserted market square, on a bench, someone had discarded a copy of the current Whitby Gazette. With half an hour still to kill before 8 a.m., Siân settled down to read it. For some reason though, every single article in the Gazette struck her as monumentally depressing. Not just the sad stories, like the one about the much-loved local janitor dying of cancer (‘He never moaned about his illness and was always cheerful’, according to a colleague – a chip off Saint Hilda’s block, then). No, even the stories about a holidaymaker being struck by lightning and surviving, or a charity snail-eating contest, or the long-overdue restoration of Egton Bridge, brought Siân closer and closer to irrational tears. She flipped the pages faster, through the property section, until she was on the back page, staring at an advertisement for a beauty clinic on the West Cliff. ‘Sun-dome with facial and leg boosters’ it said, and to Siân this seemed like the most heartbreakingly sad phrase she’d ever read this side of the Book of Ecclesiastes.
Get a grip, she counselled herself, and laid the paper aside. She noticed that someone had joined her on the bench: an obese, spiky-haired punkette, an unusual sight in Whitby – almost as unusual as a monk. Siân goggled just a few seconds too long at the infestation of silver piercings on the girl’s brow, nose and ears, and was given a warning scowl in return. Chastened, she looked down. At the punkette’s feet sat a dog, to help the girl beg perhaps. Apart from the pictogram for ‘anarchy’ doodled on his wheat-coloured flank in black felt-tip, he was a very ordinary-looking dog, a Labrador maybe – nowhere near as beautiful as Hadrian.
Face it: compared to Hadrian, every other dog was plain.
At ten to eight, Siân began to climb the hundred and ninety-nine steps and, gazing for a moment across the harbour, she suddenly spotted Hadrian and Magnus on the other side, two tiny figures sprinting along Marine Parade. Her melancholy turned at once to a sort of indignant excitement. Why would they choose there to run instead of here on her side? They must be avoiding her! Surely nobody could prefer the stink of raw fish and the pierside’s dismal panorama of amusement parlours and pubs to what lay at the foot of the church steps …
Her sudden, fervid impulse to jump up and down and wave to Mack, despite the fact that there was no chance of him noticing, alarmed her – clearly, she was farther gone than she’d thought, and should make an immediate start on restoring her sanity before it was too late.
I am here, she reminded herself, to work. I am not here to be torn apart. I am not here to be treated like dirt.
She imagined her emotions embodied in the form of a hysterical novice nun, and her judgement as the wise and kindly abbess, counselling restraint. She visualised the bare interior of one of Saint Hilda’s prayer-cells lit up gold and amber with sunbeams, a merciful ebbing away of confusion, a soul at peace.
* * *
When Siân reached the burial site, Pru was already lifting off the blue tarpaulins, exposing the damp soil. Towards the edges of the excavation, the clay was somewhat soggier than it needed to be, having absorbed some rainfall over the weekend in addition to its ritual hosing last thing Friday afternoon. Siân was glad her appointed rectangle was towards the middle of the quarter acre. All right, maybe Saint Hilda wouldn’t have approved of her desire to keep her knees dry at the expense of her fellow toilers, but the sheath of Tubigrip under her tights lost some of its elastic every time she washed it, so she’d rather it stayed clean, thank you very much.
‘Sleep well?’ asked Pru, rolling up another tarpaulin, exposing Siân’s own appointed shallow grave.
‘No, not really,’ said Siân.
‘Lemme guess – you stayed up to watch that movie about the robbery that goes wrong. The one with … oh, what’s-her-name?’ Regurgitation of facts was not Pru’s forte. ‘The one who’s gained so much weight recently.’
‘I’m sorry, I haven’t a clue,’ said Siân.
Jeff was next to arrive, a wizened old hippy who seemed to have been on every significant dig in Britain since the war. Then Keira and Trevor, a husband-and-wife team who were due to lay down their trowels and mattocks tomorrow and flee to the warmer and better-paid climes of a National Geographic dig in the Middle East. Who would replace them? Very nice people, according to Nina, the supervisor. Coming all the way from north Wales.
By ten past, everyone was on site and working, distributed like medieval potato harvesters over the sub-divided ground. Fourteen living bodies, scratching in the ground for the subtle remains of dead ones, peering at gradations in soil colour that could signal the vanished presence of a coffin or a pelvis, winkling pale fragments into the light which could, please God, be teeth.
The skeletons exhumed so far had all been buried facing east, the direction of Jerusalem, to help Judgement Day run more smoothly. Four years from now, when the research would be completed and the bones re-buried with the aid of a JCB and vicar to bless them, they’d have to sort out their direction for themselves.
Today, one of the girls was in a bad mood, her mouth clownishly downturned, her eyes avoiding contact with the young man working next to her. Yesterday, they’d been exchanging secret smiles, winks, sotto voce consultations. Today, they did their best to pretend they weren’t kneeling side by side; separated by mere inches, they cast expectant glances not at each other but at Nina, as if hoping she might assign them to different plots farther apart. A cautionary spectacle, thought Siân. A living parable (as Saint Hilda might call it) of the fickleness of human love.
‘I think I may’ve found something,’ said someone several hours later, holding up an encrusted talon which might, once it was X-rayed, prove to be a coffin pin.
At four-thirty, as Siân was walking past Saint Mary’s churchyard on her way down to the hundred and ninety-nine steps, she spotted Hadrian’s head poking up over the topmost one.
‘Hush!’ he barked in greeting. ‘Hush, hush!’
Siân hesitated, then waved. Magnus was nowhere to be seen.
Hadrian ran towards her, pausing only to scale the church’s stone boundary and sniff the base of Caedmon’s Cross. Deciding not to piss on England’s premier Anglo-Saxon poet, he bounded back onto the path and had an exuberant reunion with Siân.
By the time Magnus joined them, she was on one knee, her hands buried deep in the dog’s mane, and Hadrian was jumping up and down to lick her face.
‘Excuse me, I’m just going overboard here,’ she said, too delighted with the dog’s affection to care what a fool she must look.
Mack wasn’t wearing his running gear this afternoon; instead, his powerful frame was disguised in a button-down shirt, Chinos and some sort of expensive suede-y jacket. He was carrying a large plastic bag, but apart from that he looked like a young doctor who’d answered his beeper at a London brasserie and been persuaded to make a house call. Siân had trouble accepting he could look like this; she’d imagined him (she realised now) permanently dressed in shorts and T-shirt, running around Whitby in endless circles. She laughed at the thought, her inhibitions loosened by the excesses she was indulging with Hadrian. Casting her eyes down in an effort to reassure Mack that she wasn’t laughing at him, she caught sight of his black leather shoes, huge things too polished to be true. She giggled even more. Her own steel-capped boots were slathered in mud, and her long bedraggled skirt was filthy at the knees.
‘You and Hadrian better not get too friendly,’ Mack remarked. ‘He might run off with one of your precious old bones.’
It was such a feeble joke that Siân didn’t think anyone could possibly blame her for ignoring it. She heaved herself to her feet and, fancying she could feel his eyes on her dowdiness, she sobered up in a hurry.
‘Have you read any of the books and pamphlets?’ she said.
He snorted. ‘You sound like a Jehovah’s Witness, on a follow-up visit.’
‘Never mind that. Have you read them?’ Be firm with him, she was thinking.
‘Of course,’ he smiled.
‘And?’
‘Very interesting,’ he said, watching her straighten her shapeless cagoule. ‘More interesting than my research, anyway.’
As they fell into step with each other towards the town, Siân rifled her memory for the subject of his paper. It took her a good fifteen seconds to realise she’d never actually asked him about it.
They’d reached the bench on the resting-place near the top of the hundred and ninety-nine steps, and he indicated with a wave of his hand that they should sit down. This they did, with Hadrian settled against Siân’s skirt, and Mack carefully lowering the plastic bag onto the ground between his lustrous shoes. Judging by the sharp corners bulging through the plastic, it contained a large cardboard box.
‘That’s not your research paper in there, is it?’ she asked.
‘No,’ he said.
‘What is it?’
‘A surprise.’
Michael, one of Siân’s colleagues from the dig, walked past the bench where they were sitting. He nodded in greeting as he descended the steps, looking slightly sheepish, unsure whether to introduce himself to Siân’s new friend or pretend he hadn’t trespassed on their privacy. It was a gauche little encounter, lasting no more than a couple of seconds, but Siân was ashamed to note that it gave her a secret thrill; how sweet it was to be mistaken for a woman sharing intimacy with a man! Let the whole world pass by this bench, in an orderly procession, to witness proof incarnate that she wasn’t lonely!
For God’s sake, get a grip! she reproached herself.
‘My research,’ said Mack, smirking a little, ‘examines whether psittacosis is transferable from human to human.’ His smirk widened into a full grin as she stared back at him with a blank expression. Siân wondered if he’d make her ask, but, commendably, he didn’t. ‘Psittacosis,’ he explained, ‘is what’s popularly called parrot fever – if popular is the right word for a rare disease. It’s a virus, and you catch it by inhaling the powdered … uh … faeces of caged birds. In humans, it manifests as a kind of pneumonia that’s highly resistant to antibiotics. It used to be fatal, once upon a time.’
Siân wondered just how long ago, in his view, ‘once upon a time’ was. She, after all, had had to convince herself, after reading the ‘Health & Safety’ documents covering archaeological digs, that she wasn’t frightened of catching anthrax or the Black Death.
‘And this disease of yours,’ she said. ‘Is it transferable from human to human?’
‘The answer used to be “Maybe”. I’m aiming to change that to a definite “No”.’
‘Hmm,’ said Siân. Now that she’d been sitting for a minute, she was suddenly rather weary, and her left leg ached and felt swollen. ‘Well, I’m sure that’ll put some people’s minds at rest.’ It sounded condescending, and she had the uneasy feeling she was being a bitch. ‘No, really. With diseases, it’s always better to know, isn’t it?’ An inane comment, which reminded her of the lump in her thigh she was so determined to ignore. Irritably, she wiped her face. ‘Sorry, I’m tired.’
‘Another long day exhuming the dead?’
‘No, I just didn’t sleep so well last night.’
Again to his credit, he didn’t pry. Instead he asked, ‘Where do you keep them all, anyway? All the skeletons, I mean. Sixty of them, I read somewhere.’ He nodded towards the East Cliff car park. ‘Enough to fill a tourist bus.’
Siân giggled, picturing a large party of skeletons driving away, taking their last glimpse of Whitby through steamy coach windows as they began their long trip home.
‘We’ve only found a few complete skeletons,’ she said. ‘Usually we find half-skeletons, or bits and pieces. Clay isn’t as kind to bones as people imagine; in fact, they’d last longer just about anywhere else. Stuck in the ground, they crumble, they soften, they dissolve. Sometimes we’ll find just a discoloration in the clay. A tell-tale shadow. That’s why we have to be so careful, and so slow.’
‘And these people you’ve dug up – who were they?’
A single word, Angles, sprang to Siân’s mind, which made her feel a pang of guilty sorrow. How ruthless History was, taking as raw material the fiercely independent lives of sixty human individuals – sixty souls who, in life, fought for their right to be appreciated as unique, to earn the pride of their parents, the gratitude of their children, the loyalty of their colleagues – blending them all into the dirt, reducing them to a single archaic word.
‘They were … Angles, probably,’ she sighed. ‘Difficult to be sure, until we do Carbon-14 dating on them. They lived after the Romans, anyway, and before the Norman Conquest.’
‘Any treasures?’
‘Treasures?’
