Gathering Evidence
Page 21
There she was, dried, warm in the white hooded towel. The panic passed as suddenly as it had arrived. He was just tired. Lack of sleep and the perfectly routine amount of strain he was under.
He heard something. A knock. He waited, listened for Shel. Nothing. He left it. No-one knocked. No appointments were scheduled. A call would come first, a message. Hearing nothing further, he released his breath.
He kept looking at the hooded towel later, after he had dressed her and put her back in the cot. He watched the dip, the hoop, the lip around the rim, the bunched-up hollow hung along the back of the chair. The shape that would be pushed out, formed, with Doll inside. Her shape was implied through the house, in the safety seat in the car, in the cot, the fabric cradle, in the sling they wrapped her up in when they carried her. The premature plastic safety fittings on the table corners, simple blue clasps, instructed her to grow, to age, to stand up, to not be hurt. Later, these would be discarded, still carrying her marks, stencilled lines from where her body hit it. Tens of thousands of years in oceans. Marine life nesting in the plastic folds where her head had nudged. Dorothy sluicing away in the displaced water, her volume an overspill on the carpet. The first baby hairs already falling from her head. The simple fact she aged and grew, ungraspable. The impression of her changing shape in the towels and mats, the basins and carpets, the sinks, the fabrics they put her in, the cradle and the cot, the little indentations the cradle made by virtue of her weight on the wooden table in the kitchen. The tiniest scuff on the oak wood panel where the rolling corner of the rocking cradle swung. The gentle way she turned and stretched, tensing her little arms, pressing the base corners against the wood, creating the faintest line upon it. This line, this little scuff on the table, turned him over. His breath quickened; his vision blurred.
He went to the kitchen, put on the light, put his hands on the table. He couldn’t see the mark. Couldn’t find the line. He examined it. He was sure there was a mark. A surface mark – so they had washed it, cleaned it away. He got up, and he veered, in impossible tension. All but weightless, she was the whole of the world.
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Construction resumed quickly, and by the second time they visited the site the whole of the foundation was laid. The progress from here on was astonishing. He stopped en route to work, leaving earlier, going out of his way just so he could get a glimpse of what they’d done. He pressed the agent on the cause of the previous suspension to the work. Bureaucracy, she told him, nothing important, a piece in the planning process they’d had to smooth out. And then, of course, the weather hadn’t helped, that fog. Everything had since been settled and resolved, and they were now more than making up for the lost time. Didn’t he agree? Of course, if he was anything less than happy she could speak to the developers, but this only risked upsetting momentum, and she really didn’t think it was justified.
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In the first days she was red with a purple edge, raw, internal, like they hadn’t finished making her, would go on making her for years. Her back was marked with grooves and wrinkles from the sheet in the small cot in the hospital. Their fingers, as they held her, made impressions in her, appearing to push through her. He was talking quietly about taking the sheets home, washing and sterilising them then ironing them so the surface was entirely smooth, with no blemishes or creases, nothing that could mark her next time, a perfect flat surface that would hold her without breaking through her. Each time either he or Shel or one of the nurses went to lift her he was afraid she would slip through their fingers, a burst of water, the inclination in water always to descend, to reach a lower level. They examined her from a new light’s glare and he thought he saw her shadowed organs, and through them the white, the other side. He couldn’t believe they were taking her home, that they said that she was ready. She didn’t have a name. They had prepared a name, the name was ready, but now that she was there they couldn’t present it. It wasn’t right, it didn’t feel right. He had to document her later, externally, at the Renfield Building, the Registrar’s House.
Peeling the curtains they saw the blue midnight sky. It stretched up and up and up, deep blue banks dusted with glimmering white lights. Further still, vast distances, faint streaks of colour, star clusters he’d never seen before. Unusual conditions, brief light intensities telescoping further reaches of space. They looked up, beyond the thin, damaged upper atmosphere, the protective film around them weakening all the time, straining out their window, both inside and outside the world.
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Shel’s debriefing continued, interviewed alone and with Alice, interviewed by the department and the faculty at the university, interviewed by foreign office officials and police representatives, interviewed by members of the legal team hired by Jane’s family and by a roster of experts attached to WEBG. Each time she came back drained, ever paler. She just wanted it over. She knew it was necessary, knew these talks were important, but she’d given the same answers again and again, repeating an identical story. She’d told them everything she knew. She couldn’t account for what had happened; no amount of repetition was going to change that.
Still he saw her, late at night or in the very early morning, quietly stepping out of bed, thinking he was sleeping, taking out her laptop and writing. He heard her fingers on the keys, recognised the posture of her shoulders. He tried to intuit her words from the bob of her head and the way her fingers descended. The counsellor said it wasn’t unusual, that she remained in a state of prolonged shock; she would tell him more when she was ready. The inquest went on, reports were drafted, conclusions still to be made public. It was the park, she said, WEBG exerting its influence. Anything unfavourable would be quashed. Money was paid out to Jane’s immediate family, legal agreements signed discreetly in remote office suites. Alice had heard they were going to destroy the animal. Forensics teams, recovering what they could from the scene and from Jane’s body, had built up a profile. WEBG insisted it was acting in good conscience, doing the only thing conceivable in the circumstances. In addition to the tragedy, they had the well-being of the troop to consider. Shel and Alice both stressed this was a mistake. There was no indication the animal represented a threat to the troop. The hunt was clearly misdirection. The animal was not the issue at hand. Again and again, they repeated throughout the interviews, to the glazed eyes of the legal reps, the fault lay with the park, with WEBG. The decimated ecosystem created an imbalance; the animal was acting under unnatural pressures. ‘You know,’ Shel said in one interview, and as she told him late at night, a bitter laugh emerging through her tears, ‘if you want to find an individual to blame, then blame me. It was my fault. I insisted on staying, when already we should have left. And I’m guilty of more. I should never have been there, from the start. Don’t you see,’ she spoke into the one-way glass in the interview room, and past his shoulder in the darkness of their bed, ‘none of us should have been there, that’s the point. If you want the report to be accurate, then focus on that. We should not have been there. I should never have let her come. I should never have taken us into the park.’
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‘The bonobo, with its greater anthropomorphic potential over the common chimpanzee, will be carefully rebranded as a new domesticated species, infantilised, bred in captivity in stable numbers, sold as pets and exhibits, becoming increasingly human-like as certain qualities are artificially selected, either through careful breeding or cut directly with CRISPR tech. Year by year, domestic bonobos will spend a greater proportion of their time walking on two legs. Their capacity for expressive emotion will be harnessed and exaggerated. They will be heralded as the most human of all animals, supported by anecdotes, speculations and historical evidence, such as that they are disturbed by loud noises and sudden movements, that they are afraid of other animals, that they are particularly fraught during the night, that their sleep is fractured and they experience especially savage nightmares; that,
unlike those animals who can predict certain natural disasters including earthquakes, an uncanny attribute making those animals separate and strange, bonobos suffer like humans do, experiencing the event as it happens; that during the bombing of Munich eleven captive bonobos bellowed from their enclosure dozens of miles from the edge of the devastation, and when their keeper went to inspect them the following morning she found all eleven had suffered sudden massive cardiac arrests and died; that no other animal in the zoo was affected; that their acknowledgement of war made them already all but honorary humans, with a perceived nobility in the face, an observation similar to the one children often make on seeing coastal hamadryas baboons cleaning and picking themselves first thing in the morning, the animals bending and arcing one arm and pointing their head in the same direction, and which it is almost impossible to describe, at least the first time you see it, as anything other than the animal acknowledging the sun, the breaking day, the persistence of the world; that what had destroyed the bonobos outside Munich, rather than being the direct physical effect of sound and tremor, was something else; that the bonobos, in reality, were so terrified not even by the bombs themselves but by the possibility of the development and increasing sophistication of weaponry and warfare, that, in the instant the bombs fell, the imaginative capacity of bonobo chimpanzees compelled them to understand there was no place for them, that they couldn’t live here, that the world was going to become stranger and more inhospitable; that their fear of flowing water is instructive and might also be described as reverential; that somehow, across still unknown means of genetic storage, bonobos are aware that water created them; that the fact, long ago, that certain members of an ancestor species decided in fear to avoid a body of water, decided not to cross it, had the effect of isolating them from the rest of the troop, who moved through the stream and became divided; that the physical, behavioural limitation of this new fearful group, who were limited to staying in the same relatively small areas of forest bound by water, was compensated in other ways; that a greater imaginative demand was placed on them, now having to anticipate, react to and consciously deceive other animals; that they had to learn to devise new, elaborate, unusual paths across the land, which affected their idea of time, desire and reward; that over many generations the descendants of this small group became genetically distinct, developing parallel to but separate from the common chimpanzee, being more imaginative, displaying greater anxiety and continuing to avoid, and to fear, flowing water; that it was easier to ascribe to the bonobo than to any other animal the existence of an innate origin story, a story their behaviour continued to pay tribute to; that their fear of water was an unconscious reverence for the means of their creation; that flowing water represented not only the original topographical feature which isolated, separated and adapted them, but was identical in some way to the slippery, mutable, unreliable manner they experienced the world; that the bonobo was made, largely, of water, even, and particularly outlandishly, the claim that this fear of and reverence for water marked the bonobo as a species so sensitive and remarkable that its behaviour continued to acknowledge the water-based origin of all life, even beyond and prior to animals.’
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They bought old newsprint from a warehouse, stacks of it, placed sheets over the mat by each of the outside doors and lined a path through the house. However careful they were, shaking off snow on the steps, removing boots immediately inside, taking coats off and hanging them in the porch, water persisted and scattered through the house, trailing their movements in overlapping lines. Spilled onto the floor, it attracted and fed the mould. Roads were closed after heavy snowfall overnight and the company wouldn’t be able to come out and look at the walls until later. They gathered up the newsprint three, four times a day, one of the little tasks he enjoyed, taking in the old print and laying down fresh sheets. Early morning, still in darkness, the snow piled up from the night’s fall, fresh and untouched and with the illusion of a glow inside it, a wider silence around it, absorbing the birdcalls and the sounds of any traffic. He went silently along the corridor whispering to Doll in his arms, the snow beginning to fall again, thick and heavy and oddly slow, still gathering, flickering as he saw it through the opened curtains in the rooms they passed, the snow all around the house, the whiteness absorbing not just the vegetation and the roads and the fences and the parked vehicles but the houses too, the walls as well as the roofs, the white stone and wood panels, similar enough in tone that the snow all around the houses seemed to absorb them, to be consistent with them, to make them depthless and appear only as a series of isolated, unsupported, floating and gravity-defying windows and doors.
Attaching her in the sling, he went to the kitchen, the white glow of the covered garden casting an odd effect over the darker space inside. Carefully, he opened the cupboard, checked the heating and picked out the fresh bag of print. He told Doll what he was doing, describing the two of them walking in lines through the house, laying out the paper they would step on, predicting all the places they’d go to through the day. ‘I think we need to change you,’ he said, conscious of the odd turn in the pronoun, as if it was somehow more reasonable to suggest the baby’s assistance. ‘After that,’ he said, vision line held close, ‘why don’t we go outside? The snow will stop soon, and we won’t have the light left for long. Why don’t we go outside?’
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Forensic preservation was priority, above all else. This was made clear to them in the hours immediately after. Read the animal from the shape of it remaining. Find out what did this, what it was. They had guided them in messages relayed from the gates. Over the tent and around it Shel helped hang the remaining blue tarp to block immediate rainfall, and past the last of the evidence they dug a makeshift barrier from stones to at least offer some resistance to flooding. They used torch lights under the tarp and in the tent, illuminating the premature darkness while they recorded every aspect of the scene. They observed the arrangement of the body and its relation to the emptied blood. The way it had been dragged out of the tent. They spent what couldn’t have been really but which felt like hours on the prints, recording them from every perspective.
One of the stories she heard later but was unable to verify was that WEBG had wanted them to sever and partition Jane’s body, carry it with them on a single journey out of the park. Put it in boxes. Overcome the inconvenience of a distinct body, which is heavy, and long, and difficult to carry, by separating it out, folding it up into separate containers, then lifting it away as discontinuous pieces. A drastic response to the urgency of the moment, the necessity of getting all of them, including Jane, in whatever form, out of the park as quickly as possible. And a cost-saving exercise. Even after all that had happened, all that she had learned about WEBG, she still found it impossible to believe that such an option had actually been considered.
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The paper was warmed from the boiler in the cupboard so, as he handled it and despite its age, it seemed freshly printed; Catherine said it was relatively pure, germ free, that her mother told her midwives would sometimes bring sheets on home visits so that, if there was nothing else in the house, they could use it to wrap the child. It became a charm, putting the child in newsprint, where its wet body came through on the page. An impression of the child – edgeless from the twisting and turning – appearing as a gap, an absence, a shining transparency on the page. This was the document. The family kept this damaged paper, holding its impression of the first moments of life. They folded the sheet and put it in a safe and hidden place, somewhere a stranger wouldn’t think to look. Under a floorboard, into a roof panel, in a sealed bag inserted in a cut in the mattress. They put it into the fabric of the house, she said – blending it.
For some time the smell would remain. Periodically the family, usually the mother, would take out and unfold the page. They would check that it was okay, that it remained together. The paper, after several months, be
came hard and brittle, with a sort of ribbed effect. Holding it up, rather than seeing anything inside, anything that came back at you, anything meaningful or instructive, you looked through it at whatever was the other side.
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It wasn’t just the interviews themselves – it wasn’t as if those periods were limited to the ninety to one hundred and twenty minutes that were recorded in each session – she was preoccupied for days before and after. They were always delayed. She would drive in to the sub-level car park and take the lift up to the conference suite and there would be tea, coffee, light food; she would be encouraged into smalltalk with the several cheery personnel, different individuals each time, and she knew all this was being recorded too and that, as well as waiting for her to say something that might be leveraged against her, WEBG was also making a display, offering a glimpse of its reach and power, a warning. It had started to make her a little paranoid. Though it was probably nothing – she regretted telling John immediately – she thought she had observed the same individual several times, in an unlikely series of settings. A café; walking past faculty reception; through the window of a passing car. Even if it was the same man then it could be explained as an unusual though hardly impossible set of coincidences. The clearer point, which he agreed was a concern, was that WEBG was getting to her. Each time she only thought she saw the same pale elderly male face, hairless, eyes glowering, long thin arms reaching out below, she became more convinced that she knew him from somewhere, that he was familiar and that this cluster of near meetings pointed back to something else. She strained her memory, thinking back to the airport, the hotel in the capital, the gates before and after they entered the park. Where had she seen him originally? If she could place him definitively with the firm she would be vindicated and she could stop questioning herself like this.