The Last Neanderthal

by Claire Cameron

  Time bled away and Girl looked out and saw fangs of ice pushing the door flap. Apart from her baby bulge, she was too thin. Her arms and hands looked like those of an old man—they had lost any sign of muscle. Her knuckles buckled and the skin puckered. She could feel that her cheeks had sunken in, and the bones of her face jutted out. Her hip dug painfully into the hard ground. Her knees stuck out like bulbs. Her body was eating her own meat as fuel. It was a sign that she was failing.

  Girl reached over for the last piece of meat. It was a thin strip of squirrel, not enough to keep them fed for more than a day. She felt a kick inside her belly. It was hard and strong enough to hurt. She put her hand on the spot and felt the small foot. Again, it kicked, as though demanding that the meat she had just picked up go only to one place.

  She broke off a length of the squirrel and put it in her mouth. She sucked at it until it was soft. Any salty juices that were left in the meat slipped down her throat. For a moment, she was surrounded by warmth. It was almost as though the sun had broken through the clouds and shone down on her. More of that, more of that, her body begged and pressed.

  Girl took another bite and the warmth climbed up her back and helped her sit up. She did it with a strength that she hadn’t had for days. She chewed and chewed, and the baby inside her settled down. The kicking stopped and the baby was quiet. The warmth bathed her skin and she knew that with a few more bites, the baby would sleep. She would sleep too, a deep sleep that would restore her blood. The sleep would keep her alive, hopefully long enough to see the long season of storms end.

  She felt a nudge at her arm. Wildcat had smelled the meat and lowered his head. She kept chewing. The cat looked up with slanted eyes. It wasn’t hard to know his mind. He would take the meat by force if it were possible. He might feel sad for the lack of a warm human body, but his desire for food was more important. He would eat her if he could, she knew, and she didn’t blame him for it. That was just how a cat saw the world.

  But Wildcat didn’t try to take the squirrel from her or make a move for her throat. He knew he wasn’t a match for her, especially not when he was so weak and hungry too. And maybe he had grown to like her body beside his. There was a comfort in their companionship. She lowered her head to Wildcat to show him the same respect. She broke off the tiniest corner of the squirrel to let the cat have the small pleasure of the food. She watched him chew.

  She took the last bit of squirrel from her belt and reached forward to stroke Wildcat. They looked each other in the eyes and she leaned in until they touched noses. She placed the squirrel close to the cat’s mouth, and he took a bite and purred.

  As Wildcat chewed, she got her arms around the furry body. She could feel his contentment, and her own saliva ran as she imagined the joy of the juice running down her own throat. She pressed her cheek to the purring cat and felt his warmth. Then she moved both hands to clamp around Wildcat’s jaws. She put her knee in close and pressed. In a swift move, she snapped his neck.

  26.

  The cat meat was gone all too quickly. The storms sank farther in and Girl realized that when the melt came, she would probably greet it from the other side of the dirt. In some ways, she had prepared for this. She had already dug herself down at the base of a tree and maybe this was why the bears burrowed the same way. If a body died during the winter storms, it was already buried come spring. But that was before she felt the first pain of labor. It ripped across her body and woke her into a state in which she was more alive than she had ever been and more alive than she might want to be. Every nerve stood on end. The baby was coming.

  What happened next was nothing like what she had seen Big Mother endure. The stoic woman had made it look like a far-off rumble in her body. With closed eyes, she had moaned through labor. But Girl felt her baby come with an unexpected strength.

  The baby inside her was part of the land and had the kind of force that blew the top off a mountain. Another flash, and the mountain stretched its lava fingers through her muscles from the inside. A thin line of fire surged out and cut down between her hips, then stopped. She waited and understood. The mountain connected to her through the fire, but the quake was coming from inside. It would loosen the baby and push it out. The lava flowed out from her center with the same power and force. The mountain took over the body of the mother.

  There was a slick of sweat on her skin. She groaned. Her body shook. She was so far away. And the lava cut and tore and pulled. She had a hazy hope that it would not damage her body beyond what could heal, but she also knew that it wasn’t concerned with her. At any other time, she might be scared to die. But in the face of the mountain’s fire, bathed in its heat, she offered herself up. Her only reason for being was to birth a baby. She had to keep a family on the land. She squatted on the floor covered with hides and felt the burning rock. She let out a roar that echoed through the burrow and shook the walls so hard that there was a rumble across the land. Every part of her body pressed and pushed down. She might split in two. A shift and the pressure built. The lava flowed and the heat burned and she fell to her side. A deep breath and she opened her eyes and there was a baby. Wet. Curled. Blue. It didn’t move.

  Another shot of pain roused her, a last flare from the fire in her belly. The placenta slipped out from between her legs and with it went the power. She chewed through the umbilical cord, as there was no Big Mother to take that important first bite in the baby’s life. She felt the hard floor of the burrow dig into her hip. The cold air clawed at her spine. Her own lips turned blue and she started to shake. She pushed up and saw the baby. With one arm, she grabbed it and pulled it against her chest. She heard a mewling and looked down to see a mouth wide open. Small fists raised into the air and a bald head like the fullest of the moon’s many faces. She put her nipple into the wide mouth and the baby rooted, then latched onto her nipple. A pain traveled down a line through her body to her toes, which clenched at the feeling. This wasn’t the power of the burning mountain. This pain was cold and dry.

  When she next woke, the baby was quiet. He wasn’t hungry or angry. She put his mouth on her breast and he rooted, but he didn’t have much will. Or he wasn’t strong enough to pull out the milk. She tried to coax him. She pinched her nipple between her finger and thumb and pressed it to the back of his mouth as she had seen Big Mother do many times before. He didn’t latch on. His lips fell slack. After trying and trying, she could barely look at the small body. She didn’t want to know it. She didn’t feel anything for it. She was dying too.

  The blood kept flowing out from between her legs and there was little water to drink. She placed a chunk of snow on her lips to soothe her thirst, something only the dying did. She put a stiffened water sack near their nest of hides in hopes that the edges would melt. She took sips, while the baby was too quiet. She lay a wet finger on his lips and urged him to lick. She thought of their two bodies as one. The pain of her baby’s hunger was the same as hers. Her cache of food was gone. The snow outside was a trap that would hold her tight. The sun had left the sky for good.

  The next morning she woke to find that the temperature had dropped further. The snow that she had left to melt had not turned into water. She licked the ice, and the tip of her tongue stuck to it, as though the moon were making a grab for her body. She ripped her tongue away and tasted blood, the warmth of her own blood down her throat. All it meant was that she was still alive.

  Girl didn’t feel anything except that her body was ice and a barren land. There was no meadow or sweet stink. There was no hand left to stoke the fire, no fuel to burn, no food to eat, no milk in her breasts for her baby. Her family would not be of the land. She would freeze in the well of this tree. She would never feel warm.

  She pulled the baby close against her chest. With the back of his head in the crook of her arm, she pinched his nose and pressed her palm over his mouth. She watched the tiny arms flail and felt nothing other than the ice in her chest. The moon showed its cold face. She felt his small body s
truggle and then let go.

  Survival

  The next night came as a cluttered mix of memories, scents, and fleeting moments, each one detached from the next. I’d thought that carrying a baby through pregnancy took a toll, but nothing prepared me for what was to follow. All I wanted to do was get back to the flat and sleep. I was in a hospital room with three other mothers and their newborns. We were all in a state of disbelief. It seemed that every few minutes, there was a baby stirring, a mother struggling, or a nurse coming in to save the day. It was never quiet and I dozed only briefly, a few minutes at a time.

  At some point when it was still dark, another woman was wheeled into our room. She was in the beginning stages of labor. Every ten minutes, she would writhe in pain and let out the loneliest moan I’d ever heard. My uterus would contract painfully in response, like a wolf answering the howl. But her progress was slow. I started to brace myself between her contractions, dreading the next one. By the time she was finally wheeled out of the room, I could see the first crack of light in the sky outside the window. Beside me, Jacob, a name arrived at after a phone conversation with Simon, started to mewl. I picked him up; he had such small knees and the tiniest earlobes I’d ever seen. I tried to feed him, but he wouldn’t latch onto my nipple. He gummed the tip; pain shot through my network of nerves, and now I was the one to cry out. The woman beside me turned in her bed so that her back was to us and pulled the pillow over her head in dismay.

  As quietly as I could, I got up to change Jacob. I was expecting a little baby poo as cute as those earlobes; I got a thick, greenish, tarlike sludge. I knew it was meconium, the substance that had stuffed his digestive pipes while he was in the womb, but it is one thing to identify and quite another to clean. Using wipe after wipe, I started to wonder if I had the wrong tools for the job. A nurse finally came over with a thick washcloth to help. She solved the problem with a few swipes and then promptly scolded me for exposing Jacob to the cold air for so long. She was right. He was shivering. The woman beside us let out a loud sigh. The nurse swaddled Jacob and put him in the crib beside my bed. His small lips shook and I knew that body heat would warm him quickly, so I picked him up and brought him under the blanket. A swift hand came in and the nurse plucked him away.

  “Ne dormez pas avec le bébé dans le lit,” she scolded. Don’t sleep with the baby.

  She put him back in the crib. There was a way of doing things in the hospital, and it wasn’t mine.

  I checked myself out of the hospital as soon as I could put pen to paper. The doctor expressed concern at the color of Jacob’s skin. As the doctor hadn’t met Simon—his early-morning flight had only just touched down on the tarmac—I explained that Jacob’s father had a slightly olive complexion. I was pleased to have birthed a baby with what I saw as built-in skin protection.

  “Non.” The doctor shook his head. “C’est la jaunisse.”

  “Jaundice?”

  “A little bit.” He used his forefinger and thumb to show an inch.

  He agreed to let us check out provided Jacob took lots of liquid. A midwife would be scheduled to visit in a few days. I waved my hand saying that I didn’t need her, shuddering at the thought of one of those disapproving nurses coming through my door. I was too exhausted for such intrusion. We would visit the clinic. I carried my new little baby out the door.

  When Simon arrived at the flat, he was ecstatic. I watched with a detached sense of confusion as his face stretched into a wide smile when he looked at Jacob sleeping. Simon’s eyes were bright; his skin took on a glow, and he was full of an energy that didn’t seem appropriate to the situation. I begged Simon not to pick Jacob up. I wanted a few precious minutes of sleep, but Simon couldn’t help himself. He undid the little sleeper suit and looked at each part of the baby. He kissed the little tummy, counted each finger, and tried to guess the origin of the nose.

  “To be honest, it looks like my uncle Alec’s,” he said.

  “The uncle in Yorkshire?”

  “Uncle Alec never grew into it.” Simon laughed.

  “Because he had a heart attack,” I said flatly.

  This stopped Simon and it was the first time he saw it on my face: my experience of birth had been more like a brush with death.

  “I should have been there,” he said quietly.

  “There was nothing you could have done.” My tears were close to the surface.

  “I could have held your hand.”

  “It was up to me.”

  “I would have rubbed your back.”

  “Only me.”

  Silence. Simon looked at Jacob once more and then back at me. I watched his lips move, stop, and curl around another set of words that seemed to clog before they came from his throat. Simon, who always said the right thing, had nothing to say that could bring a measure of comfort. Maybe he finally understood that his baby had nearly died. Even if he was there, he couldn’t have done anything.

  “You sleep,” Simon said, brushing the deep circles under my eyes with his thumb. He took Jacob out of the room, but suddenly I couldn’t sleep. A kind of weight came down on me. If I was responsible for stopping Jacob’s death, I was also the only one who could ensure his life continued.

  “Could you bring him here, Simon? Just so I can see him.”

  “He’s fine.”

  “He’ll need to eat again in a minute.”

  And I was right. Simon didn’t have the fine-tuning to Jacob’s needs that I seemed to instantly acquire. Jacob wanted to eat, but he barely took my nipple. It wasn’t the strong suck that I’d read about in books. Simon moved pillows in an attempt to help. I propped myself up. We moved Jacob from the left to the right. Finally, I was exhausted and starting to feel sick.

  “When did you last eat?” Simon asked.

  I couldn’t remember.

  Jacob fell asleep and Simon cooked. The smell of the frying onions made me queasy, so he put the pan outside. I realized how sore my stitches were. I kept shifting, as I couldn’t find a good way to sit. It was Simon who figured out an arrangement of pillows that worked. He put two under my left knee and one under my right, which kept my weight off my stitches while also allowing me to rest. I thanked him over and over. I managed to eat an egg and I chugged back a glass of water. I slept for the first time.

  When I got up, Jacob was still napping and we sat together on the daybed.

  “I’ve got good news,” Simon said.

  “What’s that?”

  “I’ve got a full course load this coming semester.”

  My worry slipped to the side for a moment. Simon must have seen that on my face, as he made a show of beating his chest with his fists. “Your partner is a provider!”

  “Thank you…I mean, I’m so relieved. Or glad. I mean, happy.”

  “You can let your worries go.”

  “For now.”

  “I’ll take care of the money, Rose. And you will have to take care of Jacob for a while.”

  There was a hesitation in his voice. “But what?” I asked.

  “I tried to register you and Jacob at the clinic down the road from our flat. I thought I’d drive you back on Sunday.”

  “That sounds perfect.”

  “It might have been.”

  “It will be.”

  “But neither of you are covered by the National Health Service.”

  “Sorry?”

  “You don’t meet the residency requirements for this year. We can’t prove that you’ve been in London for long enough since last April. The bills, the mortgage, the council tax, they are all in my name.”

  I knew this had broad implications, but I was too tired to think what they could be.

  “So we’ll just go anyway?” I tried.

  “It’s risky. If something went wrong, we could end up with a huge medical bill.”

  I lay back and hazily tried to focus on the management problem. Every detail of the dig was accounted for and handled. But because I thought that I was engaged in a natural process, m
y own project had lacked supervision.

  I fell in and out of sleep, but I couldn’t sink down. I kept dreaming that Jacob was gone, then startling awake to check if he was still breathing. I went on for a few days like this, drifting in and out. I’d see Simon’s beaming face. Jacob’s bottom waving in the air. A tube of nipple cream. An impossibly small sock. The ache of stitches. It all slipped by like it wasn’t happening to me. I understood the myth of the stork and assumed that Jacob had been dropped down by a bird with a large beak. A story that was clearly made up held more sense than the reality around me.

  Unannounced, the midwife came on Saturday. I heard her voice and registered it only as something foreign. The midwife was talking to me. I watched her lips move but was too exhausted to speak in a language that was not my first. I smiled and did my best to look nice and kind, like a mother should. And soon Simon was tugging my arm. We were going back to the hospital.

  I was conscious, but every time I blinked, the world looked like a different place. I saw a doctor with thick glasses and a concerned expression. A nurse with a long, thick braid pricked Jacob’s foot to take blood for a test. Simon talked in slow English and asked me for the occasional French word. We were sent to a special ward, each set of curtains worse than the one before. Fluorescent lights buzzed above my head. The bed slid back. Simon held Jacob in his arms and tried to smile.

  I dozed, and when I woke, I saw Jacob in a tanklike crib with clear plastic curving up on all sides. Bright lights shone on his skin. It was a treatment for jaundice, to help him excrete the bilirubin molecules that were building up in his blood. Jacob had little opaque goggles over his eyes, but they kept slipping. I felt the sting of the impossibly bright light as if his eyes were mine. When it got dark, the nurses sent Simon away, saying that fathers couldn’t stay overnight. I sat up all night with my arm in the tank, holding the goggles in place to shield our eyes and wondering where our bilirubin would go.