Page 6 of The Start of the Story
‘Lorry’s blocking road,’ he said quickly through the tiny gap that I opened in my window. ‘You’ll need to turn round.’
I could feel the waves of self-satisfaction coming from the professor in the passenger seat, almost as though he’d psychically caused the accident so we’d have to go back, but obediently I U-turned and we headed back the way we’d come, inching along the road with two wheels practically on the verge.
‘So, shall I be telling you what my plans actually are now, then?’ he said, cheerful again now that we weren’t apparently falling off the edge of the world. ‘Or wait until we get back to your office?’
I didn’t answer. I was having to concentrate hard on not driving off the road and onto the boggy moor. But, of course, he went on anyway.
‘I’m on secondment to York University from Dublin, because my speciality is lost Roman settlements and the archaeologists have LIDAR evidence of something that looks like a small town out to the east there.’ He glanced quickly at my face, but I kept my expression impassive. ‘That would be a big deal – there’s not a lot of evidence of Roman settlements out here. A few villas, and, of course, they had York and Malton, to secure the river crossings.’
My interest in the Romans and their enjoyment of bridges knew no beginning.
‘So I’ve got a team out from the university to look into it. The archaeologists are doing their test-pit thing, and I’m leading the landscape people, plus lecturing on Roman daily life out here on the fringes of empire.’ Connor went on, seemingly not caring that I was not contributing to the conversation. ‘And I found out about your Fairy Stone?—’
‘Stane,’ I interjected. ‘It’s called the Fairy Stane. I know Yorkshire dialect probably doesn’t mean a lot to you, but it’s important that places keep the names that the locals give them – a lot of history can be tied up in naming.’
There was a moment’s silence. We were dropping down now, away from the higher moor and back towards the stone’s location, with the fog thinning all the way.
‘You’re right, of course,’ Connor said, turning to look at me properly now. ‘You’re very passionate about the subject, aren’t you?’
‘Someone has to be,’ I half muttered. ‘History isn’t all treasure hoards and kings in car parks. Oral history that’s passed down through the generations, even if it’s in the form of folk stories, can tell us a lot about how real people lived. They are important too, more important than your glittery Romans or buried treasure.’
‘Hang on a minute.’ Connor held his hands up. ‘I’m not saying that they’re not, now, am I?’
‘You want to lift the stone!’ Finally my composure broke. ‘You want to ruin a piece of folkloric history just to prove your own! What’s that, if not thinking that your fancy-shmancy centurions take precedence over what the ordinary farming families believed?’
We cleared the fog level and the whole of the Ryedale valley was spread out before us, from the smooth chalk rise of the wolds along the flat plain of the ancient glacial lake. A land of myth, of story.Myland.
‘It’s not that I’m wanting to lift your stone.’ Connor sounded weary now. ‘It’s more that I might have to. It could be a boundary marker, as I said, or it could be a waymarker or even mark a burial place. Wouldn’t you want to know, if you were me?’
‘Not if it meant desecrating something that’s special to others,’ I muttered. ‘Lift the stone and release the fairies, that’s how it goes. Prove that there’s no entrance to fairyland and you destroy the oral history.’
I flipped the indicator and we pulled out onto the main road. I turned for York.
‘It sounds more like a folk retelling of the myth of Pandora’s box,’ Connor said thoughtfully. ‘A mangled recital of a half-understood Greek tale. You do realise that I could lift the stone, check the underside and put it back and you’d never be any the wiser?’
‘That,’ I said tightly, ‘sounds like a threat, Professor O’Keefe.’
We drove the rest of the way back to York in silence.
4
‘So wheredidyou leave him?’ Chess asked, so utterly absorbed in my story that she’d been standing with her finger on the print button for nearly five minutes and the little green light had given up and gone out.
‘At the traffic lights on Huntington Road,’ I said, with my head in my hands. ‘I couldn’t stand him sitting there all “I’ve got the upper hand” any longer. So I told him to get out and walk from there.’
Chess sighed. ‘He seems really nice, though.’
‘He was lucky that I didn’t order him out ten miles earlier, or he’d be trying to find a bus stop in Sheriff Hutton. Honestly, Chess, it washorrible. He’s so smug and so self-satisfied and sure that he’s right and all I’m doing is writing down stories and he doesn’t evenrealisehow insufferable he is.’
‘You don’t think that might be a “you” thing, rather than a “him” thing?’ Chess admired her reflection in the printer screen for a moment. ‘You can be a bit…’ She pulled a duck face, which was further exaggerated by the streaky glass. ‘A bit touchy.’
A thorn of shame drove through my heart. She was right, Iwastouchy; short and snappy and impatient these days. Notenough sleep and bad dreams would do that to a person, plus the worry of bill paying and the other intricacies of solo living. It all wore away at the back of my head until it felt as though bare nerves reacted to every draught, like ice cream on a tooth. It was nobody’s fault but mine. Nobody’s responsibility, but mine.
‘Sorry, Chess.’ I tried to sound conciliatory rather than annoyed. ‘I do try.’
‘You go in your office and I’ll bring you a cup of tea,’ she suggested, forgetting, Chess-like, that she might have said something to upset me.
‘I can’t. I can’t sit down. My bum is still all wet and I’m not sure that chair can take any more unpleasantness without disintegrating.’
