A Bone From a Dry Sea

NOW: THURSDAY AFTERNOON

THEY BROKE THE journey to rest in the shade of a flat-topped tree beside the track. There were no weaver-bird nests in it, but otherwise it could have been the same one where Dad and Vinny had stopped for lunch five days ago, just one tree in the enormous plain which had once been the sea. The sun was half-way down the burning sky.

The buzz of a helicopter came faintly from the north-west, louder as it neared until they saw it race by about half a mile away, an ordinary commercial machine painted scarlet and silver. Dad laughed.

‘Bet that’s Wishart on his way to the camp,’ he said. ‘His flight must have been late. He’s in for a shock.’

‘What’ll happen?’ said Vinny.

‘Lord knows. The Minister’s still there, unless he’s gone home by another route. I don’t think Joe’s going to be able to make it up with him. Wishart is a thoroughly nasty piece of work, in my opinion. I’ve only met him once, and he struck me as both prickly and slippery. I doubt if he’ll hit it off with the Minister.’

‘Fred will be loving all this,’ said May Anna.

‘I think Fred’s going to come out on top,’ said Dad. ‘He’s got the contacts Watson needs. If we’ve got what we think we have, he’ll be able to raise the funds . . .’

‘Aren’t you going to help?’ said Vinny. ‘Watson’s not too bad, honestly he isn’t . . .’

‘Just think what Joe would make of it,’ said Dad. ‘I set all this up in order to lever him out and take over. The mere fact that Watson promptly arranged for us to keep our visas . . . No, I’m going to look for something with a bit less hassle in it than hominids. There’s plenty of interesting work to be done. What about you, May Anna?’

‘I told Watson I’ll come back. I want to finish my skull. It’s getting really interesting. It’s got some fascinating features – clearly hominid, but so small. Male, I think. And, do you know, something fractured it, just behind the left temple. No, seriously.’

‘You’re as bad as Joe,’ said Dad.

He laughed, then sighed.

‘I’d like to have finished it,’ he said. ‘Let’s pray Watson manages to keep control of things and get the material into some kind of decent storage. I can just see those soldiers shovelling them into plastic bags and slinging them into some corner, and then . . . You know they took every scrap of my notes?’

‘Mine too,’ said May Anna. ‘All gone.’

‘I’ve still got my bone,’ said Vinny.

‘What bone?’ said May Anna.

‘A scapula she was drawing,’ said Dad. ‘Hang on – let’s think about this. Didn’t they go through your bag?’

‘Watson carried it out to the jeep, remember?’

‘Oh, Lord. Look, I’m afraid we’re going to have to dispose of it for the moment. I’m still a bit jumpy about someone going through our bags again, and we certainly can’t risk taking it out.’

‘If May Anna’s going back . . .’ said Vinny.

‘The trouble is there’s no documentation,’ said Dad. ‘There’s nothing in my notes.’

‘If she just put it back in the H-bag,’ said Vinny.

‘Then perhaps someone could notice . . . you could notice, May Anna . . .’

‘Please,’ said May Anna.

Dad laughed.

‘See what you think. Show her, Vinny. Don’t say anything.’

Vinny fetched the fossil and gave it to May Anna, who studied it first with the naked eye and then through a magnifying glass, tilting it this way and that in a patch of sunlight to reveal its faint markings.

‘Someone’s bored a hole there,’ she said.

‘Possibly,’ said Dad.

‘Not just possibly. Look. There’s these drill-scratches this side, and look at the wearing this side. They’ve pressed down on to it with a pointed flake, using a rock as an anvil, but they didn’t turn the flake. They turned the scapula. If you didn’t have a fully manipulable hand and wrist you’d find that easier. You’re telling me this came from your site?’

‘Out of the H-layer. The one with the foot-bones in it,’ said Vinny.

May Anna whistled.

‘And you didn’t tell Joe?’ she said.

‘It was tricky,’ said Dad. ‘By the time Vinny noticed those scratch-marks – I told you she was drawing it – we were already having trouble with him.’

‘It was my fault,’ said Vinny. ‘I asked Dad not to tell him. I hated the way he kept making a fuss, pretending I was his lucky mascot and so on.’

‘It was partly that,’ said Dad. ‘Anyway, I wasn’t as sure as you are about the significance of those scratches – in fact I’m still not. Furthermore, if you’re right, then it’s going to cast considerable doubt on our dating. You’re not going to get a lot of palaeontologists believing in an artefact four and a half million years old, for a start.’

May Anna sat silent, still turning the bone to and fro.

‘What do you think it is?’ said Vinny. ‘I mean, what sort of animal did it come from? Dad doesn’t know.’

‘Just what I was thinking about. Were you ever at Pechabar, Sam?’

‘Remind me.’

‘It was the first real site I worked on. Pakistan. Harry Blakey ran it. It was amazing, a sort of cetacean graveyard. There must have been one almighty stranding incident. When I was still a student I’d handled more cetacean fossils than most guys see in a lifetime. That’s whales and dolphins, Vinny.’

‘I know. It would be neat if it was a dolphin.’

‘What on earth do you mean – “neat”?’ said Dad. ‘I can’t think of anything more untidy than an early hominid drilling a hole in a dolphin scapula.’

‘We came from the sea, Dad. Like I keep telling you.’

He laughed cheerfully and hardly at all with scorn, and May Anna joined in.

‘You haven’t cured her of that bug yet, Sam?’ she said.

‘It isn’t a bug,’ said Vinny. ‘You said you didn’t think it was complete nonsense. I bet you really think there might be something in it!’

‘Me? A poor girl with a career to make? I can’t afford to . . . What do you want me to do, Sam?’

‘Do you think you could find this tree again?’

May Anna looked around, checking landmarks.

‘Sure,’ she said.

‘Then I think we’ll bury it here for the moment. When you get back – if you get back – you can check out how things are. Maybe you’ll simply be able to tell Watson what happened. Maybe you’ll be able to sneak it into the H-bag somehow. Maybe things won’t work out and it’ll have to stay here. If necessary I can send you a note about it once I’m out of the country. All right?’

So they measured a distance from the trunk and hacked a good deep hole and wrapped the fossil in plastic and laid it in the bottom and stamped the earth back firm above it. Vinny rose, dizzy from bending, and stood and swayed with the world dark and her ears drumming. It was strange knowing where the fossil was hidden, and knowing that she and Dad and May Anna were the only ones in all the world who had that knowledge. It gave her a sudden sense of her own uniqueness, her singleness, as if she was a particular point where various lines, drawn right across the universe, came together, focusing here, now.

The drumming left her and her vision cleared. Around her the plain which had once been sea stretched into its unknowable wavering distances, like time.

THE END