Bone Lines

by Stephanie Bretherton

  Towards the latter pages Eloise came across a series of images that she’d always thought she must have dreamt but now she retrieved a memory that, apparently, was quite real. A very young Eloise (four? five?) sits astride a shaggy-maned pony, held securely in its ornate saddle by the strength and the smile of a Mongolian horseman. This must have been either before or after a dig in the Gobi Desert? Her father is not in any of these shots, so perhaps her mother had left him to his fossils and brought her young child to the steppes to experience some life.

  At once Eloise was bathed in a stream of reminiscences, of wide skies and biting cold, of warm yurts and rancid milk, of tame eagles flapping their vast wings and of red flags flying above the dust from pounding hooves. The thrill was more vital than anything in recent memory and she relished until it began to slip away, but she knew that she would return to this treasure chest again, and soon. Tomorrow perhaps, after she buried Newton… and thus the joy subsided and Eloise shuddered at the thought of this unwanted obligation.

  Feeling the need to hold on to a touch of their comfort, she tucked a couple of albums under one arm to take downstairs. As she navigated the retractable ladder down from the loft, a single photograph came loose and floated to the floor. Even before she could pick it up for closer examination, Eloise recognised the virile posturing of the tanned young man in the picture standing proudly in front of the Buddhas of Bamiyan. It was Darius.

  Her father must have taken the picture. How he would have wept at the senseless destruction of those treasures since, she could hear him in tones half-despairing, half-raging as he mourned for art beyond value that belonged not to those warped and angry vandals, not even to all Afghans, but to all humanity. It would be as monstrous to him as the Spanish conquistadors burning Mayan libraries in the name of the church, or all the other inestimable losses at the hands of various cultural ‘cleanses’. Eloise was mystified, however, as to why this particular photograph had been included in their family albums. This was taken long before she and Darius had become ‘an item’. How odd, she thought.

  Darius. Now there was someone who had known Newton well enough. Though he’d had no special fondness for cats, a friend of his had been moving abroad and after an excess of farewell drinks, he had returned home one night to present her with Newton. This was about six months before he’d left her. But she couldn’t hate the pretty cast-off tabby for that. Especially when he turned out to be far better company than her ex. Eloise continued downstairs to the kitchen, placed the albums on the table and made some herbal tea. She left the photographs where they were for now and went into the living room to surrender to the generosity of her red velvet sofa (so painfully lacking the presence of that sweet little soul curled up at the other end of it, likely only to have stretched and yawned and changed his position in lazy acknowledgement of her arrival).

  She half considered the diversion of a recorded documentary, but knew it would not satisfy. For the first time in a life full of so many hopes and joys and yet so many losses, Eloise felt an overwhelming sense of abandonment. The ache of isolation cast her back once more to the one she had tried so hard to forget, believing the brevity of that experience could override its intensity. Believing that Newton (or she) might be capable of loving anyone else as much. Before she could think better of it she had picked up the house phone. What was his number? But no, she had banished it from both phone and personal memory some time ago, to guard against temptation. It was pointless. Even if she could drag it out from the depths of her mental archives, would he still have the same number?

  No. It was as well she could not remember. It was she that had given him up (against both their wishes) and she could expect nothing from him now.

  Her mind was drawn back now to that fallen photograph from Bamiyan. To the man so tightly woven into her history there was little wiggle room for wilful amnesia. Yes, there was another number that she could remember with no trouble at all, etched in deep from the days before stored electronic memory. Darius had been one of the first to acquire a mobile phone with international capability (how proud he had been of that). He may not have bothered much with the cat that he had given her as a consolation prize but he deserved to be bothered by her bereavement now. She picked up her landline and pressed in the digits, not caring what it might cost him or what hour it was, wherever in the world he may be.

  ‘Darius.’

  ‘LoLo? What is it? Are you alright?’

  ‘Darius, it’s Newton.’

  She could say no more. But no more needed to be said, Darius, it seemed, had understood.

  ‘Oh. Oh LoLo, I’m sorry. Really. I’m so sorry.’

  He knew her well enough, the tremors in her tone when she was trying to be strong. He knew she was in pain, yes, but this time apparently he cared. She could sense the sincerity in his pauses, in a voice less icily hardened, less convinced of invulnerability, a voice becoming thawed by the friction of life.

  *

  The climb had been the right decision, despite its difficulty. From here she can make out a coastline, at last… yes, she is sure that is what she sees disappearing into the distant yellow mists. Too far for them to reach quickly, close enough to allow for a lasting rest. And there is sustenance here, she has discovered a flock of fat and slow ground-nesting birds. She has taken what she can of them, and from them, without taking more than their numbers or their spirits could recover from. Those already without mates, those with more than one egg.

  And in the heart of this high ground she has found a good cave, rare and precious, no one’s territory now but hers. She has burnt the rotting carcass of the strange animal that had come here to die, though what it once had been, she could not tell. Other than the rancid aroma that will pass in time, this is the perfect place to stop for a while. In its cool silence (so warm when the fire was new) she has allowed herself to let go of her aches, her fears, her doubts and to retrieve a long-forgotten chant for the child. The smile, the gaze it brings lurches deep into something she did not know was possible.

  In this stillness she has also felt safe to trance. Powerful, but mystifying, it is nothing she can cling to or recognise. Strange but revealing in ways she may never understand. Are these spirits or people? So, so many people. Creatures hard, sharp and angular like rocks carved by some giant elder, and they moved so fast. A colourless human, perhaps, or a ghost, is looking at her. It keeps looking back at her.

  She let it be. Let it settle somewhere where one day she might be able to recall and read the signs. Not now.

  Now she examines her necklace, those pretty shells that had required such skill, patience and precision to work without cracking. But these are not the kind of treasure that she needs in this moment. She breaks a piece of carved ochre from the centrepiece of the necklace, crushes it and mixes it with melt water. She rubs it into the parts of the bear hide that have begun to waste.

  This is important work. She was taught well by her mother how to treat any hide before letting it near a living body. How to avoid and to carefully check herself and others for those nasty crawling pests that would sink their tiny teeth into your flesh, hang on and steal your blood before you noticed them. Or worse, before they gave you the red fever and the agonising aches. She finishes with the hide and resolves to check again her own body, between her toes, her hair, and that of the child. Although they have made no close contact with any other warm, living thing for so long, it is unlikely that they have been travelling all this way alone.

  But before touching the child again, she wipes the paste on to the rock and the trail of her fingers remains. There will be no rain within these rocky walls to wash the lines away. How long will this sign of her presence stay?

  An old temptation returns. Will she try something she has often imagined but was never brave enough to attempt, as she could not know whether it might please or offend? There are no others now to ask. It is only for her to make the choice and so she begins. She prepares more paste. The figures flow from her
fingers with instinctive grace. Along the smoothest striation of the wall, they soak in and start to mark out the episodes of her odyssey.

  16

  Her eyes were tired and still red and swollen, despite the misdirection of some extra make-up. Rory had noticed her unhappiness and asked if she was OK but Eloise declined to talk about it, afraid the tears were too imminent. She had never been good at sharing her own sadness, however instinctively she gave encouragement to others. There was too much to do, but once KC had left for his regular conference call with his colleagues across the water, Eloise sent Rory home too.

  There was little of significance for KC to report. The head of Sarah’s femur, which they’d counted on as their next best source for harvesting the right cells with the least risk of damage, had turned into another dead end. But there was a glimmer of progress. To everyone’s relief, there’d been no further contamination issues since the new security measures had gone into place (and no successful email breaches since the new firewall parameters) and this was good news indeed, barring the disturbing inference that someone in the building was not to be trusted. The next step would be to compare every staff member’s DNA against the source, but that would steal time and resources they could not spare.

  Eloise caught herself wondering (in spite of how well they seemed to be getting along, both personally and professionally) whether there was the remotest possibility that KC himself had been sabotaging their work, setting up cause for a full handover to the US? Surely not? He was certainly under pressure from those responsible for the ‘bottom line’ but this would be Machiavellian beyond all reason. There was no clear cause anymore for that level of mistrust.

  Eloise put all such outlandish notions of dark plotting aside, laid all concerns about Sarah to rest for a while and reassigned herself for the evening to monitoring the progress of the corrected cells in the pancreatic study. A simple, suspicion-free project running parallel with Sarah that had a good chance of yielding applicable results. It seemed that no distraction today would be successful, however, and her thoughts kept looping back to the morning’s sorry task. To the shovel that she had forgotten to return to Mr Singh, to the sealed grey box underground that was denying, against the all-rightful demands of nature, an easy meal to her neighbourhood foxes.

  No. She needed to let thoughts of death subside with all the other heaviness and worry of her world right now, wanted to think about something vital, something energising. She needed to lose herself in the vigour of another.

  So, in the lull of her working limbo (and the failure of Mrs T’s ‘cure’ of industry) Eloise closed her eyes to remember. The shock of it still stirred her, seven years on. The pictures, the sensations emerging so clearly into the present. She is having sex in a dark stairwell. Wild sex with a thrilling but entirely unsuitable new partner. Not ‘making love’ as she had done with Darius, those complex chess moves on Egyptian cotton sheets or that half-hearted submission to enervated duty, but she is greedily shagging with complete abandon, and it is bliss.

  Afterwards she had felt a little nauseous with the shame, but the addiction had begun. She had known her eager new admirer for only a few days and he was so much younger. So absurdly delicious. She had tried to dismiss it. No. No, no, she had reproached herself at the time, this is impossible, this cannot be. But she lacked the belief to resist it.

  Eloise had met Tom when she was thirty-seven. Two dry years after Darius. She’d been running on the track in the park, in the days when she still trained religiously. The whack of filthy leather had come from nowhere, booted with venom (at Tom, not her). She recalled the jolt of the blow and the acknowledgement that, yes, a football in the back at speed is rather painful. Winded, she’d dropped to all fours. When able to feel anything again, Eloise had felt a hand gripping her bare shoulder.

  Yes, yes, she thought, as she let herself remember it all, as real as it had ever been, entering the moment as if it were happening right here, right now…

  ‘Fuck, Shit, are you alright? Fuck, I’m so sorry, are you alright, darlin’?’

  Her breath came back slowly.

  ‘Yes, I’m fine. It’s nothing. It’s OK, just the shock.’

  She was not a wimp, not frail. She was strong, she would not make a fuss. She looked up at him – and then had to look away again to avoid a wave of unexpected desire. She wasn’t ready to move yet but he helped her up and she surrendered to it, let him hold her.

  He is so young, she thought, how old can he be? Twenty? No more than twenty-five.

  Her calculation was interrupted by cat calls from his friends.

  ‘Oi! Come on, you wanker, she’s alright!’

  Eloise ignored the sequence of obscene gestures and recommendations that followed.

  ‘Fuck off, you cunts! Oh, sorry, darlin’ – ’scuse my language,’ he both cursed and apologised, as he kicked the ball back towards his cohorts.

  It was a weekday afternoon, during some welcome ‘get-things-done-at-home’ leave for Eloise. None of the players wore a team strip of any description and they were an odd number for any-a-side but they seemed harmless enough, despite the vulgarity. Eloise did not share the snobbery of many of her social strata, those who might make educated excuses for their disdain. (‘Barely bipedal,’ she imagined Darius deriding, as he condemned such lads to their fates, ‘the natural world would have selected them for extinction by now if we weren’t keeping them on benefits.’)

  But this young man was still there beside her, still touching her shoulder, still smiling at her rather than returning to his ‘losing’ team.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he offered, with playful sincerity and a half-bow.

  ‘Oh, don’t worry, it’s not your fault, it was an accident.’

  ‘Yeah, I know, it wasn’t me – but it was meant for me. If I hadn’t been watching you.’

  Eloise looked down at the ground, afraid he would notice the dilation in her pupils. Was he feeling what she was feeling? His bold touch on her shoulder told her so.

  ‘I’ve seen you here before, you know. Running.’

  She felt a little hunted, but was surprised by how much she was enjoying his shameless flirtation.

  ‘I owe you an ice cream, or something,’ he offered with persistent charm.

  ‘No, no you don’t, it’s fine really.’

  And yet Eloise had found herself eating an ice cream with this boy after he had abandoned his game and his friends, sitting at a weathered picnic table across from a face she could not figure out. It was alluring in parts but there was something elusive that would not crystallise. A proud nose. (Good.) His lips were lush and full and might not look amiss on a Hollywood starlet, and under his arched eyebrows his eyes were a little too narrow, a little too close together and an indistinguishable colour… but when they looked at her she was intoxicated.

  The human eye. Such a magnificent accomplishment of adaptation, she thought, as she remembered that feeling of connection with her new companion. Its very complexity had become the battle cry for the deniers of evolution, despite computer modelling that revealed how its progression from simple light sensor to a full optical lens was both possible and natural. To Eloise, the eyes were a window not so much to the soul but to the countless generational changes that enhanced awareness of prey or hazard. (Or perhaps, she admitted, from a more whimsical perspective, a richer appreciation of the wonders of this world.) As far as she was aware, the human eye remained superior to any computer algorithm when it came to recognising certain patterns. How much more might it evolve, she wondered. How much more, in time, would we be able to see? Or do we see only what we need to see in order to negotiate this limited consensus of physical reality?

  She had unlocked herself from his gaze to more coolly assess her audacious suitor. Tom, as he had introduced himself with a zealous handshake, kept his hazelnut hair tribally short and was pasty in the poorly nourished way of young men who eschew healthy eating in favour of beer and cigarettes, but he was hard, defined and kic
k-about athletic. The Celtic spiral tattoo that curved around his triceps (a perfectly formed triangle that presented itself for her admiration each time he twisted his Cornetto) was badly executed, but the pattern was entrancing as it flexed. The most curious thing, the feature that had reeled her in beyond return, was an identical scar to her own right under the chin. Eloise did not subscribe to divination and yet this shared marking had seemed somehow… prophetic.

  Tom had found her on the track the next day and ran backwards beside her, with an optimistic grin. Normally this might have annoyed her, raised her guard with a reflex of aloofness, but despite taking a different route Eloise had hoped he would find her. It was ludicrous of course, and yet, inexplicably, during this second encounter Tom had persuaded her to meet him again. To her amazement she had agreed to go out on a ‘date’.

  They chose the night of the summer solstice and the grass-worn mound of Primrose Hill, with its clear city views and its urban legend of ley lines, had attracted all the usual suspects. The any-excuse revellers, the hipsters, the tourists, a handful of ‘African’ drummers competing with a circle of droning didgeridoos. And of course, the druids.

  There was something so bizarre and yet so British to Eloise about a gang of white-robed, middle-aged alternatives resurrecting a romantic past while juggling hampers and handbags and organising their worship over mobile phones. It made her laugh out loud, not cruelly, but with a sudden warmth for the splendid eccentricity of it all. It was the first of many times that Eloise would laugh that night, in a way she had forgotten to, in a way she had foregone for far too long. She might have blamed the surprisingly decent wine that Tom had supplied to wash away the awkwardness, but she knew that this was more than disinhibition. It was rare to find a sense of humour in such perfect harmony with her own and they giggled like teenagers in a frequent chorus of carefree joy.