Ghost Wall

by Sarah Moss

While I was glad we weren’t going to be hacking the guts out of deer in the woods with flint blades, I thought the Professor’s dodging of violence pretty thoroughly messed up the idea that our experiences that summer were going to rediscover the lifeways of pre-modern hunter-gatherers.

She was right. You move differently in moccasins, have a different experience of the relationship between feet and land. You go around and not over rocks, feel the texture, the warmth, of different kinds of reed and grass in your muscles and your skin. The edges of the wooden steps over the stile touch your bones, an unseen pebble catches your breath. You can imagine how a person might learn a landscape with her feet. But we hadn’t yet crossed any bog and I was pretty sure it would feel different in winter. They used to stuff their moccasins with hay for insulation. You too, Silvie, said Molly, offering her packet with a red one at the top, have one if you like. Of course I liked.

Doesn’t it feel strange, I heard myself ask, putting your fingers exactly the way someone put hers only she’s been dead for a few hundred years? Louise smiled, as if it was fine for me to join in. Not to me, she said, not anymore, anyway, I’m always trying to do what dead people tell me. And especially when I’m making a replica, spending days looking at and feeling and listening to some prehistoric object, I’m kind of trying to think their thoughts too. I mean, it would make sense, wouldn’t it, that when I really concentrate on the spaces between decorative dots or the exact tension of a twist, my mind’s doing what their minds did while my hands do what their hands did. I sometimes think I can tell when two pieces from the same site were made by the same prehistoric person, because the way my hands move is the same.

He wanted his own ancestry, a claim on something, some tribe sprung from English soil like mushrooms in the night. What about Boadicea, Dad said, she routed them an’ all, didn’t she. Boudicca, said the Prof, we call her Boudicca these days, it seems to be a more accurate rendition. For a while, yes, but she led the Iceni in the south, there’s not much evidence that the people round here caused the Romans any major alarm, the Wall was much more of a symbol than a military necessity.

Stand against that tree, he said, a rowan not much taller than me, the trunk against which I leant my forehead no wider than my face, and as his arm rose and swung and rose again, as the belt sang through the sunny air, I thought hard about the tree between my hands, about the cells in its leaves photosynthesizing the afternoon sun, about the berries ripening hour by hour, the impalpable pulse of sap under my palms, the reach of roots below my feet and deep into the earth. It went on longer than usual, as if the open air invigorated him, as if he liked the setting. I thought about the leather of his belt, the animal from whose skin it was made, about the sensations that skin had known before the fear and pain of the end. Itching, scratching, wind and rain and sun. About the flaying, the tanning.

It’s all right, said Pete, sit down a bit. Jesus. Nearly vommed myself. He glanced at me. Is he always like that, Silvie? I mean, sorry, I know he’s your dad and all but. Like what, I said, a show-off and given to brutality, yes, actually, mostly he is, sorry.

Without a house, it occurred to me, it is much harder to restrict a person’s movement. Harder for a man to restrain a woman.

This is not going to work, I thought, I can’t get through today, not like this, it’s too sore, it’s never been this bad before, but I knew that I could and would. It was not as if there was an alternative.

well, you’re not exactly taking it seriously, are you? Well, she said, I’m joining in, I’m picking plums, I gathered mussels, I helped your mum wash tunics in the stream, I just think a lot of it’s boys playing in the woods. Your dad and Jim, have you noticed, they’re not much interested in the foraging and cooking, they just want to kill things and talk about fighting, why would I take it seriously? Because they are in charge, I thought, because there will be consequences if you don’t. I didn’t see how she could not know that.

They wanted to kill me at sunset. To march me up onto the moor to the beat of the drums and the bass chanting, to tie my hands and my feet, to put a rope around my neck that could be tightened and loosened for as long as blades and rocks could hold me wavering between life and death. Of course we won’t actually hurt you, the Prof said, I hope you know that, Silvie. It’s just the ritual we want to try, the way it must have looked and sounded, the drums on the moor and the winding of the ropes.

Maybe it was like that for the bog people, I thought, maybe the worst part was being chosen and everything after that was inevitable. It doesn’t matter, I said, it will all be over by morning. Maybe it will be interesting after all. No, she said. No, you can’t do this, they’re being horrible.