Two

It’s almost lunchtime, and though they have been here a week, it’s not going well. Again, because of money, Edward has not been able to bring all the equipment he would have liked.

On the first morning, Mat made a geophysical study of the meadow, but the machine is lightweight, and gives rather weak signals. While Mat walked up and down, through the hay, sticking the sensors of the magnetometer in at regular intervals, Edward, Nancy, and Isabella crowded around the laptop, trying to shield the screen from the sun’s glare, watching the scan of the field slowly emerge.

There wasn’t much to go on, in truth, but Edward decided to put two trenches in, a few meters apart, cutting across some of the features produced by Mat’s survey.

Edward watches them now, Nancy and Isabella, working side by side in trench one. Nancy is tall and thin, and kind of laid back. It’s not that he thinks she is lazy—she works as hard as the other two—it’s just that everything she does is done smoothly, easily. She is languid.

Isabella is a Goth. She has a pierced nose, and pink hair, and always dresses in black. Odd earrings and strange haircuts are not unusual among his profession, he knows, but something about the way she has even managed to develop a Goth field dress sense amuses him. But she’s a good worker, always smiling. He once asked her if she wasn’t too happy to be a Goth, really, and Isabella’s excellent English let her down for once.

“Excuse me, please?” she’d said.

“Ignore me,” Edward had replied.

Mat, Edward has decided, is great. He is exactly what he seems to be. A tall, handsome, smiley boy from the countryside. One who’s bright enough to have gone to the big city to get himself educated, but still come away without losing the trusting generosity of his people.

He talks carefully, as if considering everything, and is currently sporting a long beard and long hair, as if he’s escaped from a seventies commune, though fortunately, one where they don’t believe soap is the capitalists’ tool of oppression.

Edward looks wistfully at Mat, and while the girls are pretty, Nancy particularly, it is Mat who he thinks about the most, because he wishes he’d been more like Mat when he was young.

If he’d been more like Mat, more confident, maybe he wouldn’t have missed his chances in life, chances that sometimes only come along once. Sometimes there are single moments, he thinks, where your path divides, your life can go one way, so very different from another. Work out well, rather than be a failure. And if you miss those chances, he thinks, well, is that it?

*   *   *

His daydreams are disturbed by the woman’s voice, calling from behind the hedge. He’s never seen her; her garden backs onto the meadow, and he guesses the roof they can see beyond belongs to the boy’s house.

She calls again.

“Eric!”

The boy leaves his mound, and goes in for lunch.

“Eric!”