Lovers and Newcomers (25 page)

He was rather sharply aware that there was no one else except Selwyn for him to look out for. In the weeks he had lived here he hadn’t met anyone who actually came from Meddlett.

There was a bonfire in the middle of the field, a sheet of brisk flames with the dark figure of a guy collapsing into its heart. People eddied around it, driven into a circle by the glaring heat. On the left against the hedge stood a row of tented booths selling food and drink, in the farthest corner a huge barbecue pit and a roast pig’s carcass was tended by professional caterers, and the thick crowds of people in between occupied themselves with paper plates heaped with food, and plastic beakers of drink. Pushchairs contained sleeping toddlers. Bigger children on the brink of exhausted tantrums ran about while their parents sat down to eat and drink on hay bales arranged in sociable groups.

Amos felt rather out of it. He couldn’t remember what Miranda had said she was going to do. He decided to see if there was anything half decent to eat or drink. Katherine was away, so he might as well forage for some dinner here. He parked his fence pole against the hedge, beside some of the makeshift banners saying
No
.

The first tent was an outpost of the Griffin. At the doorway he looked again for Selwyn. A pair of hands clapped over his eyes.

‘Hi,’ a girl’s voice said in his ear. A pair of breasts nudged against his back, which cancelled out his irritation at being forcibly blindfolded.

‘Who is this?’

She had slim wrists and small, strong hands, whoever she was. He lifted them away from his face and turned to see.

‘Hi?’ she said, somewhat less confidently. ‘You knocked me off my bike. I’d have thought you’d remember that.’

He did have one acquaintance in Meddlett, he remembered.

‘I didn’t knock you off your bike. I swerved to avoid you, thus in all probability saving you from serious injury.’

Jessie snorted. ‘I’ve never ever met a person who really, actually in the flesh, uses words like
thus
.’

‘You lead quite a restricted life, then.’

She grinned up at him. Under a short dark-coloured coat she was wearing several haphazard layers of clothing that gaped open to reveal the rather substantial cleavage and a few fronds of the evidently much larger tattoo. He wondered what the complete design might be.

‘I bloody well do. D’you want to buy me a drink, Amos?’

He was flattered that she remembered his name. She had already had several drinks, that was quite clear, but he let her take his arm and draw him into the grassy hum of the pub tent. He bought her a vodka with Red Bull, whatever that was, and a large whisky for himself.

‘Ta,’ Jessie said. She drank half of hers at a gulp, then stood on tiptoe to give him a voluptuous kiss on the lips. He was quite sorry when it ended. She downed the remainder of her vodka and stroked the corner of her mouth with the back of her hand.

‘I really liked your car. I thought it was beautiful. Will you take me for a proper ride in it?’

‘Do you want another of those? Is that an, um, professional question?’

‘You’re
fucking
rude. Are you trying to suggest I’m a prozzer?’

He said cautiously, ‘No, just aiming to establish the parameters.’

Now her eyes rolled. ‘Here we go again. Parameters? I’ll have that other drink, though. Cheers.’

They took their plastic beakers outside and found themselves a hay bale in the sheltering darkness. The bonfire was big enough to give the illusion if not the reality of warmth. Amos felt that the unpromising evening was looking up dramatically. Jessie hooked up her knees, rested her chin on them and scanned the crowd.

She told him that she had just worked a ten-hour shift at the Griffin, straight through lunch to dinner orders, and finally that slave-driver Vin Clarke had said she could go at nine o’clock. So she had come down here because her ex – that world-class wanker, by the way – had promised he’d bring the dog down here and hand him over, after he’d kept him quiet indoors while all the fireworks were going off.

‘He bloody hates fireworks, Raff does. He goes mental.’

‘I’m waiting for my friend Selwyn. We got separated in the procession.’

‘Is he one of you lot from the commune?’

‘Do I look as if I live in a commune?’

She rolled her head sideways and assessed him.

‘When were they in? You look and talk like you live in the century
before
last, if you really want to know.’

Amos laughed. The girl’s company was invigorating. She was very young and careless, and that appealed to him.

Jessie was a lively talker. From their vantage point on the hay bale she identified the people who shuffled into the tent and came out again with their liberal supply of drinks. Some of them she greeted, mostly with a jerk of the chin and a muttered, ‘All right?’ Then, out of the side of her mouth, she gave Amos the details. One balding man had had a series of Brazilian girlfriends, all of them met on the internet and brought over, as Jessie put it, scratching her index fingers in the air, as ‘servants slash sex toys’. A woman in a green Husky had had a ‘big ruck’ with her neighbour over a boundary dispute, and had ended up pouring a gallon of petrol into the neighbour’s garden shed and then setting fire to it. The house itself had almost gone up in flames.

‘Two fire engines,’ Jessie grinned. ‘And Mrs Hayes was arrested.’

This woman now shared a probation officer with a boy Jessie used to go out with before Damon, who had sold a bit of weed, the odd wrap, nothing too ambitious; the trouble was he was just too thick to avoid getting caught. She knew a load of other people who were bigger time, and they never got any bother.

Amos said in surprise, ‘And I thought it was so quiet here. As if nothing ever happens except harvest festival.’

There was a band set up on a hay wagon and people were beginning to dance, Greens with Maubys. He was thoroughly enjoying these new perspectives on Meddlett, which had up until now seemed a rather dull place for country bumpkins.

Jessie jerked her chin. ‘You incomers always think the same. As if it’s all green fields and divine views and bollocks like that. But people live their lives here, all kinds of lives, same as anywhere else. There are safe ones, and there are totally crap individuals. The only difference is we don’t have much choice about being here. We have to get on with it. We can’t go off and get ourselves a weekend cottage in Notting Hill, can we?’

Amos saw the yearning behind her narrowed eyes.

‘Don’t you have a choice, Jessie?’

‘Oh, yeah.’ She sat up straighter, rejecting his sympathy.

A pair of jeans topped by a cagoule stopped in front of them. Jessie said coldly, raising her voice over the blare of distorted music, ‘You again? What do you want? Can’t you see I’m talking to someone?’

The wearer obviously could see, but came another step closer just the same. Amos recognized the junior archaeologist with the dreadlocks and difficult skin who had been so officious on the site. Remembering names tended to be a problem nowadays, but somehow he dredged this one up. Kieran, that was it. The boy nodded an anxious greeting at him. To Jessie he muttered, ‘Can we have a word? I’ve got a bone to pick with you.’

‘Ha ha. Is that your little archaeology joke?’

‘You know what it’s about. It’s why you’ve been avoiding me, isn’t it?’

‘You can find me in the bloody Griffin, any time you want.’

In an undertone Kieran said, ‘I’m not dragging all this out in the pub. But I want to know once and for all. It
was
you, wasn’t it?’

Amos was interested. Unfortunately, good manners got the better of him. ‘I’ll go and find myself another drink,’ he said.

As he stood up, he saw Miranda.

She was ten yards away, closer to the bonfire, penned in by a knot of princess protesters. Her hands were dug in her pockets and her shoulders were defensively hunched.

‘Is there a problem?’ he murmured in her ear, as soon as he reached her.

‘This is Mr Knight. He’s the owner of the site,’ she told them. ‘Thank God you’re here,’ she whispered back.

He listened. These earnest people seemed to think that he and Miranda were to blame for the loss of the princess’s remains, first of all to the faceless bureaucracy of the museums, as they put it, and then for the theft by vandals of what remained.

Amos towered over them. He began, magisterially, to explain the planning and treasure laws.

Confused shouting interrupted him, followed by a scream rising over the music. Amos turned to see what was going on.

Jessie was at the heart of a scrum of people. The girl was definitely trouble. She was kneeling with her arms around her black dog. The animal was shaking and whimpering, its black coat drenched with sweat as she stroked it and whispered in its ear.

Over and around her three men were scuffling, dragging and pulling at each other’s clothes, swinging wild punches and tripping over their feet and the hay bale. Another girl was hauling at the nearest man, trying to pull him away. She was tiny, and when he lunged forwards she sailed with him, her feet bumping like a rag doll’s.

One of the men was Kieran, and he was clearly outnumbered. He raised his arms to protect his face as punches rained on his head. Amos broke away from Miranda and the protesters. Onlookers were now tentatively trying to break up the fight.

‘He’s got a knife,’ the girl shrieked. Several people swerved aside. At the outer margins parents hustled their children away.

Jessie jumped up. She held the dog on a short leash. She swung her free arm in a wide arc, smacking one of the other two men. She kicked the second for good measure. To the third, Kieran, she bellowed, ‘Go on, piss off out of here while you can walk.’

Amos reached them. He hauled Kieran aside and interposed himself between the others.

Amos said quietly, ‘If anyone’s carrying a knife, I advise you to get away from here right now and dispose of it.’

He must have summoned the right blend of threat and authority, because the two men and the girl immediately slipped past the onlookers and vanished into the dark. To Kieran, Jessie hissed, ‘And you. You better stay at your mum’s tonight.’

Amos released him. Kieran walked quickly in the opposite direction from the others, looking at no one.

‘That’s it. All over,’ Amos announced to the spectators. The alarm was rapidly mutating into excitement and curiosity. People shuffled into buzzing groups. The music throbbed more wildly as the band attempted ‘Mustang Sally’.

Jessie returned to soothing her shivering dog.

‘You were pretty good,’ she conceded to Amos.

‘You were better. I wouldn’t like to go fifteen rounds with you,’ he replied. He was impressed by her courage. Jessie was trouble, but interesting trouble.

Miranda reached Amos’s side. Her eyes were dark hollows of alarm in her white face.

‘Are you all right? Both of you?’

‘Damon took my dog out in the fireworks. Look at him,’ Jessie cried to her.

Amos and Miranda exchanged a look.

‘Is that what it was all about?’ Amos asked. ‘One of those two was your ex-boyfriend?’

Jessie frowned. She was a small, dark, spiky bundle.

‘Never mind,’ she spat out. ‘Here, Rafferty. Come on, Raff.’ She nuzzled her face against his soaking flank.

The princess protesters had gathered in Miranda’s wake. Two wilting
No
placards stuck out at angles, and they seemed to have acquired the vicar as an extra. One of the costumed men strode forward, twitching his skins and hemp skirts around his mud-caked calves as the vicar peeled away and began benignly to circulate amidst his parishioners.

‘I take your point,’ the Iron-Age tribesman continued to Amos, as if they were sitting in some committee room. ‘However, the fact is that these remains historically belong to the people of Meddlett. There are precedents, if I may draw your attention…’

He became aware that he didn’t have Amos’s full attention, or Miranda’s.

Across the grass, passing the bonfire that was sinking into a mass of embers, came Selwyn. One side of his head was covered by a huge sterile dressing, held in place by a white turban bandage.

EIGHT

Polly sat on the modishly battered brown leather sofa at Alpha’s east London flat, watching her two girls prepare supper. They were waiting for Ben to turn up. He had told his mother that he really, really needed to see her, because talking on the phone just wouldn’t be good enough, yet he hadn’t quite managed to get there at the time he had suggested.

Alpha and Omega sidestepped between the sink and the fridge, like one individual with four hands, wordlessly passing the chopping knife or the colander. In the big kitchen of their old house Polly had taught them how to bake and make casseroles, and now their enthusiasm for cooking outstripped hers. The girls usually gave her chefs’ glossy hardback books for birthday and Christmas presents, but Polly didn’t read recipes in bed these days. Even if there had been a decent light to see by, she would have been too tired to keep her eyes open.

Omega was complaining that she still hadn’t met Jaime, Alpha’s new boyfriend, and did Polly think it might be because Alph was trying to
shield
him from her family in some weird way?

‘It’s so not right to keep us in the dark. I mean, where is he tonight?’

‘He’s working. You’ll meet him soon,’ Alpha said, not rising to the bait. ‘Tonight’s about Ben, anyway.’

The girls exchanged glances. Ben had insisted that he wanted to tell his mother the news himself.

Polly tried to concentrate on what the twins were saying. The flat overlooked a busy road, and the room densely contained the noise of traffic. The oversized plasma screen on one wall silently flashed
East Enders
, and some repetitive music chipped out of hidden speakers. In the end Selwyn had needed the car to pick up some tiles, so she had made a difficult train journey that involved a bus link to circumnavigate emergency works, and then a rush-hour transfer from the main line station to the Tube station nearest to Alpha’s flat, which wasn’t all that near.