CROW STONE

Jenni Mills

For my mother, Sheila Mills

‘A Fathomless and boundless Deep

There we wander, there we weep.’

William Blake,

‘My Spectre around me night and day’

Contents

Epigraph Level One: Corax Chapter One Chapter Two Chapter Three Level Two: Nymphus Chapter Four Chapter Five Chapter Six Chapter Seven Chapter Eight Level Three: The Soldier Chapter Nine Chapter Ten Chapter Eleven Chapter Twelve Chapter Thirteen Chapter Fourteen Chapter Fifteen Chapter Sixteen Chapter Seventeen Chapter Eighteen Level Four: The Lion Chapter Nineteen Chapter Twenty Chapter Twenty-One Chapter Twenty-Two Chapter Twenty-Three Chapter Twenty-Four Chapter Twenty-Five Chapter Twenty-Six Chapter Twenty-Seven Level Five: Luna Chapter Twenty-Eight Chapter Twenty-Nine Level Six: The Runner of the Sun Chapter Thirty Chapter Thirty-One Level Seven: The Father Chapter Thirty-Two Chapter Thirty-Three Chapter Thirty-Four Chapter Thirty-Five Chapter Thirty-Six Literary Corner Acknowledgements Copyright About the Publisher

LEVEL ONE

Corax

Corax, the Raven–the messenger of the gods. Just when you think life is on track, along comes a socking great bird, squawking news of a divine quest. My advice is, shoot the bloody thing.

Martin Ekwall, interviewed on Time Team, Roman Temple Special, Channel 4

Chapter One

Look at this. A sea urchin, so close we could snog each other. My eyes are crossing with the excitement of it, let alone the proximity. I feel like calling to Martin to get his fat arse down here, so I’ll have someone to share it with. But Martin couldn’t care less, and neither could the sea urchin.

I’d guess it’s been dead for a hundred million years or so. When it was pottering about, doing whatever sea urchins do in the warm, shallow sea, dinosaurs tramped the shore. It looks like a bun, doughy white, slightly heart-shaped. The stuff of life turned to stone.

I’m lying on my back. Stone is digging painfully into bone; the floor is nodules of chalk and outcrops of flint, none of them dovetailing with the knobbles of my spine. My nose is a couple of inches away from the white ceiling with the sea urchin in it. Until I saw it, I was trying to turn over, so I can wriggle back the way I came in–feet first, because there isn’t room to turn round. This is a fairly delicate moment. I don’t think the entire lot is going to come crashing down on me, but it’s always possible. The tunnel’s hardly more than body-width. Even by Neolithic standards, this is poky.

‘You OK?’

Martin, in dusty red overalls, is waiting at the end of the passage where it opens into the main gallery: a luxurious four feet high, so he can crouch on hands and knees and turn round, lucky bugger. He’s too big to crawl any further so, being the woman, I get all the shit jobs as usual.

‘Happy as a sunbeam,’ I hiss. We rarely shout underground, unless it’s ‘Get the fuck out quick.’ I’ve perfected a penetrating whisper that seems to travel down tunnels. Martin’s heard me, because he grunts. It’s hard to know who are the sparkier conversationalists: archaeologists or mining engineers.

This wouldn’t be most people’s idea of Saturday-afternoon fun, but I’ve lost count of how long we’ve been doing this kind of thing. We even did it right through the years of my marriage. Martin’s favourite archaeology happens underground. It’s dirty and it’s dangerous, and you can’t have much more fun than that. We’ll probably go on doing it as long as our joints hold out, or the luck.

Luck shouldn’t come into it, of course. As the engineer, I’m the guardian of the luck, the one who understands stresses and loads and how water seeps through stone, and can therefore take an educated guess as to whether we’re going to die today, entombed in a flint mine.

These galleries were dug out between five and six thousand years ago, by people who had only recently discovered farming. They’re amazing: they have proper air shafts, and pillars to support the roof. The light of my head-torch picks out five-thousand-year-old carbon stains on the walls, from the oil lamps the miners worked by. The gallery I’m investigating is a dead end, never properly dug out, a speculative tunnel that either failed to produce any decent flint or perhaps was one of the last to be opened before stone tools were superseded by bronze. Sorry, mate, no call for flint axeheads any more. Ever thought of reskilling in metalwork? Poor old flint miners. The thought of a Neolithic Arthur Scargill pops disconcertingly into my head, reminding me of those little yellow ‘Coal Not Dole’ stickers Martin and I used to wear in our student days. Flint Not Skint.

Sea urchin apart, though, I don’t like this place. There’s something claustrophobic about it, even for someone who makes a living out of going underground. The side galleries nip and pinch spitefully as you crawl down them. I keep thinking I should have brought a ball of string to make sure we find the way out again.

We’ll look bloody silly if we can’t. Particularly as no one knows we’re in here.

The point is, if Martin’s right and he can raise the money for a proper dig with the university’s blessing, I might get paid for this afternoon’s spur-of-the-moment expedition. That would be useful, because if I turn down the Bath job there may be lean times before I get a better offer.

And I will turn down the Bath job. No doubt about that.

I say goodbye to the sea urchin, and finally succeed in wriggling on to my stomach so I can start shuffling backwards down the tunnel. It seems much further when you can’t see where you’re going, and it’s with enormous relief that I feel Martin grasp my ankles to let me know I’ve made it out to the main gallery.

‘Whew. Don’t ask me to do that again in a hurry.’ I flip over on to my bottom, and bang my hard-hat on the tunnel roof. ‘Next time it’s your turn to slither up the miners’ back passages.’

Martin giggles, easing back on to his haunches. He may be six foot four and built like a bear, but he’s as camp as a Boy Scout jamboree. He’s had my arse in his face more times than I care to count, crawling through underground tunnels, and never shown the slightest interest in it, which suits me fine.

‘So, what do you think?’ he asks, offering me a swig of water. It tastes of chalk dust.

‘Well, it’s going to be expensive to dig. You’ll need to prop it to make it safe.’ I look around, my head-torch casting wild, wobbling shadows over the walls. ‘And I think you should steer clear of the side galleries altogether.’

‘Which are, of course, the most interesting from an archaeological point of view. Most of the main shafts were worked over thoroughly in the nineteenth century. Damn …’ Martin is chewing it over. I can see his heavy jaw grinding away as he nibbles the inside of his cheek. ‘… and blast. And fuck. If I had the money to employ diggers who knew what they were doing, I might risk it, but I’m going to have to take on students and anoraks. “Ooh, durr, Dr Ekwall, I seem to have brought down the ceiling with one blow of my mighty trowel.”’

‘Don’t joke. It’s that delicate.’

Martin frowns. ‘I suppose the insurance will be prohibitive.’

‘And there’s one tiny technicality,’ I remind him.

‘Ah. Yes.’

We don’t have permission to be here. Martin picked the padlock on the shaft cover. We broke in and we’re trespassing. Legally we don’t have a leg to stand on, even if we could stand up. An unofficial recce saves paperwork, but the drawback is that if anything happens to us down here we’ll be waiting a hell of a long time for the rescue party.

‘Quarter to four,’ he says. ‘Better get a move on, or it’ll be dark before we’re back at the jeep.’

We crawl back towards the central shaft, the one we climbed down earlier, my knees giving me hell in spite of the borrowed pads. I didn’t come prepared this weekend for going underground, and all Martin’s gear is miles too big. I have a prickling feeling between my shoulder-blades, and fight the temptation to keep twisting round to look behind. For God’s sake, what am I expecting to see? A flare of light far away down the passage?

It’s bliss to stand up again under the shaft. The light above is fading fast, and I can just make out an early star in the violet sky as I set foot on the iron ladder back to ground level.

By the time we reach the top my arms are killing me. I could swear my belly’s on fire too. While Martin’s on his way up, I unzip my fleece to take a look. I was in such a hurry to get out of the passage that my sweater must have ridden up as I inched over the chalk floor, and there are ugly red grazes across my abdomen. Should have worn overalls. An icy wind flicks across the hollow in the hillside, and I zip up again.

Martin swings the trap-door shut over the shaft, and crouches to padlock it. The sun is almost touching the metal rim of the sea, and there’s a tiny sliver of moon in the sky, no more than a nail paring. Back in the Neolithic, the hillside was probably cleared right up to the entrance to the flint mine. Those old miners liked a spectacular view when they came up from below. Martin’s theory is that flint mines were as much sacred sites as industrial estates, the underworld being the realm of the ancestors.

‘You didn’t like it much in there, did you?’ he asks. He has the unnerving habit of reading my thoughts.

‘No.’

‘It’s funny, I don’t like this one either,’ he says. ‘Some of those side galleries feel … spooky.’

‘I just got a bit claustrophobic. It was very tight.’

‘Sorry. Get fatter. Then I wouldn’t send you in.’

‘You’d still send me in and I’d get stuck, like a chimney sweep’s boy.’

‘If only you were.’ Martin sighs, and starts to undo the chinstrap on his helmet.

My nose is beginning to run in the freezing air so I reach into my pocket for my tissues. ‘Ah, shit.’

There’s nothing in my pocket. My tissues have gone. My stomach does a flip, and I go cold all over, then hot. My fingers are scrabbling down to the very bottom of the pocket, but all they find is fluff and an old sweet wrapper.

Martin looks up, his face ghostly with chalk dust. ‘What’s the matter?’

‘We’ve got to go back. My …’ I have to improvise, or no way will he let me go back in. ‘My car keys have fallen out of my pocket.’

He rolls his eyes. Yeah, well, I don’t feel like it either. But I have to go. I feel sick with panic.

‘The spares are three hundred miles away in Cornwall,’ I remind him.

‘Have you got the slightest idea where they fell out?’ The patient tone of someone really, really pissed off, but too nice to say so.

‘That last tunnel. I’m sure. I blew my nose just before I went into it–can’t have zipped up the pocket properly afterwards, and I turned over at least twice in there.’

‘You twit. Be quick. I want to be gone before dark. If the landowner sees a light, we’re stuffed.’

Something coughs behind me, and I swivel in sudden panic, just in time to see a huge black bird flap out of the beech trees and swoop across the clearing.

‘Jesus!’ There’s always something numinous about places like this, entrances to the underworld. ‘That must be the biggest bloody crow I saw in my life.’

‘Not a crow,’ says Martin, uncoupling the padlock. ‘Raven.’

‘Raven? Here? Come on.’

‘Definitely. Right size, right croak.’ Martin is the kind of bloke who knows these things.

‘I thought they hung around mountains and wild Welsh cliffs.’

‘Not exclusively.’ Martin peers towards the frost-tipped clump of bramble where the bird landed. ‘Unusual, I admit. Might have been a pet.’ The raven is hopping about by a tree stump, getting excited about the smell of rotting rabbit or something equally whiffy. Doesn’t look much of a pet to me.

‘Perhaps it’s the shade of a flint miner, come back to moan about us disturbing his nap.’

Martin throws back the cover with a crash loud enough to wake the dead. I sit on the edge of the shaft, feet dangling.

‘Get on with it,’ he says.

‘I’m just thinking maybe I should ring the AA instead.’ But of course I’m not thinking that, because it wasn’t car keys I lost. I’m thinking of the number of times I’ve tested my luck underground, daring myself to do what always scares me, and every single time, as I wait to go down, fingering the thing I always carry with me, not much bigger than a fifty-pence piece, rough on one side, smooth on the other. The thing I can’t stroke for comfort this time because that’s what fell out of my pocket, as if it had decided of its own accord to leave me. Martin would never understand why I have to go back for it; he thinks I’m enough of an idiot as it is.

‘Are you woman or are you wimp?’

‘Wimp.’ I stretch out one leg, feeling for the rungs of the ladder. Coal miners sometimes spat for luck before they got into the cage that took them underground. Gods live in the tunnels, and they can turn on you just like that. But there’s instinct too, a sense that some miners develop for where the danger lies, a feel for the state of the rock. As I start to climb down I try spitting, but it’s pathetic, just a pht of moisture off the end of my tongue, not a good rounded gob.

‘Hi-ho,’ says Martin, from the top of the shaft. ‘Hi-bloody-ho.’

There are good holes in the ground and there are bad holes in the ground. As I come off the ladder on to the chalk floor of the flint mine, this has turned into one of the bad sort. I know it from the way the shadows bounce and weave round the light of my head-torch; I smell it in the musty dead scent of the air.

Martin jumps down beside me.

‘You didn’t have to come,’ I tell him.

‘Don’t be daft.’

‘No point in us both getting killed.’

‘Ha-bloody-ha.’

I can tell he’s feeling it too. The place wasn’t exactly welcoming the first time, but now it’s positively chilly. That’s not physically possible, of course, because underground is warmer in winter than up top. We’re a couple of uninvited guests, tolerated out of politeness when we first came to call, now unmistakably given the cold shoulder when we presume to pop back for a second visit.

‘I don’t want to sound stupid, but which gallery was it we went down?’

‘That one.’

It would be. The smallest and darkest out of a set of very small, very dark openings.

This time the gallery seems interminable. My knees have stiffened; they hurt, hurt, hurt, but I have to go on putting them down over and over again on the hard, knobbled floor. There’s still a hell of a lot of razor-sharp flint in this mine.

How could I have been so stupid as to leave my pocket unzipped? I can hear Martin behind me muttering, ‘Fuck,’ softly with every breath, a mantra to get us through this ordeal. ‘Fuck, fuck, fuck.’ It bounces off my bum, matching the rhythm of the pain in my knees.

Chalk is made up of masses and masses of tiny, hard shells. When I was a student we had to take a piece of it and rub it with a nailbrush–abrade it, my geology textbook said, the same thing the chalk is now doing in revenge to my knees–then look at it under the microscope. The surface twinkled with minute shells belonging to foraminiferans, single-celled creatures that drifted aimlessly in their billions through sunlit Cretacean seas.

The Cretaceous follows the Jurassic, and is followed in its turn by…

The entrance to the side-passage. I stop. Martin’s helmet butts my bottom.

‘Do you want me to go in?’ he asks. Generous, but—

‘My keys, my problem.’ I take a deep, wavering breath. ‘Right. Ready or not …’

I wriggle in on my stomach. As Martin’s breathing fades behind me, I can hear the hush, hush, hush of my Gore-Tex trousers against the rock. I start counting the movements of my elbows against the sides of the tunnel. It probably fell out where the sea urchin floated above me, when I rolled over to examine the ceiling. Maybe, after all these years, it was seeking the company of its own kind. With every shuffle, my fingers reach blindly forward, patting the tunnel floor.

‘Found them?’ Martin’s voice sounds hollow, distorted by echoes in the passage. Of course I bloody haven’t. My car keys are where I always leave them when I go off potholing with him, sitting safely and sensibly with my handbag and credit cards in the hallway of his cottage.

‘No, but I just met Fungus the Bogeyman.’

Martin laughs. The echoes turn it into a creak that sets my teeth on edge.

Now, where is that blessed sea urchin? I roll over on to my back, feeling my hip bones scrape the tunnel walls. The head-torch shows a featureless stretch of chalk ceiling. I turn back on to my stomach and start pulling myself along again slowly, fingers still groping every inch of the tunnel floor. For some unknown reason Martin is laughing again–I can hear the creak of it coming down the tunnel, just as my fingers close on a small hard disc, polished and smooth on one side, rough on the other.

A creak, the same jarring note as fingernails on a blackboard. Suddenly it’s not Martin laughing, and it’s not funny.

Ah, shit.

The sensible thing is to stay on my stomach, shoulders hunched to make as big a breathing space as possible, but something has gone wrong in my head and instead I’m trying to turn over, as if I could push my face up through the chalk and out into the open air, while the creak turns into a crack and then a rushing, pattering sound … Arms and legs are flailing, or would be if there was space to flail; instead, I’m battering weakly at the sides of the tunnel. I have to see. I can’t bear to be trapped like a blind mole in the darkness. Just as my head-torch flicks on to the solid bun of the sea urchin, chalky rubble and stones rain down over my legs. The ceiling’s going, somewhere down the tunnel, and once one bit collapses there’s nothing to hold the rest up.

My fingers clamp down hard on what’s in my hand, branding it into my palm. Madness to have come back for it, but I couldn’t have left it here … There’s a swirl of dust fogging the head-torch, making me cough. As it darkens I picture the thousands of tons of earth and rock that lie between me and the sky, and brace myself for the crushing weight of it all on my chest.

Chapter Two

The night I found the tunnel there was a big white moon as bright and hard as chalk. It was a few days before my fourteenth birthday. The air was warm, but there were goosebumps on my arms; the moon’s light was chilling. I was cold with sitting still, cold with waiting. When I started the climb up the quarry face, I didn’t care whether I lived or died.

The entrance to the tunnel was a patch of shadow on the rock, covered with long creepers and dreadlocks of ivy. There was a ledge in front, a platform just big enough to park a bum on, or I would have missed it altogether. The sweat was running off me by then, and for all my misery I was scared half to death.

The moon had climbed the sky as I went up the quarry face. It shone down like a searchlight, but missed me on the ledge. I sat there in the darkness, breathing in great gasps. I couldn’t go back down. I didn’t think I had the strength left to go up.

I leaned back, expecting to find rock, but the ivy parted, and there was the adit, the tunnel leading into the mine. It must have been part of the earlier workings, forgotten when they moved on to quarry a better seam of stone. I ducked through the leaves and crawled in.

There were legends about those tunnels. About ten or fifteen years before, three schoolboys had made their way in, as schoolboys often did back then, and hadn’t come out again. They got lost in the maze of passages that wove through the hillside like tangled ropes. When they didn’t come home, the police were called. They went in after them with torches and tracker dogs, and they got lost too.

We knew really that they came out, all of them, safe and sound, but we liked to scare ourselves with the idea that they hadn’t and were still there, doomed to wander through the veins of the rock for ever. Maybe one day we would hear their ghostly singing beneath our feet. Hi-ho.

The year after the boys got lost the entrances to the tunnels had all been blocked up. Sometimes a hole would appear mysteriously in someone’s garden, or a pet dog would vanish and people would say they heard subterranean barks and yelps, but those were the only reminders that the underground world of my imagination existed.

I believed in it, even if I couldn’t see it, and I wasn’t afraid of starving terriers or schoolboys’ ghosts. Then, I was never afraid of anything underground. Caves fascinated me; in one, I was sure, I might one day find the First Englishman.

I got to my feet and took a blind step into the real darkness, fingers brushing the rough-hewn tunnel wall to keep me straight. I won’t go far, I told myself. Just a few steps. Just far enough. Then I’ll find somewhere to curl up against the wall and wait until sunlight fingers between the strands of ivy. I walked forward, testing each step on the uneven floor with my toes.

I turned round to look back. I couldn’t see the entrance.

In my panic my fingers lost contact with the tunnel wall, and I snagged my foot on a rock. I stumbled forward, lost my balance, and ended up on hands and knees. When I managed to get to my feet again, the tunnel wall had vanished too.

I could hear my breathing in my ears, tight and harsh. The sound of it had changed, and the sound of the silence around me was different too. It seemed hollow, vast, empty. I knew I must be in some large space; perhaps a huge cavern the quarrymen had cut out of the rock.

I reached out with my hand, groping empty air. I could see nothing, feel nothing. The darkness was smothering. It wrapped itself more tightly round me the more I struggled. I told myself the wall of the tunnel had been only inches away when I fell. I just had to go back a pace or two, and I would be able to reach out and touch it. I turned, took one tentative step, terrified I would stumble again. Then I took another, my hands waving uncertainly in front of me, blind-man’s buff. Still nothing. And nothing. And nothing. And nothing again. Then I understood I could no longer be sure which way I was facing.

Oh God oh God oh God. There was nothing to tell me which way I had come or which way to go, and the darkness wound so tightly round me it was crushing the air out of my body. Please, God, let me find a way back. A safe way.

But that was Crow Stone, when I was another person.

Please, God, help me to find a way back out now.

The sea urchin floats above me, set for ever in its chalky ocean. It couldn’t be more indifferent.

Chapter Three

I can still see the sea urchin so I know I’m not dead. It sits in a circle of light that’s ominously yellow. My head-torch battery must be failing.

That’s not a pleasant thought. Even if I’m not dead I might as well be, once the torch goes. It’s just about possible to be ironic while I can still see, but in the darkness I suspect I’m going to cry. I don’t want to do that if I can help it. I don’t want to die feeling sorry for myself, though I suppose it’s the one time you’re justified in feeling that way.

I don’t want to die

How long have I been here? It’s so quiet. Not even the creak of settling rock.

‘Martin!’

Pathetic. Hardly a bat-squeak. Throat too dry, tongue too big for my mouth. The air’s full of dust–but at least there’s still air. For the moment.

‘Maar-tin!’

My ears feel wrong. They’re ringing, maybe something to do with the air pressure. I can hardly hear myself.

‘Maaar-tin!’

Don’t want to bring the rest of the roof down, shouting. Come on, Martin, answer, you bugger.

Fuck.

Dust and chalk fragments on my upper body, one hand’s free and I can feel that, even reach up to touch my face, but from the pelvis down I’m pinned. My legs seem to be under a lot of rubble. I can feel them, though, and I think I’m wiggling my toes–I think–so the weight hasn’t broken my back. I suppose I should count myself lucky.

On second thoughts, lucky isn’t quite the word.

It reminds me of the games we used to play as children: which would you rather? Be crushed to death by an enormous weight? Slowly suffocated? Starve? Die screaming voicelessly, tormented by thirst?

None of the above, thank you. I think I will just have that little cry, after all.

But I’m not crying. I’m shaking.

Jesus

Stop it. I’m shaking hard enough to bring the rest of the ceiling down over my face.

My body won’t pay any attention to what I tell it. It goes on shaking. Big, shuddering tremors start in my legs, travel up to my shoulders and into my head. Is this what soldiers get the night before battle: a mad uncontrollable jerking dance of fear?

Judging by the silence, Martin’s in more trouble than I am. He must be under the main fall. Between me and the way out.

‘MAAAR-TIN!’

Got to stop this shaking.

Breathe.

Think about anything other than dying.

Chalk is fossil heaven. Even the dust is a universe, composed almost entirely of tiny shells, minute cartwheels and rings and florets, the remains of plankton, which can only be seen under the electron microscope. Coccoliths, the smallest fossils on earth.

Easier, now.

Unlike angels, they actually know how many coccoliths you can get on to a single pinhead–upwards of a hundred.

I suppose my lungs are full of the bloody things.

How long does it take to die underground?

The human body can survive weeks or months without food, but only days without water. Days like this–I’ll never stand it. My tongue’s like sandpaper. No, it’s already died in my mouth and is slowly setting, like cement.

‘Mmmm-MAA—’

Everything tightens, my lungs shut down. I can’t breathe.

I’m starting to shake again and that isn’t a good sign.

And now the bloody torch is flickering and–blink–it’s going to go and–blink–it’s back no it’s not blink it’s gone it’s dark I’m stuck here in the bloody dark I’d rather die just get it over with

The Camera Man watching with his single bloodshot eye his long pale fingers reaching for me the darkness

HOLY Mary Mother of

It’s back. Thank God. The light’s on again. Shaking so much I hit my head on the ceiling and the damn thing came back on.

Breathe, Kit, take it slow and steady. I have to get myself under control, make the most of the light while it’s still on, start trying to dig myself out instead of lying here like I’m already fossilized.

Which would you rather? Suffocate, or bleed to death, wearing your fingertips down to raw stumps as you feebly try to claw your way out?

There’s something scrabbling around my feet.

Or be eaten from the toes up by rats? Slowly gnawed and nibbled, inch by bone-crunching inch?

Ha-bloody-ha.

A waft of fresh but sweat-scented air reaches my nose.

‘Martin, you fucker, you took your time.’

Above ground, the air has never smelt so good, even though it’s laced with rotting rabbit. It strikes me, sitting on the grass by the mine-shaft, that I can’t remember anything about the last fifteen minutes or so since Martin hauled me out by my ankles, spluttering chalk dust.

I’ve almost stopped shaking. That’s a plus.

‘Got a cigarette? I need a bloody cigarette.’

‘Kit, I don’t smoke. Never have, as you well know. Where are yours?’

‘Fuck knows. Under half a ton of chalk, probably.’

God knows how long Martin must have spent shifting rubble patiently out of the tunnel before he could get to me. I hope I was helpful, on the way out. I probably wasn’t.

‘So, nothing came down where you were?’

‘Not a sausage. Fortunately it was a fairly small collapse as roof falls go. Pitifully small, I’d say.’ He tries to smile. His face is pale, though, and it isn’t just chalk dust.

‘Yeah, well,’ I say. ‘You weren’t under it, Nancy Boy. I’m counting that as a near-death experience.’

I dust myself off a bit, and look at the sliver of moon. She’s on the turn. Funny thing, all these years of looking at moons, I’m still not sure which way round is the crescent and which is waning to dark. I promise myself I’ll find out now, for sure, and never forget.

Martin squats down beside me, and puts his arm round my shoulders in a big, rough, rushed hug. It’s so rare that we touch, I find my eyes filling with tears.

‘You OK? Really?’ he asks.

‘Really. I think. I’ll tell you after a hot bath.’

‘Didn’t you hear me calling? I could hear you.’

‘Struck deaf by terror, I guess, as well as dumb.’ My ears still feel funny. Like I was in an explosion.

‘I thought for a moment I’d lost you.’ His eyes look shiny in what’s left of the light.

‘You came and found me, though.’

‘If I hadn’t you’d have dug yourself out and come after me.’ He shudders. ‘I felt like a cork in a bottle after squashing my shoulders into that passageway. Anyway, if you can make it, we ought to start down before it gets too dark to find the track.’

‘Yeah, I’m fine.’ I shove him away, and try to get up. There doesn’t seem to be any strength in me, and I can’t push myself off the ground. He puts his arm under mine and hauls me to my feet. ‘I can walk.’

‘Like a geriatric.’

Did I get up the ladder on my own? He surely couldn’t have carried me. I have a dim memory of trying to cling to the rungs with no strength in my arms, Martin pushing from below. Right now, I’d love him to give me a piggyback, but I shake him off all the same.

We set off slowly through the beech trees. The ground drops away sharply in front of us. Through the last crisp copper leaves, lights glimmer on the farmland below. In the distance there is a smudge of orange that must be Worthing. I’m listening out for the raven’s cough, but there’s nothing except the crunch of our feet on the beech mast. My feet feel like lead.

One late winter afternoon when we were students, at the end of a long day walking in the Peak District, Martin and I came over a bluff with the wind in our faces. There were about two miles of darkening moorland between us and our tea, and not a glimmer of light below us, just a dipping, rolling plateau of green and brown tussocks, broken only by scattered clumps of rocks and trees.

We set off down the hillside, too cold, tired and hungry to talk. And then the wind brought us, from nowhere, the sound of singing. It was the eeriest thing I’ve ever heard, voices out of a wild twilight emptiness. I could have sworn the sound came from beneath our feet, and for one primordially terrified moment I was on the point of legging it. But then I looked at Martin. There was a wistful expression on his face. ‘Hi-ho,’ he said.

Amid a cluster of broken rocks away to our left, I saw the first bobbing light. And then another. Then a third. An orderly file of cavers in their helmets, schoolkids probably, judging by their size, came tramping out of the hidden entrance to the pothole like the Seven Dwarfs.

The next weekend I hid my fear and went caving for the first time with him.

‘You’re not thinking of driving back to Cornwall tonight?’ asks Martin, as we reach the gate to the bridleway where his battered red jeep is parked. My car is at his cottage, twenty miles away.

‘Without car keys?’ I may be emotionally screwed but I never forget a cover story. Though God knows how I’ll deal with explaining–Ooh look, my keys are in my handbag after all–when we get back.

‘Curses, knew we forgot something.’ Martin tries unsuccessfully to get his own keys into the lock of the jeep, gives up and peels back the canvas roof flap so he can get his hand in to open the door from inside. ‘You could always nip back.’

‘Fuck off and drive me to the nearest quadruple Scotch.’

He holds open the door for me: the driver’s door. The passenger side hasn’t opened within living memory. He claims he likes the jeep because it’s got a sense of humour, which is something you definitely can’t say about a Range Rover.

‘Seriously,’ he says. ‘Alcohol. Food. Early bed.’

‘Provided you’ve got some sheets on the spare bed,’ I agree. He isn’t looking at me, pretending to fumble with the keys. ‘Clean ones,’ I add. Martin’s all-male potholing weekends are legendary. In case you hadn’t noticed, there aren’t any proper potholes in Sussex.

‘I’ll change them.’

‘You’d better.’

‘And I’ll cook you crab cakes, if we stop at Waitrose on the way back.’

‘Maybe it’s worth almost dying.’

‘God, Kit, you’re really going to milk this, aren’t you?’

He starts the jeep, which pretends for one heart-plummeting moment that the battery is flat. ‘Like I always say,’ remarks Martin, as the engine finally catches, ‘a vehicle with a highly developed sense of fun.’

We lurch down the bridleway, whose ruts have ruts. Branches snatch at the windscreen, squeaking on the glass like fingers on a blackboard. I keep hearing that creak again, and feeling the hail of earth and stones on my legs. I try not to imagine what it would have been like with the weight of the roof fall on my chest.

I couldn’t have dug myself out. I was pinned like a butterfly. Whatever he pretends, Martin saved my life. The jeep’s motion throws me towards him. He turns and grins. I haven’t even thanked him, but where do you find the words? We’re not going to talk about what happened this afternoon. It’s not what we do. Emotions R Not Us. We’ll eat crab cakes sitting in front of the fire and pour Californian chardonnay down our throats, but there are places Martin and I never go.

‘Well, I suppose that knocks my idea of excavating a flint mine next season firmly on the head,’ he says, as we pull on to the road at the bottom of the hill. ‘Back to the drawing board. Or, rather, back to the book on mystery cults. I’d much rather be digging. Which reminds me–how’s your job search?’

I look at him, in the green glow of the dashboard light. I hadn’t thought until now that I’d be saying this. ‘Found one,’ I say. ‘I’ll tell you over supper. Filling in a bloody big hole in the ground, basically. You’d hate the job. Burying something for ever.’

Three hours later, I’m sharing the hearthrug with a pile of dirty plates. Darkness is a thick, velvety blanket round Martin’s cottage, and the chardonnay is doing much the same job to the inside of my head.

‘Have another slurp,’ says Martin, pouring. ‘It’s terrible stuff, but it reminds me of San Francisco.’ A wistful look comes into his eyes, then he smiles wickedly. ‘Only a few weeks, and I’ll be able to fill the cellar again.’

Poor old Martin. The public face of archaeology is still relentlessly heterosexual, although it’s attracted quite a few old queens I could name. And, apart from Martin, I’ve never met a real caver who cares to admit he’s gay. He gets by, but he looks forward to his Christmas trips to California. I think he lives in hope of finding himself at a party singing ‘Auld Lang Syne’ next to Armistead Maupin.

We got friendly the first week at university because we didn’t find each other threatening. Going drinking with him is the nearest I get to a night out with the girls. He wasn’t out then, even to himself, and certainly not to his father who was a vicar, but I guessed he was gay the night we met. I chatted him up because he was studying archaeology; still sometimes wish I’d chosen that instead of geology and engineering. When I turn my hand to re-erecting Bronze Age stone circles for him, or rebuilding Roman siege engines, I can kid myself I’ve got some level of archaeological knowledge, but he just uses me for the practical stuff: he’s the big thinker. He jokes about not enjoying writing his book, but he adores it, really, teasing out all the esoteric stuff about Roman religion.

Firelight glints, red, gold, on my glass, brimming with pale yellow wine. I raise it to him. ‘Here’s to lots of busy little Californian Christmas elves. On rollerskates.’

‘Mmm.’ Martin drinks deeply. ‘Though naturally I would hope Santa decides to explore your chimney too.’

I cough as my wine goes down the wrong way. ‘I can’t keep up.’

‘That’s what Santa says, too.’

‘Stop it, Martin. It gets tedious.’

‘You’re just jealous. When was the last time you got laid?’

‘None of your business.’

Martin looks like a puppy that can’t understand why no one finds scratchmarks on the furniture appealing. He’s happier if he can come up with a reason for my lack of interest in sexual banter.

‘Have you been getting calls again from Nick?’

‘No, thank God. Splitting the money from the London house seems to have shut him up for a bit. And I changed my mobile number.’

‘You should have divorced him as soon as you broke up. I resent him getting half of what that house is worth now when he pissed off to Wales nearly ten years ago.’

‘More than half. It’s only fair–I’m keeping the place in Cornwall, don’t forget.’ I shouldn’t feel I have to justify myself to Martin, but I always do where Nick’s concerned.

‘You’re too soft on him.’ Martin’s frowning. He once threatened to punch the lights out of Nick on my behalf, even though I can’t imagine he has ever punched the lights out of anyone. ‘He’s always taken advantage of you.’

‘Pity you didn’t tell me that before we got married.’

‘I thought it.’

‘I’m not psychic. Next time say it aloud.’

We lapse into silence. It occurs to me that if I hadn’t come back from the flint mine this afternoon, Nick would have had the lot. I haven’t got round to changing my will.

Martin settles back in his leather chair with the scuffed arms. I get out my cigarettes, glancing over to check he isn’t in one of his antismoking moods, gearing up for California. He frowns, but doesn’t stop me lighting up.

‘So what’s this new job, then?’ he asks. ‘I thought you were looking for something abroad. What changed your mind?’

The trouble with sitting on the hearthrug in a four-hundred-year-old cottage is that you freeze on one side from the draughts and roast on the other. The left half of me’s sweating like a side of pork, but my right side keeps shivering.

‘It’s Bath,’ I say, sitting on my right hand to stop it shaking. ‘Green Down.’

‘The stone mines? I didn’t think they’d got the funding yet.’

‘They haven’t, but they’ve already started emergency work. The consultants reckon the whole lot could come down at any time.’

‘What you’d call a big headache.’

‘And technically they’re quarries, not mines, even though they’re underground. Stone is quarried, not mined.’

‘They’re going to fill them all?’

‘That’s the plan.’

Martin spits a fragment of cork from his wine into the fire. ‘Criminal. Burying three hundred years’ worth of industrial archaeology.’

‘What about all the people living on top?’

‘I don’t suppose they’d fancy moving? … No, I guess not.’ He sighs heavily. ‘Not really my period, but fascinating stuff. You know they were dug out in the eighteenth century by Ralph Allan? He and his pet architect, John Wood–mad bastard with a penchant for freemasonry–were effectively responsible for developing Georgian Bath.’

‘And Wood’s son. John Wood the Younger.’

Martin nearly kicks over the pile of plates in his surprise. ‘Blimey, Kit, you’ve been doing your homework.’

I don’t tell him that I did the homework a long time ago, that I was at school in Bath and we used to go on educational walks round the Circus and the Royal Crescent and all the other famous buildings that the John Woods, Elder and Younger, designed between them. Martin thinks I was brought up in Bournemouth. But there’s quite a lot I haven’t told him.

‘You know,’ he says, leaning forward to poke the fire into a roaring blaze, ‘I reckon there’s something deeply perverse in your nature, Kit. This afternoon you nearly get yourself killed in a roof fall, and now you’re about to take a job where it’s possible an entire suburb will land on your bonce.’

I stare into the fire. ‘Glutton for punishment, I suppose.’

‘Anyway,’ Martin continues cheerfully, ‘we’ll call the AA out first thing in the morning so they can come with their lock-picking gear and get you on the road.’

Lying always gets me into this kind of mess.

And knocking back too much wine always stops me sleeping.

Martin’s snores echo down the stairwell while I prowl the kitchen in search of tea. Proper tea, that is, the sort that comes in bags, not the poncy caddy full of Earl Grey leaves Martin insists on.

‘You get bored in the night, flower, read this,’ he said, thrusting into my arms a hot-water bottle and a pile of manuscript. ‘Tell me if you think it’s too racy for Oxford University Press.’

How did he know I’d be awake at two in the morning?

Maybe it’s the wine. Maybe it’s what happened this afternoon. Every time I turn on to my back I think of my chalk coffin, the suffocating air full of coccoliths and the light from my head-torch getting dimmer and dimmer.

The teabags are in the canister marked Flour. Last time I stayed they were in the biscuit tin.

Mug of tea at my elbow, I settle down at the kitchen table with the latest chapter in Martin’s book. ‘My very favourite mystery cult. You’ll like it,’ he said. ‘Big butch soldiers. Lots of gender-bending. And ravens.’ ‘I can do without ravens.’

‘No decent mystery cult that doesn’t have a raven or two.’

In Persia, where Mithraism originated, ravens were associated with death because it was customary to expose corpses for excarnation–known as ‘sky burial’ in other cultures–leaving the flesh to be stripped away by birds and other scavengers. Symbolically, the neophyte has to die and be reborn before he can be admitted to the mysteries of the cult.

‘I love this kind of stuff,’ he said to me earlier, when we stopped discussing my next job and turned to what he’s researching. ‘Weird as hell, nothing written down, so everything has to be pieced together from the archaeological evidence. Our best guesses come from wall paintings and mosaics in Italy, but there are temples up by Hadrian’s Wall, and one was excavated in London too. Seven stages of initiation. Ordeals at every stage. Men only but, of course, the big laugh is that most of it’s nicked from an even older eastern mystery religion, the cult of the Great Mother, of all things, popular in Rome at the same time. Don’t you just adore it?’

Firelight and enthusiasm sparkled in his eyes.

‘And then the real symbolic giveaway is that they build their temples underground, or at least tart them up to look like caves. You couldn’t get much more Freudian than that, could you? Wait till you hear what they got up to during the initiation ceremonies–typical bloody soldiers, the slightest excuse to dress up as women …’

In the Mithraic myth, the raven takes the place of the Roman god Mercury, and bears his magical staff, the caduceus. He brings a message from the sun god, ordering first the hunting then the slaying, in the cave, of the bull–a sacrifice we can be almost certain was borrowed from the cult of Magna Mater. From the animal’s blood and semen gushing on to the ground, plants grow, generating new life.

Blood and semen. The dark heart of all male-centred cults. I look up from the manuscript, and outside everything is blackness, no light visible for miles from Martin’s cottage tucked under the lip of the Sussex chalk escarpment. It feels a long, long way from Green Down, and everything that waits for me there. Another sentence from the manuscript catches my eye, a translation of some priestly invocation.

I am a star that goes with you, and shines out of the depths.

It makes me shiver. Suddenly I’m tired, after all, and my feet are cold, and I remember that hot-water bottle still holding a ghost of its warmth between the not-very-clean sheets upstairs.

The same words are still reverberating in my head a couple of weeks later. I’m sitting in my silver Audi outside the semi-detached house on the outskirts of Bath, thinking about the circular motion that has brought me back here. There’s a big crack in its honey-stone facing. Underneath, hundreds of years ago, men tunnelled into the stone and drew out the bones of which Bath is built–oolitic limestone, carrying the imprint of millions of sea creatures, ammonites with their perfectly coiled shells, like snakes with their tails in their mouths.

My fascination with the bones of things, stone and fossils and the darkness underground where they lie, has never gone away, in spite of what happened that summer. I grew up here, and lived in this ugly yellow house until I was fourteen. I had no plan then to become a mining engineer. I wanted to track the origins of the human race. I saw my future in some heat-blasted gully in Africa or the Middle East, pacing the scree and looking for patterns. Turning over stones and occasionally recognizing the shape of a knucklebone, a fragment of tibia maybe or, if I was very lucky, a whole transfiguring skull.

Instead here I am, completing the circle, back where I started before I was fourteen and the big black car took me away.

Streaks of rain are beginning to dry unevenly on the honey-stone walls. I start the engine, put the car into gear and drive away up the hill, heading for the site.

On the day the black car took me away–big-bodied and lumbering, it was, a dinosaur with headlamp eyes and a radiator grille like long, shiny teeth–we drove this way. I can’t remember what I was thinking. I probably thought I was going to be famous. Time fossilizes, strips away thought and emotion, so all I have left is the bone of memory–the sight of a neat row of quarrymen’s cottages, the smell of the car’s leather upholstery.

If I went back to a psychotherapist, I could probably reflesh those moments. Remember the exact point I realized I wasn’t ever going back to the yellow house. Trace how I had succeeded in destroying everything. Understand I would never again see Poppy or Mrs Owen or Gary. It didn’t upset me then. Everything was unreal, just as it feels unreal now: a past fossilized and forgotten.

But a therapist would pick away at my memories, scraping a little fragment of dried-up flesh off the bone, culturing it and growing it and proving to me that I was hurt, I did cry, that I screamed, in fact, as they were dragging me out of the doorway and down the steep path to the waiting car.

I’d prefer not to know. I’ve put a lot of effort into not knowing. I don’t want to hear the voice I heard when the roof collapsed in the flint mine. The point of coming back is to bury it for good.

The entrance to the underground quarry is in the middle of a recreation ground, not far from Green Down’s high street. The site offices are metal-sided cabins, painted blue, green and yellow, jumbled like Lego bricks over a carpet of hardcore. Outside the high, solid fence some little kids in Manchester United strip are kicking a football in a bored sort of way. A security guard lifts the barrier to let me in. The boys stare at my car as I drive past and I wave, but they don’t wave back. I remember leaning on the wall years ago, watching another group of boys playing football. Just as in that long-ago summer there’s a cloudless sky, but today’s is cold and brittle blue, like ice on puddles.

I park the car in the only space, next to a stack of pallets. A knot of men in hard-hats are gathered some way off by a cabin. One breaks away from the others and walks towards me, but I need to get into the right clobber, and I’m hopping about on the cold ground, rummaging behind the passenger seat to find my work boots, trying to make myself look half-way professional before he catches me in my socks …

I’ve still got my back to him when he reaches me.

‘Mrs Parry?’ he says. He’s wrong, of course. Ms. I’m not married any more, though I’ve kept Nick’s name. ‘You’ve timed it well. I’m the site foreman, by the way–Gary Bennett.’

And I’m back in the summer I turned fourteen.

LEVEL TWO

Nymphus

For such a very macho creed as Roman Mithraism, it seems unusual, to say the least, that initiates at this stage were required to play a woman’s role. Etymologically, nymphus is an interesting term. It means ‘male bride’, but no such word exists in everyday Latin. It is derived from nympha, a bride, or young woman, but as we know, women were rigorously excluded from the cult. In murals the Nymphus is shown wearing a bridal veil, and is considered to be under the protection of the planet Venus. He is joined in mystical union with the god by the Father: an adept who has attained the seventh and final level of enlightenment. The clasping of the right hand, the iunctio dextrarum, was an important part of the initiation ceremony, to pledge fidelity. This may be the origin of the modern-day custom of shaking hands on a contract. (It is also one of the many reasons why modern conspiracy theorists have sought to trace the origins of freemasonry back to Mithraism.) At a given moment in the ceremony the veil would be pulled away and the male bride revealed in all his masculine glory.

From The Mithras Enigma, Dr Martin Ekwall, OUP

Chapter Four

Digging: that was me, the summer I turned fourteen, always digging. Whenever I lifted my hand to my face I could smell moist earth on my fingers. Even when we were just hanging out, Poppy, Trish and I, my hands scrabbled obsessively at the soil, the way other people pick at the skin round their thumb or fiddle with their hair.

‘Your nails are disgusting,’ said Trish. She was right. They were always black-edged. Trish’s were filed into neat ovals, and she pushed the cuticles back every night with an orange stick so we could admire the half-moons. Right now she was painting them silvery-pink, her dark hair falling across her face. She looked up suddenly, and her hair flopped back to reveal the eyes that fascinated me, the way they changed with the light like the sea does. ‘Don’t you think this colour’s cool?’

Silvery-pink was cool but I wasn’t. A teenage girl who was obsessed with the bones of things was never going to be cool.

We were sprawled beside a big old oak, heads in the shade but skirts hitched up our thighs to let the sun get at our legs. Freckles had already erupted like sprinkles of cinnamon on Poppy’s knees. The field was laid to pasture, and some tired cows were grazing at the other end. Occasionally one moved a few slow steps, as if it could hardly be bothered to go to a juicier patch. Here, under the tree, the grass grew more sparsely, and my fingers were idly picking at bare soil, feeling for stones.

Green Down, where we lived, was a suburb that was almost a village, built on one of the hills that surround Bath, and it didn’t take long to reach open countryside. Heavy lorries rumbled up the lane to the quarries scooped out of the slope, but the fields in the valley bottom were peaceful. If I dug here I would find something, I knew it. The fields and hills held secrets: hidden valleys, mysterious embankments and ridges marking where Roman villas had once stood, or where the Saxon Wansdyke marched across the fields.

None of this interested Poppy and Trish. But I was always hopeful.

‘There are ammonites in this field,’ I said.

Poppy was gazing at the sky and chewing strands of her bobbed reddish hair. When they dried, her split ends would fan out like fuse wire.

‘No, really,’ I said, as if someone had bothered to reply. ‘If I borrowed your nail file, Trish, I bet I’d dig one up in a jiff.’

They didn’t have to ask me what ammonites were. I’d told them, plenty of times. ‘They had shells like big coiled-up snakes,’ I explained, at every possible opportunity. ‘They lived at the bottom of the ocean millions of years ago.’

If anyone was so daft as to enquire, ‘What are they doing here, then?’ I would go on to enthuse about how the hills round Bath were once the bed of a shallow sea, where dead creatures fell and fossilized. My friends’ eyes glazed over, as unresponsive as the ammonites.

‘Look,’ I went on, trying to get my fingers under a big lump of stone embedded in the soil. ‘I bet there’s a fossil in this.’

Trish began to paint Poppy’s toenails with the silvery-pink varnish.

Sometimes I couldn’t believe how little they noticed. Trish lived in an old Georgian rectory in Midcombe, where there was an ammonite built into the garden wall. It was enormous, more than a foot across, with deep corrugated ridges on its coils. You couldn’t miss it. But they did. ‘Oh, is that one?’ Trish asked, when I pointed it out to her. She couldn’t have cared less. I’d have given my left arm to bag a fossil that big. You could find little ones easily, right on the surface, early in the year when the fields were freshly ploughed. Sometimes there was only the imprint in rock, but often the ammonites themselves seemed to have crawled up from the sticky earth, fragments broken by the plough, occasionally nearly whole stone spirals. I had quite a collection in my bedroom. They looked like catherine wheels. My father said they reminded him of very stale Danish pastries. I thought they were beautiful.

I watched Trish. Her long dark hair, enviably straight, hung across her face as she bent over Poppy’s leg, curtaining them in a private tent. She never offered to paint my toenails.

Trish had been my friend first. We got to know each other by accident, rather than choice: we were the only two in our class who hadn’t been at the school right through from juniors. All the rest had known each other since they were seven. They didn’t like Trish because she was called Klein, and they didn’t like me because I was a scholarship girl. None of them realized that the most Jewish thing about Trish was her surname, and the only clever thing about me was my scholarship. For nearly three years, we had been best friends by default.

But late last year, things began to change. Trish suddenly got tall, and I stayed short. Trish–ugly old Trish, with her big nose and wide mouth, just as awkward as me, I’d always thought–started to get looks from boys. Trish had a starter bra and sanitary towels. And Trish had discovered Poppy.

Poppy had arrived in Green Down just after Christmas. Her father worked for the Ministry of Defence and had been posted from Plymouth to Bath. She immediately latched on to Trish and me. I didn’t mind at first. It made me feel like I had a wide circle of friends. Now I wasn’t so sure.

Trish straightened up, popped the brush back into the bottle and screwed down the top. Poppy wiggled her freckled toes, admiring the silvery-pink. ‘Do Katie’s,’ she said to Trish.

‘I’m not going to waste it,’ said Trish.

‘I don’t want mine done,’ I said quickly. Trish was right. I wouldn’t be careful: it would get chipped, and I didn’t have any nail-varnish remover to take it off properly. Still, I’d have liked her to paint my nails silvery-pink.

‘So,’ said Poppy, ‘what are we going to do now?’

They both looked at me. They wanted me to invite them back to my house. But I wanted to stay in the field, with the worn-out cows and the ammonites.

‘Let’s do biology,’ I said, to buy time. Trish looked pleased; this game starred her. She fished in her satchel.

There was no hurry. No one was waiting for us. My dad wouldn’t be back from rewiring someone’s house until half past six. Poppy’s parents were in Scotland that week, where her grandmother was taking her time over dying, so Poppy was staying with Trish. Trish’s mum was always relaxed about the time they came home after school.

My dad had not yet plucked up the courage to tell me the facts of life. He left that to the school, which had been slow getting round to it too. But this term we’d been thrilled to find our new biology textbook was rather more forthcoming on the subject than our teacher.

Trish pushed her hair into a tight little bun on the top of her head, and flared her nostrils in imitation of Miss Millichip. ‘Turn now to page one-nine-four, girls,’ she trilled. Poppy and I, playing dutiful pupils, opened our books. We stared at mysterious illustrations that reminded me of the plumbing schemes and wiring diagrams my father worked on at the kitchen table.

‘Today we are going to study reproduction,’ continued Trish. We’d had a real lesson on it this afternoon, but Miss Millichip had revealed nothing more exciting than the gestation period of a rabbit. ‘What kind of reproduction, Poppy McClaren?’

Poppy giggled. ‘Human reproduction, miss.’

The diagrams bore no resemblance to any human body I’d seen. Were those coils of pipework really tucked away inside me? On the opposite page there was a diagram of the male reproductive system. Staring at it, I felt an odd sensation. It was grounded somewhere not far from the pipework, but it seemed to swell up through the whole central stem of my body, so even my lips and tongue felt thick and hot and clumsy.

Trish’s mother, more advanced than the average Green Down parent, had explained matters to her daughter more than a year ago, so Trish considered herself an expert. ‘A woman,’ she intoned, ‘has an opening called the regina.’

‘Are you sure?’ asked Poppy. ‘It says here it’s called the vagina.’

‘Of course I’m sure,’ said Trish, loftily. ‘It’s Latin for “queen”. It must be a misprint in the book.’

Poppy looked sceptical, but neither of us felt brave enough to contradict Trish. Her mother had come from London, and worked as a photographer’s model before marrying Trish’s dad.

‘And the man,’ Trish continued, ‘has an appendage called a penis.’ That did it. We were all off on a fit of giggles.

‘Have you ever seen one?’ asked Poppy, a little later when we had recovered.

‘Of course I have,’ said Trish. ‘I used to have baths with Stephen.’

‘That doesn’t count,’ said Poppy. ‘Your brother’s ten. I meant a grown-up one.’

I could see Trish weighing up whether to lie or not. In spite of her mother’s racy career, her home was probably as modest as the rest of suburban Bath in the 1970s. Fathers and brothers did not wander around naked.

‘No,’ she finally admitted. ‘But I have seen my mother’s fanny. It’s all hairy.’

I decided it was time to make my own contribution to the debate. ‘I have,’ I said.

They looked at me, astonished.

‘Really?’ said Poppy, at the same moment as Trish said, ‘I don’t believe you.’

‘Really I have,’ I said. ‘It was horrible.’

‘Was it a flasher?’ asked Poppy.

‘No, it was my dad’s,’ I said. ‘I was on the toilet, and hadn’t locked the door, and he came in not knowing I was there. It was sticking out of the gap in his pyjama bottoms. It looked like a boiled beef sausage, red and a bit shiny. Except it was more wrinkled, and had this kind of eye-thing at the end, looking at me.’

‘What did you do?’ asked Trish. ‘I would have screamed. I’d have called for my mum.’

She didn’t mean to be unkind–at least, I don’t think she did – but it stung all the same. Poppy saw my face, and jumped in quickly. ‘What did he do?’

‘He went out again,’ I said. ‘Then afterwards, at breakfast, he shouted at me for not locking the bathroom door.’

‘Was it–you know, up?’ asked Trish.

‘I’m not sure,’ I said. ‘It all happened quite quickly, and what I mostly remember was the eye-thing.’

‘It must have been up if you saw the eye,’ said Trish. ‘Because if it had been down, it would have been pointing to the floor, instead of looking at you.’

‘But if it had been up, it would have been pointing at the ceiling,’ argued Poppy. ‘So it can’t have been up. Anyway, why would it have been up? He can’t have been having sex.’

‘It goes up when a man just thinks about sex,’ said Trish. ‘I expect he must still think about sex, your dad. Maybe it was half-way, on its way up or its way down.’

‘I don’t know,’ I said. My hand slid off the book and came to rest on the comforting earth. I wanted to stop this conversation. I felt embarrassed, as if I’d taken a picture of my dad’s penis and shown it to them.

‘You know, men are supposed to think about sex almost every two minutes,’ said Poppy. ‘There was something about it in the Daily Express. Some survey scientists did in America. So I don’t think it has to go up when men just think about sex.’

Trish looked belligerent. ‘My mother said it does. But you might not be able to tell, if they’re wearing trousers.’

‘I think you would be able to tell,’ insisted Poppy. ‘I mean, it gets bigger, doesn’t it? So they’d get a big bump in the front of their trousers.’ That set us off giggling again.

‘In that case Gary Bennett’s jeans might split,’ said Trish. There was a reverent silence, as we all contemplated this shockingly delicious idea.

Gary Bennett was the reason Trish and Poppy were so keen to come round to my house whenever they could. He was only two or three years older than us, but he had already left school and was working as a decorator’s apprentice. He had dishwater-blond hair in tangled curls, blue eyes and a mouth like a Roman statue’s, and we all three dreamed of that curvy mouth clamped on our own. Mrs Owen, from three doors further down the street, who sometimes brought round casseroles because she refused to believe my dad could cook, was best friends with Gary’s mum, a widow who worked at the Co-op. It was only a couple of months since mother and son had moved in across the road, and Trish had noticed him first.

‘You’ve got a boy living opposite you,’ she told me.

I wasn’t much interested. Then the decorator’s firm Gary worked for was hired to repaint Poppy’s house. Every afternoon for the whole two weeks he worked there she and Trish rushed home from school together to get a glimpse of him.

‘Why don’t we go to your house and wait for Gary to get home?’ asked Poppy.

I looked at my hands. They were scrabbling almost manically in the soil now.

‘Come on,’ said Trish. I knew her eyes would have gone sea-dark, fixed on my face, willing me to look up so she could stare me into surrender.

My fingers touched something slimy: a big fat worm. I pulled them away quickly. ‘My dad …’

‘He won’t be home for ages. And Poppy’s got binoculars.’ They’d planned this together, I could tell.

Early that year, when Trish and I were only just getting to know Poppy, I’d caught a mysterious virus, like flu but longer-lasting. My father had asked Mrs Owen to look after me. She didn’t need much persuading, her grey curls bouncing cheerfully as she trotted up and down the stairs with bowls of soup. I got better gradually, but my muscles stayed weak, and the doctor said I needed more time to recover. I would have quite enjoyed being off school if I hadn’t been worrying that Poppy would usurp me in Trish’s affections.

My father fetched me books from the library, but I soon got bored. Mrs Owen tried to keep me in bed, but I would sneak out and sit in our spare bedroom at the front of the house to watch the street.

This had once been my parents’ room, and although it had not been occupied for more than ten years it was fascinating to me because it still contained traces of my mother. Her old cosmetics were in the dressing-table: worn-down lipsticks in unfashionable shades, creamy green and blue eye-shadows, dried-up mascara. I rummaged through the drawers, slipping costume jewellery on to my wrists and fingers, wrapping silky scarves round my head: first Grace Kelly, then a Woodstock hippie. There were clothes in the wardrobe too, duster coats and full-skirted dresses that would have been already old-fashioned by the time she was gone, but they scared me too much to touch.

Mrs Owen had gone out to do her weekly shop, and I was curled on the window-seat, keeping an eye open for her. It was late afternoon. The streetlamps had not yet come on when I noticed a light in the front bedroom of the house across the street: Gary Bennett’s house.

I suppose it never occurred to Gary to draw the curtains when he went upstairs to change out of his work clothes. That afternoon he flicked on the light and came into the room, pulling his sweater and T-shirt over his head, then disappeared into the corner to wash. After a while there was another tantalizing glimpse of bare chest as he came back to the wardrobe and took out a shirt. I watched him button it from top to bottom. Then he turned his back as he tucked it into clean jeans, hunching his shoulders to do up the zip.

I remember those flashes of nakedness, like a set of Polaroid snaps–the skinny white shoulders in the nicotine-yellow light of the overhead bulb, the surprisingly solid arms, the flat slabs of pectoral muscle that were just beginning to develop as his boy’s body toned to do a man’s job. I would have watched longer, but I heard Mrs Owen’s key in the lock and scampered back to bed in my own room before she caught me.

I could hardly wait to tell the others what I’d seen. After my first day back at school, Trish and Poppy came home with me, and we settled to wait in the front bedroom. Shortly after five thirty, the light across the road snapped on and Gary crossed the bay window hauling his jumper over his head. He towelled himself dry staring out of the bedroom window, blissfully unconscious of the three admirers ducking below sill level every time he looked towards our house.

Afterwards hardly a week went by without us making at least one attempt to watch him undress. We weren’t always lucky. Some nights he conducted the entire ritual out of sight in the corner of the room. Or he didn’t get back until too late; I had to make sure Trish and Poppy left before Dad got home. Once his mother came into his room in the middle, and–perhaps telling him off for making such an exhibition of himself–crossed to the window and pulled the curtains shut.

By spring Gary’s chest was harder and broader, and his hair had grown longer. The lighter evenings frustrated us. He no longer needed to turn on the light, and the reflection of the sky on the window made it impossible to see much inside. But that didn’t stop us hoping. Perhaps warmer weather would help. Lately he had begun to fling open the windows, and once even leaned bare-chested over the sill for a full two minutes, staring into the street. Trish had timed it.

If Gary noticed our bobbing heads, he showed no sign. But two or three times lately I had passed him in the street on my way to school, and instead of ignoring me he had given me a wink or a wave. I would go hot and red. I was beginning to wonder how much longer we could get away with spying on him.

But that wasn’t why I was reluctant today. My dad didn’t like my friends coming round; he never said as much, but somehow he made it clear. I knew our time on our own together was important to him. He felt bad about being out at work when I got home, and bad about there not being a mother to get my tea. He didn’t get back till six at the earliest, but it was hard to persuade Trish and Poppy that they should leave.

‘Oh, come on, Katie,’ said Poppy. ‘I told Daddy you were a keen birdwatcher, so he’d lend me the binoculars. We’ve got to try them out.’

‘We’ll be able to see Gary in close-up,’ Trish added persuasively.

But what if he saw us? Still, I couldn’t help being excited. This might be the way to see more. Poppy swore she’d once spotted a flash of white Y-fronts when he reached up to take his shirt from the hanger, and we wanted to believe her, but Trish and I had never seen anything to confirm it.

Trish knew I was wavering. She pulled herself to her feet.

‘It’s that or we go to the tennis club,’ she said. ‘Without you.’

Her father was an architect. My dad was a handyman. He couldn’t afford membership of the club where Poppy and Trish had lessons every Saturday.

‘OK,’ I said, reluctantly freeing my restless fingers from the earth. ‘Come on, then.’

The Bath I knew was very different from the one the tourists see: Georgian crescents, terraces of tall honey-stone houses, elegant squares. Where I lived, on the city side of the hill below Green Down, there were circles and crescents, but of modern, semi-detached houses, squat and yellow, faced with cheap, reconstituted stone. The inhabitants made up for the ugliness by going to town on their front gardens. There were sundials and birdbaths, pink paving and bright green gravel, armies of regimented scarlet salvias.

‘All it needs is a weeping Jesus,’ said Trish scornfully, as we passed one particularly elaborate example. A fishing gnome hunched hopefully over a wishing-well, a nymph spilled water from a conch, and red snapdragons, yellow pansies and violet lobelia tumbled out of a stone wheelbarrow.

‘I think it’s pretty,’ I said nervously. There was a weeping Jesus on our living-room wall, and I couldn’t quite see how he fitted into a garden. Our Jesus had big, sad eyes and in the picture he was knocking on someone’s door. He reminded me of a Kleeneze brush salesman at the end of a long hard day. When I was younger I thought he was weeping because he knew he wouldn’t find my mother at home.

Trish’s wave took in the dribbling nymph, the constipated gnome and the oversexed snapdragons. ‘It’s naff,’ she said. I still didn’t get the connection with Jesus.

Our house was silent and smelt of wet washing. It always did, regardless of the weather. Every time I let my friends in through the green front door, with its lozenge of cloudy glass, I was conscious of how cramped it was. Trish’s home in Midcombe was especially lovely, an old Georgian rectory looking out on to roses and open countryside. Poppy’s big modern house on the other side of Green Down was architect-designed, and sat in nearly an acre of immaculate lawns and terraces, kept private by tall pines.

My dad had concreted most of our tiny garden and drawn wavy lines on it before it set, to make it look like crazy paving.

My mother’s room was airless, warm and musty. I thought I could catch a whiff of perfume, as if she had spilt some on her way out ten years ago.

‘Put the binoculars here,’ said Trish, marching over to the window and taking charge as usual.

‘He’ll see them,’ protested Poppy.

‘Not if you draw the curtain a bit and poke them underneath.’ Trish was about to station herself behind the binoculars but Poppy shoved her out of the way.

‘They’re Daddy’s. I get first go.’ She knelt on the floor. ‘He’s not back yet. But I can see a Led Zeppelin poster on the wall.’ A strand of red hair had found its way into her mouth again, and she was chewing it rhythmically. ‘And there’s a guitar in the corner.’

‘Hold on,’ said Trish. ‘He’s coming down the street now.’

I could see his boss’s van pulling away at the top of the road. He walked easily, nonchalantly. I wondered if he was planning the evening ahead–a pub, with his mates, perhaps meeting a girl. We had never seen Gary with a girlfriend, but that didn’t mean there wasn’t one.

He swung in through the front gate. Five long minutes crawled by. Perhaps his mum was making him a cup of tea, asking about his day.

‘Get on with it,’ muttered Poppy, through clenched teeth. Then, a moment later, she breathed, ‘Yes …’ Trish and I, huddled on the floor below the level of the window waiting our turn, wriggled in anticipation.

‘He’s in the room,’ reported Poppy. ‘I can see … he’s taking his T-shirt off.’ Silence. ‘Aaahh …’

‘What can you see?’ asked Trish.

‘His glorious chest,’ said Poppy. ‘His lovely, lovely chest. Oh!’

‘Yes?’ we said in unison.

‘He’s got a little hairy triangle just at the top,’ said Poppy, sounding disappointed. ‘I’ve never noticed that before.’ We didn’t rate chest hair. ‘He’s gone now to get washed.’

‘Give someone else a chance,’ said Trish. ‘You’ve had your turn.’

‘Katie next,’ said Poppy. ‘My binoculars, her house.’

I slithered into place. Being shorter, I had to get up on the window-seat instead of kneeling, and then the angle of the binoculars seemed wrong. I was just moving them to get a better view when Gary returned to the window, towelling under his arms. Something seemed to catch his eye, and he opened the window wider. I focused the binoculars on his chest as best I could–it wasn’t very hairy–and then realized as I lifted them that he seemed to be staring straight at me. I gave a little squeak, and fell off the window-seat.

‘What? What did you see?’ hissed Trish.

‘His Y-fronts?’ speculated Poppy, dreamily.

But I didn’t have time to reply, because suddenly I could hear feet on the stairs. The bedroom door swung open, and there was my father.

I saw him take in the scene–three teenage girls, giggling and sprawled on the floor, in the bedroom he had once shared with his wife. There was a terrible silence that seemed to go on and on.

‘What are you doing in here?’ he said eventually, in a mild, calm voice. ‘Katie, you know I don’t like you coming in here.’

Trish and Poppy heard nothing in my father’s voice except quiet disappointment, but I heard something far more dangerous. They didn’t know my father as I did.

‘I’m sorry, Mr Carter,’ said Trish. ‘We … we were just messing about.’

My father appeared to take this in peacefully, as if resigned to the whims of teenage girls.

‘Well, you’d better let me run you home,’ he said. ‘And, Katie, you’d better go to your room and start your homework.’ So softly, so reasonably, that no one but I would have understood.

‘He whistled while he was driving us home,’ Trish told me, the following day. ‘He seemed … well, a bit remote, he didn’t speak to us or anything. But he didn’t seem angry.’ She didn’t know that whistling, through clenched teeth, was how my father signalled extreme fury. ‘I can’t believe … well, he didn’t act cross at all.’

When my father returned, he came straight upstairs to my room. I was sitting on the bed, trying to take in a chapter of my history textbook on the Corn Laws, though all the time I could think only of what my father’s feet would sound like on the stairs.

He was even faster than usual; I had no chance. He crossed to the bed, and dealt me one hard heavy blow to the side of my head. I was knocked backwards, shooting an arm out to save myself and making the briefest of contacts with his merciless right hand. I crashed against the framed photo of my mother on the bedside table. It fell to the floor, and the frame and glass shattered.

All my father said was ‘Pick that up.’ He was trembling. Then he left the room.

My head sang with pain. I lay back on the bed, breathing hard, feeling no surprise, only the usual hollowness. I waited till I felt less dizzy, then picked up the photo of my mother, shaking the smashed glass into the waste-paper bin and reminding myself not to walk barefoot until I had had a chance to Hoover properly. I placed the broken frame and the photo back on the bedside table, propping it against the lamp.

Some of the hollowness was hunger, but I didn’t dare go downstairs. My heart was still thudding, but I made myself finish the chapter of history and trace a map of the Somerset coalfield for geography homework before I got into bed. It was still light outside, and for a while I lay awake, listening to the sound of the hi-fi downstairs playing Bobby Darin and Roy Orbison. It was my fault, of course. I shouldn’t have let Trish and Poppy come back.

But I also kept remembering Gary Bennett’s face. I thought his eyes had met mine, through the binoculars. I was sure he had winked.

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