26. Self-Excavation

26

Self-Excavation

When she got back to the campsite, she found a television crew from the BBC milling around in the car park outside the reception cabin. Tiffany was standing with Lindsay and Barney, shaking her head as Nat, still wearing sunglasses, grinned as he talked into the camera, a microphone making an indentation in his beard.

‘It’s like a surprise sandwich, isn’t it?’ he was saying to a mystified interviewer. ‘You’ve got your historical bread on one side—that’s the lad in the chamber over there—and you’ve got your modern bread on the other—me, of course. What’s gonna be in the filling, well, that’s just pot luck, isn’t it?’

‘What’s happened?’ Josie asked.

Tiffany grinned. ‘They took a DNA sample from the ancient king, and compared it to Nat’s. It turns out there’s an eighty-percent match, meaning Nat could be a direct descendent.’

‘Don’t we share more DNA than that with gorillas?’ Josie said.

‘Don’t tell them that,’ Tiffany said with a grin. ‘He just spent half an hour telling them his family history, and how his cult days in the eighties must have been a subconscious attempt to restart his ancient tribe. At this rate we’re looking at a two-hour documentary at least.’

‘Well, I suppose I’d watch it if it came on.’

‘By the way, what do you think of this?’

Tiffany reached into a plastic bag she was carrying and pulled out a pair of soft toys that looked like stocky, maneless lions. One was a dark, Halloween orange, the other slightly lighter. They both had spongy sabre-teeth and angry slanted eyebrows.

‘Mr. and Mrs. Cavey,’ Tiffany said. The park’s—and quite possibly the village’s—mascots.’

‘Mr. and Mrs. … Cavey?’

Tiffany shrugged. ‘It’s a work in progress. It’s pretty hard to find an original name using the word “lion”. They’ve all been copyrighted.’

‘What about the king?’

Tiffany reached into a bag and pulled out a stuffed doll with a bald head, a big beard, and clothes that reminded Josie of a Roman legionary, with the exception of the incongruous felt sunglasses covering its eyes.

‘It … ah … looks like Nathaniel.’

Tiffany grimaced. ‘It’s still very much a work in progress. He insisted on the sunglasses and the loincloth. When I pointed out that the Ice Age was several thousand years before the Romans, his response was something along the lines of “emmets ain’t gonna know”.’

‘That was a pretty good impression.’

Tiffany’s eyes widened and she swung her head from side to side. ‘Thanks. I’m working on it. Do you want the other good news?’

‘Sure.’

‘Due to the potential significance of what we’ve found, a few of the big societies are going to group together to pay for a full land survey, so we’re in the clear for that.’

‘Great. Will we be able to open by mid-June, and more importantly, before Lindsay and Geoffrey’s wedding?’

‘Looks like it. Although we’re going to have to do a bit of jostling for position. The southwestern corner of the park where the chamber was found will be cordoned off while excavations take place. There’s also talk of a visitor centre and a small museum, although that might be somewhere in the village due to planning restrictions.’

‘How exciting.’

‘Isn’t it great?’

‘It really is.’ Josie gave Tiffany a hug, but as she pulled away, she noticed a frown on her daughter’s face.

‘Mum, are you all right?’

Josie nodded. ‘I’m fine. Really.’

‘Are you sure?’

She gave Tiffany a smile, but it felt forced. ‘Yes, really.’

‘Mum?’

‘Don’t worry about me. I’m just worried about Hilda, that’s all. Everything else is fine.’

She knew it wasn’t, but she couldn’t quite define what it was. She walked down through the campsite, smiling politely for each group of people that she passed, pausing to answer a few questions about her own limited involvement, playing the good host where she could, but she couldn’t shake a nagging feeling that something was wrong.

She went back to her cabin, made a cup of tea, then sat for a while at the little bench, trying to work out just what it was that was troubling her.

I’m here, I’m surviving, and everything is going well. The campsite is on track, my daughter is nearby, my best friend is getting the treatment she needs, and I even have a man who seems to like me. So, what is it?

Something was there, niggling her, sitting right at the edge of her peripheral vision, like a little goblin, refusing to be banished into the dark. Josie sat for a while, drinking her tea, staring out of the cabin’s little window at the forest beyond, letting her mind wander, her thoughts drift, trying to identify just what it was that she couldn’t shake off in order to move on with her life.

Then, suddenly, it came into view.

And she knew what she needed to do.

She made an excuse to Tiffany that she had to go back up to Bristol to deal with some business for a couple of days. It wasn’t true, and the look in Tiffany’s eyes suggested she knew, but her daughter knew her well enough by now to just accept her mother’s decision.

Wanting to do everything by herself—not just to prove that she could, but because she wanted to avoid being talked out of anything—she caught a bus from Porth Melynos’s single bus stop up to the local railway station, and caught a train back to Exeter, and from there on to Bristol. Back in the city, she took another bus up to her old house, where the FOR SALE sign stood slanted in the overgrown square of front garden.

The house looked forlorn and unloved, devoid of the lustre it had once had, as though with no one living there anymore it had faded into sepia. Josie, feeling a little sense of disappointment, kicked away some brambles and gamely straightened the sign. Then, taking one last look at the house in which she had thought she had been happy, she turned and headed into town.

It didn’t take long to find a record shop. It gave Josie a brief sense of satisfaction to see that in the new chart, Reid’s single had dropped out of the Top Forty. She picked up a CD with a REDUCED sticker on the front and took it to the counter.

‘A leaving present for my boss,’ Josie muttered to the girl behind the counter, who gave her a knowing smile. ‘I’m about to resign.’

She put her CD into her handbag and headed across Bristol to the smart part of town where Reid now lived with his new woman, Lady Evangeline. It had been remarkably easy to find her address online, and as Josie sat under a bus shelter a little way down the bright, leafy suburb road, she wondered how she might feel if and when she saw her ex-husband again.

It was a typical early summer’s day in Bristol, a couple of degrees warmer than Cornwall, less wind, but still the constant overhead threat of rain. As she sat there, a fat dark cloud obscured the sun, and Josie waited for a cloudburst. It never came, however, the cloud passing on, the sun reappearing, the warmth to the air returning.

She took the CD out of her bag, turning it over in her hands. It still had the plastic wrapping on it, so she tore it off and opened the case. On one side of the cardboard slip case was a picture of her ex-husband standing with his acoustic guitar beside a stone humpbacked bridge out in the countryside. To her dismay Josie realised it was a picture she had taken herself some years before, back in their happier days, when their weekends had been taken up with trying to promote Reid and his music, booking shows, painstakingly making amateur promotion videos for his songs, taking mood photos anywhere and everywhere, trying to find a good look for someone not particularly photogenic.

She hadn’t known about his music when they got married. It had been his ‘secret thing’, a little hobby he did from time to time. Only after their vows had been said did she discover just how big a part of his life it was, bigger, perhaps, than any other, and that she would never truly be a part of it, just something floating on the periphery, allowed to look in from time to time.

Tiffany’s arrival had been a good excuse to keep her weekends for other things, but she had always sensed a resentment, that Tiffany should indeed also be placed second to Reid’s career aspirations, and that Josie should perhaps carry the infant around while she held the camera or made phone calls to local bars and clubs. Her reluctance to put her daughter second to his dreams had marked the start of their marriage’s slow decline, but it had taken years before the final death knell sounded. Now that it had, the only thing preventing Josie from moving forwards with her life was how she felt.

She stared at the picture. There had been good times, for sure. That had not been one of them; they had argued in the car about locations, and Josie had ended up missing a coffee date with a friend because Reid—determined to get a bridge photo—couldn’t find one that suited him. It had been a long, boring day of bickering, all for one solitary photo.

Now, as she turned the CD case over in her hands, reading the lyrics printed on the inside flap, she realised that she no longer felt anything. She took a black marker pen out from her purse, pulled off the lid, and scrawled, Goodbye, Reid, thanks for the memories, on the side of the slip case. Then, standing up, she dropped it into a litter bin nearby.

The sun had come out, the late May air warm and fresh. She hoped it boded well for the oncoming summer, but you never really could tell.

She decided to walk back into town. With a spring in her step, she shouldered her bag, gave a little smile, and set off.

Tiffany, Hilda and the campsite needed her.