Bone Lines Read online

  ‘Why?’

  Dammit, she thought. That response should have been much more laid-back, far less defensive.

  ‘Oh, you know, LoLo, I’m only making conversation. Sorry. I’m guessing that means no?’

  ‘Not right now. No.’

  (Oh but I have loved again since you, she wanted to say. Loved like never before. Perhaps like never again. Someone you would never have imagined or approved of for me!)

  ‘Well, you look great. I’m sure it won’t be long.’

  (How fucking dare you. Really.)

  ‘You assume that it’s even an issue.’

  ‘We’re academics, remember, we assume nothing until investigating. Look, let’s start that again.’ Darius leaned in, ‘You look great, LoLo. I hope you are happy. Truly, I do. And regardless of everything, I know that you are right for this adventure, I would have put every pressure on to make it happen if necessary, no matter what our history.’

  ‘Was pressure needed?’

  ‘No. That’s not the point. It seems right, that’s all. In every way.’

  Eloise relaxed, decided to take off the stab vest. In fact her heart felt surprisingly secure. Darius could still piss her off, oh yes, but it didn’t seem to sting so much.

  ‘So how are you? How’s… um…’

  ‘Sophie?’

  ‘Yes, sorry.’

  This had not been artifice. Eloise had wilfully deleted the woman’s name from her memory.

  ‘Not sure. We haven’t spoken in months. We split late last year.’

  ‘Oh god. Bloody hell. Sorry?’

  ‘I’m not. Well, of course I am in a way. I hate mess and unpleasantness, as you know. But I don’t suppose you’re really surprised?’

  Darius looked at her, half smiling his familiar cocksure grin, half hiding a new look in his eyes that she did not recognise. Although as ever he appeared more irked than anguished. Inconvenienced. He looked to her now like a small boy who had failed to win at chess and it was the first time he’d seemed anything less than unassailably masculine. He also seemed relieved. Whether that was to be out of the marriage or to have confessed its failure to her, she could not be sure.

  ‘Nothing surprises me anymore, Darius, when it comes to relationships. But I wouldn’t wish pain on anyone.’

  She meant this, sort of. Eloise was irritated, nevertheless, that Darius could extract so much as pity from her now, whether he was asking for it or not (and she realised that she wanted him to ask her for it.) He isn’t even miserable, she thought. He could at least pretend to be miserable. The divorce from ‘that girl’ seemed to have dented his pride but not much else. Of course, Eloise had known that it wouldn’t last. The man who had told her he would never marry again, who had refused to marry her, had gone off and married that odd, half-cooked (but breedable?) creature and had tried to convince himself it was for life. She wanted to say I told you so but she would not give him the satisfaction. The schadenfreude was disappointingly dull.

  She continued to think carelessly about him (and her) as a creaking Tube carriage rocked its cargo around a tight bend a few minutes before her home stop. The cue to gather up both her belongings and her thoughts. As she emerged from the sickly false light into a bright and lovely evening, the fresh air encouraged more positive deliberations and for the five-minute walk home she concentrated on the real prize of the day. The bones! Female. Partial pelvis, two full femurs, one humerus, half a cracked tibia, a shoulder blade, a semi mandible and an almost perfect upper skull. Jesus.

  Now, as she approached her front door, she was picturing the scene as her team had laid out each piece like a precious puzzle on the examination table, the stunned, reverential silence as this once-breathing being took fractured form again. Eloise did not want to be depressed, not today. Not with the archaeological find of a lifetime landing in her lap, one that would have sent her beloved father into academic nirvana. How proud, how happy he would have been for her, how intrigued to watch it all unfold. (It also seemed fitting, somehow, that the exchange of a set of skeletal remains represented the high-point of her relationship with Darius.) But when the rush of endorphins subsided, the cobweb of life’s ever-present banality caught her out.

  As she anticipated the comforts of her light-blessed living room, its Victorian features cherished by a chain of appreciative occupants (her parents included), there it was once more, overpowering everything. The foul stink registered even before she caught sight of it. Recently, appallingly, Newton had become incontinent and had taken to soothing his shame on her priceless Persian rug. She could hardly bear it. In fact she couldn’t bear it at all, relented and dissolved under the tears.

  Am I the kind of person who would euthanise the afflicted, the needy, when they do not ask for it, ask only to be loved? And who will take care of me, when, if, I ever go the same way?

  Despite his delivery (and his personal news) seeing Darius again had not helped. He brought not only the baggage of their own history together but also his connection to her family. The memory of his years as her father’s protégé pulled her hopelessly into the past and all its lost promise. With each damp tissue tossed to her ebony coffee table, Eloise could not help but trace a path backwards, to so many memories, names, regrets. To other struggles to meld her life with another’s. Or choosing not to try.

  Relationship. Her parents had made it seem so deceptively easy. Although quite happy in her own company (and needing too much of it, perhaps), Eloise also enjoyed many treasured friendships. But she understood that her strength was the glue in this network of support, while it had so often been the repellent in her attempts to bond with the male of the species. Apart from one, that is.

  The only one she truly regretted losing, however brief and unlikely that interlude had been. The one who had propelled her into the contemporary, to the edge of things, a place both alien and invigorating. One who had been actively drawn to her force of character, even as its application had ripped its way through the possibilities. No. She would not think about that now. Every memory of him, his youthful, loving face, his unrestrained heart, hurt as much as it thrilled. Enough. She would no longer dwell on any of those in her past. Not today. Not now.

  She mopped up the last teardrop, erased its trail of endocrine purging (for that was all this was, a much needed chemical rebalancing), threw away the tissues, cleaned up Newton’s mess. Eloise knew that she did not have to be alone. It was a conscious choice. One that was necessary for now, or forever if need be. She knew that attraction had never been the problem, many had sensed the passion beneath the presentation.

  *

  The snow has come again. Not unusual, but this wind. Her lips are burnt, hands raw, fingers deadening. The flakes have become icy thorns that torment her eyes and feel as though they might blind her. She pushes against the softness as it builds around feet she can no longer feel, their worn wrappings sodden and slippery. It is days since they abandoned the depleted valley and now the high, open plain has them at its mercy.

  Further. She must go further, make her breath work, keep the stride steady. She knows that if she keeps moving without breaking rhythm it will be easier to keep on moving. She clings to the thought of other long walks in better times. How she would ignore the complaints of her companions on the long trek to the summer camp. No protesting from her as she followed her elder brothers, determined to match their pace and refusing a ride on her father’s shoulders. How she longs for those shoulders now.

  She slips. Comes down hard on her knees and wrists to protect the baby at her back. It stings, but she worries only that her stumble will awaken the little one – no doubt as hungry now as she is cold, in spite of the fur-lined swaddling of the new papoose. While her daughter feeds faster but less often since their long respite in the valley, her growing weight has begun to wear on her mother so much more.

  It’s no good, they must stop again, and soon. They must rest before she drops, before her toes are beyond thawing. She needs to nurse while lyi
ng on her side so they can each recover, but how, and where? The secretive sun should have been directly overhead by now, but in spite of a world made dirty white, it is dark as the end of day. She pushes on.

  Something begins to take shape up ahead, an island of life perhaps, and she moves quickly towards the hope of it. These lonely trees are dead. Once they would have borne berries and nuts, but though barren they are sturdy. The trunks will stand and the branches that she can break with ease have enough sap left in them to bend. She coaxes them into a trellis which she then leans within the lee of the trees, against a pair of close-set spines.

  But the task is harder than she hoped and she has never enjoyed such labours, even in less brutal weather. This was always the work of the more willing, the more skilled in such matters. As several of the branches which she’d hoped would be strong enough begin to snap and crack and collapse the trellis, she curses them. Curses her own impatience for not choosing more carefully in the first place. She begins again, until the trellis can withstand its own weight and tension.

  Next, she packs some snow over the unrolled hide that she has strapped to the lean-to, its other half hanging loose in front then fixed at the ground with stones. In the morning she will gather up these stones and leave them around the base of one of the trees, as she has done at intervals along the way, whenever finding the right tree. She does this both in thanks and as a signal to any other who might understand and respect the gesture. For many days now she has found no trees sweet or rich enough to tap for their life-giving sap, but even so she honours these elders, these guides.

  The task is nearly done. She leaves a small opening uncovered at the top of the shelter, then digs out any snow left within to create a pit for the fire and lays more branches beside it to rest upon. Their dried leaves will offer some comfort. Stripping away a few thin slivers of bark, she adds these to some more of the leaves to act as tinder. The work is slow, her fingers resist her commands, but at last it is complete and she hangs her necklace of shell, feather and ochre at the shelter’s entrance in blessing. This will do, so long as the wind lets up, even a little.

  Now she pulls from under the front of her deerskin cape the small pouch that hangs around her neck, the charred purse containing a life-giving growth, the powder from a magical fungus that forms on certain trees in the shape of a stag’s foot. It takes so long to light but, by the grace of some unknowable spirit, it will hold its smouldering over the course of a day. A spark remains within despite her fears, despite the snow, and it is enough. This secret has kept the many sons and daughters of her tribe alive along so many travels, throughout the turning tides. There is no life without fire. Now under this makeshift shelter, thanks to the spirit of the flame, she can rest a while and revive.

  On a good, thin, flat rock she places a few of the dried acorns that have fallen and shrivelled around the trees. She grinds them with a handful of snow then slides the rock beneath the fire stack where the nuts will roast to an edible paste. It occurs to her that sometimes under this kind of tree there grows a flower with a bulb that can be eaten if cooked well enough, and on digging with a stick where some wilted shoots lie she discovers a handful. These flowers will bloom no more, except through the strength they will give her to carry on.

  It is a struggle to keep the fire alight, the whip of the wind is everywhere at once and it finds its way under the hide. The smoke refuses to follow a direct path upwards through the opening and she is often forced to breathe it in. The coughing is painful in the deepest part of her lungs, since the first soot that had fallen instead of rain. But at least the stones she has set around the spitting twigs already hold some heat. When they are warm enough, between her efforts to keep the spark alive and to stop the kindling from saturating, she holds the pebbles close to her skin and in her embrace of the infant. Now, at last, she can feed her child at leisure again. How patient the little one has learned to be. Unlike her mother! How fast she has grown over this handful of moons. How well she sleeps now. The hot stones and the suckling of the child bring the kind of comfort she has longed for.

  She tries to remember the warmth of another adult body around her, above her, beneath her. The heat of touch and movement. The abandonment to need, the struggle to rise to the sharpest crest of sensation, the desperate dance, like a hand-to-hand duel to arrive at a shocking surrender and a willing kind of death. She cannot bring back that burning. But now, she has something else.

  *

  Time and space, once the furore had subsided and the circus surrounding the delivery of the bones had left. Alone in the clean room, Eloise observed the evidence. Female X was about five and a half feet, judging from the length of the femur. Tall for her time? Homo sapiens rather than any other ancient hominin, as verified by the ventral ridge on the scapula, the triangular diaphysis of the femur, the canine teeth and the shape of the skull.

  Precise age undetermined, but a young adult. There was a historical hairline fracture in one femur. Perhaps she limped or perhaps she had overcome it, but there were suggestions of sustained physical activity. Signs of periodic starvation but otherwise she had been in apparently good health. The dorsal pitting of the pelvis showed an indication of possible childbirth. Cause of death unclear – probably exposure.

  Isotope analysis to establish diet was due, although waiting on a backlog at the specialist lab, but the radio carbon dating had come back in good time. Between seventy and eighty thousand years, probably closer to the middle of that period (before or after Toba?) and possibly during the onset of a minor glaciation event. Middle Palaeolithic. My god, thought Eloise, in a habitual resort to ‘divine’ wonder despite her agnosticism, although today she was immune to its irony.

  Perhaps the reference was appropriate after all. The discovery on Mount Kenya had been what many might consider miraculous, this invaluable relic uncovered in the depths of a crevasse at the beginning of a shrinking glacier. An unintended exploration, but the climber had not been badly hurt, even if his adventure holiday had been cut short. Before being hauled out by his team the crampons on his boots had uncovered the corona of an apparently humanoid skull. A few inches to the right or left and the bones might have remained buried for another generation or more. Good man, thought Eloise. Good man.

  And so now it began. Could there be any suitable cells from which to extract a viable amplified sequence? How had these bones survived the cycles of retreat and advance within the ice caps – of periods when there may have been little or no ice at all? Had any mummified soft tissue become separated and ground away at the base of the glacier? Or been slowly scavenged, the other missing bones carried off in the jaws of one or a series of animals? Had she died above or below the crevasse, fallen or been buried there deliberately? So many questions.

  The scattered remains were in remarkable condition, albeit scratched, worn and pitted post mortem. Despite the rapid melt at the discovery site the decay seemed minimal.

  Eloise took a long look at the skull. The morphology was not quite as she’d expected for the African Rift Valley at that time and, oddly, she felt a recognition scratching around in the recesses of her memory but she couldn’t reach it. Then it materialised. Qafzeh! This skull, though smaller, female and from about 10 or 20,000 years later, had arresting similarities to the 90,000-year-old Homo sapiens male found in what is now Israel. Her father had kept a replica of the Qafzeh skull in his study, and as a curious young child she had been in that very cave.

  Slight brow ridge (though a higher, more vertical forehead than Qafzeh), high cheekbones, distinctive jaw and a defined chin. There were several possibilities for the resemblance. But was it conceivable, could X perhaps share a direct, if ancient, ancestry with those brave pioneers out of Africa who had walked across a briefly flowering Sahara and then crossed a low-level Nile delta into the Sinai about 120,000 years ago? Or perhaps they had waded through the shallow channel across from the Horn around that time and migrated upwards to the Levant – and onwards from there?
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br />   Any connection between those older travellers to the Sinai and the much younger remains now in her lab, was a tempting conceit, even if that particular wave of migration appeared unsuccessful in leaving lasting populations, and Female X had been found in east Africa. Nevertheless, Eloise remained tantalised by a notion of her father’s, often derided by his contemporaries in archaeology, that the Qafzeh and other early Homo sapiens populations who had ventured beyond the African cradle (well before the direct ancestors of today’s human diaspora) had not completely disappeared but may have left some living signature behind.

  These were considerations for another time. There was another more crucial conundrum. Being clearly Anatomically Modern Human, Female X would surely be of the direct lineage of mitochondrial Eve, another hundred thousand years earlier than the Qafzeh people, but was she part of a branch that died out later in a genetic bottleneck, at a time when human numbers had plummeted – or might she have played some part in seeding any of today’s populations, African or non-African?

  So, who are you, Miss X? And what the hell were you doing way up there on that mountain?

  4

  The snow has stopped and the wind is weakening. The half-lit horizon offers several choices – from the flat, easy but waterless ground to her east to the suggestion of an old river bed to the west – but it is the hillier terrain ahead that is drawing her. More draining on her dwindling reserves, but with the promise of greater protection and resources if it yields what she hopes it will. She is directly downwind now and catches the pungent hints of life… life that has also enriched the dirt with its death. Better to smell death, than nothing at all?

  She is further south than any of her band imagined could be gained with safety but she can see that this territory once offered great bounty. Its uplands must have caught what sunlight had fallen here for much of the day (she tries to remember the warmth of the sun on her face, the richness of the colours it bestowed) but the ravines here would have offered plentiful shade too, when needed. Water would have trickled through in streams, perhaps even dripping from the stonier cliffs, once. Maybe still? This is a chance she must take, although she knows that such opportunity might also mean competition.