Bone Lines

by Stephanie Bretherton

  Before moving on she has taken some time to tremor, as her people learned to do by watching the animals of the migrating herds recover from a narrow escape. Lying down to roll on the earth she’d let her muscles shake off their fear, so that it would not become buried within and an extra weight to carry. So it could not creep around her bones the way that vines will strangle a tree. Having lain in its blood, having released her duel with the beast back into the ground where it expired, she has set out again, walking as fast as the pain in her leg will allow. She is exhausted, exhilarated. But the course she has chosen is right, she feels it.

  The earliest perceptions had come in childhood. Small, quiet knowings. The first full revelation had terrified her. Many times as a girl she had felt the earth shivering and had once heard thunder that might split a skull, but this, these sounds in her head, this sickening roaring and rumbling? A great mountain (many small mountains?), not one she had seen in the real world, not anywhere near, was smoking and shaking and bursting into liquid fire and black sky. Her nostrils flared with acridity. She refused the vision, could not comprehend it, told no one – not even when the changes came, when the skies wept ash and a sharp chill crept into bones and hearts. She did not want to be blamed.

  Often since she has wished she’d had the courage to tell them for then they may have trusted, even followed. How could she explain that she knew such a journey was possible? Her grandmother had told her the tales, in sound and sand, of the mothers and fathers many generations before who had left the old lands during the great dry. It was said they had come from even further before then, somewhere long south, in time without memory.

  In fading images that tease her deepest dreaming, there is a shoreline. A secret place of lingering life and a sea with drinkable streams that defies its own salt. Once she finds this new coast she understands that she must follow until it turns upwards on itself to the narrowest point, and then she must cross.

  7

  Sarah was staying. The Americans had agreed to collaborate, but at a cost. Now Eloise had to share her with a stranger: one Dr Kenneth Charles Harmon (an MIT alumnus no less, post-grad Johns Hopkins), or ‘KC’ for short.

  Geek chic, she thought, wasn’t that what they called it in the magazines? Those Clark Kent-ish spectacles, the unruly black fringe that he had neither the time nor the forethought to trim before it flopped into his eyes. Cheekbones as sharp as his elegantly forensic mind (Eloise had done her research, read his published papers), a slender build and a disarming, off-centre smile. She was glad that Eugene had arranged the introduction in the cafeteria rather than the airless confines of his office.

  ‘Hey! Dr Kluft! I’ve heard so much about you! It’s a real pleasure.’

  What had he heard? From whom?

  ‘You too, Dr Harmon, you too.’

  She was pleased with her nonchalance and felt sure it was coming across as unforced, but when she shook his outstretched hand there was a flash of static. Oh, come on, she thought. Seriously? If Eloise had been so inclined she might have wondered whether the laws of nature were having a laugh at her expense. Both she and her new colleague snatched their hands away with an ‘oh!’ to shake off the shock, then Eloise gave those mischievous sparks the most innocent of explanations.

  ‘Well, that would be our delightful cafeteria carpet, I expect. Nineties nylon,’ Eloise re-assigned the blame, ‘a charming leftover which we seem to have kept for nostalgia’s sake as much as for lack of budget. But then we are very fond of our relics over here.’

  ‘The air too, maybe,’ agreed KC with that dangerous smile. ‘It’s really dry. And here’s me thinking you guys got nothing but rain?’

  The ensuing eye contact suggested other factors at play, however. Eloise raised her guard but she was unable to read her newly imposed lab partner well enough to measure his subtler reactions, either to her or to their electrically charged meeting, as polite and professional as he seemed.

  After showing him around the building and introducing him to the team, it took a few beers at the nearest post-work pub to properly break the ice. Eloise insisted that her guest sample the flattest, bitterest and most tepid local brew to test his Yankee mettle while she judged every nuance of his gestural language, studied every inflection in his speech. She was beginning to think she could work with him, after all, and was glad of it.

  And yet there was something that she couldn’t quite pin down, an edge that she thought might be there but which he hadn’t fully revealed. She saw it in the way he sometimes broke eye contact and looked away to his left. (Perhaps a shyness tic? Or perhaps, she conceded, she was looking for something to dislike, a reason to keep those barriers up?) Maybe Dr Harmon really was as nice as he was working hard to appear, and yes, maybe there was some flicker of attraction between them that she would have to manage, but she was wary. What did he want? Had he been instructed with any deeper brief by his pharmaceutical backers? Was she being paranoid? Probably, but not without cause.

  There had been plenty of friendly male colleagues before, happy enough to work with her, happy enough to take any credit they could. Willing to acknowledge her abilities but equally willing to explain what she ought to know / do / understand. Always wanting to take the emotion out of the workplace – and, no doubt, out of any sex that she might have offered up too. She never had. Hopefully, would never be tempted to.

  Eloise decided to concentrate on what the Doctors Kluft and Harmon might have in common professionally (and philosophically). Which turned out to be plentiful, especially when it came to their passion for the work. Reassuringly, KC appeared to be more enlightened than many in terms of gender issues, whether or not this would turn out to be the proverbial sheepskin disguise. Eloise had no desire to dwell on politics but it was a difficult beast to ignore and they soon found a way to commiserate about their countries’ mutual tragedies with bouts of rhetorical one-upmanship.

  ‘Well, look at it this way,’ KC offered, hoping against hope, ‘maybe sometimes a wound has to be purged of all its pus before it can begin to heal?’

  ‘Or maybe we have to go through the Black Death to eventually reach the Enlightenment?’ Eloise had returned, using the heft of European history to win that round.

  As the alcohol went to work, they shifted from the depressing to the inspiring and spent the rest of the evening exploring themes from chaos and convergence to the possibility of a predictive pattern, and from the mathematics of morphogenesis to the seductive notion of a unifying scheme. New-found compatriots in the unbounded country of the mind, they indulged a shared infatuation for the magnificence of the genetic chronicle, from Precambrian bacteria through exponential speciation and on to Homo sapiens sapiens, emerging Venus-like from the tree of life. Eloise felt, at last, a stirring from her lengthy hibernation.

  So she relented on the trial-by-ale and switched to a classy single malt as a conciliatory nightcap, its rich flavour spoiled only by a late supper of dry roasted peanuts and salt and vinegar crisps. As each decided to head home Eloise cast aside restraint and followed a sudden urge to set up a re-match. While she was relieved they seemed to be on the same page in so many ways, she needed to investigate the sharper corners to KC that she suspected – and in more relaxed situations than the workplace. She needed to know whether she could trust him.

  ‘But you do appreciate now, don’t you, Dr Harmon, the critical difference between a crisp and a proper bloody chip?’ asked Eloise, ‘because this will be vital to our working relationship.’

  KC looked at her with amusement.

  ‘Well, I think I do now, yeah. Thank you. But I’ve obviously got so much more to learn.’

  She was struggling to get into her denim jacket before KC reached out to help her.

  ‘Yes. Quite. Oh, oh… thank you. Yes. The sleeve. Always does that for some reason, so annoying! OK, so, successful beer initiation notwithstanding, I feel it necessary to continue your induction into London life. Allow me to organise further culinary forays into our nat
ional dishes of, say, a kebab or a curry sometime. And absolutely, Dr Harmon, with the aforementioned authentic chip experience thrown in.’

  ‘Sounds good, Eloise. I look forward to that. But only if you start calling me KC.’

  ‘You might have to give me some time on that,’ she said, as she shook his hand again to say goodbye, half expecting, half hoping for a replay of the static but the stained floorboards and soggy air of the saloon bar would not oblige.

  Eloise strolled home that evening in a more buoyant mood, even when drenched by an unexpected shower (and without berating herself for the lack of an umbrella).

  *

  How long, how far? She knows the exhaustion of hunger all too well, but this latest fatigue, this slow draining of her soul, feels deadlier than any she has fought before. She is alone and yet not. Sometimes she wishes that she was, after all, and then feels sick for having given shape to such terrible thoughts. She knows it is only for the child now that she stays alive. She understands for the first time, if only for a fleeting moment, the old stories of terrible days when mothers had been forced to inflict a horrific kind of mercy on the most vulnerable, if only to save and feed those young more able to fend for themselves, more likely to make it.

  But this is not something she can allow herself to contemplate. Not after the heart-ripping sacrifice of the bear, her spirit animal. Too much has been taken from her now. And there are no others to save. Perhaps anywhere? No life more liveable, not even her own without the child. There is no reason to go on except for this little one, however much it puts her mother at risk. However heavy the child has become, however irritable when the milk is too stubborn, or the body that offers it too drained to keep trying. But this unspeakable feeling, this unbearable resentment remains. Her burden is a boulder strapped to her back.

  She stops to rest for a while under the cover of some thorny scrub. Pulls up some of its deepest roots to chew on. She knows this plant. There will be scant nourishment here, but enough that she may find the strength to get up again. Over the cycle of the last moon, they have suffered less snow across the vast, open plains, but she wonders whether it was a mistake to leave their last place of respite? The hot spring was but a few days walk behind them. Perhaps they should have stayed there, made a home there, even if nothing but green slime could thrive in its odorous waters? This cruellest of havens had been discovered by pursuing a hint of steam on the cool morning air, towards the dull creep of daybreak.

  She had been sure those faint wisps were not smoke and she had been right. The spring itself may have been undrinkable but its rising steam cooled upon the rocky walls around it, enough to drip slowly into a gourd that was fed by a series of reeds. She had been tempted to stay, though she knew that she could not. Bathing in the warm waters was a comfort she might have succumbed to forever. Or, until starvation released them both into the final sleep.

  The heavy heat had brought dreams, memories. Once she had felt the warmth of her mother near and then remembered with a remorseless ache that she was gone. Was anyone left? How she wishes for her mother now, with all of her laughing, scolding flock of friends. She wishes every one of those women back to her now.

  She saw herself weaving nets and baskets with them to gather the succulent life from the shallows, remembered that soft, sweet, salty taste – the energising freshness of her favourite food. She saw how her mother deftly inserted the sharpened stick into exactly the right spot to tease open a reluctant shell, recalled the reeking mounds of shells that marked the best places to find this tender flesh. Those vital lessons in how to tell when they were ready, when they were in season, when they were good. She remembered how her grandmother would force feed some poor soul the burnt wood from the base of the fire, if he had been unfortunate or foolish enough to swallow one that was bad.

  In the rising mists, she had remembered her father teaching her to make her first bow. The feel of its tension. Being allowed to follow the hunt away from the rock pools and into the deep forest. Running under the broad lacing of leaves that spoke to each other through the breeze, watching the shapes of light fight with the shadows on the dark, rich earth.

  She had fallen behind as the group chased a trail, but she was not afraid to be alone. She had climbed one of the trees and waited. Her father had been angry when he’d found her again – but not once he saw what she had caught. Watching, hiding, hearing, holding her aim. Asking permission from the mother of life to take this life. A small hog, yes, but big enough to feed them all. They had celebrated her that night and the boys had been resentful. After that, they’d tried to trip her, keep her behind, hide her arrows. But she soon learned how to wrestle back what was hers, how to use another’s weight or weakness against him. Then as she grew to womanhood she found subtler forms of revenge and a new, enticing, dangerous power. But she never missed another hunt.

  Now, the dry earth seems to drag at her feet where once it had spurred her forward. Now, she feels nothing of her ability to play or choose. At least the cold here seems to be shrinking, but they are off track again after the diversion of the hot spring and need to alter course to reach the envisioned shoreline that, even now, even in such emptiness she trusts they will find. To move away from that heat had taken so much out of her, but with every measure of will that she can summon she walks onwards into the west, towards the unseen setting of the ever-shrouded sun.

  *

  Soon the new lab partners were spending most coffee and lunch breaks together. Eloise nursed her resistance to saying ‘KC’ out loud, the unsuitability of the soubriquet for one who seemed so much on her wavelength continued to jar (as did the prospect of too great a familiarity) and she often defaulted to ‘Dr Harmon’. KC insisted, however, and at last she relented. The turning point was when he asked her, ‘So, which version? The Ryan brothers or The Damned?’

  That he knew (or had researched?) her song intrigued her and she’d replied, ‘Well, for my parents the original, of course. But for me? Oh god, The Damned. Dave Vanian giving it all that, in sexy vampire mode. How could any teenage creature of the night resist?’ KC seemed surprised by this more personal and revealing response, and perhaps a little too encouraged. He smiled, inclined towards her and asked her more about her musical tastes. But this resulted in only a greater and more dangerous sense of compatibility for Eloise, rather than reinforcing her detachment.

  More often their conversations were of an academic nature. Occasionally, Eloise tried to play devil’s advocate, if only for the sake of it. She didn’t want to agree with every word the man said like some doe-eyed fangirl, in awe of the MIT / Johns Hopkins axis of his qualifications, and she needed to keep setting a few hurdles between them. But KC had so much to share and he shared it willingly. Back home he had been working on targeted vaccine delivery and DNA replacement using viruses that had been stripped of their power but which nevertheless could stimulate the right immune response, or deliver the right new information to a sufferer’s cells.

  His team had also begun exploring the creation of synthetic virus-like mechanisms – very exciting, very controversial work, but with so much potential for realising the evanescent dream of pharmaco-genetics. They shared an ‘almost too good to be true’ sense of thrill about another new procedure that exploited sequences of palindromic code that had formerly been considered ‘junk’ within the genome. This promising advance used the simpler RNA molecules as guides and enzymatic clippers to target defective DNA in both strands of the helix, snip it out and even replace it. The potential for addressing inherited disease or frailty, or even the genetic damage inflicted by adverse environment or life events, was staggering.

  But it was the new method for the work on Sarah’s cells that was the primary game-changer for Eloise. Its application of high-throughput sequencing technology in combination with a genome analyser and a machine-learning algorithm had put their work firmly back on course, and it was gathering pace. As KC had boasted, ‘this thing can sequence the heck out of anything.’
So far they had managed to capture only fragments and were having ongoing and infuriating problems with contamination, but they were getting close. Very close. Both to the clues that would unlock the enigma of Sarah, and to each other.

  KC was married, of course, but Eloise had expected as much, at their age it was almost a given. He didn’t wear a ring (hygiene protocols, perhaps) but smiling out from his phone (left on the table one lunchtime) there she was. The well-fed Midwestern wife with a helmet hairdo and a brace of orthodontically-corrected kids. Eloise had held back from asking KC any direct questions about his marital status, felt it might suggest an interest that she would not admit to, even if she felt sure it was there. She was relieved by the knowledge of his family, however. It cleared the path to a purely professional relationship.

  When he came back to their table with two plates of shepherd’s pie (another essential step in her programme of his cultural assimilation) she reinforced her resolve by asking him about his children. She listened attentively, made appropriate noises of approval over the pictures he then swiped through, duly congratulated him on the soccer prowess of his daughter, offered sympathy for the bullying experienced by his son. Were they becoming friends?

  To resist such uncertain traction she refrained from asking him about his wife, but KC chose to tell her anyway. Apparently ‘Gretchen’ had been his college sweetheart, a humanities student and the first among his fellow freshmen (outside of the bio-chem club) to give him the time of day. Probably the first freshman with a cleavage to take notice of him at all, thought Eloise, rather unkindly. Despite the mercurial and unspecific current between them, she recognised that KC’s type was an acquired taste and he could hardly have been considered a stud, especially in his teenage years.