The Find (21 page)

‘But even that doesn't mean anything will come of it, in terms of the harassment,' Greta told Anna. They were in Anna's room at the hotel, Greta sitting with her back to the wall on Anna's bed. ‘Though the driving charges will stick. And I'm going to report this to the university. They have a very clear grievance procedure for sexual harassment. I bet I'm not the only one. Why should he get away with it? Will you support me?' Anna filled water glasses from a plastic bottle, and brought them over.

I feel responsible
is what Anna had said to Scott earlier, though she had not explained to him why, and she had not planned to tell Greta either: better, she thought, to be simply a witness, not a witness with a peculiar resurrected grievance, a perceived agenda of her own. But here she was, in the same room, or one very like it, and here was Greta.

‘You're absolutely right to make an issue of it. It happened to me, actually,' Anna said, and saw the younger woman's face loosen, and then put itself back together. ‘I had to hit him. A terrible mess— I didn't make a complaint, though probably I should have. Of course, I'll support you.'

The first time someone knocked, she found Jason outside, and watched him put his arm around Greta, saw how the younger woman turned her head into his chest while he stroked her hair. The second time, it was Scott.

‘Just checking in. Everything okay?'

‘Thank you.' It was all she could say. And all she wanted to do was sleep. She turned out the rickety bedside light and lay in the almost dark of the room, allowing the events of the day to replay themselves in her mind until they wore themselves out and became the words of the letter she would write:
I have known Greta Hanson since she began volunteering for us four years ago, first as a fieldworker and then as research assistant. Greta is a trustworthy, responsible, mature person...

♦ ♦ ♦

Swenson's team, not knowing where he was or when he might turn up again, strode ahead, leaning forward under the weight of their packs. Lin, Jason and Greta talked together in low voices. Scott had exchanged packs with Brian who clearly did not enjoy the hike: he was sweating hard, his knee, he said, was playing up; he'd been waiting months for surgery.

The site, when they arrived was dusky and still, their abandoned tents billowing slightly in the breeze.

—
♦ —

THEY ROSE EARLY, WORKED HARD UNTIL DUSK
. Kneeling or squatting on the rock, land-bound, they inched towards the moment when they would lever the skull piece, half-covered in plaster, right out of the rock, and, they hoped, turn it over without breaking it.

‘A marriage of twenty-first-century science and stone-age technology,' Brian called it, rubbing his creased, dusty hands together as he spoke. Beauty and the Beast, Scott thought when he looked at the pair of them: Brian's sun-broiled bald patch; Anna's hair not just all there, but alive and refusing to stay in the tie. His small eyes hidden in folds of skin; hers huge, alert, shining. His blunt fingers, her agile hands. They had known each other for years. There was nothing between them, or between Anna and anyone, so far as he could tell.

‘Dr Swenson has gone back to talk to the university,' Gunnar informed them on his return from a trip to town. Jason drew his finger across his throat. There was laughter; even the air seemed to relax.

‘We'll have to pick up some slack,' Anna pointed out, ‘wind up for him.'

No one minded that, and she found herself laughing at the slightest of ironies, the feeblest jokes. She touched people on the elbow or shoulder as she talked to them; they worked on, and far above them the ravens reeled out into the impossibly blue sky, teasing with their aeronautic tricks and indecipherable messages, their shrieks, caws, the deep, hollow glugging sounds. It seemed to Scott that they had arrived suddenly, and almost by accident, on Planet Paradise: just the teams and the occasional visitor, working in the silvery morning light, in thick yellow midday sun, the sudden shade that came a little earlier each afternoon.

‘Though it's a shame,' Anna told Scott, ‘about my brother and the kids. I wanted them to see this. He was going to bring them, but Lesley has complications and he can't make it. Who knows whether I'll get to do something like this again?'

‘Don't think that way,' he said, shocked to be reminded of one of the first things he'd known about her, even though it seemed, now, a groundless fear. How to say, don't worry, it will be just fine, without sounding trite? Sometimes, he felt he was starting to hate words: despite the way they proliferated, you could only ever say part of what you meant. Many things that were never said at all.

It is always best
, Anna wrote in her personal notes,
to work slowly and carefully, but it's true as well that now Mike Swenson has left, I simply don't want the dig to end. No — I want it to last. The human squabbling is over, and now we can surrender to the task before us.
They could, she felt, allow themselves to open up to the strange, stone-bound creatures they were prising from the earth's grip. These creatures were separated from them by the element they moved in, and by many millions of years, and yet it was possible to feel a kind of kinship with them. Did everyone feel this way? She liked to think so. And while they were not unravelling time, as Felix once rather grandly suggested, perhaps they were at least loosening its grip.

She did not want the dig to end because it felt so good — and also, when it was over and the specimen embarked on the long process of preparation, she would be left all over again with the question that hovered over her life, with the way things were before the dig began, before she had met Scott Macleod and asked for his help.

She would go home to all that, and Scott would do whatever he chose to do next. Maybe she would be able to help him in some way.

I will miss Scott
, she wrote.
I have to admit that I will miss him being a few metres away, miss the knowledge that he's aware of me, just as, increasingly, I'm aware of him. Of the person he has turned out to be, but also of his hands and face the way he moves.

Perhaps, she told herself, it is good that the dig is almost over.

Chip by chip, they burrowed deep into the remaining plinth, reaching in where they could not quite see, supporting the specimen with timber joists and cement blocks. They kept fragments of waste rock close by to cushion the impact when it came to flipping the skull piece over. The discard piles were huge now, five times the size of the holes they had made; at the end, they would use the waste rock to fill in, and allow the river to wash the rest away.

‘What we do has more impact than you'd think,' Felix told Scott. ‘It'll wash up somewhere, make a bank, change the river's flow.'

They nudged through the last bit of plinth, fed ropes through the gap, widened it, inserted joists, levered and propped, this side then that, until the base of the half-wrapped rock lay on a sagging timber cradle just above the main ground level. Next, it must move across, then over.

‘If Dr S were here,' Greta said, ‘he'd be telling us we're crazy — just saw the damned thing in half!'

‘Fingers crossed that he's not actually right!' Anna laughed partly from nerves, also because she could see the absurdity of it all: the rock poised in the middle of a group of sweaty humans who wanted to throw themselves at their task, but could not, who wanted what seemed to be the impossible — until, towards the end of the afternoon, the huge stone-and-plaster parcel slid slowly down the tiny slope they had created and lodged on the edge of the trench.

Good footage, Gus said. Though it would edit down to less than a minute.

‘Tomorrow,' Anna explained, no longer angry with the cameras, but including them, ‘will be better still. We'll set up more levers, bracing, ropes. We'll make a frame here, hang onto the ropes on one side, and reduce the propping of the other, and slowly, the idea is, we'll roll it.'

She squeezed her eyes as it went over: there was a sound somewhere between a groan and a cry, and when she looked again it was unbroken, ready for the underside to be jacketed and braced.

They eased the huge, irregular, plaster-coated lump of rock onto rollers and pushed it out into the middle of the gorge, taking each roller round to the front as it emerged from the back. They packed the smaller pieces into crates.

It could, Scott thought, almost be something he'd imagined — that old up, up and away thing of his. But it was real: the vibrations of a Sikorsky 61 doubled and redoubled — an impossible, heart-shaking din.

As the grip hook descended, he, Anna and Jason helped the technician from CanCo to thread the nylon straps of the harness beneath the specimen and ratchet them to length. They could hear nothing of what they did. Jason and Scott slipped the fitting onto the grip hook. Anna checked it, and then each of the ropes; returned, looked at them both, her eyes huge. Escaped strands of her hair danced in the updraft: she was thinking of the calculation, the density of shale, her estimate of the specimen's volume…

She signalled that they were done. The cable tightened. Machine and gravity pitted themselves against each other. The noise intensified. Moments passed and it seemed hopeless, and then there was the faintest suspicion of movement, an almost imperceptible wobble as the rock lost contact with the ground. The Sikorsky pulled up and they tipped their heads back to watch, their throats tight and dry.

It cleared the gorge and the treetops and slid east across the sky, dwindling fast. Soon it would be descending by the entrance to the cliff trail, where Felix and Brian and Lin and half of the other team waited with the trucks.

‘We did it!' Scott said, his arm across Anna's back. Everyone hugged everyone; the helicopter made four more trips, returning last of all for the portable WCs, dangling over all their heads.

♦ ♦ ♦

They went to Marco's. The tables had been pushed together to make one huge expanse decorated with plastic grapevines and candles stuck into wine bottles. Everyone and his friend was invited to eat lasagne, including Mac and Orianna, who had arrived home by taxi that afternoon and were sitting just beyond Brian and Lin, a tall glass of soda in front of each of them.

Anna rattled a spoon in her glass.

‘We are so delighted with how everything has turned out. I hope,' she said smiling at Coxtis, ‘that this way everyone has got something of what they wanted.'

There were whoops, whistles and cheers from the unofficial royal couple of the Forest Nation: Spruce and his pregnant girlfriend, Ocean. The St'alkwextsihn elders, Thompson and Coxtis, were more dignified in their response. They were on a long road, Anna thought. This, the end of a journey for her, was for them a tiny, symbolic step.

‘I want to thank everyone—' Scott's hand shook as he filled a few nearby glasses, and then his own. It could almost be a dream, he thought, the whole thing from meeting her until now. But now it was over: Anna thanked the protestors, she thanked Thompson for his courageous stand, for sticking to his ground but also being patient and open, she thanked Coxtis and the elders for their willingness to negotiate. She thanked the funding bodies. Her colleagues at the museum. The teams.

‘Everyone's contribution was vital in what has turned out to be a huge challenge, but I think it's true to say that without Scott Macleod here, we'd not have been able to succeed in the way we have.' There was clapping and yells:
Scott, Scott!
To begin with, he liked being thanked, but as she continued, speaking of the many ways in which he had contributed, of his hard work, kindness, calm and clear-sightedness, Scott's pleasure faded. It was the end; when he thought how soon Anna would be gone, back to where she came from, his heart ached. He was both angry and sad. He did not want to say goodbye. He did not want the story to end; he wanted another one to begin.

Plates were handed around; they moved through the main course and out the other side of it into chocolate cake. People stood and carried their glasses and coffee cups around the table to talk to each other. Scott went to sit with Mac and Orianna.

‘We can't stay much longer,' Mac told him. ‘This has been really hard for us.'

‘The wonderful thing, with Mac and me,' Orianna said, ‘is that we each know exactly how it is for the other one, don't we?' Her eyes were deeply shadowed — makeup, he thought, rather than tiredness, but couldn't be sure. Scott thanked them for coming.

‘You've done great,' he told them, yelling against the hubbub. He walked with them to where he had left the truck, handed over the keys.

‘These people,' Mac said, ‘are they going to take you on and pay you now?'

‘Don't think so. I don't have the qualifications.'

‘You don't mind?' Orianna asked Scott. ‘You really don't mind an old lady taking your dad on?' She needed, she had already explained, to sleep in Scott's room because of Mac's snoring: sleep was very important to people who were recovering. Scott could choose between his tent, the sofa, or Matt's floor. Orianna's hair tickled his face, as she leaned in for a hug. She smelled of some kind of medicinal oil, leafy and good for you. She was okay, he thought, not wonderful but okay.

‘Scott,' Alan Coxtis told him when he returned to the party, ‘I know you've got mixed feelings about family, about where you belong. But we're emerging from the darkest times. There's support, there's direction. Healing. We're evolving. We're making treaties and we're out there in the cities, everywhere, not just parked on the reserves. Our population is growing fast and in twenty years, who knows? We're re-colonising Canada, and what we need now are young people like you, who can hang on to what's important, but also think creatively. So far as I'm concerned, if you want to, you belong.'

Thompson was going back to school next year, Coxtis said. The band was sponsoring him. He was going to get an education on his own terms, do something with his life.

The room emptied. Anna was on the other side of the table with Akira, Maiko and Brian. Scott had never seen her so relaxed and open. She always drew his attention, but now her face, her skin seemed to cry out for touch.
Forty
, Scott reminded himself. Much educated. About to leave. Though not sick, he was pretty sure of that now.

Greta, Jason and the twins caught him on his way over to her.

‘What's next for you, Scott?' Greta asked. She was returning to California, and then next summer she said was, ‘TBA, either China or the Arctic. Jason's trying for the same, fingers crossed.'

‘Sounds cool,' he told them. ‘As for me— definitely neither of those.'

‘You must visit the museum,' Lin said. ‘In six months, perhaps, there will be something to see.'

Akira gave him a business card, English one side, Japanese the other and said that he must visit the institute, if he was ever in Japan. Then he and Maiko said goodbye, and a waitress leaned over to clear glasses, and it was really the end.

‘Which way are you going?' Anna asked Scott, who waved his arm in the general direction of everything. ‘I really can't thank you enough,' she said as they set off towards the hotel.
More gratitude!
he thought. He didn't want it and found he couldn't speak at all. His mouth was welded shut. ‘I've really appreciated your support and your—' she hesitated, ‘company,' she said.

‘We'll be in touch,' she said as they walked past what used to be a store selling outdoor clothing, ‘I'll keep you posted about the specimen, and remember, if you need a reference, contacts, anything, you have my email.'