Casting Off

The companion piece to last week’s The Turnback.

It was May, but a May with optimism, rather than ambition, and up here on the Whin Sill the wind made a noise like a kettle boiling.

The Book Dragon would’ve hated it.

Val the Fen boy pulled his woolly hat down over his stinging ears, pinched his rollup out between finger and thumb, and roared, “Iss a mattock, you lollopin’ gret mawkin, not a friggen toothpick! Fucken hell, Grace, what d’I tell you? It’s a test pit, you ent a landscape gardener!”

You got into a habit, after a few days.
You started off precise and formal and then it crept, kind of: first time one of the students dropped the F bomb and you stopped minding yourself quite so much, and a fortnight in the whole boiling lot of them on B2 was cursing like dismounted moss-troopers, topping up their tea with Carnation milk, and whooping every time they found an interesting stone.

Keen, they were.

Bloody lovely.

He was a volunteer – proper ticketed volunteer, mind, Dr Valentine Marshall site consultant, which meant he had all the fun and none of the paperwork. Beth was chief archaeologist on this dig: she had to wrangle the buggers into order. Val just had the pleasure of turning up, shining the light of his countenance for a couple of days, then going home when it started raining.

“Eh, look, it’s the site gargoyle.”

He tucked his rollup behind his ear, under his hat, and gave Brendan a long, flat stare. “If you ent coming to tell me you found the Eagle Of The Ninth, you baldie Geordie twat, I ent shifting. I got a brew on –“ he raised his mug meaningly – “and if you come to tell me that lad Ewan fell in the spoil heap again, thass old news, that is. Heard him go half an hour since. Never heard such language. He wants to do his boot-laces up, that one.”

“What, like you did?” He looked, deliberately, at Val’s unlaced para boots. “I seen you go arse over apex more than once in the last few years, you pointy-eared princess, so don’t you be giving me your old buck. What I came by for is, tell you your phone’s pinging away there on the finds table. Your missis’ll be wanting you for summat.”

He didn’t bite. He’d known Bren fifteen years, almost. He’d been finishing his Master’s in Durham when this bugger still had hair. “That she will,” he said comfortably. “What you reckon, then?”

“About the students, or about you on the arm?”

“The students…” and cocked his head, “ – maybe. Keen lot.”

“Aye, if that Ewan don’t fall over his own feet again. I swear to God every time he passes the datum point I’m on bloody pins.”
“He finds a midden, he’s going in it. Honestly, though, were we that cack-handed? At his age? I mean…”
Bren shoved his fluorescent beanie back over his head and surveyed the site of industry. “Mate, when we were that age, catch either me or you in a hard hat. The only way we ever learnt not to be dicks on site was by ending up in the hospital. My kids are the same. They never pay heed. As you will find out eventually.” He rubbed a hand over his scalp-stubble, leaving crumbs of soil on his rasping head, peering across the site. “Will you come out of there, honest to God, it’s like having a bloody labrador!”
“Dr Marshall says – “ the eager young voice floated back across the ragged grass.

Brendan gave Val a look. “Dr Marshall says when you’re in a bloody hole stop bloody digging!”

“Unless you find suffen,” Val said comfortably, and lit his rollup again. “Which case, dew yew keep a-troshin’, bor.”

“Oh when you go all bloody Fen boy I lost the battle, lad. You like this, don’t you?”

He took another satisfied drag on that pitiful rollup, leaned back against the damp stone bank, and exhaled. (Brendan moved with the times. Brendan vaped, and it smelt like alcopops, and Val was having none of it. He came on-site, he brought a pouch of Golden Virginia, it lasted him to the end of the dig and Hannah needed to know nothing about it, although she had looked at him a bit oddly the first time she’d dug a lighter out of the knee pocket of his working combats.)

Other than the wind trying to go through you, there was a sort of peace about it up here. Lapwings, sounding confused, the way their call went up at the end. The occasional sheep. Lambing over and done, for the most part, so there wasn’t that call and response you had sometimes, but there was one he’d come to recognise, one big bass-baritone ewe who sounded like someone trying to do an impersonation of a sheep.

“Yeah,” he said, and eased his shoulder in muscle-memory. “Yeah, I do. I could ha’ done this forever.”

There was another long silence. (Bren had been there when half a Welsh slate hillside had come unmoored on Val’s shoulder, ten years back. The rain had been torrential all summer and it had just shifted the rock. Just been lucky it’d been Val underneath it and not one of his students. The paperwork, else, would have been a bloody nightmare. But that was the first and last time Valentine Marshall had managed a site. Been desk-work and lectures all the way, after that. Bren knew that. It’d been Bren that had pulled him out of two tons of slate-fall and got him to hospital, swearing at him every step of the way for bloody-minded stubbornness that he’d still been in the damn’ trench trying to shore it up.)

He’d sort of thought they’d be like Waldorf and Stadtler – Laurel and Hardy, maybe – Marshall and Southern, site manager and dig supervisor. Carry on being twenty-five forever, buggering about in historical holes indefinitely.

And then it had been Capel Curig, and he’d lost his parents one after another, like a door slamming, and then there had been – there’d been –

Been ten years of desperate and nothing and panic and shattering, trying to piece it all back together from so many broken pieces of nothing.

“But,” he said. (Like a door slamming.) “I’d not ha’ met Hannah, then, would I?”
Brendan nodded sagely. “You work with her?”
“Head of Faculty’s PA. Reckon she’s dipping out of her pay-grade, with me, but here we are. Yeah. We.” The sheep-impersonator let rip three fields away with a noise like Bryn Terfel doing Old MacDonald, and Val stubbed his rollie out in the tin he kept for this very purpose. “Moved in together, about – eh, four months ago? Five? I had a bit of a crack-up last autumn and she picked me up off the floor.”

Brendan handed the phone over, silently. “She checking you’ve not hoyed yourself in a ditch then?”

He keyed in his passcode, and then grinned. “Nah. She’s sending me cat photos. The little bastard’s been sleeping in the bread-bin overnight, ‘cos that is what normal cats do.” Checked the text that went with it. “Has apparently also staged a dirty protest in the bath with me not being there and all. She says he’s complaining to management. I reckon it’s with him being nineteen and spoilt rotten. He can’t have the whole bed to himself now.”

Bren looked at him just a second too long.

He knew what the lad wasn’t asking. The game-face was on. They’d all done the training, the endless seminars, the workbooks. Safeguarding is everyone’s responsibility. (Which was how come he hadn’t let Ewan face-plant the marking pegs.)

Was it a healthy relationship, was what Bren was vibrating like the flagging tape in a stiff breeze trying not to ask. And Val knew bloody well that if it turned out Hannah had been some manipulative thing taking advantage of him, if it had been that Val was still wobbly and you couldn’t ha’ trusted him in a long-term relationship with a bag of crisps, never mind shared bank accounts and a credit history – well, he reckoned Bren would have gone to war for him.

Which was sort of nice. And sort of sobering, when you looked back on yourself and thought Jesus did I scare people that much before?

They’d moved to higher ground, or the wind had changed. There was a second wavering bar of reception, and a second ping.

He glanced down. “And can I pick some bread up on the way home tonight.”

“Living the rock’n’roll lifestyle there, Marshall.”

He was about to say something about short rations when a shrill yell split the air.

“Dr Marshall! Bren! Everybody! Anybody! Quick!”

Brendan closed his eyes. “If that lad’s fallen in the spoil again I swear to God I’m going to wrap him in hazard tape and glue him to the tea urn.”

But it wasn’t Ewan. Wrong tone. Wrong pitch. Wrong sort of terror.

This was excitement.

They exchanged a look—ancient comrades in the fine art of Youth Triage—and both moved. Bren pushed himself off the bank as if his knees needed a bit of a run-up, Val limbering his dodgy shoulder like a spin bowler out of habit.

Grace and two of the other first-years were standing over the test pit like they’d discovered the Holy Grail and remembered the end of Indiana Jones. “I think we’ve found… a thing.”

“Praise be,” Brendan muttered. “A thing. Sound the trumpets.”

“No — like — a proper thing,” Grace insisted, looking at Val. “We was clearing back the context and I heard this clunk? And then— well— look?”

Val stepped down into the wind-cut hollow of the pit, easing himself into a crouch. The soil was darker here, richer; the turf roots tugged at his knees when he leaned in.

And there it was. Half-exposed, still hugged by the earth: cut stone. And the hairs rose on the back of his neck.

Not natural. Not modern. And not nothing.

“Oh,” he said softly.

Brendan peered over his shoulder. “What? Coke bottle? Old spade head? Another of them bloody sheep jawbones?”

Val brushed away a little more soil with the side of his hand. “It’s a drain.”

Grace looked. Ewan popped his head over her shoulder. “A drain?” she said, and her voice was suddenly small and a bit sad.

“Oh wow,” Ewan breathed, before anyone else could. “That’s so cool.”
“It’s a drain?”

“In archaeology,” Brendan said, voice gone oddly serious, “to get drains, like, you got to have a settlement. And when you got a settlement, what have you got?”
“People,” Ewan said. He was spot-on, that one. When he grew into his feet he was going to be mustard. “So…looks like the Magna Ditch came out further than we thought – maybe?”

Grace was staring at the newest sewer of the Roman camp as if the gates of heaven had opened to reveal a public latrine. “So it’s important?”

Val looked up at her. At all of them.

Some of them were going to grow up to be proper diggers. Some of them were just having a lovely time, overseeing martial Roman toilet blocks. All of them were keen, bright, and engaged.

“Grace,” he said gravely, “believe it or not, you may have just found the most interesting thing on this site. And before you ask: the sponge on the stick is long since degraded, all right? Yes, we’ll log it. Yes, you can write it up. And yes—” he added, as she opened her mouth— “you can have first dibs on the photos for Instagram. Although I’m going to let you explain about the sponge on the stick.”

The wind had been trying to sandblast his face off for six hours. Three volunteers and the Finds Officer had materialised out of the turf as if summoned by witchcraft, his shoulder was starting to throb as the sun began to drop and the temperatures slipped, and he had a loaf of bread to pick up before the shops shut. “Has anyone let Beth know?”

This wasn’t his site. They let him play in the soil a bit, because he was the Book Dragon, and he wrote papers about blood and iron and bone that made people pay attention. But it wasn’t his site, not really. It wasn’t going to be him that wrote this one up. And for the first time in a long time, he thought he was going to allow himself to be grateful for that.

“Roman Britain is her thing, not mine,” he said, and stepped out of the past, back onto the close-cropped turf. “But thanks for letting me play.”

He still ducked his head in leavetaking when he wasn’t thinking about it, straight out of Oliver Cromwell’s playbook. Bloody idiot. Beth glanced at him as if she was making sure he was okay, as she came striding up from the vallum ditch, and he pantomimed rubbing the bad shoulder and she nodded.

Word got round. It was a small world, digging.

Val Marshall, who might have been suffen big in fieldwork if half a mountain hadn’t fell on him in Snowdonia, in the pissing rain. The flagging tape was starting to snap and rustle in a rising wind, and it’d be dark in a couple of hours, and he had a home to go to.

Bren frowned at him, just quick, before the volunteers took him and Beth started ordering the crew to start triangulating the find. He didn’t say anything. But he pulled his phone out of his pocket again. It hardly rang before she picked it up. “Just finishing up, owd gal,” he said. His voice was loud enough to carry. He knew it. “Yeah, been a good few days. Shoulder’s had enough for now, though, I think.” He paused. “Haa. Love you too. See you in a couple hours.”

And then he turned his back on the site – on the drain, and the lapwings, and the sheep that sounded like Bryn Terfel, and reading the past in the soil – and headed out. Not for always. Not gone forever. But he didn’t live there now. He lived in the here and now, in a Victorian semi where the kettle was on and he had to put up with Radio 2 first thing in the morning, and it was bloody lovely.

The silence inside the visitor centre felt like a physical weight.

It smelled of damp Gore-tex, industrial carpet, and – far off and faint – the ghost of canteen chips. Val took his hat off and gave his head a little shake, where the weight of that solid woolly cabling had pressed his unbrushed hair to his scalp for three days.

He signed the site book with a flourish that was pure Book Dragon, the pen scratching satisfyingly on the paper. V. Marshall. Consultant. Time Out: 16:15.

Be home by nine, and that was even allowing for rush hour traffic. He was muddy, he was cold right through to his marrow, and he was terrifyingly happy.

He turned to go—head down, shoulders hunched, the classic Marshall manoeuvre for navigating spaces containing People and Retail Opportunities—and then he stopped.

Because his brain, which usually processed the world like an old-fashioned radio scanning through static, suddenly locked onto the clearest signal it had had all day.

There was a wicker basket by the counter. It wasn’t the usual gift shop stuff —no rubber ducks dressed as Roman centurions or tea towels. It was piled high with skeins of yarn that looked like they’d been pulled directly out of the landscape outside.

He shouldn’t touch it. He was covered in trench. He touched it anyway.

It didn’t squeak. (Acrylic squeaked. It made the inside of his mouth feel like he’d bitten cotton wool just looking at it.) This didn’t squeak. It felt greasy, and rough, and real. It felt like sheep. It smelled like rain and lanolin and the shed at the bottom of the vicarage garden.

Val stood there, a six-foot-two academic in muddy combat trousers, burying his hands in a basket of wool.

Grounding.

The fizz in his head, which had been threatening to turn into a migraine from the strip-lighting, suddenly smoothed out into a purr.

Look at that, the fizz whispered. Look at the colour of that.

It wasn’t just grey. It was the colour of the sky over the Whin Sill at dusk. And that one—that wasn’t green, that was moss on a wet stone. And that one was the exact bruised purple of the heather he’d just been kneeling in.

Hannah.

The thought arrived whole and complete.

Hannah, sitting on his sofa with her feet under his thigh, needles clicking. Hannah, who wrapped him in layers of wool against the world because she couldn’t be there to hold him together herself.

She made you the hat, the voice in his head pointed out. She made you the gloves. She keeps you warm.

He looked at the price tag. Hand-spun. Rare breed. Local. The sort of price that made you wince, if you were sensible.

Val was not sensible. Val was a man who had just spent three days staring into the past and realising he had a future.

He scooped up the slate-grey. Then the moss-green. Then a sort of rusty, bracken-gold that looked exactly like her hair when the sun hit it.

“You all right there, love?”

The woman behind the till was watching him with a mixture of amusement and alarm. He realised he was clutching four hundred quid’s worth of artisanal yarn to his chest like he was rescuing it from a burning building.

He looked up. He was in company, in a public place, and not so long ago his default position would have been backed up against a wall scanning for the escape route. This time he smiled—the old smile, the crooked, sideways one. (Brendan would have recognised it. Brendan would have said uh-oh here comes bloody trouble.)

“It’s for my... for Hannah,” he said. He didn’t say ‘partner’ or ‘friend’. They were little ticky boxes, and a Hannah was world-sized. “She knits. She’s brilliant. She can make... structures. Out of string.”

The woman’s face softened. “It’s lovely stuff, that. Blue-faced Leicester. Spun just down the road in Hexham. You taking the lot?”

“Yes,” Val said, and the fizzy brain gave a little kick of absolute triumph. Yes. All the soft things. All the warm things. Bring them home. “She’d like all of them.” He took his glasses off and cleaned them, feeling simultaneously ten feet tall and like a very small green wyrmling, and not like a dragon at all. “End up looking like that bloke out of Time Team in the stripey pullovers, won’t I?”

He walked out to the van ten minutes later with a carrier bag that smelled of sheep, eating the last piece of parkin she’d baked for him a week ago, feeling like a hunter-gatherer returning with the best kill of the season.

He couldn’t wait to see her face. He was going to dump the whole bag in her lap and watch her do that thing where she stroked it and hummed, and then they were going to have cheese on toast and Horlicks, and the cat was going to climb his chest, purring.

And that was where he lived, now.

I saw this, he thought, unlocking the car, and I thought of you. Simple as that. Sufficient unto the day was the joy thereof.