A Bone From a Dry Sea

NOW: WEDNESDAY MORNING

THE TENT WAS like an oven, so Vinny dragged her cot into the shade of the big awning. It was still roasting there, and it seemed impossible that she could sleep, but almost at once she did.

Vinny’s dreams were dreams of heat, of a shimmering marsh which somehow she had to lead the others across. There was one safe path. If you stepped off, the crocodiles would get you. She was the one who knew the way. She walked confidently between the reed-beds and the others followed. (What others? They were vague in her mind, but she knew they were there, though she mustn’t look round.) Something on the path. A flat white bone with a hole in it – a sign someone had left for her. She stared into the mists ahead for her helper. No. And when she looked down again the bone was broken. And she’d forgotten the path. If she looked through the hole she would see it again. Someone behind her was reaching to take it away and she would be lost and the crocodiles were coming nearer. They knew . . .

She woke rigid with terror, heard the crunch of boots on shale, Dr Hamiska’s jovial laugh, and then they were standing round her, great black figures against the glare beyond the awning. There was a sense of tremendous good humour about them, of things going really well, but still half in her nightmare she had a certainty that it wasn’t real, that any moment it was going to break down into shouts and rage. She wanted to be alone, but they were all around her, too big, too black against the glare, staring, laughing, plotting something . . .

She forced herself properly awake and sat up.

‘Lunch ready then?’ cried Dr Hamiska. ‘Roast goose and all the trimmings? Cherry pie? Champagne?’

‘I’ve been asleep,’ said Vinny crossly, as she stood up, looked for Dad and moved to his side.

‘Feeling better?’ he muttered.

‘Yes, thanks. Have you found anything else?’

‘A pig mandible. More shells for you to sort. Jane’s brought in a deer femur with what could be butchery marks on it.’

‘Are butchery marks,’ said Dr Hamiska. ‘Have faith, Sam. And that second shell of yours, Vinny – that’s excellent. With the first, it is clear that the blows were deliberate. You can show them to Wishart tomorrow.’

‘Oh . . . but . . .’

‘No need to be shy. Sam will explain the technicalities. Listen, everyone – I might as well get this clear now. Our most important guest tomorrow is not a palaeontologist – in fact, before he became an administrator John Wishart specialized in early Flemish art. My spies tell me that if it weren’t for the terms of the Craig Foundation he’d have closed the Palaeontology Department down years ago. Now he’s going to be glad he didn’t, because we’ve got a really big find for him, which will help him put Craig on to the map. What we’ve got to do is make him understand that. We’ve got to show him that he can sell our find to all those people out there who never knew they could get excited about a few old bones. And it’s no use looking at me like that, Sam.’

‘I’m hungry,’ said Dad.

‘And so am I, but this is next year’s bread I’m talking about. You want to go hungry next year? What I’m saying is that it’s worth doing anything we can to show John Wishart how he can make this find into big news for Craig. People out there – the slobs in front of the goggle-boxes – show them a few old bones and tell them they are two distal phalanges and a metacarpal from a plantigrade simian four-and-a-half million years old, and they’ll switch channels. But show them a group of shells that have been deliberately smashed with a primitive tool, and tell them it was a schoolgirl on a visit who put them together – let them see her doing just that – and that’s news. That’s something they can imagine their own daughter doing. That’s the sort of line we’ve got to take with Wishart’s visit. You may not like it, but we’re working in a field where salesmanship has to go hand in hand with scholarship. So as soon as we’ve eaten I’m going to go through with each of you exactly what you’ll be doing, and what you’ll say, when I bring Wishart round. I’ll photograph you with the shells later, Vinny, when the sun’s at a good angle. Right, folks, let’s eat.’

In fact, in that heat all anyone wanted to do was nibble, and drink. They sat around, passing the latest foot-bone from hand to hand. Michael, who usually spoke very little, told a story, about another dig a few years back, when a really important visitor had brought a girl-friend who wasn’t at all interested in fossils but was determined to photograph a lioness with her cubs. It had been a different part of Africa, with more local people around (there were almost none here), and they’d got used to the idea that these foreigners would pay for news about places where you could find the right sort of old bones. Michael, who could speak the language, had been told to spread the word that now the foreigners wanted a suckling lioness, and one was found, and the girl got her photographs, and the important visitor was absolutely delighted, but for weeks afterwards locals were coming in with reports of a lioness who’d just given birth – sometimes they’d walked two days to get to the camp – and weren’t at all pleased to be told that the foreigners were only interested in old bones again.

He was a first-class story-teller. There were lots of sly jokes along the way. He made you see what everyone in the story was like – the pompous visitor, the slinky girl-friend – so it took Vinny a little while to notice that Nikki, sitting slightly aside as usual, with his pad on his knee and his pencil in his hand, was actually drawing her. Their eyes met as he glanced up, and he laughed and passed the pad across. The drawing wasn’t in his careful, exact, fossil-style – it was more like a cartoon. It showed a sort of ape-child sitting cross-legged and bashing a huge clam-shell with a stone she held in her fist. The body was half-way between ape and human, but the head was completely human, only too small.

‘Is that me?’ said Vinny.

‘Best I can do,’ said Nikki.

‘Look, Dad. Portrait of your daughter.’

‘A perfect likeness.’

‘You should have given her webbed fingers, Nikki,’ said a soft voice behind Vinny’s shoulder.

She turned. It was Dr Wessler. He was smiling amiably, but she knew that behind his sun-glasses his eyes must be glinting with malice.

‘Or do you think they’d have got as far as fins?’ he added. ‘Eh, Sam?’

Dad stiffened. Vinny cringed. So Watson must have told the others about their argument.

‘Yes, indeed, Sam,’ said Dr Hamiska. ‘What is this perverse nonsense you have been allowing your daughter to propagate? I can hardly think you are showing a proper parental responsibility, you know.’

Several of the others laughed. If Dad could have done so too it would have been all right, but he couldn’t.

‘It’s nothing to do with Dad,’ said Vinny. ‘It’s a book I found in the library at home, and as soon as I asked Dad about it he told me it was nonsense.’

‘Don’t you believe it, Vinny,’ crowed Dr Hamiska. ‘Sam’s a secret believer. He’s going to set the scientific world ablaze by finding a fossil hominid thigh-bone with unmistakably frog-like elements about it.’

‘And write a best-seller,’ said Dr Wessler. ‘Have you got a title yet, Sam? What about Me and My Gills?’

‘Oh for God’s sake,’ said Dad. ‘Didn’t you hear what Vinny said? She found the bloody book in the library.’

They were just like kids at school, just like the ones who’d found out Vinny’s real name and cornered her in corridors and chanted it at her. You know it doesn’t matter. You know it’s stupid. You know if you could laugh about it they’d leave you alone, and the worst thing you can do is burst into tears, which was what Vinny had done, or lose your temper, which was what Dad did.

He didn’t swear or shout. He simply went ultra-cold and looked directly at Dr Hamiska and said, ‘The book may be nonsense, but it is no more nonsense than some of the theories I have heard propagated about our finds in the last three days.’

For a moment it was as though he had actually hit Dr Hamiska – no, as if he’d spat at him. Then the big laugh bellowed out, and everyone pretended to relax as though it hadn’t happened. Vinny stared at Nikki’s cartoon, not enjoying it any more. She’d been thinking how Colin would have liked it – hung it in the downstairs loo probably, with his other favourite joke pictures – but now she knew she wasn’t even going to show it to him. She felt miserable. She’d really let Dad down. It wasn’t because they all thought the sea-ape theory was stupid – the actual cause didn’t matter – what mattered was that she’d landed him in a corner where he found himself behaving in a way he was ashamed of. She guessed he was the kind of person who lay awake at night remembering moments like this and feeling sick about them. Now, she thought, he was probably wishing she’d never come.

When the others were getting ready to move back up the hill Dad muttered, ‘You don’t have to come. No sane archaeologist would be digging in mid-afternoon in this heat.’

‘I’m all right. I want to come. I’m sorry about what happened. It was my fault for gabbing away to Watson.’

‘You couldn’t have known. What’s done is done. There’d have been something else, probably. How do you feel about this business of being photographed?’

‘I was going to ask you if I had to. But that was before . . .’

‘Forget about that. What’s the problem?’

‘It’s Mum, you see. I don’t want to have to go on fighting her every time I get a chance to see you. I don’t want her to mind. I don’t want her to think I’ve had a terrific time. I wasn’t going to lie, exactly, but I was going to say things like it was a pity we couldn’t go on safari and how hot it was. You know? But if I start getting my picture in the papers . . . I don’t know. It might be all right. It’s just I have this sort of feeling . . . besides not letting Joe think I’ve got to do whatever he wants. It doesn’t matter now. I expect it’ll be all right.’

‘No. If you choose not to be photographed then that’s your right. Do you want me to tackle him?’

‘Won’t he just blow up?’

‘Very likely. He’ll assume I put you up to it. Or at least he’ll pretend to.’

‘I’ll do it. I’ll tell him I’ve got a headache. Colin says you can’t argue with a headache.’

‘Colin hasn’t met Joe.’