‘It’s a lot, isn’t it?’ he says. ‘Being here again.’
I don’t reply.
‘Do you remember?’
‘I remember everything,’ I say.
He takes me, one afternoon, to the Fossil Marine Reptile Gallery.
The lights in the main hall are dim, but here they are completely off. Ahead of me, he searches for the switch and then gives up, illuminating our way with the pale light of his phone. I wrap my arms around myself, willing myself not to shiver at the lithic phalanges of fins, the sharp points of teeth. His phone comes to rest on an enormous eye. The iris is the size of a pineapple slice.
‘What is it?’ I whisper.
‘An ichthyosaur. There are a few in here but this was the very first. It was discovered not by a man but by a child, Mary Anning. She was twelve. Two years younger than you.’
He passes the light along the length of its snout. Swirls are imprinted on its knife-sharp ribs. Ammonites. I imagine them falling over the seabed like snowflakes.
‘She was self-taught like you, barely educated, she never went to university but, when she was older, she was a better palaeontologist than any of the male scientists of the day. Her illustrations rivalled the technical drawings in scientific journals.’
I think of my own sketchbook.
‘She’d go out at every tide, after every storm. She kept going, kept trying.’
‘I’m not Mary Anning.’
‘No. You’re someone else entirely. You could do anything. Be anything.’
That evening, he tells Mama he wants to take us on holiday over Christmas. Mama looks like she is about to burst, she doesn’t trust herself to say anything, unwilling to appear too desperate, too thankful, she nudges me to react. I do. I let out a peal of joy because I cannot remember a time when we’ve gone on a real holiday. School holidays are spent in the park or in front of the TV – Mama can’t afford for me to go to the cinema or drink Black Forest hot chocolates or go shopping, which is what the girls in my class talk about doing together. Even if we had the money, they’d never invite me. I am too awkward, too quiet, too absorbed in my own world.
But as I hear Daniel talk to Mama, I realise it’s more than just a Christmas holiday. Because he is speaking about going to Dorset, the Jurassic Coast, he is talking about fossils. The holiday is, at least in part, for me.
It’s December. The hotel is a stately home – wooden floors, four-poster beds, fairy lights. An enormous Christmas tree stands in the hallway decorated with silver and pink baubles, garlands of spruce are draped over the stairs, in every room, there is the crackle of burning logs. Mama is not interested in Mary Anning country, she doesn’t want to go outside, not when the weather’s so bad, not when there’s a private cinema, an indoor pool, a spa. So, it is Daniel who goes out with me at low tide.
The beaches are deserted, no one wants to brave the winter storms, but Daniel says it’s the best time for collecting, the sea batters the cliffs, exposes fresh fossils in the clay. On the shore, it’s too loud to speak, the crash of the waves, the wind lashes away any words but we fall in step with each other; he waits as I sift through shale, I pause as he empties sand from his boot.He presses the ribbed stem of a sea lily into my palm. I excavate a hunk of pyrite, it has another name, ‘fool’s gold’, luring immigrants to America with glitter and false promises. But although it’s the size of my fist, it’s not what I am searching for. I want an ammonite like the ones I saw on the ichthyosaur at the museum, they’re common here, not even on the cliff face but loose, among the pebbles.
When I see one, shining darkly with sea water, joy shoots through me. I call out something, his name perhaps, he is beside me as I pluck it from the beach. I brush off the sand, hold it out to him, millions of years coiled and perfect between my fingers, ‘I found one!’
The sky around us is grey and dim but the smile on his face is sunlight. ‘Didn’t I say?’ I hear him shout over the wind, the rain. ‘You can do anything.’
I blink at the display case. He knows what he’s doing. There’s a reason he’s taken me to this ichthyosaur. Here, in the museum, on those Dorset beaches, he gave me something – self-belief; I’ve used it at school, at university, at Dulwich & Sullivan, its power inside me as definite and tangible as a pebble. He really did love me before he destroyed me.
The glass whispers against my wrists. I could smash through, let its jagged edges slice through my skin, the lilac of my veins, but not even that will separate him from me. How do I sever what he’s given me from what he’s taken? He is in the whirr of my brain, the flutter of my heart.
There is only one way.
13
Under theArches
Now
‘Are you okay? You seem—’
I don’t reply. I am taking the lead now, turning out of the Fossil Marine Gallery, making my slow, painful way against the pull of visitors. I don’t care that I’m plunging him back into crowds. My mind is clear apart from a thin line of static. The crackle before a radio station comes on.
‘They’ve built a whole new Entomology building since I’ve been gone,’ he says. ‘It’s called the Cocoon.’
‘We’re not going to the Cocoon.’