The Hundred and Ninety-Nine Steps. Michel FaberЧитать онлайн книгу.
knees dry at the expense of her fellow toilers, but the sheath of Tubigrip under her tights lost some of its elastic every time she washed it, so she’d rather it stayed clean, thank you very much.
‘Sleep well?’ asked Pru, rolling up another tarpaulin, exposing Siân’s own appointed shallow grave.
‘No, not really,’ said Siân.
‘Lemme guess – you stayed up to watch that movie about the robbery that goes wrong. The one with … oh, what’s-her-name?’ Regurgitation of facts was not Pru’s forte. ‘The one who’s gained so much weight recently.’
‘I’m sorry, I haven’t a clue,’ said Siân.
Jeff was next to arrive, a wizened old hippy who seemed to have been on every significant dig in Britain since the war. Then Keira and Trevor, a husband-and-wife team who were due to lay down their trowels and mattocks tomorrow and flee to the warmer and better-paid climes of a National Geographic dig in the Middle East. Who would replace them? Very nice people, according to Nina, the supervisor. Coming all the way from north Wales.
By ten past, everyone was on site and working, distributed like medieval potato harvesters over the sub-divided ground. Fourteen living bodies, scratching in the ground for the subtle remains of dead ones, peering at gradations in soil colour that could signal the vanished presence of a coffin or a pelvis, winkling pale fragments into the light which could, please God, be teeth.
The skeletons exhumed so far had all been buried facing east, the direction of Jerusalem, to help Judgement Day run more smoothly. Four years from now, when the research would be completed and the bones re-buried with the aid of a JCB and vicar to bless them, they’d have to sort out their direction for themselves.
Today, one of the girls was in a bad mood, her mouth clownishly downturned, her eyes avoiding contact with the young man working next to her. Yesterday, they’d been exchanging secret smiles, winks, sotto voce consultations. Today, they did their best to pretend they weren’t kneeling side by side; separated by mere inches, they cast expectant glances not at each other but at Nina, as if hoping she might assign them to different plots farther apart. A cautionary spectacle, thought Siân. A living parable (as Saint Hilda might call it) of the fickleness of human love.
‘I think I may’ve found something,’ said someone several hours later, holding up an encrusted talon which might, once it was X-rayed, prove to be a coffin pin.
At four-thirty, as Siân was walking past Saint Mary’s churchyard on her way down to the hundred and ninety-nine steps, she spotted Hadrian’s head poking up over the topmost one.
‘Hush!’ he barked in greeting. ‘Hush, hush!’
Siân hesitated, then waved. Magnus was nowhere to be seen.
Hadrian ran towards her, pausing only to scale the church’s stone boundary and sniff the base of Caedmon’s Cross. Deciding not to piss on England’s premier Anglo-Saxon poet, he bounded back onto the path and had an exuberant reunion with Siân.
By the time Magnus joined them, she was on one knee, her hands buried deep in the dog’s mane, and Hadrian was jumping up and down to lick her face.
‘Excuse me, I’m just going overboard here,’ she said, too delighted with the dog’s affection to care what a fool she must look.
Mack wasn’t wearing his running gear this afternoon; instead, his powerful frame was disguised in a button-down shirt, Chinos and some sort of expensive suede-y jacket. He was carrying a large plastic bag, but apart from that he looked like a young doctor who’d answered his beeper at a London brasserie and been persuaded to make a house call. Siân had trouble accepting he could look like this; she’d imagined him (she realised now) permanently dressed in shorts and T-shirt, running around Whitby in endless circles. She laughed at the thought, her inhibitions loosened by the excesses she was indulging with Hadrian. Casting her eyes down in an effort to reassure Mack that she wasn’t laughing at him, she caught sight of his black leather shoes, huge things too polished to be true. She giggled even more. Her own steel-capped boots were slathered in mud, and her long bedraggled skirt was filthy at the knees.
‘You and Hadrian better not get too friendly,’ Mack remarked. ‘He might run off with one of your precious old bones.’
It was such a feeble joke that Siân didn’t think anyone could possibly blame her for ignoring it. She heaved herself to her feet and, fancying she could feel his eyes on her dowdiness, she sobered up in a hurry.
‘Have you read any of the books and pamphlets?’ she said.
He snorted. ‘You sound like a Jehovah’s Witness, on a follow-up visit.’
‘Never mind that. Have you read them?’ Be firm with him, she was thinking.
‘Of course,’ he smiled.
‘And?’
‘Very interesting,’ he said, watching her straighten her shapeless cagoule. ‘More interesting than my research, anyway.’
As they fell into step with each other towards the town, Siân rifled her memory for the subject of his paper. It took her a good fifteen seconds to realise she’d never actually asked him about it.
They’d reached the bench on the resting-place near the top of the hundred and ninety-nine steps, and he indicated with a wave of his hand that they should sit down. This they did, with Hadrian settled against Siân’s skirt, and Mack carefully lowering the plastic bag onto the ground between his lustrous shoes. Judging by the sharp corners bulging through the plastic, it contained a large cardboard box.
‘That’s not your research paper in there, is it?’ she asked.
‘No,’ he said.
‘What is it?’
‘A surprise.’
Michael, one of Siân’s colleagues from the dig, walked past the bench where they were sitting. He nodded in greeting as he descended the steps, looking slightly sheepish, unsure whether to introduce himself to Siân’s new friend or pretend he hadn’t trespassed on their privacy. It was a gauche little encounter, lasting no more than a couple of seconds, but Siân was ashamed to note that it gave her a secret thrill; how sweet it was to be mistaken for a woman sharing intimacy with a man! Let the whole world pass by this bench, in an orderly procession, to witness proof incarnate that she wasn’t lonely!
For God’s sake, get a grip! she reproached herself.
‘My research,’ said Mack, smirking a little, ‘examines whether psittacosis is transferable from human to human.’ His smirk widened into a full grin as she stared back at him with a blank expression. Siân wondered if he’d make her ask, but, commendably, he didn’t. ‘Psittacosis,’ he explained, ‘is what’s popularly called parrot fever – if popular is the right word for a rare disease. It’s a virus, and you catch it by inhaling the powdered … uh … faeces of caged birds. In humans, it manifests as a kind of pneumonia that’s highly resistant to antibiotics. It used to be fatal, once upon a time.’
Siân wondered just how long ago, in his view, ‘once upon a time’ was. She, after all, had had to convince herself, after reading the ‘Health & Safety’ documents covering archaeological digs, that she wasn’t frightened of catching anthrax or the Black Death.
‘And this disease of yours,’ she said. ‘Is it transferable from human to human?’
‘The answer used to be “Maybe”. I’m aiming to change that to a definite “No”.’
‘Hmm,’ said Siân. Now that she’d been sitting for a minute, she was suddenly rather weary, and her left leg ached and felt swollen. ‘Well, I’m sure that’ll put some people’s minds at rest.’ It sounded condescending, and she had the uneasy feeling she was being a bitch. ‘No, really. With diseases, it’s always better to know, isn’t it?’ An inane comment, which reminded her of the lump in her thigh she was so determined to ignore. Irritably, she