Stephen Booth - Dancing With the Virgins

He stepped out of the bracken and bent down to the ground near the path. He picked up a small piece of quartz. He held it with gentleness, handling it as if it were a living thing, sensitive to his touch.

‘Look at the earth. She looks so attractive, you could stroke her. Her fur is like velvet. But she’s a wild creature, she can never be tamed. A huge beast, sleeping. Or maybe only pretending to be asleep. This is her body.’

Cooper was silent, feeling foolish and embarrassed, like a man who had wandered into the wrong church service and didn’t know what to do when everyone else prayed.

‘The dancers know all about it,’ said Stride. ‘The dancers became part of her body.’

A suggestion of movement on the moor made Cooper look up. For a moment, he thought there were people standing in the trees at the scene of Jenny Weston’s murder — grey shapes that passed each other slowly, leaning to whisper to one another across the sandy earth of the clearing. Then he realized that he was seeing the Nine Virgins themselves, the stones momentarily transformed by the intensity of Stride’s conviction.

‘I can understand why our ancestors worshipped trees,’ said Stride. ‘Can’t you? When you hear a chainsaw in the woods, when you see a JCB and smell new tarmac, don’t you feel it? Don’t you feel, deep inside your head, the cry of “murder”? Do you understand?’

Cooper frowned, wanting to see what he meant. ‘I understand that you’ve found some sort of truth for yourself.’

‘Believe those who are seeking the truth,’ said Stride. ‘But doubt those who say they’ve found it.’

When they got back to the van, Stride seemed rapidly to become exhausted. He collapsed on the cushions, stretched out full-length, limp and breathing raggedly. After a few minutes, he spoke, though his voice was barely loud enough for them to hear.

‘I can still see her face,’ he said.

Stride’s own face was hidden by the shadows of the candle, expressionless, moving with the flickering light in unnatural ways. Cooper felt too warm in the claustrophobic interior of the van. He was uncomfortably hemmed in by the rugs and blankets and the smell of unwashed bodies, too tightly embraced by the metal walls. He longed for escape.

‘Whose face?’ he said.

But Stride seemed to have departed. Though his body still sprawled against the cushions, his mind had left, perhaps to drift over the moor with the kestrel. He had sunk into a state of exhaustion, and when he spoke again it was no more than a whisper, addressed only to himself.

‘I can still see her face.’

Owen and Cal seemed at ease with each other. Cooper wondered what they had talked about while he was away, whether they had simply exchanged comfortable insults as they drank their beer. Owen drained his can and they all went outside, leaving Stride alone. Cal was still looking at Cooper suspiciously.

‘Do you really not have a life to go back to, Cal?’ said Cooper.

‘Oh, yeah. If I wanted to. There are the aged parents, if I want to spend the rest of my life being lectured at. There was a girlfriend as well. But, well. . sometimes you’re better off on your own, you know?’

‘But you’re not on your own now.’

‘Me and Stride? Stride says it was karma, us meeting like that. You know, the idea of fate repaying you for what you’ve done in a previous life?’

‘He seems to be quite knowledgeable about esoteric practices.’

‘He knows sod all about it,’ said Cal.

‘Oh?’

‘He’s picked up a few phrases from books here and there, that’s all. But it keeps him content in himself. That’s what religion is for, isn’t it? Whatever he believes in, it works for him.’

‘Like the auric egg.’

‘Yeah, well. If he actually believes it keeps negative mind energies away, then it probably does.’

Cooper considered this. It seemed as useful as any advice a psychiatrist could have given.

‘How well do you really know Stride?’

‘He’s my brother.’

‘You met him only a few months ago, at the summer solstice.’

‘That doesn’t make any difference. He’s my brother.’

‘I bet you don’t know anything about him. Where is he from?’

‘What does it matter? Who cares what he did or where he came from in another life? This is our life. This is what matters now.’

‘Do you go up on the moor sometimes?’ asked Cooper.

‘Of course.’

‘To the stone circle?’

‘Stride likes to talk to the Virgins. Nothing wrong with that. He’s not doing any harm.’

‘Do you go with him? Or does he go on his own?’

Cal clamped his mouth shut. ‘I think I’ve talked to you enough.’

‘Does he go out on his own at night?’

‘You’re like all the others really, aren’t you? You sneak your way into the van, thinking you’ll get something on us. Well, just leave off Stride. He doesn’t do anyone any harm, not now.’

‘Not now?’ said Cooper gently.

But Cal turned on his heel with a scowl and walked back to the van. Cooper looked at his watch. He had spent too long at Ringham Moor already. He had an appointment with another set of stones, and there would be trouble if he was late.

Like most things in Edendale, the cemetery was built halfway up a hill. Over the bottom wall, beech trees ran down Mill Bank to an estate of new housing off Meadow Road, where white semis clustered round the back of the council highways depot. A squirrel foraged among the leaves and dead branches on the floor beneath the beeches.

Sergeant Joe Cooper was buried in the new part of the cemetery, brought into use four or five years ago, when the old one became full. In the new cemetery, there were no visible graves, only rows of headstones, with the grass mowed smooth right up to them. The dead were no longer allowed to be untidy. These headstones would never loosen and tilt and grow moss with age. They were orderly, almost regimented, a picture of civic perfection. Sergeant Cooper was far tidier now than he had been at the moment of his dying, when his blood had run out on to the stone setts in Clappergate, leaving a stain that had taken council workmen weeks to remove. His killing had darkened the reputation of the town for months afterwards. No wonder they wanted to tidy him away.

Occasionally, a jam-jar full of spring flowers or petunias appeared in front of the headstone. The Coopers never knew who they were from.

The brothers had said nothing to each other as they drove to the cemetery. By the time they were out of the car and back in the open air, Ben was beginning to feel uncomfortable with the silence between them.

‘We went to see Warren Leach again yesterday,’ he said as they followed the path towards their father’s grave. ‘I just wondered if you found anything out. .’

Matt didn’t answer. His shoulders stiffened a bit, and his stride quickened.

‘There must be somebody who knows him, Matt.’

‘I dare say.’

But Matt sounded so dismissive that Ben knew not to press it. The silence had grown even deeper by the time they reached the right spot. On every occasion they came, the row of graves had extended a little further, as if their father was somehow physically receding into the past.

Ben and Matt left their flowers and found a bench under the hawthorn hedge, where they could see the headstone. The cemetery grass had been raked clear of leaves. It glittered an unnaturally bright green against the browns and oranges of the hillside behind it, and the grey of the stone houses piled on top of each other on the outskirts of the town.

For a while, the brothers sat and watched each other’s breath drifting in small clouds, cold and formless, vanishing before it had even moved out of reach.