Crow Stone

‘You get bored in the night, flower, read this,’ he said, thrusting into my arms a hot-water bottle and a pile of manuscript. ‘Tell me if you think it’s too racy for Oxford University Press.’

How did he know I’d be awake at two in the morning?

Maybe it’s the wine. Maybe it’s what happened this afternoon. Every time I turn on to my back I think of my chalk coffin, the suffocating air full of coccoliths and the light from my head-torch getting dimmer and dimmer.

The teabags are in the canister marked Flour. Last time I stayed they were in the biscuit tin.

Mug of tea at my elbow, I settle down at the kitchen table with the latest chapter in Martin’s book. ‘My very favourite mystery cult. You’ll like it,’ he said. ‘Big butch soldiers. Lots of gender-bending. And ravens.’ ‘I can do without ravens.’

‘No decent mystery cult that doesn’t have a raven or two.’

In Persia, where Mithraism originated, ravens were associated with death because it was customary to expose corpses for excarnation–known as ‘sky burial’ in other cultures–leaving the flesh to be stripped away by birds and other scavengers. Symbolically, the neophyte has to die and be reborn before he can be admitted to the mysteries of the cult.

‘I love this kind of stuff,’ he said to me earlier, when we stopped discussing my next job and turned to what he’s researching. ‘Weird as hell, nothing written down, so everything has to be pieced together from the archaeological evidence. Our best guesses come from wall paintings and mosaics in Italy, but there are temples up by Hadrian’s Wall, and one was excavated in London too. Seven stages of initiation. Ordeals at every stage. Men only but, of course, the big laugh is that most of it’s nicked from an even older eastern mystery religion, the cult of the Great Mother, of all things, popular in Rome at the same time. Don’t you just adore it?’

Firelight and enthusiasm sparkled in his eyes.

‘And then the real symbolic giveaway is that they build their temples underground, or at least tart them up to look like caves. You couldn’t get much more Freudian than that, could you? Wait till you hear what they got up to during the initiation ceremonies–typical bloody soldiers, the slightest excuse to dress up as women …’

In the Mithraic myth, the raven takes the place of the Roman god Mercury, and bears his magical staff, the caduceus. He brings a message from the sun god, ordering first the hunting then the slaying, in the cave, of the bull–a sacrifice we can be almost certain was borrowed from the cult of Magna Mater. From the animal’s blood and semen gushing on to the ground, plants grow, generating new life.

Blood and semen. The dark heart of all male-centred cults. I look up from the manuscript, and outside everything is blackness, no light visible for miles from Martin’s cottage tucked under the lip of the Sussex chalk escarpment. It feels a long, long way from Green Down, and everything that waits for me there. Another sentence from the manuscript catches my eye, a translation of some priestly invocation.

I am a star that goes with you, and shines out of the depths.

It makes me shiver. Suddenly I’m tired, after all, and my feet are cold, and I remember that hot-water bottle still holding a ghost of its warmth between the not-very-clean sheets upstairs.

The same words are still reverberating in my head a couple of weeks later. I’m sitting in my silver Audi outside the semi-detached house on the outskirts of Bath, thinking about the circular motion that has brought me back here. There’s a big crack in its honey-stone facing. Underneath, hundreds of years ago, men tunnelled into the stone and drew out the bones of which Bath is built–oolitic limestone, carrying the imprint of millions of sea creatures, ammonites with their perfectly coiled shells, like snakes with their tails in their mouths.

My fascination with the bones of things, stone and fossils and the darkness underground where they lie, has never gone away, in spite of what happened that summer. I grew up here, and lived in this ugly yellow house until I was fourteen. I had no plan then to become a mining engineer. I wanted to track the origins of the human race. I saw my future in some heat-blasted gully in Africa or the Middle East, pacing the scree and looking for patterns. Turning over stones and occasionally recognizing the shape of a knucklebone, a fragment of tibia maybe or, if I was very lucky, a whole transfiguring skull.

Instead here I am, completing the circle, back where I started before I was fourteen and the big black car took me away.

Streaks of rain are beginning to dry unevenly on the honey-stone walls. I start the engine, put the car into gear and drive away up the hill, heading for the site.

On the day the black car took me away–big-bodied and lumbering, it was, a dinosaur with headlamp eyes and a radiator grille like long, shiny teeth–we drove this way. I can’t remember what I was thinking. I probably thought I was going to be famous. Time fossilizes, strips away thought and emotion, so all I have left is the bone of memory–the sight of a neat row of quarrymen’s cottages, the smell of the car’s leather upholstery.

If I went back to a psychotherapist, I could probably reflesh those moments. Remember the exact point I realized I wasn’t ever going back to the yellow house. Trace how I had succeeded in destroying everything. Understand I would never again see Poppy or Mrs Owen or Gary. It didn’t upset me then. Everything was unreal, just as it feels unreal now: a past fossilized and forgotten.

But a therapist would pick away at my memories, scraping a little fragment of dried-up flesh off the bone, culturing it and growing it and proving to me that I was hurt, I did cry, that I screamed, in fact, as they were dragging me out of the doorway and down the steep path to the waiting car.

I’d prefer not to know. I’ve put a lot of effort into not knowing. I don’t want to hear the voice I heard when the roof collapsed in the flint mine. The point of coming back is to bury it for good.

The entrance to the underground quarry is in the middle of a recreation ground, not far from Green Down’s high street. The site offices are metal-sided cabins, painted blue, green and yellow, jumbled like Lego bricks over a carpet of hardcore. Outside the high, solid fence some little kids in Manchester United strip are kicking a football in a bored sort of way. A security guard lifts the barrier to let me in. The boys stare at my car as I drive past and I wave, but they don’t wave back. I remember leaning on the wall years ago, watching another group of boys playing football. Just as in that long-ago summer there’s a cloudless sky, but today’s is cold and brittle blue, like ice on puddles.

I park the car in the only space, next to a stack of pallets. A knot of men in hard-hats are gathered some way off by a cabin. One breaks away from the others and walks towards me, but I need to get into the right clobber, and I’m hopping about on the cold ground, rummaging behind the passenger seat to find my work boots, trying to make myself look half-way professional before he catches me in my socks …

I’ve still got my back to him when he reaches me.

‘Mrs Parry?’ he says. He’s wrong, of course. Ms. I’m not married any more, though I’ve kept Nick’s name. ‘You’ve timed it well. I’m the site foreman, by the way–Gary Bennett.’

And I’m back in the summer I turned fourteen.

LEVEL TWO (#u2fe42597-c19f-5e5b-a716-c4080266fd02)

Nymphus (#u2fe42597-c19f-5e5b-a716-c4080266fd02)

For such a very macho creed as Roman Mithraism, it seems unusual, to say the least, that initiates at this stage were required to play a woman’s role. Etymologically, nymphus is an interesting term. It means ‘male bride’, but no such word exists in everyday Latin. It is derived from nympha, a bride, or young woman, but as we know, women were rigorously excluded from the cult. In murals the Nymphus is shown wearing a bridal veil, and is considered to be under the protection of the planet Venus. He is joined in mystical union with the god by the Father: an adept who has attained the seventh and final level of enlightenment. The clasping of the right hand, the iunctio dextrarum, was an important part of the initiation ceremony, to pledge fidelity. This may be the origin of the modern-day custom of shaking hands on a contract. (It is also one of the many reasons why modern conspiracy theorists have sought to trace the origins of freemasonry back to Mithraism.) At a given moment in the ceremony the veil would be pulled away and the male bride revealed in all his masculine glory.

From The Mithras Enigma, Dr Martin Ekwall, OUP

Chapter Four (#u2fe42597-c19f-5e5b-a716-c4080266fd02)

Digging: that was me, the summer I turned fourteen, always digging. Whenever I lifted my hand to my face I could smell moist earth on my fingers. Even when we were just hanging out, Poppy, Trish and I, my hands scrabbled obsessively at the soil, the way other people pick at the skin round their thumb or fiddle with their hair.

‘Your nails are disgusting,’ said Trish. She was right. They were always black-edged. Trish’s were filed into neat ovals, and she pushed the cuticles back every night with an orange stick so we could admire the half-moons. Right now she was painting them silvery-pink, her dark hair falling across her face. She looked up suddenly, and her hair flopped back to reveal the eyes that fascinated me, the way they changed with the light like the sea does. ‘Don’t you think this colour’s cool?’

Silvery-pink was cool but I wasn’t. A teenage girl who was obsessed with the bones of things was never going to be cool.

We were sprawled beside a big old oak, heads in the shade but skirts hitched up our thighs to let the sun get at our legs. Freckles had already erupted like sprinkles of cinnamon on Poppy’s knees. The field was laid to pasture, and some tired cows were grazing at the other end. Occasionally one moved a few slow steps, as if it could hardly be bothered to go to a juicier patch. Here, under the tree, the grass grew more sparsely, and my fingers were idly picking at bare soil, feeling for stones.

Green Down, where we lived, was a suburb that was almost a village, built on one of the hills that surround Bath, and it didn’t take long to reach open countryside. Heavy lorries rumbled up the lane to the quarries scooped out of the slope, but the fields in the valley bottom were peaceful. If I dug here I would find something, I knew it. The fields and hills held secrets: hidden valleys, mysterious embankments and ridges marking where Roman villas had once stood, or where the Saxon Wansdyke marched across the fields.

None of this interested Poppy and Trish. But I was always hopeful.

‘There are ammonites in this field,’ I said.

Poppy was gazing at the sky and chewing strands of her bobbed reddish hair. When they dried, her split ends would fan out like fuse wire.

‘No, really,’ I said, as if someone had bothered to reply. ‘If I borrowed your nail file, Trish, I bet I’d dig one up in a jiff.’

They didn’t have to ask me what ammonites were. I’d told them, plenty of times. ‘They had shells like big coiled-up snakes,’ I explained, at every possible opportunity. ‘They lived at the bottom of the ocean millions of years ago.’

If anyone was so daft as to enquire, ‘What are they doing here, then?’ I would go on to enthuse about how the hills round Bath were once the bed of a shallow sea, where dead creatures fell and fossilized. My friends’ eyes glazed over, as unresponsive as the ammonites.

‘Look,’ I went on, trying to get my fingers under a big lump of stone embedded in the soil. ‘I bet there’s a fossil in this.’

Trish began to paint Poppy’s toenails with the silvery-pink varnish.

Sometimes I couldn’t believe how little they noticed. Trish lived in an old Georgian rectory in Midcombe, where there was an ammonite built into the garden wall. It was enormous, more than a foot across, with deep corrugated ridges on its coils. You couldn’t miss it. But they did. ‘Oh, is that one?’ Trish asked, when I pointed it out to her. She couldn’t have cared less. I’d have given my left arm to bag a fossil that big. You could find little ones easily, right on the surface, early in the year when the fields were freshly ploughed. Sometimes there was only the imprint in rock, but often the ammonites themselves seemed to have crawled up from the sticky earth, fragments broken by the plough, occasionally nearly whole stone spirals. I had quite a collection in my bedroom. They looked like catherine wheels. My father said they reminded him of very stale Danish pastries. I thought they were beautiful.

I watched Trish. Her long dark hair, enviably straight, hung across her face as she bent over Poppy’s leg, curtaining them in a private tent. She never offered to paint my toenails.

Trish had been my friend first. We got to know each other by accident, rather than choice: we were the only two in our class who hadn’t been at the school right through from juniors. All the rest had known each other since they were seven. They didn’t like Trish because she was called Klein, and they didn’t like me because I was a scholarship girl. None of them realized that the most Jewish thing about Trish was her surname, and the only clever thing about me was my scholarship. For nearly three years, we had been best friends by default.

But late last year, things began to change. Trish suddenly got tall, and I stayed short. Trish–ugly old Trish, with her big nose and wide mouth, just as awkward as me, I’d always thought–started to get looks from boys. Trish had a starter bra and sanitary towels. And Trish had discovered Poppy.

Poppy had arrived in Green Down just after Christmas. Her father worked for the Ministry of Defence and had been posted from Plymouth to Bath. She immediately latched on to Trish and me. I didn’t mind at first. It made me feel like I had a wide circle of friends. Now I wasn’t so sure.