A Bone From a Dry Sea Page 3

  He said, ‘Hi, there,’ to Vinny and smiled, but before Dad could introduce her to anyone else he said, ‘We’ve got problems, Sam. The Craig people have switched their dates. They’re coming Thursday.’

  ‘I don’t see it makes much difference,’ said Dad.

  ‘Oh but it does, Sam, it does. Come and look at this.’

  He took Dad over to a trestle table under an awning and gave him a sheet of paper but kept on talking so that he couldn’t read it. From what Dad had said in the truck, Vinny guessed that this was to show her and everyone else that working for Dr Hamiska was much more important than having your daughter visit you.

  She didn’t mind. She was floating in a pool of happiness because she was here at last. She’d made it, against all the odds, since that Christmas twenty months ago. Tom had just learnt to read so Mum had sent him to get the presents from the Christmas tree and sort them into piles in the living-room while the rest of them cleared up breakfast. They’d come in and found that he’d put four piles together by the sofa and one, Vinny’s, separately by the armchair. Of course he hadn’t meant anything, not consciously, but there’d been a meaning all the same, obvious as a jeer. Colin had laughed and muddled the piles up and told everyone to find their own and made a fuss of Vinny, but while she was picking the Sellotape off her first present and folding the paper away before looking to see what Gran had sent her, she was thinking I want my own dad. After lunch she’d written a long thank-you letter for his cheque, not asking for anything, not complaining, but with questions in it which he’d have to answer. So her campaign had started, and now here she was.

  She looked around. Only twenty minutes before it had been daylight and they’d been driving through barren, hummocky ground which Dad had called badlands. Then they’d climbed to the camp among a few sparse trees on the first slope of hills, and already it was almost dark. The plain below had changed colour as she’d watched, from brown and grey and orange to nearly black. She felt she was seeing the shadow of the world rise up as the sun set behind her and the eastern stars emerged. The air was still, and thick, and hot.

  The camp was huts, tents and larger awnings. Butane lamps had been lit. Close by Vinny a woman working at a trestle table pushed her spectacles on to her forehead with a weary gesture and looked up.

  ‘Hi,’ she said. ‘You’re Vinny. I’m May Anna. I guess you’re tired after the trip.’

  ‘Dad made me a nest in the back of the truck after lunch and I slept till we were almost here. Can I see what you’re doing?’

  May Anna was about thirty-five, Vinny guessed, obviously American, thin, with lanky pale hair in a pony-tail. She wore a T-shirt and denim shorts. The lenses of her spectacles were the size of saucers.

  ‘Sure,’ she said. ‘You like jigsaws?’

  ‘Sometimes.’

  ‘Have a go at this one.’

  On the table were what looked like flakes of stone arranged in rows on two trays. Most of them were smaller than a penny. Between the trays was a rounded blob of Plasticine, on to which a few flakes had been fitted together to form two irregular patches, each about half the size of Vinny’s palm.

  ‘Is it someone’s skull?’ she said.

  ‘Correct. A fellow called Homo habilis, maybe. Maybe not. Looks like we’ve got about half a cranium, if we can fit it together. This bit here.’

  May Anna ran her fingers spider-like over the back of her head.

  ‘How old is it?’ said Vinny.

  ‘If he’s habilis, could be two million, two-and-a-half million years.’

  ‘Wow!’

  From the books Dad had told her to read, Vinny knew that habilis meant something that had been about half-way human, a bit like an upright-walking baboon with a much bigger brain. There’d been other somethings with other names, and no-one agreed which of them had really been the ancestor of modern humans. No-one seemed to agree about anything, much. They’d find a bit of jaw or a kneebone and say it was really important and different from what anyone else had found and proved all the others were wrong and there’d be a colossal row until someone found something else. Then they’d all gang up against the newcomer.

  ‘I’m used to it,’ said May Anna. ‘But I still wake up nights and think about all those years and my skin crawls. Know what I mean?’

  Vinny peered at the flakes of fossil each in its numbered square. The empty squares showed where the ones which May Anna had fitted into place came from.

  ‘It’s worse than a jigsaw,’ she said. ‘You haven’t got a picture.’

  ‘We have, though,’ said May Anna. ‘Look.’

  She held one of the larger chips slantwise to the lamplight.

  ‘See those wrinkles?’ she said. ‘Know what they are? They’re the pattern on the surface of the brain beneath.’

  ‘I can’t see anything . . . Oh, yes . . . No . . .’

  May Anna picked up another flake and held it against the first, edge on.

  ‘Your eyes have to learn to see, know what I mean?’ she said. ‘But look here – they just don’t belong. They don’t . . . Hey! Look at this! They do!’

  Laughing, she turned one chip through ninety degrees and put the two edges together. They fitted as if they’d only just been snapped apart. They overlapped, leaving a triangular space each side of the join. May Anna, still crowing, turned them over and pressed them on to the Plasticine mould, tilting her head this way and that to study them.

  ‘Some days you don’t get a single darned fit,’ she said. ‘Now a pointy bit – I’ve seen it, I know I’ve seen it. There . . . And look! Hey! Sam! Come see what we’ve got here!’

  She’d called to Dad but it was Dr Hamiska who’d reached the table first. Then everyone was crowding round to watch her fit the three new pieces against one of the existing patches, and then chip by chip ease the other patch loose and join it on with the new pieces bridging the gap. Everyone started talking together.

  ‘I guess I’ve got it wrongly oriented,’ said May Anna, twisting her hand above the surface to show which way she thought the skull now went.

  ‘It’s too small,’ said someone. ‘It can’t be habilis.’

  ‘Who said it was?’ said someone else.

  ‘It’s certainly too small,’ said Dr Hamiska. ‘A good two hundred cc too small, I think. You’re going to have to take that out of your base-mould, May Anna.’

  ‘I was just quitting and I picked out a couple of pieces to show Vinny, and what do you know? They fitted. I wasn’t even trying.’

  ‘Then you’ve brought us luck, Vinny,’ said Dr Hamiska. ‘You must keep it up.’

  ‘If it’s smaller than habilis then it’s older than habilis,’ said someone.

  ‘Exactly,’ said Dr Hamiska. ‘A million years at least. Two million. And look here . . .’

  He ran a stubby forefinger over the surface of the patch, following some kind of line Vinny couldn’t see.

  ‘We must have something a layman can understand,’ he said. ‘And by Thursday.’

  It wasn’t just a wish or a hope, it was an order. An order to the universe. He was peering and poking among the fragments as if he could will them into showing him how they fitted. Dad’s letters had made him sound a tiresome old buffer, but now, meeting him, Vinny found him more alarming than irritating. His personality was like some kind of SF force-field which he could beam out of himself when he wanted, and if you came within range it made you his slave. The fossils, though, were immune to the force-field and gave up none of their secrets, so after a minute he switched it off, straightened and smiled.

  ‘Well done, Vinny. I can see you’re going to be useful.’

  ‘I didn’t do anything.’

  ‘You brought us luck. I take luck very seriously. I’m sorry I couldn’t let Sam go with you on safari, but he’s the best there is and I can’t do without him.’

  ‘I’d much rather come here. This is really interesting.’

  ‘We’ll make a palaeontologist of you yet. Well, thanks, Sam. A
nd well done, May Anna – that’s going to be a great help with the Craig people. If only we could get a line on the dating – let’s have another look at your pig-data, Fred . . .’

  He rushed off to one of the awnings. A thin man did a Woody Allen shrug and followed him. The others hung around studying the jigsaw and searching the trays for further fits until May Anna shooed them away before they could muddle her arrangements. Dad stayed. He was the only one who hadn’t joined in the chatter round the skull.

  ‘What do you think, Sam?’ said May Anna.

  ‘I think maybe. Just don’t let him rush you or you’ll be forcing the evidence. It’s quite unnecessary, this hoo-ha about Thursday.’

  ‘You don’t have to raise the money, Sam. More important right now, I could do with a drink.’

  ‘So could I. What about you, Vinny. Coke?’

  ‘Anything.’

  He left and May Anna packed up, covering the trays with weighted plastic sheets and putting an upturned bucket over the precious skull.

  ‘Who are the Craig people?’ said Vinny.

  ‘Well now, there was this kid from Colorado called Oscar Craig who used to go wandering up into the hills looking for dinosaur fossils. This would be around eighteen-ninety-something, I guess. Then his dad ran out on the family and his ma moved to Denver where he went to college. He was a bright kid, learned chemistry, was hired by a company, developed a depilatory, from that moved into cosmetics and before he was forty he was running his own business. By the time he died he was one of the richest men in America. He’d married but there were no kids. What he’d done with his money was collect art – Impressionists and older stuff – but I guess that was because it was kind of expected of him, you know? What he really liked was still fossils. He spent a lot of money trying to prove that people came to America long before the textbooks said they did. When he died he set up the Craig Museum back in Denver, mainly for his art-collection, but he put it into his will that it’s got to have a palaeontology department too. When Joe was trying to raise funds to get us out here, the Craig people were the only ones he could get interested. Nobody in the field takes them that seriously, you see, but Joe told them he’d really put them on the map, bring them back fossils of Adam and Eve almost, so that all the other fossil-freaks would have to sit up and take notice. Now the people from Craig are coming out to see what he’s got for their money, and all he’ll have to show them is this little fellow here.’

  She tapped the upturned bucket and laughed. Dad came back with the drinks, passed one casually to May Anna and gave Vinny hers a bit more formally. He hadn’t asked May Anna what sort she wanted, either. And earlier he’d twice started to tell Vinny about something or someone special on this expedition, and then stopped himself and said she’d see. She didn’t say anything now, but sipped her Coke. It was just what she wanted.

  ‘How did you get it cold?’ she said. ‘Have you got a fridge?’

  ‘Any fool can be uncomfortable in camp,’ said Dad.

  ‘And any camp with Sam in it is as good as a Hilton,’ said May Anna. ‘It’s a big deal when we run out of canned crabmeat. He’s down in the books as our taphonomist, but that’s just an excuse. We have him to run the camp.’

  ‘Too true to be funny,’ said Dad. ‘Let’s go and unpack your stuff and I’ll show you the layout. Then it should be supper time.’

  Supper was beef curry and rice with fresh vegetables and fruit which Dad had bought at a market near the airport last evening. They ate at trestle tables. Dr Hamiska made a fuss of introducing Vinny all round, too many names to remember. Vinny sat with Dad and May Anna and Fred, Dr Wessler, the one who knew about pigs. The talk was all about the skull, and how much Plasticine May Anna ought to take out to give it the right-sized brain. Vinny couldn’t understand the detail but she could hear their excitement, though Dad was trying to be cautious and Dr Wessler kept telling May Anna – only half as a joke and half, Vinny guessed, because he was the kind of person who actually gets a kick out of things going wrong – that she’d got bits of baboon-skull muddled up with her hominid fragments. Vinny was dropping with sleep by the time the meal ended, but she couldn’t go to bed because Dad had said she mustn’t go to the loos alone in the dark, in case of leopards or something.

  At last May Anna said, ‘Looks like you’d better take Vinny to bed, Sam,’ and he remembered he’d got a daughter.

  On their way back from the loos he said, ‘I’m sure I needn’t tell you, but just in case. What I was saying about Joe, in the truck after lunch – you won’t say anything about that to anyone, will you?’

  ‘No, of course not . . . What about May Anna?’

  ‘Oh, she’s all right.’

  ‘I think she’s lovely.’

  ‘I’m glad you like her.’

  THEN

  LI WOKE IN the night. There were no caves at this other bay, but good roosting-ledges where the tribe could huddle for warmth. She turned on her back and watched the stars, at first in a thoughtless dreamy wonder, but then, as they vanished one by one behind the black lip of the cliff above, in wakeful amazement. They were moving, in just the same way the sun moved through the sky by day. The whole vast heavens moved all together, like the march of rollers towards the shore. She gazed, rapt, waiting for each prick of light to blank out, until she heard Ma-ma mutter a call in her sleep: Careful, little one.

  Ma-ma must be dreaming. At once Li fell into a new wonder that someone could dream, as she herself dreamed, inside her own head as she slept, seeing and knowing things that nobody else would ever see or know. Ma-ma, who lay so close, was utterly other. Utterly not-Li. All of them, all the tribe. Other. Before the last rains a stranger had joined the tribe, a female with a dying baby. Where had she come from? Somewhere beyond the tribe’s territory, which ended at a crocodile-infested river to the north. How had she come? Why? There were no answers. These things were the stranger’s, as other as Ma-ma’s dreams.

  The stranger had hung around on the fringes of the tribe for a few days and then they’d accepted her, but her baby had died. Where had it gone? Not the body – the stranger had carried that back into the dunes and left it – but the little sick person who’d looked out of the weary eyes? That too was other, never-to-be-known, like dreams. The stranger seemed to have forgotten her baby and her grief, but Li hadn’t.

  Li didn’t sleep again. She watched the stars fade and vanish and before the rest of the tribe began to stir, climbed down and made her way out to the rock spit that half-enclosed the bay. From here she could see the central volcano of the island already bright with the rising sun, but her mind didn’t take it in except as part of the whole strange marvellous world whose hugeness and otherness she was learning to recognize. At first she was shuddering with cold, then the sun rose, warming her through, tingling her skin with animal pleasures, but she barely noticed either the cold or the comfort. She felt she was close to something enormous, some knowledge – not a piece of knowledge like how to bash a mussel open on a rock or the way the stars moved – but a whole knowledge. The knowledge had the shape of a question. It seemed to fill her world like the light of the rising sun, to send tremors of its presence through her like the warming sun-rays. Other questions, the ones about using and seeing, she was outside of. She could study them and think and find their answers. This one she was inside of, part of. In fact she was herself the question. To answer it she would need to become somehow other, as other as Ma-ma’s dreams or the stranger’s lost baby. Perhaps she would need to go where the baby had gone.

  Ma-ma rose with a slither and slop beside the rocks and broke in on Li’s trance by making disapproval-clicks and sluicing water over her, the way mothers did until their children were old enough to know that as the sun rose they had to stay in the water or in shadow, or at least keep their bodies wet through the heat of the day. The skins of the tribe were a very dark purply brown and almost as thick as pig-skin, but an hour in the unveiled noon sun could still make them burn.

 
In fact it was not yet that hot, but Ma-ma was fussing partly because she was heavily pregnant and partly because she was puzzled by Li’s behaviour. The others took it for granted, in the same way that they took for granted Bola’s passion for scooping holes in the sand for no purpose at all. They didn’t consider that Li’s lonely trances or her rapt experiments in any way affected them, though some of them were already becoming expert with the minnow-nets she’d invented.

  On the northward journey from the shrimping beach, Li had noticed a mat of gourd-vine draped down a cliff. It was a common plant of that coast, but the tribe ignored it as the gourds were inedible, but now Li had made the connection with the fragments she’d used for shrimping, and had found that fallen gourds in the right state of decay contained intact and stronger nets which could be washed free of the pulp and then used to trap small prey. Carefully treated, such a net might last a whole day.

  Li herself was not satisfied with the discovery. She’d seen the spider make its trap. She wanted to make something too, and experimented with grass stems, with seaweed fronds, with vine-strands, with the long coarse reeds that grew by the northern river. Most of her trials ended in failure. The materials were so weak and hard to fasten, her fingers so clumsy. It took her three journeys to the shrimping beach and back before she achieved her first knot. But failure didn’t matter. The real excitement lay in thinking. Her days were electric with thought. It was better than food, better than warmth, better than sleep. At dusk she would lie down and fight off sleep so that she could think a little longer, and wake with a rush of joy that she could begin again.

  But Ma-ma felt that children should be like other children. There’d been a gap in her pregnancies, and Li was still the most important person in her life. Li understood this and was glad of it, so now she slid down into the water and hugged and kissed her as they dipped below the surface. Still holding each other they kicked gently away from the rocks, with the ripple-patterned sunlight wavering across their bodies. They kissed again as they rose for breath, and then Ma-ma swam off to look for food.