No Returns

"We're not getting any of the flush back, can we stop?" the driller had asked.

The water was washing away the marl bands in the Sherwood Sandstone and running away through the fractures. It was meant to be coming back up to the surface, all thick and muddy with pulverised rock. If it didn't do this, there was good reason to stop. It was called no returns.

That Sherwood Sandstone, again.

I knew it had been inevitable.

That with all those far flung places it was only a matter of time until I ended up there. Though it wasn't like I had imagined. No school job for extra classrooms. No looking over your shoulder. No couple of trial pits for soakaways. No awkward silence and foreboding. No shell and auger on the edge of a playing field, and no metallic clang of the drop hammer. Ringing out like a church tower at midnight. And on the back of your site lid, no crudely drawn image of an extinct crustacean. No fitting talisman.

Instead, I'd looked at the job sheet, and then stared at the map...

The land of Galligu. Just over the river. That on your way there you'd become a ghost. A shadow, an echo from another time. Though it didn't seem right or fair, but it never had done.

Just don't anthropomorphise...

To think that I'd had a drilling crew drub around in a gravel path for an hour and a half. An hour and a half looking for additions to the two stone beads I'd found. We only ever found four, and that was by no means enough to have them strung together. So an attractive archaeologist could be the first to wear them after untold years. I remembered the girl. That unlike most, she'd been a lot of places that you wanted to be. Except that barbecue. In that, I made grave mistake.

Was it that damned locust tree? The one overhanging the sunken patio. The false acacia is never to be trusted.

It had all seemed rather civilised. But then it always does to begin with...

There'd been a mother there with her young lad. A small boy running around unyieldingly, constantly exclaiming about his 'rocket boots'. It was endearing in a way, although his mother was unamused. After a while, she'd turned to him and announced in such a disparaging, matter of fact way.

"Oh don't be stupid John, you're talking nonsense."

It wasn't long before some friends turned up from the pub. All of them. En masse. Back from being beaten by Portugal. Although some individuals were clearly all for having the post mortem of English football right there and then. Strangely confused when I'd announced how happy I was now that the madness had ended for another year.

One of her friends had been notable. Perhaps the youngest of all people there. He'd been notable for several reasons, not least the opening announcement that one of his eyes was made of glass. More so that he was one of those people who choose to experiment in case innocuous household items would elicit strange narcotic effects. Pushing the boundaries of drug use. Had one of his friends really overdosed? You could never be sure.

I should have enquired further. How did he justify leaving his job in order to spontaneously write a book? Exactly what kind of book? That and other questions lost amidst his cries of "not the good eye". How could she have mistaken the wrong one?

There was another couple there. The epitome of all that was wrong in the world, because they were perfect for each other. And while she'd busied around disposable barbecues, he'd talked at me. At first it had been a barrage of questions, the smarmy smiling interrogator. Once it became clear that I'd been overwhelmed, you'd hear the tales of her pole dancing lessons and the ungainly age difference that had obviously caused them,

She seemed shallow, and had shovelled half cooked food at me, insisting. The only trouble being that I really wasn't very hungry at all.

It had been so noisy.

Far more noisy than I might have considered civilised at such an hour. Not least for the idiot couple that had arrived with their inbred King Charles spaniel. The one unimaginatively named 'Charlie'. Charlie had proceeded to spend much of the evening barking at a cat located well out of his reach. While the cat sat on the windowsill, unperturbed.

Did the pair realise that their interaction with their treasured pet was counteracting all those expensive obedience lessons they'd twittered on about for a good part of the evening? Slowly undoing the training, because the reinforcement of a real button wasn't there. And they say that dogs grow to be like their owners.

Noisy, not least for all the loud drunken talking outside in the garden, while a church bell tolled midnight. There would have been sense in going inside, not least for the noise. Outside it was cold, and with me not being entirely fortified with alcohol and unacclimatised, I felt that cold. I'd forgotten how cold it was that far north.

She was the only person I knew at that barbecue. The only person amidst a gaggle of people who'd known each other for years. Each one with their own opinions and prejudices. At least one with his own personal agenda, which I appeared to be placed in direct opposition to. Could I get a word in?

At one point in the evening, while the people still there were dwindling away, she'd disappeared. There was a question when she came back with two dark grey pieces of stone. The edges like obsidian. That in some archaeological reserve in Syria, she'd found these curious things. Curious, and out of stratigraphy. That despite a ban on taking things off site, they'd found their way into her pocket.

And I did know what they were. Both tektites. The relics of meteorite strikes in the middle of a desert.

She'd gave me one of those tektites. I sent it back to her because I didn't want to keep it.

I'd have left if I had the chance. That night, with it's bright full moon. Save for the risk of the breathalyser. Or the next morning, when the bright rising sun shone into the sitting room and onto the sofa where I lay. Save for there being no chance to slip away, because the remaining friends were asleep in the front room.

And when you logged the core from Wallsall, you'd find a trilobite and think of her. Think of her running away in her sleep, because the trilobites were chasing her.

There was something left from that time. The relict of an assumption that it wouldn't matter. Forgotten in haste. You'd be back here again and it wouldn't matter. A live set of some singer she liked. Years later, it was still there. Written out in ones and zeros. I'd tried to forget and still thought about it for a long time.

So I walked through the town. Past the dune bedding in the road cutting, that looked exactly the same as in Kidderminster. Past the obelisk across the road from some overpriced restaurant

The purple door was still there. I'd been panicked by the letterbox until I saw it at the bottom of the door. Half expecting to see her staring through the window at me. Which might have been highly awkward and very hard to explain.

So I'd posted the disc through that letterbox, after the trilobites fossilised arse. Then I went back to my van and with no good reason to be in this place, I drove away. Drove away with a hope, that just like drilling through the marl bands of the Sherwood Sandstone, there'll be no returns.