Chapter 9

Next day they started early. Normally at 8.15 a.m. (in the holidays, anyway) Jess would have been turning over in bed and sinking luxuriously into a dream about being chased around dark city streets by an ape in a tutu. But today, by 8.15 a.m. they were already driving down the motorway.

‘Oh, look at the sky! Have you ever seen such blue!’ cried Jess’s mum hysterically. Her normal character, mostly stern and anxious, seemed to have been replaced by a disconcerting, deranged joy.

This happened occasionally when her mum had a chance to wallow in nature or history. History and nature were clearly going to loom large on this trip. Jess sighed.

‘Blue is my favourite colour!’ Mum went on, as if she hadn’t already done it justice. ‘So many lovely things are blue. Sapphires . . . the sea . . .’

‘What’s your favourite colour, Jess?’ asked Granny from the front passenger seat.

‘Black,’ said Jess. She was dressed from head to toe in black.

‘Oh, that black thing is just a phase!’ said her mum. ‘You’ll grow out of it.’

Jess made immediate plans to wear nothing but black for the rest of her life. She would even get married in black (if indeed she ever got married). She would wear a long dress in black satin, carry a bouquet of black flowers, wear jet earrings and a deep black veil, and on her shoulder she would display her pet raven, Nero.

Fred would wear white, though. She hoped it would be Fred she was marrying, anyway. She certainly couldn’t imagine herself ever marrying anyone else. Yes, Fred would wear a white suit, white shoes and a white rose in his buttonhole. And possibly, for that final little weird touch, white contact lenses.

Jess spent the next hour fantasising about marrying Fred. Their wedding day would be at Christmas, so he would never forget their anniversary, and the buffet would include deep-fried mince pies.

‘The ancient Britons and the Celts both worshipped the horse,’ said her mum suddenly, just as Jess was about to give birth to divinely beautiful twins called Freda and Freddo – painlessly and without blood or slime. ‘You’ve probably seen those big white chalk horses on hillsides – installation art from the Bronze Age.’

‘When was the Bronze Age?’ asked Granny.

‘About two to four thousand years ago,’ said Jess’s mum. ‘You’d have loved it. There was a large amount of gratuitous violence.’

‘Oh, lovely, dear!’ said Granny. ‘I love those archaeology programmes on the TV. Especially when they find those skulls that have been bashed in with a heavy object.’

Jess sometimes thought that, in a previous existence, her granny might have been a ruthlessly brutal warlord.

‘There’s a figure I want you to see,’ said Mum. ‘It’s in Dorset, on the hillside, cut out in the chalk. But it’s not a horse.’

Thank goodness, thought Jess. She had never really got into that whole horsy thing. She could imagine Flora galloping along a beach, her hair streaming in the wind like a shampoo ad, but Jess was sure that if she ever tried to meddle with horses, she’d find herself upside down in a hedge, with her bra straps wrapped round a bird’s nest.

If they were going to have to look at some of that Celtic chalk art stuff on a hillside, Jess would prefer it to be an amusing chimp or a cute meerkat.

‘OK, here we are,’ said Mum, giggling rather foolishly as she pulled off the road and into a car park. ‘Don’t look yet – just get out of the car and keep your eyes down on the ground.’

They piled out and kept their eyes down. Jess hoped her mum wouldn’t go in for this surprise surprise thing too often. It seemed ever so slightly infantile.

‘Right!’ said Jess’s mum. ‘Now look across the valley – over there.’

Jess glanced up and almost died with embarrassment. Across the valley, on the opposite hillside, and cut into the chalk like the white horse, was the gigantic figure of a naked man. No detail was missing, not even his private parts. In fact it would be true to say that no parts have ever been less private.