Page 16 of The Start of the Story
‘I thought you’d be out.’ My eyes had found the gap on the wall where the map had hung, and they caught on the bare painted space, refusing to look at him.
‘Just popped back to pick up a delivery.’ He hesitated, as though he wanted to engage me in conversation, but the way I kept my eyes on the empty wall must have put him off, because he went back out again. I heard clattering in the kitchen for amoment and then he was outside to greet the arrival of a white van, bearing something big and wrapped in cardboard.
‘Just go away,’I whispered. It sounded like a plea or a prayer and I hadn’t realised how much I’d been banking on having the place to myself.
He came back in. ‘Tea?’
‘No, thank you. I’ve got work to do.’
‘Oh. Okay.’ A pause while he rummaged and I heard the kettle boil. Then, ‘I put the hoover over the broken glass, by the way. It should be fine down there now.’ A clank of mugs and a pouring of water. ‘And I’m off out away back up on the moor. We’ve found something that could be the walls on your map, or what’s left of them.’
Almost apologetic at its appearance, a mug of tea slid into the edge of my vision, backed by the dark cloud that was Connor, and then he was gone to a slam of the back door and a raised voice of greeting. The tea steamed, puffs of vapour floating across to add to the ghosts of the cottage. The miller, his wife, those children – how many others might still be around?
Not the right ones. Not the wanted ones.
I sighed and it let out some of the annoyance, then I picked up the mug and began drinking the tea almost without thinking about it but imagining instead the investigations going on up on the moors that teetered above my house. In fact, if I got up and went to the window, I could almost see them, where the sand track that had once been a road crossed the ford and rose up to become another hill on the far side. Out on that ridge was the track that led to the Fairy Stane and from there, presumably, on to this putative Roman settlement.
I turned away from the window and forced another mouthful of tea between clenched teeth. At least Connor had made lifting the stone sound like a last resort. If they got concrete results from the drone search to add to his no doubt exhaustive, in-depth and scholarly previous research, then he wouldn’tneedto lift it, would he?
And, really, whydidI care so much?
The thought hit me, barbed and vicious.Why did I care?The stone could be lifted, checked for any revealing lettering and put back. Who would know? Only whoever lifted it, Connor O’Keefe, and me, and I’d only know if I checked for disturbed foliage. Unless… unless it turned out that the stone really was a Roman relic, and then what? Would they take it to a museum, to preserve its ancient writing? And leave me with nothing but a bare space on the moor and a huge hole in the legends? I couldn’t really write a book of local folklore based around a stone that wasn’t there any more, could I?
Besides, whatever the professor might think, memory, folk history, was important. It had to be kept. It had to be guarded and curated because otherwise what use had it been to all those people who’d kept it for all those years? To us in the twenty-first century, muttering charms as you churned the milk was pointless. Unnecessary.Weknew the cream would turn to butter regardless, as long as the fat content was sufficient, the temperature was right, the cows had eaten good grass and you kept on churning. But back before science stuck its fingers in farming, so much was experience and guesswork. And charms? If someone like me didn’t keep a record of such things, if notes weren’t kept about the words used and the beliefs behind them, then they’d vanish as if they’d never been. Folklore wasimportant. It was memory and the past and ways of life long gone,and it couldn’t be allowed to die.
The silence in the house sang in my ears. There was nothing but the gentle gloop and gurgle of the river as it caught on the edges of the ford and then swirled free back to the depths of the mill race, and the hum of the air trapped in these small rooms.
I sighed again, carefully lifted the old paper of the map off my desk and turned on the computer.
9
Connor didn’t come back that evening. I went to bed and lay awake, alert for the sound of his key in the lock, but it never came. In the morning I got up to a quiet and empty house, made myself tea and was throwing the crusts from my toast out to the ducks when I thought to check my e-mails.
It’s late, I’ve been out for a drink with the drone boys, and I don’t want to wake you by coming in, so I’ll sleep on one of their sofas tonight. Don’t want you to think I’ve fallen in a bog and drowned!
Connor
I wondered if he knew that was what I’d been silently planning for him, and felt my cheeks get a bit hot. Was I reallythatobvious? Then I shrugged and decided to have a quick morning shower, just because I could. The house was mine again, in all its polish-and-old-wood-scented glory.
The gap on the wall where my map had hung snagged my eyes again as I walked past, and the map itself flopped half its length from the bureau where it was currently resting to leavemy work desk clear. Would I rehang it? I ought to, it was useful in the way it showed me sites known only to folk tales and maps like this, but I didn’t know if I could. This wasn’t just a map, it was a memory-story, leading from that secretive bookshop near the minster where we’d met over the ancient volumes, to the day we’d hung it on the wall. The day we’d moved into the cottage and looked around at all that had to be done and hugged and laughed at the hard work waiting for us.
‘God, Elliot, I miss you.’
The words felt heavy and obvious. OfcourseI missed him, that went without saying, so why did I feel the need to breathe the words aloud? To keep his memory alive, somehow?
I shook my head and sat, damp and rosy from the shower, on the edge of the bed. This gave me a prime view, too high for the river to feature, so it comprised the brownish ribbon of track, pimpled with chippings and acned with the red of broken brick that the farmers scattered every year to try to stop the whole thing degenerating into mud. Then, further up, the greying sticks of heather and whortleberry and the occasional blast of colour from gorse, as though some wild impressionist had been by and decided that what the moors needed at this time of year was more yellow.
I was making lists in my head, which was hopeful. A mental track of all the sites that I’d either written about, recorded or found among my paperwork, everything centred on the Fairy Stane, and I had about enough to fill a book. A small book, to be sure, but then nobody would read a four-thousand-page tome of scholarly research into the whys and wherefores of some of the stories. Whether the drowned maids were a cautionary tale to keep young girls from going astray with the farmers’ boys, or the hobs and goblins were distant memories of the Celtic hermits living wild in caves – the reading public didn’t care. They wanted spooks; they wanted places they could go on the moor and puttheir ear to the ground in the – hope? Expectation? Fear? – of hearing the fairy world partying beneath.
They wanted, in short,local colour. I could do that, and hopefully in such a way that the grant committee would keep funding my research, because the book would pay for itself. It might not reach the dizzy heights ofThe Timesbestseller lists, but it would sell regularly in the independent bookshops and tourist information places. People could take home a souvenir of ‘that time we went to North Yorkshire’, put it on their bookshelves and occasionally dip in to laugh at how funny we’d been in the past.
Outside, the sky, which had previously been bell-clear and cloudless, was becoming oppressed by the weight of incoming cloud. Time for me to drive through to York, see if any of those books that Chess had ordered had come in yet, and perhaps venture across to the university, where the music department was running a short course on Folklore through Lyrics. I’d promised to drop in for a chat with the students.
I gave one last long look out across the high moor and started to get dressed.
By late afternoon I was feeling proud of myself. I’d ticked off the things I had needed to do, listed some potential chapter headings for the book, given Chess a bulk of handwritten pages to start transcribing – which had interrupted her novel-reading at a vital page – and tidied the office so I now knew roughly where everything was.
There was no sign of Connor. I’d half expected a head around the door, or a text asking me what time I was leaving, but there had been no indication of his existence all day. He was probably hung-over, I thought with a degree of grim pleasure. Out drinking with his cronies and then sleeping it off on an uncomfortable sofa, then spending the day holding his head andmoving slowly. It would be one less day that I had to worry about the Fairy Stane anyway.
