Chapter Two: Sanctuary
(29th June 2012)
Eighty five years later, over the same stretch of hill on which the barrows of the prehistoric Kings ran like humps on the back of some giant half-submerged sea-creature, on a road now wider and heavy with speeding traffic, Conall Astor’s campervan lurched to a sudden halt causing a number of unsecured objects to crash into the back of his seat. Behind his van the driver of a pristine black Audi that had been tailgating him all the way from Marlborough screeched to a stop, sounded his horn and gesticulated wildly. Conall put his arm out the window and stuck up his middle finger as the Audi veered around him.
‘Fucking wanker!’ the driver yelled, so Conall changed his gesture, lifting up a curled little finger in the sign for ‘small dick’. To his immense relief the car carried on.
The cause of Conall’s sudden halt seemed oblivious to the accident it had nearly produced: the hare in the centre of the road fixed Conall with a golden eye before lolloping nonchalantly towards the grass verge. It’s angular, cat-like beauty was entrancing - like an emissary from an older world out of place on the burning tarmac – it’s indifference seemed to suggest that it, and not the road and its dirty machines, had precedence; my kind were here before yours, it seemed to say.
‘You take your time, lady!’ Conall shouted, sarcastically. The hare reached the roadside grass sat for a few seconds then was gone, leaving some flattened grass-stems as the only witness to its presence.
Restarting his van, and lifting a hand to the queue of vehicles that had formed behind him, Conall drove onwards a few yards and then signalled and turned into a small open area on the right of the road where a number of cars and vans were parked; and having found a space, the camper shivered once more to a silent halt.
For a few moments Conall sat still, gazing ahead at the rolling landscape of pale wheat and sheep-dotted insipid grassland, relieved that the three hour drive had ended; then with a nervous glance he took off his sunglasses and turned to inspect the damage in the back of the camper. Coffee was splashed up the back of the seat, and lay in a puddle on the floor in which a number of books, papers, empty tobacco packets and diet coke bottles were scattered. Shit. He’d forgotten about the coffee cup. He picked up a dripping black notebook, wiped it on the seat next to him, and leaned across and shoved it into the crowded glove-box, whose contents promptly tumbled out into the foot-well.
‘Fuck it.’
A small cardboard packet had tumbled out, spilling its contents, a few blister packs of green and cream capsules, onto the floor. It was three weeks since he’d taken the last tablet, and already he had felt a sense of the old him returning; a sharpening of edges long dulled, slivers of happiness felt for the first time in many, many months; cold washes of grief, too – real grief, not the numb dumb-show the anti-depressants had afforded him for the last year. He didn’t know why he’d bothered to bring them. Weakness, he supposed; a prop, in case it all went horribly wrong again. Wrong again? That implied things had got better, and they hadn’t; it was time, that was all – not that one could put a time limit on grieving, no – but it was time to try to start living again, he supposed. At least he had the choice. She didn’t; but she wouldn’t have wanted him to give up.
I should just throw these into the first bin I find, he thought, leaving them where they had fallen.
The drive down from London had been uneventful; he had begun it with a vague sense of stress, and had been half tempted to turn around and head for home, but having reached Fleet services on the M3, he had sat on the bank of the car park with a coffee and a cigarette, and had felt that the old lightness of spirit might yet return if he relaxed and gave it a chance. Wasn’t that the whole reason for coming here? To mark a new start by returning to a place where in the past he had always been happy, but which had become slighted in his memory by those dark, tragic events of the previous year? He took a deep breath.
It had been over a year since he had last been here; and in that time his life had changed utterly and irrecoverably. Coming back here was an attempt to put it all in perspective; to draw a line under the past; not to forget it, but to try to move on from it, to lay a ghost to rest. This place had been somewhere where he had immediately felt at home, where he could just be. Might it now welcome him home like a prodigal son, past misdemeanours waiting, if he was fortunate, to be forgiven? But just now such a hope seemed a pipe-dream; all seemed flat to him, dull – the world was leaden, and he seemed to lack the means to shake off the veneer of greyness that seemed to coat everything like a fine ash. A walk should help, he mused; and a beer.
Conall leaned out of the window and looked at himself in the wing-mirror; a tired, unshaven, face looked back at him from beneath dark curls. He looked away. Still, a year on, he couldn’t hold his own gaze for long. Conall was, in his own words, ‘pushing forty’, and for the first time in his life he felt his age. He was dreading the day itself; all his life there had been two cakes – two sets of presents; last year it hadn’t mattered as they had all been too numb with the shock, but this year – with only a couple of months to go, and it being a ‘biggy’, as she had used to call such occasions, the idea of celebrating it alone, with her not there, was unthinkable.
Conall opened the door and stepped into the heat of the early July afternoon. The majority of the cars around him were empty; though muffled music was coming from a large converted minibus a little further up the path; it was painted black, with tinted windows, and howling wolves and a giant full-moon airbrushed on its side.
Though he was still a mile or so from the main village, he had decided to stop here knowing that on such a gorgeous day the main car parks that served Avebury village and the stone circle that surrounded it would already be full; besides, he reasoned, he wished to walk into the village the old way, from the Sanctuary and along the Avenue. And he wanted to walk after spending such a long time behind the wheel. Besides, he could leave the van here and return later in the evening and camp the night; the main car park shut at seven and he would only have to move the van again – and to do that he’d need to be sober; something he had no intention of being.
Behind him, beyond the fence, and reached by a path in the long grass, lay the Bronze Age barrows; for a moment he had the urge to go and climb them but his goal for the moment lay to the immediate south of the road he had just turned off, and so locking his camper (not that, he imagined, anyone in their right mind would attempt to steal it or any of its coffee-stained contents) he headed for the road.
The road, where it crossed the brow of the hill, was steep and curved so that Conall was more reliant on his hearing to gauge a gap in the traffic than his sight. After a minute or so of waiting as cars, lorries, coaches and motorcycles roared past Conall ran across the road, a few yards from where the hare had crossed minutes before. Something furred but flat and dry coated the road; maybe once a fox or a hare. He grimaced and felt a wave of sadness.
Despite the large number of cars that had been in the lay-by Conall found the meadow in which the Sanctuary lay bereft of tourists. The only signs of life were three jackdaws poking around the long grass looking for insects, seemingly unconcerned with the roar of the traffic a few feet away. As ancient monuments went the Sanctuary, Conall thought, was singularly unimpressive. Concentric rings of concrete markers now showed where the great posts of a prehistoric structure had once stood lending to this circular meadow the feel of a badly conceived modern art installation; but its view was serene: to the east in the distance lay the cragged teeth-like stones that marked the façade of a large prehistoric tomb known as West Kennet long-barrow; and to its right the strangely rounded form of Silbury hill could be seen over the shoulder of the intervening hilltop. All lay bathed in a haze that bleached the distant rises of Milk hill and Tan hill into a uniform ridge of cyan – bluer than the sky itself which was almost colourless and hurt Conall’s eyes now he had taken his sunglasses off. The wheat field next to the long-barrow was marked with a huge crop circle, a vast circle of flattened wheat with radials of increasingly smaller circles spinning counter-clockwise from the centre. These crop glyphs still amazed him however many times he’d seen them; the work, he supposed, of guerrilla artists rather than extra-terrestrials they nevertheless still possessed a certain mystery, perhaps born of their anonymity, their perfection and their elusive meaning.
Conall walked to the central concrete ring, sat himself on one of the posts, and took a pack of American Spirit tobacco out of his shirt pocket. First taking a pinch, he crumbled the already powdery tobacco onto the earth before him. Ihtsipaitapiiyo’pa, Great Spirit, he mumbled under his breath, a habit he had picked up on his last visit here from an old man who had since returned to the Ancestors - at least he was old, Conall thought, thinking of the old man; it’s easier to deal with then – a good innings as they say, trite though it may be; no one could have said it of her though: a good innings. Thirty eight years old. She’ll always be thirty eight... they shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old: Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn. It’s not just the years that condemn, Con thought; survivors guilt; or just plain guilt – there’s a pretty fucking hefty dose of condemnation there.
He inhaled and breathed out the smoke in the direction of the swifts that were screaming and tumbling overhead beneath the criss-cross of vapour trails that divided up the sky. Not so long ago he would have looked up jealously, wishing he had been jetting off to somewhere other than where he was; somewhere where he couldn’t be reminded of things. But today Conall Astor knew that he had to stop running away.
Alone, in the circle, he put a hand over his face. Then, straightening and wiping his eyes, he drew a deep breath on his cigarette. ‘Well, I’m back!’ he said.
(29th June 2012)
Eighty five years later, over the same stretch of hill on which the barrows of the prehistoric Kings ran like humps on the back of some giant half-submerged sea-creature, on a road now wider and heavy with speeding traffic, Conall Astor’s campervan lurched to a sudden halt causing a number of unsecured objects to crash into the back of his seat. Behind his van the driver of a pristine black Audi that had been tailgating him all the way from Marlborough screeched to a stop, sounded his horn and gesticulated wildly. Conall put his arm out the window and stuck up his middle finger as the Audi veered around him.
‘Fucking wanker!’ the driver yelled, so Conall changed his gesture, lifting up a curled little finger in the sign for ‘small dick’. To his immense relief the car carried on.
The cause of Conall’s sudden halt seemed oblivious to the accident it had nearly produced: the hare in the centre of the road fixed Conall with a golden eye before lolloping nonchalantly towards the grass verge. It’s angular, cat-like beauty was entrancing - like an emissary from an older world out of place on the burning tarmac – it’s indifference seemed to suggest that it, and not the road and its dirty machines, had precedence; my kind were here before yours, it seemed to say.
‘You take your time, lady!’ Conall shouted, sarcastically. The hare reached the roadside grass sat for a few seconds then was gone, leaving some flattened grass-stems as the only witness to its presence.
Restarting his van, and lifting a hand to the queue of vehicles that had formed behind him, Conall drove onwards a few yards and then signalled and turned into a small open area on the right of the road where a number of cars and vans were parked; and having found a space, the camper shivered once more to a silent halt.
For a few moments Conall sat still, gazing ahead at the rolling landscape of pale wheat and sheep-dotted insipid grassland, relieved that the three hour drive had ended; then with a nervous glance he took off his sunglasses and turned to inspect the damage in the back of the camper. Coffee was splashed up the back of the seat, and lay in a puddle on the floor in which a number of books, papers, empty tobacco packets and diet coke bottles were scattered. Shit. He’d forgotten about the coffee cup. He picked up a dripping black notebook, wiped it on the seat next to him, and leaned across and shoved it into the crowded glove-box, whose contents promptly tumbled out into the foot-well.
‘Fuck it.’
A small cardboard packet had tumbled out, spilling its contents, a few blister packs of green and cream capsules, onto the floor. It was three weeks since he’d taken the last tablet, and already he had felt a sense of the old him returning; a sharpening of edges long dulled, slivers of happiness felt for the first time in many, many months; cold washes of grief, too – real grief, not the numb dumb-show the anti-depressants had afforded him for the last year. He didn’t know why he’d bothered to bring them. Weakness, he supposed; a prop, in case it all went horribly wrong again. Wrong again? That implied things had got better, and they hadn’t; it was time, that was all – not that one could put a time limit on grieving, no – but it was time to try to start living again, he supposed. At least he had the choice. She didn’t; but she wouldn’t have wanted him to give up.
I should just throw these into the first bin I find, he thought, leaving them where they had fallen.
The drive down from London had been uneventful; he had begun it with a vague sense of stress, and had been half tempted to turn around and head for home, but having reached Fleet services on the M3, he had sat on the bank of the car park with a coffee and a cigarette, and had felt that the old lightness of spirit might yet return if he relaxed and gave it a chance. Wasn’t that the whole reason for coming here? To mark a new start by returning to a place where in the past he had always been happy, but which had become slighted in his memory by those dark, tragic events of the previous year? He took a deep breath.
It had been over a year since he had last been here; and in that time his life had changed utterly and irrecoverably. Coming back here was an attempt to put it all in perspective; to draw a line under the past; not to forget it, but to try to move on from it, to lay a ghost to rest. This place had been somewhere where he had immediately felt at home, where he could just be. Might it now welcome him home like a prodigal son, past misdemeanours waiting, if he was fortunate, to be forgiven? But just now such a hope seemed a pipe-dream; all seemed flat to him, dull – the world was leaden, and he seemed to lack the means to shake off the veneer of greyness that seemed to coat everything like a fine ash. A walk should help, he mused; and a beer.
Conall leaned out of the window and looked at himself in the wing-mirror; a tired, unshaven, face looked back at him from beneath dark curls. He looked away. Still, a year on, he couldn’t hold his own gaze for long. Conall was, in his own words, ‘pushing forty’, and for the first time in his life he felt his age. He was dreading the day itself; all his life there had been two cakes – two sets of presents; last year it hadn’t mattered as they had all been too numb with the shock, but this year – with only a couple of months to go, and it being a ‘biggy’, as she had used to call such occasions, the idea of celebrating it alone, with her not there, was unthinkable.
Conall opened the door and stepped into the heat of the early July afternoon. The majority of the cars around him were empty; though muffled music was coming from a large converted minibus a little further up the path; it was painted black, with tinted windows, and howling wolves and a giant full-moon airbrushed on its side.
Though he was still a mile or so from the main village, he had decided to stop here knowing that on such a gorgeous day the main car parks that served Avebury village and the stone circle that surrounded it would already be full; besides, he reasoned, he wished to walk into the village the old way, from the Sanctuary and along the Avenue. And he wanted to walk after spending such a long time behind the wheel. Besides, he could leave the van here and return later in the evening and camp the night; the main car park shut at seven and he would only have to move the van again – and to do that he’d need to be sober; something he had no intention of being.
Behind him, beyond the fence, and reached by a path in the long grass, lay the Bronze Age barrows; for a moment he had the urge to go and climb them but his goal for the moment lay to the immediate south of the road he had just turned off, and so locking his camper (not that, he imagined, anyone in their right mind would attempt to steal it or any of its coffee-stained contents) he headed for the road.
The road, where it crossed the brow of the hill, was steep and curved so that Conall was more reliant on his hearing to gauge a gap in the traffic than his sight. After a minute or so of waiting as cars, lorries, coaches and motorcycles roared past Conall ran across the road, a few yards from where the hare had crossed minutes before. Something furred but flat and dry coated the road; maybe once a fox or a hare. He grimaced and felt a wave of sadness.
Despite the large number of cars that had been in the lay-by Conall found the meadow in which the Sanctuary lay bereft of tourists. The only signs of life were three jackdaws poking around the long grass looking for insects, seemingly unconcerned with the roar of the traffic a few feet away. As ancient monuments went the Sanctuary, Conall thought, was singularly unimpressive. Concentric rings of concrete markers now showed where the great posts of a prehistoric structure had once stood lending to this circular meadow the feel of a badly conceived modern art installation; but its view was serene: to the east in the distance lay the cragged teeth-like stones that marked the façade of a large prehistoric tomb known as West Kennet long-barrow; and to its right the strangely rounded form of Silbury hill could be seen over the shoulder of the intervening hilltop. All lay bathed in a haze that bleached the distant rises of Milk hill and Tan hill into a uniform ridge of cyan – bluer than the sky itself which was almost colourless and hurt Conall’s eyes now he had taken his sunglasses off. The wheat field next to the long-barrow was marked with a huge crop circle, a vast circle of flattened wheat with radials of increasingly smaller circles spinning counter-clockwise from the centre. These crop glyphs still amazed him however many times he’d seen them; the work, he supposed, of guerrilla artists rather than extra-terrestrials they nevertheless still possessed a certain mystery, perhaps born of their anonymity, their perfection and their elusive meaning.
Conall walked to the central concrete ring, sat himself on one of the posts, and took a pack of American Spirit tobacco out of his shirt pocket. First taking a pinch, he crumbled the already powdery tobacco onto the earth before him. Ihtsipaitapiiyo’pa, Great Spirit, he mumbled under his breath, a habit he had picked up on his last visit here from an old man who had since returned to the Ancestors - at least he was old, Conall thought, thinking of the old man; it’s easier to deal with then – a good innings as they say, trite though it may be; no one could have said it of her though: a good innings. Thirty eight years old. She’ll always be thirty eight... they shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old: Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn. It’s not just the years that condemn, Con thought; survivors guilt; or just plain guilt – there’s a pretty fucking hefty dose of condemnation there.
He inhaled and breathed out the smoke in the direction of the swifts that were screaming and tumbling overhead beneath the criss-cross of vapour trails that divided up the sky. Not so long ago he would have looked up jealously, wishing he had been jetting off to somewhere other than where he was; somewhere where he couldn’t be reminded of things. But today Conall Astor knew that he had to stop running away.
Alone, in the circle, he put a hand over his face. Then, straightening and wiping his eyes, he drew a deep breath on his cigarette. ‘Well, I’m back!’ he said.