Chapter 32: The Glass Prison
There was a queue into the new museum annexe, but the clouds had parted and Con was happy just to be near Shen.
She stood just ahead of him; he looked down at her dark hair bound into a single, long braid; and perhaps she felt him looking for she turned round, and seeing him staring she smiled and frowned and the same time.
‘Are you looking at my hair? It’s a mess. I didn’t have time to wash it…’
‘It looks fine to me.’ He said, embarrassed to have been caught, yet secretly kicking himself for his usual under exaggeration. Her hair was beautiful. She was beautiful. There was something in her bearing, her spirit that enchanted him; rendered him speechless. He felt dull and silent compared to her.
I am so quiet now, he thought. He thought back to an image of himself laughing with Melissa – it seemed a different Conall – carefree, spontaneous, lit-up. Where was his fire now?
A rill of her soft hair rose in the breeze and Conall’s chest quivered.
I’m like that figure in that fairy tale – Faithful John – whose heart is bound in iron fetters, he thought. One day it’s just going to burst. I’ve bound it so that I can’t feel anything anymore – pain or happiness.
Shen turned again and smiled.
‘Finally!’ she said as the queue began to move.
But her words passed Conall by. Her smile that creased up her dark eyes was charming – like a child’s, almost – joyous; and for a tremulous moment Conall’s heart leaped and he was suffused with an emotion that had long deserted him: he was suddenly happy. And in that moment he lifted his hand, reaching out with the intention of smoothing the hair where it tumbled in the breeze against the back of her head. The idea of running his hands through those locks was exquisite; of touching her lovely head. I could kiss her, he thought. But then the light seemed to fade at the thought of Hayden and of Melissa and of his guilt.
She looked back and frowned. ‘Are you ok?’ she asked.
He nodded. I’m such a fucking coward. I wish I could say fuck you to Hayden and to everything else that’s holding me back. What must she think of me? All she must see is this silent pathetic man – no fire or get up and go – happy to coast along, withdrawn and distant; but inside I’m like a fucking whirlpool of emotion and thoughts... Don’t you know, Shenandoah, that I adore you?
‘You sure? You’re very quiet.’
‘Lots on my mind.’
‘Ahh,…me too.’
‘Anything you want to share?’ he tried.
She looked at him right in the eyes, suddenly serious.
‘No – it wouldn’t be fair.’
‘Try me, I’m a big boy now.’
‘No. It really wouldn’t be. Forget I said anything.’
‘How am I supposed to do that?’
‘You figure it out – you’re a big boy now,’ she replied. Touché.
And internally he was screaming out the question he so wished to ask – was it to do with me?
They remained in silence until they reached the new display, set back into the modern glass and steel annexe that had been built on to the side of the old stone museum.
The walls were covered in dioramas showing the development of the Avebury landscape, inset with brightly lit cubes in which various artefacts were placed: stone axes, decorated pots, heads of corn of the type grown by the ancient farmers of the region.
Shen gazed at a large model that showed tiny people clearing a space in a vast wooded landscape where the henge would one day be.
‘It all looks so pedestrian, so dull, doesn’t it. Scraggy farmers in rough skins. Last night when I imagined it, it was tattooed priests in white robes singing chants to the sky…’ She looked disappointed.
‘But who’s to say your image wasn’t closer to the truth than this?’ Con asked, gesturing to the diorama. ‘If this monument was in India or Meso-America you’d have no trouble finding such reconstructions involving colourful priests. British prehistory is seen as dull, muddy, boring – more Brown Age than Bronze Age…but that’s not how I see it – I think your image is more correct.’
‘There’s an image in one of my books of Mayan, or might be Aztec priests on a flat-topped pyramid; all colours, feathers, it’s just gob-smackingly vivid and beautiful; this lot look like medieval peasants....’ she added.
‘I know. Have you seen those prints of the natives of the Pacific North-West? The ones who make totem poles and that really cool art – like the Kwakiutl, or the Haida? There are these photos of their feasts, and they’re all in these big wooden huts, well, halls, out in the forests – and they’re dressed as spirits, as animals – ravens, killer whales, bears… they’re fucking amazing. That’s what it would have been like here… not three or four peasants in brown wondering round in the mud – but people in masks, in costume; hundreds of them, dancing, in colour – with fire, and booze and singing…’
He looked wistful, and it made her smile.
‘The singing…’ he continued; ‘imagine what songs have been lost… the forgotten carols of the midwinter ceremonies… hymns of the henges.’
Shen lifted an eyebrow in curiosity.
‘You’re right; we don’t think of the music; that there may have been folksongs that these people knew – and sung for hundreds maybe thousands of years…it’s kind of haunting. And sad. Incredibly sad.’
‘That said,’ Con added, smiling, ‘Hymns of the henges sounds like a pretty cool debut album, don’t you think?’.
They had moved around the diorama to where they had a bird’s eye view from West Kennet over Silbury towards the henge.
‘It says here the area may have developed here originally because of the springs.’ Shen said, running a finger down the information panel beside the diorama.
‘I was reading some more of Tolkien’s letters this morning before the protest;’ Con said. ‘He makes the connection between the Kennet and an Irish tale about a goddess who loses an eye drinking from the well of wisdom. He says eye in Irish is Suil; and that Silbury and Swallowhead come from that; and that Kennet means Bright dog after Sirius, and that it’s the Milky Way; wish I’d read these a couple of years ago – might have save me a bit of research time! He’d not linked the Milky Way to the henge itself – but he didn’t have astronomy programs like we now have; but he did link it to the Kennet, just as I did to the Braint. I’ve only read a few of the letters – they’re a bit faded and the handwriting is rather small.’
The museum was crowded and Con and Shen found themselves jostled away from the diorama. Con, annoyed at being forced away from Shen beckoned her to follow him into a less busy corner, beneath a panel describing the many longbarrows in the area.
‘Look at this, Shen… remember my dream with the three cows by the stream?’
He was pointing at a plan of Beckhampton longbarrow, a tomb that lay at the opposite side of the circle to the sanctuary, beyond the westernmost point of the west Avenue.
'The longstones cove, Shen, points to Beckhampton longbarrow – and guess what Beckhampton longbarrow had in it?’
‘Three cows?’ she said, half-serious.
‘Yep. three ox skulls. It all fits – the milky river is the Kennet, , the 3 magical cows are in Beckhampton; so although my set in Wales on another level it
applies to a myth behind all these sites.’
‘Jeez. That’s a bit freaky. You should be happy; it’s all corroborating your theory!’
Con smiled weakly. ‘It all seems irrelevant now, somehow, now Mel’s gone.’
‘It wasn’t your fault Con’ she said. Con winced.
‘You’re right, though… it’s a bit freaky. Three cows – I mean, it’s either complete bollocks or it goes way above coincidence; and if so – what the hell does that mean?’
A space had opened up in front of the main display: a reconstruction of the chamber in West Kennet, dark, moody and lit by hidden lamps that cast an eerie glow onto the floor of the mock chamber. It had been done well; minus the incongruous modern glass-roof of the real longbarrow the reconstruction was, if anything, more atmospheric than the actual monument.
Here, crouched into one corner lay the skeleton of a man – the bones that Piggott had discovered and that had been hidden away in a museum storeroom until now.
He lay on his right side, his legs drawn up to his chest – the empty eye sockets in the dark shiny skull gazing towards the dull glass that separated him from the queue of visitors; he seemed small, fragile – Con looked hard but couldn’t see any sign of the arrow that had been found in his throat, lodged into one of the bones of his neck, the skeleton was too far away and too shadowed.
‘He seems sad.’ Shen said, crouching to better see him.
Conall nodded in agreement. ‘It’s like a glass prison; I mean they’ve done it well, but it’s a mockery, isn’t it? A false tomb behind glass and he’s just lying there, alone.’
Con knelt to get closer – but still the glass and some three feet of space separated them. He wished he could reach out and place his hand on the bones; connect in some way.
‘He was originally one a mound of bones; and there was a whole goat skeleton nearby, too. This is all a bit clean; sanitised.’
What do you want, Old Man? He thought. What can we do to help? He found himself saying the phrase Alfred Mac Govan-Crow had taught him: Itsipaiitapiiyopah; Old Man would not have understood the words, but he would have recognised the sentiment; we are one in the Great Spirit, the Being behind all beings; we are part of the same dance, you and I. I know you; I understand you, Con thought. We are both imprisoned behind a wall of glass; both wanting to be back with those we have loved, to escape and be free again. Why are we here when those we love have died and left us?
The image from the day before rose in his mind – soma, golden, streaming from the wound in the man’s throat - the creative sacrifice; the power and the giving… the act of a god…a shaman….a priest…a wizard…
The empty eyes gazed back saying nothing. Conall stood and rubbed his neck; people were waiting for him to move so they could peer into the darkness as Con had; yet Con resented their intrusion – feeling it was done for macabre and ghoulish entertainment. But he chided himself for judging. I don’t know their reasons or thoughts. Goodbye, Old Man, I wish I could help.
‘Shall we go?’ Shen said.
‘Yes, I think we should – let’s grab a coffee.’
They walked out of the museum and into the neighbouring café in silence; both sad and subdued.
In the queue for coffee, his pent-up thoughts began to tumble out again.
‘When I had the dream I didn’t know about the three cows in Beckhampton, or that the pouring of the milk into the waters was found in myth – nor the horse’s relation to the sun in myth, nor of the alignment of Bryn Celli on the Llanberis pass…’
He suddenly stopped speaking. He had wanted to say he’d gone to enact that dream the night Melissa drowned. But something was stopping him; he remembered he had left Shen at the house with Alfred. He’d been telling Alfred about the constellations. And he’d kissed her goodnight; he had gone back to the van but hadn’t slept, feeling anxious, unsettled, alive, jittery – on the verge of something. He’d felt excited, like a bubble of happiness was rising within him, so he’d walked and come to the river, realising the river had been calling him and in his mind’s eye he’d been seeing the river of his dreams – and there it was, milky with moonlight, but he had stood on the banks and shivered. He didn’t know why he’d gone – the coincidences in the dream – that hinted he was seeing the myth enacted, it had suggested to him he should enter the water; but she had instead. Had some cruel god been asking for sacrifice? He didn’t know; he remembered the sudden strange feeling of dread he’d felt when looking in, that made him shrink from the bank. No – it was coincidence, pure coincidence. But something strange had been going on, was going on; the walls between dream and reality were fading; his fragile grip on reality seeming to be altering; is it my mind that is collapsing or just the laws of time and space - melting into a quantum state of holographic unity? he wondered. Even such a question seemed mad. If someone is trying to tell me something, then who and what and why? Or had whatever it was, perhaps even he himself, sought to warn him years ago, to no avail – a cry from a future desperate to change the course of action that had led to disaster? Then why speak in riddles and myths? Why not just put it plain?
Shen was still waiting for him to finish talking.
‘Oh, fuck this queue,’ he said, frustrated. ‘Let’s catch up later, I think I need to go and lie down or something.’ And it was his turn to walk away without looking back, raising a hand when she shouted out after him.
There was a queue into the new museum annexe, but the clouds had parted and Con was happy just to be near Shen.
She stood just ahead of him; he looked down at her dark hair bound into a single, long braid; and perhaps she felt him looking for she turned round, and seeing him staring she smiled and frowned and the same time.
‘Are you looking at my hair? It’s a mess. I didn’t have time to wash it…’
‘It looks fine to me.’ He said, embarrassed to have been caught, yet secretly kicking himself for his usual under exaggeration. Her hair was beautiful. She was beautiful. There was something in her bearing, her spirit that enchanted him; rendered him speechless. He felt dull and silent compared to her.
I am so quiet now, he thought. He thought back to an image of himself laughing with Melissa – it seemed a different Conall – carefree, spontaneous, lit-up. Where was his fire now?
A rill of her soft hair rose in the breeze and Conall’s chest quivered.
I’m like that figure in that fairy tale – Faithful John – whose heart is bound in iron fetters, he thought. One day it’s just going to burst. I’ve bound it so that I can’t feel anything anymore – pain or happiness.
Shen turned again and smiled.
‘Finally!’ she said as the queue began to move.
But her words passed Conall by. Her smile that creased up her dark eyes was charming – like a child’s, almost – joyous; and for a tremulous moment Conall’s heart leaped and he was suffused with an emotion that had long deserted him: he was suddenly happy. And in that moment he lifted his hand, reaching out with the intention of smoothing the hair where it tumbled in the breeze against the back of her head. The idea of running his hands through those locks was exquisite; of touching her lovely head. I could kiss her, he thought. But then the light seemed to fade at the thought of Hayden and of Melissa and of his guilt.
She looked back and frowned. ‘Are you ok?’ she asked.
He nodded. I’m such a fucking coward. I wish I could say fuck you to Hayden and to everything else that’s holding me back. What must she think of me? All she must see is this silent pathetic man – no fire or get up and go – happy to coast along, withdrawn and distant; but inside I’m like a fucking whirlpool of emotion and thoughts... Don’t you know, Shenandoah, that I adore you?
‘You sure? You’re very quiet.’
‘Lots on my mind.’
‘Ahh,…me too.’
‘Anything you want to share?’ he tried.
She looked at him right in the eyes, suddenly serious.
‘No – it wouldn’t be fair.’
‘Try me, I’m a big boy now.’
‘No. It really wouldn’t be. Forget I said anything.’
‘How am I supposed to do that?’
‘You figure it out – you’re a big boy now,’ she replied. Touché.
And internally he was screaming out the question he so wished to ask – was it to do with me?
They remained in silence until they reached the new display, set back into the modern glass and steel annexe that had been built on to the side of the old stone museum.
The walls were covered in dioramas showing the development of the Avebury landscape, inset with brightly lit cubes in which various artefacts were placed: stone axes, decorated pots, heads of corn of the type grown by the ancient farmers of the region.
Shen gazed at a large model that showed tiny people clearing a space in a vast wooded landscape where the henge would one day be.
‘It all looks so pedestrian, so dull, doesn’t it. Scraggy farmers in rough skins. Last night when I imagined it, it was tattooed priests in white robes singing chants to the sky…’ She looked disappointed.
‘But who’s to say your image wasn’t closer to the truth than this?’ Con asked, gesturing to the diorama. ‘If this monument was in India or Meso-America you’d have no trouble finding such reconstructions involving colourful priests. British prehistory is seen as dull, muddy, boring – more Brown Age than Bronze Age…but that’s not how I see it – I think your image is more correct.’
‘There’s an image in one of my books of Mayan, or might be Aztec priests on a flat-topped pyramid; all colours, feathers, it’s just gob-smackingly vivid and beautiful; this lot look like medieval peasants....’ she added.
‘I know. Have you seen those prints of the natives of the Pacific North-West? The ones who make totem poles and that really cool art – like the Kwakiutl, or the Haida? There are these photos of their feasts, and they’re all in these big wooden huts, well, halls, out in the forests – and they’re dressed as spirits, as animals – ravens, killer whales, bears… they’re fucking amazing. That’s what it would have been like here… not three or four peasants in brown wondering round in the mud – but people in masks, in costume; hundreds of them, dancing, in colour – with fire, and booze and singing…’
He looked wistful, and it made her smile.
‘The singing…’ he continued; ‘imagine what songs have been lost… the forgotten carols of the midwinter ceremonies… hymns of the henges.’
Shen lifted an eyebrow in curiosity.
‘You’re right; we don’t think of the music; that there may have been folksongs that these people knew – and sung for hundreds maybe thousands of years…it’s kind of haunting. And sad. Incredibly sad.’
‘That said,’ Con added, smiling, ‘Hymns of the henges sounds like a pretty cool debut album, don’t you think?’.
They had moved around the diorama to where they had a bird’s eye view from West Kennet over Silbury towards the henge.
‘It says here the area may have developed here originally because of the springs.’ Shen said, running a finger down the information panel beside the diorama.
‘I was reading some more of Tolkien’s letters this morning before the protest;’ Con said. ‘He makes the connection between the Kennet and an Irish tale about a goddess who loses an eye drinking from the well of wisdom. He says eye in Irish is Suil; and that Silbury and Swallowhead come from that; and that Kennet means Bright dog after Sirius, and that it’s the Milky Way; wish I’d read these a couple of years ago – might have save me a bit of research time! He’d not linked the Milky Way to the henge itself – but he didn’t have astronomy programs like we now have; but he did link it to the Kennet, just as I did to the Braint. I’ve only read a few of the letters – they’re a bit faded and the handwriting is rather small.’
The museum was crowded and Con and Shen found themselves jostled away from the diorama. Con, annoyed at being forced away from Shen beckoned her to follow him into a less busy corner, beneath a panel describing the many longbarrows in the area.
‘Look at this, Shen… remember my dream with the three cows by the stream?’
He was pointing at a plan of Beckhampton longbarrow, a tomb that lay at the opposite side of the circle to the sanctuary, beyond the westernmost point of the west Avenue.
'The longstones cove, Shen, points to Beckhampton longbarrow – and guess what Beckhampton longbarrow had in it?’
‘Three cows?’ she said, half-serious.
‘Yep. three ox skulls. It all fits – the milky river is the Kennet, , the 3 magical cows are in Beckhampton; so although my set in Wales on another level it
applies to a myth behind all these sites.’
‘Jeez. That’s a bit freaky. You should be happy; it’s all corroborating your theory!’
Con smiled weakly. ‘It all seems irrelevant now, somehow, now Mel’s gone.’
‘It wasn’t your fault Con’ she said. Con winced.
‘You’re right, though… it’s a bit freaky. Three cows – I mean, it’s either complete bollocks or it goes way above coincidence; and if so – what the hell does that mean?’
A space had opened up in front of the main display: a reconstruction of the chamber in West Kennet, dark, moody and lit by hidden lamps that cast an eerie glow onto the floor of the mock chamber. It had been done well; minus the incongruous modern glass-roof of the real longbarrow the reconstruction was, if anything, more atmospheric than the actual monument.
Here, crouched into one corner lay the skeleton of a man – the bones that Piggott had discovered and that had been hidden away in a museum storeroom until now.
He lay on his right side, his legs drawn up to his chest – the empty eye sockets in the dark shiny skull gazing towards the dull glass that separated him from the queue of visitors; he seemed small, fragile – Con looked hard but couldn’t see any sign of the arrow that had been found in his throat, lodged into one of the bones of his neck, the skeleton was too far away and too shadowed.
‘He seems sad.’ Shen said, crouching to better see him.
Conall nodded in agreement. ‘It’s like a glass prison; I mean they’ve done it well, but it’s a mockery, isn’t it? A false tomb behind glass and he’s just lying there, alone.’
Con knelt to get closer – but still the glass and some three feet of space separated them. He wished he could reach out and place his hand on the bones; connect in some way.
‘He was originally one a mound of bones; and there was a whole goat skeleton nearby, too. This is all a bit clean; sanitised.’
What do you want, Old Man? He thought. What can we do to help? He found himself saying the phrase Alfred Mac Govan-Crow had taught him: Itsipaiitapiiyopah; Old Man would not have understood the words, but he would have recognised the sentiment; we are one in the Great Spirit, the Being behind all beings; we are part of the same dance, you and I. I know you; I understand you, Con thought. We are both imprisoned behind a wall of glass; both wanting to be back with those we have loved, to escape and be free again. Why are we here when those we love have died and left us?
The image from the day before rose in his mind – soma, golden, streaming from the wound in the man’s throat - the creative sacrifice; the power and the giving… the act of a god…a shaman….a priest…a wizard…
The empty eyes gazed back saying nothing. Conall stood and rubbed his neck; people were waiting for him to move so they could peer into the darkness as Con had; yet Con resented their intrusion – feeling it was done for macabre and ghoulish entertainment. But he chided himself for judging. I don’t know their reasons or thoughts. Goodbye, Old Man, I wish I could help.
‘Shall we go?’ Shen said.
‘Yes, I think we should – let’s grab a coffee.’
They walked out of the museum and into the neighbouring café in silence; both sad and subdued.
In the queue for coffee, his pent-up thoughts began to tumble out again.
‘When I had the dream I didn’t know about the three cows in Beckhampton, or that the pouring of the milk into the waters was found in myth – nor the horse’s relation to the sun in myth, nor of the alignment of Bryn Celli on the Llanberis pass…’
He suddenly stopped speaking. He had wanted to say he’d gone to enact that dream the night Melissa drowned. But something was stopping him; he remembered he had left Shen at the house with Alfred. He’d been telling Alfred about the constellations. And he’d kissed her goodnight; he had gone back to the van but hadn’t slept, feeling anxious, unsettled, alive, jittery – on the verge of something. He’d felt excited, like a bubble of happiness was rising within him, so he’d walked and come to the river, realising the river had been calling him and in his mind’s eye he’d been seeing the river of his dreams – and there it was, milky with moonlight, but he had stood on the banks and shivered. He didn’t know why he’d gone – the coincidences in the dream – that hinted he was seeing the myth enacted, it had suggested to him he should enter the water; but she had instead. Had some cruel god been asking for sacrifice? He didn’t know; he remembered the sudden strange feeling of dread he’d felt when looking in, that made him shrink from the bank. No – it was coincidence, pure coincidence. But something strange had been going on, was going on; the walls between dream and reality were fading; his fragile grip on reality seeming to be altering; is it my mind that is collapsing or just the laws of time and space - melting into a quantum state of holographic unity? he wondered. Even such a question seemed mad. If someone is trying to tell me something, then who and what and why? Or had whatever it was, perhaps even he himself, sought to warn him years ago, to no avail – a cry from a future desperate to change the course of action that had led to disaster? Then why speak in riddles and myths? Why not just put it plain?
Shen was still waiting for him to finish talking.
‘Oh, fuck this queue,’ he said, frustrated. ‘Let’s catch up later, I think I need to go and lie down or something.’ And it was his turn to walk away without looking back, raising a hand when she shouted out after him.