Ghost Species

by James Bradley

  ‘I don’t know,’ Jay finally says. In his voice Kate can hear the same pain she feels when she thinks about Eve’s future, about her part in making it. ‘We just have to do all we can to make sure she’s ready for it.’

  Kate nods. ‘I have to go,’ she says.

  The memorial is scheduled for ten o’clock, the first of the day, and as Kate steps out of the car the funeral director is waiting for her by the door. Kate greets her quickly, not lingering to talk, then goes through into the foyer.

  There are only a handful of attendees. Kina, a pair of older women Kate does not recognise, a confused-looking man with rheumy eyes and white hair in a dark suit and sneakers. Kina notices Kate and waits while one of the older women finishes saying something before excusing herself and crossing to where Kate stands.

  ‘Thank you for coming,’ Kate says.

  ‘Of course. I saw you finished cleaning out her apartment.’

  ‘If there’s anything you want, please let me know.’

  Kina nods. ‘I will.’ Before she can say more the funeral director approaches to say they are ready to begin, and in a straggling line the five of them head in.

  The service is brief, almost businesslike, the celebrant speaking in generalities she has clearly mouthed many times before. When she spoke with the funeral director on the day after she arrived Kate was adamant she did not want to speak: there was nothing for her to say; she and her mother had not had a relationship for twenty years, but as soon as the moment when she could have spoken passes she knows she has made a mistake, that she should have found some form of words to describe her feelings, that whatever else she was, her mother was still her mother. She is surprised to feel tears fill her eyes as the coffin slides away, but afterwards she only wants to be away, and is relieved when the others show no sign of lingering.

  On the way to the airport she remembers a conversation the year before. Hugh, one of the researchers employed on the wider project, had taken her aside after a meeting at the facility.

  ‘I need to ask you something,’ he said. ‘About Eve. She is what I think she is, isn’t she?’

  Caught off-guard, Kate hesitated. Hugh watched her intently. Seeing there was no point denying it, she gave a quick nod.

  To her surprise, Hugh smiled. ‘I googled you, saw you’d been involved since the beginning. It didn’t take long to put two and two together, although I’ll be honest with you: I didn’t really believe it until just now, and I’m still not sure I do.’

  ‘You mustn’t tell anybody,’ she said.

  ‘Of course not,’ he said. ‘How did you end up caring for her?’

  ‘It’s a long story. I was part of the team that carried out the genesis but when . . . when I saw her I realised what we’d done – that she wasn’t an experiment, she was a child, a person – I left and took her with me.’

  ‘And they let you do that?’

  She shook her head. ‘No. When they found me I had to fight to keep her.’

  He regarded her thoughtfully for a few seconds. Then he turned and looked at Eve, who was waiting a little way ahead. ‘She’s extraordinary. I’ve seen her out in the bush near the facility. There’s a . . . a stillness to her. An alertness.’

  Kate followed his gaze. Perhaps feeling herself observed, Eve turned to look at them, her face wary in the way Kate knew so well.

  ‘She’s more comfortable out there than in the city, or with people.’

  ‘You think that’s genetic?’

  ‘I don’t know. Sometimes, I suppose. But other times I think it’s just her. Or her and me. Or just everything.’

  ‘Is she the only one?’

  Kate hesitated. ‘As far as I know. Why?’

  Hugh looked thoughtful. ‘It must be very strange, to be alone like that. There are animals I’ve seen, birds mostly, that are the last of their kind. Endlings, we call them.’ He paused, as if something was troubling him. ‘Does she know?’

  Kate looked aside. Cassie and the other psychologist have long argued it is better to wait until Eve is older to tell her the truth, partly because they believe she will be better prepared emotionally, partly because of a fear she might find in it an excuse to impose limitations on herself.

  ‘No,’ she said after a moment.

  There is a small silence. ‘Is that fair?’

  ‘What would it change if she knew?’

  ‘Possibly everything. And there are practical considerations. What if something happens to you, and she gets sick? Or she wants to have children?’

  Kate does not reply at once. Finally she just says, ‘Or it would just make her feel even more alone.’

  As she boards the plane she is still thinking about Hugh’s words. Once, she would have believed everybody had a right to know where they came from, that withholding this sort of information was a kind of abuse, but now she is not so sure. Would it make things better for Eve to know the truth? Or worse? And what would it really change?

  Yet simultaneously she knows her reluctance to share the truth with Eve is as much about her own fears as it is about concern for Eve’s wellbeing. What if Eve is angry? What if she blames Kate for not telling her sooner, or for her part in creating her?

  Without realising why, she begins to cry again. She feels unmoored, lost, but she knows what she must do. And when she arrives home she tells Jay, and together the three of them sit down.

  Kate takes Eve’s hands, squeezes them tight. Her eyes are bright with tears, her heart so full she thinks it will burst. ‘There’s something we have to tell you.’

  I was a Teenage Neanderthal

  In the weeks after Kate and Jay tell her the truth about herself Eve cannot make sense of it. What can it mean? Who is she? Is this why she feels so different? So alone? Despite Kate’s efforts to coax her out she retreats to her room, watching videos and searching the web for information.

  The details online are scattered, contradictory, meaningless. They – her; the gap between the two seems incapable of collapse – were either less intelligent or as intelligent as modern humans, could probably talk, or couldn’t, buried their dead and created art or were primitive brutes incapable of symbolic thought. These propositions are debated and contradicted over and over. Behind them are other suggestions. They were violent, brutal, cannibals. They were simply less successful, were outcompeted. They were exterminated. There is a story she returns to more than once, of the last population of her kind, trapped on the edge of the Iberian peninsula. A dying community. Sometimes she tries to imagine their lives. What was it like to be so alone? Did they know they were the last?

  And then there are the images. So many are grotesque, hulking monsters. But even those that are not monsters bear little resemblance to her. One evening she calls up a virtual tour of the Natural History Museum, steps into its Hall of Mankind. The figures that populate it are so lifelike it is unsettling, but though she recognises their thick hair, the large eyes and wide noses from her own mirror, she cannot bear to approach them.

  Disturbed by Eve’s behaviour, Kate insists she accompany her to the facility in order to speak to the psychologist. Until recently Eve enjoyed their sessions; now the psychologist’s desire to explore her feelings leaves her bored and resentful, aware of the way the woman watches her, her anatomising gaze, and after one particularly frustrating session Eve simply refuses to go back. In the car Kate presses her to know why, asking her whether she is okay, but Eve just stares out the window at the passing scenery and ignores her.

  Is she the creatures she sees online? Ugly, hulking, misshapen? When she is alone – on her bike or moving through the forest – she feels strong, fast, free in motion. Yet she also sees her body in the mirror every morning and evening, its broad shoulders and heavy musculature misshapen, lumpen. Is this what others see? Although her mother has forbidden her to go there alone, one afternoon when Kate is at work she rides her bike to the shopping centre on the city’s edge, and for a time can feel all eyes on her, cannot shake the sense they a
re watching her, mocking her.

  One night, alone with her screen, she stumbles on a movie about cavemen, sits watching the grunting, fur-clad figures lope through the sun-blasted landscape of the Los Angeles hills. It is absurd, yet she cannot put it out of her mind, images of the bestial cavemen and women returning to her again and again.

  After that she seeks out other movies, not just about cavemen but about robots and monsters and patchwork people, all the uncanny golems of the Gothic imagination. Across that winter and into the summer she watches everything she can find, looking for guidance in films: Frankenstein, Splice, Blade Runner. Every time the story is the same: the thing created is monstrous but also tragic, its desire for life a violation of the natural order. Is this why her mother and Jay keep her away from people, why they are so careful to control her movements, even at the facility? Would she be shunned, tormented, driven out? She watches the villagers pursue the Monster through the streets, torches aloft, and cannot move, her hands gripping the screen. Under their trilbies the men’s faces are no different from those of the people she glimpses at the Facility, but it is not them that frighten her the most. Instead it is the snarling dogs she cannot take her eyes off; as they strain at their ropes she can almost feel their hot breath, the snap of their jaws.

  Finally, a year after she learns the truth, an alert leads her to an article about a cave discovered in Gibraltar, its entrance concealed thirty metres below the water. The team that locates it have been exploring the Mediterranean, combing its bed for remnants of towns and settlements lost when the water rose at the end of the last Ice Age, and came upon it by accident. Clad in wetsuit and wearing scuba gear, the lead archaeologist crawled upward, through a shaft, into a space sealed from the air above, a bubble in the rock, its air fifty thousand years old.

  This was one of the last places her ancestors survived, eking out an existence in these caves, yet as the diver shone her light upward she saw marks on the wall, etched lines and crosses, and over them the dark mark of charcoal.

  Armed with photos, the diver left, but when her team returned they found a wealth of remains – bones, charcoal, carved bone, entire skeletons, all layered one on top of the other. And perhaps most incredibly, at the back of the cave, a wall adorned with dozens of handprints outlined in ochre.

  At first there was debate: these markings on the stone must be the work of modern humans, equipped with brains capable of creating art, minds lit by fire and an awareness of the presence of meaning in the world. But the remains in the cave were definitely Neanderthal, and dating proved the marks were of the same vintage. Even in the face of this evidence the notion the handprints are the work of Neanderthals has been vociferously resisted by many in the scientific community.

  Yet the details of the debate concern her less than the images, which have been assembled into a virtual re-creation of the cave, complete with a journey up the shaft through the water. Setting aside the screen for Kate’s goggles, Eve moves through the cave, staring at the scratches on the wall, the charcoal marks, their mute incomprehensibility. What do they mean? What was it they needed to record? Are they a map? A drawing? A set of ritual shapes possessed of other significance again? The impossibility of knowing eats at her, echoed by the feeling she almost understands, that she holds the key in her mind, that their meaning, like a word or a name half-remembered, lies somewhere just out of reach.

  But it is only when she is done, and she walks deeper into the cave and finds the handprints, that she finally understands. For there, in that pale-walled gallery, where once firelight flickered, illuminating this record of so many lives, of so much time, she lifts a hand and places it on one of them, suddenly aware that it fits, time telescoping in a rush like wind.

  The next summer arrives early, the baking air heavy with smoke. Early in December she is woken one morning by a rumble like distant thunder and finds her room moving around her, the lampshade overhead swinging. Whimpering, she slithers off the bed, her gut sick with fear, and braces herself against it. On her shelf a book topples over with a heavy thump, sending a cup of pens and textas and paperclips spilling onto the floor. And then, almost as soon as it began, it is over. Eve takes a breath – it seems to have lasted forever and no time at all – and runs for the door. Kate is in the hall, staring around. Her face is pale, her eyes wild. Eve hurls herself into Kate’s arms.

  ‘It’s okay,’ Kate says. ‘You’re all right.’

  Pressing her face into Kate’s neck Eve drinks in her mother’s smell and nods. Her legs are shaking, the sense of wrongness that gripped her in her bedroom still not dissipated.

  ‘What was it?’ she whimpers. ‘What happened?’

  ‘I think it must have been an earthquake,’ Kate says.

  ‘Will it happen again?’ Eve feels sick at the thought of it.

  Kate strokes her hair. ‘I don’t know.’

  In fact, it happens three more times. After the second, Eve realises she can feel the tremors coming before they arrive, the intimation of their approach like the foreboding of an impending storm. Knowing they will simply make her take more tests she does not tell anybody, holding this small act of defiance to herself. At first nobody seems to know what is causing the quakes, but after the third, Kate tells her scientists believe they are caused by the crust shifting as the Antarctic ice sheet buckles and breaks, a process that should take place over thousands of years but is instead rushing forward. Later, outside in the heat, Eve closes her eyes and tries to imagine the ice, its cool blue, the ancient silence at its core, but she cannot.

  Although it is several years since Eve met regularly with the other children from the playgroup, they have kept in touch. At the urging of the Foundation, Rose and Heti were home-schooled, and for a time Eve attended classes with them several days a week. Eventually Heti’s mother took a job on the mainland and Rose began working with a different group of home-schoolers, but for several years after that Rose and Felix continued to visit intermittently. Felix stopped coming the summer he turned eleven, although he and Eve chat online sometimes, but even now, a decade after they began playgroup together, Rose still visits for a few days every holidays. Whether Rose submits to the arrangement out of duty or some less easily defined sense that her relationship with Eve connects her to her past, she seems happy to spend days at a time watching movies on their screens or wandering in the bush. Last winter she brought makeup and combs, and while Kate worked she showed Eve how to style her hair and apply lipstick and mascara; Kate blinked back tears as the two of them appeared, giggling with delight, Rose already long-limbed, her hair piled high on her head in an awkward imitation of the 1960s, Eve’s coarse, red-brown hair in a high ponytail, sparkling powder sheening on her wide cheekbones, pink lip-gloss bright against her pale skin.

  Rose comes twice more after Eve learns about herself. Both times Kate sits down with Eve before she arrives, emphasises the importance of keeping the truth to herself. But when Kate suggests Rose come again this summer, Eve says she does not want to see her. In the moment after she speaks a silence falls.

  ‘Really? Why?’ Kate asks.

  Eve does not move. She had not realised she was going to refuse until she did, but her mother’s reaction is oddly thrilling. ‘I don’t feel like it.’

  Kate pauses, but Eve just stares back. Now she has made it real the thought of not seeing Rose is like a hollow pain, but she ignores it.

  ‘Perhaps you can come to work with me instead,’ Kate says.

  Eve shakes her head. ‘I’m not going to the facility anymore.’ She hesitates. ‘And I don’t want Cassie to come here, either.’

  ‘But you’ll be alone.’

  Eve snorts. ‘Good,’ she says.

  Afterwards, in her room, she opens her screen, calls up Felix and Rose and Heti’s accounts and deletes them from her contacts. Setting the screen aside, she stares at the wall, unsure whether she wants to laugh or cry.

  Left alone in the heat, she takes to riding long distances. Sometimes
she sees bushwalkers, their figures strung out on the hillsides as they push through the scrub, or children playing. One day she rides for two hours, right to the outskirts of the city. Standing under a tree she gazes down at the buildings along the wide space of the river, the dark weight of the mountain behind them. Although it terrifies her she goes back the next night, and the night after that, guiding her bike down the silent avenues, staring at the people on the streets and in the windows. Sometimes cars stop beside her, their occupants turning to gaze at her through the glass. In the dark with her helmet on she is anonymous, but still, there are times when a passenger starts or stares, and the feeling is like a knife in her belly.

  As the days shorten and the winter begins to bear down, she spends more and more time out on the road. One morning in April she rides her bike into a shopping centre on the city’s fringes and circles around the car park, watching the cars pull in and out. She is about to leave and head out towards one of the bush tracks when she hears somebody call her name behind her. Startled, she turns to find a dark-haired figure jogging after her. She hesitates, confused, but then he calls her name again, and all at once she recognises him, the knowledge falling into place like a key. He comes to a halt in front of her.

  ‘Sami?’ she says.

  He grins. ‘Eve! It is you!’ he replies triumphantly.

  ‘What are you doing here?’

  ‘Shopping. You?’

  ‘Nothing. Riding.’ She cannot take her eyes off him. Three years earlier, when Sami turned twelve, he began to act out, skipping school and disappearing for long periods. When Yassamin tried to discipline him he went to stay with his father. At first Yassamin thought it was just a phase, that he would be back before long, but he has not returned. Seeing him again she is not sure she would have known him if he had not called her name: though she now sees the shadow of the boy she knew in him, he is taller, thinner, his black eyes liquid. Even his manner is different: distracted, twitchier, his childish cheer infected by a sort of restlessness. Yet when he smiles, the Sami she knew – foolish, playful, needful – is there again.