The Find (6 page)

The next afternoon, she called Ben Morris, who had been working for years on a huge pterosaur rookery in Brazil. His expertise, she told him, would be a huge asset, and since she had already done most of the donkey work, and was quite willing to do the rest of it, she hoped collaboration would be an attractive proposition.

‘I think this is going be astounding, and it would be wonderful to have you as a partner,' she concluded.

‘Big Crow?' Morris said. ‘Yes. Of course. I think it has excellent chances of support. And, as I said before, it's all dependent on other commitments, but I'm totally behind you guys and I'll do my utmost be there at some point during the excavation.'

‘As you said before? Said to whom?'

‘Swenson, of course,' she heard him say. ‘I'm his referee for this.'

Anna became stone, grafted to her chair, the abandoned mosasaur gathering dust in the lab behind her, the landscape it had been extracted from glaring in the sunshine outside. A hawk hovered in the middle distance.

‘What's your involvement?' Morris asked her.

‘There's been a misunderstanding,' she said and put the phone down.

Immediately, it rang: Colin.

‘Yes,' he admitted. ‘He has applied. It's gone in already. He had two of his post-docs working on it…' He sighed. ‘Of course I don't condone this, Anna. But at this particular time, I don't think there's anything I can do. And I stepped down as chair last week. I think you two need to sort it out between you. I can't say more, but I believe Mike is under a fair bit of pressure right now.'

‘You were
there
!'

‘Well,' he said, ‘yes. And I should remind you that it was I who noticed the second specimen. But yes, I know... The thing is, Anna, I wanted to respond to your message, but there's nothing that I, personally, can do'

‘Are you all right, Col?'

‘Let's say I'm doing okay,' Colin said, and then wished her all the best and ended the call.

But surely, Mike couldn't expect to get away with it?

His voice, professionally warm, invited her to leave a number so he could call back.
Are you there?
she wanted to say.
Pick up the damn phone! How dare you do this? How do you think you can punish me for something that you began?
She managed to hold back, say nothing, strode out of the too-quiet office, her hands fisted, the sound of her blood hissing in her ears.
Please, someone tell me this isn't real, or, failing that, to take the matter right out of my hands and tell me what to do.

Brian, the obvious candidate, waved at a worn typist's chair, an antique almost, he said.

‘Extraordinary,' he told her when she'd finished. ‘He's always been very professional in my dealings with him.'

‘I took all the photographs; Colin was
there
. How can he even think of saying it's
his
? Does he really expect to get away with it?' Brian's shoulders hunched. His blunt fingers dug into the remains of his hair. ‘I suppose you'd have to apprise the funding bodies of the situation, put in your own claim... Let them arbitrate. If the evidence is on your side, well… You've got to get the institution behind you. Talk to Sheila.'

Sheila was away on a course.

At home, she left Mama and Janice talking while she looked up Mike's home number. Lily answered.

‘I don't know,' she said. ‘Let me see.' For several minutes there was total silence on the line, then Mike's voice, very loud in her ear, right in her head it seemed.

‘Hello!'

‘Mike—'

‘How dare you call me at home!'

‘I can't get you at work.' She forced her voice to remain steady. ‘I know what you are doing. It's outrageous… You know as well as I do how this began.'

‘Are you making some kind of allegation?'

‘No— I don't want to make allegations. I want to find a way to—'

‘This is a
professional
matter,' he said just before he hung up. ‘Never, ever, call me at home again.'

Professional? Did he actually believe his own lies? Was his behaviour calculated or compulsive? Was it possible that people would in fact believe him, or rather, be unable to believe that he was actually doing what he was doing? Could all this be real?

Downstairs, her red-gold hair recently cut short, her eyes bright, Janice lounged on the sofa, midway through an account of the summer's main events: her eldest son's first job, her mother's visit, how Ken sold some sculptural pieces as well as masses of the tourist lines of mugs and pots, and now had prospects for shows next year. How good the garden had been. The Lester place next door had sold at last, to a family with a web design business who looked as if they might make a go of things.

Anna refilled their glasses, and sat down carefully next to her mother. The room with its honey-gold walls and her mother's large ochre-and-cream abstract over the fireplace was the same as ever; the thick evening light beyond the windows and the sounds outside were just as they should be. But all of a sudden, she was living two lives: she kept slipping or being dragged out of the one she'd made and into its opposite.

Later, when Janice had gone home, she turned on the lamp and opened the bed for her mother.

‘Are you all right, darling?'

‘Just a bit of trouble with a man,' Anna said as she bent to help her mother swing her legs in. ‘It'll blow over,' she told her, leaning over for a kiss. ‘It's not important.' Her mother gripped her arm. Her eyes seemed huge and very dark in the soft light of the bedroom.

‘I wouldn't have had anything different,' her mother said. ‘You know, I never wished I'd met another man instead of Leo.' This was something Grace had often said, and which part of Anna resisted.
But if you had known right at the beginning? What then?
— though she had come to accept it as what her mother felt to be true.

‘I know, I know.' She patted her mother's arm, kissed the warm, dry skin of her cheek. Her mother's face was owlish, now that the wild hair was thinner and kept short, in wisps around her face.

‘I wish you could have what we had—' her mother said, meaning, Anna knew, family: a communal love that warped and twisted, but never disappeared. Yet how much of that, really, had there been?

‘Mama. Everything's fine. This is the best way. I love you,' she said, and turned out the light.

In her bathroom upstairs, Anna searched her image in the mirror: no glassy stare, no discernible facial twitch. Her face was more severe in its lines than that of the wiry child who appeared, holding Vik's hand, or with him sitting on her lap, in the pre-diagnosis family photos her mother displayed on every available surface downstairs, but she looked out from beneath the same unstyleable mass of hair and she had the same tilt to her chin. There was the beginning of a smile, the familiar mixture of impatience and curiosity in her eyes, and, there on her left temple, hidden under the hair, the faint gleam of the scar.

Her mother had been right and wrong, true and false, when she'd said it was not Daddy who had thrown the binoculars at her. The cause of his irritability and his increasing violence was organic, utterly beyond his control. In one way, the violence was not him as he had historically been, but in another way it was, because he had changed at the cellular level and become a new, difficult-to-like man wearing the same skin, a person who despite everything, and perhaps partly out of loyalty to her memories, her mother still loved.

—
♦ —

ENSCONCED AT THE DESK OF THE
MOUNTAIN VIEW
and awake long after he needed to be, Scott zoomed in and studied the on-screen raven image part by part: the sharp beak, the huge eyes and stylised claws. You could see the cracks in the wood, the places where the paint was beginning to lift. In real life, he knew, the carving would never be retouched: it would slowly fade and rot and in a couple of centuries, vanish entirely into the soil. And so he should probably leave it alone, too, though it was tempting to fix things, to make them look better than they were, which was exactly what Lauren would want.

‘Tourism's all we have now,' she'd told him, her eyes wide with outrage. ‘No one's coming here on business anymore. So, better get out there.' At this time of the year, once the schools were back, but before the snow came, no one at all was stopping at Big Crow, though trucks loaded with raw logs still shuddered down the hill. How long could even that last? Some people, Scott knew, might ask how long
should
it last? Did the people of Big Crow want the planet to burn up, the climate to go haywire, the seas to rise, just so they could pay their bills? But no one here mentioned that way of looking at things. The town, like Mac, could think of nothing but its immediate needs; it was in a kind of permanent daze.

Earlier in the day, through the slatted blind on Dr Hoffman's window, Scott had a good view of the main street, half of it boarded up. Hardly any cars about. Thirty families had left since the flood, but Dr Hoffman said that while there were far fewer people in town since the flood and CanCo closing down its mill, those who had stayed seemed to be sick far more often. Well, she'd asked, how was he? He could feel her pale grey eyes all over him, taking things in: how he hadn't done his leg exercises, or been to the gym, for weeks. He still had the limp; he was gaining weight.

He had mixed feelings about the pills. They made him feel as if he wasn't quite in his own life, though then again, did he want to be?

A temporary solution, according to Dr Hoffman. A way of breaking the vicious cycle. Right now, things would be worse without them. Hopefully, he'd make some changes in his life, and then they would become unnecessary.

‘You'd find far more facilities for your father in a city,' she'd said, ‘and more opportunities for you to fulfil your potential. It's not too late. Why stay here?'

‘He won't go. Says he'll die here, where Mum died.'

‘Don't tell him. When he sobers up, present it as a
fait accompli
.' Fate what? He couldn't. Why? He didn't know. He couldn't pull a trick like that.

Co-dependency
was the other phrase she'd used. Meaning, he depended on his father wrecking his life so he wouldn't have to actually live it?

‘Something like that,' she'd said.

‘Like it's my fault?'

‘I am trying to help,' she said.

Lauren, sole proprietor of the Mountain View, was also the president of the Chamber of Commerce. She had known Scott's mother, hence his job, hence her tolerance of his poor time-keeping, her willingness to overlook the times when some emergency of Mac's meant Scott had to leave, and even the time Mac had turned up and passed out on the picnic bench out front. Recently, Lauren had persuaded the Chamber to hire Scott to create a website.

Two hundred dollars was about a tenth of the going rate — but he'd gone beyond money, way beyond what was normal, what the people you saw on TV or passed on the road looked to be getting, what statistics said people earned and lived on. It was
something
, it might lead to bigger things. He was free to work on the website while on duty (which now included cleaning reception and the breakfast room) so long as there was absolutely nothing else to do.

Lauren had sent Scott out with her camera to get pictures: of the forest, the mountain, water rushing over stones in the river, sunrise over the ocean, of the old post office and these, the carvings that marked the edge of the reserve. Ravens, or crows, depending whom you spoke to. Big beaks, either way.

‘They should put events on up there in the reserve,' Lauren had told him. ‘Drumming or dancing or pole-carving, something.'

‘Why?' he grinned at her, ‘just so we can list it under
Attractions
?'

‘Yes,' she'd said. ‘Why not? Bring people in. We're all in the same boat, except they don't pay tax.' Not exactly willing passengers, Scott thought, though what he'd said, with a slow grin, was
Jealous?
and she'd said no, far from it, but how come
they
wanted it both ways?' Then she'd blushed, and said of course, she had no intention to give offence. She wasn't prejudiced, she took people as she found them and she really admired how his mother had tried to make a different life, and what had happened to their little family was just a tragedy all round.

Tragedy? The word made him uncomfortable. And even if she hadn't been
taken from us
, as Mac put it, his mother must have known, by the time her story came to its sudden end, that she'd married someone from a culture that had its own problems, just as bad, and also someone very like her father — that her bid to escape the rough side of reserve life had failed. If she'd had more time, would she have returned home? Escaped again? Gone elsewhere? Or would she have continued to wait, endlessly, for the right moment? There were worse possibilities, too.

Scott resized the image of the raven carving, cropped out some of the trees, but left it as it was.

Fuck the big questions, he thought. Do they help any? The Door to the Universe had survived the flood and he could go anywhere a webcam went, from some kid's bedroom in Nebraska to the Great Barrier Reef and he could have e-sex with a person called Chryssie Liz (even though he didn't know who the hell she or he or it really was) and he could know any fucking useless factoid there was to know and be part of the craziest things without getting off his chair: a group on the Net — crazies who believed that some people would soon have chips in their brains and skeletons made out of titanium, and they would be the ones that lasted when the planet started to cook. It was fun to think that way for a change instead of just feeling scared about how the icecaps were melting and the sea levels rising and the prairies turning to dust and the forests being cut down or eaten by beetles and the fish having weird babies and cancer being endemic because of all the chemicals, and how before long there wouldn't be enough food to go around and now there was a whole new load of shit in the Middle East and how awful it all was — but there was nothing to be done about any of it because the multinationals who ran the planet didn't give a fuck and had the governments completely in their hands... It must make a change to feel almost on top of things, to look at a normal person, Lauren, say, and have all that going on in the back of your head while you spoke to them and think,
but I will survive
.