The Find (14 page)

Felix and Greta blotted the sound out with their headphones; she put on ear protectors, started to feel even more deranged, disconnected both from herself and from what she was doing. Dropped her chisel. Lost her train of thought: this was what happened when he, Scott, was not there. Why had she let him leave?

Turning onto Fifth, Scott noticed two beaten-up camper vans parked on the corner lot and four more in the Save on Foods carpark, both plastered with Greenpeace and anarchy stickers, little rainbows, and messages about wild fish not doing drugs and letting the trees live so people could breathe. They'd been parked all night — wispy bits of Indian cloth hung over steamed-up windows. He rapped on the last van as he walked past and heard someone groan.

He pushed into the empty store, filled the cart. Canned ground beef. Bread. Noodles. Crackers. Hard cheese. Soft cheese in a tube. Baked beans. Carrots? Apples? Onions. Nuts. Raisins. What was Mac getting nowadays? High protein? Tuna steaks? Wheatgrass juice? Cereals. Pancake mix.

‘Some kind of
Treehuggers
,' Tracy told him at the till. ‘Filled up the whole of Shady Acres and more still turning up. All wanting organic fruit! How the hell do they afford it?' Outside, a white woman with mouse-coloured dreadlocks emerged from one of the vans wearing a purple tunic half-transparent in the morning sun.

It was past ten by the time he got back to the dig. He'd been hearing Led Zeppelin for the last half-hour and knew it would not be Anna's favourite. She jerked around angrily when he tapped her shoulder, offering the laptop.

‘In the office!' she shouted, unable to hear her own voice. ‘Then, Scott, please stop this!'

Hell
, he thought.

The sound clarified as he walked towards it. They had an old CD player wired into two external speakers; he unplugged them, and carried the machine over to Swenson.

‘You're scaring the birds.' Swenson got to his feet, chisel in hand.

‘Bothering you?' he asked.

‘I heard it over a mile away.' This, Scott thought, was where a person might drop the player on the ground and, using the hammer by Swenson's foot, destroy it with a couple of well-aimed blows. Or fight, wrestling the chisel out of the other man's hand. But he stood straight and smiled into the Ray-Bans.

‘Don't want to have to confiscate your batteries,' he said, and behind him, someone laughed. Mike, too, smiled.

‘My hands are shot,' Anna told him. ‘I'm making a lot of errors.'

‘You use your hands a lot,' he pointed out. He was sitting in the shade, ready to enter data onto Anna's laptop. The screen came to life and he found himself in something called
Personal
: the whole directory was visible and available. Some kind of diary. Folders with dates, others with people's names, and one that caught his eye called
sexrules.doc
. ‘You didn't exit properly!' he told her. ‘If this is going to be passed around you need to set up passwords for your personal files. Here, look—' He felt his face burn as he pushed the machine back to her.

‘I think I'm forgetting more,' she said.

‘Everyone forgets. No one else normally uses it, right?' He looked away while she dealt with it.

The work was just data entry: the name and number of the parts of the pterosaur that had been removed and their coordinates on the grid. It had to be exact. Her own hands resting in her lap, Anna watched carefully as Scott typed each item into the spreadsheet, double-checked, and moved the ruler down on the paper for the next piece. She felt the slow release of tension in the flexor muscles of her forearms, breathed in deeply. The chatter of the keyboard was oddly soothing and, towards the bottom of the first page, she leaned back a little, allowed herself to close her eyes. She slept, her head tipped back and to one side, her hands on top of each other in her lap.

It was strange to see her with the beam of her attention switched off: she who was always doing, talking, acting, reacting — now still. For a moment Scott's hands fell still and he took in the fine skin on her eyelids, the new shape of her face now that her mouth and jaw were loose, the paleness beneath her chin.

Phalan. L, 1, prox
, he typed.
N3.15, W6.6

Phalan. L, 1, med, N5, W6.6

It felt almost wrong to look, and very hard not to. Weird: like you were suddenly close in a way neither of you might want. Suppose the insect that circled the pair of them landed on her, what would he do then? And what was it? Those big opal-shaped wings, the gangly legs: she'd know, but she was asleep.

He saved everything, moved his chair back carefully, left.

♦ ♦ ♦

She showed him the Cretaceous-Tertiary boundary, a blurred line of pale grey in the darker grey of the cliff, in some places a metre above where they stood, in others less, or invisible. ‘Dust and volcanic ash,' she explained. ‘So: years of low-light conditions. First the plants go, and then the animals depending on them. Toxic gasses, fires, disease, growth of the insect population... I do tend to feel
all
these things, rather than just one of them. But in any case, you can see that despite what Dr Swenson says, it looks as if our specimens
predate
the mass extinction at the end of the Cretaceous by at least five million years. Perhaps he meant to suggest that there were earlier periods of hostile conditions on smaller scale. That's possible.

‘The bones are still associated, so predation is unlikely. Likewise, a sudden event like a mudslide or a flash flood. So, it's a mystery—' She stopped midsentence. Stood there in the gorge, looking him in the face in a way that seemed to suggest that she was somehow seeing beneath his skin, and very likely naming things he did not even know were there. ‘A not very scientific word,' she said. ‘Something religious about it, compared to say puzzle, conundrum. Maybe I should say
unknown…

‘And what you feel faced with the unknown is a kind of yearning, like the desire to travel, to set forth in your canoe or your space ship, towards whatever it is that might be out there... I'm thinking more and more that all we can hope to do is
see
it. A glimpse even. That perhaps we'll never be sure of understanding anything. Do I make any sense?' she asked, and then her face changed, seemed to shrink. ‘Am I talking too much?'

‘No—' She grasped his arm.

‘You'll tell me, won't you, if you think I'm symptomatic?'

‘Yes,' he said, and she let go. But he knew that he couldn't be sure what he would do in that or any situation and that he was already way out into his own unknown. No one had ever spoken to him like this before, and none of these people were like him.

‘Good. Thank you,' she told him, and then set off downriver with the laptop in her backpack; she walked at a brisk pace, not looking back, the pack bouncing a little.

♦ ♦ ♦

Sometimes Anna thought she could see the Native part of Scott quite clearly — in the shape of his jaw, the set of his eyes, in the width of his face — or was it just that now that she knew about his mother she was looking to see it? In any case he was changing: his skin darkening in the sun, his body growing leaner from the work he did. And more than once, at night, Scott had appeared in her mind's eye, smiling and squinting a little in the sun: a strong face, but also one that liked to laugh. A face that could suggest irony, or enquire
How are you?
Or signal
Back off. Let it go, okay? Cool.

Was she exploiting him?

It was an arrangement — unusual, yes — but one of mutual convenience. Need, even. In six weeks, she reminded herself, the dig would be finished; Scott would move on and find something new, hopefully better than working in the hotel. And as for her own afterwards, she would think of that only when she absolutely had to.

—
♦ —

BECAUSE ANNA WAS AWAY
, the Swenson team came over with two litres of red wine. People set their chairs to claim space around the fire, and then stood by Scott's kitchen area with drinks and plates in their hands while he cooked their sausages and sipped wine from an enamel mug.

After the meal, Swenson stretched out, feet reaching to the fire, hands above his head, looked around, and grinned:

‘While the cat's way, eh.' People laughed. ‘How're you getting on over here?' Everyone waited for Jason, acting director in Anna's absence, to respond:

‘It's tough shale, and we're being cautious, but pretty good.'

‘I guess you're going to have to make very good time,' Swenson said, ‘if you're to get everything out of here before we go back into that cliff. We've got an engineer on the case and he's very positive — there's no overhang. We'll use tiny charges, but there's always a theoretical risk of some degree of collapse. So for health and safety purposes you'll need to be offsite as well when we go in… Has Anna said anything about that?'

‘Charges?'
Lin asked.

‘Maybe you could make sure she's fully aware...'

‘Sure,' Jason said.

‘Good man,' Mike told him. ‘Don't forget. And look, there's no need to stay over here. You're welcome any time to come over and see how we're setting it all up.'

He shifted in his chair then and focused his attention on Greta. Scott, opposite, watched them. He knew how Anna would see all this.

‘USC?' Swenson was saying. ‘You must be working with Alexei Goodman? Old colleague of mine. What's your thesis topic?'

‘You're very quiet tonight,' Lin said as she sat down next to Scott. It was almost dark.

‘Well, you know, I don't really speak this language,' Scott told her. Her laugh was a tiny rustle, a gasp beside him.

‘So you must learn. I learned English at school. This is only vocabulary…'

‘I'm more interested in people,' he said.

‘Difficult!' she told him. ‘Even so, if this is their language, you will have to speak it.'

Mike topped up Greta's glass with the last of the wine. He wrote something down for her, leaned in close as he handed over the scrap of paper. She smiled across at him: nothing too hard to understand there, it seemed to Scott.

Marilyn, Scott's replacement on the reception desk at the Mountain View, looked Anna in the eye and said she was sorry, but there were no other rooms available, just 221, the room Anna had specifically asked
not
to be given. Marilyn placed the key on the counter between them, and waited for Anna to give in.

Just a room, she told herself. It had been used by others since the night she lay there sleepless in the aftermath of hitting Mike. It had been vacuumed and polished, changed. She was avoiding anger (expressing it, at least) and she wanted more than anything to settle on a real bed and call Lesley and Vik. So she took the key and let herself in.

‘How's your monster?' Lesley asked. ‘Tired,' she said of herself. ‘Way bigger than when you last saw me. Way bigger than I ever was with either of the other two. Exhausted, weepy and sentimental. My wits are gone — but actually, it's okay, except for when I look at myself or put on a pair of shoes, so I'm not doing that. Blood pressure's still high, but they are letting me be.'

The nursery was perfect, Lesley said. Buttermilk with stencilled border, jungle-print drapes and high-contrast mobiles dangling above the matching cribs. She didn't think they would make the trip over to the dig. She knew
she
couldn't. Maybe Vik would bring the kids? He was asleep already. She'd suggest it to him in the morning, though he too was very tired.

Anna lay between the hotel sheets and imagined her nieces to be, floating in the amniotic sea: half-knowns. An almost mystery moving towards an ongoing revelation. In the time it had taken to return to Big Crow and begin the excavation, two entirely new people with identical DNA had been made: it was dizzying to think of the replications and divisions, the switching on and off of genes, the differentiation of tissues and organs and limbs, all of it happening two times over and that while it happened, while the twin girls in Lesley's womb quietly created themselves in the darkness, the mundane lives of those already born continued as if nothing was changing: they rushed in and out of cars, made telephone calls, booked flights, made sure there was food in the freezer, wrote papers, argued…

So she lay quite happily in the same room where she'd raged against Mike Swenson and fought against her own memories.

It seemed to her that life was sometimes terrifying, at other times shot through with bliss. So much in it, all at once: the creep of continental plates, the code in your genes, the smell of cooking, the memory of your mother's voice calling you out of your dream. Extinctions and creations. The rush of birdsong at dawn. A woman's belly, tight with the life inside. There were so many discoveries: those you went looking for, yearned for so much that it hurt, and others which lay waiting and which, if you knew of them, you'd do anything to escape, and behind each of them, another. A switchback ride, a dream of flight.

For a moment or two, she allowed herself to imagine Scott Macleod — that he was next to her, dark and solid against the white sheet. She could hear his breath, wanted to lean back into him and at the same time, wanted him to vanish: a twentysomething man whose mother was St'alkwextsihn, whose Scottish father had drunk himself almost to death, a high-school dropout getting work experience: a surprising, sweet young man with whom she should not ever get involved, and certainly not at this time of her life.

In the bright white circle of light from the flashlight suspended above him, the real Scott lay on his stomach inside his tent and read how for years after Coneally's good news, fifty-eight people in six different labs collaborated in the hope of finding, in an area of 2.2 million base pairs, the actual piece of code that created a human calamity. How they began to burn out, how they questioned themselves: the code they wanted seemed sometimes to be in one place, sometimes another. Perhaps there were several mutations, and perhaps they had to be present in particular combinations? Or perhaps the cause they sought was not a mutation, but a normal gene that failed to switch on or off at the right time? They wore white coats, had some kind of computers even back then, but they were searching for an invisible needle in a barn full of invisible straw... He turned the pages, aware of Anna's absence, one ear alert to the sounds of the night.