The Face Under the Turf

We did not run. Afterward you assume people run, and we did not. Yusuf picked his phone up out of the wet bank and wiped the lens on his coat and we stood there over the closed pale fist in the cut and did the only thing two people of our kind know how to do in front of a thing that cannot be true. We measured it.

"Grip reflex," Yusuf said. His voice had a fault in it, a hairline, but it held. "Tendons. They contract. A body that's been kept cold and wet, the soft tissue holds tension, and when you disturb it, when the pressure round it changes, it moves. Releases. It looks like a movement. It isn't a movement, it's a release of a movement that was already there." He was photographing as he said it, methodical, the flash going pale against the pale knuckles, and I understood that the words were not for me. They were the rope and he was holding it the way I hold mine, by counting, except his count was made of mechanism, of tendon and tension and release, and I let him have it because I needed one of us to have something.

"The fingers were open," I said. "Now they're closed."

"Round nothing," he said. "It closed round nothing, Ren. A live hand closes round a thing. This closed round air. It's tissue, contracting." He straightened up and looked at the readout on his logger because the logger was easier to look at than the cut. "We log the position, we fence it, we call the county. This is archaeology. This is the best-preserved bog find in forty years and it is going to be somebody's whole career, and it is going to be a coroner's nightmare first, because it has skin, and they always panic when there's skin." He almost smiled. "You'd be amazed how often I get called to a murder that turns out to be Iron Age."

I made myself look at the hand the way he was looking at it. A find. A specimen. Bog bodies come out of this country two thousand years old with the rope still round the throat and the last meal still in the gut, the leather of the skin tanned dark by the acid, the hair gone foxy red. The fens give them up entire. There is one in a case in a museum I took a school trip to once, a girl my own age then, fourteen, curled on her side under glass with her knees drawn up and her eyelashes lying on her cheek, and I had stood at that glass at fourteen and understood there and then that the ground keeps you, that down there is not nothing, that down there is a long quiet room where you lie with your knees drawn up and your eyelashes still on, and I had not slept for a week. I did not tell Yusuf that. I let him say archaeology and I wrote it in my book. Find, ditch bank, north willow, possible bog body, hand, intact, fingers flexed on exposure. Underlined nothing.

But the girl in the glass was tanned dark as a saddle. Leather. Two thousand years of the acid working on her had made her into a thing that was clearly, mercifully, an object.

This hand was not tanned. This hand was pale. The skin on the back of it was the colour of my own skin, of a living hand that has been a long time in cold water, white and soft and faintly blue at the bed of each clean nail, and that was the fact I could not get into a column, the freshness of it, and I closed the book on the fact and we did the procedure. We knocked four stakes round the slumped bank and ran fence-tape between them, orange, the most ordinary sight there is, a square of orange tape round a square of black peat with a hand in it, and Yusuf phoned the county number and got a voicemail because it was a Saturday, and left a careful message, and we walked off the field with the light going and neither of us looked back, and that not-looking-back was the same sidle I had watched Sefton do at the gate on the first day, the body keeping the field in the corner of the eye.

I should have left it till Monday. The county would send someone, a person whose job it was, with tents and tags and gloves. There was no professional reason on earth to go back out alone.

I went back at first light because of the freshness. The why is worth having straight, since I have lied to myself about smaller things. It was not courage and it was not even the job. It was that the pale unweathered skin of that hand had put a crack in the one wall I had left standing, the wall that said this place was grief and a bad mattress and an old wound dredged up by a smell, and I needed to put a brick back. I needed to go out there in clean daylight and find the hand gone leather-brown in the night air the way exposed bog finds go, oxidising, darkening, turning at last into the harmless ancient object Yusuf said it was. I needed it to rot a little. That is the whole of it. I went out to watch a thing begin, finally, to rot, because if it could rot then everything I knew about the world was still standing.

The mist was in the ditch and the field was green and the church clock struck six as I came through the gate, and I counted the strikes out of habit, six, and waited for a seventh that did not come, and walked out to the orange square alone.

The hand had not darkened. I knelt at the tape, careful not to cross it, and looked, and the skin was exactly as it had been, pale, soft, the nails clean, a whole night in the open air and no change in it at all, none, when a cut apple browns in an hour. I crouched there with my notebook and my professional reason sitting cold and useless in my hands and I said it to myself at last, the thing I had been refusing.

Peat preserves. It does not let things rot.

I knew it the way I know the slope a drain needs to run. It is acid and it is airless and it is cold, and rot is a fire that needs air, and there is no air down there, so the fire never catches, so nothing breaks down, so everything the fen takes it keeps, exactly, entire, for as long as the wet lasts, which in undrained peat is forever. I had said it to Yusuf the day before without knowing I believed it. Peat doesn't decompose here. I had meant it as a fact about heat budgets. Kneeling at the tape I understood it as a fact about the hand, and then, because the mind once it starts down a slope runs all the way to the bottom, as a fact about what a kept thing is. Because rot is also how a thing stops. Rot is the body coming undone, going back, ending. Take the rot away and you have not given a thing eternal life. You have taken away its ending. You have a thing that cannot finish, kept, and the soft curl of those fingers was not the curl of the dead, I had been right about that and wrong about everything else, it was the curl of the sleeping, of a hand that has not let go because it has not been allowed to, and I knelt at the orange tape with the cold coming up through my knees and for the first time I did not reach for a column to put it in.

I stood up too fast and the field swung and I put my hand out to nothing and got my balance back, and that was when I saw the next one.

It was the standing up that did it, the change of angle, the low light coming flat across the field from the east and laying every blade of the wrong-green grass over into shadow. From standing, looking out across the turf with the sun behind it, the surface of the Long Field was not flat. I had walked it for three days and read it level and it was not level. There were shapes under the thin green skin of it, low and long and regular, and once I had seen one I could not stop seeing them, the way once you see the face in the pattern you can never again see only the pattern. A swelling in the turf, the length of a person, and beside it another, and beyond that another, faint as the relief on a worn coin, a whole field of them, ridges and hollows under the grass laid out in no order and every order, and at the near end of the nearest one, where the turf was thinnest and the frost had burned it back to almost nothing, there was a paleness showing through the green.

I went to it. I do not know what was left of the engineer by then. I went and I knelt and I parted the thin frost-burned grass with my fingers, and I will set down what I found in the flat voice because the flat voice is all I have ever had against this, and it has never once been enough.

A face. Under the turf, the green over it no thicker than a folded cloth, a human face, turned up to the morning. The skin pale and whole. The lips parted. The mouth open, not screaming, just open, the way a mouth falls open in sleep, with a little soil at the corners of it, the dark crumb of the fen lying along the lower lip where it had sifted in. And the eyes open. Open and pale and clear and looking up at the grey sky through the cloth of grass, not filmed, not sunken, not the eyes of the dead which I have seen and which are nothing, are off, are a light switched out. Open eyes with the wet still on them, fixed on the morning, the way you would lie and look up if you had been lying a long time and had stopped expecting anything from above and looked anyway, out of habit, out of the long patience of someone who has nothing left to do but look.

I did not scream. The eight-year-old in me screamed, somewhere far down, the way she screamed into the grain, but the rest of me had gone past where screaming lives, into the cold flat place where I can still read a gauge, and I knelt over that face and I logged it, I actually logged it, my hand moving the pen on its own. Second find. Surface, mid-field. Face, intact, eyes and mouth open. And then, because the freshness was the thing the engineer could not survive, I wrote the only sentence that let me stay kneeling there, the brick I put back in the wall with shaking hands, and I underlined it, the first thing I have ever underlined in a working notebook.

Preserved bog body, disturbed by the works. The peat keeps them. That is all this is.

The fens are full of them. The drainage of the great fens turned up bog bodies by the cartload, whole families of them, the workmen tossing them aside like roots, and these were more of the same, a buried population the wet had kept, the falling water table I had caused now drawing them up toward the surface the way it had drawn the hand into the cut, the compression of the drying peat squeezing them up out of the deep toward the light, and they were old, they had to be old, they were finds, and the peacefulness of the face, that was the thing, I held onto the peacefulness, because a face in agony I could not have explained but a peaceful face was right, was what the kept dead should look like, calm, at rest, asleep, undisturbed by the works that had brought them up, and I did not let myself ask why a thing at rest would keep its eyes open. I wrote peaceful in the book. They look peaceful, I wrote, not distressed, consistent with long burial. As if a thing being kept under the earth forever ought to be a comfort. As if the ground had shown them something to make them lie still.

And the face, under my hand, with its open eyes on the sky, moved them.

Not the head. Not the body. The eyes. The pale wet eyes that had been fixed on the grey morning slid in their sockets, slow, smooth, with the unhurried weight of the field in them, and came round, and found me, and looked at me, kneeling over it with my notebook and my underlined lie, and held me the way a hand holds, the way the fingers in the cut had closed round nothing except that this was not nothing, this was me, and the mouth with the soil at its corners worked, the parted lips moving round the crumb of fen, shaping, slow and certain and without any sound at all, a word I could read off them as clean as a level off a staff.

Ren.