Gathering Evidence

by Martin MacInnes

  ‘Shel, Shel, stop, it’s me, Alice, it’s okay.’

  I stopped to find my flashlight, searching through the sodden ground, squatting, trying to regain myself. I took a deep breath. ‘I’m fine. What are you doing here?’

  ‘Shel, why didn’t you respond? I followed you for ages – I was calling you. Why didn’t you respond?’

  ‘But I – I’ve only … I don’t know. It doesn’t matter. Let’s just go back.’

  We went slowly and in silence, the air bleaching around us. I switched off my light. It felt like we’d been walking for a long time, longer than we should have. I was tired. Had we missed the camp? Unsettled, still tense, confused by the floods, it was possible we had gone the wrong way. I imagined the tents lifted and removed, the camp dismantled and grown over. Eventually the ground-water thinned and I noticed my prints in front, leading away from camp. The area was familiar; there wasn’t far to go. Alice had stopped behind me. ‘Shel,’ she said blankly. ‘Shel.’

  You could see the blue of the tarp and the three tents ahead through the trees. I tried not to look at the ground. Already I could smell something. Like the mushrooms, but stronger, worse. Unpleasant to breathe.

  Coming into the camp, looking onto the tents directly, Jane’s was the first. The front was ripped off. Pieces of the blue material lay limply in the mud, stained with red. I was distantly aware of a piece of the same blue above us, in the trees.

  The camp was silent and as if deserted. We carried nothing to defend ourselves.

  Alice stood behind me. I approached and looked inside the tent. The samples had come loose. Black mushroom everywhere, erupting over the scattered paper sheets. Blood smeared over the tent walls and the paper, over Jane’s tablet device and the few pieces of her clothing. A warmth, a stench like dissolved metal. I saw Jane’s bag first, where she had lain. I looked for a long time at it, the sleeping bag which she had worn tied all the way up to her head, comforting her, limiting her movement. She had liked to hug herself inside it. The bag was now empty. Jane lay outside it, several feet behind the tent. She had been thrown. She lay unnaturally on her front. Her limbs jutted at unsupportable angles, the bones snapped. Her head seemed to descend into the ground, as if she was tunnelling, fleeing, escaping. It was like there was a little hole there, in the ground, and she was looking into it, transfixed and held there, the earth set into the perfect shape to hold her. How had it been prepared, I thought. Who had prepared it like that for her. I coughed. The air was unclear. I felt a movement in my stomach and heard retching from behind me; everything disappeared.

  PART THREE

  Place Beyond the Forest

  ‘It makes people look closer,’ he said after he got back in, kicking the snow off his boots on the mat, his face red like it had been seared, clipping the door closed behind him, ‘the ice – you have to pay more attention so you don’t fall. And I’m finding more people are saying hello, when just going to the shops or something. I think it’s partly that you can see people breathing.

  ‘Come here,’ he said, laying the bags on the table, turning to her.

  ‘Don’t,’ she said quietly, gesturing down at the Velcro sling, ‘she’s only just gone to sleep, and already you’ve made the room at least two degrees colder.’

  ________________________

  There was the problem of how to collect, how to preserve, how to remove the body. The rangers – Frank, Joseph, Bryan – came splashing in from the trees only hours after they had found her. Shel and Alice were in shock, guarding either end of the scene. They could explain nothing. The rangers took out their guns, circled the site, silent. The smell of all that blood. Already new activity in the ground, in the trees above them. Wings beating, beetles creaking. An interest, a response from the wider environment, intent on soaking up what remained. Everything would renew; nothing would remain. The whole of the tent an opened wound, an exposed person.

  Joseph walked between the tent opening and the body, studying the ground. ‘You found her like this? You haven’t moved her?’ Shel shook her head. Frank murmured something, pointing at the blood tracks; Bryan waved his arm dismissively. They were dehydrated, they needed food, they were shivering in the wet heat and their eyes had a glazed, absent sheen. Bursts of radio static sounded through the camp as communication continued with the park authorities. They couldn’t leave the body unattended. Bryan would stay with it until they had executed the extraction plan. There was a limit on how close air transport could get. A rise in the hills eight kilometres away would have to serve as a landing area. Somehow they would have to bring the body up to it. It would take three days at least to have a vehicle arranged and delivered. Shel and Alice had to leave before then; the message was that they could not remain at the site. The park was sending a team and with Jane too the loading weight would be at capacity. Bryan repeated, they had no option, they had to walk out.

  She flinched as the trowel smacked the mud. Bryan couldn’t hold her gaze. They had to wrap the body in a tarp and lower it into the shallow excavation. A temporary measure, just to hold the body, just a little longer, until the team arrived. He would wait by it, it wouldn’t be long, he had a weapon, he would be okay. They couldn’t risk the provocation of leaving the body outside on the surface. It would invite further attack. I’m afraid this is just what we have to do, he said.

  ________________________

  She was born early, her bones still soft. The nurses spoke of pre-age, as if she wasn’t really born and they still had time to prepare. References to negative time – minus four weeks – suggested an error, a countdown, a terrible energy inside her. Soon she would be minus eight weeks, minus sixteen, they would drift beyond the point of conception, beyond where their own lives began. Aware of the danger, the nurses then worked urgently, rapidly, reproducing and multiplying and ratifying her. She was too small to be enough so they made more of her, made images of her, which they hung along the corridors in protest, in refusal. She does exist. She will grow stronger. He walked out into the corridor and back into the room, switching between the test images and the body, trying to find out what was happening, what it meant. There were grainy prints that seemed to show the surface of a planet but were actually her brain. ‘In ultrasound,’ the nurse said. ‘We can do it because of the gap in the acoustic barrier.’

  He must have looked blank.

  ‘The fontanelle. Soft spots.’

  ‘It isn’t hurting her? You’re sure it isn’t hurting?’

  ‘Of course not. She doesn’t feel a thing.’

  It was an old, brute method, using echo to measure. ‘They don’t use their eyes either,’ Shel said later, back at home, ‘not at first. It might be one of the reasons she’s crying – the sound gives her pictures too.’

  ‘Pictures?’

  ‘Of what’s around her. Of us, distance. You know – like bats do.’

  As she began to see more, and as everyone was telling them they needed high-contrast images, that newborns responded to monochrome, to binary, and as they didn’t have anything else in the new house, they used the ultrasound scans, hanging them up in the cot. Catherine looked down, hands on her hips.

  ‘No. I don’t like this.’

  ‘Why not?’ Shel demanded.

  ‘It isn’t natural. She shouldn’t be seeing it.’

  ‘Why? It’s just a tone contrast – her eyes are barely open, Mother.’

  ‘I don’t know. I don’t like it.’

  ‘Well, she likes it and it’s helping so we’re keeping it.’

  He put her down in the cot and switched her position after an hour. He checked she was comfortable and measured her breath. Though the paediatrician assured them everything was fine, he watched the slightly raised front, the soft dip in two places at the cap, the flat area at the base of her head. The temporary openings were a little more pronounced and would take longer to form over. The skull is more fragile so the brain can grow. Could they really know, for certain, something wasn’t wrong? The tests,
the measurements, establishing what they could and couldn’t know, were part of the problem; pressing in at her, taking from her, pushing sound against her, they shaped her too.

  All this worry, Catherine said, was unremarkable, being simply what they had to live with. ‘You focus on one day at a time, and you manage. You will never be more creative than in the conspiracies and nightmares you imagine now. You’ll see the end of the world everywhere. But you’ll get through it. She is much stronger than either of you realise.’

  Alice had taken leave and she visited often, bringing drawings they hung alongside the scans, black charcoal sketches on paper – Dorothy sleeping, animals playing, a tall city skyline, figures in silhouette at windows. In directing Dorothy’s growing attention, they influenced the way she moved her head. They changed the position of the pictures a little every day, and she rotated her head in sympathy. If they maintained this, ensuring her head wasn’t static, then the flattening effect would disappear sooner. Carrying her in the sling – ‘like an injury,’ Shel said – helped too, adjusting her position through their natural walking motion. Part of his focus at home was in varying all movement, finding a counter-position for each activity. When he fed her, he had to remind himself to rotate, to use his left arm as well as his right. If he thought about the implications for any length of time – the direct correlation between this rhythm, over the surface, and the extension of her skull; the plastic exposure of her learning brain – it was unbearable.

  ________________________

  Shel helped wrap her, lift her and lower her. Staring at the ground. They filled the earth in over her. Alice waited a distance away, unable to retreat to her own tent, which was identical to Jane’s and thus a reproduction of the nightmare, but reluctant to go any further into the forest on her own. They worked slowly and carefully with the body, compromising forensics. They must hide the evidence they needed to retain, and in doing so they altered it.

  The late morning darkness grew heavier, the sky snapping in thunder. Whatever the conditions, they were to leave. The park was explicit about it. The rainfall should not create undue problems, they said.

  The walk was staged in prolonged twilight. Shel couldn’t recall stopping for any length of time. Following the feet in front – Joseph a peripheral presence, an edge of safety, leading them, ushering them out – she put her arms into the wet undergrowth, hands running along the vines. None of it felt real. She welcomed the fatigue, welcomed the draining of her body, encouraged the pain. With the pressure on her back from the packs of samples and equipment, she was reminded of the first sensation in picking Jane up. She ate nothing and they had to intervene to make her drink. It wasn’t that she didn’t want to, she told John in the cottage, later. It was just that she had forgotten. It simply didn’t occur to her that this was the kind of thing she might do.

  Sometimes she stopped and looked up, and when the others looked to her and said, what, what is it, and she said, really, are you sure you don’t hear it, you don’t hear anything, she began doubting herself, doubting all this, doubting everything she had seen. This can’t be happening. She heard a mechanical fluttering sound, like the audio they’d recorded earlier. Joseph assured her it was impossible, that the helicopter couldn’t have been shuttled in so quickly. As they continued in silence, she thought back to the airport, an eternity ago. Jane slumped in the tall-backed chair, her fringe surely irritating her eyes, going through document after document in preparation. Would it have been different if they had been able to locate the doctor and bring him with them? How much sooner would they have gathered the blood and left? Her nausea peaked again, something turning and folding inside her. Something was wrong, inside her.

  ________________________

  They moved in three months before the due date. The new house was small, box-shaped with two bedrooms adjacent on the front side and a kitchen and living room on the reverse side, a narrow corridor running across it and a bathroom at one end. The second bedroom had functioned as a guest room – Catherine stayed frequently in the first weeks while they were settling in, unpacking the boxes from storage, and as the birth drew nearer – but now they put Dorothy’s things in it. They washed and changed and fed her there as often as possible, trying to make the space familiar. At the back of the house, the broad kitchen and living-room windows looked out onto a small grass patch with the beginnings of a hedgerow and fences at either end. Beyond the hedge was a field they were told wasn’t immediately to be built on, and beyond this the remains of what had once been several hectares of forest. Six houses had gone up almost at the same time; theirs was the first street in what would become a larger development. For the first time in their lives they had a house that would be their own.

  Shel left for work at 7.45; Dorothy would sleep for up to one and a half hours, usually significantly less. He began cleaning during this first sleep, keeping her at or near eye level, placing the cradle on the kitchen table. He swept, dusted, disinfected the surfaces. By nine o’clock he’d given her her first change, laying her on her back on the waterproof mat over two towels on the floor. After this they continued playing, and he was often so surprised by the ringing alarm that it took him one or two moments to understand this signalled she was due another feed.

  He tried to get outside not too long after midday, checking the cupboards and going out to buy any items that wouldn’t be auto-replaced. The rhythm of the car on the road usually put her to sleep within four minutes. He drove a longer route to prolong her sleeping. By two o’clock they were home. He sat directly on the floor, supporting her on his chest and holding the bottle across her in his left hand. Then they read, played appearance games – he directed Dorothy’s face tracking side to side. She saw him three feet away, her sight extending all the time. He tried to keep in that ambit, on the edge of her. She signalled when he left it, pulling him back into appearance. If he sat at the table he placed the cradle in front of him. If he was on his feet – making something to eat, searching for his keys – and couldn’t attach her directly then he placed the cradle on a clear part of the worktop, from where their eyes were closer to level.

  Her yawns occupied her whole body, from her closed eyes down to her toes, almost as small as spokes on a hairbrush. Another change, a sleep, usually the longest of the day. He cleared the bedroom, put laundry on. Tried again to make some progress with work, brewed coffee, washed his face. Her next cry was the signal for their walk.

  The cold was a problem both directly, in its sharpness on her skin, and through the long, elaborate process of putting her into the various protective layers, which she protested and countered, cried at and tried to turn over against. He kept the afternoon walk under thirty minutes now that winter had arrived. When it was especially cold and she was against his chest and he hadn’t heard her cry or make any other sound in the previous ninety seconds, he stopped, took the support off and studied her sleeping. He watched, tried to learn to feel, as well, against him, the faint pulse that sometimes issued from her head. He was bathing her the first time he saw it, something crawling in her head – he’d almost panicked but thankfully it was evening and Shel was home. Still, after putting her down he opened his tablet to medical dictionaries, one definition drifting into another, each time he said this is it and I’ll close it but there was something else he had to know, and then something further.

  ________________________

  He arrived at the neurology department, after he’d phoned, in a state of anxiety. He was still reeling from Shel’s news from the park. But his swelling had gone down and they were satisfied with the results of the scans. The nurse told him it wasn’t unusual for symptoms to continue, in some form, for months. He may never regain clear memory of the attack and the time directly following it. If he was worried about anything in particular, or if he noticed strange, unusual developments, he should have someone drive him to the department. It was highly unlikely, she said. He was in good shape. Other than certain temporary prohibitions – he
wasn’t to drive for another two weeks, and he’d return to work gradually – he was essentially ready to resume his old life. She smiled; apparently he’d looked shocked.

  He spent the following days cleaning, resting, regaining his appetite, walking further all the time. The doctors told him under no condition could he fly. Shel was being checked and debriefed and she said it wasn’t a good idea for him to come out anyway. They spoke on video every day, long, halting conversations, peering in at the screen. She had become clumsy – he watched her misjudge distance and drop things. She wasn’t herself. She put her arm out to the screen as if she would enter it. Her voice was blank, slow. She said they would have left camp earlier if it were not for her. She was worried about Alice. He downplayed his own accident; it seemed insignificant now.

  The area around the cottage was still unfamiliar and he enjoyed, each walk a little longer than the last, discovering what was around him. At first he went slowly, bracing for the slight jolt inside his skull. A lot of it was in his mind, and if he didn’t think about it he could move without too much discomfort. He greeted the few people he passed, spoke briefly about the pleasant weather, smiled at the farmer and at a neighbour walking her dog. Day by day, the slow buzzing around his head, the tenderness above his eyes and behind his ears, and other symptoms such as his occasional loss of balance, his sudden extreme thirst and his nausea, all began to subside. Soon enough, he was relishing the walks. Something was peeling open in front of him, the outside world slowly coming back in a gathering clarity. The light, which he had grown almost afraid of, wrapped behind the fog, felt warm, and good, and nourishing on his skin. He felt stronger, eager to make up for lost time. The seventeen days of the doctor’s visits felt like something from a nightmare. It was a period in which he had lost autonomy. He was so grateful, now that it was over. He had walked a distance from the cottage, and as he turned and looked back, he saw the city’s depth behind, carried in the clear light. He saw the colour in individual houses that must have been over a mile away. He made out details on the facades, saw tiny figures coming in and out. He had a feeling of unprecedented possibility and opportunity. He was well, and he couldn’t believe his fortune. Shel would be home any day now. When he thought of her, of how much he missed her, of the danger she had been in, he almost burst with longing. His relief, now that it was over, was overwhelming