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The helicopter rises in a stomach-emptying corkscrew. ‘You still want the run into the sun, Steve?’ asks Ed. ‘It’ll be out again in a second.’ Even through the headphones, his voice is a turn-on. There’s something unbearably attractive about men and machines and competence. He told me last night that piloting a plane is a technical exercise, but flying a helicopter’s an art form. I grit my teeth and remind myself that he’s married; I don’t do married men.
‘Fine,’ says Steve. ‘But lower, this time, right? I want to feel we’re just above the barley’
‘Can’t go in too low at this speed or we could get yaw.’
None of this means anything. I should have been listening earlier. ‘Don’t we need a shot from higher up?’ I ask.
‘I told you, we’ll do the low shots first. Low as you possibly can, Ed.’
The ‘copter starts its run-in again, skimming the tops of some trees and dipping down towards the barley. ‘Wooo!’ yells one of the Americans. ‘I love the smell of napalm in the morning!’
It is a great shot, though, because it feels like we’re in the UFO coming in to land. The crop circle unrolls around us, immense, foreboding, the sun winking at the edge of inflated cumulus clouds as we lift again.
‘There,’ I say, pretty pleased with myself, if I’m honest. That looked professional.
‘We have to do it again,’ says Steve.
‘You’re joking. What was wrong with that?’
‘Too high.’
‘Oh, come on. Any lower and my foot’ll be scraping the ground.’
‘The shot will only work if we’re really low. Let’s go for another approach.’
‘Steve, I’m not happy about going much lower.’ Ed sounds uncertain. ‘You can get some tricky air currents round these fields at low level, not always predictable.’
‘Aw, come on,’ says the Apocalypse Now junkie. ‘Let’s do it. We ain’t scared, are we, guys?’ There’s an embarrassed silence. One of the women shifts a little in her seat. ‘Just a couple of feet lower,’ wheedles Steve. ‘I want that Gladiator shot, skimming the ears of corn. You can do it. I’ve directed moves like this before, and it’s always been fine with other pilots.’ I’m sure this is an out-and-out lie: Steve’s a shameless bullshitter and, if you ask me, they didn’t use a helicopter for the Gladiator shot.
‘O-kaaay’ Never let it be said that Ed is afraid to rise to a challenge, as I remember all too well from last night. He swings the helicopter round, and we start to drop towards the crop circle.
The shot is not so good, whatever Steve thinks. We’re so close to the ground on this pass that we’re losing all sense of the shape we’re flying over. The viewfinder makes it appear we’re travelling much faster. I tilt up to get the flare effect on the sun again, but this time the exposure’s wrong and it looks like an explosion.
‘Slow down!’ yells Steve. ‘You’re flicking it up.’
For once someone else is getting the blame instead of me. But, suddenly, we are going slower, in a horrible, stuttery kind of motion that doesn’t feel right at all. It feels like the tail of the helicopter is trying to pull away, and we’re zigzagging over the flattened barley, coming closer and closer to the ground.
Nobody apart from me seems to think anything’s wrong. The Americans are whooping, and Steve’s yelling: ‘Keep it STEADY, for Christ’s sake!’ But there’s no way I can keep this shot steady, the bungee cords bouncing and the hiccuping motion threatening to pull the camera out of my arms altogether. I take my eye from the viewfinder, and twist round in the webbing straps to tell him so. Behind me, Steve is shaking his head furiously, staring at the monitor, oblivious to everything but the picture. I twist the other way, towards the front. Ed’s shoulders are knotted and writhing under his T-shirt. I remember the feel of those shoulders moving under my fingers, but this time it’s different. He’s fighting the controls. Shit, something is wrong. The note of the engine is rising to a howl. The tail seems to be trying to wrench itself right off. The helicopter is slewing sideways over the barley like a dragonfly with a torn wing. We’re going to crash.
‘Going to be bumpy,’ yells Ed. ‘Brace!’
Now we’re starting to spin. The rotors seem to be getting louder in my head–thoom, thhooom, THHHOOMMM, until everything else is drowned in the noise of beating air and beating blood and vibrating metal. God, the camera. If that comes loose when we crash it’ll bounce around in here like a lethal beachball. I wrap my arms round it, and try to fold myself and it into a foetal curl but the straps won’t let me and everything is shaking so much, the spin dizzying, like being sucked into a whirlpool. How long is this going to take, how high off the ground are we can only be a matter of five or ten feet at most we’re still going too fast what happens when we come down will it blow like in the films the helicopter always explodes in a fireball I don’t want to–
The helicopter hits the ground, bounces, metal tearing with an awful howl, my stomach tries to jump out through my throat, then we hit earth again and the whole thing rolls over and I’m being tumbled backwards, the camera flying out of my arms OW its whipping lead catching me on the ear and I feel sick with pain, someone’s shouting FUCK FUCK FUCK in an American accent and there’s so much noise, grinding, shrieking, smashing glass–
and the sledgehammer shatters the windscreen, my mother calling no no no, blood between my fingers–
All my fault. We shouldn’t have flown widdershins round Avebury. I should have made them take out the right-hand door, and we would have flown sunwise–
And I’d have been underneath the helicopter now, as we grind over the crushed barley and the hard dry chalk, and the metal skin on the right-hand side crumples like paper–
And we stop.
Silence. Blessed silence. Nothing. It’s all stopped, apart from a humming note that must be my ears, and the odd creak and sigh and tick of settling metal. I wait for the sound of running feet through the barley, of some sign there’s someone else alive somewhere, but nothing happens, as I hang in my straps, the helicopter suspended between worlds. I’m holding my breath waiting for the real one to rush back in.
‘Goddamn.’ It’s one of the Americans, his voice a croak. ‘You OK, Ruth?’ Then Ruth starts sobbing and the world is back with a bang, the others going Jeez that was close Didya see how we got caught in like a vortex? and Was it the forcefield of the crop circle that brought us down? and Ed’s voice saying Is everyone all right, take it easy, we’re on our side, be careful how you unbuckle and there’s a groan of shifting metal and everything sways sickeningly and something falls off outside and he shouts I said be careful you fat fuck stop panicking you’ll all be able to climb out through the side door there’s plenty of time it’s only in the movies that they blow up we came in really slowly hit the ground with hardly any force
Steve is uncharacteristically quiet.
He wasn’t belted in, crouched at the back of the helicopter behind me, watching the shots unroll on the monitor. I twist in my webbing straps to see if he’s OK.
He’s lying on his back staring up at me, on the stoved-in wall of the helicopter. It looks like he’s reaching out one hand to catch the camera, which has landed beside him, its eye pointed towards him and the red light still winking, the black plastic rim of the lens smeared with thick red. Colour, angle, geometry: all fit perfectly, all come together to centre the shot on the ugly dent in the side of his forehead.
CHAPTER 2 Autumn Equinox (#uf18fbc97-e764-564b-93d6-6ca1d1406389)
‘India! Been a fair old time since you phoned. Orright? Did you get my birthday card?’
‘Sorry, John. Should’ve been in touch sooner.’
I can picture him in the kitchen of his cottage at West Overton, his feet up on the scarred pine table, setting September sun refracting through the quartz crystals that dangle at the window, making a dappled pattern of light. It’s late enough in the afternoon for his lovely ladies, the middle-aged country wives who drive over in their 4 × 4s for reflexology and a shag, to have gone home. He’ll be rolling a spliff one-handed. There’ll be a home-baked loaf on the breadboard, and maybe even a rabbit suspended by its feet from the hook on the back of the kitchen door, waiting for him to skin and stew it. John grew up in suburban Sutton Coldfield, but he embraced rural life with a vengeance when he moved to Wiltshire after my mother left him. He’s good at it too, maybe because he was once in the army.
‘So, how’s life in the big city? You running the BBC yet?’
‘Not exactly. Um, John, I’m ringing because…’
‘You OK, our kid?’
‘Yeah, fine, just–wanted to ask if you think it’s a good idea to come to Avebury.’
When I tell people I’ve known John for ever, he’ll give me that look that says, Yeah, really for ever, baby girl, because he’s a shaman and into reincarnation and all those books about how life is a spiritual journey and you’ll meet up with the same group of significant people every time round. John believes the three Rs get you through life: reflexology, reiki, and rebirthing. He and my mother were a lopsided kind of item for about five years, though even an eight-year-old could tell the devotion was one way: all his to her. Mum wasn’t the most faithful of partners. Or the best of mothers, when it comes down to it.
When John does my feet, kneading and probing and smoothing with his long reflexologist’s fingers, he says he can feel two big hard knots of anger just back from my toes. I walk on my fury.
‘Why shouldn’t you come back?’ he says. ‘Love to see you. There’s a band Sunday night at the pub in Devizes, if you don’t have to drive back early.’
‘Not just the weekend. I mean for the foreseeable future.’
‘Right.’ There’s a pause, John holding the idea up to the light at his end, turning it carefully this way and that, as he always does. ‘I thought you were involved with some big ghost-watching series for ITV.’
‘UFOs, actually, and it was for a digital channel. That’s been–cancelled.’
‘Bad luck.’
‘Yeah.’
Another pause. I can hear John taking a long, deep drag on his rollie. ‘This wouldn’t have anything to do with a fatal helicopter crash over Alton Barnes way last month, would it? Bunch of Americans and a camera crew, overloaded chopper?’
The tears have started rolling down my face. ‘Oh, John, I’ve fucked up again, I’ve really fucked up this time…’ Voice all choked and clotted. I’m beginning to shudder.
‘Hey, hold on. Way I heard it, the pilot crashed the helicopter, not you. He’ll probably lose his licence.’
‘Yes, but–’
‘No but. Listen, darling girl, you haven’t fucked up. Not then, not now. Believe me, I’m a world expert in fuck-ups. Blame Wyrd, if you like, web of fate, will of God, karma, whatever else carries us through the night, but it was not your fault!
‘You don’t understand. I killed someone. I should have held on to the camera but I didn’t and it killed him, there was this hole in his head, it was awful–I’ll never get another job in television.’ I’ve thought this through. I ponder it every night, sweating when police helicopters fly over the block of flats, while the Australian girls heave and struggle with their lovers on the other side of the thin wall. ‘Who’d want me? I’m bad luck. And, oh, God, John, he’s dead, and I didn’t like him very much but I so wish he wasn’t dead, he was twenty-three, his parents…’ I keep remembering his mother’s stricken face when they came to the office to collect his stuff. Soon as I realized who she was I went and locked myself into the loo. ‘There was this piece about him in Broadcast, saying how talented he was and stuff…’
‘Hey hey hey. You been sitting on this for a month, mithering, all by yourself in London?’
Can’t manage even a yes. John takes gulping silence for confirmation. ‘Listen to me. Get on the train. Don’t even think about driving. Come straight down. I’ll pick you up at Swindon. We can fetch your car some other time. Don’t go to Frannie’s, come to me, for tonight at least. Then tomorrow I’ll drive you back to London, load up your stuff, and…maybe it’s time you came home.’
There it is. The H word. A shudder goes through me, relief this time, though mixed with something darker. Avebury tugging at my string, reeling me back in.
Get in the van, Indy
‘Do you good to hang out at Fran’s as long as it takes.’ John’s gone into fatherly mode, he being the nearest thing I have to a dad, Lars (or whatever the Icelandic backpacker’s name was–I’ve never known) being blissfully unaware of my existence. ‘She always keeps the bed made up, she’d love to see you–there’s more room there than in that shithole of yours in London.’ The voice coming down the phone line is like the water of a hot bath. I can feel myself relaxing, letting the warmth slip over my tense skin. ‘Find a job, nothing demanding. They’re always looking for people in the caf or the shop.’ Easing it all away. I can almost smell the scented steam. ‘Give yourself time. Frannie could do with some help.’
An unexpected drip from the cold tap. ‘What do you mean?’ ‘Only that she’s over eighty. Not as spry as she was. And she sold the car a couple of months ago, said she was too old to drive.’ ‘She told me she still walks a couple of miles every day’.
‘Oh, yeah, she’s up and down that path from Trusloe to the post office at Big Avebury, rain or shine. But you might see a change.’ Another long draw on the roll-up. Anyway, that’s not the point. You get your arse down here and we’ll talk everything through.’
I can feel myself getting tearful again. ‘John, I don’t know…’ Because I’m bad luck. I’m widdershins. I’m not safe to be near.
‘None of us know, Indy That’s bleedin’ life. Stop thinking so hard, and live it.’
A dusty golden harvest moon is hanging low on the horizon as I drive my rust-nibbled red Peugeot past the art-deco garage on the road into Avebury, two days later. Alban Elfid, the autumn equinox: strictly speaking, still a few days away, but who cares with a moon like that casting its magic?
Alban Elfid, said John in London this morning, as we loaded the back of his pickup for him to drive ahead with my stuff. Harvest home. Whatever you like to call it. A time for reflection and healing. I know you don’t believe any of it, Indy, but doesn’t matter, I believe it for you. You couldn’t be coming back at a better time.
The road bends, passing a high bank and an enormous diamond-shaped stone, and I’m inside the Avebury circle. It gives me a jolt every time: the stones gleaming like big scary teeth in a smile that sweeps towards the church tower rising out of the trees. My route takes me through the old cottages and the circle, and out again towards Avebury Trusloe, with its grid of twentieth-century former council houses. Poor old Frannie–she’d have loved to live in a thatched cottage in Big Avebury but, buy or let, they’re way beyond reach of her pension. So she’s in Little Avebury, as Avebury Trusloe is known locally, with the rest of the exiles.
Past the cricket field, past the National Trust car park, off the main road, and a bit of a wiggle takes me into the cul-de-sac where Frannie bought Bella Vista, a red-brick semi, after I left home four years ago. Whoever named it was incurably optimistic. It has a view mostly of identical red-brick semis and bungalows, although from the bedroom window, if someone held your ankles, you might glimpse an awe-inspiring panorama of waterlogged fields and the odd telegraph pole. Frannie adores it.
When I climb out of the car, she’s already opened the front door, standing there with a beaming smile bunching the smoker’s wrinkles that seam her cheeks. Suddenly I can’t think why I stayed away.
‘Hello, stranger,’ she says, in her gravelly voice–such a big voice, I always thought, for such a small person. ‘Your bed’s made up. Beans and bacon for tea.’
Our ritual every year when the home-grown runners were ready in the garden at Chippenham. It was the first meal she made me when Social Services left me with her in 1989, the year she took over my upbringing. I’m vegetarian, I said to her. Bollocks, she said. Eight years old? Too young to be vegetarian. You ever tried bacon? ‘Tidn’ really meat.
I give her a hug, feeling the boniness of her back through her lumpy hand-knitted cardigan. I’d swear she’s shrunk: I have to stoop. Her hair’s cut badly–why do hairdressers always hack old people’s hair as if they won’t mind the shape so long as it’s short?–but still the colour of sweet sherry. She seems to think I don’t realize she dyes it; that I never noticed her locking herself in the bathroom every six weeks, leaving clots of purplish foam clinging to the back of the tap after she’d wiped the basin and let herself out.
‘You OK?’ I say to her.
‘I’m OK. What about you?’
‘I’m OK.’ And I am, now I’m home.
I follow her along the hallway to the kitchen. Not quite so spry, maybe, but still a bounce in her step. She is OK.
Then I see the tin on the table.
‘Not fresh beans, then?’ Trying to make it casual, uneasy all the same. Fran never serves tinned vegetables she could grow herself or buy fresh.
‘Lor’ sake, India,’ she says. ‘Don’t you know there’s a war on?’
While Frannie wields the tin opener, humming ballads from the Blitz, I go upstairs to check where John’s put my things. Mostly, it seems, in the front bedroom, where the bed’s made up for me. ‘Fran! Mind if I shift some of my things down into the dining room?’
A clatter, a muffled ‘Oh, buggeration,’ from the kitchen. That sounds like the old Frannie. She comes out into the hall. ‘You can’t, India, I’m sleeping in there.’
‘You what? I lean over the banisters. She’s standing at the foot of the stairs with her hands on her hips.
‘John moved my bed downstairs in the summer.’
‘What’s the matter with upstairs?’ A worm twists in my gut. I can hear myself sounding like a social worker jollying her along. ‘Don’t tell me you’re too old to climb stairs. John said you were down the post office showing them how to hokey-cokey the other week. Left leg in, left leg out, shaking it all about like a spring lamb.’
‘Lights,’ she says. ‘Bloody lights, can’t sleep at night because of ‘em.’
‘Your room’s at the back. No lights out there, apart from the people in the bungalows, and far as I remember their average age is ninety-two. Anyway, you could’ve moved into the other bedroom. I don’t mind swapping.’
There’s a guilty but defiant look on her face. ‘Buggerin’ lights. Keep me awake. Rather be down here.’
‘What brought you back?’ she asks over supper.
‘Bored with London.’ Steve’s staring eyes, which a part of me never stops seeing, accuse me of cowardice, as well as murder, but I can’t burden her with the truth. ‘And to be honest, Fran, I don’t think I’m getting anywhere in television. You need connections, or luck, or mega-talent, preferably all three, and I haven’t any of those.’
‘Don’t be silly,’ she says briskly, the way she always does. ‘You’re a clever girl, India. Don’t know where you got it from, but you are. Anyway, you stay here long as you want. John said you needed a good rest.’
‘I’ll find a job.’ I take hold of her hand as she reaches for her glass of water. Her knobbly fingers are cold between my warm ones. ‘Can’t ask you to support me.’
‘You’ve no idea what money I got.’ She’s grinning.
‘Millions, probably, all under the mattress. I don’t care. I’m not going to sponge off you.’
‘Well, that’s a relief. Can I drink my glass of water now?’
I let go of her hand reluctantly. Millions under the mattress wouldn’t compensate if I lost Fran. Then something comes to me out of nowhere.
‘I’ve been meaning to ask,’ I say.
Frannie pauses with the glass halfway to her lips. There’s a wary expression in her eyes. ‘Yes?’
‘Grandad.’
The story I’ve been told is that Grandad’s plane fell out of the sky a few months before my mother was born. But Fran has never talked about him, and the impression grew, during childhood, that it was better not to ask: the briefest of answers would escape through tight lips. Now I’m all too conscious that one day the opportunity to find out more will be gone for ever.
‘Which one?’ Her eyes have slid away from mine, and she’s put down the water glass to fiddle with a bean that has escaped onto the tablecloth. Have I upset her? Surely not, he died more than sixty years ago. Then the weirdness of her response hits me.
‘What d’you mean, which one? You never met my father, let alone his family’
