The Daily Dormouse. (aka Bike) Part 1772 by Angharad Copyright © 2012 Angharad All Rights Reserved.

I phoned home while I waited and told Simon we were staying overnight. He was disappointed that we wouldn’t be home but the baby was fine and David and Sammi seemed to be looking after her very well. That comforted me that at least I wasn’t causing her any discomfort while I waited to find out if my mission here was just to act as a taxi for the ‘brain’. Somehow, that didn’t seem to make a lot of sense but then none of this blue light stuff did.

I’d had no sense of being drawn to anything or having the little insights I usually get when someone needs my help, so if Mary was the one in need, it wasn’t making itself obvious.

“Look at me, Mummy,” Trish came through the door wearing a lovely floral nightdress, and the colour seemed to suit her fair hair.

“You look delightful, sweetheart.” I gave her a hug.

“Auntie Mary says I can take it home with me tomorrow.”

Auntie Mary? Somebody’s obviously been on a charm offensive which with Trish being an ingénue has succeeded. Sometimes I think she’s safer when she’s being a bit more assertive.

I took her up to bed, she was sharing one with me and I settled her down and told her a very quick story at which she seemed to go to sleep quite quickly. I returned to my hostess who’d finished loading her dishwasher and was sipping her wine.

“This is a lovely old house,” I noted.

“Yes, it was my parent’s house. My mother died in childbirth when I was six, sadly my little brother perished with her. My dad lived on with me and a woman who came in for an hour or two each day to do the housework and cook us a meal. I had to learn how to cook for myself when I went off to university.”

“There’s a hint of sadness about the place, isn’t there?”

“You picked up on it, did you?”

“Yeah, I wasn’t sure what it was at first then I tried to tune into it and it’s sadness of some sort. Don’t know if it’s human or predating all that.”

“Now that is interesting,” Mary sat down on the sofa and I sat in an easy chair opposite her, “There are suggestions that these houses were built on some sort of Neolithic circle.”

“What a henge monument?” I suggested.

“Never quite sure what one of those is.”

“It has a bank outside a ditch.” I hoped I was right.

“Oh, is that all?”

“I think it’s more than that but that’s the basics, if it doesn’t have the inner ditch with a bank, it isn’t a henge.”

“For one so young, you are a veritable fountain of knowledge. I can see where Trish gets it from.”

I sipped my wine and let go some of the truth, “Trish is adopted–I can’t have children of my own–no ovaries.”

Mary looked at me in astonishment and her mouth opened for a second or two before any sound emerged. That was a laugh, a loud raucous laugh. I sat there blushing not sure where she was coming from.

“We are a pair, aren’t we–not one egg between us?”

I nodded my agreement.

“So what happened to your ovaries then?”

“I never had any.”

“Oh, got lost in the post, did they?”

“Something like that.”

“Yet you’ve acquired a whole bloody football team and I’ve spent my life feeling sorry for myself and burying myself in my work.”

“We each deal with things differently.”

“Don’t we just.” She shook her head, “I can’t believe you’re not the birth mother of that scrap up in my spare bed.”

“I’ve had her for about four years, she is a delight to be with though she does get frustrated at my inability to follow her lightning quick mind at times. I have to rely on greater experience or pulling rank to keep her in check.”

“She must be a nightmare to teach.”

“She is, I send all the girls to a private school which just so happens to be a convent. I’m agnostic and make no attempt to disguise it, believing in Darwin, not mumbo jumbo. She often follows my example and because she absorbs information like a sponge she argues or corrects the nuns teaching her.”

Mary chortled and sipped her wine. “Reminds me of my time in school; my dad was a geneticist–it was the early days of such things–and he was a definite Darwinian, so I got into all sorts of arguments with the religious teachers who weren’t well enough versed to argue constructively, so I demolished them and disrupted classes. Spent most of the those lessons outside the headmistress’ door waiting to be reprimanded.

I yawned, it was eleven o’clock and I finished my wine, thanked Mary for her hospitality and went up to bed. Trish was fast asleep lying diagonally across the middle of the bed.

I washed my face and hands after using the en suite loo, then cleaned my teeth. It felt really odd using an ordinary toothbrush, I have one of those ultrasonic ones. I collected the nightdress Mary had left out for me, it was a silky thing with spaghetti laces and built in support, so I went to bed flashing loads of cleavage. Simon would have creamed himself if he had seen me in this.

I moved Trish over and got into the bed, snuggling round my darling girl. I had such a bond with her it was difficult to describe. I lay there listening to her breathing and feeling such gratitude that she had been sent to me to care for her. I accepted that she was challenging and would get more so as she got older, because she was so bright, and occasionally I wondered if I would cope when she really overshadowed me intellectually. I hoped for both our sakes that I would.

I drifted off to sleep and a little later I awoke to hear the sound of crying, a soft sobbing noise. I sat up to try and work out where it was emanating from, Trish rolled over and blinked her eyes open. “You can hear it too, Mummy?”

“Yes, darling, it sounds like a child.”

“There are no children here, Mummy, except me.”

I felt a chill run up and down my spine. “So what is it then?”

She sat up and hugged me, “Don’t worry, it won’t hurt you.”

Shouldn’t I be protecting her? “What can you see?” I asked aware she was looking at something.

“Hush,” she said putting a finger to my lips, “and don’t put the light on.”

She was looking at the fireplace in the room, which had long since been closed in and had a vase of silk flowers stood in front of it. She let go of me and got out of bed, I wasn’t sure what to do, but she didn’t seem afraid of whatever it was she could see and I couldn’t.

She seemed to be talking to something and in a language I didn’t understand. I tried to draw down the blue light to protect her but nothing much seemed to be happening in that regard, and I felt inadequate once again.

I listened to Trish talking in this weird language which could have been Navaho Indian for all I knew it sounded so alien to any of the European languages I had some familiarity with. Her conversation seemed to go on for several minutes then she chuckled and the sobbing turned to a childish laugh and Trish nodded and then came back to bed.

“It’s okay now, Mummy.”

“What is?” though I had to admit my earlier sense of sadness had disappeared.

“It was a little boy about my age, he was sacrificed back five thousand years ago to make this site sacred. They killed a little girl too but she’d been helped by Mary when she was a child, but he, his name was Nevo, didn’t like Mary, she frightened him.”

“So he carried on sobbing to those who could hear him?”

“Yes, couldn’t you see him?”

“No, what did he look like?”

She described him and the ligature around his neck which had been used to kill him. She apparently untied it for him and sent him on his way to rest with his ancestors. She also hugged him and he thanked her and left, taking his sadness with him.

I thanked her for her compassion and she just shrugged, “I only did what you would have done if you could have seen him.”

“I thought you were very brave and kind to help him.”

“Isn’t that how you’ve brought us up to be?”

I hugged her and felt the dampness in my eyes.

The next morning Mary seemed to be very happy and I wondered if she was bi-polar, she was so different to the night before.

Over breakfast she declared, “I’m going to see if I can adopt a child–bugger my career–I want to look after a child before it’s too late.”

Trish gave me a knowing look and continued eating her cornflakes.