Fossils, page 5
Who’s there? she asked in a big voice.
She peered in again. The trainer and the knee had moved.
Finally, a hand reached across and lifted the twine. The door swung open.
The trainer and the knee belonged to a man, who had short brown hair and brown eyes.
Hello, he said.
It seemed to Sherrie-Lee like an insubstantial thing to say when you had just been discovered hiding out in a shed. Though he looked harmless enough. He had a calm face, even though it was covered in stubble and his hair was sticking up. She was a good judge of character. She was always the one to spot the villain in films.
Who are you? she asked him.
My name’s Mark. Is it your shed?
It’s my dad’s, she said, looking back at the flat windows.
You won’t tell no one will you? I’ll be gone in a day or two.
There was something about him that Sherrie-Lee found disarming. The simplicity of him. Just there on his own in the shed. There in a place where he shouldn’t be. Helpless. Like he had turned his skin inside out – everything visible and vulnerable. She felt for him.
No. I won’t tell no one. What you doing here?
My missus threw me out. We had a fight and I had nowhere else to kip down. She’ll be alright in a day or two.
That’s too bad. What did you fight about?
The question seemed to surprise him. He looked thoughtful and seemed to be considering the question for a few moments. Sherrie-Lee noticed that the bottom of his left earlobe was missing.
You know what, I don’t really know what we were fighting about. He laughed, and then added, She gets like that sometimes.
What happened to your ear?
He touched it, as if to check what was wrong with it, and said almost in an apologetic way, When I was a kid, we had this dog and he bit a chunk of it off.
Was he vicious then, your dog?
Nah. I was just playing with him, roughing him up a bit. And he got a bit over-excited.
Dogs, hey!
He was a nice dog really. He looked away. Do you live here then?
Yeah. We live in the bottom flat. Me and my dad, Bob.
What’s your name?
Zadie. She didn’t miss a beat.
That’s a nice name. He held the toe of his trainer and seemed to relax a bit more.
I know. It’s my favourite name.
That’s a bit of luck then. It being your name and your favourite name. Most people don’t like their own name.
Sherrie-Lee nodded. Don’t you like your name then?
It’s alright. It’s at school when you don’t like it. No matter what your name is you’ll always get kids making fun of it. You’ve got a mark on your shirt. Mark set go. Nonsense like that.
Sherrie-Lee considered what he said, thinking about all the times kids had teased her real name. Nobody makes fun of Zadie, she said. Which was true.
Is your dad in?
No, she said automatically. Then, because you could never be too sure of people, she added, But he’ll be back soon.
He looked around the shed as though he was looking for something, and then reached behind him and produced an empty plastic bottle. One of those two-litre sized ones, though the original label had been torn off. Listen, Zadie. Can you do me a favour? Would you go and fill this up with water for me? I’m parched.
She took the bottle from him and went inside.
When she had given him the water and was back inside, by herself on the sofa, she thought how nice it felt saying Bob was her dad. How proper normal it made her look. Then she caught herself smiling. All that spying she’d done, and she hadn’t even noticed someone was living in the shed at the back! No shit, Sherlock.
*
At the park, Sherrie-Lee took her notebook and pen from her pocket and flicked over to a new page. She wrote down the date and the time. There were quite a few people around, but that was the good thing about insects, they didn’t seem to mind people the way some species of birds did. She took her usual route. Since the fifteenth of March, she had been doing a survey of insects in the park. She was good at this kind of thing. For two years, she had been monitoring birds, and had become an expert on the ones that lived around here. She had taught herself the names of all the ones she had seen and could tell a crow from a raven. A raven was bigger and when it was flying its tail fanned out in a kind of diamond shape, whereas a crow’s tail was more rounded. Crows also liked to hang out by themselves, or in pairs. Rooks too, she could spot. They had thinner greyish beaks, and lived in groups, often alongside jackdaws. Jackdaws were the easiest to spot. They had grey heads and pale eyes. All the different kinds of birds had their own special habits. Their own special way of being. There was no end to all the amazing facts you could learn about them. Learning the names of different animals, finding out how to tell one from another felt important. Finding out about them, and finding a way in, opened up the world in a new way. This learning of names, this storing of facts inside herself. You’d be amazed if you took the time to find out. Like how crows never forget a face. Or how they are highly intelligent, and when they encounter a mean human, they teach other crows to recognise that human so they can avoid them. So now, when she saw a crow, she could think of its name and all the facts she knew about it. It was like a story in a way, and that’s how she thought of it. Being drawn into a world created by the story of an animal. The library had loads of books about birds. Birds were what she really loved. Probably, there were just as many interesting facts about insects, but she was finding it more difficult to get drawn into their stories. She moved to insects because she had been learning about the insect population collapse. She had been so fixated on the birds that she hadn’t noticed the insects so much. Though it made sense, and you could see that that was probably why a lot of birds were dying out, the insect-feeders anyway. The seed-eaters had problems of their own.
Everything was dying out and it was all happening a lot quicker than anyone imagined. They were losing their habitats on a daily basis. Sometimes it depressed her so much that she had difficulty getting out of bed. The creatures were powerless in it all. They just had to stand by as their worlds disappeared. Powerless and voiceless. They couldn’t stand up for themselves. She had a secret wish that she would find an orphaned corvid baby, perhaps a crow, that she would raise it and teach it to talk. Though she knew too that if you found an orphan like that, it probably wasn’t an orphan and you should leave it to its parents: they were the best at looking after it. Rescuing baby birds was a bit like giving bread and milk to hedgehogs. It was misguided. A lot of people didn’t know that. That bread and milk is poisonous for hedgehogs and that rescuing a bird is almost definitely doing more harm than good.
She spent a lot of time back in March and April learning about the different species of insects, but all the time she still came across ones that she didn’t know the names of, there were so many different species, and sometimes some of the ones she knew were hard to tell apart so there was a bit of guesswork involved too. A bit like looking at stars. She found it even more depressing than monitoring birds. All the stuff she had read. Farmers, gardeners, haters of ants, all of them were addicted to insecticides. She went to the garden section of the DIY superstore on the edge of town and hid all the insecticides. It took ages finding places to put them all, where they wouldn’t be found so easily. She pushed some behind the grass seed. Some she put inside a kind of fancy metal bin dotted with round holes. Others she put in a trolley, or hid behind bags of gravel. It was not like other shops, because it was massive and there were not many shop assistants and they didn’t seem to worry about shoplifters so they were not always on the lookout like they were at other places. Another time she took a roll of labels from school and wrote on each one – DO NOT BUY THIS PRODUCT!!!! IT KILLS ALL THE BEES AND EVENTUALLY YOU!!!– and stuck them on the spray canisters. People were short-sighted and could not see how bad killing insects was. At first, she thought they were just fucking stupid, but that was not fair, they just needed educating. And all the companies should not be producing the insecticides and advertising them in the first place. She was optimistic in this respect. People just needed saving from themselves. This phrase she had heard somewhere and thought of it each time she found herself thinking about this particular dilemma. Farmers ought to know better, though. Living in nature and being dependent on insects to pollinate their crops, and still they sprayed, even when they didn’t need to. Neonicotinoids were the worst. She had been researching all about them in the computer room at school. They were a nerve poison. A nerve poison! And deadly. Just five maize seeds sprayed with the stuff was enough to kill a partridge. And that was just the start, if it got in the soil and the food chain. She could feel the rapid thud of her heartbeat.
All the way up to the folly at the high point of the park, she didn’t see any insects. But that part was all rhododendrons and those big waxy-leaved plants with no flowers, so it was usually the deadest part, insect-wise. She probably could find some if she looked hard in the grass, but she didn’t do that in this part of the park and she needed to keep to the same routine. Behind the folly was better. There was a kind of small meadow with grasses and tall, wild daisies. This folly bothered her, too. It was a kind of stone seat with four stone columns and a roof above it. It wasn’t the thing itself that bothered her. The word was the problem. She looked the word up once, but it didn’t seem right. It was a Victorian thing, this kind of folly. The dictionary had said. Sherrie-Lee thought it was a silly word for a silly thing, and that made it seem worse somehow. They had a lot to answer for, those Victorians. The sign to it saying folly also irked her. She sighed, seeing it now, as she always tried not to look at it. She always tried, but never succeeded. This was like a ritual. Always at the same section of the park she would begin trying not to see it, and then she would see the thing. It was mad, really. I mean, how hard could it be? You just needed not to look that way. But not looking at something was a lot harder than you might imagine. Anyway, the seat itself, when she got there, was a good place to sit for twenty minutes to count the insects in the meadow. The hill was steep. It made her breathless getting to the top, her poor heart working overtime. Made her legs ache, striding up. From the seat, she breathed in the warm air. A small breeze rustled through the pink heads of the grasses, making them all move in the same direction. There were a couple of white butterflies flitting together. She wrote down two cabbage whites – there were a couple of other butterflies they could have been but she plumped for cabbage whites. There was a six-spot burnet moth milling around the yellow flower heads of common ragwort. And a hoverfly near to that. She wrote them down in her notepad.
6
Although it didn’t seem to have all that much going for it, the city at least had a good skyline. Bob looked at it from the wall of the cafe, high on the hill, next to the memorial. The sinking sun bled into the sky, reddening the edges of clouds and the sky beyond. The industrial relics of the city’s architecture blackened up in the diminishing light. Factory buildings bolstered by rows of terraces, which spread beneath like trays of boxes in specimen drawers that he had seen in a museum as a child. He imagined the people inside like the insects collected and housed in the small wooden boxes – carrying out their lives, their hopes and burdens. Further out, the lines spread out and curved into cul-de-sacs of semis. The outline of the castle reached above, and the tower of the Priory, all of it reducing to silhouette in the fired glow of the sunset. Bob’s thoughts emptied out and slowly repossessed him as he watched the progression of the sky. He was thirty-six years old and had long felt that things ought to change. The how of that change had so far eluded him. Had manifested only in a series of bad decisions. He tilted his head back to take in the uppermost reaches of the sky, high above him. At the zenith, a watery blue took back control over the colouring, resistant to the blaze of the sunset.
A memory pushed its way into his mind. Inside: the first time in the canteen. The nervousness he had felt seeing the rows of tables full of men sitting with their trays. Taking his place in the queue. Knowing nobody. The smell of men and boiled meat and cabbage mixing with the echoed scrape of cutlery and voices. How quickly he fell into the routine, the enforced hours in his cell, the mind-numbing boredom and idleness rebounding off all the white walls. He was grateful that his first cellmate there was quiet and easy to get along with. And then after he was released, perhaps it had taken him longer to adjust to that than it took him to adjust to being inside. Freedom was a funny thing. Everything had been difficult. Finding a job. A place to live. Readjusting to being with people. Deciding things for himself, even the basic things, like when and what to eat. What to do with his time when there seemed to be so many options. There had been so many things he needed to make up for. The sentence people got was for time spent inside, but there was all the extra time that people served when trying to get back to life on the outside. Like climbing out of a river and still walking around for months, years, with the river mud clinging on.
*
The evening had been advertised as a ‘Lament for Lost Species’. There were about twelve people in the church hall when Sherrie-Lee arrived, all of them much, much older. They were sitting on chairs in a semicircle when she got there and the speaker stood at the centre of the circle, while the sitters shuffled and arranged themselves. Sherrie-Lee took a vacant seat between two grey-haired people. Her stomach growled, causing her a flush of embarrassment. The speaker looked at them before he welcomed them briefly and efficiently in a gentle, quiet voice.
We are joined here this evening in a confusion of our feeling. We are tossed into a sea of bewilderment in our loss of connection to what’s happening to the world. In our collective sorrow for this world and our need to mourn all the lost species.
Sherrie-Lee hadn’t known what to expect and was put off by the therapy-group arrangement of chairs, but when mourning all the lost species was mentioned she was gripped by a sense of the urgency of it all. Everything else could be put up with after that. That it was just her among a lot of old people. That there was no token food on offer. That it was just one person speaking, with everyone else having to listen. Though she was glad that everyone didn’t have to introduce themselves, not only because she had a personal dislike of doing it, but also because it meant that it wasn’t about them at all, it was about the animals. She wished that more people were there to listen and that younger people, people her own age, cared more about all the animals and all the stuff that was happening.
Grief was our innermost feeling and mourning was the outward show of that grief, he continued. Where are our funerals for all these extinct species? raising his voice just a little and looking off into the back of the hall. We must come together to express grief and protect species in the future, he said. We must trust the process of ritual.
He explained that he had written the names of some of the extinct species on leaf-shaped pieces of card and each of the thirteen people had to pick up three of them and place them in what he called the ‘sacred space’. He instructed them to take turns placing a leaf in the sacred space and to pronounce each of the names of the lost species. He gestured towards a small circle of unlit candles behind him. People stood up and began to move towards an area at the back corner of the hall, which Sherrie-Lee had not noticed when she came in. A tall man in a brown waistcoat took the lead in collecting his three leaves.
There was a solemn feeling in the hall, that Sherrie-Lee had felt as soon as she arrived. The feeling had intensified as the evening progressed. They took turns, slowly, in placing their leaves in the sacred space. Pronouncing the names of the extinct species. Mexican grizzly bear 1964. Desert bandicoot 1943. Caspian tiger 1970s. Eastern cougar 2018. Saudi gazelle 1980s. When all the leaves were placed in the sacred space all the people stood around quietly before returning to their chairs and then, in silence, the speaker lit the candles, crouching down to light each one in turn.
A ten-minute silence followed. Only the odd shuffle could be heard, the creak of a chair, someone’s breathing close to where Sherrie-Lee was sitting. She felt a deep burrowing sorrow in that ten minutes. She felt the sorrow of everyone around her too. It seemed from the beginning a kind of sorrow from which there was no return.
Walking back to Bob’s place, she thought about all those animals that she would never meet. How all of them were gone forever, never to return. Never to exist or be born again. How real it made it all, having those funerals for them. That made it concrete and undeniable and terrible at the same time. Sherrie-Lee felt like she would never be happy again. As though everything had changed and nothing could ever be the same. And she felt, too, that the woman with the short grey hair, who had sat next to her in the semicircle, had felt the same as Sherrie-Lee. She saw that after the silence, the woman’s face was wet with tears.
She walked an extended, convoluted route back to Bob’s, feeling the need to walk and come back to herself. As she walked, bits of the evening played in her mind with fresh sadness until she tried not to think of it at all. She would put another thing in its place when the thoughts came. She would make herself think good things about Joshy, about the library, about Claire, about her nan until that filled her mind, with only the edges of it threatening to peel away, to let the sadness back in.
Already the creak of the floorboard just inside the living room door had become familiar to her. Coming in now it felt like a greeting, as though the room was welcoming her. She came into the room without turning on the lights and sat for a long time in the darkness.
7
When she first saw the poster pinned to the telegraph pole, it was from a distance. Only the word MISSING stood out in bold black capitals at the top. Her breath caught in anticipation and the arteries feeding her brain pulsed and throbbed as her heart rate quickened. The photo below it was out of focus, and it took a few steps of walking towards it before she could make it out. It had rained the night before, and this had made the plastic wallet that the poster was sealed into steam up slightly, adding to the blur. When she got close enough to see, she saw that it wasn’t her after all. The thing that was missing was not even human, but a ginger cat. The photo showed it curled up on a white background. Missing since Saturday, she read. She immediately noticed that it had been missing for less time than she had, but there were no posters about her being missing. No posters for a missing twelve-year-old girl. Though, she supposed, that was probably a good thing, not something that she should feel sad about. If anyone was kicking up a fuss, she’d probably have to skedaddle back home. She read on. A four-year-old male ginger cat, answering to the name Tiger. Tiger is affectionate and will be scared while he’s away from home. He has three legs. Please check your sheds and garages. Please call this number. She warmed to the cat after she read that it only had three legs, thinking that it wasn’t its fault that it was being looked for and she wasn’t. People were funny like that. They liked their animals. There was nothing wrong with that. She spent several minutes looking at the phone number to memorise it. 077 – pretty standard. 844 – eight is two fours. 725 – seven take two is five. Seven add two is nine, or that’s nine digits before it – ending like it began with a zero – 90. She turned her back to the poster and recited it a couple of times. She would write it down when she got back.
