Bone Lines Read online

  Is it a kill yet? No. Not yet. The animal too has a spirit that will not acquiesce, not without understanding that its sacrifice is essential. Or that its opponent is worthy. She holds on, waving her hips, kicking her legs, using the weight of every life yet to come to ensure that the animal’s heart cannot survive, knowing that her own can never be the same. Knowing that what she kills is any hope of loving through the body again. It is the price she must pay for retaining her soul. For saving this child. It is the cost of holding on to a heart that still beats.

  6

  In the unexpected encounter between a camera case and a shin bone, the shin will come off considerably worse. Eloise had confirmed this fact the sharp-cornered way, and rubbing in the arnica that was a permanent fixture of her handbag was having little effect. Neither had she been able to swear away the pain, having no desire to draw further attention to her stumble.

  ‘Are you alright, Dr Kluft? We’ll be shooting your sequence very soon. Thanks so much for your patience. Can I get you a coffee, or a doughnut? Or some water?’

  The chirpy young production runner was determined to be useful. Eloise wondered who he was related to, quite sure that nepotism was the way such entry-level breaks into film and TV were attained.

  ‘Yes, yes, I’m fine thanks, no problem. All good.’

  The film team documenting ‘The Story of Sarah’ had commandeered the lab, stopping all useful work, and Eloise felt like a spare part as she waited to be interviewed. She wondered if she should rethink her appearance. Reading glasses or no? Some had thought they suited her. One scandalous yet irresistible young lover in particular. (‘No, stop, keep ’em on, babe’ – he asks as he lifts her on to her kitchen island – ‘I like it.’) That tiny clutching in her lower abdomen, she smiled with it, tried to hold on to the memory, but then it was gone.

  She kept the glasses on, enjoying the new aura of inscrutability those sensations had delivered, and she allowed herself a subtle dusting of make-up, a slash of mascara. No need for strict compliance with the boffin stereotype, after all, a little lip gloss was surely not ‘unscientific’?

  Eloise had been glad that she’d made the effort when, immediately after, she was introduced to ‘The Climber’ – the young Australian mountaineer who had found Sarah’s skull and who had been invited to the lab today to record his side of the story. Max Michaelson. Eloise had heard his name before, of course, but today she thought it had a suitably heroic ring to it. Indeed, she’d had to resist a sudden urge to throw her arms around him, and not only out of gratitude. Max was strong and mission-fit, of course, but otherwise not quite as she’d imagined him. Arrestingly tall, he was attractive in a rough, surf-dude kind of way with shoulder-length hair that had been sand-blasted into fair, spiral curls but he also had an unexpected authority that was both calming and compelling.

  ‘Hey, Dr Kluft, how ya going?’ He shook her hand as if they were about to do business, as if he were bidding for a contract.

  ‘G’day,’ she said in return, feeling a complete fool, although he seemed entirely good-natured about her patronising attempt to bond.

  ‘I really don’t know how to thank you enough, really,’ Eloise continued, trying to salvage something from this first impression, ‘I don’t think there’s ever been a more fortuitous accident, from my perspective anyway.’

  ‘Well, I’d have to agree with you there, Doc! And just as well it was someone with a clue, eh, and not some drongo with an Indiana Jones complex?’

  At first the Aussie accent had put her off, reached into the place where she had buried her prejudices and confirmed him as a ‘type’. And Max Michaelson was not lacking in bravado, but there was much more to him than this. Eloise knew that he was a fellow of the scientific fraternity but now learned that his specialism was astrophysics at the University of Manchester and that a doctorate was on the way. One of the glamour boys.

  Eloise found herself tempted to flirt, to search into eyes that were as blue as her own, and felt that perhaps the Sarah connection between them warranted some exploration, but then she pulled back. Too bloody young. She couldn’t go ‘there’ again, regardless of all the insistent recollections that had been bothering her recently, the rebirth of an ancient longing. Or could she? Should she try to find him again after all this time, the source of all this recurring turbulence? No. Ridiculous. That escapade, as delicious as it was, had ended for all the right reasons. She was fine on her own, she was making the most of her space and freedom, of the ability to focus and to pursue the goals that really mattered. Even if the world beyond tended to regard the deliberately single woman with suspicion, or worse, sympathy.

  She made a closer examination of Max in order to reinforce her professional equanimity, and yes, there it was, right there on his left hand – a wedding ring. Good, she thought. Good for him.

  Nevertheless, Eloise had sensed some manner of connection between them, something that reached beyond this young man’s obvious appeal, beyond even their slight degrees of separation in the form of Sarah. And there was more about Max that fascinated her. Despite the aquamarine eyes and the sun-singed curls, Eloise was unclear about his ethnicity. Something about his features suggested a recent ancestry that drew from a gene pool not exclusively Caucasian.

  Eloise decided to hover and watch his interview on a monitor. My god, she thought, he’s a natural. The lens was a long-lost lover, found again. He neither stuttered nor stumbled nor blushed, but maintained a beguiling stillness and a vocal flow that made everything he said seem at once very clever and readily comprehensible. Not everyone was so charmed. She saw one member of the film crew curl his lip, and a couple of her colleagues appeared most put out by this telegenic intruder. If the doctorate doesn’t work out for him, she thought, Max could easily carve out a more financially rewarding career. He had the scent of stardom about him, for sure.

  Max was not the only distraction. Darius was also there, to regale the crowd with his charisma. Eloise had smiled, unable to resist shooting an arched glance in his direction when Max had made the Indiana Jones remark. But otherwise she felt strangely unaffected by his presence, despite the unusual warmth of his greeting to her or the enthusiastic pressure of his kiss to each cheek… and how often she caught him smiling in her direction.

  She was deeply grateful to Darius, nonetheless. Not only for urging the documentary crew to her domain so much sooner than planned, after they’d finished filming him at the dig on Mount Kenya, but also for the VIP guest that he had brought with him. The presence of the Kenyan Director of Antiquities was indeed having an effect upon her, raising the stakes to the point of making her a nervous wreck. Eloise knew that she must summon every inherited drop of her mother’s legendary charm and channel it into action. But then Darius walked over, almost as if pushed by her parents’ invisible hands, to give her shoulder an encouraging squeeze before she was gathered up and ushered into position by the keen young runner.

  ‘OK, Dr Kluft, comfortable?’ the director, a wiry, short-haired woman called Marcy asked rhetorically, her time-is-money manner doing little to calm her subject’s nerves.

  ‘Yes, thanks,’ said Eloise, although she didn’t feel comfortable at all. The lighting guy was still fussing around her, waving his hand-held meter in her face to measure its reflectivity.

  ‘OK, so, why don’t we start by going through some of the basics: what you’re looking for, what you might expect to find, some of the challenges,’ instructed Marcy, ‘in fact, start right from the beginning, explain what genes actually mean, why the mitochondrial DNA is so important, for the uninitiated. Try to translate for the layman. Don’t worry because we can edit down or go over something again in a tighter way if necessary. Just start explaining and we’ll go from there.’

  Oh hell, thought Eloise. Please don’t let me make a fool of myself. Then she told herself to get a grip and do whatever it took to keep Sarah with them, keep her connected, let them know what she meant to the team.

  Oh, but what do
I say, she agonised, and how many tired old terms should I trot out? Can I bear to say ‘building blocks’?

  Eloise heard the director declare that they were rolling – and then remembered nothing of her interview until a few days later, when she was emailed a download link to a rough cut of her section. She didn’t know what to do with the uneasy sensation in her stomach as she watched herself, but felt some relief that it was nowhere near as bad as she’d imagined. At least this particular sequence they had edited together didn’t linger long over her obvious discomfort, but regularly cut away to a variety of infographics and more general footage.

  During a brief, fast-motion clip of cellular division, Eloise heard herself pronounce in commentary (and in a far higher voice than she recognised as her own): ‘Our genes, which are found in the nuclei of almost every living cell of our bodies, write the blueprint for our lives in so many indelible ways – and not only in terms of obvious factors such as build, colouring, or abilities etc., but they may also have an effect on our disposition, our vulnerability to certain diseases and many other characteristics that we’re still learning about.’

  At this point the film switched from microscopic images to a montage of the many peoples of the world, of busy streets, athletes in action, concert pianists.

  ‘Although of course nurture and how our genes interact with our environment – in effect how we ‘use’ our genetic material – also plays a vital role. Genes are passed down to us in pairs, one half from each parent, and they can be recessive or dominant depending on how each strand of DNA recombines.’

  Now they’d spliced in an animated clip of the helix unrolling before switching to an excruciating close-up.

  ‘There are four key amino acids that allow us to read DNA, labelled for short as A, C, G & T. Wait. Stop, no, can I rephrase that, or rather re-arrange it, that combination sounds too much like an aperitif! Come to think of it, I could use one of those right now…’

  To her horror they had left in that little gaffe, along with her visible blushes. Eloise made sure to note the time code on the screen in preparation for the email that would beg them to take that out and go straight to the corrected version. The editor might have been amused by her poor attempt at a joke and considered it worth keeping – but, no, no, this was far too embarrassing for broadcast. She hit play again.

  ‘… There are four key chemicals, which are the markers that help us to map out DNA. These are labelled for short as GTCA. Each strand, which is in the form of a double coil, is packaged into chromosomes, of which we each have 23 pairs. The Y chromosome exists only in males and the X chromosome is found in both men and women. But there are two types of DNA: nucleic – and this is where the most variation occurs – and mitochondrial DNA, which is found in the tiny power sources or ‘batteries’ within our cells. This changes very slowly over the generations and comes to us from the egg, so is inherited only through the maternal line…’

  Mercifully, here they had cut away to some magnified film of a fertilised egg dividing and becoming an embryo.

  ‘… It’s through this mitochondrial DNA that we can track matrilineal ancestry and which has told us that, theoretically, all humans now alive on earth today are descended from one particular Homo sapiens female – a kind of biological Eve, if you like – who lived in Africa nearly 200,000 years ago. Though it’s important not to think of her as either the sole or the first human female, but rather our most recent common ancestor, the one who had a continual line of surviving female descendants.’

  After returning to a close-up, but one in which, thankfully, she didn’t have the appearance of a cat observing a ghost, they faded to stock footage of a range of indigenous peoples.

  ‘As humans we share about 99.5 per cent of our genetic material in common and we are all so much more closely related than previously appreciated. The apparent racial distinctions that have divided us for so long are no more than minor, mutable adaptations to environment or climate, to diet or exposure to pathogens. Or some tiny percentage of DNA acquired from other ancient hominins outside of Africa, and these are related mostly to hair and eye colour, or to health and resistance, or sun exposure and circadian rhythms. Not so different really to one sister having red hair, burning easily and being a night owl, and another being a brunette who tans better and goes to bed early, or, say, one being a better swimmer and the other good at ballet.

  ‘The rest is cultural, or the result of how race is experienced in a world so sadly inclined to bigotry and ‘othering’. The fact is we even share certain universal genes from primordial organisms with every living thing on the planet. In studying Sarah’s genetic makeup, once we have unravelled a complete sequence – and we’re confident that we’ll soon find some cells that have survived the millennia of her icy grave – this could not only tell us about Sarah’s branch of pre-historical humanity but also about ourselves today. This is such a significant find because a great swathe of the descendants of mitochondrial Eve, and other pre-historic cousins, died out in a series of natural catastrophes. This reduction may have been caused by changing climate or other environmental and geophysical stresses, but also through competition for resources.’

  For this section, Eloise was relieved to be featured only as voiceover above an impressive montage of volcanoes, firestorms, drought, wind-blasted ice sheets. The full apocalyptic playlist.

  ‘We hope to establish whether or not Sarah is, in fact, related to any of our contemporary lineages and how much she might have in common, or otherwise, with people living today. And we may gain crucial insights into certain diseases and into human characteristics and adaptations that are relevant to our current struggles…’

  The screen then defaulted to its over-familiarity with a face that, yes, she acknowledged, had needed so much more make-up after all – not the false insouciance of less. It seemed the team had been unable to use the longer shots they had filmed of her at first, perhaps because those fidgeting hands they’d mentioned were too much of a distraction. But now Eloise was becoming inured to the magnification of her faults and not flinching so much at the stark reality of her middle-aged self. It seemed that her cursory glances at passing mirrors, especially without her glasses on, had been blessedly deceiving up until now. Oh well, never mind. At least the ageing process was also dressing her with a distinguished air, which surely could not hurt in a professional arena where young female scientists were often ‘invisible’ – even when fully present.

  ‘There’s no way of knowing whether Sarah had any surviving offspring or whether she herself is one of our direct ancestors. But the fact that she was found in the African tropical refugia, a safe climatic haven between certain latitudes which was home to several successful Homo sapiens groups, makes this is an intriguing possibility. It’s feasible that she – or her family group – were a source for our forebears and that the children of Sarah, so to speak, could still be walking among us today…’

  They wrapped up her interview with more ‘busy streets’ footage, followed by an onscreen note explaining that this would fade into the reconstruction of Sarah once it was complete. Eloise clicked stop, closed her laptop and went to find that bottle of Sancerre she’d been saving, which soon proved to have been a good decision.

  When she turned on her TV in time for the recapped headlines at the end of the early evening news, she was confronted with the very same footage that she’d previously endured. She caught a moment of a smiling Max before they cut to ‘Dr Louise Cruft’ (as the caption had renamed her) wondering whether ‘The Children of Sarah’ might still be walking among us today.

  Oh, bloody hell. That first swallow of wine had never been so welcome. No one had warned her they might leak anything to the press so soon. Although she should not have been surprised. When Darius had promised to do all that he could, of course that would mean pulling in his heavyweight PR contacts too. Within a minute of the closing credits her landline had started to ring and her mobile was quivering with incoming alerts.
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  *

  The bear skin is an unbelievable boon. Perhaps the Spirits have come back to her. Yes, there is a cost to this kill, but maybe a gift too? The extra weight is demanding but she is warm for the first time in so many cycles of the blighted sky above. Such a risk, she has barely recovered. Walking is difficult but she can manage. She was clinging tight when the dying beast had fallen and rolled, trapping her leg for a few terrible moments.

  She had honoured the animal and given thanks, as she had been taught, yet knew she would always feel the pain of its passing. It had been a relief to confirm it as male. She was grateful no living cubs would suffer from this loss, only those unborn.

  The liver and the fat have filled her and the meat will last a few more days before it rots. It is already drawing flies, which she keeps away however she can. Some slivers of flesh have been smoked over the fire, some fat rendered to a thin paste. The best is now packed with snow into the dead bear’s stomach and slung across her back, though the aroma will soon be ripe enough to reach the ravenous.

  It is a deep shame to her that she must waste so much of this magnificent animal but there is no clan, no gathering to share the blessing and the burden. At least its carcass will serve one final purpose, drawing scavengers towards its decay and away from their onward path.

  She had blunted her hand axe in skinning and gutting it. Her hands are raw, but now the hide she has tanned with ochre is wrapped around her feet, her body, her baby. The bear’s thigh bone is strapped to her back for a club, its claws are in the hare-fur pouch. One sharp tooth takes pride of place on her amulet. She has been marked by the encounter, both in her body and in her being. She still feels the risk, the bruises, the sprains and the tears (possibly worse within her leg, but she cannot allow that to be. She cannot wait for any fracture to heal.)