Chapter 20: The Weave of Time
The midday heat was oppressive, and the steady flow of visitors around the circle was annoying Conall; for him the evening, when the car park would close and the day-trippers return to their homes, couldn’t come soon enough. He felt depressed; at a loss at what to do. He had sent a text to Shenandoah asking if she wanted to meet at the pub for lunch but had received no answer, and so had slept for a while in his van, only to awake and still find no reply on his phone. The thought of walking to Windmill Hill or up to West Kennet seemed foolhardy under this hot august sun. Perhaps, after all, a drink at the Red Lion was still in order, he decided, albeit alone.
He crossed the north-west quadrant of the circle, packed with picnickers and families kicking footballs, and muttered something under his breath about it being an archaeological site, not a fucking park. As he approached the towering stones of the cove across the road from the pub car park he was surprised to see Shenandoah sat on the grass against a stone with a book on her lap, her eyes shut.
‘Shen?’ she opened her eyes and smiled, wincing in the light.
‘Hello!’ she tapped the grass beside her. ‘I got your text – I ran out of credit though! Thought I’d just wait here, et voila!’
Con sat and took out his tobacco. He offered her a cigarette one and she accepted with no show of reluctance; she lay back against the stone, looking skywards with half open eyes, a contented smile on her face. Conall took the time to look at her; her shapely crow-black eyebrows arching above those dark creased eyes, that seemed to express such an innocent joy at being alive: an animal delight in the warm sun and the smoke.
‘Don’t tell Hayden.’ She said.
‘I wouldn’t.’ Con replied.
‘I know. It’s just he can be such a bore. Saving my life once isn’t enough for him…’
‘Saving your life?’ Con asked.
‘It’s how we met – I was bitten by an adder last summer on the path near Silbury, and he was here with some mates – he drove me to Savernake hospital.’
‘I don’t think you can die from an adder bite.’ Said Con, uncharitably.
Shen giggled. ‘Bloody hurt, though! I felt so sick and shaky. So you see – he’d have a go for me for voluntarily putting this poison in my system,’ she waved the cigarette, ‘when my life had nearly been claimed by another!’
She smiled at him and her whole dark face lit up.
‘What are you thinking?’ she asked. ‘you look irritated.’
He breathed the smoke out through his nose. ‘Do you fancy a drink?’
The pub was busy, but they managed to find a free table in the large front dining room that bordered the road. Conall headed for the bar and bought a cold lager for himself and a half for Shen, who he had left to peruse the menu.
He brought the drinks back to the table.
‘You know what you’re having? I have to go back and order at the bar.’ He said.
Shen looked up and smiled at him, and Con felt an odd tightening in his stomach.
‘The fish; and garlic bread to start’ she cooed. ‘I fancy mussels and crusty bread, but they don’t do that here anymore.’
‘Since when did you eat fish?’ he asked.
‘I lapsed when I started seeing Hayden. Just seemed easier.’
‘Not for the poor fish…’
She looked up at him and at his already half-empty pint-glass.
‘It’s thirsty work all this doing nothing, you know!’ he grinned, by way of explanation.
‘I wouldn’t know, I was up at about four. Hayden wouldn’t let me sleep, so I got up and made us breakfast; I was going to do some housework but it was so nice out I just picked up my book and sat out there –‘
‘Four?! Fuck that… So, fish for you and…chips and salad for me.’
‘Still vegan, then? Puritan!’ she asked.
‘Ironically, yes.’
‘Why ironically?’
He laughed – ‘well it seems all the myths I’m studying are all about milk and cows and dairying…’
‘I won’t tell if you nick some of my salmon, you know…’
‘Halloumi I might be tempted by, but not fish! You’ll go back to it, you know…Shen?’
‘Hmm?’
‘Seeing as this is your local - could you tell me why there’s a well in the corner of the room?’ he laughed.
She grinned.
‘Apparently in the 1600’s the landlord pushed his wife down it – and you can sometimes hear her screams.’
‘Nice,’ Conall said. ‘Have you ever heard them?’
Shen shook her head and then looked at him, suddenly more serious.
‘Do you believe in ghosts?’ she asked.
‘Maybe – can’t be sure. You?’
‘Kind of.’
‘Well go on then, tell me!’ Conall beamed.
‘Will you think I’m nuts?’
‘No more than I do already’. She pulled a face at him, then eyed him silently as if judging whether he could be trusted.
‘I sense more than see things; sometimes it might be a smell or even a taste…’
‘What kind of taste?’
‘Flowers; a kind of perfume…’
‘And do you sense anything now?’ he asked.
She shook her head and lifted her glass. ‘It’s just I don’t tell many people. People don’t understand.’ Con wondered if such people were tall and blond and fought fires.
‘I don’t blame you. Most people haven't got a fucking clue …’ he snorted. 'I’m convinced there's more to life than just flesh and bones.' he said.
'You think?' she said, brightening.
'I know. I mean - I look solid, yeah?' He said, and Shen nodded. '…But in reality, I'm more space than matter! The amount of matter in an atom is like a marble inside a football stadium - only it's moving so fast it seems to fill all the space... if you put all the actual matter in every person on the planet into one space do you know how big it would be?'
Shen shook her head.
Conall held out his fist. 'This big! - the rest is space! We're just energy, moving at such a fast speed we seem solid - but were not. It's an illusion. All is energy, some of which we’ve evolved to be able to perceive; but some we can’t. So why can't there be spirits or ghosts or fairies out there beyond our perception? Or other kinds of beings sharing this space with us that we just aren't tuned into? I mean, there’s billions of microscopic life forms on and in us that we can’t see unaided – there might be vast being striding across space we can’t see...or walking through the circle or through this pub.’
Shen looked at him open eyed.
'That’s weird. That’s how I kind of think of it. Think of all the phone and radio signals flying through the air at this moment. Can we hear them? No! But they're there! To hear them we need a proper receiver, and to be able to tune it to the right frequency.’
‘Exactly,’ Con said, ‘and maybe when you say you sense things it’s just that you can tune into frequencies that most people just can't - or have at least forgotten how to; maybe such abilities were bred out of us as we evolved, but they still exist in some of us.'
Shen smiled and briefly placed her hand over his. ‘Are you calling me a genetic throwback, Conall Astor?’ she teased. ‘I think as children we have that ability – to see beyond, somehow, but we lose it. Or some of us do. Maybe in the childhood of the human species we could see and hear such things too; talk to the plants and animals; how lovely would that be? I’ve not told anyone this before…’ she began., ‘you’ll think I’m mad…’
‘I hope so; the most interesting people I know are mad.’ He said.
‘Do you think there could be moments when you could see… into other times?’
‘Go on…’
She looked out of the window over the courtyard, as if something she had seen there had triggered a memory.
‘When I was in my late teens I used to hang around with this group of girls, and ‘cos I was the only one with a driving license I’d be the one who’d have to go to the shops and get booze for our nights in… but I’d always rope one of the others along to give me a hand…’
Shen looked at Conall, hesitantly.
‘Well… this one time, me and this other friend had gone to the supermarket – this was in Marlborough – and were driving back… and I suddenly noticed the sky was this kind of strange purple colour, and I looked over the hills and they were covered in trees, whereas usually they were fields. This friend starts shouting at me that I’d got us lost, which was impossible, because I hadn’t turned off the main road, but the road was now like a dirt track, with ruts in the side and the centre overgrown so it was scraping the bottom of the car…’
Shen looked at Conall again to check how he was reacting.
‘And I wanted to stop and get out, because the hedge at the side of the road was like overgrown, really tall, too – much taller than it usually is, and the hills were just covered in fir trees. My friend was shouting at me to keep driving, but I was just amazed and I wanted to stop. I wanted to get out the car and look around. I was slowing down the car but she was literally screaming at me not to stop, to keep driving; but the weird thing was that it was like the car was see-through; I could see my hands gripping the steering wheel, but it was like the shadow of a wheel, transparent, and I could see the dirt track under the car.’
Conall was listening without comment.
‘And then we started to go up the hill, where the turning should be, and there’s a house on the corner of the turning, but it wasn’t there… and then as we drove on it was there! And the trees were gone and the road was normal again, with houses on one side and no fir trees. Well, we got in and told our friends, and we were like really in shock, but the funny thing is she later denied it – she said I’d made it up, even though she’d confirmed everything and told them what she’d seen, too.’
Shen looked at Con for a reaction.
Conall held her gaze.
‘I can understand why she denied it. It didn’t fit in with her view of reality; and rather than expand that view and challenge the beliefs of a lifetime she chose to shut it out.’
‘So you believe me?’
‘Yeah, course. Why wouldn’t I? It sounds amazing – I’m just trying to think how far back you might have slipped… there was a road, at least, but it sounds like a cart-track…’
‘That’s what I thought. I’ve often thought I should try to find an old map and see if there was record of those hills being covered in trees and not farmed. I wish I’d stopped.’
‘Do you? There are plenty of legends about people getting trapped in faerie you know, and never coming back. I wonder how many missing persons have done what you didn’t – stopped and got trapped.’
‘I wanted to pick a leaf off the hedgerow.’
‘Maybe it would have turned to dust as you found yourself back in modern times…’
Just then their food arrived and they stopped talking until the waitress had left them.
‘I heard this story once,’ Shen continued ‘about these boys who wondered into this Iron Age village, and they kind of assumed it was a re-enactment, but they picked up these axes and when later they were carbon-dated they were two thousand years old…’
Con smiled. ‘That sounds dodgy, you can’t carbon date stone or metal, for a start, and even if you could surely the dates would have revealed the axes had been made recently? Unless they aged as they were brought forward in time?’
Shen looked a bit crestfallen, as if having been unmasked as overly gullible. But Conall wasn’t finished.
‘Have you heard about the time slip at Versailles?’ he asked. When she shook her head he continued. ‘It was in 1901, two Oxford women were visiting the Palace at Versailles and they saw what they thought were modern people dressed up in costumes from Marie-Antoinette’s time; it was only when they returned years later and realised that they couldn’t find the bit of the gardens where they’d seen this ‘costume party’, that they looked into it a bit more and found they’d seen the gardens as they were over a century before... It freaks me out; I don’t get scared by horror stories or films, but stuff like that gives me the creeps – in a good way, though. I’m jealous of your experience.’
‘But why would that happen – would it be some kind of worm-hole or a crack in time?’ she asked, tearing off a piece of garlic bread, and offering some to Con, which he waved away.
Conall shrugged. ‘I don’t know. I don’t see it like that; it’s not a door you walk through, more an expansion of your perception so you see things you normally wouldn’t. Tuning in, as I said, to another frequency – or widening your perception.’ She was looking at him quizzically.
‘We see time as flowing in one direction, but quantum physics suggests electrons can move back in time. Time, essentially, is an illusion – it seems to be moving forwards to us because we’re in it – it seems to be a function of consciousness, not a quality inherent in the cosmos. But if you could somehow step outside time… it’s as if everything that could ever happen has happened, as if you gain some kind of birds-eye view and you can see everything that not only was, but also could be.’
Shen shivered. ‘I don’t like that – it makes it sound like everything is fixed and we’re like a needle on a record player following a groove that’s already defined. It makes me feel like we have no free will.’
‘But I don’t mean it like that. If everything that has happened has been the result of free will, but you’re just looking back on it after the event, the you would be unable to affect it – like looking at an album of photos from your life. If you have that ‘birds-eye’ view you can choose to look at any photo at any point in time; you can look at them backwards and see yourself grow younger – but that wouldn’t affect the events of your life by doing that; you couldn’t alter those events; now imagine, and it’s hard because it goes against our ‘x causes y’ logic, that the photo-album exists not at the end of your life but in a timeless state outside of it. If you accessed it in a dream and it referred to an event that had already happened you’d just assume it was a memory… but if you dreamed of an event yet to happen, you’d not understand it as real as you’d not recognise it, and you’d just think it was a weird dream...but it might be it’s no more weird than the ‘memory’ type dream.’
‘So, you think people can see the future?’
‘If time is subjective, I don’t see why not.’
‘I wonder if someone sitting in this pub in the future may catch a glimpse of us in our old fashioned clothes and think we’re ghosts?’ Shen asked. ‘Or might be able to travel back and see exactly why Avebury was built? That would be quite a gift.’
‘It would certainly be a gift to me and my research!’ Con laughed. ‘But just imagine it - if you could float above the whole of history, from beginning to end, and see and know everything that was and will be, like this massive complex tapestry – you’d perhaps see patterns in it that we, on the ground, completely miss. You’d be like a god; you’d know everything!’
‘That’s scary.’ Shen said.
‘Yep. And probably why it doesn’t happen very often – or when it does, like your friend in the car, it’s immediately repressed and forgotten because it doesn’t fit in with their world view; but people like psychics and mystics who do see such thing always say the same thing: they see and know everything – but when they ‘wake up’ any specific knowledge, like who’s going to win the Grand National, has faded. They just know that they did see everything – and that it was good, and I mean morally good, like there was some kind of order, benevolence, in the Universe; that everything is linked, and all our trials and tribulations here on earth make sense and are made right when seen from that god-like perspective out of time.’
And will this be made right? He wondered. Will my trials and tribulations one day be made right when looked back on with the eye of divinity? He thought of Wolf’s testing god; the stage manager setting a road of trials for his apprentice…
‘When you do your cards surely you’re seeing things from that perspective?’ Con added; ‘Catching a glimpse of the weave of the fabric of history? It’s not really a conscious thing – it can only be apprehended when your conscious mind is off guard, such as in a trance, or in dreams.’
‘Do you really think dreams can predict the future, then?’ she asked.
‘Yeah, or can tell you about things going on in the present you couldn’t physically know.’ He thought of his dream of the river of milk and the horse with the crescent between its brows; the mountains in the background with the gorge or valley cutting through the highest peaks, and quickly dismissed it from his mind. What was the point in such dreams if one could do nothing about the warning they gave?
‘Have you ever had a dream like that?’
‘No.’ he lied, the image of the river of milk flashing across his mind. It’s not as if the dream had told him she would drown, so it wasn’t wholly a lie, for it was him in the dream; what haunted him was why he had remembered the dream that specific night last year, at the same hour, so he believed, that she had gone into the water some 300 miles away from his own visit to the Kennet. Had she been calling out to him? But he had felt no fear – surely, he would have felt her despair and pain – but to feel nothing…
…But if that were all he might be able to just dismiss it as coincidence; but it didn’t end there: there was the image of the gorge in the mountains, and what his research had uncovered concerning it – a verifiable fact involving the location of the dream, and its revelation as a real physical location, the location of her death, no less - something that pointed to a level of truth within the dream that couldn’t just be brushed away…
‘Sometimes…’ he admitted, ‘I’ve dreamed things and they’ve provided answers to certain questions, you know, about my work…’
‘If time, as we know it,’ he stuttered, ‘is an illusion; that the ‘flow’ of time is just our experience of events that really exist out of time…’ he was fighting for words, trying to explain… ‘then just as events, past events, effect the future…’
He took a long drink and continued. ‘What if an event was so important, so drastic and powerful, that like a stone dropped in a pond it sent ripples in every direction… and by that, I mean into the past…’
He could see Shen’s brows knitted in concentration, trying to understand. He reiterated his point.
‘…if time isn’t real, as such, or can flow both forward or back, as quantum physics suggests is the case… then might a future event send ripples back in time…? Perhaps what we think of as precognition or prophecy is just a memory, but a memory of an event yet to occur?’
Her death, sending out ripples into the past, into the mind of his dreaming self, 20 years before, warning him, preparing him…hence the fact that details within it were verifiable, scientifically…the mountain cleft, the placement of the river and the sacred site that would later be built there… facts he had discovered 20 years later, and then projected back in time…
But before she could ask for specifics he continued,
‘I sometimes wonder if it’s possible to dream other people’s dreams – or to meet in dreams; or if in those ‘time-slips’ you actually see through some other person’s eyes from the past.’
‘So maybe I was picking up on someone who had walked, or been driving a wagon, down that road near Marlborough? Maybe it was me in some past life…’
‘All I know is that the world we think we live in isn’t half as strange as the world we do live in. We think we know everything, but we know nothing. But if there was a timeless part of us that did know everything… I wish it would appear to me and tell me that it’ll all be okay.’ he said, finishing his pint.
‘Maybe it tries, but subtly. I mean, if the ‘true’ you suddenly appeared to yourself and informed you that you were really immortal you’d think you’d gone nuts.’
‘It might be worth the risk.’ he laughed. ‘But if there is such a part of us, how would it explain itself to us? It would be like you trying to explain yourself to that bird.’ He said, nodding towards a sparrow picking at crumbs under one of the outside tables.
‘Well, maybe the universe uses other means to show us.’ she suggested.
‘Do you believe the universe is benevolent?’ he asked.
‘Yes. Yes, I do. And you?’
‘Maybe once I did. And maybe I will again. Perhaps this is just a rough part of the weave of the tapestry I’m crossing right now.’ He sighed. They sat for a while in silence. ‘It’s something Wolf said. The Universe isn’t bad – it just isn’t easy – that it makes us make an effort because it helps us grow.’
‘I thought about you.’ She suddenly said.
‘Likewise’ he toyed with his empty beer glass and said no more.
She looked at him, her face strained with a host of unasked questions.
‘I’m sorry, Con. About Melissa.’
‘I know. Everyone is.’