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.
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
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
