Page 7 of The Start of the Story
‘Go and hover, then. I’ll find you something dry to put on.Andmake you a cup of tea.’
I gave in and went down the tiny narrow windowless corridor that led to my office behind the main rooms in the little library. My encounter with Professor Smuggo had had the same effect on my nerves as a night of tossing and turning. It made me feel as though my skin were too small and the inside of my head were too hot. A kind of sensation of the whole world being wrong and nobody could tell except me.
At least the office smelled familiar – of cheap fibreboard, sun-scorched papers, dust and carpet squares cannibalised from, from the smell of them, a cats’ home. I nearly made the mistake of sitting down, but managed to pull myself back at the last moment and went to lean against the desk. I was lucky to have a desk. I was lucky to have an office and Chess, and a grant for ‘Recording Local Oral Traditions and Tales and Maintaining Social Historical Artefacts and Material Culture relating to Tradition’. Most folklorists had to freelance, recording and writing as and when they could whilst having a day job. I’d drawn the long straw, got a council grant, a workspace and thebudget for an assistant. Even if the assistant was someone with no real interest in the subject, a desire to try all the hair-colour products in Boots and a somewhatlooseapproach to actual working hours.
As for the office… I looked around at the walls and the windows, which showed only a view of more walls. We were slightly below ground level; folklore hadn’t been relegated quite as far as the basement, but there was an air of damp fernyness about this room that let me know that basement dwelling was still a possibility, should I not manage to keep my work sufficiently within the public view. Or, I thought in my more charitable moments, the room was sinking slowly under the weight of information inside it. All those years of oral history, all those stories of grandmothers who’d ‘turned’ the butter using charms, or healed wounds with certain herbs and told bedtime stories about exactlywhythe children shouldn’t go out onto the high moor after dark, weighted even the air and added gravity.
I gritted my teeth. It was important. Recording these memories before they were subsumed beneath computerisation, globalisation and the generalisation of a population who moved every five years was important. I was already hearing the memories of memories, one more generation and most of it would be lost or diluted by popular fiction and television.
I looked around again, at the stacked box files of written evidence donated by families who hadn’t known what to do with granny’s notes, recipes and charms; at the cupboard that contained artefacts like someone’s great-uncle’s water-divining rods, corn dollies, a jar of home-made ointment for keeping the snow from balling in horses’ hooves. And I couldn’t help the feeling that I was drowning in it all.
‘Here!’ Chess burst in, dragging an air of enthusiasm and a carrier bag with her. ‘I borrowed these off Magda. They’re all I could find.’
I opened the carrier bag to reveal what looked like a set of curtains. ‘What is it?’
‘She’s got her belly-dancing class tonight, but she says you can borrow the trousers for the rest of the day if you want.’ Chess gave me an encouraging smile. ‘Better than getting your chair seat wet and having to sit on damp for the next week or so, isn’t it? I’ll go and make that tea now.’
Okay, I thought, with the sense of resignation that often overcame me when I was here. I had a meeting later with a lady who was coming down from Durham with some tape recordings of her father’s reminiscences of growing up in the wilds of High Cup Nick. I needed to get my jeans dry for that.
There were little brass discs that chimed to contend with, I discovered as I clambered into the borrowed trousers to the accompaniment of hundreds of little metal castanets. Luckily I had emergency knickers, kept in the secret lower drawer of my desk where most researchers would have a bottle of whisky, against those months when nature didn’t play ball, so at least I wasn’t having to go commando in the voluminous trousers. Having dry, warm buttocks again was comforting. I hadn’t realised how much of my ire at the professor had been occasioned by the unpleasant chafing of damp jeans.
Then I put my headphones on and set to work typing up some more memories from the tape I’d made a few days before. Properly evidenced, collated and dated material was the bedrock of my life. It would all make a book one day – at least that was what I’d told the grants committee, and maybe it would, but I needed to find an angle first. Nobody was going to read this loose collection of stories, memories of the elderly who sometimes wandered back into times when their tales had been current or third-hand retellings of family reminiscences, not as it currently stood anyway. I had to find something concrete to peg it all to, a loom to weave the stories so that they felt as though they allcame from the same cloth, rather than disparate recollections from varying locations.
Then the thought came to me – I had the Fairy Stane. Though I’d told Professor O’Keefe that I was researching the area, obviously I’d lied to give him second thoughts about raising the stone. But what if I actuallydidwrite that book? If I used the stone, the idea that fairyland lay beneath the North York Moors, the theory that disturbing the fairies would bring doom and destruction… yes, it might work. And it might put another obstacle in the way of his interfering with my landscape.
I found I’d stopped typing and put my chin in my hand as I thought. My face was reflected in the bland blank screen and I could see my hair hadn’t benefitted from the rain any more than my bottom had from sitting on the damp stone. Both ends of me were rebelling. At least my lower regions were recovering slowly, now encased in the capacious and startlingly coloured belly-dancing trousers, but my hair wasn’t so lucky and was twisting upwards into the kind of dreadlocks normally seen in illustrations of Grendel fromBeowulf.No wonder the professor had been giving me those covert, amused looks right up until I’d slowed down at the traffic lights and told him he could find his own way back from there. I looked less fey and more forty thousand volts.
But the Fairy Stane… yes. I could do it. I’d got enough general material on belief in fairies, hobs, boggarts and sprites from the locality. If I could link it all back to the late nineteenth century generalised acceptance of the liminality of the moors and the accessibility of the fair folk and their propensity for hanging around human farms… I teased a hand up and through my hair, thoughtfully. Yes, it could work. Plus, that would give me a legitimate reason to hang around the stone and make sure that nothing untoward happened to it.
Of course, hecouldlift the stone, examine the underside and drop it back down again without telling me. But the disruption it would cause to all the overgrowing lichens and bog grass would be an absolute giveaway and I could, and would, raise not only fairyland but merry hell if he tried it. I didn’t think that whoever had seconded him down to York to look into the Romans and their possible settlement would be too keen on that kind of publicity. They’d at least knock his charm back to Ireland and he could go and brood and wear his expensive wardrobe over there.
The thought made me smile, and my reflection softened at the edges.
‘Here’s your tea.’ Chess wafted back in again. ‘And he’s here again.’
‘Who is?’ I shifted around in my chair to take the tea and my trousers clattered and chimed.
‘Our hunky professor. He looks a bit annoyed, mind.’
‘Tell him to go away. There must be something he has to do apart from hang around being a pain to me. Doesn’t he have lectures to do or a modelling contract to fulfil or something?’
‘No, he bloody doesn’t. Right now he has the little matter of being lost to take up with you,’ came the ringing tones from the corridor outside. His voice echoed off the walls like someone shouting into a trumpet. ‘You left me. I’ve only been over here three days, I have no idea where I am most of the time, and youleftme.’
Guilt instantly washed over me, flushing my skin and making me cough on my tea. Threedays? He’d only been here three days and I’d ordered him out of my car well beyond the city centre and where, if memory served, there weren’t even any helpful signs.
‘I had to stop a bunch of kids and ask them the way into town!’ Connor burst through the door looking hot anddishevelled. ‘Andthe cheeky gobshites pretended they couldn’t understand my accent.’
‘I think you’d better make another cup of tea,’ I said weakly to Chess as the professor slumped wearily into the spare chair, as though he’d hiked fourteen miles up a vertical slope, rather than walking the mile and a half to my out-of-the centre library and office.
‘I’m sorry,’ I said, genuinely, once Chess had returned to the little kitchenette, probably to evict the library volunteers, who tended to cluster around the kettle and any biscuits or cake that had been donated. ‘I didn’t know you were new to York.’
‘Well, I am. I only know my way from the house I’ve rented to the university, and even that’s a bit of a stretch still. There’s too many turns and roads and they all look the same out there!’ Connor was unmollified. He gathered his coat around him like a villain’s cape, drawing himself in until he was one pencil-slim tube of blackness. ‘I could be anywhere in the world, and yet here I am looking at some quite frankly shaky evidence for another Roman town somewhere where it never bloody stops raining, like you don’t have Roman experts of your own.’
The words came out of him in a torrent of pent-up exasperation. I still felt too guilty about making him find his way back to town to really appreciate the fact that I’d finally managed to wipe the charming smile off his face. There was also that tiny tickle of shame that Chess had engendered in me with her accusation of touchiness. Whilst I didn’t really care what people thought of me, I couldn’t afford a reputation for being hard to deal with. It might put people off from coming forward to tell me their stories if they heard I was testy and grumpy.
‘You’re Irish, though,’ I pointed out, trying to sound a little more friendly. ‘You must be used to rain.’
‘Not,’ he enunciated carefully, ‘Yorkshire rain.Wehave proper rain, the sort that makes everything soft.Yoursjust goesthrough fifteen layers of clothing, and then you’re wet and cold and it still doesn’t stop.’
