Bone Lines

by Stephanie Bretherton

  Was this why her back-bent grandmother had protected her and rushed to form the circle around her that first terrifying time she had witnessed the damage that men can do? She will never forget the heart-piercing scream that alerted her band to the coming danger. The clan had found that woman later, the one who had cried out while gathering sticks, before her throat had been emptied. She had struggled and bitten and sacrificed herself to free her tongue and warn them all.

  Without words they all had reacted to that scream and had done what they had known they must, remembering how to survive such brutal, sudden blood-letting, even though it had been a generation since such evils had come. They had learned, and they had remembered.

  The attack was brought by a strange and distant tribe of people, unknown and unknowable. Of shared bloodlines perhaps, but not the same way of being. It had been a dry summer. They must have been desperate, hungry, angry… but without the wisdom, without the sense to trade or to talk or to ask for help. When they had come upon her kin with violence instead, the group had not scattered under the ambush but had formed circles within circles while keeping to the highest ground, quickly gathering up sticks and clubs and stones, arrows and spears and nets.

  A ring of the oldest men at the outside had met the initial wave of attack. They had struck out and then let the others strike, allowing themselves to receive those first furious blows. Then from behind this line the strongest of the young men had surged, surprising those now drawing breath once more, their arms still raised in anger, their trunks exposed. And, from behind this ring, those women who were strong enough but beyond childbearing picked off any who had pushed through or finished off those who might be wounded but still dangerous. Meanwhile their men regrouped.

  The youngest and the very oldest of the women guarded the children, while letting out a shrill chorus of cries and sounding the horn that one clever soul had found the sense to carry with her. This inner circle had huddled together and called for the other clans. Called out angrily on the air for this violence to be turned back against their tormentors. Until, finally, it was over.

  Their losses had been hard to bear, horrific for the youngest to witness, but they were not too heavy to survive. The invaders were all but finished off. Those who had realised the fight was lost and were strong enough to run had been intercepted by others coming to aid her clan. Two young women, wise enough to submit, lying on the ground as if still in the womb, were left behind, and with them a young boy.

  They had brought some trouble these three, never truly healing from their misfortune or from the foolish mistakes of their fathers. Although her grandmother had tried to help, with smoke and chants, with patience and good will. But in time, this burden had been shared out among the other clans and two of the strangers had become of use, found the way to be. The other’s fate was never spoken of. Unlike the story of their own famous victory, a tale that was told over and over again.

  This same tactic had almost worked for her family one other time (the last time) after the dread, the dark, the dying, but they had been too few, too weak, too frightened. She had wanted to fight with them, but the circle had held long enough to hide her for one last time. Their only salvation had been that equal numbers of their aggressors had fallen, giving them time to flee, while carrying with them the greatest wound of all. The knowledge that this latest horror had come from within their own kin. She had never imagined that one of their own could turn on them in desperation, join with strangers that he believed to be stronger, and die at her feet for his mistake. The world had darkened in too many ways.

  12

  Eloise slept well after her evening with John but woke early with fragments of the conversation becoming confused, like a poorly edited replay of something half-heard and hardly remembered. She let it drift away, there were notes about the challenges of the Sarah project to write up and so despite the temptations of a Saturday lie-in, she heaved herself out of bed to make coffee. She knew that writing was going to be a struggle, but also felt these preliminary thoughts might form the basis of any future book, a way to share all that they were learning, all that she hoped they would learn still, and she needed to set them down.

  First, coffee. What was needed most was inspiration but for now a strong dose of caffeine would do. And music. Eloise shuffled through her new smartphone until she found the duet from Lakmé that never failed her. She was forced to admit that this play-listing capacity alone was worth the gadget’s price tag and wondered why she’d held out for so long against such technological delights. Eloise recognised that her natural thriftiness, together with an ingrained resistance to any change of routine, had often denied her a little harmless indulgence.

  She hit play and let the music build towards its crescendo. As she stared out of the kitchen window, waiting for a potent enough brew to percolate, her gaze settled in soft focus on a tiny finch that was fluffing up his feathers in her bird bath. Instinctively, she looked more closely at its beak (seed or nectar feeder?) but the connection with her hero, and an idea for starting her book that this contemplation had hatched only came together once she sat at her desk and her attention wandered to the small plastic bust of Darwin that Rory had given her one birthday, a souvenir from the Natural History Museum.

  She looked away again in case she was discouraged from switching on her laptop at all. Whereas some writers might torture themselves by setting up the Bard as an impassive observer, Eloise had her own idol to live up to – even if this benchmark often caused her to refuse the first hurdle. Oh, but how she wished she could talk to her hero. She had so many questions to ask him. To talk. To exchange ideas. Such a singular human blessing.

  This notion of conversation reminded her of the work of a colleague, who in researching a cure for an inherited muscular wasting disease, had made a genetic discovery that set alight new theories about the origins of human speech. Eloise found herself looking long and hard at that little statuette again, and then embraced a long-denied temptation. She clicked open a fresh white page full of digital possibility and began to compose the letter that she had always wanted to write.

  My Dear Mr Darwin,

  Oh, how you would have loved all this, living today. How it would have lifted your heart to know not only that speciation by natural selection (along with other mechanisms that we are exploring) is correct, but also how it works! (Even if it doesn’t quite take the linear, hierarchical structure that you imagined. Perhaps more of a crooked bush than a neat and tidy tree.) But how you would have enjoyed your introduction to the wonder that is DNA! To understand precisely how all those tiny little messengers in living cells inform and instruct all the variation. And, my goodness, everything that we’ve discovered since! For example, that within the human genome what at first looks like an aberration or an omission of letters that could cause a terrible muscular handicap may be partly responsible for our speech… and thus perhaps for the flowering of our intelligence. Indeed, for your beacon of brilliance and all that your ideas have given us.

  They ridiculed you for tracing our roots to a common ancestor with the apes, drew your benign head upon a monkey’s shoulders. Little did they know that all their slack-jawed chattering was a clue to the truths that would one day reinstate your dignity.

  For my dear, dear Mr Darwin, there are so few genetic differences between us and our closest primate relatives (the Human Accelerated Region notwithstanding), but it seems that one key distinction between your magnificent head and that of the chimpanzee may result from a mutation that makes our bite so much weaker than theirs. Because of this missing code in the MYH16 gene, our jaw muscles now have but a fraction of the power of our cousins – and it’s possible that this ‘accident’ allowed us to vocalise so much more fluently.

  So did the weakening and loosening of those muscles then create the extra space for our skulls (and therefore our brains) to outgrow the chimp’s, blooming gradually into the rippling cortex that enables not only complex language, but music, art, imag
ination, advanced mathematics? The idea makes me want to break into the museum at night like a ninja vandal and chisel a wry smile across the sombre expression of your statue. Oh yes, you would be smiling now, Charles (may I call you that?), I am quite sure of it.

  So, are we really what evolution intended? (If you will forgive the figure of speech, Charles, because of course there’s no evidence for intention at all.) But are we its pinnacle, its optimal outcome, so far and in the here and now? How might it have happened on earth in a different form, or has it, is it happening somewhere else?

  We know that convergent evolution comes up with common solutions across radically dissimilar species that are separated by millions of years of divergence. Bilateral symmetry (in almost every complex life form), the camera eye (the clever octopus sees very much as we do), the wing (insect, bat and bird have all learned how to fly), a problem-solving mind with the ability to deceive (humans and crows). But what has accelerated the process so dramatically in us? Why and how in our short time on the planet have we evolved so much faster and apparently more intelligently than, say, the dinosaurs?

  Our mammalian progenitors survived the Permian extinction not only by being small but by being adaptable, from food source to habitat to temperature. A quality that, much later, along with an inclination to co-operate with other bands of sapien brothers, would serve us very well (and which may well have been the decider in the ultimate competition with those unlucky, isolated Neanderthals).

  Although, of course, we now know that we had, in fact, some low-level interbreeding with these and other archaic hominins before they completely disappeared. For as one wave of anatomically modern humans spread out from Africa and encountered new pathogens, so we needed to acquire some fresh immunity from the ‘locals’ who had arrived from that same continent millennia earlier, in order to create the enormous differentiation of leukocyte antigens that we see in non-African populations today.

  The dinosaurs had millions upon millions of years and yet still couldn’t come up with opposable thumbs, significantly larger brains, complex language (a reasonable supposition), tools or technology. Of course the apex predators among them may have been very canny indeed, but surely they had none of the abilities we see in the higher mammals (or even cephalopods). Perhaps they had no need, no spur, especially during a more settled environmental period. So how have we managed in only a couple of million (if taken from a more ape-like than truly human start) to get anatomically to where we are now? To shed our fur and then replace it when necessary with another’s, or with the warmth of fire, so that we could sweat away our body heat to walk and run and hunt – through burning day and frozen night – right across the globe? And then in another few hundred thousand years to begin the process of civilisation, and in only ten thousand to go from farming into space?

  Were the reptilian kings no more than a long, slow dead end that was never going to get much better? (Until of course their smaller cousins evolved into birds, whose attached parenting encouraged considerable intelligence, held back only by a lack of fingers that were sacrificed for wings.) But were those big lizards merely a dead-end branch of cold-blooded, thumb-free losers? Or will their angry ghosts have the last laugh if, for all our arrogant smarts, we can’t make it past the next generation? Burn brightly, burn out quickly. (And perhaps, as some say, humanity has been nature’s greatest mistake.) But what else, apart from birds, might the dinosaur family have become given a little more time and a few more molecular accidents, or essential adaptations? Or, dare I say it, interference?

  Please excuse this mad, momentary speculation, my dear Mr Darwin. I blame it on my companion of last night, he wrapped me up in the sense of something greater, something other, and he can be most persuasive when in the full warmth of his passion. (Although I think he is someone that you might have liked too. At the very least you would have been polite. And equally kind I’m quite sure of it, even if you lost your own faith in increments.) But didn’t even Francis Crick – unraveller of the helix, Nobel Laureate and establishment darling – develop a version of the Panspermia theory in which all life was originally seeded from one molybdenum-rich place in the universe, and then was spread outward? And who was it that likened the odds of the higher life forms emerging into such complexity over such a short evolutionary timescale to a tornado sweeping through a junk-yard and assembling a Boeing 747? Ah, yes (excuse me, but I have just googled it, Charles, another of the wonders of our times) it was Sir Fred Hoyle, noted English astronomer and the provider of many such a pithy observation.

  So, did we all begin in something resembling your notion of a ‘warm pond’ – or maybe in some dry, thermal, boron-laden, RNA-friendly wasteland? Was it the effect of cosmic rays on the essential elements for organic matter that eventually brought the DNA molecule to life? Do those odd recurring numerical patterns, symmetries and sequences inside the code actually mean anything or are they nothing more than a mathematically improbable display of chance?

  The questions are endless. And yet, everything (or almost everything) it seems can be explained with the new understanding that you set in motion, Charles. An understanding that has itself evolved by taking into account all the environmental stimuli of our volatile home planet – whether that be the movement of our tectonic plates (so deadly and yet so life-giving) or the wobbles of our axis and the magnetic flipping of our poles.

  How I wish I could ask you what you think of it all now, Charles. To invite you, together with Sarah and a few other VIPs to my ultimate dinner party and thrash it all out over some fine food and wine (or for Sarah’s sake perhaps an al fresco hog roast?). There are so many questions, still so many questions…

  Eloise stopped typing and stemmed the stream of consciousness for the time being. She recognised it as an exercise in vanity, a rather embarrassing unburdening of her soul to someone she considered to be the greatest Englishman (a handful of other luminaries notwithstanding) but she decided to take some distance from it before judging it too harshly. She printed it out, put it aside and went into the kitchen to make more coffee.

  Halfway through the process she regretted that decision. Yes, she had needed a change of cognitive direction but now she was dismayed to find herself thinking about the state of her kitchen and how badly it needed refurbishment. Eloise comforted herself with the notion that if she waited long enough this hand-painted Shaker look that her mother had so loved would surely come back around again. (Hopefully with the ‘distressed’ version of the aesthetic being particularly in vogue.)

  As the brew deepened to the precise bite of bitterness she preferred, Eloise temporarily discarded dreams of a sleek, minimalist, high-gloss scheme with all mod cons (and maybe one of those fancy new percolating machines). She poured herself a fresh cup, breathed in the Pavlovian effects of its aroma and went back to her desk to pick up the printed missive to her hero. As she read it back she knew that it was silly, just silly. Certainly not the way to start her book about Sarah. She crumpled it up and binned it. (Even if she saved the digital file in her personal folder, perhaps as one might treat an unwise outpouring to a long lost lover. The writing of it had been catharsis enough. No need to stamp and post it. No need to click send.)

  Nevertheless, Eloise was not entirely ready to abandon her whimsy. She rummaged in her desk drawer for a marker pen, lifted up that little bust of Darwin and drew upon it a slightly smug, subtle smile.

  *

  Perhaps it is better. This being alone. Perhaps it is right to start everything, all of life, all over again? Or maybe it is wiser to let everything come to an end. Here, now, on her knees, watching her blood mingle with the dirt. Mourning the waste of both warmth and moisture, as the tears tumble from her cheeks. Maybe the carnage she has seen before setting out on this quest is natural to her kind, and will always be the way it goes when death stalks the living as patiently as the spider. When it knows that all it must do is wait and watch and savour the foul struggle within its web. Hunger is the cruellest hunter.
At least the sharp-toothed beasts kill quickly.

  But why has the spider left her until last? Is it a special kind of triumph to savour the death throes of the strongest? And will her child, perhaps the very last child, taste sweetest of all? Pride again. She is neither the strongest nor the best. Perhaps she is the weakest and the worst and her punishment is to be left behind to witness all of this withering loss.

  She sucks in a few shallow gasps of air and then purges them, too quickly. What use such thoughts? She still draws breath. If she can choose to get up again, she knows that she can still walk, despite the pain, and that she will still walk. She knows that she will stand and strain against the web with her final shout of fury. Yes, she will shout and scream and cry and rage and make herself too sour, too bitter to the taste. The spider will surely spit her out again.

  Whether she is good or bad, whether she is worth the sacrifice of the others or not, she can still move, she can still fight, and that is enough. Even for those unseen watchers, those cold-hearted web-weavers. Even though the moments of her life seem to stretch and contract in turns and the earth now takes so much more from her than it gives. The Mother who no longer cherishes or supports her, but gashes her knees as she stumbles exhausted into her jagged embrace.

  Yes, she still breathes, however sharp and gasping as it leaks away her strength. However heavy the growing infant lashed to her aching back. The child that cries now too, taking her moods from the heart she is wrapped so close to. No. She must stop this foolishness. She must inhale until her lungs are tight, hold it there and then give it back slowly, slowly, slowly.

  There is a ritual that her people practise to prepare for the hunt. Right before first light those who wear the skins and claws and teeth of famous kills, those with the taste for what must be done, gather to welcome in the rays of the sun and encourage their warmth with the sound of their breathing. Slowly at first. Long cycles of fresh morning air. They light no fires, seek no other comfort but the closeness of their skin to the cold, damp soil, drawing the heat they need instead from deep within the belly.