A Bone From a Dry Sea

NOW: SUNDAY MORNING

THE TRUCK WALLOWED along the gravelly road, if you could call it a road. Often there was nothing to mark it off from the rest of the brown, enormous plain, but Dad knew where he was because then there’d be tyre-ruts making the truck wallow worse than ever. Vinny clutched the handgrip on the dash to stop herself being thrown around. They’d done two hours from the airport, though it seemed longer, when Dad stopped by a flat-topped tree with a lot of grassy bundles hanging among the branches. Weaver-birds, Vinny guessed. She’d seen them on TV.

‘Ready for lunch?’ he said.

‘I’m starving. How much further?’

‘We’re a bit over half-way. But look.’

He pointed and Vinny stared through the shimmer of heat. Far off there were blue hills. Much nearer something moved, changed shape, vanished as the wavering air distorted the distance, and then was there again, steady for a moment – three long, slightly arching necks with small heads. She’d known them since she was tiny, from the Noah’s Ark frieze round her room.

‘Giraffes,’ she said.

‘Right.’

‘Are there any lions?’

‘They’ll be resting till it gets a bit cooler. Take a good look. We don’t get much wildlife round the camp, because we’re on the edge of the badlands.’

‘Why’s it all so flat?’

‘Because it was sea until a few million years ago. Those hills used to be the shoreline. In fact the section the camp’s on seems to have been an island. Seen enough?’

He drove into the shade of the tree and fetched crates from the back of the truck for them to sit on while Vinny unpacked the lunch. Crisps, Coke, chicken sandwiches, mangoes and a Mars Bar.

‘I hope that’s the sort of thing you like,’ he said.

‘I like anything.’

She sensed that he was as nervous as she was. They hadn’t seen each other for over a year, and never before like this. It had always been London hotels, visits to the zoo or the planetarium, jerky talk about school and her friends and what she liked doing, both of them jumpy with having to watch what they said because of the anger between him and Mum, still there, still no better, eight years after the split.

He ate in silence. Vinny was ready for this. That was one of the things Mum couldn’t cope with, his silences. Whole days sometimes, she’d said. A complete skiing holiday once. The obvious thing was to be silent too, but Mum wouldn’t have known how.

The cooling engine clicked. The weaver-birds accepted their presence and began to move and chatter. An ant the size of a button came and dragged away a crumb of bread.

‘You’re not tired?’ he said for about the fifth time.

‘I’m fine. But listen, Dad. It’s going to be all right. And if it isn’t, then it’s my fault. It was all my idea.’

‘So I gathered. Your mother . . .’

He didn’t try to keep the sourness out of his laugh.

‘Colin talked her round,’ she said. ‘It makes going to Grasse a lot easier for them, you see – they don’t have to bother about what I want, only them and the boys. You know, Mum was still trying to make me join an Outward Bound course or something till you said we couldn’t go on a safari after all because you’d got to go on working, and you thought I’d be bored. That made it all right.’

‘Because it was a nuisance for me?’

‘Not just that. She wouldn’t mind so much provided I was bored. Look, Dad, I’ll tell you what I think about Mum and then we don’t have to talk about it any more. It’s a bit like Grandad and his bad leg – you know, there’s things he just can’t do because of it, but otherwise he’s the same as anyone else. Only with Mum it’s inside her. She just can’t be sensible about anything to do with you. Apart from that she’s the same as my friends’ mums. She can be lovely, she can be a pain in the neck, you know? I’m lucky she fell for Colin. I really like him. The boys can be pests, but that’s the age they are. But honestly, I’m a lot happier at home than some of the kids I know. You needn’t worry – I’m not going to try and sucker on to you from now on.’

‘You’ve thought it all out?’

‘Yes. I suppose I’m like that.’

He grunted and went into another of his silences. Vinny ate the half-melted Mars Bar, quite wrong for Africa but she knew he’d got it because she’d asked for one on a bitter winter day in London once. She glanced at him out of the corner of her eyes. Not like a dad, somehow – short, broad-chested, round-faced, dark-haired once but now more than half bald.

‘It doesn’t always work,’ he said.

‘Uh?’

‘Thinking things out. Oy oy – we’re going to have to move. This lot are biters.’

Out of nowhere troops of shiny orange ants had appeared, obviously intending to carry off not just the crumbs and leavings but the untouched food as well. Vinny helped pack up and climbed into the truck. Dad got in the other side but didn’t start the engine.

‘That’s a good image of yours,’ he said. ‘Pop’s duff leg, I’m talking about. You’ve got your head screwed on . . . Look, I’d better explain one or two things about the set-up at the camp.’

‘I thought I’d just keep my mouth shut till I found out.’

‘Still, it’ll be easier if . . . Things aren’t too good, you see. For a start, we haven’t been lucky in our finds. That’s always a risk. Any expedition has its ups and downs – you go a few weeks without significant finds and everyone gets short-tempered and bitchy – it’s been such an effort to get here and you don’t get that many chances, so you feel you’re wasting your time, and the food tastes foul and stupid accidents begin to happen. But then someone comes up with something really worthwhile and everybody’s on a high, and they start seeing things they’d missed, and meals don’t matter . . . you understand?’

‘You haven’t found anything?’

‘Not much. Some badly smashed fragments of one skull. Hundreds of pig-mandibles which might be useful for dating if we’d found anything else of interest, which we haven’t. We’ve got plenty of material, but almost nothing new. Joe’s famous luck seems to have deserted him.’

Vinny looked at him. The sour note was back, the one he used when he was talking about Mum. She knew from Dad’s letters that Joe was Dr Hamiska, who was leading the expedition.

‘You’d better know,’ he said. ‘Joe and I haven’t hit it off. Don’t worry – he’ll turn on the charm for you, all right. But it’s different with me. I was afraid this might happen – in fact I was in two minds about joining the expedition in the first place.’

‘Why did you, then?’

‘Partly personal reasons – you’ll see. Maybe . . . But from a professional point of view it was a terrific opportunity. There’s been a civil war going on here for the last twelve years and nobody’s been able to get in. This is the obvious next place to look for early hominid remains. Everyone I know has been itching to come, but things aren’t really settled down yet and the new government don’t want a lot of foreign palaeontologists poking around, so they have turned everyone down – except, of course, Joe Hamiska. Absolutely typically he had a line to the Minister of the Interior, through an ex-pupil who happened to be the Minister’s nephew. You’ll meet him. He can’t stop talking. So here we are, in one of the hottest, dreariest bits of Africa, with this unique opportunity to increase the sum of human knowledge, and not getting anywhere. Do you understand?’

‘I think so. Why’s it the obvious place to look?’

‘Did you read any of those books I suggested?’

‘Oh, yes. All the ones I could find in the library.’

‘Good for you. Then you’ll know there’s an enormous gap in the fossil record of human evolution?’

‘You’d better remind me.’

‘Well, about ten million years ago there were ape-like creatures, walking on four legs and so on, with just enough to show that they’re probably our ancestors, and then there’s a huge gap to about three-and-a-half million years ago when there are creatures something like us, with smaller brains than ours but walking on two legs and with jaws much nearer to ours and so on. Between those two points there’s one doubtful tooth and one even more doubtful bit of jaw. Now, if you look at a map of Africa and plot the various finds this side of the gap, and their probable dates, you’ll find you’ve got a rough line running north-east. Start at the newer finds, carry on through the older finds and on a bit further, and you finish up here. Right?’

Vinny gazed round the stretching distances.

‘There’s still an awful lot of places to look,’ she said.

‘That’s where Joe’s famous luck comes in. There’s exactly one Western-educated palaeontologist in the country.’

‘The Minister’s nephew?’

‘Right. He came to Joe with a bit of pig-jaw someone had brought in. Pigs are important, because they evolved in a nice simple-minded way and if you know your stuff you can date their jaws pretty accurately, and then you’ve got a good idea that anything you find alongside them is likely to be roughly the same date. This bit of jaw turned out to be between four and five million years old. Reports of plenty of other fossils around. You see?’

‘I’m not surprised you wanted to come.’

‘It was touch and go. A lot of good people turned Joe down when he asked them to join.’

‘And now you wish you had too?’

‘Well, it’s not entirely Joe’s fault. In some ways the place has turned out to be a palaeontologist’s nightmare. You see those peaks over there? That was a volcano, and so was that, and that.’

Vinny looked. She had no idea how far away the mountains were, but there was snow on the cone-shaped summits, white, magical, where the blue range rose to meet the immense and even bluer sky. She’d have known those were volcanoes without his telling her.

‘Have you done plate tectonics yet?’ he said.

‘Last term.’

‘Well, we’re right at the point where the plate carrying Asia moves against the one carrying Africa. In one way this is terrific, because there’ve been a whole series of eruptions, which have laid down layers of volcanic ash, which in theory you can date by scientific methods. But at the same time the ground has been churned around and shoved to and fro and turned upside-down even, so you get a series of strata in one place, and half a mile away they’re the other way up, or whole sections are missing. Joe brought a geologist, but she took one look at the place and told him that any dates she came up with would be give or take a million years each way, and being Joe he tried to teach her her own business, so she said she was sick and pulled out. That was one thing. Then again, being Joe he’s quarrelled with so many people that he couldn’t get any responsible organization to fund him, so we’re funded by people no-one takes seriously, and that in turn means that a lot of the team are beginners or second-raters. Not that Joe minds. Second-raters are easier to impress. And he hasn’t got anyone to run the camp properly and can’t be bothered himself, so I’m having to spend half my time sorting things out for him . . . Oh, God. I’m sorry.’

He sounded ashamed of himself. It had all come bursting out of him, unstoppable, like an eruption from one of the volcanoes he’d pointed out. He was a bottler-up, Vinny guessed. That was what the silences were about, perhaps, anger going round and round inside his head while he tried to tame it, master it. He really needed someone he didn’t mind bursting out to. Mum wouldn’t have been any use – she’d have been full of suggestions, 1,001 Things to Do, Colin called it. That wasn’t what Dad needed.

‘It’s all right,’ she said. ‘It’s much easier for me, knowing. I hope there’s someone there you like a bit.’

He laughed.

‘Oh yes, of course. Several of them. In fact . . . Well, as I said, you’ll see.’